Álvaro Bisama

Dead Stars

Foreword

"I don't know where he's headed," a friend of mine said to me about Álvaro Bisama a few years ago, and I don't think he meant it as a compliment. It's hard, though, for me to think of a more flattering and appropriate way to describe a writer's work. What my friend was trying to capture, with his tone of doubt or disappointment, was the feeling of disquiet Bisama's books provoked in him; or, better said, how each new book forces him to discard any theories carried over from the previous one. As each new book "illuminates" the previous ones, it modifies the system not only going forward, but also backward. I cannot say, either, where Álvaro Bisama is headed, and I'm grateful for that uncertainty. While I think it's unquestionable that the path leading from Caja negra (Black Box, 2006) to Los muertos (The Dead, 2014) is the trajectory of a single writer, it's also obvious that this writer has found ways to change direction and heed the road signs from a space and a language that are constantly shifting.

From the very beginning — starting with Caja negra or even earlier, since a complete appreciation of Bisama's work should take into account the articles compiled in Zona cero (2003) and the sometimes incendiary, other times compassionate, always unpredictable literary criticism that he published in the Chilean media over many years — Bisama has been a writer who seems willing to blend everything together, to dissent from official, accepted divisions and combinations, and perhaps that's why his early work was received to some degree as an experimental, fragmentary literature, full of gestures toward pop culture (mostly cinema and music). All of that is undeniable, as was (is) the enjoyment: Bisama seemed to delight in composing those lists, in using unprecedented settings (from the beginning, his work dealt with spaces that hadn't figured in Chilean literature before — the space of the provinces, for one, but from the experience of the people who grew up there in the eighties), and especially in the proliferation of stories within stories.

At this point, following in the sacred custom of the Chilean literary establishment — to disqualify out of hand anything that sounds new, anything that threatens the status quo, anything that obliges us to view Chilean literature as a book in a state of permanent revision — there were some who objected that in order to understand Bisama's books, a reader needed to recognize countless obscure references, that Bisama talked about an inaccessible and improbable world. I think, on the other hand, that those books launched into orbit heretofore unseen representations of Chilean society: to silence those novels of Bisama's was a more or less underhanded way to silence that world, to impede the explosion of voices tuned to a different register; voices that, like the voices of the dead in the Spoon River Anthology, speak in a chorus but without hiding their differences, without appealing to some kind of homogeneity, without normalizing themselves to cover over the fissures of History.

Originally published in 2010, Dead Stars is an apparently very different novel from the ones Bisama had published before, particularly for its elegiac, disillusioned tone, for its acidity, for the hypnotic sadness that runs through its pages. The nineties are shown here the way they were for our generation, the people who were children during one dictatorship and who grew up under another one, less obvious, but searing and corrosive all the same: Pinochet was still in power, directing everything by remote control, and Chilean leaders, making an enormous effort to hide their fear, seemed determined to demonstrate that nothing was happening, that everything was all right, that Chile had been cured, overnight, of all its wounds, that we should be making champagne toasts to celebrate a reconciliation that is absurd and impossible (still). This is a harsh book about the legitimacy of pain, about everyday violence, about the moment when not even love is a refuge, that final utopia you can grasp hold of.

I think that in Álvaro Bisama's books — like those of Alejandra Costamagna or Carlos Labbé, among other generationally linked authors — a crucial problem of our generation is dramatized: the vacillation between "I" and "we"; in short, the desire to construct a genuine collective story. It's no wonder, then, that Bisama's most recent book, Ruido, is written in the first person plural, and that Los muertos—his book of short stories just published in Chile — can be understood as a series of dramatic monologues where the characters from Caja negra or Música marciana allow the camera to approach in the closest of close-ups. I mean: at this point Bisama has not written one or two good books, but rather an entire literature, and we his readers are thankful not to know where he's headed. I'm sure that he himself doesn't know, in fact, because like all true writers, he writes to discover, not to confirm previously held ideas: to write is, for Bisama, a dangerous, enjoyable, and radical adventure.

— Alejandro Zambra

Dead Stars

For Carla

This is not a love song

This is not a love song

This is not a love song

This is not a love song

John Lydon, Public Image Ltd.

1

We'd be down in the port at the Hesperia café, 8:30 in the morning. Talking about whatever. She'd be chain-smoking, and I would shred the skin of my lips with my teeth. Those nervous habits were all we had left in those days, when the Laguna Verde forests were on fire and the wind from the south blew the black smoke over the hills on the horizon. With that dark sky hanging over the port, I couldn't help but think how those ashes floating in the air were like the ashes from concentration camp ovens or the flecks of human skin an atomic bomb leaves behind. We were devastated. Even before she opened that newspaper, we were done for. What we had, our life together, was coming to an end. We would head to the Hesperia to pass the time while we waited for offices to open so we could begin whichever formality of our separation was slated for that day. Nothing to say, nothing to say to each other; we'd order peach juice, cappuccinos, or just water, and we'd sit in silence for hours or minutes, looking at the photos hanging on the wall — a series that showed a ship going down in open water. Sometimes we bought newspapers and divided up the pages while we made small talk, hoping to kill time and trying to ignore our reflection in the gigantic mirrors behind the bar, where a dark and twisted version of ourselves looked back at us, mocking us from an alternate world where we — that couple sunk in a silence barely contained by monosyllables — would leave the bar, desperate, and go have sex in some flea-ridden hotel on Calle Chacabuco. But that happened in the mirror world, of which we knew nothing beyond what we could see: a reflection we avoided out of shyness or shame, taking refuge in the assumption that it was not and would never be us, that it was just the illusion of an impossible life, a life that we would never know. All the same, we would stay in the Hesperia and talk about whatever, or reverentially read the newspaper's headlines in order to avoid mentioning what was happening to us in the final hours of our life together. And it worked. We weren't even angry, or ashamed. The time for recriminations was already past. It worked for us until that morning when she looked at the newspaper, started to cry, and then showed me a photo of a woman being escorted by two policemen.

2

Before she opened the newspaper, before the photo, before her story, she told me about the ending of a teen movie, where this character explodes and turns into a cockroach and then escapes through the bedroom window. She said the window was only a prop, there was nothing outside it: someone had painted a trompe l'oeil of stars in the night sky. The cockroach went running out there, headed for that false sky. In the room, someone was left screaming in a bed full of blood. Then there was a song with the line "Love is stronger than death." She said she'd become obsessed with that song. We talked about that while we killed time, waiting. About nothing important. We could do that for hours: talk about the meanderings of a song that wouldn't let itself be forgotten, fluorescent stars twinkling in a papier mâché sky, people covered in fake blood, lovers who turn into cockroaches. It worked, and we would lose ourselves in the inferno of details to avoid walking in the desert of the real. But it was precarious: a calm that lasted until she took a sip of hot coffee, opened and almost immediately closed The Valparaíso Star, and then started to cry. After a few minutes she calmed down. She didn't cry again, not even when — some time later — she finished telling me everything. First, she swallowed her tears and showed me the photo. She said, pointing at the page with her finger, pointing at the woman: I know her.

3

I know that girl, man. That's Javiera, she said. It's Javiera, she was a classmate of mine at the university. Javiera, she said, the one I told you about, the communist. Javiera from the Youth League. I nodded. I pretended to understand. I knew part of the story, details she had told me with no clear connection, details that were nothing but shards and loose ends of other people's lives that she finally made sense of that morning: the article and the photo were a kind of gate that she could open or close, but either way she would catch glimpses of her own past, a past I barely knew about because it had been buried someplace in a port city where the sky had yet to turn black and there was no ashy wind to breathe in, a decade and a half before.

4

She said: You're going to have to listen to me, you owe it to me; we're going to spend the whole morning on this shit.

5

It starts just like that: with an image. The two of them sitting together. In the first row. By chance. I stayed in the back. It was the first day of classes. I didn't talk to anyone. They talked to each other. Maybe that's what defined everything. The first minute of the years to come, the laws of attraction that would embrace them, the solitude of the rooms they would inhabit and the desert they would flee to, the volume of the gray sea's murmur, like a dream of silence. I don't remember what class it was. I don't have such a good memory. I don't even remember what our majors were. I don't know if majors are important here, or jobs — any of the things that define us in the eyes of others. What matters is the beginning, which I can't help but fill in with lies or assumptions as I tell you about it, as I wonder whether that was the decisive day, if it was then that they began this thing that is only now ending. Because I can't see any of that, she said. The past is a place the light doesn't reach, she said. I don't know if they looked at each other, if they recognized the probability of some connection, she said. Then the professor made us introduce ourselves. I remember I said my name and that I lived in Viña. That was all I could say about myself. It was the only thing I was certain of. I remember that Donoso said: I'm from Antofagasta. I remember that Javiera said: I lived in exile and I came back last year. I remember that Donoso was dark-skinned and looked almost hairless. Later I would learn he was eighteen years old. I remember I had read that year, on a beach close to Quintero, a novel by Agatha Christie. It was also the year after the president who smiled like an idiot ended up crying on TV. I remember that Donoso wore a white school shirt, and Javiera was dark and had a few white hairs and wore glasses and was short and very thin and that she wore lilac-colored clothes, faded hand-dyed blouses. I can't remember how I wore my hair that day.

6

I didn't know you remembered so many details, I said. I didn't either, she said.

7

She said: It all comes back at once, it all comes back so suddenly. The photo opens the door. My memory is the room. I have a head full of furniture. They're wandering around in there now. They — Javiera and Donoso — are a multitude, and I can hardly contain them. But I'd rather that than go on crying; although maybe that's exactly what I should do, man: cry until I learn to accept it all. I can't. Maybe you think I'm crazy, she said. I looked at her and bit my bottom lip. The spit burned my mouth. I took a breath. I ordered two more coffees. I looked at the photo in the paper again: a woman with white hair, a woman getting into a patrol car. No, I said.

