My Documents

by Megan McDowell Alejandro Zambra

  “I voted for Aylwin and for Frei,” said Daniel in response, revealing that he was totally lost in the conversation. When his guests finally left, he asked the boy if the Catalans were true or false.

  “They were weird,” he replied.

  ***

  That afternoon they lost the white kitten, the Argentine. Daniel, Lucas, and Pedra searched for it for two hours, but it never turned up. There was no way it could have gotten out, so during the following weeks Daniel had to move around the house with extreme caution. When he got home from work, he went stealthily through the rooms, always barefoot, almost on tiptoe, and he took extra care any time he sat or lay down. One morning, almost a month after it disappeared, he saw the white kitten sleeping peacefully next to its mother. It had returned from who knew where and taken its place with a nonchalance that annoyed Daniel. Over the phone, his son was happy to hear the news, but there was no excited shouting like his father had expected.

  “Why are you talking so quietly?” he asked Lucas.

  “I don’t want to wake them up,” replied the boy, still whispering.

  “Who?”

  “The cats.”

  “The cats aren’t sleeping,” said Daniel, with a touch of rage. “So you can just talk normally, okay?”

  “Don’t lie to me, Dad, I know they’re sleeping.”

  “It’s not true. And even if they were sleeping and you shouted over the phone, you wouldn’t wake them up. You know that.”

  “Yes, I know. I have to hang up.”

  “Did something happen?”

  It was the first time his son had hung up on him. He called Maru and she treated him nicely, much more friendly than usual. Nothing strange here, thought Daniel, resigned, in the middle of the conversation. But suddenly, as though pretending she’d just been struck by a casual thought, Maru said that maybe it would be better for the cats to live with her.

  “But you don’t like cats. You have a phobia.”

  “No, I don’t have a phobia. I have a phobia with elevators, spiders, and pigeons. What’s that called?”

  “What?”

  “The fear of pigeons.”

  “Colombophobia,” replied Daniel, exasperated. “Stop asking me stupid questions and tell me why you want the cats. You’ve never let the kid have one before.”

  “It’s just that Lucas talks to me about them a lot. I’d like to have them live with us. And then give them away gradually, and keep only Pedra. I already talked to some girlfriends who would be thrilled to have a cat.”

  Maru and Daniel fought like never before, or, rather, just like before. An inexplicable rhetorical twist had reversed things: not even the best lawyer in the world—and Daniel was not, certainly, the best lawyer in the world—could convince Maru that it was not her right to decide the fate of the cats. The negotiation was long and erratic, since Daniel wasn’t necessarily against the idea, but he hated to lose. He didn’t want them, really, except maybe Pedra—he did everything in his power to keep Pedra. At least ten times he said, “You can have the babies, but Pedra does not leave this house,” and all ten times he had to endure reasonable and dangerous arguments about a mother’s rights.

  “You can have the white one, then, if you want her,” said Maru, finally.

  “We don’t know if it’s a boy or a girl,” said Daniel, for the sheer pleasure of correcting her.

  “Lucas thinks it’s a girl,” she replied. “But fine, that’s not the point. Do you or do you not want the white cat, boy or girl?”

  He said he did. The day they moved the cats into the true house, the boy was happy.

  Daniel still hasn’t decided what to name the white cat. He calls it Argentina or Argentino indiscriminately. When he flops into the armchair to read the paper, the cat comes to sit between the page and his eyes, kneading at his sweater, concentrating intensely.

  “I’ve had to get used to reading standing up,” he says, glass in hand, to his neighbors, who have stopped in to say good-bye, because they’re returning to Barcelona soon.

  “It must have been hard for you to lose the kittens,” says the playwright.

  “It wasn’t too bad,” replies Daniel. “It must be harder to write plays,” he adds, obligingly, and then he asks them why they have to go, since he seems to remember that they were going to leave the following year. The question is, for some reason, inappropriate, and the playwright and his wife stare at the floor, maybe at the same point on the floor.

