Navidad & Matanza (8 page)

But he never managed to do anything, because suddenly he heard someone pounding forcefully on the front door. It was the foreigner's friends. They were upset because they'd spent more than ten minutes calling and no one had come out to greet them. “One lady, one gentlemen, and two teenagers, they seemed to have been arguing among themselves. They were constantly interrupting
each other, even the little girl would aggressively grab her father's shoulder every time she wanted to say something.” They explained to him that they'd already spent two days in Navidad and that they wouldn't be spending the night at his house, although of course he'd be compensated. They were counting, however, on his discretion, the gentlemen told him in a low voice, while taking his hand for a second. When he withdrew his hand, in his palm, the man from the service station found a twenty-dollar bill. They asked about Dounn. The man said he didn't know, that he'd disappeared unexpectedly. Then they got back into a luxury Japanese sedan and left. Only Elena, Juan Francisco, and Bruno. When he went back into the house the man from the service station found Alicia sitting on his living room floor, looking through the book he was reading at the time. Always science fiction, really cheap editions that he bought in Pichilemu, he told me. How boring, said Alicia, and she asked what his name was. Then she wanted to know about his job and if he had any children. The girl took a cigarette from the pack that he had in the kitchen and put it in her mouth. The man offered her a light. Alicia made a noise, her tongue against her teeth. She said she didn't smoke, that he should leave her alone. Please, tell me where the beach is, I can't find it.

The man from the service station accompanied Alicia to the beach, walking two steps behind her for several kilometers through the night. She asked many questions and he answered them, aware all the time of the cash he'd make housing this strange group of people for a few days. Afterward everything would be calm and normal again. That's what he believed, he said. But it wasn't so. Every once in a while the girl would yell: Right? Left? And now,
which way? It was like she was walking with her eyes closed, like she wanted to be guided in the darkness. Then all of a sudden the sound of the sea was very near. When the sand and
docas
came into view, Alicia started to run. Rising up from down below he heard a shrill, sharp sound. At first it seemed to him that a woman was screaming. Then he thought someone was doing something bad to the young girl. He quickened his pace across the beach. The night was moonless, and there were no streetlamps in the town, and so he was barely able to make out two distant silhouettes approaching the water. Little by little the shrill sound turned into a birdsong, into the gurgle of an immense stomach, and finally into a strange music. “A female robot, singing with her mouth shut in the shower,” that's how Patrice Dounn's theremin sounded to the man from the service station. The foreigner was standing on a dune, an open case beside him—a different case, not the one he'd opened in the kitchen—his left hand suspended above a strange gleaming, blue instrument. The other hand, the right hand, moved slowly toward and away from the object. The music was very beautiful.

The man from the service station sat down to listen a few feet away. Soon, a third sound rose through the noise of the ocean and the song of the theremin. It was the voice of Alicia Vivar, who'd sat down silently next to the man from the service station. Resting her head on his arm she stared up at the stars. She hummed the melody that Dounn's instrument was playing, while at the same time, with a finger, she drew concentric circles in the damp sand, each one larger than the last.

Finally they were quiet, Alicia and the theremin. For a moment there was silence, “because the sound of the sea doesn't exist for
those who live near it,” said the man. Then the girl told him to look out at the waves. Patrice Dounn had begun to play another song. This is my favorite, “La Mer,” by Debussy, Alicia whispered. Then she stood up and ran to embrace the Congolese.

65

D
URING ONE OF MANY
calm Sunday afternoon conversations in Sabado's white bedroom, I looked up from the computer screen, where I was reviewing her chapter of the novel-game, and spoke. What I'm going to tell you is a secret: when I was young I loved that song from
The Sound of Music
, called “My Favorite Things”:
Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens, bright copper kettles, lalala-lala
. She smiled. I continued. I've always liked inventories,
Je me souviens
by Perec, or that other essay by Barthes where he lists his tastes. She said to me: That's true, inventories are beautiful when making them isn't obligatory. Above all I like lists as a literary form. She looked me in the eyes and added: Now, imagine a man, a theft, the murmur of the sea, the sound of people playing paddleball, the cry of seagulls, the playful flirtation of a man and a woman who are dodging the waves, a man and woman who at the same time sit down in the shade of a dune to look at some photographs. Does it say somewhere that our lives should be uncomfortable? Yes. The world. The rock. The sand. The sun.

