Loquela (7 page)

Soon another hand goes up among the listeners in the class. A gringa is talking now. In the face of the general stupor, her question, which is heard out of context, seems to reveal a doubt that was burning inside all of us before we came into the classroom; I smile hearing her poorly pronounced Spanish: “Excuse me, professor, but do you know what happened to the student Violeta Drago?” The professor goes pale, looks at the floor, unbuttons the collar of his shirt. He swallows and answers: “It's good of you to ask. The truth is my conscience won't let me work. I know Violeta's hidden story, she was, of course, a very dear student. It's a tragedy, but I want to assure you that if I didn't say anything it was
only because I didn't want to get myself in any trouble. Besides, no one has come to me to talk about it, no one has asked me anything.”

(And so, in all my apathetic infatuations, as a reader and as a body, where do I locate the attraction I feel for Violeta? She was a living human being, reliant on blood like myself or any other, and yet she has now become a memory. [And where are the pictures of her, the video footage, the sound of her voice captured on a cassette, her high school yearbook, where is she?] That main character in her deliriums, as fictional as Donoso's monsters, although she insists they were lived experiences. Alicia moves her head, angry. Would I ever be able to get anywhere near that albino girl—though she has appeared so often in my dreams of white walls in recent nights—if she weren't dead? The answer is no. Because when she died, the pages she'd written came to me. [Alicia reads this and says not a word.] We living beings are cursed, we can't know ourselves without the existence of inanimate objects: a novel, a personal diary, a letter. Another paradox: whoever claimed that the dead don't communicate is the one who is dead.)

In my dream the professor kept on explaining himself. “She showed me a few stories she was writing, very interesting. We met at a café on the fisherman's cove. She was ridiculously nervous when she showed up, barely hanging onto a pile of loose papers, she told me they were dreams (dreams within the dream), not stories, and that she couldn't stay to talk because she had to hurry to go help a friend. A friend of hers was going to be killed within a half hour, or have stones thrown at him, or get turned over to the police, I can't remember. She ran off down the street. I
followed her of course, in my car at a safe distance. Suddenly I was stopped by the sound of a gunshot. I saw Violeta and a boy clinging to each other, the boy—I don't know if you know him—who walks around out on the quad with his books and notebooks; he was pale from the shot, I already said it, from the bullet that had struck Violeta too. The two kids—I really want you to understand this—were staring out at the sea; like they died trying to catch a glimpse of the horizon of Neutria, still on their feet, bleeding out, rigid, entwined, eyes open to the sea. It was a statue, I don't know if I'm making myself clear: they were the very same statue that's been down on the waterfront for years, do you get it?

Then the class and the professor disappear. I find myself walking along that same tourist stretch, along the waterfront from his story, along the boardwalk of a port city that I wouldn't have known what to call besides: Neutria. I walked for hours. Neutria, now that I write it I understand my vacillation, but I was there; now, when I reread my dream I recognize that salty aroma, that air that's impossible to find in Concón, or Iquique, or San Antonio, just as I imagined those streets when I read Violeta's pages! And in this city there were, in effect, not one, but hundreds of identical statues; in every Neutrian plaza, the same plaster and marble couple, clinging to each other, in all those classical profiles, the demented eyes of Violeta, her hair white against a masculine face.

That Sunday afternoon, in my dream, I sat down on a bench in the plaza, surrounded by adolescents touching each other for the first time, two old people watching everything, a middle aged couple arm-in-arm, a balloon vendor, an organ grinder, children, dogs. From the water rushing out of the fountain that plaza's statue had become, through the bustle of the crowd, a faint voice
called my name. I approached the fountain and heard the sound of a small waterfall: it wasn't the bullet, it was the professor; it's not a gunshot, it's a sentence; not a detective novel, but an academic essay, a letter, a prayer. Then another image was superimposed: me and ten people whom I love, around a table. Sitting in the dining room of my old childhood home, in Rancagua. I held a thick pen in my hand, a felt-tipped pen with which I wrote a hundred insults on a plastic whiteboard: “Go away, fucking fuckhead professor, decrepit piece of shit, motherfucking fairy, get out of my body.” Someone shakes me awake; Alicia (or J) asks me about Violeta, where is Violeta. I write another sentence on the whiteboard: “Carlos closed the small notebook.” Then everyone remains still and reads what I write in silence, and I wake up, furious that I can't remember what it was I wrote that was so important, realizing at last that I am not Carlos, that no one calls me Carlos.

