EPISODE XVI
“I find it hard to tell you, very hard, that Balou has been the Master of the game”.
Dumb: stupid, stubborn, irritating.
Cali, Colombia, 27th January 2018
Valentina had not taken any sleep-inducing pills; she had only made it believe to her father. Instead, while the writer was embarked on the task of demolishing the flat door, she was on the task of reading his book (the only thing from Balou she had not left under Daniela´s care), switching it with David Fishman´s “Success is a decision”. Much to her chagrin, Valentina trembled with astonishment, because synchronicity turned possible to be reading a book whose author was, some meters away, trying to break into her house. The ongoing phenomenon led Valentina to think of solar eclipses, rare astronomic happenings that cause an overlapping sensation on the observer, which transcends reality. By no means was she going to let a hopping mad person walk inside her place, as no one is deemed to upset her balance. Besides, what Balou has come to dreaded her: a cut-and-dried discarded piece of evidence by the counter-party. Her balance had been nonetheless altered, since the hopeless muddle in which the argentine got himself into disturbed the placid previous reading atmosphere. It has no sense to be afraid of him though, she reassured, as arrows shot by hopeless romantics are not aimed to murder the muses who inspired their lyricism, they [the hopeless romantics] merely pour themselves poetically the way middle-age troubadours used to. Free-style as a matter of fact. In any case, Valentina was aware of the risk she would have taken if she had decided not to hold back the temptation to open him the door, as you always know at what time a troubadour steps on stage, but never when the show is over. “If my level of temptation had not been so mild -she reckoned- Balou would have remained over here eons of time”.
It was a must to finish the book of Balou prior to René´s arrival.
Every time she goes on a bus, minibus or whatever, Valentina gradually progresses in reading the Argentinian’s masterpiece, as well as to look afresh at the dedication. She has been noting that the text consisted of an array of amusing episodes full of descriptions, with heavily spicy anecdotes -in order to perk up the audience, she tended to believe. Being the text self-referential, Valentina was prone to think that the author, Balou, had left a string of lovers behind in real life, one in every port; who knows whether he anchored an offspring in every cove too. In the middle of her loneliness, Valentina recovered from her memory the phrase “a new process begins” that Balou had spoken minutes before boarding the plane, the day they first met. When the phrase was spelled, she instantaneously speculated of a Right to Maintenance claim laid by one of his ex-lovers with regards to unrecognised children. “I was a bit forward, wasn´t I?” -Valentina reproached herself-. After all, she had never asked him anything about his civil status, descendants, etc…Private matters in the end, but female curiosity, awakened out of the episodes related in the book, turned that passport-information intriguing to her. Given that eighty percent of the storyline was sex-oriented, Valentina assumed that under the skin of the main character lies a Casanova (behind whom the author certainly hid), a serial collector of love affairs. If, as the plot suggested, every grief-stricken lady meant to the protagonist nothing else but a closed chapter which enabled him to move on to the next one; if the social worker (said to render, to the afflicted women, regret-reducing services in whole) used the assistancialism as a façade for sexual gratification; if the main character´s interest for those women was clearly ephemeral, in view that his non-stop trips provided him with the proper situations as to get tangled -every next time in another country- into a new affair where components of welfarism are present again, Valentina wondered: “Why the hell Balou, author and responsible for the creation -in his own image and likeness- of the literary character, addresses to me so many loving expressions which are at odds with the detachment shown by the nonchalant vagabond of his book?” Valentina appealed to logic on this subject, as a university student she is being taught to reason, so much so that her feelings were impregnated with a hint of rationality, they were tactically governed by Aristotle statements. “I think, therefore I am” -René Descartes declared and Valentina agrees with him. Once again, she was stuck on the horns of a dilemma, as her mindset didn´t have the key access to enter the back room of Balou´s heart. Much less did she envisage the motivations behind his volcanic soul. “I do nurture my soul on Sunday Mass, but afterward, from Mondays through Saturday’s, logic regains control of my life” -Valentina was ready to admit.
When she heard Tania downstairs carrying Balou away, Valentina phoned Daniela and pleaded her to come over. It took Daniela less than half an hour to arrive, as she lives a few blocks from the condominium. Daniela rang in the very moment Valentina finished the reading of Balou´s book.
- Hi dear, don´t tell me, the Writer´s Gate striking one more time? -Daniela started getting warmed up.
