Álvaro Bisama - Dead Stars

And she answered: And to the decision to tell you all this, piece by piece, shard after shard of broken glass.

She said: Javiera told me everything when I went to see her in the hospital. Her ex-husband and her son had come to the coast, and she'd gone to spend a whole week with them in Las Cruces. They were planning to work out the terms of their separation while they were at the beach. On that trip, Javiera slept with her ex. When she came back, she told Donoso. Her ex and her son had come to pick her up at the apartment on a Monday morning, and she got into the car her ex's brother had lent him. As far as she knew, her ex and his brother weren't on speaking terms, they hated each other's guts. Javiera also didn't know that her ex-husband could drive. She'd been with him for five years and she didn't remember that detail; she'd never once seen him get behind the wheel of anything. The car was Russian and small and ugly. Her son was in the back seat. He'd turned ten. Javiera didn't remember his skin being so light. She said that for a moment, she felt like they weren't who they said they were. There was an odd calm about them, like they were more civilized, and more silent, than she remembered. She thought the silence was caused by her absence, that it was the true essence of her absence. It was the noise that was missing, the share of babble that corresponded to her. She felt sad, jealous. She hadn't told anyone she was pregnant. Her ex just thought she'd gotten fatter. But then, as the Lada made its way up the coast, she looked at her ex and her son and she thought about the secret forms of communication they'd established, communication she was excluded from; about the life they led without her, in another world; about all the family photos in which she would never appear. Her ex had rented a cabin. He spent every night sleeping on the living room sofa. The cabin was made of wood and decorated with old, dust-covered seascapes. Every day was cloudy. Every day, the rain threatened to fall like knives, but nothing happened. Every day, they walked on the beach, watched TV, discussed the state of Chilean politics. Every night, when the boy went to bed, the two of them remained at the dining room table, drinking tea or wine and talking about their broken relationship. She asked him to talk to a friend of his in Santiago, get him to take a look at her standing in the Party, see where she was. Javiera called Donoso every morning when she went out to buy things for breakfast. She felt like that call was clandestine, almost secret. Donoso answered reluctantly; sometimes he was still half-asleep and he barely told her he missed her. She went back to the cabin and made breakfast or watched TV on a little black and white set while she listened to her ex-husband talk about how things were going with him. She also listened to the sea as if it were a murmured message impossible to decipher, she said. One night, she slept with her ex-husband. Out of nostalgia. For old time's sake. For the warmth. Because of the falseness of that trip, the imitation of a promised world that had never existed and never would, she said. She regretted it immediately. She could see the marks of age on their bodies, but she also took comfort in the knowledge that they really hadn't changed much, that she could still predict the progression of every one of his thrusts, she could anticipate every change in the rhythm of his breathing, every stifled gasp, as if it was familiar terrain, a place that was still the same in spite of the distance, she said. That day Javiera forgot she was pregnant, she said. She forgot Donoso. She forgot her own present. She lived the illusion of a false life and a family that had long since stopped being hers, she said. She only remembered she was pregnant on the way back, when her son asked her ex when his new girlfriend would be moving into the house in Ñuñoa. Later, she would tell Donoso that she had slept with her ex and Donoso would give her a beating so bad it would make her miscarry, she said. Javiera would spend some time in the hospital, trying not to bleed to death. Her son would call his mother on the phone and Donoso would say she wasn't there, she'd gone out, she was at a meeting.

I first heard about what happened a few days later, from Lila, a girl from the Party who hated Javiera. The way Lila told it, the whole thing was Javiera's fault, she practically deserved the beating. Later, Javiera gave me her version. That night, doped up on syrup, I put on an album by The Exploited and waited for sleep to come, but nothing happened; there in the darkness I welcomed into my arms a legion of unborn children descending from the ceiling to embrace me.

She said: Donoso gave me his version as we were leaving class. He told me he'd tried to kill himself that night, after sitting there in the waiting room of the hospital trying to understand what the hell he had done, his head in his hands, not eating, not sleeping, smoking cigarette after cigarette, she said. There, Donoso remembered how in between the blows, in the middle of that violence he hadn't known he was capable of, he'd realized there was too much blood on the floor and that Javiera had started to scream louder and louder, clutching her stomach, as if trying to hold up her own body. Donoso, full of rage and fear and self-hatred, could barely remember how the two of them got out of the building and caught a cab to the hospital, she said. What Donoso did remember was how the doctor looked at him when Javiera told the nurse on duty that she'd fallen down the stairs in her building, and the terror that kept him from going to the ward to see Javiera, and, once things had calmed down, the way Javiera looked at him with eyes black from the beating, before turning her face away, while he stood there at her bedside, the TV news on in the background.

The night of the beating, when he got back from the hospital, he played a bootleg Upa! cassette at full blast on the stereo and tried to hang himself with his belt in the bathroom. He couldn't, she said. He didn't know how. He looped the belt over the curtain rod in the bathroom. When he let himself fall, the rod broke. The weight of Donoso's body yanked it out of the wall, she said. Donoso stayed lying there, in the fetal position in the bathtub, with the belt around his neck, for an hour, dying of fright, unable even to cry. He said his mind was a blank, not a single word came into his mind. He said he heard his own breathing like an echo of the emptiness inside him, the sounds of his body bringing him back to earth, quieting his panic, filling him with an inexplicable peace. After that, he went to the kitchen and made himself some noodles with cream and canned tuna. Then he lay down to sleep. The Upa! tape rewound automatically over and over again, and it went on playing into the night. The next day, he showed up at the hospital and asked Javiera to forgive him.

And you went to the hospital to see her too, I said. Yes, she said. I went to the hospital. Alone. Javiera's son was there. He didn't look like her. He hardly spoke at all. Javiera told me her side of the story. They discharged her the next day. The son was staying in La Ligua at Javiera's sister's house. When I came out of the room, Donoso intercepted me and took me to the cafeteria. I don't remember the exact details of that conversation. I tried to see him as a monster. He showed me the mark from the belt on his neck. It all happened just the way I've told you. Blurry, confused, full of holes. What I'm telling you now, maybe it didn't really happen like that. Maybe all I know how to do is sew scraps together. While Donoso was talking to me, there was a man on the other side of the cafeteria crying into his coffee. No one seemed to notice. He was an older man in work clothes. He was staring at some indeterminate spot in the room and his tears fell of their own accord; he didn't wrinkle his face or close his eyes. There was dignity in that gesture of not wanting to break down, of swallowing his sorrow. Donoso was calm, placid. Javiera still hadn't decided whether to talk to him. The only thing she said to him was that her son had come to see her and she didn't want them to meet. She would talk to him later, Javiera told him. In the short hour I spent with her, she told me that the boy would get bored and go wander around the hospital. She asked me if I knew about what had happened. I told her I did. We sat in silence. Javiera's face was destroyed, with black eyes, swollen lips, she said. I'd never seen anyone look like that, she said. I'd seen blood before, but never a broken body, never a body in that state. They were giving her strong painkillers and she was sleeping intermittently, without dreaming. I don't even dream, she would tell me. I sleep badly, because I know I won't dream. She told me that when she woke up, Donoso was there at her side. She told me she didn't want to press charges. She told me it was nothing compared to what the army thugs had done to her, this was just domestic. That she was tough. She told me she would have more children, that this was just an accident. I didn't say anything. I felt a stabbing pain in my stomach, I felt like I needed to throw up. I made up an excuse and left. On the way out, in one of the hospital's many hallways, I saw the boy sitting on the floor and staring into space, she said.