In the darkness of the beach, I seemed to also see that a pale girl was attentively watching me and He Who Is Writing the Novel — the couple that we formed for a second, holding hands, while he threatened me — observing us and taking notes; a girl like me, who went to my spot, who walked the streets of Neutria with me, who arrived at the entrance to my building, went up in the elevator, took out the key, entered my room, felt the need to take off her clothes, went to the bathroom, splashed water on her face and albino hair. In the dining room she found a note from her friend Alicia that said: I’m sick of this place, I’m going back to Santiago. The girl put her clothes back on, and took a taxi to the Neutria bus station. On the way she noticed that the streetlamps were falling from their posts, cars were entering a nonexistent roundabout, people were going into unnumbered houses, kids on bicycles in the plaza were turning where there wasn’t a corner, the trees were growing, dense, becoming a forest, exuberant vegetation untouched by human beings. Instead of a city there appeared a small village, then a military stronghold, four Spaniards dismounting and building a fire on which to cook, three natives chasing two animals leaving an egg hidden in a cave that is nothing but dry earth, dust, gas, emptiness.
A hand rose to wave goodbye to the albino girl at the entrance to the bus station and it was her own hand; no, it was the hand of the taxi driver who was touching her shoulder, asking if she was feeling okay. She didn’t trust him, she paid and ran to the entrance, fearful that the ground on which she walked would cease to exist before she could find the bus. She remembered her dear Alicia, she half turned to look for her and in that instant a girl emerged out of her own back, took two steps, dropped an empty cup in a trash can, climbed onto the first step of the bus that in eight hours would drop me off in Santiago. For a long time, I was afraid. I lay down in my bedroom, alone, wondering why I’d let Alicia leave Neutria without saying goodbye. Every now and then my grandmother poked her head in to offer me lunch, tea, cookies; she asked me if I was feeling okay, she stroked my face with one hand that, before settling on my forehead, she waved from side to side as if she were saying goodbye to me. According to my grandmother — who actually died when I was eight — I was shaking with fever, delirious, saying that you were coming to find me at my apartment, that I couldn’t understand how the city remained standing if I wasn’t observing it, if I wasn’t able to make the waves break at my feet on the beach, if from my bed here in Santiago all I see is Cerro San Cristóbal. I slept with my grandmother’s hand on my forehead — now and then I saw her move her head with the sort of swaying acquired by everything that drifts away — sweating and shouting where had He Who Is Writing the Novel gone, if he’d forgotten me because my sick body would be of no more use to him, unable to escape my nightmare: I walked for days through the city, I was unable to lift my head to see where I’d come to. Until I woke up. Soaked with sweat, I went to the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror: out the window was the university, the port, and beyond that, the sea. I understood that if Neutria was still standing it was because you and I met each other, because I told you that dying isn’t necessary and you answered with a proposition: better that we live together. I took off my pajamas, showered, got dressed again. On the answering machine I had a message from the professor, who invited me to the opening of an art show that he’d organized in the exhibition hall at Universidad de Neutria.
The sun was setting again. The streetlamps barely cast any light, as if they were coming to understand that the city was slowly entering the night and would never return. As I went turning down the corridors on my way to the university auditorium, I heard a deep voice that unexpectedly narrated in detail, through some speakers, every step I was taking: she passes through the grayish gateway into the dark space of the central nave, passes through another archway down a new, still-darker corridor. She arrives at the central quad, turns — furious, sad, beside herself — to the left to enter the exposition hall. From a dais, dressed in meticulous mourning, smiling, the professor lifted his left hand and waved to her, leaving the microphone for a moment, no longer narrating my footsteps, because I took three glasses of wine and clutched them against the palms of my hands before hurling them against the dais, where he was now commenting to other academics about my gesture, about memory, about the social body, about collective intimacy, about private horizons. I hurled the glasses against the wall behind the fucking professor, I broke into pieces, and the red stained the whiteness of the wall at least.
The guests at the opening of the Corporalism show, the most recent work of documentary fiction by the famous professor, gathered around the sequence of photos hung in the hall. The first ones depicted girls like me and boys like He Who Is Writing the Novel in a living room, heatedly arguing about A Young Poet who never existed. In the photos that followed we made a toast with whiskey, the three of us, including the artist responsible for the show. This man is a genius, said the Undersecretary of Culture, and studied with interest the huge photo of He Who Is Writing the Novel slicing his index finger on the golden edge of an opulent edition of Madame Bovary, whose bloody pages were displayed in the Objects section. Dozens of photos documenting a student march, students who also received cash payment, whose posters proclaimed “Corporalism is fascism,” the stones thrown at the Biblioteca Nacional, the frustrated arson attempts at the houses of Eltit, Richard, and Zurita; hundreds of photos that established the chronology of the “Birth,” “Adolescence,” and “Death of an artistic movement.” Across one wall was printed the Corporalization Manifesto, at last I was able to read what you’d written in order to make me understand that a great artifice was making it so the wine glasses kept falling all around me without hurting me, so the light bulbs shattered without their brightness leaving me blind, otherwise I’d have been unable to witness the exposition of every single one of these words, of every blink of my eyes, of my name itself which had been foreseen by that professor: while He Who Is Writing the Novel and I were creating it, someone else was gathering together our pages like the corpus of an academic essay that would bear the title Loquela.