Loquela (5 page)

THE NOVEL

Carlos read each paragraph and then, emitting a soft tsk of his tongue, tore out the page. He'd been doing this for quite a while: he stared at the alarm clock on the nightstand; it was two in the afternoon. He was still wearing pajamas. The same confusion persisted that he'd felt when, upon waking, opening his eyes, and contemplating the ceiling, he'd run through in his mind the day that awaited him: revise the novel, write the missing parts, a final pass with a lead pencil or red pen, like a professor hurrying to correct his students' exams. He hated having to visit those faraway albino girls again and again, to fire the fateful weapon that hurt no one, like he was writing a screenplay for a cartoon. He'd rather stay in bed, trying to recover the thread of what he'd dreamed in the middle of the night. He still retained a few images: an infinite castle that he couldn't look away from, because his head was the only part of his body not buried in sand. And the epilogue, if he could call it that, when he came to a pleasant town where the sea's freshness made him feel weightless. He went into a barbershop—not a stylist, nothing like that—and the barber, wearing the face of a childhood friend, greeted him with a joke. The door opened, a woman appeared whom he didn't recognize, but who he knew to be his girlfriend because she hugged him, whispering that this was the way she was going to bring him back from the dead. And she kissed him.
He recalled something the professor of his detective fiction class had said: death should not be taken lightly. Repeating this advice to himself, he went to his desk and took out the notebook that contained the novel. He read quickly: it was a holiday the day the man learned of the existence of the albino girl, that she was in danger, and that she'd come searching for him anyway. The streets were empty, so it was easy to watch her cross over, eyes fixed on him, paying no attention to the car approaching at full speed from the opposite direction.

He had the impression that there was nothing alive in this notebook. He asked himself if at some point this page—meticulously concocted with twists and turns and more twists and turns—might form part of a book, whether this machine of actions would cease. And he tore it out. He read the next one and the next. Always the same, fifty pages of chasing after a woman who reveals no clear reasons for why she's being pursued. It was already two in the afternoon. He paused, reading over the ending: the protagonist didn't react when a man shoved him. He left the bathroom, convinced he should confront the fat man behind the bar. He'd ask for a drink. And when the guy came over he'd warn him to stop playing games, he'd been found out. Stop calling the albino girl, no more men following her home or threatening him in the bathroom while he was washing his hands, he'd say, his voice grave. He made his way through the multitude that was moving euphorically to the sounds of a popular song. Suddenly the lights came down, a rush of couples holding hands descended on the dance floor. The protagonist was climbing the stairway to the second level when he stopped: on the dance floor, in a corner, he recognized the confident stride and preoccupied face of the albino girl. He stumbled his way back down, losing her for a second in the crowd; he had a hunch he'd find her near the exit. He grabbed her arm and asked her what she was doing there. The girl—blonde hair, straight back, tight dress—looked
at him uncomprehendingly: it was someone else. He apologized, embarrassed by his mistake. Back on the stairs a bouncer blocked his assent; the police were clearing everyone out, something unfortunate had gone down between the fat bartender and a drunk with a broken glass. The bartender defended himself, they fought, there were blows, and the one stabbed the other. Carlos stopped reading. He thought that the protagonist, shaken by the coincidence, should've marveled at his luck, but he didn't. Instead he shoved the bouncer who was describing the situation out of his way and went up to see with his own eyes what had happened, and ended up getting kicked out. The error was that his characters never noticed what was right in front of them and were instead always trying to see past it.

He stared at the pile of torn-out pages sitting on his desk. He became aware of the connection between that particular chapter and a phone call from Elisa that'd woken him up one Friday at six in the morning a few months ago. Her voice hesitated when she told him that she'd gone out dancing with her friends that night, after drinking all afternoon and reminiscing about existential discussions they'd had in high school. That night, at the club, they ran into one of her ex-boyfriends, and before long he and Elisa were conversing in close proximity, then he convinced her to dance. Just when she said yes, Elisa spotted him, Carlos, leaning on the bar, staring out across the dance floor. She shuddered and went over to him, but it turned out to be some random guy who tried to wrap his arms around her, proud of having seduced her with a single look. That morning Elisa, drunk, asked his forgiveness over the phone. She also told him that she was sure he'd appeared there in that instant to look out for her, to make sure she didn't do something stupid.

