The clock on the living room wall showed six in the morning. He saw a delicate hand open the door of the room to his right. It was Alicia; she too was taking shelter in the doorway. Her hair was messy and her eyes barely open; she was wearing a red tracksuit under a large T-shirt featuring a Japanese anime character.
The shaking continued and didn’t decrease in intensity; they waited for the jolt that at any moment would transform the tremor into an earthquake. Then the girl seemed to come awake, seeing the man a few meters away, watching her. She raised her hand in a friendly wave. The man from the service station murmured good morning. The tremor stopped.
As he moved toward the kitchen the man wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. He opened the refrigerator, took out a carton of milk and a jar of strawberry-colored powdered juice. He drank a glass and sat down at the small table. He stood up to turn on the television, but before he could he saw Alicia walking toward him and he sat back down, awkwardly. He offered her a glass of milk, which she accepted. The man asked about the foreign visitor. Alicia said: What do I know. She scrunched up her nose when she passed by him, muttering: Gross, you’re all wet, like you just got back from the gym. And she sat down across from him.
He already had a couple liters of beer in his system and I think that’s why the man from the service station told me all of this. Despite considering himself a fairly shy person — maybe because he was still kind of sleepy — he told Alicia about his dream. She listened with interest, getting up every now and then to look for sugar or a spoon, or to open a drawer and close it again, nervously. When the man finished telling her what he’d dreamed, she asked him if maybe he wanted her to be his oneiromancer. My what? Dream reader, like Joseph in Egypt. The man understood, he remembered that Joseph had gotten out of prison and become an advisor to the Pharaoh by revealing to him what God had been trying to tell him in a dream. At that point, the man from the service station inserted a small parenthetical to tell me that his father was an evangelist, and that when he was young, in Santiago, he’d frequently read him chapters from the book of Genesis before bedtime. He loved listening to those stories, but when his father would say goodnight and turn out the light, the shadows that came in from the street would keep him from sleep.
It was impossible to tell whether Alicia’s offer was sincere or in jest. The man asked her how she knew about the biblical Joseph; outside the sun was coming up and they could hear the roosters crowing. The girl laughed and said that obviously she hadn’t learned about it in her religion classes in high school. The man started toasting some bread. Alicia laughed again. She told him that his dream was simple: the sea was the world, parties, commerce. The city was the same. High places were high places. The sky. And her, why’d she make an appearance? Asked the man. At that moment they heard the honking of a car horn. The man and the girl looked out the window. In front of the house was parked the Japanese car of Juan Francisco Vivar. He was accompanied by his son Bruno and, asleep in the backseat, was Patrice Dounn.
75
I DIMLY remember what came next in the story told by the man from the service station that night at Miriada, in the town of Matanza. The truth is I’d finished three or four glasses of brandy, and he’d covered the table with more than a square meter of empty pilsner bottles. The light bulbs in the bar had faded gradually. Everything turned yellower, browner, blacker. Including the voice of my interlocutor. Still, I remember the dazzling young body of the waitress, who watched me out of the corner of her eye from another table, making calculations in a notebook. That’s what I thought, with a total lack of intuition: the girl was making calculations. I’d only brought a ninety-minute tape, so by that point the conversation was empty air. Misleading human memory. The wind blew in through the cracks of a large, old window to my right. Progressively — mea culpa — the story of the disappearance of the Vivar siblings told by the temporary assistant of Patrice Dounn became, in my memory, a collage of blurry images. Without a doubt, the events that took place at the Transensorial Beyond Seasons Celebration were, in reality, much more impressive than how my alcohol-muddled mind recalls them.
That morning, Juan Francisco Vivar and his son made breakfast in the kitchen of the man from the service station. Patrice Dounn, half asleep, walked to his room and shut the door. Alicia went in with him, although after half an hour she came back out. She’d changed into a very thin green dress, her hair tied up with knitting needles. She sat down at the table. She drank chocolate milk and responded to a couple jokes Bruno made about the color of her outfit. Their father drank his coffee in silence without saying or doing anything. He just looked out the window. The man from the service station watched everything very nervously; it was difficult for him to understand the words the siblings spoke to one another. At one point, Juan Francisco stretched out his arm and pinched the soft flesh of his daughter’s shoulder. Alicia didn’t cry out or seem upset, according to the man from the service station. On the contrary, she tilted her head slightly as if it pleased her. Then Bruno and Alicia stood up at the same time and said they were going to the beach to go swimming. They retrieved two towels from the trunk of the car and left.
Even though it was cloudy, the man emphasized, the beach was full of tourists of all nationalities. This was apparent at first glance, in the varieties of hair and skin. It was the same burning sun, the same freezing sea, but all of a sudden one was no longer in Chile, in the same suffocating, monotonous summer as always, but on a gringo or European beach where everyone spoke loudly, where there were barely any children, and women were stretched out in the sun, their breasts in plain sight. They’ve told me that’s how it is there, said the man. The beach of Babel, I remember remarking sarcastically, prompted by the biblical references he’d introduced into our conversation. The man from the service station laughed at this: Babel, yes. Just so. Asians, Islanders, Africans, Europeans, North and South Americans, everyone was speaking English. From what I was able to deduce from his description, the beach in Matanza was clearly divided into specific sectors — team sports, live music (classical, electronic, jazz, rock, indie, pop, and world music); artistic, recreational, and athletic dance; restaurants, bars, and kiosks; an ecological nudist zoo, water sports, libraries, virtual electronic games, spas, private security huts — marked off by buoys and plastic ribbons of the event’s official color, a soft florescent white that at sunset turned into a metallic blue. Still, in the middle of invisible amplification systems, areas of acoustic isolation, and the roaring of passing motors, the occasional shouts of “pan de huevo,” “cuchufli, barquillo,” “helado, helado, heladito,” “lleve la palmera pa los regalones” rose up from the town’s local vendors, authorized by the organization to supply the event with local color.
That morning, Bruno and Alicia looked for the least crowded area to lay down their towels. The Swimmers Section, about eleven meters from the water, at the center of the beach. The best spot on any of the nation’s beaches was deserted. The tourists preferred to lie down between the dunes, for more intimacy, or on the terraces of the restaurants or bars. The man from the service station arrived to the spot around three in the afternoon, carrying the theremin case, following Patrice Dounn. The Congolese was much more expressive with his music: I want to see the children, they’re at the beach, take me. . Don’t lose my case. Those were the only words he’d uttered since appearing in the kitchen that morning, after having slept off what, the man from the service station suspected, was a hangover. But he was wrong. That man always had a hangover. The hangover of hate and fear, which is a type of boredom, he said. Without losing his composure, Patrice Dounn removed his Italian shoes and silk socks. He rolled up his suit pants so that later he’d be more comfortable on the damp white towel of Alicia Vivar, who, from the water, waved to them and gave a little shout. On his own towel, Bruno Vivar pretended to be sleeping, hiding his face in his forearm.