Loquela (17 page)

THE RECIPIENT

            
December 9
^th

From here onward the only excision will consist in referring to you with just the initial of your first name. I'm sitting at the base of a tree in the Plaza de Armas, I'm not in Neutria and it seems like I won't ever be; I lift my head and can see perhaps the only peaceful space in this city of shrieking and taunting: the façade of the cathedral, lit from below. The severe, illuminated statue of the carpenter Joseph, I guess, and above it a glimmering point, the only star in the blind night of Santiago, a night of walls and ceilings in which I'm trapped. The plaza, the new old Plaza de Armas is the only place where I feel alone, where I can be a stranger and weep with my hand covering my face, hearing the songs of the fanatics who preach about the coming inferno, that inferno is already here; the only place I can weep in silence with eyes closed, while people crowd together in order to laugh loudly at two clowns who are also shrieking horrors in the pedestrian walkway, where I can sit down and weep after having walked for several hours, trying to find a miserable church and its silence. If I'd been able to come before God in the penultimate pew, face to the floor, asking why
I have to lose you, why it's permitted, asking for an answer with the cynicism of knowing that I only ask so that you'll come back, that I want to believe that God exists and there are places that do make sense, where you'll always be waiting for me.

Like an act of honesty and a rupture of the vice of the lie, of obliqueness, that has allowed me to tolerate the great shame of living in this time and in this city of pure death, of beggars, of children coming to hospitals for the beatings and violations of their parents, while we close our eyes so as not to disturb the clean and kind home we're creating on the page; to escape from this vice of creating fictions that aren't as disgustingly transitory as the streets of Santiago, as the gaze of the residents of Santiago, as my writing is filthy; to stop being the writer who doesn't let the clamor and stench enter his room—because you can't work like that—who doesn't let the senselessness of his protagonist touch him in any word, because his work is to write, transcendence be damned; for that I'll sacrifice the narrative perfection of my novel. You know that I'd thought of closing the puzzle with the story that occurred in Neutria, with the past, with the explanation of who was going to kill whom, when, and why. No. Once I told C that I was going to make my novel out of the days, out of what the facts wrote for me. Well, here I am. Trembling because I'm alone after having wept when I discovered that I will not have you if not in transcendence. Pounding on the doors of churches that are closed at this hour of the night. I love you so much and I leave you until next time, until the end of a novel that I thought was worthwhile because in it I was going to save you. I'll write you every day, whenever I can, these letters, until we are together again, wherever it may be; nothing will matter to me, I'll pay no
attention to any character, to any action. Objects will cease to be named so that around me everything will begin to disappear, so that the limits of the place where we live might be believable. I'll stop being a voice, I'll be me, I want to go back to speaking sentences and have you by my side, kissing me, telling me what to say.

            
December 24
^th

To save you would be beautiful if I could go where I'm going without having to leave the place where I've been. I recite your return letter from memory; you felt me naked against your naked back and I love you. With you I am part of something more, flesh that isn't flesh that will cool but is part of a heartbeat; yours that I hear quicken, your ear on my chest, a movement that traverses everything and includes us when our pulses beat as one, your tongue in mine; you give where you receive, a slap, my fingers hurt and yet it is your fingers that burn against my skin, you remove them and the skin is left bloodless, white, burning, painful. The body is one; a man who is a woman looks to the heavens and between two moans hears the never-still silence of God's contemplation as I want to imagine it; you are the one I could enter without leaving myself. In that moment I looked up and you didn't even tell me that you understood, instead you just stretched out your hand from below to open my eyelids. To save you and together we'd write the end of the novel.

