The meeting for the novel-game was brief and insignificant, but now I’ll go to bed feeling that everyone had more than enough to say to each other. At least everyone seemed to be happy about having to read and write. Your fragment was praised in passing, by Viernes if I’m not mistaken, as a marvel of concision. Or was it Jueves. I don’t know. My words, I stain everything, almost everything, you know. About Wednesday, an open day, regrettably, Viernes suggested that a friend of his write. He says that he has a rational, essayistic style that no one else has. We all agreed. It’s worth a shot.
I don’t have a strong opinion about the problems you brought up in your email. To my taste everything is fine as we set it up, and I like the idea of people landing on the same square. Forced intertexuality. Goodbye and thank you.
Domingo
45
I MUST ADMIT THAT I abhor articles that begin this way: Life imitates art. I deplore equally both pretentious and self-referential journalism, and above all, journalism that lacks documentation. Art — I am not saying anything particularly original — doesn’t imitate life, nor vice versa, for the same reason that people normally hang mirrors in the bathroom or behind the door and not on the bedroom wall facing the bed. This circumlocution serves to justify me: as I listened to Carmen Riza, Alicia Vivar’s first grade teacher, an image of myself in this particular moment that I had eight years ago came into my mind. The certainty — though that sounds emphatic — that I’d spend a great deal of time in front of the computer writing an article about an international child-trafficking network. Narrative anticipation, a term I’d not heard since my days in university.
When she disappeared, Alicia Vivar was going into eighth grade at Santiago College, where she’d been enrolled since she was four years old. The teacher, Carmen Riza, taught her to read and write, to add and subtract, to know the differences between the kingdoms of the natural world, and also to cut paper with scissors. But mostly she remembered Alicia’s exceptional work in violin class. For more than three years, Alicia composed the variations that a group of fifteen young violinists, accompanied by the teacher on piano, performed during the school’s award ceremonies each December. According to Carmen Riza, her Song of the Sand is still played in a civic performance at the end of the year. She didn’t excel as a violinist — says Riza — in fact she was the third chair of the second row. But I appreciated her solemnity and that she never placed importance on her ability to invent melodies. She didn’t even talk about it. On any given day she’d come in with her lined staves and hand them to me: This is the Song of the Sun, she’d say, this is the Song of the Bush, of the Mean Bear, the Song of Hands, the Song of Evening, those are the ones I remember. It must’ve been about twenty songs. The only one we didn’t perform was the Song of the Corridor. She gave me the sheet and started to cry. She wouldn’t tell me what was wrong. Before I sent her home she said quietly: it’s just so hard to play.
Alicia Vivar left music behind. When she was ten years old she stopped attending violin class. Instead, according to her classmates, she became interested in rhythmic gymnastics and field hockey. On the topic, Carmen Riza claims to not understand the change, because “the girl had a special ear. It was a loss for the class.” But what could Alicia Vivar’s musical activities have to do with her disappearance? That is something I can only illustrate with a personal anecdote.
Eight years ago, for no particular reason, I attended a performance by the Santiago College violin class. I went in and sat down without knowing why. It was a Friday afternoon in mid June; it was very cold and the days were passing quickly. I’d recently gotten my degree in journalism and I was looking for a job. Many other things had, regrettably, become much less important. One of those things was fun, just fun, in the abstract, without adjectives or adverbs. What I’d call now, from a certain distance, pleasure. I enjoyed writing stories, novels, poetry, letters to women, Greek comedies, scripts for documentaries. I also enjoyed talking about my writing and the writing of others. To that end, five friends of similar interests and I had come up with a system that, in the beginning, seemed like an original and fascinating discovery. A novel-game. In short, it involved rolling dice, moving your token to a space with prefigured plotlines and formal constraints, writing a text according to those constraints and, that night, mailing this text to the other participants. Everyone had been assigned a day of the week, except Sunday, a day of rest. It was a game of complex rules and seduction. And the result was out of control. However, weeks passed and participants started deserting, for various reasons that were occulted by shame, that “crossroads of love and fear,” in the words of a little-known French philosopher we were reading at the time. Already three of my friends — those assigned Monday, Wednesday, and Friday — had stopped participating in the novel-game. A fourth had announced an upcoming trip to New York. We had to decide what was going to happen to the project in light of these desertions.
We decided to meet that Friday, at four in the afternoon, at the Youth and Children’s Book Fair, which in those days was held at the Parque Bustamante, in Providencia.
I got there half an hour early. The place was overflowing with red and blue balloons. There were clowns, and people dressed as characters from fairytales, and techno music. I passed by the various editorial stands. At the Pehuen stand, for five hundred pesos, I bought an anthology of contemporary Canadian poets, which interested me because of the inclusion of Margaret Atwood, one of my favorite novelists at that time. I looked at my watch: it was already four fifteen and no one else had arrived. Then over the loudspeaker they announced that in five minutes the Santiago College violin class would be performing in the amphitheater. I walked toward the venue, deciding to pass the time in one of the plastic chairs. To my left, two mothers were taking pictures; to my right, a little brown-haired girl whose feet didn’t reach the floor was applauding soundlessly. On the stage there were three rows of young violinists. Behind them, sat more than fifteen prepubescent girls, whispering, their cheeks burning with embarrassment; they were part of the choir that would accompany the violinists on their last song.
The audience was almost entirely made up of children from different schools, carefree, eating cotton candy. There were some teachers, parents and other relatives who were filming and photographing the musicians. Except for me, lifting my head every five minutes to look around for one of my friends, the only person out of place was a very elegantly dressed man. He stood for the entire performance, arms crossed, wearing dark sunglasses, and a smile that appeared every time the third girl in the second row frowned or glanced at him. I don’t remember much about her; she wasn’t striking. She was just another girl among those strange, six-year-olds: hair pulled back in a ponytail, thin hands vibrating with the bow, cold face angled over the wood surface of the little violin. The teacher shouted instructions that only the children could hear. F, up down, bow to the audience, next, remember Caro, you begin, louder Alicia. The last song was announced: This is the Song of Sand, thank you. One three-year-old girl, dressed ridiculously in green, took two steps forward, looked with disturbing seriousness at the teacher, placed the violin under her chin. She waited for two chords from Carmen Riza’s electric piano before she began to move her bow. A clean sharp sound lead into a scale, across which the entire section of children’s violins joined together in something that sounded to me like Schubert, but sadder, and sicker. Like a child who imagines the music of Schubert after he has learned about Schubert’s biography. That’s how I felt. I don’t know if they were already there, but all of a sudden I noticed that the floor of the stage was covered with pink balloons. In the final crescendo, when the choirgirls stood up and sang, a string on the violin of the little girl alone in the front row broke. Applause erupted. In that moment, without taking the violin from her shoulder, the girl in the second row — who I know now was Alicia Vivar — was the only performer who didn’t bow. All alone, she lifted her foot and kicked one of the balloons off the stage, right at the man dressed in the elegant suit, who uncrossed his arms to catch the balloon. I stood, looking at the stage. And in the confusion of congratulating mothers, crying children, and people running from one side to the other, I watched as the girl walked calmly down the steps, went up to the man, and took his hand. He bent down and kissed her cheek. The man was around thirty years old, my age now, I realize. Watching them, I knew where I’d be eight years later, what story I’d be writing right now at my computer. His name was Boris Real. I’m certain that Alicia never composed a single song for the violin. The scores Alicia gave to her teacher were written by Boris Real so that she could perform them. Gifts, you might say. That afternoon they left the Youth and Children’s Book Fair holding hands. I felt dirty for what I thought in that moment, and I feel dirty for thinking it now: twenty-four years separated the two of them.