8

But it doesnt look like her. The woman in the photo doesn't look like her. It's her, but it isn't. In the photo she looks old. The photo doesn't do her justice. That downcast, lost look — it's not hers. Javiera used to talk so loudly that sometimes you'd think she was shouting. The next day we heard half her life in five minutes, when she asked us to stay after class to choose a student representative. Of course, we immediately elected her. That day, she told us she'd been expelled in the eighties. She told us how the rector had called for her head and she was kicked out of school. She left the country. The rest of us had all been just kids back then. None of our life stories could compete with hers. What could I talk about? My story was the same as everyone else's. I'd gone to a public high school, I had a boyfriend I cared about, I secretly listened to Iron Maiden, I read mystery novels or watched TV until I fell asleep. That was it: a handful of things that had nothing to do with each other, that lacked any kind of story. When that class was over, they left the room together. I walked behind them. I don't know what I thought of Javiera that day. I don't know if I liked her or not, if I believed her or not. I remember that someone had hung an MIR poster of Miguel Enríquez's face in the hallway. I didn't know who he was, or that he was dead. Enríquez's face was in black and white, in profile: suspended in action, weightless, frozen like a saint, the deceased man's portrait on top of a coffin, a distant relative who only appears in a photo from another era. Javiera stood there looking at it. For a second I thought they might know each other. She said something out loud, but I don't remember what. I don't think any of it mattered much to me until a week later, when she invited me to a Youth League meeting.

9

I went to the meeting. I listened to the way she spoke. I don't remember what she said, but I noticed her fervor. I noticed how Javiera embraced and enveloped the others, the way she looked everyone in the eye and waited for an answer. I realized she had been pretty. That once she had been beautiful. Girls pick up on these things. We pick up on beauty and its desertion; beauty had been there, but now there were only her facial features: her small black eyes, her hair falling over her face in a certain way, her mouth's way of breaking open into a smile. A losing battle, beauty. We women can see that, but we try not to because it's like looking at ourselves in a mirror, she said. Like looking at ourselves in a pool and seeing an image from the future in the water, she said. And Javiera provoked that feeling. Or at least she provoked it in me when I was eighteen: déjà vu, a warning about the person I could become. But it was only that, a warning, an illusion, because I knew I could never speak like her, I would never talk about or hold on to things with her conviction. I would never have that capacity for immediate empathy, that certainty of being able to achieve some kind of connection with another person. But I was aware of her broken beauty, yes. I was aware of it and I forgot about it almost immediately.

10

It still hadn't become a story, it wasn't anything at that point, she said. Just fragments of tedium in classrooms, how cold the campus was in the mornings when the ocean wind beat against the buildings; a wind that I thought couldn't come from the sea, only from the cemetery. Sometimes it was refreshing. It was all quite logical. It was logical that Javiera would invite me to a Youth League meeting, just as it was logical that I would accept and thank her and attend. Of course, I have no memory of what was discussed at that meeting, only of what came afterward. Javiera related the other half of her life story to Donoso and me — Donoso had also gone to the meeting — in a bar a block from campus. She told us she had a son who lived in Ñuñoa, and that she had been tortured by the CNI. That's what she told us: They took me prisoner two days after they expelled me from the university. She described the days she spent in the cell; she told us that they raped her, that they applied electricity to her vagina and her breasts, that they had her on the "grill" for hours, that she got lice and crabs, that one of her torturers became obsessed with her, that it was a classmate who had snitched on her, and that the classmate was dead now; she insinuated that it was all vaguely connected to the attempt on Pinochet's life. She told us that the pain was so bad she felt like someone was yanking her guts out with their bare hands; that at the end of a week in that cell she was practically a cadaver, a mass of flesh and sores; that her hair fell out, that it turned white, that her body began to rot. She told us that she didn't talk, she didn't say a word, she didn't give anyone up. She told us they released her after a week, that they could have slit her throat, they could have opened her belly and thrown her into the sea or into a volcano in a sack weighted down with rubble. She told us that it all ended when they put her into a car, her clothes stinking of piss and blood and shit, and tossed her out in an empty lot close to an abandoned hospital in Recoleta. That she thought, in the middle of the nightmare, that she was in hell. That when she woke up, some people from the nearby shantytown picked her up. That she left the country. That abroad she got married almost immediately and had a son. That she returned in 1990.

11

Javiera told us all this as if it were a morality play. Javiera's life was a kind of fable: the life of a saint, a warrior, a heroine, she said. It had its happy moments — abandoned lovers in European capitals, jokes lost in translation, moments of unforgettable danger. Her life was a novel. I read it as I listened to her, but until now I never knew how it ended. Because this is the end, right now: it's what's written here in The Star. But back then I had no way of knowing, no way to guess the ending. It was getting late, so I went home. They stayed at the bar. By the next week, they were already together. Donoso told me after class one day that the courtship had been quick. That it all happened that night when I left and they stayed at the bar; that what happened later, the life that closed in around them, it all started with the beers they drank in that shadowy tavern, with the way she seduced him by telling him about her life in hiding, leaving him with no other option than the desperate gesture of brazenly displaying his youth. Almost immediately a language installed itself between them, a language that others — me, the people at the bar, fellow Party members, the rest of the city — at first saw only as a university routine, like private lessons in political education. Years later, in a hotel that was crumbling to pieces, Donoso would talk to me about those first weeks together as one of the few things that hadn't fallen apart, like the beams of a house they never managed to finish a single part of. They didn't have time, they wouldn't have time. Because Donoso told me that they'd known right away and they'd had no choice but to throw themselves into each other's arms without thinking, with no respite of any kind, no moderation.

12

I said: How did the Party take their relationship? They didn't like it, she said. They forgave Javiera, just like they sidestepped the fact that she was almost forty years old and still assigned to the Youth League. For a while they just let her be. There were whispers, I guess. Maybe Javiera went to the Organizing Committee and they asked her some questions. I don't know any more than that. I guess for some people it was a scandal, but she busted her ass for the Party, she'd built her life around it. They had to forgive her. She knew people in the Central Committee, in Santiago. Her husband was someone's friend or relative. Because Javiera was married, or divorced, but she never talked about that life, she acted like it didn't exist. Also, she'd been tortured. That gave her weight. It gave her moral authority. She followed in the footsteps of Gladys Marín, that type of provincial Stalinism, a port city Stalinism. Javiera could be forgiven for a slip-up, she said. Javiera had waged war and she had won the war. She'd come out of it alive. I said: I guess she didn't tell you much about their sex life. She said: Sometimes she did. I didn't want to know, but Javiera would talk. She, who lived in secrecy about almost everything, would let things slip, she'd go into detail. She liked to talk about that, about the kid she got it on with when she went home.

13

They took it seriously. There was no going back. It was never just a fling for them. They kept it secret for a while. At first they only told a few people close to them, but later they told their families. He moved in with her. It was Donoso who told me. I didn't know what to say. She conferred over the phone with her son, who was in grade school in Ñuñoa. She said she wouldn't be back in Santiago for a while. There were shouts and sobs on both ends of the line, and then a silence that lasted an entire day. Donoso called his mother. She was stunned, silent. His father, up north, told him that starting that very instant his monthly allowance would be cut off, because if he wanted to play grown up and have a woman, he could very well support himself on his own. Let's just see how that works out for you, he said. They tried; they survived as best they could on the meager salary the Party paid her. That detail's not irrelevant. The Party gave Javiera money, they paid her as a functionary. The Party paid her expenses. A minimum stipend, just enough to eat, to live day-to-day and work toward the revolution, she said.

14

So, while the revolution was incubating, they tried to live off of that salary. Donoso got an unemployment loan. They adopted a little cat that ran away across the rooftops, she said. It was a brown tomcat, really skinny. Donoso told me the cat got out of the house while he was reading Marta Harnecker. Javiera went on working for the Party. Sometimes she would go out and not come back until the next morning. Meetings. He would wait up for her, looking at things she'd hung on the walls: a photo of Neruda in hiding, crossing the cordillera on horseback; a poster of Che she'd brought from her house in Ñuñoa; a reproduction of that photo of naked Vietnamese children running toward the camera, fleeing an explosion of napalm. Donoso told me that sometimes while he waited he would masturbate furiously, to help him fall asleep, she said. Sometimes in his dreams an army of Vietnamese people in flames would chase him through the streets of Antofagasta, she said.

15

One day Donoso said to me: We didn't have enough to live on, so I got a job as a waiter in Viña. He went from the hills of Valparaíso to Viña by bus every day to work in one of those pasta restaurants on Calle San Martín. He worked there four nights a week. Javiera came and went from the university, and he would go to some of the meetings. The tips at the restaurant were good, she said. Donoso said that Admiral Merina came in one time and they spit in his food. After work he would meet up with Javiera in some diner and they'd drink beer, or they'd order a stout and egg if it was cold out. Then sometimes she would head off to another meeting. He was in love. When she got back from wherever she was, she would wake him up to screw. They screwed a lot; they were in heat. She told him she'd never had so much sex in her life. He had never had sex before. Donoso told me once: That's how I spent my nineteenth year — in that apartment, screwing, going to class in the morning, and praying to God that my beard would grow while I listened to the freezing wind lash against the windows.

16

You remember Valparaíso back then? she said. I said: Yes, the whole city was in ruins.

17

I went to see them in that apartment, she said. It was in Quebrada Verde. Half the apartments in the building belonged to the same owner, and the furniture was passed down from one tenant to the next. Several of my classmates lived in that place over the years; from those brick balconies the bay looked miniscule, just a model made of lights that created the illusion it was there within arm's reach. I remember the way Javiera and Donoso had decorated the place: the Vietnamese children, Che, some family pictures of hers, and that painting of a naked woman next to a fetus shaped like the sun. Some art school chick had given it to them at a party. It was horrible. Their furniture was wicker. There was a little TV and a stereo that played Silvio Rodríguez cassettes or salsa records. This was during the time when salsa was popular around the university thanks to those Rubén Blades songs with lyrics about the disappeared. I went over there several times to do homework. We would drink Nescafe and eat scrambled eggs while we listened to salsa, and then I would go back home. They would ask me to stay, but I never wanted to. That was my trick. To go. To flee. To get out of there, go downtown, get on a bus.

