I run into a neighbor in the elevator, we exchange greetings, comments about the weather, questions about whether eggs have arrived at the corner shop. We are still on the sixth floor when, in the protected and momentary privacy of the cabin, she tells me that thanks to me she’s been able to watch a Colombian soap opera. I don’t understand. What relationship could there be between this skeptical blogger and the dramatic soap operas skilled in wrenching tears from people on the other side of the screen. But the woman insists. With four floors still to go before we reach the ground, I begin to think of the scripts of the old Félix B. Cañet.
The answer comes to me in the most unexpected way. As the elevator signals Floor 3, she tells me that her fear of the dark park — on one side of our building — was an obstacle to her going to a friend’s house every night to watch an episode of her soap opera, captured by an illegal satellite dish. But now, she said with gratitude, that strip of concrete and vegetation is guarded 24 hours a day. I look like I don’t understand, but she stresses that the Interior Ministry agents that surround my house have made the neighborhood safer. I would prefer to believe that those shadows I see from my balcony are the fantasies of someone who consumes too much fiction, but the woman returns to the charge. She won’t let me hide behind a smile, rather she wants to emphasize that she owes it to me that she can get to the other building safely.
I’m unexpectedly overcome by horror, someone just thanked me for being raw meat for the surveillance machinery, the target of guards. I’ve never seen a more lighthearted way of understanding repression, but I laugh with the neighbor, what else can I do?! Not wanting to seem distant, I ask her about the plot of the soap opera I have “helped” her to enjoy. She details it with delight. It’s a re-creation of the eighteenth century, with slaves on the run, matrons hiding their illegitimate children from their husbands, the sound of whips landing on backs, dark narrow paths guarded at night by overseers with dogs.
28 February 2011
