Time goes by with happy indolence. There are hours, maybe entire days, when Martín manages to forget who he really is. He forgets he is pretending, that he’s lying, that he’s guilty. On two occasions, however, he almost lets the truth slip out. But the truth is long. Telling the truth would require many words. And there are only two weeks left. No! One week.
Now he’s driving, nervously: it’s Friday, and tomorrow he has to go to a wedding as Paz’s date. She asked him if they could take the car, so now he has only one day to practice—he has to seem like a seasoned driver, or at least he has to obey the traffic laws. At first it all goes well. He stalls at a red light, as he tends to do, but he has some courage in reserve, and, for a little bit, he achieves a certain fluidity. Then he gets carried away and decides to go to the mall to buy two plates and three cups to replace the ones that he’s broken, but he’s unable to change lanes at the right time, or move ahead of the other cars, and he gets stuck in his lane for ten minutes, until the exits run out. Now he’s headed southward on the highway, and there’s nothing to do but attempt a U-turn.
He pulls over onto the median and decides to wait until he calms down. He turns off the radio and bides his time until he can make the turn, but, when the opening comes, the car stalls again, and he’s left at the mercy of an oncoming truck. The driver swerves to avoid him and leans on the horn.
He backs up and continues south, and every once in a while he thinks about trying another U-turn, or trying to get off the highway, but he’s frozen dead with fear and all he can do is keep going in this straight line. He comes to a tollbooth and slams on the brakes; the toll collector smiles at him, but he’s incapable of smiling back at her. He is forced to keep going, like a slow automaton, until he reaches Rancagua.
I’ve never been to Rancagua, he thinks, ashamed. He gets out of the car, looks at the people, tries to guess the time from the movement in the Plaza de Armas: twelve—no, eleven. It’s early, but he’s hungry. He buys an empanada. He stays there an entire hour, parked, smoking, thinking about Paz. Such weighty names annoy him—they’re so full, so directly symbolic: Paz, Consuelo—peace and consolation. He thinks that if he ever has a child, he’s going to come up with a name that doesn’t mean anything. Then he takes twenty-four turns around the plaza—though he doesn’t count them—and some teenage girls playing hooky eye him strangely. He parks again and his phone rings; he tells Paz he’s at the supermarket. She wants to see him. He replies that he can’t because he has to pick his daughter up from school.
“Finally, you can see her?” she asks, overjoyed.
“Yes. We came to an agreement,” he says.
“I’d love to meet her,” says Paz.
“Not yet,” replies Martín. “Down the road.”
Not until four in the afternoon does he start heading back. The trip is calm this time, or less tense. I’ve just learned to really drive, he thinks that night before going to sleep, a little bit proud.
And yet, on Saturday, on the way to the wedding, he stalls the car. He says his eyes feel “caustic”—he’s not sure that’s the right word, but he uses it. Paz takes the wheel—she doesn’t have a license, but it doesn’t matter. He watches her drive, concentrated on the road, the seat belt between her breasts. He drinks a lot at the wedding. A lot. And even so, it all turns out well. People like him, he dances well, he cracks some good jokes. Paz’s friends congratulate her. She takes off her red shoes and dances barefoot, and he thinks it’s absurd that he doubted her beauty at first: she’s beautiful, she’s free, she’s fun, marvelous. He feels the desire to tell her right there, in the middle of the dance floor, that all is lost, irreversible. That the family is returning on Wednesday. He goes back to the table, watches her dance with her friends, with the groom, with the groom’s father. Martín orders another Jack Daniel’s and drinks it in one gulp. He likes the grating pain in his throat. He looks at the chair where Paz’s purse and shoes are: he thinks about keeping those red shoes, like a caricature of a fetishist.
The next day he’s hungover. He wakes up at eleven thirty and there’s strange music playing, a kind of new-age music that Paz hums along with while she cooks. She’s gotten up early, gone out to buy sea bream and a ton of vegetables, which she’s now frying in the wok, slowly stirring in the soy sauce. After lunch, stretched out naked on the bed, Martín counts the freckles on her back, on her ass, on her legs: 223. It’s the moment to confess everything, and he thinks she might even understand: she would get mad, she would mock him, she would stop seeing him for weeks, for months, she would feel confused and all that, but she would forgive him. He starts to talk, timidly, searching for the right tone, but she interrupts him and leaves to go pick up her son, who is at her parents’ house.
