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She takes a long shower and makes him take one too. To wash the kidnapping off of them, she says, referring, he assumes, to the groping she’d been subjected to, a groping that was in any case minimal, for which they are both thankful. That is, in fact, what she said to the bandits when she got out of the car: “Thank you.” She’s said it many times over the course of the night: “Thank you, thank you, everyone.” To the Spaniard who comforted them, to the Chilean who ignored them but in some way also comforted them, and to the bandits too, again, it’s never a bad idea to repeat it: “Thank you,” because you didn’t kill us and now life can go on.

She also says thank you to Chilean One, as they lie there caressing each other, knowing that tonight they won’t make love, that they will spend the hours very close, dangerously, generously
close, talking. Before going to sleep she says thank you to him, and he answers a little late but with conviction: “Thank you.”

They sleep badly, but they sleep. And they go on talking the next day, as if they had their whole lives in front of them and were willing to work at love, and if someone saw them from outside—someone brash, someone who believed in these kinds of stories, someone who collected them and tried to tell them well, someone who believed in love—he would think that the two of them would be together for a very long time.

THE MOST CHILEAN MAN IN THE WORLD

For Gonzalo Maier

I
n mid-2011 she received a grant from the Chilean government and set off for Leuven to start a doctoral program. He was teaching at a private high school in Santiago, but he wanted to go with her and live some version of “forever”; after talking it over, though, at the end of a sad night when they’d had very bad sex, they decided it was better to separate.

During the first months, it was hard to tell if Elisa really missed him, even though she sent him all kinds of signals that he thought he interpreted correctly: he was sure that those long e-mails and the erratic and flirtatious messages on his Facebook wall and, above all, those unforgettable afternoon-nights (afternoons for him, nights for
her) of virtual sex via Skype could be interpreted only one way. The natural thing would have been to go on like that for a while and then gradually cool off, forget each other, and maybe, in the best of cases, run into each other again after some time, maybe many years later, their bodies bearing the weight of other failures, this time ready to give it their all. But an executive at Banco Santander, at the Pedro Aguirre Cerda branch, offered Rodrigo a checking account and credit card, and suddenly he found himself passing from one screen to another, checking boxes that said “yes” and “I agree,” entering the codes B4, C9, and F8, and that was how he found himself, at the start of January, without telling anyone—without telling her—on his way to Belgium.

There was no connecting thread, no constant in his thoughts during the nearly twenty-four hours he spent traveling. On the flight to Paris, he was struck by the amount of turbulence, but since he hadn’t flown much—or never any significant distance, at least—he was, in a way, grateful for the feeling of adventure. He never really felt afraid, and he even imagined himself saying—sounding so sophisticated—that the flight “had been a little rough.” He had a couple of books in his backpack, but it was the first time he’d flown on a plane with so many entertainment options, and he spent hours deciding which movies or TV series he wanted to see. In the end he didn’t watch anything in its entirety but he did play, with a degree of skill that surprised him, several rounds of some sort of
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
video game.

While he was walking through Charles de Gaulle to take the train, he had the fairly conventional thought that no, he did not
want to be a millionaire, he’d never wanted to be a millionaire. And that trivial thought led him, who knows how, to a scorned and maligned word, which nevertheless now glittered, or at least shone a little, or was less dark than usual, or was dark and serious and big but didn’t embarrass him:
maturity
. He went on with these thoughts on the train ride from Brussels to Leuven. Inexplicably, using up almost all of the credit on his card to buy a plane ticket to Belgium to visit Elisa struck him as a sign of maturity.

And what happened in Leuven? The worst. Although sometimes the worst is the best thing that can happen. It must be said that Elisa could have been nicer, a little less cruel. But if she had been nicer, he might not have understood. She didn’t want to leave that possibility open. He called her from the station, and Elisa thought it was a joke, but she started walking toward him anyway, talking to him on the phone all the while. Then she turned a corner and saw him, a hundred steps away, but she didn’t tell him she was there and he went right on talking, sitting on his suitcase, half-numb and anxious, looking at the ground and then at the sky with a mixture of confidence and innocence that was repulsive to Elisa—she couldn’t put her feelings, her thoughts, in order, but she was sure of one thing: she didn’t want to spend the coming days with Rodrigo, not those days or any others, none. And maybe she was still a little in love, and she cared about him, and liked to talk to him, but for him to show up out of nowhere, like in some bad movie, ready to embrace and be embraced, ready to become the star, the hero who crossed the world for love: that was, for Elisa, much more of an affront and a humiliation than a cause for happiness.

