People can get used to anything. I’m getting used to my friends killing themselves.
First it was Chubs Reboiras, with his round, 130-pound baby face. Chubs was the only other kid at school who didn’t play soccer. We’d spend recess sitting on the sidelines watching everyone else play. Sometimes we’d have to duck to avoid getting hit by the ball when it came our way. Chubs always had it worse, since he was a wider target. We never talked much.
Once, after class, Chubs invited me to his house to see his butterfly collection. They were dead butterflies, hung with pins on black fabric in a box made of wood and glass. He had a lot, from little blue tropical ones to huge moths. His father collected larger animals, because he was a hunter. In the living room there were bear heads, moose heads, and even a tiger, although he had bought that one, Chubs confessed. He had long guns in a display case. Rifles and things like that.
That afternoon we played Pac-Man and had cookies with milk. Then he let me watch his sister lying out in the sun by the pool. I wanted to tell him that I’d had a nice time at his house, but we never ended up talking much.
One Friday I brought a Masters of the Universe comic to school to show him how much he looked like Ram-Man. They really were identical. But Chubs wasn’t in class that day. The following Monday, after we sang the school song and the national anthem, a priest announced in front of the whole school that Chubs had passed away in an accident. He asked us to pray, but I didn’t, because Chubs Reboiras was definitely going to hell for letting me look at his sister. When I asked the priest what had happened, he told me that Chubs had been cleaning one of his father’s guns when it went off. It sounded plausible at the time, but now I wonder whether Mr. Reboiras had really asked his eleven-year-old son to clean his hunting weapons. I think Chubs just killed himself, although maybe he hadn’t planned to. These things happen.
A few years later I became friends with Julián. We were fifteen but he had been living as if he were forty. Because of his drug problems, he had to repeat his sophomore year of high school. In his junior year, they expelled him for insulting the principal’s mother. That was good for us. Since he was no longer a student, he could bring us bottles of pisco and rum that we’d drink secretly during breaks, hidden behind the biology lab.
By our senior year, Julián was completely wrecked—he tried to sell marijuana to ten-year-olds at the school entrance. He managed to stay out of juvie, but that cost his parents all of their savings, which were supposed to go toward the cottage at the beach. And they spent it exclusively on bribes for officials. What’s more, they were thinking about checking Julián into Eternal Peace, a rehab center that—we learned years later—abused its patients. In a few cases, the director sexually assaulted patients who were minors. Nobody knew this when my friend’s parents were thinking of sending him there. Luckily (and just in time), Julián fell in love with Mili, and almost immediately, he cleaned up his act.
Mili had freckles and blue eyes. She had an apple-pie face. She wasn’t as good-looking as Chubs Reboiras’s sister, but she was sweet. And she saved Julián’s life. As soon as he started dating her, he stopped buying marijuana and cocaine and the rest of it. He started working out and walking Mili back to her house at night. I think that’s how they both lost their virginity. Must have been nice. Mili and Julián, growing up. After they had been together for two years, Mili left Julián. Apparently she started seeing Luchito Cárdenas, who was a complete imbecile. The same day she left him, Julián made a phone call to Chato Cabieses (or was it the older Espichán brother?) and told him that he loved him a lot, man, and that he was going to miss him. Chato (or the Espichán kid) didn’t understand what was going on but he was worried.
He ran over to Julián’s house and knocked on the door. His mom opened it. He ran up the stairs. From below he could hear Iron Maiden blasting in the bedroom. His mom asked Chato to tell Julián to lower the volume. Chato went up to the bedroom and tried to open the door but it was locked. He knocked and shouted and called to him. Julián didn’t respond. Chato went back down and told the mother to open the door. She looked for the key to the room in a drawer in her bedroom. She couldn’t find it. She called her husband. He started shouting at her, saying that she didn’t know how to control Julián, that it was all her fault, that she had raised her son terribly. Throughout all of this, Chato kept knocking on our friend’s door. When the shot rang out, he tried to imagine that it was part of Iron Maiden’s drum solo.
At Julián’s wake, they put a hat on him so we couldn’t see the hole in his head. The mother cried more than the father, but I think that’s normal.
The following year I started college. I must have been pretty drunk the whole first year, because I remember very little. It was 1992, there had been a coup d’etat, and there was a bar across the street from the university. Leo’s. I had a lot of friends and they all hung out at Leo’s. Babas was there, too. Babas had gone to high school with me, but he hadn’t been able to move past it. He was one of those people who looked back nostalgically on the “good old days” of a year earlier, cried about having left high school behind, and sang the school song when he was drunk—and also when he was sober, which was less common. When he enrolled in college, he was given a car.
