by Carlos Labbé
We laughed. What, she thought I was going to stay inside sleeping because of the disgusting behavior of some drunks? Or better: The Little One and I laughed as we ran down the stairs and got in her car. I grabbed her around the waist to kiss her, she twisted away, without taking her eyes from the stoplight at Américo Vespucio she asked me not to be a coward today, at her friend’s birthday party. Be quiet, I responded; it was just that, a couple nights before, I’d been dumbfounded to see her like that, on top of a table surrounded by executives toasting a fat man, who was vomiting bile, glasses breaking on the floor while her hands were pinned down onto the sharp edge of the table by the knees of a man wearing a tie. The man had approached her, run his fingers along her fleshy arm, and whispered something in her ear. He’d call her later to have us join them in a private room. What name had he uttered in that moment? She didn’t answer. We parked, went up to the house’s gate, knocked. No one came out to let us in for quite a while. The Little One looked at me, I took her hand and squeezed it, demanding that she tell me her name.
(I danced with S almost all night, we had a good time together, thrilled by the stupid movements extremities make when there’s something driving them: music that takes hold of the hips and arms and chest, as if a different type of pounding blood animated us and the autonomy of the organism were lost when confronted with this pulse that comes from outside, that connects and disconnects us not only to the person smiling in front of us, but also to the couple whose backs touch ours because of a misstep, to the passionate kiss over there in the corner, to hands that form bodies when brought together, and to the mouths that open yet say nothing; there’s only one body that’s separate, Alicia’s body, dancing around whomever she likes, never in front of them; she joins a circle of bodies clapping their hands for a wild dancer, comes toward us, makes a half turn and I don’t want to smile; I smile at S, the three of us dance together, she’s lost again in the confusion of heads and necks. When S goes to the bathroom, I stay on the dance floor and Alicia reappears beside me, distant because we’re never able to bring our movements together to form a single figure, a figure that moves forward, draws away and comes together and laughs, but never stops. The body is movement, its only rest is death or dreaming: Alicia and I discussed this the other day. Now, on the other hand, when we try to dance, the silence is the moment I trip and almost fall; in the blank spaces of our conversations each of us reproduces the true message on our own; I don’t understand what it is she’s doing, but I marvel at the confusion her movements provoke in me. I go up to her and kiss her: there’s no possible interpretation, I’m separated from you if you stop reading these words and start dancing; Alicia moves away, she’s disappointed by our stiffness. Later I find her sitting down and offer her my beer. Why the long face? I ask. She answers with a monosyllable and I, without having planned it, respond with a phrase that she likes. The moment is overwhelming: she and I in the absolute ubiquity of our dialogue, I think about how much I love her and for an unexpected second she rests her head on my shoulder. All of a sudden we realize what we’re doing, we shake ourselves and talk again about some random thing; the contact provokes separation.)
The Little One didn’t want to tell me her name right away. She opened her mouth with surprise, but then a blond man appeared and invited us to follow him through the gate without saying a word. Later, she licked my ear a little as she told me I could call her whatever I wanted, and I was delighted by that party where dozens of couples groped each other on the couches. With my hand on her back I led her to the center of the living room. She came close, put her arms around my neck, and we swayed to a soft music. It must sound different from how it was; the Corporalists of Santiago rarely use words. They were there to enjoy themselves, The Little One explained. Mouths opening only to share their partner’s mouth, tongues fulfilling their roles while fingers weren’t instruments, but parts of foreign bodies, like the knees, the waist, the neck, the eyelids, the groin. A solitary woman fell down, asleep; she was useless there. A man lifted her in his arms, she curled against that unfamiliar chest moving off to one of the bedrooms; the two of them were sleeping deeply in one of the beds; or maybe he was shaking her violently, then came a slap, she shoved him and ran crying out to the patio. At the end of the night, the couple lay peacefully on a rug in a room on the second floor: it’s love, The Little One interrupted at sunrise, when I told her that I’d spent the entire night thinking of the perfect names with which she and I would be happy.
