Loquela (3 page)

And yet, the letter from Alicia's friend is still in the drawer. It's taken an effort not to open it, I should give it to Alicia tomorrow, it's addressed to her. (Every time Alicia sat down next to me in the quad, she seemed to be searching for a word. I talk and I talk. She remains distant. Is it possible that Alicia was born while her parents were traveling abroad somewhere? No, that was her friend, the one who died, the one who spent her life thinking of a way to escape, “to go back,” as Alicia says. Back where? And I chose to hide myself in this dusty apartment instead of wandering through the deserted fields of Rancagua.) They say that Alicia writes too, poems maybe. Pizarnik's eyes. Pizarnik's mouth. The professor at the university, with the uncomprehending smile: “Poetry is the woman: an image that contains and expresses itself through suggestion, with silences; narrative is like men: another image, but this time expansive, overwhelmingly explicit and verbose.” But Alicia looks so sure of herself, she gives me a sidelong glance and tells me about things that happened in her childhood. When she names them, the ten people she's been involved with in her life, they revolve around me, as if I knew them.

            
August 12
^th

            
7:50
P.M.

I don't want to sit and write, I'm exhausted, but if I stop I'll forget myself. I took an hour-long nap, an hour and a half, give or take, and I dreamed. This last week the nightmares have been constant, the face of the albino girl (Violeta?) cupped in the hands of some
man. The man caresses her, she maintains a stoical expression of sensual pleasure, a face of false enjoyment. The man was me, I mean, it wasn't me but the resemblance was horrifying. It was Carlos. The phone woke me, a telemarketer or something; I realized that it'd been years since I'd last written about Carlos and his girlfriend. At that time, J lived only a few blocks away, we'd wait for each other in the square, for the other to appear when one of us was sad and needed a shoulder to cry on. (And this longing, what is it?) I would give her little sheets of paper with poems written on them. Wow.

Pathetic Carlos. I found the notebook containing the story I wrote the summer of my and J's first kiss. “Carlos is actually just the opposite of me, I'm a coward. He's fearless, he acts,” that's how the opening paragraph starts. I took out Violeta's letter before lying down to go to bed. I stared at it. What would Carlos do in this situation? Open the envelope and read what it says.

            
August 13
^th

Wasted day. I've slept and slept, just now turning on the three lights in my room and the radio to wake myself up. I've never thought of dying by my own volition, but today I came close.

I feel like puking. I have to go to the bathroom every fifteen minutes and my face is burning. I drank a lot last night; this morning, walking to the university, an old lady offered me a job selling chocolates in an artisanal market, probably because I reeked horribly of alcohol. Self-pity is the word. Alicia used it against me
and I couldn't keep the tears from falling. She stopped the car and sat motionless, looking straight ahead, like she was still driving. Understand that I was drunk, that I've forgotten almost all my words and instead remember every single one of hers: they hurt as if they were burying me underground. I know I talked to her, or tried to talk, about the almost inexpressible pain the thing with J caused me. In her face I saw disappointment, that she was bewildered by my tears, that she was thinking: “So that's the big mystery, a simple case of loneliness and the inability to be alone.”

“I'm trembling. Delirious.” That, according to Alicia, was one of her dead friend's favorite expressions. Yes, I believe that justice should exist, that yes, there's such a thing as kindness. And then I realize mistakenly that these are just verbal constructions, because I can't help but think that last night I got exactly what I deserved: a few months ago, in a car parked along the curb, I was the same worn out statue that Alicia was last night. And J qualifying her miserable life (that same lack of self-love) was just like me, sitting in the passenger seat, watching my own tears fall. Without knowing it, Alicia hurt me the same way I wanted to hurt J when I told her I never wanted to see her again, never again. I wouldn't be surprised if Alicia told me the same thing last night. The symmetry, which had already disappeared, makes me think about God again. That I was a religious being, or something like that, added the callous Alicia with a reproachful tone. I should see a specialist; “check yourself in,” she told me. And me in the morning, almost having to force myself to get up: I'm bound for madness.

I called Alicia, the maid told me to hang on. She came back, unfortunately Alicita just went out, I wasn't able to catch her.
(White lie?) I don't want to lose her, I don't want to forget her faraway look, her rigid posture in front of the steering wheel; last night she was a wise woman. She'd never been as attractive as in the moment when she revealed her deepest disdain for me, and at the same time, deep down, she wanted to help me see beyond the pit where I've stuck my head. I'm going to puke.

