Carlos didn’t know how long he’d been sleeping on the sofa. Outside the first songs of the thrushes and the roar of micros starting their routes could be heard. He unbuckled his belt, unbuttoned his pants, kicked off his shoes. It was cold. People’s bodies didn’t disappear when they closed their eyes, he thought. One time he had convinced that same friend to go drink with him in his car, parked near the exit to the club where Elisa and her friends from school would often end up when they went out. They talked, watching conversations between the bouncers at the door and guys who were trying to get in without paying, a drunken brawl that ended with ambulances, the shouts of an intoxicated kid who didn’t want to surrender his car keys. Suddenly another car that was parking caught Carlos’s attention, especially when a group of girls climbed out. Her: the one with short hair, a skirt, quick movements, and an invisible nose, he pointed. He was about to get out of the car to greet her, ask her name, and give her his phone number, who knows. You’re an idiot, his friend said: how had he not realized that it was Elisa, arriving with her friends.
THE SENDER
That morning He Who Is Writing the Novel showed up at my apartment, yawning, with circles under his eyes. He had to see me, to talk to me; for the first time he said: I want to tell you about Corporalism. I kept hearing I want you, I want you to know, that his words wanted to use mine, that he was going to say things for me, the silence that goes unwritten when there are two authors. And there are always two. In that silence Corporalism was already formulated, before they were introduced to it in the auditorium at the Universidad de Neutria, even before you sat down in your room to write the novel that would serve as a guide to the Movement of the Body and the text enslaved you.
Alicia and I had convinced ourselves that sooner or later He Who Is Writing the Novel would come to our apartment on the pretext of picking up the story that I’d promised him at one point for the third issue of his photocopied magazine. I lied to him; never in my life had I been able to write something with a beginning, middle, and end, I’d never put a single letter of mine on any page that wasn’t the transcription of a dream or an attempted ekphrasis, so I went to Alicia and asked for one of her short stories. We made a deaclass="underline" one of us would sit down and write and the other would publically present herself as the author of eventual features in magazines and books, to receive the praise, give thanks, and put on a good face for the critics. It was fair. My pages are not easy to publish; Alicia’s stories, on the other hand, might interest certain readers obsessed with children’s literature. So I selected a pathetic fable entitled The Wasted Night and gave it to He Who Is Writing the Novel. Later he blushed when, on his way to the elevator, he turned back to look through the open apartment door and noticed that I was waving to him from out on the balcony with one hand in the air, while behind me Alicia was gesticulating with all her fingers: at first glance it looked like obscenities, but then I realized she was sketching a small glass sphere inside an elastic and translucent globe that was closing in on its center. Soon the globe would explode and, with it, the sphere, before we could make out the face reflected in the glass. I closed the door to the apartment and Alicia shook me harshly, her hands on my shoulders, so that I understood: the man hadn’t come for our story, she said, he’s going to lose those pages because he wants a different narrative, one in which you and I are just the names of women he likes. Mark my words.
Days later, He Who Is Writing the Novel buzzed the apartment intercom and asked for me. Alicia answered and he said: I’m coming up. Because he needed to see me again. He knocked on the door, I came out of my room fixing my hair, half asleep. Taking the wrist of his right arm I lead him out onto the balcony, and we sat down.
He Who Is Writing the Novel looked out at the sea. His head and his hands moved back and forth, he couldn’t look away from the rolling of the waves; I, on the other hand, sat in front of him, my eyes fixed on his face. Sometimes he crossed his legs and I’d grab his hands to keep them from moving; other times I’d look back into the apartment, where Alicia sat in an armchair, her legs crossed too, holding a cigarette in one hand and a book in the other. Her fingers kept separating, slowly, then the coming back together, never quite making contact. Then my gaze moved from her to my own barely perceptible reflection in the glass, then to the face of He Who Is Writing the Novel. Objects were injuring him, he said. Suffering from insomnia, he decided to get up and try to leave his room, he ran into a wall and ended up on the floor, his head cracked open; he started writing frenetically and one of his fingers slipped on the surface of the pen and he cut himself on the edge of the page. He was bleeding.
I stopped writing for fifteen minutes. I went out to the patio to see how the night was spreading over the garden, its stars concealed by clouds and a dry, scarcely perceptible, summer wind. Since then, not even closing the big windows and the curtains has been enough to keep me from feeling that wind; I felt heavy, I could barely keep myself from falling asleep on top of these pages, sleep again. Sleep as an alternative to permanence and death, the dilemma that has led me to write this lengthy letter. Sleep is an alternative, He Who Is Writing the Novel said to me, haggard; he slept in fits and starts because every three hours he had to return to the notebook on his desk; to leave behind all forms of writing is death, my Violeta Who Is Writing the Novel, he was saying, stretched out across one of the chairs on the balcony. Because there’s no other way to stay here besides slicing yourself up into various characters, who nonetheless — because they all belong to a single body, to me, the one who is writing this right now — struggle to be reunited. The characters move away from each other and disappear from sight, getting lost in the narration and, contemplating the landscape of the story that awaits them, they decide to return with eyes closed, running, only to collide with the others who are approaching them at full speed. Those who survive the impact remember nothing, they don’t realize that they’ve grown or that they were bigger before, and they begin to wander through these pages without knowing that they’re preparing for the next collision. Finally, after many pages, there’s only one left: one who has endured all the blows, who traverses valleys, oceans, deserts, and mountains without finding anyone, until he sees me, the one who is writing. Every night through the window I see the character coming toward me. He approaches at a run. He reminds me of so many people I’ve known, more than anything he resembles me: he’s a woman. And yet he’s not a woman, but someone who is not a man, someone who will appear at the end of my novel and demand his death or my own.