Imagine then that the first man stole some towels. That he began running toward the dunes. That he heard the shouts of people behind him, the lifeguard's whistle. Get the thief, Get the thief. Someone tried to stop him by throwing a paddleball racquet
at his legs. The impact of the wood against his shins hurt, but he kept running. Speed. There were many things he wanted to think about as he ran, clutching the new towels in his arms, but all he felt was the sand burning the soles of his feet. Through his mind flashed an evening in a campsite when Boris had taught them that to avoid being burned you had to focus your attention on the foot that cooled for an instant as it lifted up into the air away from the heat. He looked toward the end of the beach, past the dunes, where she'd be waiting for him, tan, half-naked, behind her dark sunglasses, the keys to the Spyder hanging from the tip of her erect ring finger. He yelled to her: Come on Alicia, run. The girl ignored him; she kept looking at the photographs and talking with her friend. And why should she respond? Her name wasn't Alicia. By the third shout, he was right in front of her, and she realized something odd was going on. She handed the photos to her friend, who sat beside her staring at the sea. She stood up and looked directly into the eyes of the man, who was gasping, covered in sweat. Before he could say anything, three policemen were dragging him toward a squad car. The towels were left behind, abandoned, there, at her feet. Sabado had to stop because it was getting late and I had to leave.

As we walked to the door, she told me how much she liked reading and writing in the novel-game. Everything is good; it's decaying, it's the image of a world destined to die and rot, and we're participating in the construction of that image. For what? For God? The truth, I replied, is that when we planned all of this with Viernes, at no point did we consider the comforts we'd leave behind. Excuse me, but what exactly do you mean by comforts?

71

T
HAT FIRST NIGHT
, the wind blew ferociously on the beach in Matanza. The man from the service station told me that although his eyes filled with sand, he could still see Patrice Dounn, standing, playing his theremin—the sound of the instrument reverberated wonderfully in open spaces, the Congolese would tell him later—and at his side Alicia, lying on her back looking up. He couldn't tell if she was sleeping or staring at the stars. It was late, the wind was growing violent, and the man decided to go home.

Early that morning he woke up, shaken out of bed by a tremor. For some reason, the man from the service station described in great detail what he'd been dreaming that night, during the internal cracking of the earth, before seismic shudders threw him out of bed. In his dream, Navidad was a large modern capital, extensive and full of neon lights, futuristically designed automobiles, and a multiracial population. He was walking the streets of the city toward his wife's office, because she'd promised him that they'd go out to lunch. His wife was Alicia, the Vivar's young daughter. Then everything began to break. The man returned instinctively to the beach, shouting, terrified. The entire ocean had gathered into a huge wave, so tall its foam touched the clouds. Then he was soaking wet—the heat of the summer night in Navidad, he explained—walking through rubble of the city devastated by the enormous mass of water, and by the immense force of the current pulling it back. Concrete structures scattered everywhere, bodies of animals, entire parks pulled up by the roots, a dirty film covering all the useless objects, an unbearable, salty cold. He looked
toward the place where Alicia Vivar's office used to be. He saw the building was intact, damaged, but standing, cut off from the rest of the city by a deep, wide chasm in whose depths he heard the echo of the ocean currents violently crashing against forgotten tectonic layers. Somehow he also heard Alicia's small voice desperately calling for him to get her out of there before the building collapsed. Then her voice was lost in the deafening rumble of the rising tide, as the ocean gathered again into a single enormous wave. An authority was shouting that if they wanted to survive they should climb the hills, climb to the highest places. The man started to run. He saw how everyone around him stumbled and fell, saw their terrified faces. Alicia's voice called his name with horrible desperation. She asked him not to leave her there; she didn't want to drown. Then the earth began to move violently. The man woke up afraid, bathed in sweat. He went to the door of his room, opened it, and stood under the lintel, waiting for the tremor to pass.

