Loquela Read online

  I’m in a corridor in the big house that belonged to my uncle. Near Coya, down a busy, unpaved road, any local can tell you the way if you ask. A fantasy house, immense and silent, accessed through an electronic gate, a fountain and gravel parking area appear. (Being very young, I didn’t get why they covered the ground with sharp little rocks, particularly when we ran barefoot across it on our way to swim in the pool.) A fantasy house, as I said, that often appears in my nightmares along with that other house, the wood cabin on the shore of some southern beach where I’ve never been, an invention where J liked to predict that she and I would someday live.

  I found myself in my uncle’s house, sitting on the parquet of a long corridor, that echoing corridor where, when we stayed overnight, the great thrill was to jump out at someone at the last second without them noticing your approach in the darkness. And the silence of that house. It still disconcerts me every time I see (or better, admire) the four people who live in that place, forced to live with the knowledge that, day after day, there’s no one lying in any of the beds in any of the ten or twelve bedrooms, that the soap in all seven of the bathrooms remains unused, the showers clean, but rusty. The emptiness in that house becomes unbearable, and so the birthdays and Christmases that my family celebrates there are competitive displays of affection and camaraderie, to fill the silence between conversations. And, because there’s something terrifying about letting them trail off, the conversations become banal, then personal, repetitive, uncomfortable, then banal again, an uncle, an aunt, a great aunt, and another uncle think they’ve been talking to me, but we just make sounds with our mouths and we keep on like that, not hearing one another, until they get in their car and go back to Santiago in silence, immediately turning on the radio—music always saves us from that horrible muteness. (Why can’t we sit quietly and look at each other? Why do I get nervous when Alicia says nothing, when I ask her “what’s wrong” and she pauses before responding, “nothing, I just don’t want to talk”?) Music or the newspaper or a book, never just the two of us.

  I was sitting in that corridor with some of my cousins, but they weren’t actually my cousins, they were old friends from high school; insulting each other jokingly, making fun of the each other’s foibles and defects for a laugh—they’re the same even in a dream. We were obviously children, dressed in bathing trunks and playing a game of some kind across the rectangles of the parquet. Marbles, or something. And while, bursting with laughter, we were competing to say the cruelest joke, someone steals the bag of marbles from M, he bites R’s hand, R starts crying, C mimics his cries, M screams “abuse” in falsetto, I watch poor R earnestly, we all start slapping each other, repeating the worst jokes. I made some suggestion, N insulted me, I was tripped, and I fell down. Everyone jumped on top of me in a little pile, and it would have been futile to use the air that was scarcely reaching my lungs to scream that they were suffocating me, that I was dying, because just as I was starting to feel desperate, the human tower fell to the ground. Then, as we were getting to our feet and M was picking up his marbles, a grownup came over (an adult, I remember someone whispering “sshh, a grownup is coming,” heavy black shoes resounding through the house), and told us, calm down, you little shits. The grownup continued into my uncle’s bedroom, the master bedroom. I left the group of kids and followed him down the long red carpet in that twilight corridor, wine-colored walls barely illuminated by the small dark bulbs of the few hanging lamps. The grownup turned back to me, a finger placed vertically across his lips, commanding my silence. I grew along the way, it was now extremely difficult to see the details of his big shoes, and when he turned and told me to be quiet I saw that he didn’t have a face. Terror.

  Alone, I went into the bedroom, decorated and furnished in identical fashion to my uncle’s actual bedroom. An enormous television, piles of photos, a table with flowers, pastel curtains tied with olive-colored cloth ties, empty nightstands on each side of the immense master bed. An unnerving piece of furniture with locked drawers (there are secrets here). The warm sun and the fragrance of pollen and fresh cut grass coming in through a window that opened onto the garden—spring in Rancagua. A young girl was sleeping peacefully.

  I wanted to get out of there; I hate disrupting other people’s sleep, especially when it’s someone I don’t know. But the door was locked. I looked around the room and sat down on the bed, at the girl’s feet. Her back was to me, her body wrapped in the sheets. Softly, I touched her, she didn’t wake up. I think I said something. I prodded her, nothing happened. Little by little, I became more forceful, until I found myself with my hands on her shoulders, rolling her towards me, shaking her. She was very pretty, apart from her dead eyes. Dead eyes and cold skin. Her mouth: clenched so tightly that her teeth had ground together before she died. I’d never seen a corpse, but knew I had one in front of me now. (Her white hair—a noteworthy detail—resembled the nylon wig of a doll.) Repulsed, I let go of her and ran to the door, which was open.

