Loquela

THE NOVEL

Carlos closed the small notebook and the movement knocked the pen off his writing desk. Anxiously he yanked off his T-shirt and threw it into a corner. He was sweating. He got up from his chair and sat down on the floor. For a few seconds, he glanced through some photos from his cousin’s party that were spread out across the rug. He opened the window and looked out onto the street. An organ grinder inspected the contents of his can, hoping for a coin. Carlos looked at his notebook and reread the last page: anticipating that the killer—whoever it was—would defend himself, the man had retrieved the gun. His head pounded and his knees were shaking. There’s a dead girl lying inside, he thought. He’d never fired a gun. His vision clouded over, his whole body pulsed as the door opened slowly from inside. He decided to fire first. And he did. The albino girl let out a soft cry and fell at his feet. He was the killer.

This was not the ending Carlos had planned. But as he was writing it, he’d lost sight of the pages delineating the plot structure. It’s like a weight’s been lifted, he said to himself. Like escaping the body. Guided by the pen, in a sort of feverish state, he’d turned the man into the killer; and now the carefully constructed plot was a complete mess. His own ineptitude infuriated him: four months figuring out a way for the stalker to remain unseen while simultaneously leaving behind clear indications of his intentions; innumerable nights of the man following the albino girl, up all night reading chapters from the detective story she’d scrawled in that notebook. The man’s interpretations of the woman’s story, the walks tracing those absurd maps she’d invented, and the characters with names that obviously concealed the identities of other people. The staged shootout. Or, to put it another way, the strange coincidence of a shootout between cops and bank robbers and the chapter dedicated to bullets, on a parallel day at a parallel location, a warning sign compelling him to take up his own investigation. All of it so the man arrived at the right address, opened the right door, and shot the albino girl, the albino girl he wanted so badly. This final image was incomplete: after the shot, the man’s eyes wouldn’t come to rest on her body, instead, through the door into the next room, they’d find a mirror hanging on the opposing wall, and there he’d catch a glimpse of his own face, sirens drawing ever nearer. Even though he had ignored the novel’s outline, Carlos thought, it was possible that this was his favorite part. He went to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. He brought a jar of red juice to his lips and drank, asking himself how the letter the protagonist sent to the wrong address had led to him being followed by an unknown car, to a death threat in the bathroom of a dance club where he’d gone to look for the girl one Saturday night, and had suddenly found himself embroiled in a shootout in the middle of the street. He remembered his friend’s comment when he’d received a popular detective novel for Christmas the previous year, that these kinds of books were more machination and less mystery all the time. They’ve got no soul, Elisa would’ve added. She suggested the possibility that the plot of his book was the result of a sick imagination—that of the protagonist perhaps—and that the only recognizable thing in those pages was the presence of an albino girl doomed to die. Every time she offered an opinion about what he wrote, his girlfriend claimed that his characters weren’t human beings. They never yawned, they didn’t shower in the morning, and never woke up in a bad mood; she’d say: the author should keep in mind that during the day he had to use the bathroom, laugh every now and then, and sleep a little after lunch. This would prevent his characters from forgetting their own bodies every time they jumped, or ran, or shot somebody.

Carlos looked out the window again and saw the organ grinder walking away, his instrument on his back. A little girl was pulling her dog’s leash, trying to get it to stop barking at the poor old man. There were no bullets out there, no persecutions, no deaths, he thought. Of course, the organ grinder was afraid that the dog might bite him, or that someone might assault him while passing through certain neighborhoods. He tried to remember being in a similar situation: the novel’s protagonist felt fear, seeing his own deformed reflection on that wall, gun in hand, the face of a killer. He picked the pen up off the floor. He’d been mistaken, he said to himself, as he sat back down at the desk: he didn’t want to write a detective novel; he wanted to write a mystery.

