Loquela (2 page)

THE RECIPIENT

            
August 10
^th

I'm so tired. I woke up with the sensation of having not slept at all, of having traveled thousands of miles during the night. And in the mirror, my face wasn't great either: two puffy circles around my eyes ordered me back to bed, but I was already standing, I had to go to class. The images from my dream would've kept me from shutting my eyes again anyway. I took a shower.

I dreamed, like I never do, all night. If I wanted, I could enumerate all the stages of this exhausting dream, this long and vivid dream. I know that Alicia, making fun of everything as usual, accompanied me to a room in my old and unfamiliar country house in Rancagua, that she played dolls with my little sisters (affecting voices, inventing frivolous plots: Barbie goes to the salon and some strange stuffed elves give her a new hairdo while gossiping about other toys, laughing at a headless Playmobil); that she slept in the same room as me, in another bed or in a sleeping bag on the floor, like a childhood sleepover: we turned off the light and talked for a while, but fell asleep in the middle of an important conversation (maybe just when I asked her who she
liked, whether or not I was the one she loved?). Another time she went to school with me, we skipped class and went to talk on the far side of the playground. I didn't know it, but she was following every move I made and every word I said, in the afternoon she showed me a garish comic strip she'd drawn that featured me. A synopsis of my day in vignettes, something like that. I never got bored of her, nor she of me: the same old story. Then suddenly, Alicia disappears.

I'm in a corridor in the big house that belonged to my uncle. Near Coya, down a busy, unpaved road, any local can tell you the way if you ask. A fantasy house, immense and silent, accessed through an electronic gate, a fountain and gravel parking area appear. (Being very young, I didn't get why they covered the ground with sharp little rocks, particularly when we ran barefoot across it on our way to swim in the pool.) A fantasy house, as I said, that often appears in my nightmares along with that other house, the wood cabin on the shore of some southern beach where I've never been, an invention where J liked to predict that she and I would someday live.

I found myself in my uncle's house, sitting on the parquet of a long corridor, that echoing corridor where, when we stayed overnight, the great thrill was to jump out at someone at the last second without them noticing your approach in the darkness. And the silence of that house. It still disconcerts me every time I see (or better, admire) the four people who live in that place, forced to live with the knowledge that, day after day, there's no one lying in any of the beds in any of the ten or twelve bedrooms, that the soap in all seven of the bathrooms remains unused, the showers clean, but rusty. The emptiness in that house becomes unbearable,
and so the birthdays and Christmases that my family celebrates there are competitive displays of affection and camaraderie, to fill the silence between conversations. And, because there's something terrifying about letting them trail off, the conversations become banal, then personal, repetitive, uncomfortable, then banal again, an uncle, an aunt, a great aunt, and another uncle think they've been talking to me, but we just make sounds with our mouths and we keep on like that, not hearing one another, until they get in their car and go back to Santiago in silence, immediately turning on the radio—music always saves us from that horrible muteness. (Why can't we sit quietly and look at each other? Why do I get nervous when Alicia says nothing, when I ask her “what's wrong” and she pauses before responding, “nothing, I just don't want to talk”?) Music or the newspaper or a book, never just the two of us.

I was sitting in that corridor with some of my cousins, but they weren't actually my cousins, they were old friends from high school; insulting each other jokingly, making fun of the each other's foibles and defects for a laugh—they're the same even in a dream. We were obviously children, dressed in bathing trunks and playing a game of some kind across the rectangles of the parquet. Marbles, or something. And while, bursting with laughter, we were competing to say the cruelest joke, someone steals the bag of marbles from M, he bites R's hand, R starts crying, C mimics his cries, M screams “abuse” in falsetto, I watch poor R earnestly, we all start slapping each other, repeating the worst jokes. I made some suggestion, N insulted me, I was tripped, and I fell down. Everyone jumped on top of me in a little pile, and it would have been futile to use the air that was scarcely reaching my lungs to
scream that they were suffocating me, that I was dying, because just as I was starting to feel desperate, the human tower fell to the ground. Then, as we were getting to our feet and M was picking up his marbles, a grownup came over (an adult, I remember someone whispering “sshh, a grownup is coming,” heavy black shoes resounding through the house), and told us, calm down, you little shits. The grownup continued into my uncle's bedroom, the master bedroom. I left the group of kids and followed him down the long red carpet in that twilight corridor, wine-colored walls barely illuminated by the small dark bulbs of the few hanging lamps. The grownup turned back to me, a finger placed vertically across his lips, commanding my silence. I grew along the way, it was now extremely difficult to see the details of his big shoes, and when he turned and told me to be quiet I saw that he didn't have a face. Terror.

Alone, I went into the bedroom, decorated and furnished in identical fashion to my uncle's actual bedroom. An enormous television, piles of photos, a table with flowers, pastel curtains tied with olive-colored cloth ties, empty nightstands on each side of the immense master bed. An unnerving piece of furniture with locked drawers (there are secrets here). The warm sun and the fragrance of pollen and fresh cut grass coming in through a window that opened onto the garden—spring in Rancagua. A young girl was sleeping peacefully.

I wanted to get out of there; I hate disrupting other people's sleep, especially when it's someone I don't know. But the door was locked. I looked around the room and sat down on the bed, at the girl's feet. Her back was to me, her body wrapped in the sheets. Softly, I touched her, she didn't wake up. I think I said something.
I prodded her, nothing happened. Little by little, I became more forceful, until I found myself with my hands on her shoulders, rolling her towards me, shaking her. She was very pretty, apart from her dead eyes. Dead eyes and cold skin. Her mouth: clenched so tightly that her teeth had ground together before she died. I'd never seen a corpse, but knew I had one in front of me now. (Her white hair—a noteworthy detail—resembled the nylon wig of a doll.) Repulsed, I let go of her and ran to the door, which was open.

