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THANK YOU

“I got a feeling you two are together and you’re keepin’ it a secret.” “No we’re not,” they answer in unison, and it’s the truth: for a little over a month now they’ve been sleeping together, and they eat, read, and work together, so someone with a tendency to exaggerate, someone who watched them and carefully parsed the words they say to each other, the way their bodies move closer to each other and entwine — a brash person, someone who still believed in these sorts of things — would say they really loved each other, or that, at least, they felt a dangerous and generous passion for each other. And yet they are not together. If there is one thing they are very clear about, it is precisely this: they are not together. She is Argentine and he’s Chilean, and it’s much better to refer to them like that: the Argentine woman, the Chilean man.

They’d planned on walking, they’d talked about how nice it is to go long distances on foot, and they even reached the point where they were dividing people into two groups: those who never walk long distances and those who do — the latter group being, they thought, somehow better. They’d planned on walking, but, on a whim, they hailed a taxi. They had known for months, even before they’d arrived in Mexico City, when they’d received a set of instructions that was full of warnings, that they should never hail a taxi in the street, and up till then it had never occurred to them to hail a taxi in the street, but this time, on a whim, they did it, and from the beginning she thought the driver was going the wrong way and she said as much to the Chilean in a whisper, and he reassured her out loud, but his words didn’t even get to take effect because right away the taxi stopped and two men got in and the Chilean reacted valiantly, recklessly, confusedly, childishly, stupidly: he punched one of the bandits in the nose, and he went on struggling for a few long seconds while she shouted, “Stop it, stop it, stop it.” The Chilean stopped, and the bandits let him have it, they showed him no mercy, they may have even broken something, but this all happened long ago, a good ten minutes ago. By now they’ve already given up their money and their credit cards and they’ve already recited their ATM pin numbers and there’s only a little time left — though, to them, it seems like an eternity — during which they ride with their eyes squeezed shut. “Shut your eyes, pinches cabrones,” the two men tell them.

And now there are three men, because the car stopped a few minutes ago and the taxi driver got out and a third bandit, who’d been following behind them in a pickup truck, got behind the wheel. The new driver turns around and hits the Chilean again and then feels up the Argentine, and they accept the punches and the grabbing hands with a kind of resignation, and wouldn’t they like to know, as we know, that this kidnapping really will be over soon, that soon they will be walking silently, laboriously, with their arms around each other, down some street in La Condesa — because the bandits had asked them where they were going and they replied that they were going to La Condesa and the bandits said, “Well, we’ll drop you off in La Condesa then. We’re not so bad, we don’t want to take you too far out of your way,” and a second before letting them out, incredibly, the bandits handed them a hundred pesos so they could take a taxi home, but of course they didn’t go home by taxi, they got on the subway, and, at times, she cried and he held her close and at other times he confusedly held back his tears and she moved her feet closer to his the way she had in the taxi, because even though the kidnappers had made them keep their distance, she had kept her right sandal on top of the Chilean’s left shoe the whole time.

As so often happens on the Mexico City subway, the train stops for a long time, an inexplicable six or seven minutes, at an intermediate station, and this delay — the type of delay that they are, at this point, very used to — makes them suffer, strikes them as intentional and unnecessary, until eventually the doors close and the train begins to move again, and they finally reach their station and then go on walking together until they reach the house where she lives. The Argentine and the Chilean don’t live together. He lives with an Ecuadorian writer and she lives with two friends — one Spanish and one Chilean, another Chilean — though they aren’t really friends, or they are but that’s not why they live together, they are all just passing through, they’re all writers and they are in Mexico to write thanks to a grant from the Mexican government, although the thing they do the very least is write, but oddly, when they arrive and open the door, the Spaniard, a very thin and cordial guy, with eyes that are maybe a bit too large, is writing, and Chilean Two isn’t there (there’s no way around calling him Chilean Two; this story is imperfect because it has two Chileans in it when there should be only one, or even better, much better, none, but there are two). Chilean One and Chilean Two are not friends, really they’re more like enemies, or at least they were in Chile, and now they’re both in Mexico and they are both, each in his own way, aware that it would be absurd and unnecessary to go on fighting, and moreover their fights were tacit ones and nothing was keeping them from trying out a kind of reconciliation, although they also both know that they will never be friends, and that thought is, in a way, a relief, and there is one thing that unites them, in any case: alcohol, since out of the whole group the two of them are, without a doubt, the biggest drinkers.

