My Documents

CAMILO

“I’m Camilo!” he shouted to me from the gate, opening his arms wide, as if we knew each other. “Your daddy’s godson.” It seemed terribly suspicious to me, like a caricature of danger, and I was nine then, already too big to fall for a trap like that. Those dark glasses, like a blind man’s, and on such a cloudy day. And that jean jacket, covered in sewn-on patches with the names of rock bands. “My dad’s not here,” I told him, closing the door, and I didn’t even give my father the message. I forgot.

But it turned out to be true: my father had been a close friend of Camilo’s father, Big Camilo — they’d played soccer together on the Renca team. We had photographs of the baptism, the baby crying and the adults looking solemnly into the camera. All was well for several years — my father was an engaged godfather, and he took an interest in the child — but he and Big Camilo had a fight, and later, some months after the coup, Big Camilo was imprisoned, and after he was released he went into exile. The plan was for his wife, July, to bring Little Camilo and meet up with him in Paris, but she didn’t want to, and the marriage ended. So Little Camilo grew up missing his father, waiting for him, saving up money to go visit him. And one day, just after he turned eighteen, he decided that if he couldn’t see his father, he should at least find his godfather.

I learned all this over tea the first time Camilo came to have onces with us, or maybe I found it out gradually. I want to be clear here, and I’m getting mixed up. But I remember how moved my father was that afternoon when he saw how much his godson looked like his old friend. “You have the same face,” he told him, which was not necessarily a compliment, because it was an unremarkable face, difficult to remember, and though Camilo used many products to style his stiff hair fashionably, it had a tendency to play dirty tricks on him.

Despite my initial distrust, Camilo soon became a benevolent and protective presence for me, luminous, a real older brother. When he set off for France to fulfill his lifelong dream, that’s how it felt: like my brother was leaving. This was in January of 1991. I know that for certain.

I wasn’t the only one who was fascinated by Camilo. My older sister was completely infatuated, and my younger sister, who usually couldn’t keep her attention on anything for more than two seconds, would watch him intently when he came to visit, celebrating every one of his wisecracks. Not to mention my mom, whom he joked around with but also spoke to seriously, because during that time Camilo was — in his own words—“full of religious tension,” and although my mother was no saint, she was so astounded by the idea that a person could deny the existence of God that she’d sit and listen to him in awe.

As for my father, I think that, for him, Camilo became more of a companion or friend than a godson; he even let Camilo address him with the informal tú. They would sit up late in the living room, talking about all kinds of things — except about the existence of God, because my father didn’t allow such things to be questioned, or about soccer, because Camilo was the first man I met who didn’t like soccer. It seemed so funny to me, so exotic: he didn’t even understand the rules. The only match he’d ever played took place in the San Miguel gym, when he was five years old: his knowledge of the game back then came from the replays he’d seen on TV, so he spent the whole afternoon running every which way, cheering for goals that hadn’t happened and waving happily to the crowd, utterly uninterested in the ball.

My own relationship with my father, however, was closely tied to soccer. We watched or listened to games, sometimes we went to the stadium together, and every Sunday at noon I went with him to a field in La Farfana, where he played goalie. He was really good — I remember him suspended in the air, grabbing hold of the ball with both hands and clutching it to his chest. Still, I always suspected that his teammates hated him, because he was the kind of goalie who spent the whole game barking instructions, ordering around the defense and even the midfield players at the top of his lungs. “Pass it back, man, pass it back! Here! Pass it back, man, back!” How many times did I hear my father call that out in a tone of utmost alarm? When he yelled at me — if he ever did — it was never as loud as those shrieks on the soccer field. His teammates endured them with annoyance, or at least that’s what I assumed, since trying to play with that nonstop commotion in the background can’t have been pleasant. But he was respected, my father. And he was really good, I’ll say it again. I would settle in behind the goal with my Bilz or my Chocolito, and sometimes he would glance at me quickly to be sure I was still there, and other times he would ask me, without turning around, what had happened, because that was my father’s main problem as a goalie, the reason he never went pro: his myopia was so severe that he could see only as far as the midfield. His reflexes, however, were extraordinary, as was his bravery, which he paid for with two fractures in his right hand and one in his left.

During halftime I liked to go and stand in the goalie’s spot, and invariably I’d think about how immense the goal was. Over and over, I wondered how anyone could possibly block a penalty kick. My father blocked penalty kicks — of course he did. One out of every three or four: he never dived for them early; he always waited, and if the kicker’s execution was anything less than perfect, he attacked the ball.

***

I remember a trip to the country when Camilo discovered I blinked between streetlights. I still do it, even when I’m driving; I can’t help it. As soon as I get on the highway, I start blinking carefully, trying to hit the exact midpoint between streetlights. That day, my sisters, Camilo, and I were crowded into the backseat of my parents’ Chevette, and Camilo noticed that I was tense, concentrating, and then he started to blink at the same time that I did, smiling at me. I got worried, because I didn’t want to make any mistakes; I fervently believed that only if I blinked between streetlights would we all be kept safe.

My nervous habits don’t bother me so much now, but when I was a kid they used to make me so anxious that even the simplest activities became unbearable. I guess I was partly or completely OCD. Like many children, I scrupulously avoided the cracks in the sidewalk. If I ever accidentally stepped on one I fell into a state of unspeakable despair — and yet I knew, on some level, that it was all too ridiculous to talk about. I also had an obsession with balancing out parts of my body: if one leg hurt, I’d hit the other one to make them even. Sometimes I’d move my right shoulder to the rhythm of my heartbeats, as if I had two hearts. I had some truly random routines as well, like going nine times up and down the steep staircase that led from the pool to the park. This wasn’t really so strange — it could have been a kind of game — but I managed to keep it from being one by hiding it carefully: I’d stop at the bottom step, shake my head as if I’d forgotten something, and then turn around and retrace my steps.

If I mention all this it’s only because Camilo always seemed willing to help me. That time in the Chevette, when he realized that I was nervous, he patted my hair and said something I don’t remember, but I’m sure that it was warm, caring, and subtle. Sometime later, when I started telling him about my eccentricities, he told me that everyone was different, and maybe the strange things I did were normal, or maybe they weren’t, but it didn’t matter, because normal people stank.

I could fill many pages writing about Camilo’s importance in my life. For now, I remember that it was Camilo who, after many long and sophisticated arguments, managed to get me permission to go to my first concert. (We saw Aparato Raro at the Don Orione school in Cerrillos.) He was also the first person to read my poems.

I’d written poems since I was little, which was, of course, a shameful secret. They weren’t any good, but I thought they were, and when Camilo read them, he did so respectfully, though he immediately explained that these days poems didn’t rhyme. That was news to me. I’d never read a poem that didn’t rhyme, and I’d always thought that poetry was something unchanging: ancient and immutable. But it was great to hear, since there were times when it cost me the world to find rhymes, and I knew I couldn’t always fall back on the easy combinations.

I asked him what the difference was, then, between a poem and a story. We were stretched out by the pool — in full-on photosynthesis, as he would say. He looked at me with a pedagogical expression and told me that a poem was the exact opposite of a story. “Stories are boring. Poetry is madness, poetry is savage, poetry is a torrent of extreme emotions,” he said, or something like that. It’s difficult not to start inventing, not to let myself be carried along on the scent of memory. He definitely used the words madness, savage, and emotions. Torrent, maybe not. I think extreme, yes.

Back at home, he picked up my notebook and started to write poems himself. It took him maybe half an hour to write ten or twelve long texts, and then he read them to me. I didn’t understand a thing. I asked him if other people understood his poems. He told me that people might not understand them, but that wasn’t the important thing. I asked him if he wanted to publish a book. He told me yes, he was sure he would, but that wasn’t the important thing, either. I asked him what the important thing was. And he said this, or this was what I understood: “The important thing is to express your feelings, to show yourself as a passionate, interesting man, maybe a bit fragile, someone who isn’t afraid of anything, someone who accepts his feminine side.” That was definitely the first time I heard the expression “feminine side.”

Another day, not long after that, he asked me if I liked men or women. I was a bit alarmed, because there were certainly guys that I liked — Camilo himself, for example — but I was quite sure that I liked girls more, much more. “I like girls,” I told him. “I like them a lot. I think they’re hot as hell.”

“Okay,” he said, very seriously, and then he added that if I liked guys it was all right — that happened sometimes too.

***

I remember Camilo that afternoon, standing on the bow-shaped bridge in Providencia, smoking. I could tell it was not your usual cigarette, but I didn’t know exactly what it was. “It’s too strong for a kid,” he said in apology when I asked him for a drag, because by then I’d started smoking, once in a while. This must have been 1986 or early 1987; I was ten or eleven years old. I’m sure of that because at that age I still didn’t know my way around Providencia or downtown Santiago very well, and also because later that day we went to buy True Stories by the Talking Heads, which was still a new album then.

“We have to solve your problem,” Camilo had told me that morning as we were walking toward the bus stop. I asked him which problem, because I thought I had a lot, not just one. “Your shyness,” he replied. “Women don’t like shy men.” And I really was shy back then; I’m talking about genuine shyness, not the kind you see now, when so many things are blamed on shyness it’s almost a joke. If someone doesn’t say hi, it’s because he’s shy; if a guy kills his wife, it’s because of shyness; if he cheats a whole town, if he runs for office, if he eats the last bit of Nutella from the jar without asking anyone: shy. No, I’m talking about something else: stuttering, introspection, insecurity.

“I’m going to help you,” Camilo told me. “I’m going to give you a lesson, but don’t worry, you won’t have to do anything — just don’t leave my side, no matter what I do.” I nodded, feeling a bit dizzy. During the hour-long bus ride, he told me jokes, most of them ones he’d told me before, but this time he told them in a very loud voice, all but shouting. I thought the lesson was that I had to laugh equally loudly, which was very hard for me, but I tried. Then, as we were getting off the bus, he told me that that hadn’t been the lesson.

