Loquela (15 page)

THE NOVEL

The doorbell rang. Carlos muted the TV and hurried to turn on lights in his bedroom, the hallway, the living room, and the kitchen, as well as the lamp outside. He was about to turn the knob, just as the doorbell rang for a second time. Elisa was waiting for him, almost falling against the door, with a smile that vanished just as soon as her arms touched his and, instead of greeting her, Carlos asked a question: had she lost her key? She was having trouble speaking, could they please close the curtains and turn off the lights, she said, so that no one would see them from the street. Then, in the armchair, she wrapped her arms around her legs and buried her face between her knees: there was something Elisa didn't want to see, or wished she'd never witnessed, thought Carlos as he went through the house flipping switches. In the kitchen he found a long white candle; he lit it, let a few drops of wax fall in an ashtray, stuck it there, went to the living room, and sat down timidly next to his girlfriend. Outside a strange wind was blowing, it made the windows vibrate. Gently she stretched one arm across his chest, murmuring that tonight there was a full moon. I had another bad dream, she said, like back in high school: she found herself in the faraway south, on the ranch of one of her father's friends, a pampa of such uniformly short grass that, from where she'd materialized, she could see, in the distance, the inhospitable waves
of the Strait of Magellan. The landscape was empty, as if the hundreds of cows, the house, and the garden had been uprooted by a storm. She was running, unable to stop, across the pastures, struggling, soaked by rain, to advance through the mud, she could make out the sea and experienced a feeling akin to hope; then she tripped. She stayed on the ground looking at the palms of her hands and her scraped knees, dirty, bleeding. When she lifted her head and continued to run, she discovered that the hopeful vision of the sea was, suddenly, terrifying. None of her muscles obeyed her. On the shore was a boat that appeared ready to launch, to save itself from the imminent rising of the storm. Or maybe she fell again and saw, in the distance, the boat begin to depart without her. They couldn't wait for her anymore. Before she lost sight of the crew in the shadow of the storm, she was able to make out the silhouette of Carlos, an oar in his hands, his posture severe. Then she ran on, the mud came up to her knees and she was drenched; crying, she fell to the ground again. When she saw the empty sea, she felt calm for a moment, allowing herself to forget the need to reach the shore, until the vessel reappeared in which Carlos and the others made the decision to leave her behind one, ten, a thousand times.

THE SENDER

What I knew would happen has happened, but the flow of these pages has carried it far away, to the point of transforming it into the irredeemable—the only true word among these I've written to you—into a light that flickers in the distance, like a cruel lighthouse that lures you to the rocks, to collision: my notebook pages have run out, I wrote two words in the empty space beyond the white, on the table. Better still is the image of a lighthouse extinguished in the cloudy Neutrian night; I reminded myself that I'm writing you so that the two of us might see each other before this is over. Imagine a lighthouse abandoned in the night, and you trapped in the darkness of that lighthouse, and me in a boat without oars, adrift.

Me, you, the lighthouse, and the boat occur to me with the certainty that today I am departing, now that Neutria has left me for the last time. You don't realize that the only way to enter this city is to remove it from inside me, liberating that which I invented out of my presence so that anyone at all might inhabit it; the certainty that the end of my life in Neutria is the end of my life strikes me all at once, like a branch being torn free by the wind and falling on
the roof of this house. How foolish I was to flee from the city of my childhood so that He Who Is Writing the Novel wouldn't follow me, as if it were possible for one to choose between soul and body, as if staying alive depended on keeping the body far away from the gunshots and the blades, though my soul—just like there exist abandoned boats, floating at high sea—has stayed in Neutria and this body continues writing to you in Santiago. Finding myself in my grandmother's house—when you rang the doorbell and laughably pretended to be someone else, someone named Carlos, and called me The Little One—I became aware that you wanted to enter Neutria through me, but I didn't let you. You wanted to make your soul enter my body and, because this is impossible except through writing, I wrote you one, two, three novels in order to please you. I'm leaving them here for you, on this table in an envelope—if you dare to take it when you come—where between simulacra you will see that you are in fact entering an other: yourself. And because we die we have no body; it's another deception of those who've studied everything, of your friend the professor, who even planned that I should write this last letter.

What terrifies me is that if you don't come to take me, I'll have to go alone, that if that happens this letter will be my last useless act. I move through the house like a thirsty animal that stumbles while carrying cups of water and spills them; the water runs across the parquet floor and is nevertheless absorbed by a dry earth that calls to me. This is vengeance. When finally you enter Neutria, when you are living there and you don't know just what it is that bothers you in that longed-for place, it will be me. In the names of the streets, in the letter you receive, in the darkness of
your bedroom my remnants will resound. But I must speak quick and clear, because in my grandmother's trunk I've only discovered fifteen old sheets, like fifteen opportunities to remain blank, yellowing, ancient, that are wasted once covered with ink.

