Autor:    Julián Silva Puentes

THE 101 KILOS BOY

Having your birthday on the same day that you were a voting juror is not a coincidence. I have no evidence to support it, but I could swear that the Colombian Registry Office wants me, instead of eating cake, to have warm instant coffee and drink water from the bathroom tap, because no one gave us anything to drink all day.

“On a rainy October morning 43 years ago, a child was born who…”, I tell myself in my mind, because I like to narrate every aspect of my life. I´m not saying it´s not ridiculous, but it´s Sunday and I´ve been awake since 5:30 am to do a job that, no matter how democratic and "of service" it may be, no one would do voluntarily.

I am a simple man with simple desires. Playing music with my brother-in-law at my sister´s house, eating cake and receiving a couple of books is the best celebration for me. Spending time in bed the next day watching horror movies with Diana is the perfect culmination of a date to which I usually give little importance.

“I can´t find your ID, sir, please check your voting station”. After forty times of repeating it, it turns into a nervous tic. People receive with suspicion anything you say from “the fulfillment of your mission”. The issue with the voting table becomes the subject of “they don´t want me to vote”, or “they can´t stop me from voting”. Actually, I don´t care if “this” or “that” person has their ID registered in Iceland. If someone is not assigned to my table, I must send them with all the power of my small list to the place where they are assigned, because if I do things differently, the Colombian Registry Office could fine me 11 million pesos and remove me from my job. Such is the incentive to do things “the right way,” even though you are ridiculously honest, perhaps because of your lack of ambition regarding the things that people are willing to do, killing themselves and others to achieve.

Distrust in Colombian institutions is justified by the fact that it is healthy and advisable not to trust in Colombian institutions. Now, Colombian institutions are managed by Colombians. Logically. It is also logical that is completely necessary that people have to be controlled so they behave in an honest and orderly manner.

I know that saying about yourself “I am an honest and truthful person” makes you think otherwise. I swear that in my case it is true. I am so honest that when I worked at a certain public entity a few years ago, my supervisor changed me from “sustanciador” to “tutelas” because I didn´t know how to take bribes. “You are too honest,” he told me in a reproachful tone. I was deeply offended not because I was being too honest, but because filing “tutelas” is terribly stressful. Not only you have to respond within a couple of hours, but if you don´t, the person who signs the letters can go to jail for contempt. “I will do my best,” I responded to my supervisor with the servility of someone who depends on a single job, an unusual case in the public sector, since there are people who sign up to four contracts and with that they earn like a congressman.

“Aha,” my supervisor responded without hiding his disdain and went to his lair where he had to plan all his shady deals. He was a charismatic and kind little man except when he wasn´t. He greeted each one of us when he arrived at the office and invited us for Friday drinks. We called him by his first name instead of “doctor.” “I don´t have a doctorate to call myself a doctor,” he used to say. Now, when he got upset with you, he didn´t yell at you, but he assigned an amount of work that was impossible to get done unless you spent part of the night at the office and the entire weekend at home figuring out how to accomplish the task.

Speaking of my supervisor, years later he became a councilman of a certain city. It was said of him that he was less of a thief than the others and that is why they loved him so much. He was a thief, yes, but he did not leave the city bankrupt and that in Colombia is called public service.

It is not like a public service to give away 13 hours of your Sunday to count votes in the name of democracy. As I said before, if you don´t do it, they will fine you, and also get you fired. Anyway, you do the best you can because you have no other choice. You look at the clock and dream of being in bed watching movies and eating pizza. The day before Diana made gin and tonics and we ended up finishing a liter of Gordon´s before six in the afternoon. “We have to celebrate it in some way,” she told me. I agreed, because all we do is work and at least once a year you should be able to do something fun.

Doing something fun on your birthday when you spend it counting votes with a group of strangers is a challenge you don´t have the energy to face. Instead, every time you go to the bathroom to drink tap water and pee, you stay in front of the mirror imagining that your reflection is enjoying a michelada on the beach just as you did last year. “I wish I were you”, I say to my reflection on the beach and at that moment they shout at me from outside: “There is a huge line. Hurry him up!”. The colleague who rushes me is making a bad face. I do not blame him. We all have a bad face. Nobody wants to be here because it´s Sunday, it´s very cold, it´s raining and I´m also turning 43.

“Today is my birthday”, I confess to the person sitting next to me. “How many votes are there?”, he asks me without recognizing what I just told him. “Today I could be on the beach having a michelada and swimming in the sea”, I reply. “I have 247 to the council”, he adds. “Are we counting the council votes?”, I ask him. The others stop what they are doing and take my pile of votes to count themselves. Nobody says anything to me, but it´s obvious they´re upset. I do not blame them. We´re going to take longer because of me.

