Navidad & Matanza Read online

  •

  FROM: Jueves

  TO: Domingo

  DATE:

  SUBJECT: I’ll set everything up. Days and hours at her side, talking about love and imitating precisely the behavior and character of her father—dominant, sophisticated, and manipulative, but also attentive, well-meaning, and sometimes a little bit awkward—so she’ll want to take care of me as she would him. I won’t try to hurt her, on the contrary, I’ll try to protect her. Breaking down the memory of the old man, roaming the highway without apparent motive (as far as she can tell), B’s Porsche pulling over on the shoulder, B who is sitting in the back seat of the convertible, gesturing and speaking to the old man: Excuse me, can you tell me how to get to the Mormon golf course? And she: a girl wrapped in a towel, chasing B, who at the same time, was chasing a towel wrapped around the small body of a girl. Days and hours acting like the old man, putting my hand on her shoulder so we walk at the same speed, buying her books that she almost likes, almost. Asking her if she enjoyed the movie she went to see with a friend. In short, loving her. Wrapped in towels, of course. And wet. Floating.

  When and where is the meeting? I agree that we should create a system that avoids repetition of squares. I also think that if we had more time to develop the fragments the quality would be higher (I’ve never understood more time as necessarily resulting in longer texts).

  Clearly we shouldn’t write for children, rather we should write like children (although this might frighten young readers), since it’s true that young readers are essentially indefinable (tending to shy away from fixed categories). There’s nothing worse than a children’s book written for mothers.

  With respect to children’s books as objects, I think that, as a religious person, you might be interested in something I came across in my research. I don’t know if you know this, but one of the first publications exclusively for children was a hieroglyphic bible, that is, text and drawings laid out next to each other, so that a child could read it by describing the drawings (like comics in newspapers). The book is from like the seventeenth century and the pictures of it on the Internet are very odd. It’s called The Hieroglyphical Bible, you should check it out. I own a book by Lewis Carroll with a prologue by Leopoldo María Panero where he discusses at length why Lewis Carroll wrote for children. The text, written in a slightly schizoid way, is good, and since this theme interests you, I can lend it to you if you’d like.

  Well, the words have run out, it remains only for me to give thanks.

  •

  FROM: Viernes

  TO: Lunes, Miercoles, Sabado, Domingo

  DATE:

  SUBJECT: I’ll want you like this: recalling what’s forgotten, your face poking out of a dirty pile of sodden towels, panting, sometimes pretty, sometimes ugly, and the saddest thing is that my cruel examination will last only a fraction of a second, because I’ll walk by on the avenue and in that moment look absentmindedly up at the window, seeing you covered with dozens of towels like a zombie. It won’t be an insult, just the opposite, the line of the horizon flashing in your pupil, hollow because you’re only here, I repeat, for a fraction of a second. I won’t be there but I’ll see you. Wretched. Remnant. Mine.

  Cheers, it’s very important that we set up a meeting for the end of the week. We should decide what to do if people land on the same space.

  Also we should roll all of the dice. The novel will be bullshit if we only have one day to write; I insist that our texts have a respectable period for development.

  I am sending this message to you because I don’t know how the hell to send it to everyone at once, I need you to do that for me, thanks.

  V.

  •

  FROM: Sabado

  TO: Domingo

  DATE:

  SUBJECT: She’ll enter the room and, as a blast of moisture hits her face, realize that it’s been locked all day. She’s been out in the street for a long time looking for B. She doesn’t know his face, or his name, just the initial. Still, not knowing why, she feels she’ll find him. The delicate shape of his head from behind, his shoulders, the name, the quiet, understanding smile, the difficulty speaking, the gelled and messy hair. He might turn around and suggest that they sit down, that they speak, that they search. A passing gleam in which name, face, moisture, laughter, three bears and a wound, a garden, a white stone among many, never alone, please, that gleam that lasts only a fraction of a second and as it appears someone else shares; everything will overlap, no, another word, it’ll come together, it’ll converge in the name. Soon, however, it’ll be of little importance, because curiously, as Rimbaud and the Evangelist simultaneously say, “life is elsewhere.” She’ll patiently retrieve the towels from the walls, she’ll hang them on the balcony, she’ll tell him on the phone how strange the prank was, again she’ll look for him until he comes.

  What do I know? In any case, the fundamental thing is this: we’re not fucking infallible, being a Christian is not to be less wrong, or being wrong is not to be bad, or being imperfect is also compatible with success. Maybe you’ll meet someone who loves this fragility, the twisting, everything, someone who can also be this way, and everything will be fine. What I told you the other day makes sense, but it doesn’t have to be the truth.

  Domingo, it’s very late. I’ve already written my brand new episode. Viernes has made you his secretary? I’ll do the same, please forward my chapter to everyone. We need to have a meeting, but this weekend I’m leaving and have to leave. I’d like to be at the fucking meeting. Would it be possible to have it sooner? I agree about the repeated squares, but only to a certain extent (it’s also fun to watch people organize things to make something new, in one way or another, that isn’t identical and fits in every way, variations on a theme, I don’t know, for some reason the stories sometimes cross each other but are in a way independent, right? Don’t you think?). The timing is a little problematic; it seems the trick would be to write something about the progression. I don’t know. Take care.

