Soon another hand goes up among the listeners in the class. A gringa is talking now. In the face of the general stupor, her question, which is heard out of context, seems to reveal a doubt that was burning inside all of us before we came into the classroom; I smile hearing her poorly pronounced Spanish: “Excuse me, professor, but do you know what happened to the student Violeta Drago?” The professor goes pale, looks at the floor, unbuttons the collar of his shirt. He swallows and answers: “It’s good of you to ask. The truth is my conscience won’t let me work. I know Violeta’s hidden story, she was, of course, a very dear student. It’s a tragedy, but I want to assure you that if I didn’t say anything it was only because I didn’t want to get myself in any trouble. Besides, no one has come to me to talk about it, no one has asked me anything.”
(And so, in all my apathetic infatuations, as a reader and as a body, where do I locate the attraction I feel for Violeta? She was a living human being, reliant on blood like myself or any other, and yet she has now become a memory. [And where are the pictures of her, the video footage, the sound of her voice captured on a cassette, her high school yearbook, where is she?] That main character in her deliriums, as fictional as Donoso’s monsters, although she insists they were lived experiences. Alicia moves her head, angry. Would I ever be able to get anywhere near that albino girl — though she has appeared so often in my dreams of white walls in recent nights — if she weren’t dead? The answer is no. Because when she died, the pages she’d written came to me. [Alicia reads this and says not a word.] We living beings are cursed, we can’t know ourselves without the existence of inanimate objects: a novel, a personal diary, a letter. Another paradox: whoever claimed that the dead don’t communicate is the one who is dead.)
In my dream the professor kept on explaining himself. “She showed me a few stories she was writing, very interesting. We met at a café on the fisherman’s cove. She was ridiculously nervous when she showed up, barely hanging onto a pile of loose papers, she told me they were dreams (dreams within the dream), not stories, and that she couldn’t stay to talk because she had to hurry to go help a friend. A friend of hers was going to be killed within a half hour, or have stones thrown at him, or get turned over to the police, I can’t remember. She ran off down the street. I followed her of course, in my car at a safe distance. Suddenly I was stopped by the sound of a gunshot. I saw Violeta and a boy clinging to each other, the boy — I don’t know if you know him — who walks around out on the quad with his books and notebooks; he was pale from the shot, I already said it, from the bullet that had struck Violeta too. The two kids — I really want you to understand this — were staring out at the sea; like they died trying to catch a glimpse of the horizon of Neutria, still on their feet, bleeding out, rigid, entwined, eyes open to the sea. It was a statue, I don’t know if I’m making myself clear: they were the very same statue that’s been down on the waterfront for years, do you get it?
Then the class and the professor disappear. I find myself walking along that same tourist stretch, along the waterfront from his story, along the boardwalk of a port city that I wouldn’t have known what to call besides: Neutria. I walked for hours. Neutria, now that I write it I understand my vacillation, but I was there; now, when I reread my dream I recognize that salty aroma, that air that’s impossible to find in Concón, or Iquique, or San Antonio, just as I imagined those streets when I read Violeta’s pages! And in this city there were, in effect, not one, but hundreds of identical statues; in every Neutrian plaza, the same plaster and marble couple, clinging to each other, in all those classical profiles, the demented eyes of Violeta, her hair white against a masculine face.
That Sunday afternoon, in my dream, I sat down on a bench in the plaza, surrounded by adolescents touching each other for the first time, two old people watching everything, a middle aged couple arm-in-arm, a balloon vendor, an organ grinder, children, dogs. From the water rushing out of the fountain that plaza’s statue had become, through the bustle of the crowd, a faint voice called my name. I approached the fountain and heard the sound of a small waterfalclass="underline" it wasn’t the bullet, it was the professor; it’s not a gunshot, it’s a sentence; not a detective novel, but an academic essay, a letter, a prayer. Then another image was superimposed: me and ten people whom I love, around a table. Sitting in the dining room of my old childhood home, in Rancagua. I held a thick pen in my hand, a felt-tipped pen with which I wrote a hundred insults on a plastic whiteboard: “Go away, fucking fuckhead professor, decrepit piece of shit, motherfucking fairy, get out of my body.” Someone shakes me awake; Alicia (or J) asks me about Violeta, where is Violeta. I write another sentence on the whiteboard: “Carlos closed the small notebook.” Then everyone remains still and reads what I write in silence, and I wake up, furious that I can’t remember what it was I wrote that was so important, realizing at last that I am not Carlos, that no one calls me Carlos.
THE NOVEL
That night Carlos slept at his parents’ house because he had to watch his little sister. Elisa had asked to use his home studio, she needed to put together some pieces of iron and concrete. Bernarda, a friend from university, who was also taking the opportunity to assemble her project for sculpture class, went with her. By seven they’d finished moving their materials into Carlos’s studio. In the living room, Alicia spent the afternoon cutting pieces of glossy paper, which later she’d glue on top of old family photos. Elisa, sitting beside her, stared at the entrance to a house, where two extremely elegant men — impeccable dark suits, handkerchiefs in their breast pockets, starched collars, and gelled hair — smiled at the camera. One of them held a newborn baby in his arms. In the background, the sun setting into the sea, a boat, a streetcar turning the corner, one of the early automobiles. The distant setting sun had already been altered by Alicia’s scissors: on top of it she put a flat, orange semicircle. Elisa asked, jokingly, which of the men was Gardel. I bet that’s him, indicating the newborn. Alicia let out a little laugh and reassumed her posture of concentration. Gardel was her grandfather, she said; Carlos’s grandfather too. Originally these men had been standing in Valparaiso, but now that paper circle was an all-encompassing sun that didn’t resemble the sun of that city. It was the sun of Neutria. Elisa sat watching how her boyfriend’s cousin pronounced this unfamiliar word: Neutria. Neutria still retained a coastal charm, unlike Valparaiso or Puerto Aysén. Industries had not yet overrun its beaches, a neighboring city hadn’t robbed it of its grasses, its flowers, its tranquility, because there was nothing, not even a country house, for a hundred kilometers in any direction. Bernarda asked them what they were talking about: she brought in some bottles of beer, peanuts, three glasses. Elisa got up and went to put a tape in the stereo. That night the heat was unbearable.