Loquela (11 page)

THE NOVEL

Carlos remembered a summer when he was about fourteen, a girl in Rapel. He would dive into the lake and then run back to his towel. The girl, he didn't remember her name, spent entire days lying there, wearing ridiculous dark toy sunglasses, reading a book; there were times when she didn't appear for days and other times she'd spend a whole week just a few feet away. When he came back from swimming, numb, he felt like he was being watched. Once, Carlos asked her what she was looking at, the girl said nothing. The next day he tried a different tack: why was she looking at him. She responded that it was because she desired to look at him. Just like that, over and over, without variations in the dialogue until, at the end of the summer, Carlos had approached the girl to invite her to go waterskiing at the reservoir on his friend's boat. She thanked him, but said she had no desire to go. Desire! Carlos exclaimed mockingly, and went running toward the pier.

He saw her again a year later. Rapel was emptying out, it was the last night of vacation and Carlos was sitting alone under the spotlight on the wooden pier with a can of worms and a fishing line. Every now and then, in the dark of night, he made out couples walking together, groups of children, fathers unable to sleep because the next day they had to go back to Santiago, back to work. After a while a girl, one or two years
older than he, sat down next to him, looked out at the still water and slapped one foot, chasing away a mosquito. Carlos looked at her out of the corner of his eye and, despite the fact that she wasn't wearing those hilarious sunglasses, he recognized her as the girl from the previous summer. She asked if any fish were biting. He shook his head and considered saying that the only thing biting him were mosquitoes, but didn't. The girl threw a rock into the water and then apologized, maybe throwing stuff in scared away the fish. No big deal, said Carlos; she stood up and took off her clothes so fast that he barely saw her as she jumped into the water, swimming out into the lake and coming back immediately because it was too dark, she said. Carlos offered the girl his hand and she climbed up onto the pier and sat down beside him again. He said that it was really cold to go swimming; she'd felt the desire, that was all, she said, gathering her clothes, shivering as she disappeared toward the houses. He hadn't seen her again but, lying there on his bed, he remembered her features perfectly. He had a desire to kiss that distant mouth, to bite it. Then he went and looked out the window: there was no one in the street.

THE SENDER

It's hard to put in order what was said at the professor's house, when He Who Is Writing the Novel led me by the hand to look at that painting. It's hard because I've never transcribed a dialogue, because dialogues don't exist, no, what exists is a multiplicity of voices that don't always correspond to the people opening their mouths; sometimes they aren't even speaking, and yet we hear them. The professor was waiting for us on a soft armchair, legs crossed, a whiskey on the table, the aforementioned painting on the wall behind him. The professor greeted He Who Is Writing the Novel with a wave and looked me right in the eyes, waiting for me to look away, ashamed, but I wasn't at all perturbed to find myself so composed in the same place where previously I'd been writhing and sweating. He Who Is Writing the Novel removed a great quantity of pages, notecards, and biographical clippings from a folder that contained the professor's research regarding an unknown Neutrian poet from the '60s. The money He Who Is Writing the Novel's family sent from Santiago to pay for his studies came late or not at all, and the professor offered sizable sums to students who compiled information about writers of particular academic interest, demanding their complete discretion and
erasing any possibility of ever sharing credit for his publications with them. Truth be told, He Who Is Writing the Novel never took himself all that seriously: the professor published his student's annotations verbatim. A debt of some kind existed between the two of them, and because of this the professor had allowed me back into his house.

