From the editors
STAY Words Federico Ruiz
The warm softness of my bed amplifies the rawness of the scene. A young man kicks a policeman on his motorbike. The agent, clumsy, reaches for his gun. What follows is a mechanical sequence of movements: aim, fire, miss, get off the motorbike, aim again, pull the trigger twice. His attacker, his enemy, is now dead. Marcelo Agredo, still a teenager, is dead. “This is the country I am going back to,” I think.
12
Stay!
Stay.
The voice notes play as I see an egg turning white in the pan. “Things are turning dark and everything seems to indicate that, and I tell you this so you really think about it, they are setting up a state of exception, or a state of siege,” says the voice of a good friend who lives in Bogotá. He is not the kind of person who gets scared easily, so I understand his words as a veiled warning, a pessimistic attempt to discourage me from returning to the city. Doubts grow, and with them a deep feeling of unrest.
I sit in one of the faculty’s rooms. When I turn on my laptop, I see that my mother has sent me a link to the transcript of a speech by Gabriel García Márquez. It begins with a quote from Miguel de Cervantes’ “Don Quixote”:
Stay… The deep voice of a radio host is the usual soundtrack of my showers. The main theme of conversation has been the same for a whole month now: The national strike, initially sparked by a draft of a new tax law, which has now become an unstoppable force fuelled by the indignation of many Colombians. On the other side, the government, used to assimilate opposition as terrorism, keeps suppressing their pacific protests through brutal, military-styled actions. In this radio station, they prefer to focus on the violence than on the legitimate requests of protestors. I swear each time they do that, while my skin boils under hot water.
“all these tempests that fall upon us are signs that fair weather is coming shortly, and that things will go well with us, for it is impossible for good or evil to last forever; and hence it follows that the evil having lasted long, the good must be now nigh at hand.” This apparently flawed logic is what allows me, and many of my compatriots, to remain deeply optimistic. Back home, every disgrace adds to the promise of a heyday that we still have to see. Stay? It is lunch time and I am in the kitchen, watching an interview of Pepe Mujica, former president of Uruguay. There’s a moment when the interviewer asks him how he sees Europe. “Europe has the suffering of having been¸ and not being anymore. Having been the epicentre of civilisation and having
