by Carlos Labbé
Will a wondrous thing that occurred only once—and all too quickly—make sense again when it’s repeated ad infinitum? You decide, you’ve already received these pages, if I am now in eternity or simply in the lines of a novel, as a person, as a persona, as a model; you decide if I die with you in the moment you stop reading me. Who more than you, the Corporalist, would long for our bodies to stay, touching each other, in these pages. Fleetingly me, because I can’t write you letters from the beyond or the rottenness, I prefer to call it the triumph of silence—not eternity—so that you forget what I’m saying and stay with my body, so that you put what there is to put where it is missing.
In the last days of summer, the beach was no longer the same as in my descriptions. Maybe writing erodes too—you tell me, you’re the one who writes. The couple who had come to occupy the center of my picture stopped appearing, walking right to left across the sand, their movements slowing down before they disappeared altogether, and then my sentences could only repeat the landscape, a wave breaking over a wave breaking over a wave breaking over a wave breaking over a wave breaking. The ekphrasis retreated like the undertow, the picture yielded and there appeared multiple glimmers I’d never seen before, and would never see again: the shape of the wave—breaking in dozens of movements that I could scarcely individuate, much less reduce to the word ocean, because they came and went—disappearing like all the water that falls on you when you go under.
I went home shivering. The experiment had exploded in front of my face, the ekphrasis had revealed itself and I’d been unable to write it. Alicia consoled me when she said my tears confused her, that there was no way to know if my writing had succeeded or failed. Looking me in the eyes, she asked me to let her do a final session, that, in her schoolgirl handwriting, I let her do a final description of the black beach, and then I could keep the results if they seemed useful. I accepted.
The next day, Alicia walked eleven steps in a straight line past the kiosk toward the ocean, she sat down and did her best to find the exact words to describe each wave until they came to form a single wall of water that broke without ever ceasing to break, immobile in the moment that the foreign couple approached, walking along the beach. They looked exhausted; he rolled up his pants and she sat down and looked out at the sea without saying anything. Behind them, Alicia—dressed in a black dress and dark sunglasses as if acting out the joke she’d made: this seems like a job for a private detective—started unsuccessfully to write down every gesture the couple made: she lifts her hand and touches his mouth, brushing away a stain on his face that looked like sand, but then it’s darker—her finger’s shadow, I suggested, but Alicia raised her voice to tell me no; it’s a minute drawing in black pencil—and he’s unfazed when she skillfully draws lines on his face, so quickly that he doesn’t even discover the pencil against his cheek until she stops, she kisses him and says something in his ear.
You know, Alicia says to me, the two of us trying to fix movement using words and she, the cunt, adds a drawing to our picture, three lines—the sand, the waves, and the horizon—and two points—the sun high on his face and an unknown figure moving off down the beach. That slut ruins our chance to halt what’s spinning in circles, vibrating, shaking, ending up on the page convincing us that, nevertheless, the world that falls on top of us can also be suspended. Sky, sand, sea, wave cease falling; they stay still around us and we’re able to sit on the sand, dive into the sea, ride the wave, never lose sight of the stars that begin appearing in the sky, and in this way we save Neutria. You know, yells Alicia: that little bitch isn’t stupid like us; she draws, tattoos, marks the body she adores with a figure that doesn’t change, and no one will ever even turn these pages. Then the couple heard our voices. Their eyes turned curiously toward me, and I could clearly make out their faces; perhaps you can guess whom they resembled. Every morning you went with me to walk on that beach, that day you heard a shout behind us, you saw me walking toward the kiosk and also returning home with the notebook under my arm, looking calm, though in truth we ran at full speed, Alicia and I, laughing. She chided me in a low voice: but that’s the boy from the university, the one writing the novel, the one who stares at you in class. You were with him every morning, you little minx. I’m jealous, why didn’t you tell me?
