Claudia had a hard time absorbing the loss, but she called in a real technician who changed the operating system and created separate profiles for both users, and even a symbolic third account, at Claudia’s request, for Sebastián, Max’s son. Yes, it’s true, he should have come up sooner — over two thousand words had to go by before he came into play — but the thing is that Max often forgot about the child’s existence: in recent years he’d seen him just once, and for only two days. Claudia had never even met him, because Sebastián lived in Temuco. It was hard for her to understand the situation, which had become, naturally, the black spot or the blind spot in her relationship with Max. It was better not to broach the subject, though it still came up every once in a while, in vicious arguments that ended with both of them crying, and of the two, it was he who cried the most — he sobbed with rage, with resentment, with shame, and then his face would harden as though the tears had settled like sediment onto his skin; it’s a commonplace analogy but really, after crying, his skin looked denser and darker.
It wasn’t all so terrible. When, with money from her parents, Claudia bought an amazing all-in-one device — it could print, scan, and even make photocopies — she threw herself passionately into digitizing extensive family albums. She would sit in front of the computer doing this for hours, and although the sessions seemed fairly tedious, she enjoyed them because she wasn’t just documenting the past, she was altering it: she distorted the faces of her more obnoxious relatives, she erased secondary characters and added in other, unlikely guests, like Jim Jarmusch (at her birthday party), or Leonard Cohen (beside Claudia taking her First Communion), or Sinéad O’Connor, Carlos Cabezas, and the congressman Fulvio Rossi (tagging along on a trip to San Pedro de Atacama). The editing wasn’t very good, but it got some laughs out of friends and cousins.
Another year passed like that.
Now Max worked the morning shift, so in theory they had more time together, but they wasted a good portion of that time arguing over the computer. He complained that because Claudia was on the computer so often, he wasn’t able to write when inspiration struck him, which was untrue, because he still used the same old notebooks for his endless drafts of poems (he felt that they were destroyed by the process of transcription). He had also gotten into the habit of writing endless e-mails to people he hadn’t seen in years, whom he now missed, or thought he missed. Some of these people lived nearby or not so far away, and Max had their phone numbers, but he preferred to write them letters — they were letters more than e-mails: melancholic texts, sensationalist, wistful, the kind of messages whose replies are put off indefinitely, although sometimes he received responses that were every bit as elaborate and contaminated by a frivolous, whining nostalgia.
Summer arrived and so did Sebastián, after months of delicate negotiations. They both went to Temuco to pick him up, by bus, nine hours there and almost ten back. The boy had just turned eight years old and the slight, premature shadow of a mustache gave him a comic, grown-up look. During his first days with them, Sebastián spoke little, especially if he was answering his father. Their intense trips to downtown Santiago, to the zoo, and to Fantasilandia all ended with them back at the apartment, and they seemed to have a better time shut inside on those hot afternoons than they did during the supposedly fun activities. Seba took advantage of his user profile, signing in to Messenger without restrictions for interminable chats with his Temucan friends. He quickly demonstrated his computer knowledge, which wasn’t surprising — like most children of his generation, he had learned about computers from a young age — but the extent of his dexterity impressed Claudia and Max. In a precise, slightly bored tone, the boy educated them about their choice of a new antivirus program and explained how they needed to defrag the hard drive periodically. He ran through the Pink Panther game with astonishing speed, it goes without saying, and the two or three afternoons he spent teaching his father and Claudia the logic of the game — so elementary for him — were the most glorious and full moments of his visit. He had certainly never been so close to his father, and he and Claudia became friends, so to speak. Claudia thought Sebastián was a good kid, and Sebastián thought Claudia was pretty.
They all went back to Temuco together. The trip was a happy one, with gifts and promises of reencounters. But the trip home was somber and exhausting, a distinct prelude to what was coming next. Because the moment they opened the door to the apartment, life entered into an irresolvable paralysis. Maybe annoyed by Claudia’s conclusions and advice (“You got him back, but now you have to keep him,” “You’ll lose him again if you don’t take care of your relationship,” “Seba’s mother is a good woman”), or maybe just bored with her, Max withdrew, sunk into himself. He didn’t hide his annoyance, but wouldn’t explain his mood either, and he ignored Claudia’s endless questions, or he answered them reluctantly, in monosyllables.
One night he came home drunk and went to sleep without even greeting her. She didn’t know what to do. She went to bed, embraced him, tried to sleep next to him, but she couldn’t. She turned on the computer, roamed the Internet, and spent two hours playing Pac-Man with the arrow keys. Then she called a taxi and went to a liquor store to buy white wine and menthol cigarettes. She drank half the bottle at the table in the living room, looking at the cracks in the laminate flooring, the white walls, the faint but numerous fingerprints on the light switches — from my fingers, she thought, plus Max’s, plus the fingers of all the people who ever turned on the lights in this apartment. Then she went back to the computer, chose Max’s profile, and, as she had done many times before, tried the obvious passwords, in capital letters, in lowercase—charlesbaudelaire, nicanorparra, anthrax, losprisioneros, star wars, sigridalegria, blancalewin, mataderocinco, laetitiacasta, juancarlosonetti, monicabelluci, laconjuradelosnecios. She apprehensively smoked a cigarette, five cigarettes, while she tuned in to a new anxiety, one that grew and shrank at an imprecise rhythm. Then she typed in claudiatoro— an obvious option, which out of modesty or low self-esteem she hadn’t tried yet. The system responded immediately. The e-mail program was open, and didn’t require a password. She stopped, poured more wine, was about to desist, but she was already there, facing the formidable in-box and the even more formidable record of sent messages. There was no turning back.
She read, in no particular order, messages that were ultimately innocent, but that hurt her nonetheless — so many times the word dear, so many hugs (“a big hug,” “two hugs,” and other, more original formulations, like “sending hugs,” “hugging you,” “sending hugs your way”), so many references to the past, and that suspicious ambiguity when he had to write about the present or about the future. There were the kind of fleeting, fierce flirtations that show up in everyone’s e-mail accounts, hers too, but there were also five chains of messages that spoke of meetings with unknown women. But what hurt her most was her own invisibility, because he never mentioned her, or at least not in the messages she read — except for one, sent to a friend, in which he confessed that the relationship was on the rocks: he literally wrote that he wasn’t interested in sex with her anymore, and that they would probably break up anytime now.