The hangover had consumed my patience. I took out a bill, placed it on the table, and looked her in the eyes: Last night a woman named Alicia was working. One of the men in the corner stood up and leaned on the bar next to me. Last night nothing, insisted the woman. She was the only person who worked there, and she didn’t have to explain herself to anyone. It’d be better if I just left; this was not a place to try and pick up women.
I walked out into the plaza. It was five in the afternoon; Matanza’s infamous wind was blowing. I wanted to go back to my apartment in peace, forget about the Vivars, sleep calmly. In a couple of days the story would be written. The strange feelings would be forgotten. Once written, the truth about the parts played by Alicia and Boris Real would be reduced to those of characters in a book (or worse, in a journal), and Matanza and Navidad would become exotic towns on postcards from provincial Chile.
Before going back to Santiago — while buying a postcard that depicted a fisherman smiling on the cold, dry beach, under a white sky — I randomly overheard the conversation of a man working in the market and a woman, sitting on a wicker stool, weaving. The man told her that he’d finally be able to pay off a debt because he’d come into some unexpected money. A few days ago, while he was walking with Violeta on the beach toward the cove, “Boris” had approached him and asked if his daughter, who was shivering because she’d just come out of the water, would be interested in becoming an actress. How random, the woman said. Boris told him that at the school in Navidad they were going to be putting on a play at the beginning of the school year. And Violetita would be perfect for the part. Imagine that, Violetita an actress, said the woman indifferently.
I interrupted to ask the man where I could find this Boris. At the service station they both replied at the same time; the service station attendant is named Boris.
89
LITERATURE IS A LIE. Embrace the wind. Today is Saturday, the fourteenth day of September in the year two thousand and two since the birth of Jesus Christ. I’m sitting in front of the screen, the keyboard, and the speakers of my computer, at eight hours twenty minutes past noon, in an apartment in a building on Merced, whose number, with respect to the Plaza de Armas in Santiago de Chile, is four-hundred seventy-one. Twenty-five years have passed since my mother gave birth to me. More than twenty minutes ago a beautiful woman left my apartment, up from the armchair, out through the door into the hallway, and gone. Thirty minutes from now I’ll be sitting in front of the television. Only what happens exists. Only what I can see, hear, touch, smell, taste. Nevertheless, she bit her bottom lip and smiled. She looked at the floor. I sensed for a brief instant the chess game of God. She’d been thinking about me too, and my body was attracted to hers like metal to a magnet. It is now, here. You might say that I want to raise walls, construct a bedroom, write a chapter in a novel where the two of us would touch each other freely. But I don’t. She looks at the clock and says: I have to go.
It is a game. Not a novel.
There is no story. Only rules.
95
MARTES LET HIMSELF fall to the floor. His hands hurt and he was tired of thinking about ways of escaping. Surely Juan Carlos Montes had laughed seeing him running circles around the room and slamming into walls. He only hoped for two things: that Sabado was truly safe in a city somewhere, and that the message she’d sent him was a lie, a joke in bad taste devised by Domingo to frighten him. If Montes locked them together in a room, like the lab mice they were, the hadón would take effect and one of the two would end up killing the other. Which in itself would be useless, for the survivor would quickly be eliminated by Montes. At this point, he saw no way out but through the precarious lines of the novel-game that they began to write when there were still seven of them, like the days of the week.
99
DO YOU REMEMBER how many times we discussed that Wittgensteinian way of looking at things? And how many times we talked about idealism? That objects don’t exist, dear Sabado, only words, which build and break, build and break. It’s impossible to know what happens to the apple when you bite it. To write with hate. Under the effect of hadón, wanting my words not to bite the open chin, the purple cheek, the white eyes of Martes, but to bite your throat, your neck, your mouth, from a distance. Let me hate you, Sabado, since I can’t touch you, to dispel the death of these four walls. For this I write you.
“But tell me, do you hate me?” Martes asked me, before smashing his head against the wall of mirrors and falling unconscious to the floor. He’s not dead; he sleeps, I believe. I hope.
The only way to save the head is to train it. In the Lacanian sense of the term, Montes would say, because, he claims, the mind is only language.
Or an invention of language.
I too let myself fall to the floor of the entertainment room, my hands locked together, staring at Martes. They’ve locked the door from outside, right? He asked me. He already knew. He’d read it in an email you sent him, he said. We’ll kill each other beyond saving, Domingo. The compound should already be working in our hypothalamuses. Really I don’t hate you, he continued, occasionally I’ve been bothered by your need to control everything, just a little bit. That you seemed indifferent to the disappearances of Viernes, Miercoles, Lunes, and Jueves. But tell me, do you hate me?
No, I replied. I continued to stare at the ceiling, humming a suite by Debussy that my father listened to on Sundays, early in the morning. La la la la. La la la la la. Do you remember “Le mer?” Jueves bought a theremin on the Internet and it arrived on a Saturday. It was the perfect excuse to celebrate. While we put peanuts in his beer, Jueves moved his hands toward and away from the apparatus. The terrifying sound waves oscillated from the deepest to the sharpest. Uuuuuuu, uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu. I don’t know. Jueves spent a couple weeks making sounds with it; he even printed the Debussy score. This must have been during the period when I was writing the story about the Congolese on the beach. You remember. It was a Friday night, we were playing cards. I got up to go to the bathroom and when I came back the chairs of Lunes, Miercoles, Jueves, and Viernes were empty.
“But, tell me, do you hate me?”
I stopped humming the suite when Martes’s shouts grew more powerful than my own. I told him: I’m not going to kill you, I’m sorry. I believe in God, that God gives and takes life, and that if I do it intentionally, I’ll be definitively separated from Him, which is the same as dying. Martes began kicking furniture and throwing papers in the air. Rage all you want, but don’t touch the computer, I howled. I brandished the leg of a chair, ready to give him a real blow in the neck, below the nape to calm him. He sat down and kept screaming that I was a fool, a fool. Only a fool can believe in God while at the same time experimenting with cannibalistic white mice. I closed my eyes. I remembered that when Jueves’s hands moved away from the theremin, the sounds were deeper. Martes continued. Shit on the angels, on the first, on the second, the third, the fourth, the fifth, the sixth, the seventh, shit on every single one of the days of creation. That’s what he said. And he added the names of the patriarchs, of the judges, of the prophets, of the kings, of the King. So I stood up and I took the chair leg in my hands. I calculated where I should strike him so there’d be no blood. Right at that moment he stopped talking. He asked me if I hated him. He moved quickly to dodge my blow, his right leg tangled with what was left of the couch and his head smashed against the mirrored wall. He’s unconscious now. Until someone kills him or revives him.