But Chilean Two isn’t there when they come home after the kidnapping, only the Spaniard is there, at the table in the living room, concentrated, writing, beside a bottle of Coca-Cola — you could say clinging to a bottle of Coca-Cola — but when they tell him what has happened, he puts his work aside and he seems shaken and he comforts them, invites them to talk, eases the mood with a well-timed and lighthearted joke, helps them look for the phone number they need to call to block their credit cards. The thieves have taken three thousand pesos, two credit cards, two cell phones, two leather jackets, a silver chain, and even a camera. The Chilean had gone back to the apartment to get the camera, he had wanted to take pictures of the Argentine, because she is really beautiful — which is a cliché, but what can you do, the fact is she’s beautiful — and of course he has thought about how if he hadn’t gone back to get the camera they wouldn’t have taken that particular taxi, the same way so many other things that could have sped them up or slowed them down would have spared them from the kidnapping.

The Argentine and Chilean One tell the Spaniard what happened, and, as they tell him, they relive it, and for the second or third time they share the experience. Chilean One asks himself whether what has just happened is going to bring them closer or drive them apart, and the Argentine wonders exactly the same thing, but neither of them says it out loud. Just then Chilean Number Two returns, he’s coming back from a party. He sits down to eat a piece of chicken and right away he starts talking without realizing something has happened, but then he sees that Chilean One’s face is very swollen and he’s holding a bag of ice to it to try to bring the swelling down, and only then does Chilean Two realize — maybe at first it seemed perfectly natural to him that Chilean One would have a bag of ice on his face, maybe in his singular, poet’s universe, it is normal for a person to spend the evening with a bag of ice on his face, but no, it’s not normal, so Chilean Two asks what happened and when he finds out he says, “That’s horrible, the same thing almost happened to me this afternoon,” and he sets off talking about the possible attack of which he was almost the victim, but from which he was able to save himself by making a split-second decision to get out of the taxi. While he talks, Chilean One is taking long pulls from a bottle of mescal, and the Spaniard and the Argentine are smoking a joint.

Now someone else arrives, maybe a friend of the Spaniard’s, and they go over the whole story once again but focus mostly on the last part, the final half hour in the taxi, which for them is a kind of Part Two, because the kidnapping had lasted an hour and, for the first half of it, they feared for their lives, but for the second half they didn’t fear for their lives anymore; they were terrified but they vaguely intuited that, however long it lasted, the bandits weren’t going to kill them, because their words weren’t violent anymore, or they were violent but in a calm and terrible way: “We’ve held up Argentines before, but never a Chilean,” says the one in the passenger seat, and he seems like he is truly curious, and he starts to ask Chilean One about the situation in his country and the Chilean answers politely, as if they were in a restaurant and they were waiter and customer or something, and the guy seems so articulate, so used to that kind of conversation that Chilean One thinks that if he ever tells this story, no one will believe him, and that impression only grows over the next few minutes when the bandit riding with them in the backseat, the one holding the gun, says to them, “I got a feeling you two are together and you’re keepin’ it a secret,” and they respond in unison that no, no they aren’t. “And why not?” asks the bandit. “Why aren’t you together? He’s not so ugly,” he says. “Ugly, but not that ugly, and you’d look better if you cut that hair, it’s straight outta the ’70s — no one wears their hair like that anymore,” he tells the Chilean. “And those giant glasses, too; here, I’m gonna do you a favor,” and he takes the glasses off the Chilean’s face and throws them out the window. For a second the Chilean thinks about a Woody Allen film he saw recently where the protagonist gets his glasses smashed over and over, and the Chilean smiles slightly, maybe he smiles to himself, he smiles the way we smile in panic, but still, he smiles.

“I can’t cut your hair ’cause we don’t have any scissors,” the gunman says. “Remind me to bring some good scissors tomorrow so I can cut the Chileans’ hair when we hold ’em up, ’cause from now on we’re only holding up Chileans. We haven’t been fair up to this point: we’ve held up lots of Argentines but only this one motherfucking Chilean de la chingada, and from now on, we’ll specialize in long-haired Chileans. I got a knife but you can’t cut hair with a knife, knives are for cutting off the balls of pinches Chileans. Your boyfriend’s got balls, but the ones with balls sometimes gotta lose ’em. Tell your boyfriend not to be so ballsy anymore, ’cause I was just about to wanna fuck you, little Argentine, because of this one’s balls, and if I don’t fuck you, it’s not ’cause I’m not into you, you’re real hot, of all the Argentine chicks I’ve ever met, you’re the hottest, but I’m working now and when I fuck I’m not working, ’cause if fucking was my job then I’d be a whore and even though you can’t see my face you know I’m no whore, and I wish you could see my face so you’d know I’m one pretty crook who also knows how to cut hair, even though I don’t have any scissors and I sure can’t cut your hair with this knife, Chilean — I can cut off your dick but you need that to fuck this Argentine hottie, and I can’t cut your hair with this gun either, or maybe I could, but I’d lose the bullets and I need them in case you get your balls back, and then I would fuck the Argentine hottie, after I killed you, my Chilean friend, I’d fuck your girlfriend, I didn’t plan to kill you but I would kill you and I didn’t plan to fuck her but I’d fuck her, because she’s really hot, she looks like she’s straight outta the best whorehouse in the city. I’d sure choose you, my little Argentine, tomorrow I’m gonna get a hooker and I’ll pick the one who looks the most like you, my Argentine hottie.”