The sound of the door being unlocked distracted Carlos and he got up and went to see who it was. Elisa walked in slowly, carrying heavy bags
that she set down on the floor; she came over and kissed him. She made fun of the pajamas he was still wearing. Seeing the torn-out pages on the desk, she didn't bother asking what had happened, she just went into the other room to find a box of paper clips. One by one she began putting the pages back into the notebook, trying to follow the order of the story, but Carlos grabbed her from behind and began to lightly bite the nape of her neck until she gave him her attention.

THE RECIPIENT

            
August 18
^th

Blanchot again, but read this time in Librería Gradiva, near my apartment, so I'll cite it from memory: to write “I am alone” is comical, a farce, because the simple fact of writing it refutes it. The paper, the reader who reads the phrase, the proofreader, the publishing house, the publisher's propaganda, newspapers, the translation, a citation in a foreign text, then another and another and on and on until it grows commonplace and gets used in some magazine, on TV, in everyday conversation, and, in the end, it loses all meaning. Hundreds of people accompany me when I write that I am alone: writing is a renunciation of solitude. No one writes to read themselves, no intimate diary is private. And so I impersonate my voice in these pages (but of all the voices, which one is mine?) to make them resemble an article by Fernando Pérez about Adolfo Couve that I read in the magazine
Vértebra
. The honesty those two taught me, which I love to resort to, compels me to transcribe the first footnote from that article: “The text is composed by alternating fragments from my diary (often transformed, tightened up, corrected) with my observations and
outside citations inserted into the text a posteriori [. . .] as a kind of counterpoint, to compensate for potential excesses of subjectivity.” In these pages, I've copied the form in which Pérez approaches his analysis of Couve's work; and yet I'd forgotten this model for my voice until this afternoon, when I found the magazine in question among my photocopies. (I should just write, I'll delete all the “I”s from the sentences later, I'll remove the allusions to easily identifiable individuals, I'll erase the overly personal fragments, I'll make corrections to avoid problems, no big deal. I should take a moment to laugh at myself for having pointed out the problem of solitude, for checking to see if someone is sitting down beside me to read what I'm writing, for noticing the inevitable curiosity that overcomes you confronting a page covered in the handwriting of someone you know.)

I go back to reading Violeta's notebooks, without any value judgment at this point. I had an erotic dream about her; it wasn't entirely her, but it was an albino girl. In the morning, Alicia and I are sitting in adjacent seats. She looks around with a peculiar expression that I don't recognize, I wonder if I might have something to do with that look, if it's true that it seemed to call me phony, phony Carlos. She leans back against the wall and for a few seconds her thin shoulder rests against my arm. Call me a fool, but I wanted for the day to stop passing, for that boring class where our surfaces touched not to end. But that night, with a kind of bitterness, I couldn't tell if it was a put-on or not, she said: I want the Carlos from last week, I don't want you. (But how is it possible that I'm a substitute for the Carlos she knew if she is the only person I've told [as far as I remember] about what's afflicting me? It must be that what's actually happening isn't easy to
describe, the proof being that I'm still unable to slip a single certainty into this notebook.)

That afternoon I talked to my mom on the phone. It's cold in Rancagua. My grandmother is suffering from migraines and the doctors can't figure out what's wrong with her: it's not her blood pressure, not her medication, not changes in temperature. They say she's really lonely. (And if during her birthday party they were to make the whole family be quiet so she could get up from her armchair—where she'd been sitting motionless all afternoon, acting like she wasn't there—and say: “My children, I have to tell you, without beating around the bush, that loneliness is making me ill,” what would my father, my uncles, my cousins do? Who—out of all of us who feel alone [all of us?]—would leave their life behind to be with her? Without a doubt none of us would take her words seriously. Without a doubt none of this would ever happen: my grandmother asks for a general silence only to thank God for giving her a family like this one.)