We went up onto the bridge and stopped halfway across. Camilo smoked in silence, while I looked down at the murky, rushing water of the river, which was higher than usual. I focused on the current, until I was so concentrated that I had the feeling the water was standing still and we were aboard a moving boat, although I’d never been on a boat in my life. I stayed like that for a long time, fifteen, maybe twenty minutes. “We’re on a boat,” I said to Camilo. I had trouble explaining; he didn’t get it, but then, suddenly, he saw it too, and let out a cry of profound and growing astonishment. We went on gazing at the current while he repeated, “Incredible, incredible, incredible.”

Afterward, as we were walking toward Providencia, he told me that he now respected me. He added, emphatically, “I liked you a lot before, I still like you a lot, but now I respect you, too.” When we got to an intersection, maybe Providencia and Carlos Antúnez, he looked at me, made a subtle, sharp movement with his head that meant now, then threw himself to the ground, clutching his stomach, and started laughing extravagantly, scandalously. A group of people gathered around us right away, and I did not want to be there, but I understood that this was the lesson. When he finally stopped laughing, there were five policemen there asking him for an explanation. Camilo gave me a nod of approval — I had stayed beside him the whole time, and I had even laughed a little, too. I watched the cops’ faces, impassive and severe, while Camilo rattled off a disjointed explanation in which he talked about me and my shyness, and how it was necessary to teach me this lesson so that I could, he told them, grow. He had disrupted the public order, we were living under a dictatorship, but Camilo managed to placate the policemen, and we walked away after making the strange promise never to laugh in a public place again.

“I’m really high,” Camilo said to me, or maybe he said it to himself, a little concerned. We went to a store to buy the Talking Heads album. The place seemed different from any record store I’d been to — everything struck me as luxurious and exclusive. When the sales clerk handed us True Stories, Camilo translated the opening lyrics of “Love for Sale” for me, though he may have gone a little off course, since he didn’t know any English. I took the album from him, examined its red-and-white cover, and then I gave him the same quick gesture he’d given me: now. He barely had time to acknowledge it with a panicked look before I took off with the record in my hands, and we went running, dodging pedestrians at full speed, for a long time, laughing like crazy.

That afternoon, when we got home, there was a soccer match. I don’t remember which one, but Colo-Colo was definitely playing, and Camilo stayed to watch it with us. My father asked him why. “I don’t have a father,” Camilo said. “You’re my godfather, so you have to teach me about soccer. Otherwise,” he warned, winking at me, “I’ll turn out to be a fairy.”

It became routine for Camilo to watch the games with us, but I don’t know if my dad enjoyed it. The questions Camilo asked were so simple and off-base that, before long, boredom overcame us.

***

On December 4, 1987, I committed a mortal sin. Los Prisioneros had just released La cultura de la basura, their third album; I was dying to buy it, but I didn’t have a single peso. I considered stealing again, but I didn’t think I could do it — that time with the Talking Heads had been a spontaneous flash of inspiration. Then I had a better idea: since the annual Telethon was happening that day, I asked my parents for money to help the handicapped children, and then I headed off to the store and bought the cassette.

I had a terrible time of it. I locked myself in my room to listen to the tape, and at first every song sounded, in one way or another, as if it were about my act of villainy. I decided that I had to go to confession, but I was afraid of the priest’s reaction. “Confess to me,” Camilo said, when I told him I felt guilty. “What do you need to go blabbing your business to a priest for? Also, I’ll tell you straight off: masturbating is not a sin. I think even Jesus whacked off a few times thinking about Mary Magdalene.”

I laughed so much I felt giddy. Never in my life had I heard such heresy. There was a picture of Jesus above the table in the living room, and from then on I could never look at it without thinking that he was making that face after ejaculating. Anyway, I had never thought that masturbation was a sin. When I told Camilo what I had done, he told me that the telethon met its goals through the sponsorships alone, and that maybe I had needed that cassette, maybe I had done the right thing. “I don’t understand,” I said.

“Okay,” he pronounced. “If you still feel guilty, pray that one prayer where you have to hit your chest.”

“What about your godmother? Have you seen her?” I asked him one morning — in those days he used to stay over and sleep in the living room. He’d get up early and come back from the market with a watermelon, because it was summer. He said yes, that she was still his mother’s best friend.

“And you? Do you have godparents?”

“Yeah, my aunt and uncle, my mom’s brother and sister.”

“That’s no good,” he said. “The idea is that they aren’t family. Aunts and uncles will give you presents anyway. I think my father should be your godfather,” he told me very seriously. “When I go see him I’m going to ask him to be your godfather.”

Camilo still insisted that we teach him about soccer, and sometimes we practiced penalty kicks in the street. But my father would get fed up; he said that Camilo didn’t concentrate, that his interest wasn’t serious. Still, one weekend the three of us went to the Santa Laura Stadium to watch a double-header. First it was Universidad de Chile against Concepción. Camilo, to my father’s and my annoyance, had decided to root for the U, which had been his father’s team, although of course he didn’t even know the players’ names. He liked the way that everyone in the stadium criticized and shouted at the players, but was surprised to see that they got angry with the ref. He decided to come to his defense, and although at first people didn’t take it well, it was truly funny to hear Camilo, every time the ref called a foul or carded a player, stand up and yell, “Very well done, sir! Excellent decision!”

Camilo kept cheering on the referee during the next match, which was between Colo-Colo and Naval, I think. I joined him for a while, even though watching Colo-Colo was to me a very serious matter. I had grown up admiring Chino Hisis, Pillo Vera, Carlos Caszely, Horacio Simaldone, and, of course, Roberto Rojas—“el Cóndor.” I had hated some players too: Cristián Saavedra (I don’t know why) and, during the period when the coach inexplicably used to make him and Rojas alternate as starters, Mario Osbén. That infuriated me. One of the great joys of my childhood was going down to the fence to yell at the coach, and I’d really let him have it. At home, cursing was strictly forbidden, but at the stadium I had free rein.

None of those players were on the team anymore that day at the stadium with Camilo, but the one I missed the most was obviously Cóndor Rojas. All Chileans admired Rojas, but for me, because he was a goalie, it was also a roundabout way of admiring my father. What’s more, I knew the position perfectly, and I considered the goalie’s job to be without a doubt the hardest. Sometimes I played goalie too, trying to emulate Cóndor Rojas, or maybe my father (in all but the shouting). Still, when I joined the Cobresal Youth leagues, in Maipú, playing on the same field where Iván Zamorano began his career, I tried out as a midfielder and not a goalie. I was afraid, perhaps, that I wouldn’t be good enough.

***

Why did Camilo spend so much time with us? Because we loved him, sure. And because he didn’t like being at his own house. He fought with his mother about his religious beliefs and about the political situation. Before the 1988 referendum, Camilo went to all the demonstrations in favor of the “No” vote, and that led to severe arguments. He wanted “No” to win because he hated Pinochet, but also because he thought that, if it did, his father would come back to Chile. But Camilo’s father didn’t want to come back, or at least that’s what Auntie July always told him: “Your father has another family now. He has another country. He doesn’t even remember you.” But Camilo’s father still wrote to him, sent him money, and called him every once in a while.

Auntie July was tough. Even so, she treated us very well the one time we went over to her house. She gave us bread cake and banana milk while we played Montezuma’s Revenge with Camilo’s halfbrothers. It was strange to see Camilo there. He didn’t seem to belong. I went into his room, and it was as if he didn’t live there. He used to give my sisters and me posters and pictures to hang on our walls, but there was none of that in his own room: I was impressed by those white, empty walls, without even a nail to hang a photograph.

Oh, what did Camilo study? Administration or Management of Something, at the Universidad Tecnológica Metropolitana, which back then was called the Instituto Profesional de Santiago. But he didn’t like to study. Once, he tried to give me math lessons, but it didn’t work out, and, anyway, I didn’t really need them. Nor do I know if he read much, though I feel like he did. Now I sometimes think, from this suspiciously stable place that is the present, that Camilo was immature. But no. He wasn’t. Or he also had another side, an intuitive, generous, perceptive side.

He’d been there with us, in front of the TV, when Cóndor Rojas faked his injury in Brazil and the Chilean team walked off the field at the Maracaná. My father and I couldn’t believe what we were seeing, and Camilo was distraught too. “Fucking Brazilians!” I shouted, to see if anyone would scold me, but no one did. My father sank into furious silence. Camilo immediately set off downtown, and he was part of the crowd that protested in front of the Brazilian Embassy. I wanted to go with him, but my parents wouldn’t let me, and I had to swallow my rage.

One evening, while the subject was still being debated and Cóndor Rojas was still giving interviews in which he proclaimed his innocence, Camilo came over to eat with us and said that he no longer believed that Cóndor was innocent. By then the rumors were already circulating, but my father and I considered them defamatory. My father looked at Camilo with contempt, almost with hatred. “You don’t have the right to an opinion. You don’t know anything about soccer,” he told him. “Do you really think that Cóndor would be stupid enough to do something like that?” When Rojas finally admitted he was guilty, that he really had hidden a razor blade in his glove to fake his injury, we had no choice but to accept it. We apologized to Camilo then, but he said he didn’t think it was at all important.

Eventually we had to stop admiring Cóndor Rojas, and I also stopped going to my father’s games. Soon after that my father broke his right hand for the second time, and the doctor told him that he should never play soccer again.

Toward the end of 1990, something marvelous happened: after a decade of requesting a telephone line, we finally got one. We were given the number 557-3317. The morning they came to install it, I was home alone with my mother. The first thing she did was call one of her girlfriends, and then she told me that I should call one of my friends too, so I called Camilo. It was during a period when he had, without explanation, stopped coming to visit. He sounded happy, and I asked him to come see us. He appeared a few days later.

