Carlos, lying next to his sister, pressed a button on the remote control, searching for a movie on TV. Josefina had gotten up and was pushing open the closet’s enormous sliding door; she knew her mother kept her grandmother’s trunk, a couple of fur coats she never used, and a whole collection of family photo albums in the back of the closet. Carlos asked her what she was looking for while she silently flipped through the albums one by one, tossing them onto the bed. Written on the covers, in their mother’s lovely handwriting, was the year the photographs were taken. Ugh, said the girl, too old. Carlos said nothing, thinking that in those garish snapshots he was more or less the same age as his sister. Josefa continued doing her thing: she’d open an album, catch sight of the first photo and toss it aside impatiently, picking up another. Apparently she wasn’t looking at the photos for the fun of it, even though she loved doing that too; instead, Carlos deduced, she was trying to find one photo in particular. He repeated the question: what’re you looking for? Josefina paused and said, one from when she was a baby. He put a photo in front of her from when she was around a year old, with a spot of hair and a surprised expression — taking your first steps in the living room of the house in Pocuro, he explained. She immediately opened another album, closed it, grabbed a third, protesting that she was already big in that one, that she needed one from when she was a newborn. They reviewed the photos carefully and could only find Josefina smiling at the camera, two years old, with a beach hat and chair on the sand; a dozen similar polaroids: her yawning around five, raising a hand around three, waking up, eyes barely open around four years old. The girl twisted her mouth and sat down silently on the edge of the bed, staring at the TV. Carlos waited for her to say something; he knew she wasn’t paying attention to the movie that’d begun about an hour before, she was thinking about something else. Without turning around, she muttered that she knew she was adopted. It took Carlos a second to understand what she was saying and then he smiled: Don’t be silly. Josefina turned to face him, furious, like he was to blame; then why wasn’t there a photo of her as a newborn like everyone else has at home, she said. Carlos responded calmly that she shouldn’t be so stubborn, that he’d seen her in the clinic, bald and red, less than a day old, sleeping in a cradle next to their mother, who, because of her, was very tired. That she shouldn’t be ridiculous, she looked so much like their father and like him. Josefina got the point. She’d never really believed she was adopted, what happened is that her friend Cata’s parents, just last week, had told her that they weren’t really her parents, and all because she found a photo where she appeared in the arms of other people.
Carlos got up to go to the bathroom. While brushing his teeth he yelled to Josefina to put the albums back in order. Elisa had told him once that, when she was little, she’d thought she was adopted too, all because her older siblings liked to bug her with jokes about her dark hair and nearly nonexistent nose. Since she wasn’t blonde, she wasn’t part of the family, they’d repeat. And she invented an alternate identity so as not to feel hurt: her name was Carolina, a name that in her childhood she found particularly melodious for some now faded reason, a name given by her true parents, benevolent people who lived in another place, in the country of the good people. One day she was playing with her ten siblings in the garden of a house that looked a lot like the gingerbread house she’d seen in an illustration of Hansel and Gretel, when the imaginary country was invaded by the neighboring bloodthirsty nation. Her parents were killed in the upheaval and, in an act of desperation, the firstborn brother loaded her and all her siblings onto a boat, and they were able to make their escape. Indescribable adventures led them to many of the world’s ports, where different families would grow fond of one of the siblings and beg the firstborn to let them adopt the child: who wouldn’t want to raise one of the last remaining children from the country of the benevolent people? The firstborn believed he’d be able to ensure the happiness of all his siblings, giving them away one by one to interested parents, and yet he wasn’t always successful; often the natural children of these adoptive families were envious of their kindly nature and teased them, like what happened to her in Viña del Mar when she was taken in by new parents, given a new name. With time, Elisa had come to understand that she was just as boring as her siblings and didn’t really belong to some benevolent race. And yet, as long she was unable to come up with a just fate for the oldest brother, she would never forget this children’s story: she imagined him in the most absolute solitude, old and dejected on a dilapidated boat, looking out at the immensity of the ocean before the breaking of the storm.
THE RECIPIENT
September 13th
Still too tired to really get into it. And yet it’s important that I continue to record the unbelievable storyline of these days; without ceasing to read, without ever closing a book, I decide to go out into the street to recover whatever is still alive of Violeta Drago in this city. It’s stopped raining at last, the dark clouds have receded, and the days are getting lighter. Without purporting to get up from this chair or put away this notebook, I spend the days walking toward Pedro Valdivia Norte, the neighborhood where Violeta’s house is located. Friday I was leaning on the railing of my apartment balcony, not moving; the whole afternoon I was in that same position, staring dangerously at the ground, many floors below. None of the solutions seemed right to me: not the morbidity of Arguedas and Lihn writing their death diaries, not Onetti and Violeta inventing a city where they run away from their own ruin, and in whose streets their characters find no relief from suffering, but do find oblivion. Keeping in mind that the impudence in these pages was my solitude’s only saving grace, aware too that I write these lines to be read, hoping only that someone will be able to understand what I cannot. With the suicidal compulsion to put this notebook in an envelope and send it to J’s address. But I already said that she’s going to disappear, like me in front of a desk, surrounded by towers of books and worn-out pens, piling up. Only Alicia, because the name I’ve given her here isn’t her name and doesn’t do her justice, will survive. (I realize that she doesn’t fit here, that she can only look in and never enter entirely, or follow along for a few pages, because this notebook is in error, hardly one true word.) Just Alicia versus The Little One. Alicia during the day and The Little One late at night: me, drunk, I can’t help it that first one and then the other appear on my right, on my left; my uneven Manichean vision. And like Carlos, I try to bring them together in an embrace, as if I were the center of everything: me and my pen describing this three-way relationship such that The Little One, lying down, was reading a story in which the protagonist pays for her parents’ nursing-care by working as a whore, exclusively group encounters. That’s what The Little One said to me, the one who was reading an anthology of stories and poems for a writing workshop at a university in some southern city. In Neutria.
When I rang the doorbell at the house on Calle Los Araucanos, it was she, The Little One, who appeared. She asked me what I wanted: she was holding a book in her hands, dressed in pajamas, her short hair in disarray. I lied, telling her I was Violeta’s friend. She returned my look, disbelieving, had I come from the south perhaps, she said. The south? Why the south? Your naivety is infinite, she repeated all night long, when she wasn’t biting me. In that moment I said yes, somewhat inhibited by the brightness of the house, by the decorations Violeta and The Little One’s grandmother had used, by the silverware, by the ceramic animals, the fake ivory, the yellow lamps, and the acrylic plants. The Little One put the teapot in the kitchen and led me to her room. Her grandmother wasn’t home. Had she been waiting for me? Had she been waiting for someone else? The unease on her face when she took off my clothes, she’d probably felt obligated to open the gate when I told her I was Violeta’s friend. Then I asked her if they really were cousins. (Why does she live in Violeta’s house and stay in her room, so talkative, such short bones and rapid movements, the opposite of the figure that weeks of reading Violeta’s infernal handwriting had created for me?) Yes, of course, The Little One said: Yeah right. And she went into the bathroom. I stayed erect. I was entering another body, another city, at last I was emerging from the pit, I say, of this apartment.