THE NOVEL

Someone would be coming by to pick up the suitcase, Carlos said. Elisa held him tighter, resting her head against his chest. Without listening to him she murmured that it felt like winter, a rainy winter. Carlos ran his fingers through her hair and asked who'd be coming by to pick up the suitcase. She continued, saying that it was like they'd cut off the electricity to all of Santiago and it was only going to come back on after a downpour of many days; only the rubble would be illuminated, wet under the light of a sun that would come out at last. Carlos kissed her. She added that there was no way she was going to answer the phone if it rang again, and he noticed that, in the half-light of the living room, the streetlamp caused a luminous line to come in through a crack between the curtains, falling transversally across the two of them, across the sofa, the glass of the table, and the chair where the suitcase rested. The light divided the living room in half, that space where the two of them took refuge, Elisa said. They continued holding each other in silence, then she began to fantasize that she was interrogating him: she put her chin on her boyfriend's abdomen, face down, so that the questions she asked tickled him and he was unable to answer. Where had her female friends gone, they didn't call her anymore. Why was she so afraid recently, even when they were holding each other; surely she was watching too many
movies, reading many books, paying excessive attention to news about wars, assaults, domestic violence, and accidents. When she was asleep she'd wake up because the disc she'd been listening to ended, and at an hour when there wasn't even the sound of cars in the street. She started to tremble. Carlos twisted the hair on the nape of her neck around his fingers and told her to be quiet, sshh, but she asked again why it was so cold if it was summer, and what . . . where did that bell they heard on Sunday mornings come from, if the one time she woke up, got dressed, and went to the church to see, of course, it'd been locked. All the while, he couldn't stop thinking about what he'd done the previous afternoon: he decided to get rid of the notebook containing the detective novel. He'd reviewed the whole thing in a couple of hours, and he was so annoyed by the silence in which he was reading that he ended up saying the dialogues between the protagonist and the other characters out loud, almost shouting; people passing by in the street looked in the window. Sweating, he'd let himself collapse on top of the desk when he realized that there was nothing at all intriguing about a guy who plotted a murder—of the albino girl and of the reader—behind the protagonist's back, it was nothing more than the account of a storyteller obsessed with loneliness, in which there was no room for any characters besides himself. The tale of a suicide that was never named, that's what he'd written; so where did the gunshot and the twisted face in the mirror go? Now he heard Elisa asking why, while napping, she'd had that nightmare: she was a man stranded on a faraway island, she spent innumerable days building a hut and, after she placed the final branch, she went inside to rest; but the structure collapsed and her body was trapped. No, Carlos decided, I'm not going to keep writing the diary of a madman. The first thing to do was tear out the pages of the final chapter; from there he would make a new novel, one in which a man, after an inexplicable tragedy, would find a wife, a family, and a
place in the city. He went down to the corner store. This time he picked out a spiral notebook, with three sections and a plastic cover, totally different from the one with sixty yellow pages that he'd found forgotten in his sister's drawer, adorned with only a couple childish drawings on the back cover. Elisa had spoken to him once about a box where she kept things she didn't want to see again but didn't dare throw away. They'd argued about that, and he got the impression that the poems and stories he'd given her in high school were in there, he swore to her that he'd never regret anything he'd written. Okay then, this was the moment to decide, to hide away the voice of that protagonist somewhere that would drown out his cries. Back in the store he found an elegant box that, according to the saleswoman, had once been used to store top hats. He threw the notebook inside, went on foot to the bridge at Pio Nono and Santa María. When he lit the box on fire, the wind unexpectedly ripped it from his hands and hurled it into the Rio Mapocho, for a long time he stayed there, watching how the current carried away the soaked remnants. The stench of the riverbank was nauseating: this was revulsion now, not fear, and he felt relieved. From a payphone he called Elisa and awkwardly told her that he'd burned the story of the albino girl. Elisa interrupted him: coincidently, her clothes smelled like smoke; she'd spent the afternoon talking with Violeta, while the bakery across the street from her house burned. He was silent. The truth, she went on, was that she hadn't told her anything about the letter she'd kept hidden for months now. She couldn't take it anymore, she was going to take it to her now, she would return it and he could do whatever he wanted with the albino girl and her messages. Now Carlos stared into darkness of the living room and kept touching Elisa's soft neck, entranced by the line of light that was falling across the rug as her voice grew almost inaudible, asking why everything creaked in this house, when were they going to bed, why was
she so alone if she wasn't alone. The next day he would personally return Violeta's letter; moreover, he decided, he wasn't going to open the envelope. For him it was enough that he was there, holding Elisa, the two of them sleeping together on the sofa. He was also confident that it was too late now for anyone to come pick up the suitcase, that the next morning the two of them would wake up with the sun on their faces and they'd still be in the same position.

