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the use of newspapers

On the ice floe that was Santiago, Ignacio couldn’t stop repeating it’s so cold, my toes are frozen. His feet were like a cadaver’s even with the hot water bottle and three pairs of socks. You don’t use heating here? And yes, sometimes, usually we turned it on in the afternoons. Olga opened the doors and windows early to air the place out, and in filtered a winter that was impossible to chase away with a paraffin stove that, more than heat, exuded an infernal smoke. The currents of air sustained family life, they made us drop our little grudges to join in the accumulation of heat around the table or in a shared bed. But only Ignacio and I were in the house during the day. My brothers only appeared sometimes, fleetingly, on weekends. My parents worked continuously at their respective hospitals, consulting offices, occasional shifts and home visits. Aren’t you dying of cold? Ignacio insisted, rubbing his hands together as if lighting a fire. I was trained to resist the damp air that was seeping into his bones. His teeth chattered. He got up from the chair and bent his legs to wake them up. He rummaged quickly in a packet of cigarettes, the match scratched in my ears, and I heard him suck on the cigarette in spite of his imaginary flu. I could envision him forming fragile smoke rings that his forced cough then tore apart, his dry cough and the beaten voice of a bellyaching Galician. Winter in my Santiago made him remember winter in his own, in Compostela, and he told me again how as a boy he’d slept beside a wall that let water filter in from outside, how he’d spent his whole childhood sick, covered in rashes, his ears hardened by chilblains. He exaggerated his hardships or invented them, all so as not to talk about our own. We need to move, he decided suddenly and predictably, putting an end to his moaning. But aren’t you already moving? You’re pacing like a prisoner. We need to leave the house, he corrected himself. It’s colder inside than out. The car has heat, right? Yes, more or less, I wavered, at least there’s heat from the motor. I want to buy another newspaper, because the one in the house isn’t worth a damn. It used to be great for cleaning windows, I thought, and for wrapping eggs and fish at the market, but I let him transfer his climactic complaints to the newspapers and then I explained. Everyone says the same thing, Ignacio, here there are only opposition newspapers — that is, newspapers of the right. There are no left-leaning papers. Not even centrist papers. No newspaper that is informatively decent. Ignacio sighed. Where can we go? He got up again from his chair and immediately sat down again and crossed his legs. And then he let out an uuf or something similar, and he said no, we can’t go, and he lit another cigarette, scraping another match. And, exhaling meticulously, he said, what a shame we can’t go out. And why not? I don’t know Santiago, he said, I’ve never driven in Santiago. And abruptly stubbing out what was left of his tobacco against the ashtray, he fell silent. What do you mean we can’t? Of course we can, I’ll direct you, I know Santiago like the back of my hand. I told him where to find the keys to the car that had once been mine and was still there, faithfully awaiting my return, and we went down, me limping a little and Ignacio trotting down the stairs that led to the door and the gate, and we went down also along expansive avenues that disappeared into the mountains until they reach, at the bottom, the rotunda that was one of the city’s nerve centers. They killed a minister there, I told Ignacio, pointing ahead without really knowing where to. They dealt with him in the first months of socialism. That was the spark of what would happen later, La Moneda in flames, the open wound of Chile’s history. Yes, says Ignacio, who knows everything about politics but nothing about streets or motors. Ignacio who hates to drive, who now snakes through the city to save himself from claustrophobia. He accelerates so his anxiety can’t keep up, and he heads west, following my directions. I put my memory on autopilot and I give him such precise instructions I surprise myself: keep in the left lane but stay on Costanera. Yes? It’s the large avenue, and go a little further, a few blocks, and when we come to a wide street with three traffic lights with arrows and a left turn lane, keep going straight, and careful with the pedestrian crossing hidden behind some trees. And so we cross Santiago. Turn to go up, toward the mountains. I don’t see any mountains, said Ignacio. They must be there, hidden by thick clouds from industrial smokestacks. And there on the corner must also be a sign. A little wooden sign. Do you see it? (Open your eyes wide, Ignacio, you’re seeing it without seeing it.) Nothing, sighed Ignacio, exhausted as though newly blind himself. I don’t see anything but a closed shop with the window covered in newspapers. Top to bottom, old newspapers singed by the sun. That was where I used to buy books, I told him, in a uselessly tragic tone, and then: go slowly because there’s a speed bump in half a block. You see a big chestnut tree to your left? Then it’s the next street, past a green kiosk. To the left is a parking lot. I hand him change. The cafe terrace will be covered in plastic and will have space heaters. Are we there? Yes, says Ignacio, his words thinning before a sneeze. We sit down to order two cups of coffee and to choose from a pile of worn-out newspapers.

painkillers

Lethargic, no schedules, no routines. We stayed in bed in the mornings like a couple of unemployed or retired people, or hopeless addicts, addicted to each other. Under the sheets we lived in a jumble of newspapers, cassettes, and neglect, of sleepiness and carnivorous groping seasoned with anti-flu medicines (Ignacio) and painkillers and anti-inflammatories (me). Ignacio was bombarded by an invented virus, and I, on top of everything, had shooting pains like needles in my groin. There were hours during the day, during the day but mostly throughout the immense night, when the stiffness in my hip intensified and I shuddered and twisted every time I turned over in bed. I lay still, assaulted by nails that drove into the joint and moved through my body, to come to rest in my insomnia. My mind raced until the fatigue of dawn. Ignacio’s mind, on the other hand, fell into a coma from the medicine and he snored like he was growling; at other times, it was just a deaf and tortured whistle, almost a sigh. His was a sleep as restless, as exhausting, as my lack of sleep, and I wanted to wake him up to give him a little sex. Only a little, to get to sleep. Ignacio, I whispered, Ignacio, and I waited for a sign. From the deep pit of his consciousness rose a hoarse noise suggesting that even if he wasn’t there, his body was indeed available. I started by putting my tongue in a corner of his eyelid, slowly, and as my mouth covered his eyes I felt a savage desire to suck them, hard, to take possession of them on my palate as if they were little eggs or enormous and excited roe, hard, but Ignacio, half-asleep or now half-awake, refused to open them, he refused to give himself to that newly discovered desire, and instead of giving me what I wanted he pushed me back onto the bed and put his tongue in my ear and between my lips although he didn’t dare lick my sick eyes when I asked him to, maybe he was afraid or maybe disgusted, and instead he bit the nipples that were the open eyes of my breasts, and by then I had finished waking up too and I forced him back on the bed forgetting all my pains, and I kissed the start of his thighs, between his legs where it smelled of dampness and confinement, and I put in my mouth the tip of his body as if it were what most excited me, though it wasn’t that exactly, not that but rather the knowledge that my tongue was moving under a thick eyelid of wrinkled and secret skin, to know that under that lid was Ignacio’s blind, round, soft eye, giving in to me, growing taut on my tongue until it shed a tear, spasming, in my mouth. I drank the tear and I climbed up Ignacio’s body to peer over his belly button and enter that socket as well. But Ignacio grabbed me by the shoulders, hesitating, still undecided about whether he should, whether I wanted it too, if it was possible, because between us, like a gash, was the doctor’s warning, the medical words alerting us to the danger, Ignacio’s terror of making me bleed again and making my eyes burst. But Ignacio, I whispered, that already happened, I’m already full of blood. Let’s go for it, I told him, ready for anything. I said it like an extreme athlete tied to an elastic cord, ready to throw myself off a bridge of a not insignificant height, just to try my luck in the fall. But my harness was insecure. But his heart was delicate. But pulled along by the strength of my impulse, Ignacio closed his eyes and clenched his teeth and begged me at least not to try any contortions in the air.