crosswords
Sloppy and swaddled in blankets like dogs, our ears cold, the tips of our noses damp. I opened my eyes reflexively and I understood I’d woken up, but I turned over again. A marine light was growing stronger in the hollows of the curtains, Ignacio told me, and then I finished waking up to tell him the light couldn’t be marine, we were in the middle of a town, the house surrounded by dirt and pines that shed their cones onto the roof. Don’t confuse me. Right, said Ignacio, and he tripped over a hot water bottle that had fallen to the floor like a dead child. He showered as fast as he could and I did the same, but I took longer trying to catch the soap and detect the shampoo. With our heads drying, we went out in search of lunch. Along the supermarket aisles Ignacio started hunting nouns on the cans of food — peaches were damascos and not albaricoques, peas were arvejas and not guisantes, beans were porotos and not judías. Then I stopped in front of a shelf, and moving my fingers softly over the surfaces like laser readers I told him that here cans are called tarros and not latas, and they hold choclo and not maíz. Don’t talk so loudly, said Ignacio, and then, those are olivas you’re touching. But are these aceitunas yellow? I asked. More like green, answered Ignacio. And afterwards we got in line at a register. And I know that in the afterwards of the afterwards the car stopped at a kiosk, that Ignacio got out, slamming the door, that he talked with the newsagent, held out his hand with coins on his palm and asked the man to pay himself, because Ignacio still didn’t get the money. (That’s how I remember it, as if I’d seen it with my eyes.) And still afterwards, Ignacio came back with the week’s zillionth newspaper so he could follow in detail the crisis that was shaking the world outside us. Here, this is for you, I heard him say. I touched some booklets of cheap paper. What’s this? I smiled. Porn magazines in braille? I felt Ignacio’s laughter sticking to his voice: porn magazines for the blind that also work for people who can see, if they’re trained. Schoolboys reading porn with one hand under the desk. And girls, I suggested, we shouldn’t forget about them, discovering a voyeurism of the hands. Yes, said Ignacio, them too, the schoolgirls at public schools and private and catholic schools. Yeah, but what is this? Don’t you want to guess? No, I don’t want to, I go through life guessing, all this guesswork is killing me. Crosswords, he said, and me: crosswords? What do I want those for? We want them, Ignacio corrected me, so we don’t forget words. Ignacio must have found my notebooks full of words in some box. Not books of grand quotations. Not titles of pending books and certainly not diaries. Single words that I collected so I could put them to work later on. Words that carried me from one idea to another with no need for a dictionary, which was a stopped-up dam of words. The crossword was a meaningless set of words that interlaced for no other reason than that they happened to share a letter. Sharing a letter as the only condition, I thought. Every word naked and crosscut with others in different positions. Are you sending me a coded message? And again Ignacio started laughing, inside and then out; he laughed in happy, booming peals that disconcerted me. I let him laugh because someone had to express happiness; and just like that, Ignacio laughing and me disconcerted, we went down, with the windows open, along roads that stretched like roots, letting ourselves be coated in dust and eucalyptus. We sat in the living room. Forget the walkman, said Ignacio, you’re turning autistic with those recorded books, and then he announced: Clothing. Seven letters, and he plopped beside me like a wet rag. Apparel? Could be, and his pen wrote it down. Arabic liquor, four letters, it would have to start with an A. Arak. Govern starting with R, four letters. Rule? I heard the pen scratching paper, filling the empty spaces. You’re not giving me time to think, Ignacio. Let’s see, silversmith’s tool used to change dimensions of an object. I have no idea what that is. Swage. Half a maniac? How many letters? If it’s three, could be Man or Iac. Female Nobel winner with seven letters, under the photo of an old lady with really short hair? Mistral! And adding up words, we ate empanadas and drank a glass of wine, and still in bed it suddenly got very cold because the fuel had run out, and when he opened the door Ignacio exclaimed joder, the sun is coming up. But the word sunrise evoked nothing. Nothing even close to a sunrise. My eyes were emptying of all the things they’d seen. And it occurred to me that words and their rhythms would remain, but not landscapes, not colors or faces, not those black eyes of Ignacio’s that I had seen spill out a love at times wary, sullen, cutting, but above all an open love, expectant, full of mirages that the crossword puzzle would define as hallucinations.
