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 the closet, from the box she’d hidden behind all of her clothes.
August 10th
I’m so tired. I woke up with the sensation of having not slept at all, of having traveled thousands of miles during the night. And in the mirror, my face wasn’t great either: two puffy circles around my eyes ordered me back to bed, but I was already standing, I had to go to class. The images from my dream would’ve kept me from shutting my eyes again anyway. I took a shower.
I dreamed, like I never do, all night. If I wanted, I could enumerate all the stages of this exhausting dream, this long and vivid dream. I know that Alicia, making fun of everything as usual, accompanied me to a room in my old and unfamiliar country house in Rancagua, that she played dolls with my little sisters (affecting voices, inventing frivolous plots: Barbie goes to the salon and some strange stuffed elves give her a new hairdo while gossiping about other toys, laughing at a headless Playmobil); that she slept in the same room as me, in another bed or in a sleeping bag on the floor, like a childhood sleepover: we turned off the light and talked for a while, but fell asleep in the middle of an important conversation (maybe just when I asked her who she liked, whether or not I was the one she loved?). Another time she went to school with me, we skipped class and went to talk on the far side of the playground. I didn’t know it, but she was following every move I made and every word I said, in the afternoon she showed me a garish comic strip she’d drawn that featured me. A synopsis of my day in vignettes, something like that. I never got bored of her, nor she of me: the same old story. Then suddenly, Alicia disappears.
I’m in a corridor in the big house that belonged to my uncle. Near Coya, down a busy, unpaved road, any local can tell you the way if you ask. A fantasy house, immense and silent, accessed through an electronic gate, a fountain and gravel parking area appear. (Being very young, I didn’t get why they covered the ground with sharp little rocks, particularly when we ran barefoot across it on our way to swim in the pool.) A fantasy house, as I said, that often appears in my nightmares along with that other house, the wood cabin on the shore of some southern beach where I’ve never been, an invention where J liked to predict that she and I would someday live.
I found myself in my uncle’s house, sitting on the parquet of a long corridor, that echoing corridor where, when we stayed overnight, the great thrill was to jump out at someone at the last second without them noticing your approach in the darkness. And the silence of that house. It still disconcerts me every time I see (or better, admire) the four people who live in that place, forced to live with the knowledge that, day after day, there’s no one lying in any of the beds in any of the ten or twelve bedrooms, that the soap in all seven of the bathrooms remains unused, the showers clean, but rusty. The emptiness in that house becomes unbearable, and so the birthdays and Christmases that my family celebrates there are competitive displays of affection and camaraderie, to fill the silence between conversations. And, because there’s something terrifying about letting them trail off, the conversations become banal, then personal, repetitive, uncomfortable, then banal again, an uncle, an aunt, a great aunt, and another uncle think they’ve been talking to me, but we just make sounds with our mouths and we keep on like that, not hearing one another, until they get in their car and go back to Santiago in silence, immediately turning on the radio—music always saves us from that horrible muteness. (Why can’t we sit quietly and look at each other? Why do I get nervous when Alicia says nothing, when I ask her “what’s wrong” and she pauses before responding, “nothing, I just don’t want to talk”?) Music or the newspaper or a book, never just the two of us.