They come back at five. Up to this point the boy has been reticent with Martín, but this time he loosens up and is more trusting. For the first time, they play together. First they try to cheer up Mississippi, who is still convalescing, but soon they give up. Then the boy puts the tomatoes next to the oranges and tells Martín he wants some orange juice. Martín picks up the tomatoes, and when he’s about to cut the first one the boy cries, “Noooooo!” They repeat the routine twelve, fifteen times. There is a variation: before cutting the tomato, Martín catches on and feigns fury, saying that the grocer sold him tomatoes instead of oranges, pretending that he’s going to storm back and complain, all so the boy will say, intoxicated with happiness, “Nooooooo!”
Now they’re playing with the remote control. The boy pushes a button and Martín falls down, bites his own hand, shouts, or goes mute.
And if I really did lose my voice? he thinks afterward, while the child sleeps on his mother’s lap.
May they turn my volume down, thinks Martín.
May they fast-forward me, rewind me.
May they record over me.
May they erase me.
Now Paz, the boy, and Mississippi are asleep, and Martín has been locked in the study for hours doing who knows what, maybe crying.
***
They like what they see at first, when they get out of the taxi. Consuelo looks at the bougainvillea and the rose bush, and she wants to find Martín right away to thank him for that gesture. Then they are surprised to see the photo of Consuelo on the main wall, and in the confusion she even thinks, for a split second, that the photo has always been there, but no, of course it hasn’t. They go through the house, alarmed, and their confusion grows as they look into each of the bedrooms—it’s clear that Martín moved the boxes and wardrobes around, and every minute brings a new discovery: stains on the curtains, cigarette ash on the carpet. The cat is in the girl’s room, sleeping on top of the stuffed animals. They look over his wounds, which still haven’t scarred over completely, and they are furious at first, but then grateful, after all, that he’s alive. In the kitchen they find some used syringes, along with some of their medicine and prescriptions.
Martín isn’t there and he doesn’t answer his cell phone. There is no note to explain the situation at all. They can’t understand what has happened. It’s difficult to understand. At first they think Martín robbed them, and Bruno anxiously looks over the library, but he finds no evidence of theft.
He feels stupid for having trusted Martín. They had corresponded so much by e-mail, and he had no reason to be suspicious. “These things happen,” says Consuelo, for her part, but she says it automatically, without conviction. Every so often Bruno calls Martín again, leaves messages on his voice mail, messages that are sometimes friendly and other times violent.
***
A few days later, the doorbell rings very early in the morning. Consuelo goes out to answer it. “What do you want?” she asks a young woman, who is frozen, recognizing her. “What do you want?” Consuelo repeats. She takes a while to answer. She stares again, intently, at Consuelo, and, with a gesture of contempt, or of supreme sadness, she answers: “Nothing.”
“Who was it?” asks Bruno from the bedroom. Consuelo closes the do
or and hesitates a second before answering: “No one.”
ARTIST’S RENDITION
Yasna fired the gun into her father’s chest and then suffocated him with a pillow. He was a gym teacher, and she wasn’t anything, she was no one. But she’s something now: now she’s someone who has killed, someone who sits in jail waiting for her shitty food and remembering her father’s blood, dark and thick. She doesn’t write about that, though. She writes only love letters.
Only love letters, as if that were nothing.
But it isn’t true that she killed her father. That crime never happened. Nor does she write love letters, she never has, maybe because she knows almost nothing about love, and what she does know, she doesn’t like. What she does know is monstrous. The one doing the writing is someone else, someone urgently recalling her, not because he misses her or wants to see her but simply because he was commissioned, a few months ago now, to write a detective story. Preferably one set in Chile. And right away he thought of her, of Yasna, of that crime that was never committed, and although he had dozens of other stories to choose from, some of them more docile, easier to turn into detective stories, he thought that Yasna’s story deserved to be told, or at least that he would be able to tell it.
