Loquela (8 page)

THE NOVEL

Elisa came back with two cheap popsicles. Carlos removed the wrapper on his and they ate it together. The other popsicle melted after a few hours on the bench in the plaza where they spent the afternoon. Elisa lay her head down across his knees and without intending to she fell asleep. A while later the cold woke her. It wasn't Carlos's knees that she felt under her head, but a jacket, his jacket, shaped into a pillow. Just before opening her eyes she'd believed she was in bed, but the bench's boards materialized and she remembered where she was. Another false alarm she said to herself, just like when she was little and stayed at her cousins' house in Viña de Mar: she thought she was waking up in her own room in Santiago, but then she heard breathing, the sea in the background, and her Aunt Pepa coming up the stairs to wake them for breakfast. For a second—before discovering that Carlos had left her alone, sleeping in the plaza—she thought that, like before, she'd been mysteriously transported to some hostile place in middle of the night. Nearly desiccated trees, poorly pruned shrubs, the gardener hosing down the street, and the old man pretending to read the paper but actually ogling her, all of it added to her disappointment.

She ran her hand over her face and sat up. A pair of men whistled at her from a distance, at her or at someone else, then disappeared. It was
late. Shivering, she put on Carlos's jacket. She stretched her legs out over the gravel and looked around. The old man on the bench had put his newspaper away inside his wool jacket. She looked around for Carlos, she saw some workers playing a game of pickup soccer with a rubber ball. A few of them, freshly showered, had come from the building that was under construction near Carlos's home-studio; some days, looking out the window, she'd see them leave, all spruced up, heading out to a bar. She got up. Her head hurt and she was anxious to tell off that old degenerate: the one who'd been staring at her all this time. She started walking.

Suddenly she was in front of a bar. She stood still, staring at the glass of the display window where the specials were written in white and red marker: half-liter beers 500 pesos, chicken and fries 1,000, beer and a hotdog 890. She looked at her face, still swollen with sleep. For a second, she glanced past her own reflection and a man appeared, drinking a beer, his eyes fixed on the wall. It was him. When Elisa entered the bar, Carlos was watching a pretty girl come in through the doorway and walk toward his table. In the neon light he discovered it was Elisa, her face hard, pulling back a chair and sitting down across from him. She moved aside two bottles that were apparently in her way and asked him dryly what'd made him decide to leave her on that bench, alone and sleeping. Better to have offered her up for a million pesos to the construction workers who whistled at her every time she passed by on her way home. Carlos asked her to forgive him. He gestured to the woman cleaning the mirror behind the bar: one glass, please. All was silent as Carlos emptied the bottle into the glass and offered it to Elisa, who turned it down with a raised hand and a tsk of her tongue. She pushed back her chair intending to leave, but Carlos took her arm and spoke: she had fallen sound asleep when the organ grinder started his song. And he'd experienced an urge to learn the man's name, to exchange a few words with him, after all Carlos could
hum from memory the melody the organ grinder played every week in the neighborhood. Then he decided he'd give him a coin—he'd never done so before—with the secret hope that he'd be allowed to turn the crank on the apparatus. It'd only take a couple minutes; he hadn't meant to leave her alone for anything in the world. He'd laid her down on top of his jacket—she was sleeping soundly, he'd said this already—and headed toward the organ grinder, who'd just finished his second melody and, as usual, was pausing for a moment to accept coins from passersby. As he approached he couldn't help but stare at the girl talking to the organ grinder, who listened to her very intently, nodding his head with every word she said. It was the albino girl. The albino girl, he repeated, and he'd seen her face before. Perfectly calm, he handed the organ grinder 100 pesos so he could listen in on their conversation: she said that it was a deal then, that he better not leave her expecting, this comment made both of them laugh quietly. The albino girl said goodbye and began walking rapidly away. When Carlos caught up to her, he asked if she was Violeta, Alicia's friend, and she smiled, glanced up, as if noting his hair color, and nodded her head. Carlos paused. He stared at Elisa, who was drinking her beer now, her eyes never leaving his. She was certain he wouldn't tell her everything. He'd wanted to tell Violeta who he was—her friend's cousin—but she didn't show the slightest interest in his words, I know, I know, she said. They were silent, Violeta turned and walked toward Providencia; she didn't look where she was going, her attention on Carlos, walking beside her. Then he asked her what she was carrying in her hand. A magazine founded by some of her cousin's classmates, she said: they'd published a story she'd written. She handed him the stapled and folded photocopies. A gift. In that instant, as he thanked her and told her he'd read it, Carlos remembered Elisa, alone in the plaza. As if he'd betrayed her, as if he were betraying her, she thought. Violeta smiled for
the first time, she moved her head again and murmured: See you, have a good one. She looked a lot like the albino girl from the novel, the one he'd been unable to find in his notebook; he told Elisa that he'd been thinking about the coincidence of their hair color as he headed back toward the plaza, walking, not running, why lie; she looked just like that unfathomable character that he heard in his head. At the stoplight he started flipping through the photocopied magazine. He was stunned when he read the title of her story: “The Wasted Night” by Violeta Drago. When he told her this, he silently looked for surprise on Elisa's face, and yet he realized how hard it would be for her to comprehend what it was that had kept him from returning to the plaza, what made him go into the bar, buy a beer, and a second, and a third. The title and the plot corresponded to the most well-guarded story he'd ever written, a story he invented the painful night after his cousin's wedding when, in the bathroom, he and Elisa had definitively stopped being best friends. The motivations mattered little, he thought, what was important was that in Violeta's sentences the boy who is in love with his best friend was also named Carlos. Although in her version, the girl's name is Beatrice, like in Dante's paradise and unlike his own medieval tale, in which Carlos is a castle swineherd, Elisa a princess, and the curse is delivered from the mouth of a sinister court magician, who's jealous of the seemingly idealistic yet inappropriate relationship that is beginning to blossom between heiress and servant in the kingdom's springtime countryside.