Before leaving the room and waking myself up, I looked at the girl one last time to see if her eyes had recovered their glow, if her pale skin ran with blood again. The angle of her arm lost its rigidity, she became human, and with revived fingers, uncovered herself. She stood, her voice so unexpected said thanks, many thanks, and who might I be, a new cousin perhaps. “But,” she went on, “haven't they told you that if I'm made to remember that person whom I hate, the loathing I feel is so strong that it paralyzes me, that it kills me? No, I'd already forgotten that person, but when I saw the trunk full of papers, I was overcome with rage. And why not? I'm going to die on the floor of my house, snarling like a rabid dog!” (And with her eyes she indicated the trunk, a trunk just like one that had belonged to my grandmother, heavy, ancient, and cold because it's made of metal.) “His disgusting body is in there. I opened it and found him. I wanted to kill him again, cousin, a hundred times. Before he killed me.” (But what she told me is impossible; a body would never fit in that trunk.) Then my eyes fell upon the trunk and, slowly, it began to expand, transforming into a coffin. (Or was it maybe I who shrank, turned back into child?)

Then I woke up and went to the bathroom. Then to the kitchen, still half asleep, and I realized that someone had slipped a letter
under the door, a letter that got the recipient's address wrong. The sender's name is “Violeta Drago.” Do I know her? Of course I know her. She's the friend Alicia has been crying over, locked away in her room all these days. The friend who was apparently murdered in her own apartment, a horrible crime that was never publicized. Just now, I remembered a time when Alicia showed me a video from her graduation, she paused the video to point out her friend Violeta, the albino girl.

            
August 12
^th

            
12:13

I write little because I'm beginning to value silence. During break Alicia and I discussed the uselessness of writing just a character's initials, it no longer drew attention to the connotations of the names, the characters lost immediacy and simply became letters (she's reading Kafka). I'm tortured by hundreds of images and ideas, I can't maintain coherence in my diary. So much to say, but also so much noise: cars, footsteps in the hallway, the telephone . . .

It was Alicia calling. Why does her ability to silently absorb the problems of others attract me this way? Why does being next to her physically paralyze me? Why, over the phone, were we functional (functional? we're not machines)? I'm sad and alone in the middle of a sad city. Alicia seems better prepared than I for the constant aggression of Santiago's inhabitants; she seems to always be going somewhere. (Once, awkwardly, I asked her—she was on the verge of tears and I didn't know if I should say something,
which is what her friend who died would've done—what she did for fun, and she said, “I never wanted to be here, that's why I leave sometimes.”) Alicia, never serious, told me during break that if I wrote a diary or something like that, I should name her A and not Alicia, because readers would invariably associate her with that little girl who went to Wonderland, a situation that was not at all accurate in her case. I am sad, a delicious wind is blowing, the myrrh trees are already in bloom.

Yesterday afternoon T confessed to me that he was starting to scare himself. Every year, at the beginning of spring, he experienced a sensation of overwhelming emotional catastrophe. “Like the driver of a car who discovers that he's dead a second before crashing,” he said, hearing the birds start to sing, the blue sky, the warmth returning. Then he confessed to me: couples will start making out right in front of my eyes, walking around holding each other, happy, and I'll be alone. Winter coats and summer orgies won't do; spring speaks the truth: some come to this world alone and others come in groups. (T asks for advice, I maintain my position and invent experiences to support my words. Then I hate myself: but I can't stop lying. I'm not sure anyone would be interested in what I'd have to say if I could.)

(According to Blanchot, Sade says the only way to avoid suffering is to enjoy the giving and receiving of pain. But, at the same time, the only way to transcend the vice of sadism is to become unfeeling, because vice makes me weak again, rendering me dependent on pleasure and pain.) If only for a little while I might stop feeling. (Although I think that is impossible in this harsh, biting world. In the city of Santiago, pausing in the middle of the street, when the face of a girl demands your attention, bears as
consequence a car blasting you with its horn, a woman gesturing “get moving, jackass,” a delinquent selling ice cream stepping on your feet in the rush to board the
micro
. And by then the face would already be lost in the swarming crosswalk at Lyon and Providencia.) To write is to feel myself dangerous in the moment I do not hesitate. But I must accept that in a diary I'm allowed to be obscene. (I think about J, her small face between my hands, “it hurts,” “you make me feel like a slut,” then I kiss her forcefully. Awful night, her really awful bed, the worst part is that it was I who was there. And afterward I fled, what a coward. J, forgive me. Yes, I do feel bad.)

Alicia loaned me a magazine from Uruguay. I'm staring at a photograph of Pizarnik, the article says that she realized with horror that writing was keeping her alive, and the result of this was her spine-tingling poems. In her face you can see how greatly she needed the silence. “A great writer of letters,” says the caption. What is this lush mystery in the correspondence of strangers? Why is it that I'd kill to gain access to the stack of letters that Alicia says is her prize possession? (I want to be honest, I aspire to that in these pages: I've been waiting several months for two letters: the one Alicia sent me from Czechoslovakia last summer, marvelously trivial, without a doubt, but something of her, for me, indelible smile would arrive in that envelope; the letter that J implied she was going to send me, if I'm not mistaken, telling me off over and over, after describing in cruel detail what happened that February night when I was a monster. The postal service took care of losing them, and I've not heard from J since. And what if Alicia finally did decide to write me, is it possible that I'll never get to possess her handwriting?)