Loquela

by Carlos Labbé

  (Before lunch I called Alicia. We joked around for a while about the detective novel I’d loaned her. Then she asked me what I thought of Violeta’s notebooks. I evaded the inevitable by answering that I bet the letter inadvertently delivered to me was more interesting, the one the albino girl signed as sender. Alicia said she didn’t know what I was talking about. The letter, I insisted; the letter I’d given her in exchange for her friend’s writings. Alicia still didn’t understand. Really, are you sure I didn’t give it to you? No, what letter? We argued. I don’t know what’s going on. I hung up, nervous; it seemed like someone was knocking on the door to my apartment. I opened it and there was nobody there. How stupid, why would anybody be knocking when there’s a doorbell?

  In my mind I reviewed where Violeta’s letter might be. In the drawer, no. I went through the papers on my desk, the closet, the disorder on the little table with the telephone. The last thing I retained in my worthless memory was me, sitting and contemplating the envelope, too afraid to open that strange correspondence, even though the mailman slid it under my door. And yet it was a letter from the girl who’d been murdered, my best friend’s best friend. Then I thought about what Carlos would do in my situation: open the envelope and read the letter; discover everything that Violeta had written for me, what she’d decided to convey in her own sentences; he’d be unable to take it and he’d run out, I don’t know where, that is to say, I do know where: to the home of Violeta Drago, over on Pedro de Valdivia Norte, as indicated on the envelope. Having said nothing to his girlfriend, Carlos was standing in front of the door. He rang the bell. He’d ask the albino girl why she was imploring him to stay with her, here in Santiago.) Action, pure, simple, and ephemeral action. (That of writing: I plagiarize Onetti just like he copied Faulkner, who imitated someone else I don’t know.)

  September 7th

  It’s snowing in Santiago. Amazing, I’m lying down and I feel cold. I go to the balcony to check if it’s still raining and see the falling snowflakes. Down below a couple is dancing like on Broadway (I imagine); happy, she swings the umbrella from side to side, he’s holding her around the waist, and of course they’re singing. She opens her mouth and the snowflakes fall (how fascinating to write the word snowflake, snowflake, snowflake, to write snowflake because they are actually falling right here in this exact instant and not somewhere else—where I can’t see them unless I force myself, fantasize—in some distant and nonexistent country where it snows every winter, for whose inhabitants the snow is commonplace; this doesn’t happen in my fiction when I want it to either. This is tangible, like the difference between writing a love letter and forging Carlos’s love letter to his girlfriend, Elisa). The happiness bestowed by the certainty of ice melting in my frozen hand is the same happiness I felt when I looked out and saw that it was snowing. So I ask myself how I might come to touch the woman I love without my hands disappearing on her waist, I ask myself this just because the snow is falling.

  Snowflakes in Santiago: an oxymoron. What happens when the impossible occurs in front of my eyes? Other times I would’ve called it a miracle, and yet it would have provoked the same certainty of being alive that I feel now. One day Alicia asked me, a little drunk and knowing her question to be repetitious and unanswerable: “why is it impossible to write from a place of happiness?” My relationship with her cannot be explained, despite all this verbiage. It’s not love (that wasted word), rather a condition that helps me go to bed and to get up, that I insist on re-creating, on masking with other names, on transposing into Carlos’s novel, and also on recording in an artificially intimate diary. That which only occurs in our presence, that which would only grow in one way: if our bodies made contact. And that act is outside language’s reference, an act (love?) so private and elemental that it breaks apart at the simple attempt to assign it a verb. Not even God (I think now that it’s a stretch to believe in Him) has remained in that sacred borderland, which is the unnamable, the unrepeatable. God already has a designation and that’s why he fell into these pages, where the word can provide for everything. Alicia and I have no nexus, just the one that appears when I write our names together: Alicia and I. The rest is a painful exercise in nostalgia for what will never happen, fiction is sad because it’s not alive, because it requires that I turn some pages for it to exist.

  (Why do wondrous things make us feel a need to share them with the people we love? I’m thinking about the time we hiked up a hill in Rancagua, when J and her friend got lost on a different path and ended up stranded on the face of a cliff. Her friend was stuck up there all afternoon, paralyzed with panic; J, on the other hand, decided to climb up to the top and go for help. Knowing nothing of mountaineering, she climbed tooth and nail, at one point believing that she wouldn’t make it, that she’d fall into the emptiness and die. In that second she thought about her parents, her siblings, her true friends, about me perhaps, but focused on none of them. On the brink of death, it was the memory of a guy she was hooking up with at the time [I can’t remember his name anymore]—and the desire to touch him again, to feel his body on top of hers, to still be alive with him—that impelled her to claw hold of a root, prop her feet against the wall, and climb up the cliff face to safety. At least that’s what she told me a few days later, after I’d seen her approaching in the distance, injured, her face terrified; when she spotted me, she hurried over, gave me a quick hug, and asked for help. I understood [although in a fragmentary and divergent way, while I took her by the hand, telling her to calm down, calm down, everything will be okay] the nature of her feelings [what I deduced really was this pretentious]: she felt no affection for anyone, we only mattered on the surface, because in the crucial moment she reverted to the memory of a brief fling, a fleeting [I’m simplifying again, I know] romance [that’s how I’ve always thought of them], instead of conjuring me, her best friend of many years. But later I had the contrary certainty: for J, the individuals who transcend are not those who for years have shared her projects, her moods, ordinary and transcendent events, no, they are those who can give her new experiences of sensuality, who can make her completely forget everything but her own body. This was a disaster for me: faced with eternity or the end, my adored J had clung to an instant of the flesh that would rot in a matter of days. And I [invoking God, the transcendence of her in me, of me in her] voluntarily unravel what I most believed in, the image of her at my side; I wept in the tent, a sleeping bag wrapped around me up to my neck, while the whole campground got drunk, celebrating the successful rescue of the two lost girls. I wept, hating J, I wept because I’d have to get back at her for making me feel this hate.)

