Loquela (16 page)

The guests at the opening of the
Corporalism
show, the most recent work of documentary fiction by the famous professor, gathered around the sequence of photos hung in the hall. The first ones depicted girls like me and boys like He Who Is Writing the Novel in a living room, heatedly arguing about A Young Poet who never existed. In the photos that followed we made a toast with whiskey, the three of us, including the artist responsible for the show. This man is a genius, said the Undersecretary of Culture,
and studied with interest the huge photo of He Who Is Writing the Novel slicing his index finger on the golden edge of an opulent edition of
Madame Bovary
, whose bloody pages were displayed in the Objects section. Dozens of photos documenting a student march, students who also received cash payment, whose posters proclaimed “Corporalism is fascism,” the stones thrown at the Biblioteca Nacional, the frustrated arson attempts at the houses of Eltit, Richard, and Zurita; hundreds of photos that established the chronology of the “Birth,” “Adolescence,” and “Death of an artistic movement.” Across one wall was printed the
Corporalization Manifesto
, at last I was able to read what you'd written in order to make me understand that a great artifice was making it so the wine glasses kept falling all around me without hurting me, so the light bulbs shattered without their brightness leaving me blind, otherwise I'd have been unable to witness the exposition of every single one of these words, of every blink of my eyes, of my name itself which had been foreseen by that professor: while He Who Is Writing the Novel and I were creating it, someone else was gathering together our pages like the corpus of an academic essay that would bear the title
Loquela
.

When another wine glass fell to the floor of the exhibition hall, I drew near to see if it had actually broken, and I heard the long-winded speech the professor was delivering to an art critic: with this installation I explore the emotional emptiness of individuals as the foundation of a society of consumption that conceives of itself as a healthy organism, where the artist is paradoxically the cancerous tumor and the only individual without needs; the economic order
is maintained by a structure that is doubly hypocritical with respect to cultural creation, since as much as this system of exchange convinces the artist of the uselessness of his work, it demands that his face, his name, and his body be a polemic object in a scenario of psychological degradation and social marginalization where anyone can read the limitations of the market without experiencing them personally, or simply to conceive of marketing campaigns that seek the socialization of consumption. Corporalism—declared the professor in words that wanted to break against me and stain the white wall of this house from where I write you—is the dramatization of all the errors we artists commit, most of the time due to ingenuousness, alcoholism, or ambition, until we turn our own bodies into metastasis. Instead of spilling what is imposed on us across a page and giving it back in the form of book, instead of offering society that tumor, which is why they pay us to study in their laboratories, we mix ourselves into the work itself and end up presenting our bodies in pieces on silver platters so that the attendants of openings and launches can devour us. I divined what the professor wanted to add and he was quiet: the artist is a tumor that should not spread, but that must exist to focus the malignance. He believed himself to be an artist, because of that he was the most despicable being on Earth, I thought when I came to the photograph in sepia where you and I are holding each other on the beach; you were biting my ear and I was slipping my hand into your pants, we were standing and the sea was a monochrome wall of water. It had stopped moving at last! That was the photo, the picture I'd been seeking for so long across the eternity of a couple: the missing landscape that kept Neutria from leaving me, the last photo in the final room of the show.

On my shoulder I felt the weight of a hand that slid down to my waist, a warm hand that was cooling against my flesh and grabbing me. I turned: He Who Is Writing the Novel was in front of me, dressed elegantly, hair gelled and slicked back like an executive. He smiled at me with malice; I asked him if he was happy with the way his novel had ended—a huge party, fame and posterity in the media. Without blinking he said that I could stick posterity wherever it fit, that he didn't want to talk: I had to leave with him. He tried to drag me and I put up a fight, threatening to scream. He said that the others like him, who are writing the novel of Corporalism and who were wandering around the exhibit, wouldn't let me off the hook if they saw me again. I shuddered. My voice breaking, I asked him what he was talking about. He said that I shouldn't pretend like I didn't understand, that the limits of the movement were inside the body of its protagonists, that the end of Corporalism was the end of its characters. I still didn't understand: it had all been staged by the professor and had turned out just how he'd planned. No, that wasn't so, he responded. The implications and phases were much vaster: I would never be able to see the magnitude of all of it, the professor and his exhibit formed part of something greater. Like how the bricklayer does not imagine the dimensions of the city when he builds his first house?, I asked. He looked at me in silence. I had contributed to the failure of this part of the project, he murmured. My presence and the disgusting sentimentalism of He Who Is Writing the Novel, who had been unable to bear seeing me there, holding him on the beach, assuring him that I loved him, that I loved him completely, standing, walking, alive. He Who Is Writing the Novel had at last transformed himself into The Young Poet and
disappeared without leaving traces or records. Gently I pulled my arm from the hand that was clutching me. He stayed there sitting on the quad, watching me walk toward the exit; he was unable to keep himself from shouting after me, from a distance: You're going to die.

