The Trails of Ifigenia

By Eduardo Garcia Aguilar

Sensitive, intelligent and independent, Ifigenia Botero blazes her own trails through the cultural confines of Colombia during the 1960s snd '70s. Narrated through the memories of her lovestruck neighbor that are set against the backdrop of urban slums and guerrilla camps in the mountains, The Trails of Ifigenia recounts the sexual, sentimental, artistic and political education of a generation that came of age after a period wrought with violence. This novel is a celebration of bearded revolutionaries and peace-and-love hippies, the literature of the Latin American boom and clumsy young poets, rock and salsa, space travel and forest paths.  And just wait until the last sentence.

Eduardo Garcia Aguilar (Manizales, Colombia, 1953) is a novelist, poet and journalsit. His works translated into English include the novels The Triumphant Voyage and Boulevard of Heroes, the collection of short stories Luminous Cities, and the critical examination of globalism Mexico Madness: Manifesto for a Disenchanted Generation. A self-described professiona foreigner, he currently lives in Paris, where he is a special correpsondent and editor for Agence France-Presse.

"The best way to get into literature, its foibles and its direction, is to live it. This is precisely what Eduardo Garcia Aguilar lets us do..."  Gregory Rabassa (translator of One Hundred Years of Solitude)

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookRix
• Release date: Aug 28, 2020
• ISBN: 9783748755470

Book preview

Ifigenia in the House of Dahlias

Raining as usual, and the rain intensified desire. Humidity covered the roofs, walls, plazas and our young bodies with a film of imperceptible sweat while we played in the basements, patios and hallways of the Monster Castle and took advantage of the dim light to secretly kiss and rub against each other. Boys and girls, boys and boys, girls and girls. That’s the way things were while my grandmother tried to guard our innocence.

Outside existed neither war nor death nor hunger nor hate, or so we thought at the House of Dahlias, that is until we began to understand the news. Wind from the snow-covered mountains would stream down over the forest as we flew our red, blue and yellow kites over the cliffs. Vultures soared in circles above the deep ravines and you could hear the river below crashing against the rocks strewn about by the last volcanic eruption.

My grandmother was in agony, and for that reason I preferred to fly my kites, so I wouldn’t have to hear the old woman’s strange groans and labored asthmatic breathing. Meanwhile my mother wandered around the enormous mansion where we lived, going from one room to another or giving the servant girl orders or answering the endless phone calls.

The central patio was pretty as a postcard with all its primroses, azaleas, geraniums, hydrangeas, camellias, dahlias and daisies whose aroma drifted through the centuries-old place. A parrot sang and screeched wonderful swear words from atop a magnolia tree where it went to escape the dogs and cats.

There was no refuge from the permanent desire that took hold of us, our sex organs imperceptibly stealing right in, searching for some limitless satisfaction which we didn’t know at the time would always make itself present, even in agony itself. We cast a seductive gaze at each other’s bodies and a desire to touch, love, kiss, caress, possess, achieve a primordial explosion, reach an elevated state, led us to something beyond: to dream of others during long sleepless nights. Once discovered though not understood, nothing can hold back the essential secret of desire, a secret interior weapon—proper, ardent, insistent, always knocking at the door, even in the terrain of dreams.

During the afternoons the smell of magnolias would spread through the patios while the luminosity of the high, humid lands cleaved through the clouds and with its rays covered, penetrated, pried into the darkest corners. In the wall connecting our houses was a secret place, almost inaccessible, where the gazes of my grandmother and other grownups couldn’t reach. At certain hours it remained as well separated from the absolute light of the Andes. Only for brief moments would the smell of the trees and flowers come through the air to that blind spot whose secret entrance led to vast basements where we hid between wild races and games and laughter. And there among the little scorpions, during the long afternoons of days off from school, suddenly, secretly, we would rub against each other and feel the other’s trembling body, our hearts beating, my incredibly hard member throbbing, my eyes closed while her hand caressed my zipper. And then from the other side of the house would come the voice of her mother screaming, the screech resounding through that secret limbo.

Ifigenia, where are you? Didn’t I say not to wander off or go hiding? Ifigenia, I told you! Where are you? Come here now!

She’d unglue herself and say, See you later, Marco Aurelio, and then head towards the light, towards the patio, under the trees and between the bushes, running faster until her mother could see her.

And I’d stay there desperate, almost choking, suffused in her perfume, and then come, I couldn’t help it, feeling the spasms, my damp dick hard and palpitating, emptying itself again and again in an endless death rattle. I’d close my eyes and lean against the wall, floating in that little death. Ifigenia, Ifigenia, where are you now, Ifigenia? I would say to myself on that journey through vast space, far from reality, her smells impregnated in my skin.

