Carlos Labbé: Loquela

August 10 th

I’m so tired. I woke up with the sensation of having not slept at all, of having traveled thousands of miles during the night. And in the mirror, my face wasn’t great either: two puffy circles around my eyes ordered me back to bed, but I was already standing, I had to go to class. The images from my dream would’ve kept me from shutting my eyes again anyway. I took a shower.

I dreamed, like I never do, all night. If I wanted, I could enumerate all the stages of this exhausting dream, this long and vivid dream. I know that Alicia, making fun of everything as usual, accompanied me to a room in my old and unfamiliar country house in Rancagua, that she played dolls with my little sisters (affecting voices, inventing frivolous plots: Barbie goes to the salon and some strange stuffed elves give her a new hairdo while gossiping about other toys, laughing at a headless Playmobil); that she slept in the same room as me, in another bed or in a sleeping bag on the floor, like a childhood sleepover: we turned off the light and talked for a while, but fell asleep in the middle of an important conversation (maybe just when I asked her who she liked, whether or not I was the one she loved?). Another time she went to school with me, we skipped class and went to talk on the far side of the playground. I didn’t know it, but she was following every move I made and every word I said, in the afternoon she showed me a garish comic strip she’d drawn that featured me. A synopsis of my day in vignettes, something like that. I never got bored of her, nor she of me: the same old story. Then suddenly, Alicia disappears.

I’m in a corridor in the big house that belonged to my uncle. Near Coya, down a busy, unpaved road, any local can tell you the way if you ask. A fantasy house, immense and silent, accessed through an electronic gate, a fountain and gravel parking area appear. (Being very young, I didn’t get why they covered the ground with sharp little rocks, particularly when we ran barefoot across it on our way to swim in the pool.) A fantasy house, as I said, that often appears in my nightmares along with that other house, the wood cabin on the shore of some southern beach where I’ve never been, an invention where J liked to predict that she and I would someday live.

I found myself in my uncle’s house, sitting on the parquet of a long corridor, that echoing corridor where, when we stayed overnight, the great thrill was to jump out at someone at the last second without them noticing your approach in the darkness. And the silence of that house. It still disconcerts me every time I see (or better, admire) the four people who live in that place, forced to live with the knowledge that, day after day, there’s no one lying in any of the beds in any of the ten or twelve bedrooms, that the soap in all seven of the bathrooms remains unused, the showers clean, but rusty. The emptiness in that house becomes unbearable, and so the birthdays and Christmases that my family celebrates there are competitive displays of affection and camaraderie, to fill the silence between conversations. And, because there’s something terrifying about letting them trail off, the conversations become banal, then personal, repetitive, uncomfortable, then banal again, an uncle, an aunt, a great aunt, and another uncle think they’ve been talking to me, but we just make sounds with our mouths and we keep on like that, not hearing one another, until they get in their car and go back to Santiago in silence, immediately turning on the radio — music always saves us from that horrible muteness. (Why can’t we sit quietly and look at each other? Why do I get nervous when Alicia says nothing, when I ask her “what’s wrong” and she pauses before responding, “nothing, I just don’t want to talk”?) Music or the newspaper or a book, never just the two of us.

I was sitting in that corridor with some of my cousins, but they weren’t actually my cousins, they were old friends from high school; insulting each other jokingly, making fun of the each other’s foibles and defects for a laugh — they’re the same even in a dream. We were obviously children, dressed in bathing trunks and playing a game of some kind across the rectangles of the parquet. Marbles, or something. And while, bursting with laughter, we were competing to say the cruelest joke, someone steals the bag of marbles from M, he bites R’s hand, R starts crying, C mimics his cries, M screams “abuse” in falsetto, I watch poor R earnestly, we all start slapping each other, repeating the worst jokes. I made some suggestion, N insulted me, I was tripped, and I fell down. Everyone jumped on top of me in a little pile, and it would have been futile to use the air that was scarcely reaching my lungs to scream that they were suffocating me, that I was dying, because just as I was starting to feel desperate, the human tower fell to the ground. Then, as we were getting to our feet and M was picking up his marbles, a grownup came over (an adult, I remember someone whispering “sshh, a grownup is coming,” heavy black shoes resounding through the house), and told us, calm down, you little shits. The grownup continued into my uncle’s bedroom, the master bedroom. I left the group of kids and followed him down the long red carpet in that twilight corridor, wine-colored walls barely illuminated by the small dark bulbs of the few hanging lamps. The grownup turned back to me, a finger placed vertically across his lips, commanding my silence. I grew along the way, it was now extremely difficult to see the details of his big shoes, and when he turned and told me to be quiet I saw that he didn’t have a face. Terror.

Alone, I went into the bedroom, decorated and furnished in identical fashion to my uncle’s actual bedroom. An enormous television, piles of photos, a table with flowers, pastel curtains tied with olive-colored cloth ties, empty nightstands on each side of the immense master bed. An unnerving piece of furniture with locked drawers (there are secrets here). The warm sun and the fragrance of pollen and fresh cut grass coming in through a window that opened onto the garden — spring in Rancagua. A young girl was sleeping peacefully.

I wanted to get out of there; I hate disrupting other people’s sleep, especially when it’s someone I don’t know. But the door was locked. I looked around the room and sat down on the bed, at the girl’s feet. Her back was to me, her body wrapped in the sheets. Softly, I touched her, she didn’t wake up. I think I said something. I prodded her, nothing happened. Little by little, I became more forceful, until I found myself with my hands on her shoulders, rolling her towards me, shaking her. She was very pretty, apart from her dead eyes. Dead eyes and cold skin. Her mouth: clenched so tightly that her teeth had ground together before she died. I’d never seen a corpse, but knew I had one in front of me now. (Her white hair — a noteworthy detail — resembled the nylon wig of a doll.) Repulsed, I let go of her and ran to the door, which was open.

Before leaving the room and waking myself up, I looked at the girl one last time to see if her eyes had recovered their glow, if her pale skin ran with blood again. The angle of her arm lost its rigidity, she became human, and with revived fingers, uncovered herself. She stood, her voice so unexpected said thanks, many thanks, and who might I be, a new cousin perhaps. “But,” she went on, “haven’t they told you that if I’m made to remember that person whom I hate, the loathing I feel is so strong that it paralyzes me, that it kills me? No, I’d already forgotten that person, but when I saw the trunk full of papers, I was overcome with rage. And why not? I’m going to die on the floor of my house, snarling like a rabid dog!” (And with her eyes she indicated the trunk, a trunk just like one that had belonged to my grandmother, heavy, ancient, and cold because it’s made of metal.) “His disgusting body is in there. I opened it and found him. I wanted to kill him again, cousin, a hundred times. Before he killed me.” (But what she told me is impossible; a body would never fit in that trunk.) Then my eyes fell upon the trunk and, slowly, it began to expand, transforming into a coffin. (Or was it maybe I who shrank, turned back into child?)