He’d decided to take a break from the novel, he told Elisa. They were lying together on his bed. His notebook was still open on the desk, the uncapped pen, the jar with what remained of the powdered juice. She was staring at a white canvas that hung on one wall, her back to her boyfriend, who was holding her. I need to take a step back from the plot so I can figure out who the characters are, he said; you’ll finally find out whether they’re flesh and bone or paper, she murmured. You were right, he added. That it’d be good to get to know the man, find someone who looks like the albino girl, talk to both of them. Elisa closed her eyes and took hold of Carlos’s elusive hand. They lay there in silence. From a neighbor’s house they heard the shouts of children playing. She looks like Violeta, Elisa said. Who?, he asked; the albino, the albino girl looks like your cousin’s friend whose name is Violeta, but Carlos had never seen her. Elisa got up, went out into the living room, and came back to the bed, holding a photograph between her fingers. She sat down next to Carlos and pointed out a figure dancing on the edge of the dance floor, near some tables. The girl was albino.

It was the final meeting of his detective fiction class. Carlos sat down in the back, near the aisle. The professor was trying to summarize what they’d covered that semester in a long monologue, replete with authors but lacking quotes or plotlines. The closed windows and door made the room’s air unbreathable; Carlos’s head began to nod with sleepiness. None of the students he knew were in attendance; there were only four people in that class, which was the last one of the semester. All of a sudden a hand touched him on the shoulder. Carlos jumped, surprised. Without completely waking up, he turned to see who it was and found the rows behind him empty. A pair of eyes backed away from the door, eyes belonging to a face he barely recognized and that he’d forget immediately. He stood up abruptly, bumped into a desk, someone timidly told him to be quiet. There was no one in the hallway. He went to the bathroom, splashed water on his face, and went back into the classroom just as the professor was talking about the error of making light of death, the state from which the story you tell is always a mystery.

Elisa opened the door to Carlos’s house with her copy of the key. Relieved, she found that her sketch was still on the table in the middle of the living room. As she was leaving, a letter that had been slipped under the door caught her attention. She looked for the mailman on the street but saw no one. Just seeing the name of the sender made her want to get out of there, but not before putting the envelope in her handbag. On the corner she ran into Alicia, Carlos’s cousin and housemate, and they talked about the weather while she racked her brain over and over, wondering if at some point she and her boyfriend had been together with Violeta, the girl who’d written the letter.

Carlos’s mother came into the bedroom and opened the curtains to wake him up. She told him he shouldn’t sleep so late and that she was on her way to the store. Putting on makeup in the bathroom, she asked him if he’d be staying for breakfast. Either way, he should stick around until she got back, because his father was at the office and Josefita shouldn’t be left alone.

Carlos got in the shower. Massaging shampoo into his scalp, he remembered a forgotten chapter that was saved on his parent’s computer: the protagonist is supposed to meet the albino girl at the ticket counter of a movie theater, but she stands him up. He heard the engine of his mother’s car fade away in the distance, and the insistent ringing of the telephone. Dressed now, he peeked into the living room and greeted Jose, who was talking to a friend on the phone, but she didn’t respond, as if she hadn’t seen him. He sat down in front of the computer to review the chapter and print it out. He’d never asked himself why the albino girl didn’t show up for the date. The protagonist, on the other hand, had an immediate hypothesis: she’d been kidnapped; the stalker had found her at last. There was no doubt, her message had indicated that particular theater, not another: the stalker had doubtlessly run into her randomly on some downtown street, let’s say the corner of Ahumada and Moneda, where people always sit and stare at the passersby as if searching for someone, and all because he’d insisted that they meet. Near the mouth of the metro he rested, fatigued, on one of the benches; he didn’t see anyone suspicious. He realized, looking at a clock on top of a post, that it was earlier than he’d thought. So, he said to himself, one of these people could be the one who abducted the albino girl; that old man flipping through the headlines of the afternoon paper, the kid eating French fries, the guy with the shopping bags and the sweaty face. But none of them fit the profile he imagined for the maniac, they weren’t suspicious faces; in fact, they were intimidated by his scrutinizing eyes, right then the clock on the corner read two minutes past seven. He went back to the theater—worried that the albino girl might already have come and decided to leave, disappointed that he wasn’t there—in vain: they weren’t going to meet that night, and he decided to go in and watch the movie. Fucking public clocks, you never know if they’re broken or on time.

