Loquela (10 page)

THE NOVEL

Josefita had pulled back the covers of her parents' bed and lay down to sleep and watch TV until they got home from a dinner party at the house of some friends. Mesmerized, she checked the time on the bedside table clock when she was woken by the sounds of the car parking, the key turning in the lock, and her father's voice saying something. She buried her face in the big pillow to seem soundly asleep while hearing every single one of their interminable footsteps, until her father lifted her in his arms and she understood nothing yet knew perfectly well that they were carrying her to bed.

Carlos, lying next to his sister, pressed a button on the remote control, searching for a movie on TV. Josefina had gotten up and was pushing open the closet's enormous sliding door; she knew her mother kept her grandmother's trunk, a couple of fur coats she never used, and a whole collection of family photo albums in the back of the closet. Carlos asked her what she was looking for while she silently flipped through the albums one by one, tossing them onto the bed. Written on the covers, in their mother's lovely handwriting, was the year the photographs were taken. Ugh, said the girl, too old. Carlos said nothing, thinking that in those garish snapshots he was more or less the same age as his sister. Josefa continued doing her thing: she'd open an album, catch sight of the
first photo and toss it aside impatiently, picking up another. Apparently she wasn't looking at the photos for the fun of it, even though she loved doing that too; instead, Carlos deduced, she was trying to find one photo in particular. He repeated the question: what're you looking for? Josefina paused and said, one from when she was a baby. He put a photo in front of her from when she was around a year old, with a spot of hair and a surprised expression—taking your first steps in the living room of the house in Pocuro, he explained. She immediately opened another album, closed it, grabbed a third, protesting that she was already big in that one, that she needed one from when she was a newborn. They reviewed the photos carefully and could only find Josefina smiling at the camera, two years old, with a beach hat and chair on the sand; a dozen similar polaroids: her yawning around five, raising a hand around three, waking up, eyes barely open around four years old. The girl twisted her mouth and sat down silently on the edge of the bed, staring at the TV. Carlos waited for her to say something; he knew she wasn't paying attention to the movie that'd begun about an hour before, she was thinking about something else. Without turning around, she muttered that she knew she was adopted. It took Carlos a second to understand what she was saying and then he smiled: Don't be silly. Josefina turned to face him, furious, like he was to blame; then why wasn't there a photo of her as a newborn like everyone else has at home, she said. Carlos responded calmly that she shouldn't be so stubborn, that he'd seen her in the clinic, bald and red, less than a day old, sleeping in a cradle next to their mother, who, because of her, was very tired. That she shouldn't be ridiculous, she looked so much like their father and like him. Josefina got the point. She'd never really believed she was adopted, what happened is that her friend Cata's parents, just last week, had told her that they weren't really
her parents, and all because she found a photo where she appeared in the arms of other people.

Carlos got up to go to the bathroom. While brushing his teeth he yelled to Josefina to put the albums back in order. Elisa had told him once that, when she was little, she'd thought she was adopted too, all because her older siblings liked to bug her with jokes about her dark hair and nearly nonexistent nose. Since she wasn't blonde, she wasn't part of the family, they'd repeat. And she invented an alternate identity so as not to feel hurt: her name was Carolina, a name that in her childhood she found particularly melodious for some now faded reason, a name given by her true parents, benevolent people who lived in another place, in the country of the good people. One day she was playing with her ten siblings in the garden of a house that looked a lot like the gingerbread house she'd seen in an illustration of Hansel and Gretel, when the imaginary country was invaded by the neighboring bloodthirsty nation. Her parents were killed in the upheaval and, in an act of desperation, the firstborn brother loaded her and all her siblings onto a boat, and they were able to make their escape. Indescribable adventures led them to many of the world's ports, where different families would grow fond of one of the siblings and beg the firstborn to let them adopt the child: who wouldn't want to raise one of the last remaining children from the country of the benevolent people? The firstborn believed he'd be able to ensure the happiness of all his siblings, giving them away one by one to interested parents, and yet he wasn't always successful; often the natural children of these adoptive families were envious of their kindly nature and teased them, like what happened to her in Viña del Mar when she was taken in by new parents, given a new name. With time, Elisa had come to understand that she was just as boring as her siblings and didn't really belong to some
benevolent race. And yet, as long she was unable to come up with a just fate for the oldest brother, she would never forget this children's story: she imagined him in the most absolute solitude, old and dejected on a dilapidated boat, looking out at the immensity of the ocean before the breaking of the storm.