…

It is almost the first time in six years that I celebrate my birthday in Bogotá. The previous years we went to the coast, except for two in which we did a jam session with my brother-in-law. Diana strives to make my day spectacular. I always tell her that I don´t want to do anything. Going to the movies and listening to a live band is all I ask for. Instead, she invites me on a surprise trip to Taganga. That was my first birthday with her. We had so much fun that we have repeated the trip to the coast since then.

Except for today.

“The night I was born I swear the moon turned fiery red”, I say to my reflection on one of my trips to the bathroom to drink water. Despite being somewhere on the beach drinking the fifth beer, my reflection reminds me that it was Jimi Hendrix who said it. “It´s true”, I answer, and I keep thinking that I am turning 43 years old. How awful! My maternal grandfather lived to be 73 years old, which means I have 30 years to live based on genetic predisposition. Two decades ago, I saw such an age as a distant thing. Reaching 50 also seemed like an unattractive impossibility. Today I have 7 years left to achieve 50. I want to think that I will not be celebrating then by counting votes in Bogotá, but on a beach very far from where we are now. Anywhere in Portugal would be nice. Even eating pizza in bed with Diana passing the hangover would be a thousand times better than what I do now... “How many for the mayor´s office?”, I hear someone ask me. At that moment I am dreaming of a future that has not yet arrived, but that will not be long. 7 years is a short time if you think about the age of a cat. Seven years for them for each of ours? Today I feel like I´m a cat with 43 human years multiplied by 7 every year. Gins are heavy when you don´t get enough sleep. “198 for the Mayor´s Office”, I say without thinking. “It matches”, responds the man busy comparing the results. Somehow, I said the correct number even though I wasn´t counting. “Tomorrow I´ll play the lottery”, I say to myself, although I say it out loud. The colleague next to me looks at me without paying attention. I don´t wait for him to ask me why I should play the lottery, and I still tell him: “I guessed the number”. “What number?”, he asks me. I remain silent because otherwise they will make me count again. “Today I´m celebrating my birthday”, I tell him to get by. “Aha”, he answers me.

…

The 101-kilogram Boy is a workmate who got that weight on a garbage weighing scale. In my line of work, we must verify the documentation of all types of businesses. Fifteen days ago, we were in the whore houses in the southern end of Bogotá. “Documentation please”, I said, accompanied by the Police and Colombian Immigration agents. The place was decorated with dim red and hospital green light bulbs. “Lights, please”, I requested in my most authoritative voice. As soon as they turn them on, a group of five old men remain frozen in their chairs with their eyes wide open. “Old whores seekers”, I say to myself. The place smells like baby powder and urine. A guy from the Ministry of Health goes out to vomit. “Dumb”, one of the police officers gestures. It´s not right for me to say it out loud, but he´s absolutely right. The people at the Ministry of Health must see things even more horrendous than the smell of powder and urine. I don´t mean to say that the smells can be seen, but the atmosphere is so dense that it gives that impression. Also, there is that kind of “fog” with a candy smell that they used to put in the clubs in the 90s.

“Please don´t take photos”, says the whore house manager. We must take the photos so that there is evidence of the operation. Logically, the clients do not appear in the shot because of the “right to privacy”. The visual record goes to the entity´s Webpage, and they know it. I doubt very much that they feel like (...) with fifteen district officials checking the expiration date of the liquor, the state of the bathrooms and even the trash cans. “Don´t you have a separate container for biological material?”, asks the Health Secretariat official who did not go out to vomit. This time I´m the one who retches, because the trash can they´re talking about has all kinds of horrors inside. “We use the same bin for everything”, responds the administrator. The official from the Ministry of Health takes a kind of plastic stick and stirs the garbage. The policeman who said “dumb” a while ago turns pale and leaves in a hurry. I feel the urge to follow him, but I can´t do it. I am the one leading the operation and it would not be good for them to see me broken down.

Clearly what I am saying did not happen on voting day. I am resorting to something that people who know about cinema call “flashbacks”, to improvise the common thread and give more coherence to the story. I swear on my own birthday that I don´t try to make anything coherent. I´m simply telling you something that happened to me a few days ago. It just so happened that today it´s my birthday.

A couple of weeks ago I had the operation of the “lenocinio” houses or whore houses, and a week before, my coworker weighed himself on the garbage scale. I´m putting all the stories together because I´m writing this in one go. It´s rare that words come out in a torrent. In that sense, the anecdotes that I´m telling in real time are like that diabolical trash can where condoms, cigarette butts, broken bottles and white cloths were mixed. Many white cloths stained with all the colors of the rainbow.

