Shorts: Stories

ALBERTO FUGUET

SHORTS

STORIES

Translated by Ezra E. Fitz

Short (Middle English, from Old English sceort; akin to Old High German scurz short, Old Norse skortr lack), adj. 1. Describes those things of little length or that are small in comparison with others of their sort. 2. Of little duration, estimation, or worth. 3. Insufficient or defective…12. A live-action or animated film of a brief, imprecise duration.

Story (Middle English storie, from Old French estorie, from Latin historia— more at HISTORY), noun. 1. The relation of an event or happening. 2. The written or spoken relation of a fictional, invented event. 3. A brief narration of simple, invented events, often done for pleasure or to convey a certain lesson or moral.

Storyteller, adj. 1. Describes a person known for telling lies, exaggerations, and gossip. 2. Describes a person known for telling or writing stories. 3. Describes a person who, for vanity or another similar reason, exaggerates or falsifies reality.

Contents

EPIGRAPH

THE TEST

SANTIAGO

HOW TIME FLIES

DOVE HUNTING

RICH LITTLE KIDS FROM POOR COUNTRIES

A PLACE IN THE WORLD

GIVE ME A REASON

GENERAL INFORMATION

SOCIAL LIFE

BORDERLINE

FAMILY SITCOM

THE TRANSITION

PURE PISCOLOGY

THE FORCE IS NOT WITH ME

I WAS MADE FOR LOVIN’ YOU

EVERYBODY KNOWS EVERYBODY ELSE AROUND HERE

WE FEW

GIVE SANTIAGO A LITTLE PLACE IN YOUR HEART

A GREAT CITY

FAR WEST

CHILDREN

1

We’re a young couple with no children. But being young…

2

The house isn’t a house but rather an apartment complex hidden…

LOST

MORE STARS THAN IN HEAVEN

SCENE ONE; TAKE ONE. A DENNY’S RESTAURANT.

INTERIOR/NIGHT. WIDE PANNING SHOT.

SCENE TWO; TAKE THREE. A DENNY’S RESTAURANT.

INTERIOR/NIGHT. PANNING SHOT.

SCENE THREE; TAKE TWO. A DENNY’S RESTAURANT.

INTERIOR/NIGHT. AMERICANA SHOT.

SCENE FOUR; TAKE FOUR. A DENNY’S RESTAURANT.

INTERIOR/NIGHT. MID-RANGE SHOT.

SCENE FIVE; TAKE TWO. A DENNY’S RESTAURANT.

INTERIOR/NIGHT. OPENING SHOT.

SCENE SIX; TAKE ONE. A DENNY’S RESTAURANT.

INTERIOR/NIGHT. VERY OPENING SHOT.

TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES

THE MAGIC HOUR (MATINEE, VERMOUTH, AND NIGHT)

ACT I: WINTER, 1992

SCENE ONE

SCENE TWO

SCENE THREE

ACT II: AUTUMN, 1993

ACT III: SUMMER, 2007

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

OTHER BOOKS BY ALBERTO FUGUET

COPYRIGHT

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

Epigraph

Inadvertently overhearing words that suddenly make everything clear.

—Anton Chekhov, from Elements Most Often Found in Novels, Short Stories, Etc.

Youth is wasted on the young.

—George Bernard Shaw

Why film a story when one can write? Why write it when one will film it?

—Eric Rohmer

I will not tell all in this story. On the other hand, there is no story but a series, a selection of very current events, of coincidences and accidents, the way there always are, more or less, in life….

—Eric Rohmer,

from My Night with Maud (the story)

THE TEST

I spent that year—the year I want to tell you about—attending a prep school for lost rich kids who needed to find themselves. I wasn’t rich, but I knew I needed to find myself, and that being lost wasn’t going to do me any good. I felt like that decorated cadet who stumbled in the middle of the Parada Militar. Remember him? They say it was Pinochet’s nephew, or somebody related to Lucía Hiriart, Pinochet’s fucking wife. I don’t know; the details were a little sketchy. But they’d coddled him and spoiled him with trips to Disneyland and South Africa, yet all that pampering didn’t amount to much in the end because the guy stumbled. And I don’t mean metaphorically—he tripped and fell right in the middle of the Parque O’Higgins ellipse with TVN broadcasting live from Arica to Punta Arenas. Falling in public sucks, because it comes with an added bonus: everyone can see you.

He vanished, Raimundo Baeza told me as we were leaving our advanced history and geography class. He made their whole family look ridiculous.