THE NOVEL
Elisa came back with two cheap popsicles. Carlos removed the wrapper on his and they ate it together. The other popsicle melted after a few hours on the bench in the plaza where they spent the afternoon. Elisa lay her head down across his knees and without intending to she fell asleep. A while later the cold woke her. It wasn’t Carlos’s knees that she felt under her head, but a jacket, his jacket, shaped into a pillow. Just before opening her eyes she’d believed she was in bed, but the bench’s boards materialized and she remembered where she was. Another false alarm she said to herself, just like when she was little and stayed at her cousins’ house in Viña de Mar: she thought she was waking up in her own room in Santiago, but then she heard breathing, the sea in the background, and her Aunt Pepa coming up the stairs to wake them for breakfast. For a second—before discovering that Carlos had left her alone, sleeping in the plaza—she thought that, like before, she’d been mysteriously transported to some hostile place in middle of the night. Nearly desiccated trees, poorly pruned shrubs, the gardener hosing down the street, and the old man pretending to read the paper but actually ogling her, all of it added to her disappointment.
She ran her hand over her face and sat up. A pair of men whistled at her from a distance, at her or at someone else, then disappeared. It was late. Shivering, she put on Carlos’s jacket. She stretched her legs out over the gravel and looked around. The old man on the bench had put his newspaper away inside his wool jacket. She looked around for Carlos, she saw some workers playing a game of pickup soccer with a rubber ball. A few of them, freshly showered, had come from the building that was under construction near Carlos’s home-studio; some days, looking out the window, she’d see them leave, all spruced up, heading out to a bar. She got up. Her head hurt and she was anxious to tell off that old degenerate: the one who’d been staring at her all this time. She started walking.
Suddenly she was in front of a bar. She stood still, staring at the glass of the display window where the specials were written in white and red marker: half-liter beers 500 pesos, chicken and fries 1,000, beer and a hotdog 890. She looked at her face, still swollen with sleep. For a second, she glanced past her own reflection and a man appeared, drinking a beer, his eyes fixed on the wall. It was him. When Elisa entered the bar, Carlos was watching a pretty girl come in through the doorway and walk toward his table. In the neon light he discovered it was Elisa, her face hard, pulling back a chair and sitting down across from him. She moved aside two bottles that were apparently in her way and asked him dryly what’d made him decide to leave her on that bench, alone and sleeping. Better to have offered her up for a million pesos to the construction workers who whistled at her every time she passed by on her way home. Carlos asked her to forgive him. He gestured to the woman cleaning the mirror behind the bar: one glass, please. All was silent as Carlos emptied the bottle into the glass and offered it to Elisa, who turned it down with a raised hand and a tsk of her tongue. She pushed back her chair intending to leave, but Carlos took her arm and spoke: she had fallen sound asleep when the organ grinder started his song. And he’d experienced an urge to learn the man’s name, to exchange a few words with him, after all Carlos could hum from memory the melody the organ grinder played every week in the neighborhood. Then he decided he’d give him a coin—he’d never done so before—with the secret hope that he’d be allowed to turn the crank on the apparatus. It’d only take a couple minutes; he hadn’t meant to leave her alone for anything in the world. He’d laid her down on top of his jacket—she was sleeping soundly, he’d said this already—and headed toward the organ grinder, who’d just finished his second melody and, as usual, was pausing for a moment to accept coins from passe
rsby. As he approached he couldn’t help but stare at the girl talking to the organ grinder, who listened to her very intently, nodding his head with every word she said. It was the albino girl. The albino girl, he repeated, and he’d seen her face before. Perfectly calm, he handed the organ grinder 100 pesos so he could listen in on their conversation: she said that it was a deal then, that he better not leave her expecting, this comment made both of them laugh quietly. The albino girl said goodbye and began walking rapidly away. When Carlos caught up to her, he asked if she was Violeta, Alicia’s friend, and she smiled, glanced up, as if noting his hair color, and nodded her head. Carlos paused. He stared at Elisa, who was drinking her beer now, her eyes never leaving his. She was certain he wouldn’t tell her everything. He’d wanted to tell Violeta who he was—her friend’s cousin—but she didn’t show the slightest interest in his words, I know, I know, she said. They were silent, Violeta turned and walked toward Providencia; she didn’t look where she was going, her attention on Carlos, walking beside her. Then he asked her what she was carrying in her hand. A magazine founded by some of her cousin’s classmates, she said: they’d published a story she’d written. She handed him the stapled and folded photocopies. A gift. In that instant, as he thanked her and told her he’d read it, Carlos remembered Elisa, alone in the plaza. As if he’d betrayed her, as if he were betraying her, she thought. Violeta smiled for the first time, she moved her head again and murmured: See you, have a good one. She looked a lot like the albino girl