Episode 06: The Birthday Envelope

All characters are 18 or older. Fiction.

Episode 06 is the birthday episode, the only Angel of Bogota episode with a cake in it, and the guide always warns that it opens like a comedy: three kinds of cake, an aunt with a cameraphone, a boy who has been told all night that twenty-one is the age where things start. Then the party empties out and there is an envelope on the table with a ribbon around it, and the season remembers what kind of show it is. The Angel of Bogota episodes do not usually do family. This one does, and then it does not.

Esteban is twenty-one today and works at a print shop in Kennedy, running the laminator and the guillotine and breathing toner dust eight hours a day. His aunt has made a party in her patio with plastic chairs and a speaker and a cake from the bakery on the corner, and by nine o'clock there are twenty people there and someone has put a hat on him that says CUMPLEANERO in gold letters.

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He is not complaining. He is, in fact, enjoying himself in the specific way of a boy who has never been the centre of anything and has decided to make the most of it. He dances with his mother. He dances with his aunt. He lets his little cousins put cake on his nose. He opens presents: a shirt, a belt, a bottle of rum, a phone case for a phone he does not own, and forty thousand pesos in a card from his cousins.

The man arrives at half past nine with his uncle Tavo, and Esteban has never seen him before. He is stocky, unhurried, dark jacket, gold band on his left hand, and he carries a black briefcase which he leaves by the door and a bottle of good aguardiente which he puts on the table. Tavo introduces him only as a friend from work, and the man shakes Esteban's hand and says, "Happy birthday," in a low voice, and then goes and sits in the corner with the older men and says nothing else for an hour.

Esteban watches him from across the patio. He cannot help it. The man does not drink much and does not dance and does not seem bored. He watches the party the way a man watches weather he has already been through.

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The envelope

At eleven the party thins out. The speaker goes quiet. His aunt is stacking chairs and his mother is putting cake into containers, and Esteban is carrying bottles to the bin when Tavo finds him by the kitchen door.

"The man wants a word," Tavo says. "The one from work. It is a good thing, Esteban. Do not be stupid about it."

"What does that mean?"

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"It means be polite."

The man is in the small room at the back of the patio, the one with the sewing machine and the sofa nobody sits on. He has the briefcase open on the sewing table. Beside it there is a gift, actually wrapped, with paper and a ribbon and everything, which is somehow the strangest thing that has happened all night.

"Close the door," he says.

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Esteban closes it. The room smells of dust and thread and, faintly, of cardamom and rum.

"Happy birthday," the man says again. "Open it."

Esteban opens it. Inside the paper is an envelope, and inside the envelope is five hundred thousand pesos in notes of twenty, and a smaller folded paper with a number on it.

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"That is a lot of money," Esteban says. His voice has gone thin.

"It is what I brought." The man closes the briefcase and opens it again, which makes no sense until Esteban sees that the money in it is the real money, a great deal more of it. "Sit down."

Esteban sits on the sofa with the envelope in both hands.

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"I am going to say this once," the man says. "You are twenty-one. You can say no and keep the envelope, because it is a birthday present and presents are not contracts. If you say yes, there is more. I want the night. You, and the camera. My face stays out of it. If you say stop, I stop and I leave and the money stays. Do you understand?"

Esteban looks at the envelope. Five hundred thousand pesos is five months of his salary at the print shop. It is a bed that is not a mattress on a floor. It is the phone he does not own.

"You want to film me," he says.

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"Yes."

"With the hat on?"

The man's mouth twitches. "The hat can stay on."

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What the camera saw

Esteban says yes because he is twenty-one and because the envelope is already in his hands and because, if he is honest with himself, he has been watched all night and it has not been unpleasant. The man sets the phone on the sewing machine, angled at the sofa, and a small red light comes on.

"Take off your shirt," he says. "Slowly. Say your name and your age."

"Esteban. Twenty-one." The shirt comes off. The gold hat stays on. "I work at a print shop."

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"Tell me about the print shop."

So Esteban talks about the laminator, which eats paper if you feed it wrong. He talks about the guillotine and how the blade has to be changed. He is talking because he is nervous, and the man lets him, and moves the camera in slow arcs, and when Esteban runs out of things to say about the print shop the man says, "Stand up. The rest of it."

Esteban stands up and takes off the rest of it, and the room is small enough that the man is very close, close enough that Esteban can feel the warmth of him, and when the man's hand comes flat onto his chest Esteban's whole body shivers once, hard, like a dog shaking off water.

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"Kiss me," the man says, "or do not."

Esteban has kissed four people in his life and none of them like this. The man's mouth is slow and heavy and tastes of aguardiente, and one hand comes up into Esteban's hair and knocks the hat sideways, and Esteban laughs against his mouth and the man swallows the laugh and keeps going.

"On the sofa," he says. "Face down. Knees on the cushion."

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The sofa is old and the cushions are thin. Esteban kneels on it with his chest against the armrest and the man behind him, and the lubricant is cold and the first finger makes him gasp and grip the fabric.

"Breathe," the man says. "You are not being hurt."

"I know. I know. It is just. It is a lot."

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"It is." Two fingers. "You can still say stop."

"I am not saying stop."

He is thick, and slow, and the curve of him is a pressure that Esteban feels all the way up his spine. When he is all the way in he stops and stays there, one hand flat on Esteban's back, and waits until Esteban's breathing has come back down, and then he starts to move, and the rhythm is so steady that Esteban stops being able to think in sentences.

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The camera watches from the sewing machine. The hat falls off somewhere and neither of them picks it up. Esteban comes with his face in the armrest and the man's hand over his mouth, and afterwards the man stays inside him for a moment longer, breathing hard for the first time all night, and then pulls away.

He dresses. He counts another five hundred thousand pesos onto the sewing table beside the envelope.

"Both," he says. "You said yes to the whole night."

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Esteban sits up. His legs are shaking. "Do you want to stay? For cake?"

The man looks at him, and for a second something almost soft goes across his face, and then it is gone and the briefcase is closed.

"No," he says. "Happy birthday, Esteban."

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He goes out through the patio and the gate, and Esteban sits on the sofa in the small room with a million pesos and a gold hat on the floor, and outside his aunt is still stacking chairs.

The trailer stops here. The episode does not.