The following is from Sergio de la Pava’s Every Arc Bends Its Radian. de la Pava is the author of Lost Empress, Personae, and A Naked Singularity, for which he won the 2013 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Award for debut fiction. He lives in New York City.
That was about the time I put my faith in nothing.
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I don’t mean to say there wasn’t anything I put my faith in. I’m asserting something like the opposite. Because, above all, I had acted. The action was placing all my dwindling faith in a very particular entity, and that entity was the referent we invoke whenever we form the word Nothing.
Thing about doing that is the freedom. But is freedom even a good? Nothing begets nothing and that includes no restrictions. If you expand outward what you might do, with little regard for notions like precedent or consequence, the result can be a kind of drive to negation. Seeing what I’d seen in my debtors’ prison of an apartment? Man, there was nothing I wouldn’t do after that.
So, Colombia?
Even just buying the plane ticket my head’s already in Spanish. So when I choose nonrefundable to save money I recall how, growing up, my sister Genevieve and I would call cash effective in deference to the brilliant Spanish-speaking maniacs who looked at that damned force and decided that only the word efectivo could do it justice. And I’m relying mostly on third-party observation here, but when it comes to cash, inventions don’t come any more effective.
Cartagena is my initial thought, but further reflection results in Cali, Colombia, instead. Because I don’t need a historic walled city right now, I need a descent into simple instinct. And forgive me, Jane, but this is the magic potion I’m going to ingest in hopes of erasing all this.
The airport in Cali. It’s been an era since I’ve been, so the sight of so many authorized machine guns unsettles at first.
Now the minimally nice woman in customs wants to know the purpose of my trip, and when I say the purpose is «amnesia» I know immediately that’s a mistake. But instead of fixing it I make it worse when I can’t answer an even simpler question: Where are you going?
Where am I going?
She means ¿hotel o familia? but I’m off on the deeper question. Her voice doesn’t help. All Colombian women talk the same way and it’s magical. Couple syllables and I’m two feet tall in Jersey City and it’s okay to not understand anything that’s happening because any one of those many angelic voices can individually make everything all right.
Back in the urgent here and now, Colombia doesn’t want to let me in. My answers are satisfying no one. And things are maybe starting to escalate in the special way that place has, when I remember Cousin Mauro. Mauro, who months ago called to no response but who will still be a missed call on my phone so I can change my story for at least the third time to one where that is who I will be staying with. Only I’ve misplaced the address, one of those Colombian postal messes with the Valle del Maracuyá fucking Diagonal Norte whatever the fuck.
No one official takes kindly to this latest flourish, but I’m ignoring them and dialing and before anyone really knows what’s happened I’ve got Mauro on the line and am reminding him of my arrival and how I need his address so that the fine folks at Aeropuerto Internacional Alfonso Bonilla Aragón de Palmira with the palm trees and lithe women and ungodly humidity and gleeful yelps can verify that I will not be an undomiciled ward of the state wandering the streets of Cali without aim.
It works. If you need to improv into any kind of confidence operation, this particular primo of mine is your man.
Later, at the hotel in Ciudad Jardín, picked on the recommendation of a taxi driver whose middle name somehow features a strange symbol that I swear an argument could be made is subtly formed by the official Colombian stamp on my passport, the full implication of my rashness hits me.
I had intended a kind of . . . I don’t know what I’d intended. I was running. Away or to or from, I didn’t know. But all that depended on invisibility and instead here’s my phone blowing up with disbelief that I’m in jueputa Cali, mijo. Also the realization, as I look out the window and listen to the messages, that I have come to Cali, Colombia, seeking solitude during its annual post-Christmas, end-of-the-year Feria de Cali, which is like Rio de Janeiro’s Carnaval, only fun.
Tomorrow I’ll claim jet lag and tomorrow I’ll worry about how I’m going to pay for this loft in what is a pretty fucking killer hotel. Tonight we drink.
Only there’s no we. Drink, thankfully, there is. And is. Until one of those voices again and:
—Hay, mi amor, estamos cerrados.
Yes, I say. I’m all wit when fueled by aguardiente, man. We’re all closed.
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From Every Arc Bends Its Radian by Sergio de la Pava. Used with permission of the publisher, Simon & Schuster. Copyright © 2024 by Sergio de la Pava.