He told me he wanted to teach me how to talk to girls. I was fourteen by then, I had already kissed a few of them, but my relations with girls were still difficult. Camilo said that he’d recently met a girl called Lorena, and they’d gone out on a date and had slept together. He explained how one should treat a woman in bed (“You have to take her clothes off slowly — you can’t rush it”), and he offered to call Lorena, while I listened in from my mother’s room. “That way you can learn how a guy seduces a woman,” he said. He was not showing off — he really did want to teach me.

“Hi, Lorena, it’s Camilo,” he said, in a deep voice, when she picked up.

“Oh, how are you?” Her voice was sweet, sweet and a little hoarse.

“I’m good, but I need to see you.”

She was quiet for five seconds, and then she pronounced a sentence that I will never forget. “Well, if it’s already a necessity, we’ll just end it here,” she said, and hung up.

I went to the kitchen, put the kettle on, and made a cup of tea for Camilo. I think it was the first time I ever made tea for someone. I put a lot of sugar in it, which was what I understood you did when making tea for someone who was sad.

“Thanks,” Camilo said, with a gesture of resignation. “But it doesn’t matter. I’m happy. Next summer something very important is going to happen.”

“What?”

“Well, it won’t be summer for me. It’ll be winter.”

It was a perfect clue, but I still didn’t understand. How stupid.

“I’m going to France to see my father,” he said, the excitement clear in his face.

Now I jump ahead many years; more precisely, twenty-two. It’s October of 2012. I’m in Amsterdam, at a gathering of Chileans, most of them exiles, others students. And there is Big Camilo, Camilo Sr. Someone introduces us and when he hears my last name I notice the interest in his eyes. “You look like your father,” he tells me.

“And you look like Camilo,” I answer. He asks me some vague questions. We talk about the protests, about the shameful official refusal to allow Chileans abroad to vote in elections. We talk about Piñera, and suddenly we are compatriots spelling out the incompetence of their president. And then: “How is Hernán?” he asks me.

“Good,” I say, thinking that it’s been a while since I’ve talked to my father. I feel a little bullied, I don’t know why. I’m frozen. Then I realize: Camilo suffered so much because of his father. I feel that, in some dark and absurd way, by talking to Big Camilo I am betraying my friend, my brother. At the same time, I want to talk to this man, to understand who he is. I suggest that we meet up the next day.

We agree to meet at a Mexican restaurant on Keizersgracht. It’s a short walk from my hotel. I arrive almost two hours early so I can watch the Barcelona game. Alexis is on the bench. For decades now, soccer has been an individual sport for us Chileans. After what happened with Cóndor Rojas, not only were we out of Italy in ’90, we were also forbidden to participate in the South American qualifiers for the ’94 World Cup. There was nothing for us to do, for years, but focus on the local competition and on the individual triumphs and failures of our few countrymen who played outside Chile. We rooted for Real Madrid when Zamorano was there, and now we root for Barcelona, with Alexis, for as long as that lasts (if it lasts). And we have been and will be for whatever teams Mati Fernández or Arturo Vidal or Gary Medel or the others play for. We’re used to this way of watching: what do the goals that David Villa and Messi score matter to me? The only thing I care about is that they put Alexis in, and even if he doesn’t shine, may he at least not do something dumb.

Big Camilo also arrives early. I think, I’m going to watch a match with Camilo’s dad.

Everything I know about Big Camilo, about his exile, is what his son told me: that he was imprisoned in 1974, and that he had the good luck, so to speak, to get out of Chile in ’75. He went to Paris and soon met an Argentine woman, with whom he had two children. He tells me that he has been in Holland for fifteen years, first in Utrecht, then in Rotterdam, and now in a small town close to Amsterdam. Before long, like a policeman who doesn’t want to waste time, I speed up the investigation. I ask why Camilo was changed when he came back to Chile.

“I don’t know why,” he tells me. “He came to Paris to find me. He wanted us to go back to Chile together. He wasn’t interested in moving here, though I asked him to. He told me he was Chilean. I proposed that he come to study. I talked about our plans to settle in Holland. He told me he didn’t like studying, not in Santiago and not in Europe. It got more and more heated. He said horrible things to me. I said horrible things to him. And it became a contest, a competition of who could say the most horrible things. And I ended up feeling that he had won. He ended up feeling that I had won. All those years we’d been in contact, I’d thought about him, I’d sent him money — not much, but I’d sent it. Later, the first time I went back to Chile, we saw each other, we had lunch several times, but we always fought.”

“That was in ’92,” I say.

“Yes,” he replies.

Fifteen minutes into the second half, Alexis goes in; he’s offside a couple of times, but he plays a small role in Xavi’s 3–0 goal. Then Fàbregas scores, and then Messi again. Alexis misses an easy goal in the final minutes.

“What do you think of Alexis?” Big Camilo asks me.

“That he’s not better than Messi,” I say, and he smiles. I add that he was never much for scoring goals — in Chile he missed goals all the time — but that he was an exceptional winger. Suddenly I have that thought again: I’m talking about soccer with Camilo’s father, and I feel a kind of tremor. A very strange feeling. I talk about the 2006 Colo-Colo team. I talk about Claudio Borghi, about Mati Fernández, about Chupete Suazo, Kalule, Arturo Sanhueza. I talk about that terrible finals match against Pachuca, at the National Stadium. I feel awkward talking this way. Naive.

Later, I tell him that Camilo wanted him to be my godfather. He smiles, as if he doesn’t understand. And I don’t explain. Then he asks me to use the informal tú with him. I tell him no. He asks me if my father and Camilo used the informal with each other. I say yes. “Use it with me, then,” he responds.

But I don’t want to. I try to answer politely, but the only thing that comes out is a weak, murmured “No.”

I ask him why he and my father had fallen out. My dad never wanted to tell me or Camilo when we asked him: he always changed the subject. And no one else knew. I always assumed it was something very serious.

“It was toward the end of the season,” Big Camilo tells me. “We had it all sewn up, two — nil: I was playing center defense, there were only a few minutes left, and your dad was shouting like crazy: ‘Pass it, pass it back, pass it, Camilo!’ We’d been fighting about that for several games. He never let me make my own decisions. ‘Pass it, pass it back!’ In those days, the goalie was still allowed to pick the ball up with his hands when you passed it back to him.”

“I remember,” I tell him. “I’m not that young.”

“You are very young,” he tells me.

We order more beers.

He goes on, “He kept saying it over and over. ‘Pass it back, Camilo, come on!’ And I was fed up. Out of pure spite I put the ball in the corner and scored a goal on my own team: ‘There’s your ball, motherfucker!’ I told him. Some people laughed, others yelled at me, your father just looked at me with hate. And then the other team scored, and we tied. If I hadn’t scored that own goal, we could have advanced further, maybe even won the championship.”

Just then my Dutch friend Luc arrives; he has some books to give me. I introduce him to Camilo. He sits with us for a few minutes, and in his extravagant Spanish he asks Camilo if he’s in exile. “Not anymore,” Camilo answers. “Or, yes. I don’t know anymore.” Luc wants me to leave with him, but I feel like I should stay. I tell him we’ll meet up later.

Big Camilo had told his son that he was never tortured, even though he was held prisoner for several months. “They beat the shit out of me,” he says to me now. “But I don’t want to talk about that. I’m alive. I got to leave, start over again.” We both fall silent, thinking about Camilo. I think of the record shop, the song by the Talking Heads; maybe I hum it a little. “I was born in a house with the television always on / Guess I grew up too fast / And I forgot my name.”

***

Now we are walking along Prinsengracht. It’s cold. Without meaning to, I start to count the bicycles that are going by on the street at breakneck speed. Fifty, sixty, a hundred. The silence seems definitive. I sense that we’re about to say good-bye. And, sure enough, just then he says, “Well, I’ll be going now.

“Tell Hernán I’m sorry,” he adds. I assure him that my father forgave him many years ago, that it’s not important. We ask a boy to take our picture with my phone. As we pose, I think about how tomorrow I’m going to call my father, and we’ll talk for a long time about Big Camilo, and we’ll also remember, as we do sometimes, the horrendous night in early ’94 when Auntie July called to tell us that Camilo had been hit by a car, and the wretched week when he almost pulled through but didn’t pull through.

I don’t know why I ask Big Camilo how he learned of his son’s death. “I found out eight days later,” he says. “July knew how to contact me, but she didn’t want to.” We’re standing, staring at the ground, on a corner by a lamp store. I’ve seen this several times in Amsterdam: shopwindows filled with lamps that are all turned on at night. I’m about to tell him this, to change the subject. Then he repeats, “Please tell Hernán I’m sorry about that goal.”

“I’ll tell him,” I reply. When we say good-bye, he hugs me and starts to cry. I think that the story can’t end like that, with Camilo Sr. crying for his dead son, his son who was practically a stranger to him. But that’s how it ends.

LONG DISTANCE

I worked nights as a phone operator, and it was one of the best jobs I’ve ever had. The money wasn’t good, but it wasn’t awful either, and although the place looked inhospitable — a cramped office on Guardia Vieja whose only window looked out on an immense gray wall — it was a pleasant place to work: not too cold in winter or too hot in summer. Well, maybe I got cold in summer and hot in winter, but that was because I never managed to figure out how the thermostat worked.

This was in 1998: the World Cup in France had ended, and, a little while later, after I’d been working at the job for a couple of months, they arrested Pinochet. My boss, who was Spanish, put a photo of Judge Garzón on a corner of his desk, and we placed flowers around it in thanks. Portillo was a good boss, a generous guy; I rarely saw him, sometimes only on the twenty-ninth, when I waited, with some stupendous circles under my eyes, to pick up my paycheck. What I remember most about him is his voice, so high-pitched, like a teenager’s — a common enough tone among Chileans but, for me, a disconcerting one to hear from a Spaniard. He would call me very early, at six or seven in the morning, so I could give him a report on what had happened the previous night, which was pretty much pointless, because nothing ever happened, or almost nothing: maybe some call or other from Rome or Paris, simple cases from people who weren’t really sick but who wanted to make the most of the medical insurance they had bought in Santiago. My job was to listen to them, take down their information, make sure the policy was valid, and connect them to my counterparts in Europe.

