Loquela (6 page)

On Thursday afternoon I told C about my anxiety. I was lying in bed, worn out. I didn't want to see anybody I knew, the mere idea of picking up the phone made me want to puke. But I desperately needed to get out of my apartment and to speak. For a moment, I wished there were a place in Santiago where strangers could sit on benches and have conversations without having to interact in what we call social relations. A pretty little plaza with trees, streetlamps, and life. Where? Nowhere, dreaming, you knew it right away. As if La Cañada or La Alameda de las Delicias still existed, as if people still walked arm-in-arm, she said, as if we were of an age to go sit in the Plaza de Armas and watch the people go walking by. Then she told me about a place in Spain, Alicante, San Sebastián, like she was remembering it herself. A place where old people go to retire; there, facing the sea, they have set out hundreds of chairs, and when the weather is nice, they can sit down wherever they like to watch the waves come and go, to deliberately converse with anyone who is nearby. Imagine that in Chile such a place existed, a place called Neutria.

            
August 27
^th

            
3:10
A.M.

Before entering my room I sense an odor, a foul, rancid odor. How is it possible? My own body disturbs me, I can't even begin to imagine the displeasure I provoke. Ah, please, forgive my indelicacy in these notes. As might be expected, I read and read all week long. I was hoping to give fate a chance, what chance! Look at me, reading the weekly horoscope—a habit I no doubt retain from afternoons spent with J—where it says that Thursday is a special day: love moves into the phase of compromise. Alicia is so far away, I cannot see her and yet I evoke her, even now. (Why don't I just use her initials like I do with everyone else, why does she have the luck of being the woman whom I name while writing this diary, the only one not victim of my lethal capriciousness?)

The horrible thing is that reading doesn't make me calm; I spent the afternoon thinking about Donoso, about
Coronation
and its protagonist who doesn't live life, but just reflects on it. (Do I want to be him?) I regret getting drunk so easily, just because C is celebrating her birthday, I am going to reject Alicia's invitation to dance. Too many questions await me back at my desk. Yesterday, coming back from playing soccer, E's friend's car turned a corner and, instead of asking them to drop me off, I let out an absurd laugh. A few blocks later, realizing we'd passed my address, they stopped. They asked me why I hadn't said anything, I said I didn't know.

I think about corruption, about indecency, and about the unfathomable. At C's party, J was dancing, talking, and laughing—happy. I know I didn't deserve—nor did she—an explanation (or
even a greeting), but we were both waiting for one. That's why, in these first days of spring, I take up the contradiction of writing this diary, revelation and concealment, the resplendent whiteness of the page and the hope that if I play enough soccer, if I write and write, I'll be able to distance myself from the terror that after reading me, no one will ever want to see me. Give me shelter. I can't go on.

            
August 27
^th

            
12:00
P.M.

I want to explain myself but I am not, I'm not capable. My head hurts, my vision is spinning, and I'm nauseated. I felt deranged reading what I wrote last night with the last of my strength, its meaning escapes me now and I don't understand why I repeat the same words over and over: my re-creation of Neutria has failed. I wanted to arrive at that city, using the same methods as Violeta; alcoholic excess took me elsewhere, somewhere far wetter and more fateful than paper. Now my body is paying for that compulsion, if I'm brave enough to sit down with a pen I'll explain later.

While I made the bed and vacuumed the hallway, I thought about F. Peréz's (or Roland Barthes's) explanatory sentences regarding his article on Couve: he doesn't structure the text as a daily diary for rhetorical authenticity, not at all, rather he does so out of a desire to construct a discourse with marks of the process by which it was written. I refuse to let myself agree, I write this way because I lack the indifference necessary to construct a narrative
object that's alien to me, even if only in appearance. I admire this in Couve, Donoso, Balzac, Henry James, all those who, lashed by the storm, are able to cling to a third person, to produce dialogues without the intervention of the I, to describe, to divide themselves into chapters. As if in the middle of his suffering, in the moment they activated the electric chair, the condemned man ran through his mind a fairytale he'd composed in his cell, and he felt no pain, because his head was so occupied with finding the precise perspective from which to approach the final scene, when the protagonist finds the girl's body. (“I regret nothing” is the only thing that Violeta wrote, every day during the second half of July; the days of August were left blank, and then, furiously, she recounts a dream similar to one I had, if I'm able I'll write about it later.) Is that not, perhaps, what Violeta is doing, inventing a false city to escape from the days of Santiago, from the fact that there's someone stalking her with letters and phone calls, following her to class, perhaps not just one someone, but several? The doorbell is ringing.

            
August 27
^th

            
7:56
P.M.

“Just like dogs, I experience that need for the infinite.” Here in Santiago, nobody barks, and even if I heard barking I wouldn't be able to go see what was going on, who is biting what. I wish I were Lautréamont, I wish I could write just one sentence without paraphrasing, I wish I'd been born before the printing press, and
that I didn't speak with someone else's voice whenever I want to make myself understood, to say what it is I imagine. (I'm going up to Alicia during a break, ready to blurt out what's eating me up inside: I love her. She looks at me stiffly, even though these days the spring air is sweet and lifts spirits, she doesn't smile at me. Just arcs her eyebrows. I open my mouth: “Like the dogs, I thirst for the infinite.” Her surprise is barely visible. I don't get it, what're you trying to say. I don't know, I answer, quieter all the time. But that's the sentence.)

