by Carlos Labbé
(Edgardo Marín, the soccer commentator, says he’s not surprised at all that a player punched a reporter, that an ex-soldier gave an uppercut to a student protesting about disappeared detainees, and not only that, but it didn’t surprise him that everyone acted like nothing happened, like it was perfectly normal for Colo Colo’s owner to force a reporter to leave a press conference and for his colleagues to just stand there, regarding him impassively, not even getting up and leaving in solidarity. Because [he says, and he’s right] if I get used to living in fear, the frustration makes me a monster: fear engenders violence. I tried to rape the girl I loved, the next day the whole thing was silenced, it never happened; or worse, she and I decided to stop seeing each other, to stop talking, but the more it’s hidden the deeper the wound gets, until I can’t take it anymore and I get up, go to her house, and force myself on her, tearing her clothes amid her desperate screams and my pleasure, would I really feel pleasure? I live [we live in Chile, the commentator says] with a head full of filth. That’s why I’m going crazy, I can only write dreams and alcoholic deliriums, unleashing the monster [the other]: I’m Carlos’s scattered dust. And that’s why Alicia stared straight ahead while I burst into tears in the car, because she’s not from here, she has nothing to do with these dead bodies [the ones that’ll inhabit these pages], because she’s kind, even though she denies it, even though later, her jaw set, she says: “you don’t know me at all.” As always, I’m simplifying, I’m idealizing, I’m very literal; I should run away to the country that Alicia’s from, to the city where her friend Violeta wanted to live. Or where she is now. Here in Santiago we’re all going to end up stabbing each other.)
August 16th
A quote from a different magazine: “Kristeva changes the location of things. She always destroys our last prejudice, the one you thought you could be reassured by, could take pride in (Barthes).” I should go back to reading. I wish I had more desire to write, but I’m exhausted. Abuse of the pen, the hope or the struggle to make this diary form part of something greater, so that it illuminates and is illuminated by another text. On the other hand, there is the fear that I’ve forgotten the important moments. (What is a diary if not a retelling, an attempt to give narrative significance to a life that has no order? A deception.)
Saturday night, during a party at S’s house, Alicia completely ignored me, and I couldn’t get into the game. We were strangers for hours, like I didn’t know she was following me with her eyes. At one point we found ourselves dancing face to face, and our movements seemed to correspond to two entirely different songs, then she disappeared toward the kitchen. A while later, I ran into her again: I was dancing enthusiastically and laughing with M; she was letting P wrap his arms around her. (Fear of the future, when she’ll be off traveling and not here.) She wasn’t the same either, struggling to show me that I wasn’t just another random guy on the university quad. She barely smiled, she didn’t ask how I was, even though she always does. (There’s no one else like her, I say, but I prove myself wrong if I go out on Providencia and count how many girls there are who’re just like J.) Before getting up off the bench in the quad (she’s always going somewhere), Alicia asks me to stop talking about the party: “Who are you, the one from Saturday or the one from Thursday?” I respond that today I am Carlos. She doesn’t laugh. I’m losing my spark, she said this herself. With a distinct quiver of her tight lips, Alicia tells me that tomorrow she is going to give me something, something I have to read as if it were more important than any of my unspoken obsessions, dedicate more time to it than to my thesis. I kiss my thumb and say: “a matter of life and death.” (She blinks, she hates me, I don’t want her to go, I want to spend my last days with Alicia.) She doesn’t find my comment funny and stands up.
August 17th
I’ve decided that, for the moment, I’ve said enough. I should read, read, otherwise my own writing will become repetitive. Just like Alicia or J when you spend too much time with them: words begin to become excessive. All that’s left are the gestures, the looks, the hands, the mouth.
I have a large envelope containing two notebooks that belong to the albino girl, Violeta. Belonged, I should say, she was writing in them just before she was killed. One of the notebooks is green, the other is covered in wrapping paper. One of them contains paragraphs she calls “Descriptions of the Sea”; the other, her dreams. Alicia gave me the envelope so that, in exchange, I’d give her the letter from Violeta that was (mistakenly) delivered to my address. I must read, read.
(A little drunk, Alicia asked me who this Carlos was that I’d been talking about. I told her that I’d send her another letter that would endeavor to explain this inexplicable thing. She told me that I’m evil. In spite of myself, I came up with a sentence from the intolerable La nueva novela by the homonymous Carlos Fuentes, regarding Cortázar, Oliveira, and Traveler: “Confronting the double incarnation there are only two answers: murder or madness.” I think about how fond J and I were of Hopscotch at one time, just like Alicia, who told me that when she was sixteen she did a sort of pilgrimage through the streets of Paris where the drama of Oliveira and Maga unfolded, I don’t want to laugh at such innocence. Talita and Maga, Oliveira and Traveler. The problem with doubles is that they must inevitably exterminate each other. At some point I’ll write about Goytisolo’s State of Siege, where he claims that everyone has a virtual enemy. Who am I going to kill if I’m my own enemy! The only part of Hopscotch that’s worth the effort is the part that takes place in Buenos Aires. The final schizophrenia.)
