by Carlos Labbé
THE SENDER
Alicia changed the names when narrating certain events, when fitting them together for me, one with the other, inventing stories that made her laugh while I sat and watched the boats that went out fishing at night in the port, incessant little lights. She liked coming up with sarcastic lullabies inspired by whatever I was doing, this little light is going out, going out, going out, for The Little One who doesn’t sleep, doesn’t sleep, that’s what she sang; I listened to her from where I was leaning on the railing, contemplating the illuminated port of Neutria, working, waiting for the ring of the telephone to rupture the nocturnal silence and for it to be you on the other end of the line.
She said she preferred to adopt the indefinite voice of fairytales in her stories in order to, just for the fun of it, alter the names of those who appeared to me each day. And yet the next morning she said that she didn’t want to use real names of people, because it made her feel repulsive, repulsive words used again and again across the centuries, sullied and cleansed by each and every life, like the windows of a house clouded over by the contaminated air of its inhabitants, like the crystal glasses of a busy locale that—from years of washing—are bound to break, like my hours, like this pen, like my voice.
Alicia was talking behind me and laughed loudly again, she was fixing her hair, about to go out and swim in the ocean, to watch from afar the boy who left the university at sunset. I ignored her; I didn’t want to get worn out, I enjoyed sitting still, watching the way Neutria moved. Alicia gave him a name—He Who Is Writing the Novel—when she peered in the window of his room, which faced the street, and saw him remove a notebook from a drawer, tear out some pages, and sit down to write. I didn’t want to know that she’d seen him buy a new notebook, transcribe a few of the torn-out pages, date several sections, and, with distinct handwriting, begin to write the following: Starting today the novel will dictate my days; my days will be embodied in these pages, these pages will be embodied in me, and I’ll be embodied in an other, until this other can no longer be embodied and the novel ends. Even though I didn’t want to hear about it, that night Alicia came out to the balcony anyway, to tell me stories about how he watched me and wanted me, wanted me the way an author wants his protagonist, with a longing that demands an end, and this isn’t just a manner of speaking, silly Violeta, I’ve seen how he spends sleepless nights writing the story of an albino girl to whom something fatal happens. Then I laughed at myself.
We’d seen each other almost one year before, we were classmates in a literature course at the university. But I’m sure that we’ve met each other long before, somewhere else: a plaza in different city; you’re a little boy, you approach the edge of a fountain because a supernatural glimmer at the bottom catches your eye; you are deeply disappointed because through the water you see that it’s the light of the sun reflecting off a coin. I’m a little girl, I approach you with great curiosity because you’ve stayed in the same place for so long, but I can’t see what you’re seeing, I’m much smaller than you. You turn around, you find me on tiptoes and ask me what I’m looking for; the bottom, I say. At the bottom of the water there’s just more water, you say.
Then you go. And I believe you.
The professor of the class where we met liked to repeat that literature is a laboratory, and on one occasion someone asked him if by this he was referring to the naturalism of Zola, he concealed a mocking expression and said that we should follow the etymology: literature as a space to labor. I was left with a feeling of something missing, of malignance, by the discussion of the nature of the written—like everything that seems to have no end—and when everyone was leaving, I approached the professor to discuss this. But before I could say anything, I found the eyes of He Who Is Writing the Novel, standing beside the professor; a heavy sensuality came over me, I’m not sure if it was prompted by the professor or the student. According to Alicia, as I walked away, the professor said something in a low voice and He Who Is Writing the Novel raised a hand in my direction, leaning slightly, then lifted his other hand and pointed at me, and then, quickly, let both arms fall, unsettled by the professor’s words: That is a body. Alicia maintained that neither of them smiled, but stayed serious; the boy stared at the floor and lifted his arm for a third time to sketch the movement of my feet walking away in the air. The professor, on the other hand, looked directly into the eyes of He Who Is Writing the Novel.
