by Carlos Labbé
THE RECIPIENT
September 13th
Still too tired to really get into it. And yet it’s important that I continue to record the unbelievable storyline of these days; without ceasing to read, without ever closing a book, I decide to go out into the street to recover whatever is still alive of Violeta Drago in this city. It’s stopped raining at last, the dark clouds have receded, and the days are getting lighter. Without purporting to get up from this chair or put away this notebook, I spend the days walking toward Pedro Valdivia Norte, the neighborhood where Violeta’s house is located. Friday I was leaning on the railing of my apartment balcony, not moving; the whole afternoon I was in that same position, staring dangerously at the ground, many floors below. None of the solutions seemed right to me: not the morbidity of Arguedas and Lihn writing their death diaries, not Onetti and Violeta inventing a city where they run away from their own ruin, and in whose streets their characters find no relief from suffering, but do find oblivion. Keeping in mind that the impudence in these pages was my solitude’s only saving grace, aware too that I write these lines to be read, hoping only that someone will be able to understand what I cannot. With the suicidal compulsion to put this notebook in an envelope and send it to J’s address. But I already said that she’s going to disappear, like me in front of a desk, surrounded by towers of books and worn-out pens, piling up. Only Alicia, because the name I’ve given her here isn’t her name and doesn’t do her justice, will survive. (I realize that she doesn’t fit here, that she can only look in and never enter entirely, or follow along for a few pages, because this notebook is in error, hardly one true word.) Just Alicia versus The Little One. Alicia during the day and The Little One late at night: me, drunk, I can’t help it that first one and then the other appear on my right, on my left; my uneven Manichean vision. And like Carlos, I try to bring them together in an embrace, as if I were the center of everything: me and my pen describing this three-way relationship such that The Little One, lying down, was reading a story in which the protagonist pays for her parents’ nursing-care by working as a whore, exclusively group encounters. That’s what The Little One said to me, the one who was reading an anthology of stories and poems for a writing workshop at a university in some southern city. In Neutria.
When I rang the doorbell at the house on Calle Los Araucanos, it was she, The Little One, who appeared. She asked me what I wanted: she was holding a book in her hands, dressed in pajamas, her short hair in disarray. I lied, telling her I was Violeta’s friend. She returned my look, disbelieving, had I come from the south perhaps, she said. The south? Why the south? Your naivety is infinite, she repeated all night long, when she wasn’t biting me. In that moment I said yes, somewhat inhibited by the brightness of the house, by the decorations Violeta and The Little One’s grandmother had used, by the silverware, by the ceramic animals, the fake ivory, the yellow lamps, and the acrylic plants. The Little One put the teapot in the kitchen and led me to her room. Her grandmother wasn’t home. Had she been waiting for me? Had she been waiting for someone else? The unease on her face when she took off my clothes, she’d probably felt obligated to open the gate when I told her I was Violeta’s friend. Then I asked her if they really were cousins. (Why does she live in Violeta’s house and stay in her room, so talkative, such short bones and rapid movements, the opposite of the figure that weeks of reading Violeta’s infernal handwriting had created for me?) Yes, of course, The Little One said: Yeah right. And she went into the bathroom. I stayed erect. I was entering another body, another city, at last I was emerging from the pit, I say, of this apartment.
Hours later she came out of the bathroom, drying her hands, and asked me my name. Carlos, I continued to lie, as if that very afternoon I hadn’t been pulled from paralysis by Alicia’s phone call: she told me it was important that we see each other, not about Violeta or my novel, but about her and about me. (About us, responding without being cheeky.) As if I hadn’t spent that very day thinking about putting a bullet in J for what she’d said to me when I called her, ready to start over. As if I hadn’t spent an eternity leaning on the railing, watching the raindrops fall more heavily than yesterday and the day before, playing with the idea of locking myself in my room, not sleeping not eating not watching TV, not waiting for the days to fabricate this book for me, but forcing myself, like a maniac, to write a facsimile-novel of A Brief Life, substituting my own presence for Brausen, J for Gertrudis, Santiago for Buenos Aires, and Neutria for Santa María, but never finding in that facsimile-novel a character corresponding to Alicia, to her role of impartiality. Then she called me. I put on gloves and a scarf, expecting that it’d be another afternoon of indecisive conversation; Alicia would try to keep me from getting obsessed with her (or with her friend of the notebooks), I’d want to believe that her teasing was intended to get me to make the first move, to stand up and kiss her and pull her far away from this dusty city with my madness: I exited the elevator promising myself I’d destroy all of it after a few beers. Of course she’d react to my violence, which would at least give rise to a story of another sort. But no, it was preferable for me to remain still, hearing her neutrally over the telephone. I thought that Carlos, that he would act in the exact opposite way that I do. That I should have never given Violeta’s letter to Alicia, since it was addressed me. I closed the umbrella, raised my hand. The micro that was coming, splashing pedestrians, wasn’t the Providencia micro, it was the one that went down Kennedy directly to Pedro de Valdivia Norte. The moment I got on it I became someone else: with the certainty of having stood Alicia up, I stopped in front of the door to the house on Los Araucanos and asked for Violeta. I regret nothing, I regret nothing.
