A man found me walking with lost eyes. He climbed over the bridge rail, slipped through the bars, down to the river bed, took my arm, put his jacket around my shoulders to keep me warm, got me out onto the street, asked me what I was doing down there in the disgusting Mapocho, and so early. He told me he was going to take me to the house; the house, he said. That made me mistrustful. When I asked his name, he responded with a grimace. Before you could pull out your gun, I forced myself to run again, and lost you at a stoplight. All the way home. My grandmother, who was eating breakfast, rebuked me for getting home at such an hour and in such a state; she called me a whore. I agreed, agreed so much that I started to cry. Finally I went to my room and fell asleep.
In the afternoon my grandmother had gone out. You appeared again; you wouldn’t leave me alone. This time you pretended you were a friend of the family, that you were passing through the neighborhood and you wanted to stop in for a visit, you shyly introduced yourself as someone else, with a name that made me laugh. You claimed not to know me, but went to get in bed with me anyway; I made you believe we were going to sleep together. And for the first time. Then Alicia called on the phone to invite me to her birthday. You can’t miss it, she said. You asked me who was calling, I responded no one important. I thought I was lying to you, yet immediately I knew it was true, because Alicia could no longer do anything for me. You found me, there’s no way out. The sound of a current of air, across the metal of the hinge, I feel the wind of the river on my face: someone is opening the door. I’m waiting for you now, I’m going to stop writing so you can come in.
Oh God.
THE NOVEL
Elisa said she’d wondered why Violeta was just sitting there. Like she was waiting for her, Elisa saw a space between two cars and parked immediately, not thinking about what she was doing and not hearing the instructions of the old man with a rag for washing windshields: pull forward just so, turn in a bit more. The old man smiled at her, she ignored him. She took the path through the plaza toward the bench where she’d seen Violeta. The albino girl was holding a notebook in her right hand across her knees, hunched over, tense. Suddenly she shut her eyes and started writing. Elisa watched her from where she was leaning against a tree. She’d never seen a person like her before, such pale skin; when she didn’t move for a few seconds, she looked lifeless. No, not like a lizard, Elisa answered. Like a woman made of marble, maybe, she said when they asked her for a description, but she wasn’t referring to those actors who dress up as statues, like the detective who was trying to flirt with her had stupidly suggested. For moment it had seemed to her that time had stopped, perhaps because Violeta was writing in her notebook without paying attention to the movement of the pen. Yes, she’d had to look at the clock to realize she didn’t care at all about the time. Then she pressed the little black bag against her waist, walked to the bench, and sat down beside her. Breathing heavily, she leaned against the wooden backrest and looked at Violeta out of the corner of her eye: now she was turning the pages one after another, not reading them, as if she were reviewing the appearance of each page, looking for flaws, focusing on the layout of the letters and on the blank spaces, just like she liked to do herself, not reading. Violeta turned her face unexpectedly and asked her if she was Elisa, little Elisa. She didn’t know what to do, she pressed her hands against the wood of the seat to take stock of her own body and not feel even smaller in front of that woman, like a little girl beside her older cousin, she said, and tried to ignore the disapproving eyes of the detectives, absorbed in her tits.
She nodded, Violeta had responded by saying she didn’t remember having seen her before and yet she recognized her, because Alicia was so precise in her descriptions of people. Elisa didn’t like imagining the two of them talking about her at all, about her appearance, about her clothes; nor did she want to know why she came up in their conversations, she told the detective. Anyway, she gave Violeta an angry look, and Violeta sighed deeply, like she’d been crying for days, like a mute person registering a complaint. Only then did she smile; not to enter into confidence or anything like that, but to curtly tell her that, after all, she was the longtime girlfriend of the dearest cousin of her best friend. Elisa hadn’t dared to get up and run away, so affected was she by the way Violeta spoke, similar, she thought, to how she felt when her older brothers told horror stories around bonfires in the country so many years ago; after a silence they’d look at her and say, slowly: it was the devil incarnate.
And yet she preferred to tell the detectives that Violeta put the notebook in her backpack indifferently, that they sat there for several minutes without saying anything, until they caught sight of large columns of smoke pouring out of the roof of a bakery on the opposite side of the street. People were growing agitated, an old couple went over to see what was going on, the shopkeepers came curiously out into the street, and a group of children on bicycles went to alert the police at a nearby station. The plaza had emptied out where they were sitting, while on the next block the cars, the crowd, the jets of water, and the flames mixed noisily together. At last, Violeta smiled, for some reason the fire made her laugh. How cruel, how irresponsible, how foolish; that’s what Elisa thought then, but she said nothing, instead it was the albino girl who spoke: it’s so hot here, all the houses could catch fire. In the end, that was Santiago, hot or cold there was always smoke, so a fire shouldn’t be some kind of novelty. In a new silence, contaminated by the firefighters’ sirens, Elisa had begun to feel nervous again, recalling another chapter she’d read in Carlos’s noveclass="underline" for several blocks, the protagonist followed the albino girl, who was looking for an address she’d written down on a piece of paper. Suddenly he’d seen her stop, mouth agape, watching how the firefighters were putting out a fire in what was left of a house. The protagonist went a little closer to listen to the discussion the albino girl was having with a captain, who was trying to disperse the onlookers; he told her that if she lived there she would be considered a suspect, since the fire had been intentional. The albino girl laughed in the firefighter’s face: think what you like, but this is not my fire. Violeta coughed before interrupting Elisa’s thoughts to tell her that she’d read that there exist three types of fire, explosive fires, flaming fires, and smoking fires; she preferred the first ones. From a distance someone was trying to evacuate people with a megaphone, but nobody was moving and the air was growing heavier all the time. Violeta insisted that she hated smoke, then she said that this wasn’t her fire. Elisa didn’t tell the detectives about any of the coincidences; instead she stated that she’d stared at Violeta and asked what she was writing in her notebook. She wanted to threaten her directly, to get her to stop sending messages to her boyfriend, to have her leave them in peace, but she didn’t talk about that either. She was starting to like Violeta and, at the same time, she knew they’d never be friends; she hadn’t grown paler in that moment, that was impossible, nor had she blushed, Elisa explained. She had simply answered with a different face: she was writing about a dream she’d had. Elisa didn’t know what to say, she felt arrogant, intrusive, uncomfortable. As if all the weight of the silence of that conversation was on top of her, without pausing she said the first thing that came into her head: many of her friends had dream notebooks and all of them would rather burn those pages than let anyone see them, except for the pages they were forced to write for their psychologist. The wail of a siren interrupted her. The firefighters tried in vain to disperse the crowd, hypnotized by the flames that were swallowing the roof of the bakery. Violeta covered her ears. Elisa did the same. When calm returned, the albino girl put her hand on the zipper of her backpack and said in a low voice that she had the same dream every night, though the faces and names of those vile men changed. The smoke lowered across the plaza. The albino girl smiled at Elisa, coughed, stood up, and walked away. She never saw her again, she assured the detective. Later on she’d swear that Carlos’s novel, which they discovered in Violeta’s house, had never left her hands.