A SUDACA BAR-GIRL IN JAPAN (2024)

ANOTHER EXCERPT FROM SHEM´S BLOCKBUSTER NOVEL, MY PART IN THE NARCO-WAR. DUE TO THE COMPLICATIONS OF UPLOADING IT ONTO AMAZON BOOKS, ITS PUBLICATION, ANNOUNCED A FEW WEEKS AGO, HAS BEEN POSTPONED FOR A WHILE. SO, DEAR READERS, PATIENCE PLEASE

Andrea had now taken to selling fashion accessories door to door in offices, ostensibly to raise the money to visit a sister living in Japan, though I guessed it was really a token of independence from her philandering husband, plus a warning that he´d better earn them a steady income instead of relying on the haphazard sale, on commission, of luxury watches and antiques.

As the remittances to their mother showed, her sister was making lots of money. But I doubt whether she would have taken the idea seriously, if a short visit from her sister hadn´t coincided with a major cash flow crisis when Tonio´s best and increasingly only client – the bagman for the big cocaine cartel -- refused a colonial-era religious painting he´d promised to buy.

The plan was that her sister would put her up in Tokyo and find her a job where she worked, “being a sort of waitress”, Andrea explained, with a nervous giggle.

The sister, when I briefly met her, didn´t inspire much confidence. Maybe to show off her success, maybe because punk-Kabuki was in fashion there, she was a painted lady of high heels, tight mini skirt, glitter-dust sweater and streaky bleached hairdo.

So, as usual, when one way of escaping the war didn´t work, Colombians found another. To dispel any doubts, Tonio, not Andrea, showed me her plane ticket, passport and traveler´s checks with a certain truculence. The proprietorial satisfaction he took in the success of others, that narco above all, was never more peculiar than now.

To further prove his magnanimity, he mounted the mother of all send-off parties. As per the custom, not only their friends, but relatives on both sides of the family were invited. And the traveler obliged to get dead drunk on the eve of the flight, as if air travel weren´t horrible enough without a hangover.

By eleven, everyone but a handful of our downtown crew had left. Though she had had a few, the high Angela was on was due more to stardom and nerves and gave her a kittenish urge to keep the party going to the wee hours of the morning. When our friends started to tire, she insisted on one for the road, was deaf to “no more”, emptied the bottle, turned up the music and did a pole-dance. I rose to leave with the others but stopped when Tonio insisted I stay behind. We then started to steer her upstairs but at Tonio´s gentle touch of her arm, she exploded.

“Time for bed! The bed where you´re going to fuck all your girlfriends once I´m gone. Go on, enjoy yourself, you bastard. You and your farty friends on the money I´m sending home.”

Tonio tightened his arm round her shoulder. She wrested herself free, jammed a knee that narrowly missed his groin, forcing him back, but still sufficiently on guard to stop her lunge at an oriental vase she was about to smash, the lacquer Ali-Baba kind Pablo Escobar liked, as I learned from a man who bribed a wagonload of them past the customs officials for him.

Somehow, she made it to the airport, but her daftness continued from afar: pining for home and husband in one phone call and enthusing about Japan the next. How polite, clean and safe it was, while simultaneously saying she missed him and was only there for the money and swore she´d only need a few more months. But each time the deadline was reached, she hesitated, until, without any prior announcement, she suddenly returned.

As I watched her being welcomed back by our friends, I nevertheless wondered whether her effusiveness was as spontaneous as it appeared, because when she began to talk of her time in Japan, I sensed the prep of the accomplished actress, who, as the curtain rises, reaches deep into herself to bring out reserves of artistry.

It was a good way to skirt details that might cause her embarrassment but why did she gush with such force? This wasn´t Sicily after all, where no emigrant would have dared to return to the old country without raining cash on his folks, not even when starving to death in the States was the only alternative. Here, the measure of his or her success was not being turned back on arrival and each day after that considered a plus. Besides, no one had expected much of her anyway.

I also noticed certain small but telling inconsistencies. In a phone call only a month before, she´d boasted to Tonio about her imminent move from the kind of communal digs where twenty sudacos and sudacas shared one toilet and kitchen and took turns sleeping on cots to an apartment which had to be costly, even though it was small and the rent would be split with another Colombian girl. It indicated a stability that didn´t square with her stealthy return. And wasn´t she supposed to be staying with her sister?