CORPORALIZATION MANIFESTO

(Unprintable text)

I'll only be satisfied when I sit down to write: I'll find people who share my ideas or whom I'll convince to agree with me. Then I'll try to form a group with them, stating at the outset that the results will depend exclusively on the plurality of the project.

The reader lives and the author has died, we'll proclaim, though our goal will be to resuscitate him, to give him what he never had: body, flesh, presence. And what will die instead is the text, the artistic product that escapes from our hands and becomes merchandise: all the time we spent spilling our blood across the page is transformed into food for publishers, newspapers, critics. That's why we're anemic, that's why we need to suck up the humors of others and end up dissolved in foreign books, that's why we die every time we read, in handwriting that is not our own, a sentence that belongs to us.

We ourselves will be the project, our own breathing will be that of every character we create. The autonomous world of the text will no longer be able to justify this or that coward, because it won't exist anywhere but in each moment of our existence. Every time that a respectable voice pejoratively describes the initial action
of one of our chapters, for example, it will be passing judgment on our way of life, which naturally will provoke a reaction. Literature is a fight to the death but, since we are the creators and all the others just have fun at our expense, the balance is leaning in our favor from the beginning. As the virtuosos of the world join Corporalism, the indolent will wonder desperately what inexplicable phenomenon has caused the people to cease, suddenly and en masse, producing works of art. And we'll respond with the joyful silence of those who share a secret.

The reader won't know that we're always finishing a creation, at every moment and according to a composite plan prefigured in advance; he'll only be able to learn of this creation in the records, documents, and expositions charged with making it known that it's time to unveil the word
end
. In any event, we'll take the comments, mutterings, and applause without a care, because to read is to be in the presence of a corpse. We, on the other hand, the ones who survive, find ourselves again at the beginning of the one and only pleasure: we will be fruitful.

THE NOVEL

Carlos was sitting on the sidewalk looking at the ground when Elisa came up in front of him. A patrol car had picked her up around four in the afternoon, they'd asked via the intercom for her to accompany them, because her boyfriend was in trouble. No one said a word to her on the way. Once they got out of the car and entered the cordoned-off area someone spoke to her: there had been a homicide. She froze. Horns sounded in the surrounding streets, a car radio transmitted at full volume a metallic voice that tirelessly insulted someone of an indistinguishable name, while men in uniforms ran from one side to the other and threw crumpled-up pages into the street. The door to an ambulance opened to the rhythm of a piercing alarm, out of it emerged men with gloves, masks, and bags, dozens of bags in their hands.

An officer approached her, muttering that a young man had shot a girl point-blank; he asked her to identify them. She was taken inside a patrol car, where they showed her two photos in which Violeta appeared sitting on a beach, dressed in black, her eyes lost in the ocean. They asked if she knew her: yes, she had spoken to her once. But it appears that your boyfriend knew her better, added the same detective who'd told her first how Carlos had notified them that Violeta was dead, just inside the door of her own house. Elisa paled. Her boyfriend's explanations weren't
sufficient, and now he was detained as a preventative measure, they informed her. Leaning against the car door, she brought her hand to her head; she felt like it was nighttime in a foreign town, that an unknown man was insisting on sharing a motel room with her, that although he spoke an unfamiliar language she understood him, and yet was unable to find the expression to reject him. She opened her eyes, she felt a little dizzy when she asked to see him. That's what she said: take me to him, let me talk to him.

Carlos was gaunt, the white T-shirt he was wearing was stained with dirt, his pants too. Elisa asked him, with a knot in her throat, why he was dirty like that. He stood up, made as if to hug her but two officers twisted one of his arms so he was rendered immobile. Don't imagine anything, he told Elisa, almost shouting. He hadn't killed anyone, he'd just gone out that morning to return Violeta's letter. He rang the doorbell but nobody answered. He realized that he'd been a fool to go in through the unlocked gate. His idea had been to slip the letter under the door but, as soon as he leaned against it, it opened without resistance. Inside the curtains were drawn, so he took a few steps before tripping over a shape on the floor. A body covered in blood. And he didn't know it was a corpse, he told Elisa, like he was talking to the officers. She came close and took his hand, which had started to tremble in the moment that he asked her again not to imagine anything, when he told her that everyone was confused and they all needed someone to blame.