Navidad & Matanza Read online

  The man from the service station accompanied Alicia to the beach, walking two steps behind her for several kilometers through the night. She asked many questions and he answered them, aware all the time of the cash he’d make housing this strange group of people for a few days. Afterward everything would be calm and normal again. That’s what he believed, he said. But it wasn’t so. Every once in a while the girl would yell: Right? Left? And now, which way? It was like she was walking with her eyes closed, like she wanted to be guided in the darkness. Then all of a sudden the sound of the sea was very near. When the sand and docas came into view, Alicia started to run. Rising up from down below he heard a shrill, sharp sound. At first it seemed to him that a woman was screaming. Then he thought someone was doing something bad to the young girl. He quickened his pace across the beach. The night was moonless, and there were no streetlamps in the town, and so he was barely able to make out two distant silhouettes approaching the water. Little by little the shrill sound turned into a birdsong, into the gurgle of an immense stomach, and finally into a strange music. “A female robot, singing with her mouth shut in the shower,” that’s how Patrice Dounn’s theremin sounded to the man from the service station. The foreigner was standing on a dune, an open case beside him—a different case, not the one he’d opened in the kitchen—his left hand suspended above a strange gleaming, blue instrument. The other hand, the right hand, moved slowly toward and away from the object. The music was very beautiful.

  The man from the service station sat down to listen a few feet away. Soon, a third sound rose through the noise of the ocean and the song of the theremin. It was the voice of Alicia Vivar, who’d sat down silently next to the man from the service station. Resting her head on his arm she stared up at the stars. She hummed the melody that Dounn’s instrument was playing, while at the same time, with a finger, she drew concentric circles in the damp sand, each one larger than the last.

  Finally they were quiet, Alicia and the theremin. For a moment there was silence, “because the sound of the sea doesn’t exist for those who live near it,” said the man. Then the girl told him to look out at the waves. Patrice Dounn had begun to play another song. This is my favorite, “La Mer,” by Debussy, Alicia whispered. Then she stood up and ran to embrace the Congolese.

  65

  DURING ONE OF MANY calm Sunday afternoon conversations in Sabado’s white bedroom, I looked up from the computer screen, where I was reviewing her chapter of the novel-game, and spoke. What I’m going to tell you is a secret: when I was young I loved that song from The Sound of Music, called “My Favorite Things”: Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens, bright copper kettles, lalala-lala. She smiled. I continued. I’ve always liked inventories, Je me souviens by Perec, or that other essay by Barthes where he lists his tastes. She said to me: That’s true, inventories are beautiful when making them isn’t obligatory. Above all I like lists as a literary form. She looked me in the eyes and added: Now, imagine a man, a theft, the murmur of the sea, the sound of people playing paddleball, the cry of seagulls, the playful flirtation of a man and a woman who are dodging the waves, a man and woman who at the same time sit down in the shade of a dune to look at some photographs. Does it say somewhere that our lives should be uncomfortable? Yes. The world. The rock. The sand. The sun.

  Imagine then that the first man stole some towels. That he began running toward the dunes. That he heard the shouts of people behind him, the lifeguard’s whistle. Get the thief, Get the thief. Someone tried to stop him by throwing a paddleball racquet at his legs. The impact of the wood against his shins hurt, but he kept running. Speed. There were many things he wanted to think about as he ran, clutching the new towels in his arms, but all he felt was the sand burning the soles of his feet. Through his mind flashed an evening in a campsite when Boris had taught them that to avoid being burned you had to focus your attention on the foot that cooled for an instant as it lifted up into the air away from the heat. He looked toward the end of the beach, past the dunes, where she’d be waiting for him, tan, half-naked, behind her dark sunglasses, the keys to the Spyder hanging from the tip of her erect ring finger. He yelled to her: Come on Alicia, run. The girl ignored him; she kept looking at the photographs and talking with her friend. And why should she respond? Her name wasn’t Alicia. By the third shout, he was right in front of her, and she realized something odd was going on. She handed the photos to her friend, who sat beside her staring at the sea. She stood up and looked directly into the eyes of the man, who was gasping, covered in sweat. Before he could say anything, three policemen were dragging him toward a squad car. The towels were left behind, abandoned, there, at her feet. Sabado had to stop because it was getting late and I had to leave.