THE NOVEL

That night Carlos slept at his parents' house because he had to watch his little sister. Elisa had asked to use his home studio, she needed to put together some pieces of iron and concrete. Bernarda, a friend from university, who was also taking the opportunity to assemble her project for sculpture class, went with her. By seven they'd finished moving their materials into Carlos's studio. In the living room, Alicia spent the afternoon cutting pieces of glossy paper, which later she'd glue on top of old family photos. Elisa, sitting beside her, stared at the entrance to a house, where two extremely elegant men—impeccable dark suits, handkerchiefs in their breast pockets, starched collars, and gelled hair—smiled at the camera. One of them held a newborn baby in his arms. In the background, the sun setting into the sea, a boat, a streetcar turning the corner, one of the early automobiles. The distant setting sun had already been altered by Alicia's scissors: on top of it she put a flat, orange semicircle. Elisa asked, jokingly, which of the men was Gardel. I bet that's him, indicating the newborn. Alicia let out a little laugh and reassumed her posture of concentration. Gardel was her grandfather, she said; Carlos's grandfather too. Originally these men had been standing in Valparaiso, but now that paper circle was an all-encompassing sun that didn't resemble the sun of that city. It was the sun of Neutria. Elisa sat
watching how her boyfriend's cousin pronounced this unfamiliar word: Neutria. Neutria still retained a coastal charm, unlike Valparaiso or Puerto Aysén. Industries had not yet overrun its beaches, a neighboring city hadn't robbed it of its grasses, its flowers, its tranquility, because there was nothing, not even a country house, for a hundred kilometers in any direction. Bernarda asked them what they were talking about: she brought in some bottles of beer, peanuts, three glasses. Elisa got up and went to put a tape in the stereo. That night the heat was unbearable.

“Dancing Queen” played at full volume. They'd already been drinking, they were dancing almost without realizing it. Another song and another bottle of beer, until the tape stopped and, with the silence, came the certainty that they hadn't gotten any work done. Alicia picked up her scissors and papers again. Jars of latex paint with brushes inside them and some plaster figures were waiting for Bernarda, while Elisa, squatting, was coating rusty old pieces of iron with concrete. At a certain point in the night, a rush of air slammed the door to Carlos's room and, little by little, the window pushed open. Elisa and Bernarda glanced up and the tools fell from their hands: a strange face was peering in from the street, watching them. All three gazes were fixed until Elisa, all at once, shut the window and the curtains, and Bernarda turned off the light. A light from the street outlined the silhouette of the watcher on the curtain, immobile, in profile, waiting for a few seconds. The door to the house was opened from outside. It was Alicia coming in, she called to them in a high-pitched voice. She came into the room and sat down on the floor next to them. She was frightened, she said: before going to bed she'd gone to take the trash out to the street; she was putting the bags next to the neighbor's when she noticed a man sitting on the sidewalk, smoking, staring at the ground. The guy commented that if there was any music that could wake the dead, it was ABBA. Alicia started walking faster
toward the door, imagining that any hesitation would result in a heavy hand on her arm, then he'd be inside the house, in the darkness. She managed to turn the key, go inside, shut the door, and stay still waiting for the furious rattling of the doorknob. But the man decided to leave. Alicia, Elisa, and Bernarda sighed, they didn't move, they talked until they fell asleep right there, leaning against the wall, huddled together.

THE SENDER

I want you to know that if I die young I'm going to stick around.

Like the foam on a wave photographed in black and white one winter afternoon, a photograph I found in a library book by one of the Corporalists: gray sky, white spots from errors in the developing process, stripes cutting across the photographic paper. And in the background, the horizon, black like a thick wall of water that should still be, should have been, moving, forming part of time, water that will never be in the same position again, a faint glimmer and life, or better, each second's passing reminding me that I'm going to die. The distant glimmer—no suggestion of color, just a glimmer streaking across the black water—is not foam, delicious foam running toward me without ever wetting my feet, foam dissolving in the surf that leaves without leaving. The rocks, another shadow on the sea, I can't walk on that beach; to enter that place is to inevitably leave another place behind; seeing myself sitting on a beach wearing a black dress and dark sunglasses is to no longer see myself standing, naked, walking into the sea, bent over this notebook, dancing with you at a party. I choose one image, I lose the rest.

