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“Really, sorry to insist,” she says, “but if it bothers you to fuck here, you have to tell me.”

“But she and I were really almost never having sex anymore,” answers Martín, and they fall silent until she asks him if he ever had sex with his wife on the table in the living room. He gives her a horny smile and says that he didn’t. The game continues, vertiginous and fun. She asks if his wife ever dipped his dick in condensed milk before sucking it, or if perhaps, by chance, his wife liked him to stick three fingers in her ass, or if there’d been a time when she asked him to come on her face, on her tits, on her ass, in her hair.

One of those mornings, Paz shows up with a rose bush and a bougainvillea. He gets a shovel and together they construct a minimal garden in the empty plot by the house’s entrance. He digs clumsily, so Paz takes the shovel away from him, and, in a matter of minutes, the job is done.

“Sorry,” Martín tells her. “I know the guy is supposed to do the hard part.”

“No worries,” she answers, and she adds, cheerfully: “I was born under democracy.” Later, apropos of nothing, maybe as a way of anticipating his confession, Martín launches into a monologue about the past, in which brushstrokes of the truth are mixed with some obligatory lies, as he searches for a way of being honest, or at least less dishonest. He talks about pain, about the difficulty of building long-lasting, simple ties with people. “I’m addicted to the drug of solitude,” he tells her, sounding like a slogan on a plaque. She listens to him attentively, compassionately, and she nods several times in affirmation, but after a pause in which she adjusts her hair, settles into the armchair, and takes off her tennis shoes, she says it again, mischievously: “I was born under democracy.” And at lunch, when she sees him cutting his pieces of chicken with a knife and fork, she says she’d rather eat with her hands because she was “born under democracy.” The phrase works for everything, especially in bed: when he wants to do it without a condom, when he asks her not to yell so loud or to be careful about walking around the living room naked, and when she moves so savagely and eagerly on top that Martín can’t hide the pain in his penis—to all of these things, she responds that she was born under democracy, or she simply says, shrugging: “Democracy!”

Time goes by with happy indolence. There are hours, maybe entire days, when Martín manages to forget who he really is. He forgets he is pretending, that he’s lying, that he’s guilty. On two occasions, however, he almost lets the truth slip out. But the truth
is long. Telling the truth would require many words. And there are only two weeks left. No! One week.

Now he’s driving, nervously: it’s Friday, and tomorrow he has to go to a wedding as Paz’s date. She asked him if they could take the car, so now he has only one day to practice—he has to seem like a seasoned driver, or at least he has to obey the traffic laws. At first it all goes well. He stalls at a red light, as he tends to do, but he has some courage in reserve, and, for a little bit, he achieves a certain fluidity. Then he gets carried away and decides to go to the mall to buy two plates and three cups to replace the ones that he’s broken, but he’s unable to change lanes at the right time, or move ahead of the other cars, and he gets stuck in his lane for ten minutes, until the exits run out. Now he’s headed southward on the highway, and there’s nothing to do but attempt a U-turn.

He pulls over onto the median and decides to wait until he calms down. He turns off the radio and bides his time until he can make the turn, but, when the opening comes, the car stalls again, and he’s left at the mercy of an oncoming truck. The driver swerves to avoid him and leans on the horn.

He backs up and continues south, and every once in a while he thinks about trying another U-turn, or trying to get off the highway, but he’s frozen dead with fear and all he can do is keep going in this straight line. He comes to a tollbooth and slams on the brakes; the toll collector smiles at him, but he’s incapable of
smiling back at her. He is forced to keep going, like a slow automaton, until he reaches Rancagua.

I’ve never been to Rancagua, he thinks, ashamed. He gets out of the car, looks at the people, tries to guess the time from the movement in the Plaza de Armas: twelve—no, eleven. It’s early, but he’s hungry. He buys an empanada. He stays there an entire hour, parked, smoking, thinking about Paz. Such weighty names annoy him—they’re so full, so directly symbolic: Paz, Consuelo—peace and consolation. He thinks that if he ever has a child, he’s going to come up with a name that doesn’t mean anything. Then he takes twenty-four turns around the plaza—though he doesn’t count them—and some teenage girls playing hooky eye him strangely. He parks again and his phone rings; he tells Paz he’s at the supermarket. She wants to see him. He replies that he can’t because he has to pick his daughter up from school.

