And what happened in Leuven? The worst. Although sometimes the worst is the best thing that can happen. It must be said that Elisa could have been nicer, a little less cruel. But if she had been nicer, he might not have understood. She didn’t want to leave that possibility open. He called her from the station, and Elisa thought it was a joke, but she started walking toward him anyway, talking to him on the phone all the while. Then she turned a corner and saw him, a hundred steps away, but she didn’t tell him she was there and he went right on talking, sitting on his suitcase, half-numb and anxious, looking at the ground and then at the sky with a mixture of confidence and innocence that was repulsive to Elisa—she couldn’t put her feelings, her thoughts, in order, but she was sure of one thing: she didn’t want to spend the coming days with Rodrigo, not those days or any others, none. And maybe she was still a little in love, and she cared about him, and liked to talk to him, but for him to show up out of nowhere, like in some bad movie, ready to embrace and be embraced, ready to become the star, the hero who crossed the world for love: that was, for Elisa, much more of an affront and a humiliation than a cause for happiness.
As she took long strides back to her house, she felt the constant vibration of her cell phone in her pocket, but she answered only half an hour later, already in bed, duly protected: “I’m not going to pick you up,” she told him. “I don’t want to see you. I have a boyfriend [lie]. I live with him. I don’t ever want to see you ever again.” There were another nine calls, and all nine times she answered and said more or less the same thing, and in the end she told him, to add a little realism to the thing, that her boyfriend was German.
Of course there are other reasons for her reaction, there’s another story that runs parallel to this one, one that explains why Elisa didn’t ever want to see Rodrigo again: a story that talks about the need for a real change, the need to leave behind her small Chilean world of Catholic school, her desire to seek out other paths—a story that explains why, in the end, it was logical and also healthy to break up with Rodrigo definitively, maybe not like that, maybe it wasn’t fair of her to leave him sitting there, eager and numb, but she had to break it off with him. In any case, for now, she is stretched out on her bed, listening to some album that falls somewhere on the broad spectrum of alternative music (the latest from Beach House, for example). She feels calm.
Rodrigo tests out a quick and mindless walk around the city. He sees twenty or thirty women who all look more beautiful than Elisa; he wonders why Hans—he decides the German’s name is Hans—chose Elisa, this Chilean woman, who isn’t so voluptuous or so dark-skinned, and then he remembers how good she is in bed, and he feels rotten. He goes on walking, but now he sees nothing but a beautiful city full of beautiful people. He thinks what a whore Elisa is, and other things typical of a scorned man. He walks aimlessly, but Leuven is too small a city to walk around aimlessly in, and after a little while he is back at the station. He stops in front of Fonske—it’s practically the only thing Elisa had told him about the city: that there is a fountain with a statue of a boy (or a student or a man) who is looking at the formula for happiness in a book and pouring water (or beer) over his head. The fountain strikes him as strange, even aggressive or grotesque, and he tries to avoid engaging with the irony of a “formula for happiness.” He goes on looking at the fountain—which for some reason that day is dry, turned off—while he smokes a cigarette, the first since he’s been off the train, the first on European soil, a pilgrim Belmont cigarette from Chile. And although during all this time he has felt an intense cold, only now does he feel the urgency of the freezing wind on his face and body, as if the cold was really trying to work its way into his bones. He opens his suitcase, finds a pair of loose-fitting pants, and puts them on over the ones he is wearing, along with another shirt, an extra pair of socks, and a knit cap (he doesn’t have gloves). For a moment, carried along by rage and a sense of drama, he thinks that he is going to die of cold, literally. And that this is ironic, because Elisa had always been the cold-blooded one, the most cold-blooded girlfriend he’d ever had, the most cold-blooded woman he’d ever met: even during the summer, at night, she used to wear jackets and shawls and sleep with a hot-water bottle.