  Sabado

  •

  FROM: Domingo

  TO:

  DATE: 09/14/2002

  SUBJECT: Wet towel. I remember it wrapped around you.

  All I do is think about what someone said to me, about what I say, about what I’m saying, about what I’ll someday dare to say. I go to my room and write, I come to the silver room and write to you, later I lie down and pray. What I always want is to pray without words, but I’m nowhere near the “full-time mystics.” It’s just that sometimes words exhaust me. They are, how to put it, communication, tool, pleasure, and doubt. Forgive the complaints and the affectation. I can’t avoid it. That is to say, yes I can, but I must speak.

  The meeting for the novel-game was brief and insignificant, but now I’ll go to bed feeling that everyone had more than enough to say to each other. At least everyone seemed to be happy about having to read and write. Your fragment was praised in passing, by Viernes if I’m not mistaken, as a marvel of concision. Or was it Jueves. I don’t know. My words, I stain everything, almost everything, you know. About Wednesday, an open day, regrettably, Viernes suggested that a friend of his write. He says that he has a rational, essayistic style that no one else has. We all agreed. It’s worth a shot.

  I don’t have a strong opinion about the problems you brought up in your email. To my taste everything is fine as we set it up, and I like the idea of people landing on the same square. Forced intertexuality. Goodbye and thank you.

  Domingo

  45

  I MUST ADMIT THAT I abhor articles that begin this way: Life imitates art. I deplore equally both pretentious and self-referential journalism, and above all, journalism that lacks documentation. Art—I am not saying anything particularly original—doesn’t imitate life, nor vice versa, for the same reason that people normally hang mirrors in the bathroom or behind the door and not on the bedroom wall facing the bed. This circumlocution serves to justify me: as I listened to Carmen Riza, Alicia Vivar’s first grad
e teacher, an image of myself in this particular moment that I had eight years ago came into my mind. The certainty—though that sounds emphatic—that I’d spend a great deal of time in front of the computer writing an article about an international child-trafficking network. Narrative anticipation, a term I’d not heard since my days in university.

  When she disappeared, Alicia Vivar was going into eighth grade at Santiago College, where she’d been enrolled since she was four years old. The teacher, Carmen Riza, taught her to read and write, to add and subtract, to know the differences between the kingdoms of the natural world, and also to cut paper with scissors. But mostly she remembered Alicia’s exceptional work in violin class. For more than three years, Alicia composed the variations that a group of fifteen young violinists, accompanied by the teacher on piano, performed during the school’s award ceremonies each December. According to Carmen Riza, her Song of the Sand is still played in a civic performance at the end of the year. She didn’t excel as a violinist—says Riza—in fact she was the third chair of the second row. But I appreciated her solemnity and that she never placed importance on her ability to invent melodies. She didn’t even talk about it. On any given day she’d come in with her lined staves and hand them to me: This is the Song of the Sun, she’d say, this is the Song of the Bush, of the Mean Bear, the Song of Hands, the Song of Evening, those are the ones I remember. It must’ve been about twenty songs. The only one we didn’t perform was the Song of the Corridor. She gave me the sheet and started to cry. She wouldn’t tell me what was wrong. Before I sent her home she said quietly: it’s just so hard to play.

  Alicia Vivar left music behind. When she was ten years old she stopped attending violin class. Instead, according to her classmates, she became interested in rhythmic gymnastics and field hockey. On the topic, Carmen Riza claims to not understand the change, because “the girl had a special ear. It was a loss for the class.” But what could Alicia Vivar’s musical activities have to do with her disappearance? That is something I can only illustrate with a personal anecdote.

  Eight years ago, for no particular reason, I attended a performance by the Santiago College violin class. I went in and sat down without knowing why. It was a Friday afternoon in mid June; it was very cold and the days were passing quickly. I’d recently gotten my degree in journalism and I was looking for a job. Many other things had, regrettably, become much less important. One of those things was fun, just fun, in the abstract, without adjectives or adverbs. What I’d call now, from a certain distance, pleasure. I enjoyed writing stories, novels, poetry, letters to women, Greek comedies, scripts for documentaries. I also enjoyed talking about my writing and the writing of others. To that end, five friends of similar interests and I had come up with a system that, in the beginning, seemed like an original and fascinating discovery. A novel-game. In short, it involved rolling dice, moving your token to a space with prefigured plotlines and formal constraints, writing a text according to those constraints and, that night, mailing this text to the other participants. Everyone had been assigned a day of the week, except Sunday, a day of rest. It was a game of complex rules and seduction. And the result was out of control. However, weeks passed and participants started deserting, for various reasons that were occulted by shame, that “crossroads of love and fear,” in the words of a little-known French philosopher we were reading at the time. Already three of my friends—those assigned Monday, Wednesday, and Friday—had stopped participating in the novel-game. A fourth had announced an upcoming trip to New York. We had to decide what was going to happen to the project in light of these desertions.