At first they were discussing their latest discoveries, but couldn't come to an agreement. For my part, I considered the pain I could cause the professor, while fixing three more whiskeys and drinking them, chewing the ice and scratching the surface of the sofa, ignoring their conversation. They'd spread out dozens of pages across the surface of the coffee table that summarized the different versions of the biography of Our Young Poet, which is how they referred to the subject of their research. The professor was nodding, parroting certain paragraphs out loud, asking repeatedly about some irrelevant detail; so there was nothing left for me to do but get more ice or flee to the bathroom, where I voiced questions that Alicia would then respond to in the mirror: how to make the professor but not He Who Is Writing the Novel disappear, I said to myself, after splashing my face with water. Returning to the living room, I found them taking notes for the official biography of “Our Young Poet,” and I sat down to read their pages. I remember little besides a few sordid milestones from the last months of his adolescent life. Enough of this nonsense, I said, it wasn't funny to play at writing new chapters of
Heinrich von Ofterdingen
if Novalis himself had wanted to leave his novel incomplete, but He Who Is Writing the Novel stopped me, gently removed the glass from my hand, and, coming close, kissed me, the bastard. Truth
be told, Our Young Poet believed Novalis, he believed Artaud, he believed Lautréamont, and he proclaimed this in meetings at Casa del Escritor, in lectures at the Municipal Library, in confessions to friends who were casually studying journalism: you should only write in extreme states like rage, drunkenness, anxiety, pain, and sickness, he said. Although he'd published two very short books when he was sixteen and seventeen years old, he was praised by poetry experts who never wrote a single verse, and when someone insulted him, calling him “regurgitated Rimbaud” at the reception for an award, he felt so understood that no one ever saw him again; sticking to the Rimbaudian plan like clockwork, except that on his desk he left behind too many clues. If the boy had left behind a posthumous work, then all this mimicry was just a farce or the concealment of something more, I said to them. He Who Is Writing the Novel responded that in light of those final pages, Our Young Poet had decided to give up at the last minute, impelled by a horrifying discovery. Then the professor gave me—with his bloodstained hand, bloodstained sooner or later—a photo of The Young Poet at eighteen, pictured with his father and an uncle at sunset in Neutria, between neighboring houses, a street that dropped down toward the port and, in the background, the sea, the sea, the sea, the sea, until He Who Is Writing the Novel took the glass from my hand, helped me up from my seat, we took two steps and stood facing the painting that hung from the white wall: a multiplicity of faces appeared between the brushstrokes, faces that swarmed under a ruined bridge, barely illuminated by an old lamppost in the foggy night, next to the black river; the fleshless faces of the beggars appeared, their heads bald and pallid,
each one the same as the next. The enigma was that only one of those imprecise faces belonged to Our Young Poet and they were all identical to the photo the professor showed me.