THE NOVEL
It was very early in the morning. 5:15, Carlos saw on his watch. He turned the key, pushed open the door, groped the wall in search of the light switch and turned it on. He contemplated the living room, briefly illuminated, then flicked the switch again to proceed in darkness. He bumped into a potted plant. Tired, sad, and drunk, he let himself collapse onto the couch and closed his eyes. He could still hear the shouting inside the car of the friend who’d offered to give him a ride home. At Salvador and Providencia they’d spotted two transvestites. His friend had slowed down to get a look at the fairies, he found these girls fascinating from a distance, he said. He said to look closely, they were paragons of woman: legs long as columns, those waists, oh, those waists. Of course their hair was a little strange, but those shoulders, those shoulders in the air. The car crept up the incline; the two transvestites approached one step, then another. The problem, according to his friend, was that everything changed at a few meters; it was a problem of distance. Now those exquisite women had turned into garish men, costumed and painted, serious faces giving way to nervous chuckles and then fits of laughter, he added, accelerating. In the rearview mirror, the shrinking image of one of the transvestites panting, furious, open mouth insulting them: sissy faggots. From desire to laughter and then the leering faces, the weariness, the silence. The problem of distance, of the lie the head tells the eyes, and the eyes tell the touch. Like what’d happened to his girlfriend, said Carlos, interrupting the silence in which they were moving. Like the problem Elisa had when that gringa with whom she’d exchanged letters since she was thirteen came to meet her in person; she hadn’t had the courage to tell her unknown yet intimate friend that she disliked her shrill voice, or the strange acidity of her scent, or her emphatic hand gestures, that she came too close when starting a conversation or blinked slowly whenever responding to a question, moving her head up and down. The truth is that Elisa only relaxed after dropping her off at the airport, and that the feeling had been mutual: she never received another letter from the gringa.
Carlos didn’t know how long he’d been sleeping on the sofa. Outside the first songs of the thrushes and the roar of micros starting their routes could be heard. He unbuckled his belt, unbuttoned his pants, kicked off his shoes. It was cold. People’s bodies didn’t disappear when they closed their eyes, he thought. One time he had convinced that same friend to go drink with him in his car, parked near the exit to the club where Elisa and her friends from school would often end up when they went out. They talked, watching conversations between the bouncers at the door and guys who were trying to get in without paying, a drunken brawl that ended with ambulances, the shouts of an intoxicated kid who didn’t want to surrender his car keys. Suddenly another car that was parking caught Carlos’s attention, especially when a group of girls climbed out. Her: the one with short hair, a skirt, quick movements, and an invisible nose, he pointed. He was about to get out of the car to greet her, ask her name, and give her his phone number, who knows. You’re an idiot, his friend said: how had he not realized that it was Elisa, arriving with her friends.
THE SENDER
That morning He Who Is Writing the Novel showed up at my apartment, yawning, with circles under his eyes. He had to see me, to talk to me; for the first time he said: I want to tell you about Corporalism. I kept hearing I want you, I want you to know, that his words wanted to use mine, that he was going to say things for me, the silence that goes unwritten when there are two authors. And there are alway
s two. In that silence Corporalism was already formulated, before they were introduced to it in the auditorium at the Universidad de Neutria, even before you sat down in your room to write the novel that would serve as a guide to the Movement of the Body and the text enslaved you.