Thin and fair-skinned like the women on her mother’s side, she used to dress in freshly washed jeans, still smelling of soap, that her aunt brought her from Miami, plain white blouses and simple blue tennis shoes. Those faded bell bottom blue jeans were her second skin. Sometimes she wore mini-skirts that showed off her firm thighs, knowing the effect they had on old men and boys. Or she’d put on tight white jeans and a light purple blouse, her brown hair held back by a ribbon waving free in the air. She was beautiful, possessing a strong character that made her famous as a girl among her friends and classmates, but always with a wicked look in her eye. Invincible, obstinate, astute, quick, flirtatious, dominant. A leader with neither law nor master.

Although when we were around seven or eight we shared a secret about a ghost who made us take our clothes off in a nearby field and pretend to have sex, Ifigenia began to distinguish, to note, to desire, to know the truth around thirteen, more or less a year before we saw Blow Up, when a flood that washed away everything overcame our bodies. From that time date the notes I wrote in coded letters trying to grasp those burning charms, which in their wake seemed to scorch the city into ashes. During that first year of awareness I was a total slave to her forces and she knew it. My only refuge was words and words saved me, for in them I reconstructed the world within the world, in another dimension, and her body and smell and fleeting presence were my personal forbidden grounds. There simmered liberated worlds I tried to dominate with language, sculpting her body from different angles, imagining damp garments upon her thighs, stomach, torso, neck and sex, or my own hands touching her naked body.

I freely noted names, descriptions and doubts about all the objects of my desire, whether boys or girls, neighbors, servants, classmates. Ifigenia ignited in me that overwhelming, precocious perversity that possessed us all during the rainy season.

Not only in what we called the Monster Castle, hidden behind the magnolia tree and the opening in the wall, did we search each other out, but as well in other places where trusting adults left us to ourselves. When we went to the farm La Linda or slept over at each other’s houses under the pretext of studying, we took advantage of discovering our bodies, exciting each other in the darkness of long nights beneath the dogged Andean rain. With my secret alphabet I recorded in that notebook those encounters, registering like the Ten Commandments the initiation into that most fascinating world where some resided perhaps without even realizing it, carried towards those lands by an unstoppable animal nature, but which I controlled and understood more deeply with the help of language that trapped reality like a carnivorous plant, or a vigilant lizard, salamander or basilisk that strikes out with its long forked tongue to snare insects.

For a while Ifigenia was prohibited any contact with me, and all of us in general. Fortunately not for long. Her father had beat her for being impure. Maybe that family had quickly understood the terrible danger signified by her obvious confidence in her budding body, now that at any moment our games might be translated into one of those banal tragedies that have forever shaken tribal worlds, secretly guarded in the family album of unsayable things. Babies abandoned at the doors of hospitals, secret abortions, a girl’s life lost because of a miscarriage, and in other distant worlds stoning, immolation, mutilation.

Her isolation cut me to the quick. Then nature directed us boys to search out our own methods for advancing in the school of desire and pleasure during those long playful afternoons full of lubricious complicity. And on their side Ifigenia and the girls also found a way to satisfy their passion. Until the hatch once again opened.

Charly Snoopy was furious to discover that Ifigenia wrote us all the same letter, only changing the names according to the receiver. Charly, I love you, you’re the love of my life, my genius. My stud Marco Aurelio, I desire you, I can’t live without your smell. Franky Largo, you are the best of them all, the bravest, ugly but tasty. Upegui, your intelligence amazes me, your hands make me tremble, my body shivers while I caress your silky hair. And so according to Charly the letters were interchangeable, not mattering which of those labels—the intelligent, the brave, the stud—she assigned to us.

Ifigenia the queen bee extended her reign around the House of Dahlias like a wave of desire and seduction. She knew better than anyone how at fourteen, with an infinite power over any male she encountered, nothing was prohibited to her. She would ride her bicycle in her faded bell bottoms and pink shirt that said Love around on those days of choking clarity, when the sun lorded over the heights and strong winds blew through the trees and over the clothes lines hanging in the patios and colorful kites flew over the cliffs.

She’d stop at the store Canaima and buy an ice cream to savor, placing one foot on the pedal and the other on the ground, a hand upon her hip. We’d see her like that, all of us who adored her and jumped on the secret carrousels of love organized in the basements of big old houses, a scarf covering our eyes, waiting to see whose turn it was to receive her kisses and caresses, or vice versa.