Sitting near the station, in front of a small waffle shop, he remembers the joke about the most cold-blooded man in the world, the only joke his father ever used to tell. He remembers his father beside the bonfire, on the wide open beach at Pelluhue, many years ago: he was a distant and taciturn man, but when he told that joke he became another person, every sentence coming out of his mouth as if spurred by some mysterious mechanism, and upon seeing him like that—wisely setting up his audience, preparing for the imminent peals of laughter—one might think that he was a funny and clever man, maybe a specialist in telling these types of long jokes, which can be told so many different ways, because the important thing isn’t the punch line but, rather, the flair of the teller, his feeling for detail, his ability to fill the air with digressions without losing the audience’s interest. The joke started in Punta Arenas, with a baby crying from cold and his parents desperately wrapping him up in blankets of wool from Chiloé. Then, surrendering to the obvious, they decide they must find a better climate for the baby, and they start to climb up the map of Chile in search of the sun. They go from Concepción to Talca, to Curicó, to San Fernando, always heading north, passing through Santiago and, after a lot of adventures, heading up to La Serena and Antofagasta, until finally they reach Arica, the so-called city of eternal spring, but it’s no use: the boy, who by now is a teenager, still feels cold. Once he’s an adult, the coldest man in the world travels through Latin America in search of a more favorable climate, but he never—not in Iquitos or Guayaquil or Maracaibo or Mexicali or Rio de Janeiro—stops feeling a profound and lacerating cold. He feels it in Arizona, in California, and he arrives and departs from Cairo and Tunis wrapped in blankets, shivering, convulsing, complaining interminably, but in a nice way, because in spite of how bad a time he had of it the coldest man in the world always remained polite, cordial, and perhaps because of this, when the much-feared ending finally came—when the coldest man in the world, who was Chilean, finally died of cold—no one doubted that he would go directly, without any major trouble, to heaven.
Cairo, Arizona, Tunis, California, thinks Rodrigo, almost smiling: Leuven. It’s been months since he’s seen his father—they’ve grown apart after some stupid argument. He thinks that, in a situation like this one, his father would want him to be brave. No, he doesn’t really know what his father would think about a situation like the one he is in. His father would never have a credit card, much less travel irresponsibly thousands of miles just to be kicked in the stomach. What would my father do in this situation? Rodrigo wonders again, naively. He doesn’t know. Maybe he should go back right away to Chile, or maybe he should stay in Belgium for good, make a life here? He decides, for the moment, to go back to Brussels.
People travel from Leuven to Brussels, or from Brussels to Antwerp, or from Antwerp to Ghent, but they are such short journeys that it’s almost excessive to consider them travel in the proper sense of the word. And even so, to Rodrigo, the half hour to Brussels seems like an eternity. He thinks about Elisa and Hans walking around that city, such a university town, so European and correct. Again he remembers Elisa’s body: he recalls her convalescing after she had her appendix out, receiving him with a sweet, pained smile. And he remembers her sometime later, one Sunday morning, completely naked, massaging rose-hip oil into the scar. And how, maybe that same night, she’d played with the warm semen around that scar, drawing something like letters with her index finger, hot and laughing.
He gets off the train, walks a few blocks, but he doesn’t look at the city, he goes on thinking about Elisa, about Hans, about Leuven, and something like forty minutes go by before he realizes he has forgotten his suitcase on the train, he’s left it in a corner next to the other passengers’ luggage, and he’s gotten off carrying only his
backpack. He says to himself, out loud, energetically: “Ahuevonado,” you stupid asshole.
He buys some french fries near the station, and he stops on a corner to eat. When he stands up again he feels dizzy, or something like dizziness. He was planning on buying cigarettes and then walking for a while, but he has to stop because of this feeling, which just seems like a nuisance at first, an impression of vertigo that he has never felt before, but which immediately starts to grow, as if freeing itself from something, and soon he feels that he is going to fall, but he manages, with a lot of effort, to maintain the minimum stability necessary to move forward. The backpack weighs next to nothing, but he puts it down and takes five steps, to test himself. The dizziness continues and he has to stop completely and lean against the window of a shoe store. He moves forward slowly, propping himself up against one shopwindow after another, like Spider Man’s cowardly apprentice, while he looks out of the corner of his eye at the interiors of the stores, overflowing with different kinds of chocolates, beers, and lamps, some of them selling strange gifts: drumsticks that are also chopsticks, a mug in the shape of a camera lens, an endless array of figurines.
