Álvaro Bisama - Dead Stars

Or maybe I did. Maybe it was all about living a double life. Like everyone does at some point. I never learned how to do it. I never broke in quite that way. I never figured out how to dissociate myself. I never learned to multiply myself into a thousand masks and live a double or triple life in that port town that was falling to pieces, she said.

I didn't answer. Outside the café, the vendors were starting to set up their stalls in the street. A man sat down alone at the Hesperia's bar and ordered a beer. It was ten in the morning. I looked at one of the photos of the shipwreck. The image was ambiguous: the sinking ship could also have been a submarine rising to the surface. Or a whale. I remembered one time when I went to the fishing cove at Quintay and I walked along the abandoned whaling boat there. No one was around. What was now completely abandoned had once been a blood-red sea, full of the cadaver smell of giant dead whales. The image of the shipwreck reminded me of all that: the phantom pestilence I never smelled, that abandoned shipyard, the horrible feeling that what we'd had together was broken beyond repair.

She swallowed what was left of her coffee and said: That life lasted two years for Javiera and Donoso. They lived happily for two years and then it all went to hell. They didn't break up, but something went rotten. I was there when everything fell apart. That was my good fortune, or bad. To be there, walking along behind them.

She said: Once I heard a Belgian woman give a talk about that at a conference. About what it means to be a witness. You know what she said? She said it was impossible to write any kind of testimony, because the very idea is superfluous and false; because the things we remember about our past, about other people's lives, are only ground-up fragments, disjointed moments that we try to line up and stick together to take the place of experience, so ultimately they become experience, she said. But when that experience verges on horror, when that experience is pure catastrophe, the lives of others materialize as the background of a picture, blurry, and they appear exactly the way Javiera does in that newspaper photo now, turned into a diffuse silhouette, turned into a shadow of herself, she said. An illusion. A ghost. So, really, the idea of a witness is completely absurd. Because repeating a story does nothing for us, it's like fumbling around in the mud, she said, and then she added: Really, I don't know if that was what the Belgian woman was trying to say. Maybe she said the opposite. That it's the only possible effort you can make, even though it's useless. Maybe the true message was lost in translation, in the voice of someone who was trying to capture what the words said in the exact moment they were pronounced, but it didn't come out right, the translator wasn't fast enough and tripped over every step, every syllable. I don't know if this makes sense, she said. Yes, it does, I said. She said: I haven't felt like this in years, but right now this is hitting me in the pit of my stomach and knocking the wind out of me and if I don't tell you I think it will make me sick, it'll give me cancer or something like that, my body will be poisoned by all this shit. That Belgian lady didn't mention that part. She didn't say that in the end it's the witness who swallows other people's toxins, who is poisoned by memories. That's why the witness has to talk about them, to get it all out, because that venom is slow and silent. It kills. It's a time bomb. I didn't know it then. But that's how I feel now. Poisoned by other people's stories, by other people's lives. When I think about those two, that's how I feel: I feel like the witness to something that no one cares about. That's why I haven't stopped talking, that's why I'm not going to stop talking, she said.

I didn't tell her that I did know parts of that story, I didn't tell her I'd seen Javiera and Donoso in some photos when I went through her old albums trying to get a look at her face back before we'd met. It was another life. I wasn't there. But I couldn't tell her anything, ask her anything. It wasn't my place. I looked over at the reflection of our life in common, the reflection of my head rising up behind the Hesperia's bar. That would be one of the thousand things I'd never tell her. I let her talk among the mirrors and the shipwrecks, frozen in the half-light of the deserted Hesperia café.

