Loquela (9 page)

            
September 9
^th

If I'd had the energy to design the perfect story for a novel I would be perfect. I'd be able to become one of those writers who appear
on the back cover of an expensive book smoking and wearing a wry expression, if only I were able to weave together a world of a hundred and some odd pages that depended on me alone. But it's too hard. I mentioned this to Alicia tonight and she called me a coward, like I'd done to J on other nights: I can't decline an opportunity to lock myself away in a monastery and go mad while, with adequate care, I produce and polish The Book (rewriting
The Aleph
not exactly in a monastery, but rotting away in a hostel in Pichilemu, not leaving that apartment for a year, spending my empty nights working as a janitor in an apartment complex); I don't know if I should cloister myself in a false priesthood or just forget about reading and writing, find a practical woman, a mechanized job, and live, what here they call life. Attend parties with her, laugh my ass off, drink till I pass out. Planning business deals, no risk no rewards; taking up some sort of hobby of course, let's say, attending movie premieres every Thursday at the theater; going out drinking once a month with friends at a local bar, when I get bored of my old lady. Buy some land near Rancagua. Sounds lovely, doesn't it? No. What I've written embarrasses me, I won't exalt the priests or the engineers, of course, but not the writers, intellectuals, or thinkers of this country either, rather those who are in between. Ugh. In the future, these words will be enough for me, if I persevere. I don't know how to be brief.

If I were to take up a regular plotline and sit down every day and stick to what I'd sketched out, I'd be satisfied, but in the margins of my own writing. I would have sat down in a chair and observed the lives of others and only later, in secret, produced my own silent material. Which (I think) Onetti would defend by saying: “I might be a bad writer, but at least I write my life.” To
write pure fiction, I wonder how he could aspire to be calm by removing himself from the days of his books, hiding in the pages under the names of different characters. Perhaps he felt the same loneliness as his narrator, the same fictive vice that his own creatures used to invent a lair in order to hide from the painful days of flesh and bone. If this strategy worked for Onetti or Brausen, I can't really know.

Although I admire cowards, I don't want to become the coward that Alicia claims I am. I'm not going to ignore the world because it hurts, to the contrary: the most surprising plot is the one that the days continuously reveal to me. There's no protagonist more paradoxical than Alicia, I'm just dull with the pencil. (And yet, Violeta hid away in her house, with her grandmother, weaving next to the chimney. She sat down at the dining room table with a notebook and described a city more grotesque than this one, nicer and sadder, but full of life; there, without leaving her chair, with pure imagination, she was able to get to know boys whom she'd never meet here, to let them pull her away to corners that were impossible to find in Santiago, because they were occupied by buildings, and cars, and dust.

Or not. Or Violeta came from Neutria every Tuesday on the strange buses she describes, arriving Tuesday around midday, she hasn't left her senile grandmother's side except to visit her only friend in the neighborhood, and to buy medications or bread. Violeta kissed her on the forehead, ate a piece of bread and cheese, and went up to her room. Before letting herself fall into bed, she took a notebook from a drawer to document all of the day's salacious and happy Neutrian moments, not like a fiction, rather like a vital struggle against her own fragile childhood memory, such
that by eight at night, in the moment that the telephone wakes her and she goes out onto the balcony to watch a line of cars in the distance, over on Calle Santa María, complaining to herself about the horns and the dry air, she'd be able to open those pages and see that a better place really did exist, a place by the sea, with her best friend and, above all, the boy from school.)

The days surprise me, I should write with the objective that novelty be constant. I was at the university, I went to the library to return a book, dropped it off, turned toward the door, and on my way out, at a distance, caught sight of a very familiar face. In the back of the reading room, J was getting up from a table where she'd set down her books and notebooks. Her bright eyes, her happy smile. We'd sworn not to see each other again, it's better for us, but I stood there, motionless, waiting for her; she came over hesitantly and stood in front of me. Stupidly, all I wanted to do was kiss her and pull her body against mine, right there, that we might travel to a foreign land, the two of us alone, married, old lovers; all I was able to do was open my mouth and say: “Say something, please, say something.” And she came close to me, fascinated, like she'd forgotten me and was seeing me for the first time. She hugged me fiercely. She was wearing a winter jacket; I put my face against the fur hood that fell across her shoulders. She murmured something in my ear that I didn't understand, stepped away and, without looking back, returned to her table.

I stood in the hallway staring out a window, my eyes blank, my mouth hardening little by little. I tried to turn around, go up the stairs, and for once tell a woman that I love her, that I do now, but first I had to confront my own ineptitude: she hugged me and I didn't comprehend what she said. Writer—fabricator of
inert signs. I can understand Pierce's semiotic treatise, but at the same time I'm unable to communicate with my mouth, to listen with my ears, to taste with my tongue, to receive an embrace. Words alone, words don't give warmth. I don't want to be a solitary writer in this room, nor, like Violeta, to scribble (feverishly) that any heat in Alicia's lips, in J's lips, against my own, cannot be written; only that she sees me writing this and wants to read it.