August 18th
In the dining hall at the university I kept repeating the phrase “this is not a good year” and P got pissed off, she almost threw her food in my face. During my thesis seminar, while the professor was talking, making sterile attempts to provoke some sort of response from us students, I observed the faces of my colleagues: heads down, eyes inert, hands hidden. Smug mouths: we’ve already heard this too many times, this is interesting but it’s too early in the morning and the sky is very gray; what the professor was saying was external, we’re in our final year of studying literature and in one way or another we’ve made up our minds to forget that we don’t want to be here. The book was actually entertaining, like TV, parties, the cinema. The photocopies had a distinct smell, we can simulate an analysis of the mythical structure of One Hundred Years of Solitude, for two hours we drink down lessons of generative linguistics with our coffee, the rest of the day we live! We walk around the campus, holding hands with our girlfriends, we go to a theater performance, then suddenly a book appears in the display case. One book. We touch it, it’s a beautiful edition. I sit down in the plaza and run my eyes over every line, every letter, I enter that historical world, I’m just another one of those characters on the edge of the abyss and my skin is crawling, I convince myself of repulsive human uncertainty, of suffering, of the declamation, of the verbal chaos, and of the silence of the last paragraph; ominous, death. I turn off the light above my head and think in silence: “If God doesn’t exist then this is all there is: disappointment, depopulation, the asepsis of the word end.” You don’t think about the courage of writing a novel in a Santiago on the brink of collapse, it doesn’t occur to you that the only valid thing would be to make up poems in your mind, like Borges, entire verses in your mind, go over them a couple times before falling asleep, and the possibility of their publication evaporates forever; you enjoy yourself for a while fantasizing about how publishers and critics should be executioners of benevolent smiles; you don’t think, you just feel. You turn the last page, the image of the protagonists curled up together, cynical, afraid to pierce the moment with the word; the question “how are you, are you still sad?” actually means “I can’t hold you any longer, we can’t spend our lives holding each other, sheltered from the world”; which actually means that when you turn off the light above you, you discover that your body exists and functions on its own, that if at some point you’re lucky enough to be sleeping with your wif
e breathing deeply a few centimeters away, you’ll dream of another woman, in spite of this you must wake yourself up, slowly pull her close, and repeat that you love her, that you live together.
(Abuse of “that,” the self-indulgences of my writing “that,” the colon, and the semicolon. Proof that I write poorly but that I say something, always with the same words, yet saying something that matters. I reread this. My head hurts [abuse of “but”], but for the first time in many days I’ve been able to recover a passing happiness. I’m alone, I repeat to myself, and yet there are so many pages, so many names, so many years.) You lie down with a book clutched tightly in your hands. The book has done all of this to you: weeping. Real tears, really. Not like the ones that you shed during the drunken display in Alicia’s car, the sea that ran down your face, rupturing the false desire that was growing between the two of you, too soon, too forced. I abuse repetitions, I lose plotlines. You wake up early, the faces stop screaming at you, that hand retracts from your body, the albino girl from the dream evaporates. You know that today it is an anxious Carlos. You do everything quickly; you don’t sing or think about Alicia in the shower, no breakfast, the micro comes by on the hour and you find a seat next to the girl with the curly hair, the really attractive one who’s always talking to people by the water fountain in the corner of the quad. You show up to your seminar, still tasting the novel, wanting to open up to the professor and tell him, with complete respect, that during the part when the guy and young girl have their encounter in the middle of the jungle (or was it in the middle of the dance floor dressed up as beggars or transvestites?), you got a phone call from Alicia. The funny thing, you’d tell the professor, is that, for a second, Alicia’s voice was J’s voice (it’s possible, both voices are deep and delicate), which made you shiver; the book fell from your hands and the glass of red powdered juice that you were drinking slid off the table. The professor might smile at the anecdote because he’s a good person, you know you’re not that funny, you’re already tired of playing the fool. So that’s it, the professor’s smile injects a soft warmth into your body, tomorrow will be less gray, the time not so early, the dream will have vanished. Even when the professor takes attendance, in the moment that he asks if anyone knows a certain individual who has never attended class and you suggest that perhaps it’s a pseudonym, you think you hear a burst of laughter. The professor didn’t get the joke, the other students keep staring at the floor with empty expressions though this time they’re firmly griping their book bags, getting ready to leave as soon as possible. Someone laughs, but you see that there’s no one left in the classroom. “Funny,” you think absurdly, walking and promising yourself to try to write more entertaining paragraphs; I promise to find out what it is that’s hidden in my books: the warm slap, the irresistible phrase with which Alicia wakes my eyes from their lethargy.
THE NOVEL
Sitting on a bench in the plaza, Carlos was drawing a tree. He groaned and crumpled up the paper, realizing that every day his lines were getting worse; the tree he was sketching looked nothing like the one in front of him, it was more like a building or a statue. A few days ago, his little sister had asked him to teach her to draw hands. To start with he showed her how to copy her own, the left. But in the end, Josefa looked at his drawing and narrowed her eyes: that’s not a hand, she said, it’s the claws of a beast. He put the sketch down beside him and looked around the plaza. A modest, pretty schoolgirl passed by in front of him. Holding her by the hand was a man dressed in a suit and tie, one of those guys who’d run you over to get to the bank on time. What a waste, thought Carlos.
