He enjoyed his job, he told me later, after the first beer. That first day I showed up at one in the afternoon, turned on my tape recorder and began to question him about Boris Real. He looked at me with surprise and said nothing. A fat man in a straw hat arrived in an oil truck, he greeted the attendant and asked him to fill the tank, then he left. A couple minutes went by and I didn’t know whether to say something or to leave. A thrush landed a few meters away, it hopped around, jerked its head nervously, pecked at the ground. The man watched the movements of the bird. It hopped twice more and flew away. Only then did he speak to me: Not yet, gancho, wait till I get off, and buy me a beer. Then I’ll answer you, can’t you see I’m working. I asked him what time he’d be done with work and he replied that it depended on the traffic. During the middle of the week it was hard to know how many vehicles would pass by, he added.
That first day, waiting for him in that plexiglas booth, I picked up and read the book he’d taken with him at his lunch hour. The title was James Versus the Spider, a strange novel — horribly translated — whose premise postulated that in reality James Dean hadn’t died in his famous accident, but that he’d ended up in a coma. Years later, for an exorbitant sum, his relatives auctioned off the unconscious body of the actor, selling it to a private clinic in Salt Lake City. In secret, the clinic began a series of genetic experiments paid for by large pharmaceutical laboratories. The novel ended when the scientists failed in their DNA calculations and instead of cloning the perfect human being — beautiful, astute, sensitive, intelligent — they gave life to a tiny spider which was inserted, through the nose, into the president of the most powerful communications network in the United States, to feed on his brain and to direct the fate of the planet.
At sunset, in my car heading to the bar located on Matanza’s small square, I asked the man from the service station where he’d bought that strange novel. A woman gave it to me, man. He was referring to a friend, or maybe a lover. We passed a few more minutes in silence. Then, to my surprise, he added: She loved to say that our friendship was just like that story.
56
DURING THE SUMMER we traversed the beaches of Chile’s central coast in the Cadillac or the Porsche. I’d stop in a beach’s parking lot and Bruno would get out of the car while I reclined in the drivers seat, shut my eyes and with closed lips sat humming old songs. I remember that we argued: Memory is made of music, he said; Memory is made of names, I maintained. I lay there with closed eyes, taking a drag on my cigar every now and then. That was the only movement alerting someone watching from outside that I wasn’t sleeping. Sometimes I sat up, searching for Bruno among the swimmers. Then I’d guess, with a glance, which girl he’d chosen that afternoon.
58
ACCORDING TO WITNESS reports, Bruno Vivar would dive into the sea alongside various young women. He’d tell them a charming joke, pretend to drown or swim out a ways commenting on the size of an approaching wave, until one of the girls took the bait. Violeta Drago (27) tells how one afternoon in January of 2001 she saw a boy’s body floating in the surf. It was a cloudy morning on the small beach of Algarrobo, only a few people felt inspired to go in the water. More confused than afraid, she says, she swam toward the body and took it by the waist to pull it back to solid ground. But when she touched it she knew immediately that it was a prank. There in front of the amazed girl, the inanimate body began to move. Bruno lifted his head from the water and smiled at the young woman. I’m cold, he said to her. Then it began to rain. Violeta left him there and swam furiously back to the beach. Those features, childlike and blue with cold, corresponded to the description of Bruno Vivar. His face was contorted, gaunt, says Violeta. If he was trying to act like a corpse, he very nearly succeeded.
59
THE BAR MIRIADA—just like that, without an accent mark — sits on Matanza’s small square, next door to Don Julio’s butcher shop, on the only urbanized block in town. Before I sat down, I paused for a minute, staring at the name written on a brass sign above the door. As a joke, I asked the man from the service station — who had come along, and was willing to answer my questions about Boris Real, on the condition that I bought the beers — if Miriada referred to the bar’s owner, assuming it was another orthographical error to be added to my list of provincial oddities: miriada for miríada, in other words: myriad, numberless, legion, quantity, abundance, infinity, plethora, excess. Maybe Miriada was the wife of Don Julio, the mother of Julito, or maybe it was the name of a waitress who’d broken his heart. No, said the waitress, who brought four liter bottles of Cristal pilsner for my guest and a brandy with gin and ginger ale for me. There’s no one named Miriada here. It’s what we call the tiny worms that eat the ears of corn, added the man from the service station. The trees used to be full of miriada in August, right at the end of winter. That’s where the name comes from. Used to be, before what? I asked. Before the gringos showed up with their laboratories.
I pretended not to know which gringos he meant. It’s fine, the man told me, wiping away the foam that had fallen from his lips. Do you want to ask me questions or just chat? We can talk about the African musician or about gringos, you decide, I have to work tomorrow and I can’t spend all night drinking, I’ve got someone waiting for me at home: TV and a book. There would be enough time to inquire about the organizers of the “mobile party,” I thought. Under the table, in a pocket of my bag, I pressed the button on the tape recorder, and told him that I didn’t want to be a bother.
During the months of January and February of 1999 the locals had a lot of free time on their hands because the organizers of the Transensorial Beyond Seasons Festival had gotten the city council of Navidad and Matanza, in exchange for generous compensation, to suspend all commercial, civic, and social activity. The idea was to avoid all competition and consolidate control of the towns, forcing everyone to use the corporate logo of the international organization. In practice this meant that the restaurant on the fisherman’s cove became part of a fast seafood chain; the bars and diners temporarily turned into pubs, taverns, cafés, tearooms, cabarets, trattorias, food courts, cafeterias, wine shops, lounges, casinos; and the service station, among many transformations, became a Gas Station. So the man spent those days sitting on a stump across the highway from the service station where he’d worked for so long. Accustomed as he was to spending his days in that place, he just sat and watched as massive tanks, and engines, and generators arrived. I like my job and I didn’t want to be put out like that without getting to see why, he said. Every now and then a foreigner dressed in yellow and green overalls would approach him and attempt, in his words, to frighten him. But he just sat there, not understanding the language, until they left him in peace.