  As we walked to the door, she told me how much she liked reading and writing in the novel-game. Everything is good; it’s decaying, it’s the image of a world destined to die and rot, and we’re participating in the construction of that image. For what? For God? The truth, I replied, is that when we planned all of this with Viernes, at no point did we consider the comforts we’d leave behind. Excuse me, but what exactly do you mean by comforts?

  71

  THAT FIRST NIGHT, the wind blew ferociously on the beach in Matanza. The man from the service station told me that although his eyes filled with sand, he could still see Patrice Dounn, standing, playing his theremin—the sound of the instrument reverberated wonderfully in open spaces, the Congolese would tell him later—and at his side Alicia, lying on her back looking up. He couldn’t tell if she was sleeping or staring at the stars. It was late, the wind was growing violent, and the man decided to go home.

  Early that morning he woke up, shaken out of bed by a tremor. For some reason, the man from the service station described in great detail what he’d been dreaming that night, during the internal cracking of the earth, before seismic shudders threw him out of bed. In his dream, Navidad was a large modern capital, extensive and full of neon lights, futuristically designed automobiles, and a multiracial population. He was walking the streets of the city toward his wife’s office, because she’d promised him that they’d go out to lunch. His wife was Alicia, the Vivar’s young daughter. Then everything began to break. The man returned instinctively to the beach, shouting, terrified. The entire ocean had gathered into a huge wave, so tall its foam touched the clouds. Then he was soaking wet—the heat of the summer night in Navidad, he explained—walking through rubble of the city devastated by the enormous mass of water, and by the immense force of the current pulling it back. Concrete structures scattered everywhere, bodies of animals, entire parks pulled up by the roots, a dirty film covering all the useless objects, an unbearable, salty cold. He looked toward the place where Alicia Vivar’s office used to be. He saw the building was intact, damaged, but standing, cut off from the rest of the city by a deep, wide chasm in whose depths he heard the echo of the ocean currents violently crashing against forgotten tectonic layers. Somehow he also heard Alicia’s small voice desperately calling for him to get her out of there before the building collapsed. Then her voice was lost in the deafening rumble of the rising tide, as the ocean gathered again into a single enormous wave. An authority was shouting that if they wanted to survive they should climb the hills, climb to the highest places. The man started to run. He saw how everyone around him stumbled and fell, saw their terrified faces. Alicia’s voice called his name with horrible desperation. She asked him not to leave her there; she didn’t want to drown. Then the earth began to move violently. The man woke up afraid, bathed in sweat. He went to the door of his room, opened it, and stood under the lintel, waiting for the tremor to pass.

  The clock on the living room wall showed six in the morning. He saw a delicate hand open the door of the room to his right. It was Alicia; she too was taking shelter in the doorway. Her hair was messy and her eyes barely open; she was wearing a red tracksuit under a large T-shirt featuring a Japanese anime character.

  The shaking continued and didn’t decreas
e in intensity; they waited for the jolt that at any moment would transform the tremor into an earthquake. Then the girl seemed to come awake, seeing the man a few meters away, watching her. She raised her hand in a friendly wave. The man from the service station murmured good morning. The tremor stopped.

  As he moved toward the kitchen the man wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. He opened the refrigerator, took out a carton of milk and a jar of strawberry-colored powdered juice. He drank a glass and sat down at the small table. He stood up to turn on the television, but before he could he saw Alicia walking toward him and he sat back down, awkwardly. He offered her a glass of milk, which she accepted. The man asked about the foreign visitor. Alicia said: What do I know. She scrunched up her nose when she passed by him, muttering: Gross, you’re all wet, like you just got back from the gym. And she sat down across from him.