18

I said: I never learned to dance. Sorry, but I never listened to salsa. I hate cumbia and all that shit. I ordered another coffee. She lit her umpteenth cigarette. We weren't going anywhere until she finished talking. She answered me with the hint of a smile. She took a breath. The roof of my mouth burned. I tried to hold on to her every move, as she told me about these other people's lives. You know me, I said. I never learned to dance, I repeated.

19

The eighties were over; that apartment was their mausoleum. But not just the apartment. The whole campus was the same way. I still remember the architecture. The cement buildings. The wide hallways. The cold classrooms. The lights that didn't work. The almost complete absence of wood. The monumental feeling of it, like an abandoned convent. The distorted silhouettes reflected on the floor, as if the years had turned the tiles opaque. The walls of the bathrooms where the thin coats of paint couldn't cover the graffiti. The images on the walls inspired by Mexican muralists. In those years members of the MIR were still kicking around there, humanists who sold tin trinkets in the halls, dissidents from Trotskyite parties no one would ever hear about again, brothers of dead Front members, people who had been expelled in '73 and were now trying to finish a degree. The university was truly the museum of a revolution that never came, a resistance that had been slaughtered in the trenches. Sometimes I remember that place, I dream about it, about those motionless people in the hallways. Those faces have a statuesque stillness, the stone rictus of a monument, the murky contentment of going nowhere. Does that seem strange to you? Not to me, man. The echo within those walls is the echo of footsteps, someone walking among inanimate objects that send the sound back with chilling clarity. Sometimes those objects move, but it's just reflex. There's no life there. It's only the spasm that animates a fading body, the muscles and nerves that twitch automatically until someone cuts the electricity or wakes from a dream. She said: That's the only way a time machine could possibly work — a voyage to a frozen world, as if the entire structure of the place were set on becoming a theme park, stubbornly insisting on remembering that hour of knives and bombs, the day of the dead, the decade of the dead, the century of the dead. Because it worked, all of it, she said. It all animated the machine. It all gave the place an air of false familiarity. An invisible weight that danced the dance of a predictable mathematics; tapes that repeat the same words, the slogans and shouts in the air from bodies that open and close their eyes, talking to other bodies that do and say the same things because they have no room to do anything else but nod and answer with more of the same. In a way that's all their lives are: speaking in ready-made phrases, imitating something they can never regain, disintegrating into an epic retelling of the past and a life lived dangerously, throwing themselves into the suffering and the fear, into something that disappeared at the exact moment the previous decade ended and all the danger was wiped away, man; like even though we were late to the party and we were denied that vertigo, we were forced to pay homage to the fire, to listen to other people's war stories because that was all we had that they'd let us keep: the stories of other people's battles, she said. That tragedy told like a volatile fable, inscrutable in its commonplaces. Because the past was made of old light, she said. The past was a liturgy that excluded us from its miracle, she said. Because we had no share in the tragedy, and we had no right to ask for anything. When Javiera talked, that's how I felt. I felt like we were left out, like all we could do was listen to her, because she had assumed the duty of telling me, without ever saying so out loud, that our lot was only wooziness and hangover. The time of blood and vertigo was over. Our fate was to sit on the floor and listen in silence to the war stories. And so, when I went to Party meetings, I stayed quiet and listened to the words of others, the slogans of others, the lives of others, she said.

20

She said: I was never active in the Party. Javiera was the star. Sometimes Donoso would speak up to support her. He referred to her as his comrade. He emphasized "his" in a way that made it difficult to know if he meant it in terms of the Party or something more. The meetings were in a big room at the federation offices. Someone had painted an imitation of a work by Guayasamín on one wall. It was awful. Sometimes I'd stop listening and look at that indigenous man with his face resting in his hands as he stared at the horizon with all the sadness in the world. Some weekends my boyfriend would be home alone and I'd go over to his house. I told my mother I was staying at a girlfriend's. We'd watch VHS movies and then have sex in his parents' bed while they were off at their country house. Then he would ask me how things were going at school. I would tell him: Good. We'd been together since our junior year of high school. Everything's good. Uneventful. That's what I'd tell him. I kept quiet about how tired I felt. I didn't tell him I went to Communist Party meetings, where I would sit without talking, frozen stiff, rubbing my knees with my hands. I didn't tell him about my classmates. I didn't tell him about Javiera and Donoso. I didn't tell him: I went to their house and it seemed so small and so dark I thought it must be impossible for someone to live there, with the cold knocking at their door every night. No. I didn't tell him that. I just stayed with him and acted like everything was normal, like I was still the same person and nothing had changed. I didn't tell him about the indigenous man in the painting, or the stories I'd heard, about a man whose face I'd never seen but whose life I knew by heart they talked about it so often — how he'd fallen, riddled with bullets, in crossfire with the CNI ten years earlier; about how Javiera had told us in the diner that once she thought she'd seen one of her torturers in the street, and she'd sat down on a bench in Plaza Victoria to cry hysterically while the fucker walked away down Condell with his family. I didn't say anything because I didn't understand it very well myself, she said. Because I myself couldn't even repeat what I heard. Because I didn't know what to do with all that, with those brand new but foreign things that were too big for me. Because the world was too big for me, man. When I was eighteen and in my first year of university I felt like the world was too big for me, and women like Javiera made me feel like a kid, they made me feel like I was shit, like there was something I wasn't good enough for and I never even knew what the hell it was, she said.

21

Or maybe I did. Maybe it was all about living a double life. Like everyone does at some point. I never learned how to do it. I never broke in quite that way. I never figured out how to dissociate myself. I never learned to multiply myself into a thousand masks and live a double or triple life in that port town that was falling to pieces, she said.

22

I didn't answer. Outside the café, the vendors were starting to set up their stalls in the street. A man sat down alone at the Hesperia's bar and ordered a beer. It was ten in the morning. I looked at one of the photos of the shipwreck. The image was ambiguous: the sinking ship could also have been a submarine rising to the surface. Or a whale. I remembered one time when I went to the fishing cove at Quintay and I walked along the abandoned whaling boat there. No one was around. What was now completely abandoned had once been a blood-red sea, full of the cadaver smell of giant dead whales. The image of the shipwreck reminded me of all that: the phantom pestilence I never smelled, that abandoned shipyard, the horrible feeling that what we'd had together was broken beyond repair.

23

She swallowed what was left of her coffee and said: That life lasted two years for Javiera and Donoso. They lived happily for two years and then it all went to hell. They didn't break up, but something went rotten. I was there when everything fell apart. That was my good fortune, or bad. To be there, walking along behind them.

24

She said: Once I heard a Belgian woman give a talk about that at a conference. About what it means to be a witness. You know what she said? She said it was impossible to write any kind of testimony, because the very idea is superfluous and false; because the things we remember about our past, about other people's lives, are only ground-up fragments, disjointed moments that we try to line up and stick together to take the place of experience, so ultimately they become experience, she said. But when that experience verges on horror, when that experience is pure catastrophe, the lives of others materialize as the background of a picture, blurry, and they appear exactly the way Javiera does in that newspaper photo now, turned into a diffuse silhouette, turned into a shadow of herself, she said. An illusion. A ghost. So, really, the idea of a witness is completely absurd. Because repeating a story does nothing for us, it's like fumbling around in the mud, she said, and then she added: Really, I don't know if that was what the Belgian woman was trying to say. Maybe she said the opposite. That it's the only possible effort you can make, even though it's useless. Maybe the true message was lost in translation, in the voice of someone who was trying to capture what the words said in the exact moment they were pronounced, but it didn't come out right, the translator wasn't fast enough and tripped over every step, every syllable. I don't know if this makes sense, she said. Yes, it does, I said. She said: I haven't felt like this in years, but right now this is hitting me in the pit of my stomach and knocking the wind out of me and if I don't tell you I think it will make me sick, it'll give me cancer or something like that, my body will be poisoned by all this shit. That Belgian lady didn't mention that part. She didn't say that in the end it's the witness who swallows other people's toxins, who is poisoned by memories. That's why the witness has to talk about them, to get it all out, because that venom is slow and silent. It kills. It's a time bomb. I didn't know it then. But that's how I feel now. Poisoned by other people's stories, by other people's lives. When I think about those two, that's how I feel: I feel like the witness to something that no one cares about. That's why I haven't stopped talking, that's why I'm not going to stop talking, she said.

25

I didn't tell her that I did know parts of that story, I didn't tell her I'd seen Javiera and Donoso in some photos when I went through her old albums trying to get a look at her face back before we'd met. It was another life. I wasn't there. But I couldn't tell her anything, ask her anything. It wasn't my place. I looked over at the reflection of our life in common, the reflection of my head rising up behind the Hesperia's bar. That would be one of the thousand things I'd never tell her. I let her talk among the mirrors and the shipwrecks, frozen in the half-light of the deserted Hesperia café.

26

She went on: That period didn't last long. Or it did, if you look at it a different way. Javiera failed almost all of her classes. We always used to put her name on our assignments. That way she'd come closer to passing her courses. I offered that gesture, as did Donoso, and Luisa, our classmate who was going out with Charly Alberti, the drummer from Soda Stereo, she said. You're fucking with me, I said. Seriously, that's what she said, she said she was Charly Alberti's girlfriend, that he was crazy about her and sometimes he'd sneak away to Chile in secret to see her. Donoso and I knew about it. No one else. Not even Javiera, unless Donoso told her. But I don't think he did. Donoso was very discreet. But that's what Luisa told us. Once when she was drunk she confessed, and it was all downhill from there. She was always telling us the gory details about her and Alberti. She told us they had spent the weekend in Reñaca, because he'd come by private jet to show her his new album. She told us her parents knew about it. That it had been hard to convince her father, who was a cop and an evangelical, but Alberti had done it. That he was serious about their relationship. That he had been respectful of her. That she was still almost a virgin. I don't know what she meant by that almost, but Donoso would hug her and sometimes she'd open her backpack and take out a giant album full of photos of Charly Alberti, a heavy folder full of concert memorabilia, posters from TV Grama and VEA, and newspaper clippings. There was only one photo of them together, Alberti and Luisa, taken in the hallway of a hotel.

