When another wine glass fell to the floor of the exhibition hall, I drew near to see if it had actually broken, and I heard the long-winded speech the professor was delivering to an art critic: with this installation I explore the emotional emptiness of individuals as the foundation of a society of consumption that conceives of itself as a healthy organism, where the artist is paradoxically the cancerous tumor and the only individual without needs; the economic order is maintained by a structure that is doubly hypocritical with respect to cultural creation, since as much as this system of exchange convinces the artist of the uselessness of his work, it demands that his face, his name, and his body be a polemic object in a scenario of psychological degradation and social marginalization where anyone can read the limitations of the market without experiencing them personally, or simply to conceive of marketing campaigns that seek the socialization of consumption. Corporalism — declared the professor in words that wanted to break against me and stain the white wall of this house from where I write you — is the dramatization of all the errors we artists commit, most of the time due to ingenuousness, alcoholism, or ambition, until we turn our own bodies into metastasis. Instead of spilling what is imposed on us across a page and giving it back in the form of book, instead of offering society that tumor, which is why they pay us to study in their laboratories, we mix ourselves into the work itself and end up presenting our bodies in pieces on silver platters so that the attendants of openings and launches can devour us. I divined what the professor wanted to add and he was quiet: the artist is a tumor that should not spread, but that must exist to focus the malignance. He believed himself to be an artist, because of that he was the most despicable being on Earth, I thought when I came to the photograph in sepia where you and I are holding each other on the beach; you were biting my ear and I was slipping my hand into your pants, we were standing and the sea was a monochrome wall of water. It had stopped moving at last! That was the photo, the picture I’d been seeking for so long across the eternity of a couple: the missing landscape that kept Neutria from leaving me, the last photo in the final room of the show.
On my shoulder I felt the weight of a hand that slid down to my waist, a warm hand that was cooling against my flesh and grabbing me. I turned: He Who Is Writing the Novel was in front of me, dressed elegantly, hair gelled and slicked back like an executive. He smiled at me with malice; I asked him if he was happy with the way his novel had ended — a huge party, fame and posterity in the media. Without blinking he said that I could stick posterity wherever it fit, that he didn’t want to talk: I had to leave with him. He tried to drag me and I put up a fight, threatening to scream. He said that the others like him, who are writing the novel of Corporalism and who were wandering around the exhibit, wouldn’t let me off the hook if they saw me again. I shuddered. My voice breaking, I asked him what he was talking about. He said that I shouldn’t pretend like I didn’t understand, that the limits of the movement were inside the body of its protagonists, that the end of Corporalism was the end of its characters. I still didn’t understand: it had all been staged by the professor and had turned out just how he’d planned. No, that wasn’t so, he responded. The implications and phases were much vaster: I would never be able to see the magnitude of all of it, the professor and his exhibit formed part of something greater. Like how the bricklayer does not imagine the dimensions of the city when he builds his first house? I asked. He looked at me in silence. I had contributed to the failure of this part of the project, he murmured. My presence and the disgusting sentimentalism of He Who Is Writing the Novel, who had been unable to bear seeing me there, holding him on the beach, assuring him that I loved him, that I loved him completely, standing, walking, alive. He Who Is Writing the Novel had at last transformed himself into The Young Poet and disappeared without leaving traces or records. Gently I pulled my arm from the hand that was clutching me. He stayed there sitting on the quad, watching me walk toward the exit; he was unable to keep himself from shouting after me, from a distance: You’re going to die.
I’m already coming to the end of my letter, my dear. I write you at the hour of greatest silence in this city that is never silent, at sunrise in this Santiago where the sun never rises. Now the wind off the river comes against the windows of this house, it makes them shake but they remain intact, like writing on paper; it pushes the white of the page, it dirties but doesn’t rip it. I hope this happens when I have nothing left to tell you, when the only thing left is the description of the coastline of Neutria vanishing behind me as I dragged my suitcase toward the bus station, running away before He Who Is Writing the Novel appeared with his gun and left me there on the floor, my eyes filled with their own liquids, which would prevent me from seeing how the ocean rose up, sweeping away the beach, the pavement, the avenues, the valley of Neutria, filling the empty space above it with water, the empty space which I’d filled first with little houses, then a pier, businesses, plazas, buildings, schools, a university, a stadium, and a touristic boardwalk along the sea so that people would come from other places to live here, so that a couple who walked through the university entrance would take each other by the hand, decide to love each other, pass time and grow old together, in these streets, weep for the other at his or her funeral; but the water will also sweep away this Neutrian cemetery where I won’t end up because it will have died with me, because it isn’t possible to put a body in a page, because paper isn’t earth.
I tried to drag my suitcase full of notebooks through the trash-cans, the rubble, and the enormous dust cloud: with each passing step the cement threatened to cease covering the ground. When I came to the Black River I saw that the bridge had surrendered to the erosion, so I had to carefully descend the damp hillside where I sank into mud up to my knees. It wouldn’t be easy to get away from you that way; nor was I able to run when I saw the beggars who sleep under the bridge approaching. In the mud-marred landscape I distinguished their shaved heads, the firebrands on their naked skins, their faces painted with lime — the last vestiges of the most recent raid by the city’s sanitary services — that surrounded me and touched me, emitting hoarse moans, pulling at my clothes with hands covered in sores, tearing them. Beggars emerged from ruins across the city, all of them wanting a piece of me: they appeared in multitudes on the street, limping as they forded the river that no longer existed, barely splashing me at all with its remaining puddles, tugging at my skin through mutterings that were senseless yet rhymed nonetheless. As they spread my legs they incessantly asked a question that only my pain could answer. When I was able to stand and tried to run, I understood what one of them was saying: I was The Young Poet, I wanted to throw myself into the river, but a beggar caught me, threw me harshly to the ground, got on top of me and screamed that he was The Young Poet; another limping beggar approached, another, and many more who surrounded me, threw me down again and got on top of me, howling the same sentences: I was The Young Poet, I wanted to throw myself into the river, but a beggar caught me, threw me harshly to the ground, got on top of me and screamed that he was The Young Poet; another limping beggar approached, another, and many more who surrounded me, threw me down again and got on top of me, howling the same sentences: I was The Young Poet, I wanted to throw myself into the river, but a beggar caught me, threw me harshly to the ground, got on top of me and screamed that he was The Young Poet; another limping beggar approached, another, and many more who surrounded me, threw me down again and got on top of me, howling the same sentences. I ran and ran and ran through the mud, escaping. Until the sun came up.