If I were to take up a regular plotline and sit down every day and stick to what I’d sketched out, I’d be satisfied, but in the margins of my own writing. I would have sat down in a chair and observed the lives of others and only later, in secret, produced my own silent material. Which (I think) Onetti would defend by saying: “I might be a bad writer, but at least I write my life.” To write pure fiction, I wonder how he could aspire to be calm by removing himself from the days of his books, hiding in the pages under the names of different characters. Perhaps he felt the same loneliness as his narrator, the same fictive vice that his own creatures used to invent a lair in order to hide from the painful days of flesh and bone. If this strategy worked for Onetti or Brausen, I can’t really know.
Although I admire cowards, I don’t want to become the coward that Alicia claims I am. I’m not going to ignore the world because it hurts, to the contrary: the most surprising plot is the one that the days continuously reveal to me. There’s no protagonist more paradoxical than Alicia, I’m just dull with the pencil. (And yet, Violeta hid away in her house, with her grandmother, weaving next to the chimney. She sat down at the dining room table with a notebook and described a city more grotesque than this one, nicer and sadder, but full of life; there, without leaving her chair, with pure imagination, she was able to get to know boys whom she’d never meet here, to let them pull her away to corners that were impossible to find in Santiago, because they were occupied by buildings, and cars, and dust.
Or not. Or Violeta came from Neutria every Tuesday on the strange buses she describes, arriving Tuesday around midday, she hasn’t left her senile grandmother’s side except to visit her only friend in the neighborhood, and to buy medications or bread. Violeta kissed her on the forehead, ate a piece of bread and cheese, and went up to her room. Before letting herself fall into bed, she took a notebook from a drawer to document all of the day’s salacious and happy Neutrian moments, not like a fiction, rather like a vital struggle against her own fragile childhood memory, such that by eight at night, in the moment that the telephone wakes her and she goes out onto the balcony to watch a line of cars in the distance, over on Calle Santa María, complaining to herself about the horns and the dry air, she’d be able to open those pages and see that a better place really did exist, a place by the sea, with her best friend and, above all, the boy from school.)
The days surprise me, I should write with the objective that novelty be constant. I was at the university, I went to the library to return a book, dropped it off, turned toward the door, and on my way out, at a distance, caught sight of a very familiar face. In the back of the reading room, J was getting up from a table where she’d set down her books and notebooks. Her bright eyes, her happy smile. We’d sworn not to see each other again, it’s better for us, but I stood there, motionless, waiting for her; she came over hesitantly and stood in front of me. Stupidly, all I wanted to do was kiss her and pull her body against mine, right there, that we might travel to a foreign land, the two of us alone, married, old lovers; all I was able to do was open my mouth and say: “Say something, please, say something.” And she came close to me, fascinated, like she’d forgotten me and was seeing me for the first time. She hugged me fiercely. She was wearing a winter jacket; I put my face against the fur hood that fell across her shoulders. She murmured something in my ear that I didn’t understand, stepped away and, without looking back, returned to her table.
I stood in the hallway staring out a window, my eyes blank, my mouth hardening little by little. I tried to turn around, go up the stairs, and for once tell a woman that I love her, that I do now, but first I had to confront my own ineptitude: she hugged me and I didn’t comprehend what she said. Writer — fabricator of inert signs. I can understand Pierce’s semiotic treatise, but at the same time I’m unable to communicate with my mouth, to listen with my ears, to taste with my tongue, to receive an embrace. Words alone, words don’t give warmth. I don’t want to be a solitary writer in this room, nor, like Violeta, to scribble (feverishly) that any heat in Alicia’s lips, in J’s lips, against my own, cannot be written; only that she sees me writing this and wants to read it.
THE NOVEL
Carlos and Elisa and kept in touch with just a couple phone calls: she answered and couldn’t conceal the fact that hearing his voice made her happy, saying his name, Carlos, with actual surprise, but then immediately seemed to recall a promise and went quiet. Then came the silence. Carlos couldn’t take it and asked how she’d been, what she was up to before he called. Elisa responded, fine, nothing special. Then he told her his cousin was going to Europe, her parents had given her a ticket to make up for who knows how many of her birthdays when they’d been faraway and had forgotten to even call her, poor little Alicia. And as he was saying little Alicia, both of them were recalling all the times that Carlos held her around the waist and called her his little Elisa. She asked him to stop: I already know about Alicia’s vacation. He felt the desire to surprise her, by reading what he’d written that afternoon for instance, a story without beginning or end about an old woman and old man who, every afternoon, after lunch, have the habit of going and sitting on a bench in the plaza; any plaza, Plaza de Armas, Plaza de Avenida Perú in Viña del Mar, Plaza de Sucre and Miguel Claro, it doesn’t matter. They like to sit there, hands laced together, and watch: a young couple meet, the next day they kiss, and many nights later the girl appears alone, weeping because every bush gives off the odor of that rotten relationship. And beyond, a group of kids on bicycles chase after a dog, a married couple looks around for the child that doesn’t want to arrive, the man selling cotton candy doesn’t return, but is replaced by a man selling helium balloons, and then by a third man with Styrofoam airplanes. The girl who was crying in front of the bushes is now carrying on an animated conversation with the man who one of the boys on bicycles had become; they get married and grow tired of their oldest son, who escapes from them because there’s no other way he’ll be able to meet up with the group of adolescents who are making fun of the old guy selling Styrofoam airplanes. The younger daughter, widow of the bike shop owner, buys for her grandsons — no longer children — two bags of popcorn that someone is selling from a truck decorated with neon lights. The old woman and old man do not age so long as they stay in the plaza, so long as their hands remain locked together at the hour of the siesta. This is what Carlos had wanted to read to Elisa, but not over the phone, because as soon as she guessed that it was a story without an end, she’d interrupt and tell him she was sleepy. She’d say it, stretching out the vowels, like she was about to fall asleep in the middle of the conversation. And then Carlos would regret having opened the notebook, believing that he could guess what her response would be if he told her he was going to read something: she’d murmur, as if she were waking up, that if she heard another word about the albino girl she was going to hang up the phone. The silence seemed to last a long time. Elisa asked him if he’d called to have her read his mind; actually, to listen to you breathing, said Carlos. She hung up.