You and those identical to you who make up the Corporalist group had delineated a plan that would end with your disappearance, like what happened to The Young Poet. According to the plan that you'd written in your novel you were going to submit yourself, step-by-step, to various humiliations, wrapping pages of
Canto General
around rocks and throwing them through the windows of the Neutrian Writers' Society. You'd be detained, taken away, and, while being tortured, recite paragraphs from Walt Whitman. The professor would get you out so that by the afternoon you'd already be covering the walls of the Neutria municipal theater with cheap professions from
Corporalization Manifesto
; the next day that supposedly secret text was reproduced in all the newspapers alongside a photo of you tattooing a Marinetti verse across your whole chest. You screamed in pain in downtown Neutria, because you'd cut your arms with razor blades, smearing shop windows with blood—that's what the novel ordered you to do that day—and you were arrested again for disturbing the peace. In jail you were raped by four prisoners, because you punched one of them when he laughed at you; you said nothing, you did not waver at all when confronted with the demands of each phase of the plan: bottles broken over your head during a fight in a Lárico poets' bar, twenty-one days drinking only wine, bathing naked in the fountain in the Plaza de Armas wearing nothing but a heavy mask of Enrique Lihn. How you let a little boy who assaulted you on a corner of
the most dangerous shantytown in the port stab you, the tears on your face as he buried the blade in your shoulder. You were accused so many times of inciting violence, at the stadium you went into the bar wearing the rival jersey, whistling every time of one of the local strikers got near the goal. They accused you of being deranged, of being an imbecile, they said you were a mental patient: on TV a senator offered to have you interned at an asylum on his dime; a journalist used you as an example of compromise and rebellion in a magazine, later you spit on his hands in a press conference. You regretted none of it, because each one of your misdeeds were systematically announced in your paragraphs, and a boy just like you was following you everywhere to write down a detailed chronicle of your actions in his notebook, another novel that would be the register of the long, sweaty workdays of Corporalism. One hand on my waist, the other on a recording device, the third scratching a wall, and the fourth writing the novel of the novel; in this way we passed the time together, because when He Who Is Writing the Novel ceased to appear, the movement would end, so it was possible to read the manifesto in your notes: the written register of your body's transition—from a clean and fresh body, to a filthy, wrinkled body, torn to its furthest reaches by hairs, scars, hematomas, scratches, marks, irritations, encrusted metals, bleedings, pusses, and gangrenes—was proof that body and literature are incomplete words; how then to speak of the soul, of permanence? I was watching how you doused yourself with gasoline, lit a match, wrote something down about the man in flames, asking me how I could love you, what the name of this thing that united us was, what place you occupied in the painting of Neutria that I was finally describing in my pages. Then you
took my hand and told me to be calm, that in the novel a woman appeared walking on the beach, looking somberly at the sea, and it was me—little because you saw me from far away—the albino girl, who would carry out a culminating role in the History of Corporalism.

As if at the same time we were somewhere else, He Who Is Writing the Novel accompanied me every morning to the beach. We walked across the sand holding hands, we stopped to kiss each other, we fell down together and then I had to get up, to keep going, while He Who Is Writing the Novel stayed on the sand, watching me. Sometimes I thought I noticed that a man just like him was filming us from a distance while we rolled around together, and simultaneously I kept walking toward the sea with my notebook, while at my side you asked me why we weren't going to my apartment. I held your hand in silence, how insistent you were. Sitting in the sand I dedicated myself to the painting of the beach of Neutria; the rolling wave in its coming and going, frustrated by the tide that rose as the sun shifted position in the sky, the water insisted on continuing to be the word water, it made me want to throw my notebook as far as I could to see how the sea sank any attempt to immobilize it, and I kicked you, and shouted: imbecile, can't you see I want permanence, and you just the opposite, you want disappearance. You're going to kill me. You laughed at my cries while napping on the sand; you hadn't slept much that week because you stayed up every night writing the novel. But that was impossible, we members of Corporalism knew that after He Who Is Writing the Novel marked the final period nobody would be able to change even a comma of the
plan. Right then you confessed that you were going to change the novel's ending, that every night you reread the chapters so that it wasn't the protagonist who died, while during the day you kept on pretending that your body was irredeemably destroying itself. Another wave broke, a boy built a sand castle near where we held each other. During the day you tried to rape a schoolgirl in some Neutrian plaza, in full view of everyone so that they'd lynch you, yet at night you make corrections: as he was spreading the girl's legs he saw in her face the woman he loved. The scream was her scream, the pain was her pain. So night after night, chapter after chapter, Corporalism passed from a manifesto about death to a love story, you told me, and without writing anything new, every night you asked the same question: how to tell the untellable. I embraced you, happy: from a love story to a novel about the salvation of a character. I always forgave your pretentiousness. I loved you so much. And we stayed there, lying on the sand, holding each other. The waves retreated, the sun set, you left, I stayed there describing how the tide went out in my picture. The lighthouse of Neutria was already lit. Suddenly someone identical to you sat down next to me and took my hand in the darkness. He Who Is Writing the Novel squeezed my fingers forcefully, he kissed me all over and even bit me, and in the end he threatened me so I'd stop writing Corporalism in my way: I am just a useful narrator here, and if the character takes the novel too far, the author might find himself forced to make her die.

