by Carlos Labbé
August 23rd
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.)
On Thursday afternoon I told C about my anxiety. I was lying in bed, worn out. I didn’t want to see anybody I knew, the mere idea of picking up the phone made me want to puke. But I desperately needed to get out of my apartment and to spea
k. For a moment, I wished there were a place in Santiago where strangers could sit on benches and have conversations without having to interact in what we call social relations. A pretty little plaza with trees, streetlamps, and life. Where? Nowhere, dreaming, you knew it right away. As if La Cañada or La Alameda de las Delicias still existed, as if people still walked arm-in-arm, she said, as if we were of an age to go sit in the Plaza de Armas and watch the people go walking by. Then she told me about a place in Spain, Alicante, San Sebastián, like she was remembering it herself. A place where old people go to retire; there, facing the sea, they have set out hundreds of chairs, and when the weather is nice, they can sit down wherever they like to watch the waves come and go, to deliberately converse with anyone who is nearby. Imagine that in Chile such a place existed, a place called Neutria.
August 27th
3:10 A.M.
Before entering my room I sense an odor, a foul, rancid odor. How is it possible? My own body disturbs me, I can’t even begin to imagine the displeasure I provoke. Ah, please, forgive my indelicacy in these notes. As might be expected, I read and read all week long. I was hoping to give fate a chance, what chance! Look at me, reading the weekly horoscope—a habit I no doubt retain from afternoons spent with J—where it says that Thursday is a special day: love moves into the phase of compromise. Alicia is so far away, I cannot see her and yet I evoke her, even now. (Why don’t I just use her initials like I do with everyone else, why does she have the luck of being the woman whom I name while writing this diary, the only one not victim of my lethal capriciousness?)
The horrible thing is that reading doesn’t make me calm; I spent the afternoon thinking about Donoso, about Coronation and its protagonist who doesn’t live life, but just reflects on it. (Do I want to be him?) I regret getting drunk so easily, just because C is celebrating her birthday, I am going to reject Alicia’s invitation to dance. Too many questions await me back at my desk. Yesterday, coming back from playing soccer, E’s friend’s car turned a corner and, instead of asking them to drop me off, I let out an absurd laugh. A few blocks later, realizing we’d passed my address, they stopped. They asked me why I hadn’t said anything, I said I didn’t know.
I think about corruption, about indecency, and about the unfathomable. At C’s party, J was dancing, talking, and laughing—happy. I know I didn’t deserve—nor did she—an explanation (or even a greeting), but we were both waiting for one. That’s why, in these first days of spring, I take up the contradiction of writing this diary, revelation and concealment, the resplendent whiteness of the page and the hope that if I play enough soccer, if I write and write, I’ll be able to distance myself from the terror that after reading me, no one will ever want to see me. Give me shelter. I can’t go on.
August 27th
12:00 P.M.
I want to explain myself but I am not, I’m not capable. My head hurts, my vision is spinning, and I’m nauseated. I felt deranged reading what I wrote last night with the last of my strength, its meaning escapes me now and I don’t understand why I repeat the same words over and over: my re-creation of Neutria has failed. I wanted to arrive at that city, using the same methods as Violeta; alcoholic excess took me elsewhere, somewhere far wetter and more fateful than paper. Now my body is paying for that compulsion, if I’m brave enough to sit down with a pen I’ll explain later.
While I made the bed and vacuumed the hallway, I thought about F. Peréz’s (or Roland Barthes’s) explanatory sentences regarding his article on Couve: he doesn’t structure the text as a daily diary for rhetorical authenticity, not at all, rather he does so out of a desire to construct a discourse with marks of the process by which it was written. I refuse to let myself agree, I write this way because I lack the indifference necessary to construct a narrative object that’s alien to me, even if only in appearance. I admire this in Couve, Donoso, Balzac, Henry James, all those who, lashed by the storm, are able to cling to a third person, to produce dialogues without the intervention of the I, to describe, to divide themselves into chapters. As if in the middle of his suffering, in the moment they activated the electric chair, the condemned man ran through his mind a fairytale he’d composed in his cell, and he felt no pain, because his head was so occupied with finding the precise perspective from which to approach the final scene, when the protagonist finds the girl’s body. (“I regret nothing” is the only thing that Violeta wrote, every day during the second half of July; the days of August were left blank, and then, furiously, she recounts a dream similar to one I had, if I’m able I’ll write about it later.) Is that not, perhaps, what Violeta is doing, inventing a false city to escape from the days of Santiago, from the fact that there’s someone stalking her with letters and phone calls, following her to class, perhaps not just one someone, but several? The doorbell is ringing.