- Yes, it is, I am overcome with the Writer´s Gate, as you name it. I don´t know how to stop it, how to surmount the up-hill situation I got involved into. I´ve underestimated him so far. By the way, as strange as it may seem, I don´t know his name, since Balou is a nickname, he probably picked up at random. His book was signed with a pseudonym. Everything is strange with regards to him, Daniela, during last December we chatted and chatted and I forgot to ask him his Christian name. I think it embarrassed me.
- How could it be possible for you to feel uninterested in knowing your “friend´s” Christian name?
They came into the flat with their arms around each other.
Valentina stood up, then, uncharacteristically, she began to walk in circles around the living-room, like a wasp induced on a hallucinatory trip; she seemed to be panting for breath and, at the same time, unable to remember something she had on the tip of her tongue. One could swear she was concentrated on the reformulation of the theory of relativity.
- I did it, I underestimated the writer indeed -Valentina reasserted, more to herself than to Daniela-. I gave him no clues of myself, I masked who I am. And that´s when I made a fatal mistake, my dear friend. As a sweet revenge he asked me to fill out a personality assessment test to which I should obviously have said no but, contrary to my usual custom, I accepted. To put things worse, I sold out by giving sincere answers to the questionary. The test was certainly his trick to worm things out of me, since not long afterward he would be sending me messages stating lots of character traits of me which are indeed true, undoubtedly inputs provided by the test results. What else could it be? A miracle? No, Misses Durango. It was the damned outcome of the personality test. I think that Balou linked up my answers with intuitions of his own, he managed to bridge the gap between him and my personality through an illogical method. On my side, I failed to blow down the bridges he erected in order to sneak up on me. Actually, on second thoughts, I gloated over the scene of Balou standing on the bridge, as long as I could stay safe from him on the opposite shore. It´s so weird a scene, Daniela, but as much as it is weird it is also natural. Balou succeeds in making weird things sound familiar to me. But today he crossed the line. He barked up the wrong tree.
- Mind your words, Valentina -Daniela scolded her.
- Tell me what he has done today.
- I knew he was coming -Valentina told her in a whisper-. Father warned me.
- René warned you on Balou´s coming? How did he know that? Is he even a fortune-teller?
- Long story. They are in touch on WhatsApp.
- Will Balou be in love with your father?
Despite her nervousness, in spite of the cat of the deaf neighbours ‘loud mew, Daniela with her wild guess managed to ease Valentina´s circular reasonings.
- Daniela: Don´t change subject, please. This is serious. Balou went too far this morning, he somehow got into the building evading the guard’s control check-point, and nearly knocks the flat door down.
- What happened is quite easy to understand, sweet heart: you weren´t able to bring the bridges down, and he was not able to catch you. Game over. Balou flew the bridges through the air symbolically by trying to knock your door down, because the bridges weren´t instrumental in the fulfilment of his purpose -which was to pass over them to ultimately get to you. Nothing to be worried about: The wheel has turned full circle.
- Perhaps -Daniela came up with a new idea- it´s something even simpler: He might have wanted to declare his love to you without the annoying interference of your parents. You have your own destroyer Romeo, Valentina, who applies radical methods in order to be heard. “Romeo The Destroyer” sounds good for the title of a movie, does it? He might also dislike to imitate trite romantic scenes, so he preferred to innovate. I am well aware that you, Valentina, love to be pampered, to be woken up to hear mariachis singing to you in your bedroom as you lean on the window, but that´s not Balou free-styled way of approach. His candour towards you has been demonstrated with ninja kicks smashing against your door. Balou is unique. He does things that haven´t been done before. There should be no records on romantic literature which accounts for this kind of flirting strategies.
- No, Dani, he came along to tell me something else. I am sure about it. To him love is nothing, he suggested in many different ways that feelings stronger than love do exist. He tried to make it out during his attempts to tear the door down…
- What did he say?
- He spouted a bunch of jargon, like we had signed a sacred contract, whatever that expression means to him. Knowing that I study Laws, he uses legal terminology during his deliriums so to deliver me unintelligible messages. He also accused me of committing him a foul inside the penalty area and now he was there joyfully injured, unable to get up. Later on, he referred to “I don´t know what” kind of drum-directed psychedelic dance of spirits, in the middle of which he spotted me among the crowd. He insisted on his turning into a waiting room until, fifty years post-his birth, the airport happening took place. He blames his madness on those too many waiting years. He asked me not to be disturbed by his words, I should not feel anything special, for anything that might happen it´s bound to be unilateral and it ought to fall on his side, not on mine, he assured. Furthermore, he said it brought him grief that it was my mother who asked him what happened at the airport; it was me who were to ask that to him. He finished saying that if he had been asked (by me) details on the airport happening, he wouldn´t have gone mad nor would have been so exalted and alive nowadays. In short, we would be close friends.
