I acted like the child I was and missed our meetings after that. I thought that was what I should do: forget about Claudia. But after a few weeks I was surprised to get a letter from her. She summoned me urgently, asking me to come see her anytime; she said it didn’t matter if her mother was home or not.
It was almost nine at night. Magali opened the door and asked my name, but it was obvious she already knew it. Claudia greeted me effusively and told her mother that I was Raúl’s neighbor, and Magali made excessive gestures of delight. “You’ve grown so much,” she said, “I didn’t recognize you.” I’m sure they were performing a rehearsed introduction, and the questions the woman directed at me were entirely studied in advance. A bit bewildered by the situation, I asked if she was still an English teacher, and she answered with a smile that yes, it wasn’t easy to stop, overnight, being an English teacher.
I asked Claudia to tell me what had happened: How had things changed so much that now my presence was legitimate?
“It’s more like things are changing little by little,” she told me. “Very slowly, things are changing. You don’t need to spy on Raúl anymore, you can come and see me whenever you want, but you don’t have to make any reports,” she repeated, and all I could do was leave, brooding over a deep disquiet.
I went to Claudia’s one or two more times, but I ran into Esteban again. I never found out if he was her boyfriend or not, but in any case I detested him. And then I stopped going, and the days went by like a gust of wind. For some months or maybe a year I forgot all about Claudia. Until one morning I saw Raúl loading up a white truck with dozens of boxes.
Everything happened very quickly. I went up to him and asked where he was going, and he didn’t answer: he looked at me with a neutral and evasive gesture. I took off running to Claudia’s house. I wanted to warn her, and as I was running I discovered that I also wanted her to forgive me. But Claudia wasn’t there anymore.
“They left a few days ago,” said the woman next door. “I don’t know where they went, how should I know that?” she said. “To another neighborhood, I guess.”
LITERATURE OF THE PARENTS
I’m advancing little by little in the novel. I pass the time thinking about Claudia as if she existed, as if she had existed. At first I questioned even her name. But it’s the name 90 percent of the women of my generation share. It’s right that she should have that name. I never get tired of the sound, either. Claudia.
I like that my characters don’t have last names. It’s a relief.
* * *
One of these days this house will start to refuse me. I wanted to start to inhabit it again, organize the books, rearrange the furniture, fix up the yard a bit. None of that has been possible. But a few fingers of mescal are helping for now.
This afternoon I spoke, for the second time in a long time, with Eme. We asked about the friends we have in common, and then, after more than a year of separation, we talked about the books she took with her or accidentally forgot. It seemed painful to go over the list of losses in such a civilized way, but in the end I even roused myself to ask for the books by Hebe Uhart and Josefina Vicens that I’ve missed so much.
“I read them,” she said. For a second I thought she was lying, even though she never lies about things like that; she never lied about anything, really. That was exactly our problem, we didn’t lie. We failed because of the desire to always be honest.
Then she told me about the house where she lives — a mansion, really, some twenty blocks from here, which she shares with two girlfriends.
“You don’t know them,” she told me, “and they aren’t really my friends, but we make a good group: thirty-year-old women happily chatting about our frustrations.” I told her I could go see her and bring the books she needed. She said no. “I want to come over myself, one of these days, after Christmas. You can give me a cup of tea and we’ll talk,” she said.
“Since we’ve been separated,” she added suddenly, forcing or searching for a natural tone, “since we’ve been separated I’ve slept with two men.”
“I haven’t been with any,” I answered, joking.
“Then you haven’t changed all that much,” she told me, laughing.
“But I’ve been with two women,” I told her. The truth is that it’s been only one. I lied, maybe to even the score. Still, I couldn’t go on with the game. “The mere idea of you with someone else is unbearable,” I said, and we had a hard time, after that, filling the silence.
I remember the day she left. It’s supposed to be the man who leaves the house. While she cried and packed her things, the only thing I managed to say to her was that absurd sentence: “It’s supposed to be the man who leaves the house.” In some ways I still feel that this space is hers. That’s why it’s so hard for me to live here.
Talking to her again was good and perhaps necessary. I told her about the new novel. I said that at first I was keeping a steady pace, but little by little I had lost the rhythm, or the precision.
“Why don’t you just write it all at once?” she advised, as if she didn’t know me, as if she hadn’t been with me through so many nights of writing.
“I don’t know,” I answered. And it’s true, I don’t know.
The thing is, Eme — I think now, a little drunk — I’m waiting for a voice. A voice that isn’t mine. An old voice, novelistic and solid.
Or maybe it’s just that I like working on the book. That I prefer writing to having written. I’d rather stay there, inhabit the time of the book, cohabit with those years, chase the distant images at length and then carefully go over them again. See them badly, but see them. To just stay there, looking.
* * *
As is to be expected, I spent the whole day thinking about Eme. It’s thanks to her that I found the story for the novel. It must have been five years ago, when we had just moved into this house. We were still in bed at noon and were telling anecdotes from our childhoods, as lovers do who want to know everything, who cast about for old stories to exchange with the other person, who also searches: to find themselves in that illusion of control, of surrender.
She was seven or eight years old, in the yard with other little girls, playing hide-and-seek. It was getting late, time to go inside; the adults were calling and the girls answered that they were coming. The push and pull went on, the calls were more and more urgent, but the girls laughed and kept playing.
Suddenly they realized the adults had stopped calling them a while ago and night had already fallen. They thought the adults must be watching them, trying to teach them a lesson, and that now the grown-ups were the ones playing hide-and-seek. But no. When she went inside, Eme saw that her father’s friends were crying and that her mother, rooted to her seat, was staring off into space. They were listening to the news on the radio. A voice was talking about a raid. It talked about the dead, about more dead.
“That happened so many times,” Eme said that day, five years ago. “We kids understood, all of a sudden, that we weren’t so important. That there were unfathomable and serious things that we couldn’t know or understand.”
The novel belongs to our parents, I thought then, I think now. That’s what we grew up believing, that the novel belonged to our parents. We cursed them, and also took refuge in their shadows, relieved. While the adults killed or were killed, we drew pictures in a corner. While the country was falling to pieces, we were learning to talk, to walk, to fold napkins in the shape of boats, of airplanes. While the novel was happening, we played hide-and-seek, we played at disappearing.
* * *
Instead of writing, I spent the morning drinking beer and reading Madame Bovary. Now I think the best thing I’ve done in recent years has been to drink a lot of beer and reread certain books with dedication, with an odd fidelity, as if something of my own beat within them, some clue to my destiny. Apart from that, to read morosely, stretched out in bed for long hours and doing nothing to soothe my burning eyes — it’s the perfect pretext for waiting for night to fall. And that’s what I hope for, nothing more: that night will come quickly.