The Brownie

I wanted the brownie.

We were in Amsterdam for the weekend. It was my only chance. Yes, I could find a brownie in Stuttgart, but I wasn't going to risk it. I am Colombian; I wasn't about to shoot myself in the foot. I didn't want to be the stereotypical tourist, but I was about to be, though I swore I would eat it privately to avoid all theatrics. Jonatán and I drove for seven hours in our rented Peugeot and arrived to a quiet suburb of the city late at night. The hotel was large and modern, with high ceilings and glass walls. It was raining. Jonatán was silly about the parking, made me ask the receptionist whether we could park in the hotel's parking lot.

"Yes, of course," the man said mechanically without looking up from his computer, unsurprised by the absurdity of the question.

He was tall, with a blond mustache, which seemed to me like an impossible feature that only a prince in a children's book could veritably wear. His shirtsleeves were rolled up to the elbow, and I could see several tattoos on his right forearm: half of a fire truck, a drawing of lightning, the words Deus Vult in a precious, Vivaldi-like font. He sensed that I was staring at him and finally looked up impatiently, by which time I had long ceased to see him as a prince. I turned away with a vague smile I didn't understand, a smile that felt like a grimace. Was I trying to convey to him that I had no idea what those words meant, perhaps out of embarrassment for him? Or was I afraid of him and trying to appease him? His flashing eyes, a brief sense of danger, then nothing, the orange glow of the streetlights outside, my regret at another smile I didn't intend, a smile that seemed to force itself on me.

I told Jonatán about the man and the tattoo.

"I will be asking questions," Jonatán said, rubbing his hands excitedly, and I immediately regretted telling him.

But when we walked inside, the man was gone. An older woman wearing a long, sweater dress sat at the front desk.

"That's a nice dress," Jonatán said.

We rode the tiny hotel elevator with two youths speaking feverishly in Dutch, a nice language, a bit softer than German. Jonatán was making eyes with the shorter one, a boy with tousled hair and a T-shirt with a photo of Britney with a shaved head. The hotel room had dark-wooded panels and minimalist decor in the style of those Nordic countries, which I couldn't really distinguish aesthetically from one another. Here, as in Germany, the bed was made up of two beds pushed together and two small mattresses with their own comforters to guarantee ideal, individual sleep. There were small reading lamps everywhere, screwed to each side of the headboard with movable necks like people-pleasing giraffes, and convenient outlets so that maybe you could also plug yourself into the wall should you need to. A glass wall overlooked a canal, a few tennis courts, and a mostly empty parking lot to the west. Farther down, city lights dotted the dark haphazardly. I could see myself reflected on the glass wall, my face tired but resigned, the dark water of the canal projected onto the faint silhouette of my body. I washed my hands until my knuckles stung. The virus was beginning to encroach into Germany, and soon enough it would be all over Europe. We fell asleep in our clothes, reading about the virus on our phones, the room's curtain still drawn back.

I wasn't exactly looking forward to going back to Stuttgart. I wasn't painting much these days, unless you counted a triptych I made of the different views from my apartment. The Christmas markets had closed, leaving the exuberant youth who didn't care about the cold to implode in the bars and squares. I was young, but it did not feel...