In Violeta's story, on the other hand, Carlos and Beatrice have been life-long neighbors in a neighborhood in the fictional city of Neutria. Beatrice is obsessed with the place's legend: in a distant time, where a full moon shone every night, the heir and heiress to the thrones of the two Humalén—an imaginary indigenous people—clans, enemies since the beginning, loved one another in silence; as you might surmise, just like in
Ovid, Shakespeare, and
Lovers of Teruel,
their love is as forbidden as it is inevitable. The night before the first rain, when it is customary for both clans to give thanks to the moon for her gifts, the heir and the heiress took refuge in the celebrations, they concealed themselves, they started touching each other; the legend is cut short at this crucial point. And all that's been recovered is a written epilogue: from that time onward the moon made the decision to show her full self only after several nights of darkness, to remind mankind that fullness is fleeting, and perhaps to subject herself to the same transience as everything that shines on the Earth. In the solitude of her house in Neutria, in front of her notebook, Beatrice wonders what it was that might have befallen the heir and the heiress at that celebration that had sparked everything that followed. Whenever they talk about it, Carlos comes up with all kinds of explanations to answer her questions, because—as we already know—Carlos secretly loves Beatrice. Until one night, coincidently moonlit, he gives his neighbor a letter that recounts the denouement he has imagined for the legend: foreseeing that fatality lies in store for the passion of their children, the fathers of the heir and heiress ask for help, each in his own way, from the moon. And she arranges for the couple to be allowed a single night of love: for the din of the celebrations to provide refuge for the lovers this one time. And so it is. But when morning comes, the heir and heiress of the Humalén clans decide to take their own lives in the same tree: never to part again. The moon, furious at this act of rebellion, withdraws her presence from the Humalén. Beatrice reads the page and weeps. She hugs Carlos, they pull apart, look at each other, and touch again. Early the next morning, Beatrice wakes up and rereads the letter. She calls her neighbor to tell him that she never wants to see him again, that they aren't friends anymore. Carlos knew the rest of the story by heart. And he verified this by comparing it with his own version, in which the court
magician wants to make the young princess his wife and so he reads the mind of the swineherd with whom she converses in the palace gardens every afternoon: because that filthy mind has no room for friendship, not even a spell would be required to break them apart. In the spring the two of them would meet in secret in some passageway for what would be their long-awaited yet ephemeral—though they might have believed the opposite—night of love. The magician outsmarts himself. While in his version of the story the swineherd is hung from a rafter in the pigsty, and princess Elisa willfully drowns herself in a river, Violeta made the ending more implacable: Beatrice flees from the world, she locks herself in her dark room and is found in a state of decomposition weeks later. Carlos, her neighbor, dedicates himself to his job in an administrative office in the center of Neutria for forty years, no family, no friends, no place to call home. He smiles at his coworkers every morning and never tells anyone the daily agony of the fading memory of the touch, the smell, the body of Beatrice that one night, until he forgets even her name and dies, alone, in a hospital bed. And Carlos said none of this to Elisa that day in the bar. He just ordered another beer and handed her the photocopied magazine. Elisa flipped through the pages without seeing them, until she came to the story and read it. A half-hour later she lifted her head, took a last sip from her glass, held Carlos's hand with affection, and they spoke of other things. She can't understand the coincidences, he thought. She thought: he's leaving me all alone.