Portillo let me read or write, or even doze off, on the condition that I always answer the phone in good time. That’s why he called at six or seven — although, when he was out partying, he might call earlier, a little drunk. “The phone should never ring more than three times,” he would tell me if I took too long picking up. But he didn’t usually scold me; on the contrary, he was quite friendly. Sometimes he asked me what I was reading. I would say Paul Celan, or Emily Dickinson, or Emmanuel Bove, or Humberto Díaz Casanueva, and he always burst out laughing, as if he had just heard a very good and unexpected joke.

One night, around four in the morning, I received a call from someone whose voice sounded mock-serious, or disguised, and I thought it was my boss pretending to be someone else. “I’m calling from Paris,” said the voice. The man was calling direct, which increased my feeling that it was a prank of Portillo’s, because clients usually reversed the charges when they called. Portillo and I had a certain level of trust between us, so I told him not to fuck with me, that I was very busy reading. “I don’t understand, I’m calling from Paris,” the man responded. “Is this the number of the travel insurance?”

I apologized and asked him for his number so I could call him back. When we talked again I’d become the nicest phone operator on the planet, which wasn’t really necessary, because I’ve never been impolite, and because the man with the unrealistic voice was also unrealistically nice, which was not usual in that job: it was more common for clients to show their bad manners, their highhandedness, their habit of treating phone operators badly, and surely also laborers, cooks, salespeople, or any other of the many groups made up of their supposed inferiors.

Juan Emilio’s voice, on the other hand, suggested the possibility of a reasonable conversation, although I don’t know if reasonable is the word, because as I was taking down his information (fifty-five years old, home address in Lo Curro, no preexisting conditions) and checking his policy (his insurance had the best coverage available on the market), something in his voice made me think that, more than a doctor, he just needed someone to talk to, someone who would listen.

He told me he’d been in Europe for five months, most of that time in Paris, where his daughter — whom he called la Moño — was working on her doctorate and living with her husband — el Mati — and the kids. None of this was in response to my questions, but he was talking so enthusiastically that it was impossible for me to break in. He told me how the kids spoke French with charmingly correct accents, and he also threw in a few commonplace observations about Paris. By the time he started talking to me about the difficulties la Moño had been having lately meeting her academic obligations, about the complexity of the doctoral programs, and about what kind of sense parenthood made in a world like this one (“a world that sometimes seems so strange nowadays, so different,” he told me), I realized we’d been talking for almost forty minutes. I had to interrupt him and respectfully ask him to tell me why he was calling. He told me he was a little under the weather, and he’d had a fever. I typed up the fax and sent it to the office in Paris so they could coordinate the case, and then I started the long process of saying good-bye to Juan Emilio, who fell all over himself in apologies and politeness before finally accepting that the conversation had ended.

Back then I’d picked up a few evening hours teaching at the technical training institute. The schedule fit perfectly: the class was from 8:00 to 9:20 p.m., twice a week, so I could maintain my nocturnal rhythm, getting up at noon, reading a lot, and all was well.

My first class was in March of 2000, a few days after Pinochet returned to Chile like he owned the place (I’m sorry for these reference points, but they’re the ones that come to mind). My students were older than me: they were all at least thirty and some were in their fifties. They worked all day, and struggled to pay their tuition for programs in Business Administration, Accounting, Secretarial Studies, or Tourism. I was to teach them “Techniques of Written Expression,” according to a very rigid and outdated syllabus, which encompassed composition, grammar, and even pronunciation.

In the first classes I tried to comply with what was asked of me, but my students came to class very tired from their jobs, and I think all of us got bored. I remember the desolation at the end of those first workdays. I remember walking along Avenida España after the third or fourth class, stopping at a hot-dog stand, ordering an Italiano, and thinking that I should tackle that feeling of wasted time head-on. After all, I was there to talk about language, and if there had been one constant thing in my life it was a love of certain stories, certain phrases, of a handful of words. But it was clear that, up to that point, I hadn’t been able to communicate anything. “Interesting class, Prof,” one student told me at the entrance to the metro, as if fate were trying to dispel my dark thoughts. I hadn’t recognized her. To combat my shyness, I opted to teach class without my glasses, so that I couldn’t make out my students’ faces, and if I had to ask a question, I’d just look toward some undefined place and say, “What do you think, Daniela?” It was an infallible method, because there were five Danielas in the course.

The name of the woman who talked to me in the metro wasn’t Daniela, but it rhymed: Pamela. She told me that she still lived with her parents, that she didn’t have a job. I asked her why she went to school at night, then. “Because it’s hot during the day,” she answered, flirtatious and disdainful. I asked her if she went to school at noon during the winter, and she laughed. Then I wanted to know if she really thought the class had been good. She looked down, as if I’d asked her something very intimate. Then almost a station later she said, “Yes, interesting.” We got out together at Baquedano, and I kept her company while she waited for the bus to Quilicura.

It hadn’t been so unusual when I was at the university, there were tons of examples: male teacher with student (male or female), female teacher with student (same), and there was talk of a few salacious cases (perhaps somewhat exaggerated) of a male teacher with two female students, and a female teacher with three male students and a female librarian (in the library, on top of the returns desk). So I thought it wouldn’t be that serious of an infraction if I tried to make something happen with Pamela. She wasn’t short or tall, not fat or thin: perfect, I thought. (I’ve never known how to answer those kinds of questions: do you prefer dark hair or blond, et cetera.) I knew for certain that there was something in her voice, in her attitude, in her eyes, that I liked.

I was engrossed in these speculations when I reached the office. I poured a coffee and smoked one cigarette after another (Portillo didn’t smoke, but he still allowed us to), thinking about love and also, I don’t know why, about death, and then about the future, which wasn’t my favorite subject. I thought how it was the year 2000, and I remembered the conversations we’d had as children, as teenagers, about that far-off future year: we had imagined a life full of flying cars and happy teleportations, or maybe something less spectacular but still radically different from the soulless and repressive world we lived in. I must have fallen asleep thinking about that, because the phone woke me up shortly after, at one in the morning. It was my boss calling to remind me that at 3 a.m. they were going to shut off the water. While I was filling up the thermos and the sink, I thought of myself, probably for the first time ever, as a solitary person.

According to procedure, fourteen days after the first call took place, we had to contact the client (the “pax,” as we called them) and ask how their illness had turned out, and what their opinion was of the service they had received. This part of the process was referred to as the social call, and it was the last step before closing a file (oh, what strange pleasure we felt when we finally closed a file). So I picked up the phone and I called Paris: Juan Emilio was still at his daughter’s house, and it was she who answered — la Moño didn’t strike me as quite so friendly as her father. “Call him later,” she said dryly. That’s what I did. Juan Emilio seemed moved by my call, which tended to happen, because some of the clients thought that we were calling out of personal concern, as if some sad night operator would or could care about a compatriot on the other side of the world coming down with a slight cold.

Toward the end of the conversation, Juan Emilio asked me if I liked my job. I replied that there were better ones, but that this one was pretty good. “But what did you study?” he insisted. “Literature,” I replied, and he let out a chuckle. I usually hated it when people asked me that question, but neither his question nor his laughter bothered me. Over time I learned to accept and appreciate Juan Emilio’s crescendos of laughter, minimal at first, and then frank and contagious.

Four or five days later, now back in Chile, he called again. It was seven in the morning, and I was fast asleep in the office. “I want to know if you’re okay,” he told me, and we got caught up in a conversation that would have been normal if we had been two teenagers becoming friends, or two old men trying to combat the inertia of a Monday at their retirement home. I thought Juan Emilio was pretty crazy, and maybe I felt proud to participate in his madness. “Pax very friendly, calls for no reason and thanks me again for the service,” I wrote in his file. But really there was a reason for his call, although I think that it occurred to him only as we were talking: he asked me to be his teacher, his guide in reading. “I need to be more cultured,” he said. It seemed simple: I would recommend books for him to read, and then we would discuss them. I accepted, of course. I proposed a monthly sum and he insisted on doubling it. I offered to go to his house or his office, although I didn’t really see myself taking the metro and a shared taxi to cross the entire city every week. Luckily, he wanted the classes to take place at my apartment, every Monday, at seven in the evening.

Juan Emilio was short, redheaded, dandified. He dressed with awkward elegance, as if his clothes were always new, as if his clothes wanted to say in a loud and energetic voice: I don’t have anything to do with this body, I’m never going to get used to this body. We made a reading list that I thought might interest him. He was enthusiastic. I liked Juan Emilio, but the warmth I felt toward him was tempered by an ambiguous, guilty feeling. What kind of person could allow himself, when he was of working age, such a long European vacation? What had he done all that time, besides take his grandchildren to all the ice cream parlors in Paris? I tried to imagine him as one of those millionaire Chileans who flew to London to support Pinochet. I tried to see him as what I supposed he was: a full-on cuico, conservative, bourgeois, Pinochetista or ex-Pinochetista, although he didn’t talk like a cuico and his opinions weren’t so conservative and inflexible: at least you could talk to him, you really could. He was also discreet: he looked around my small apartment on Plaza Italia without revealing that it seemed a poor and rundown place to him. Later I thought, to mollify myself, Manichaean-style, that no Chilean executive would have a daughter studying in France, that France was the worst place in the world for the daughter of a Pinochetista.

The classes at the technical training institute, meanwhile, improved. I started to use my glasses so that I could pay more attention to Pamela. A pair of dimples insinuated themselves into her cheeks, and the way she did her makeup was odd: she drew a too-thick line around her eyes, as if fencing them in, as if she wanted to keep them from jumping out of her skull and escaping. One night we had to go over the various kinds of letter-writing, and I rambled on ineloquently until I had the idea to give them an exercise. I asked them to write a letter that they would have liked to receive, a letter that would have changed their lives. Almost all of them did predictable things, but there were four who took the exercise to its extremes and wrote texts that were savage, devastating, beautiful. One of them, as he read his letter aloud, ended up crying and cursing his father, or his uncle, or a father who was really his uncle — I think we were all uncertain on that point, but we didn’t dare ask him to clarify.

