Before then, neither of them had really spent too much time on e-mail, but soon they both became addicts. Max’s greatest newfound addiction, however—one he would never kick—was pornography. This led to the couple’s third big argument, but also to several experiments, like the disconcerting—to Claudia, at least—ejaculations on the face, and Max’s obsession with anal sex, which provoked irate but ultimately beneficial discussions about the possible limits of pleasure.
It was around then that they lost the vowel a and the consonant t. It happened on a night when Claudia had to turn in an urgent report, so she tried to make do without those letters. Max, who once upon a time had attempted to write experimental poems, tried to help her, but it didn’t work out. The next day they bought a very good keyboard: it was black and had some flirtatious pink multimedia buttons that allowed you to play or stop music instantaneously, without having to resort to the mouse.
For some months, however, there had been portents of a greater disaster: dozens of inexplicable delays, some of them short and reversible, others so long they had to give in and restart the computer. It finally happened one rainy Saturday, which they should have spent calmly watching TV and eating sopaipillas or, in the worst of cases, moving the cooking pots and basins from one leaky spot to another; instead they had to devote the whole day to repairing the computer—or trying to repair it, more with willpower than any real, coordinated strategy.
On Sunday, Max called in a friend who was studying engineering. By the end of the afternoon, two bottles of pisco and five cans of Coca-Cola dominated the desk, but no one was drunk, they were just frustrated by the difficulty of the repair job, which Max’s friend attributed to “something very strange, something never before seen.” But maybe they really were drunk, or at least Max’s friend was, because all of a sudden, in one disastrous maneuver, he erased the hard drive.
“Well, you lost everything, but from now on it will work better,” said the friend, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, his coldness and fortitude worthy of a doctor who has just amputated a leg.
“It was your fault, you idiot,” said Claudia, sounding as if, out of pure negligence, one or maybe both of her legs had actually been cut off. Max kept quiet and hugged her protectively. The friend took one final and exaggerated gulp of his piscola, grabbed a few cubes of Gouda, and left.
Claudia had a hard time absorbing the loss, but she called in a real technician who changed the operating system and created separate profiles for both users, and even a symbolic third account, at Claudia’s request, for Sebastián, Max’s son. Yes, it’s true, he should have come up sooner—over two thousand words had to go by before he came into play—but the thing is that Max often forgot about the child’s existence: in recent years he’d seen him just once, and for only two days. Claudia had never even met him, because Sebastián lived in Temuco. It was hard for her to understand the situation, which had become, naturally, the black spot or the blind spot in her relationship with Max. It was better not to broach the subject, though it still came up every once in a while, in vicious arguments that ended with both of them crying, and of the two, it was he who cried the most—he sobbed with rage, with resentment, with shame, and then his face would harden as though the tears had settled like sediment onto his skin; it’s a commonplace analogy but really, after crying, his skin looked denser and darker.
It wasn’t all so terrible. When, with money from her parents, Claudia bought an amazing all-in-one device—it could print, scan, and even make photocopies—she threw herself passionately into digitizing extensive family albums. She would sit in front of the computer doing this for hours, and although the sessions seemed fairly tedious, she enjoyed them because she wasn’t just documenting the past, she was altering it: she distorted the faces of her more obnoxious relatives, she erased secondary characters and added in other, unlikely guests, like Jim Jarmusch (at her birthday party), or Leonard Cohen (beside Claudia taking her First Communion), or Sinéad O’Connor, Carlos Cabezas, and the congressman Fulvio Rossi (tagging along on a trip to San Pedro de Atacama). The editing wasn’t very good, but it got some laughs out of friends and cousins.
Another year passed like that.
Now Max worked the morning shift, so in theory they had more time together, but they wasted a good portion of that time arguing over the computer. He complained that because Claudia was on the computer so often, he wasn’t able to write when inspiration struck him, which was untrue, because he still used the same old notebooks for his endless drafts of poems (he felt that they were destroyed by the process of transcription). He had also gotten into the habit of writing endless e-mails to people he hadn’t seen in years, whom he now missed, or thought he missed. Some of these people lived nearby or not so far away, and Max had their phone numbers, but he preferred to write them letters—they were letters more than e-mails: melancholic texts, sensationalist, wistful, the kind of messages whose replies are put off indefinitely, although sometimes he received responses that were every bit as elaborate and contaminated by a frivolous, whining nostalgia.
Summer arrived and so did Sebastián, after months of delicate negotiations. They both went to Temuco to pick him up, by bus, nine hours there and almost ten back. The boy had just turned eight years old and the slight, premature shadow of a mustache gave him a comic, grown-up look. During his first days with them, Sebastián spoke little, especially if he was answering his father. Their intense trips to downtown Santiago, to the zoo, and to Fantasilandia all ended with them back at the apartment, and they seemed to have a better time shut inside on those hot afternoons than they did during the supposedly fun activities. Seba took advantage of his user profile, signing in to Messenger without restrictions for interminable chats with his Temucan friends. He quickly demonstrated his computer knowledge, which wasn’t surprising—like most children of his generation, he had learned about computers from a young age—but the extent of his dexterity impressed Claudia and Max. In a precise, slightly bored tone, the boy educated them about their choice of a new antivirus program and explained how they needed to defrag the hard drive periodically. He ran through the Pink Panther game with astonishing speed, it goes without saying, and the two or three afternoons he spent teaching his father and Claudia the logic of the game—so elementary for him—were the most glorious and full moments of his visit. He had certainly never been so close to his father, and he and Claudia became friends, so to speak. Claudia thought Sebastián was a good kid, and Sebastián thought Claudia was pretty.