As she took long strides back to her house, she felt the constant vibration of her cell phone in her pocket, but she answered only half an hour later, already in bed, duly protected: “I’m not going to pick you up,” she told him. “I don’t want to see you. I have a boyfriend [lie]. I live with him. I don’t ever want to see you ever again.” There were another nine calls, and all nine times she answered and said more or less the same thing, and in the end she told him, to add a little realism to the thing, that her boyfriend was German.

Of course there are other reasons for her reaction, there’s another story that runs parallel to this one, one that explains why Elisa didn’t ever want to see Rodrigo again: a story that talks about the need for a real change, the need to leave behind her small Chilean world of Catholic school, her desire to seek out other paths—a story that explains why, in the end, it was logical and also healthy to break up with Rodrigo definitively, maybe not like that, maybe it wasn’t fair of her to leave him sitting there, eager and numb, but she had to break it off with him. In any case, for now, she is stretched out on her bed, listening to some album that falls somewhere on the broad spectrum of alternative music (the latest from Beach House, for example). She feels calm.

Rodrigo tests out a quick and mindless walk around the city. He sees twenty or thirty women who all look more beautiful than Elisa; he wonders why Hans—he decides the German’s name is Hans—chose Elisa, this Chilean woman, who isn’t so voluptuous
or so dark-skinned, and then he remembers how good she is in bed, and he feels rotten. He goes on walking, but now he sees nothing but a beautiful city full of beautiful people. He thinks what a whore Elisa is, and other things typical of a scorned man. He walks aimlessly, but Leuven is too small a city to walk around aimlessly in, and after a little while he is back at the station. He stops in front of Fonske—it’s practically the only thing Elisa had told him about the city: that there is a fountain with a statue of a boy (or a student or a man) who is looking at the formula for happiness in a book and pouring water (or beer) over his head. The fountain strikes him as strange, even aggressive or grotesque, and he tries to avoid engaging with the irony of a “formula for happiness.” He goes on looking at the fountain—which for some reason that day is dry, turned off—while he smokes a cigarette, the first since he’s been off the train, the first on European soil, a pilgrim Belmont cigarette from Chile. And although during all this time he has felt an intense cold, only now does he feel the urgency of the freezing wind on his face and body, as if the cold was really trying to work its way into his bones. He opens his suitcase, finds a pair of loose-fitting pants, and puts them on over the ones he is wearing, along with another shirt, an extra pair of socks, and a knit cap (he doesn’t have gloves). For a moment, carried along by rage and a sense of drama, he thinks that he is going to die of cold, literally. And that this is ironic, because Elisa had always been the cold-blooded one, the most cold-blooded girlfriend he’d ever had, the most cold-blooded woman he’d ever met: even during the summer, at night, she used to wear jackets and shawls and sleep with a hot-water bottle.