“Finally, you can see her?” she asks, overjoyed.

“Yes. We came to an agreement,” he says.

“I’d love to meet her,” says Paz.

“Not yet,” replies Martín. “Down the road.”

Not until four in the afternoon does he start heading back. The trip is calm this time, or less tense. I’ve just learned to really drive, he thinks that night before going to sleep, a little bit proud.

And yet, on Saturday, on the way to the wedding, he stalls the car. He says his eyes feel “caustic”—he’s not sure that’s the right word, but he uses it. Paz takes the wheel—she doesn’t have a license, but it doesn’t matter. He watches her drive, concentrated on the road, the seat belt between her breasts. He drinks a lot at the
wedding. A lot. And even so, it all turns out well. People like him, he dances well, he cracks some good jokes. Paz’s friends congratulate her. She takes off her red shoes and dances barefoot, and he thinks it’s absurd that he doubted her beauty at first: she’s beautiful, she’s free, she’s fun, marvelous. He feels the desire to tell her right there, in the middle of the dance floor, that all is lost, irreversible. That the family is returning on Wednesday. He goes back to the table, watches her dance with her friends, with the groom, with the groom’s father. Martín orders another Jack Daniel’s and drinks it in one gulp. He likes the grating pain in his throat. He looks at the chair where Paz’s purse and shoes are: he thinks about keeping those red shoes, like a caricature of a fetishist.

The next day he’s hungover. He wakes up at eleven thirty and there’s strange music playing, a kind of new-age music that Paz hums along with while she cooks. She’s gotten up early, gone out to buy sea bream and a ton of vegetables, which she’s now frying in the wok, slowly stirring in the soy sauce. After lunch, stretched out naked on the bed, Martín counts the freckles on her back, on her ass, on her legs: 223. It’s the moment to confess everything, and he thinks she might even understand: she would get mad, she would mock him, she would stop seeing him for weeks, for months, she would feel confused and all that, but she would forgive him. He starts to talk, timidly, searching for the right tone, but she interrupts him and leaves to go pick up her son, who is at her parents’ house.

They come back at five. Up to this point the boy has been reticent with Martín, but this time he loosens up and is more trusting. For the first time, they play together. First they try to cheer up Mississippi, who is still convalescing, but soon they give up. Then the boy puts the tomatoes next to the oranges and tells Martín he wants some orange juice. Martín picks up the tomatoes, and when he’s about to cut the first one the boy cries, “Noooooo!” They repeat the routine twelve, fifteen times. There is a variation: before cutting the tomato, Martín catches on and feigns fury, saying that the grocer sold him tomatoes instead of oranges, pretending that he’s going to storm back and complain, all so the boy will say, intoxicated with happiness, “Nooooooo!”

Now they’re playing with the remote control. The boy pushes a button and Martín falls down, bites his own hand, shouts, or goes mute.

And if I really did lose my voice? he thinks afterward, while the child sleeps on his mother’s lap.

May they turn my volume down, thinks Martín.

May they fast-forward me, rewind me.

May they record over me.

May they erase me.

Now Paz, the boy, and Mississippi are asleep, and Martín has been locked in the study for hours doing who knows what, maybe crying.

*
   
*
   
*

They like what they see at first, when they get out of the taxi. Consuelo looks at the bougainvillea and the rose bush, and she wants to find Martín right away to thank him for that gesture. Then they are surprised to see the photo of Consuelo on the main wall, and in the confusion she even thinks, for a split second, that the photo has always been there, but no, of course it hasn’t. They go through the house, alarmed, and their confusion grows as they look into each of the bedrooms—it’s clear that Martín moved the boxes and wardrobes around, and every minute brings a new discovery: stains on the curtains, cigarette ash on the carpet. The cat is in the girl’s room, sleeping on top of the stuffed animals. They look over his wounds, which still haven’t scarred over completely, and they are furious at first, but then grateful, after all, that he’s alive. In the kitchen they find some used syringes, along with some of their medicine and prescriptions.

