A Villain Origin Story: The strange autobiography of how Julián Mayorga turned blue
Editor’s Note: Julián Mayorga is an avant-garde pop star from Colombia. Ahead of the release of his latest album, Chak Chak Chak Chak, we asked him to write an op-ed about anything of his choosing. He presented us with his potted history, one which he calls ‘A Villain Origin Story’. As presented by the Witchdoctor of South American Pop Folk himself, this is the story of Julián Mayorga…
In 1993, I was seven years old and had not been baptised. My father was a radical atheist, and my mother, though a Catholic, did not believe in eternal life. At that time, we children played shooting at the sky with a gun that we improvised quickly with our thumb and index finger. Then, we would declare that we had killed God. We killed God every day: in the morning, during free time at school, and in the afternoon in a little park in some corner of the neighbourhood. God would die every couple of hours and then return triumphantly to inhabit heaven and uncover his chest to receive the bullets of the children of the El Topacio neighbourhood in Ibagué, Colombia. As common as deicide was in the neighbourhood, it was very rare not to be baptised.
At the end of that year, I started getting bruises on the skin of my arms and legs. First, small circular marks appeared, then large irregular islands. My skin was an ocean in which archipelagos of intense colours ranging from light blue to deep black appeared. They appeared at night and disappeared gradually over the next three or four days. The islands would emerge, especially on nights when it rained a lot.
Back then, my house, like most of my neighbours, had a tin roof. The silver metal shingles gleamed in the daytime, vindictively returning to the sun the rays it sent us every eight minutes to roast us in our bare brick boxes. Of course, we would keep the bits of lightning we could use. Just enough to see our faces, to photosynthesise the ferns, the myrtle in front of the house, the coriander bushes and other primordial plants, and to distinguish day from night.
The rest we returned to the sky with our army of gleaming silver-plated zinc tiles. At night, the tiles amplified the sound of things that came into contact with them: the birds, cats and other animals that walked on the roofs of El Topacio sounded like great beasts clawing at the surface of the metal with long, sharp nails. The slightest rain seemed to be the last deluge of our lives, the final one, the one that finally came to wash everything away.
“The witch is sucking him,” said one of the neighbours to my mum. “It’s because he’s not baptised”. Because I’m not baptised and because I shoot God in the mornings and afternoons and nights with my homemade gun; because before I go to sleep, I stick my arm out of the window and point my fingers of gleaming zinc at the sky and boom boom boom, piu-piu, I activate my deadly index finger, my little deicidal ray.
By the time I was about to turn eight in December 1993, the bruises had already covered more than half of my skin. I would wake up with a fever in the middle of the night, startled by noises from the roof, by fleeting shadows at the window and by the frightening thought of waking up as blue as a fish. The plantain plasters and the visits to the doctor had been fruitless. It rained and rained, and my archipelagos were unifying, becoming a continent, conquering my skin, claiming each other, and invoking the Ultimate Pangaea.
“The witch is sucking him”, the neighbour repeated. “It’s because he’s not baptised”. Because I am not baptised, a madam, and because all year I have been inviting the children of the neighbourhood to form a circle, to crouch under the dead sticks on the banks of the infectious river Chipalo, to hide from the neighbourhood’s pious women, to discuss the implications of making the sign of the horns with our hand.
It is because I invite them to open the coffer I make by joining my seven-year-old hands together and to take out an imaginary gun and shoot into the sky and claim that they have killed God, that we children of El Topacio have killed God. It is because I am not baptised and because we have formed a guerrilla to blow a hole in the omnipotent one’s forehead, to test his mythical mercy after we have punctured his existence after we have diminished his omnipresence.