Then he picked up his sketch again. He didn’t give the couple another thought, they’ll end up on some bench somewhere, as usual, he said to himself. The tree was no longer a tree but a gathering of strange shadows, immense stains suggesting shapes: a couple through a window and perhaps someone spying from the corner, lying in wait. He was distracted by a cry that gradually became a scream: a girl was calling for help. He walked calmly to the other side of the plaza, where he found a circle of onlookers gathering around the same schoolgirl he’d seen before, whose torn uniform didn’t cover the bruises on her legs. A compassionate woman who was trying to console the girl retrieved her buttonless blouse from the bushes. A man was asking questions. The degenerate had run away, he realized, and the schoolgirl cried, ignoring all the people, hands covering her face. Nothing about her was sexy now, just the opposite, he thought, walking away. He realized that the girl’s blue uniform was just like the one Elisa had been wearing only a few years before. He remembered afternoons junior year when he’d wait for her outside the school before they’d walk home together down Alcántara. Sometimes she walked a few steps ahead, other times he led the way, but walking backwards, facing Elisa. He never took his eyes off her, not her, not that uniform; he could barely contain the desire to slip his hand up under her blue skirt. He called her from a payphone, fearing she wouldn’t be there. She answered and asked him a question: why did his voice sound so different, like he was someone else entirely.
THE SENDER
At last. If it’s difficult for you to comprehend my writing and you get lost in my inconclusive sentences it’s because I write against the waning day. My hours are like cups of water confronting a thirst. Although I’m trying to be as honest as I can, understand that not even on the edge of the pit can I find a way to say the right thing. What matters is my ultimate sincerity, that which speaks to the other, to you and not to me. I’ll use up a lot of ink adapting to your presence, but I trust that it’ll be worth it, or better, that I did the only thing left for me to do. Because there’s not one disinterested sentence here, not even being crazy about you, as they say, alters my intention: to tell you why I found myself forced to abandon Neutria.
When I was a little girl, my hair came down to my waist and sparkled like the snow. Fearful, that’s how children are. But once, hearing Alicia’s warning cries, I turned around and there you were, concealing the scissors in your woolen fingers. I snatched them away from you easily, while you looked at me with surprise but without fear, the same look—let’s say empty yet impassioned—that you gave me last Saturday at Alicia’s party as night was falling; you were intoxicated and charming, and I was intrigued when you responded that yes, that now, with me, you were someone else and not Carlos in Neutria. Let’s not go quite so fast, just fast enough to unsettle your reading and to make you aware that your Sunday headache isn’t just the result of a night of drinking, but of having remembered the most important and hardest thing to remember.
Back then I was very small. You know: smiling, secluded inside the house, my long white hair seeking the light of day to shine. The girl kept hidden three houses away from yours. I spend my time playing with Alicia, tall and attractive. You boys tease us, calling us Snowflake, Miss Transparent, Glassgirl. My hair, long as a summer day, is an obsession for you, because you enjoy ruining things that require care: you stomp on flowers in the garden of a woman who lives all alone, you wake up early to rearrange the pages of the newspaper, freshly dropped on the doorstep, you terrorize, with a dozen different calls, your neighbor’s cage of parrots. You threaten me: doll hair, we’re gonna cut off your doll hair. I’ve gotten used to seeing you through the window, brandishing scissors. I don’t even tell on you, I just run to my room. Alicia is the one who confronts you, with her deafening, high-pitched screams, one time I punch your most annoying friend, the fat one, in the face, and he goes off and cries behind a tree. You make fun of him, and for a little while I get you guys to forget about my hair, because you’re busy inventing a supposed romance between Alicia and her victim, the fat boy.
Allow me this speed with which I write you, a different rhythm from the immobile sentences I sought in most of my notebooks; it’s just that, inevitably, there’s someone zeroing in on this house, someone who wants my end. I shouldn’t say this, but what I hope is that you stop him. Besides, at this point in my recollections, you should already be able
to guess what comes next. Because another year passes and again one of you begins to fixate on my hair, which I spend my time brushing. The end of summer, an unusually detailed image from early childhood: the city grayer than ever, people running over each other in the streets to buy textbooks, pens, spiral notebooks, even the sun’s presence is lost, dissolving into the monotone sky, dirty, more dust than anything. It’s the awful Santiago of our childhood, doubly abandoned. So bad that I only recall one moment of fun that took place outside the confines of the house: two naïve girls shouting gleefully, soaking each other with a hose, white with green stripes, me and Alicia. All of a sudden, she freezes. I see myself turning instinctively around and I find your eyes, wide with surprise. You hide the scissors behind your back. I come at you with a violence that frightens even me, grab the scissors away from you, your friends, hanging back a little ways, speculate in low voices, expecting you to defend yourself, not just stand there, impassive, not crying or smiling, doing nothing: that’s a difficult expression for a child to make. Serious as an animal. We leave you there, fixed to that spot, and go inside the house.