But no, I would not have liked growing up without a library in the house. Honestly I'd despise my own ignorance even more, I'd believe in the ability to know everything through reading, I'd be a fucking parody of an academic. What is Alicia reading? I only know what she told me this afternoon: a costume party, a movie, a book all afternoon, and alone. I turned back toward the window and for a moment she was plainly sad, the pain in her bright eyes, the unusual movement of her fingers is unwritable, just like J's hypocritical smile last night. Did I mention that I saw her—smaller than ever, a shy little girl—on the dance floor? She's not pretty anymore, her thin waist developed rickets, the neck I sometimes bite in one of my nightmares was a vulgar piece of flesh. (Frightening, today, my inability to hold the pen. I endure getting the shit kicked out of me, like in that dream when I stayed asleep, blood in my eyes, knees to my face, and yet I can't stay seated throughout the day without perspiring, without my eyes burning and my tongue turning into cloth. Much less read.) Cross off Friday, full moon falling and buried, total darkness, and that's how it should be, get used to it.

In last night's dream, Alicia opened her legs for me in a white room. J led me by the hand up the street toward Cerro Santa Lucía, we lay down on the dry grass; Alicia and I were naked, we couldn't keep from clawing each other's skin, I could barely breathe through her biting. I clung to both of them desperately, but neither of them was who they seemed to be: Alicia had that particular taste of cigarettes that belonged to J; J's smile verged on foolishness and malice, like Alicia's. I prefer to write it like this: confusion, amalgamation, I don't want either of them except in pieces. Alicia's ears, J's mouth, Alicia's hands, her eyes, J's chin and torso, Alicia's hair, again her eyes. The hours go by so fast and are so false, it's stupid to stay up late when I have a tower of books waiting for me. Dreams don't matter either, I dream on the surface and thousands of images pass me by without stopping, I don't laugh or cry, I recognize none of the faces that brush up against me. I wake with the certainty that I've been up for three days.

            
August 30
^th

Physically exhausted and mentally ebullient. Absorbed. And I dream: again I find myself in the middle of a classroom at the university, all the desks are empty. Next to me a certain professor is waiting for the rest of the students to arrive, he gives me a friendly look and asks me questions: why do I think attendance is so low, are his lectures inadequate. As usual, I get ready to tell a half-truth, “you lack a certain profundity that approximates
something literary, but we're not really capable of expecting much anyway.” The scene is nothing more than a replica of everyday life; this is something that actually happens to me, I show up too early or move too slowly, such that, when I go to pick up J, I have to wait for her and converse with her father in the living room; or when I drop her off, we take so long saying goodbye that we wake up her little brother or run into her parents coming home from a dinner, a little drunk (them or me), and engage in these bizarre but fraught exchanges about how late or how early we are. The same thing happens to me with my professors, I'm often the first student to arrive, the only one who shows up on time; I greet the professor with a false smile and he takes advantage of the unanticipated intimacy to ask me questions.

Later in the dream we are finishing up a class on some author. The professor has entered into the nervous part of his monologue when he repeats the main ideas in different words, hoping that the charitable voice of some student will offer an opinion or interesting question—he never knows whether he'll have to end class early. In the end, the professor is quiet, frustrated. Just then, someone questions the typology of the novel's spaces. Your ideas are plausible, says the professor, but we can't know whether they're true, because they involve projecting ourselves beyond the text, to speculate about the couple's future, which the author denies us in the moment he writes the word “end.” (It seems that I was thinking [in the dream I was thinking, parallel to that discussion], about how the novel was unfair to me, its faithful reader. What happens if I want to follow the day-to-day life of a character who fascinates me, is it possible that I don't have the right to know if, in
Coronation
, Mario and Estela manage to escape poverty, make
a family, raise a beautiful daughter? But Estela is finished on the penultimate page, when at last the book reveals her to me as an extraordinary woman, it also takes her away from me, takes her right out of my hands, because I long to carry her with me beyond the confines of the paragraph. She'll never be held by the reader, only by Mario. Alicia, on the other hand: I could get up right now, get on a
micro
, get off in front of her building, buzz the intercom, go up, she opens the door, surprised; she's alone, I pull her to me; pressure, tangible and ephemeral desire, if I so desired. All things considered, I know more about Estela than I do about Alicia. And I'm more adventurous with her, of course, it's easy if the woman is invented, she doesn't have a body. Saying her name in the flesh, Estela, I don't feel the death rattles that Alicia provokes, each breath I use to name her is something lost, a wasted chance to hold her, kiss her all over, to speak and to be silent two inches from her face, breathe her tobacco smell before she departs for somewhere else, some faraway place, for Neutria, for old age, where my hands will only touch her in writing.)