His mother’s voice interrupted him. She was coming up the stairs, asking with feigned calm where Josefita was. In the living room watching TV, he suggested. His mother searched the house, top to bottom, calling to Josefita over and over, but the girl had disappeared. She was too old to be hiding, but not old enough to go out on a walk or to run off with a friend. None of the neighbors had seen her leave. When his mother came up to the second floor for the third time, swearing, asking him where Jose was, Carlos felt the weight of a hand on his shoulder again, like someone was watching him from the doorway. His little sister had been taken while he, lost in thought, read a chapter on the computer screen. He ran through the neighborhood’s surrounding blocks, but like always, the streets were nearly deserted. A nanny was monitoring some children in the plaza, a nurse was pushing an old man in a wheelchair, and a few dogs were sniffing around on a corner. In which of these tranquil apartments could Josefita be? How was it possible that she’d not overheard a single worried conversation, a single knock, a single shout? When he got home, his mother was waiting for him, smiling: his father had called while he was out to see if he should pick something up for lunch, and she’d told him desperately that Josefa was missing. His father had laughed, because more than an hour before, he’d come by to take her clothes shopping. He’d even parked, come inside, used the bathroom, yelled to Carlos that he was going out with Josefina and, without waiting for a response, they’d left.

Kneeling on her bed, Elisa studied the name of the letter’s sender. It’d be so easy to open the envelope and read the words Violeta had written for Carlos. But she’d never do it: opening that letter that didn’t belong to her might unleash the strange person who over the years she’d managed to hide away in the cardboard box that now sat open on the floor, its interior revealing folded, yellow papers, old notebook pages on which Carlos had written poems and letters that he’d given her in the most sentimental days of high school. Elisa threw Violeta’s envelope into the box. Then she replaced the lid and concealed the box in the very back of her closet, near the ceiling, next to a moth-eaten superhero costume and a pink sleeping bag that only came up to her hip now. She closed her eyes and lay down. It was more like she was recalling a significant dream than really falling asleep: fade to black; Carlos’s eyes finding hers the first time they saw each other, in an elevator in the apartment building of a mutual friend. The heat of his shoulder when she’d cried at a party. And him not daring to touch her. His voice had been different, so serious, when they walked home together, always following the same route. She’d loved him in high school. Loved him like that, young, pretending to be tormented and solitary but surrounded by a large group of friends. She adored the game of randomly running into him on any one of the ten corners that separated their houses just to make him think about the two of them. They never touched each other, that was the promise; he gave her obscure poems and she gave him looks, nothing more, but all that ambiguity got old, they couldn’t go through life guessing, so the mystery got boring, she confused him at parties with other guys, she didn’t want to be alone. They trivialized one another, Carlos would’ve said at the time; they became best friends, confidants. Elisa knew that he liked to lie, that he was lazy. He teased her for taking half-hour showers, for competing with every girl she encountered, and for acting like she didn’t know she was beautiful. On the phone, once a week and once a month face-to-face, that was their agreement. They discussed the minutia of their lives over beer, then they’d walk to her house in silence, nostalgic for something that had not yet happened.

One day Carlos called her and asked if she’d have any trouble getting a formal dress. She said no, she’d even put on some makeup. He’d decided to go to his cousin’s wedding and he wanted her to be his date. They danced with each other, they had a good time. They talked about marriage after a few too many drinks. She swore that she’d never get married, he said he’d heard it a hundred times before, that love isn’t eternal. They stared at each other. Remembering that night, Elisa always used whiskey to justify what they did. But this time she limited herself to remembering that they’d climbed the stairs holding hands, gone into a dark bathroom, and that one of them had locked the door. He asked her to kiss him, she made him promise something, that they’d stop talking, that they’d stop being themselves, and the mouth that agreed was a strange mouth, whose penetrating smell and unknown moistures lasted until the next day, and when the sun came up they were no longer best friends. They kissed again to open their eyes and studied the details of each other’s features. He said something clever, they laughed and started talking again. But Elisa had never forgotten the stranger from that wedding night. She covered her face again, a large mouth sucked at her until she started losing air not realizing that it was her own breathing. Violeta’s letter, in lines not written for Elisa, might be intended for that intruder—the one who’d bent her over the old bathtub in that unfamiliar bathroom and stripped off her clothes—for that man who appeared when she was sleeping and heard noises, bells, moans that she was sure were coming from