Navidad & Matanza Read online

  I realized that I still had the tape recorder. The tape was there too.

  The assignment—or my whim, if you like—was finished: I could piece together what happened to the Vivars that summer day in 1999. The story would exemplify the double standard at the heart of appearances and disappearances of Chileans, but none of this sounded right to me. The dramatic effect was too perfect. The pieces fit with suspicious ease: the perverse executive, the hedonistic musician, the tormented nymphet, the international orgy, the mysterious drug. A love story about a provincial man and underage girl from the capital. Then at last, I remembered Alicia Vivar’s words: Tomorrow, here. I turned off the radio, started the car, and went back to Matanza.

  I parked on one side of the small plaza. A bunch of kids were milling around in front of a man selling cotton candy. I figured it was the novelty of summer. I went into the Miriada looking for the apron that Alicia had been wearing the night before, but in her place I found a fifty-something-year-old manager, running a damp cloth across the surface of the bar. She asked me if I wanted breakfast. In the corner, two old men were disinterestedly watching a daytime television series, sucking down bowls of soup. I sat. I ordered a sandwich and a mineral water. After fifteen minutes, when the manager brought out paper napkins, mustard, and ketchup, I stared at her. I didn’t know if I should talk to her about Alicia. Whether or not I’d be able to communicate with her. In the end, I asked her what time the younger waitress started working. The manager smiled and exclaimed: The womanizer has been bitten by a spider. A while later, as she brought me a coffee, I asked her directly about the waitress named Alicia. The woman was taken aback at my insistence. No waitresses work here, just me. Sometimes the old man, when he’s not drinking.

  The hangover had consumed my patience. I took out a bill, placed it on the table, and looked her in the eyes: Last night a woman named Alicia was working. One of the men in the corner stood up and leaned on the bar next to me. Last night nothing, insisted the woman. She was the only person who worked there, and she didn’t have to explain herself to anyone. It’d be better if I just left; this was not a place to try and pick up women.

  I walked out into the plaza. It was five in the afternoon; Matanza’s infamous wind was blowing. I wanted to go back to my apartment in peace, forget about the Vivars, sleep calmly. In a couple of days the story would be written. The strange feelings would be forgotten. Once written, the truth about the parts played by Alicia and Boris Real would be reduced to those of characters in a book (or worse, in a journal), and Matanza and Navidad would become exotic towns on postcards from provincial Chile.

  Before going back to Santiago—while buying a postcard that depicted a fisherman smiling on the cold, dry beach, under a white sky—I randomly overheard the conversation of a man working in the market and a woman, sitting on a wicker stool, weaving. The man told her that he’d finally be able to pay off a debt because he’d come into some unexpected money. A few days ago, while he was walking with Violeta on the beach toward the cove, “Boris” had approached him and asked if his daughter, who was shivering because she’d just come out of the water, would be interested in becoming an actress. How random, the woman said. Boris told him that at the school in Navidad they were going to be putting on a play at the beginning of the school year. And Violetita would be perfect for the part. Imagine that, Violetita an actress, said the woman indifferently.

  I interrupted to ask the man where I could find this Boris. At the service station they both replied at the same time; the service station attendant is named Boris.

  89

  LITERATURE IS A LIE. Embrace the wind. Today is Saturday, the fourteenth day of September in the year two thousand and two since the birth of Jesus Christ. I’m sitting in front of the screen, the keyboard, and the speakers of my computer, at eight hours twenty minutes past noon, in an apartment in a building on Merced, whose number, with respect to the Plaza de Armas in Santiago de Chile, is four-hundred seventy-one. Twenty-five years have passed since my mother gave birth to me. More than twenty minutes ago a beautiful woman left my apartment, up from the armchair, out through the door into the hallway, and gone. Thirty minutes from now I’ll be sitting in front of the television. Only what happens exists. Only what I can see, hear, touch, smell, taste. Nevertheless, she bit her bottom lip and smiled. She looked at the floor. I sensed for a brief instant the chess game of God. She’d been thinking about me too, and my body was attracted to hers like metal to a magnet. It is now, here. You might say that I want to raise walls, construct a bedroom, write a chapter in a novel where the two of us would touch each other freely. But I don’t. She looks at the clock and says: I have to go.

  It is a game. Not a novel.

  There is no story. Only rules.

  95

  MARTES LET HIMSELF fall to the floor. His hands hurt and he was tired of thinking about ways of escaping. Surely Juan Carlos Montes had laughed seeing him running circles around the room and slamming into walls. He only hoped for two things: that Sabado was truly safe in a city somewhere, and that the message she’d sent him was a lie, a joke in bad taste devised by Domingo to frighten him. If Montes locked them together in a room, like the lab mice they were, the hadón would take effect and one of the two would end up killing the other. Which in itself would be useless, for the survivor would quickly be eliminated by Montes. At this point, he saw no way out but through the precarious lines of the novel-game that they began to write when there were still seven of them, like the days of the week.