September 20th
No one regrets nothing. The last memory I have of J (if that was the last time, because her writings are very oblique) is of her raising one hand in shy greeting, from a distance. I couldn’t imagine her, despite the determination of her words: shrunken but in no way fragile, her long fingers energetic in the air. The other seemed to be oscillating between his notebook, his book, his pillow, the TV, the telephone, the balcony, and all of a sudden The Little One was clawing his skin and he was unable to hide because he was naked in the middle of an unknown city, maybe a consequence of nothing more than the inexperience of our poor narrator. (I know that he’ll come and rewrite this, one, three times, but at least I’ll dedicate myself to writing about my own life.) Or maybe he’s lying there in bed, half asleep and trying to focus on a photocopied article of criticism on Onetti that he’s reading, thinking he’s abandoned the writing of his so-called personal diary; while reading about the notion of uprooting in A Brief Life, his desolate eyes fall on the drawer containing this notebook, wrapped in brown paper, and he thinks: another precious project that never materialized. The idea had been to defy Alicia, that a novel fabricated with the uncomfortable and carnal plot of the quotidian would be more excessive than all the scribblings of a little albino girl, who abuses her body to gain access to that imaginary childhood city; he couldn’t have known that the passing of the hours would turn against the writer, chaining him to everyday life. O, how I adore those types of figures: the one who writes in isolation triumphing over the one who lives constantly thinking about what is happening. Unfortunately I am subject. I live here, with someone who has fallen asleep, who is starting to dream about snow, about the idea of purity. The Little One enjoys this, looking up at me panting on top of her, saying: “Carlitos, you still believe in purity?” And I stroke her face with both hands, with the backs of my fingers. If I speak the learning will cease; I should moan, breathe, cough, clear my throat and spit on that little girl, whom I despise and adore simultaneously, stretched out naked across the wrinkled bedspread of the moth-eaten mattress where she lies waiting for me. She gives me a sign, putting a vertical finger over her lips and together we draw back, watching him; the expression his face is wearing now is very entertaining, leaning on the desk, ripping out a page from the notebook where he has w
ritten the following:
September 20th
I spent the 18th at Alicia’s house; her parents weren’t there. She invited me to dinner with one of her cousins and his fiancée. The conversation was very interesting, she was gorgeous coming back from the kitchen with a tray full of sushi and everything arranged so she’d always be sitting in the empty seat next to me. She avoided looking me in the eyes, turning her back on me whenever she could. She had an artichoke leaf in her small teeth and she wanted to hold my hand, rocking one leg, the same combat boots as always, sometimes brushing against one of my shoes, the left, and announcing in a serious tone that this was a celebration, the reason didn’t matter, better that way, right? For a second, let’s pretend that we can be other people, that a space exists where we could be happy, the pain of the pen leaving its mark. Let’s leave behind for a second this thing about you and me, about literature and possibility. I was going to say that it’d be better for us to forget that she was Alicia and that I was me, sitting there with such affection, such longing, such love (that word), that we lost the names, that I am a false resident of Santiago, that she travels every month and every week, but where is she going? That when I attempted to write an authentic page, her albino friend got raped in the paradisiacal port of Neutria by a group of beggars who found her under a bridge without any clothes, all because of her longing for transcendence, a twisted need to escape the skin. Alicia was widening her eyes, listening to me, then she interrupted, exclaiming that she was nervous because her brother had taken her parents’ car out right in the middle of the September 18th festivities, and some drunk might’ve run into him. I went home, I was that drunk, and I brought her smell with me, asking myself how I could possibly keep from getting obsessed with a woman like her, thinking about her black dress, about good and evil, about the body and the soul (the blathering of drunks). How not to want her, how to understand why she evaded my touch, I don’t know, for the same reason that J asked that we just be friends, because the flesh ruins itself, the touch becomes abrasive, the orgasm ends, not so a conversation between a man and a woman who guess each other’s words, complete each other’s sentences, invent expressions, laugh at their own verbal ridiculousness. Thinking this, I got in bed, tried to masturbate, but felt like a child, went over to my desk chair wanting to touch something in this apartment that wasn’t mine, I opened my eyes knowing what Carlos would be doing now: sleeping with The Little One, or, at least, dreaming my wet dream about her.
