An Orphan World

An Orphan World is extraordinary: an unflinching anatomy of poverty and violence, a harrowingly brave exploration of desire, and also the most beautiful account I’ve ever read of a son’s love for his father. Caputo is a blazing new talent in world literature. Everyone should read this book. Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You

An Orphan World has won Caputo a place on the prestigious Hay Bogota 39 list of the best Latin American writers under 40 years of age. The reasons? This is a powerful, poetic novel that tells a story of rites of passage.

Carlos Pardo, Babelia (El País)

The novelty of Caputo’s prose and the truthfulness of his intuition will leave readers speechless.

Carolina Sanín, author of The Children

An Orphan World is a beautiful novel, sad and moving, bold and violent, in which the understanding of the body and of sex is crafted in radical and astonishing ways.

Alia Trabucco Zerán, author of Man Booker International shortlisted The Remainder

An Orphan World blows up conventional forms in order to create something original and delicately beautiful.

Margarita García Robayo, author of Fish Soup

Caputo has rewritten Colombian violence. (…) This debut novel marks the birth of a great writer.

Laura Restrepo, author of Delirium

An Orphan World is a great novel, profound and complex (…) Readers will feel grateful at the beauty captured by Caputo.

Marianne Ponsford

An Orphan World is a novel both desolate and libertine, a chrysalis in the happening where sometimes the horrific is to the fore (...) I loved its pure poetic essence.

Mageda Baudoin, El País

An Orphan World

Giuseppe Caputo

An Orphan World

Translated by

Juana Adcock & Sophie Hughes

A butterfly fluttered down to a dark place;

of beautiful colours it seemed;

it was hard to tell.

Marosa Di Giorgio

CHAPTER I

The Cardboard Star

We’re cloaked in black light tonight. That’s why the men can’t see each other. At most they see violet teeth, which disappear for moments in the violet smoke, or in encounters with other teeth. Then the moon, a ball glowing purple in the light, purple like their teeth, comes into view. And as it appears, white shafts of light rise from the floor, intermittently setting bodies and faces aglow. And that’s why the men, fragmented in the light, scintillating in the rays, look like stars. They quiver and flicker, those stars, and the newfound brightness to the place is the brightness of the full moonlit sky.

The men hug and holler. They crowd together, delirious, jostling to get closer to the sphere. They raise their arms as if trying to touch it.

‘You too,’ one of them says to me. ‘Come in closer!’ I do as he says, letting him lead me astray. I thread my way through until I’m directly beneath the ball, which starts to descend: the moon starts to descend.

The beams of light turn green, and with them, the faces. Then the music changes: louder now, now slower. The music is dripping. The men change too: they all switch off for a beat. They gaze at the moon from behind the smoky haze, and there they remain, gazing. But they are in total darkness again, and even the moon disappears, only to reappear bigger, whiter, closer.

Now the mirrors on the ball are visible: I see us in its facets. The men come back to life and start dancing again. In among them, I feel something brimming: time, bubbling, spilling out of me; space, like me, giving way. And still the moon descends. The men go on dancing. One of them, whirling around in circles, stops, disoriented.

‘What’s with all the clothes? Aren’t you hot?’ he asks, caressing me.

He takes off my shirt, smells it, and starts waving it in the air. Then he spots my star, plastered to my sweaty chest. He looks at it, looks at me. And, just like that, the time rewinds…

* * *

One night, many nights ago, my dad gave me a star. We lived in the red, as we do now, in a sad house with next to no furniture. And since the house was sad, and its white walls were bare, my dad decided to decorate. Taking inspiration from cave paintings, so primally ancient, more ancient than this story by thousands of years, he began his artistic project by drawing a crayon cow on the kitchen wall: two black circles, one on top of the other, and two triangles for the ears. He added a tail, coiled like a spring, and for a face two dots – the eyes – and a smiling curve.

‘All that’s missing is the nose,’ my dad said, and he drew a nose: two dots, like the eyes, only bigger. Once he’d finished, he pointed at the sketch and said, pensively, ‘Cow’.

Then he went to my room where, as if gauging what he needed for his next creation, he stood contemplating the ceiling. He tried to touch it, clambering onto the bed, but he still couldn’t reach. He asked me to bring him a chair. His idea was to put the chair on the bed and then climb on top of it. I told him to forget it.

‘You could fall, Pa. You could split your head open, break your hip. Come on, the chair might break. We don’t have furniture to go around breaking.’

Clearly annoyed, he turned his back on me and began drawing on the wall next to the door: a circle, again, and some lines for a torso, arms and legs. Above the stick man he wrote, ‘Pa’.

‘Love you, son,’ he said.

With our arms around each other we went to his room, and there he drew another tiny body in the exact spot where the light shone – the light that was never turned out, since Pa was scared of being plunged into total darkness. And with the black crayon he drew a heart around the little man.

‘You, my darling,’ he said, and kissed me on the forehead. I sensed it was time to say something, show him some affection, even support his creative venture, so I stared at the portrait in silence, mimicking the way he’d stared at the ceiling.

‘You know,’ I said finally, ‘it makes me want to tear out this piece of wall, frame it, and hang it right back up again, like a painting.’

