EPISODE II
“An opportunity shall come for him to sound me out and likewise for me to sound him out; perhaps, when I become a lawyer –she made a promise to herself-, time would be ripe to schedule a formal appointment.”
Guesswork: The review of the conditions in which a case is laid out as well as the perspectives it provides.
Bogotá, Colombia, November 29th 2017
Valentina and the writer had been long distanced from one another upon boarding the aircraft: he was assigned a seat in row seven, while she ended up at the far back, where crew members usually dozed during flights and pissful passengers wait for their turns to enter the toilet. The Loser Titan watched Valentina´s image becoming huge; instead she caught a glimpse of her upcoming agenda, in the way a furtive tax-evader would.
Before turning his mobile phone off, The Loser Titan sent her a WhatsApp message wishing her a pleasant flight: he was sure she would interpret it as to have a nice trip. The fact remains, though, that not only the Loser Titan expected her to enjoy a smooth journey, but also to make her available to sail off with him in a vessel ride towards an horizon of unconditional vibrations. He kept on caring about these insights until he finally got asleep.
Once at the capital that famous Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez called “grey-skies city”, the young lady would attend the dinner graduation party, she would rely upon her beauty to assault on cold-blooded habitants of Bogotá, leaving them bewildered and warmed-up. Combining the attendance of her cousin´s football matches with work; she underwent exhausting photo sessions, modelled for fashion events, business congresses and participated in solidarity campaigns. Occasionally Valentina opened herself up to meet again this mature Argentinian, whose age she tried not to calculate but estimated anyway. Not on any account was she going to spit him out something more about herself, for he was just a newcomer, at most an intruder blessed with a nice gaze. She preferred to place attention on her list of priorities. “An opportunity shall come for him to sound me out and likewise for me to sound him out; perhaps, when I become a lawyer –she made a promise to herself- time would be ripe to schedule a formal appointment.”
The print-run bonus pick up appointment was scheduled at seven in the evening. Since the Loser Titan arrived early, he decided to kill time having a coffee at OMA Bar-café, in a shopping mall whose name it didn´t even know. He plunged into a day-time dream, his obsession with the model slid back into mighty questions: “What would she be doing? Would I be, even momentarily, in her head, reason or heart? Would she have enjoyed the airport encounter as much as I did?” Abstaining from carrying loads of absurd thinking, he made a brain switch and figured out the cover and back cover of his book fixed up. Besides, he was attentive to receiving two phone calls: one from Franco Salomone and the other from Adriana, the Printer Manager, with whom the collection of the print-run bonus had been arranged. Still, he failed to concentrate on literary issues –it was not unexpectedly that he called himself The Loser Titan. Valentina had been enshrined in him; she had been transformed in his diamond, in his nomadic poem. The books were eventually collected at seven thirty and packed by the Loser Titan himself, since the personnel suffered a logistic shock due to seemingly more urgent deliveries. A mix of confusion, improvisation and nervousness dominated the ambiance of the printer house, witness of Adriana being harassed by his boyfriend, a bulldog-faced hostile human who put pressure on her finishing the working day at the soonest, to rush together to the cinema.
Unaware of this struggling delivery of books, Valentina unknowingly overflew The Loser Titan´s heart soundboard.
Although the propensity to think of her usually froze his earthly actions, the Loser Titan managed to introduce the forty four copies of his book inside the first taxi he stopped. The taxi-driver turned out to be an ex-stash constructor under the command of Colombian outlaw Pablo Escobar Gaviria. Twenty four years ago he had received directly from Pablo the taxi he was now in, plus another cab now driven by one of his closest friends, both in compensation for dismissal, days before the most wanted man at the time went into hiding. Eternities passed as one traffic jam disappeared into the next, until the taxi-driver dropped the writer at Salitre bus terminal of Bogotá. The Loser Titan could not help but to suspect that the delay was deliberately provoked by the taxi-driver in order for him to dwell on his glorious days in the criminal underworld, since he proudly lingered on telling the Loser Titan about the modus operandi of El Capo, as well as his own skills at making stone cases out of the reach of the Search Bloc Squad. His workplace was mainly the farm Hacienda Nápoles, where El Capo liked to storage the earnings with which he financed his life on the run. In his role as the foremost stash constructor permanent resident there, he was entitled to spot any possible nook, the degree of confidence that Escobar conceded to the cab driver was such, that he used to share evenings out accompanied by the lovers of the Drug Lord. “The sin equa non condition to work for a narco-guerrilla and overprice him my job seventeen times higher than its market price, was to behave the same way as him, which meant –the cab driver was now yelling at The Loser Titan- to set up an harem of lovers around me.” The story-teller succeeded in grabbing the writer´s attention, for he listened to the tale fascinated to some extent, but much more fascinated the Loser Titan was by Valentina, whose picture remained imprinted in his retina. A picture that was reluctant to flee the nest. Someday the Loser Titan will claim for his indemnity too, because he was assigned a job for which he felt underqualified outright.