  99

  DO YOU REMEMBER how many times we discussed that Wittgensteinian way of looking at things? And how many times we talked about idealism? That objects don’t exist, dear Sabado, only words, which build and break, build and break. It’s impossible to know what happens to the apple when you bite it. To write with hate. Under the effect of hadón, wanting my words not to bite the open chin, the purple cheek, the white eyes of Martes, but to bite your throat, your neck, your mouth, from a distance. Let me hate you, Sabado, since I can’t touch you, to dispel the death of these four walls. For this I write you.

  “But tell me, do you hate me?” Martes asked me, before smashing his head against the wall of mirrors and falling unconscious to the floor. He’s not dead; he sleeps, I believe. I hope.

  The only way to save the head is to train it. In the Lacanian sense of the term, Montes would say, because, he claims, the mind is only language.

  Or an invention of language.

  I too let myself fall to the floor of the entertainment room, my hands locked together, staring at Martes. They’ve locked the door from outside, right? He asked me. He already knew. He’d read it in an email you sent him, he said. We’ll kill each other beyond saving, Domingo. The compound should already be working in our hypothalamuses. Really I don’t hate you, he continued, occasionally I’ve been bothered by your need to control everything, just a little bit. That you seemed indifferent to the disappearances of Viernes, Miercoles, Lunes, and Jueves. But tell me, do you hate me?

  No, I replied. I continued to stare at the ceiling, humming a suite by Debussy that my father listened to on Sundays, early in the morning. La la la la. La la la la la. Do you remember “Le mer?” Jueves bought a theremin on the Internet and it arrived on a Saturday. It was the perfect excuse to celebrate. While we put peanuts in his beer, Jueves moved his hands toward and away from the apparatus. The terrifying sound waves oscillated from the deepest to the sharpest. Uuuuuuu, uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu. I don’t know. Jueves spent a couple weeks making sounds with it; he even printed the Debussy score. This must have been during the period when I was writing the story about the Congolese on the beach. You remember. It was a Friday night, we were playing cards. I got up to go to the bathroom and when I came back the chairs of Lunes, Miercoles, Jueves, and Viernes were empty.

  “But, tell me, do you hate me?”

  I stopped humming the suite when Martes’s shouts grew more powerful than my own. I told him: I’m not going to kill you, I’m s
orry. I believe in God, that God gives and takes life, and that if I do it intentionally, I’ll be definitively separated from Him, which is the same as dying. Martes began kicking furniture and throwing papers in the air. Rage all you want, but don’t touch the computer, I howled. I brandished the leg of a chair, ready to give him a real blow in the neck, below the nape to calm him. He sat down and kept screaming that I was a fool, a fool. Only a fool can believe in God while at the same time experimenting with cannibalistic white mice. I closed my eyes. I remembered that when Jueves’s hands moved away from the theremin, the sounds were deeper. Martes continued. Shit on the angels, on the first, on the second, the third, the fourth, the fifth, the sixth, the seventh, shit on every single one of the days of creation. That’s what he said. And he added the names of the patriarchs, of the judges, of the prophets, of the kings, of the King. So I stood up and I took the chair leg in my hands. I calculated where I should strike him so there’d be no blood. Right at that moment he stopped talking. He asked me if I hated him. He moved quickly to dodge my blow, his right leg tangled with what was left of the couch and his head smashed against the mirrored wall. He’s unconscious now. Until someone kills him or revives him.

  I remember it well. I came back to the entertainment room from the bathroom and there were four empty chairs. I thought they were pulling a prank. For the rest of the afternoon I opened every door, every closet, I looked under every bed. Nothing. Sabado and Martes were too busy to tell me if they’d seen the others leave. On the computer I wrote that Bruno and Boris Real had traversed the beaches of the central coast, so that later I could email that chapter to the others. While I was writing, I felt like I was walking the seaside streets of the novel. I was furious, as I am now. I’ve felt this way for a long time, ever since my mother took my brother to the supermarket and left me at home. Ever since I kissed a girl who I really liked; she moved her lips softly as if mouthing a phrase or a name. I backed away quickly and asked her what she was saying. I’m sorry, she whispered. A few days later I found out she was seeing someone else. There was someone following me when I left the market in Navidad. A little girl on roller-skates. She’s been behind me for a while, I thought; she knows something. I stopped and she stopped. She was beautiful, I remember: she was about to go through puberty. I thought that her name must be Alicia or Violeta—a strong name, tinged with adventure. And that she must’ve seen the others leave the laboratory and run to the beach. The girl must have an important message. Alicia, tell me, where are they? Who? She asked with an expression of distrust. Please, can you get out of the way? I need to get past. And she was gone.

  This is the end of the message, my dear. I am going to press send, I’ll run circles around the room until I gather enough courage to smash my head against the mirror. I hope I don’t die.

  If I wake up, I hope I’m not alone.

  100

  THE BRILLIANT IDEA had been Bruno’s. That afternoon, when the journalist showed up at the beach, the oldest Vivar had said: Now I know where we can get some cash. Then he looked his sister gravely in the eyes and she noticed his lips were smeared with sand. You’re disgusting, Alicia said to him. He smiled and slid his hand under the towel.