  “It’s personal. Family problems,” says the woman.

  “And were you able to write?” asks Daniel, to change the subject.

  “Not much,” she says, as if she were in charge of answering the questions directed at her husband. The scene strikes Daniel as grotesque, or at least embarrassing—above all because of that slippery expression “family problems.” He’s been in a good mood, but suddenly he is lost, or bored. He wants them to leave soon.

  “And what did you want to write about?” he asks, without the slightest interest.

  “He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know what about,” she says. “Maybe about the transition.”

  “What transition?”

  “Chile’s, Spain’s. Both, in comparison.”

  Daniel quickly imagines one or two boring plays, with actors who are very old or too young, bellowing like they are at the market. Then he asks how many pages the playwright has written in Santiago.

  “Fifty, seventy pages, but none of it works,” answers the woman.

  “And how do you know that none of it works?”

  “I don’t know, ask him.”

  “I am asking him. All of these questions have been for him. I don’t know why you answered.”

  The playwright is still aggrieved. The woman is caressing his hair. She whispers something to him in Catalan, and right away, without looking at Daniel, they leave the apartment. They are sad and offended, but Daniel doesn’t care. He feels, for some reason, furious. He drinks whiskey until dawn; from time to time the Argentine cat jumps up, compassionately, onto his lap. He thinks of his son. He feels like calling him but doesn’t do it. He thinks about saving money to buy a house on the beach. He thinks about changing something, anything: paint some walls, buy a few grams of coke, let his beard grow out, improve his English, learn martial arts. Suddenly he looks at the cat and he finds a name for it—a perfect, androgynous name—but immediately, in his drunkenness, he forgets it. How is it possible, so quickly, to forget a name? he wonders. And then he doesn’t think about anything anymore, because he drops onto the carpet and doesn’t wake up until the following afternoon. He finds, while grappling with his budding hangover, that he’s missed work, that he hasn’t heard his phone ring ten or fifteen times, that he’s missed many e-mails. The cat is sleeping beside him, purring. Daniel tries to see if it has a penis or not. “Nothing,” he says out loud. “You don’t have a cock. You’re a girl cat,” he tells it, solemnly. “You are a true girl cat.”

  He gets up, prepares an Alka-Seltzer, and drinks it without waiting for the tablet to dissolve entirely. His head hurts, but he still puts on an album he’s discovered recently, a selection of old waltzes, tangos, and fox-trots that remind him of his grandfather. While he showers, the cat chases his shadow on the shower curtain. He sings, half aloud, more sad than happy, along with a silly song—“Once a blonde was ready to die / for my love / not a lie / When her father found out / he got so mad / He tried to wipe me right off the map.”

  Then he lies down on the bed for a few minutes, with the towel around his waist, still wet, like he always does. The phone rings: it’s the playwright, who wants to apologize for the night before by inviting him to dine.

  “In Chile we don’t ‘dine,’ in Chile we ‘eat,’” he answers. “And I don’t want to dine or eat. I want to jerk off,” he says, forcing a crude tone of voice.

  “So jerk off, man, no worries, we’ll wait for you,” says the playwright, laughing.

  “I’m not going over there,” replies Daniel, with m
elodramatic gravity. “I’m not alone.”

  It’s two in the morning. The cat is sleeping on the computer keyboard. Daniel looks at himself in the bathroom mirror, maybe searching for scratches or bruises. Then he lies down and masturbates mechanically, without thinking about anyone. He wipes the semen on the sheets as he falls asleep.

  MEMORIES OF A PERSONAL COMPUTER

  It was bought on March 15, 2000, for four hundred thousand eighty pesos, payable in thirty-six monthly installments. Max tried to fit the three boxes into the trunk of a taxi, but there wasn’t enough room, so he had to use string and a bungee cord to secure everything; it was a short trip, though, only ten blocks to Plaza Italia. Once in the apartment, Max installed the heavy CPU as best he could under the dining-room table, arranged the cables in a more or less harmonic way, and played like a kid with the Bubble Wrap it had been packaged in. Before solemnly starting up the system, he took a moment to look at everything deliberately, fascinated: the keyboard seemed impeccable to him, the monitor, perfect, and he even thought that the mouse and speakers were somehow pleasant.