  Why do wondrous things make us long for the company of others? In photographs and paintings couples stand out against a background of snow, because the relationship between two people begins with a physiological need for warmth, says Violeta in her texts on Corporalism, justifying her promiscuity by inventing a little literary group. Should I tell Alicia about this? No, her notebooks are written with astonishing verisimilitude, different from an intimate diary like this one, where in spite of my pretensions I don’t abandon the stereotypes of the novel. Another digression: I was going to comment how, through the window, I watched people come out of their offices and marvel at the snow. How the children were yelling (in Santiago children don’t yell and dogs don’t bark) so loudly that the houses opened up and families came out to take photos against the immaculate background. The man from the apartment across the street, who spends his days watching television or sleeping or writing in a notebook, got up, leaned out the window, and spent half an hour outside with his arms stretched out, looking at the sky. Like the passersby, who walk, tracking the snowflakes overhead (here no one wants to look at the sky, because it’s toxic; the ground is no different, but we inhabitants of Santiago have a particular fixation with concrete). I was the only one who was melancholy, it was sad not to have someone with whom to share the unexpected weather; and then the phone rang. In disbelief, I picked up t
he device and heard Alicia say: I’ve never seen it snow before! For a second, talking with her about some random thing, blown away by the snowflakes, I thought I was happy: and the feeling was nothing like what I felt when my body was on top of J’s. Under the snow, separated by the telephone line, we could be together, each in our own apartment, watching the snowflakes fall, listening: I was wholesome, diurnal, white like the snow, as if I were pulling my head out of a pit, convinced that kindness is not an empty word.

  September 9th

  If I’d had the energy to design the perfect story for a novel I would be perfect. I’d be able to become one of those writers who appear on the back cover of an expensive book smoking and wearing a wry expression, if only I were able to weave together a world of a hundred and some odd pages that depended on me alone. But it’s too hard. I mentioned this to Alicia tonight and she called me a coward, like I’d done to J on other nights: I can’t decline an opportunity to lock myself away in a monastery and go mad while, with adequate care, I produce and polish The Book (rewriting The Aleph not exactly in a monastery, but rotting away in a hostel in Pichilemu, not leaving that apartment for a year, spending my empty nights working as a janitor in an apartment complex); I don’t know if I should cloister myself in a false priesthood or just forget about reading and writing, find a practical woman, a mechanized job, and live, what here they call life. Attend parties with her, laugh my ass off, drink till I pass out. Planning business deals, no risk no rewards; taking up some sort of hobby of course, let’s say, attending movie premieres every Thursday at the theater; going out drinking once a month with friends at a local bar, when I get bored of my old lady. Buy some land near Rancagua. Sounds lovely, doesn’t it? No. What I’ve written embarrasses me, I won’t exalt the priests or the engineers, of course, but not the writers, intellectuals, or thinkers of this country either, rather those who are in between. Ugh. In the future, these words will be enough for me, if I persevere. I don’t know how to be brief.

  If I were to take up a regular plotline and sit down every day and stick to what I’d sketched out, I’d be satisfied, but in the margins of my own writing. I would have sat down in a chair and observed the lives of others and only later, in secret, produced my own silent material. Which (I think) Onetti would defend by saying: “I might be a bad writer, but at least I write my life.” To write pure fiction, I wonder how he could aspire to be calm by removing himself from the days of his books, hiding in the pages under the names of different characters. Perhaps he felt the same loneliness as his narrator, the same fictive vice that his own creatures used to invent a lair in order to hide from the painful days of flesh and bone. If this strategy worked for Onetti or Brausen, I can’t really know.

  Although I admire cowards, I don’t want to become the coward that Alicia claims I am. I’m not going to ignore the world because it hurts, to the contrary: the most surprising plot is the one that the days continuously reveal to me. There’s no protagonist more paradoxical than Alicia, I’m just dull with the pencil. (And yet, Violeta hid away in her house, with her grandmother, weaving next to the chimney. She sat down at the dining room table with a notebook and described a city more grotesque than this one, nicer and sadder, but full of life; there, without leaving her chair, with pure imagination, she was able to get to know boys whom she’d never meet here, to let them pull her away to corners that were impossible to find in Santiago, because they were occupied by buildings, and cars, and dust.