I don't want to write about myself anymore, but it's no use, TV and music don't work; books even less; not the phone either. I just received a telephonic greeting from a supermarket; after hanging up I had to fight the urge to dial J's number. I miss her, but I wouldn't be able to handle hearing her. Alicia is so decent: she told me she didn't want to know anything about J, it was what it was, not a single miserable detail of the sordidness that went down between us. Alicia and I. Me and J. Like that time in the country, when my dog tore half of the chickens to shreds. My mom was horrified and I decided to teach him a lesson: I started by kicking him repeatedly over in the corner of the chicken coop until the poor thing cowered, howling in pain. I kept hitting him even though he looked at me with his most pained eyes—I was the master and I was giving him a beating. I restrained myself when he dropped to the ground. Then I ran to the river. Sitting on a large rock beside the brown water of a rushing branch of the Cachapoal, I watched as my dog approached, his head bowed in pure shame. He came up to me, frightened and guilty; I petted him. He was ashamed, even though it was I who'd almost beaten him to death, taking advantage of my superiority! What would Carlos have done? He would've taken each dead chicken, put it in front of the dog's nose, and then slapped the nose quickly and deftly. He would've seen Alicia, rigid in her seat, approached her
and, gently turning her head with his hand, kissed her softly, just lips, the way J kissed me in the car to force me to make a decision: truly damage her or be her friend again. And I waited for her to say the words: “Okay already, if that's what you need to hear: do whatever you want to me.” But instead, I started the car, drove her home, and told her that we'd never, ever see each other again. I don't know if I said goodbye to Alicia last night. I would've given her a kiss just like Carlos, like the other guys who stayed in her car, oh how I wanted her, but how can I imagine leaning in, how can I forget that what I'm writing isn't my diary but the diary of another, which in turn forms part of a detective novel or a study of death. (Thinking it over carefully, Carlos wouldn't commit the blunder of kissing his cousin. Because Carlos and Alicia are first cousins: two individuals of such rare will can only be bound by blood. He's had a girlfriend for several years; yes, he wouldn't dare cheat on Elisa, especially with his cousin.) I need to get my head out of this pit; I'm going to turn on the TV.

(Edgardo Marín, the soccer commentator, says he's not surprised at all that a player punched a reporter, that an ex-soldier gave an uppercut to a student protesting about disappeared detainees, and not only that, but it didn't surprise him that everyone acted like nothing happened, like it was perfectly normal for Colo Colo's owner to force a reporter to leave a press conference and for his colleagues to just stand there, regarding him impassively, not even getting up and leaving in solidarity. Because [he says, and he's right] if I get used to living in fear, the frustration makes me a monster: fear engenders violence. I tried to rape the girl I loved, the next day the whole thing was silenced, it never happened; or worse, she and I decided to stop seeing each other, to stop talking,
but the more it's hidden the deeper the wound gets, until I can't take it anymore and I get up, go to her house, and force myself on her, tearing her clothes amid her desperate screams and my pleasure, would I really feel pleasure? I live [we live in Chile, the commentator says] with a head full of filth. That's why I'm going crazy, I can only write dreams and alcoholic deliriums, unleashing the monster [the other]: I'm Carlos's scattered dust. And that's why Alicia stared straight ahead while I burst into tears in the car, because she's not from here, she has nothing to do with these dead bodies [the ones that'll inhabit these pages], because she's kind, even though she denies it, even though later, her jaw set, she says: “you don't know me at all.” As always, I'm simplifying, I'm idealizing, I'm very literal; I should run away to the country that Alicia's from, to the city where her friend Violeta wanted to live. Or where she is now. Here in Santiago we're all going to end up stabbing each other.)

            
August 16
^th

A quote from a different magazine: “Kristeva changes the location of things. She always destroys our last prejudice, the one you thought you could be reassured by, could take pride in (Barthes).” I should go back to reading. I wish I had more desire to write, but I'm exhausted. Abuse of the pen, the hope or the struggle to make this diary form part of something greater, so that it illuminates and is illuminated by another text. On the other hand, there is the fear that I've forgotten the important moments. (What is a diary
if not a retelling, an attempt to give narrative significance to a life that has no order? A deception.)

Saturday night, during a party at S's house, Alicia completely ignored me, and I couldn't get into the game. We were strangers for hours, like I didn't know she was following me with her eyes. At one point we found ourselves dancing face to face, and our movements seemed to correspond to two entirely different songs, then she disappeared toward the kitchen. A while later, I ran into her again: I was dancing enthusiastically and laughing with M; she was letting P wrap his arms around her. (Fear of the future, when she'll be off traveling and not here.) She wasn't the same either, struggling to show me that I wasn't just another random guy on the university quad. She barely smiled, she didn't ask how I was, even though she always does. (There's no one else like her, I say, but I prove myself wrong if I go out on Providencia and count how many girls there are who're just like J.) Before getting up off the bench in the quad (she's always going somewhere), Alicia asks me to stop talking about the party: “Who are you, the one from Saturday or the one from Thursday?” I respond that today I am Carlos. She doesn't laugh. I'm losing my spark, she said this herself. With a distinct quiver of her tight lips, Alicia tells me that tomorrow she is going to give me something, something I have to read as if it were more important than any of my unspoken obsessions, dedicate more time to it than to my thesis. I kiss my thumb and say: “a matter of life and death.” (She blinks, she hates me, I don't want her to go, I want to spend my last days with Alicia.) She doesn't find my comment funny and stands up.