THE RECIPIENT
August 31st
“In an aberrant world where taking a drink, hoisting a chair, or passing through a doorway are acts requiring superhuman will power” (Luis Harss on Onetti). I’ve decided to stay in my apartment, watch TV, eat, sleep, go out with friends (whomever), have a beer some night with Alicia, or another new friend, a pretty girl I just met with whom I can talk about random stuff, not novels, dreams, or love. Laugh a little. Read the assigned reading for a class, study linguistics, go see movies at an old cinema.
That other stuff is not for me. It’s for another.
(I got up late, cottonmouth. My head was buzzing and I remembered that there had been other days that C had shown up at the university with her face ravaged by insomnia; she told me that when she actually managed to fall asleep she dreamed prolonged misadventures and, for some reason, woke up with the need to recollect these dreams, to recount them to her boyfriend, who was sleeping beside her. Of course, when she turned on the light, the episodes vanished from her memory and she was left empty, her boyfriend waking up grudgingly, complaining to her to please let him sleep. So she turned off the light but was unable to close her eyes, she lay there thinking, imagining that she got up, got dressed in the dark, went out, walked down to Plaza Ñuñoa, and went into a bar. There she met an actor from a TV show who invited her to his apartment in a building across from hers. They slept together. At last, in his arms, C was able to fall into a deep sleep, right when the alarm sounded and she had to get up so she wouldn’t be late for class.)
If I were to stop writing this diary, I imagine, these problems that are wearing me out would disappear. And yet if I were unable to reread my supposed visit to Neutria, if there were no chance of going back to eat cotton candy in the plaza where the statues in the fountain spoke to me, the possibility of fleeing to a better place than this one without leaving my room would disappear. If I were to resign myself to the smog, to spending hours talking about the flooding in Pudahuel produced by yesterday’s rainfall, to spending Saturdays at my grandmother’s house listening to my cousins discuss used SUV prices, all excited over the possibility of acquiring cheaper vehicle registration. If I were to write an essay proving Violeta’s madness through her texts, her cowardice, or simply a letter recriminating Alicia for the way she attributes her own ramblings to her friend, for using a dead person as a pseudonym. And not see her again. Or dress myself in shame, go to J’s apartment, kneel down, beg her forgiveness, tell her I’m ready to begin how I should’ve; like a man who feels physically attracted to a woman, who grows close to her, gets to know her, they like each other, they go out, become a couple, get married. I’d go work on an estate in Rancagua, she’d be a history or philosophy teacher in some prestigious prep school, we’d have three children and satellite TV to break the monotony, no books. If I never read or wrote again about a lost city — silent but with sea and dogs and children — maybe I’d get used to wearing a tie, getting in my car and communicating via honks of the horn with my fellow office workers, residents of Santa María de Manquehue. Or if I were to get up from this chair right now, get on the metro, get off at the bus terminal and, walking up to the ticket window, boldly ask for a ticket to Neutria, the most expensive you have, if you please. Or if, in the middle of a binge, I were to take Alicia to bed, and her legs wrapped around me were cold, even though her hands are always warm. Or if I were to turn myself in at the Police Investigations building on Calle Condell (where last year I sat with J on the sidewalk to listen to the screams of people being tortured) and declare myself guilty of the murder of Violeta Drago, my only pretext being to find out who really killed her. And if after each of these decisions all I received was a laugh, a mocking laugh.
(Before lunch I called Alicia. We joked around for a while about the detective novel I’d loaned her. Then she asked me what I thought of Violeta’s notebooks. I evaded the inevitable by answering that I bet the letter inadvertently delivered to me was more interesting, the one the albino girl signed as sender. Alicia said she didn’t know what I was talking about. The letter, I insisted; the letter I’d given her in exchange for her friend’s writings. Alicia still didn’t understand. Really, are you sure I didn’t give it to you? No, what letter? We argued. I don’t know what’s going on. I hung up, nervous; it seemed like someone was knocking on the door to my apartment. I opened it and there was nobody there. How stupid, why would anybody be knocking when there’s a doorbell?
In my mind I reviewed where Violeta’s letter might be. In the drawer, no. I went through the papers on my desk, the closet, the disorder on the little table with the telephone. The last thing I retained in my worthless memory was me, sitting and contemplating the envelope, too afraid to open that strange correspondence, even though the mailman slid it under my door. And yet it was a letter from the girl who’d been murdered, my best friend’s best friend. Then I thought about what Carlos would do in my situation: open the envelope and read the letter; discover everything that Violeta had written for me, what she’d decided to convey in her own sentences; he’d be unable to take it and he’d run out, I don’t know where, that is to say, I do know where: to the home of Violeta Drago, over on Pedro de Valdivia Norte, as indicated on the envelope. Having said nothing to his girlfriend, Carlos was standing in front of the door. He rang the bell. He’d ask the albino girl why she was imploring him to stay with her, here in Santiago.) Action, pure, simple, and ephemeral action. (That of writing: I plagiarize Onetti just like he copied Faulkner, who imitated someone else I don’t know.)