THE RECIPIENT

            
August 31
^st

“In an aberrant world where taking a drink, hoisting a chair, or passing through a doorway are acts requiring superhuman will power” (Luis Harss on Onetti). I've decided to stay in my apartment, watch TV, eat, sleep, go out with friends (whomever), have a beer some night with Alicia, or another new friend, a pretty girl I just met with whom I can talk about random stuff, not novels, dreams, or love. Laugh a little. Read the assigned reading for a class, study linguistics, go see movies at an old cinema.

That other stuff is not for me. It's for another.

(I got up late, cottonmouth. My head was buzzing and I remembered that there had been other days that C had shown up at the university with her face ravaged by insomnia; she told me that when she actually managed to fall asleep she dreamed prolonged misadventures and, for some reason, woke up with the need to recollect these dreams, to recount them to her boyfriend, who was sleeping beside her. Of course, when she turned on the light, the episodes vanished from her memory and she was left empty,
her boyfriend waking up grudgingly, complaining to her to please let him sleep. So she turned off the light but was unable to close her eyes, she lay there thinking, imagining that she got up, got dressed in the dark, went out, walked down to Plaza Ñuñoa, and went into a bar. There she met an actor from a TV show who invited her to his apartment in a building across from hers. They slept together. At last, in his arms, C was able to fall into a deep sleep, right when the alarm sounded and she had to get up so she wouldn't be late for class.)

If I were to stop writing this diary, I imagine, these problems that are wearing me out would disappear. And yet if I were unable to reread my supposed visit to Neutria, if there were no chance of going back to eat cotton candy in the plaza where the statues in the fountain spoke to me, the possibility of fleeing to a better place than this one without leaving my room would disappear. If I were to resign myself to the smog, to spending hours talking about the flooding in Pudahuel produced by yesterday's rainfall, to spending Saturdays at my grandmother's house listening to my cousins discuss used SUV prices, all excited over the possibility of acquiring cheaper vehicle registration. If I were to write an essay proving Violeta's madness through her texts, her cowardice, or simply a letter recriminating Alicia for the way she attributes her own ramblings to her friend, for using a dead person as a pseudonym. And not see her again. Or dress myself in shame, go to J's apartment, kneel down, beg her forgiveness, tell her I'm ready to begin how I should've; like a man who feels physically attracted to a woman, who grows close to her, gets to know her, they like each other, they go out, become a couple, get married. I'd go work on an estate in Rancagua, she'd be a history or philosophy
teacher in some prestigious prep school, we'd have three children and satellite TV to break the monotony, no books. If I never read or wrote again about a lost city—silent but with sea and dogs and children—maybe I'd get used to wearing a tie, getting in my car and communicating via honks of the horn with my fellow office workers, residents of Santa María de Manquehue. Or if I were to get up from this chair right now, get on the metro, get off at the bus terminal and, walking up to the ticket window, boldly ask for a ticket to Neutria, the most expensive you have, if you please. Or if, in the middle of a binge, I were to take Alicia to bed, and her legs wrapped around me were cold, even though her hands are always warm. Or if I were to turn myself in at the Police Investigations building on Calle Condell (where last year I sat with J on the sidewalk to listen to the screams of people being tortured) and declare myself guilty of the murder of Violeta Drago, my only pretext being to find out who really killed her. And if after each of these decisions all I received was a laugh, a mocking laugh.