The next week I lost all interest in the lights out in the port. Alicia sang: the little light has gone out, where is The Little One, find me The Little One. I lost interest in my classes at the university, too, and concentrated on the composition of my second picture. Just like how every now and then I hear footsteps approaching the door to this house and get up to look out the window, pretending to be focused on the trees moving in the wind, but actually sad not to have welcomed you with this finished letter, until I sit down again to write you, it happened then, when the voices interrupted me at the exit to the university and made me turn around to see who was saying my name. Then, just then, I was at the right distance from the façade to realize that I had discovered my second picture, the one that would at last sustain the ekphrasis: in a landscape that is purely human—I said to myself at the exit to the university—nothing will stop; but a construction that people enter and exit will be different. I believed that once I wrote about the persistence of a single building and its inhabitants, the eternity of all of Neutria would not be unthinkable.
What I’d never considered is the illusion upon which the ekphrasis is based, which came to me suddenly when at last I gave up writing the paragraphs that I was using daily to describe the façade of the Universidad de Neutria, repeating the same succession of images, the same nouns, the same verb. Actually, it was Alicia who revealed the illusion to me and planted the doubt that would again give rise to the movement of the characters, that would alter them by putting these words in their mouths as their only reflection: this action might be my last. When she came up to me complaining that she was bored of my stationary routine, asking me to at least let her read my paragraphs, she almost touched my face with hers trying to understand the smile provoked by my final lines: He Who Is Writing the Novel takes a step forward before starting down the stairs that give way to the path of smooth stones leading to the university gate; around him, the pointed arch frames the blackness of the tall entrance to campus; the stones are interlocked in a formation that is rectilinear in every way up to the metal lettering that displays the name and the year the university was founded, flanked by two gargoyles, leading to a barely discernable curve that bears toward the depths of one corridor, the wall at the back from where it descends to a basement whose classrooms hold up the edifice of thick beams and old concrete, covered by the plastic tiles that support the right foot of He Who Is Writing the Novel, who balances on the edge of the first step—while one of his hands tightens the shoulder strap of his backpack, his hair falling straight across a forehead that hasn’t a single wrinkle, the origin of the skin, the smoothness of his forehead extends across his face, twisting along the tops of his temples, reaching his neck and covering his clavicles, his arm, part of his fingers, his fingernail, not a hitch in the movement of the hand that opens, not a crease on the shirt, not a mark on the face clean as the marble that half covers the walls at the entrance—and moves toward someone on the steps who has made a false move, who is losing their balance and falling, no; he walks toward the gate with a stack of papers under his arm, copies of a magazine called Suspensión, one of its sheets still folded across his butter-colored shirt, which, in spite of the wind and the quality of the fabric, isn’t wrinkled or stained; one of his eyes slightly closed because the sun is hitting his face, the half-closed pupil stares straight ahead; I’d say that the angle of his right foot with respect to his leg is too open, exaggerated, he doesn’t seem to be walking; I’d say that his only wrinkle is the eyelid above the contracted pupil, I’d say that He Who Is Writing the Novel sees nothing as it fa
lls.
After reading the ekphrasis, Alicia bent closer to my ear: liar, the only artifice is in the eye of the girl who watches, in her cold eye, for she doesn’t want to know that blood still circulates through her, that above his head the shadow of a leaf is falling, detached from aromas of the university entrance; that if the girl is a light, all lights go out; that the ekphrasis is writing and all writing is linear, it has to end, it ends like the silence, and like the circulation of the blood that pauses to keep my eye from lingering on the image of He Who Is Writing the Novel, not because his young body is now floating in a glorious state of permanence, but because he slips on the step, clumsy, disbelieving, and goes down, his head cracking open against the only solid thing, and the running blood hurrying to finally stop running.
He stumbles. Catching himself when his pupils manage to look up and see me once again: she’s been sitting there writing at the same time every day since we returned to classes. He Who Is Writing the Novel decides that his experiment is ending, he won’t come through that gate again to see if the albino girl is watching him, because—when I stand up in the moment he loses balance—he has proven that she is. He comes over to tell me that he’s writing a novel in which the important thing is the persistence of bodies, in which, he’ll tell me a few weeks later, he asks himself what would be left of me in him if he’d managed to touched me. I’m afraid, alone, and attracted by that hand as it rises toward my body. Alicia’s intervention shatters the picture, and those pieces begin to move with me until they attain the velocity of my writing, so fast that if you or I fall to the ground we won’t ever be able to say that we got up.