- Which is true, because I was interested in him at the beginning, and I let him know that on a text message -Valentina added.
- Clear enough, Balou lives beyond Planet Earth, somewhere afar in another galaxy, whereas you are in here stuck to this beautiful land -Daniela raised her eyebrows, sign of reinforcement of her emerging theory-. There is a big distance, a world of distance between him and you. You could hardly understand a specimen whose concerns are farther away from your earthly borders. Balou is out of bounds. Your fashion shows, the modelling atmosphere you are in, seasonal clothes-selling collections…how to say it? you, Valentina, live with your feet firmly on the ground, whereas Balou has not come back down to earth yet. Hence, the flyer writer that stretches his wings out in the sky shall always judge your interests as frivolous, he surely puts you in the team of the flappers, those young women in the 1920s who were known for pushing barriers for women´s sexual, economic and political freedoms, earthy matters for our candidate for the mad-house.
- Which is also true -Valentina came to terms with the pronouncements flowing out of her friend´s mouth.
- As far as I can see, the goal was not attained, -Daniela remarked-, the door remains standing. Maybe it´s writers-resistance.
- He almost succeeds, Daniela. The kicks and punches hopefully reached the ears of the guards, they showed up immediately and threw Balou out of here. I keep on thinking on the language he used, the strange words he threw around while he urged me to open the door.
- What else did he say?
- In the last minute before being caught, between gasps he said that when we came across each other at the airport -I remember clearly his words- he went to the restroom, he stood in front of the mirror and exclaimed: “I am back home”. Remember the bible´s parable of the prodigal son? He made smart use of that parable to consider my house of Nugaró as yours. What is mine is yours. Can you imagine that my house is his house? Why is this happening, Daniela? I have no clues to track the train of his thoughts! I want him to slip away of my life and at the same time I´m dying to figure out his messages. You know what? I would have felt unsettled with so an unpredictable man by my side, always watchful to the unexpected. It´s noticeable out of the message exchanges the permanent intention of him to conceal the deep sense of his phrases, the fox is cunning, he put some cards on the table (not all of them) in order to test my capacity to read between the lines. Plain foolishness of me to believe that silence is golden. With Balou things works otherwise, his obscure writing resulted in him having an ace up the sleeve. Not me. The truth is that it´s a foul play beyond my understanding: tricky phrases, magic numbers, contexts given in codes. I find it hard to tell you, very hard, that Balou has been the master of the game, Dani. And to think, it was everything under my control! I´ve been reflecting lately that I got the wrong diagnosis about him, I changed my mind after listening to his today´s verbal diarrhoea on the Sacred Contract and so on. You are right when you affirmed that Balou lives far from Planet Earth, now I acknowledge it. If you should finger me for something, Daniela, do it for sin of omission: I spent no time in knowing him in depth; right the opposite to what he did. I spent instead too much time seeing what kind of efforts he could make to enter my life. Meanwhile, the decision to give him the key access stayed on-hold. I went off the road, like cars, for being in a waiting mode, such convinced that it would be me who decides to hand the key access over to him. However, expectations were not met. Due to an oversight on my part, he seized the key access. He stole me the keys in a blink of an eye! He spotted some others and took them out of my reach immediately after. I was caught in a trap fuelled by my self-confidence, and the keys to get out of it are not in my possession any longer. If I had abandoned my comfort-zone and ascended up to the heavens where Balou supposedly lives, it would have been the only way to get to know him. In fact, he knows me better than I know myself. You have no idea how angry it makes me, as I am used to stand out above others in every field of knowledge. Contrary to my plans, he gets me wrapped around his fingers. Rather than a diagnosis unproperly run, I acknowledge it was lack of dedication from my side, the problem was an egocentric self-centred girl (you sometimes mocked on me for being a Valentino-centric Sun) who clings to the belief of being a planet around which men orbit. Fatal belief. Balou is out and off and beyond astronomic laws, as he himself decides in complete anarchy what paths his orbits will describe. Indeed, I am his one and only planet, he is my satellite, there is no question about that. He loves me and he will orbit around me even in his deathbed, but his orbital movements, unlike those of the rest of male prospects, are unsteady, unforeseeable. His toing’s and froing´s are like a seesaw in my head. I would say that Balou is a celestial body speeding in sheer desperation, he is an aimless meteor adrift in the ocean of the cosmos struggling for something reliable. However long it takes me, I will put an end to this game. Balou misled me, Daniela. I hoisted myself with my own petard and, to tell you the truth, I forgot the way back to calmness. Besides, Balou stands to lose if my father sets in motion. Balou could finish in trouble if he persists in getting closer to me. I know Dad is thinking over setting himself in motion because he feels that Balou is winning the game. Father, like me, hates to be a loser. Father is determined to beat Balou at any cost. It´s disgusting to be lost in the middle of a forest where the gateway to the outside is in someone else´s hands.