But how?

He fucked up, that’s how. He had to leave the country. What did you think, Ferrer, that they’d give him a medal?

I went to class every morning. I didn’t have friends per se, but I did have something of a clique. They’d also been left back, of course—Cristóbal Urquidi, Claudia Marconi (Florencia’s sister), and Raimundo Baeza with his thick eyebrows and his exaggerated smile. I’d met all of them during that year. We had two semesters to prepare ourselves by taking practice tests and answering the usual multiple-choice questions. We were paralyzed by the idea that the rest of our lives would be defined by a single three-day exam. Our only goal was to do whatever it took to increase our scores on that exalted, famous, feared, arbitrary, and—at the time—detested assessment of future success that was the Prueba de Aptitud Académica, for we belonged to the hopeless group who’d scored in the 400–600 range. Those who’d triumphed by breaking the 700-point barrier were going on to college, while the gates of Higher Education had been slammed in our faces for at least another year.

Sometimes I would take the Metro to the Universidad Católica station, where I’d get off and just look at the big Casa Central. I’d stare at the students walking out into the sun, their faces lit up with happiness and their notebooks emblazoned with the pontifical logo. I was on the outside looking in. Those people had something I didn’t have. Plus, they probably didn’t even realize what they had, because you’re only conscious of things like that when you don’t have them. I couldn’t deal with the fact that most of my friends, acquaintances, and former classmates had managed to get accepted, leaving me on the edge, on the fringe, on the fuckin’ sideline.

The teachers at the prep school insisted to us that this was nothing more than a stepping-stone and didn’t have anything to do with our abilities as students. Plus, a year to mature would do us good. Even so—or maybe even because of that—we felt like losers. And when you feel like a loser, you start to act like a loser. You’re overcome by envy, your soul jumps out of you, it takes you over, it shakes you until it controls you. When you envy someone, you feel it so much that you stop feeling everything else. That year, I envied people I didn’t even know. Those who scored in the nation’s upper echelons had their names printed in the papers and were shown on TV. You could see the little geniuses in their homes, with their TVs and proud grandmothers in their living rooms. The moral imperative was: grow up, take the lead, and come out on top.

Chile wasn’t a place for the weak, but at the time, that’s exactly what I was: weak. Under a dictatorship, you do much better when you are strong.

Of my entire class, I was the only one who didn’t end up going on to college. And for me, that fact was more than a mere statistic. My shame was such that I stopped hanging out with my old classmates. Simply because of numbers, the few friends that I’d had quickly became my worst enemies.

To make matters worse: my supposed consolation prize didn’t console me in the least: I had been accepted—winning the last spot on the list—into a dubious arts program located in some distant shit-hole where it never stopped raining. It didn’t seem like much of a prize, either. More like a way to highlight my failure in fluorescent yellow. But I did it: I paid my tuition, sent in my paperwork, and had my fucking passport-sized photos made. What else could I have done? What other opportunities did I have? The night before I was to leave for the distant South, I couldn’t sleep. Everything terrified me: being so far away, leaving my mother alone, missing her, not knowing anybody, studying something I didn’t want to study, and not becoming what I had planned to become.

I’ve never cried quite like I did that one afternoon on the highway.

It’s not healthy to travel with so much pent-up anguish, a woman in orthopedic shoes told me. She passed me Kleenex and caressed my hair.

I got off the bus at the next stop and started walking back home. It took me over two hours to get there. Along the way, in a dark alley that smelled like chicha beer, I puked. By the time I arrived, my hair was matted with sweat and my feet stung and bled. I opened the door to find the living room cast in shadows. My mother was on her knees on the floor with her head buried in the lap of a man who was sitting in an armchair, smoking. I knew him, but I never thought I’d see my mother in that position. Luckily, they kept quiet and didn’t acknowledge me. Very slowly, I made my way up the creaky staircase to my room on the second floor, where I collapsed on my unmade bed. I didn’t get up until the next afternoon.

That year in which everything I’m about to tell you happened, I was barely eighteen years old, and disco music still dominated the radio waves. In physical terms, my face was blemished with acne, my hair was oily, and I was growing uncontrollably skinny. I felt like a one-armed juggler. My mind was under too much stress. I couldn’t sleep for that entire year. At best, I slept fitfully, but I still couldn’t dream. Ever. Sleeping without dreaming is like watching TV with neither picture nor sound. You start to imagine things.