  Before leaving the room and waking myself up, I looked at the girl one last time to see if her eyes had recovered their glow, if her pale skin ran with blood again. The angle of her arm lost its rigidity, she became human, and with revived fingers, uncovered herself. She stood, her voice so unexpected said thanks, many thanks, and who might I be, a new cousin perhaps. “But,” she went on, “haven’t they told you that if I’m made to remember that person whom I hate, the loathing I feel is so strong that it paralyzes me, that it kills me? No, I’d already forgotten that person, but when I saw the trunk full of papers, I was overcome with rage. And why not? I’m going to die on the floor of my house, snarling like a rabid dog!” (And with her eyes she indicated the trunk, a trunk just like one that had belonged to my grandmother, heavy, ancient, and cold because it’s made of metal.) “His disgusting body is in there. I opened it and found him. I wanted to kill him again, cousin, a hundred times. Before he killed me.” (But what she told me is impossible; a body would never fit in that trunk.) Then my eyes fell upon the trunk and, slowly, it began to expand, transforming into a coffin. (Or was it maybe I who shrank, turned back into child?)

  Then I woke up and went to the bathroom. Then to the kitchen, still half asleep, and I realized that someone had slipped a letter under the door, a letter that got the recipient’s address wrong. The sender’s name is “Violeta Drago.” Do I know her? Of course I know her. She’s the friend Alicia has been crying over, locked away in her room all these days. The friend who was apparently murdered in her own apartment, a horrible crime that was never publicized. Just now, I remembered a time when Alicia showed me a video from her graduation, she paused the video to point out her friend Violeta, the albino girl.

  August 12th

  12:13

  I write little because I’m beginning to value silence. During break Alicia and I discussed the uselessness of writing just a character’s initials, it no longer drew attention to the connotations of the names, the characters lost immediacy and simply became letters (she’s reading Kafka). I’m tortured by hundreds of images and ideas, I can’t maintain coherence in my diary. So much to say, but also so much noise: cars, footsteps in the hallway, the telephone . . .

  It was Alicia calling. Why does her ability to silently absorb the problems of others attract me this way? Why does being next to her physically paralyze me? Why, over the phone, were we functional (functional? we’re not machines)? I’m sad and alone in the middle of a sad city. Alicia seems better prepared than I for the constant aggression of Santiago’s inhabitants; she seems to always be going somewhere. (Once, awkwardly, I asked her—she was on the verge of tears and I didn’t know if I should say something, which is what her friend who died would’ve done—what she did for fun, and she said, “I never wanted to be here, that’s why I leave sometimes.”) Alicia, never serious, told me during break that if I wrote a diary or something like that, I should name her A and not Alicia, because readers would invariably associate her with that little girl who went to Wonderlan
d, a situation that was not at all accurate in her case. I am sad, a delicious wind is blowing, the myrrh trees are already in bloom.

  Yesterday afternoon T confessed to me that he was starting to scare himself. Every year, at the beginning of spring, he experienced a sensation of overwhelming emotional catastrophe. “Like the driver of a car who discovers that he’s dead a second before crashing,” he said, hearing the birds start to sing, the blue sky, the warmth returning. Then he confessed to me: couples will start making out right in front of my eyes, walking around holding each other, happy, and I’ll be alone. Winter coats and summer orgies won’t do; spring speaks the truth: some come to this world alone and others come in groups. (T asks for advice, I maintain my position and invent experiences to support my words. Then I hate myself: but I can’t stop lying. I’m not sure anyone would be interested in what I’d have to say if I could.)