  He already had a couple liters of beer in his system and I think that’s why the man from the service station told me all of this. Despite considering himself a fairly shy person—maybe because he was still kind of sleepy—he told Alicia about his dream. She listened with interest, getting up every now and then to look for sugar or a spoon, or to open a drawer and close it again, nervously. When the man finished telling her what he’d dreamed, she asked him if maybe he wanted her to be his oneiromancer. My what? Dream reader, like Joseph in Egypt. The man understood, he remembered that Joseph had gotten out of prison and become an advisor to the Pharaoh by revealing to him what God had been trying to tell him in a dream. At that point, the man from the service station inserted a small parenthetical to tell me that his father was an evangelist, and that when he was young, in Santiago, he’d frequently read him chapters from the book of Genesis before bedtime. He loved listening to those stories, but when his father would say goodnight and turn out the light, the shadows that came in from the street would keep him from sleep.

  It was impossible to tell whether Alicia’s offer was sincere or in jest. The man asked her how she knew about the biblical Joseph; outside the sun was coming up and they could hear the roosters crowing. The girl laughed and said that obviously she hadn’t learned about it in her religion classes in high school. The man started toasting some bread. Alicia laughed again. She told him that his dream was simple: the sea was the world, parties, commerce. The city was the same. High places were high places. The sky. And her, why’d she make an appearance? Asked the man. At that moment they heard the honking of a car horn. The man and the girl looked out the window. In front of the house was parked the Japanese car of Juan Francisco Vivar. He was accompanied by his son Bruno and, asleep in the backseat, was Patrice Dounn.

  75

  I DIMLY remember what came next in the story told by the man from the service station that night at Miriada, in the town of Matanza. The truth is I’d finished three or four glasses of brandy, and he’d covered the table with more than a square meter of empty pilsner bottles. The light bulbs in the bar had faded gradually. Everything turned yellower, browner, blacker. Including the voice of my interlocutor. Still, I remember the dazzling young body of the waitress, who watched me out of the corner of her eye from another table, making calculations in a notebook. That’s what I thought, with a total lack of intuition: the girl was making calculations. I’d only brought a ninety-minute tape, so by that point the conversation was empty air. Misleading human memory. The wind blew in through the cracks of a large, old window to my right. Progressively—mea culpa—the story of the disappearance of the Vivar siblings told by the temporary assistant of Patrice Dounn became, in my memory, a collage of blurry images. Without a doubt, the events that took place at the Transensorial Beyond Seasons Celebration were, in reality, much more impressive than how my alcohol-muddled mind recalls them.

  That morning, Juan Francisco Vivar and his son made breakfast in the kitchen of the man from the service station. Patrice Dounn, half asleep, walked to his room and shut the door. Alicia went in with him, although after half an hour she came back out. She’d changed into a very thin green dress, her hair tied up with knitting needles. She sat down at the table. She drank chocolate milk and responded to a couple jokes Bruno made about the color of her outfit. Their father drank his coffee in silence without saying or doing anything. He just looked out the window. The man from the service station watched everything very nervously; it was difficult for him to understand the words the siblings spoke to one another. At one point, Juan Francisco stretched out his arm and pinched the soft flesh of his daughter’s shoulder. Alicia didn’t cry out or seem upset, according to the man from the service station. On the contrary, she tilted her head slightly as if it pleased her. Then Bruno and Alicia stood up at the same time and said they were going to the beach to go swimming. They retrieved two towels from the trunk of the car and left.

