holes
If you’re not exhausted, said Félix as he came tiptoeing into my room, if you’re not absolutely worn out, come take a drive with me. Downtown, he said. I have a new project I want to show you. Show me? Tell you about, he replied, editing himself, adding, let’s go for a ride! You feel like it? Do I feel like it? I yanked off my headphones, leaving half-finished the chapter of another novel I’d already read. I turned off the device and threw it onto the bed. I would have headed out into the street and crossed through blaring horns without looking, I would have forced the locks to get into any random car, I would have pressed my own foot to the accelerator just to get out of that house. I needed fresh air, even if Santiago’s was radioactive. Now we can talk about the important things, said my brother as he fastened his seatbelt and constrained my body with the passenger side belt. As the car set off and began to gather speed, I looked into the rearview mirror with my mind’s eye, the eye that later conceives memories. Félix checked behind him; my eyes were staring blankly forward. Right away Félix began talking to me about the tower he was involved in, involved up to his eyebrows, he said, with his team. But why build more towers? I thought. Towers are monuments in decline, you only have to build them and someone comes and knocks them down. But my brother unspooled his soliloquy with the modular details of the design, the widths and lengths of each floor, every one of the windows; he threw out names of materials, angles of incline, resistance calculations. He talked, absorbed in the downtown’s architectural renovation, the urgent need to make room for the new, the empty lot’s biography. I listened to him silently, thinking how at that insipid afternoon hour we would be surrounded by full buses, full taxis, maybe an empty cart coming from the central market, how we’d be traveling with an escort of shining and insolent cars destined to leave us behind. I thought about and almost saw the muddy and hostile river that Ignacio would come to feel was his, as with everything, as with too much. I struggled to listen to what my brother was saying, so young and euphoric, so indifferent. I let loose pieces of the city sprinkle over the map in my visual memory, Santiago’s dirty avenues and the contours of its corners, handwritten signs with grammatical mistakes, shops selling used American clothes, the dubious cafes
con piernas in the city center, certain streets that every Chilean knows and that I was going to introduce Ignacio to later, broken phone booths, carts selling cups of cold mote con huesillo. To your left is Plaza Italia (and the plaza appeared to me, Ignacio, the one that’s now recorded by your eyes, the plaza with its Icarus carrying an excessive bronze torch), and to the right, he said, the refurbished, or rather, converted ex-Normandie, (the cinema where I watched midnight screenings of devastating Russian films, killing myself with cold, dying of fatigue), and here, Félix’s voice interrupted my memories, here is Santa Lucia hill and its mural of the founding of Santiago (each word a spadeful of color in my head), you know where we are? I simply nodded before the panoramic format of my Santiago past as it went through my head. The car shot through the city like a meteor until we reached La Moneda palace, which appeared to me white, immaculate, the way it was before military helicopters flying overhead dropped bombs on it, and in the midst of the imagined offensive, with the soundtrack of the dictator’s voice announcing his ignominious victory in the background, the live, guttural, articulate voice of my brother Félix slipped in, chronicling the square meters his tower would have, his invisible team’s tower, once it was complete. Félix, I said, interrupting him: where are the holes? In La Moneda? What are you talking about, he answered impatiently. They rebuilt it ages ago! But I was talking about the buildings across Alameda, on Paseo Bulnes, the old buildings with walls colored by time and dust, perforated especially on the highest floors by devastating bazooka fire. Oh, yes, he said, those are still there, the gaping holes, and also in the less visible buildings on nearby streets you can see the holes from the machine guns fired by sharpshooters posted on neighboring roofs. Why do you ask? I’m not sure, I heard myself answer. And I also told him that I was thinking about the shards of the coup, so many acid shards eating away at the concrete. And I also thought, but didn’t say, that those walls had witnessed everything, but were now blindfolded by a thick layer of soot that only fell away, a little every few years, in the earthquakes.