The man looked at me with barely concealed annoyance, but he went with me. When we arrived he didn’t mention that he had spent the night at Raúl’s house. I thanked him and then I had no other option: I asked him if he knew Raúl, and he answered that they were cousins, that he lived in Puerto Montt, and that he had stayed at Raúl’s house because he had an errand to run in Santiago.
“I’m Raúl’s neighbor,” I told him.
“See you later, Raúl’s neighbor,” said the man, and he set off quickly, almost running.
“It’s possible,” said Claudia, to my surprise, when I told her about the stranger. It was possible that Raúl had a cousin in Puerto Montt? Wouldn’t that cousin, then, be related to Claudia?
“We have a very big family,” said Claudia, “and there are a lot of uncles in the south I’ve never met.” She serenely changed the subject.
* * *
There were five other men at Raúl’s house in the following months, and each time Claudia seemed unaffected by the news. But she had a very different reaction when I told her that a woman had stayed there, and not for one night, as usual, but for two nights in a row.
“Maybe she came from the south, too,” I said.
“Could be,” she answered, but she was obviously surprised, even angry.
“She could be a girlfriend. Maybe Raúl isn’t alone anymore,” I said.
“Yes,” she answered, after a while. “Raúl is single, it’s entirely possible he could have a girlfriend. In any case, I want you to find out everything you can about that possible girlfriend.”
She seemed to be struggling not to cry. I looked at her closely until she stood up. “Let’s go inside the temple,” she said. She dipped her fingers into the bowl of holy water and used it to cool her face. We stayed on our feet next to some enormous candelabra with wax dripping from the candles — some new and others about to burn out — that people would bring when they prayed for miracles. Claudia put her hands over the flames as if to warm them; she dipped her fingertips in the wax, and played at making the sign of the cross with her wax-coated fingers. She didn’t know the sign of the cross. I taught her.
We sat in the first pew. I looked obediently at the altar, while Claudia looked to the sides and identified, one by one, the flags that flanked the statue of the virgin. She asked me if I knew why the flags were there. “They’re the flags of the Americas,” I said.
“Yes, but why are they here?”
“I don’t know,” I answered. “Something about the unity of the Americans, I guess.”
She took my hand and told me that the prettiest flag was Argentina’s. “Which one do you think is prettiest?” she asked me, and I was going to say the United States flag but luckily I kept quiet, because then she said the United States flag was the ugliest, a truly horrible flag, and I added that I agreed, the United States flag was really disgusting.
For weeks I waited fruitlessly for the woman to return. Then she appeared, finally, one Saturday morning. She was a girl, really. I figured she was around eighteen years old. She could hardly have been Raúl’s girlfriend.
I spent hours trying to hear what she and Raúl talked about, but they exchanged barely a few sentences that I couldn’t understand. I thought she would spend the night, but she left that same afternoon. I followed her, absurdly camouflaged by a red cap. The woman walked quickly toward a bus stop and when I got there, next to her, I wanted to say something but my voice wouldn’t come.
The bus pulled up and I had to decide, in a matter of seconds, whether I would follow her onto it. At that time I already rode the bus alone, but only on the short, ten-minute ride to school. I got on and rode for a long time, a bold hour-and-a-half foray I spent rooted to the seat right behind hers.
I had never traveled so far from home on my own, and the powerful impression the city left on me is, in some way, the one that still rears up now and then: a formless space, open but also closed, with imprecise plazas that are almost always empty, and people walking along narrow sidewalks, gazing at the ground with a kind of deaf fervor, as if they could only move forward along a forced anonymity.
Night fell over that forbidden neck as I looked at it ever more fixedly, as if staring would free me from that flight, as if watching her intensely would protect me. By that point the bus was starting to fill up and one woman looked at me, expecting me to give her my seat, but I couldn’t risk losing my place. I decided to act like I was mentally retarded, or the way I thought a mentally retarded boy would act — a boy who looked straight ahead, entranced and completely absorbed by an imaginary world.
Raúl’s supposed girlfriend got off the bus suddenly and almost left me behind. I barely made it to the door, elbowing my way out. She waited for me and helped me down. I kept moving like a retarded child, though she knew full well that I wasn’t a retarded child but rather Raúl’s neighbor who had followed her, who seemed resolved to follow her all night long. There was no reproach in her gaze, though — only an absolute serenity.
I ventured with pointless discretion into a maze of streets that seemed big and old. Every once in a while she would turn around, smile at me, and speed up, as if it were a game and not an extremely serious matter. Suddenly she started to trot and then took off running, just like that, and I almost lost her; then I saw her go into a shop far ahead. I climbed a tree and waited several minutes for her to finally come out, assuming I would be gone. Then she walked just half a block farther, to what had to be her house. I waited until she had gone in and I went closer. The fence was green and the facade was blue, and that caught my attention, because I had never seen that color combination before. I wrote the address in my notebook, happy to have gotten such exact information.
I had a hard time getting back to the street where I had to catch the return bus. But I remembered the name clearly: Tobalaba. I got home at one in the morning, and I was so frightened that I couldn’t even outline a convincing explanation. My parents had gone to the police, and the affair had leaked to the neighbors. I finally told them I had fallen asleep in a plaza and had only just woken up. They believed me, and later they even made me see a doctor who checked me for sleep disorders.
Emboldened by my discoveries, I arrived at our Thursday date firmly intending to tell Claudia everything I knew about Raúl’s supposed girlfriend.
But things didn’t turn out that way. Claudia arrived late to the meeting, and she wasn’t alone. With a friendly gesture she introduced me to Esteban, a guy with long blond hair. She told me I could trust him and that he knew the whole story. I tensed up, disconcerted, not daring to ask if he was her boyfriend or cousin or what. He must have been seventeen or eighteen years old: a little older than Claudia, a lot older than me.
Esteban bought three marraquetas and a quarter of a kilo of mortadella at the supermarket. We didn’t go to the temple. We stayed in the plaza to eat. The guy didn’t talk much, but that afternoon I spoke even less. I didn’t tell Claudia what I had discovered, maybe as a form of revenge, since I wasn’t prepared for what was happening; I couldn’t understand why someone else was allowed to know what I was doing with Claudia, why she was allowed to share our secret.