She ran her hand over her face and sat up. A pair of men whistled at her from a distance, at her or at someone else, then disappeared. It was late. Shivering, she put on Carlos’s jacket. She stretched her legs out over the gravel and looked around. The old man on the bench had put his newspaper away inside his wool jacket. She looked around for Carlos, she saw some workers playing a game of pickup soccer with a rubber ball. A few of them, freshly showered, had come from the building that was under construction near Carlos’s home-studio; some days, looking out the window, she’d see them leave, all spruced up, heading out to a bar. She got up. Her head hurt and she was anxious to tell off that old degenerate: the one who’d been staring at her all this time. She started walking.
Suddenly she was in front of a bar. She stood still, staring at the glass of the display window where the specials were written in white and red marker: half-liter beers 500 pesos, chicken and fries 1,000, beer and a hotdog 890. She looked at her face, still swollen with sleep. For a second, she glanced past her own reflection and a man appeared, drinking a beer, his eyes fixed on the wall. It was him. When Elisa entered the bar, Carlos was watching a pretty girl come in through the doorway and walk toward his table. In the neon light he discovered it was Elisa, her face hard, pulling back a chair and sitting down across from him. She moved aside two bottles that were apparently in her way and asked him dryly what’d made him decide to leave her on that bench, alone and sleeping. Better to have offered her up for a million pesos to the construction workers who whistled at her every time she passed by on her way home. Carlos asked her to forgive him. He gestured to the woman cleaning the mirror behind the bar: one glass, please. All was silent as Carlos emptied the bottle into the glass and offered it to Elisa, who turned it down with a raised hand and a tsk of her tongue. She pushed back her chair intending to leave, but Carlos took her arm and spoke: she had fallen sound asleep when the organ grinder started his song. And he’d experienced an urge to learn the man’s name, to exchange a few words with him, after all Carlos could hum from memory the melody the organ grinder played every week in the neighborhood. Then he decided he’d give him a coin — he’d never done so before — with the secret hope that he’d be allowed to turn the crank on the apparatus. It’d only take a couple minutes; he hadn’t meant to leave her alone for anything in the world. He’d laid her down on top of his jacket — she was sleeping soundly, he’d said this already — and headed toward the organ grinder, who’d just finished his second melody and, as usual, was pausing for a moment to accept coins from passersby. As he approached he couldn’t help but stare at the girl talking to the organ grinder, who listened to her very intently, nodding his head with every word she said. It was the albino girl. The albino girl, he repeated, and he’d seen her face before. Perfectly calm, he handed the organ grinder 100 pesos so he could listen in on their conversation: she said that it was a deal then, that he better not leave her expecting, this comment made both of them laugh quietly. The albino girl said goodbye and began walking rapidly away. When Carlos caught up to her, he asked if she was Violeta, Alicia’s friend, and she smiled, glanced up, as if noting his hair color, and nodded her head. Carlos paused. He stared at Elisa, who was drinking her beer now, her eyes never leaving his. She was certain he wouldn’t tell her everything. He’d wanted to tell Violeta who he was — her friend’s cousin — but she didn’t show the slightest interest in his words, I know, I know, she said. They were silent, Violeta turned and walked toward Providencia; she didn’t look where she was going, her attention on Carlos, walking beside her. Then he asked her what she was carrying in her hand. A magazine founded by some of her cousin’s classmates, she said: they’d published a story she’d written. She handed him the stapled and folded photocopies. A gift. In that instant, as he thanked her and told her he’d read it, Carlos remembered Elisa, alone in the plaza. As if he’d betrayed her, as if he were betraying her, she thought. Violeta smiled for the first time, she moved her head again and murmured: See you, have a good one. She looked a lot like the albino girl from the novel, the one he’d been unable to find in his notebook; he told Elisa that he’d been thinking about the coincidence of their hair color as he headed back toward the plaza, walking, not running, why lie; she looked just like that unfathomable character that he heard in his head. At the stoplight he started flipping through the photocopied magazine. He was stunned when he read the title of her story: “The Wasted Night” by Violeta Drago. When he told her this, he silently looked for surprise on Elisa’s face, and yet he realized how hard it would be for her to comprehend what it was that had kept him from returning to the plaza, what made him go into the bar, buy a beer, and a second, and a third. The title and the plot corresponded to the most well-guarded story he’d ever written, a story he invented the painful night after his cousin’s wedding when, in the bathroom, he and Elisa had definitively stopped being best friends. The motivations mattered little, he thought, what was important was that in Violeta’s sentences the boy who is in love with his best friend was also named Carlos. Although in her version, the girl’s name is Beatrice, like in Dante’s paradise and unlike his own medieval tale, in which Carlos is a castle swineherd, Elisa a princess, and the curse is delivered from the mouth of a sinister court magician, who’s jealous of the seemingly idealistic yet inappropriate relationship that is beginning to blossom between heiress and servant in the kingdom’s springtime countryside.