An hour later he has made it only seven blocks, but fortunately, at a kiosk, he finds a blue umbrella that costs him ten euros. At first he still feels unstable when he walks, but the umbrella gives him confidence, and after a few steps he feels like he’s gotten used to the wobbling. Only then does he look at or focus on the city; only then does he try to understand it, start to understand it. He thinks it’s all a dream, that he’s near Plaza de Armas, near the Cathedral, in the Peruvian neighborhood, in Santiago de Chile. No, he doesn’t think that: he thinks that he thinks he’s in Plaza de Armas. He thinks that he thinks it’s all a dream.
The stores are starting to close. It’s hard to know if it’s day or night: 5:15 p.m. and the lights of apartments and cars are already on. He starts to walk away from downtown, but instinctively he goes into a Laundromat and decides to spend some time there—he doesn’t really decide this, actually, but this is where he ends up, along with two guys who are reading while they wait for their clothes. It isn’t exactly warm there, but at least it isn’t cold. It’s absurd—he knows that he’s short on money, that he’s going to need every coin—but still he decides he is going to wash one of the pairs of pants, the second shirt, and the extra pair of socks. It takes him a while to figure out how the washing machines work—they’re old and look sort of dangerous—but when he finally gets the apparatus going the victory gives him a stupid and absolute feeling of satisfaction. He sits there looking at the tumbling clothes, entranced or paralyzed, focused like someone watching the end of a championship game on TV, and maybe for him this is even more interesting than the end of a championship game, because while he’s watching the tumbling clothes pushed up against the glass, soaked in soapy water, he thinks, as if discovering something important, how these clothes are his, how they belong to him, how he has worn those pants a hundred times, those socks too, and how once upon a time that shirt, a little faded now, was his best, the one he picked out on special occasions; he remembers his own body wearing that shirt with pride, and it’s a strange vision, vain, awkward. It’s perhaps his kitsch idea of purification.
Then he goes into a pizzeria called Bella Vita, which looks cheap. His waiter is a man named Bülent, a very friendly and cheerful Turk who speaks some French and a little Flemish but no English, so they have to communicate exclusively through gestures and a reciprocal murmur that perhaps serves only to demonstrate that neither of them is mute. He eats a Napolitano pizza that tastes out of this world to him, and then he sits there, drinking a coffee. He doesn’t know what to do, he doesn’t want to go on wandering, but he can’t make up his mind to look for a cheap hotel or a hostel. He tries to ask Bülent if the place has Wi-Fi, but it is truly difficult to mime the idea of Wi-Fi, and at this point, he is already so helpless that he doesn’t think of the simplest option, which would have been to say “Wi-Fi” and pronounce it in all possible ways until Bülent understood. Luckily Piet arrives just then; he’s a very tall guy who wears glasses with thick red rims and has an unspecifiable number of piercings in his right eyebrow. Piet knows English and a little Spanish—he has even been to Chile, for a month, years ago. Rodrigo finally has someone to talk to.
A couple of hours later they are in the living room of Piet’s beautiful apartment, across from the pizzeria. While his host makes coffee, Rodrigo watches from the window as Bülent, with the help of the waitress and another man, closes the place up for the night. Rodrigo feels something like the pulse or the pain or the aura of daily life. He turns on his laptop and connects to the Internet; there are no messages from Elisa, but he wasn’t really expecting any. He tries to find a friend from high school who, as he remembers, has lived in Brussels for several years. He finds him easily on Facebook, and the friend responds right away but says that he’s in Chile now, taking care of his sick mother, and although he plans to come back to university, for now he’s going to stay in Santiago, he doesn’t know for how long. Ten minutes later he gets another message in which the friend recommends that he not be afraid to drink peket (“It’s a good buzz, but a bad hangover”), that he avoid the grilled endive (“No to the grilled endive, yes to the boulettes de viande and to the moules-frites”), that he try the hot dogs with warm sauerkraut and mustard, that he buy chocolates at Galler, near the Grand Place, that he go to the Tropismes bookstore, and that he shouldn’t miss the Musical Instrument or the Magritte Museums—to Rodrigo, all of these details seem remote, almost impossible, because this isn’t a vacation, it never was. He feels desperate. He doesn’t have much credit left on his card, and he has only a hundred euros left in his wallet.
