Well, that’s something, at least, he says. And? Nothing, she says, we talked, he told me he was sorry for what he’d done, he said he was crazy about the victim. Well put, he says. They met at the airport in Calama; he was a security guard, and she worked there for a while, as a receptionist. Before getting the job at the mine, says the sock salesman. In a mining company, she says. Same thing, he says. Well, not exactly. And how did he kill her? he asks. With a knife, she says. He stabbed her twenty-seven times. Don’t you think that’s strange? He looks down at the toes of his shoes for a few seconds. Then he looks at her again and says, What am I supposed to think is strange? The fact that she was twenty-seven and got stabbed twenty-seven times? Then a fury seizes her and she says, I’m in pretty much the same situation, so I guess I’m going to get killed one day too. She’s on the point of saying, And you’re the sad bastard who’s going to kill me, but she checks herself just in time. She’s shaking. But he can’t tell from where he’s sitting. To sum up: it’s her ex who kills her. The night of the murder she sleeps with the current boyfriend. The ex knows what’s going on. She’s told him and he’s been informed by others. Jealousy is eating him. He badgers and threatens her. But she pays him no attention; she’s decided to get on with her life. She’s met another man. They sleep together. That’s the key to the crime: by refusing to give anything up she signs her death warrant. Yes, says the sock salesman, now I understand. No, you don’t understand at all.
I CAN'T READ
This story is about four people. Two children, Lautaro and Pascual, a woman, Andrea, and another child, named Carlos. It’s also about Chile, and, in a way, about Latin America in general.
When my son Lautaro was eight years old, he made friends with Pascual, who was four at the time. A friendship between children of such different ages is unusual, and maybe it was entirely due to the fact that when they met, in November 1998, Lautaro hadn’t seen or played with another child for days on end, because Carolina and I had been trundling him around all over the place, much to his disgruntlement. It was Carolina’s first trip to Chile and my first trip back since leaving in January 1974.
So when Lautaro met Pascual they immediately became friends.
I think it was when we went to have dinner with Pascual’s parents. The second time they met was when Alexandra, Pascual’s mother, took Carolina and Lautaro to a swimming pool. I didn’t go. And the boys might have seen each other again later on. So twice, or three times at the most.
The swimming pool was in the foothills of the Cordillera and, according to Carolina, the water was icy cold and neither she nor Alexandra went in. But Pascual and Lautaro did, and they had a great time.
A strange thing happened (one of the many strange things that will happen in this story and carry it and perhaps turn out to be what it’s really about): when they got to the swimming pool, Lautaro asked Carolina if he could have a pee. She, of course, said yes, and then Lautaro went to the edge of the pool, pulled down his trunks a bit and peed into the water. That night, Carolina said that she’d been embarrassed, not for Lautaro, but because of what Alexandra might have thought. The fact is Lautaro had never done anything like that before. The swimming pool wasn’t really busy, but there were a few people, and my son is not some wild boy who pees wherever he feels like it. It was very strange, Carolina said that night: the enormous Cordillera looming behind the swimming pool as if it were waiting, the laughter and the muted voices of the adults, oblivious to Lautaro’s surprising urination, and Lautaro himself, wearing only his swimming trunks, peeing onto the blue surface of the water. What happened next? I asked. Well, she got up from where she was sunbathing, walked over to our son, and took him to the bathroom. It was like he was under hypnosis, said Carolina. Then he felt ashamed and didn’t want to get into the pool, where Pascual was already splashing around, though after a while he forgot all about it and went in. But Carolina didn’t. Alexandra asked if it was because of the pee, and Carolina said it was because of the cold, which was the truth.
I’d met Alexandra at the airport, a few minutes after stepping off the plane. It was almost a quarter of a century since I’d been in Chile. I’d been invited by Paula magazine, as one of the judges for their short story competition, and when we got through customs and immigration, Alexandra was there waiting for us, along with some people I didn’t know. When she said her name, Alexandra Edwards, I asked her if she was the daughter of Jorge Edwards, the writer, and she looked at me, frowned slightly, as if considering how to reply, then said no. I’m the daughter of the photographer, she explained a little while later. By that stage I was already one of her admirers. I have to say it’s not hard to admire her, because she’s very pretty. But it wasn’t her physical beauty that impressed me; it was something else, a side of her that I’ve gradually come to know and will probably never know completely, and yet I know it well enough to be sure that we’ll always be friends. We’d arrived in the morning, and that afternoon, I remember, I had lunch with the rest of the judges, and I had to make a speech, and Alexandra was there, on the other side of the table, laughing with her eyes, which is something that Chilean women often do, or that’s how it seemed to me at the time, a mistaken impression that must have been due to finding myself back in the country after so many years away; women everywhere laugh with their eyes, all the time, and men do too occasionally, and sometimes it’s actually happening, and sometimes we only think it is, that silent laughter, which reminds me of Andrea, who is one of the main characters in this story, Andrea and Lautaro and Pascual and Carlitos, but I still hadn’t met Andrea, or Pascual, and I’d never even heard of Carlitos, although the fortunate day was drawing near, as someone might have said — myself, perhaps, in January 1974.
Anyway, in spite of the age difference, Lautaro and Pascual became friends, and maybe it was there at the swimming pool perched in the foothills of the Cordillera that their friendship was cemented, after the peeing incident. When Carolina told me, I couldn’t believe it: Lautaro urinating, not in the pool, underwater, as almost all kids do, but from the edge, for everyone to see.
That night, however, I fell asleep and dreamed of my son in that landscape, which had once been mine, the landscape of my twentieth year, and I came to understand a part of what he must have felt. If I’d been killed in Chile, at the end of 1973 or the beginning of 1974, he wouldn’t have been born, I thought, and the act of urinating from the edge of the swimming pool — as if he were asleep or had suddenly been overtaken by a dream — was a physical way of acknowledging that fact and its shadow: having been born and being in a world that might have existed without him.
In the dream I understood that when Lautaro peed in the pool, he was dreaming too, and I understood that although I would never be able to approach his dream, I would always be there beside him. And when I woke up I remembered that one night, when I was a boy, I got out of bed and urinated abundantly in my sister’s closet. But I was a sleepwalker, and Lautaro, fortunately, is not.
During that trip, which took up almost all of November 1998, I didn’t see Andrea. Well, I did, but without really seeing her.