  (According to Blanchot, Sade says the only way to avoid suffering is to enjoy the giving and receiving of pain. But, at the same time, the only way to transcend the vice of sadism is to become unfeeling, because vice makes me weak again, rendering me dependent on pleasure and pain.) If only for a little while I might stop feeling. (Although I think that is impossible in this harsh, biting world. In the city of Santiago, pausing in the middle of the street, when the face of a girl demands your attention, bears as consequence a car blasting you with its horn, a woman gesturing “get moving, jackass,” a delinquent selling ice cream stepping on your feet in the rush to board the micro. And by then the face would already be lost in the swarming crosswalk at Lyon and Providencia.) To write is to feel myself dangerous in the moment I do not hesitate. But I must accept that in a diary I’m allowed to be obscene. (I think about J, her small face between my hands, “it hurts,” “you make me feel like a slut,” then I kiss her forcefully. Awful night, her really awful bed, the worst part is that it was I who was there. And afterward I fled, what a coward. J, forgive me. Yes, I do feel bad.)

  Alicia loaned me a magazine from Uruguay. I’m staring at a photograph of Pizarnik, the article says that she realized with horror that writing was keeping her alive, and the result of this was her spine-tingling poems. In her face you can see how greatly she needed the silence. “A great writer of letters,” says the caption. What is this lush mystery in the correspondence of strangers? Why is it that I’d kill to gain access to the stack of letters that Alicia says is her prize possession? (I want to be honest, I aspire to that in these pages: I’ve been waiting several months for two letters: the one Alicia sent me from Czechoslovakia last summer, marvelously trivial, without a doubt, but something of her, for me, indelible smile would arrive in that envelope; the letter that J implied she was going to send me, if I’m not mistaken, telling me off over and over, after describing in cruel detail what happened that February night when I was a monster. The postal service took care of losing them, and I’ve not heard from J since. And what if Alicia finally did decide to write me, is it possible that I’ll never get to possess her handwriting?)

  And yet, the letter from Alicia’s friend is still in the drawer. It’s taken an effort not to open it, I should give it to Alicia tomorrow, it’s addressed to her. (Every time Alicia sat down next to me in the quad, she seemed to be searching for a word. I talk and I talk. She remains distant. Is it possible that Alicia was born while her parents were traveling abroad somewhere? No, that was her friend, the one who died, the one who spent her life thinking of a way to escape, “to go back,” as Alicia says. Back where? And I chose to hide myself in this dusty apartment instead of wandering through the deserted fields of Rancagua.) They say that Alicia writes too, poems maybe. Pizarnik’s eyes. Pizarnik’s mouth. The professor at the university, with the uncomprehending smile: “Poetry is the woman: an image that contains and expresses itself through suggestion, with silences; narrative is like men: another image, but this time expansive, overwhelmingly explicit and verbose.” But Alicia looks so sure of herself, she gives me a sidelong glance and tells me about things that happened in her childhood. When she names them, the ten people she’s been involved with in her life, they revolve around me, as if I knew them.

  August 12th

  7:50 P.M.

  I don’t want to sit and write, I’m exhausted, but if I stop I’ll forget myself. I took an hour-long nap, an hour and a half, give or take, and I dreamed. This last week the nightmares have been constant, the face of the albino girl (Violeta?) cupped in the hands of some man. The man caresses her, she maintains a stoical expression of sensual pleasure, a face of false enjoyment. The man was me, I mean, it wasn’t me but the resemblance was horrifying. It was Carlos. The phone woke me, a telemarketer or something; I realized that it’d been years since I’d last written about Carlos and his girlfriend. At that time, J lived only a few blocks away, we’d wait for each other in the square, for the other to appear when one of us was sad and needed a shoulder to cry on. (And this longing, what is it?) I would give her little sheets of paper with poems written on them. Wow.

  Pathetic Carlos. I found the notebook containing the story I wrote the summer of my and J’s first kiss. “Carlos is actually just the opposite of me, I’m a coward. He’s fearless, he acts,” that’s how the opening paragraph starts. I took out Violeta’s letter before lying down to go to bed. I stared at it. What would Carlos do in this situation? Open the envelope and read what it says.

  August 13th

  Wasted day. I’ve slept and slept, just now turning on the three lights in my room and the radio to wake myself up. I’ve never thought of dying by my own volition, but today I came close.

