“Dancing Queen” played at full volume. They’d already been drinking, they were dancing almost without realizing it. Another song and another bottle of beer, until the tape stopped and, with the silence, came the certainty that they hadn’t gotten any work done. Alicia picked up her scissors and papers again. Jars of latex paint with brushes inside them and some plaster figures were waiting for Bernarda, while Elisa, squatting, was coating rusty old pieces of iron with concrete. At a certain point in the night, a rush of air slammed the door to Carlos’s room and, little by little, the window pushed open. Elisa and Bernarda glanced up and the tools fell from their hands: a strange face was peering in from the street, watching them. All three gazes were fixed until Elisa, all at once, shut the window and the curtains, and Bernarda turned off the light. A light from the street outlined the silhouette of the watcher on the curtain, immobile, in profile, waiting for a few seconds. The door to the house was opened from outside. It was Alicia coming in, she called to them in a high-pitched voice. She came into the room and sat down on the floor next to them. She was frightened, she said: before going to bed she’d gone to take the trash out to the street; she was putting the bags next to the neighbor’s when she noticed a man sitting on the sidewalk, smoking, staring at the ground. The guy commented that if there was any music that could wake the dead, it was ABBA. Alicia started walking faster toward the door, imagining that any hesitation would result in a heavy hand on her arm, then he’d be inside the house, in the darkness. She managed to turn the key, go inside, shut the door, and stay still waiting for the furious rattling of the doorknob. But the man decided to leave. Alicia, Elisa, and Bernarda sighed, they didn’t move, they talked until they fell asleep right there, leaning against the wall, huddled together.
THE SENDER
I want you to know that if I die young I’m going to stick around.
Like the foam on a wave photographed in black and white one winter afternoon, a photograph I found in a library book by one of the Corporalists: gray sky, white spots from errors in the developing process, stripes cutting across the photographic paper. And in the background, the horizon, black like a thick wall of water that should still be, should have been, moving, forming part of time, water that will never be in the same position again, a faint glimmer and life, or better, each second’s passing reminding me that I’m going to die. The distant glimmer — no suggestion of color, just a glimmer streaking across the black water — is not foam, delicious foam running toward me without ever wetting my feet, foam dissolving in the surf that leaves without leaving. The rocks, another shadow on the sea, I can’t walk on that beach; to enter that place is to inevitably leave another place behind; seeing myself sitting on a beach wearing a black dress and dark sunglasses is to no longer see myself standing, naked, walking into the sea, bent over this notebook, dancing with you at a party. I choose one image, I lose the rest.
I recall, or rather I write, a memory, saying that this word, this situation, and this place correspond to the exact moment that I saw you for the first time, coming out through the university’s main entrance, closer and closer to death all the time: I saw you coming out in a dozen different ways, if you want to know; you were you and you were other, you were a girl who sat next to me in a class; you took a slight step forward, no, you went down two stairs, you touched your backpack, your hair, you focused on me immediately; there were three or more people between us, you closed your eyes from all the sleepiness, you saw me blearily out here, in the same position I adopt every morning, day after day, my eyes absorbing the slightest variations that have occurred on the university’s façade during the past two weeks.
To remember something and to write it down is akin to dying, denying that it could’ve happened another way. But I’m going to die anyway and I want at least to save one image, I insist, one token that tells me how I lost you, since in your gesture of greeting, a slight smile, it was already stated that in the end you were going to go: the frozen image has to be broken so you can move, so you can come close to where I am. Though the night is immobile — like the black and white photo of the beach landscape I found in the library of my professor, the only Corporalist I ever got to know — you are not afraid to come.
And you wonder why what began as an extensive and well-plotted letter has become a succession of fragments. Without answering, I say to you: when I no longer exist — or no longer exist in these pages but in that which is never lost or burned, that which can’t even be called word because it lasts, because its meaning never changes, your reading — please, please look at these fragments and understand that what I sought in Neutria wasn’t continuity, but convergence. That from the first to last page I wrote, I knew that it wasn’t I who initiated contact, nor would it be you who would complete it, just like the postman who gives you this envelope will think he’s done his job, ignoring that with the act of delivering my correspondence he has helped bring you closer to Neutria and me closer to Santiago.
I had established a routine through which I was going to render the ekphrasis, an ancient name for the writing of the present: ecstatic descriptions of a situation in which the totality is palpable. My routine, in a few words, consisted of going to write down my observations — in the same place, at the same time (eleven-thirty, ten steps in a straight line past the red kiosk) — of a foreign couple who often sat down to rest, briefly and in silence, before continuing their regular morning walk along the black beach. Of course, many times they — the centerpiece of this, my first picture — did not appear. On those occasions I tried to keep the order intact: I’d begin, moving left to right, in one paragraph, naming every detail my eyes touched, from the sand sticking to my foot to the impassable line of the sea in the background. The idea was to arrive at a description that was undisturbed except at the exact point where the amorous bodies, his and hers, with their tender and gentle — if not weary — movements, interrupted the recursive vision of the ocean waves. Each one of her fingers on his face, traveling slowly down to his neck, completing a movement I might never see again. And three days later, when the couple reappeared, walking, in different clothes and a detail in the expression on their faces acquired from the weight, I mean, the passing of the days, when she asked that they rest for a while and he lay down beside her on the sand, the caress would invariably be distinct, the woman’s skin other, the approach of his fingernails different, foreign the wrinkles, the shine, the dryness, the position of a single hair growing at the base of the ring finger that disappeared within two weeks, blending in with the stain on his hand — was he a painter? — maybe a shadow her nose projected onto those knuckles that were touching her, their edges diffuse on that cloudy day.
I was seeking to prove that the shapes their bodies could take in my picture were infinite, unlike the background of the beach which I deliberately tried to describe in the same number of crystallized sentences every time, such that if there were two or three days that the couple didn’t appear, the paragraphs in my notebook would necessarily be identicaclass="underline" if the sand on the beach was immutable, the waves changed so much that it was always the same wave. And this way I was able to reduce the observation of the sea to a simple formula; the couple, on the other hand, when they came into my picture, never, not even once, allowed me to repeat the expressions of my description. So, through months of work, I was able to establish in my writing what, in your words, is “my makeshift Manichean vision”: across an immortal backdrop, the human couple in constant motion. And I attributed the capacity to fix those two bodies that didn’t want to linger in my picture to a noun: benevolence.