I saw that moment as my chance to change the course of things. I devoted the next few classes to lessons on letter writing, always trying to get them to discover the power of language, the ability of words to influence reality. Some of the students were still uneasy, but we started to have a good time. They wrote to their parents, to childhood friends, to their first loves. I remember one student who wrote to John Paul II to explain why she no longer believed in God (her letter prompted a horrible and convoluted fight that almost came to blows, but in the end we were all better for it). By now they liked the class: the only thing they wanted to do was write letters, express feelings, explore what was happening to them — except for Pamela, who avoided me and abstained from class participation. And, despite my best efforts, we hadn’t run into each other in the metro again.

One night, at the beginning of class, a student raised his hand and told me that he wanted to write a letter of resignation because he was planning to quit his job. He started talking, then, about the problems he had with his boss; I tried to give him advice, but I was possibly the least qualified person in the room to do that. Someone told him he was irresponsible, that before quitting he should think about how he was going to live and how he would pay for school. A weighty and serious silence followed, which I didn’t know how to fill.

“I want to write the letter,” he told us then. “I’m not going to quit, I couldn’t, I have kids, I have problems, but I still want to write that letter. I want to imagine what it would be like to quit. I want to tell my boss how I really feel about him. I want to tell him he’s a son of a bitch, but without using that word.”

“It’s not a word, it’s several,” said a student sitting in the first row.

“What?”

“It’s four words: son of a bitch.”

We started on the letter. We wrote the first paragraphs on the board, but because the class period was coming to an end, we agreed to pick up the exercise next time.

Only there wasn’t a next time. I arrived on Monday just early enough to pick up the folder and go to the classroom, but the building was boarded up and there was even fresh paint on the facade. The institute no longer existed. The students explained all this to me, devastated. They had already paid their tuition that month, and a few had even paid the whole year in advance, taking advantage of a discount.

That night I went with my students to a bar on Avenida España. They didn’t usually go out together and they’d never become friends, so while some of them spoke about their lives and got to know each other, the rest just focused on their beers and churrasco sandwiches. Pamela was at the opposite end of the table, with another group, and never talked to me, but I timed things so that, after leaving the bar, we met on the way to the metro. I went with her again to the bus in Plaza Italia, and when we said good-bye she told me that she felt overly watched by me, but that if I didn’t look at her so much, maybe she would start to like me. “But we’re never going to see each other again,” I told her. “Who knows,” she replied.

The sessions with Juan Emilio weren’t as easy as I’d thought they’d be. He didn’t question the books I chose, but he tried to extract messages and morals from them — as most people do, it must be said. Every week I gave him an exercise to do at home, and he always arrived with a bottle of wine in apology: “I didn’t get to finish my homework,” he’d tell me, with a sort of mischievous gesture, and then off he would go, talking with a dizzying erudition about the vintage or the vineyard of the wine he’d brought, using that language that seemed as funny to me as literary terminology must have seemed to him. Juan Emilio was an executive of something, but I chose not to delve too deeply into his work, basically for the same reason I chose not to ask him what he thought about Pinochet’s return: I didn’t want to find out that he was a bloodsucking tycoon or anything like that — I didn’t want to have any reason to despise him.

On the other hand, I came to know a lot about his family: I started to really take an interest in his children’s lives, which were in no way interesting. From our conversations I deduced that his marriage was complex but stable; I’m sure there had been infidelities, but he and his wife were too old by then to separate, and maybe they lived in that world where people don’t separate even if they hate each other. But Juan Emilio didn’t hate his wife (who had a terrible but, to me, literary-sounding name: Eduviges), nor did she hate him. They seemed to tolerate each other, and maybe every once in a while she waited for him with a pisco sour in hand, and they sat on the sofa to talk about the fates of other, less-fortunate couples, about how good they themselves had it, together and happy after all this time.

It was hard for me to interrupt his speeches to redirect the conversation; in fact, a couple of times it got too late and he had to go before we’d even started the class. In any case, he paid me, of course.

I tried to help my ex-students with their complaint before the Ministry of Education, which offered them little or nothing. We wrote, among all of us, the Big Letter, the crucial missive that would demonstrate the importance of written communication, the power of words, but nothing happened. We had compiled testimonies, the opinions of politicians and of experts in education, but it was all to no avail. The situation was scandalous, and for a time it was in the news, but all of a sudden that silence set in, so suspicious and Chilean, which shrouded everything back then. Some of the students managed to enroll in other institutes, under conditions that were never advantageous, but the ones who had paid for the whole year never found a real solution. And neither did I, I should say: I was owed a month’s salary, but when I tried to join together with the other teachers, I had no luck. I got in touch with two, in fact, who chose not to complain, because they also worked at other institutes, and they didn’t want to come off as troublemakers.

In any case, I resolved to see the class through, meeting at that same bar on Avenida España every week. Of the thirty-five original students, ten of them continued with me through the rest of the semester, every Wednesday, and although a couple of times the thing degenerated, we spent most of those sessions working and discussing. One of those nights, after I had lost all hope, Pamela appeared and joined the group without comment, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. We left together for the metro, and she handed me a five-thousand-peso bill. I told her that the class was free, that at most I would let the students buy me a beer and a sandwich during class. She said that she wanted to pay me anyway, and she wouldn’t take the money back. “Let’s go to your house, Professor,” she said to me then, using the formal usted. She always used usted with me and I almost don’t have to explain how absurd it was for her to do that, since she was ten years older. It was later than usual; I was in the habit of going home and eating a can of tuna before heading to the insurance office, but that night I didn’t have much leeway. I decided to risk it, and I brought her to the office. She sucked me off on the rug and then we had sex on Portillo’s desk, and luckily the phone didn’t ring. At three in the morning a taxi came, which I charged to the company. Before she left, she told me, with exquisite seriousness: “Pay me, Professor, it’s five thousand pesos.” It became, then, a routine: she came to classes and paid, but then, at the office or at my house, I paid her. And always, even in the middle of sex, she used usted with me.

“At least use the informal in bed,” I told her one night.

“I prefer to use usted, Professor,” she said, fixing her hair. “Just pretend I’m a hot Colombian.”

One evening when the rain was coming down in torrents, Juan Emilio arrived late. He brought with him a man who greeted me happily, then immediately started to pile a series of boxes next to my desk. It was hard for me to understand the situation, which Juan Emilio failed to explain except with a strange, condescending smirk.

“I hope these little gifts won’t bother you,” he said finally.

I reacted angrily, but too late. I’m sure he had never met anyone as poor as me; in fact, coming down to Plaza Italia must have been, for Juan Emilio, a kind of transgressive adventure in itself. But I wasn’t poor, far from it. I lived on very little, but in no way was I poor. I told him I couldn’t accept his charity, asked how he could he even think of such a thing, but as I was arguing Juan Emilio was opening the boxes and stocking the pantry, or that corner of my minuscule kitchen that served as a pantry. There really were a lot of boxes, and they held, among other delicacies, soy drinks, different kinds of Twinings tea, a sophisticated selection of cheeses, octopus and salmon carpaccio, some tins of caviar, several six-packs of imported beers, and two dozen bottles of wine. There was also an immense box of cleaning products, which in a certain way offended me, since he obviously thought they were necessary.

I thanked him for his good intentions and I told him again that I couldn’t accept his generosity. “It’s nothing to me,” he replied, which was undoubtedly true, and after refusing two more times, with less conviction, I finally accepted the gifts. Then there was a less than emphatic attempt on my part to begin the class. We vaguely discussed some stories by Onetti while we snacked on cheese and olives and some delicious Middle Eastern pastries. I tried, but I couldn’t hide the fact that I was hungry.

As he was leaving I started to tell him about what we would do the following Monday, but he stopped me. He ran his hand through his hair and lit a cigarette with a speed that was unusual for him, before telling me: “I’ve discovered that I don’t really like literature so much. I like to talk to you, to come here, to see how you live. But I haven’t really liked anything I’ve read.”

He pronounced these last phrases with a distasteful emphasis; I’m sure it was the same tone he used when he fired his employees. Something like: I’m afraid we’re going to have to find someone else. Only then did I understand that the merchandise was a kind of severance pay. Before taking his leave, he looked me straight in the eyes and leaned in for an unexpected and very long kiss on the lips.

I was frozen. It annoyed me that I hadn’t understood the plot. I felt stupid. The kiss didn’t upset me, it didn’t disgust me, but just in case, I took a long drink from a bottle of Syrah; I have no idea if it had a fruity expression or a pronounced acidity, but right at that moment it struck me as fitting.

At work the next night, since it was rumored that they were going to cut off the supply again, I collected some water, but I forgot to turn off the tap. I fell fast asleep, like never before, on the floor, and I woke up at seven in the morning, lying in water, the rug almost entirely drenched. My boss gave free rein to his well-trained sarcasm as he chastised me, but in the end he thought my ineptitude was so funny that he decided not to fire me. I understood, however, that it was the end.

More than once I had thought about staying in that office forever, answering that phone for the rest of my life. It wasn’t hard to imagine myself at forty or fifty years old, spending the night with my feet up on that same desk, reading the same books over and over. Up till then I had chosen not to think about anything too confusing or elaborate. I never seriously imagined the future, perhaps because I trusted in that thing they call good luck. When I decided to study literature, for example, the only thing I knew was that I liked to read. What sort of work I’d do, what kind of life I wanted: I don’t know if I ever thought about those things — it would have brought nothing but anxiety. And nevertheless, I guess that, as they say, I wanted to come out ahead, I wanted to thrive. The flood was a sign: I had to work in the field I’d studied. Or in other words, to be precise: I had to work with something at least slightly connected to what I had studied. I quit right then. At my good-bye dinner, Portillo gave me a book by Arturo Pérez Reverte, his favorite author.