I'm already coming to the end of my letter, my dear. I write you at the hour of greatest silence in this city that is never silent, at sunrise in this Santiago where the sun never rises. Now the wind off the river comes against the windows of this house, it makes them shake but they remain intact, like writing on paper; it pushes the white of the page, it dirties but doesn't rip it. I hope this happens when I have nothing left to tell you, when the only thing left is the description of the coastline of Neutria vanishing behind me as I dragged my suitcase toward the bus station, running away before He Who Is Writing the Novel appeared with his gun and left me there on the floor, my eyes filled with their own liquids, which would prevent me from seeing how the ocean rose up, sweeping away the beach, the pavement, the avenues, the valley of Neutria, filling the empty space above it with water, the empty space which I'd filled first with little houses, then a pier, businesses, plazas, buildings, schools, a university, a stadium, and a touristic boardwalk along the sea so that people would come from other places to live here, so that a couple who walked through the university entrance would take each other by the hand, decide to love each other, pass time and grow old together, in these streets, weep for the other at his or her funeral; but the water will also sweep away this Neutrian cemetery where I won't end up because
it will have died with me, because it isn't possible to put a body in a page, because paper isn't earth.

I tried to drag my suitcase full of notebooks through the trash-cans, the rubble, and the enormous dust cloud: with each passing step the cement threatened to cease covering the ground. When I came to the Black River I saw that the bridge had surrendered to the erosion, so I had to carefully descend the damp hillside where I sank into mud up to my knees. It wouldn't be easy to get away from you that way; nor was I able to run when I saw the beggars who sleep under the bridge approaching. In the mud-marred landscape I distinguished their shaved heads, the firebrands on their naked skins, their faces painted with lime—the last vestiges of the most recent raid by the city's sanitary services—that surrounded me and touched me, emitting hoarse moans, pulling at my clothes with hands covered in sores, tearing them. Beggars emerged from ruins across the city, all of them wanting a piece of me: they appeared in multitudes on the street, limping as they forded the river that no longer existed, barely splashing me at all with its remaining puddles, tugging at my skin through mutterings that were senseless yet rhymed nonetheless. As they spread my legs they incessantly asked a question that only my pain could answer. When I was able to stand and tried to run, I understood what one of them was saying: I was The Young Poet, I wanted to throw myself into the river, but a beggar caught me, threw me harshly to the ground, got on top of me and screamed that he was The Young Poet; another limping beggar approached, another, and many more who surrounded me, threw me down again and got
on top of me, howling the same sentences: I was The Young Poet, I wanted to throw myself into the river, but a beggar caught me, threw me harshly to the ground, got on top of me and screamed that he was The Young Poet; another limping beggar approached, another, and many more who surrounded me, threw me down again and got on top of me, howling the same sentences: I was The Young Poet, I wanted to throw myself into the river, but a beggar caught me, threw me harshly to the ground, got on top of me and screamed that he was The Young Poet; another limping beggar approached, another, and many more who surrounded me, threw me down again and got on top of me, howling the same sentences. I ran and ran and ran through the mud, escaping. Until the sun came up.

A man found me walking with lost eyes. He climbed over the bridge rail, slipped through the bars, down to the river bed, took my arm, put his jacket around my shoulders to keep me warm, got me out onto the street, asked me what I was doing down there in the disgusting Mapocho, and so early. He told me he was going to take me to the house; the house, he said. That made me mistrustful. When I asked his name, he responded with a grimace. Before you could pull out your gun, I forced myself to run again, and lost you at a stoplight. All the way home. My grandmother, who was eating breakfast, rebuked me for getting home at such an hour and in such a state; she called me a whore. I agreed, agreed so much that I started to cry. Finally I went to my room and fell asleep.

In the afternoon my grandmother had gone out. You appeared again; you wouldn't leave me alone. This time you pretended you were a friend of the family, that you were passing through the
neighborhood and you wanted to stop in for a visit, you shyly introduced yourself as someone else, with a name that made me laugh. You claimed not to know me, but went to get in bed with me anyway; I made you believe we were going to sleep together. And for the first time. Then Alicia called on the phone to invite me to her birthday. You can't miss it, she said. You asked me who was calling, I responded no one important. I thought I was lying to you, yet immediately I knew it was true, because Alicia could no longer do anything for me. You found me, there's no way out. The sound of a current of air, across the metal of the hinge, I feel the wind of the river on my face: someone is opening the door. I'm waiting for you now, I'm going to stop writing so you can come in.

Oh God.