In Violeta’s story, on the other hand, Carlos and Beatrice have been life-long neighbors in a neighborhood in the fictional city of Neutria. Beatrice is obsessed with the place’s legend: in a distant time, where a full moon shone every night, the heir and heiress to the thrones of the two Humalén — an imaginary indigenous people — clans, enemies since the beginning, loved one another in silence; as you might surmise, just like in Ovid, Shakespeare, and Lovers of Teruel, their love is as forbidden as it is inevitable. The night before the first rain, when it is customary for both clans to give thanks to the moon for her gifts, the heir and the heiress took refuge in the celebrations, they concealed themselves, they started touching each other; the legend is cut short at this crucial point. And all that’s been recovered is a written epilogue: from that time onward the moon made the decision to show her full self only after several nights of darkness, to remind mankind that fullness is fleeting, and perhaps to subject herself to the same transience as everything that shines on the Earth. In the solitude of her house in Neutria, in front of her notebook, Beatrice wonders what it was that might have befallen the heir and the heiress at that celebration that had sparked everything that followed. Whenever they talk about it, Carlos comes up with all kinds of explanations to answer her questions, because — as we already know — Carlos secretly loves Beatrice. Until one night, coincidently moonlit, he gives his neighbor a letter that recounts the denouement he has imagined for the legend: foreseeing that fatality lies in store for the passion of their children, the fathers of the heir and heiress ask for help, each in his own way, from the moon. And she arranges for the couple to be allowed a single night of love: for the din of the celebrations to provide refuge for the lovers this one time. And so it is. But when morning comes, the heir and heiress of the Humalén clans decide to take their own lives in the same tree: never to part again. The moon, furious at this act of rebellion, withdraws her presence from the Humalén. Beatrice reads the page and weeps. She hugs Carlos, they pull apart, look at each other, and touch again. Early the next morning, Beatrice wakes up and rereads the letter. She calls her neighbor to tell him that she never wants to see him again, that they aren’t friends anymore. Carlos knew the rest of the story by heart. And he verified this by comparing it with his own version, in which the court magician wants to make the young princess his wife and so he reads the mind of the swineherd with whom she converses in the palace gardens every afternoon: because that filthy mind has no room for friendship, not even a spell would be required to break them apart. In the spring the two of them would meet in secret in some passageway for what would be their long-awaited yet ephemeral — though they might have believed the opposite — night of love. The magician outsmarts himself. While in his version of the story the swineherd is hung from a rafter in the pigsty, and princess Elisa willfully drowns herself in a river, Violeta made the ending more implacable: Beatrice flees from the world, she locks herself in her dark room and is found in a state of decomposition weeks later. Carlos, her neighbor, dedicates himself to his job in an administrative office in the center of Neutria for forty years, no family, no friends, no place to call home. He smiles at his coworkers every morning and never tells anyone the daily agony of the fading memory of the touch, the smell, the body of Beatrice that one night, until he forgets even her name and dies, alone, in a hospital bed. And Carlos said none of this to Elisa that day in the bar. He just ordered another beer and handed her the photocopied magazine. Elisa flipped through the pages without seeing them, until she came to the story and read it. A half-hour later she lifted her head, took a last sip from her glass, held Carlos’s hand with affection, and they spoke of other things. She can’t understand the coincidences, he thought. She thought: he’s leaving me all alone.