When I told my students that I was unemployed, they offered to help me, although they didn’t have any money or contacts or anything. I told them it wasn’t necessary, that I had time to look for work, that I had managed to save a bit of money. They looked at me very seriously, but when I told them about the accident at the office, they cracked up, and they agreed that I had to quit. Especially Pamela.

We went to my apartment; we could finally sleep together. It was the beginning of October, the night was pleasant, enticing. We drank an incredible wine, and after sex we watched a game show (she got all the questions right) and a movie. We woke up late, but there was no rush. We stayed in bed for an hour while I caressed her generous legs and looked at her feet, perfect but a little diminished by the turquoise polish, now fairly chipped, that she used on her nails. By then we had decided to raise the price: she charged me ten thousand, and I charged her ten thousand.

“You’re out of work, but your house is full of food,” she told me, laughing. It really was a lot of food, I thought, and I started to fill a bag with cheeses, cold cuts, cups of yogurt, and bottles of wine. I gave it to her. I was young and much more of a dumbass than I am now, it goes without saying. She listened, stunned, to the stupid sentences I said to her. Only then did I realize I had committed a fatal mistake. Pamela looked at me with rage, silent, disconcerted, disappointed. She touched one of her breasts, who knows why, as if it hurt her.

Then she picked up the bag and dumped it furiously at my feet. She was about to leave without saying a word, she’d opened the door but then she stopped, and she told me, in a broken voice, that she was not and would never be a whore. And that I was not, and would never be, a real professor.

TRUE OR FALSE

“I got the cat so you would have something here,” said Daniel, repeating the psychologist’s words exactly, and Lucas showed an enthusiasm that seemed new, unexpected. At his mother’s house—“my true house,” the boy said — there was a little yard where a cat or a small dog could have lived happily, but Maru, on that point, was inflexible: no dog, no cat. But from now on, every other week, the boy would get to spend a couple of days with the cat at Daniel’s house. They named him Pedro, and later, after they found out it was actually a girl cat, and she was pregnant, they started calling her Pedra.

The “true or false” thing came from school — they were the only exercises that Lucas liked, that he did well on, and he insisted on applying the categories to everything, capriciously: Maru’s house was his true house, but for some reason he judged the living room of that same house to be false — and the armchairs in the living room were true, but the door and all the lamps were false. Only some of his toys were true, but those weren’t the ones that he always preferred. Just because something was false didn’t mean the boy disliked it. The few days he spent with his father at the false house, for example, consisted of a bounteous marathon of Nintendo, pizza, and french fries.

Sometimes Lucas was silent, calm, a bit absent: he seemed to be immersed in incommunicable thoughts. But other times he never stopped asking questions, and although, at nine years old, he was starting to resemble a normal child, his father wasn’t satisfied and didn’t know how to interact with him. Daniel was obviously a normal man, because he had married, had a child, endured several years of family life, and then, as all normal men do, gotten divorced. It was also normal for him to run late with the alimony payments he owed his ex-wife — almost always out of pure distraction, because he didn’t have money problems.

Daniel lived on the eleventh floor of a building where pets were not allowed, but Pedra was discreet: she spent her hours licking her shiny black paws and looking down at the street from the slightly grimy balcony. She didn’t need anything other than her bowl of water and a handful of food, which she ate unhurriedly after looking at the dish for a few minutes, as if deciding whether it was really worth the trouble to eat. Daniel had never liked cats; he’d had a few as a child, but they had all really belonged to his brothers. Even so, he was willing to make the effort — a cat is good company, he thought, visualizing an abstract image of a lonely man and his cat. He wasn’t exactly alone, himself, or he was, but he didn’t think that solitude was a problem. He’d had too much company during the years of his marriage: that’s why he’d left his wife, he thought, out of a need for silence. “I separated from my wife for reasons of silence,” Daniel would say, flirtatiously, if someone were to ask him why it had ended, but no one asked him about that anymore, and in any case, that answer wouldn’t be true, or false: he needed silence, but he’d also wanted to save himself, was trying to save himself — or maybe to protect himself — from a life he had never wished for.

Or maybe he had wanted, once, to be a father, but it had been a naive, stupid desire. The years they’d lived together (“as a family”), he’d had to be too much of a father. Everything had meaning, every gesture, every sentence held some conclusion or lesson, including his silence, of course — that too. One had to be so cautious with words, so endlessly careful, so sadly pedagogical. He could be a better father from a distance, he had thought, and there was no sense of defeat lurking behind that conclusion.

His plan was to tell the boy that the kittens had died at birth. He was going to drown them without thinking about it much, the way he’d heard it was done: throw them into the toilet, flush, and immediately forget about that bitter secondary scene. But luck was not on his side and they were born on a day when the boy was at his house.

“We can’t keep them, Lucas,” he told the boy that afternoon.

“Of course we can,” replied Lucas. Daniel looked at his son: it occurred to him that they looked alike, or they would in the future — their slightly cleft chins, their curly black hair. He helped the boy put on a back brace the doctor had prescribed for his scoliosis. Lucas also wore braces on his teeth, and a pair of glasses that made his dark eyes, and even his eyelashes, look bigger.

“Do you have homework?” Daniel asked.

“Yes.”

“Do you want to do it?”

“No.”

What they did, instead, was make phone calls, offering the kittens up for adoption. And then they drafted an e-mail that Daniel sent to all his contacts. When he dropped Lucas off at the boy’s true house, he got caught up in a harsh argument with his ex-wife, in which he tried to convince her that she was the one who should take on the responsibility of the kittens.

***

“Sometimes I forget what you’re like,” Maru said to him.

“And what am I like?”

Maru fell silent.

During the following months, the cats opened their eyes and started to drag themselves laboriously across the living room. There were five of them: two black, two gray, and one that was almost entirely white. To avoid repeating the mistake of Pedro/Pedra, Lucas decided not to name them. Now that there were kittens at his father’s house, the boy wanted to be there all the time. For Daniel it was a victory, but an uncomfortable one.

One Thursday, suddenly, at seven in the evening, Lucas showed up at Daniel’s without any advance notice. Five minutes later Maru appeared, panting after climbing the eleven flights of stairs up to his apartment. She hated elevators, hated that Daniel lived on the eleventh floor — and not only because she was concerned for the boy’s safety, or because of her own phobia, but also because it reminded her, insistently, of that far-off night when Daniel had promised her that there would be no elevators in their life together, that they would always live, so to speak, with their feet on the ground.

Maru apologized for the visit.

“We were in the neighborhood,” she said, which was highly unlikely, because they lived on the other side of the city.

“For a second I thought the kid came alone,” said Daniel.

“What do you mean, alone?”

“Alone.”

“Are you crazy?”

“No.”

Daniel toasted some bread and made coffee, which they drank in silence while the boy assigned nationalities to the cats: the white or almost-white cat was Argentine, the black cats were Brazilian, and the gray cats were Chilean.

Thanks to the group e-mail, Daniel got back in contact with a former classmate from college, a woman who came over one night on the pretense of adopting a cat. After the first pisco and Coke they went to bed, and it was good, or more or less good, as she said the next morning.

“I mean, I liked it,” she added lightly, but to Daniel it seemed like an aggressive remark. “What happened to you is really strange,” she said next; she had the habit of changing the subject every time she lit a cigarette. “It’s really strange what happened to you — it’s more common for male cats to be mistaken for female, and not the other way around.”

“What?”

“Just, it’s normal to not see their cocks well. But you saw a cock on Pedra where there wasn’t one,” said the woman, who hardly had time to laugh at her joke before she told another one: “She’s called Pedra and you’re called padre.”

Daniel laughed late, irritated.

“Why do you say ‘cock’?” he asked her.

“What, I can’t say that?”

“Women don’t say cock.”

“But what you put in me last night is called a cock,” she said. “And what Pedra doesn’t have is called a cock.”

To Daniel it seemed like phony indecency. Before leaving, the woman assured him that she would come by later for the cat, so that, in a fit of optimism, Daniel thought that the scene from the night before would repeat itself over and over: every evening she would come for a cat, sleep with him, and leave at dawn. But it wasn’t like that, not at all. She never came back, didn’t call, didn’t write.

Someone spread the word that there were cats in the building, so Daniel had to bribe the concierges with a bottle of pisco and a few opportune boxes — as a joke — of Gato Negro wine. Then he needed several whiskeys to neutralize the downstairs neighbors, a Catalan playwright and his wife.

“We like the country, and the neighborhood is very clean,” they said almost in unison, as if they were competing in a contest that tested their matrimonial harmony. Pedra sniffed at the guests, and the little cats dozed in a pile inside a shoe box. The couple had come to Chile to be near their daughter, who’d just had a baby. The woman spent a lot of time with the granddaughter, and the man tended to stay at home alone — he was in need of a little solitude and inspiration, he explained.

Solitude and inspiration, thought Daniel later on, lying in bed. He had solitude and he’d never needed inspiration, but the playwright’s words made him think that maybe that was precisely what he was missing: inspiration. His job, however, was very simple, almost mechanical: a lawyer doesn’t need inspiration, but rather the patience to tolerate his superiors, and doubtless also intelligence and subtlety to saw the floor out from under them, and maybe also imagination, but just practical imagination, he told himself, as though definitively resolving the issue.

I look for inspiration only when I jack off, he thought later, wide awake, evoking the happiness of a table full of good friends who would celebrate that sentence, and then he started to masturbate, taking inspiration, first, from the playwright’s wife, especially her legs, and then from that friend of his who never came back, and finally from Maru, who was still attractive to him, although the image he focused on was one from their youth, from those first years full of motel sex, and especially from a trip home on Route 78, when he drove some twenty kilometers with her bent over, sucking him off. He focused on that memory and proceeded hurriedly, uneasily, greedily, but the semen wouldn’t come — and he didn’t come. It was hard for him to convince himself that he just had to go to sleep, erection and all, still half drunk.