27

Her: Aside from many other things, the past is that: a photo taken in a hotel we wish was our home — false photographs, proof of the life we never had.

28

She said: But it doesn't matter. The photo isn't important. What's important is Luisa's role in this, because it was with her that I saw Javiera and Donoso's relationship start to go to shit. Because, even though she was a facha right-wing conservative, she went with me to a party thrown by the Youth League in a typographical union close to Calle Colón. I don't know why we went. Maybe we just wanted to relax. Or maybe it was easier to go there than home after classes. I don't know. The fact is, we went. We killed time browsing thrift stores, and then we made ourselves up in the bathroom of a diner. Javiera and Donoso were at the party. We hadn't seen much of them that semester. Javiera was in the middle of an appeal, trying to get them to let her take a class for the third time, and Donoso was busy at the restaurant, she said. So I went with Luisa to the party. She complained because they weren't playing "Luna Roja," and she insisted that Alberti was coming to see her that weekend. That she wasn't going to drink too much because Alberti hated it when she drank, he detested drugs and alcohol. Of course, the party was full. I was drinking beer. I didn't see Javiera anywhere. In the throng of people, I saw Donoso with a bottle of pisco in his hand. There were a few bands that played Andean music, and a couple Pablo Milanés clones. In between the bands, people danced. The party was fun, if you like that kind of thing. I didn't really like it, but it wasn't terrible. This was just before the mayoral election in Valparaíso. Back then, before the Spiniak case, that fat guy Pino was way ahead. At the university, someone said Javiera was going to run for councilwoman. I don't know if it was just a rumor. It was probably true. They would put any university leader up for election; they'd send whoever it was to campaign in villages out in the middle of nowhere, like Catemu or Puchuncaví. It seemed like an obvious thing to us that Javiera would be a candidate, she said. So that's how things were at that party: Luisa talking about Charly Alberti, Donoso drinking alone, Javiera nowhere to be found. The last thing I saw before disaster struck was this: Donoso sitting in a plastic chair clutching a bottle of straight pisco. That was the cut-off point, maybe. That was the moment when I lost sight of them, because after Luisa went to the bathroom she didn't come back, and after a while someone told me: Your friend is in the bathroom crying. I went to find her. The bathroom was disgusting, but there was Luisa, sitting on the wet floor, hysterical. She had a piece of paper in her hand. A newspaper page, she said. Luisa was holding a page from a newspaper or a magazine and sobbing hysterically. No, the fucker can't do this to me, he can't do this, Luisa said. I hugged her and she repeated it, he can't fuck me over like this, he can't do this to me, the motherfucker, she was saying, sniffling. I hugged her and she was pretty drunk and then I saw that page in her hand. There was Charly Alberti with his fiancée, a model. That's why Luisa was crying. Because of that page she found on the floor of the bathroom or in the hallway. A social page, a page with the kind of short articles that close every edition of a paper. That loose page, lost at the party, a little bit of trash just like the bit of trash you have in your hands now that shows Javiera with white hair. It's like someone let these articles loose on the wind, waiting for someone else to see them and break down, just like I'm doing now, man, just like Luisa broke down then.

29

The past is always a newspaper page left behind on the ground, she said.

30

She said: But then something happened. While I was hugging Luisa, we heard noises coming from the men's bathroom. Shouts. We heard something break. A mirror. A woman's voice screeching: Let him go, you asshole, let him go! Then more voices. Let him go, man, you're going to kill him. Let him go. Luisa stopped crying. I got up from the floor. There was a cumbia song playing. We walked out of the women's bathroom. The door to the men's room was across the hall. The paper with the photo of Charly Alberti's wedding stayed behind on the floor. At that moment several guys shoved Donoso out of the bathroom. He fought back, legs kicking. His shirt was torn. They threw him to the ground in the middle of the dance floor. They kicked him. We watched as they carried him to the door and threw him down the stairs. The cumbia never stopped. And then they finally played Soda Stereo. It all lasted one minute, two minutes, she said. It lasted for half of one song. We couldn't do anything, say anything. Then, Javiera came running from the bathroom. She followed Donoso out. She didn't see us. We stood there, paralyzed. Then, the same guys who had kicked Donoso out went back to the bathroom and hauled out a guy, unconscious, his face covered in blood; it seemed like he was someone important. I'd seen him around campus. He was always surrounded by members of the Youth League, and he always sat in front at the events they held in the quad. He never spoke. The others conferred with him in whispers. But now the same people who talked to him in whispers were carrying him like a sack. His mouth was destroyed. I think he was missing teeth. I guess those teeth were scattered around the bathroom and covered in urine, dirty water, and blood, she said. And the guy wasn't responding. I guess they put him in a taxi and took him to the hospital. Luisa didn't say anything. I remember the two of us just stood there outside that bathroom, staring at the tiles. More than the wounds or the guy's face, I remember those tiles, just that: the dragons drawn in black and white on the floor. Those tiles were worn out, chipped by the passage of time, cracked. The bathroom at my house had similar ones. I dreamed about those dragons for a week. Finally I said: What happened? I don't know, Luisa answered.

31

But I do know. What happened was that everything went to shit, she said. I said: It's a law of nature. When everything goes to shit, someone's teeth wind up on a bathroom floor. There's no turning back. No turning back.

32

On Monday, neither Donoso nor Javiera went to class. We didn't see them for a week. The rumor was that Javiera had kissed that guy on the dance floor. The rumor was that they had gone to the men's room together. Rumor was that Donoso followed them. Rumor was that Javiera and Donoso had had a fight that afternoon. Rumor was that they had broken up. Rumor was that she and the guy had been smoking marijuana. Rumor was that it wasn't marijuana, they were doing cocaine. Rumor was that they weren't just kissing, they were in the stall screwing standing up. Rumor was that Donoso went into the bathroom drunk and grabbed the guy by the lapels of his jacket and threw him against the mirror. Rumor was that he broke the guy's face against the sink. Rumor was that he didn't say anything to the guy, and Javiera couldn't stop him. That the violence was soundless and had to do with the straight pisco. El trago lo pone mal a uno, as Los Electrodomésticos say, Drink will do you wrong. That's what we heard on Monday, but maybe it was all lies, repeated hearsay, fractured interpretations of events that very well may not have happened, she said.

33

Oh, and from one day to the next, Luisa stopped talking to me. Javiera took a semester off so she wouldn't flunk out. Donoso kept on going to classes as always. Alberti got married and lived happily ever after in places unknown.

34

She said: At the end of that year, I overheard someone in the hallways say that Javiera was pregnant.

35

I was turning into a punk, she said. Or, I was listening to punk. I don't know why. I listened to bands that sang about the end of the world, about destroying capitalist society. Bands with singers who looked strung out onstage, addicted to who knows what. Bands I listened to on cassette in my room with the headphones turned up all the way so I'd go deaf. Bands I listened to alone, because I'd broken up with that boyfriend I'd been with forever, because I didn't give a shit about university, because things had happened that semester that were more interesting than Javiera and Donoso's issues. Things like I took a high school friend to get an abortion, and sat there in the waiting room looking at back issues of Caras magazine. Things like, I could no longer stand talking to my parents. Things like, I stopped reading books or going to the movies, I would just go straight home from the university and lock myself up as if my body were some kind of trunk with no key. Things I never told you about, because those years of our lives seem like shadows of a place we don't want to visit ever again. That's why I listened to punk, she said. That's why I dreamed every night about the end of civilization, about the extermination of human life, about total anarchy; I dreamed that the port and the hills faded away into absolute darkness. That's what that music made me think about. That's what I imagined, and I thought about the mouth of the guy Donoso had pulverized and I imagined the explanations Javiera must've had to give to the Party; I thought about how one day, as we were leaving class, someone told me that she wasn't a candidate anymore, that the party leadership was wary of her, that she had fallen from grace. But I forgot about all that and devoted myself to listening to punk rock on my walkman while I wandered around downtown Viña, which was packed with Argentine tourists, as if the whole city was nothing more than fake scenery, the set of an old monster movie. That summer, my parents went on vacation and I decided to stay home. I rented movies, but I didn't finish any of them. I had forgotten about the future; the future had run off, it had evaporated. In the mid-nineties in Chile, at the beginning of the era of Frei Junior, with Pinochet still alive, there was no future; everything was stagnation, the boredom of every day the same as the last. And the only thing left to us, left to me, she said, was to anesthetize myself, dope myself up with music played by people so damaged they could only express themselves through noise, people who were nothing but screams, people made of terror, she said. That's what I spent that summer doing, listening to punk and wandering around a city full of foreigners.

36

And you? she said. What did you do that summer? she asked me. Nothing. Or everything. I drank Tres Palos cognac mixed with Free Cola, I said. I took a pair of old jeans and cut them off and made myself some shorts. I read González Vera, a man who wrote about an empty village called Alhué, I said. I spent entire nights drinking with my friends on the train tracks in my town; it wasn't empty, but it still seemed like Alhué. I wanted to get away from there but I couldn't. I didn't go anywhere. I stayed right there. I played pinball. I watched horror movies. I expected nothing because I myself was nothing, I said.