The clock on the living room wall showed six in the morning. He saw a delicate hand open the door of the room to his right. It was Alicia; she too was taking shelter in the doorway. Her hair was messy and her eyes barely open; she was wearing a red tracksuit under a large T-shirt featuring a Japanese anime character.

The shaking continued and didn't decrease in intensity; they waited for the jolt that at any moment would transform the tremor into an earthquake. Then the girl seemed to come awake, seeing the man a few meters away, watching her. She raised her hand in a friendly wave. The man from the service station murmured good morning. The tremor stopped.

As he moved toward the kitchen the man wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. He opened the refrigerator, took out a carton of milk and a jar of strawberry-colored powdered juice. He drank a glass and sat down at the small table. He stood up to turn on the television, but before he could he saw Alicia walking toward him and he sat back down, awkwardly. He offered her a glass of milk, which she accepted. The man asked about the foreign visitor. Alicia said: What do I know. She scrunched up her nose when she passed by him, muttering: Gross, you're all wet, like you just got back from the gym. And she sat down across from him.

He already had a couple liters of beer in his system and I think that's why the man from the service station told me all of this. Despite considering himself a fairly shy person—maybe because he was still kind of sleepy—he told Alicia about his dream. She listened with interest, getting up every now and then to look for sugar or a spoon, or to open a drawer and close it again, nervously. When the man finished telling her what he'd dreamed, she asked him if maybe he wanted her to be his
oneiromancer
. My what? Dream reader, like Joseph in Egypt. The man understood, he remembered that Joseph had gotten out of prison and become an advisor to the Pharaoh by revealing to him what God had been trying to tell him in a dream. At that point, the man from the service station inserted a small parenthetical to tell me that his father was an evangelist, and that when he was young, in Santiago, he'd frequently read him chapters from the book of Genesis before bedtime. He loved listening to those stories, but when his father would say goodnight and turn out the light, the shadows that came in from the street would keep him from sleep.

It was impossible to tell whether Alicia's offer was sincere or in jest. The man asked her how she knew about the biblical Joseph; outside the sun was coming up and they could hear the roosters crowing. The girl laughed and said that obviously she hadn't learned about it in her religion classes in high school. The man started toasting some bread. Alicia laughed again. She told him that his dream was simple: the sea was the world, parties, commerce. The city was the same. High places were high places. The sky. And her, why'd she make an appearance? Asked the man. At that moment they heard the honking of a car horn. The man and the girl looked out the window. In front of the house was parked the Japanese car of Juan Francisco Vivar. He was accompanied by his son Bruno and, asleep in the backseat, was Patrice Dounn.

75

I
DIMLY
remember what came next in the story told by the man from the service station that night at
Miriada
, in the town of Matanza. The truth is I'd finished three or four glasses of brandy, and he'd covered the table with more than a square meter of empty pilsner bottles. The light bulbs in the bar had faded gradually. Everything turned yellower, browner, blacker. Including the voice of my interlocutor. Still, I remember the dazzling young body of the waitress, who watched me out of the corner of her eye from another table, making calculations in a notebook. That's what I thought, with a total lack of intuition: the girl was making calculations. I'd only brought a ninety-minute tape, so by that point the conversation was empty air. Misleading human memory. The wind blew in through the cracks of a large, old window to my
right. Progressively—mea culpa—the story of the disappearance of the Vivar siblings told by the temporary assistant of Patrice Dounn became, in my memory, a collage of blurry images. Without a doubt, the events that took place at the
Transensorial Beyond Seasons Celebration
were, in reality, much more impressive than how my alcohol-muddled mind recalls them.