The most annoying thing about not having been accepted to college was that it forced me to admit that the system might be right. I played the devil’s advocate, reasoning that if a university didn’t want me among its student body, then it was certainly possible that it was justified to feel that way. Maybe I really didn’t deserve to be there. Maybe my intelligence really did max out in the 400–600 range. I tried to convince myself that I didn’t want to belong to an institution that didn’t want me among its members, but that proved futile: at that age, you spend all your energy trying to belong to groups that don’t even realize you’re alive. In any case, I wasn’t the only one. That’s how all of us at the prep school felt. Unwanted. Scorned. Like wrong answers in a multiple-choice question. But the thing that complicated matters was the fact that I knew I wasn’t dumb. My fall—my exile—hadn’t come about because of a lack of ability; rather, I was being punished. I was paying for my juvenile behavior. All those red marks that I picked up in all those poorly taught classes were now beginning to taint my destiny.

We didn’t have many options back in those days. It was either study what we wanted to study, or study something that held no interest for us whatsoever. Period. If you don’t like it, then pack your things and get out. If one of life’s roads doesn’t pass through college, then it’s on very shaky ground. You had two choices—yes and yes—and there was nothing else to discuss. There were no private universities, and the few public ones that did exist were divided into those that good people attended and those that the others went to.

I was a member of neither group.

And so that year, the only thing that seemed legitimate, worthy, and bearable was to become a journalist. I just didn’t see any other possibilities. Not studying journalism was tantamount to not being able to speak Spanish. To not breathing, to being cast off the planet. Sometimes I would cry when the nightly newscasts were over. I idolized Hernán Olguín and wanted to travel the world, interviewing people and learning about science and technology like him. I would have lunch while watching The Navasals at One, which was hosted by this old married couple, José María and Marina Navasal. Every day they would invite guests to be on the show to discuss current events, and I would call in with questions, though I never gave my real name. I invented pseudonyms inspired by the names of the foreign journalists whose work I read in the newspapers and magazines that the library at the Chilean–North American Cultural Institute on Moneda Street subscribed to.

The prep school curriculum I landed in was based in the sciences and humanities and populated by aspiring doctors, dentists, lawyers, and—as it happened—journalists. We split up into two irreconcilable factions: the lost causes, who were the more kind and free, and those who almost made it but just missed. I was part of the second group. Cristóbal Urquidi and Raimundo Baeza clearly identified themselves with those who had stumbled. Claudia Marconi, on the other hand, was quite content to take a year’s sabbatical. Nevertheless, all of us were confident that the second time would be the charm.

That year, which I still can’t erase from my mind, the TV only had four channels, and none of them broadcast in the mornings. There was no such thing as cable, and food was neither fast nor lite. The smog was not yet suffocating, and you could see the Andes from any spot in the city. The city hadn’t needed to institute emissions regulations yet. I remember also that that was the year when the first big department store opened; it was called Sears; it had air conditioning and sold thousands of imported items. The only way to send mail was through the post office; telephones were fixed to the wall with cords; and if nobody was home, then you just had to call back later. Recorded music was bought and not downloaded, and a few privileged students—such as Raimundo Baeza—had calculators to help them with their homework. Those were also the kind of people who had a machine known as a Betamax video recorder and who rented their movies at the kiosk just before exiting the grocery store. Our participation in that year’s World Cup was a disaster. We missed a penalty shot, and the entire country realized that the wound we’d hidden away was beginning to get infected. A financial crisis was looming over our heads, but even then we still couldn’t see it.

We couldn’t see a lot of things. Later came the divisive protests that would fracture our country. But it’s easy to contextualize things after they’ve sailed their course. In hindsight, everyone—even the dumbest—is wise. If we’d known the consequences, obviously we wouldn’t have done what we did. That’s how we protect ourselves. We’re convinced that the worst is over and that the best is yet to come. That’s not always the case. But that’s how we are: blindness isn’t so bad. It lets us wander near the edge of a cliff without fear. If we could see, then perhaps we wouldn’t even dare to get out of bed in the morning. We want our own offenses to be forgiven, but we’re unable to forgive those who offend us. To forgive Raimundo Baeza, for example. At least I couldn’t. Sometimes I ask myself if Cristóbal Urquidi will be able to. Able to forgive Baeza, or able to forgive me.