  He was twenty-three years old, it was the first computer he’d owned, and he didn’t know exactly what he wanted it for, considering he barely knew how to turn it on and open the word processor. But it was necessary to have a computer, everyone said so, even his mother, who’d promised to help him with the payments. He worked as an assistant at the university and he thought that maybe he could type up the reading tests, or transcribe his old notes, written by hand or laboriously typed on an old Olympia typewriter on which he had also written all his undergraduate papers, provoking the laughter or admiration of his classmates, who were, by then, all using computers.

  The first thing he did was transcribe the poems he had written over the past several years—short texts, elliptical and incidental, which were considered good by no one, but weren’t considered bad either. Something happened, though, when he saw those words on the screen, words that had made so much sense in his notebooks: he began to doubt the verses, and he let himself get carried along by a different rhythm—maybe one that was more visual than musical. But instead of feeling like the change of style was an experiment, he pulled back, got frustrated, and very often just deleted the poems and started over again, or wasted time changing fonts or moving the pointer of the mouse from one side of the screen to the other, in straight lines, in diagonals, in circles. He didn’t give up his notebooks or his pen, though, and at the first slip-up, he splattered ink all over the keyboard, which also had to endure the threatening presence of countless cups of coffee and a continuous rain of ash, because Max almost never made it to the ashtray, and he smoked a lot while he wrote, or, rather, he wrote a little while he smoked a lot. Years later the accumulated grime would lead to the loss of the vowel a and the consonant t, but that’s getting ahead of things, and it would be best, for now, to respect the proper sequence of events.

  The computer brought about a new kind of solitude. Max didn’t watch the news anymore, or waste any time playing the guitar or drawing: when he came back from the university he would immediately turn on the computer and start working or exploring the machine’s possibilities. Soon he discovered very simple programs whose capabilities struck him as astonishing, such as the voice recorder, which he used with a scrawny little microphone that he bought at Casa Royal, or his My Music folder, which now hosted all twenty-four of the compact discs he owned. While he listened to those songs, amazed at how a ballad by Roberto Carlos could give way to the Sex Pistols, he continued working on his poems, which he never considered finished. Sometimes, lacking a heater, Max fought off the cold by kneeling and embracing the CPU, whose low hum merged with the refrigerator’s snore and the voices and horns that filtered in from outside. He wasn’t interested in the Internet, he distrusted it, and though he had set up an e-mail account at his friend’s mother’s house, he refused to connect to the web, or to insert those diskettes that were so dangerous: potential virus-carriers, he’d been told, with the power to ruin everything.

  The few women who came to his apartment during those months all left before dawn, without even showering or eating breakfast, and they didn’t come back. But at the beginning of summer there was one who did stay to sleep, and then also stayed for breakfast: Claudia. And she came back—once, twice, many times. One morning, emerging from the shower, Claudia stopped in front of the darkened screen, as if looking at her reflection, searching for incipient wrinkles or some other stray mark or blemish. Her face was dark, her lips more thin than full, her neck long, her eyes dark green, almond-shaped. Her hair hung down to her wet shoulders: the tips of it were like needles resting above her bones. The towel that she herself had brought over to Max’s house could wrap around her body twice. Weeks later, Claudia also brought over a mirror for the bathroom, but she still went on looking at herself in the screen, though it was difficult to find, in the dark reflection, anything more than the outline of her face.