As the Loser Titan listened to the sufficiently compensated stash constructor, some kilometres away Valentina unpacked her luggage of a “Wannabe Diva” and made her bed in one of the bedrooms of her cousin´s house. From one of her bags she took her teddy bear out, a pet she couldn´t live without, and for a second the Argentinian writer came to her mind; then her younger cousin summoned her up to dress-fitting together. Her uncles would invite her for dinner that night; they would select Katmandú, one of the most chic Restaurants in town, a must when visiting Bogotá, the favourite both for Valentina and the Loser Titan.
- We´ll spend a great time tonight –Valentina said to her cousins. They tied their hands together as if the connection between them was going to last forever.
By no means did Valentina think of start sending WhatsApp messages to this veteran presumptuous writer, it was him to kick the game off. ¡God save The Queen! In any case she had not thought about the guidelines of this newly born relationship, nor where it will lead her to. It was too early for that. A couple of days later the Loser Titan sent her a message on his way to the airport, with the news that the dedicated book had just been handed over to the reception clerk of Valentina´s condominium.
Cali, Colombia, December 1st 2017
It was an easy task for the Loser Titan to write down the dedication, it took him only twenty minutes to get it done (meanwhile he was making a backup, since he was the Financial Manager of a multinational holding, so every time he travelled abroad he copied the documents needed in his daily work routine) between six and six twenty in the afternoon. To that end he picked up a notebook where two sheets of outlines were filled out. What it first sprang out of his heart was uninterruptedly being poured onto the paper sheet, as if it were an exercise of spontaneous prose. Once at home he would transcript the outcome on the book to be delivered to Valentina. Waves of poetry invaded the prose, the self-produced script came out like a seasonal diarrhoea. By the way, an outstanding excerpt stressed on how deep The Loser Titan loved Valentina: whatever she did or undid, whatever reaction she might have towards him, it did not make any difference, the very nature of her sentient being triggered his inflamed loving. End of story. It did not lack the opportunity all across the dedication, though, to pray not to ever Valentina put herself on sale, to preserve her immaculate way of being from the claws of the popes of Dolce&Gabbana when hired as their model, it was sure Domenico Dolce´s well-paid mastiffs will try to make Valentina succumb by promising her the earth if she wouldn´t resist their lower instincts. Who knows if incited by extravagant invitations her personality will be tarnished and ended up being a passenger on Saint Tropez luxury sailboats, putting her virginity at risk. To the Loser Titan Valentina´s purity must be exempted from the wimping -sometimes superficial- atmosphere of the modelling world. At least from his literary lair, he made a wish to impede such an exaction.
If The Loser Titan could know what she was scared of, which preoccupations might be boiling in her head, he would act on her behalf and turn them into divine substance, he would always be helpful and ready to ride her problems out, he would help her grow up as well as to recruit her boyfriends, since it was clear to him that he would not catch Valentinas´attention for the time being. Therefore, he would not compete for the pole position, to steal Valentinas´ heart. ¡Dammit!, that´s a tall order, he admitted. “I´m not competing with anyone, at least I´m losing against society” –assured to himself, The Loser Titan. At most, if trying to depict the best-case scenario in the search of undefined clarifications, Valentina will let time pass by before she could ever think about including the Loser Titan in the realm of her affections.
The dedication would exceed the Colombian model´s expectations; her intuition told her The Loser Titan had been saving inspiration for so long until the appearance of the proper lady to share his secrets with. It was not long before Valentina realized that she was in the pole position in the consideration of the Loser Titan´s blooming heart.
