No one was ever able to determine the exact cause of death. What is certain, however, is that the deceased had been struck down by a heart attack in the middle of intercourse, without even reaching his final ejaculation.

It happened around midnight, on New Year’s Eve, on the threshold of a tragic year.

At that precise moment, one of the prostitutes stood up, raised her glass—half empty, half full—and said:

“I raise my glass to life, to this wretched life that grants us only brief silences of happiness. I also raise it to the year that has just died and to this new year that life has just given birth to. Above all, I raise it to all those deprived of carnal love who appear at our doors, panting, and take refuge in the anonymity of our sheets.

“I drink to you and to all of them—to those who came, to those who will come, and to those who never stopped coming.

“I would also like to take advantage of this deplorable occasion to offer you some advice—advice that may serve at the same time as an epitaph for the man he was in life:

“Please be careful when you fornicate, because, as you can plainly see, love really does kill.”

A total silence fell over the room.

Never before had anyone proposed a toast like that. In all the decades of history of that famous house of assignation, no client had ever died in the middle of the sexual act. Nor had anyone ever left without firing his final shot, much less had a customer ever kicked the bucket one second before the birth of the new year.

She straightened her transparent blouse and rearranged her breasts as if they were two unruly mother-of-pearl ornaments. As she stepped onto the platform, she slightly lifted the fold of her dress, revealing the red underwear she was wearing.

Then, as a bad omen, she misstepped, and the twelve wish-granting grapes rolled down her half-naked legs.

She stood upright again, exuberant and unblemished like a maiden, took a gulp of liquor, and continued:

“On behalf of all the women present, and with the reservations and respect that the deceased deserves, I want to declare emphatically and solemnly that we intend to remain whores—but revolutionary whores.

“From this day forward, every courtesan who takes a client will do so in the name of the promised revolution, and we will donate ten percent of our earnings to the cause of the proletariat.”

The Secret Mission

Hours before that tragic event, a group of comrades—progressive militants and dreamers—had gathered in the dilapidated stands of the Open-Air Theater, on a rise of alaymosca stones as cold as the night itself.

It was December 31 of that fateful year.

Eight of us attended the clandestine meeting, and we had all arrived with our materials and propaganda supplies.

The materials in question consisted of nothing more than tins of lard filled with homemade paint, a dozen and a half paintbrushes, and, naturally, a clean change of clothes in case the police caught us in the act.

It was around seven in the evening in the Imperial City.

The rays of the sun had already disappeared, as they usually did. Once the sunlight slipped behind the skirts of the mountain, night took possession of the city. In an instant, the town covered itself with a gray poncho and became a territory of cold, secrecy, mystery, and who knows what else.

We tossed a coin into the air to decide the route and destination for that dying night.

We divided ourselves into two groups of four. With the help of a candle stolen from a nearby church, we illuminated the city map spread out in front of us.

We split the city in two. My friend and comrade Negro took charge of Brigade One and headed south with his disabled army of three comrades. They went along singing and whistling melodies about Mambrú.

By the last flicker of the stolen candle, they crossed the mountain ridge and disappeared, the way the fifth columns of hope disappear.

I was left in charge of Brigade Two, and naturally, we headed north.

Our mission was to cover the city from one end to the other with revolutionary verses, along with the occasional poem of love or reparation. We were to paint the walls of houses as though they were endless canvases of white cotton and coarse cloth.

That way, when the people awoke, recovered from the farewell celebration for the year that had died, they would find themselves in a metropolis filled with images of armed saints, peasants marching in circles, and miners wearing helmets and holding dynamite in their hands.

It would be as realistic and fantastic as one of the immense murals by Alandia Pantoja.

The darkness—the mother and friend of all clandestine activity—had already spread throughout the city. I gave the order, and we began marching toward the western side of town.

We set to work, advancing along the route with brutal brushstrokes and painting what looked like Greek tragedies wherever we went.

The column I led passed unnoticed through the main square. We walked silently, sheltered by the noise of the firecrackers that the crowd was launching into the sky and by the occasional yellowish lights shining through the pine trees.

The fireworks, combined with the ringing of bells and the barking of stray dogs, gave the impression that a papal absolution had finally been declared for Judgment Day.

In reality, they were merely the customary rituals and revelry surrounding the inevitable death of the old year and the festive preliminaries welcoming the new year, which was just around the corner.

Like good and obedient parishioners, the endless revelers had decided to get a head start on finishing off the old year and send it off with drums and rattles. And, naturally, they intended to celebrate the birth of the new year with even greater force and enthusiasm.

The common people were so immersed in the whirlpool of celebration that they did not notice us slipping like ghosts toward the northern part of the city.

Without incident, we passed above and below the silverwork arches, avoiding the confetti scattered across the paving stones. Like a single-file patrol on campaign, we moved silently, evading even the footsteps of our own shadows.

It is true that night we painted and repainted the walls of hundreds of anonymous houses. We covered their façades with chants of rebellion and hope.

Without realizing it, we had reached the far end of Eduardo Avaroa Square.