She went on: That period didn't last long. Or it did, if you look at it a different way. Javiera failed almost all of her classes. We always used to put her name on our assignments. That way she'd come closer to passing her courses. I offered that gesture, as did Donoso, and Luisa, our classmate who was going out with Charly Alberti, the drummer from Soda Stereo, she said. You're fucking with me, I said. Seriously, that's what she said, she said she was Charly Alberti's girlfriend, that he was crazy about her and sometimes he'd sneak away to Chile in secret to see her. Donoso and I knew about it. No one else. Not even Javiera, unless Donoso told her. But I don't think he did. Donoso was very discreet. But that's what Luisa told us. Once when she was drunk she confessed, and it was all downhill from there. She was always telling us the gory details about her and Alberti. She told us they had spent the weekend in Reñaca, because he'd come by private jet to show her his new album. She told us her parents knew about it. That it had been hard to convince her father, who was a cop and an evangelical, but Alberti had done it. That he was serious about their relationship. That he had been respectful of her. That she was still almost a virgin. I don't know what she meant by that almost, but Donoso would hug her and sometimes she'd open her backpack and take out a giant album full of photos of Charly Alberti, a heavy folder full of concert memorabilia, posters from TV Grama and VEA , and newspaper clippings. There was only one photo of them together, Alberti and Luisa, taken in the hallway of a hotel.

Her: Aside from many other things, the past is that: a photo taken in a hotel we wish was our home — false photographs, proof of the life we never had.

She said: But it doesn't matter. The photo isn't important. What's important is Luisa's role in this, because it was with her that I saw Javiera and Donoso's relationship start to go to shit. Because, even though she was a facha right-wing conservative, she went with me to a party thrown by the Youth League in a typographical union close to Calle Colón. I don't know why we went. Maybe we just wanted to relax. Or maybe it was easier to go there than home after classes. I don't know. The fact is, we went. We killed time browsing thrift stores, and then we made ourselves up in the bathroom of a diner. Javiera and Donoso were at the party. We hadn't seen much of them that semester. Javiera was in the middle of an appeal, trying to get them to let her take a class for the third time, and Donoso was busy at the restaurant, she said. So I went with Luisa to the party. She complained because they weren't playing "Luna Roja," and she insisted that Alberti was coming to see her that weekend. That she wasn't going to drink too much because Alberti hated it when she drank, he detested drugs and alcohol. Of course, the party was full. I was drinking beer. I didn't see Javiera anywhere. In the throng of people, I saw Donoso with a bottle of pisco in his hand. There were a few bands that played Andean music, and a couple Pablo Milanés clones. In between the bands, people danced. The party was fun, if you like that kind of thing. I didn't really like it, but it wasn't terrible. This was just before the mayoral election in Valparaíso. Back then, before the Spiniak case, that fat guy Pino was way ahead. At the university, someone said Javiera was going to run for councilwoman. I don't know if it was just a rumor. It was probably true. They would put any university leader up for election; they'd send whoever it was to campaign in villages out in the middle of nowhere, like Catemu or Puchuncaví. It seemed like an obvious thing to us that Javiera would be a candidate, she said. So that's how things were at that party: Luisa talking about Charly Alberti, Donoso drinking alone, Javiera nowhere to be found. The last thing I saw before disaster struck was this: Donoso sitting in a plastic chair clutching a bottle of straight pisco. That was the cut-off point, maybe. That was the moment when I lost sight of them, because after Luisa went to the bathroom she didn't come back, and after a while someone told me: Your friend is in the bathroom crying. I went to find her. The bathroom was disgusting, but there was Luisa, sitting on the wet floor, hysterical. She had a piece of paper in her hand. A newspaper page, she said. Luisa was holding a page from a newspaper or a magazine and sobbing hysterically. No, the fucker can't do this to me, he can't do this, Luisa said. I hugged her and she repeated it, he can't fuck me over like this, he can't do this to me, the motherfucker, she was saying, sniffling. I hugged her and she was pretty drunk and then I saw that page in her hand. There was Charly Alberti with his fiancée, a model. That's why Luisa was crying. Because of that page she found on the floor of the bathroom or in the hallway. A social page, a page with the kind of short articles that close every edition of a paper. That loose page, lost at the party, a little bit of trash just like the bit of trash you have in your hands now that shows Javiera with white hair. It's like someone let these articles loose on the wind, waiting for someone else to see them and break down, just like I'm doing now, man, just like Luisa broke down then.