The next day he was supposed to pick Lucas up, but he woke up late. He called Maru and invented an excuse, told her he had a headache. She put Lucas on the phone and Daniel promised to pick him up at five. “I learned how to make sushi,” he told him, which was a lie, but Daniel liked to casually toss out that kind of falsehood, to force himself to turn it into truth. After ten minutes online he knew what he needed to buy. In addition to the sushi supplies, he returned from the supermarket with a large bag of Whiskas, a lot of milk, and bottles of Bilz, Pap, and Kem Piña, because he could never manage to remember which of those three sodas was his son’s favorite.

“These cats need a father,” Lucas told him that night, while he fought with a disastrous sushi roll.

“Cats don’t have fathers,” answered Daniel, hesitantly. “When they’re in heat, the girl cats have sex with whoever, and the kittens aren’t always even real brothers and sisters.”

“What?”

“Just that — they’re not necessarily siblings. They’re half siblings, that’s why they’re different colors. Most likely Pedra had sex with three boy cats: one gray, one white, and one that was black, like her.”

“I don’t care,” said Lucas, who seemed to have thought about the subject. “I don’t care. I think that these cats definitely need a father.”

“We already have a lot of cats, Lucas, and also, cats behave differently than humans. The dad cats forget about their babies,” said Daniel, for a second fearing an acidic answer from his son, but it didn’t come. “And the moms do too,” he went on cautiously. “After a little bit, it’s likely that Pedra won’t recognize her babies.”

“Now that I don’t believe,” said the boy, astonished. “That’s impossible.”

“You’ll see. Now she looks for them, carries them around in her mouth, gathers them together, and cries if she can’t find them. But soon she’ll forget about them. That’s how animals are.”

“You seem to know a lot about animals,” said Lucas, in a tone that seemed either ironic or candid.

“Not really, but your uncles had cats.”

“But you lived in the same house as them.”

“Yes, but they weren’t mine.”

They were in the bedroom, watching a very slow Mexican soccer match, about to fall asleep. Daniel went to the kitchen to get a glass of water, and he stayed there for a few minutes watching Pedra, who seemed either committed or resigned to the kittens scrabbling at her teats. He went back to the bedroom; the boy had closed his eyes and was murmuring a kind of litany — Daniel thought he was having a nightmare and shook him lightly, waking him.

“I wasn’t sleeping, Dad, I was praying.”

“Praying? And since when do you pray?”

“Since Monday. On Monday I learned how to pray.”

“Who taught you?”

“Mom.”

“And since when does she pray?”

“She doesn’t pray. But she taught me to pray, and I like it.”

They slept, as always, in the same bed. That night there was a tremor and hundreds of dogs howled pitifully as the earth shook, but Daniel and Lucas didn’t wake up. Far off, the thunder of a car crash sounded, as well as the voices of the neighbors, who were arguing or talking or maybe practicing a scene in which two people argued or talked. But Daniel and Lucas slept well, breakfasted better, and spent the morning playing Double Dragon.

“I’m sure that Pedra’s babies are true,” Lucas told his father later, at the park.

“Without a doubt they are true, they’re completely true, you can be sure of that. A friend of mine told me recently that our confusion about Pedra was strange. Normally, according to my friend, people think boy cats are girls, not that girl cats are boys.”

“I don’t understand,” said the child.

“I don’t understand too well either. It’s complicated. Forget about it.”

“Forget about your friend?”

“Yes, my friend,” said Daniel, annoyed.

***

Daniel invited the Catalans over for coffee.

“You all have a wonderful country,” said the playwright’s wife, looking at the boy.

“Lucas thinks that Santiago is false,” Daniel told his guests.

“No!” shouted the boy. “Chile is false, Santiago is true.”

“And Barcelona?” they asked. Lucas shrugged and started to play with some papers on the floor, as though he were one of the cats. He was wearing shorts and his legs were covered in scratches, as were his arms and his right cheek.

“The situation in Chile is incredible,” said the playwright, with either a reflective or a questioning tone. “Doesn’t it bother you that Pinochet still has so much power? Aren’t people afraid that the dictatorship will come back?”

“Weren’t you just talking about how peaceful Chile is?” Daniel answered.

“That’s precisely what bothers me about the situation here,” said the playwright, sententiously. “Everything is so calm, so civilized.” Then he strung together a speech featuring words that reminded Daniel of some papers he’d had to read once upon a time, in those tedious elective courses at university: globalization, postmodernity, hegemony.

“I voted for Aylwin and for Frei,” said Daniel in response, revealing that he was totally lost in the conversation. When his guests finally left, he asked the boy if the Catalans were true or false.

“They were weird,” he replied.

***

That afternoon they lost the white kitten, the Argentine. Daniel, Lucas, and Pedra searched for it for two hours, but it never turned up. There was no way it could have gotten out, so during the following weeks Daniel had to move around the house with extreme caution. When he got home from work, he went stealthily through the rooms, always barefoot, almost on tiptoe, and he took extra care any time he sat or lay down. One morning, almost a month after it disappeared, he saw the white kitten sleeping peacefully next to its mother. It had returned from who knew where and taken its place with a nonchalance that annoyed Daniel. Over the phone, his son was happy to hear the news, but there was no excited shouting like his father had expected.

“Why are you talking so quietly?” he asked Lucas.

“I don’t want to wake them up,” replied the boy, still whispering.

“Who?”

“The cats.”

“The cats aren’t sleeping,” said Daniel, with a touch of rage. “So you can just talk normally, okay?”

“Don’t lie to me, Dad, I know they’re sleeping.”

“It’s not true. And even if they were sleeping and you shouted over the phone, you wouldn’t wake them up. You know that.”

“Yes, I know. I have to hang up.”

“Did something happen?”

It was the first time his son had hung up on him. He called Maru and she treated him nicely, much more friendly than usual. Nothing strange here, thought Daniel, resigned, in the middle of the conversation. But suddenly, as though pretending she’d just been struck by a casual thought, Maru said that maybe it would be better for the cats to live with her.

“But you don’t like cats. You have a phobia.”

“No, I don’t have a phobia. I have a phobia with elevators, spiders, and pigeons. What’s that called?”

“What?”

“The fear of pigeons.”

“Colombophobia,” replied Daniel, exasperated. “Stop asking me stupid questions and tell me why you want the cats. You’ve never let the kid have one before.”

“It’s just that Lucas talks to me about them a lot. I’d like to have them live with us. And then give them away gradually, and keep only Pedra. I already talked to some girlfriends who would be thrilled to have a cat.”

Maru and Daniel fought like never before, or, rather, just like before. An inexplicable rhetorical twist had reversed things: not even the best lawyer in the world — and Daniel was not, certainly, the best lawyer in the world — could convince Maru that it was not her right to decide the fate of the cats. The negotiation was long and erratic, since Daniel wasn’t necessarily against the idea, but he hated to lose. He didn’t want them, really, except maybe Pedra — he did everything in his power to keep Pedra. At least ten times he said, “You can have the babies, but Pedra does not leave this house,” and all ten times he had to endure reasonable and dangerous arguments about a mother’s rights.

“You can have the white one, then, if you want her,” said Maru, finally.

“We don’t know if it’s a boy or a girl,” said Daniel, for the sheer pleasure of correcting her.

“Lucas thinks it’s a girl,” she replied. “But fine, that’s not the point. Do you or do you not want the white cat, boy or girl?”

He said he did. The day they moved the cats into the true house, the boy was happy.

Daniel still hasn’t decided what to name the white cat. He calls it Argentina or Argentino indiscriminately. When he flops into the armchair to read the paper, the cat comes to sit between the page and his eyes, kneading at his sweater, concentrating intensely.

“I’ve had to get used to reading standing up,” he says, glass in hand, to his neighbors, who have stopped in to say good-bye, because they’re returning to Barcelona soon.

“It must have been hard for you to lose the kittens,” says the playwright.

“It wasn’t too bad,” replies Daniel. “It must be harder to write plays,” he adds, obligingly, and then he asks them why they have to go, since he seems to remember that they were going to leave the following year. The question is, for some reason, inappropriate, and the playwright and his wife stare at the floor, maybe at the same point on the floor.

“It’s personal. Family problems,” says the woman.

“And were you able to write?” asks Daniel, to change the subject.

“Not much,” she says, as if she were in charge of answering the questions directed at her husband. The scene strikes Daniel as grotesque, or at least embarrassing — above all because of that slippery expression “family problems.” He’s been in a good mood, but suddenly he is lost, or bored. He wants them to leave soon.

“And what did you want to write about?” he asks, without the slightest interest.

“He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know what about,” she says. “Maybe about the transition.”

“What transition?”

“Chile’s, Spain’s. Both, in comparison.”

Daniel quickly imagines one or two boring plays, with actors who are very old or too young, bellowing like they are at the market. Then he asks how many pages the playwright has written in Santiago.

“Fifty, seventy pages, but none of it works,” answers the woman.

“And how do you know that none of it works?”

“I don’t know, ask him.”

“I am asking him. All of these questions have been for him. I don’t know why you answered.”

The playwright is still aggrieved. The woman is caressing his hair. She whispers something to him in Catalan, and right away, without looking at Daniel, they leave the apartment. They are sad and offended, but Daniel doesn’t care. He feels, for some reason, furious. He drinks whiskey until dawn; from time to time the Argentine cat jumps up, compassionately, onto his lap. He thinks of his son. He feels like calling him but doesn’t do it. He thinks about saving money to buy a house on the beach. He thinks about changing something, anything: paint some walls, buy a few grams of coke, let his beard grow out, improve his English, learn martial arts. Suddenly he looks at the cat and he finds a name for it — a perfect, androgynous name — but immediately, in his drunkenness, he forgets it. How is it possible, so quickly, to forget a name? he wonders. And then he doesn’t think about anything anymore, because he drops onto the carpet and doesn’t wake up until the following afternoon. He finds, while grappling with his budding hangover, that he’s missed work, that he hasn’t heard his phone ring ten or fifteen times, that he’s missed many e-mails. The cat is sleeping beside him, purring. Daniel tries to see if it has a penis or not. “Nothing,” he says out loud. “You don’t have a cock. You’re a girl cat,” he tells it, solemnly. “You are a true girl cat.”