We lit cigarettes and began smoking, blowing clouds of smoke into the open sky at the edge of the bridge. As we wandered through one alley after another, we remembered the War of the Pacific.

Many people say that we lost our coastline not because we lacked a fighting spirit, but because we were living in a state of carefree revelry, immersed in the carnival celebrations of 1879.

The same phenomenon was repeating itself that night. The rabble had surrendered themselves to their own whims, celebrating and intoxicated by the carefree merriment of the end-of-year festivities.

Before leaving, we painted the clothing of the hero of Topáter and wrote him a message:

“Don Eduardo, damn it! We are tired, but not defeated.”

Then we moved on.

The Lovers by the Tank

I remember that, moving from street to street and avenue to avenue, we eventually reached the vicinity of the Bolívar Tank.

As we approached, we heard a plaintive sound—a lamentation of souls. It resembled the howl of a wandering wolf. It was a mixture of moans of pleasure and screams of pain, something impossible to decipher but profoundly disturbing.

With the stolen candle still burning brightly, we were able to make out the silhouettes of two lovers fused into a single body.

Their shadows moved like the waves of a sinful ocean. The force of their lust splashed the adobe walls with the secretions of a dog’s love. On the ground lay an inert brassiere, covered in semen and soaked with the sweat of unfaithful lovers.

After a brief pause, the slapping and kicking began again, along with the pinching and screaming. Their savage coupling continued.

The obscene act was intensified by the woman’s tremendous libidinous cries, which nearly drowned out even the firecrackers exploding throughout the city.

The two of them yowled like alley cats in an enraged state of heat. They were fornicating as if it were the last night of their lives.

But the man was also abusing and beating the woman so violently that the scene seemed less like an affair between lovers than a settling of accounts.

As the sexual indulgence reached its climax, driven by the urgency of orgasm, he delivered a terrible slap that nearly broke her jaw. The sound of the blow almost shattered the balcony of the Hanged Man from its exhausted railings.

The impact sent her goldsmith-crafted earrings flying through the air.

Faced with such a beating, we approached and tried, with great diplomacy, to separate them and put an end to the abuse—if not the sexual abuse, then at least the physical violence.

That was when the chola from Tickaloma lifted her skirt, tightened her braids, and shouted at us:

“He’s my man and my lover! He has the right to abuse me. Let him hit me if he wants to! And you filthy faggots stay out of it. Go take care of your own women—they’re probably cheating on you!”

As my grandmother would have said, that woman nearly ate us alive.

And so, without further ado, I began descending, leading my troops. We were still stunned by such a display of passion and thoroughly demoralized after losing that unequal battle of words and bodies.

And so we left—still painting.

The Military Jeep

It must have been around eleven-thirty at night when the bells of the churches and convents began to ring.

The pigeons in the main square could not sleep because of the endless explosions of firecrackers. They began flying in vicious circles, unable to escape the noisy whirlpool.

To make matters worse, the tinny ringing of the bells, combined with the echoes of the small fireworks, confused their sense of direction.

Overcome by such a complete lack of reason—and perhaps out of sheer irritation—they all joined together and began defecating at the same time.

The white manure of their droppings began falling gradually from the highest cornice of the cathedral, like flakes in a storm of limestone snow.

Whitened by pigeon excrement and carrying our cans of paint, we continued painting until we reached the geographical junction of the San Roque neighborhood.

Among other things, this district was home to two important institutions: the Pérez 3rd Infantry Regiment barracks and the most famous brothel in town, popularly known as “La Pastora” or “The Curve.”

By that hour, our political and artistic itinerary was nearly complete. We were about to disband the column and go our separate ways when we suddenly spotted a Military Police Jeep parked facing the wrong direction in front of a bar on the block.

We peered through the crack in the door of the establishment and saw a colonel sitting in a chair, completely drunk and asleep.

He lay there collapsed like an emperor without his laurel leaves. His bare head rested on the shoulder of his recruit, while he drooled generously over the exhausted subordinate.

A light flickered on the floor. It was the gleam of one of the commander’s tin stars—a commander of imaginary wars.

The poor star had probably fallen from one of the many decorations sewn onto the colonel’s uniform.

After studying the situation, analyzing the possibility of being discovered, and mentally weighing the consequences, sentences, and mistreatment we would undoubtedly suffer if we were caught red-handed, we decided to go ahead.

To add a little seasoning to the prank, we began repainting the military Jeep in revolutionary orange, changing the olive-green tone of its camouflage appearance.

As a second coat, we painted red roses, perhaps suggesting an imitation of Portugal’s Carnation Revolution—the popular uprising that brought down Salazar’s dictatorship.

For our column, this was the most outrageous act of all, the very pearl of our escapades.

To close the adventure with a flourish, we decided that, given the place’s proximity, we would go have a glass of champagne in the sacred chambers of the city’s most famous brothel, La Pastora.

We would also raise a toast to the arrival of the new year with the most oppressed women in society.

We reasoned that the prostitutes had more need than anyone to drink to the arrival of a new year—one that, with God’s help, would surely change the fate of those gypsy women who sold pleasure for a living.