The 101-kilo Boy was not with me in the lenocinio houses a few weeks ago. He is not accompanying me in my task of counting votes either. The last time I saw him was on a mission of one of the many invasion zones in the south of Bogotá. Recycling centers, neighborhood stores, rotten chicken warehouses, garbage dumps and many houses made of brick. Curiously, and despite the rampant poverty that is not only seen but smelled, some houses have up to four or five floors. It is not uncommon to see high-end trucks and motorcyclists with black viscera helmets passing by. The colleagues who have been in the entity the longest assure that they are hitmen. Others say that the criminal band “Tren de Aragua” operates in that entire area. “This is one of the biggest invasion neighborhoods in the world,” said someone whose name I forget. I heard something like that from a Fabela in Brazil. We are definitely brothers of misery. I am referring to the south of the Americas.

The 101-kilo Boy knows misery, because he is assigned to “one of the largest invasion neighborhoods in the world”. Every time I have an operation with him, he asks me to go to the recycling warehouses to ask for papers. “So much poverty”, I remember saying my first time there. “These people have more money than you and I combined”, he responded, which is not a big thing because I earn just enough to live very well. In any case I wouldn´t want to live like these people. None of the streets are paved. Mud, garbage and a river that smells like shit is everything that supports the feet of those who walk here daily.

…

Lenocinio means “pandering” or “third party”. It took me a long time to pronounce it correctly. “Leoncito”, I said at the beginning and my companions laughed. My grandmother called it “a panderer” when I broke something, and my mother didn´t scold me. Later I learned that “pander” is what the person who takes care of prostitutes is called in some countries. “What is this operation about?”, I asked the first time I was assigned for it. “Dates houses,” someone told me. I understood what they meant and wondered why they called it that. Then I understood. The schedule of activities could never say: “Tuesday, October 31: WHORE houses operations. 8:00 pm to 2:00 am”. It would be in very bad taste for the other entities that accompany us.

It took the 101-kilogram Boy more work than me to pronounce “lenocinio.” He said “letzxoncinio” and I made fun of him even though I couldn´t pronounce it either. When I was a child, I couldn´t pronounce the letter “r” and my schoolmates asked me to say “the cars roll fast, collecting sugar on the railway”, to make fun of me. Logically I didn´t pay attention to them, however, it is difficult to stop pronouncing words with that letter, so they had no shortage of opportunity to laugh in my face.

“LENOCINIO”. Today I can say it without effort. The 101-kilo Boy says it correctly after a long time of insisting. “Scacle”, I saw him practicing in a low voice before getting on the scale that weighs the garbage in one of the hundreds of recycling warehouses that abound around here.

“How much do you weigh?”, the 101-kilo Boy asked me. “I weigh 62 kilograms,” I replied. I weigh 83 kilos and I get 101 kilos,” he said.

The scale had to be truncated given the weight it marked me: 81 kilograms. The 101-kilogram Boy was marked just that, and we started laughing at him. For some reason, my weight was no fun. Obviously, I don´t weigh all that. The 101-kilo Boy shouldn´t weigh that much either. He is not the “obese” type. He must be one meter ninety tall. Surely his head weighs a little more. That doesn´t make him stubborn. Rather he has thick bones.

It is my entity´s discretion to monitor the scales, whether in vegetable markets or butcher shops. In this case we took it to a recycling warehouse. The smell is very strong. It differs from the talc and urine of the “lioncillos” houses, but it is no less disgusting. We must enter with masks and ask for the documentation of the place:

“Bfsdfgsd fgrgjyg, rytgdfhfg”, I say as soon as I enter accompanied by the police. “What does it say?”, asks the person in charge of the recycler. “Bfsdfgsd mkjlhhlh, rytgdfhfg!”, I repeat. “Excuse me, but I don´t understand anything”, the manager responds. “Good morning, papers please”, I say this time without the mask. “Follow me”, the manager invites us.

The 101-kilogram Boy is so used to these smells that he doesn´t need a mask. It´s funny to see me pale. He knows I´m holding back the nausea. Luckily, I always carry a “personal” bottle of alcohol with me and put it to my nose to combat the stench. If someone saw me from a distance, they would think I was smelling Boxer glue. It is a fairly common practice in the vulnerable neighborhoods of Bogotá. “It seems like you are smelling Bocer,” the 101-kilogram Boy tells me as a joke. I almost scoff at his “bocer,” but I´m busy fighting the urge to throw up. I´m not saying it´s okay to make fun of people, but the 250-pound Boy does the same thing to me, calling me a "runt" and a "tadpole" because of my height and weight. Next to him I look like a child. If we lived in the Middle Ages, his height would give him an advantage over the rest of us and I wouldn´t dare laugh in his face. Unless he was the court jester.