He gets up, prepares an Alka-Seltzer, and drinks it without waiting for the tablet to dissolve entirely. His head hurts, but he still puts on an album he’s discovered recently, a selection of old waltzes, tangos, and fox-trots that remind him of his grandfather. While he showers, the cat chases his shadow on the shower curtain. He sings, half aloud, more sad than happy, along with a silly song—“Once a blonde was ready to die / for my love / not a lie / When her father found out / he got so mad / He tried to wipe me right off the map.”

Then he lies down on the bed for a few minutes, with the towel around his waist, still wet, like he always does. The phone rings: it’s the playwright, who wants to apologize for the night before by inviting him to dine.

“In Chile we don’t ‘dine,’ in Chile we ‘eat,’” he answers. “And I don’t want to dine or eat. I want to jerk off,” he says, forcing a crude tone of voice.

“So jerk off, man, no worries, we’ll wait for you,” says the playwright, laughing.

“I’m not going over there,” replies Daniel, with melodramatic gravity. “I’m not alone.”

It’s two in the morning. The cat is sleeping on the computer keyboard. Daniel looks at himself in the bathroom mirror, maybe searching for scratches or bruises. Then he lies down and masturbates mechanically, without thinking about anyone. He wipes the semen on the sheets as he falls asleep.

MEMORIES OF A PERSONAL COMPUTER

It was bought on March 15, 2000, for four hundred thousand eighty pesos, payable in thirty-six monthly installments. Max tried to fit the three boxes into the trunk of a taxi, but there wasn’t enough room, so he had to use string and a bungee cord to secure everything; it was a short trip, though, only ten blocks to Plaza Italia. Once in the apartment, Max installed the heavy CPU as best he could under the dining-room table, arranged the cables in a more or less harmonic way, and played like a kid with the Bubble Wrap it had been packaged in. Before solemnly starting up the system, he took a moment to look at everything deliberately, fascinated: the keyboard seemed impeccable to him, the monitor, perfect, and he even thought that the mouse and speakers were somehow pleasant.

He was twenty-three years old, it was the first computer he’d owned, and he didn’t know exactly what he wanted it for, considering he barely knew how to turn it on and open the word processor. But it was necessary to have a computer, everyone said so, even his mother, who’d promised to help him with the payments. He worked as an assistant at the university and he thought that maybe he could type up the reading tests, or transcribe his old notes, written by hand or laboriously typed on an old Olympia typewriter on which he had also written all his undergraduate papers, provoking the laughter or admiration of his classmates, who were, by then, all using computers.

The first thing he did was transcribe the poems he had written over the past several years — short texts, elliptical and incidental, which were considered good by no one, but weren’t considered bad either. Something happened, though, when he saw those words on the screen, words that had made so much sense in his notebooks: he began to doubt the verses, and he let himself get carried along by a different rhythm — maybe one that was more visual than musical. But instead of feeling like the change of style was an experiment, he pulled back, got frustrated, and very often just deleted the poems and started over again, or wasted time changing fonts or moving the pointer of the mouse from one side of the screen to the other, in straight lines, in diagonals, in circles. He didn’t give up his notebooks or his pen, though, and at the first slip-up, he splattered ink all over the keyboard, which also had to endure the threatening presence of countless cups of coffee and a continuous rain of ash, because Max almost never made it to the ashtray, and he smoked a lot while he wrote, or, rather, he wrote a little while he smoked a lot. Years later the accumulated grime would lead to the loss of the vowel a and the consonant t, but that’s getting ahead of things, and it would be best, for now, to respect the proper sequence of events.

The computer brought about a new kind of solitude. Max didn’t watch the news anymore, or waste any time playing the guitar or drawing: when he came back from the university he would immediately turn on the computer and start working or exploring the machine’s possibilities. Soon he discovered very simple programs whose capabilities struck him as astonishing, such as the voice recorder, which he used with a scrawny little microphone that he bought at Casa Royal, or his My Music folder, which now hosted all twenty-four of the compact discs he owned. While he listened to those songs, amazed at how a ballad by Roberto Carlos could give way to the Sex Pistols, he continued working on his poems, which he never considered finished. Sometimes, lacking a heater, Max fought off the cold by kneeling and embracing the CPU, whose low hum merged with the refrigerator’s snore and the voices and horns that filtered in from outside. He wasn’t interested in the Internet, he distrusted it, and though he had set up an e-mail account at his friend’s mother’s house, he refused to connect to the web, or to insert those diskettes that were so dangerous: potential virus-carriers, he’d been told, with the power to ruin everything.

The few women who came to his apartment during those months all left before dawn, without even showering or eating breakfast, and they didn’t come back. But at the beginning of summer there was one who did stay to sleep, and then also stayed for breakfast: Claudia. And she came back — once, twice, many times. One morning, emerging from the shower, Claudia stopped in front of the darkened screen, as if looking at her reflection, searching for incipient wrinkles or some other stray mark or blemish. Her face was dark, her lips more thin than full, her neck long, her eyes dark green, almond-shaped. Her hair hung down to her wet shoulders: the tips of it were like needles resting above her bones. The towel that she herself had brought over to Max’s house could wrap around her body twice. Weeks later, Claudia also brought over a mirror for the bathroom, but she still went on looking at herself in the screen, though it was difficult to find, in the dark reflection, anything more than the outline of her face.

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.

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.

She closed the e-mail, went to sleep at dawn, intoxicated with rage more than wine. She woke up in the mid-afternoon and she was alone. Lethargically, she walked to the computer — to the room next door, though to her it seemed like a long way — but instead of turning it on, she stared at the glare of the sun on the monitor. She closed the blinds, wishing for absolute darkness, while tears flowed down her neck and disappeared in the furrow between her breasts. She sat down on the ground and took off her shirt; she looked at her alert nipples, her smooth and soft belly, her knees, her fingers firm on the cold floor. Then she got up and wiped the screen clean, or, rather, she dirtied it with her fingers, which were wet with tears. She smeared her fingers angrily over the surface, as if she were scrubbing it with a rag. Then she turned on the computer, wrote a short note in Word, and started packing her suitcase.

***

She came back the next Sunday to pick up some books and the all-in-one device.

Max was in his underwear, at the computer, writing a long e-mail in which he told Claudia a thousand things, and in which he apologized, in an elliptical way, with sentences that left his bewilderment and mediocrity in plain view. There were drafts of the letter piled on the desk, seven or eight pages of legal-size paper, and while he protested that it wasn’t fair — he hadn’t gotten to finish his letter, it was full of mistakes, he had trouble saying things clearly — Claudia read the different versions of that unsent message, and she noticed how a definitive phrase in one draft became ambiguous in the next, how he changed adjectives, cut and pasted phrases. And she noticed too how he had adjusted the line spacing, the font size, the character spacing, and it was these changes, in particular, that struck Claudia as sordid — it was like he thought she would forgive him if the message seemed longer, and that’s what she was thinking about when he grabbed her and held her by the wrists, knowing that she hated to be held by the wrists, and as they were struggling, he hit her in the breasts and she responded with four slaps, but he won out and he bent her over and forced himself into her, penetrating her ass with a violence he’d never shown before. She grabbed the keyboard and tried to defend herself, unsuccessfully. Then, two minutes later, Max ejaculated a meager amount of semen, and she turned around and stared at him, as if suggesting a truce, but instead of embracing him, she kneed him in the balls. While Max writhed in pain, she unhooked the all-in-one device and called a taxi that would take her far away from that house forever.

Max felt an immense but short-lived relief. Her relief took its time in coming, but once it came, it came to stay, and so, three months later, when they met on the stairs of the National Library and he begged her without the slightest sense of decorum to come back, it was no use.

He went home sad and furious, and, out of habit, he turned on the computer, which had been crashing a lot recently; for some reason, when it crashed this time, Max decided it was finished.

“I’m going to give it away, I don’t care about anything stored on it,” he said the next day to his engineer friend, who offered to buy it for a ridiculously small amount.

“Hell no,” said Max. “I’m going to give it to my son.”

“Okay,” the friend said, and then he reluctantly wiped the hard drive clean.

That Friday, Max took an overnight bus to Temuco. He had no time to box up the computer, so he put the mouse and the microphone in his pockets, the CPU and keyboard under the seat, and the heavy screen on his lap. He rode this way for nine hours. The lights on the highway shone on his face, as though they were calling him, inviting him, as though they were blaming him for something, for everything.

Max didn’t know his way around Temuco, and he hadn’t written down Sebastián’s address. He hailed a taxi at the bus stop and they drove around for a long time before coming to a street that Max thought he recognized. He arrived at ten in the morning, zombified. When he saw Max, Sebastián immediately asked about Claudia, as if the surprise were not his father’s unexpected presence but the absence of his father’s girlfriend. “She couldn’t come,” answered Max, trying out a hug he didn’t know how to give.

“Did you break up?”

“No, we didn’t break up. She just couldn’t come, is all. Grown-ups have to work.”

The boy thanked him for the gift very politely, and his mother greeted Max in a friendly way, telling him he could stay and sleep on the sofa. But he didn’t want to stay. He sipped a little of the bitter maté she offered him, devoured a cheese empanada, and headed back to the station to catch the twelve thirty bus. “I’m really busy, I have a ton of work,” he said before getting into the same taxi that had brought him there. He ruffled Sebastián’s hair brusquely and gave him a kiss on the forehead.

Once he was alone, Sebastián set up the computer and confirmed what he already suspected: it was notably inferior, no matter how you looked at it, to the one he already had. He laughed about it a lot with his mother’s husband, after lunch. Then, together, they went to the basement to find a place to store the computer, where it has been ever since, waiting, as they say, for better times to come.