THE RECIPIENT

            
September 13
^th

Still too tired to really get into it. And yet it's important that I continue to record the unbelievable storyline of these days; without ceasing to read, without ever closing a book, I decide to go out into the street to recover whatever is still alive of Violeta Drago in this city. It's stopped raining at last, the dark clouds have receded, and the days are getting lighter. Without purporting to get up from this chair or put away this notebook, I spend the days walking toward Pedro Valdivia Norte, the neighborhood where Violeta's house is located. Friday I was leaning on the railing of my apartment balcony, not moving; the whole afternoon I was in that same position, staring dangerously at the ground, many floors below. None of the solutions seemed right to me: not the morbidity of Arguedas and Lihn writing their death diaries, not Onetti and Violeta inventing a city where they run away from their own ruin, and in whose streets their characters find no relief from suffering, but do find oblivion. Keeping in mind that the impudence in these pages was my solitude's only saving grace, aware too that I write these lines to be read, hoping only that someone will be
able to understand what I cannot. With the suicidal compulsion to put this notebook in an envelope and send it to J's address. But I already said that she's going to disappear, like me in front of a desk, surrounded by towers of books and worn-out pens, piling up. Only Alicia, because the name I've given her here isn't her name and doesn't do her justice, will survive. (I realize that she doesn't fit here, that she can only look in and never enter entirely, or follow along for a few pages, because this notebook is in error, hardly one true word.) Just Alicia versus The Little One. Alicia during the day and The Little One late at night: me, drunk, I can't help it that first one and then the other appear on my right, on my left; my uneven Manichean vision. And like Carlos, I try to bring them together in an embrace, as if I were the center of everything: me and my pen describing this three-way relationship such that The Little One, lying down, was reading a story in which the protagonist pays for her parents' nursing-care by working as a whore, exclusively group encounters. That's what The Little One said to me, the one who was reading an anthology of stories and poems for a writing workshop at a university in some southern city. In Neutria.

When I rang the doorbell at the house on Calle Los Araucanos, it was she, The Little One, who appeared. She asked me what I wanted: she was holding a book in her hands, dressed in pajamas, her short hair in disarray. I lied, telling her I was Violeta's friend. She returned my look, disbelieving, had I come from the south perhaps, she said. The south? Why the south? Your naivety is infinite, she repeated all night long, when she wasn't biting me. In that moment I said yes, somewhat inhibited by the brightness of the house, by the decorations Violeta and The Little One's
grandmother had used, by the silverware, by the ceramic animals, the fake ivory, the yellow lamps, and the acrylic plants. The Little One put the teapot in the kitchen and led me to her room. Her grandmother wasn't home. Had she been waiting for me? Had she been waiting for someone else? The unease on her face when she took off my clothes, she'd probably felt obligated to open the gate when I told her I was Violeta's friend. Then I asked her if they really were cousins. (Why does she live in Violeta's house and stay in her room, so talkative, such short bones and rapid movements, the opposite of the figure that weeks of reading Violeta's infernal handwriting had created for me?) Yes, of course, The Little One said: Yeah right. And she went into the bathroom. I stayed erect. I was entering another body, another city, at last I was emerging from the pit, I say, of this apartment.

Hours later she came out of the bathroom, drying her hands, and asked me my name. Carlos, I continued to lie, as if that very afternoon I hadn't been pulled from paralysis by Alicia's phone call: she told me it was important that we see each other, not about Violeta or my novel, but about her and about me. (About us, responding without being cheeky.) As if I hadn't spent that very day thinking about putting a bullet in J for what she'd said to me when I called her, ready to start over. As if I hadn't spent an eternity leaning on the railing, watching the raindrops fall more heavily than yesterday and the day before, playing with the idea of locking myself in my room, not sleeping not eating not watching TV, not waiting for the days to fabricate this book for me, but forcing myself, like a maniac, to write a facsimile-novel of
A Brief Life
, substituting my own presence for Brausen, J for Gertrudis, Santiago for Buenos Aires, and Neutria for Santa María, but never
finding in that facsimile-novel a character corresponding to Alicia, to her role of impartiality. Then she called me. I put on gloves and a scarf, expecting that it'd be another afternoon of indecisive conversation; Alicia would try to keep me from getting obsessed with her (or with her friend of the notebooks), I'd want to believe that her teasing was intended to get me to make the first move, to stand up and kiss her and pull her far away from this dusty city with my madness: I exited the elevator promising myself I'd destroy all of it after a few beers. Of course she'd react to my violence, which would at least give rise to a story of another sort. But no, it was preferable for me to remain still, hearing her neutrally over the telephone. I thought that Carlos, that he would act in the exact opposite way that I do. That I should have never given Violeta's letter to Alicia, since it was addressed me. I closed the umbrella, raised my hand. The
micro
that was coming, splashing pedestrians, wasn't the Providencia
micro
, it was the one that went down Kennedy directly to Pedro de Valdivia Norte. The moment I got on it I became someone else: with the certainty of having stood Alicia up, I stopped in front of the door to the house on Los Araucanos and asked for Violeta. I regret nothing, I regret nothing.