- Do you think that the life of Balou is at risk?
Valentina made an affirmative gesture with her head.
- Well, it´s enough. It´s not your fault. Don´t mistreat you, Valen. You did what you could, not what you should. Bear in mind that you are only seventeen years old and him fifty. What it happened is reasonable, because he is more experienced than you.
Daniela kept silent in a sudden, put two and two together, mentally double-checked available data, until she laid out a scheme typical of an archaeology student after a day of field research. Conclusion? A legal case drew up in her mind. There are an accuser (René) and the defendant (Balou), some charges are brought against the latter, the accuser seeks compensation for the victim (Valentina) with a hefty fine. Having enjoyed so many loving encounters with Valentina´s father allowed Daniela to predict his reactions anytime he found himself cornered, whenever he failed to figure out the conduct of his enemy. At this point, he could make use of whatever tricks for self-defence, he would show no fear to pull the trigger if a trying situation comes up in his way. Given that René regarded Balou as his sworn enemy, Daniela said: “What an idiot Balou is, he is screwed up”.
Valentina raised her hands letting Daniela know that she was at a dead-end street. Valentina instantly went to the bedroom and brought the dedicated book: “take it with you, Dani. Daddy is coming soon, if he sees this book, he will seize it. That´s how his modus operandi uses to work”. “If you want to bring into question Balou´s mental state, please read the dedication”.
Daniela placed the book into her small backpack.
René got to the flat ahead of time so he bumped into Daniela in the living-room. Daniela and him overacted indifference on greeting each other, a mandatory rule for clandestine lovers behaving in public. Valentina and René swapped their cell phones back, René grabbed his, and shortly after he sent a long text message to Balou, that reads:
Dear Mister Writer: It´s time for you to know our position over the texts you have delivered to my daughter. Stop it already, enough of it! Valentina reacted badly to your poor stuff; she is emotionally affected. Devote to writing if that is your trade, but do not disturb my daughter any more. Fiction writers create out of their imagination; having said that, get acquainted with a topic, write something about it and you will have a report hence, you become a chronicler, an historian. However, at reading your poems where corny language is spread among flash-backs, we realise that you are not a chronicler, those homegrown corny poems for Valentina are just filler. Whatever product coming from your imagination in verse are a toothache. If literature is the matter of your concern, good, keep on writing but don´t send anything to Valentina. Any doubt? So, I advise you to shuffle the pack again and pick out another card, as the paths of flattery may be slippery sometimes. I warn you to never again stick your nose at my daughter´s home; Don´t even think to drop by at the university either. Should you want to get into trouble with me, beware no one in the world will get you off-the-hook.
Balou wrote back:
Am I under a restriction order with regards to your daughter?
You definitely are, Sir.
Dear Mister Writer has a name: Adolfo Sammartino.
Mister Sammartino: I ask you not to send me neither audios nor messages any more from now on. I am sick of them. You know our position already.
Balou adds a smiley face emoticon:
Our position? What is that, René? Are we perhaps into a war where a look-out location is to be found for further bombardment to the enemy? There is no position to seek for. I am afraid you have watched too many war-films.
Whatever you think is none of my business, Mister Sammartino. Our family has taken a position and that´s it.
Good, René, this is not a lover´s quarrel and this is not the place to discuss whether my literature comes from living experiences or from my imagination. Okey, I promise you not to drop by the University and Valentina´s home. Happy now? Unlike many people, I keep my promises. Do you need a handwritten proof? It´s not necessary, you have my word on that. Give Valen my regards.
Balou wrote Valen on purpose, fully aware that René hated anyone who referred to her daughter by her nickname.
Though he stayed online, René didn´t answer. The communication was over even if both men were still connected.