Alicia and I had convinced ourselves that sooner or later He Who Is Writing the Novel would come to our apartment on the pretext of picking up the story that I’d promised him at one point for the third issue of his photocopied magazine. I lied to him; never in my life had I been able to write something with a beginning, middle, and end, I’d never put a single letter of mine on any page that wasn’t the transcription of a dream or an attempted ekphrasis, so I went to Alicia and asked for one of her short stories. We made a deal: one of us would sit down and write and the other would publically present herself as the author of eventual features in magazines and books, to receive the praise, give thanks, and put on a good face for the critics. It was fair. My pages are not easy to publish; Alicia’s stories, on the other hand, might interest certain readers obsessed with children’s literature. So I selected a pathetic fable entitled The Wasted Night and gave it to He Who Is Writing the Novel. Later he blushed when, on his way to the elevator, he turned back to look through the open apartment door and noticed that I was waving to him from out on the balcony with one hand in the air, while behind me Alicia was gesticulating with all her fingers: at first glance it looked like obscenities, but then I realized she was sketching a small glass sphere inside an elastic and translucent globe that was closing in on its center. Soon the globe would explode and, with it, the sphere, before we could make out the face reflected in the glass. I closed the door to the apartment and Alicia shook me harshly, her hands on my shoulders, so that I understood: the man hadn’t come for our story, she said, he’s going to lose those pages because he wants a different narrative, one in which you and I are just the names of women he likes. Mark my words.
Days later, He Who Is Writing the Novel buzzed the apartment intercom and asked for me. Alicia answered and he said: I’m coming up. Because he needed to see me again. He knocked on the door, I came out of my room fixing my hair, half asleep. Taking the wrist of his right arm I lead him out onto the balcony, and we sat down.
He Who Is Writing the Novel looked out at the sea. His head and his hands moved back and forth, he couldn’t look away from the rolling of the waves; I, on the other hand, sat in front of him, my eyes fixed on his face. Sometimes he crossed his legs and I’d grab his hands to keep them from moving; other times I’d look back into the apartment, where Alicia sat in an armchair, her legs crossed too, holding a cigarette in one hand and a book in the other. Her fingers kept separating, slowly, then the coming back together, never quite making contact. Then my gaze moved from her to my own barely perceptible reflection in the glass, then to the face of He Who Is Writing the Novel. Objects were injuring him, he said. Suffering from insomnia, he decided to get up and try to leave his room, he ran into a wall and ended up on the floor, his head cracked open; he started writing frenetically and one of his fingers slipped on the surface of the pen and he cut himself on the edge of the page. He was bleeding.
I stopped writing for fifteen minutes. I went out to the patio to see how the night was spreading over the garden, its stars concealed by clouds and a dry, scarcely perceptible, summer wind. Since then, not even closing the big windows and the curtains has been enough to keep me from feeling that wind; I felt heavy, I could barely keep myself from falling asleep on top of these pages, sleep again. Sleep as an alternative to permanence and death, the dilemma that has led me to write this lengthy letter. Sleep is an alternative, He Who Is Writing the Novel said to me, haggard; he slept in fits and starts because every three hours he had to return to the notebook on his desk; to leave behind all forms of writing is death, my Violeta Who Is Writing the Novel, he was saying, stretched out across one of the chairs on the balcony. Because there’s no other way to stay here besides slicing yourself up into various characters, who nonetheless—because they all belong to a single body, to me, the one who is writing this right now—struggle to be reunited. The characters move away from each other and disappear from sight, getting lost in the narration and, contemplating the landscape of the story that awaits them, they decide to return with eyes closed, running, only to collide with the others who are approaching them at full speed. Those who survive the impact remember nothing, they don’t realize that they’ve grown or that they were bigger before, and they begin to wander through these pages without knowing that they’re preparing for the next collision. Finally, after many pages, there’s only one left: one who has endured all the blows, who traverses valleys, oceans, deserts, and mountains without finding anyone, until he sees me, the one who is writing. Every night through the window I see the character coming toward me. He approaches at a run. He reminds me of so many people I’ve known, more than anything he resembles me: he’s a woman. And yet he’s not a woman, but someone who is not a man, someone who will appear at the end of my novel and demand his death or my own.
Then I asked him a question that neither of us could hear because I couldn’t get it out of my mouth. I was lying on top of He Who Is Writing the Novel—his words emerging disconnected as if in a dream, the murmur of the sea mingling with his voice as he stroked my head with one hand—when he started to tell me what the novel was about.