(Before lunch I called Alicia. We joked around for a while about the detective novel I'd loaned her. Then she asked me what I thought of Violeta's notebooks. I evaded the inevitable by answering that I bet the letter inadvertently delivered to me was more interesting, the one the albino girl signed as sender. Alicia said she didn't know what I was talking about. The letter, I insisted; the letter I'd given her in exchange for her friend's writings. Alicia still didn't understand. Really, are you sure I didn't give it to you? No, what letter? We argued. I don't know what's going on. I hung up, nervous; it seemed like someone was knocking on the door to my apartment. I opened it and there was nobody there. How stupid, why would anybody be knocking when there's a doorbell?

In my mind I reviewed where Violeta's letter might be. In the drawer, no. I went through the papers on my desk, the closet, the disorder on the little table with the telephone. The last thing I retained in my worthless memory was me, sitting and contemplating the envelope, too afraid to open that strange correspondence, even though the mailman slid it under my door. And yet it was a letter from the girl who'd been murdered, my best friend's best friend. Then I thought about what Carlos would do in my situation: open the envelope and read the letter; discover everything that Violeta had written for me, what she'd decided to convey in her own sentences; he'd be unable to take it and he'd run out, I don't know where, that is to say, I do know where: to the home of Violeta Drago, over on Pedro de Valdivia Norte, as indicated on the envelope. Having said nothing to his girlfriend, Carlos was standing in front of the door. He rang the bell. He'd ask the albino girl why she was imploring him to stay with her, here in Santiago.) Action, pure, simple, and ephemeral action. (That of writing: I plagiarize Onetti just like he copied Faulkner, who imitated someone else I don't know.)

            
September 7
^th

It's snowing in Santiago. Amazing, I'm lying down and I feel cold. I go to the balcony to check if it's still raining and see the falling snowflakes. Down below a couple is dancing like on Broadway (I imagine); happy, she swings the umbrella from side to side, he's holding her around the waist, and of course they're singing. She
opens her mouth and the snowflakes fall (how fascinating to write the word snowflake, snowflake, snowflake, to write snowflake because they are actually falling right here in this exact instant and not somewhere else—where I can't see them unless I force myself, fantasize—in some distant and nonexistent country where it snows every winter, for whose inhabitants the snow is commonplace; this doesn't happen in my fiction when I want it to either. This is tangible, like the difference between writing a love letter and forging Carlos's love letter to his girlfriend, Elisa). The happiness bestowed by the certainty of ice melting in my frozen hand is the same happiness I felt when I looked out and saw that it was snowing. So I ask myself how I might come to touch the woman I love without my hands disappearing on her waist, I ask myself this just because the snow is falling.

Snowflakes in Santiago: an oxymoron. What happens when the impossible occurs in front of my eyes? Other times I would've called it a miracle, and yet it would have provoked the same certainty of being alive that I feel now. One day Alicia asked me, a little drunk and knowing her question to be repetitious and unanswerable: “why is it impossible to write from a place of happiness?” My relationship with her cannot be explained, despite all this verbiage. It's not love (that wasted word), rather a condition that helps me go to bed and to get up, that I insist on re-creating, on masking with other names, on transposing into Carlos's novel, and also on recording in an artificially intimate diary. That which only occurs in our presence, that which would only grow in one way: if our bodies made contact. And that act is outside language's reference, an act (love?) so private and elemental that it breaks apart at the simple attempt to assign it a verb. Not even God (I
think now that it's a stretch to believe in Him) has remained in that sacred borderland, which is the unnamable, the unrepeatable. God already has a designation and that's why he fell into these pages, where the word can provide for everything. Alicia and I have no nexus, just the one that appears when I write our names together: Alicia and I. The rest is a painful exercise in nostalgia for what will never happen, fiction is sad because it's not alive, because it requires that I turn some pages for it to exist.