August 27th
7:56 P.M.
“Just like dogs, I experience that need for the infinite.” Here in Santiago, nobody barks, and even if I heard barking I wouldn’t be able to go see what was going on, who is biting what. I wish I were Lautréamont, I wish I could write just one sentence without paraphrasing, I wish I’d been born before the printing press, and that I didn’t speak with someone else’s voice whenever I want to make myself understood, to say what it is I imagine. (I’m going up to Alicia during a break, ready to blurt out what’s eating me up inside: I love her. She looks at me stiffly, even though these days the spring air is sweet and lifts spirits, she doesn’t smile at me. Just arcs her eyebrows. I open my mouth: “Like the dogs, I thirst for the infinite.” Her surprise is barely visible. I don’t get it, what’re you trying to say. I don’t know, I answer, quieter all the time. But that’s the sentence.)
But no, I would not have liked growing up without a library in the house. Honestly I’d despise my own ignorance even more, I’d believe in the ability to know everything through reading, I’d be a fucking parody of an academic. What is Alicia reading? I only know what she told me this afternoon: a costume party, a movie, a book all afternoon, and alone. I turned back toward the window and for a moment she was plainly sad, the pain in her bright eyes, the unusual movement of her fingers is unwritable, just like J’s hypocritical smile last night. Did I mention that I saw her—smaller than ever, a shy little girl—on the dance floor? She’s not pretty anymore, her thin waist developed rickets, the neck I sometimes bite in one of my nightmares was a vulgar piece of flesh. (Frightening, today, my inability to hold the pen. I endure getting the shit kicked out of me, like in that dream when I stayed asleep, blood in my eyes, knees to my face, and yet I can’t stay seated throughout the day without perspiring, without my eyes burning and my tongue turning into cloth. Much less read.) Cross off Friday, full moon falling and buried, total darkness, and that’s how it should be, get used to it.
In last night’s dream, Alicia opened her legs for me in a white room. J led me by the hand up the street toward Cerro Santa Lucía, we lay down on the dry grass; Alicia and I were naked, we couldn’t keep from clawing each other’s skin, I could barely breathe through her biting. I clung to both of them desperately, but neither of them was who they seemed to be: Alicia had that particular taste of cigarettes that belonged to J; J’s smile verged on foolishness and malice, like Alicia’s. I prefer to write it like this: confusion, amalgamation, I don’t want either of them except in pieces. Alicia’s ears, J’s mouth, Alicia’s hands, her eyes, J’s chin and torso, Alicia’s hair, again her eyes. The hours go by so fast and are so false, it’s stupid to stay up late when I have a tower of books waiting for me. Dreams don’t matter either, I dream on the surface and thousands of images pass me by without stopping, I don’t laugh or cry, I recognize none of the faces that brush up against me. I wake with the certainty that I’ve been up for three days.
August 30th
Physically exhausted and mentally ebullient. Absorbed. And I dream: again I find myself in the middle of a classroom at the university, all the desks are empty. Next to me a certain professor is
waiting for the rest of the students to arrive, he gives me a friendly look and asks me questions: why do I think attendance is so low, are his lectures inadequate. As usual, I get ready to tell a half-truth, “you lack a certain profundity that approximates something literary, but we’re not really capable of expecting much anyway.” The scene is nothing more than a replica of everyday life; this is something that actually happens to me, I show up too early or move too slowly, such that, when I go to pick up J, I have to wait for her and converse with her father in the living room; or when I drop her off, we take so long saying goodbye that we wake up her little brother or run into her parents coming home from a dinner, a little drunk (them or me), and engage in these bizarre but fraught exchanges about how late or how early we are. The same thing happens to me with my professors, I’m often the first student to arrive, the only one who shows up on time; I greet the professor with a false smile and he takes advantage of the unanticipated intimacy to ask me questions.