Loquela (4 page)

            
August 17
^th

I've decided that, for the moment, I've said enough. I should read, read, otherwise my own writing will become repetitive. Just like Alicia or J when you spend too much time with them: words begin to become excessive. All that's left are the gestures, the looks, the hands, the mouth.

I have a large envelope containing two notebooks that belong to the albino girl, Violeta. Belonged, I should say, she was writing in them just before she was killed. One of the notebooks is green, the other is covered in wrapping paper. One of them contains paragraphs she calls “Descriptions of the Sea”; the other, her dreams. Alicia gave me the envelope so that, in exchange, I'd give her the letter from Violeta that was (mistakenly) delivered to my address. I must read, read.

(A little drunk, Alicia asked me who this Carlos was that I'd been talking about. I told her that I'd send her another letter that would endeavor to explain this inexplicable thing. She told me that I'm evil. In spite of myself, I came up with a sentence from the intolerable
La nueva novela
by the homonymous Carlos Fuentes, regarding Cortázar, Oliveira, and Traveler: “Confronting the double incarnation there are only two answers: murder or madness.” I think about how fond J and I were of
Hopscotch
at one time, just like Alicia, who told me that when she was sixteen she did a sort of pilgrimage through the streets of Paris where the drama of Oliveira and Maga unfolded, I don't want to laugh at such innocence. Talita and Maga, Oliveira and Traveler. The problem with doubles is that they must inevitably exterminate each other. At some point I'll write about Goytisolo's
State of Siege
,
where he claims that everyone has a virtual enemy. Who am I going to kill if I'm my own enemy! The only part of
Hopscotch
that's worth the effort is the part that takes place in Buenos Aires. The final schizophrenia.)

            
August 18
^th

In the dining hall at the university I kept repeating the phrase “this is not a good year” and P got pissed off, she almost threw her food in my face. During my thesis seminar, while the professor was talking, making sterile attempts to provoke some sort of response from us students, I observed the faces of my colleagues: heads down, eyes inert, hands hidden. Smug mouths: we've already heard this too many times, this is interesting but it's too early in the morning and the sky is very gray; what the professor was saying was external, we're in our final year of studying literature and in one way or another we've made up our minds to forget that we don't want to be here. The book was actually entertaining, like TV, parties, the cinema. The photocopies had a distinct smell, we can simulate an analysis of the mythical structure of
One Hundred Years of Solitude
, for two hours we drink down lessons of generative linguistics with our coffee, the rest of the day we live! We walk around the campus, holding hands with our girlfriends, we go to a theater performance, then suddenly a book appears in the display case. One book. We touch it, it's a beautiful edition. I sit down in the plaza and run my eyes over every line, every letter, I enter that historical world, I'm just another one of
those characters on the edge of the abyss and my skin is crawling, I convince myself of repulsive human uncertainty, of suffering, of the declamation, of the verbal chaos, and of the silence of the last paragraph; ominous, death. I turn off the light above my head and think in silence: “If God doesn't exist then this is all there is: disappointment, depopulation, the asepsis of the word
end
.” You don't think about the courage of writing a novel in a Santiago on the brink of collapse, it doesn't occur to you that the only valid thing would be to make up poems in your mind, like Borges, entire verses in your mind, go over them a couple times before falling asleep, and the possibility of their publication evaporates forever; you enjoy yourself for a while fantasizing about how publishers and critics should be executioners of benevolent smiles; you don't think, you just feel. You turn the last page, the image of the protagonists curled up together, cynical, afraid to pierce the moment with the word; the question “how are you, are you still sad?” actually means “I can't hold you any longer, we can't spend our lives holding each other, sheltered from the world”; which actually means that when you turn off the light above you, you discover that your body exists and functions on its own, that if at some point you're lucky enough to be sleeping with your wife breathing deeply a few centimeters away, you'll dream of another woman, in spite of this you must wake yourself up, slowly pull her close, and repeat that you love her, that you live together.