(Why do wondrous things make us feel a need to share them with the people we love? I'm thinking about the time we hiked up a hill in Rancagua, when J and her friend got lost on a different path and ended up stranded on the face of a cliff. Her friend was stuck up there all afternoon, paralyzed with panic; J, on the other hand, decided to climb up to the top and go for help. Knowing nothing of mountaineering, she climbed tooth and nail, at one point believing that she wouldn't make it, that she'd fall into the emptiness and die. In that second she thought about her parents, her siblings, her true friends, about me perhaps, but focused on none of them. On the brink of death, it was the memory of a guy she was hooking up with at the time [I can't remember his name anymore]—and the desire to touch him again, to feel his body on top of hers, to still be alive with him—that impelled her to claw hold of a root, prop her feet against the wall, and climb up the cliff face to safety. At least that's what she told me a few days later, after I'd seen her approaching in the distance, injured, her face terrified; when she spotted me, she hurried over, gave me a quick hug, and asked for help. I understood [although in a fragmentary and divergent way, while I took her by the hand, telling her to calm down, calm down, everything will be okay] the nature of
her feelings [what I deduced really was this pretentious]: she felt no affection for anyone, we only mattered on the surface, because in the crucial moment she reverted to the memory of a brief fling, a fleeting [I'm simplifying again, I know] romance [that's how I've always thought of them], instead of conjuring me, her best friend of many years. But later I had the contrary certainty: for J, the individuals who transcend are not those who for years have shared her projects, her moods, ordinary and transcendent events, no, they are those who can give her new experiences of sensuality, who can make her completely forget everything but her own body. This was a disaster for me: faced with eternity or the end, my adored J had clung to an instant of the flesh that would rot in a matter of days. And I [invoking God, the transcendence of her in me, of me in her] voluntarily unravel what I most believed in, the image of her at my side; I wept in the tent, a sleeping bag wrapped around me up to my neck, while the whole campground got drunk, celebrating the successful rescue of the two lost girls. I wept, hating J, I wept because I'd have to get back at her for making me feel this hate.)

Why do wondrous things make us long for the company of others? In photographs and paintings couples stand out against a background of snow, because the relationship between two people begins with a physiological need for warmth, says Violeta in her texts on Corporalism, justifying her promiscuity by inventing a little literary group. Should I tell Alicia about this? No, her notebooks are written with astonishing verisimilitude, different from an intimate diary like this one, where in spite of my pretensions I don't abandon the stereotypes of the novel. Another digression: I was going to comment how, through the window, I watched
people come out of their offices and marvel at the snow. How the children were yelling (in Santiago children don't yell and dogs don't bark) so loudly that the houses opened up and families came out to take photos against the immaculate background. The man from the apartment across the street, who spends his days watching television or sleeping or writing in a notebook, got up, leaned out the window, and spent half an hour outside with his arms stretched out, looking at the sky. Like the passersby, who walk, tracking the snowflakes overhead (here no one wants to look at the sky, because it's toxic; the ground is no different, but we inhabitants of Santiago have a particular fixation with concrete). I was the only one who was melancholy, it was sad not to have someone with whom to share the unexpected weather; and then the phone rang. In disbelief, I picked up the device and heard Alicia say: I've never seen it snow before! For a second, talking with her about some random thing, blown away by the snowflakes, I thought I was happy: and the feeling was nothing like what I felt when my body was on top of J's. Under the snow, separated by the telephone line, we could be together, each in our own apartment, watching the snowflakes fall, listening: I was wholesome, diurnal, white like the snow, as if I were pulling my head out of a pit, convinced that kindness is not an empty word.