The Little One listened with a silent, little laugh to the way I imitated that guy’s monologue. Then she unclasped her legs, which were wrapped around me, got dressed and said: come on, Carlitos, it’s Fiestas Patrias. We’re going to find the others, we’re going back to Neutria, without Violeta, who cares about her. Let that other guy sit around and worry about the dead albino girl, not understanding that she was trying to leave but was just afraid to do it on her own, and that no one knows how to interpret those pages she wrote about the Corporalists. Don’t look at me like that, you don’t understand anything either, who’s going to shoot her if she’s already dead, stupid. She was so beautiful.
Then it was dark. It was a cold night, we were walking toward Cerro San Cristóbal, and into my mind came his rueful face looking at his notebook, uselessly recovering the thread of his diary. A static image like the last one I have of J, and so it’s not a surprise that he stays like that, like in one of Alicia’s drawings where, sitting in the quad at the university, she and he observe J approaching in the distance, and in turn J is watching them: all three with their hands in the air, waving. The characters understand that they’ll never touch again, that they’ll only be able to wave to each other from far away, and The Little One and I pass through a gate that opens onto the part of Cerro San Cristóbal covered with bushes, at last we make out a naked hand holding a cigarette that rises to guide us.
THE NOVEL
Carlos remembered a summer when he was about fourteen, a girl in Rapel. He would dive into the lake and then run back to his towel. The girl, he didn’t remember her name, spent entire days lying there, wearing ridiculous dark toy sunglasses, reading a book; there were times when she didn’t appear for days and other times she’d spend a whole week just a few feet away. When he came back from swimming, numb, he felt like he was being watched. Once, Carlos asked her what she was looking at, the girl said nothing. The next day he tried a different tack: why was she looking at him. She responded that it was because she desired to look at him. Just like that, over and over, without variations in the dialogue until, at the end of the summer, Carlos had approached the girl to invite her to go waterskiing at the reservoir on his friend’s boat. She thanked him, but said she had no desire to go. Desire! Carlos exclaimed mockingly, and went running toward the pier.
He saw her again a year later. Rapel was emptying out, it was the last night of vacation and Carlos was sitting alone under the spotlight on the wooden pier with a can of worms and a fishing line. Every now and then, in the dark of night, he made out couples walking together, groups of children, fathers unable to sleep because the next day they had to go back to Santiago, back to work. After a while a girl, one or two years older than he, sat down next to him, looked out at the still water and slapped one foot, chasing away a mosquito. Carlos looked at her out of the corner of his eye and, despite the fact that she wasn’t wearing those hilarious sunglasses, he recognized her as the girl from the previous summer. She asked if any fish were biting. He shook his head and considered saying that the only thing biting him were mosquitoes, but didn’t. The girl threw a rock into the water and then apologized, maybe throwing stuff in scared away the fish. No big deal, said Carlos; she stood up and took off her clothes so fast that he barely saw her as she jumped into the water, swimming out into the lake and coming back immediately because it was too dark, she said. Carlos offered the girl his hand and she climbed up onto the pier and sat down beside him again. He said that it was really cold to go swimming; she’d felt the desire, that was all, she said, gathering her clothes, shivering as she disappeared toward the houses. He hadn’t seen her again but, lying there on his bed, he remembered her features perfectly. He had a desire to kiss that distant mouth, to bite it. Then he went and looked out the window: there was no one in the street.