Being the court jester had certain advantages: mocking the king was one of them. A clown, on the other hand, produces as much laughter about himself as about what he does. When I was a child, I liked clowns until I saw the movie “It”, based on the novel of the same name by Stephen King. First scene: a girl plays in the garden of her house. Among the bedding hanging in the sun, the clown appears and greets her. The girl greets him back smiling. The clown gets closer. He moves closer. The girl´s expression changes. The clown face changes too.

The movie “It” I´m talking about is the 90´s version. In those days I must have been eight years old. Horror movies scared the hell out of me, but I still couldn´t stop watching them. Fear was something that could be contained by moving into your mother´s bed. Today I am 43 years old, and I cannot solve the things that scare me by going to my mother´s bed. At this age it is very scary to miscount the votes and earn a fine of 11 million pesos. I don´t think the Colombian Registrar´s Office will care that I´m celebrating my birthday when it comes to having me removed from work.

“Hurry up, we want to leave!”, one of my tablemates tells me from outside the bathroom. Right at that moment I was asking my reflection in the mirror if he had already switched to white drinks. “We´ll see each other next year”, I tell him before he answers me, and I go out to end this day that has had little of “happy” and a lot of birthday.

Forty-three years in this world. It´s not much when you think about all the people who have set foot on this earth since it all began. It´s not even much compared to the Colombian Registry Office. How old will it be? I highly doubt that the Registrar General of the Nation will throw it a party like the one we had yesterday with Diana for the Registry Office birthday. If I were a little more curious, I would find out the founding date of the Colombian Registry. So what? Just mentioning it makes me sleepy. I also get sleepy because it´s almost midnight and I want to finish this writing before going to bed. We arrived three hours ago and had a hamburger. “Happy birthday!”, Diana told me, giving me a book that she had been looking for, for a long time. We served a couple of micheladas and talked about the problematic people who voted at her table. “A man in his seventies sneezed on the ballots before inserting them”, she tells me. For my part, a young man called all of us at the table “corrupt” because two voting ballots fell on the floor. I didn´t have the energy to answer him anything. Whatever. Deep down I didn´t care. I just wanted to finish counting the votes and go home with Diana. It finally happened. Happy Birthday to me.

…

The most difficult thing about writing is the beginning and the end. In the middle you can ramble as much as you want, as long as what you say is entertaining. Talking about the “leoncitos” bars and my 101-kilo workmate is a way to entertain the reader. Entertain him or her like a clown, not like a jester. To be a jester there must be a king. To be a clown you don´t even have to have an audience, because being embarrassed is a quality that feeds on itself, like the Ouroboros forever biting its tail. It also helps that no one sees your face. Writing is a solitary task and that is why you learn to take certain liberties. You say things that you would never dare to mention in public.

The 101-kilo Boy dared to confess to us that he still lives with his mother. He talked about her girlfriend and how much he would like to move in with her. “Why don´t you do it?”, we asked him almost in chorus. “I like the food my mom makes”, he responded. Something like that should not be said in public, much less in front of people who make fun of you in your face. “Do she still tell you bedtime stories?”, I hurriedly asked him. “Mommy, tell me a story”, added another mate. “Once upon a time there was a boy…”, I said, and a very serious engineer who almost never speaks interrupted me: “Once upon a time there was a boy weighing 101 kilos”.

The most difficult thing about a piece of writing is the beginning and the end, true, but sometimes the end doesn´t come no matter how hard you look for it. Then you ramble until a flash of inspiration appears and the perfect word presents itself. This is not the case: midnight and one minute. No ending. My birthday is officially over. 43 years to be exact. Diana sleeps next to me and the television shines at night. I´m watching “Nacho Libre” for the twentieth time. The 220-pound Kid looks a bit like Jack Black except for his height. What will it feel like to measure one meter and ninety? He must be very uncomfortable to travel by plane: “Sir, you are crushing me, could you straighten your chair?” Going to the bathroom on a plane must be a problem too; I don´t think he can urinate any other way than sitting down. Airplane bathrooms are wet because in full turbulence you cannot aim well. Tomorrow I will ask the 101-kilo Boy how he pees on airplanes: Do you clean the bowl with toilet paper before sitting down? Do you prefer to urinate in the sink to avoid any contact with the bowl? All of these questions seem conducive to me and that´s why I write them down in my notebook along with everything that happened today. Yesterday better said, because my birthday ended. It wasn´t so bad if you look at it closely. It wasn´t the best either, but at least I got a story out of it. There was a boy who weighed 101 kilos, and…”.