love is blind too
You’ll see signs, keep north. Quintero. Puchuncaví. Zapallar. When the road forks, take a dirt road that will turn to sand that right away will be the blue ocean edged with pines, swarming with albatross, strewn with pigeon shit. With our feet sunk in the beach scum we walked — me, painfully — to the table where Genaro and the other man were waiting for us. Overcoming his aversion to awkward situations with a pisco sour in hand, and surely biting his tongue to keep from saying anything about how long it had been since we’d seen each other, Genaro hugged us both simultaneously. But sit down, he says, the clams a la parmesana just got here, and there’s a bottle of white wine. Yes, echoes Genaro’s lover, a delicious white wine. Ignacio pours me a glass that I grasp tightly in my fingers, and he moves the others so I don’t knock them over with my other hand that flits over everything like a feather duster. I know Ignacio, Genaro, and the other man wield knives and forks like three musketeers and they attack the clams to which three steaming seafood stews are soon added, along with one or two reheated rolls. That, a piece of bread, is what I manage to chew, dissolve in my mouth, and swallow while they talk about people who no longer concern me. They swaddle the conversation with rigorous courtesy. They order another bottle and I drain my glass. And with the smell of salt and iodine encrusted in my nose I go back, now alone, to that long night when Genaro and I first met. The party where we’d been introduced, the immediate affinity, the emergency stairs where we went up the three floors to his apartment. Halfway up he stopped to explain. He wanted to tell me. Tell me anything you want, I said, wondering what that smell could be and thinking that it must be the floor cleaner. Tell me whatever you want, I repeated. And without altering the expression on his face Genaro told me that his boyfriend had just died of AIDS. Died in his arms like lovers die in movies, after a slow, terrible, unimaginable agony. He died without passing on the disease, but Genaro still suffered night sweats; he got up at midnight thinking about his own death. I remember that confession, and suddenly I understand that this lunch is a goodbye. Genaro will let me leave like he let the dead man go. And while I have this revelation, in my memory we’re entering his apartment together and I see that the walls are covered in pictures the dead man painted. This is a mausoleum, I’d told Genaro, alarmed. You have to take all these down, give them a last kiss one by one before wrapping them up and sending them to a storage unit from where you will never retrieve them. That dead man won’t let you breathe, he’s looking at you from every one of these portraits. Genaro looked at me in horror, and then he looked at the pictures one by one, he stared at each painted face and he said yes like a zombie waking up, yes, yes, mechanically. Yes, Lucina, it’s true, I hadn’t thought about that, and he took down the paintings, he silenced their eyes, leaned them against the wall for a few days before putting them in storage forever. And he painted his house white again, he bought sheets that didn’t smell like the deceased man, and then he gave me all the life he’d accumulated in those months of mourning. But then I’d left him, I’d traded him for a doctorate in New York and for Ignacio. Especially for Ignacio, who was so much like him. Genaro had taken me down from his friendship, he’d blindfolded me with his rage, he had turned me toward the wall. This was only a momentary truce. Here’s to love, blind love, bellows the Genaro present here, angry with wine, and I tell him yes, of course, Genaro, we must always toast to that, and I pick up the only clam on my plate and I feel like clouting him with it. I slurp the lemon juice from the shell and push the mollusk covered in now-hard cheese between my lips. Ignacio only opens his mouth to suck thoughtfully on a cigarette; his ashtray will be stuffed with broken butts. I steal a drag, seeking Ignacio’s comforting saliva on the filter, and by the time they bring us the check everything between us has turned salty and contradictory. The wind lifts up sand that the humidity adheres to our necks. Genaro roars with laughter that falls like a whip while he repeats that love is blind, that we are all blind as clams, and how can we not realize. Not so loud, his lover says discreetly, you’re making a scene. But all the seeing people are gone already, says Genaro, not a decibel lower. Be quiet anyway, that’s enough. And then Genaro’s lover turns to me, ashamed (blushing, you’ll tell me later, Ignacio). Don’t pay any attention to him, Lucina, don’t mind him, he’s been out of sorts for days, but in any case you’re going to get better, right? I’m quiet, annoyed, thinking you’re a cretin and at the same time thinking what not to say; while I consider possible combinations, whether to console Genaro or insult him, whether to be falsely polite to his lover or throw the plates at him, I hear Ignacio start talking for me as if he’d forgotten I was there. We don’t know what, he says, without finishing the thought. I snatch the words from him, saying that not even the doctor knows. But yes, says Genaro from somewhere, from all possible places, you’ll recover like economies do, first up then down. Don’t get started on the economy, I cut him off, tired of him and of the wind cracking open my skin and implacably lashing my hair over my face. What’s more, Genaro, empires also fall and they don’t rise up again, and it’s getting really cold, it’s time for us to go. Yes, Ignacio jumps in, prompted by my knee, it’s getting dark and I don’t know the roads well. We all get up at the same time and Genaro wraps me in his arms, kisses both my cheeks and my forehead, promises to call me next week, to come visit me, but I know he won’t, that our friendship has ended in that picturesque restaurant of scavenging seagulls. We got into the car. They howled a duet of bye, Lucina, and they growled a ferocious bye, Ignacio, and I waved my hand slackly toward a place where no one remained. Not even the memory of Genaro.