THE NOVEL

Elisa said she'd wondered why Violeta was just sitting there. Like she was waiting for her, Elisa saw a space between two cars and parked immediately, not thinking about what she was doing and not hearing the instructions of the old man with a rag for washing windshields: pull forward just so, turn in a bit more. The old man smiled at her, she ignored him. She took the path through the plaza toward the bench where she'd seen Violeta. The albino girl was holding a notebook in her right hand across her knees, hunched over, tense. Suddenly she shut her eyes and started writing. Elisa watched her from where she was leaning against a tree. She'd never seen a person like her before, such pale skin; when she didn't move for a few seconds, she looked lifeless. No, not like a lizard, Elisa answered. Like a woman made of marble, maybe, she said when they asked her for a description, but she wasn't referring to those actors who dress up as statues, like the detective who was trying to flirt with her had stupidly suggested. For moment it had seemed to her that time had stopped, perhaps because Violeta was writing in her notebook without paying attention to the movement of the pen. Yes, she'd had to look at the clock to realize she didn't care at all about the time. Then she pressed the little black bag against her waist, walked to the bench, and sat down beside her. Breathing heavily, she leaned against the wooden backrest
and looked at Violeta out of the corner of her eye: now she was turning the pages one after another, not reading them, as if she were reviewing the appearance of each page, looking for flaws, focusing on the layout of the letters and on the blank spaces, just like she liked to do herself, not reading. Violeta turned her face unexpectedly and asked her if she was Elisa, little Elisa. She didn't know what to do, she pressed her hands against the wood of the seat to take stock of her own body and not feel even smaller in front of that woman, like a little girl beside her older cousin, she said, and tried to ignore the disapproving eyes of the detectives, absorbed in her tits.

She nodded, Violeta had responded by saying she didn't remember having seen her before and yet she recognized her, because Alicia was so precise in her descriptions of people. Elisa didn't like imagining the two of them talking about her at all, about her appearance, about her clothes; nor did she want to know why she came up in their conversations, she told the detective. Anyway, she gave Violeta an angry look, and Violeta sighed deeply, like she'd been crying for days, like a mute person registering a complaint. Only then did she smile; not to enter into confidence or anything like that, but to curtly tell her that, after all, she was the longtime girlfriend of the dearest cousin of her best friend. Elisa hadn't dared to get up and run away, so affected was she by the way Violeta spoke, similar, she thought, to how she felt when her older brothers told horror stories around bonfires in the country so many years ago; after a silence they'd look at her and say, slowly: it was the devil incarnate.

And yet she preferred to tell the detectives that Violeta put the notebook in her backpack indifferently, that they sat there for several minutes without saying anything, until they caught sight of large columns of smoke pouring out of the roof of a bakery on the opposite side of the street. People were growing agitated, an old couple went over to see what
was going on, the shopkeepers came curiously out into the street, and a group of children on bicycles went to alert the police at a nearby station. The plaza had emptied out where they were sitting, while on the next block the cars, the crowd, the jets of water, and the flames mixed noisily together. At last, Violeta smiled, for some reason the fire made her laugh. How cruel, how irresponsible, how foolish; that's what Elisa thought then, but she said nothing, instead it was the albino girl who spoke: it's so hot here, all the houses could catch fire. In the end, that was Santiago, hot or cold there was always smoke, so a fire shouldn't be some kind of novelty. In a new silence, contaminated by the firefighters' sirens, Elisa had begun to feel nervous again, recalling another chapter she'd read in Carlos's novel: for several blocks, the protagonist followed the albino girl, who was looking for an address she'd written down on a piece of paper. Suddenly he'd seen her stop, mouth agape, watching how the firefighters were putting out a fire in what was left of a house. The protagonist went a little closer to listen to the discussion the albino girl was having with a captain, who was trying to disperse the onlookers; he told her that if she lived there she would be considered a suspect, since the fire had been intentional. The albino girl laughed in the firefighter's face: think what you like, but this is not my fire. Violeta coughed before interrupting Elisa's thoughts to tell her that she'd read that there exist three types of fire, explosive fires, flaming fires, and smoking fires; she preferred the first ones. From a distance someone was trying to evacuate people with a megaphone, but nobody was moving and the air was growing heavier all the time. Violeta insisted that she hated smoke, then she said that this wasn't her fire. Elisa didn't tell the detectives about any of the coincidences; instead she stated that she'd stared at Violeta and asked what she was writing in her notebook. She wanted to threaten her directly, to get her to stop sending messages to her boyfriend, to have her leave
them in peace, but she didn't talk about that either. She was starting to like Violeta and, at the same time, she knew they'd never be friends; she hadn't grown paler in that moment, that was impossible, nor had she blushed, Elisa explained. She had simply answered with a different face: she was writing about a dream she'd had. Elisa didn't know what to say, she felt arrogant, intrusive, uncomfortable. As if all the weight of the silence of that conversation was on top of her, without pausing she said the first thing that came into her head: many of her friends had dream notebooks and all of them would rather burn those pages than let anyone see them, except for the pages they were forced to write for their psychologist. The wail of a siren interrupted her. The firefighters tried in vain to disperse the crowd, hypnotized by the flames that were swallowing the roof of the bakery. Violeta covered her ears. Elisa did the same. When calm returned, the albino girl put her hand on the zipper of her backpack and said in a low voice that she had the same dream every night, though the faces and names of those vile men changed. The smoke lowered across the plaza. The albino girl smiled at Elisa, coughed, stood up, and walked away. She never saw her again, she assured the detective. Later on she'd swear that Carlos's novel, which they discovered in Violeta's house, had never left her hands.