Do we really recognize someone twenty years later? Can we recognize now, in some luminous sign, the definitive features, irrevocably adult, of a bygone face? I’ve spent the afternoon thinking about that, deliberating that.
It seems beautiful to me for them to never reunite. To simply go on with separate lives until the present, slowly getting closer and closer: two parallel trajectories that never quite meet. But someone else will have to write that novel. I would like to read it. Because in the novel I want to write they meet again. I need for them to meet again.
* * *
“Do they fall in love? Is it a love story?”
Eme asks this and I just smile. She arrived mid-afternoon; we drank several cups of tea and listened to an entire Kinks album. I asked her to let me read her a few pages of the manuscript and again she refused. “I’d rather read them when you’re further along,” she said.
“I’m writing about you, the protagonist is a lot like you,” I said bravely.
“All the more reason,” she answered, smiling, “I’d rather read it when you’re further along. But I’m so happy you’ve started writing again,” she added. “I like what happens to you when you write. Writing is good for you, it protects you.”
“Protects me from what?”
“The words protect you. You search for phrases, you search for words, that’s really good,” she said.
Later she asked me for more details about the story. I told her very little, the minimum. When I talked about Claudia, I started to question her name again.
She asked me later, half-joking, if the characters stay together for the rest of their lives. I couldn’t avoid a flicker of annoyance. I answered no: they see each other again as adults and they get involved for a few weeks, maybe months, but in no way do they stay together. I told her it couldn’t be like that, it’s never like that.
“It’s never like that in good novels, but in bad novels anything is possible,” said Eme as she tied up her hair nervously, flirtatiously.
I looked at her chapped lips, her cheeks, her short eyelashes. She seemed to be sunk into a deep contemplation. Soon after, she left. I didn’t want her to leave yet. But she left. She’s taking serious precautions. I agree, I don’t think it would be good for us to live together again either, for now. We need time.
Afterward I tried to keep writing. I don’t know which direction to take. I don’t want to talk about innocence or guilt; I want nothing more than to illuminate some corners, the corners where we were. But I’m not sure I can do it well. I feel too close to what I’m telling. I’ve abused some memories, I’ve sacked my memory, and also, in a certain way, I’ve made up too much. I’m starting from scratch again, like a caricature of a writer staring impotently at the screen.
I didn’t tell Eme how hard it is for me to write without her. I remember her sleepy face, when I went to her very late to read her just a paragraph or a sentence. She listened and nodded or else said, accurately: It wouldn’t be like that, this character wouldn’t answer with those words. Those kinds of valuable, essential observations.
Now I’m going to write again with her, I think. And I feel happy.
* * *
Last night I walked for hours. It was as if I wanted to get lost down some unknown street. To get absolutely and happily lost. But there are moments when we can’t, when we don’t know how to lose our way. Even if we always go in the wrong direction. Even if we lose all our points of reference. Even if it begins to grow late and we feel the weight of morning as we advance. There are times when no matter how we try to find out what we don’t know, we can’t lose our way. And perhaps we long for the time when we could be lost. The time when all the streets were new.
I’ve spent several days remembering the landscape of Maipú, comparing its image — a world of identical houses, red bricks and vinyl flooring — with the old streets where I’ve lived for years now, where each house is different from the next — uneven bricks, parquet floors — these noble streets that don’t belong to me but that I travel with familiarity. Streets named after people, after real places, after battles lost and won, and not those fantastical streets, that false world where we grew up quickly.
* * *
This morning I saw a woman reading, on a bench in Intercommunal Park. I sat down across from her just to get a look at her face, but it was impossible. The book absorbed her gaze completely, and there were a few moments I believed she was aware of it. That holding the book like that — at the exact height of her eyes, with both hands, her elbows resting on an imaginary table — was her way of hiding.
I saw her white forehead and her almost blond hair, but never her eyes. The book was her disguise, a precious mask.
Her long fingers held up the book like strong, slender branches. I got close enough at one point to see that her nails were ragged, as if she had been chewing them.
I’m sure she sensed my presence, but she didn’t lower the book. She held it as if she were meeting someone else’s gaze.
To read is to cover one’s face, I thought.
To read is to cover one’s face. And to write is to show it.
* * *
Today I watched The Battle of Chile, the documentary by Patricio Guzmán. I’d only seen bits and pieces, mostly from the second part of the film when they showed it once at school, after democracy was restored. I remember how the student president narrated the scenes, and every so often would stop the tape so he could tell us how seeing these images was more important than learning the multiplication tables.
We understood, of course, what he was trying to say, but his example still seemed strange to us, because if we were in that school it was precisely because we had known the multiplication tables for many years. Someone in the last row of the auditorium interrupted to ask if seeing those images was more important than learning to divide decimals, and then someone asked if, instead of learning the periodic table, we could watch those images over and over, since they were so important. No one laughed, though. The student president didn’t want to answer, but he looked at us with a mixture of sadness and irony. Then another representative intervened and said: “There are some things you shouldn’t joke about. If you understand that, you can stay in the room.”
I didn’t remember or I hadn’t seen the long sequence of The Battle of Chile that takes place in the fields of Maipú. Workers and peasants defend the land and argue heatedly with a representative from Salvador Allende’s government. I thought how that land could very well be Aladdin Street. The land where, later on, neighborhoods with fantasy names would appear and where we would live, the new families — with no history — of Pinochet’s Chile.
* * *
School changed a lot when democracy returned. I had just turned thirteen and was belatedly starting to get to know my classmates: children of murdered, tortured, disappeared parents. Children of murderers as well. Rich kids, poor kids, good kids, bad kids. Good rich kids, bad rich kids, good poor kids, bad poor kids. It’s absurd to put it that way, but I remember thinking about it more or less like that. I remember thinking, without pride or self-pity, that I was not rich or poor, that I wasn’t good or bad. But that was difficult: to be neither good nor bad. It seemed to me, in the end, the same as being bad.
I remember a history teacher I had in high school, when I was sixteen, one whom I didn’t particularly like. One morning three thieves who were fleeing the police took cover in the school’s parking lot, and the cops followed them and fired a couple of shots into the air. We got scared and threw ourselves to the floor, but once the danger had passed we were surprised to see our teacher crying under the table, with his eyes squeezed shut and his hands over his ears. We brought water and tried to convince him to drink it, but finally we had to throw it in his face. He slowly managed to calm down as we explained to him that no, the military had not taken over again. That class could continue. “I don’t want to be here, I never wanted to be here,” the teacher repeated, shouting. Then there was complete, compassionate silence. A beautiful and restorative silence.