He Who Is Writing the Novel waited for me to dry my mouth enough to speak before smiling, warming up, putting his arms around me without making it overly obvious that he wanted to touch me, and he said: what you’re doing is precisely what I’m unable to write. According to him, he needed me to speak concisely about a painting that interested him greatly, in a text that would be read in public, because it would form part of the manifesto of an artistic movement that would leave everyone in Neutria, everyone in the world, with closed eyes—I expected him to say with open mouths. He said he needed my help, he looked me in the eyes and then, don’t ask me why, I kissed him quickly on mouth, just lips. He Who Is Writing the Novel was stunned, repeating barely comprehensible phrases; that love and work don’t mix, like soul and body, I responded, trying to help him, but he was speechless. I promised I wouldn’t touch him again, that we wouldn’t spend our time fornicating whenever we saw each other. He trembled and in that moment I really loved him; I loved him like a child, that’s what I told Alicia. Like an adolescent would be better, she specified. Perhaps that’s why her stories are incomplete.
I haven’t told you about my earlier visits to the professor’s house yet. He had invited me over twice before you took me: Alicia came along both times, she can attest to the fact that the professor did nothing to force me, rather it was I who told him to stop talking as I got on top of him, not caring anymore about Alicia’s eyes on the painting of a beach and its waves that occupied the entire surface of the living room wall; the armchair was moving, the sea was no longer restrained by the strokes of the paintbrush—I knew then that it was the professor who’d painted it—and it began to recede and get me wet. I admit that the professor’s mouth irritated my lips, yet his hands grew old and then vanished when I turned my back on the ekphrasis: yes, at the cost of my degradation, of the physical effort to separate body from soul—delusion from delight, we called them as little girls, laughing, me and Alicia—the painting hanging on the wall breaking apart in time, along the opposite path I was going to perpetuate the intangible. And then, before the wave painted on the wall broke with its powerful aroma, I got up off the professor’s body, got dressed, washed my hands, looked into his old face to verify that he’d planned the whole thing: I was just a useful body, he said to me the first and the second time. In particular I remember his fingers pressing against the wall where he’d painted the seascape, the soft way his index finger slid across the line of the horizon when he asked that we forget about what’d happened, and this explains why I felt nothing the afternoon He Who Is Writing the Novel invited me to visit the professor’s house so we could look at the painting that he wanted to write about. Just then I realized that the wall where the oil of the seascape had mingled with my sweat a few months before had been meticulously blotted out, and over it there now hung a small canvas.
I don’t expect this letter to become a series of notes about my life, I’m not going to tell you about how I get up, come and go, climb the stairs, and enter the bathroom with nothing to do there, stare at myself in the mirror so I don’t have to look at my actual self. Violeta is my enemy and Violeta is me: alone in my grandmother’s house, abandoned by Alicia, waiting for you, but you won’t be coming to hold me, to cover me with your body and its heat. Though it’s guaranteed that you will come: you’ll open the door, and without approaching you’ll touch me from afar, I’ll fall down wounded, me alone. And at no point will you have moved from the doorway. I just need for you to imagine that I raise one hand from the notebook, that you take it, that together our fingers collapse on the bed and stay there, entwined; if I become something more than the dead body at the beginning of your detective novel, the pages will open up so that any person walking by on the street can look in and stand there motionless watching how I’m writing at this table in the moment that you open the door and take aim.
THE NOVEL
Josefita had pulled back the covers of her parents’ bed and lay down to sleep and watch TV until they got home from a dinner party at the house of some friends. Mesmerized, she checked the time on the bedside table clock when she was woken by the sounds of the car parking, the key turning in the lock, and her father’s voice saying something. She buried her face in the big pillow to seem soundly asleep while hearing every single one of their interminable footsteps, until her father lifted her in his arms and she understood nothing yet knew perfectly well that they were carrying her to bed.
