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He Who Is Writing the Novel squeezed my hand, looked at me from the podium, cleared his throat, ran a finger through his hair, tugged at the collar of his shirt, handed the microphone to another boy just like him who was going to introduce me to the public; through the window I watched He Who Is Writing the Novel sitting on the quad: in the end he hadn't come into the auditorium; literary magazine, fuck that, I thought. Then, timidly, he lifted one hand, waving to me. And I didn't like that an albino girl sitting next to me noticed our exchange, our broken intimacy; that she moved her eyebrows in response to his wave.
He Who Is Writing the Novel thanked the audience for their interest, squeezed my hand, cleared his throat on my apartment terrace as the wind whipped the trees that night. Good afternoon, thank you for coming. He gave the microphone to another just like him, a boy who is also writing the novel, who also squeezed me, who thanked the audience, looked out at them, and said: all of you have come to the presentation of the third edition of the magazine
Suspensión
, but I have to be honest with you: there is no magazine, the magazine has ended. The magazine is dead, because paper is dead vegetal carcasses, and so is literature. The lights were low now, the perplexed albino features of all those faces of mine, pressed against the glasses of water and the windows of the auditorium. It was night. The wind came in forcefully from the sea and the curtains of my apartment were out of control. He Who Is Writing the Novel took my face between his hands, kissed me, and said that he wanted to sleep with me, that he wanted my body; I kicked him in the ankle and he let me go. He Who Is Writing the Novel proclaimed the existence of Corporalism; the multitude moved furiously from the university to the street, one boy wanted to hit him, from all directions people called him a pretentious asshole, the Breton of porn, a man tried to grab me around the waist, another took my hand and wouldn't let go. One went so far as to follow me home. First they threw a beer bottle from the back of the room, then came the shattering of wine glasses like a storm on the Neutria pier. They called us ignoramuses, intellectuals, imbeciles: that Corporalist mafia just wants publicity, to attract some big publisher, and indeed after a few days we received a call from a widely circulated newspaper that wanted to interview us. The auditorium was silent. Sad, He
Who Is Writing the Novel got to his feet, went to the door of the auditorium, left the university, walked to my house, buzzed the intercom, told me that he wanted to talk about the novel that was keeping him from sleep. I, on the other hand, slept deeply against his chest while he ran his fingertips along the nape of my neck and murmured that I should sleep in peace, that this too is written in the only work of Corporalism.

The novel had fifteen chapters—one per month for one year and the following summer—detailing the actions he would take along the path that led from the writing itself to the founding of Corporalism, from the public declaration of the end of literature to the confusion of character, writing, and author. He Who Is Writing the Novel put both hands on my back and let them slide slowly down. We went to my room; he entered and I stayed in the doorway watching him get into my bed, waiting for the groan of the mattress to stop and transform into a moan, into foam, into the sound of a great deal of water filling an immense space that is the ocean and that comes in through the open window of my apartment in Neutria. The same sound that I can no longer hear through the car horns, the house alarms, the TVs, and the screams of no one: the sound of a dead body that climbs out of bed and settles on top of another dead body, just so, with that nighttime silence so necessary for sleep.

THE NOVEL

Carlos had spent that Sunday at his uncle's place, where the whole family had gotten together for a cookout so they could check out his uncle's new property. The sun was setting by the time he went home. The heat was beginning to descend both in the country and in Santiago, but his bedroom, the living room, and the bathroom were cold like always, far from the summer sun. He closed the door. In the hallway there was a leather suitcase; on top of it, an affectionate note indicating that someone would be by that night to pick it up. The paper was signed by his cosmopolitan cousin Alicia. Carlos left the message where it was, he stood still for a moment, sneezed. He removed a tissue from his pocket and blew his nose. He remembered that he should bundle up or he'd catch a cold, that warning he heard in his mother's voice and also in Elisa's every time they heard him sneeze. He went to his room to grab a sweatshirt. In the living room he turned on the standing lamp so he could find the answering machine. There was a message: someone complaining about her terrible memory, asking him to remind her about a trip they had coming up, and to call her. It was the voice of a woman. Carlos's first impression was that it was Elisa, he recognized that deep sleepy voice she spoke with sometimes, but he had no idea what she could've been referring to: during the last few weeks they'd scarcely exchanged a word, they saw each other
once at a mutual friend's birthday party and ended up in bed, drunk. But they didn't converse.