(Abuse of “that,” the self-indulgences of my writing “that,” the colon, and the semicolon. Proof that I write poorly but that I say something, always with the same words, yet saying something that matters. I reread this. My head hurts [abuse of “but”], but for the first time in many days I've been able to recover a passing
happiness. I'm alone, I repeat to myself, and yet there are so many pages, so many names, so many years.) You lie down with a book clutched tightly in your hands. The book has done all of this to you: weeping. Real tears, really. Not like the ones that you shed during the drunken display in Alicia's car, the sea that ran down your face, rupturing the false desire that was growing between the two of you, too soon, too forced. I abuse repetitions, I lose plotlines. You wake up early, the faces stop screaming at you, that hand retracts from your body, the albino girl from the dream evaporates. You know that today it is an anxious Carlos. You do everything quickly; you don't sing or think about Alicia in the shower, no breakfast, the
micro
comes by on the hour and you find a seat next to the girl with the curly hair, the really attractive one who's always talking to people by the water fountain in the corner of the quad. You show up to your seminar, still tasting the novel, wanting to open up to the professor and tell him, with complete respect, that during the part when the guy and young girl have their encounter in the middle of the jungle (or was it in the middle of the dance floor dressed up as beggars or transvestites?), you got a phone call from Alicia. The funny thing, you'd tell the professor, is that, for a second, Alicia's voice was J's voice (it's possible, both voices are deep and delicate), which made you shiver; the book fell from your hands and the glass of red powdered juice that you were drinking slid off the table. The professor might smile at the anecdote because he's a good person, you know you're not that funny, you're already tired of playing the fool. So that's it, the professor's smile injects a soft warmth into your body, tomorrow will be less gray, the time not so early, the dream will have vanished. Even when the professor takes attendance, in the moment that he asks
if anyone knows a certain individual who has never attended class and you suggest that perhaps it's a pseudonym, you think you hear a burst of laughter. The professor didn't get the joke, the other students keep staring at the floor with empty expressions though this time they're firmly griping their book bags, getting ready to leave as soon as possible. Someone laughs, but you see that there's no one left in the classroom. “Funny,” you think absurdly, walking and promising yourself to try to write more entertaining paragraphs; I promise to find out what it is that's hidden in my books: the warm slap, the irresistible phrase with which Alicia wakes my eyes from their lethargy.

THE NOVEL

Sitting on a bench in the plaza, Carlos was drawing a tree. He groaned and crumpled up the paper, realizing that every day his lines were getting worse; the tree he was sketching looked nothing like the one in front of him, it was more like a building or a statue. A few days ago, his little sister had asked him to teach her to draw hands. To start with he showed her how to copy her own, the left. But in the end, Josefa looked at his drawing and narrowed her eyes: that's not a hand, she said, it's the claws of a beast. He put the sketch down beside him and looked around the plaza. A modest, pretty schoolgirl passed by in front of him. Holding her by the hand was a man dressed in a suit and tie, one of those guys who'd run you over to get to the bank on time. What a waste, thought Carlos.

Then he picked up his sketch again. He didn't give the couple another thought, they'll end up on some bench somewhere, as usual, he said to himself. The tree was no longer a tree but a gathering of strange shadows, immense stains suggesting shapes: a couple through a window and perhaps someone spying from the corner, lying in wait. He was distracted by a cry that gradually became a scream: a girl was calling for help. He walked calmly to the other side of the plaza, where he found a circle of onlookers gathering around the same schoolgirl he'd seen before, whose torn uniform didn't cover the bruises on her legs. A compassionate
woman who was trying to console the girl retrieved her buttonless blouse from the bushes. A man was asking questions. The degenerate had run away, he realized, and the schoolgirl cried, ignoring all the people, hands covering her face. Nothing about her was sexy now, just the opposite, he thought, walking away. He realized that the girl's blue uniform was just like the one Elisa had been wearing only a few years before. He remembered afternoons junior year when he'd wait for her outside the school before they'd walk home together down Alcántara. Sometimes she walked a few steps ahead, other times he led the way, but walking backwards, facing Elisa. He never took his eyes off her, not her, not that uniform; he could barely contain the desire to slip his hand up under her blue skirt. He called her from a payphone, fearing she wouldn't be there. She answered and asked him a question: why did his voice sound so different, like he was someone else entirely.

THE SENDER

At last. If it's difficult for you to comprehend my writing and you get lost in my inconclusive sentences it's because I write against the waning day. My hours are like cups of water confronting a thirst. Although I'm trying to be as honest as I can, understand that not even on the edge of the pit can I find a way to say the right thing. What matters is my ultimate sincerity, that which speaks to the other, to you and not to me. I'll use up a lot of ink adapting to your presence, but I trust that it'll be worth it, or better, that I did the only thing left for me to do. Because there's not one disinterested sentence here, not even being crazy about you, as they say, alters my intention: to tell you why I found myself forced to abandon Neutria.

When I was a little girl, my hair came down to my waist and sparkled like the snow. Fearful, that's how children are. But once, hearing Alicia's warning cries, I turned around and there you were, concealing the scissors in your woolen fingers. I snatched them away from you easily, while you looked at me with surprise but without fear, the same look—let's say empty yet impassioned—that you gave me last Saturday at Alicia's party as night was falling; you were intoxicated and charming, and I was intrigued when you
responded that yes, that now, with me, you were someone else and not Carlos in Neutria. Let's not go quite so fast, just fast enough to unsettle your reading and to make you aware that your Sunday headache isn't just the result of a night of drinking, but of having remembered the most important and hardest thing to remember.