They all went back to Temuco together. The trip was a happy one, with gifts and promises of reencounters. But the trip home was somber and exhausting, a distinct prelude to what was coming next. Because the moment they opened the door to the apartment, life entered into an irresolvable paralysis. Maybe annoyed by Claudia’s conclusions and advice (“You got him back, but now you have to keep him,” “You’ll lose him again if you don’t take care of your relationship,” “Seba’s mother is a good woman”), or maybe just bored with her, Max withdrew, sunk into himself. He didn’t hide his annoyance, but wouldn’t explain his mood either, and he ignored Claudia’s endless questions, or he answered them reluctantly, in monosyllables.
One night he came home drunk and went to sleep without even greeting her. She didn’t know what to do. She went to bed, embraced him, tried to sleep next to him, but she couldn’t. She turned on the computer, roamed the Internet, and spent two hours playing Pac-Man with the arrow keys. Then she called a taxi and went to a liquor store to buy white wine and menthol cigarettes. She drank half the bottle at the table in the living room, looking at the cracks in the laminate flooring, the white walls, the faint but numerous fingerprints on the light switches—from my fingers, she thought, plus Max’s, plus the fingers of all the people who ever turned on the lights in this apartment. Then she went back to the computer, chose Max’s profile, and, as she had done many times before, tried the obvious passwords, in capital letters, in lowercase—charlesbau
delaire, nicanorparra, anthrax, losprisioneros, star wars, sigridalegria, blancalewin, mataderocinco, laetitiacasta, juancarlosonetti, monicabelluci, laconjuradelosnecios. She apprehensively smoked a cigarette, five cigarettes, while she tuned in to a new anxiety, one that grew and shrank at an imprecise rhythm. Then she typed in claudiatoro— an obvious option, which out of modesty or low self-esteem she hadn’t tried yet. The system responded immediately. The e-mail program was open, and didn’t require a password. She stopped, poured more wine, was about to desist, but she was already there, facing the formidable in-box and the even more formidable record of sent messages. There was no turning back.
She read, in no particular order, messages that were ultimately innocent, but that hurt her nonetheless—so many times the word dear, so many hugs (“a big hug,” “two hugs,” and other, more original formulations, like “sending hugs,” “hugging you,” “sending hugs your way”), so many references to the past, and that suspicious ambiguity when he had to write about the present or about the future. There were the kind of fleeting, fierce flirtations that show up in everyone’s e-mail accounts, hers too, but there were also five chains of messages that spoke of meetings with unknown women. But what hurt her most was her own invisibility, because he never mentioned her, or at least not in the messages she read—except for one, sent to a friend, in which he confessed that the relationship was on the rocks: he literally wrote that he wasn’t interested in sex with her anymore, and that they would probably break up anytime now.
She closed the e-mail, went to sleep at dawn, intoxicated with rage more than wine. She woke up in the mid-afternoon and she was alone. Lethargically, she walked to the computer—to the room next door, though to her it seemed like a long way—but instead of turning it on, she stared at the glare of the sun on the monitor. She closed the blinds, wishing for absolute darkness, while tears flowed down her neck and disappeared in the furrow between her breasts. She sat down on the ground and took off her shirt; she looked at her alert nipples, her smooth and soft belly, her knees, her fingers firm on the cold floor. Then she got up and wiped the screen clean, or, rather, she dirtied it with her fingers, which were wet with tears. She smeared her fingers angrily over the surface, as if she were scrubbing it with a rag. Then she turned on the computer, wrote a short note in Word, and started packing her suitcase.
***
She came back the next Sunday to pick up some books and the all-in-one device.
Max was in his underwear, at the computer, writing a long e-mail in which he told Claudia a thousand things, and in which he apologized, in an elliptical way, with sentences that left his bewilderment and mediocrity in plain view. There were drafts of the letter piled on the desk, seven or eight pages of legal-size paper, and while he protested that it wasn’t fair—he hadn’t gotten to finish his letter, it was full of mistakes, he had trouble saying things clearly—Claudia read the different versions of that unsent message, and she noticed how a definitive phrase in one draft became ambiguous in the next, how he changed adjectives, cut and pasted phrases. And she noticed too how he had adjusted the line spacing, the font size, the character spacing, and it was these changes, in particular, that struck Claudia as sordid—it was like he thought she would forgive him if the message seemed longer, and that’s what she was thinking about when he grabbed her and held her by the wrists, knowing that she hated to be held by the wrists, and as they were struggling, he hit her in the breasts and she responded with four slaps, but he won out and he bent her over and forced himself into her, penetrating her ass with a violence he’d never shown before. She grabbed the keyboard and tried to defend herself, unsuccessfully. Then, two minutes later, Max ejaculated a meager amount of semen, and she turned around and stared at him, as if suggesting a truce, but instead of embracing him, she kneed him in the balls. While Max writhed in pain, she unhooked the all-in-one device and called a taxi that would take her far away from that house forever.