He listened to the message again. Elisa always signed off her messages by leaving her name in order to avoid any confusion, because her voice changed: it was like a shrill little girl's when she was happy, like an adolescent's when she had a bad cold or when she was just waking up, like a very thin piece of glass when she wanted to hide something painful. It wasn't Elisa talking, but it sounded so similar; it was just like Elisa's voice, Alicia had commented after reading the paragraph from his novel in which the protagonist tells a man in a bar everything he knows about the albino girl and describes her voice. That day his cousin told him that his female characters would never speak differently than Elisa, because he never listened to anyone else. Carlos defended himself by saying that was how he preferred it, that all the men have his face, that all the women be slight and distant like his girlfriend. Why lie: in those two-hundred-and-some-odd pages there was no city other than the one in which he lived, no one else walking its streets but the two of them, though they were disguised consecutively as detective, as killer, as writer, as albino girl, as beggar, as old woman. He couldn't keep a paralysis from descending from his head to his hand every day that, ready to move forward on some chapter, he sat down in front of the notebook; this should've been resolved when Elisa denied, with a scornful gesture, that there existed any resemblance between her and the albino girl in his novel. And yet when the protagonist tried to listen to the conversations between that albino girl, the professor, and another man, deducing their words from the movement of their mouths through the window pane, hiding between the trees on the plaza, walking anonymous through the foggy nighttime port, it was the voice of Elisa that he inserted into the discussion instead of the girl. And although he would never hear the albino girl, except her
final moan, which she'd utter bleeding on the floor, the protagonist spent days describing a particular emphasis in Elisa's voice. Carlos was still leaning on the small table by the telephone, attempting to reproduce her pronunciation, without any luck. He dialed the number on the answering machine. Hello, he said, is Violeta there? An old woman, half-asleep, muttered that she wasn't there, that she'd gone traveling. He hung up. He sat on the couch, watching the day slowly break. Maybe his cousin and Violeta were going on a trip together, maybe it was a wrong number and the old woman on the other end of the line had been confused. He stared at the leather suitcase in the hallway: someone would come by that night to pick it up. The telephone was ringing, he froze. Hello, he said when he managed to pick it up. It was the same voice that made him nervous, the only one he heard. What's up, how's everything going, was he busy right then. He exhaled. Elisa asked him why his voice sounded so strange, if she'd woken him, and he responded that he was happy to hear from her, that he wanted to see her.

THE RECIPIENT

            
October 19
^th

This is the first time I am writing here, at this desk that I've had since I was little and that now, in the light coming through the window, looks different. Getting used to living in a house—even though this is also a studio and the smell of Alicia's paintings impregnates the walls—is also new to me. It's a freedom, when all is said and done, to live with my cousin. I know now what it means to live alone.

Things are happening.

