When I wanted to die young: a story by Jaime Bayly

In London there is a niece, a goddaughter, a cousin and the bones of my ancestors. In the next few days I will visit the cemeteries where the latter are buried and, if I am lucky, I will talk to them.

My ancestors fled wars, debts, women they left pregnant, honour and reputations. I have managed to preserve that legacy. I am even worse than them.

In London I have been poor and I have been rich, but I have always been cold, even in summer. I have had lovers, a tattooed girl who worked in a bar, a young intellectual who worked as a translator, and I have had boyfriends, a fashion photographer who took a hundred black and white photos of me, with my torso naked, although I didn’t like any of them.

In the towns near London I have searched for traces of my elders, but there is no record of their adventures, only a vague melancholic fog like the one those elusive men went to look for on the other side of the sea, in the futureless city where I was born, the same city that half a century later insists on turning its back on the future and the sea.

I have been mocked and humiliated in London by certain model and fashion designer friends who, crowned with success, princes of frivolity, doped-up kings of endless nights, laugh at my hairstyle, my worn-out clothes, my fondness for ice cream, my flabby, swollen belly.

I have not been able to forget, and even less forgive, the curious incident of the famous celebrity photographer, who came into my room in London, opened the closet drawers without asking permission, took out my clothes one by one as if they were spiders or lizards, making faces of disgust, and burst out laughing when he saw that my clothes, all my clothes, were at odds with fashion.

I am not, and have never been, a man sensitive to the capricious dictates of fashion, although I have sometimes been a man of fashion, and perhaps right now I am fashionable.

I’m not willing to give up ice cream so that my friends in London will like me more or consider me part of their very mild brotherhood.

The glories that were given to me in London live on in my memory: the pool games I won in certain bars, the cars with the steering wheel turned to the right that I knew how to drive without crashing, like a very rich guy who lived in that city did, the football matches I watched from the stands of the stadiums, the drugs I smoked and snorted when I wanted to die young.

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I mean, I’m a man coming from London and going to London, just as I’m going to London now on a double-decker plane with five hundred passengers, me on the bottom deck, afraid that the top deck will fall on me.

My very rich uncle and my very rich aunt brought me books from London about adventures, pirates, police intrigues, as well as classical music records, but I wanted them to bring me records by Elton John, Bowie, Sting. They also brought me orange marmalade, one of my aunt’s weaknesses, the other being poodles.

Every summer my grandfather travelled to London. He was very English in his humour, his correctness, his severity and his intellectual curiosity. He often spoke to me in English. He seemed to have a certain confidence in my future. He would tell me: he who knows, knows. And he knew.

In London I was briefly a hero, who would have thought so. I once arrived on a flight from America. At the airport, they wouldn’t let a young Argentinian girl in because she didn’t have enough cash. They told her they would deport her. I immediately approached them, said it was a misunderstanding, that this young woman was my girlfriend and I would pay her expenses. I showed them a wad of pounds sterling and they believed me and the Argentinian girl entered London with me, as if she were my girlfriend. My efforts to persuade her to return the favour and spend the night with me were in vain. She wisely went to a friend’s apartment. I never saw her again. I am moved to remember her, what her life must have become.

In London I have seen or thought I saw Sabina singing in bars when he was not yet famous and was being persecuted by the Spanish dictatorship, García Márquez studying English and saying that certain London streets seemed Panamanian because of the bustle and colour, Cabrera Infante smoking cigars and making puns and wordplay, Vargas Llosa writing in a notebook in the British Museum, Borges saying that he who looks at the sea sees England. Although I have not seen them in real time, as I describe them, I have dreamed of them so much, and so powerfully, that without a doubt I have seen them and that is how I remember them now.

No visit to London is complete without a visit to the bar of the three-star hotel where I stayed the first time I stayed in the city. I hardly slept at all then and the hotel seemed decent and well located. My daughter laughs when I tell her that I slept in that old, run-down, smelly hotel, a hotel that smells of human shit, of old human shit.

I used to arrive in London without so many pills. Now I am haunted by the haunting spectre of death. After the pandemic, I fell ill with coronavirus in London and thought it was my destiny to die in that city. Now I carry with me numerous antibiotics and the usual sleeping pills. I do not wish to die in London. Not yet. I am a man of America. My wish or my destiny is to die in America and have my bones buried in America.

Nobody is waiting for me in London, not my niece, not my goddaughter, not my first cousin, not the bones of my ancestors, not the Argentinean woman who could have been my girlfriend but refrained, as a sign of elegance.

Waiting for me, perhaps, are the hotel driver, the receptionists who already know me, the uniformed girls from the club, all of them and the vague certainty that the ancient origin of my life, or the chain of chances and misfortunes that preceded the very beginning of my life, began there, in that city, on that island, in those frozen seas that my ancestors sailed, fleeing from wars, from debts, from the women they left pregnant, from honor and reputations.