Читать книгу Navidad & Matanza - Carlos Labbe - Страница 12

14

THAT SUMMER THEY traversed the beaches of Chile’s central coast in a Cadillac. Virditti reclined the passenger seat, shut his eyes, and with closed lips, hummed old songs from a tape made for him by a woman years before. “Memories Are Made of This” could be heard. He took drags on a cigar now and then, that being the only movement indicating to someone watching from outside that he wasn’t asleep. Specifically for someone watching from the other side of the beach; there I was on my towel, lying down, with a pair of binoculars. Alicia was at my side. Or rather: she occasionally came shivering from the sea to lie down beside me, clutching her arms tightly against the longed-for skin of her body. I dropped my binoculars, picked up a handful of sand, and let it fall delicately along the path traced by the freckles on her back between her shoulder blades down to her waist. But she didn’t smile. With closed eyes she murmured, Fist-fuck, and only upon hearing this immensely disturbing expression she reminded me that she wasn’t happy and never would be. Those nights she spoke to me in English, from her room across the hotel hallway, in a voice hoarse with weeping or laughter, the voice of a woman who has pissed herself laughing. She told me terrible stories of children that transformed into the story of her nightmares: a rabbit walking by, her on top of another woman whom I also love, sucking on her dried-up breast, unaware. On top of a grave. Brazenly she said: The grave into which I’m now staring. Would you like to know what I see?

Obviously, the Alicia of whom I speak is not the same girl of fourteen, at least not the Alicia Vivar for whom the police are still searching. She stood up; she went running toward the sea. She kicked sand in my eyes. For peeking! she shouted. So I ran after her, grabbing her, the waves already over our shoulders, and held her underwater with the weight of my whole body for half a minute. She came up gasping and didn’t want to speak to me. Then I took her face in my hands and said to her: My little girl, my lost one, my indecipherable book. Sure, moron, your little girl my ass, she responded and then leaned in and bit my lip. This is what I had to discover. That we’ll never be allowed to experience a desire we simply cannot handle. I write this for her, wherever she is. For me, this report will not be neutral: hundreds of connotations have imposed themselves between me and her, because I was naïve enough to think that love has something to do with words, with the proper use of them. Now I’m afraid to speak; I’ll just become a professional. But there is one truth. I loved Alicia. Above all: I love her still. Whatever name she has now.

That’s the reason I write at this late hour. Returning after forty hours of work in the laboratory. Drunk. Alone. Lost. With my head in the grave. I know what’s right, what awaits me, and the splendor. Glimpses. I also know that sometimes in the Cadillac, Francisco Virditti opened his eyes and watched how Bruno headed for the beach wearing nothing but a bathing suit. Virditti knew perfectly well which girl Bruno had chosen that afternoon, all of them different, but resembling each other in the unfathomable. Bruno would get ready to go in the water and dive in next to them, make a disarming joke, laugh, a sidelong glance, and manage to randomly brush up against them in the salt and the spray. And, after ten minutes, the girl, moved by Bruno Vivar’s purple lips, would offer to share her towel with him. This was the moment they waited for, when they arrived where her things had been, the girl would pale to find her towels had been stolen. Her face would empty. It reminded me of my sister; or rather, the daughter of my father, Bruno would tell me much later, between two whiskeys, confronting a death threat: one that I made. Arrogant, twisted, motherfucking fool. If I had him in front of me now I wouldn’t let him speak. I’d spit on him and kick the shit out of him. There’s nothing more to say. At that same moment, in the car, Virditti was dying of laughter. He’d managed to cross the beach, take the towels, and return coolly to the passenger seat of the Cadillac, while Bruno plied his charms amid the waves. But the game was interrupted when Alicia decided to wait for Francisco Virditti in the backseat of the Cadillac and greet him: Fool, you’re the one I was looking for. I realize there was nothing I could’ve done to stop her. Then he started the car and flew toward the highway. Out there, where death so often dwells.