I recall, or rather I write, a memory, saying that this word, this situation, and this place correspond to the exact moment that I saw you for the first time, coming out through the university's main entrance, closer and closer to death all the time: I saw you coming out in a dozen different ways, if you want to know; you were you and you were other, you were a girl who sat next to me in a class; you took a slight step forward, no, you went down two stairs, you touched your backpack, your hair, you focused on me immediately; there were three or more people between us, you closed your eyes from all the sleepiness, you saw me blearily out here, in the same position I adopt every morning, day after day, my eyes absorbing the slightest variations that have occurred on the university's façade during the past two weeks.

To remember something and to write it down is akin to dying, denying that it could've happened another way. But I'm going to die anyway and I want at least to save one image, I insist, one token that tells me how I lost you, since in your gesture of greeting, a slight smile, it was already stated that in the end you were going to go: the frozen image has to be broken so you can move, so you can come close to where I am. Though the night is immobile—like the black and white photo of the beach landscape I found in the library of my professor, the only Corporalist I ever got to know—you are not afraid to come.

And you wonder why what began as an extensive and well-plotted letter has become a succession of fragments. Without answering, I say to you: when I no longer exist—or no longer exist in these pages but in that which is never lost or burned, that which can't even be called
word
because it lasts, because its meaning never
changes, your reading—please, please look at these fragments and understand that what I sought in Neutria wasn't continuity, but convergence. That from the first to last page I wrote, I knew that it wasn't I who initiated contact, nor would it be you who would complete it, just like the postman who gives you this envelope will think he's done his job, ignoring that with the act of delivering my correspondence he has helped bring you closer to Neutria and me closer to Santiago.

I had established a routine through which I was going to render the ekphrasis, an ancient name for the writing of the present: ecstatic descriptions of a situation in which the totality is palpable. My routine, in a few words, consisted of going to write down my observations—in the same place, at the same time (eleven-thirty, ten steps in a straight line past the red kiosk)—of a foreign couple who often sat down to rest, briefly and in silence, before continuing their regular morning walk along the black beach. Of course, many times they—the centerpiece of this, my first picture—did not appear. On those occasions I tried to keep the order intact: I'd begin, moving left to right, in one paragraph, naming every detail my eyes touched, from the sand sticking to my foot to the impassable line of the sea in the background. The idea was to arrive at a description that was undisturbed except at the exact point where the amorous bodies, his and hers, with their tender and gentle—if not weary—movements, interrupted the recursive vision of the ocean waves. Each one of her fingers on his face, traveling slowly down to his neck, completing a movement I might never see again. And three days later, when the couple reappeared, walking, in different clothes and a detail in the expression on their faces
acquired from the weight, I mean, the passing of the days, when she asked that they rest for a while and he lay down beside her on the sand, the caress would invariably be distinct, the woman's skin other, the approach of his fingernails different, foreign the wrinkles, the shine, the dryness, the position of a single hair growing at the base of the ring finger that disappeared within two weeks, blending in with the stain on his hand—was he a painter?—maybe a shadow her nose projected onto those knuckles that were touching her, their edges diffuse on that cloudy day.

I was seeking to prove that the shapes their bodies could take in my picture were infinite, unlike the background of the beach which I deliberately tried to describe in the same number of crystallized sentences every time, such that if there were two or three days that the couple didn't appear, the paragraphs in my notebook would necessarily be identical: if the sand on the beach was immutable, the waves changed so much that it was always the same wave. And this way I was able to reduce the observation of the sea to a simple formula; the couple, on the other hand, when they came into my picture, never, not even once, allowed me to repeat the expressions of my description. So, through months of work, I was able to establish in my writing what, in your words, is “my makeshift Manichean vision”: across an immortal backdrop, the human couple in constant motion. And I attributed the capacity to fix those two bodies that didn't want to linger in my picture to a noun: benevolence.

In the last days of summer, the beach was no longer the same as in my descriptions. Maybe writing erodes too, in the end it's ink on paper, matter on matter, you know this better than I: a body
tends to displace any other body that occupies its space, words end up crushing the silence, and that's why I write you; in the end I'll make that which has no body triumph over that which does, and that is the story, the ostentatious sentences that prevent me from immediately beginning to tell you about my last weeks in Neutria.