However, I went along with the pretense that she was only on a brief family visit and would soon take up where she had left off, but Tonio´s patience with her inconsistency was wearing thin. “Whenever we talk about it, she agrees the past is the past. But inside, she´s convinced she´ll be going back. It´s a sort of psychosis, so I don´t push too hard, especially because she´s been really hyper the past few weeks”.

I should have let it ride too, but a possible answer to a question I wasn´t asking accidentally found me, this time through Dom, the star journalist, just back from New York

“Brought this. Have a look, tell me if you´re thinking what I am”.

It was a neoyorquino tabloid, of the tits-and-stiffs type I´d seen on every adolescent subway ride, with a front-page photo of the late-night sidewalk scene outside some bars in what looked like Spanish Harlem. Sleaze lit by neon, drunk, drugged or mugging; shades and hiked skirts by pimpmobiles; prelude to a mass deportation of Latino illegals. Only the fuzzy details showed it to be Tokyo,

“Could be,” said Dom, “insofar as they´d never give a visa to someone like her and she came back in a hurry. Then there´s her sister, the way she dresses, all the money she´s made”.

“But Angela, a whore? I doubt it”.

“I´m willing to accept she was only waitressing. But, short of being a bona fide student or ugly or old, any Colombian gal is on the game as far as the Japanese are concerned”.

“Then how come her sister´s still there?”

All unanswerable just then, but ,be they political, financial or sexual, secrets never stay secret for long in Locombia. A while later, needing to unburden herself, Andrea confessed the truth in a phone call to an old girlfriend in Santa Marta, at a safe distance, she thought, except that another woman, a neighbor of ours in Bogotá, happened to visit the coast, ran into the girlfriend, and, in the manner of “Songo le dio a Borondongo/Borondongo le dio a Bernabé/ Bernabé le pegó a Muchilanga”^*, it eventually reached us.

To wit: one night, at the bar where she worked, Andrea noticed that someone was staring at her. A kid about twenty who looked like a student, he stood out from the horny, middle-aged men who frequented the place. But when she asked him if he needed anything, he went white and fled. Since such youngsters usually acted like that at strip joints, she didn´t think any more of it and when he returned the next night and the nights after that, much the same happened. Meanwhile, realizing he was shy, Andrea was the first to come when he ordered a drink and made an extra effort to be maternal and unthreatening until he relaxed, sometimes talked to her in pidgin English and finally asked for a date with a desperation she found appealing. Mostly because she felt sorry for him at that point, she accepted, knowing as well he wouldn´t expect it to end in paid sex, as the other clients did.

After the movie, they ate in a traditional-type restaurant. It was the first time a Japanese, of either sex, was actually friendly towards her and she began to see him as a person, a man like any other, but handsome and nice and more refined than any she´d met there until then.

Even so, getting closer was painful, given the barriers of culture, language and class, worsened by the xenophobia of his parents, who´d marked out his path from nursery school: exams, the university, a career in the company where his father was an executive and a more or less arranged marriage to a girl of the same status.

Andrea had skipped over how they went from dates to bed, only saying it had been gradual, slow and tender. Since he lived at home and she in digs shared with twenty, it was a fair guess that needing a place to be private in was the reason why she´d rented (or only planned to rent?)an apartment with another Colombian girl, borrowing money from her sister.

Thus far, it was just a modern, open-ended arrangement which millions of the young make, until the migra turned it into an opera. Always aware that illegality was a risk, Andrea lived day to day and reacted to the deportation order with a certain resignation. For one facing the full pressure of Japan who was also too sheltered and immature, on the other hand, it was as if his one taste of heaven had been brutally snatched away. Maybe under the bows and plastic smiles, the Japanese are as romantic as us, I guessed.

In the ten minutes allotted to him at the airport, he asked her to marry him, and not just because it was the only way for her to return. If he couldn´t live with the woman he loved, he swore he´d kill himself.

“And you agreed to marry him just like that, without thinking it over?”, her friend in Santa Marta had asked.

