Dazzling Bloom (original) (raw)

I just went through the saddest spectacle tonight. The scenario, my friends concert. The Howlers were playing tonight at a bar opening, and Hansel brought his new girlfriend.
I guess it is important for me to add that Hansel was never lucky with girls at Raimondi. He is very friendly and easy going, but girls - the ones that mattered anyway- could always find a better looking guy in their classroom.
I always talked to him, in my sarcastic mocking tone of the times when i could bring myself out of bed and come to class and thus be considered as "all right" by my doctor. We always made fun of the way Lima's elite was also, by chance or plastic surgery, all very pretty. As are all my friends.

Somewhere along that way he told me that he liked me. I was disgusted at him. I wanted to yell at him and ask him who the hell did he think he was to use me like that, and play with my feelings in such a manner. I just gave a light laugh, and told him that it wasn't nice to play with people's feelings. He insisted a little bit, but he saw me getting angry and went away.

Truth is, I hated myself in such a way back then that I didn't think it possible for a guy to like me. Sure, my then so called friends talked to me and asked me to eat and invited me to their parties (where I would rarely go, and only to get drunk), but i thought they were doing it out of pity and the thought that one of them might like me for who I am just never crossed my head.

And now this Lucia shows up with Hansel at the concert. Hansel told I had been right all along (that once in college you actually have the chance to meet someone that you have something in common with). I was happy to hear that, but there was something strange at the way this girl acted.
She seemed disappointed to see how hot the guys in the band (meaning: giuseppe, giordano, paolo, renzo and Ivo), almost as if she were calculating how better it would be if she had had the chance to hook up with someone from Raimondi who was also drop dead gorgeous. And there was something funny about the way she stressed over the fact that she was hanging out with someone from Raimondi.
The Raimondi quartet being incomplete (because Luciana is in the States), she tried to be in almost every picture the media took of Emilia, Nani and me. Like it was fun to have every shot of tequila recorded and then published.

My suspicions: one of the reasons why she is dating Hansel (if not the only one) is because he is from Raimondi, and thus Lima's elite.

This all adds to the fact that a really bad article has been circulating around Lima, not even in a newspaper or magazine but over the internet, written supposedly by a sociologist.

It is called "The decadence of Lima's The People" (La decadencia de La Gente limeña) and it particularly stresses out Raimondi school, and Roosevelt school, the so called Raimondi and Roosevelt quartets, that the tabloids invented a row between.

One of the paragraphs goes like this:

"Week after week we see on ATV or on society columns in Cosas or Ellos & Ellas this kids, the future owners of Lima, treated from now as if they were royalty (discounts on restaurants, free VIP passes on clubs), who live by the Asia's Decalog and stroll by from shop to shop, being the delight of the sales girl who earn by commission, wasting their future away. They are to inherit the most important businesses in the city -and country. They are thought from early on in schools such as Raimondi or Roosevelt that those of a different skin color are not to be treated as equals, and that all they have to do is sit and wait, for it will be given. These kids, in 20 years, will be making most political or economical decisions for the rest of us, and sure as hell they won't be able to do so from the seaside at Playa Blanca."

another part goes like this:
"It is really sad to examine their lives and see that the most of a job they have done in their 16 or 20 years of life is a photoshoot or a catwalk, and their most tiresome moments have been after a night of daiquiris and cocaine. What would happen if tomorrow daddy doesn't give them money? The word goes around some of this girls do "male escorting" for other prominent businessmen, who obvoiusly don't mind to sleep with their colleagues's daughters".

Since them it seems like a lot of attention has been poured on us. We can't even have a small, rather underground concert without the press being there trying to get a pic of someone spilling a beer and making it a headline.

Which gets me to one of the unspoken things that I liked about Hani: he wasn't a part of that world.
He didn't know my dad used to be on TV twice a week to talk about international politics, he didn't know who my grandfather is or what businesses does he run from his sickbed, or my uncle's work in the Congress. And when he saw my mom giving medical advice on TV, it was by chance, not because he knew she was a regular guest at that network.
He just took me for who I was. And Lucia isn't taking Hansel for what he is.

Off to bed,

Xime