Carlos, lying next to his sister, pressed a button on the remote control, searching for a movie on TV. Josefina had gotten up and was pushing open the closet’s enormous sliding door; she knew her mother kept her grandmother’s trunk, a couple of fur coats she never used, and a whole collection of family photo albums in the back of the closet. Carlos asked her what she was looking for while she silently flipped through the albums one by one, tossing them onto the bed. Written on the covers, in their mother’s lovely handwriting, was the year the photographs were taken. Ugh, said the girl, too old. Carlos said nothing, thinking that in those garish snapshots he was more or less the same age as his sister. Josefa continued doing her thing: she’d open an album, catch sight of the first photo and toss it aside impatiently, picking up another. Apparently she wasn’t looking at the photos for the fun of it, even though she loved doing that too; instead, Carlos deduced, she was trying to find one photo in particular. He repeated the question: what’re you looking for? Josefina paused and said, one from when she was a baby. He put a photo in front of her from when she was around a year old, with a spot of hair and a surprised expression—taking your first steps in the living room of the house in Pocuro, he explained. She immediately opened another album, closed it, grabbed a third, protesting that she was already big in that one, that she needed one from when she was a newborn. They reviewed the photos carefully and could only find Josefina smiling at the camera, two years old, with a beach hat and chair on the sand; a dozen similar polaroids: her yawning around five, raising a hand around three, waking up, eyes barely open around four years old. The girl twisted her mouth and sat down silently on the edge of the bed, staring at the TV. Carlos waited for her to say something; he knew she wasn’t paying attention to the movie that’d begun about an hour before, she was thinking about something else. Without turning around, she muttered that she knew she was adopted. It took Carlos a second to understand what she was
saying and then he smiled: Don’t be silly. Josefina turned to face him, furious, like he was to blame; then why wasn’t there a photo of her as a newborn like everyone else has at home, she said. Carlos responded calmly that she shouldn’t be so stubborn, that he’d seen her in the clinic, bald and red, less than a day old, sleeping in a cradle next to their mother, who, because of her, was very tired. That she shouldn’t be ridiculous, she looked so much like their father and like him. Josefina got the point. She’d never really believed she was adopted, what happened is that her friend Cata’s parents, just last week, had told her that they weren’t really her parents, and all because she found a photo where she appeared in the arms of other people.
Carlos got up to go to the bathroom. While brushing his teeth he yelled to Josefina to put the albums back in order. Elisa had told him once that, when she was little, she’d thought she was adopted too, all because her older siblings liked to bug her with jokes about her dark hair and nearly nonexistent nose. Since she wasn’t blonde, she wasn’t part of the family, they’d repeat. And she invented an alternate identity so as not to feel hurt: her name was Carolina, a name that in her childhood she found particularly melodious for some now faded reason, a name given by her true parents, benevolent people who lived in another place, in the country of the good people. One day she was playing with her ten siblings in the garden of a house that looked a lot like the gingerbread house she’d seen in an illustration of Hansel and Gretel, when the imaginary country was invaded by the neighboring bloodthirsty nation. Her parents were killed in the upheaval and, in an act of desperation, the firstborn brother loaded her and all her siblings onto a boat, and they were able to make their escape. Indescribable adventures led them to many of the world’s ports, where different families would grow fond of one of the siblings and beg the firstborn to let them adopt the child: who wouldn’t want to raise one of the last remaining children from the country of the benevolent people? The firstborn believed he’d be able to ensure the happiness of all his siblings, giving them away one by one to interested parents, and yet he wasn’t always successful; often the natural children of these adoptive families were envious of their kindly nature and teased them, like what happened to her in Viña del Mar when she was taken in by new parents, given a new name. With time, Elisa had come to understand that she was just as boring as her siblings and didn’t really belong to some benevolent race. And yet, as long she was unable to come up with a just fate for the oldest brother, she would never forget this children’s story: she imagined him in the most absolute solitude, old and dejected on a dilapidated boat, looking out at the immensity of the ocean before the breaking of the storm.