I'm heading down Providencia chewing over the episode that I just finished reading in one of the notebooks, where, at a party, Violeta suffered her first delirium. I focus on the fact that the word “delirium” seems to be written by someone else, a different handwriting superimposed over the old title, which has been erased. I hope I get to talk to Alicia about these adulterations. “No one else has seen these pages,” she said when she gave them to me. Could it have been her? I need to wash my mind with soap. I see the eyes of the people walking at Providencia and Pedro de Valdivia, I focus on their faces. I head home on Once de Septiembre, I pretend to ask about some CDs in a store but the employee's response annoys me: I've never seen the people of Santiago more
absent than today. No one is talking, no one is watching where they're going. A gringa sings Madonna at full volume while listening to her headphones. I'm surprised to hear an organic sound in the middle of the intersection of Holanda and Providencia. The gringa, spooked, shies away from the look I give her and quickens her pace, no doubt I'm a psychopath, a clown, or another gringo. I cut perpendicularly across the sidewalk to disrupt the flow of pedestrians: a man with a briefcase, an old lady with a shopping bag, two students smoking themselves to death, another executive with a ringing cell phone. Nobody runs into me, they avoid me with the skill of the occupied, I'm just another obstacle, another post en route to the office. My mediocre experiment fails. Disgusted, I get ready to throw up my arms and scream at full volume: doesn't anybody have anything to scream in this city! But I don't do it, I just keep walking, in silence, like always.

            
August 23
^rd

Who shot Violeta Drago? I should write this question down, I should ask it every time I read one of her pages. The truth is that there's no answer. That's why I keep taking notes. This morning I wasn't able to say anything to Alicia, now hidden away in the library, when we were talking about whatever insignificant thing (is it possible for a conversation to simply be banal or is it oblique, am I really short-sighted enough to believe that her comments are actually about the latest album by whomever, or about the Canadian film we saw on Friday?). When it comes to talking about
reality, the subject has never been us, it's always been the unwanted miscue that forces us to opt for impersonal dialogues. When I ask her about her weekend she invents some story so that I'll leave her in peace: her friend found himself, in the middle of the dance floor, bored with the seventies disco music; he said he was going to the bathroom, but what he did was go get in his car and leave her stranded at the party. I don't know how to react to this anecdote, I look at her and she looks me right in the eyes before she says okay, I'm going, and turns around and walks resignedly away. The moment for saying things is yet to come.

The important thing is that a few hours later, contemplating the rain (today it has rained magnificently), I randomly run into Alicia again. When she sees me, her expression is transparent. For an instant my face must be identical to hers. Of course, we conceal ourselves again, taking refuge in neutral terrain, a lame joke from me (and you, I thought you'd left), a sudden presence next to us. (The friends, the third parties, who appear out of focus in every movie, who in realist books are barely named, who in day-to-day life can become omnipresent and harsh in their judgments, like the comment L made today after Alicia left, that who would've imagined, back in our first year, that I'd be such good friends with the girl in the black dress and combat boots, irony or no. Maybe it's me who has yet to understand egoism and who pays attention to irrelevant voices, voices that, for the sake of mental health, one should only listen to the way one listens to car horns when crossing the street.)

And I haven't felt weak again.

Right now, in this moment, despondency pulls me to my feet. I know that today's words are more repetitive than ever and my
pen weighs a ton. I've read too much over the last few days, I transgressed on Friday when I asked Alicia if Violeta was mentally ill. With glassy eyes and an unanticipated seriousness in her voice she said: “Jackass. And I thought that you—” She went to the bathroom, and I acted like the guy who's acting like nothing's going on, but without a doubt I'd blunderingly ruined the morning. My comments (they lost any novelty a long time ago) weren't going to get me anywhere, and wearing the same face as always wouldn't either. The rest of the day was filled with evasive, failed attempts to bridge the gap with a phrase, and too much time, and a fucking silence that (I believe) festered in me alone.