                  
September 20
^th

No one regrets nothing. The last memory I have of J (if that was the last time, because her writings are very oblique) is of her raising one hand in shy greeting, from
a distance. I couldn't imagine her, despite the determination of her words: shrunken but in no way fragile, her long fingers energetic in the air. The other seemed to be oscillating between his notebook, his book, his pillow, the TV, the telephone, the balcony, and all of a sudden The Little One was clawing his skin and he was unable to hide because he was naked in the middle of an unknown city, maybe a consequence of nothing more than the inexperience of our poor narrator. (I know that he'll come and rewrite this, one, three times, but at least I'll dedicate myself to writing about my own life.) Or maybe he's lying there in bed, half asleep and trying to focus on a photocopied article of criticism on Onetti that he's reading, thinking he's abandoned the writing of his so-called personal diary; while reading about the notion of uprooting in
A Brief Life
, his desolate eyes fall on the drawer containing this notebook, wrapped in brown paper, and he thinks: another precious project that never materialized. The idea had been to defy Alicia, that a novel fabricated with the uncomfortable and carnal plot of the quotidian would be more excessive than all the scribblings of a little albino girl, who abuses her body to gain access to that imaginary childhood city; he couldn't have known that the passing of the hours would turn against the writer, chaining him to everyday life. O, how I adore those types of figures: the one who writes in isolation triumphing over the one who lives constantly thinking about what is happening. Unfortunately I am subject. I live here, with someone who has fallen asleep,
who is starting to dream about snow, about the idea of purity. The Little One enjoys this, looking up at me panting on top of her, saying: “Carlitos, you still believe in purity?” And I stroke her face with both hands, with the backs of my fingers. If I speak the learning will cease; I should moan, breathe, cough, clear my throat and spit on that little girl, whom I despise and adore simultaneously, stretched out naked across the wrinkled bedspread of the moth-eaten mattress where she lies waiting for me. She gives me a sign, putting a vertical finger over her lips and together we draw back, watching him; the expression his face is wearing now is very entertaining, leaning on the desk, ripping out a page from the notebook where he has written the following:

            
September 20
^th

I spent the 18
^th
at Alicia's house; her parents weren't there. She invited me to dinner with one of her cousins and his fiancée. The conversation was very interesting, she was gorgeous coming back from the kitchen with a tray full of sushi and everything arranged so she'd always be sitting in the empty seat next to me. She avoided looking me in the eyes, turning her back on me whenever she could. She had an artichoke leaf in her small teeth and she wanted to hold my hand, rocking one leg, the same combat boots as always, sometimes brushing against one of my shoes, the left, and announcing in a serious tone that this was a celebration,
the reason didn't matter, better that way, right? For a second, let's pretend that we can be other people, that a space exists where we could be happy, the pain of the pen leaving its mark. Let's leave behind for a second this thing about you and me, about literature and possibility. I was going to say that it'd be better for us to forget that she was Alicia and that I was me, sitting there with such affection, such longing, such love (that word), that we lost the names, that I am a false resident of Santiago, that she travels every month and every week, but where is she going? That when I attempted to write an
authentic
page, her albino friend got raped in the paradisiacal port of Neutria by a group of beggars who found her under a bridge without any clothes, all because of her longing for transcendence, a twisted need to escape the skin. Alicia was widening her eyes, listening to me, then she interrupted, exclaiming that she was nervous because her brother had taken her parents' car out right in the middle of the September 18
^th
festivities, and some drunk might've run into him. I went home, I was that drunk, and I brought her smell with me, asking myself how I could possibly keep from getting obsessed with a woman like her, thinking about her black dress, about good and evil, about the body and the soul (the blathering of drunks). How not to want her, how to understand why she evaded my touch, I don't know, for the same reason that J asked that we just be friends, because the flesh ruins itself, the touch becomes abrasive, the orgasm ends, not so a conversation between a man and a woman who guess each other's words, complete each other's sentences, invent expressions, laugh at their own verbal ridiculousness. Thinking this, I got in bed, tried to masturbate, but felt like a child, went over to my desk chair wanting to touch something in this apartment that wasn't
mine, I opened my eyes knowing what Carlos would be doing now: sleeping with The Little One, or, at least, dreaming my wet dream about her.

The Little One listened with a silent, little laugh to the way I imitated that guy's monologue. Then she unclasped her legs, which were wrapped around me, got dressed and said: come on, Carlitos, it's Fiestas Patrias. We're going to find the others, we're going back to Neutria, without Violeta, who cares about her. Let that other guy sit around and worry about the dead albino girl, not understanding that she was trying to leave but was just afraid to do it on her own, and that no one knows how to interpret those pages she wrote about the Corporalists. Don't look at me like that, you don't understand anything either, who's going to shoot her if she's already dead, stupid. She was so beautiful.

Then it was dark. It was a cold night, we were walking toward Cerro San Cristóbal, and into my mind came his rueful face looking at his notebook, uselessly recovering the thread of his diary. A static image like the last one I have of J, and so it's not a surprise that he stays like that, like in one of Alicia's drawings where, sitting in the quad at the university, she and he observe J approaching in the distance, and in turn J is watching them: all three with their hands in the air, waving. The characters understand that they'll never touch again, that they'll only be able to wave to each other from far away, and The Little One and I pass through a gate that opens onto the part of Cerro San Cristóbal covered with bushes, at last we make out a naked hand holding a cigarette that rises to guide us.