37

She said: You know what Donoso did? Donoso did something really heavy metal. He left. He disappeared. He went back to Antofagasta. He couldn't do it anymore. He left Javiera in the apartment and got on a bus heading north. That's what he told me in March. He watched the fireworks in the port and the next day he bought his ticket. He didn't say a word to Javiera. She was two months pregnant, and her sister had come from La Ligua to see her. There was a possibility that her son might come, from Ñuñoa. So Donoso got on a bus and went back to his parents' house. He told me how, on that beat-up old bus, he dreamed he was travelling by plane. He imagined a flight he'd never been on. While he looked out at the dry desert, he tried to pretend he was in the air, and that he could watch from the window as the aircraft banked and one of its wings brushed the surface of the waves leaving a wake of foam on the black water. That was what he remembered most. That aerial image that had never existed. He told me he'd left without warning. That he hadn't left a note. That he hadn't even brought his things with him. He told me he hadn't spoken to Javiera, that he'd stopped calling her, that he thought about her every single minute. He told me his parents hadn't wanted to take him in. His father opened the door, then shut it right away. He stayed at a friend's house. His friend still had the same Metallica posters on the wall that he'd had two years earlier, before Donoso left the city. His mother called him there. They met for lunch in a Chinese restaurant downtown. The heat was unbearable. Donoso missed the weather in Valparaíso. His mother asked him what he wanted. She asked him what he'd been doing with his life. He hadn't called in almost a year. He'd decided to stop when his father had insulted Javiera over the phone. His mother asked if he was still with her. Donoso said no. He said it was over. That it was all finished. She said he could come home again. He accepted. He spent that January and that February sleeping at his parents' house. He tried to read, but couldn't finish anything. The words didn't mean anything to him. He got a job as a clerk in a shop, down by the funeral parlors. When it wasn't too hot, he went to the market at the foot of the hill, on the edge of the pampas, to buy bootleg cassettes. Javiera never once called him. He slept with a classmate from high school after a party. The relationship lasted three days. She ended it. Every day, Donoso would go to work and then return to his parents' house. His mother told him he could start studying again next year. His father didn't speak to him, she said. They would eat in silence, with the television tuned to the news or the radio to a Nueva Ola station. Donoso thought he could get used to that life, she said. He dreamed about moving to the north, about watching his parents grow old, about meeting someone and getting married. He had dismissed the idea of being a father, he had forgotten about the fact that Javiera, in the middle of a fight two weeks before Christmas, had told him she was pregnant. He remembered how she'd thrown it in his face like one more tragedy after what had happened at the party, after the disaster he was making of her life. That's what she told him: You fucked up my life. When he was on the bus, she said, Donoso had sworn he would forget everything, he would erase his time in the port city from his memory. But it hurt too much, he said, I can't forget, I can't close my eyes. He started to miss Javiera. He started to imagine her in the apartment, coming and going from some indeterminate place. He cried alone in his room, he put a pillow over his mouth to drown out his sobs, he ground his teeth. He stopped caring about work. He stopped seeing his friend, the Metallica fan. He stopped listening to his mother; he noticed his father's silences, but instead of feeling tortured, he couldn't have cared less. One night, while his parents were watching the Viña Music Festival on TV, he started packing. At dawn he left the house and took a taxi to the bus terminal. He called his mother from there. He didn't tell me what she said. He waited for the bus that morning. He told me that once he was on the bus, he dreamed about a storm. When he woke up, he saw lightning out the window. He imagined that below him, on the pampa, a million hurricanes were gathering. When he reached the port, he took a local bus up into the hills. She hadn't changed the locks. She wasn't there. He waited for her in the dark. When she arrived, she saw him sitting there in the wicker chair. They embraced in the darkness, she said.

38

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.

39

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.

40

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.

41

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?

42

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.

43

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

44

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.

45

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.

46

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.

47

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.

48

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.

49

She said: I went into a hospital bathroom, drank some syrup, and went out into the street. I walked to Plaza Victoria. I sat down on a bench. I tried to picture what the boy was doing at the hospital. I wondered what he'd seen, that boy, wandering around the hospital wards unnoticed, like a ghost. I imagined he had witnessed operations, births, bullet extractions. Watched old people die connected to peeling tanks of oxygen, heard conversations between the nurses about their private lives. The boy had seen the urgency and fear of the waiting rooms, that tense silence that traverses the hallways. Perhaps the boy had found other children and teenagers like him, orphans or soon-to-be orphans, living inside time borrowed from the sickness of others, she said. I was paranoid, I hallucinated: the borrowed time turned them into a brotherhood, it made them act like a cult. I imagined them all dressed the same, like mourners at an Asian funeral. I hallucinated: all of them turned into phantoms in white, waiting for their relatives to die, getting through the in-between time as if they were ghost brides and ghost grooms who only knew a life of drifting from one end of the hospital to another, with steps like an ice-cold breeze that stands your hair on end. I hallucinated, she said, that those children had stopped speaking by choice, that their steps didn't make any noise on the surface of the tiles, that they didn't cast any shadows.

50

What do you think about that? she asked. Not much. Or a lot. That winter a teenager got lost in the hills on the outskirts of my town. I think I told you about it. I knew her, sort of. Really, I knew her older sister. I'd seen this chick, the one who got lost, at parties. She didn't drink. She didn't talk much. She was straight edge. She'd drawn an "X" on the back of her hand. Nothing more pathetic than being straight edge in the asshole of the world. Nothing braver than being straight edge in a place where no one even knows what that is. What happened: she ran away from home one night, crossed the train tracks, and continued through the north side of town until she got to the statue of the Virgin. She went up the hill, but then she kept on going. She went down the other side. I had always thought of the top of that hill as an inviolable border. But she went past it. It's not hard to explain why she did it. I've heard a few stories where the devil speaks to someone and calls him into his fold. That voice is inescapable; it overpowers your own conscience. You can't do anything but listen to it and follow its orders and wander off. Well, it could have been that voice, or voices, or something else, but the girl walked several kilometers in the dark through the hills at night. Her parents and her sister didn't realize she was gone until the next day. They called the school. No one knew anything. The girl went on walking all day. She hadn't taken any food with her. That winter temperatures dropped below zero. She was wearing a jean jacket, a black T-shirt, and some canvas tennis shoes. She didn't find the devil. She didn't find anything. The case never made the news. At some point she collapsed out there in the hills. The family didn't have any money; nobody cared. That whole drama played out in silence. It was just the case of a young country girl who disappeared in the valley. Things like that happen every day. She didn't leave a note, she didn't tell anyone. Two days later, a police helicopter spotted the body and called it in. She'd walked fifteen kilometers among the weeds and rabbit holes without getting anywhere. We went to her funeral. We weren't straight edge or anything, but we went. We knew her sister. So, while you were seeing shadowless children in a public hospital, people in my town were getting lost in the hills, and maybe the devil was talking to them, I said, biting my upper lip.

51

I would've liked to disappear like that too, but I didn't; I was never brave enough, she said. By the time I got up the courage, it was too late. I just stayed here, trapped between Valparaíso and Viña, she said. Then that desire passed. You came along.

52

I was still drinking syrup. Javiera was still with Donoso. She forgave him. They left the apartment in Playa Ancha and moved to a boarding house, just one room. She finally got kicked out of the university. She failed all her classes for the third time. The students' union tried to appeal, but to no avail. Javiera claimed she was being persecuted. Donoso went to talk with some of the professors. He told them what had happened. It was no use. No one took pity on them. The university refused to honor Javiera's course credits. I remember signing a petition, but nothing happened. In those months, everything was coming apart, everything was dissolving. Javiera kept on going to the university. She recovered from the beating. If you'd seen her with Donoso, you might think nothing had happened and they were still the same as before. That spring the police arrested some guys I knew who were with the MIR. They weren't my friends, but I had seen them at parties. We knew they were involved in something, but we didn't know what. At that point in the decade, everything was already over, everyone was defeated. Lots of groups had sputtered out, they'd splintered into ever smaller groups, taking their differences to such extremes that they became something arcane. Except for the communists and a couple of anarchists, there wasn't much left; it was a wasteland. Everyone was preoccupied with their own business. Because of that, we were surprised when they arrested the guys from the MIR who were still active. The report said they had placed some cherry bombs under some benches on Calle Prat and sprayed some graffiti, but that was it. They were sent to a high security prison under the Arms Control Act. They'd had some explosives and a few pistols left over from when the dinosaurs still roamed the Earth. They were in for three or four years. I remember seeing it on the news when they got arrested; they were in handcuffs, and they looked defeated. My father asked me if I knew them. I said I didn't. I said they studied at another campus. Then I went to the bathroom and downed a bottle of syrup. My fix. I felt panicked. I thought the whole city was about to come apart, turn into a bunch of icebergs floating in a frozen sea. That night I lay awake: I felt like my body was falling into the sheets as if into an abyss, as if I was stuffed full of earth and dry leaves. The next day I got my period, she said.

53

I spent that New Year's alone. I watched the fireworks from the stairs on Bellavista Hill. I drank a bottle of champagne. A few meters above me on the same stairs, an entire family embraced one another. An hour later, I walked back to Viña along Avenida España, which was full of confetti, empty and broken bottles, garbage, and a celebrating crowd. Along the water, large groups were dancing to cumbia. It took me an hour to get home. My parents had gone to Limanche to spend the holiday with an aunt. That night I called my ex-boyfriend, who I hadn't seen in two years; I was going to ask him to come over, but no one answered the phone. I fell asleep at five in the morning watching a vampire movie.

54

That was the year they lost their minds. They got kicked out of the boarding house after six months. Because of the noise. They were always either screwing or throwing dishes at each other. Or Javiera would cry nonstop for hours. Or Donoso would cry and bang his head against the wall. People would hear that noise: Donoso hitting his head against the wall to keep himself from laying a hand on her. I remember they'd left half their things behind in their old apartment because they didn't fit in the room. Eventually, they got rid of almost everything: the furniture, books, music, their clothes. Their life together was wringing them out. Suffocating them. Also, Javiera claimed she'd been cursed. That somebody had cast a spell on her, and she'd gone to a shaman to break it. I didn't know what to believe. Donoso didn't show anything: he still had that same half-smile that always faded into a grimace, that same fake expression of peace or resignation. He would walk into class right under the wire and disappear immediately afterward. Somebody told me he was selling marijuana, but I never dared to ask him about it. Sometimes Javiera would work the photocopier in the student union. It had been a long time since she'd gotten a steady income. But in general, she spent practically the whole day at the boarding house. Her only luxury was a small TV left behind by the student who'd lived in their room before, as part of his last month's rent. Javiera watched soaps. She told me that once: I spend the whole day watching soap operas, I know them all by heart. I like the Brazilian ones; the Colombian ones are weird, I don't get them. They're always shouting in the Venezuelan ones. They're always crying in the Argentine ones. I don't watch the Chilean ones. Of course, they started fighting every day. It started over a girl from school — no idea what she was studying — who moved in with them, some little prepubescent chick who, according to Javiera, had her eye on Donoso. Sometimes Javiera would show up at school and say: That bitch wants to fuck me over, she's always hitting on him. She's going to have to get past me first. I never found out if it was true. Once, Javiera locked the girl in the bathroom. Another time, she cornered her in the kitchen and threatened her with a knife. And then another time, Javiera tried to throw hydrochloric acid on the girl's hair. She called the cops. The cops came. Donoso was at the university. Javiera raised her voice with the cops. She said she'd been tortured, she wasn't afraid of them, they were a couple of sad sons of bitches. The cops arrested her. One of them slapped her to calm her down. Donoso went to get her out of holding that night. They went back to the boarding house. The other girl had left. She didn't want to see them again. Javiera and Donoso argued. The next day, the owner came and told them they had to leave.