He took a few notes at the time, but then he had to focus on other obligations. Now he has only one day left to write it.
The innocent part of the story, the least useful part, the part he won’t include, and that he doesn’t even fully remember—since his job consists, also, of forgetting, or rather of pretending that he remembers what he has forgotten—begins in the summertime, toward the end of the eighties, when both of them were fourteen years old. He wasn’t even interested in literature yet; back then the only thing that held his interest was chasing women, with timidity but also persistence. But it’s excessive to call them women—they weren’t women yet, just as he was not yet a man. Although Yasna was several times more a woman than he was a man.
Yasna lived a few blocks away. She spent her afternoons in the messy front yard of her house, surrounded by roses, rue shrubs, and foxtails, sitting on a stool, a block of drawing paper on her lap.
“What are you drawing?” he asked her one afternoon from the other side of the fence, momentarily emboldened, and she smiled, not because she wanted to smile, but out of reflex. In reply she held up the block, and from a distance it seemed to him that there was a face sketched on the paper. He didn’t know if it was a man’s or a woman’s, but he thought he could tell it was a face.
They didn’t become friends, but they went on talking every once in a while. Two months later she invited him to her birthday party, and he, breathing happiness, going for broke, bought her a globe in the bookstore on the plaza. The night of the party he ran into Danilo, who was smoking a joint with another friend on the corner—they had a ton of weed, they’d started growing it a while ago, but they still hadn’t made up their minds to sell it. Danilo offered him the joint, and he took four or five deep drags, and straightaway he felt the dulling effect that he knew well, though he didn’t smoke with any real frequency. “What’ve you got there?” Danilo asked him, and he’d been waiting for that question, hiding the bag precisely so they would ask him. “The world,” he replied with glee. They carefully undid the cellophane wrapping and spent some time searching for countries. Danilo wanted to find Sweden, but couldn’t. “Look how big that country is,” he said, pointing to the Soviet Union. They finished the joint before parting ways.
Yasna seemed to be the only one taking the party seriously. She wore a blue dress down to her knees; her eyes were lined, her eyelashes curled and darkened, and there was a shadow of shy sky blue on her eyelids. The music came from a cassette tape played end to end, one that was no longer in fashion, or that was in fashion only for the more or less fifteen guests crammed into the living room. They were clearly all good friends, they’d change partners in the middle of the songs, which they sang along to enthusiastically, though they knew absolutely no English.
He felt out of place, but Yasna looked over at him every two minutes, every five minutes, and the rhythm of those glances competed with the lethargy from the weed. After gulping down two tall glasses of Kem Piña, he sat down at the dining-room table as a new cassette started to play, Duran Duran this time. No-no-notorious. They danced to it strangely, as if it were a polka, or one of those old ballroom dances. It all seemed ridiculous to him, but he wouldn’t have said no to joining in, he would have danced well, he thought suddenly, with an inexplicable drop of resentment, and then he focused on the chips, on the shoestring potatoes, the cheese cut up into uneven cubes, the nuts, and a few dozen multicolored crunchy balls that struck him, who knows why, as interesting.
He doesn’t remember the details, except for the sudden lash of hunger, the wound of hunger: the munchies. He made an effort to eat at a normal speed, but when Yasna came in with the tortilla chips and an immense bowl of guacamole, he lost control. Tortilla chips and guacamole had only recently been introduced in Chile, he had never tried them before, he didn’t even know that was what they were called, but after trying one he couldn’t stop, even though he knew everyone was watching him; it seemed like they were taking turns looking at him. He had bits of avocado on his fingers, and tomato, and grease from the chips; his mouth hurt, he felt half-chewed bits of food stuck in his molars, he extricated them tenaciously with his tongue. He ate the entire bowl almost by himself, it was scandalous. And still he wanted to go on eating.