That’s when Bart arrives, Piet’s editor, who lives in Utrecht. Only then does Rodrigo find out that Piet is a writer, that he has published several books of short stories and a novel. He likes that Piet showed this kind of discretion, that he was so reserved. He thinks that if he were a writer, he wouldn’t go around proclaiming it to all the world either.
Bart is even taller than Piet, he’s a giant of almost two meters. Along with a friend, who is also named Bart, he runs a small press that publishes emerging writers, almost all of them fiction writers, almost all of them Dutch, but there are a few Belgians, also. The other Bart, oddly, lives in Colombia (because he fell in love with a woman from Popayán, Rodrigo learns), but he handles everything online from there: his job is to manage distribution—to a series of small bookstores, none of them commercial—and to organize small events and readings where he sells the books himself.
Bart is friendly and he tells his story in pretty fluent English, though he is also helped by his emphatic gestures and a certain talent for mimicry when words fail him. It’s almost ten; they walk for a few blocks. Rodrigo feels better, he leans on the umbrella-cane, but it’s more of a precaution than a necessity. They reach La Vesa, a somewhat gloomy bar that has poetry readings on Thursdays, but today isn’t Thursday, it’s Tuesday, and the patrons are scarce, which is better, thinks Rodrigo, who enjoys this feeling of intimacy, of routine camaraderie, this sensible chatting with new friends, and the comments—short but laden with slight ironies—that come every once in a while from Laura, an Italian waitress who isn’t beautiful at first sight, but who becomes beautiful as the minutes pass, and not from the effect of the alcohol, but because you have to look at her really closely to discover her beauty. His friends are drinking Orval and Rodrigo orders wine by the glass; Piet asks him if he dislikes beer, and he replies that he likes it, but he’s still too cold and he prefers the warmth of wine. They start talking about Belgian beer, which is the best in the world. Piet tells him it’s not so cold out, that there have been many worse winters. Then Rodrigo wants to tell them the joke about the coldest man in the world, but he doesn’t know how to say friolento, “cold-blooded,” in English, so he says “I am” and makes the gesture of shivering, and Bart tells him, “You’re chilly,” and it all g
ets tangled up because Rodrigo thinks they’re talking about Chile, about whether he’s from Chile, which supposedly they already knew, until, after several misunderstandings that they celebrate thunderously, they understand that the joke is about the chilliest man on earth, and Rodrigo adds that the most cold-blooded man on earth is definitely Chilean, he’s the chilliest man on earth, and he laughs heartily, for the first time he laughs on Belgian soil the way he would laugh on Chilean soil.
Rodrigo starts the joke uncertainly, because as he strings the story together, he thinks that maybe in Belgium and Holland they have the same joke, that maybe there are as many versions of the joke as there are countries in the world. His listeners react well, however, giving themselves over to the story: they enjoy the enumeration of the cities, whose names sound so strange to them (“‘Arica’ sounds like ‘Osaka,’” says Bart), and when the chilliest man in the world, who is Chilean, dies of cold under the burning sun of Bangkok, his friends let out an anxious giggle and grab their heads in a mournful gesture.
The chilliest man in the world had been a good son, a good father, a good Christian, so Saint Peter accepts him into Heaven without delay, but the problems start immediately: incredibly, even though in heaven hot and cold don’t exist—at least not in the way we understand them down here—and even though all the rooms in that formidable hotel that is Heaven automatically adjust to the needs of their guests, the Chilean still feels cold, and in his friendly but also effusive manner he goes on complaining, until the blessed patience that reigns in Heaven runs out, everyone gets fed up, and they all agree that the chilliest man in the world should go find a truly beneficial climate. It is God himself who decides to send him to Hell, where it’s unthinkable that he could go on feeling cold. But in spite of the unquenchable fires, the burning waters, the scorching coals, and the human heat, which in such an overcrowded place is intense, the chilliest man in the world still feels cold, and the case becomes so famous that it reaches the ears of Satan, who sees it as an amusing challenge and decides to take matters into his own hands.
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