Sitting near the station, in front of a small waffle shop, he remembers the joke about the most cold-blooded man in the world, the only joke his father ever used to tell. He remembers his father beside the bonfire, on the wide open beach at Pelluhue, many years ago: he was a distant and taciturn man, but when he told that joke he became another person, every sentence coming out of his mouth as if spurred by some mysterious mechanism, and upon seeing him like that—wisely setting up his audience, preparing for the imminent peals of laughter—one might think that he was a funny and clever man, maybe a specialist in telling these types of long jokes, which can be told so many different ways, because the important thing isn’t the punch line but, rather, the flair of the teller, his feeling for detail, his ability to fill the air with digressions without losing the audience’s interest. The joke started in Punta Arenas, with a baby crying from cold and his parents desperately wrapping him up in blankets of wool from Chiloé. Then, surrendering to the obvious, they decide they must find a better climate for the baby, and they start to climb up the map of Chile in search of the sun. They go from Concepción to Talca, to Curicó, to San Fernando, always heading north, passing through Santiago and, after a lot of adventures, heading up to La Serena and Antofagasta, until finally they reach Arica, the so-called city of eternal spring, but it’s no use: the boy, who by now is a teenager, still feels cold. Once he’s an adult, the coldest man in the world travels through Latin America in search of a more favorable climate, but he never—not in Iquitos or Guayaquil or Maracaibo or Mexicali or Rio de Janeiro—stops feeling a
profound and lacerating cold. He feels it in Arizona, in California, and he arrives and departs from Cairo and Tunis wrapped in blankets, shivering, convulsing, complaining interminably, but in a nice way, because in spite of how bad a time he had of it the coldest man in the world always remained polite, cordial, and perhaps because of this, when the much-feared ending finally came—when the coldest man in the world, who was Chilean, finally died of cold—no one doubted that he would go directly, without any major trouble, to heaven.

Cairo, Arizona, Tunis, California, thinks Rodrigo, almost smiling: Leuven. It’s been months since he’s seen his father—they’ve grown apart after some stupid argument. He thinks that, in a situation like this one, his father would want him to be brave. No, he doesn’t really know what his father would think about a situation like the one he is in. His father would never have a credit card, much less travel irresponsibly thousands of miles just to be kicked in the stomach. What would my father do in this situation? Rodrigo wonders again, naively. He doesn’t know. Maybe he should go back right away to Chile, or maybe he should stay in Belgium for good, make a life here? He decides, for the moment, to go back to Brussels.

People travel from Leuven to Brussels, or from Brussels to Antwerp, or from Antwerp to Ghent, but they are such short journeys that it’s almost excessive to consider them travel in the proper sense of the word. And even so, to Rodrigo, the half hour
to Brussels seems like an eternity. He thinks about Elisa and Hans walking around that city, such a university town, so European and correct. Again he remembers Elisa’s body: he recalls her convalescing after she had her appendix out, receiving him with a sweet, pained smile. And he remembers her sometime later, one Sunday morning, completely naked, massaging rose-hip oil into the scar. And how, maybe that same night, she’d played with the warm semen around that scar, drawing something like letters with her index finger, hot and laughing.

He gets off the train, walks a few blocks, but he doesn’t look at the city, he goes on thinking about Elisa, about Hans, about Leuven, and something like forty minutes go by before he realizes he has forgotten his suitcase on the train, he’s left it in a corner next to the other passengers’ luggage, and he’s gotten off carrying only his backpack. He says to himself, out loud, energetically: “
Ahuevonado,
” you stupid asshole.

He buys some french fries near the station, and he stops on a corner to eat. When he stands up again he feels dizzy, or something like dizziness. He was planning on buying cigarettes and then walking for a while, but he has to stop because of this feeling, which just seems like a nuisance at first, an impression of vertigo that he has never felt before, but which immediately starts to grow, as if freeing itself from something, and soon he feels that he is going to fall, but he manages, with a lot of effort, to maintain the minimum stability necessary to move forward. The backpack weighs next to nothing, but he puts it down and takes five steps, to test himself. The dizziness continues and he has to stop completely and lean against the window
of a shoe store. He moves forward slowly, propping himself up against one shopwindow after another, like Spider Man’s cowardly apprentice, while he looks out of the corner of his eye at the interiors of the stores, overflowing with different kinds of chocolates, beers, and lamps, some of them selling strange gifts: drumsticks that are also chopsticks, a mug in the shape of a camera lens, an endless array of figurines.

An hour later he has made it only seven blocks, but fortunately, at a kiosk, he finds a blue umbrella that costs him ten euros. At first he still feels unstable when he walks, but the umbrella gives him confidence, and after a few steps he feels like he’s gotten used to the wobbling. Only then does he look at or focus on the city; only then does he try to understand it, start to understand it. He thinks it’s all a dream, that he’s near Plaza de Armas, near the Cathedral, in the Peruvian neighborhood, in Santiago de Chile. No, he doesn’t think that: he thinks that he thinks he’s in Plaza de Armas. He thinks that he thinks it’s all a dream.