Just then the door to the kitchen opened and a white light hit him right in the face. A man looked out; he was fairly fat but brawny, his parted hair divided into two identical halves combed back with gel. It was Yasna’s father. Beside him was someone younger, very similar in appearance, you might say good-looking if it weren’t for the scar from a cleft lip, though perhaps that imperfection made him more attractive. Here ends, perhaps, the innocent part of the story: when they grab him tightly by the arm and he tries desperately to go on eating, and a few moments later, after a long and confused series of hard looks and clipped sentences, of scraping and dragging, when he feels a kick in his right thigh followed by dozens of kicks on his ass, his shins, his back. He’s on the floor, enduring the pain, with Yasna’s sobbing and some unintelligible shouts in the background; he wants to defend himself, but he barely manages to shield his groin. It’s the second man who is beating him, the one Yasna will later call the assistant. Yasna’s father stands there and watches, laughing the way bad guys laugh in lousy movies and sometimes also in real life.
Although none of this, in essence, interests him for his story, he tries to remember if it was cold that night (no), if there was a moon (waning), if it was Friday or Saturday (it was Saturday), if anyone tried, in all the confusion, to defend him (no). He puts his clothes on over his pajamas, because it’s the middle of winter and much too cold, and as he drives to the service station to buy kerosene, he thinks with confidence, with optimism, that he has all morning to work on his notes and in the afternoon he will write nonstop, for four or five hours, and then he’ll even have enough time, in the evening, to go with a friend to try out the new Peruvian restaurant that has opened up near his house. He fills the gas cans and now he’s at the Esso market, drinking coffee, chewing on a ham-and-cheese sandwich, and thumbing through the newspaper he got for free for buying a coffee and a ham-and-cheese sandwich. What they want from him is simply a blood-soaked Latin American story, he thinks, and in the margins of the news he jots down a series of decisions that take shape harmoniously, naturally, like the promise of a peaceful day at work: the father will be named Feliciano and she will be Joana; the assistant and Danilo are no good, nor is the marijuana, maybe a hard drug instead, and though he doesn’t really want to make Feliciano into a drug trafficker—too hackneyed—he does think it’s necessary to move the protagonists down in class, because the middle class—and he thinks this without irony—is a problem if one wants to write Latin American literature. He needs a Santiago slum
where it’s not unusual to see teenagers in the plazas cracked out or huffing paint thinner.
Nor will it work for Feliciano to be a gym teacher. He imagines him unemployed instead, humiliated and jobless at the start of the eighties, or, later, surviving in the work programs of the dictatorship, endlessly sweeping the same bit of sidewalk, or turned into a snitch who informs on suspicious activity in the neighborhood, or maybe even knifing someone to the ground. Or maybe as a cop, one who comes home late and shouts for his food, and who has no qualms about threatening his daughter at night with the same billy club he used to beat back protesters at noon.
He has some doubts at this point, but they’re nothing serious. Nothing is that serious, he thinks: it’s just a ten-page story, fifteen pages tops, he doesn’t have to waste time on the backstory. Two or three resonant phrases, a few well-placed adjectives will fix any problems. He parks, takes the gas cans out of the trunk, and then, while he fills the heater’s tank, he imagines Joana splashing kerosene all over the house, with her father inside—too sensationalist, he thinks, he prefers a gun, maybe because he remembers that there was a gun in Yasna’s house, that when she said she was going to kill her father she mentioned the gun in the house.
There was a gun, of course there was, but it was only an air rifle, which had lain idle for years in the closet. It was a testament to the time when the man used to go to the country with his friends to hunt partridge and rabbit. Only once, one spring Sunday, coming back from church when she was seven years old, did Yasna see her father fire it. He was in the yard, downing a beer and taking aim with a steady hand at the kites in the sky over the park. He hit the bull’s-eye four times: the owners couldn’t understand what was happening. Yasna thought about those parents and children from other neighborhoods watching their kites founder and crash, so disconcerted, but she didn’t say anything. Later she asked him if you could kill someone with that rifle, and he answered that no, it was good only for hunting. “Though if you got the guy in the head from close up,” amended her father after a while, “you’d fuck him up pretty good.”
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