Back then I was very small. You know: smiling, secluded inside the house, my long white hair seeking the light of day to shine. The girl kept hidden three houses away from yours. I spend my time playing with Alicia, tall and attractive. You boys tease us, calling us Snowflake, Miss Transparent, Glassgirl. My hair, long as a summer day, is an obsession for you, because you enjoy ruining things that require care: you stomp on flowers in the garden of a woman who lives all alone, you wake up early to rearrange the pages of the newspaper, freshly dropped on the doorstep, you terrorize, with a dozen different calls, your neighbor's cage of parrots. You threaten me: doll hair, we're gonna cut off your doll hair. I've gotten used to seeing you through the window, brandishing scissors. I don't even tell on you, I just run to my room. Alicia is the one who confronts you, with her deafening, high-pitched screams, one time I punch your most annoying friend, the fat one, in the face, and he goes off and cries behind a tree. You make fun of him, and for a little while I get you guys to forget about my hair, because you're busy inventing a supposed romance between Alicia and her victim, the fat boy.

Allow me this speed with which I write you, a different rhythm from the immobile sentences I sought in most of my notebooks; it's just that, inevitably, there's someone zeroing in on this house, someone who wants my end. I shouldn't say this, but what I hope is that you stop him. Besides, at this point in my recollections,
you should already be able to guess what comes next. Because another year passes and again one of you begins to fixate on my hair, which I spend my time brushing. The end of summer, an unusually detailed image from early childhood: the city grayer than ever, people running over each other in the streets to buy textbooks, pens, spiral notebooks, even the sun's presence is lost, dissolving into the monotone sky, dirty, more dust than anything. It's the awful Santiago of our childhood, doubly abandoned. So bad that I only recall one moment of fun that took place outside the confines of the house: two naïve girls shouting gleefully, soaking each other with a hose, white with green stripes, me and Alicia. All of a sudden, she freezes. I see myself turning instinctively around and I find your eyes, wide with surprise. You hide the scissors behind your back. I come at you with a violence that frightens even me, grab the scissors away from you, your friends, hanging back a little ways, speculate in low voices, expecting you to defend yourself, not just stand there, impassive, not crying or smiling, doing nothing: that's a difficult expression for a child to make. Serious as an animal. We leave you there, fixed to that spot, and go inside the house.

You should know this part better than I do. To me it seems that what happens next is that in the following days your group of men—forgive me, boys—gathers in the rundown shack at the abandoned train station that you guys call The Clubhouse and they decide to make an example of you, or maybe to kick you out for being worthless and a coward. The truth is that after I take the scissors away from you, all the pranks you guys pull fail, and so the group begins to fall apart: one family leaves the neighborhood, others disappear without explanation, you avoid meetings
at The Clubhouse. It's possible that you guys just got bored of each other or were too busy with school. I remember realizing that life in the passageway was ending and that we were entering Neutria when I watched the other boys stop in front of your house on their bikes and invite you to go get ice cream; you come out and don't know how to lie, you don't understand why, but they believe you when you tell them that you have to go to the supermarket with your mother, for the first time you're able to get out of going with them, and you're left alone in the exact moment that Alicia and I say to ourselves that from now on this is Neutria, without even knowing what we mean. I know, I can already hear your arrogant response: it was a childish way to give name to the unknown, to evade fear through familiarization. That's what you said to me on Saturday, at the party. That sometimes, when you thought about it, you found our overflowing imagination interesting, an intriguing subject for a novel even; but a few pages later we were tragic, demented, frightening.

What comes next is the moment in which my childhood multiplies into details I'd love to recount and cannot. Most of them were lost the instant we played together, the rest are still there, in Neutria, and you can see them for yourself. Sometimes Neutria was the land of semi-divine emperors, of infinite cruelty or kindness, whose slothful and obese courtiers, in contrast, engaged in decadent melodramas. Other times it was a simple village where farmers, shepherds, and foreigners traded honey, cheese, bread, or fruit for a song or an entertaining story. Or it was the nexus of activity for stylized spies, convertibles, casinos, firearms, hotels, highways, and femme fatales. And in the middle of all those adult faces appears a boyish one, yours, insistently inquiring what it is
that we're playing, and coldly I reply that we're playing the city of Neutria, not expecting you to make fun of us: you talk to yourself—my mother says people who talk to themselves are lunatics. Alicia gets up, says again that it isn't make-believe, that Neutria exists; it's a beautiful place, incredible, we travel there on long weekends with our parents. It's so much fun that we like to recall everything that happened there. That's what we're doing, remembering all the wondrous things, not inventing them.