“In that moment, I realized I´d known it from the start”.

But how so, when Andrea wasn´t the sort to cross cultures and too entangled with her son, family and Tonio? As he himself pointed out: “Whenever Andrea´s is in the dark, she invents a light to hold onto and my bet is that marrying the guy is the latest illusion”.

It seemed to make sense. The boy´s almost daily calls from Japan dwindled to one or two a month, supposedly because they´d already accepted it would take time and the details would come later. But he meanwhile kept changing his story, They´d wait till he saved up the airfare. Later, it was till he got his degree (or a good job after that).

Meanwhile, it was clear that Andrea herself was doubtful. Thinking it might be therapeutic, I invited her to join me at an ayahuasca ceremony. Seeing that she weathered the purge well, I concluded that she was coping with the situation, whatever it was. She was now wedged by a wall, head between knees, not quite asleep, but out of it. Given the bustle in the room, I didn´t realize I was wrong until, horns down, mouth slathered with saliva, she charged at me.

“I knew it, you bastard! That shaman´s doing witchcraft on me. I could tell because there was this blackness that was sucking, sucking me into hell. The fires, the sulfur, the devils: I felt them.”

“Please, Andrea. It´s been a rough ride for all of us and you´re too tired to make sense of it now. Why don´t you rest for a while”.

Then she lunged right over the altar at the old man, who paid no more attention to her than he would to a fly. Freak-outs I´d witnessed my time. Out of fear came resistance, then trauma, then panic erupting into insanity but I´d never before seen anyone attack the healer.

In seconds, they pulled her off him: by then, she was already spent. Collapsed on the floor, she turned into jelly, snot, sobs and keening.

While I avoided her after that, I heard that Andrea did return to Japan but only for a few hours, before returning to Bogotá, where she finally separated from Tonio and moved into one those futuristic ghost-town barrios way down the Américas – tall blocks of tiny flats, gated and gardened; social life: her surly son, senile aunt, door man and supermarket teller.

Ironically, it was Tonio, the former lady killer, who found the love of his life, moved to the countryside and (partly for want of opportunity) finally became more or less monogamous. I´d visit him from time to time and gradually learned what had happened to Andrea.

“Let me get this clear,” I said. “In addition to being Colombian, a black mark in itself, Andrea didn´t have a visa and was deported once. Sure, he´d promised to marry her. But a year goes by without his doing anything about it. Alright, he´s a kid, so the promise was impulsive. But Andrea . . .she´s grown up, isn´t she? She must have been crazy to stake everything on that”.

“I thought so too, to begin with. But when she explained, it sounded plausible. If it had been a Colombian guy, she might have been doubtful, she said. You know, anything to get the bitch off your back. In Japan, never. I´ve no idea of how Andrea found the money for the flight. But the fact is she did and he swore he´d be waiting for her at the airport”.

“What happened after that?”

“She first thought he´d been held up in traffic. Pleaded with the immigration people to give her more time, but they put her straight into the holding pen. Even then, she didn´t give up, remembering that they give you one phone call. She´d written down the number of his parent´s place just in case.

But to explain things in Japanese? She starts to cry. Another deportee, a rough-looking Peruvian girl, asks her what´s wrong. ´Is that all, sister? I´ll handle the call. When you whore here for ten years, you pick up the basics´.

So, ring, ring, blabbering in Japanese goes on for a quite a time. Either the Peruvian girl isn´t as fluent as she made out or the parents of her fiancé don´t understand what she wants.

Finally, ´Oh, it´s for our son. Name, please´. Further delay as the Peruvian tries to explain it´s on behalf of Andrea. Phone static and background noise when they go off to find him. Footsteps, a voice, Peruvian passes the receiver, Andrea, hearing Japanese, hands it back.

´Yes, Andrea, from Colombia. She standing right beside me´.

`Sorry´.

´ Andrea, his fiancé!´

´Sorry, son not know the name´.

Faulty translation or different culture? All we can say is that the ways of the West are inscrutable too.

*From the classic comic song sung by Celia Cruz: “Songo punched Borondongo/Borondongo punched Bernabé/Bernabé punched Muchilanga”