from the novel, the one he’d been unable to find in his notebook; he told Elisa that he’d been thinking about the coincidence of their hair color as he headed back toward the plaza, walking, not running, why lie; she looked just like that unfathomable character that he heard in his head. At the stoplight he started flipping through the photocopied magazine. He was stunned when he read the title of her story: “The Wasted Night” by Violeta Drago. When he told her this, he silently looked for surprise on Elisa’s face, and yet he realized how hard it would be for her to comprehend what it was that had kept him from returning to the plaza, what made him go into the bar, buy a beer, and a second, and a third. The title and the plot corresponded to the most well-guarded story he’d ever written, a story he invented the painful night after his cousin’s wedding when, in the bathroom, he and Elisa had definitively stopped being best friends. The motivations mattered little, he thought, what was important was that in Violeta’s sentences the boy who is in love with his best friend was also named Carlos. Although in her version, the girl’s name is Beatrice, like in Dante’s paradise and unlike his own medieval tale, in which Carlos is a castle swineherd, Elisa a princess, and the curse is delivered from the mouth of a sinister court magician, who’s jealous of the seemingly idealistic yet inappropriate relationship that is beginning to blossom between heiress and servant in the kingdom’s springtime countryside.
In Violeta’s story, on the other hand, Carlos and Beatrice have been life-long neighbors in a neighborhood in the fictional city of Neutria. Beatrice is obsessed with the place’s legend: in a distant time, where a full moon shone every night, the heir and heiress to the thrones of the two Humalén—an imaginary indigenous people—clans, enemies since the beginning, loved one another in silence; as you might surmise, just like in Ovid, Shakespeare, and Lovers of Teruel, their love is as forbidden as it is inevitable. The night before the first rain, when it is customary for both clans to give thanks to the moon for her gifts, the heir and the heiress took refuge in the celebrations, they concealed themselves, they started touching each other; the legend is cut short at this crucial point. And all that’s been recovered is a written epilogue: from that time onward the moon made the decision to show her full self only after several nights of darkness, to remind mankind that fullness is fleeting, and perhaps to subject herself to the same transience as everything that shines on the Earth. In the solitude of her house in Neutria, in front of her notebook, Beatrice wonders what it was that might have befallen the heir and the heiress at that celebration that had sparked everything that followed. Whenever they talk about it, Carlos comes up with all kinds of explanations to answer her questions, because—as we already know—Carlos secretly loves Beatrice. Until one night, coincidently moonlit, he gives his neighbor a letter that recounts the denouement he has imagined for the legend: foreseeing that fatality lies in store for the passion of their children, the fathers of the heir and heiress ask for help, each in his own way, from the moon. And she arranges for the couple to be allowed a single night of love: for the din of the celebrations to provide refuge for the lovers this one time. And so it is. But when morning comes, the heir and heiress of the Humalén clans decide to take their own lives in the same tree: never to part again. The moon, furious at this act of rebellion, withdraws her presence from the Humalén. Beatrice reads the page and weeps. She hugs Carlos, they pull apart, look at each other, and touch again. Early the next morning, Beatrice wakes up and rereads the letter. She calls her neighbor to tell him that she never wants to see him again, that they aren’t friends anymore. Carlos knew the rest of the story by heart. And he verified this by comparing it with his own version, in which the court magician wants to make the young princess his wife and so he reads the mind of the swineherd with whom she converses in the palace gardens every afternoon: because that filthy mind has no room for friendship, not even a spell would be required to break them apart. In the spring the two of them would meet in secret in some passageway for what would be their long-awaited yet ephemeral—though they might have believed the opposite—night of love. The magician outsmarts himself. While in his version of the story the swineherd is hung from a rafter in the pigsty, and princess Elisa willfully drowns herself in a river, Violeta made the ending more implacable: Beatrice flees from the world, she locks herself in her dark room and is found in a state of decomposition weeks later. Carlos, her neighbor, dedicates himself to his job in an administrative office in the center of Neutria for forty years, no family, no friends, no place to call home. He smiles at his coworkers every morning and never tells anyone the daily agony of the fading memory of the touch, the smell, the body of Beatrice that one night, until he forgets even her name and dies, alone, in a hospital bed. And Carlos said none of this to Elisa that day in the bar. He just ordered another beer and handed her the photocopied magazine. Elisa flipped through the pages without seeing them, until she came to the story and read it. A half-hour later she lifted her head, took a last sip from her glass, held Carlos’s hand with affection, and they spoke of other things. She can’t understand the coincidences, he thought. She thought: he’s leaving me all alone.