Of course, you're the only boy who talks to us and asks us questions. Alicia and I don't talk about this, but we're fascinated that you come around and bother us. Make memory, that's what I said to you, with oh so drunken words, at the party when you came up and hugged me and asked me how I still remembered: you were my first, one never forgets her first. It also pleases us that you watch us play through the window and then ring the doorbell and run away, because there's cruelty in our inventiveness, because your doubt challenged us. The game changes. The two of us go on to describe everything that occurs in Neutria in order—I start writing in notebooks, we draw a rudimentary map—and from one day to the next every detail of Santiago interests us: the drainage system, the hierarchy of the authorities, the traffic, the demographic distribution, and I surprise myself by paying great attention in my history and geography classes. With the sole objective of convincing you of Neutria's existence, I open my eyes to the place where I live and realize how much I hate it, I also hear how much other people abhor this chunk of concrete and how much they'd give to move to the coast, to the beach, to the cordillera, wherever. Yes, I know: this is nothing new.

It all began as a joke, as a small act of vengeance, because you had doubted us, and so it was only right that, in the end, it was back in your hands. Remember that winter, the last one on our street. You knock on my door every Friday afternoon and sarcastically ask us why our parents weren't taking us to Neutria that weekend. Forgive me, what you say is: that strange city. Alicia and I are sitting by the fireplace, that first time we're eating a big chocolate bar with almonds, and that is your excuse for coming in. It's raining, of this I'm certain. Alicia says we can't go to Neutria, it's dangerous to cross the great suspension bridge that leads to the city in a storm. The Black River is treacherous, it swells violently, swallowing cars and the boats coming in from the sea, rumor has it that it feeds on them, seriously, but also that this is the river's way of protesting that monstrosity of a bridge that's been built across it. You listen in silence, probably imagining the river not as a swollen stream but as an aquatic animal with a hard, aquamarine hide, something like a shadow. Then you ask if it eats people too, or just cars and boats, a silly notion, but we try hard to take it seriously. I hurry to respond, citing the legends of Neutrian fishermen, and then Alicia quickly recounts in specific detail the story of a man who, after falling in the river and being rescued, claimed to have been saved by a marine monster. You listen with amazement to the story that Alicia invents on the spot, with total disregard for the rules of Neutria we spent every afternoon writing. I felt betrayed, for the first time I hated her: I was jealous of the attention you were giving her. That night we argued, yelling at each other. Alicia didn't understand why I was so upset, for her it was all in fun, we were just making fun of you, of how much
you wanted to meddle in our business. I calmed down when she proposed that we come up with a new way to humiliate you, using the stories that you asked us to tell. Remembering how you sat down to listen to us, open-mouthed, sometimes asking absurd questions, making us feel superior, clever, intelligent, special, because you were foolish enough to believe us.

Until one day you stopped coming. The next day we waited for you, and the day after that, but you had disappeared. I didn't tell Alicia this, but I was miserable all week, I thought you'd gotten bored of our stories about Neutria. Not telling them made me forget about that city, it gave me the horrifying sensation that I was trapped in putrid Santiago. If I'd known what was coming, I would've preferred your appendicitis got worse rather than have you lie to us. But you lied and our laughter came to an end. On Sunday, you showed up unexpectedly and we went out onto the patio and asked you what'd happened and you stood very still, looking us in the eyes without blinking. You said: I went on a trip with my parents, they took me to visit Neutria. Alicia and I were only quiet for a second, we had to say something or we'd start to cry. It was the end of the game, a situation we'd foreseen so many times, the point when—according to our plan—we'd burst into savage, irrepressible laughter; choking, we'd tell you that Neutria didn't exist, and how could someone be idiotic enough to try and make us believe our own lie. I was about to say something but Alicia beat me to it, and it was a disaster: my neighbor, my playmate, my best friend turned on me. She sat down next to you, took your hand, smiled at you, happy because at last you knew Neutria. She asked you questions about the redesign of the Plaza de Armas, whether or not you'd gone to the ice cream shop near
the entrance to the black beach, if by chance you found the board-walk pretty. The words were already beginning to sound faraway, I couldn't stand to be in that place any longer, that place I didn't love, that place I hated. That afternoon was one of the last times I saw you, before the party last Saturday night. And yet Alicia and I have stayed in touch. It's been hard for us to go back to being the friends we were when we were young, but there were a few summers when she did come see me in Neutria.