But what happened between Raimundo and Cristóbal took place after we suffered through The Test. Between Christmas and New Year’s—December 28th, to be precise. The Day of the Innocents. What happened that day at Claudia and Florencia Marconi’s house changed my outcome. Not my test scores per se, but rather what I decided to do with my life. In the end, I achieved the coveted 750 points—which was beyond my wildest dreams—but I didn’t use it to stake any claim anywhere. Instead, I left the country. Just for a while, to get my head in order. I didn’t want to stay there a moment longer, and so I started out by going back to Paraguay.

But that was later. At the year’s end.

I’m getting ahead of myself.

I better rewind. One morning, our Verbal Aptitude tutor had me read—from my secret outpost in the back of the class—the five possible answers to a multiple-choice question that he’d written on the board. I couldn’t make out anything more than a blur. I was frightened; I had to get up and walk to the front of the room. Gradually—luckily—the letters then came into focus.

After class, Cristóbal came up to me to examine my eyes. I don’t know why, but I let him. It was the first time that we’d had any real sort of contact. A few months before, I’d spilled a cup of hot coffee on him, but acted like it was an accident. In class I would stare at his back and try to irradicate him with my bad vibes as if I had secret, super-hero powers. I secretly wished for him to flunk The Test. I drew pictures of him in my notebooks, and then pierced him with arrows, hung him from gallows, and decapitated him in guillotines.

You should let my dad check you out, he said in a voice so muted it was as if his batteries were running low. I can get you an appointment.

When I think about Cristóbal—and I think about him a lot, believe me—the things I remember most are his soft, hesitant voice, his slight frame, his boring, almost gloomy clothes, and his eyes. His eyes, especially—gray, dense, and clouded with too many siestas.

He has the eyes of someone who has seen a lot of things, is what Florencia once told me, after getting to know him.

He hasn’t seen everything, I replied. That much is clear to me. There are things he doesn’t know, and things he hasn’t seen.

I knew one thing that Cristóbal didn’t. It had to do with his father. I’d seen him a few times, at my house. He was the guy who I walked in on while he was smoking in the chair. You see, for the year I’m telling you about, Eduardo Urquidi was my mother’s lover. Or rather, they were each other’s lovers. I think that my mother, at least, was in love, but that he wouldn’t have dared to leave his wife, who—as he put it—was such a wonderful person. Which is why their encounters were always conducted furtively, in passing, between seven and nine o’clock.

Before he abandoned us—that is, when he still lived in the house—my father had had several women, though we never saw them. They belonged to another world, a completely undiscovered country, as far as we were concerned. But my mother, on the other hand, was one of us. She stayed the same. More wrought-up, of course, but generally the same. In those days, she worked for a real estate company, leasing homes. She was out all day showing properties. It was hard for me to look at her with the kind of eyes with which Cristóbal’s mother doubtless did, calling her a bitch or a whore or worse. You grow up believing that all mistresses are evil sluts who wreck homes and aren’t worth anything to anybody. But it’s quite a different story when the other woman—the mistress, the one who’s shaking up what’s already been destroyed—is your mother. I would wake up at night thinking about the obscenities that Cristóbal’s mother must be screaming at her husband, and how that coward would never be able to stand up for my mother.

I never made anything of the incident in the living room; never mentioned it to my mother or my younger siblings. I didn’t mention it to Florencia, either, although she would have understood. Florencia had the gift of being able to understand anything. That was her grace, and what separated her from the rest of us. She was even able to understand me.

One night, around dinnertime, my mother came home with Eduardo Urquidi. My siblings had already finished eating, but I was still there and my mother introduced him to me as a friend. Eduardo covered his food in salt (even the dessert), and the fact that he had the same soft and hesitant voice as Cristóbal unnerved me. Everything about him seemed bland and unfinished. He used gel in his hair, and his jowls were flabby. He was the complete opposite of my father.

I’m young. I’ve got a right to have friends, my mother told me after he’d gone.

But he’s married! Do you think I didn’t see his ring? I responded defiantly.

We’re just friends. Besides, he doesn’t love his wife anymore. She’s just a fat old frigid Catholic woman, but she won’t stop having kids.

You should choose someone who’s not married. Someone who’s single.

You don’t choose such things, Alvaro. Though I wish you could.

That night, as I struggled to fall asleep I deduced Cristóbal was the oldest. Just like me. And he lived his life like a firstborn, too: slowly, fearfully, guiltily.

Eduardo makes me laugh. He’s good company, she explained the following morning as she opened a can of Nescafé. "That’s all that I’m looking for. Can’t you understand that? Can’t you support me here? Haven’t I sacrificed enough for you kids