Álvaro Bisama - Dead Stars

They started going to class again, she said. Donoso looked happy, he'd let his beard grow but cut his hair. His face was no longer that of a child. He looked like one of those peasants you'd have found on a Russian farm, she said, one of those peasants you see marching in the black and white photos they still sell as posters in some of the handicrafts markets. Javiera was only taking freshman-level courses. The teachers hated her. The year before, she had stirred up a minor scandal just so she wouldn't fail one of her classes. She wasn't interested in studying. She was only there because of the Party; she lived for it. It made sense to me, but Donoso distanced himself more and more from that whole world, and after the fight at the party he'd become a pariah. Javiera told everyone he'd become a Trotskyite. She, on the other hand, did everything possible to stay in the Party's favor, but by that point it wasn't really working. They hadn't made her a candidate for anything, nor would they, not for a while; and to us, the rest of us, she became a bore. Her stories had become a routine. Sometimes, she had attacks of hysteria and she shouted at whoever was around her. Many of those meetings ended in blows, in spitting and threats, she said. I remember countless meetings when we would vote on strikes or elect representatives for something. They dragged on forever, she said. Once in a while, they'd invite a teacher or some authority figure and we'd get into arguments. The university went on strike in May. Blockades. Marches. Protests. Fights with the cops. Javiera always had a hand in it, she'd always laid the groundwork, plotted, talked to people one-on-one. Sometimes she'd ask us for our notes or books from previous years. She always said the professors couldn't stand her, that going to school and attending classes was torture, and she'd ask us to sign a letter accusing some teacher of persecuting her. I always signed. Sometimes it was true, she said. Of course they hated her, of course they couldn't stand her: she interrupted class, she used weird examples, she told half-coherent stories from her own life in order to refute whatever people said. Then she'd take the tests and the professors would tear her apart. Donoso would go with her to talk to her professors, he would vouch for her, he would help her study. I don't know if it worked. When she got pregnant she started to turn in doctor's notes so she could skip almost everything, and the professors always accepted them. Ultimately, they knew she didn't have a future there. But they did pay some attention to Donoso. Some of the older professors went to him and asked him why he was still with her, why he stayed with that woman. He didn't answer. At that point in the conversation, he would turn around and go back down the hallway, to the swarm of murmuring voices in the cafeteria, to everyday life in the quad.

Things happened that semester. Kurt Cobain killed himself. The university went on strike again. I started drinking cough syrup, she said. And Javiera miscarried: Donoso beat her up and she lost the baby, she said.

Let me back up, she said: The cough syrup was sickeningly sweet. A guy studying to teach English told me about it. My real life was secret, no one knew that I listened to punk and drank cough syrup. I bought the bottles without a problem in different pharmacies around the city. I was addicted for almost two years. No one realized. I knew how to keep up appearances. I made it my secret. I listened to punk rock and drank cough syrup in the university bathroom. It affected me in various ways. Sometimes it made me euphoric. Sometimes it made me sleepy. I didn't have any depth perception. The smell pursued me like a plague. I learned how to keep it down. I learned how to retch without throwing up. Sometimes I forgot myself completely, I'd wander around Viña, stay on a bus until it finished its route. I came across other people who were into syrup. Some chick and her boyfriend who would go out to bars and end up beating each other up. A bald man who later became a Hare Krishna. I'd see them sometimes in the pharmacies or at school. It was a kind of secret brotherhood. None of us talked to each other. I didn't exist for anyone during that time, she said. It didn't affect my grades. I could barely remember what was real: conversations with my parents, parties, walks through stores, it was all a dream that came in flashes, as if it wasn't worth remembering everything, as if oblivion, that white noise I drowned out with music at an ever-louder volume in my headphones, was the only tangible thing. I never got violent. The syrup aged me. I no longer looked like a teenager. I got wrinkles. I got skinnier. I stopped getting my period. You wouldn't have recognized me then. I knew how to make it through withdrawal. My parents were lost in their own lives. I was a ghost to them. I could have disappeared in my room and they wouldn't have noticed. I tried to be smart. I was always good at managing what little money I had: I always had enough for syrup, she said. I always had a bottle at hand. I never went crazy. Withdrawal would paralyze me, but it never actually drove me crazy. I knew people who tried to kill themselves. I thought I'd turned into a spider once, another time I lost my center of gravity, and there was one time my skin looked like it was covered in scabs. But no one noticed. There was no one to notice; no one to look me in the face and see the circles under my eyes, my body getting thinner, my gaze lost somewhere in the distance. I felt like a ghost, she said, like I wasn't there, in my own body, present in my own life.

She said: Bad things happened. I think it was around the time when Cobain died. I think it was around that time when a guy I knew killed himself. He jumped from the eighth floor of a building, depressed because his ex wasn't answering her phone. He wasn't a friend, but I'd seen him around in the hallway. I went to the wake. I didn't look at the body. Or, more like I think I didn't look, but I had taken syrup that day and it's possible I did go up and I've just forgotten his face, I've forgotten the way his parents dressed him and styled his hair to make him presentable for everyone's condolences. Or maybe it was just that the coffin was closed because he was so messed up it would be hard to even look at him. But I'm not sure about any of that. My own memory melts away, it turns into something that only works by hearsay, that works like a story told by someone else, by a voice that isn't mine. Hasn't that ever happened to you? she asked. Hasn't it happened to you that you've been too far gone to notice that everything around you has changed? she asked. Hasn't it happened to you, like it happened to me, that you lost your memory and when you opened your eyes and got it back, there was a battered woman and a dead baby, and everything had gone to shit?

I said: I remember what happened with Cobain. The fucker stuck a shotgun in his mouth and blew his head off, all because his stomach hurt. Because of that. Because he couldn't stand living in a world where his stomach hurt all the time. The world of '94. I remember things from that year: coming back from some indeterminate place where the city turned into countryside and there was nothing to do but walk a couple kilometers to get home at night because you'd been out drinking cheap wine and killing time chain-smoking. I remember I couldn't tell the difference between dawn and dusk, as if before and after didn't exist or were inverted, flipped, aimless. That's how that decade was, it felt like it didn't matter whether you lived or died because every day was the same. A hangover full of black holes, of memory loss, I said. But it passed. Then you came along, I said. Those days in that frozen world came to an end and time started up again. And then what we had fell apart. But it doesn't matter: time had already imposed its rule over everything we had; no matter how we cling to these shipwrecks, to bitten lips with no skin left on them, to this morning, to all these cups of coffee we haven't finished drinking. That's what I said.