I hate your foul-smelling flesh and love remembering when you supported the full weight of your body on top of mine. But no. The night extends outside, in the ugly Santiago streets that resound louder and louder, telling me: you'll never say anything to anyone, your words will be cups, but not cups full of water for the thirsty—your time is running out and the night is long—but cups that slip from your hands and begin their fateful fall; this notebook transcribes the precise instant that the cup is suspended in the air before turning to dust on the ground. It won't be transcendence I attain but silence, because I can't comprehend the way I scratched out, the slaps you put up with in the name of our love—while I wept, begging your forgiveness on a dark and disappeared Neutrian street, bending down to unbutton your pants, but you took a quick step backwards and I, humiliated, mocked your pseudo-Corporalism—the brevity of that memory that in my notebook takes up no more than three words—blow, tears, insult (and before it had been so lovely, when you brought me home in a taxi, we were coming from the university, we'd had our first kiss in the library, a one-second kiss, just lips, I was scared and I felt a wave of blood in my neck, a powerful heartbeat, but a heartbeat)—stays with me so I live it over and over again, breaking up.

Will a wondrous thing that occurred only once—and all too quickly—make sense again when it's repeated ad infinitum? You
decide, you've already received these pages, if I am now in eternity or simply in the lines of a novel, as a person, as a persona, as a model; you decide if I die with you in the moment you stop reading me. Who more than you, the Corporalist, would long for our bodies to stay, touching each other, in these pages. Fleetingly me, because I can't write you letters from the beyond or the rottenness, I prefer to call it the triumph of silence—not eternity—so that you forget what I'm saying and stay with my body, so that you put what there is to put where it is missing.

In the last days of summer, the beach was no longer the same as in my descriptions. Maybe writing erodes too—you tell me, you're the one who writes. The couple who had come to occupy the center of my picture stopped appearing, walking right to left across the sand, their movements slowing down before they disappeared altogether, and then my sentences could only repeat the landscape, a wave breaking over a wave breaking over a wave breaking over a wave breaking over a wave breaking. The ekphrasis retreated like the undertow, the picture yielded and there appeared multiple glimmers I'd never seen before, and would never see again: the shape of the wave—breaking in dozens of movements that I could scarcely individuate, much less reduce to the word ocean, because they came and went—disappearing like all the water that falls on you when you go under.

I went home shivering. The experiment had exploded in front of my face, the ekphrasis had revealed itself and I'd been unable to write it. Alicia consoled me when she said my tears confused her, that there was no way to know if my writing had succeeded or
failed. Looking me in the eyes, she asked me to let her do a final session, that, in her schoolgirl handwriting, I let her do a final description of the black beach, and then I could keep the results if they seemed useful. I accepted.

The next day, Alicia walked eleven steps in a straight line past the kiosk toward the ocean, she sat down and did her best to find the exact words to describe each wave until they came to form a single wall of water that broke without ever ceasing to break, immobile in the moment that the foreign couple approached, walking along the beach. They looked exhausted; he rolled up his pants and she sat down and looked out at the sea without saying anything. Behind them, Alicia—dressed in a black dress and dark sunglasses as if acting out the joke she'd made: this seems like a job for a private detective—started unsuccessfully to write down every gesture the couple made: she lifts her hand and touches his mouth, brushing away a stain on his face that looked like sand, but then it's darker—her finger's shadow, I suggested, but Alicia raised her voice to tell me no; it's a minute drawing in black pencil—and he's unfazed when she skillfully draws lines on his face, so quickly that he doesn't even discover the pencil against his cheek until she stops, she kisses him and says something in his ear.

You know, Alicia says to me, the two of us trying to fix movement using words and she, the cunt, adds a drawing to our picture, three lines—the sand, the waves, and the horizon—and two points—the sun high on his face and an unknown figure moving off down the beach. That slut ruins our chance to halt what's spinning in circles, vibrating, shaking, ending up on the page convincing us that, nevertheless, the world that falls on top of us can also
be suspended. Sky, sand, sea, wave cease falling; they stay still around us and we're able to sit on the sand, dive into the sea, ride the wave, never lose sight of the stars that begin appearing in the sky, and in this way we save Neutria. You know, yells Alicia: that little bitch isn't stupid like us; she draws, tattoos, marks the body she adores with a figure that doesn't change, and no one will ever even turn these pages. Then the couple heard our voices. Their eyes turned curiously toward me, and I could clearly make out their faces; perhaps you can guess whom they resembled. Every morning you went with me to walk on that beach, that day you heard a shout behind us, you saw me walking toward the kiosk and also returning home with the notebook under my arm, looking calm, though in truth we ran at full speed, Alicia and I, laughing. She chided me in a low voice: but that's the boy from the university, the one writing the novel, the one who stares at you in class. You were with him every morning, you little minx. I'm jealous, why didn't you tell me?