THE NOVEL

Carlos and Elisa and kept in touch with just a couple phone calls: she answered and couldn't conceal the fact that hearing his voice made her happy, saying his name, Carlos, with actual surprise, but then immediately seemed to recall a promise and went quiet. Then came the silence. Carlos couldn't take it and asked how she'd been, what she was up to before he called. Elisa responded, fine, nothing special. Then he told her his cousin was going to Europe, her parents had given her a ticket to make up for who knows how many of her birthdays when they'd been faraway and had forgotten to even call her, poor little Alicia. And as he was saying little Alicia, both of them were recalling all the times that Carlos held her around the waist and called her his little Elisa. She asked him to stop: I already know about Alicia's vacation. He felt the desire to surprise her, by reading what he'd written that afternoon for instance, a story without beginning or end about an old woman and old man who, every afternoon, after lunch, have the habit of going and sitting on a bench in the plaza; any plaza, Plaza de Armas, Plaza de Avenida Perú in Viña del Mar, Plaza de Sucre and Miguel Claro, it doesn't matter. They like to sit there, hands laced together, and watch: a young couple meet, the next day they kiss, and many nights later the girl appears alone, weeping because every bush gives off the odor of that rotten relationship. And
beyond, a group of kids on bicycles chase after a dog, a married couple looks around for the child that doesn't want to arrive, the man selling cotton candy doesn't return, but is replaced by a man selling helium balloons, and then by a third man with Styrofoam airplanes. The girl who was crying in front of the bushes is now carrying on an animated conversation with the man who one of the boys on bicycles had become; they get married and grow tired of their oldest son, who escapes from them because there's no other way he'll be able to meet up with the group of adolescents who are making fun of the old guy selling Styrofoam airplanes. The younger daughter, widow of the bike shop owner, buys for her grandsons—no longer children—two bags of popcorn that someone is selling from a truck decorated with neon lights. The old woman and old man do not age so long as they stay in the plaza, so long as their hands remain locked together at the hour of the siesta. This is what Carlos had wanted to read to Elisa, but not over the phone, because as soon as she guessed that it was a story without an end, she'd interrupt and tell him she was sleepy. She'd say it, stretching out the vowels, like she was about to fall asleep in the middle of the conversation. And then Carlos would regret having opened the notebook, believing that he could guess what her response would be if he told her he was going to read something: she'd murmur, as if she were waking up, that if she heard another word about the albino girl she was going to hang up the phone. The silence seemed to last a long time. Elisa asked him if he'd called to have her read his mind; actually, to listen to you breathing, said Carlos. She hung up.

THE SENDER

Alicia changed the names when narrating certain events, when fitting them together for me, one with the other, inventing stories that made her laugh while I sat and watched the boats that went out fishing at night in the port, incessant little lights. She liked coming up with sarcastic lullabies inspired by whatever I was doing, this little light is going out, going out, going out, for The Little One who doesn't sleep, doesn't sleep, that's what she sang; I listened to her from where I was leaning on the railing, contemplating the illuminated port of Neutria, working, waiting for the ring of the telephone to rupture the nocturnal silence and for it to be you on the other end of the line.

She said she preferred to adopt the indefinite voice of fairytales in her stories in order to, just for the fun of it, alter the names of those who appeared to me each day. And yet the next morning she said that she didn't want to use real names of people, because it made her feel repulsive, repulsive words used again and again across the centuries, sullied and cleansed by each and every life, like the windows of a house clouded over by the contaminated air of its inhabitants, like the crystal glasses of a busy locale
that—from years of washing—are bound to break, like my hours, like this pen, like my voice.

Alicia was talking behind me and laughed loudly again, she was fixing her hair, about to go out and swim in the ocean, to watch from afar the boy who left the university at sunset. I ignored her; I didn't want to get worn out, I enjoyed sitting still, watching the way Neutria moved. Alicia gave him a name—He Who Is Writing the Novel—when she peered in the window of his room, which faced the street, and saw him remove a notebook from a drawer, tear out some pages, and sit down to write. I didn't want to know that she'd seen him buy a new notebook, transcribe a few of the torn-out pages, date several sections, and, with distinct handwriting, begin to write the following: Starting today the novel will dictate my days; my days will be embodied in these pages, these pages will be embodied in me, and I'll be embodied in an other, until this other can no longer be embodied and the novel ends. Even though I didn't want to hear about it, that night Alicia came out to the balcony anyway, to tell me stories about how he watched me and wanted me, wanted me the way an author wants his protagonist, with a longing that demands an end, and this isn't just a manner of speaking, silly Violeta, I've seen how he spends sleepless nights writing the story of an albino girl to whom something fatal happens. Then I laughed at myself.