55

The same thing happened in two or three other places. They got kicked out for those kinds of problems. Javiera would meet up sometimes with an anarchist group. She got pregnant again in November of that year. They ended up moving into a hotel close to the Congress building, she said.

56

I put my studies on hold, skipped that semester. I had an accident and I had to kick the syrup. I fell into an empty pool at a party. At the party, there was a Pixies song playing. That's when I fell in. Backwards. I don't remember being in the air. The syrup protected me. Everything went black almost immediately. When I regained consciousness, the song was still playing. It was saying: This monkey's gone to heaven. I hadn't gone anywhere. Someone was shouting in my ear. I broke a leg and an arm. They had to operate; they reconstructed my elbow. My parents got cable TV for me in my room. I could feel my withdrawal, but I swallowed it in silence. The details are unpleasant and I'd rather not remember them. Aches. Cold sweats. Vomiting. Insects pushing their way between my skin and my muscles. Voices from a planet inside my head. My stomach shrunk and my skin cracked open. I didn't shave for a good while. I let my hair grow into dreadlocks. It didn't seem to matter to anyone. I started a diary but I only scribbled numbers and doodles in it. I watched music videos all day. I got addicted to painkillers. I lost entire days. I didn't read anything. I got even thinner, she said. I barely spoke to my parents. Almost no one came to see me. I didn't leave the house for two months, except to take a taxi to the clinic. I watered the plants and waited for the apocalypse. From there, Viña seemed unreal to me. Valparaíso didn't exist, she said. It was a formless black stain, an unknown city. The pain had let up by then. Not having syrup made me feel weak, as if my body was only half of what it once was. As if I didn't have any organs and there was nothing under my skin except broken bones, she said. Nothing under my skin but emptiness. I regained my depth perception. I met a guy at the clinic. A forty-year-old man, a bank employee. I've told you a little about him. Separated from his wife. A fucking wreck. I also told you we slept together for a couple weeks. I never came. I told you that too. He would come to see me at my house when my parents left for work. He was on medical leave for depression. He also suffered from seizures and panic attacks. He asked me to be his girlfriend. He told me I was the only real thing in his life. I ended it with him right then. I told him nothing in my life seemed real. First came my slowly ebbing pain, sending deaf signals from my broken leg and my reconstructed elbow, and then came everything else, what you could call life. They still hadn't taken my cast off; we'd slept together those two weeks during working hours with the cast on my arm. He never called again after that, she said. He told me he was going to kill himself. I didn't believe him. I wanted to believe him. I walked around with the appealingly morbid idea that he had committed suicide. I fantasized that someone could kill himself because of me. When they took the cast off my leg, I shaved my head. I threw the dreadlocks out. I thought I could shed my skin that way. I saw a movie about a woman who called a suicide hotline and fell in love with the guy who answered. The woman didn't know why she was calling; she'd never thought about suicide. Being alone was all she knew; she wandered through empty streets. The guy who answered the phone was nice, charming. When she called on the phone she said: I'm going to kill myself. I want to die. And then she started telling the guy everything that had happened to her that day. The most horrific things became commonplace. Everything commonplace became horrific. I don't remember how the movie ended, she said. I never remember how anything ends. What I do remember is that city full of dirty light, the colors of the telephones, black or beige. But I don't remember how it ended, she said. I thought about that movie when I went back to the university the next semester, after summer ended. The port was still a dark city. Neither Javiera nor Donoso went back to classes.

57

I never fully recovered. Now that I think about it, I've been sick ever since, she said. I never got back up from the bottom of that empty pool, with my arm destroyed and the taste of syrup in my mouth, blacked out to avoid the pain. Now that I think of it, I've never come back from that cold.

58

The last time I saw them was in that hotel. Until now. Until this newspaper. I don't know how to tell you this, man. I don't know how to tell you this because from this point on, everything becomes hard to trace, like blood or shit smeared on the floor, she said. I'll summarize. I'll go back over it: I had gotten off the syrup and shaved my head. They had moved in to that hotel. Javiera had gotten pregnant again. These are the last certain facts. The last real ones. After that, another life began. After that, my life began. After that, you appeared.

59

Just like the city, like the whole country frozen in time, that hotel was in ruins.

60

I said: I knew that hotel. I never went inside. I saw it from the street. It was in one of those parts of the city that urban renewal never reached, close to the Congress and the market. I always thought that particular block was especially sad. Next to the hotel there was a bar where they used to play death metal. I went there sometimes, I said. I always noticed the hotel's façade, which had once been white but was now cracked and crumbling and covered in graffiti. I had long hair and wore black t-shirts. I remember how the reception area looked from the street, like a photo taken from a moving car. Memory as a crooked picture frame. The photo empty, deserted. There was never anyone there. The market was two blocks away. No one seemed to even realize that place existed. I always wondered what they charged, how much a night there cost, or who would possibly live there.

61

Javiera and Donoso did. They moved in there. It couldn't have been very expensive, she said. I mean, if they moved there, it couldn't have cost a peso. Because nobody else would have them. Lila, that girl from the Party I told you about before, said: Once you leave here, you can't come back. Every move is a betrayal. You get judged. Javiera fucked up. She didn't follow through with the commitments she made. That fucker Donoso tore her up. Lila told me: We were jealous of her. She survived a lot of shit. She gave herself to the Party the same way she gave herself to that asshole. I've never seen anyone so all-in. She was infatuated with him and then everything just went to hell. I don't know what happened. The fucker did what he did to her and still she went back to him. She forgave him. She threw everything away. Her son, her husband. She hurt herself, she hurt everyone else. You should have seen her, man, how she started acting at the meetings. She shouted in our faces. She told us all to go to hell. She would go into hysterics. The anarchist kids and the Trotskyites were happy to have her, Lila told me. Javiera lost it, she said. You didn't see her then, before she got pregnant. She called us all fascists, sellouts. ¡Patria o muerte! she'd shout, Fatherland or death! She hung out with the anarchists, practically homeless street punks who drank rum at all hours of the day. She would disappear with them. You didn't see any of that, Lila told me. You didn't see how low she sank. You didn't see those things anymore. You didn't want to see anything. You weren't around. You didn't see how violent she got. Then she got pregnant again and she vanished and we were all relieved.

62

I went to the hotel to see them. I remember I listened to the Dead Kennedys on the way there. A greatest hits cassette, she said. I don't know if I liked it, but I was still listening to punk, she said. At university, I only listened to punk. Then I stopped, cold turkey. You couldn't really listen to anything else with the port as a backdrop; it didn't allow you any peace. My memory of those years is just an infinity of songs playing one after another like a single indistinguishable murmur that has never left me. But I also feel like that murmur lasts for the time it takes for a second to die, or the time we're able to hold our breath before we have to exhale or start to suffocate, she said. That murmur is made of shouts. I think about that music and I think about Javiera and Donoso, too, about what happened to them, about this right now. Not that I understand much now, this article, this photo, she said. But that murmur is there, the whisper that was in my head when I went to see them. The singer destroying his voice over each chord, burning up in my ears. That static, the static of the port: all the misery placed out on the street in plain view, that city abandoned to its luck, that horrible Congress building that Pinochet built, the rotting fruit and the junk and the broken toys they sold along the edges of the market. It was all summed up by that hotel whose name I can't remember, that refuge for the desperate, the last possible stop before disappearing completely.

63

Some time later, an architect told me the history of the place. He'd done some work for the city and that's how he found out about it. Some of it I already knew and other things he confirmed. There's not a lot to tell. There was no telephone there. The rain gutters were clogged with pigeon shit. The electricity went out almost every day. It cost a third of what any other boarding house would have cost. The stove didn't work anymore; maybe it never had. The manager let some of the rooms out to the rent boys who worked the route between Plaza Victoria and the Delta pinball machines on Calle Pedro Montt and spent their nights in the diners on Calle Uruguay. He also rented rooms by the month or week. They called the guy the Gringo, and he barely spoke at all. He may have actually been Argentine or German. Or Chilean. Nothing repulsed the Gringo. He rented rooms to some of the hookers in exchange for sex. There were some transvestites there too. No one lasted very long. The place had a certain splendor to it once. The Gringo managed it because there were some problems with the property title. The rooms had high ceilings. You could still see the cracks from the earthquake of '85. It was full of cats, because it had once had a rat infestation. The cats filled the hallways with the stink of shit. Everything you can think of happened there: murder, suicide, robbery, rape. It didn't matter much to the Gringo, as long as whatever was owed got paid. A fire had devoured the top floor in the late eighties. An alcoholic lit a camp stove in his room. He died, along with an old lady who lived in the room next door. The Gringo never gave a thought to fixing it; he just closed off the entire floor. You could see clothes hung up in the hotel windows, almost always party dresses and towels. The hot water heaters didn't work, either. It didn't have much architectural value: the cornices and ornaments had crumbled off over time with the wind and humidity, and the bronze plating on the doors had been stolen, maybe by the tenants themselves, to sell off by the kilo. The art deco furniture in the reception area had the stuffing coming out of it, or was patched, or covered in grease stains. The Gringo took care of what little had to be done: he collected rent, waxed the floors once a century, changed the rubber washers in the bathroom faucets, brought buckets or pots to the rooms with leaky roofs. Not that he was overly concerned, she said. A window could stay broken for months, a rubber washer could be disintegrated for decades. There were days and weeks when the Gringo would disappear completely. No one knew what he did, where he went. But when he came back, he went on taking care of everything and running a little business selling bottles of pisco or cold beer to passers-by or the tenants, she said. No one cared about much of anything there. This was no hotel for artists or students. There were people living there who huffed glue, pickpockets who wanted to lie low for the night, retirees who would talk to themselves in the square. I heard all this from my architect friend, who'd had to inspect the place, take notes on everything. It wasn't a hotel, it was an end station, he told me.