  I feel like puking. I have to go to the bathroom every fifteen minutes and my face is burning. I drank a lot last night; this morning, walking to the university, an old lady offered me a job selling chocolates in an artisanal market, probably because I reeked horribly of alcohol. Self-pity is the word. Alicia used it against me and I couldn’t keep the tears from falling. She stopped the car and sat motionless, looking straight ahead, like she was still driving. Understand that I was drunk, that I’ve forgotten almost all my words and instead remember every single one of hers: they hurt as if they were burying me underground. I know I talked to her, or tried to talk, about the almost inexpressible pain the thing with J caused me. In her face I saw disappointment, that she was bewildered by my tears, that she was thinking: “So that’s the big mystery, a simple case of loneliness and the inability to be alone.”

  “I’m trembling. Delirious.” That, according to Alicia, was one of her dead friend’s favorite expressions. Yes, I believe that justice should exist, that yes, there’s such a thing as kindness. And then I realize mistakenly that these are just verbal constructions, because I can’t help but think that last night I got exactly what I deserved: a few months ago, in a car parked along the curb, I was the same worn out statue that Alicia was last night. And J qualifying her miserable life (that same lack of self-love) was just like me, sitting in the passenger seat, watching my own tears fall. Without knowing it, Alicia hurt me the same way I wanted to hurt J when I told her I never wanted to see her again, never again. I wouldn’t be surprised if Alicia told me the same thing last night. The symmetry, which had already disappeared, makes me think about God again. That I was a religious being, or something like that, added the callous Alicia with a reproachful tone. I should see a specialist; “check yourself in,” she told me. And me in the morning, almost having to force myself to get up: I’m bound for madness.

  I called Alicia, the maid told me to hang on. She came back, unfortunately Alicita just went out, I wasn’t able to catch her. (White lie?) I don’t want to lose her, I don’t want to forget her faraway look, her rigid posture in front of the steering wheel; last night she was a wise woman. She’d never been as attractive as in the moment when she revealed her deepest disdain for me, and at the same time, deep down, she wanted to help me see beyond the pit where I’ve stuck my head. I’m going to puke.

  I don’t want to write about myself anymor
e, but it’s no use, TV and music don’t work; books even less; not the phone either. I just received a telephonic greeting from a supermarket; after hanging up I had to fight the urge to dial J’s number. I miss her, but I wouldn’t be able to handle hearing her. Alicia is so decent: she told me she didn’t want to know anything about J, it was what it was, not a single miserable detail of the sordidness that went down between us. Alicia and I. Me and J. Like that time in the country, when my dog tore half of the chickens to shreds. My mom was horrified and I decided to teach him a lesson: I started by kicking him repeatedly over in the corner of the chicken coop until the poor thing cowered, howling in pain. I kept hitting him even though he looked at me with his most pained eyes—I was the master and I was giving him a beating. I restrained myself when he dropped to the ground. Then I ran to the river. Sitting on a large rock beside the brown water of a rushing branch of the Cachapoal, I watched as my dog approached, his head bowed in pure shame. He came up to me, frightened and guilty; I petted him. He was ashamed, even though it was I who’d almost beaten him to death, taking advantage of my superiority! What would Carlos have done? He would’ve taken each dead chicken, put it in front of the dog’s nose, and then slapped the nose quickly and deftly. He would’ve seen Alicia, rigid in her seat, approached her and, gently turning her head with his hand, kissed her softly, just lips, the way J kissed me in the car to force me to make a decision: truly damage her or be her friend again. And I waited for her to say the words: “Okay already, if that’s what you need to hear: do whatever you want to me.” But instead, I started the car, drove her home, and told her that we’d never, ever see each other again. I don’t know if I said goodbye to Alicia last night. I would’ve given her a kiss just like Carlos, like the other guys who stayed in her car, oh how I wanted her, but how can I imagine leaning in, how can I forget that what I’m writing isn’t my diary but the diary of another, which in turn forms part of a detective novel or a study of death. (Thinking it over carefully, Carlos wouldn’t commit the blunder of kissing his cousin. Because Carlos and Alicia are first cousins: two individuals of such rare will can only be bound by blood. He’s had a girlfriend for several years; yes, he wouldn’t dare cheat on Elisa, especially with his cousin.) I need to get my head out of this pit; I’m going to turn on the TV.