  Or not. Or Violeta came from Neutria every Tuesday on the strange buses she describes, arriving Tuesday around midday, she hasn’t left her senile grandmother’s side except to visit her only friend in the neighborhood, and to buy medications or bread. Violeta kissed her on the forehead, ate a piece of bread and cheese, and went up to her room. Before letting herself fall into bed, she took a notebook from a drawer to document all of the day’s salacious and happy Neutrian moments, not like a fiction, rather like a vital struggle against her own fragile childhood memory, such that by eight at night, in the moment that the telephone wakes her and she goes out onto the balcony to watch a line of cars in the distance, over on Calle Santa María, complaining to herself about the horns and the dry air, she’d be able to open those pages and see that a better place really did exist, a place by the sea, with her best friend and, above all, the boy from school.)

  The days surprise me, I should write with the objective that novelty be constant. I was at the university, I went to the library to return a book, dropped it off, turned toward the door, and on my way out, at a distance, caught sight of a very familiar face. In the back of the reading room, J was getting up from a table where she’d set down her books and notebooks. Her bright eyes, her happy smile. We’d sworn not to see each other again, it’s better for us, but I stood there, motionless, waiting for her; she came over hesitantly and stood in front of me. Stupidly, all I wanted to do was kiss her and pull her body against mine, right there, that we might travel to a foreign land, the two of us alone, married, old lovers; all I was able to do was open my mouth and say: “Say something, please, say something.” And she came close to me, fascinated, like she’d forgotten me and was seeing me for the first time. She hugged me fiercely. She was wearing a winter jacket; I put my face against the fur hood that fell across her shoulders. She murmured something in my ear that I didn’t understand, stepped away and, without looking back, returned to her table.

  I stood in the hallway staring out a window, my eyes blank, my mouth hardening little by little. I tried to turn around, go up the stairs, and for once tell a woman that I love her, that I do now, but first I had to confront my own ineptitude: she hugged me and I didn’t comprehend what she said. Writer—fabricator of inert signs. I can understand Pierce’s semiotic treatise, but at the same time I’m unable to communicate with my mouth, to listen with my ears, to taste with my tongue, to receive an embrace. Words alone, words don’t give warmth. I don’t want to be a solitary writer in this room, nor, like Violeta, to scribble (feverishly) that any heat in Alicia’s lips, in J’s lips, against my own, cannot be written; only that she sees me writing this and wants to read it.

  THE NOVEL

  Carlos and Elisa and kept in touch with just a couple phone calls: she answered and couldn’t conceal the fact that hearing his voice made her happy, saying his name, Carlos, with actual surprise, but then immediately seemed to recall a promise and went quiet. Then came the silence. Carlos couldn’t take it and asked how she’d been, what she was up to before he called. Elisa responded, fine, nothing special. Then he told her his cousin was going to Europe, her parents had given her a ticket to make up for who knows how many of her birthdays when they’d been faraway and had forgotten to even call her, poor little Alicia. And as he was saying little Alicia, both of them were recalling all the times that Carlos held her around the waist and called her his little Elisa. She asked him to stop: I already know about Alicia’s vacation. He felt the desire to surprise her, by reading what he’d written that afternoon for instance, a story without beginning or end about an old woman and old man who, every afternoon, after lunch, have the habit of going and sitting on a bench in the plaza; any plaza, Plaza de Armas, Plaza de Avenida Perú in Viña del Mar, Plaza de Sucre and Miguel Claro, it doesn’t matter. They like to sit there, hands laced together, and watch: a young couple meet, the next day they kiss, and many nights later the girl appears alone, weeping because every bush gives off the odor of that rotten relationship. And beyond, a group of kids on bicycles chase after a dog, a married couple looks around for the child that doesn’t want to arrive, the man selling cotton candy doesn’t return, but is replaced by a man selling helium balloons, and then by a third man with Styrofoam airplanes. The girl who was crying in front of the bushes is now carrying on an animated conversation with the man who one of the boys on bicycles had become; they get married and grow tired of their oldest son, who escapes from them because there’s no other way he’ll be able to meet up with the group of adolescents who are maki
ng fun of the old guy selling Styrofoam airplanes. The younger daughter, widow of the bike shop owner, buys for her grandsons—no longer children—two bags of popcorn that someone is selling from a truck decorated with neon lights. The old woman and old man do not age so long as they stay in the plaza, so long as their hands remain locked together at the hour of the siesta. This is what Carlos had wanted to read to Elisa, but not over the phone, because as soon as she guessed that it was a story without an end, she’d interrupt and tell him she was sleepy. She’d say it, stretching out the vowels, like she was about to fall asleep in the middle of the conversation. And then Carlos would regret having opened the notebook, believing that he could guess what her response would be if he told her he was going to read something: she’d murmur, as if she were waking up, that if she heard another word about the albino girl she was going to hang up the phone. The silence seemed to last a long time. Elisa asked him if he’d called to have her read his mind; actually, to listen to you breathing, said Carlos. She hung up.