Ifigenia not only listened to rock in her secret room, where she spent hours looking at herself in the mirror, but also consumed every book that fell into her hands at the Colombian-American Center, like The Metamorphosis, The Portrait of Dorian Gray, Demián, Steppenwolf and Thus Spake Zarathustra. In her letters she scattered quotes from those works, along with aphorisms and beautiful thoughts. And so Charly got pissed off when the same quotes appeared in both his letters and mine, without us knowing to whom she wrote first, for later by chance we discovered that elsewhere in her concentric circles the queen bee possessed another enamored, Lucas Upegui, a saintly tall, skinny poet who attended the high school Nuestra Señora, whom she also seduced and gave those long literary letters that filled our nights with love.

And Charly got even madder when she laughed and told him to calm down, saying he was the only one, the one she most loved, the best, an unequalled genius. Sometimes he’d take her inside the pink and white Oldsmobile owned by his father, the director of the university hospital, and there under the sun complain about all her supposed infidelities, but she would get out of things with a kiss, telling him to shut his eyes and kiss her slowly, not to open them for long minutes so he could better smell her scent. Charly Snoopy would end up as happy as the tall kid from Nuestra Señora, or Franky Largo, ugly but tasty, or Marco Aurelio Estrada, her servant, the fast buck of the prairies, or the genius, according to whatever she chose to call me.

The queen bee would fly down the block and flee towards the mountains that surrounded the city, the hills growing greener and clearer in the high slopes teeming with stagnant pools filled with history, like the tombs of the Quimbayas where at night emerged flickering dancing flames. She passed through those days bathed by a cool sun that at times disappeared behind the radiant white clouds and then appeared again in the intense blue sky cleared by winds coming from the Pacific Ocean. With her antennas on alert she would wander from the heights down to where the nests of the vast flocks of migratory birds from Mount Leon rested amidst sounds of nature intact from the earth’s most distant eras. The Pleistocene, the Cambric, the age of dinosaurs, of winged animals, of pterodactyls, of diamonds and emeralds and lapis lazulis and rubies, there where volcanoes erupted in lava while the wrinkles of the mountain range became more indiscernible and unpredictable. And then she’d show up again, tired out, sitting on her bicycle by the store, licking her ice cream and talking about those stories she read and quoted in her love letters.

Palm reader of desire, alchemist of seduction, the repose and dream of every lazy, crazy teenager who lived near the House of Dahlias, Ifigenia ruled that atmosphere full of poetry and dreams and love and melodies and bodies. She would read the lines of our palms, dressed in a colorful gypsy shawl of psychedelic flowers, the same one worn by her Aunt Amanda when she returned down the Honey River and stayed at Ifigenia’s home despite disturbing the Walking Swastika and all the old ladies on the block who dressed in the black mantle of widowhood. Bad company, perverter of children, dishonest, immoral—they used every epithet possible against her aunt, who since early on had steered her niece off the right path with vulgar peals of laughter, who had taught her since she was little how to read the cards and coffee grounds and stories and histories, encouraging the girl to leaf through illustrated books and think about the United States and London and Paris and fashion and rock music.

The floral shawl, the pink shirt with the word Love, the faded bell bottoms, the sandals. Her image was stamped on the white adobe walls of the old city which by some miracle still survived in these times of cement, its houses of broad eaves and patios and tile roofs resting upon the embankments and commanding slopes. That city the founders built upon the cliffs of the mountain range was a kind of beehive out of a fairy tale, but without a Hansel and Gretel, without a Pied Piper.

Everything about Ifigenia was ahead of her time. At times she’d show up in shorts, a white embroidered blouse, tennis shoes and striped pink socks. And always when it was sunny an ice cream. She was always posing, or so it seemed like a pose, and she had a natural, savage expression, perhaps inspired by the rush from Blow Up, the film we’d seen together at the Cumanday Theater one Saturday after I managed to wheedle the money out of my grandmother.

Antonioni’s film seemed quite natural to her, she told me, as if she’d dreamt about it after reading a few short stories from Julio Cortázar’s Ceremonies she found in the purse of her crazy hippie aunt. That is one of the happiest afternoons of my life because I escaped with her without Charly the genius or Franky the ugly but tasty, or the elegant poet with dreamy eyes from Nuestra Señora. She spent hours looking at that red movie poster where the photographer straddles the beautiful model Verushka, shooting her face with his camera. Her arms spread wide, the woman surrenders herself to the pose. The blond photographer with his messy hair, his unbuttoned blue shirt revealing his chest, his khaki pants; the woman with that great head of hair, wearing a light black sleeveless sheath that seems to float over her body, slit up the side to show her outstretched arms and long sylph-like legs. Metro Goldwin Meyer presents a Carlo Ponti Production. Grand Prize at the 1967 Cannes International Film Festival. A film by Michelangelo Antonioni. Starring David Hemmings and Vanessa Redgrave. Hemmings very British in his blue serge sport coat and white bell bottoms taking photos in Maryon Park of a couple who seem to be playing games of desire and love among the trees in an almost unreal green field. The comings and goings, the antique shop, The Yardbirds, Jane Birkin and her friend pursuing the detestable photographer so he’ll take their photo, the models knocking over all the papers in his studio, just as Ifigenia wished to wallow before the cameras of Wadys Echeverry and the rockers at the Colombian-American Center who copied Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones.