In the darkness of the beach, I seemed to also see that a pale girl was attentively watching me and He Who Is Writing the Novel—the couple that we formed for a second, holding hands, while he
threatened me—observing us and taking notes; a girl like me, who went to my spot, who walked the streets of Neutria with me, who arrived at the entrance to my building, went up in the elevator, took out the key, entered my room, felt the need to take off her clothes, went to the bathroom, splashed water on her face and albino hair. In the dining room she found a note from her friend Alicia that said: I'm sick of this place, I'm going back to Santiago. The girl put her clothes back on, and took a taxi to the Neutria bus station. On the way she noticed that the streetlamps were falling from their posts, cars were entering a nonexistent roundabout, people were going into unnumbered houses, kids on bicycles in the plaza were turning where there wasn't a corner, the trees were growing, dense, becoming a forest, exuberant vegetation untouched by human beings. Instead of a city there appeared a small village, then a military stronghold, four Spaniards dismounting and building a fire on which to cook, three natives chasing two animals leaving an egg hidden in a cave that is nothing but dry earth, dust, gas, emptiness.

A hand rose to wave goodbye to the albino girl at the entrance to the bus station and it was her own hand; no, it was the hand of the taxi driver who was touching her shoulder, asking if she was feeling okay. She didn't trust him, she paid and ran to the entrance, fearful that the ground on which she walked would cease to exist before she could find the bus. She remembered her dear Alicia, she half turned to look for her and in that instant a girl emerged out of her own back, took two steps, dropped an empty cup in a trash can, climbed onto the first step of the bus that in eight hours would
drop me off in Santiago. For a long time, I was afraid. I lay down in my bedroom, alone, wondering why I'd let Alicia leave Neutria without saying goodbye. Every now and then my grandmother poked her head in to offer me lunch, tea, cookies; she asked me if I was feeling okay, she stroked my face with one hand that, before settling on my forehead, she waved from side to side as if she were saying goodbye to me. According to my grandmother—who actually died when I was eight—I was shaking with fever, delirious, saying that you were coming to find me at my apartment, that I couldn't understand how the city remained standing if I wasn't observing it, if I wasn't able to make the waves break at my feet on the beach, if from my bed here in Santiago all I see is Cerro San Cristóbal. I slept with my grandmother's hand on my forehead—now and then I saw her move her head with the sort of swaying acquired by everything that drifts away—sweating and shouting where had He Who Is Writing the Novel gone, if he'd forgotten me because my sick body would be of no more use to him, unable to escape my nightmare: I walked for days through the city, I was unable to lift my head to see where I'd come to. Until I woke up. Soaked with sweat, I went to the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror: out the window was the university, the port, and beyond that, the sea. I understood that if Neutria was still standing it was because you and I met each other, because I told you that dying isn't necessary and you answered with a proposition: better that we live together. I took off my pajamas, showered, got dressed again. On the answering machine I had a message from the professor, who invited me to the opening of an art show that he'd organized in the exhibition hall at Universidad de Neutria.

The sun was setting again. The streetlamps barely cast any light, as if they were coming to understand that the city was slowly entering the night and would never return. As I went turning down the corridors on my way to the university auditorium, I heard a deep voice that unexpectedly narrated in detail, through some speakers, every step I was taking: she passes through the grayish gateway into the dark space of the central nave, passes through another archway down a new, still-darker corridor. She arrives at the central quad, turns—furious, sad, beside herself—to the left to enter the exposition hall. From a dais, dressed in meticulous mourning, smiling, the professor lifted his left hand and waved to her, leaving the microphone for a moment, no longer narrating my footsteps, because I took three glasses of wine and clutched them against the palms of my hands before hurling them against the dais, where he was now commenting to other academics about my gesture, about memory, about the social body, about collective intimacy, about private horizons. I hurled the glasses against the wall behind the fucking professor, I broke into pieces, and the red stained the whiteness of the wall at least.