THE SENDER
It’s hard to put in order what was said at the professor’s house, when He Who Is Writing the Novel led me by the hand to look at that painting. It’s hard because I’ve never transcribed a dialogue, because dialogues don’t exist, no, what exists is a multiplicity of voices that don’t always correspond to the people opening their mouths; sometimes they aren’t even speaking, and yet we hear them. The professor was waiting for us on a soft armchair, legs crossed, a whiskey on the table, the aforementioned painting on the wall behind him. The professor greeted He Who Is Writing the Novel with a wave and looked me right in the eyes, waiting for me to look away, ashamed, but I wasn’t at all perturbed to find myself so composed in the same place where previously I’d been writhing and sweating. He Who Is Writing the Novel removed a great quantity of pages, notecards, and biographical clippings from a folder that contained the professor’s research regarding an unknown Neutrian poet from the ’60s. The money He Who Is Writing the Novel’s family sent from Santiago to pay for his studies came late or not at all, and the professor offered sizable sums to students who compiled information about writers of particular academic interest, demanding their complete discretion and erasing any possibility of ever sharing credit for his publications with them. Truth be told, He Who Is Writing the Novel never took himself all that seriously: the professor published his student’s annotations verbatim. A debt of some kind existed between the two of them, and because of this the professor had allowed me back into his house.
At first they were discussing their latest discoveries, but couldn’t come to an agreement. For my part, I considered the pain I could cause the professor, while fixing three more whiskeys and drinking them, chewing
the ice and scratching the surface of the sofa, ignoring their conversation. They’d spread out dozens of pages across the surface of the coffee table that summarized the different versions of the biography of Our Young Poet, which is how they referred to the subject of their research. The professor was nodding, parroting certain paragraphs out loud, asking repeatedly about some irrelevant detail; so there was nothing left for me to do but get more ice or flee to the bathroom, where I voiced questions that Alicia would then respond to in the mirror: how to make the professor but not He Who Is Writing the Novel disappear, I said to myself, after splashing my face with water. Returning to the living room, I found them taking notes for the official biography of “Our Young Poet,” and I sat down to read their pages. I remember little besides a few sordid milestones from the last months of his adolescent life. Enough of this nonsense, I said, it wasn’t funny to play at writing new chapters of Heinrich von Ofterdingen if Novalis himself had wanted to leave his novel incomplete, but He Who Is Writing the Novel stopped me, gently removed the glass from my hand, and, coming close, kissed me, the bastard. Truth be told, Our Young Poet believed Novalis, he believed Artaud, he believed Lautréamont, and he proclaimed this in meetings at Casa del Escritor, in lectures at the Municipal Library, in confessions to friends who were casually studying journalism: you should only write in extreme states like rage, drunkenness, anxiety, pain, and sickness, he said. Although he’d published two very short books when he was sixteen and seventeen years old, he was praised by poetry experts who never wrote a single verse, and when someone insulted him, calling him “regurgitated Rimbaud” at the reception for an award, he felt so understood that no one ever saw him again; sticking to the Rimbaudian plan like clockwork, except that on his desk he left behind too many clues. If the boy had left behind a posthumous work, then all this mimicry was just a farce or the concealment of something more, I said to them. He Who Is Writing the Novel responded that in light of those final pages, Our Young Poet had decided to give up at the last minute, impelled by a horrifying discovery. Then the professor gave me—with his bloodstained hand, bloodstained sooner or later—a photo of The Young Poet at eighteen, pictured with his father and an uncle at sunset in Neutria, between neighboring houses, a street that dropped down toward the port and, in the background, the sea, the sea, the sea, the sea, until He Who Is Writing the Novel took the glass from my hand, helped me up from my seat, we took two steps and stood facing the painting that hung from the white wall: a multiplicity of faces appeared between the brushstrokes, faces that swarmed under a ruined bridge, barely illuminated by an old lamppost in the foggy night, next to the black river; the fleshless faces of the beggars appeared, their heads bald and pallid, each one the same as the next. The enigma was that only one of those imprecise faces belonged to Our Young Poet and they were all identical to the photo the professor showed me.