My dad listened, perplexed but gratified, and carried on drawing.

We lived in a neighbourhood with no street lights. It was dark, at night I mean, even though it was at the bottom of Lights Avenue. Three immensities surrounded us there: the city on one side, an electric forest; the sea on the other, made to seem darker against the bright city; and the sky above, the same as always, constantly erupting, sometimes into rain, sometimes into thunder, or into stars, into moon.

Lights Avenue cut right through the city. That’s where the parks were, all lit up, and the huge houses like castles. They called it Lights Avenue because of all the street lights, which were packed together at the start, still plentiful in the middle stretch, and then dotted infrequently towards the end, gradually petering out as the street approached our neighbourhood. One by one the lamps went out, or simply hung back, as if avoiding the edge, or as if the street itself grew gloomier the closer it came to where we lived. But nearby was the sea, eternal; the old, spent sea, and sometimes it left on the sand the most unlikely offerings.

One night, as my dad and I strolled along the beach, we noticed the waves had washed a sofa onto the shore. And that sofa – bright red, run aground – was covered in seaweed.

‘If it’s not rotten,’ Pa said, ‘we’ll take it home. We could do with a sofa.’

I moved in closer to inspect it and the stench knocked me for six. I cried out and retched.

‘That bad, eh?’ he teased.

‘Nah, not too bad at all,’ I replied.

Once I’d recomposed myself, I grabbed a handful of seaweed, slapped it on my head and jumped up and down saying, ‘Look at my hair, so lush and long!’ I danced and strutted about. Pa laughed, we both laughed, and we carried on along the shore.

The sea’s detritus was so baffling it was beautiful: clocks washed up on the sand, many still working, the minute and second hands marking the exact time. And alongside the clocks there’d be driftwood – coconut branches or broomsticks, which Pa would use to sweep up the foam, sending it back to the water. The sea also carried lamps on its waves, and since they were never on, each time my dad came across one he’d say, ‘Let’s hope one of these nights the light holds out.’ And with that, we’d slowly make our way home, arm in arm, pondering the causes and quandaries of our poverty.

‘We’re broke,’ my dad said, the night he gave me the star. He chuckled as he said it, as if accepting his lot, our lot, and I looked at him, worried, and tired, too, of worrying, and annoyed at him for having laughed. As I sat thinking what to do, how to keep the house afloat, how to keep us afloat, Pa picked up a square piece of cardboard from the floor. He cut around the corners, transforming it into a star. Then he poked a tiny hole in it and threaded a length of wool through the hole. Finally, he tied the ends and hung the new chain around my neck.

‘To remind you, my shining light, that we still have love.’

* * *

And precisely because the light is black tonight, all white things, as I was saying, look violet: the men’s teeth, but also the whites of their eyes. When they kiss and wet the lips of one man, of another, their teeth, glowing violet, disappear. And since they close their eyes as their lips meet, their violet eyeballs vanish too. Those kisses make the darkness darker.

All the while, the moon keeps descending. The closer it gets to the stage, the louder they shout, the more they dance. Out of nowhere, another light stops them in their tracks – no, it stills them: the men go on dancing, but as if in slow motion, their frenzied movements stilled for a second, stilled again the next, slow. Each man looks like two men, like one, like several.

Eventually, the moon ends its descent. It shines bright, and, stationed at the centre, between the jumping crowd and the domed ceiling, it begins to open: like an egg it begins to crack, and the men, dazzled, stop dancing or looking at one another. They stare instead at the moon, and they applaud it, glistening in all that light and sweat, beaming in the light of the moon, which finally opens out like a seashell.

‘Good evening!’ booms a voice, and giddily we reply, ‘Good evening!’

Only Luna exists, emerging beautiful, handsome, from the moon. All lit up, she (he) waves down at us. All lit up, he (she) poses, singing, ‘No, I’ll never fall in love again… I gave you my hands: you shattered them. And my feet, oh, my feet: you walked all over them. How can I run to you with this pain in my step aching right down to my soul? How can I slap your face, sweet fool, with this pair of broken hands?’

Someone beside me speaks, anticipating the string of ballads we’ll be subjected to for the rest of the night.

‘Oh, this is bad… he’s on the rebound.’

Luna pulls away from the microphone and starts to drink, gulping from the bottle, forgetting we’re there. Some boo. We all stop watching her.

‘Arseholes,’ Luna says suddenly. ‘Pay attention.’ And she starts crooning again.

I look around for the guy who stole my shirt and spot him grinding against a pillar, arms in the air. He smiles, convinced I’m giving him the eye, and blows me a kiss. So I walk over, feigning indifference, and tell him I just want my shirt back. Laughing to himself, the man shows me his empty hands.

‘If you’ve lost it,’ I say, ‘you’ll have to give me yours. I don’t care how sweaty it is.’

I stare at him blankly, then expectantly, waiting for some kind of reaction, but the man just gives me the finger and rubs himself up and down against the pillar, looking ridiculous. I turn away, and just as I’m thinking, in a rage, that I don’t have shirts to go around losing, I feel a tap on my shoulder.

