Issue 21

Clara E. Ronderos
Translated by Mary G. Berg

Gabriela didn’t have a lot of respect for Professor Millán. His esoteric assignments made the writing workshop a space that encouraged exaggeration and false prophecies. Her companions gazed admiringly at this poet who always sported a three-day beard and wore expensive brand-name clothing, slightly wrinkled to give him a bohemian look. Professor Millán, or Samuel, as his followers at school called him, had accustomed his eyes to producing a wild stare that matched his excessively careful pronunciation of words spoken at a varying and unpredictable volume. His sometimes startling appearance, meticulously constructed for its effect on his literature classes, became extremely exaggerated when Samuel strutted around the university greeting his admirers.

On Monday, the students had come to class expecting to discuss a Walter Benjamin essay they’d been assigned. Samuel arrived later than usual and stared at them for a while as though he were waking from a dream, or what was more probable, Gabriela thought, as if he were suffering from an impossible hangover and had not the slightest idea what the class was about this morning. Finally, his gaze settled directly on her as he exclaimed: “I have an adventure for you all! Benjamin’s city, its commercial alleyways, are all here in Bogotá, and just around the corner. All you have to do is go down 19Street to Tenth Avenue, and head for downtown. Rivas Alley will be where you’ll discover the urban secrets of modern life.”

A kind of unanimous groan could be heard in the classroom. None of the students, not even Gabriela, whose mother picked her up at the university gate every afternoon so she wouldn’t have to wait on the corner for a bus, had gone beyond certain precise limits that marked for them the only possible geography of the city where they had spent a great part of their lives. They could go up to the center, above Seventh Avenue. There the library, the theater, a few museums worthy of visiting, and the Plaza Bolívar were obligatory places when a tourist friend, met on travels abroad, came to visit the city: a city divided into worlds without channels of communication for those in the North. Those in the North, who had traveled through all the European capitals, who bathed happily on Miami Beach and were familiar with the Beat poets and the existentialists, but who had never set foot on that forbidden border that separated their city from the unknown “South.”

So now Samuel was asking them to write a story inspired by Rivas Alley, which, although technically “north” of the Plaza Bolívar, was outside the navigable limits of the city familiar to them. “If we can get out of there alive!” thought Gabriela, who, like all the others, felt herself incapable of admitting her terror when faced with this new challenge that their professor had hurled at them.

In a dark corner of his store, surrounded by a thousand random items that reeked of humidity and storage, José del Carmen González waited for the first customer of the morning. The other merchants, obsequious and smiling, offered their wares to any stranger who came down the alley. José, on the other hand, resented this attitude: “A bunch of idiots,” he’d say, “the buyer buys and the one who doesn’t, doesn’t.” His system protected him from the fake buyers, those browsers with nothing else to do but wander through the alley looking at everything, asking prices and always moving on empty-handed. “As though one were stupid enough to not notice that they’re just killing time without a single peso on them.” Nevertheless, he didn’t resist the temptation of looking up to see if anyone was interested in his shop.

It was then that he saw Gabriela, coming along the alley. Everything about her gave off the scent of a trapped beast forced to be there like Daniel in the lions’ den. What disconcerted Don José the most was that she didn’t go right past him. After pausing in the shop’s doorway, and slowly examining a 20,000 peso table, she stepped inside with her expression of “I don’t know what I’m doing here” while methodically asking the price of the tin chest of drawers, the cotton mattress, the big basket in the corner and … She asked as though she were making an unconscious inventory of everything standing around there that smelled of humidity and storage. Her voice resonated among the hampers and the hammocks, and José, grumpy and wary, answered her automatically. From memory, he repeated the prices: “three thousand two hundred,” “four thousand three hundred,” “I can’t reduce the price of that any farther, Miss.” Don José’s voice seemed familiar to her and she lowered her guard and began letting go of her fear.

Gabriela spent entire days with Don Venancio on the farm, and sometimes with Don Rafael, who worked in the mine with her father. They had taken her on marvelous excursions through the mountains. On one of these trips she had seen the famous “site of the bell” where it was said the indigenous people had hidden their treasures since the days the colony began. It was also said that it was bewitched and that the bell tolled when a stone was thrown, simply to remind us that we shouldn’t dare to seek the gold-carpeted chamber.

And while she was thinking that this man with his moustache and hat reminded her of someone, she felt cold and rubbed her hands together as if she were beginning an entertaining task. José was sure that this was not the client he was waiting for who would retrieve his wife’s sewing machine from the pawnshop. But he noticed how fragile this girl was, surrounded by objects that obviously seemed unfamiliar to her. It was as if some of the fear she’d pulled inside herself were being transmitted to him through his woolen ruana and he surprised himself by thinking: “Poor kid, who knows if she’ll get robbed when she goes out with that look on her face…” Before he could change his mind, he heard himself say: “Miss, would you like some coffee?” And to himself, “Am I just kidding myself? This stupid girl isn’t going to buy anything, and on top of that I’m offering her a coffee?” As if coming down from the clouds, she said: “Yes, thank you—I’m dying of cold.” And she thought, “Who knows what infection I’ll get, but I’m so cold …”

Gabriela set her handbag of fine leather with Hegel and Cervantes inside it beside the little wooden bench where she sat down, and José touched a match to the alcohol stove and set the jug of coffee on it. As she drank from the chipped cup, almost without apprehension now, he gazed at her with no idea what was happening to him. He thought, “I don’t like to be duped. Or for people who come here to say they want to buy when they’re just wasting my time,” and immediately after that, “Poor kid, now she’s calming down a little.”