I’m not sure if I should count Babas in the list, because he didn’t commit suicide like the rest. Although maybe he did. He always drove so fast—and so drunkenly—that we all knew one day something would happen. And then it happened: he crashed into a tree by Olivar Park in San Isidro. He was with Kike Frisancho—who broke an arm—and Mario and Jimena, who got minor injuries. The only one who ended up in a coma was Babas.
His other friends and I spent days gathered around the hospital entrance, waiting for news and wishing we could help, even though there was nothing to be done. We were so bored that we’d sneak up to his room to see him connected to the respirators and then go back down to tell the rest. On the fifth day, his father managed to return from England, where he lived, to give the order to unplug him. Babas couldn’t stay hooked up to machines indefinitely. We all understood. Babas was buried wearing a black suit that was too big for him and a cotton ball in his mouth. The fibers poked out through his lips. He had a silk tie on, surely his father’s.
After what happened to Babas, we stopped drinking for about two days. Then everything returned to normal. The rest of my literature degree was monotonous but enjoyable.
Early in my university days, I met Javier Tanaka. Tanaka was a Quixote expert. He knew everything there was to know about each edition and he smoked hand-rolled cigarettes with complete self-assurance and a big smile. He was fun and extremely short.
One day, my throat swelled up. And it stayed swollen for more than fifteen days. I went to the doctor. In the public hospital, there was an ear, nose, and throat specialist named Tanaka. I chose him. He was a solemn, silent man who did his job without hardly speaking to me. I asked him if he was Javier’s father. Yes, he said. Nothing else. I told him that I went to school with his son. Hm, he responded. He gave me a prescription for an injection in my ass that was administered in the pharmacy next door with questionable hygienic conditions but cheaply. A few days later, I told Tanaka that I had met his father. Tanaka said: Ah. I thought that they must be on bad terms, but then I found out that they lived together. Maybe that’s why they were on bad terms.
Two days after he received a scholarship for an exchange program in Spain, Tanaka died. The housekeeper found him face up in his bed. The sheets were wet with frothy saliva. His family said it wasn’t a suicide. They called it an accident. According to what El Flaco Céspedes told me, Tanaka alone took more pills than an entire rave in Ibiza. But they weren’t hallucinogens or anything like that. Tanaka needed amphetamines to wake up and barbiturates to fall asleep. Maybe he really didn’t commit suicide. Maybe he just accidentally took a little more than his normal dose—or maybe there had been a bad interaction with the alcohol when he was celebrating the trip to Spain that he wouldn’t live to go on.
Or maybe we had it all wrong, and he’d been trying to kill himself for years until one day, by chance, he pulled it off. He’d been unhappy for a few days and the loneliness was tugging at his neck. One day before his death, he asked my friend Rony to get a coffee with him. He wanted to talk. Rony canceled because he had to finish an essay for Medieval Literature. He told him they could meet up the following day. Rony will always feel terrible about that cup of coffee he missed. He says that to this day, when he has a cappuccino, he feels like he’s drinking the froth from Tanaka’s sheets.
By that time, another of my friends was sending strange signals from the planet of the dead. His name was Alex Antúnez and he was a poet—which never bodes well. Peruvian poets always end up killing themselves. Luis Hernández threw himself onto some train tracks, Vallejo might as well have killed himself, Moro took a job at a military school knowing that at the least, he’d be discriminated against for being gay, Adán voluntarily committed himself to a mental asylum, Heraud organized a guerrilla group but was the only one who died—the others fled when they saw his body. Alex Antúnez didn’t want to be the exception. Alex had also gone to my high school before his failed bid to join the Jesuit seminary and a brief attempt to devote himself entirely to poetry (which lasted for three days). After that he went to the university, where I met him because we were teaching assistants for the same course. The first time we had to teach a class, we got together before for a beer to calm our nerves. I liked Alex. Months later, we organized a party to raise money for a literary magazine. When we’d all had too much to drink, Alex tried to kiss me. I told him that I respected him but that I was attracted to women, and I felt like a complete jackass.
Our relationship cooled off a bit, but we would talk whenever we ran into each other on campus. Alex would often say that he wanted to see a psychologist but that he didn’t have the money. He told me about when he hit a police officer in the face and spent the night in the precinct, when he slept with one of his students, and when he pulled his pants down in front of the dean of the law school. After that I lost track of him. Later on, I heard that he’d gone to live in the jungle, that he had finally published his book of poems, and that he had gotten married. I was surprised that he was married, but even more surprised to hear he had a daughter. The last couple of times I saw him we barely acknowledged each other. He was wearing those beaded necklaces from the jungle and looked happy.
