Hours later she came out of the bathroom, drying her hands, and asked me my name. Carlos, I continued to lie, as if that very afternoon I hadn’t been pulled from paralysis by Alicia’s phone calclass="underline" she told me it was important that we see each other, not about Violeta or my novel, but about her and about me. (About us, responding without being cheeky.) As if I hadn’t spent that very day thinking about putting a bullet in J for what she’d said to me when I called her, ready to start over. As if I hadn’t spent an eternity leaning on the railing, watching the raindrops fall more heavily than yesterday and the day before, playing with the idea of locking myself in my room, not sleeping not eating not watching TV, not waiting for the days to fabricate this book for me, but forcing myself, like a maniac, to write a facsimile-novel of A Brief Life, substituting my own presence for Brausen, J for Gertrudis, Santiago for Buenos Aires, and Neutria for Santa María, but never finding in that facsimile-novel a character corresponding to Alicia, to her role of impartiality. Then she called me. I put on gloves and a scarf, expecting that it’d be another afternoon of indecisive conversation; Alicia would try to keep me from getting obsessed with her (or with her friend of the notebooks), I’d want to believe that her teasing was intended to get me to make the first move, to stand up and kiss her and pull her far away from this dusty city with my madness: I exited the elevator promising myself I’d destroy all of it after a few beers. Of course she’d react to my violence, which would at least give rise to a story of another sort. But no, it was preferable for me to remain still, hearing her neutrally over the telephone. I thought that Carlos, that he would act in the exact opposite way that I do. That I should have never given Violeta’s letter to Alicia, since it was addressed me. I closed the umbrella, raised my hand. The micro that was coming, splashing pedestrians, wasn’t the Providencia micro, it was the one that went down Kennedy directly to Pedro de Valdivia Norte. The moment I got on it I became someone else: with the certainty of having stood Alicia up, I stopped in front of the door to the house on Los Araucanos and asked for Violeta. I regret nothing, I regret nothing.
September 20th
No one regrets nothing. The last memory I have of J (if that was the last time, because her writings are very oblique) is of her raising one hand in shy greeting, from a distance. I couldn’t imagine her, despite the determination of her words: shrunken but in no way fragile, her long fingers energetic in the air. The other seemed to be oscillating between his notebook, his book, his pillow, the TV, the telephone, the balcony, and all of a sudden The Little One was clawing his skin and he was unable to hide because he was naked in the middle of an unknown city, maybe a consequence of nothing more than the inexperience of our poor narrator. (I know that he’ll come and rewrite this, one, three times, but at least I’ll dedicate myself to writing about my own life.) Or maybe he’s lying there in bed, half asleep and trying to focus on a photocopied article of criticism on Onetti that he’s reading, thinking he’s abandoned the writing of his so-called personal diary; while reading about the notion of uprooting in A Brief Life, his desolate eyes fall on the drawer containing this notebook, wrapped in brown paper, and he thinks: another precious project that never materialized. The idea had been to defy Alicia, that a novel fabricated with the uncomfortable and carnal plot of the quotidian would be more excessive than all the scribblings of a little albino girl, who abuses her body to gain access to that imaginary childhood city; he couldn’t have known that the passing of the hours would turn against the writer, chaining him to everyday life. O, how I adore those types of figures: the one who writes in isolation triumphing over the one who lives constantly thinking about what is happening. Unfortunately I am subject. I live here, with someone who has fallen asleep, who is starting to dream about snow, about the idea of purity. The Little One enjoys this, looking up at me panting on top of her, saying: “Carlitos, you still believe in purity?” And I stroke her face with both hands, with the backs of my fingers. If I speak the learning will cease; I should moan, breathe, cough, clear my throat and spit on that little girl, whom I despise and adore simultaneously, stretched out naked across the wrinkled bedspread of the moth-eaten mattress where she lies waiting for me. She gives me a sign, putting a vertical finger over her lips and together we draw back, watching him; the expression his face is wearing now is very entertaining, leaning on the desk, ripping out a page from the notebook where he has written the following:
September 20th
I spent the 18th at Alicia’s house; her parents weren’t there. She invited me to dinner with one of her cousins and his fiancée. The conversation was very interesting, she was gorgeous coming back from the kitchen with a tray full of sushi and everything arranged so she’d always be sitting in the empty seat next to me. She avoided looking me in the eyes, turning her back on me whenever she could. She had an artichoke leaf in her small teeth and she wanted to hold my hand, rocking one leg, the same combat boots as always, sometimes brushing against one of my shoes, the left, and announcing in a serious tone that this was a celebration, the reason didn’t matter, better that way, right? For a second, let’s pretend that we can be other people, that a space exists where we could be happy, the pain of the pen leaving its mark. Let’s leave behind for a second this thing about you and me, about literature and possibility. I was going to say that it’d be better for us to forget that she was Alicia and that I was me, sitting there with such affection, such longing, such love (that word), that we lost the names, that I am a false resident of Santiago, that she travels every month and every week, but where is she going? That when I attempted to write an authentic page, her albino friend got raped in the paradisiacal port of Neutria by a group of beggars who found her under a bridge without any clothes, all because of her longing for transcendence, a twisted need to escape the skin. Alicia was widening her eyes, listening to me, then she interrupted, exclaiming that she was nervous because her brother had taken her parents’ car out right in the middle of the September 18th festivities, and some drunk might’ve run into him. I went home, I was that drunk, and I brought her smell with me, asking myself how I could possibly keep from getting obsessed with a woman like her, thinking about her black dress, about good and evil, about the body and the soul (the blathering of drunks). How not to want her, how to understand why she evaded my touch, I don’t know, for the same reason that J asked that we just be friends, because the flesh ruins itself, the touch becomes abrasive, the orgasm ends, not so a conversation between a man and a woman who guess each other’s words, complete each other’s sentences, invent expressions, laugh at their own verbal ridiculousness. Thinking this, I got in bed, tried to masturbate, but felt like a child, went over to my desk chair wanting to touch something in this apartment that wasn’t mine, I opened my eyes knowing what Carlos would be doing now: sleeping with The Little One, or, at least, dreaming my wet dream about her.