La Pastora

And so we reached the very threshold of that house of prostitution, situated—as if through some geographical prank—directly across from the municipal cemetery.

We entered just as midnight approached.

The place was nearly deserted, although a few patrons were dancing without making a sound, like goblins escaped from the very cemetery where my friend Gato Medrano had once made a bet in the Ataúd bar and spent the entire night disturbing the sleep of the dead.

That night, more than on any other, the establishment was gloomy.

The colored lights that normally enlivened the brothel had been replaced by dim purple lights, as though foretelling that something terrible was about to happen.

The atmosphere was so heavy that it could have been sliced like a loaf of bread.

The air carried the stench of a rabid dog. A penetrating smell of anise descended from the ceiling, while the smoke of erotic incense spread through the salon, forming a ghostly shroud.

Normally, because the town’s bars and brothels lacked heating, the owners placed charcoal braziers in the middle of the rooms. They boiled eucalyptus leaves in brine to freshen the air and provide a little warmth for their freezing clientele.

The arrangement also helped sharpen the visitors’ sense of smell.

I looked at my fanciful Rolex and saw that its hands marked 11:59:59 p.m.

Only one second remained before the old year ended.

Suddenly, a scream came from one of the corridors.

Through the large doorway, decorated with a pink silk curtain, Doña Pastora—may she rest in peace—the Grand Madam herself came running like a soul being carried away by the devil.

Her face was paler than tunta, the freeze-dried potato. Her hair, presumably disheveled by terror and shock, looked like the mane of a circus lion in a poor traveling show.

Without caring what the audience might say, she announced in the voice of a withered Aphrodite that a customer had just died while making love to a foreign prostitute.

Many things had happened in her house of assignation.

There had been triple murders born of passion, challenges involving swords and capes, and even baptisms of illegitimate children. Those baptisms were conducted entirely according to the law, complete with priests in cassocks and crucifixes—the same priests who came religiously every Carnival, on Ash Wednesday, to bless Potosí’s most famous brothel.

But no one had ever died there on a night like that, at that exact moment, precisely when the spirits in the bell tower of the cemetery were exhaling the final breath of the dying year.

And so no one ever discovered whether the year ended or began with that desperate death by love.

The event moved the patrons to build a kind of altar on the platform. Instead of celebrating the New Year, the “clients” began praying for the soul of the man he had been in life.

Noblesse oblige.

With a heavy heart, I ordered our column to stand an honor guard around the corpse. With great solemnity and the slow, mournful dignity of professional mourners, we instructed the band to stop playing those rowdy cumbias and perform Chopin’s Funeral March instead.

We briefly declared a minute of silence, accompanied by the solemn notes of a military bugle.

Once the formalities were over—and determined not to waste the occasion—I climbed onto the platform, raised my glass, and began to toast the New Year.

I also expressed my heartfelt condolences to the prostitute who had loved the unfortunate customer to death, since she was, in fact, the only person close to the deceased.

To conclude my speech, I delivered a political sermon borrowed from the statutes of the nihilist party:

“The MIR struggles to organize sex workers in defense of their interests and against the exploitation of human capital through cooperativism and trade unionism…”

And so on and so forth.

It was a proselytizing act unlike anything ever seen before, conducted in the most improbable place imaginable.

At that moment, a pimp appeared carrying a cloth soaked in the juices of love.

It was the same sheet beneath which the lovers had hidden their intercourse moments before the unfortunate man kicked the bucket without even reaching orgasm, according to the distraught libertine, who offered this testimony as a kind of epitaph.

The pimp quickly spread out the damp fabric and covered the corpse as though it were the very Shroud of Turin.

Then he leaned closer and closed the dead man’s eyes.

According to him, it was not good for a person to leave this earth with his eyes so wide open, because it would give the impression that he had died in a fit of passion rather than from love.

A Political Conversion

Amid the grief and gloom, a makeshift transitional committee was formed, and everyone present began receiving party identification cards.

As if by an act of black magic, many of the regular patrons were transformed from right-wingers of the dead year into left-wingers of the new one.

This political metamorphosis occurred in the most improbable political setting imaginable: inside the city’s most popular brothel.

Our speech was so effective, and the assistance and consolation we offered the courtesans were so moving, that they ended up swearing allegiance to our political party, the MIR.

Later, after democracy was restored, the Democratic and Popular Unity coalition—UDP—won the vote at the polling station installed in the chambers of that brothel.

It was at that precise moment that the prostitute drank the last round and, with a sorrowful expression, finished toasting the miseries of a courtesan’s life and the twists and turns of her political commitment.

Before leaving the place, we painted our final sign.

It was an epitaph for the man he had been in life—for the nameless man who had died from a lack of love and an excess of love.

The epitaph read something like this:

“I have known good and evil, sin and virtue, justice and disgrace. I judged and was judged. I passed through birth and death, through joy and sorrow, through heaven and hell. And in the end, I recognized that I am in everything and that everything is in me.”

Hazrat Inayat Khan

Finally, when we left that place of tragedy and love, it was six o’clock in the morning on January 1.

The rooster had already announced the new dawn.

At last, it was another year.