I was already living in Spain when I got an email about the fire in his house. His wife had found it upon returning from an errand. Smoke was pouring out of the windows. She tried to open the door, but it was locked from the inside. She called the firefighters. When they broke down the door, they found Alex, or what was left of him, holding a copy of his book open to the last page, to the verses that read:
I want to be of the air
And so I set my body on fire
I don’t know if Alex was cowardly or brave. I wonder the same thing about the rest of them. But of all my series of suicidal, loner, misfit, lifeless friends, the one that intrigues me most is the only woman. The beautiful Bel Murakami (apparently, the Japanese are captivated by suicide).
Bel was different from the rest. She wasn’t my friend. Mainly, I was dying to sleep with her. Bel was legendary among the assistant professors. One of my colleagues, Andrés Molina, took it upon himself to create a list ranking the most attractive female students. When Bel Murakami arrived, Molina immediately declared her the “freshman of the century” and never made another list. I saw her from time to time and voted for her as well, but didn’t actually know her.
Years later, shortly before leaving Peru, I saw her in the audience at my stepbrother’s concert. Bel was radiant. But that night, I had invited my friend Daniela to come with me. Even though Daniela was just a friend, it seemed rude to ditch her and go talk to another woman. Besides, I’d never had the slightest idea how to seduce a woman I don’t know. It’s a technique that all of my male friends—living and dead—seemed to grasp fully. But I’ve never mastered it. Halfway through the concert, a girl at the table behind us had a seizure. Everyone was scared, the concert stopped, and my friend Daniela ran to help her, because Daniela wants to save the world. Suddenly, I found myself next to Bel Murakami without any inconvenient bystanders—and with the perfect conversation topic. We talked about seizures. About what you’re supposed to do, why it happens, what the risks are. She said that when someone’s having a seizure you should put a spoon in the victim’s mouth so they don’t bite their tongue off. The seizure was soon over and everything calmed down more quickly than I expected. Daniela returned to our table and Bel to hers. She seemed to be alone. I didn’t manage to get her phone number, but the next time I saw my stepbrother, I told him that at his concert I’d met a really gorgeous girl. I mentioned Bel’s name. My stepbrother was appalled. He said that he had dated her and that she was crazy. Crazy, crazy, crazy, he repeated. Hysterical, he added. He said she had only gone to the concert to piss him off—specifically, to piss off his new girlfriend, who, sure enough, had been furious. Regardless, for the next few nights, every time I masturbated to porn stars late at night, I imagined them with Bel’s face.
I saw her three days later in another bar. I was with my Kamasutra friend group—all total druggies—and we’d been out partying for hours already. Terrible. When I saw her, I decided to go up to her, say something, ask for her number. I made my way across the dance floor, between sweaty bodies and elbow jabs. I lifted my hand to greet her. She returned the gesture. I kept going. I was only a few feet away when I realized that I was so drunk and coked out that I was about to make a fool of myself. I couldn’t even form words because my jaw wouldn’t stop shaking. I was sweating. I wanted to throw up. When I saw that she was about to stand up, I smiled at her and walked toward the bathroom. I only saw her once more in person. This was one night months later, in a gas station where I stopped to buy beer. I was with a girl who wasn’t half as pretty as Bel and she was with a guy who was a millionaire. We greeted each other with a nod. I spent the rest of the night trying to forget that I wasn’t with her.
The last time I saw her was in a Peruvian magazine that my father brought me in Spain. There was a photo of Bel, who had just put on an exhibition of her prints. She was very thin—still beautiful, but at least thirty pounds less beautiful than the week when I was in love with her.
Two days ago, my friend Lorenzo wrote to me with the news that Bel had been found partway down the cliffs in front of the ocean in Lima. I imagine it was one of those days when the sky looks like a used rug. Bel had jumped from the top, but she had only fallen—or rather, rolled—about sixty feet. She’s alive, but still in the hospital for another two or three days to treat various minor injuries. Lorenzo said he heard that Bel had been pregnant and that she lost the baby because of the fall. I hope it’s just a rumor. 
Santiago Roncagliolo (Lima, 1975) explores dark moments in Latin American history through noir and thriller. His novel Red April received the international Alfaguara Prize and the British Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. La pena máxima was shortlisted in France for Violeta Negra Award, and Y líbranos del mal topped the Peruvian bestsellers list. His last work of fiction, El año en que nació el demonio, is a historical thriller set in the seventeenth century. Also a screenwriter for films and TV, he lives in Barcelona.
Sofia LeBlanc lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where she writes poetry and translates Spanish-language literature. She co-teaches a poetry translation workshop in Club Hidalgo and her Spanish-language poetry has been published in Rapallo and the Buenos Aires Young Artists Biennial’s anthology Van llegando. She is originally from New Jersey.
Illustration: Sam Hadley.