That afternoon I read, mistrustfully, Violeta's chaotic recollection of her father, of the moment when he brings her from Neutria to Santiago. The trip lasts an entire night and the girl calls on absurd resources to return to that cynical paradise that she baptized as Neutria. (On Saturday, at my grandmother's house, I carefully scanned a political map: where Violeta would've located her city of origin, there's nothing—miles of coastline, not even a fisherman's cove. I mistrust geography, traced as abstractly as Violeta's, yet imposed by years of pretense and a cadre of shysters who've agreed to turn the horizon into lines, dots, and limits.) I fantasize about an investigation, about a trip Alicia and I might take in the summer to search for Neutria. We'd use the albino girl's diary as a kind of guide, along with a roadmap composed of all geographic versions of Chile—colonial cartography, military maps, trip plans sold in gas stations, international guidebooks for gringo backpackers. Then I get tired of speculation: Neutria might, or not, be a city with a semi-hidden physical existence, as Violeta claims. But is it possible in this day and age for a town
to really be inaccessible? (Clueless. You trust information in such a visceral way. Something to do with your attachment to books, your disastrous habit of enjoying the TV newsman, your pathetic solidarity with the words people say.)

Enthused, I asked the professor a question and kept my eyes on C while listening to the answer. Sitting beside me, she returned my look and told me that this boring major wasn't worth studying anymore. For some reason, her comment made all my enthusiasm vanish and the class itself turned gray, monothematic. In the middle of the classroom, surrounded by my classmates, the loneliness was palpable. As if it were a game, and I were the only one who wanted to play. As if I were somewhere else, far away, in a sunny city by the sea where the literature that's taught isn't a collection of themes, of structures, of forced characters, but is instead the part of us that we're unable to see. I saw myself following Violeta to her city, sitting down in a classroom at the university she attended without permission to listen to how the professor and the students conducted their discussion—some of them standing, some bewildered by the succession of interpretations—between the outbursts of lachrymose laughter from one student who'd had the world that he'd read in some novel or other destroyed by the professor. A student was speaking with a hesitant voice but in the first person, quoting with precision and gesticulating, as if the coherence of his sentences might call into question the validity of his existence. When the professor looked directly at Violeta and said “don't you think?” she could no longer stay silent, she got up from her seat and went out into the hallway.

I seemed to be there, and yet all the other seats were occupied by my actual classmates, dead-eyed, discussing whether to
change the date of a quiz or the due date of an assignment. Apathetic, slumped in their chairs, seeming not to hear or see, but I applauded when Violeta left the classroom, and watched as the kid with the expressive hands went after her and—she described it this way herself—grabbed her arm, asking her name and what year she was. V didn't pay him any mind, find out for yourself, she said, she came to these classes because she got a kick out of the ridiculous enthusiasm for literature; occasionally it was a good spectacle, when it wasn't she'd go to the beach and take a nap. What I'm saying is that all of this came to an end when (my question in the middle of class) C confessed that she was sick of studying Literature at Universidad Católica. It's sad.

I've been reading nonstop. Coincidences disturb me and stimulate me and give me faith (my pretentiousness is unbearable today). The question mark of Neutria, my doubt is illuminated the minute I start doing research for my thesis on Onetti. The Uruguayan invented a metropolis, Santa María, inspired by Faulkner. (García Márquez did too, but I ignored him.) I should read more Onetti, not just out of academic responsibility. (But why does the existence of Neutria matter to me, why does it matter if Violeta wrote a novel or a chronicle? Onetti himself has ceased to exist; I don't recall seeing his face in any photo, I don't know anything about his life except that he died. Onetti could have easily been the pseudonym, the heteronym, the alias of another writer; the literary identity of a journalist working in Santa María. No matter what, there will always be someone who empirically proves the impossible. Without a doubt, right now a detective or a visiting judge is trying to clear up the actual facts of Violeta Drago's death: according to the file she was a maniac with pen and paper,
but all paths inevitably lead to Neutria, to the fictional address, because in Santiago there's no evidence and no suspects.) Saturday I almost dialed Alicia's number to ask her about Violeta's city. Sooner or later she'll make me offer an opinion, a hypothesis about her friend's death, because clearly she didn't give me the notebooks for my own enjoyment. And here I am, seeing ulterior motives in Alicia. (But what's wrong with that? Carlos has always enjoyed detective novels.)