  It’d be simple: they were relying on the fact that after sixteen years, the journalist wouldn’t have forgotten them.

  He’s a writer now, it might not matter to him what happened in the past or what stopped happening, murmured Alicia, sunning herself. Those are the bad writers, the ones who call themselves poets, her brother said, as he watched the man undress his little girl and put on her bathing suit. Alicia lowered her dark sunglasses and gave Bruno a glacial look: What’re you trying to say? Well, you write poetry, you should know, replied Bruno. Disgusting, she repeated, and smiled. Better save that smile for the lovely interview that awaits you.

  The next day, at five in the afternoon, Alicia got up off her towel. They’d spent the entire night inventing and disguising the sordid story that she’d tell the journalist. Why we ran away from our parents, who tied us to our cribs, and abused us. The more I cried the redder my father’s face got and the more painful his blows. Or worse: they never even touched us. They wouldn’t say our names. On weekends they locked us in the attic with bags of dog food, this is why the only living human I can tolerate is my brother; it’s not that I love him. That’s why we stole the Porsche and headed north: something eye-catching, bright, a toy for us and no one else. At Christmas they let us open presents, but only open them. Then they’d take the toy away and put it on a shelf, at a height we couldn’t reach.

  Alicia set down the book she was reading and wrapped her body in a thin blue dress. A few meters away the journalist was sitting on the wet sand, his legs stretched out in front of him. Every now and then the surf splashed the soles of his feet, which must’ve felt delicious, but the intent, serious expression never left his face. Except when the little girl came running toward him from the sea, where she was swimming with her mother, and yelled something to him. Then he smiled, although he didn’t answer her. Just a smile.

  Alicia started walking toward the journalist. Some vacationers were playing paddleball and the sounds of conversations mingling with the murmur of the sea, formed the same uniform mass of sound she’d heard so many summers throughout her life. She remembered a childhood afternoon in Zapallar, in her aunt and uncle’s house. She was nine years old. After lunch she took her book and went alone down to the beach. She didn’t sit on the sand, but on the grass between the parking lot and the shore. She sat there reading and watching people for hours, until the sun began to drop and she got hungry. Then she walked back to the house, always the same. Thinking about what she’d tell her mother when she asked the same questions as always (“Did you have a good time?” “Did you eat a lot of ice cream?” “Did you make a new friend?” “Did you wear sunscreen?”). Forgetting the answers because there was always something that distracted her. Once she found a cat that’d been hit by a car, lying on the pavement. It was in agony. Someone had had the decency to move it so that the cars passing by in the street wouldn’t crush it. Surely this person, who’d carried it in their hands, must’ve realized that it was alive and had left it there anyway. Alicia remembered asking herself, feeling very sad, why such cruel people existed; it never occurred to her that apathy might be an explanation. She sat down next to the cat. It was gray with white and yellow spots, and a very fluffy tail. Its back—which was cut open—oozed a white, fetid liquid; it was bleeding from one ear, from the eyes, and the anus. Its left rear foot hung, connected to the body only by skin. She too was incapable of doing anything, except accompanying it while it died. She caressed its head and soon the cat began to purr. She couldn’t swallow her tears. She also felt—for a moment—a desire to crush it with her foot or throw it in the street so the cars would obliterate it. She’d given it a name, Maximiliano. A name she liked a lot. Soon night came and the cat stopped purring. It breathed less frequently all the time, it was getting cold. Alicia decided that no, the cat wouldn’t be called Maximiliano, because maybe someone else had already named him and it wasn’t fair that he should spend his last moments with another name. And finally he died. That time she got home late. They scolded her. If she was going to be out walking at that hour then she wouldn’t be allowed to go to the beach on her own. She told them about the cat and her mother yelled: That’s why you smell so bad.

  Alicia continued walking across the beach. The journalist was on his side, drawing pictures in the sand that his daughter finished with her tiny fingers. When she was just a few steps away from them, the surf came up and erased the drawing. The journalist lifted his head noticing her presence. His expression didn’t change. Alicia sat down next to them. The daughter put a wet, sandy hand between them; in the middle of her palm a sand flea writhed. She asked if the flea would die if it stayed out of the water for a long time. The journalist replied that it wasn’t water that it needed, but water and sand mixed together.

  Alicia wante
d to add something to his answer. She remembered when she was young she’d kept a few fleas in a jar, with seawater and sand and everything, and that still, the next day they were dead. She opened her mouth but didn’t say anything. The journalist sat looking at her. In that moment she should’ve begun telling him about the Vivar family, about her childhood, about Boris Real, the longing, Bruno, her father’s chemistry laboratory, the woman, the sirens, the hadón, the bloodless body of James Dean that’d given her nightmares until she was thirteen; yet all three of them sat in silence. The sand flea moved slowly across the child’s hand until it fell to the sand right as the tide came in and got them all wet. They heard simultaneous shouts. One from the journalist’s wife, telling them to come swimming. The other shout was Bruno’s, angry because someone had stolen their towels. A scandal was building. The lifeguard asked him to calm down, while the boy emphatically demanded compensation from the municipality.