Max felt an immense but short-lived relief. Her relief took its time in coming, but once it came, it came to stay, and so, three months later, when they met on the stairs of the National Library and he begged her without the slightest sense of decorum to come back, it was no use.
He went home sad and furious, and, out of habit, he turned on the computer, which had been crashing a lot recently; for some reason, when it crashed this time, Max decided it was finished.
“I’m going to give it away, I don’t care about anything stored on it,” he said the next day to his engineer friend, who offered to buy it for a ridiculously small amount.
“Hell no,” said Max. “I’m going to give it to my son.”
“Okay,” the friend said, and then he reluctantly wiped the hard drive clean.
That Friday, Max took an overnight bus to Temuco. He had no time to box up the computer, so he put the mouse and the microphone in his pockets, the CPU and keyboard under the seat, and the heavy screen on his lap. He rode this way for nine hours. The lights on the highway shone on his face, as though they were calling him, inviting him, as though they were blaming him for something, for everything.
Max didn’t know his way around Temuco, and he hadn’t written down Sebastián’s address. He hailed a taxi at the bus stop and they drove around for a long time before coming to a street that Max thought he recognized. He arrived at ten in the morning, zombified. When he saw Max, Sebastián immediately asked about Claudia, as if the surprise were not his father’s unexpected presence but the absence of his father’s girlfriend. “She couldn’t come,” answered Max, trying out a hug he didn’t know how to give.
“Did you break up?”
“No, we didn’t break up. She just couldn’t come, is all. Grown-ups have to work.”
The boy thanked him for the gift very politely, and his mother greeted Max in a friendly way, telling him he could stay and sleep on the sofa. But he didn’t want to stay. He sipped a little of the bitter maté she offered him, devoured a cheese empanada, and headed back to the station to catch the twelve thirty bus. “I’m really busy, I have a ton of work,” he said before getting into the same taxi that had brought him there. He ruffled Sebastián’s hair brusquely and gave him a kiss on the forehead.
Once he was alone, Sebastián set up the computer and confirmed what he already suspected: it was notably inferior, no matter how you looked at it, to the one he already had. He laughed about it a lot with his mother’s husband, after lunch. Then, together, they went to the basement to find a place to store the computer, where it has been ever since, waiting, as they say, for better times to come.
NATIONAL INSTITUTE
For Marcelo Montecinos
1
The teachers called us by our number on the list. I say that in apology: I don’t even know my character’s name, though I remember much about 34 very well. At that time, I was 45. Because of the first letter of my last name, I enjoyed a more stable identity than the others. I still feel a certain familiarity with that number. It was good to be last, number 45. Much better than being, for example, 15, or 27.
The first thing I remember about 34 is that he sometimes ate carrots during recess. His mother peeled them and placed them harmoniously in a little Tupperware that he opened by cautiously loosening the corners. He measured the exact amount of force necessary, as if practicing a very difficult art. But more important than his taste for carrots was the fact that he had been held back: he was the only student in our grade who was repeating it.
For us, repeating a grade was a shameful affair. We had never gotten close to that kind of failure in our short lives. We were eleven or twelve years old, we came from all kinds of backgrounds, and we had been selected to enter Chile’s gargantuan and illustrious National Institute: our files were impeccable. But then there was number 34: his presence was proof that failure was possible, and that perhaps it wasn’t even that bad, because he wore his stigma with ease, as if he were, ultimately, happy to go back over the same subjects again. “You’re a familiar face,” a te
acher would sometimes say to him, sarcastically, and 34 would respond graciously: “Yes, sir, I’m repeating this grade. I’m the only one repeating in the class. But I’m sure that this year is going to go better for me.”
Those first months at the National Institute were hell. The teachers made sure to tell us over and over how difficult the school was; they tried to make us regret coming there, tried to make us go back to “the school on the corner,” as they said, contemptuously, in that terrifying, gargling tone of voice.
I don’t know if it’s necessary to clarify that those teachers were some real sons of bitches. They did have names, first ones and last ones: the math teacher, Mr. Bernardo Aguayo, for example—he was a total son of a bitch. And the shop teacher, Mr. Eduardo Venegas. A real motherfucker. Neither time nor distance has dampened my rage. They were cruel and mediocre. Frustrated and stupid people. Obsequious Pinochetistas. Fucking assholes. But I was talking about 34, and not those fucking bastards we had for teachers.
***
Number 34’s behavior was not what you would expect from someone who was repeating a grade. You’d think that a kid who gets held back would be sullen, out of step with their new class, reluctant to join in, but 34 was always willing to experience things right along with us. He didn’t suffer from that attachment to the past that makes kids who repeat grades into unhappy and melancholic characters, perpetually trailing along behind their classmates from the previous year, or waging a continuous battle against those who are supposedly to blame for their situation.
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