Carlos Labbé - Navidad & Matanza

As we walked to the door, she told me how much she liked reading and writing in the novel-game. Everything is good; it’s decaying, it’s the image of a world destined to die and rot, and we’re participating in the construction of that image. For what? For God? The truth, I replied, is that when we planned all of this with Viernes, at no point did we consider the comforts we’d leave behind. Excuse me, but what exactly do you mean by comforts?

THAT FIRST NIGHT, the wind blew ferociously on the beach in Matanza. The man from the service station told me that although his eyes filled with sand, he could still see Patrice Dounn, standing, playing his theremin — the sound of the instrument reverberated wonderfully in open spaces, the Congolese would tell him later — and at his side Alicia, lying on her back looking up. He couldn’t tell if she was sleeping or staring at the stars. It was late, the wind was growing violent, and the man decided to go home.

Early that morning he woke up, shaken out of bed by a tremor. For some reason, the man from the service station described in great detail what he’d been dreaming that night, during the internal cracking of the earth, before seismic shudders threw him out of bed. In his dream, Navidad was a large modern capital, extensive and full of neon lights, futuristically designed automobiles, and a multiracial population. He was walking the streets of the city toward his wife’s office, because she’d promised him that they’d go out to lunch. His wife was Alicia, the Vivar’s young daughter. Then everything began to break. The man returned instinctively to the beach, shouting, terrified. The entire ocean had gathered into a huge wave, so tall its foam touched the clouds. Then he was soaking wet — the heat of the summer night in Navidad, he explained — walking through rubble of the city devastated by the enormous mass of water, and by the immense force of the current pulling it back. Concrete structures scattered everywhere, bodies of animals, entire parks pulled up by the roots, a dirty film covering all the useless objects, an unbearable, salty cold. He looked toward the place where Alicia Vivar’s office used to be. He saw the building was intact, damaged, but standing, cut off from the rest of the city by a deep, wide chasm in whose depths he heard the echo of the ocean currents violently crashing against forgotten tectonic layers. Somehow he also heard Alicia’s small voice desperately calling for him to get her out of there before the building collapsed. Then her voice was lost in the deafening rumble of the rising tide, as the ocean gathered again into a single enormous wave. An authority was shouting that if they wanted to survive they should climb the hills, climb to the highest places. The man started to run. He saw how everyone around him stumbled and fell, saw their terrified faces. Alicia’s voice called his name with horrible desperation. She asked him not to leave her there; she didn’t want to drown. Then the earth began to move violently. The man woke up afraid, bathed in sweat. He went to the door of his room, opened it, and stood under the lintel, waiting for the tremor to pass.

The clock on the living room wall showed six in the morning. He saw a delicate hand open the door of the room to his right. It was Alicia; she too was taking shelter in the doorway. Her hair was messy and her eyes barely open; she was wearing a red tracksuit under a large T-shirt featuring a Japanese anime character.

The shaking continued and didn’t decrease in intensity; they waited for the jolt that at any moment would transform the tremor into an earthquake. Then the girl seemed to come awake, seeing the man a few meters away, watching her. She raised her hand in a friendly wave. The man from the service station murmured good morning. The tremor stopped.

As he moved toward the kitchen the man wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. He opened the refrigerator, took out a carton of milk and a jar of strawberry-colored powdered juice. He drank a glass and sat down at the small table. He stood up to turn on the television, but before he could he saw Alicia walking toward him and he sat back down, awkwardly. He offered her a glass of milk, which she accepted. The man asked about the foreign visitor. Alicia said: What do I know. She scrunched up her nose when she passed by him, muttering: Gross, you’re all wet, like you just got back from the gym. And she sat down across from him.

He already had a couple liters of beer in his system and I think that’s why the man from the service station told me all of this. Despite considering himself a fairly shy person — maybe because he was still kind of sleepy — he told Alicia about his dream. She listened with interest, getting up every now and then to look for sugar or a spoon, or to open a drawer and close it again, nervously. When the man finished telling her what he’d dreamed, she asked him if maybe he wanted her to be his oneiromancer . My what? Dream reader, like Joseph in Egypt. The man understood, he remembered that Joseph had gotten out of prison and become an advisor to the Pharaoh by revealing to him what God had been trying to tell him in a dream. At that point, the man from the service station inserted a small parenthetical to tell me that his father was an evangelist, and that when he was young, in Santiago, he’d frequently read him chapters from the book of Genesis before bedtime. He loved listening to those stories, but when his father would say goodnight and turn out the light, the shadows that came in from the street would keep him from sleep.

It was impossible to tell whether Alicia’s offer was sincere or in jest. The man asked her how she knew about the biblical Joseph; outside the sun was coming up and they could hear the roosters crowing. The girl laughed and said that obviously she hadn’t learned about it in her religion classes in high school. The man started toasting some bread. Alicia laughed again. She told him that his dream was simple: the sea was the world, parties, commerce. The city was the same. High places were high places. The sky. And her, why’d she make an appearance? Asked the man. At that moment they heard the honking of a car horn. The man and the girl looked out the window. In front of the house was parked the Japanese car of Juan Francisco Vivar. He was accompanied by his son Bruno and, asleep in the backseat, was Patrice Dounn.

I DIMLY remember what came next in the story told by the man from the service station that night at Miriada , in the town of Matanza. The truth is I’d finished three or four glasses of brandy, and he’d covered the table with more than a square meter of empty pilsner bottles. The light bulbs in the bar had faded gradually. Everything turned yellower, browner, blacker. Including the voice of my interlocutor. Still, I remember the dazzling young body of the waitress, who watched me out of the corner of her eye from another table, making calculations in a notebook. That’s what I thought, with a total lack of intuition: the girl was making calculations. I’d only brought a ninety-minute tape, so by that point the conversation was empty air. Misleading human memory. The wind blew in through the cracks of a large, old window to my right. Progressively — mea culpa — the story of the disappearance of the Vivar siblings told by the temporary assistant of Patrice Dounn became, in my memory, a collage of blurry images. Without a doubt, the events that took place at the Transensorial Beyond Seasons Celebration were, in reality, much more impressive than how my alcohol-muddled mind recalls them.

That morning, Juan Francisco Vivar and his son made breakfast in the kitchen of the man from the service station. Patrice Dounn, half asleep, walked to his room and shut the door. Alicia went in with him, although after half an hour she came back out. She’d changed into a very thin green dress, her hair tied up with knitting needles. She sat down at the table. She drank chocolate milk and responded to a couple jokes Bruno made about the color of her outfit. Their father drank his coffee in silence without saying or doing anything. He just looked out the window. The man from the service station watched everything very nervously; it was difficult for him to understand the words the siblings spoke to one another. At one point, Juan Francisco stretched out his arm and pinched the soft flesh of his daughter’s shoulder. Alicia didn’t cry out or seem upset, according to the man from the service station. On the contrary, she tilted her head slightly as if it pleased her. Then Bruno and Alicia stood up at the same time and said they were going to the beach to go swimming. They retrieved two towels from the trunk of the car and left.