The Little One listened with a silent, little laugh to the way I imitated that guy’s monologue. Then she unclasped her legs, which were wrapped around me, got dressed and said: come on, Carlitos, it’s Fiestas Patrias. We’re going to find the others, we’re going back to Neutria, without Violeta, who cares about her. Let that other guy sit around and worry about the dead albino girl, not understanding that she was trying to leave but was just afraid to do it on her own, and that no one knows how to interpret those pages she wrote about the Corporalists. Don’t look at me like that, you don’t understand anything either, who’s going to shoot her if she’s already dead, stupid. She was so beautiful.
Then it was dark. It was a cold night, we were walking toward Cerro San Cristóbal, and into my mind came his rueful face looking at his notebook, uselessly recovering the thread of his diary. A static image like the last one I have of J, and so it’s not a surprise that he stays like that, like in one of Alicia’s drawings where, sitting in the quad at the university, she and he observe J approaching in the distance, and in turn J is watching them: all three with their hands in the air, waving. The characters understand that they’ll never touch again, that they’ll only be able to wave to each other from far away, and The Little One and I pass through a gate that opens onto the part of Cerro San Cristóbal covered with bushes, at last we make out a naked hand holding a cigarette that rises to guide us.
THE NOVEL
Carlos remembered a summer when he was about fourteen, a girl in Rapel. He would dive into the lake and then run back to his towel. The girl, he didn’t remember her name, spent entire days lying there, wearing ridiculous dark toy sunglasses, reading a book; there were times when she didn’t appear for days and other times she’d spend a whole week just a few feet away. When he came back from swimming, numb, he felt like he was being watched. Once, Carlos asked her what she was looking at, the girl said nothing. The next day he tried a different tack: why was she looking at him. She responded that it was because she desired to look at him. Just like that, over and over, without variations in the dialogue until, at the end of the summer, Carlos had approached the girl to invite her to go waterskiing at the reservoir on his friend’s boat. She thanked him, but said she had no desire to go. Desire! Carlos exclaimed mockingly, and went running toward the pier.
He saw her again a year later. Rapel was emptying out, it was the last night of vacation and Carlos was sitting alone under the spotlight on the wooden pier with a can of worms and a fishing line. Every now and then, in the dark of night, he made out couples walking together, groups of children, fathers unable to sleep because the next day they had to go back to Santiago, back to work. After a while a girl, one or two years older than he, sat down next to him, looked out at the still water and slapped one foot, chasing away a mosquito. Carlos looked at her out of the corner of his eye and, despite the fact that she wasn’t wearing those hilarious sunglasses, he recognized her as the girl from the previous summer. She asked if any fish were biting. He shook his head and considered saying that the only thing biting him were mosquitoes, but didn’t. The girl threw a rock into the water and then apologized, maybe throwing stuff in scared away the fish. No big deal, said Carlos; she stood up and took off her clothes so fast that he barely saw her as she jumped into the water, swimming out into the lake and coming back immediately because it was too dark, she said. Carlos offered the girl his hand and she climbed up onto the pier and sat down beside him again. He said that it was really cold to go swimming; she’d felt the desire, that was all, she said, gathering her clothes, shivering as she disappeared toward the houses. He hadn’t seen her again but, lying there on his bed, he remembered her features perfectly. He had a desire to kiss that distant mouth, to bite it. Then he went and looked out the window: there was no one in the street.
THE SENDER
It’s hard to put in order what was said at the professor’s house, when He Who Is Writing the Novel led me by the hand to look at that painting. It’s hard because I’ve never transcribed a dialogue, because dialogues don’t exist, no, what exists is a multiplicity of voices that don’t always correspond to the people opening their mouths; sometimes they aren’t even speaking, and yet we hear them. The professor was waiting for us on a soft armchair, legs crossed, a whiskey on the table, the aforementioned painting on the wall behind him. The professor greeted He Who Is Writing the Novel with a wave and looked me right in the eyes, waiting for me to look away, ashamed, but I wasn’t at all perturbed to find myself so composed in the same place where previously I’d been writhing and sweating. He Who Is Writing the Novel removed a great quantity of pages, notecards, and biographical clippings from a folder that contained the professor’s research regarding an unknown Neutrian poet from the ’60s. The money He Who Is Writing the Novel’s family sent from Santiago to pay for his studies came late or not at all, and the professor offered sizable sums to students who compiled information about writers of particular academic interest, demanding their complete discretion and erasing any possibility of ever sharing credit for his publications with them. Truth be told, He Who Is Writing the Novel never took himself all that seriously: the professor published his student’s annotations verbatim. A debt of some kind existed between the two of them, and because of this the professor had allowed me back into his house.
At first they were discussing their latest discoveries, but couldn’t come to an agreement. For my part, I considered the pain I could cause the professor, while fixing three more whiskeys and drinking them, chewing the ice and scratching the surface of the sofa, ignoring their conversation. They’d spread out dozens of pages across the surface of the coffee table that summarized the different versions of the biography of Our Young Poet, which is how they referred to the subject of their research. The professor was nodding, parroting certain paragraphs out loud, asking repeatedly about some irrelevant detail; so there was nothing left for me to do but get more ice or flee to the bathroom, where I voiced questions that Alicia would then respond to in the mirror: how to make the professor but not He Who Is Writing the Novel disappear, I said to myself, after splashing my face with water. Returning to the living room, I found them taking notes for the official biography of “Our Young Poet,” and I sat down to read their pages. I remember little besides a few sordid milestones from the last months of his adolescent life. Enough of this nonsense, I said, it wasn’t funny to play at writing new chapters of Heinrich von Ofterdingen if Novalis himself had wanted to leave his novel incomplete, but He Who Is Writing the Novel stopped me, gently removed the glass from my hand, and, coming close, kissed me, the bastard. Truth be told, Our Young Poet believed Novalis, he believed Artaud, he believed Lautréamont, and he proclaimed this in meetings at Casa del Escritor, in lectures at the Municipal Library, in confessions to friends who were casually studying journalism: you should only write in extreme states like rage, drunkenness, anxiety, pain, and sickness, he said. Although he’d published two very short books when he was sixteen and seventeen years old, he was praised by poetry experts who never wrote a single verse, and when someone insulted him, calling him “regurgitated Rimbaud” at the reception for an award, he felt so understood that no one ever saw him again; sticking to the Rimbaudian plan like clockwork, except that on his desk he left behind too many clues. If the boy had left behind a posthumous work, then all this mimicry was just a farce or the concealment of something more, I said to them. He Who Is Writing the Novel responded that in light of those final pages, Our Young Poet had decided to give up at the last minute, impelled by a horrifying discovery. Then the professor gave me — with his bloodstained hand, bloodstained sooner or later — a photo of The Young Poet at eighteen, pictured with his father and an uncle at sunset in Neutria, between neighboring houses, a street that dropped down toward the port and, in the background, the sea, the sea, the sea, the sea, until He Who Is Writing the Novel took the glass from my hand, helped me up from my seat, we took two steps and stood facing the painting that hung from the white walclass="underline" a multiplicity of faces appeared between the brushstrokes, faces that swarmed under a ruined bridge, barely illuminated by an old lamppost in the foggy night, next to the black river; the fleshless faces of the beggars appeared, their heads bald and pallid, each one the same as the next. The enigma was that only one of those imprecise faces belonged to Our Young Poet and they were all identical to the photo the professor showed me.