So many memories came to her: the crude sweetness of a voice, a face whose feelings you could imagine if you looked at it carefully. She remembered the child she’d been who’d climb the guava tree, looking for the ripe fruit and fighting over it with the slippery white worms that she fished out of the pink flesh without disgust; Gabriela, the one who hunted ants the way Venancio had shown her and arrived triumphant and sweating with her Saltine can of black insects that would fill the house with their aroma when they were put on the fire the next afternoon.

She broke the silence. She explained to Don José (that’s what she called him, after asking him his name) what a writers’ workshop was, or rather, she tried to explain because for José del Carmen a “workshop” meant overalls black with grease and burnt spark plugs. She told him about their assignment and how she hadn’t brought a single peso with her out of fear of being robbed and he: “Well, that doesn’t matter, miss, you’re welcome here, please come back.” And she, laughing, “Yes, but with money,” and he, “Here, take this wooden spoon to your professor,” and she “A thousand thanks, sir, very kind of you, see you again.”

It was as though she had, in one step, crossed the enormous gap that separated her from her life story of when she walked, wobbling, over the stone wall to go into town to do the errands. As if she could hear Isabel again and her stories of Pedro Remalas, see the color of the arepa, the flat corn bread on her plate every morning, and feel the eagerness to be free to look for Venancio and help him to bring in the cattle or to harvest the native potatoes her mother had imported from the cold country and managed to make grow on the highest part of the tropical hillside.

José, upset, watched her leave with her handbag hanging from her shoulder and the spoon in her hand as though it were a war trophy. “What the hell, what fault is it of the kid that teachers make them do stuff like this?”

In the dim light, surrounded by merchandise, José del Carmen González still waits for the first client of the morning while Gabriela mentally goes over the story she’ll read next Monday in Professor Millán’s class.

It will no longer be a story about Benjamin and modernity. It will be a story about a small town salvaged from oblivion: the countryside and the taste of the cup of guarapo offered to her at a ranch along the road, like that coffee with brown sugar water that still has a sweet taste in her mouth. It probably will be, this is how she imagines it, a story about the big house up the hill, where she lived with her parents and her sister Susana, and the smaller house down the path, where the heat was overwhelming and where people had fewer things.

In her story, perhaps the frontier between her world and that of José del Carmen will not be 19th Street with its dilapidated hotels and its tourist shops. It will be a little path that winds in and out with yellow flowers all along it. It will be like the voice of that bird who knew the multiplication tables: “fivetimeseight forty, fivetimeseight forty,” like Don Rafael had explained to her the day he took her to see the stones like prehistoric animals beside a palm tree full of corozo nuts. Don José would also have come from a similar place. Like her, in the absurd “North” of her adult life, he might have also lost his freedom in that narrow passageway where he earned his living.

The assignment imposed by the extravagant Professor Millán, the act of crossing that invisible frontier that separated her from places she feared and the singular encounter with Don José had pushed her, like a kind of Alice, toward the other side of that looking glass in which she gazed daily at her city life. She discovered ties that bound her to those she supposedly feared, to that world that had terrified her because it was so unknown and so opposed to what she now remembered with unerring nostalgia. Gabriela, the Gabriela who tried to keep up with those who surrounded her in the upper-class university, came tumbling down, and a new Gabriela tied to other histories had emerged from the imposed exercise.

It’s Monday again, and Gabriela enters the classroom with a renewed respect for that absurd person she’s been waging a silent war with for two semesters. Professor Millán seems to her to be wise and profound this afternoon, and it is hard for her to wait her turn to read her story to him and to the whole class. It’s as though by reading it, she would reveal her true self: the one that has been hidden since she entered the university. She stands up very straight and reads. A reverent silence (or she interprets it as this, at any rate) surrounds her when she finishes her reading. She feels that she has revealed something profound about her life story.

Millán, after a few minutes, breaks the heavy silence in the classroom. “Miss, your problem is that you don’t know how to present your ideas. That story is like a very fine gift but wrapped up in newspaper.” The students laugh, somewhat uncomfortably. Gabriela feels as though she’s been struck by lightning. The class continues with the animated discussion of a dull story by another of the participants, in which he narrates a kind of police history with Rivas Alley as a backdrop and which ends with the arrest and eventual sentencing of a man with a ruana and a moustache who was posing as a vendor in one of the stalls along the alley and who, according to the fairly unconvincing argument of the story, has been the mysterious assassin of a series of young women who dared to go to the Alley without a companion.

After the class, Gabriela walks, alone and totally depressed, toward the corner where her mother is waiting for her. She feels that she is barely at the beginning of the route she imagined she had discovered. She thinks she understands now that all that which surrounds her, all that which has been evoked by things and people she has seen, are doors leading to what she is hiding from herself or what she hasn’t even imagined that she is hiding within herself. She hopes to find, perhaps for the next workshop, an appropriate way to wrap up and express all that. A package that not only will serve to let her reveal her most secret and hidden self but which also reaches the hands of her readers, arrayed in unmistakable splendor.

Originally published by Ediciones Torremozas, Madrid, 2016 in the volume of Clara Ronderos’ short stories titled Ábrete Sésamo.