Carlos Labbé - Loquela

(Before lunch I called Alicia. We joked around for a while about the detective novel I’d loaned her. Then she asked me what I thought of Violeta’s notebooks. I evaded the inevitable by answering that I bet the letter inadvertently delivered to me was more interesting, the one the albino girl signed as sender. Alicia said she didn’t know what I was talking about. The letter, I insisted; the letter I’d given her in exchange for her friend’s writings. Alicia still didn’t understand. Really, are you sure I didn’t give it to you? No, what letter? We argued. I don’t know what’s going on. I hung up, nervous; it seemed like someone was knocking on the door to my apartment. I opened it and there was nobody there. How stupid, why would anybody be knocking when there’s a doorbell?

In my mind I reviewed where Violeta’s letter might be. In the drawer, no. I went through the papers on my desk, the closet, the disorder on the little table with the telephone. The last thing I retained in my worthless memory was me, sitting and contemplating the envelope, too afraid to open that strange correspondence, even though the mailman slid it under my door. And yet it was a letter from the girl who’d been murdered, my best friend’s best friend. Then I thought about what Carlos would do in my situation: open the envelope and read the letter; discover everything that Violeta had written for me, what she’d decided to convey in her own sentences; he’d be unable to take it and he’d run out, I don’t know where, that is to say, I do know where: to the home of Violeta Drago, over on Pedro de Valdivia Norte, as indicated on the envelope. Having said nothing to his girlfriend, Carlos was standing in front of the door. He rang the bell. He’d ask the albino girl why she was imploring him to stay with her, here in Santiago.) Action, pure, simple, and ephemeral action. (That of writing: I plagiarize Onetti just like he copied Faulkner, who imitated someone else I don’t know.)

September 7 th

It’s snowing in Santiago. Amazing, I’m lying down and I feel cold. I go to the balcony to check if it’s still raining and see the falling snowflakes. Down below a couple is dancing like on Broadway (I imagine); happy, she swings the umbrella from side to side, he’s holding her around the waist, and of course they’re singing. She opens her mouth and the snowflakes fall (how fascinating to write the word snowflake, snowflake, snowflake, to write snowflake because they are actually falling right here in this exact instant and not somewhere else — where I can’t see them unless I force myself, fantasize — in some distant and nonexistent country where it snows every winter, for whose inhabitants the snow is commonplace; this doesn’t happen in my fiction when I want it to either. This is tangible, like the difference between writing a love letter and forging Carlos’s love letter to his girlfriend, Elisa). The happiness bestowed by the certainty of ice melting in my frozen hand is the same happiness I felt when I looked out and saw that it was snowing. So I ask myself how I might come to touch the woman I love without my hands disappearing on her waist, I ask myself this just because the snow is falling.

Snowflakes in Santiago: an oxymoron. What happens when the impossible occurs in front of my eyes? Other times I would’ve called it a miracle, and yet it would have provoked the same certainty of being alive that I feel now. One day Alicia asked me, a little drunk and knowing her question to be repetitious and unanswerable: “why is it impossible to write from a place of happiness?” My relationship with her cannot be explained, despite all this verbiage. It’s not love (that wasted word), rather a condition that helps me go to bed and to get up, that I insist on re-creating, on masking with other names, on transposing into Carlos’s novel, and also on recording in an artificially intimate diary. That which only occurs in our presence, that which would only grow in one way: if our bodies made contact. And that act is outside language’s reference, an act (love?) so private and elemental that it breaks apart at the simple attempt to assign it a verb. Not even God (I think now that it’s a stretch to believe in Him) has remained in that sacred borderland, which is the unnamable, the unrepeatable. God already has a designation and that’s why he fell into these pages, where the word can provide for everything. Alicia and I have no nexus, just the one that appears when I write our names together: Alicia and I. The rest is a painful exercise in nostalgia for what will never happen, fiction is sad because it’s not alive, because it requires that I turn some pages for it to exist.

(Why do wondrous things make us feel a need to share them with the people we love? I’m thinking about the time we hiked up a hill in Rancagua, when J and her friend got lost on a different path and ended up stranded on the face of a cliff. Her friend was stuck up there all afternoon, paralyzed with panic; J, on the other hand, decided to climb up to the top and go for help. Knowing nothing of mountaineering, she climbed tooth and nail, at one point believing that she wouldn’t make it, that she’d fall into the emptiness and die. In that second she thought about her parents, her siblings, her true friends, about me perhaps, but focused on none of them. On the brink of death, it was the memory of a guy she was hooking up with at the time [I can’t remember his name anymore] — and the desire to touch him again, to feel his body on top of hers, to still be alive with him — that impelled her to claw hold of a root, prop her feet against the wall, and climb up the cliff face to safety. At least that’s what she told me a few days later, after I’d seen her approaching in the distance, injured, her face terrified; when she spotted me, she hurried over, gave me a quick hug, and asked for help. I understood [although in a fragmentary and divergent way, while I took her by the hand, telling her to calm down, calm down, everything will be okay] the nature of her feelings [what I deduced really was this pretentious]: she felt no affection for anyone, we only mattered on the surface, because in the crucial moment she reverted to the memory of a brief fling, a fleeting [I’m simplifying again, I know] romance [that’s how I’ve always thought of them], instead of conjuring me, her best friend of many years. But later I had the contrary certainty: for J, the individuals who transcend are not those who for years have shared her projects, her moods, ordinary and transcendent events, no, they are those who can give her new experiences of sensuality, who can make her completely forget everything but her own body. This was a disaster for me: faced with eternity or the end, my adored J had clung to an instant of the flesh that would rot in a matter of days. And I [invoking God, the transcendence of her in me, of me in her] voluntarily unravel what I most believed in, the image of her at my side; I wept in the tent, a sleeping bag wrapped around me up to my neck, while the whole campground got drunk, celebrating the successful rescue of the two lost girls. I wept, hating J, I wept because I’d have to get back at her for making me feel this hate.)

Why do wondrous things make us long for the company of others? In photographs and paintings couples stand out against a background of snow, because the relationship between two people begins with a physiological need for warmth, says Violeta in her texts on Corporalism, justifying her promiscuity by inventing a little literary group. Should I tell Alicia about this? No, her notebooks are written with astonishing verisimilitude, different from an intimate diary like this one, where in spite of my pretensions I don’t abandon the stereotypes of the novel. Another digression: I was going to comment how, through the window, I watched people come out of their offices and marvel at the snow. How the children were yelling (in Santiago children don’t yell and dogs don’t bark) so loudly that the houses opened up and families came out to take photos against the immaculate background. The man from the apartment across the street, who spends his days watching television or sleeping or writing in a notebook, got up, leaned out the window, and spent half an hour outside with his arms stretched out, looking at the sky. Like the passersby, who walk, tracking the snowflakes overhead (here no one wants to look at the sky, because it’s toxic; the ground is no different, but we inhabitants of Santiago have a particular fixation with concrete). I was the only one who was melancholy, it was sad not to have someone with whom to share the unexpected weather; and then the phone rang. In disbelief, I picked up the device and heard Alicia say: I’ve never seen it snow before! For a second, talking with her about some random thing, blown away by the snowflakes, I thought I was happy: and the feeling was nothing like what I felt when my body was on top of J’s. Under the snow, separated by the telephone line, we could be together, each in our own apartment, watching the snowflakes fall, listening: I was wholesome, diurnal, white like the snow, as if I were pulling my head out of a pit, convinced that kindness is not an empty word.