  Even though it was cloudy, the man emphasized, the beach was full of tourists of all nationalities. This was apparent at first glance, in the varieties of hair and skin. It was the same burning sun, the same freezing sea, but all of a sudden one was no longer in Chile, in the same suffocating, monotonous summer as always, but on a gringo or European beach where everyone spoke loudly, where there were barely any children, and women were stretched out in the sun, their breasts in plain sight. They’ve told me that’s how it is there, said the man. The beach of Babel, I remember remarking sarcastically, prompted by the biblical references he’d introduced into our conversation. The man from the service station laughed at this: Babel, yes. Just so. Asians, Islanders, Africans, Europeans, North and South Americans, everyone was speaking English. From what I was able to deduce from his description, the beach in Matanza was clearly divided into specific sectors—team sports, live music (classical, electronic, jazz, rock, indie, pop, and world music); artistic, recreational, and athletic dance; restaurants, bars, and kiosks; an ecological nudist zoo, water sports, libraries, virtual electronic games, spas, private security huts—marked off by buoys and plastic ribbons of the event’s official color, a soft florescent white that at sunset turned into a metallic blue. Still, in the middle of invisible amplification systems, areas of acoustic isolation, and the roaring of passing motors, the occasional shouts of “pan de huevo,” “cuchufli, barquillo,” “helado, helado, heladito,” “lleve la palmera pa los regalones” rose up from the town’s local vendors, authorized by the organization to supply the event with local color.

  That morning, Bruno and Alicia looked for the least crowded area to lay down their towels. The Swimmers Section, about eleven meters from the water, at the center of the beach. The best spot on any of the nation’s beaches was deserted. The tourists preferred to lie down between the dunes, for more intimacy, or on the terraces of the restaurants or bars. The man from the service station arrived to the spot around three in the afternoon, carrying the theremin case, following Patrice Dounn. The Congolese was much more expressive with his music: I want to see the children, they’re at the beach, take me . . . Don’t lose my case. Those were the only words he’d uttered since appearing in the kitchen that morning, after having slept off what, the man from the service station suspected, was a hangover. But he was wrong. That man always had a hangover. The hangover of hate and fear, which is a type of boredom, he said. Without losing his composure, Patrice Dounn removed his Italian shoes and silk socks. He rolled up his suit pants so that later he’d be more comfortable on the damp white towel of Alicia Vivar, who, from the water, waved to them and gave a little shout. On his own towel, Bruno Vivar pretended to be sleeping, hiding his face in his forearm.

  The man from the service station offered descriptions I’m unable to forget: Bruno, completely hairless and pale, tiny next to Patrice Dounn, dressed all in black, wearing sunglasses, his hair gelled. Without warning, the musician picked up some sand in his left hand, holding it up in the air, leaning his head slightly toward the boy. Anticipating what he was about to do, Bruno leapt to his feet. With both hands he grabbed Patrice Dounn’s venomous fingers and made him open them, forcing him to drop t
he sand. You were going to throw sand at me, blurted Bruno. He grabbed a fistful and threw it at him. The fraudulent Congolese barely reacted as the sand struck him in the face; he spat modestly and tried to smile. Poor boy, he murmured. There followed a conversation in English that the man from the service station couldn’t understand.

  A while later, señor and señora Vivar arrived. It was about six in the evening, the heat had increased and the guests of the Transensorial Celebration covered the beach. Alicia was still in the water. Her brother, father, and Patrice Dounn were conversing in some language that, if it wasn’t English, must’ve been French. All three were lying motionless on the sand, looking up at the blue sky through black sunglasses. Teresa Elena Virditti, señora Vivar, was reading a magazine, indifferently. After flipping through the pages once or twice she looked up at the man from the service station, who was watching her daughter swimming in the sea. Curiously she asked him how long Alicia had been in the water. The man told me that he’d wanted to say: How would I know? I’m not your nanny. But instead he said: About four or five hours. Señora Vivar looked at her watch. She shook her head saying the girl was very irresponsible, she’d end up catching a cold and, of course, she’d have to spend the whole next day at her bedside, worrying over thermometers and remedies. She was very cynical, said the man from the service station. Like they didn’t have tons of employees who’d take care of Alicia. At that point, after the brandy in the bar had run out and I’d begun to drink my companion’s beer to stay animated, I wondered to myself about the relationship between the man from the service station and Alicia Vivar. Why he paid so much attention to a preadolescent; how he knew so much about the life of that family; why he seemed to particularly detest Juan Francisco and Elena. I didn’t want to interrupt his story by asking these questions. Or maybe these questions could just as easily have been directed at myself, at the motivation behind this story.