  After sex, Max tended to fall asleep, but Claudia would go to the computer and play rapid games of solitaire, or Minesweeper, or chess (at the intermediate level). Sometimes he would wake up and go sit next to her, giving her advice on the game or caressing her hair and back. Claudia gripped the mouse tightly in her right hand, like someone was going to snatch it from her, and she clenched her teeth and widened her eyes exaggeratedly—although every once in a while she let out a nervous giggle that seemed to give him permission to go on caressing her. Maybe she played better with him beside her. When the game ended she’d sit on Max’s lap and they would begin a long, slow screw. The strange lights of the screen saver drew fickle lines on her shoulders, on her back, her buttocks, on her soft thighs.

  They drank coffee in bed, but sometimes they made space at the table so they could sit down to eat breakfast “the way God intended,” as she would say. Max would unplug the keyboard and monitor and leave them on the floor, exposing them to treading feet and minuscule breadcrumbs, and so, every once in a while, Claudia had to use glass cleaner and a kitchen rag to clean them. But the computer’s conduct was, during this period, exemplary: Windows always started successfully.

  On the thirtieth of December, 2001, almost two years after its purchase, the computer moved neighborhoods to a slightly larger apartment in Ñuñoa. Its surroundings were significantly more favorable now: it had its own room and its own desk, which had been assembled from an old door and two sawhorses. Claudia graduated from hands of solitaire and interminable chess games to more sophisticated activities—she connected a digital camera, for example, that contained dozens of photos from a recent trip, which, though it couldn’t exactly be considered a honeymoon, because Max and Claudia weren’t married, had more or less functioned as one. In some of those images she posed with the ocean behind her, or in a wood-paneled room with Mexican sombreros and immense crucifixes on the walls, and shells that served as ashtrays. In other images she looked serious, or was holding back her laugher, and in still others she was naked or wearing very little, smoking weed, drinking, covering her breasts or displaying them mischievously. (“I can’t resist your lustful, wanton face,” he wrote on an afternoon that was certainly hot but maybe a little too iambic-pentametered.) There were also some photos that showed only the rocks or the waves or the sun going down on the horizon, a series of imitation postcards. Max appeared in only two photos, and only one showed both of them, embracing, smiling, a typical seaside restaurant in the background. Claudia spent days organizing those images: she renamed the files with phrases that were too long and tended to end in exclamation points or ellipses, and she grouped the files into several folders, as if they corresponded to many different trips, but then she put them all together again, thinking that, in a few years, there would be many more files—fifty, a hundred files for all the photos from a hundred future trips, because they were going to have a life full of travel and photographs. She also spent hours trying to beat level five on a Pink Panther game that came as a gift with the detergent. When she
despaired, Max tried to help her, although he had always been terrible at video games. If you could have seen them in front of the screen, how tense and concentrated they were, you might have thought they were solving arduous and urgent problems on which the future of the country or world depended.

  Their schedules didn’t always coincide in the new house, because now Max had a night job—he had lost the contest for assistant-ships at the university, or rather the professor’s new girlfriend had won—and Claudia sold insurance and was also studying for some kind of postgraduate certificate. Sometimes they would go one or two days without seeing each other—Claudia would call him at work and they would talk for a long time, since Max’s job consisted, precisely, of talking on the phone, or waiting for remote telephone calls that never came. “Seems like your real job is talking to me on the phone,” Claudia told him one night, the receiver sliding off her right shoulder. Then she laughed with a kind of wheeze, as if she had to cough but the cough wouldn’t come, or as if it had gotten mixed up with the laugh.

  Just like Max, she preferred to write by hand and later transfer her work to the computer. The documents she wrote were very long, and featured childish fonts and frequent transcription errors. They covered things related to cultural administration or politics or native rain forests, or something like that. It became necessary for her to do research on the Internet, and this was a big change; it led to the couple’s first fight, because Max still refused to use the Internet—he wanted nothing to do with web pages or antiviruses, but in the end he had to give in. Then one night there was a second furious argument: Max had been calling insistently for hours, but the line had been busy because Claudia was online. They bought a cell phone to solve the problem, but it was too expensive for their long conversations, and they had to get a second landline.