For two entire nights of insufficient sleep, he wrote the novel, until he closed the notebook with a start, terrified by the possibility that I’d actually died in the final fragment. He left his house and came running to see if I was still alive, frightened that he was fulfilling his puerile desire to have the written turn material. The novel was something else, new and the same as always; the novel in which he opens the door, I look up from the pages of Neutria, and then I’m dead on the floor of my own house, was a novel-manifesto, he said: the novel of Corporalism.
He was the protagonist. He used his own name or simply He Who Is Writing the Novel, depending on his mood. He reiterated his own physical features, those hands that were too much for him and that I sometimes held between my own; again and again you enumerated the stages of the novel-writing process, and during the book you split into two, three, even four. You asked me if I’d fallen asleep, I swallowed a sound that signified yes and adjusted my position against your chest. You kept one hand on my head and another on my back, you were smiling because my slack body was at your disposal, what you didn’t realize was that your hands were also prisoners of my weight.
He Who Is Writing the Novel had resolved to carefully follow the movements, alive and dead, of The Young Poet: that his body had been found in a grave of disappeared people, that he might have ended up a beggar under the bridge, just as he’d predicted in his own posthumous poems. Waking up I asked him if he really believed that the painting we’d found in the professor’s house had been painted by The Young Poet, by his adolescent hands that experimented with rhymes. He Who Is Writing the Novel tried to get up to find something that would verify his suspicions—an article by an art critic, a photo, a reproduction of the painting—in vain, all my weight was still on top of him. I’m an obstacle, he said. I asked him again if he really believed this; he kissed me and answered: my little skeptic. I couldn’t laugh in that moment because he had one of his fingers between my teeth and I didn’t want to make him bleed. He added that to follow closely the path of one writer we couldn’t pretend to be inside the skin of another; and since he hadn’t had the privilege of being The Young Poet, it occurred to him to write down a plan so that anyone else would be able to trace his steps. A map, he summarized. He would describe the passage from writing to simulation—and from simulation to application to belief—that The Young Poet had followed. I looked out at the Neutrian sea, at the old houses near city hall, the buildings, the forest, the old port and the new one, the park, everything visible from that balcony, and thought about what he was saying: to tell how a boy writes verses about a character who paints the
portrait of a beggar to in the end become that beggar, that character who paints, that boy who versifies, that narrator who narrates. Or instead to memorize the verses, hold the paintbrush, say that among the portraits of beggars that one portrait exists, give everything away, stop eating, remain silent when spoken to, go to the bridge, convert. Divide an author into his characters just to see if it’s true that in so doing you can arrive somewhere far away. And once you’re far away, recover the author in the characters from a distance, insignificant; be The Young Poet. To achieve this he had to imagine how he spoke, the way he moved, to what extent he faltered when he walked. That was why he needed to write a novel, to follow one writer until he became another writer, never the same one. It’s just that there would come a point when it would become impossible to deny that something false was sustaining the project, something that would make him lose all motivation, put his notebooks aside, do nothing for hours, months, years, until his own indolence ended up turning him—definitively, without words—into a beggar. And I, sleeping on his chest, confused what he was telling me with a dream in which the inhabitants of Neutria came, one by one, to enter me like a rented costume left on the floor after a party, while Alicia continued to smile at me from the living room of our apartment. I woke up when He Who Is Writing the Novel removed his hand from my hair, upset because I hadn’t paid attention to him, asking me why I arranged things to always hear the same words, as if I couldn’t understand. As if I were stupid. And it was always the same for me: character and author, the sea and the shore; our boat and the dock from where we just set sail.
Alicia got up from her armchair, hurt by the way He Who Is Writing the Novel was treating me. The afternoon sun reflecting off the big window blinded me, and yet I was able to see her take a chair, climb up to the top shelf in our closet, and pull out a large suitcase. I was alarmed.