We'd seen each other almost one year before, we were classmates in a literature course at the university. But I'm sure that we've met each other long before, somewhere else: a plaza in different city; you're a little boy, you approach the edge of a fountain because
a supernatural glimmer at the bottom catches your eye; you are deeply disappointed because through the water you see that it's the light of the sun reflecting off a coin. I'm a little girl, I approach you with great curiosity because you've stayed in the same place for so long, but I can't see what you're seeing, I'm much smaller than you. You turn around, you find me on tiptoes and ask me what I'm looking for; the bottom, I say. At the bottom of the water there's just more water, you say.

Then you go. And I believe you.

The professor of the class where we met liked to repeat that literature is a laboratory, and on one occasion someone asked him if by this he was referring to the naturalism of Zola, he concealed a mocking expression and said that we should follow the etymology: literature as a space to labor. I was left with a feeling of something missing, of malignance, by the discussion of the nature of the written—like everything that seems to have no end—and when everyone was leaving, I approached the professor to discuss this. But before I could say anything, I found the eyes of He Who Is Writing the Novel, standing beside the professor; a heavy sensuality came over me, I'm not sure if it was prompted by the professor or the student. According to Alicia, as I walked away, the professor said something in a low voice and He Who Is Writing the Novel raised a hand in my direction, leaning slightly, then lifted his other hand and pointed at me, and then, quickly, let both arms fall, unsettled by the professor's words: That is a body. Alicia maintained that neither of them smiled, but stayed serious; the boy stared at the floor and lifted his arm for a third time to sketch
the movement of my feet walking away in the air. The professor, on the other hand, looked directly into the eyes of He Who Is Writing the Novel.

The next week I lost all interest in the lights out in the port. Alicia sang: the little light has gone out, where is The Little One, find me The Little One. I lost interest in my classes at the university, too, and concentrated on the composition of my second picture. Just like how every now and then I hear footsteps approaching the door to this house and get up to look out the window, pretending to be focused on the trees moving in the wind, but actually sad not to have welcomed you with this finished letter, until I sit down again to write you, it happened then, when the voices interrupted me at the exit to the university and made me turn around to see who was saying my name. Then, just then, I was at the right distance from the façade to realize that I had discovered my second picture, the one that would at last sustain the ekphrasis: in a landscape that is purely human—I said to myself at the exit to the university—nothing will stop; but a construction that people enter and exit will be different. I believed that once I wrote about the persistence of a single building and its inhabitants, the eternity of all of Neutria would not be unthinkable.

What I'd never considered is the illusion upon which the ekphrasis is based, which came to me suddenly when at last I gave up writing the paragraphs that I was using daily to describe the façade of the Universidad de Neutria, repeating the same succession of images, the same nouns, the same verb. Actually, it was Alicia who
revealed the illusion to me and planted the doubt that would again give rise to the movement of the characters, that would alter them by putting these words in their mouths as their only reflection: this action might be my last. When she came up to me complaining that she was bored of my stationary routine, asking me to at least let her read my paragraphs, she almost touched my face with hers trying to understand the smile provoked by my final lines: He Who Is Writing the Novel takes a step forward before starting down the stairs that give way to the path of smooth stones leading to the university gate; around him, the pointed arch frames the blackness of the tall entrance to campus; the stones are interlocked in a formation that is rectilinear in every way up to the metal lettering that displays the name and the year the university was founded, flanked by two gargoyles, leading to a barely discernable curve that bears toward the depths of one corridor, the wall at the back from where it descends to a basement whose classrooms hold up the edifice of thick beams and old concrete, covered by the plastic tiles that support the right foot of He Who Is Writing the Novel, who balances on the edge of the first step—while one of his hands tightens the shoulder strap of his backpack, his hair falling straight across a forehead that hasn't a single wrinkle, the origin of the skin, the smoothness of his forehead extends across his face, twisting along the tops of his temples, reaching his neck and covering his clavicles, his arm, part of his fingers, his fingernail, not a hitch in the movement of the hand that opens, not a crease on the shirt, not a mark on the face clean as the marble that half covers the walls at the entrance—and moves toward someone on the steps who has made a false move, who is losing their balance
and falling, no; he walks toward the gate with a stack of papers under his arm, copies of a magazine called
Suspensión
, one of its sheets still folded across his butter-colored shirt, which, in spite of the wind and the quality of the fabric, isn't wrinkled or stained; one of his eyes slightly closed because the sun is hitting his face, the half-closed pupil stares straight ahead; I'd say that the angle of his right foot with respect to his leg is too open, exaggerated, he doesn't seem to be walking; I'd say that his only wrinkle is the eyelid above the contracted pupil, I'd say that He Who Is Writing the Novel sees nothing as it falls.