THE RECIPIENT
August 31st
“In an aberrant world where taking a drink, hoisting a chair, or passing through a doorway are acts requiring superhuman will power” (Luis Harss on Onetti). I’ve decided to stay in my apartment, watch TV, eat, sleep, go out with friends (whomever), have a beer some night with Alicia, or another new friend, a pretty girl I just met with whom I can talk about random stuff, not novels, dreams, or love. Laugh a little. Read the assigned reading for a class, study linguistics, go see movies at an old cinema.
That other stuff is not for me. It’s for another.
(I got up late, cottonmouth. My head was buzzing and I remembered that there had been other days that C had shown up at the university with her face ravaged by insomnia; she told me that when she actually managed to fall asleep she dreamed prolonged misadventures and, for some reason, woke up with the need to recollect these dreams, to recount them to her boyfriend, who was sleeping beside her. Of course, when she turned on the light, the episodes vanished from her memory and she was left empty, her boyfriend waking up grudgingly, complaining to her to please let him sleep. So she turned off the light but was unable to close her eyes, she lay there thinking, imagining that she got up, got dressed in the dark, went out, walked down to Plaza Ñuñoa, and went into a bar. There she met an actor from a TV show who invited her to his apartment in a building a
cross from hers. They slept together. At last, in his arms, C was able to fall into a deep sleep, right when the alarm sounded and she had to get up so she wouldn’t be late for class.)
If I were to stop writing this diary, I imagine, these problems that are wearing me out would disappear. And yet if I were unable to reread my supposed visit to Neutria, if there were no chance of going back to eat cotton candy in the plaza where the statues in the fountain spoke to me, the possibility of fleeing to a better place than this one without leaving my room would disappear. If I were to resign myself to the smog, to spending hours talking about the flooding in Pudahuel produced by yesterday’s rainfall, to spending Saturdays at my grandmother’s house listening to my cousins discuss used SUV prices, all excited over the possibility of acquiring cheaper vehicle registration. If I were to write an essay proving Violeta’s madness through her texts, her cowardice, or simply a letter recriminating Alicia for the way she attributes her own ramblings to her friend, for using a dead person as a pseudonym. And not see her again. Or dress myself in shame, go to J’s apartment, kneel down, beg her forgiveness, tell her I’m ready to begin how I should’ve; like a man who feels physically attracted to a woman, who grows close to her, gets to know her, they like each other, they go out, become a couple, get married. I’d go work on an estate in Rancagua, she’d be a history or philosophy teacher in some prestigious prep school, we’d have three children and satellite TV to break the monotony, no books. If I never read or wrote again about a lost city—silent but with sea and dogs and children—maybe I’d get used to wearing a tie, getting in my car and communicating via honks of the horn with my fellow office workers, residents of Santa María de Manquehue. Or if I were to get up from this chair right now, get on the metro, get off at the bus terminal and, walking up to the ticket window, boldly ask for a ticket to Neutria, the most expensive you have, if you please. Or if, in the middle of a binge, I were to take Alicia to bed, and her legs wrapped around me were cold, even though her hands are always warm. Or if I were to turn myself in at the Police Investigations building on Calle Condell (where last year I sat with J on the sidewalk to listen to the screams of people being tortured) and declare myself guilty of the murder of Violeta Drago, my only pretext being to find out who really killed her. And if after each of these decisions all I received was a laugh, a mocking laugh.