When Perla was transferred to Señor Ortiz’s office, it fed a romantic dream. She was flattered by his attention and quickly embraced the idea that perhaps she had a chance to enjoy life with another man, just as Leo did with his flings. It took a few years for Perla to get used to Señor Ortiz, and it took a while longer for her to feel she missed him during weekends or when she imagined what her life with him could have been. It was Barranquilla that gave her the courage to accept his advances.
She never confessed the affair; the same way Leo never confessed to her the existence of any other woman in his life. But it is not expected that a married man will admit his unfaithfulness. By contrast, a married woman could instantly be considered a whore if she admits the same unfaithful behavior. Doña Perla felt that her affair with Ortiz had leveled the playing field; she had done to Leo what he had done to her. Whenever she thinks back on the affair, Ortiz is simply part of her calculated plan. Now that everything is over, she can continue being the decent and progressive wife everyone respected. She now has a secret treasure, a secret episode of liberation to reminisce on. She is modern; she is the embodiment of the values in her women’s magazines. The 60s and 70s are certainly decades where she witnessed changes in women’s lives. Decades to gain freedom.
Doña Perla thinks of Barranquilla and Honda, pausing her work on the typewriter to listen to the rain, expecting claps of thunder or car horns marking the peak of daily traffic outside. She would have loved this rain in Barranquilla, or Honda for that matter. Both cities built out of stubbornness against unbearable tropical heat.
Leo took Perla to Honda almost as soon as he secured a stable job traveling there to supervise sugar cane and rice shipped through the Magdalena river.
The bus drove endlessly up and down high mountains before a final drastic descent on winding roads, opening into a valley where the white houses with their balconies full of bougainvillea contrasted with the wild brown waters of the river. From the distance, it looked like the river had sliced mountains, barely leaving space for people to expand a city, fighting for every inch of land against nature.
Honda was busier than Perla expected. In her mind, cities outside Bogota were shanty towns of dirt roads and unbearable heat. Barranquilla surprised her as well. Like Honda, it had wide asphalt avenidas, with palm trees perfectly placed between lamp posts, modern cars, and well dressed people enjoying shops and restaurants like those in Avenida 19 around the international hotels in Bogota. In spite of the humidity and heat, men wore linen suits, sweating profusely under Panama hats, and women walked gracefully with their high heels and wide skirts, holding abanicos that matched their outfits.
On the trip to Honda, Perla saw ceiling fans for the first time. A luxury recently imported from America, marking a new symbol of status and prestige, like the women’s abanicos imported from Spain. Leo had booked a nice hotel room to try to convince her to move to Honda, but she had started to work and was enjoying the feeling of having a salary, not depending entirely on Leo’s job. No other woman in her family had had that experience.
Perla remembers lying in bed, mesmerized by the immense helix on the white ceiling stirring the air. At first, she was afraid the fan would fall on her, but she was quickly seduced by the artificial wind that made it easier to breathe. She couldn’t tolerate the temperature outside and made sure to remove any suggestion of sex from Leo’s head in such a place. When she went with Ortiz to Barranquilla, the tension of sharing the office in Bogotá for so long made it impossible for him to keep his hands off her. As soon as they arrived in the hotel room, their timid hand holding, the occasional intimacy in the office, the kissing in hiding behind the office door, exploded into a desperate need to remove clothes, to be together, to embrace. That contrasted with the many years of physical distance she had managed to establish with Leo.
Perla realized a while ago that she had never enjoyed physical contact with Leo nor, ultimately, with Señor Ortiz. Catholic education taught her that she should tolerate the physical urges of her man. A marriage was a business transaction that included the inconveniences of sharing a bed and a home in exchange for money, social status and security. She allowed Leo to fuck her, but just when they were young. She would lay still under his weight, waiting for him to “do his thing.” As time went by, she found excuses to avoid sex, and Leo stopped begging her for intimacy, for more children, for a big family. He arrived drunk more often, and that made it easier for her to reject him. She didn’t want pregnancies destroying her figure. Years went by, and now she was left with a combination of disgust and embarrassment when embracing or holding hands with either of the two men and to a lesser extent, with anyone who attempted any kind of physical affection.
(…to be continued…)
Transadaptation Volume 5 – Of Flowing Vicissitudes
January: The Night the Stars Stopped Shining – Sarah-Leah Pimentel (South Africa)
February: Three Sides to Every Story – Krisztina Janosi (Hungary)
March: Rain Trap – Adriana Uribe (Columbia)
April: Priorities – Narantsogt Baatarkhuu (Mongolia)
May: The Night in Heaven – Armine Asryan (Armenia)
June: Witches Don’t Burn – Alejandra Baccino (Uruguay)
July: At One and The End of Misery – Angelika Friedrich (America)
August: Many Happy Returns – Svetlana Molchanova (Russia)
September: And Now, It Will All Go Downhill – Jonay Quintero Hernandez (Spain)
October: (To be announced) – Gennady Bondarenko (Ukraine)
November: You Are Her, Aren’t You? – Seyit Ali Dastan (Turkey)
December: To be announced
Background – Context
Transadaptation Volume 4: Material Dissent – Adulthood Transadapted, (eds.) Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2023)
Transadaptation Volume 3: Evanescent – Young Adulthood Transadapted, (eds.) Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2022)
Transadaptation Volume 2: Conceived – Childhood Transadapted, (eds.) Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2021)
Transadaptation Volume 1: In the Middle – Prelude to a Contemporary Transadaptation, (eds.) Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2020)
Peripatetic Alterity: A Philosophical Treatise on the Spectrum of Being – Romantics and Pragmatists by Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2019)
La Syncrétion of Polarization and Extremes Transposée, (eds.) Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2019)
The Codex of Uncertainty Transposed, (eds.) Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2018)
L’anthologie of Global Instability Transpuesta, (eds.) Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2017)
From Wahnsinnig to the Loony Bin: German and Russian Stories Transposed to Modern-day America, (eds.) Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2013)
Emblems and stories on the international community
Perception by country – Transposing emblems, articles, short stories and reports from around the world
Credits
1. Top left: Bogota, Columbia – The walls of Bogota – Nowaczyk (Shutterstock); 2. Middle left: Bogota, Columbia – In the rain – Andrés Gómez (Unsplash); 3. Lower left: Bogota, Columbia – The old sector – Nowaczyk (Shutterstock); 4. Middle: Bogota, Columbia – Universidad Javeriana – Adrian Cogua (Unsplash); 5. Bottom middle: Bogota, Columbia – Calle del Embudo – Nowaczyk (Shutterstock); 6. Top right: Bogota, Columbia – On the street – Michael Schmid (Unsplash); 7. Bottom right: Bogota, Columbia – Street art in Bogota – Azzedine Rouichi (Unsplash).
Source: The Codex of Uncertainty Transposed