64

The DKs sounded perfect there, she said. A soundtrack for the parade of ruin, she said.

65

How did they end up there? How the hell do you wind up in a place like that? I have no idea, but they did it. By then, they weren't thinking clearly. To sum up: Donoso had disappeared from classes, I didn't know if he was working anymore; Javiera had left the Party; they had lost a baby — no, more like Donoso had kicked Javiera so hard she had a miscarriage; Javiera had cheated on him with her ex-husband; they had made each other's lives hell, and they had forgiven each other. They walked around filled with black bile. Javiera told everyone that her whole life had been a sham, that the Party lied. That it was all a farce. I never saw them anymore. Anyway, they moved there, to that hotel. A friend of Javiera's told her about it. He'd spent an entire semester there because he didn't have the money for anything halfway decent. That semester he'd lived off of other students' leftovers in the cafeteria, she said. Javiera saw that as some kind of revolutionary heroism, a kind of rebel asceticism. They moved there on his recommendation. He told them about it after they got kicked out of a boarding house and didn't have anywhere else to go, because they already had a sort of black legend surrounding them. They packed up the little they had left in two knapsacks and moved. They paid two months' rent in advance. Then Javiera got pregnant again. The doctors advised absolute bed rest. She abandoned everything. She locked herself in their room. That's what my classmates from university told me, that she had disappeared because of the pregnancy. She almost never came out. She practically went crazy, shut up behind those walls whose paper had turned black with mold, with that bathroom that almost never worked, with the shouts of the building's drunks and mental cases. Donoso didn't stir from her side. Donoso stayed there with her and cooked lunch on a little gas stove they'd brought, and soothed her when she was stricken with nightmares or pain, she said.

66

That's how things were when I went to see them. The Gringo told me to go on up. I climbed an unlit staircase. The light was out in the hallway, too. Their room was on the third floor at the back. You couldn't see anything in the hall. It smelled like cat piss. I felt afraid. I didn't take my headphones off for even a second. The music was still there. The DKs. Holiday in Cambodia. I hung on tight to that sound, she said. I hung on to that desperation. To that urgency and those shouts. I hung on to Biafra's voice, thinking I was on the verge of collapsing at any second and that I would never be anything more, never again be anything but a body falling in darkness, she said. That noise made it possible for me to go on, to reach the end of the hall and knock on the door. Donoso opened. The room wasn't big. The window was open. You could hear the cars going by a block away on Avenida Argentina. It had gotten dark out. Javiera was lying on the bed, her eyes closed. The only light came from a candle. They didn't have any furniture other than a dresser, two chairs, and the bed. Donoso said we should keep our voices down; Javiera wasn't feeling well. I handed him some Coca-Colas and sandwiches. He offered me tea. I asked him how he was. I hadn't seen him in a long time. In the darkness, he looked cadaverous; the shadows in the room deepened the craters beneath his cheekbones. Javiera was breathing heavily. She was asleep. Donoso told me they were good, they were managing. That it was hard. He told me he didn't plan on going back to the university ever again. It wasn't for him. He was going to find a job. I asked him how things were with her. He didn't say anything. I realized then that Donoso never said anything, that he expressed himself through silence, words suspended in the air, facial expressions. At that moment, I realized why I'd never been attracted to him and why Javiera liked him, why she insisted on being with him, why she had thrown her life overboard for him. I didn't tell him any of what I was thinking. I kept quiet and listened to him talk in whispers about how they had come to the hotel, about what a delicate state Javiera was in. While she slept he told me how much he loved her. He told me about the violence he felt inside at the very idea of her absence. He told me about the physical pain he felt when he thought about being separated from her. He told me that sometimes he went down to see the Gringo and buy a bottle of cheap rum, which he would drink all by himself in the room, staring at the ceiling. He didn't mix the rum with anything. There was no ice. He said there was no difference between being drunk and being sober. She never said anything to him. Sometimes he'd serve her a little glass and she would drink it lying down. It helped her sleep. Then, he would embrace her and she'd stay there, her back pressed against him, and they would cry together. Or he would cry and she would listen to him. She hadn't heard any news from her son. When she phoned him in Ñuñoa, her ex asked her not to call anymore, to leave them alone. Donoso told her they didn't need him. He told me that soon they would have a child of their own, and they were going to get out of there. As he said this, I saw Javiera stretched out on her back, eyes closed, breathing slowly. I thought about how she could die in that position, she could just stop breathing and her body would remain there, inert, in that bed, lit only by the fluorescence of the street lights that filtered in through the holes in the curtains. When that thought hit me, I got the urge to leave. I told Donoso I had things to do, and that I would come back soon. I hugged him and told him to take care of himself. He didn't say anything to me. I went out to the hallway. I heard shouts coming from another room. I went down the stairs. The Gringo wasn't around. I went back out to the street. I put on my headphones but I never pressed play, I remained deaf, I didn't hear a thing.

67

That was the last time I saw them, she said. After that, they were just rumors to me, they spoke with other people's voices, they became echoes.

68

Until now, I said. Until now, she said, and she called the waiter over and ordered two more coffees. I checked the time. Twelve o'clock. We hadn't done any of the things we needed to do. She'd been telling that story and I had barely interrupted. Now she was sunk into silence. On the walls, the ships went on sinking. She took a sip of hot coffee. I thought she had burned her mouth. Then she closed her eyes. She opened them a second later. I had seen this gesture a thousand times. She was catching her breath, trying to understand that photograph like a person unraveling a mystery. But from her face, it seemed more like a door that had opened onto an abyss. She asked me: Were we ever happy together?

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I bit my lips. I pulled more and more skin off of my lower lip and I told her: Yes, we were happy. Then we got tired of that, of being happy.

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She said: I heard they moved to La Ligua before the little girl was born. To Javiera's sister's house. Donoso got a job at a supermarket. The child was born healthy in the general hospital. I didn't go see them. I had an exam. I don't know if we were still friends by that point, she said. Javiera stayed in that house: she took care of the baby and her sister's kids, too. Donoso worked. We stopped hearing from them. I graduated. I met you, she said. I never told you much about them. Javiera had gone back to the Party, she was active in the La Ligua cell. Donoso went from one low-paying job to another. The hotel was as disgusting as ever. A classmate died in a motorcycle accident and I expected to see them at the funeral, but they didn't show up, she said. Sometimes we would get news: Donoso would send his regards and ask us to come see the baby. According to these people, he looked good. He didn't talk much about Javiera. He insisted that she was still doing her thing. There was some truth to that: one of those years, Javiera was a Party candidate for city council in La Ligua. Life can correct itself sometimes, it can get back on course. That year I looked at the electoral results. She got thirty votes. That was the number: thirty votes. No one expected her to win. No one expected her to get any more than that. I wondered if she had campaigned, if the Ramona Parra Brigade had graffitied her name in the streets around town. I wondered what Donoso would say about all that. Later, Javiera told someone she wanted to go back to the university. I never found out if she did. I had stopped seeing almost everyone. They disappeared. I forgot. I guess they all forgot about me, too, she said. I fantasized about that, about being a blurry shadow in people's lives. But every once in a while, someone would tell me things about them. And I listened to their news, even though that world didn't matter to me anymore, she said. They'd say: Donoso didn't say hi to me, he pretended he didn't know me. Later, someone told me they'd seen him holding hands with another girl. But that same person assured me that Donoso and Javiera were still a couple. These contradictory reports stopped after someone told me they had broken up, that they were no longer together, she said. These reports stopped suddenly in 1998, the year Donoso took the two-year-old girl, got on a bus again, and fled with her to Antofagasta. Around that same time, the decade came to end. Around that same time, they arrested Pinochet in London.

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She said: You remember what we did when they arrested Pinochet in London? Yes, I said. We spent the entire night fucking like rabbits, I said.

72

Her: I didn't tell you about any of this because you wouldn't have been interested, but during the first few years we were together, sometimes I thought about Donoso's trip up north with the little girl. I imagined a father on a bus in the middle of the desert, that little girl looking out the window at the flatlands, while he closed his eyes and imagined a future in that dead expanse. I fantasized that it was over, that it all ended there, that I would never hear about them again, I would never again think about that hotel where Javiera lay resting in a dark room. The desert was the future, and the empty, dry horizon promised a place where time, frozen now, would start back up again. Years later, a guy from school told me that according to Javiera, things with Donoso had broken down right after they moved to La Ligua. That he'd felt hurt when she went back to the Party, when she asked them for forgiveness and they took her back. That same classmate told me that for Donoso, life in La Ligua was monotonous: the TV channels didn't come in very well, he felt out of place in the house of that sister-in-law who hated him, he would sit looking out at the field full of avocado trees. Donoso told the classmate that was why he'd had no problem cheating on Javiera, no problem getting involved with a girl from an English class he was taking. Javiera had found out and stopped speaking to him. She wandered the streets, drank beer in the village taverns. Donoso realized that the little girl was often home alone. One night, they had an argument, she said. Javiera threatened him with a knife. He decided to take his daughter and get out of there, she said. He decided to run away. The countryside was suffocating him, killing him. Donoso told this classmate that he thought about going back to Valparaíso, but he decided against it. He had escaped from there. He didn't want to see the dead Sunday streets ever again in his life, he didn't want to feel the freezing spring wind on his cheeks. From the squalid bus terminal in La Ligua, he called his mother in Antofagasta. He told her he was coming and bringing the child. Donoso's mother didn't know she had a granddaughter. She found out just then. Come on home, she said.