After reading the ekphrasis, Alicia bent closer to my ear: liar, the only artifice is in the eye of the girl who watches, in her cold eye, for she doesn't want to know that blood still circulates through her, that above his head the shadow of a leaf is falling, detached from aromas of the university entrance; that if the girl is a light, all lights go out; that the ekphrasis is writing and all writing is linear, it has to end, it ends like the silence, and like the circulation of the blood that pauses to keep my eye from lingering on the image of He Who Is Writing the Novel, not because his young body is now floating in a glorious state of permanence, but because he slips on the step, clumsy, disbelieving, and goes down, his head cracking open against the only solid thing, and the running blood hurrying to finally stop running.

He stumbles. Catching himself when his pupils manage to look up and see me once again: she's been sitting there writing at the same time every day since we returned to classes. He Who Is Writing the Novel decides that his experiment is ending, he won't come through that gate again to see if the albino girl is watching
him, because—when I stand up in the moment he loses balance—he has proven that she is. He comes over to tell me that he's writing a novel in which the important thing is the persistence of bodies, in which, he'll tell me a few weeks later, he asks himself what would be left of me in him if he'd managed to touched me. I'm afraid, alone, and attracted by that hand as it rises toward my body. Alicia's intervention shatters the picture, and those pieces begin to move with me until they attain the velocity of my writing, so fast that if you or I fall to the ground we won't ever be able to say that we got up.

He Who Is Writing the Novel waited for me to dry my mouth enough to speak before smiling, warming up, putting his arms around me without making it overly obvious that he wanted to touch me, and he said: what you're doing is precisely what I'm unable to write. According to him, he needed me to speak concisely about a painting that interested him greatly, in a text that would be read in public, because it would form part of the manifesto of an artistic movement that would leave everyone in Neutria, everyone in the world, with closed eyes—I expected him to say with open mouths. He said he needed my help, he looked me in the eyes and then, don't ask me why, I kissed him quickly on mouth, just lips. He Who Is Writing the Novel was stunned, repeating barely comprehensible phrases; that love and work don't mix, like soul and body, I responded, trying to help him, but he was speechless. I promised I wouldn't touch him again, that we wouldn't spend our time fornicating whenever we saw each other. He trembled and in that moment I really loved him; I loved him like a child, that's
what I told Alicia. Like an adolescent would be better, she specified. Perhaps that's why her stories are incomplete.

I haven't told you about my earlier visits to the professor's house yet. He had invited me over twice before you took me: Alicia came along both times, she can attest to the fact that the professor did nothing to force me, rather it was I who told him to stop talking as I got on top of him, not caring anymore about Alicia's eyes on the painting of a beach and its waves that occupied the entire surface of the living room wall; the armchair was moving, the sea was no longer restrained by the strokes of the paintbrush—I knew then that it was the professor who'd painted it—and it began to recede and get me wet. I admit that the professor's mouth irritated my lips, yet his hands grew old and then vanished when I turned my back on the ekphrasis: yes, at the cost of my degradation, of the physical effort to separate body from soul—
delusion
from
delight
, we called them as little girls, laughing, me and Alicia—the painting hanging on the wall breaking apart in time, along the opposite path I was going to perpetuate the intangible. And then, before the wave painted on the wall broke with its powerful aroma, I got up off the professor's body, got dressed, washed my hands, looked into his old face to verify that he'd planned the whole thing: I was just a useful body, he said to me the first and the second time. In particular I remember his fingers pressing against the wall where he'd painted the seascape, the soft way his index finger slid across the line of the horizon when he asked that we forget about what'd happened, and this explains why I felt nothing the afternoon He Who Is Writing the Novel invited me to visit the professor's house
so we could look at the painting that he wanted to write about. Just then I realized that the wall where the oil of the seascape had mingled with my sweat a few months before had been meticulously blotted out, and over it there now hung a small canvas.

I don't expect this letter to become a series of notes about my life, I'm not going to tell you about how I get up, come and go, climb the stairs, and enter the bathroom with nothing to do there, stare at myself in the mirror so I don't have to look at my actual self. Violeta is my enemy and Violeta is me: alone in my grandmother's house, abandoned by Alicia, waiting for you, but you won't be coming to hold me, to cover me with your body and its heat. Though it's guaranteed that you will come: you'll open the door, and without approaching you'll touch me from afar, I'll fall down wounded, me alone. And at no point will you have moved from the doorway. I just need for you to imagine that I raise one hand from the notebook, that you take it, that together our fingers collapse on the bed and stay there, entwined; if I become something more than the dead body at the beginning of your detective novel, the pages will open up so that any person walking by on the street can look in and stand there motionless watching how I'm writing at this table in the moment that you open the door and take aim.