by Carlos Labbé
You should know this part better than I do. To me it seems that what happens next is that in the following days your group of men—forgive me, boys—gathers in the rundown shack at the abandoned train station that you guys call The Clubhouse and they decide to make an example of you, or maybe to kick you out for being worthless and a coward. The truth is that after I take the scissors away from you, all the pranks you guys pull fail, and so the group begins to fall apart: one family leaves the neighborhood, others disappear without explanation, you avoid meetings at The Clubhouse. It’s possible that you guys just got bored of each other or were too busy with school. I remember realizing that life in the passageway was ending and that we were entering Neutria when I watched the other boys stop in front of your house on their bikes and invite you to go get ice cream; you come out and don’t know how to lie, you don’t understand why, but they believe you when you tell them that you have to go to the supermarket with your mother, for the first time you’re able to get out of going with them, and you’re left alone in the exact moment that Alicia and I say to ourselves that from now on this is Neutria, without even knowing what we mean. I know, I can already hear your arrogant response: it was a childish way to give name to the unknown, to evade fear through familiarization. That’s what you said to me on Saturday, at the party. That sometimes, when you thought about it, you found our overflowing imagination interesting, an intriguing subject for a novel even; but a few pages later we were tragic, demented, frightening.
What comes next is the moment in which my childhood multiplies into details I’d love to recount and cannot. Most of them were lost the instant we played together, the rest are still there, in Neutria, and you can see them for yourself. Sometimes Neutria was the land of semi-divine emperors, of infinite cruelty or kindness, whose slothful and obese courtiers, in contrast, engaged in decadent melodramas. Other times it was a simple village where farmers, shepherds, and foreigners traded honey, cheese, bread, or fruit for a song or an entertaining story. Or it was the nexus of activity for stylized spies, convertibles, casinos, firearms, hotels, highways, and femme fatales. And in the middle of all those adult faces appears a boyish one, yours, insistently inquiring what it is that we’re playing, and coldly I reply that we’re playing the city of Neutria, not expecting you to make fun of us: you talk to yourself—my mother says people who talk to themselves are lunatics. Alicia gets up, says again that it isn’t make-believe, that Neutria exists; it’s a beautiful place, incredible, we travel there on long weekends with our parents. It’s so much fun that we like to recall everything that happened there. That’s what we’re doing, remembering all the wondrous things, not inventing them.
Of course, you’re the only boy who talks to us and asks us questions. Alicia and I don’t talk about this, but we’re fascinated that you come around and bother us. Make memory, that’s what I said to you, with oh so drunken words, at the party when you came up and hugged me and asked me how I still remembered: you were my first, one never forgets her first. It also pleases us that you watch us play through the window and then ring the doorbell and run away, because there’s cruelty in our inventiveness, because your doubt challenged us. The game changes. The two of us go on to describe everything that occurs in Neutria in order—I start writing in notebooks, we draw a rudimentary map—and from one day to the next every detail of Santiago interests us: the drainage system, the hierarchy of the authorities, the traffic, the demographic distribution, and I surprise myself by paying great attention in my history and geography classes. With the sole objective of convincing you of Neutria’s existence, I open my eyes to the place where I live and realize how much I hate it, I also hear how much other people abhor this chunk of concrete and how much they’d give to move to the coast, to the beach, to the cordillera, wherever. Yes, I know: this is nothing new.
It all began as a joke, as a small act of vengeance, because you had doubted us, and so it was only right that, in the end, it was back in your hands. Remember that winter, the last one on our street. You knock on my door every Friday afternoon and sarcastically ask us why our parents weren’t taking us to Neutria that weekend. Forgive me, what you say is: that strange city. Alicia and I are sitting by the fireplace, that first time we’re eating a big chocolate bar with almonds, and that is your excuse for coming in. It’s raining, of this I’m certain. Alicia says we can’t go to Neutria, it’s dangerous to cross the great suspension bridge that leads to the city in a storm. The Black River is treacherous, it swells violently, swallowing cars and the boats coming in from the sea, rumor has it that it feeds on them, seriously, but also that this is the river’s way of protesting that monstrosity of a bridge that’s been built across it. You listen in silence, probably imagining the river not as a swollen stream but as an aquatic animal with a hard, aquamarine hide, something like a shadow. Then you ask if it eats people too, or just cars and boats, a silly notion, but we try hard to take it seriously. I hurry to respond, citing the legends of Neutrian fishermen, and then Alicia quickly recounts in specific detail the story of a man who, after falling in the river and being rescued, claimed to have been saved by a marine monster. You listen with amazement to the story that Alicia invents on the spot, with total disregard for the rules of Neutria we spent every afternoon writing. I felt betrayed, for the first time I hated her: I was jealous of the attention you were giving her. That night we argued, yelling at each other. Alicia didn’t understand why I was so upset, for her it was all in fun, we were just making fun of you, of how much you wanted to meddle in our business. I calmed down when she proposed that we come up with a new way to humiliate you, using the stories that you asked us to tell. Remembering how you sat down to listen to us, open-mouthed, sometimes asking absurd questions, making us feel superior, clever, intelligent, special, because you were foolish enough to believe us.
Until one day you stopped coming. The next day we waited for you, and the day after that, but you had disappeared. I didn’t tell Alicia this, but I was miserable all week, I thought you’d gotten bored of our stories about Neutria. Not telling them made me forget about that city, it gave me the horrifying sensation that I was trapped in putrid Santiago. If I’d known what was coming, I would’ve preferred your appendicitis got worse rather than have you lie to us. But you lied and our laughter came to an end. On Sunday, you showed up unexpectedly and we went out onto the patio and asked you what’d happened and you stood very still, looking us in the eyes without blinking. You said: I went on a trip with my parents, they took me to visit Neutria. Alicia and I were only quiet for a second, we had to say something or we’d start to cry. It was the end of the game, a situation we’d foreseen so many times, the point when—according to our plan—we’d burst into savage, irrepressible laughter; choking, we’d tell you that Neutria didn’t exist, and how could someone be idiotic enough to try and make us believe our own lie. I was about to say something but Alicia beat me to it, and it was a disaster: my neighbor, my playmate, my best friend turned on me. She sat down next to you, took your hand, smiled at you, happy because at last you knew Neutria. She asked you questions about the redesign of the Plaza de Armas, whether or not you’d gone to the ice cream shop near the entrance to the black beach, if by chance you found the board-walk pretty. The words were already beginning to sound faraway, I couldn’t stand to be in that place any longer, that place I didn’t love, that place I hated. That afternoon was one of the last times I saw you, before the party last Saturday night. And yet Alicia and I have stayed in touch. It’s been hard for us to go back to being the friends we were when we were young, but there were a few summers when she did come see me in Neutria.
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 ceilin
g, 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 18th
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 sin
gle 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.