73

Javiera stayed in La Ligua. I never heard anything else about her until now. I can't put myself in her shoes, imagine her sorrow. Things get to a point where you can't put yourself in someone else's place. When you can't understand anything, she said. I don't know what she's done all these years. I don't know how she faced the fact that Donoso had taken the girl. I don't know how someone can live with a thing like that. The century ended. The world didn't. Nothing exploded. I suddenly forgot almost all of the past decade. There was you. There was all this, she told me. Then that fell apart, too, but by then we were used to getting knocked around, we were already damaged, grown old. And here we are; we walked into this café and we turned into those reflections, those photos of something sinking.

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But we aren't those reflections, I said. Even though we're here, torn apart, tearing each other apart, I said.

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She said: No. We aren't. We're the black sea in those photos. The dirty surface of the ocean that everything sinks into. That's what we are.

76

She said: The last I heard of Javiera was from a classmate I saw at a party. You were there, but you didn't notice anything. In a minute, half a minute, half a second, someone can tell you another person's whole life. She had run into Javiera at a party held at the community radio station, in the port. Javiera was wasted. She tried to hook up with a guy, but he ignored her. Then she talked to my classmate about Donoso, how much she missed him, how she was going to get her man back. She said that she still needed him, that she had already forgiven him. That's what she said. My classmate told me the conversation only lasted a second, and then Javiera went off to dance, she went back to the party. The classmate stayed with her friends. Before she left, she saw Javiera with her arms around a punk guy. Javiera was kissing him and he was laughing. The punk was twenty years old at most, with a mohawk bleached blonde with hydrogen peroxide, she said. That was the last thing anyone told me about them. What do you think?

77

I said: Nothing. She looked at the newspaper and held it up for a few seconds in her hands. She tried for the umpteenth time to comprehend that it was true. She closed the newspaper. She said: I think a few things. Thoughts that came to me while I was telling you all this. Thoughts I had without thinking them, like a storyline that can only be resolved this way, in the back of my head, with clues I have to invent for myself, like some sort of lie. Maybe I'm right about everything. Maybe I don't have any of it right. But it's all I know. It's what I believe. I've tried to fill in the empty holes in the article in The Star with what I know, with the little I remember of them. Because two whole lives won't fit into a single conversation.

78

What do you think happened? I asked. All of this could be a fabrication, she said. What I think: I think Javiera called them in Antofagasta sometimes and no one answered, or someone hung up on her. At some point, she must have found out that Donoso had another girlfriend, that he was rebuilding his life, that he had forgotten her. Remember what that chick told me she saw at the radio station party, that Javiera never stopped talking about Donoso, how they were going to get back together, how they would go back to La Ligua. So Javiera was thinking about that, she was obsessing over it while she paced around the Party headquarters. But something must have set her off. Something motivated her to leave La Ligua and head north. I don't know what it could have been, she said. Maybe Donoso went to live with his new girlfriend. Maybe Javiera found out from someone else. In fact, now that I think about it, that may be the most likely thing. Donoso got together with another girl. That was the logical thing. He started a new life. His life. Maybe he moved on to something else, something we can't even imagine and only Javiera knows, something we can't see in the newspaper photo. The fact is she couldn't stand the distance anymore, she went crazy with jealousy and sorrow. Everyone's felt like that at some point, where you miss someone so badly it seeps into your consciousness and won't let you think straight, until it absorbs you completely. I think that's what happened. Javiera couldn't stand missing Donoso and her daughter anymore. Instead of alleviating the pain, the years only sharpened it. I don't know where she got the money or how she traveled north. I have no way of knowing what bus she was on or how long it took to get there. I don't know if she talked to anyone, if she left a note. The Star doesn't say anything about that. I don't know if her sister found the house empty when she came home, or if Javiera explained in detail what she was going to do, what route she would take. The fact is that she arrived in Antofagasta, a city she'd never been to before. Antofagasta must have surprised her: how old the houses were, the dryness of the air, the imminence of the desert, the aging colors of the city center. I don't know if that affected her. Maybe she listened to a song by Violeta Parra there in Antofagasta, or on the bus. Or two songs. Or three. I want to think she had a whole cassette in her bag, or in her head. There, in those songs, the echo in the room where she recorded them makes Violeta's voice sound more timorous, more broken. Withdrawn into herself, she sings about a woman who leaves pieces of her body around the country, about another woman waiting for a lover who never comes back, about someone watching as a party turns into a funeral. That's how I imagine Javiera, walking around downtown Antofagasta and listening to those songs as if they were her own shadow, like the voice of a consciousness speaking to her from beyond her own, the broken whisper of someone who knows nothing more than how to keep still, in the tense calm of a windowless room. I think that's what Javiera did. I imagine she stayed in a cheap room, or slept in the plaza. I imagine she didn't eat or bathe. It could have taken a little while, or maybe a couple of days, to find Donoso's address. She must have remembered conversations, recalled places, gone back over her own memories while she searched for him. The article doesn't say anything about what Javiera did in Antofagasta, she said. Here's what I think: I think she showed up at Donoso's house. I think he opened the door and didn't know what to say. I think maybe everything was going fine. Donoso hadn't seen Javiera in years. Maybe he thought she looked older. Maybe he didn't recognize her: she didn't look anything like the woman he had left behind. This Javiera in the photograph has white hair, she isn't so thin anymore and she's not wearing glasses. I don't know if things happened like that, if they could have happened like that. Donoso must have invited her in, he must have brought the little girl to her. He must have said: Your mommy came back from her trip. Javiera must have hugged the girl while she lied to her about that long trip that had just ended. The girl must have wondered why she was older than Donoso and why her father had no photos of her mother around the house. It's impossible to know if Donoso talked to the little girl about her, we can't know what he said to her, what the girl knew about Javiera. Maybe that moment was a happy one, maybe it was cheerful. We know, because the newspaper says so, that Javiera stayed there. That Donoso let her stay in his house. He must have called his girlfriend and told her Javiera was there. The newspaper doesn't say anything about that, about whether the girlfriend went to meet her. I bet she did. I bet she went to see Javiera, to meet her. I would go: I'd want to know who hurt you, whose hands you'd passed through before you were with me, she said. Maybe they met. Maybe they spoke. Maybe Donoso's girlfriend left and Javiera stayed. Maybe that's what set everything off, maybe that's the missing piece. That night, maybe she argued with Donoso. Maybe they slept together. Maybe she rejected him or he rejected her. Maybe she stayed up all night. Maybe no one in that house could sleep, she said. Maybe all three of them, Javiera, Donoso, and the little girl, were in their rooms, trapped, thinking about the roles they played in all that drama. The next morning, Javiera asked Donoso if she could stay and watch the girl. Donoso agreed. Javiera said goodbye from the doorway of a house that wasn't hers, from the threshold of a life she would never have, she said. I can imagine that goodbye. The clear sky, the metallic blue of Antofagasta. The desert whispering in her head like the devil. The morning sun ricocheting off the bare horizon of the hills. I want to imagine that. I want to think of it as one last second of peace, like some impossible and final form of sanity, she said.

79

But things didn't happen that way. That's not what's in the article, I said. That's why the police are taking Javiera away, I said. I said: That morning, yesterday morning, Javiera drowned the child in the bathtub.

80

That's how it all ends. I picked up The Star and looked for the umpteenth time at Javiera's face in the photograph, at Javiera in handcuffs. Then I dropped the paper and tried to cross the chasm of that table that separated us. I took her hand. She pulled away. It was over. Her face had changed. My face had changed. I looked at our reflections in the bar mirror. There was nothing there now. That's all they were, reflections. Outside, the ashes went on falling. The fire wouldn't stop. I ran my eyes over the sequence of the shipwreck on the wall. I tried to look at the photos in reverse, like before, to pretend that the order of the images was inverted, that something was emerging from the depths of the paper ocean. She was looking at the same photos, but in the opposite direction. Then she stood up and walked out. The newspaper was lying there on the table. The waiter came and left the check. I paid and went out. I walked half a block and sat on a bench in Parque Italia and I stayed there for an hour, breathing in the dirty air, looking at the black clouds and the far-off reflection of the fires devouring the earth beyond the hills.

81

Sometimes we talk on the phone, about whatever, almost always in the middle of the night. That's what remains of what we had: insomnia. In those conversations, every once in a while, there are silences where all we do is listen to each other's breathing on the other end of the line. Then, we pick up the conversation again and fall asleep from exhaustion.

82

She never mentioned Javiera and Donoso again, except when she'd tell me: I had another nightmare about the little dead girl.

83

We're still alone.

84

Everything familiar to me was extinguished. All of humanity became a legion of vampires, a crowd of rats frozen in the middle of the dance floor, just centimeters from the precipice. We never went back to the Hesperia. Sometime after that, whatever there had been between us devolved into a lament. We acted like animals, we acted like people. We never came out of that café. We never left it, we never really left the port. The city burned down, it disappeared. The sky filled up with dead stars.

About the Author

Álvaro Bisama (Valparaíso, Chile, 1975) is a writer, cultural critic, and a professor at Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago. In 2007, he was selected as one of the 39 best Latin American authors under the age of 39 at the Hay Festival in Bogota. Estrellas muertas (Dead Stars), his third novel, won the 2011 Santiago Municipal Prize for Literature and the 2011 Premio Academia, given out by the Chilean Academy of Language for the best book of 2010. His most recent novel, Ruido (Noise), was published in 2013.

About the Translator

Megan McDowell is a literary translator from Richmond, Kentucky. Her translations have appeared in Words Without Borders, Mandorla, LARB, McSweeney's, Vice, and Granta, among others. She has translated books by Alejandro Zambra, Arturo Fontaine, Carlos Busqued, and Juan Emar. She is also a Managing Editor of Asymptote journal. She lives in Zurich, Switzerland.

About Ox and Pigeon

Ox and Pigeon is a digital publisher founded by three friends in September 2010 over a round of pisco sours in Lima, Peru. Our goal is to use the accessibility and convenience of electronic publishing to share the work of great authors from around the world and provide a quality complement to traditional books and journals.

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Content

Álvaro Bisama
Dead Stars

Foreword

Dead Stars

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About the Author

About the Translator

About Ox and Pigeon