I ran into the teacher a few days later, during break. I asked him how he was, and he thanked me for asking. “I can tell you know what I lived through,” he said in a sign of complicity. Of course I knew, we all knew; he had been tortured and his cousin was taken prisoner and disappeared. “I don’t believe in this democracy,” he said. “Chile is and will always be a battleground.” He asked me if I was politically active, and I said no. He asked about my family, and I told him that during the dictatorship my parents had kept to the sidelines. The teacher looked at me curiously or disdainfully — he looked at me curiously but I felt that his gaze also held disdain.
* * *
I didn’t write or read anything in Punta Arenas. I spent the entire week defending myself from the weather and talking with new friends. On the return flight I sat next to two women who told me their life stories in detail. All was well until they asked me what I did for a living. I never know how to respond. I used to say I was a teacher, which tended to lead to long and confused conversations about Chile’s crisis in education. So now I say I’m a writer, and when they ask what kind of books I write, I say, to avoid a long and uncertain explanation, that I write action novels; it isn’t exactly a lie, since in all novels, even mine, things happen.
Instead of asking what kind of books I write, though, the woman next to me wanted to know what my pseudonym was. I answered that I didn’t use a pseudonym. That writers hadn’t been using pseudonyms for years now. She looked at me skeptically, and from that moment on her interest in me waned. When we said goodbye she told me not to worry, maybe soon I would come up with a good pseudonym.
* * *
A while ago the poet Rodrigo Olavarría stopped by to see me. We don’t know each other well but there is a sort of prior and reciprocal trust that allies us. I like that he gives advice. Now that I think about it, there was a time when everyone gave advice. When life consisted of giving and receiving advice. But then all of a sudden, no one wanted any more advice. It was too late, we’d fallen in love with failure, and the wounds were trophies just like when we were kids, after we’d been playing under the trees. But Rodrigo gives advice. And he listens to it, asks for it. He’s in love with failure, but he’s also, still, in love with old and noble kinds of friendship.
We spent the afternoon listening to Bill Callahan and Emmy the Great. It was fun. Later I told him about the conversation in the airplane. We decided to get together, one of these days, to choose pseudonyms. “You’ll see, we’re going to find some great ones,” he said.
Rodrigo doesn’t remember exactly when he saw The Battle of Chile for the first time, but he knows the documentary by heart, because back in Puerto Montt in the mid-eighties his parents sold pirated copies to raise money for the Communist Party’s activities. When he was eight or nine, Rodrigo had the job of changing the tapes and stockpiling the new copies in a cardboard box. “I spent the whole afternoon,” he told me, “doing homework and copying that documentary two at a time, with four VHS tapes and two TVs. The only breaks were to watch Robotech on Channel Thirteen.”
* * *
Sick with a bad cold, in bed for days. I self-medicate with high doses of television. Eme’s visits always seem too short. I asked her again to listen to the first pages of the novel and she again said no. Her excuse was poor and realistic: “You’re sick,” she said. A little while ago I insisted and she refused again. It’s obvious that she doesn’t want to read them; maybe she’d rather not resume that part of our relationship.
Well. I just watched Good Morning, Ozu’s beautiful movie. What greater happiness than to know that movie exists, that I can watch it many times, that I can watch it always.
* * *
In the morning I gave myself the stupid task of hiding my cigarettes in different corners of the house. Of course I find them, but I don’t smoke much, I smoke less, I struggle to get better once and for all. My illness lasts too long, though, and every once in a while I wonder if I’ve caught the swine flu. Only the fever is missing, although I’ve just read on the Internet that some patients don’t list fever among their symptoms.
Last night, the emergency room of the Indisa Clinic was full of people with real or imaginary illnesses, but they astonishingly attended to me immediately. There was an explanation. A young, gray-haired doctor appeared and told me, indicating the name tag on his coat: “We’re family.” And it really is likely that we are related in some way. “I bought your books,” he told me, “but I haven’t read them.” He apologized in a humiliating or merely comic way: “I don’t even have time to read the kind of short books you write,” he said. “But a year ago I talked about you to my relatives in Careno.” To amaze the doctor with my ignorance, I asked him where Careno was.
“It’s in Italy, the north of Italy,” he answered, scandalized. Then he lowered his eyes, as if in forgiveness. He asked me what my father’s name was, my grandfather, my great-grandfather. I answered compliantly but soon got tired of so many questions and told him that there was no point in having this conversation—“My family is definitely descended from some bastard child.” I told him: “We come from some patrón who didn’t take responsibility.” I told him that in my family we’re all dark-skinned — the doctor himself was very white and fairly ugly, with that hygienic whiteness that in some people hardly seems real. Resigned to not finding any sign of encouragement from me, the doctor told me that every year he traveled to Careno, where there are many people with our last name, since historically the family was quite inbred.
“There are lots of marriages between siblings and between cousins, so the genes aren’t so good,” he said.
“We don’t have that problem,” I told him. “In my branch of the family we treat our cousins with respect.”
He laughed, or tried to laugh. I wanted, I’m not sure why, to apologize. But before I could say the sentence I was vaguely trying to formulate, the doctor asked about my symptoms. He was in a hurry now. He spent barely two minutes on my ailment, roundly denying I had the swine flu, as if reproaching me for even thinking it. He didn’t even lecture me about how many cigarettes I smoke.
I went home a bit humiliated, with the same antiflu medicines as always, thinking about those families in far-off Careno, about what my face would be like white, washed-out, or about my distant desire, once upon a time, to study medicine. I imagined that same doctor, older than me in medical school, answering emphatically, annoyed: no, we’re not related.
* * *
Parents abandon their children. Children abandon their parents. Parents protect or forsake, but they always forsake. Children stay or go but they always go. And it’s all unfair, especially the sound of the words, because the language is pleasing and confusing, because ultimately we would like to sing or at least whistle a tune, to walk alongside the stage whistling a tune. We want to be actors waiting patiently for the cue to walk onstage. But the audience left a long time ago.
* * *
Today I made up this joke:
“When I grow up I’m going to be a secondary character,” a boy says to his father.