I've been imagining a detective story. It occurred to me that I could write a novel of innumerable pages about a girl who, frightened because a man is apparently following her, contacts a detective to help her. She and the detective become friends, they flirt. He ends up obsessed with her and follows her everywhere. I want to sit down every afternoon, take advantage of the dead hours of summer to write. On one of these afternoons the inspiration comes to me. Until I was twelve years old, I invented fairytales and succeeded in getting all my friends to fall asleep when we camped out in the yard at one of our houses. I think that little
Elisa would love to see me plot something out and then, at first, refuse to show it to her—she loves it when I'm mysterious. That story of the girl who gets stalked by the same guy she is paying to protect her has been coming back to me ever since my cousin told it at our uncle and aunt's country house last Sunday. Elisa won't go to family gatherings with me, she says that my relatives talk too much and she gets tired of them asking about her family, of so many little kids relentlessly running around, crying, shrieking. She says any day now some kid is going to fall in the pool and that no one will notice, my uncles cracking up at their crude double entendres, my aunts talking just to talk, and my grandmother sitting in the center, pretending to listen, like she cares about the grades some grandkid got in school, the clothes someone or other bought, the kind words of some relative's loving girlfriend. At least Alicia was always there in some corner, laughing like the others, but laughing to herself, remembering when we saw ghosts roaming the corridors of that immense mansion in Rancagua, or when an older cousin convinced us that our crazed and sick great-grandmother was locked in the forbidden room, the room on the other side of my uncle and aunt's bedroom. And the enormous trunk hidden away in the cellar, what's in there?, we would ask. That Sunday my cousin Alicia and I talked almost all afternoon. I told her I wanted to live alone that next year and she invited me to come check out her home-studio on Calle Bustamente, she could rent me a room there. And that's where I'm writing this now. She also told me about her friend Violeta. Bored of living in the cesspool of Santiago (my cousin's words), she moved to another city—I can't remember which one—for a couple years. She met a guy there, a classmate at the university, with whom she went out
and then broke up. The guy was unhinged and wouldn't leave her alone, calling her on the phone every night, following her through the streets, buzzing the intercom at her apartment and not saying anything when she answered. One day, desperate, it occurred to her to ask a professor friend from the university for help, and he managed to get the guy expelled, but that was worse: one time the guy, furious, almost hit her with his car, and another time he almost pushed her into the city's river. She loved where she was living, but in the end Violeta had to go back to Santiago. What she doesn't know is if the guy followed her here or if she just had the terrible luck of encountering another psychopath. Alicia was very worried when she told me this, her friend is receiving letters that are making her paranoid, lately she thinks she sees that guy on every corner. There aren't many girls like Violeta, according to Alicia, and that's why men go crazy for her. This is a story I'd love to be able to write.

But something's happening. I got home in the afternoon and there was little Elisa, napping on the sofa, a serious expression on her face. I wasn't expecting her, I thought she was going to the beach for the weekend; she'd decided to stay at the last minute, she said. I said great and gave her a quick hug without squeezing her, just the way she likes, and yet she remained silent, indifferent. I gave her a bunch of quick kisses, I sat calmly beside her without touching her, I gave her names (she always likes that): My Little Lady, The Little One, The One with the Waist, The One with Hair in Her Eyes, The One with the Lips. She told me to be quiet. She stood up suddenly and went over to the little table by the phone to pick up some pencil drawings that were sitting there. She had to go, she apologized, she came back to the couch where
I was lying with open arms. She threw a heavy white envelope at my head. I read the name of the sender: Violeta Drago. Elisa asked me what this was all about. Someone had dropped off a letter from this Violeta, who was she and why was she sending me little messages. I asked if she'd seen the person who delivered it, she said no, then I went up to her and smiled calmly, there was no reason to get upset and confuse things. I told her not to be silly, that she was being paranoid: Violeta Drago was just one of my cousin's friends.

Later we drank tea with Alicia and a friend who'd come to visit her. Afterwards we were watching a movie, lying down, and Elisa decided she wanted to spend the night at home, alone, so I took her. I don't know why I'm so tired, and I can't go back to bed either. It's cold inside this house, as if it weren't summer. I know that if I go to sleep, I'll have that same nightmare, the one that won't leave me alone, that nightmare that seems to come with this house: I open my eyes and look out of a curtainless window that turns into the window of an intercity bus. The landscapes pass rapidly before my eyes, the hills expand until they swallow the fields, and the bus begins to descend. Now we are arriving at a port, beyond you can see lights, many lights, and the sea.