  We decided to meet that Friday, at four in the afternoon, at the Youth and Children’s Book Fair, which in those days was held at the Parque Bustamante, in Providencia.

  I got there half an hour early. The place was overflowing with red and blue balloons. There were clowns, and people dressed as characters from fairytales, and techno music. I passed by the various editorial stands. At the Pehuen stand, for five hundred pesos, I bought an anthology of contemporary Canadian poets, which interested me because of the inclusion of Margaret Atwood, one of my favorite novelists at that time. I looked at my watch: it was already four fifteen and no one else had arrived. Then over the loudspeaker they announced that in five minutes the Santiago College violin class would be performing in the amphitheater. I walked toward the venue, deciding to pass the time in one of the plastic chairs. To my left, two mothers were taking pictures; to my right, a little brown-haired girl whose feet didn’t reach the floor was applauding soundlessly. On the stage there were three rows of young violinists. Behind them, sat more than fifteen prepubescent girls, whispering, their cheeks burning with embarrassment; they were part of the choir that would accompany the violinists on their last song.

  The audience was almost entirely made up of children from different schools, carefree, eating cotton candy. There were some teachers, parents and other relatives who were filming and photographing the musicians. Except for me, lifting my head every five minutes to look around for one of my friends, the only person out of place was a very elegantly dressed man. He stood for the entire performance, arms crossed, wearing dark sunglasses, and a smile that appeared every time the third girl in the second row frowned or glanced at him. I don’t remember much about her; she wasn’t striking. She was just another girl among those strange, six-year-olds: hair pulled back in a ponytail, thin hands vibrating with the bow, cold face angled over the wood surface of the little violin. The teacher shouted instructions that only the children could hear. F, up down, bow to the audience, next, remember Caro, you begin, louder Alicia. The last song was announced: This is the Song of Sand, thank you. One three-year-old girl, dressed ridiculously in green, took two steps forward, looked with disturbing seriousness at the teacher, placed the violin under her chin. She waited for two chords from Carmen Riza’s electric piano before she began to move her bow. A clean sharp sound lead into a scale, across which the entire section of children’s violins joined together in something that sounded to me like Schubert, but sadder, and sicker. Like a child who imagines the music of Schubert after he has learned about Schubert’s biography. That’s how I felt. I don’t know if they were already there, but all of a sudden I noticed that the floor of the stage was covered with pink balloons. In the final crescendo, when the choirgirls stood up and sang, a string on the violin of the little girl alone in the front row broke. Applause erupted. In that moment, without taking the violin from her shoulder, the girl in the second row—who I know now was Alicia Vivar—was the only performer who didn’t bow. All alone, she lifted her foot and kicked one of the balloons off the stage, right at the man dressed in the elegant suit, who uncrossed his arms to catch the balloon. I stood, looking at the stage. And in the confusion of congratulating mothers, crying children, and people running from one side to the other, I watched as the girl walked calmly down the steps, went up to the man, and took his hand. He bent down and kissed her cheek. The man was around thirty years old, my age now, I realize. Watching them, I knew where I’d be eight years later, what story I’d be writing right now at my computer. His name was Boris Real. I’m certain that Alicia never composed a single song for the violin. The scores Alicia gave to her teacher were written by Boris Real so that she could perform them. Gifts, you might say. That afternoon they left the Youth and Children’s Book Fair holding hands. I felt dirty for what I thought in that moment, and I feel dirty for thinking it now: twenty-four years separated the two of them.

  49

  WE STOPPED THE CAR at a service station along the highway. We got out to buy a big bottle of ginger ale and took the opportunity to call home. When mother answered we were silent until she started to cry. Then we cried too, and she listened. She always listens though she knows we’ll say nothing. Sometimes she laughs, out of pleasure we imagine, because she feels less alone. Then we hang up. It’s been twenty-nine years; we’d love to see her. But not father.

  We paid the service station at
tendant to wash the windshield with that tool that collects everything but the last bit of foam. As his face appeared in a corner of the glass, he looked shamelessly inside, and we asked each other if we should make faces at him or direct our gaze toward the infinite. Later we rewrote my last poem, we added an attention grabber, “you remember,” which we didn’t know if we’d keep. We always do that, add something or remove something when we’re bored. Or we read a strange novel aloud, with a flashlight, as we drive through the night. And later we discuss over and over what it was all about.

  This was the poem:

  DOLLHOUSE

  When I’m not looking he comes toward me, when I’m looking he stays over there, at a distance, watching me. If I could carry him alone into the silence without cracking my hands beneath the bark, between the bars, into the hole, open like a grave. And later we move away to a place where I’ve never been, opening myself in front of him, a telescope kept in an old shoebox, we see only a gray room without paintings or corners. It’s the dollhouse, you remember, out in the rain there live three bears who do not sleep because someone may be in one of their beds, who do not wake up because during the day they had to find honey, before it hardened, and they are tired.