Martín isn’t there and he doesn’t answer his cell phone. There is no note to explain the situation at all. They can’t understand what has happened. It’s difficult to understand. At first they think Martín robbed them, and Bruno anxiously looks over the library, but he finds no evidence of theft.

He feels stupid for having trusted Martín. They had corresponded so much by e-mail, and he had no reason to be suspicious. “These things happen,” says Consuelo, for her part, but she says it automatically, without conviction. Every so often Bruno calls Martín again, leaves messages on his voice mail, messages that are sometimes friendly and other times violent.

*
   
*
   
*

A few days later, the doorbell rings very early in the morning. Consuelo goes out to answer it. “What do you want?” she asks a young woman, who is frozen, recognizing her. “What do you want?” Consuelo repeats. She takes a while to answer. She stares again, intently, at Consuelo, and, with a gesture of contempt, or of supreme sadness, she answers: “Nothing.”

“Who was it?” asks Bruno from the bedroom. Consuelo closes the door and hesitates a second before answering: “No one.”

ARTIST’S RENDITION

Y
asna fired the gun into her father’s chest and then suffocated him with a pillow. He was a gym teacher, and she wasn’t anything, she was no one. But she’s something now: now she’s someone who has killed, someone who sits in jail waiting for her shitty food and remembering her father’s blood, dark and thick. She doesn’t write about that, though. She writes only love letters.

Only love letters, as if that were nothing.

But it isn’t true that she killed her father. That crime never happened. Nor does she write love letters, she never has, maybe because she knows almost nothing about love, and what she does know, she doesn’t like. What she does know is monstrous. The one
doing the writing is someone else, someone urgently recalling her, not because he misses her or wants to see her but simply because he was commissioned, a few months ago now, to write a detective story. Preferably one set in Chile. And right away he thought of her, of Yasna, of that crime that was never committed, and although he had dozens of other stories to choose from, some of them more docile, easier to turn into detective stories, he thought that Yasna’s story deserved to be told, or at least that he would be able to tell it.

He took a few notes at the time, but then he had to focus on other obligations. Now he has only one day left to write it.

The innocent part of the story, the least useful part, the part he won’t include, and that he doesn’t even fully remember—since his job consists, also, of forgetting, or rather of pretending that he remembers what he has forgotten—begins in the summertime, toward the end of the eighties, when both of them were fourteen years old. He wasn’t even interested in literature yet; back then the only thing that held his interest was chasing women, with timidity but also persistence. But it’s excessive to call them women—they weren’t women yet, just as he was not yet a man. Although Yasna was several times more a woman than he was a man.

Yasna lived a few blocks away. She spent her afternoons in the messy front yard of her house, surrounded by roses, rue shrubs, and foxtails, sitting on a stool, a block of drawing paper on her lap.

“What are you drawing?” he asked her one afternoon from the other side of the fence, momentarily emboldened, and she smiled, not because she wanted to smile, but out of reflex. In reply she held up the block, and from a distance it seemed to him that there was
a face sketched on the paper. He didn’t know if it was a man’s or a woman’s, but he thought he could tell it was a face.

They didn’t become friends, but they went on talking every once in a while. Two months later she invited him to her birthday party, and he, breathing happiness, going for broke, bought her a globe in the bookstore on the plaza. The night of the party he ran into Danilo, who was smoking a joint with another friend on the corner—they had a ton of weed, they’d started growing it a while ago, but they still hadn’t made up their minds to sell it. Danilo offered him the joint, and he took four or five deep drags, and straightaway he felt the dulling effect that he knew well, though he didn’t smoke with any real frequency. “What’ve you got there?” Danilo asked him, and he’d been waiting for that question, hiding the bag precisely so they would ask him. “The world,” he replied with glee. They carefully undid the cellophane wrapping and spent some time searching for countries. Danilo wanted to find Sweden, but couldn’t. “Look how big that country is,” he said, pointing to the Soviet Union. They finished the joint before parting ways.