dissolving into the monotone sky, dirty, more dust than anything. It’s the awful Santiago of our childhood, doubly abandoned. So bad that I only recall one moment of fun that took place outside the confines of the house: two naïve girls shouting gleefully, soaking each other with a hose, white with green stripes, me and Alicia. All of a sudden, she freezes. I see myself turning instinctively around and I find your eyes, wide with surprise. You hide the scissors behind your back. I come at you with a violence that frightens even me, grab the scissors away from you, your friends, hanging back a little ways, speculate in low voices, expecting you to defend yourself, not just stand there, impassive, not crying or smiling, doing nothing: that’s a difficult expression for a child to make. Serious as an animal. We leave you there, fixed to that spot, and go inside the house.
You should know this part better than I do. To me it seems that what happens next is that in the following days your group of men—forgive me, boys—gathers in the rundown shack at the abandoned train station that you guys call The Clubhouse and they decide to make an example of you, or maybe to kick you out for being worthless and a coward. The truth is that after I take the scissors away from you, all the pranks you guys pull fail, and so the group begins to fall apart: one family leaves the neighborhood, others disappear without explanation, you avoid meetings at The Clubhouse. It’s possible that you guys just got bored of each other or were too busy with school. I remember realizing that life in the passageway was ending and that we were entering Neutria when I watched the other boys stop in front of your house on their bikes and invite you to go get ice cream; you come out and don’t know how to lie, you don’t understand why, but they believe you when you tell them that you have to go to the supermarket with your mother, for the first time you’re able to get out of going with them, and you’re left alone in the exact moment that Alicia and I say to ourselves that from now on this is Neutria, without even knowing what we mean. I know, I can already hear your arrogant response: it was a childish way to give name to the unknown, to evade fear through familiarization. That’s what you said to me on Saturday, at the party. That sometimes, when you thought about it, you found our overflowing imagination interesting, an intriguing subject for a novel even; but a few pages later we were tragic, demented, frightening.
What comes next is the moment in which my childhood multiplies into details I’d love to recount and cannot. Most of them were lost the instant we played together, the rest are still there, in Neutria, and you can see them for yourself. Sometimes Neutria was the land of semi-divine emperors, of infinite cruelty or kindness, whose slothful and obese courtiers, in contrast, engaged in decadent melodramas. Other times it was a simple village where farmers, shepherds, and foreigners traded honey, cheese, bread, or fruit for a song or an entertaining story. Or it was the nexus of activity for stylized spies, convertibles, casinos, firearms, hotels, highways, and femme fatales. And in the middle of all those adult faces appears a boyish one, yours, insistently inquiring what it is that we’re playing, and coldly I reply that we’re playing the city of Neutria, not expecting you to make fun of us: you talk to yourself—my mother says people who talk to themselves are lunatics. Alicia gets up, says again that it isn’t make-believe, that Neutria exists; it’s a beautiful place, incredible, we travel there on long weekends with our parents. It’s so much fun that we like to recall everything that happened there. That’s what we’re doing, remembering all the wondrous things, not inventing them.
Of course, you’re the only boy who talks to us and asks us questions. Alicia and I don’t talk about this, but we’re fascinated that you come around and bother us. Make memory, that’s what I said to you, with oh so drunken words, at the party when you came up and hugged me and asked me how I still remembered: you were my first, one never forgets her first. It also pleases us that you watch us play through the window and then ring the doorbell and run away, because there’s cruelty in our inventiveness, because your doubt challenged us. The game changes. The two of us go on to describe everything that occurs in Neutria in order—I start writing in notebooks, we draw a rudimentary map—and from one day to the next every detail of Santiago interests us: the drainage system, the hierarchy of the authorities, the traffic, the demographic distribution, and I surprise myself by paying great attention in my history and geography classes. With the sole objective of convincing you of Neutria’s existence, I open my eyes to the place where I live and realize how much I hate it, I also hear how much other people abhor this chunk of concrete and how much they’d give to move to the coast, to the beach, to the cordillera, wherever. Yes, I know: this is nothing new.
It all began as a joke, as a small act of vengeance, because you had doubted us, and so it was only right that, in the end, it was back in your hands. Remember that winter, the last one on our street. You knock on my door every Friday afternoon and sarcastically ask us why our parents weren’t taking us to Neutria that weekend. Forgive me, what you say is: that strange city. Alicia and I are sitting by the fireplace, that first time we’re eating a big chocolate bar with almonds, and that is your excuse for coming in. It’s raining, of this I’m certain. Alicia says we can’t go to Neutria, it’s dangerous to cross the great suspension bridge that leads to the city in a storm. The Black River is treacherous, it swells violently, swallowing cars and the boats coming in from the sea, rumor has it that it feeds on them, seriously, but also that this is the river’s way of protesting that monstrosity of a bridge that’s been built across it. You listen in silence, probably imagining the river not as a swollen stream but as an aquatic animal with a hard, aquamarine hide, something like a shadow. Then you ask if it eats people too, or just cars and boats, a silly notion, but we try hard to take it seriously. I hurry to respond, citing the legends of Neutrian fishermen, and then Alicia quickly recounts in specific detail the story of a man who, after falling in the river and being rescued, claimed to have been saved by a marine monster. You listen with amazement to the story that Alicia invents on the spot, with total disregard for the rules of Neutria we spent every afternoon writing. I felt betrayed, for the first time I hated her: I was jealous of the attention you were giving her. That night we argued, yelling at each other. Alicia didn’t understand why I was so upset, for her it was all in fun, we were just making fun of you, of how much you wanted to meddle in our business. I calmed down when she proposed that we come up with a new way to humiliate you, using the stories that you asked us to tell. Remembering how you sat down to listen to us, open-mouthed, sometimes asking absurd questions, making us feel superior, clever, intelligent, special, because you were foolish enough to believe us.
Until one day you stopped coming. The next day we waited for you, and the day after that, but you had disappeared. I didn’t tell Alicia this, but I was miserable all week, I thought you’d gotten bored of our stories about Neutria. Not telling them made me forget about that city, it gave me the horrifying sensation that I was trapped in putrid Santiago. If I’d known what was coming, I would’ve preferred your appendicitis got worse rather than have you lie to us. But you lied and our laughter came to an end. On Sunday, you showed up unexpectedly and we went out onto the patio and asked you what’d happened and you stood very still, looking us in the eyes without blinking. You said: I went on a trip with my parents, they took me to visit Neutria. Alicia and I were only quiet for a second, we had to say something or we’d start to cry. It was the end of the game, a situation we’d foreseen so many times, the point when—according to our plan—we’d burst into savage, irrepressible laughter; choking, we’d tell you that Neutria didn’t exist, and how could someone be idiotic enough to try and make us believe our own lie. I was about to say something but Alicia beat me to it, and it was a disaster: my neighbor, my playmate, my best friend turned on me. She sat down next to you, took your hand, smiled at you, happy because at last you knew Neutria. She asked you questions about the redesign of the Plaza de Armas, whether or not you’d gone to the ice cream shop near the entrance to the black beach, if by chance you found the board-walk pretty. The words were already beginning to sound faraway, I couldn’t stand to be in that place any longer, that place I didn’t love, that place I hated. That afternoon was one of the last times I saw you, before the party last Saturday night. And yet Alicia and I have stayed in touch. It’s been hard for us to go back to being the friends we were when we were young, but there were a few summers when she did come see me in Neutria.