Just like at Alicia's party, where we saw each other much later on, I raised my glass—full, immediately empty—to protect myself from the light and to see, through the glass, your face glowing in two distinct ways. Then I had to touch you, to be sure that the radiance emanated from your skin and not from the surface of my eyes. At the professor's house, unlike at the party, I set the glass down on the table with great care and began reading the poem that you'd handed me by Our Young Poet: stanzas that told, almost without verbs, the story of a beggar who knocks on the door of a mansion where a Decadent party is being thrown; the host, an enormous fat man, was describing the dinner's obscure dishes to his guests: octopus with purple cabbage and beans, oxtail soup, eggplant in toasted sesame sauce, roasted legs of lamb with caviar and dried mushrooms, beet flan, blackberries, seaweed, and chocolate. For a few seconds, in the enormous fat man's ostentations, I could see the tricks of the professor, smoking on his sofa, belt unbuckled, legs crossed, eyes half-closed, one inert hand, pointed in my direction. He Who Is Writing the Novel ran his fingertips down my neck, the enormous fat man was getting dressed to specially welcome the intruder who, according to the acrostic formed by those verses—“AWAITING ANOTHER GUEST”—was coming to infiltrate his party, while the whiskey, like the anxiety, was making me sweat, seeing the movements of the host as he stretched a silk sock up over his adipose left leg, bent in front of a burnished old bed, where five naked adolescents were drawing near to lick his spine,
mine; the votive candles on the tables had consumed themselves down to their pearl holders when the lovers' muscles contracted in front of the ash and the wax that a very tall woman, veiled in lace, standing at the foot of the bed, let fall from the cigarette and the white candle that she held in her hands. Then the enormous fat man adjusted his perfumed, blond wig while wrapping each of his fingers, voluptuously, around the knob of the front door. The heavy wood opened slowly and, suddenly, with the cold of the late night, a set of claws clutched the edge of the door, which the enormous fat man attempted to close with mock terror. In that moment, He Who Is Writing the Novel was talking about the poem's lack of synesthesia, about how it was impossible to feel the stench, the filth. And the professor corrected him, without taking his eyes off me: the purulence, the pages and pages describing those filthy men whom the poem calls beggars; their flirtations with the exclusive guests on mattresses in dozens of bedrooms, the bleeding who cried out for mercy in the hallway, with open arms, smiling. The final stanzas, more concise and lyrical, stayed with just one of the beggars: one who advanced through the flames that at dawn were consuming the mansion, until he came to the door of a room that was still intact: when he entered he could scarcely see anything, every vase, every table, every chair shone brighter than gold. Almost falling down, blind, he was able to comprehend that it was an optical illusion caused by hundreds of mirrors and one candelabrum. He blew out the candles with a single breath and, although the fire had reached that room too, he paused, enraptured in front of a canvas that hung on one wall: it was the portrait of a large group of filthy men under a bridge. The poem ended with a dialogue between the beggar and the tall
woman with the veiled body in the middle of the fire. The beggar managed to take down the canvas and roll it up while telling her that this was the final work of a painter who'd gone mad, who'd disappeared from the art salons after putting the finishing brush-stroke on the canvas that the beggar now held under his arm, revealing to the woman that he was himself this very painter and that he'd come back to reclaim his work: he'd had a vision of his future once, he'd decided to paint it though he remembered little, and yet he couldn't bear what he saw emerge from his own two hands. The woman let the lace fall from her body and approached: but now you're with me, inside a mansion in flames; this wasn't the image of the future that appeared to you. The beggar covered his eyes with one hand, clutched his painting with the other, and ran. Until he tripped.

I looked up from the book, I saw that the hands of He Who Is Writing the Novel were far away from me, clutching the chair. But how can you not understand that this is what's most important? He shouted, furious, the guy decided to put his resolution in writing! The professor offered him money to keep something a secret and He Who Is Writing the Novel fumed that a time was coming when those who write would be able to defend that something. I don't remember exactly what they were talking about, because I found myself somewhere else, on my balcony, looking out toward the port of Neutria, seeing myself in the light of a boat, in the night; I was leaving and Alicia was waving goodbye to me from a distance, her hand high in the air, leaning on the railing of the beachside boardwalk. I know that later He Who Is Writing the Novel was singing the praise of Corporalism and its founder, Our Young Poet, while I climbed up on the sofa to remove the painting
from the wall and take it. The professor was so scandalized that he demanded we leave his house immediately.

Days later, He Who Is Writing the Novel buzzed the intercom at my apartment and asked for me. I heard Alicia's laugh, she didn't want to tell me who it was until he was already standing in my door, moving his hands up and down, nervous. I didn't want him to come in my room, so I led him out to the balcony so Alicia could observe us calmly from the living room, while we turned our backs to her.

He Who Is Writing the Novel looked haggard. He took out a notebook and pen, sat down in one of the chairs, and told me he was about to fall down from sleepiness, because he could only write at night and in the morning he had to work and to study in the afternoon. He chose one of the chairs facing the sea. I already wrote this: I'm exhausted too, the words are leaving me behind, I can't stop myself and the place where I come from, the place of the first lines of my letter––the simple story of my love for you in Neutria––is behind me; so I turn around––because it isn't just movement that exists here, but the obligation to write “so I turn around”––and I delay in picking up the pen and again the words are behind me, like trying to touch something at the center of my own spine, unattainable yet mine alone. Alicia lost patience when I began to digress: better to get yourself two mirrors, put one behind you and one in front, open your eyes, my God. I got angry too: so why was she there, then. More than once, I'd held a hand mirror in front of me, turning my back on the big mirror in my grandmother's bathroom, without success: behind me I always saw Alicia, never the nape of my own neck.