CHAPTER 13

T’aime Paris

“It’s a beautiful city,” I said. “There are streets that look like they were taken from a fairy tale. Cafés on every corner. Artists painting outdoors. And when the Eiffel Tower lights up at night, you feel time stand still.”

Sebastián settled deeper against the sofa, his legs crossed, like a child asking for the story to go on.

“Tell me more,” he said. “I’ve never left Colombia. I haven’t even seen the sea.”

“There’s a neighborhood called Montmartre,” I continued, letting the memory carry me, “at the highest point of the city. The streets are cobblestone, narrow, with stairs instead of sidewalks in some stretches. You still see painters set up with their easels there, offering to do your portrait in fifteen minutes for a few coins. On Sundays I liked to walk to a bakery two blocks from my apartment, buy bread still warm, and sit at some nearby café watching people go by with a glass of wine, even if it was eleven in the morning. Nobody gives you a strange look for that over there.”

“And the museums? I’ve seen pictures of the ‘Lou-ver’ online. That glass pyramid.”

“Louvre,” I corrected, with the best professor face I could manage. “You say ‘Loov.’ Almost nothing at the end.”

“Oh, sorry, I forgot that over there they take letters away instead of adding them. You people really complicate things.”

“The Louvre,” I repeated, laughing myself now, “is almost a city inside the city. You can spend a whole day there and not manage to see it all. The Mona Lisa, to give you a reference, is a tiny painting, smaller than you’d imagine from everything people say about it, and it’s always surrounded by a crowd of tourists taking photos from far away, because they don’t even let you get close anymore. ”

“And does that one get pronounced like it’s written, or is there a trick too?”

“That one, yes. ‘Mona Lisa,’ just like that.”

“Thank goodness. I was starting to think that in Paris even your own name changes when you land at the airport.”

“Is it really small?”

“Tiny, compared to its fame. But I liked another museum better, the Orsay, which sits in an old train station beside the river. That’s where the Impressionists are: Monet, Renoir, Degas.

Painters who, instead of painting things exactly as they looked, tried to capture how light changes on them depending on the time of day.

Monet, for example, painted the same cathedral façade dozens of times, always at different hours, because for him the morning cathedral and the afternoon cathedral were, deep down, two completely different cathedrals. ”

Sebastián listened with an attention I hadn’t expected, elbows resting on his knees, leaning slightly forward.

“That’s beautiful,” he said. “I’d never thought light could change one thing so much.”

“There’s also Van Gogh,” I went on, encouraged by his interest. “There’s a painting of his there, of a very simple room, his own bedroom in a town in the south of France.

Strong colors, a little crooked, as if the whole room were trembling.

They say he painted it at a time when he could barely stand, and even so he managed to put into it something like calm, or at least the wish to find it. ”

“And you understand all that? How do you know so much?”

I laughed, a little embarrassed.

“My mother took me to museums since I was a kid, and at university in Paris I took a couple of art history courses, almost on a whim, because they were near my law classes and I was curious. But you don’t need to know much to like it.

For me it was enough to sit in front of a painting long enough to let it tell me something. ”

Sebastián shook his head, with a smile that mixed amusement with something closer to genuine admiration.

“It’s that you talk about all of it like it’s the most normal thing in the world. To me it’d be like listening to someone from another planet.”

“It’s not that big a deal,” I said, though deep down the comment pleased me more than I was willing to admit. “It’s just free time and the desire to make use of it. You have other things I couldn’t do even in my dreams. Cleaning a wound, for example.”

“Touché,” he said, laughing.

“It sounds incredible,” he added afterward, with his eyes half closed, as if he could still see the streets I had described.

“It is. But you know what’s the most beautiful part? Sharing it with someone you love. No place is special if you don’t have someone to live it with.”

I fell silent for a second, weighing whether to say what came next.

“And most important: you feel free. You know? In Paris I lived without hiding, Sebastián. I came out of the closet there. I had boyfriends. I walked hand in hand with whoever I wanted down the streets, without anyone looking at me strangely. I was free for the first time in my life.”

He smiled, in a soft way I hadn’t expected.

“What a beautiful thing you’re telling me,” he said. “It’s just that, over there, it’s a different world.”

“But then, coming back to Colombia,” I continued, and my voice faded a little with each word, “I went back to being Senator Piedraita’s son.

I put myself back in the closet all on my own.

With no one forcing me. Out of fear of what people would say.

Out of fear of ruining my father’s career.

Out of fear of telling him his only son wasn’t going to give him grandchildren.

I’ve been living here for three years as if that part of me in Paris had never existed. ”

“And now that your dad is gone,” he asked, with a delicacy I didn’t know whether I fully deserved, “are you going to keep hiding?”

I looked at him. I felt I already had the answer before he finished asking.

“No,” I said. “Life took away a wonderful person, but it gave me back another. And that’s you, Sebastián.”

He said nothing. I took out of my pocket the glass marbles we had played with as children, not knowing for certain at what exact moment I’d put them there, and held out my hand for him to take one.

“Shall we play? Like old times.”

He took a marble, smiling. I put the music on again, this time “My Blue Unicorn,” and for a moment, as we played sitting on the floor of my living room, I thought I heard, in the background, the voices of children laughing in a courtyard that no longer existed except in the memory of the two of us.

What followed I don’t remember as an orderly sequence of scenes, but as something closer to a broken dream, the kind you don’t know whether you dreamed once or many times in a row.

We played hide-and-seek behind the sofa, as if the entire apartment had become, for a while, the courtyard of the hacienda.

A moment later we were kicking a ball across the living room, laughing like two eight-year-olds, with no weight on us, no dead father, no war in between.

I don’t know how long it lasted. I know that when the lights finally went out that night, we had both recovered, if only for a couple of hours, something neither of us knew was still possible to recover.

And I thought, amid the laughter and the marbles rolling across my living room floor, that this, exactly this, was the closest thing to the freedom I had felt in Paris.

There was no need for the Eiffel Tower, or the Seine, or any street with a pretty name.

All that was needed was, simply, to stop hiding.

And that, that night, in my own country, for the first time in three years, I was doing.