‘Spoilsport,’ he says, ‘killjoy, tight-arse. You can stay alone then, with your manky little star.’

The moment he’s facing the other way I toss an ice cube at him vindictively, but it hits someone else on the head. And this guy seems baffled at first, but quickly turns aggressive.

‘What’s your problem?’

‘Finally, you notice me!’ I improvise on the spot before planting a kiss on him.

* * *

From the outside, our house looked like a head of wild hair, its roof tiles all out of place. Inside, it was like a building site: lots of the floor tiles – black and white like a chequerboard – had come loose, and wobbled when we stepped on them. You could see pipes and cables poking out here and there.

Our living room had one big window, which looked out onto the street. We never put up curtains; there was no money for that.

‘Why would we cover the view with curtains,’ my dad said, ‘when we’ve got a wall-to-wall work of art right here?’

And Pa would sit, sometimes for hours on end, staring out onto the street in a state of perpetual wonder, giving titles to each of the paintings as they formed before his eyes, ‘Still Life with Bins’, ‘The Star Belt’, ‘Birds on a Power Cable’, ‘Thief with Victim’, ‘Roadkill Cat’, ‘Lone Man Picking Up Cigarette’, ‘Lovers in the Night’, ‘Moonless Sky’, ‘Self-Portrait in Silence’, ‘Nocturnal Nude’.

Whenever I walked into the room and he spotted my reflection in the window, my dad would say, ‘The Apparition of the Son’.

I, too, would gaze out of the window sometimes, and neighbours and passers-by would look back at me. Having noticed the bare living room, scantily furnished with a couple of chairs, they would rap at the window and ask if the house was for sale.

‘Piss off,’ I’d tell them. ‘Leave us alone.’

Musicians would pass by too, on their way to the bar district or back, and on seeing the house they’d laugh.

‘Well, well, a window made for serenading,’ they’d mock us, before striking up a tune and loitering until I had to pee on them to make them leave.

Then, one night, as he gazed out of the window, Pa had one of his epiphanies. ‘I’ve got it! I’ve had an idea. Come on. We’re off to the bar to make some money.’

I said that if we went to the bar we’d only end up spending money, and that I was done with buying on credit.

‘Don’t be such a sourpuss, come on.’

I reminded him that fewer and fewer people hung out at The Letcher now, that it would just be the same old guys with the same old gals, each more broke than the last, to which Pa, clearly tired of listening to me, responded, voice raised, with his favourite line:

‘Don’t answer back.’

So I kept my dismay and despair to myself as we left the house, and, once we were outside, Pa explained that there were a lot of sad men in the bar in need of advice.

‘And where’s the money in that?’ I asked, genuinely intrigued, and anticipating, besides, a bad night.

‘It couldn’t be simpler: I’ll offer advice to whoever wants it. The first piece is free, and from then on I charge. Winos generally value my experience.’

This made me laugh and also decide that, even though it was a terrible plan, a change of scene would do me good. We put our arms on each other’s shoulders and walked like that all the way to The Letcher. When we arrived, there was a new bouncer on the door.

‘Come on in, congratulations!’ he said, and he tossed a handful of tiny paper hearts into the air. I gawped at him, my eyes two question marks.

‘It’s Couples Night,’ the man explained.

‘Excuse me,’ my dad elbowed past impatiently, perhaps feeling uncomfortable. Stepping inside, we spotted two couples. The first pair weren’t even looking at each other as they sipped their drinks. The second were having an argument. At the bar, as if they hadn’t moved since the last time we saw them, were Ramón-Ramona – serving – and The Three Toupées: Alirio, Simón and Chickpeas. We called them that, Toupées, because all three of them, despite showing clear signs of balding, modelled haircuts ranging from wacky to desperate. It was hard to tell if they were trying to emphasise their baldness or mask it as far as humanly possible. Ramón-Ramona was sporting the same look as ever: a hat, trousers and a waistcoat embroidered in different colours. There was also the fake beauty spot drawn just above the mouth.

My dad went over and greeted the fighting couple, pulling up a stool as if he’d been invited.

‘Talk it out, that’s the way,’ he said. They both stared at him, but before either could get a word in he added, this time just for the lady, ‘It’s good to hear him out, but you don’t have to be his dustbin. You don’t have to take his rubbish. Don’t ever become an emotional dumping ground.’

I rolled my eyes, turned away from the unfolding scene, and sat down at the bar between Simón and Chickpeas. Ramón-Ramona put a glass of water down in front of me and told me, in a friendly but firm tone, that we couldn’t keep adding our drinks to the tab. I said no problem, thanks, I understood, and Ramón-Ramona replied with a wink, ‘But you know you two are always welcome.’

I mentioned the bouncer throwing heart-shaped confetti at my dad and me.

‘Here’s to my favourite couple!’ Ramón-Ramona chuckled.

‘Anyway, what happened to the other guy on the door?’ I asked.

‘Oh, nothing, kid. He got knifed.’

My dad was back.

‘Nothing?’ he said. ‘You call that nothing? Imagine how deserted that poor doorman would feel if he could hear you, Ramón-Ramona. Take my advice: look out for the people around