            
November 22
^nd

(I find myself sitting in class. My eyes, my tongue, my temples will burst if I go on; it's as if I were insisting on leaving behind the here and now of my Latin American Literature class, at 11:45
in the morning, in the second to last seat in the final row on the right-hand side, to transform myself into the guy who complains about his professor, who meets his people, reads his pages, walks in his footsteps, kisses his girl; to transform myself into the girl who's sitting beside me, be made of her long bones, adopt her cautious stride, smell her cleanness on my skin, feel how that black dress falls across my body and how my feet sustain the weight of those enormous boots, to touch with those fingers my nearly nonexistent nose, the way she looks at me now and smiles for no reason yet with beguiling kindness, to see out of her bright eyes, to feel the spring air on my face coming in through the window, to be a woman and respond with a kind expression that I'm unable to describe when people say Alicia. Transform myself into someone else who's watching us from the opposite side of the room, who sees us flirting and imagines that we love each other, that we have loved each other, and that we will love each other right now as she rests her head on my shoulder. To fixate, from the other side of the room, on my imperturbable expression, see that Alicia looks up and notices, for the first time, the movement of my pen across the page, and how her attention shifts to me until her face is transfigured by terror when she reads what I'm writing in this moment: “see that Alicia looks up and notices, for the first time, the movement of my pen across the page, and how her attention shifts to me until her face is transfigured by terror when she reads what I'm writing in this moment: see that Alicia looks up and notices, for the first time, the movement of my pen across the page, and how her attention shifts to me until her face is transfigured by terror when she reads what I'm writing in this moment.” I keep writing and she tries to stop me by reading to
the end of the paragraph before I get there, when the page is still blank; I battle against this interference and keep on writing while, in the room's other corner, I see that the girl in the last row on the right-hand side is looking anxiously at the notebook of the guy sitting next to her, that she smiles a smile full of mockery and then starts laughing sonorously, the burst of her husky voice interrupting the professor; she starts to read aloud, almost yelling, what it says in the notebook of her classmate, who [the scene is absurd] doesn't seem to notice and keeps on writing. The other students start chuckling when they hear the albino girl read that embarrassing text, the emphasis she puts on certain words, and the guy starts to sweat. Alicia is tearing me apart, the delusion of suspending her movement on this page with my writing turns into simple rambling when my words become public, when what I write is a spectacle for other people who don't know who we are and that this notebook is full of personal things, when they scorn what I say [horror], fixing their ears and filthy eyes on Alicia's chapped lips, which could never utter anything hurtful.

Suddenly the boy, that strange boy who was watching the albino girl with feverish eyes and incessantly taking notes, jumps up from his seat like a hungry animal; with a crack he slams his notebook down on the linoleum and takes off running toward the door. He disappears into the hallway. The professor makes an ironic comment. The albino girl, the only person not laughing, gets up to go to the bathroom; they meet on the quad. He is sitting in the sun, his look is different, it seems to be directed at something very far away, lacking the permanent shadow of worry that had previously marked it. She sits down next to him. They talk for a while, calmly, as if they'd been together for years, as if
they were married and they both knew the exact amount of time it took the other to say something. I don't know if they kiss or lean in close to share a secret that no one, absolutely no one else can hear. Then he takes a wallet out of his backpack and from the wallet he removes two bus tickets. She moves her head, we suppose that she's agreeing to go on a trip with him, but where are they going? He asks her what time it is and they get up and walk together down the hallway toward the campus entrance. He looks at everything along the way with tenderness: it's the last time that he'll pass this way, that he'll perceive the aroma of photocopies, the posters promoting parties or offering to share an apartment's rent, the last time he'll hear the phrases of friends greeting each other, the condescending tone of a professor who bumps into a student leaving the bathroom, heading toward the quad of the drama department. I choose to follow the boy and not the girl, in the moment that they separate: he walks down Calle Los Leones, takes the metro of the same name, stares at the faces of the passengers the whole ride, gets off with the majority of them at the Universidad de Santiago station, heads with his backpack toward Terminal Sur. It's not a big deal, I think, he must be going to visit his parents in Rancagua; but he boards a bus whose destination I don't recognize, a bus that surprises me not because of the color of it's paint or because of how few people occupy its seats, but because of the name of its destination: Neutria. I wave to the driver, the engine is already in drive. The baggage handler asks me if I have more luggage, I shake my head.

He glances nervously at his watch. Out the window he recognizes a short girl running in vain to catch the bus, already pulling away from one of the platforms, he tries to remember her
name but cannot. He clings to his backpack like a child bound for the unknown as the bus begins to pick up speed. He thinks that right now Alicia is frightened in her room, that she has locked herself in, and is studying the portrait of Violeta or of herself on the beach, with dark sunglasses and a black dress in the middle of summer. He doesn't want to be dead, and yet he's moving toward Neutria. In the seat next to him an unfamiliar woman is sleeping, he looks out the window, I look out the window at the landscape that grows steeper all the time, full of rocks, precipitous, dangerous. Suddenly I see that it's snowing, that snow is falling from the sky and the bus will have to stop.)