After sex, Max tended to fall asleep, but Claudia would go to the computer and play rapid games of solitaire, or Minesweeper, or chess (at the intermediate level). Sometimes he would wake up and go sit next to her, giving her advice on the game or caressing her hair and back. Claudia gripped the mouse tightly in her right hand, like someone was going to snatch it from her, and she clenched her teeth and widened her eyes exaggeratedly — although every once in a while she let out a nervous giggle that seemed to give him permission to go on caressing her. Maybe she played better with him beside her. When the game ended she’d sit on Max’s lap and they would begin a long, slow screw. The strange lights of the screen saver drew fickle lines on her shoulders, on her back, her buttocks, on her soft thighs.
They drank coffee in bed, but sometimes they made space at the table so they could sit down to eat breakfast “the way God intended,” as she would say. Max would unplug the keyboard and monitor and leave them on the floor, exposing them to treading feet and minuscule breadcrumbs, and so, every once in a while, Claudia had to use glass cleaner and a kitchen rag to clean them. But the computer’s conduct was, during this period, exemplary: Windows always started successfully.
On the thirtieth of December, 2001, almost two years after its purchase, the computer moved neighborhoods to a slightly larger apartment in Ñuñoa. Its surroundings were significantly more favorable now: it had its own room and its own desk, which had been assembled from an old door and two sawhorses. Claudia graduated from hands of solitaire and interminable chess games to more sophisticated activities — she connected a digital camera, for example, that contained dozens of photos from a recent trip, which, though it couldn’t exactly be considered a honeymoon, because Max and Claudia weren’t married, had more or less functioned as one. In some of those images she posed with the ocean behind her, or in a wood-paneled room with Mexican sombreros and immense crucifixes on the walls, and shells that served as ashtrays. In other images she looked serious, or was holding back her laugher, and in still others she was naked or wearing very little, smoking weed, drinking, covering her breasts or displaying them mischievously. (“I can’t resist your lustful, wanton face,” he wrote on an afternoon that was certainly hot but maybe a little too iambic-pentametered.) There were also some photos that showed only the rocks or the waves or the sun going down on the horizon, a series of imitation postcards. Max appeared in only two photos, and only one showed both of them, embracing, smiling, a typical seaside restaurant in the background. Claudia spent days organizing those images: she renamed the files with phrases that were too long and tended to end in exclamation points or ellipses, and she grouped the files into several folders, as if they corresponded to many different trips, but then she put them all together again, thinking that, in a few years, there would be many more files — fifty, a hundred files for all the photos from a hundred future trips, because they were going to have a life full of travel and photographs. She also spent hours trying to beat level five on a Pink Panther game that came as a gift with the detergent. When she despaired, Max tried to help her, although he had always been terrible at video games. If you could have seen them in front of the screen, how tense and concentrated they were, you might have thought they were solving arduous and urgent problems on which the future of the country or world depended.
Their schedules didn’t always coincide in the new house, because now Max had a night job — he had lost the contest for assistant-ships at the university, or rather the professor’s new girlfriend had won — and Claudia sold insurance and was also studying for some kind of postgraduate certificate. Sometimes they would go one or two days without seeing each other — Claudia would call him at work and they would talk for a long time, since Max’s job consisted, precisely, of talking on the phone, or waiting for remote telephone calls that never came. “Seems like your real job is talking to me on the phone,” Claudia told him one night, the receiver sliding off her right shoulder. Then she laughed with a kind of wheeze, as if she had to cough but the cough wouldn’t come, or as if it had gotten mixed up with the laugh.
Just like Max, she preferred to write by hand and later transfer her work to the computer. The documents she wrote were very long, and featured childish fonts and frequent transcription errors. They covered things related to cultural administration or politics or native rain forests, or something like that. It became necessary for her to do research on the Internet, and this was a big change; it led to the couple’s first fight, because Max still refused to use the Internet — he wanted nothing to do with web pages or antiviruses, but in the end he had to give in. Then one night there was a second furious argument: Max had been calling insistently for hours, but the line had been busy because Claudia was online. They bought a cell phone to solve the problem, but it was too expensive for their long conversations, and they had to get a second landline.
Before then, neither of them had really spent too much time on e-mail, but soon they both became addicts. Max’s greatest newfound addiction, however — one he would never kick — was pornography. This led to the couple’s third big argument, but also to several experiments, like the disconcerting — to Claudia, at least — ejaculations on the face, and Max’s obsession with anal sex, which provoked irate but ultimately beneficial discussions about the possible limits of pleasure.
It was around then that they lost the vowel a and the consonant t. It happened on a night when Claudia had to turn in an urgent report, so she tried to make do without those letters. Max, who once upon a time had attempted to write experimental poems, tried to help her, but it didn’t work out. The next day they bought a very good keyboard: it was black and had some flirtatious pink multimedia buttons that allowed you to play or stop music instantaneously, without having to resort to the mouse.
For some months, however, there had been portents of a greater disaster: dozens of inexplicable delays, some of them short and reversible, others so long they had to give in and restart the computer. It finally happened one rainy Saturday, which they should have spent calmly watching TV and eating sopaipillas or, in the worst of cases, moving the cooking pots and basins from one leaky spot to another; instead they had to devote the whole day to repairing the computer — or trying to repair it, more with willpower than any real, coordinated strategy.
On Sunday, Max called in a friend who was studying engineering. By the end of the afternoon, two bottles of pisco and five cans of Coca-Cola dominated the desk, but no one was drunk, they were just frustrated by the difficulty of the repair job, which Max’s friend attributed to “something very strange, something never before seen.” But maybe they really were drunk, or at least Max’s friend was, because all of a sudden, in one disastrous maneuver, he erased the hard drive.
“Well, you lost everything, but from now on it will work better,” said the friend, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, his coldness and fortitude worthy of a doctor who has just amputated a leg.
“It was your fault, you idiot,” said Claudia, sounding as if, out of pure negligence, one or maybe both of her legs had actually been cut off. Max kept quiet and hugged her protectively. The friend took one final and exaggerated gulp of his piscola, grabbed a few cubes of Gouda, and left.