Charly Snoopy never knew I went to the movies at the Cumanday Theater with Ifigenia and that we held hands the whole time and kissed. She was right beside me, I felt her, I saw her out of the corner of my eye concentrating on the images, looking at Vanessa Redgrave, Jane Birkin, Verushka and Sara Miles, the soft smell of her patchouli inundating me on that April afternoon in 1968 that marked a before and after in our lives.

When she got out of school, Ifigenia would run to her 5 o’clock class at the Colombian-American Center, a light-filled place where so many new things were dissolving the dead weight of tradition. She would arrive still dressed in her school uniform, stopping at the entrance to look at the posters on the bulletin board. Then she’d go up to the classroom on the second floor where some American teacher sent by the Peace Corps was initiating her into the secrets of Shakespeare’s language.

An hour later she’d emerge and go hang out in the main patio, talking to friends, joking and laughing, before heading to the library to hear the music that had started to seduce her, listening to her favorite channels like The Voice of America or Radio Nederland Holanda, which I’d shown her how to tune in one afternoon in her cave of miracles, there next to the House of Dahlias.

The library of the Colombian-American Center was a huge gulp of oxygen for everyone. The director, a young blond woman recently arrived from the US, had created there a free and open space, like some sunny May afternoon on the campus of Berkeley or UCLA.

Ifigenia’s hippie aunt paid for her English classes against the strenuous opposition of her parents, who saw in them a grave danger, a quick way for their daughter to mix with bad company and take the route of perdition. Her crazy old father was partly right. Wasn’t the theater group led precisely by a skinny deranged nihilist with long hair and big sunglasses named Mario Escobar, that coarse fellow who wore flowered shirts and bell bottom pants? Didn’t Wadys Echeverry and his band play there, imitating the Rolling Stones, contorting themselves and shrieking as if possessed by the devil? Didn’t everyone who’d been to the United States or dreamed of visiting there, and obviously were addicted to marihuana, go to the center?

The library acquired recent releases of the new Latin American literature by Mexican and Argentine publishers and books and magazines about theater, science and fashion, as well as records with the new sounds of jazz and rock. The place was open to the world, receptive to the ideas of Peace and Love. The librarian Peggy designed the space in such a way that each person could find their own niche. And there Ifigenia and the rest of us escaped that heavy, leaden world dominated by the fat old men who represented violence and power, puppets directed by the Church and political directorates and government offices populated by ghosts dressed in neck ties and vested suits and carrying umbrellas, with airs as welcoming as a priest giving last rites.

"The illustrated biography of Hemingway just came in, and it’s fantastic! Did you see Truman Capote’s latest book? Nabokov’s Lolita has arrived!" Peggy would say, plugging her new acquisitions and trying to convince us to explore different paths. She was on top of everything, carrying out her work with a bibliophile’s passion. She felt it a victory when we stayed there captivated by a new work and later told her all about the reading experience.

Compared to the books in the old municipal library on the Plaza de Bolívar, located on the first floor of the Liquor Industry Building, or family and school libraries, the books at the Colombian-American Center smelled new; the aroma of their fine paper and ink was different, modern; using the most recent technology, the printing was of excellent quality with clearly defined images. Before starting to read one would note the unique smell, breathing in the aroma emanating from the pages. Nothing new had come to the library on the Plaza de Bolívar since the ‘40s and its shelves were packed with old cloth-bound books impregnated with dust. It was a dinosaur full of the enormous, heavy funereal volumes of the Encyclopedia Espasa embedded on the shelves like gravestones and bound editions of Spanish classics or translations of Russian and French authors from the past. There you could find Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Gogol, which was a great pleasure, but at the same time you’d stumble upon writers smelling of moth balls along with so many other illegible books that almost fell apart in your hands. On the contrary, at the Colombian-American library were the most recent editions of contemporary fiction and theater, the newest currents of thought, recently released works from the United States, books fresh from the oven that Peggy displayed when they arrived to draw in readers, because above all else her job was to make us love books. The end justified the means so that her books might find a readership among so many brainless people. I was her best patron, always there, including Saturday mornings when only those most succumbed to the pleasure of reading came to enjoy the divine light that filled the air and shone off the huge tables.