The night before my birthday, I saw her for the first time. A large black bird flapped its wings, trying to cling to the bars of my window. An animal the size of a turkey that alternated cackling and twitching with the giggles of a shy girl. When its feet managed to grasp the window bars, the bird took the opportunity to stare at me with its blue eyes. Its gaze was tender and strangely soothing, like a soporific that slowly lulled me to sleep. Just as I was about to fall asleep, the flapping would return, and also the sound of his nails against the metal and the giggles and “guru-guru-guru-guru” and the sound of my own heart going “boom-boom-boom-boom” and my own heavy breathing and the rain on the tin roof and the cats singing in chorus from the street in impossible-to-discern harmonies.
Then the drowsiness and the tranquillity returned, and the beautiful blue eyes that looked at me tenderly and touched me inside, between skin and flesh, returned. His gaze injected me with a warm, viscous liquid that ran through my whole body with rigour, that bathed my nervous system with patience, with serenity. Calmness took over me, and I abandoned myself, resigned to the presence of the turkey, which at times seemed to be already inside my room, on this side of the window. The cackling would return, the flapping would return, and the chuckle with which the heavy bird mocked gravity would return. It became unbearable. More because of the longing for its warm gaze than because of the violent flight and the cacophony.
And then, again, there were the blue eyes that looked at me more closely, now an inch away, as if the turkey was already on top of me, astride on my bare chest as a newly turned eight-year-old. It would open its beak, from which hung a long, beautiful caruncle halfway between solid and liquid, and stick out a tongue curled up like a cudgel that unfurled in slow motion over endless hours, sticking to my body and injecting me with small doses of its saliva. The caruncle, which hypnotised me with its pendular movement, released tiny spores of the most beautiful shades of blue that danced, suspended in the rays of light, and then fell on my skin, covering it with purple.
On the morning of my birthday, I was completely blue except for my hair. Blue ears, blue fingernails, blue eyelids, blue everything. My scalp and the conjunctiva, the webbing that covered my eyes, all blue. But my own gaze was not blue, although the world did change. I could feel the drops of the turkey saliva searching for each other along my bloodstream, meeting and embracing and forming a single perfectly round drop that explored my veins and arteries and slightly modified my new and old blood.
The world had changed for me. I had changed for the world. What a joy the suffocating heat now was, the rotting smell of the river Chipalo, and the worm, the fungi, and bacteria that devour the dead dog that we children poke with a stick. What a joy the violent rain on the roof, the violent sunbeam that scorches the ferns, and the violence with which the weeds break the pavement tiles. What a joy the violence of the hideous graffiti painted by my older neighbours: drawings of penises and fannies that insult us all, that offend us and make us cry because they break the ideal of the neighbourhood.
What a joy the loudness, the noise and the suffocation. What a joy to shoot God without hiding: bang-bang-bang. What a joy to stick a curled-up piece of paper up my nostril and sneeze at will until my nose hurts. What a joy to touch my asshole with my god-killing index finger and then sniff it at length and without complexes. What a joy to recite long love verses to the turkeys I see around. What a joy to pick up pieces of wire and iron and make the most strident music the neighbourhood has ever heard. What a joy to hum wicked music to my neighbour, cacophonous music that diverts the Chipalo River from its destiny, that invites the twenty cats on the block to shriek in chorus, the ten thousand crickets in the neighbourhood to sing in one voice without pause for days, for years until our ears bleed.
What a joy! Music that restores our capacity for trance, songs that disgust us, and that give us uncontrollable laughter that makes our ribs ache. Rhythms played by an army of bricklayers and rabid peasants, metallic rhythms made with drums and rods, with hoes and spatulas and machetes. Rhythms that self-destruct in the middle of the dance, that break our hips and invite us to spasm. Wicked music that leaves us walking on crutches, that summons the vultures of the river to gather to mourn and eat their dead at midday in the middle of the road. What a joy! A ball of concentrated saliva, a crystal of compressed saliva, a translucent witch’s eye that runs through my lifeblood and poisons my gaze.
Editor’s Note II: While Mayorga failed to mention whether turning blue informed his latest release, Chak Chak Chak Chak, out November 15th, it certainly carries the joyous hallmarks of the turkey-liberated sound he describes. He is, indeed, ‘Villain: Song Destroyer’.