Then the driver asks the Argentine if she’s a Boca fan, and though it would have been more opportune to say yes, she goes with the truth and says no, she’s for Vélez. The Chilean doesn’t have this problem, since he’s for Colo-Colo, which is the only Chilean team the bandits know. Then they ask about Maradona and the Argentine says something in reply and then the driver comes out with something crazy: he says that Chicharito Hernández is better than Messi, and then he asks them which of Mexico’s teams they’re for, and the Argentine says she doesn’t really know that much about soccer — which is a lie, she knows a lot, she knows much more than that poor bandit who thinks Chicharito Hernández is better than Messi — and the Chilean, rather than resorting to a similar lie, gets nervous and thinks hard for a long second about whether the bandits would be for Pumas or for América or Cruz Azul or maybe for Chivas de Guadalajara, since he’s heard there are a lot of people in Mexico City who root for Chivas, but in the end he decides to tell the truth and he says that he follows Monterrey because that’s who Chupete Suazo plays for, and the driver doesn’t like Monterrey but he loves Chupete Suazo and then he says to his companions, “Let’s not kill them. In honor of Chupete Suazo we’re going to spare their lives.”

“Who’s Chupete Suazo?” asks Chilean Two, who surely knows but feels obliged to demonstrate that he doesn’t care about soccer. Chilean One was going to answer him, but the Spaniard knows a lot about soccer and tells him he’s a Chilean center forward who looks fat but isn’t, who plays for the Rayados in Monterrey, and who had a successful season when he was lent to Zaragoza, but then he went back to Mexico because the Spaniards couldn’t afford him. Chilean Two replies that the same thing happens to him, that he’s actually skinny but people think he’s fat.

Chilean One and the Argentine are still sitting very close together, but they keep a prudent distance, because even though everyone knows or guesses they’re together, they still pretend they aren’t — not exactly out of modesty, more like desperation, or maybe because the time is gone when things were so simple that you could just be together or not, or maybe everything is still that simple but they haven’t accepted it, and it really is absurd that they don’t live together because they eat, read, and work together, and, of course, they sleep together — it’s almost always him who sleeps over at her place, but sometimes the Argentine stays over at the apartment the Chilean shares with the Ecuadorian girl. What the Chilean and the Argentine really want is to be alone, but the night draws itself out as they search for new, unremembered details that, once remembered, bring the Chilean and the Argentine a new sense of closeness. Finally he says he’s going to the bathroom but instead goes into the Argentine’s bedroom; she stays a little longer in the living room, and then she slips away too.

She takes a long shower and makes him take one too. To wash the kidnapping off of them, she says, referring, he assumes, to the groping she’d been subjected to, a groping that was in any case minimal, for which they are both thankful. That is, in fact, what she said to the bandits when she got out of the car: “Thank you.” She’s said it many times over the course of the night: “Thank you, thank you, everyone.” To the Spaniard who comforted them, to the Chilean who ignored them but in some way also comforted them, and to the bandits too, again, it’s never a bad idea to repeat it: “Thank you,” because you didn’t kill us and now life can go on.

She also says thank you to Chilean One, as they lie there caressing each other, knowing that tonight they won’t make love, that they will spend the hours very close, dangerously, generously close, talking. Before going to sleep she says thank you to him, and he answers a little late but with conviction: “Thank you.”

They sleep badly, but they sleep. And they go on talking the next day, as if they had their whole lives in front of them and were willing to work at love, and if someone saw them from outside — someone brash, someone who believed in these kinds of stories, someone who collected them and tried to tell them well, someone who believed in love — he would think that the two of them would be together for a very long time.

THE MOST CHILEAN MAN IN THE WORLD

In mid-2011 she received a grant from the Chilean government and set off for Leuven to start a doctoral program. He was teaching at a private high school in Santiago, but he wanted to go with her and live some version of “forever”; after talking it over, though, at the end of a sad night when they’d had very bad sex, they decided it was better to separate.

During the first months, it was hard to tell if Elisa really missed him, even though she sent him all kinds of signals that he thought he interpreted correctly: he was sure that those long e-mails and the erratic and flirtatious messages on his Facebook wall and, above all, those unforgettable afternoon-nights (afternoons for him, nights for her) of virtual sex via Skype could be interpreted only one way. The natural thing would have been to go on like that for a while and then gradually cool off, forget each other, and maybe, in the best of cases, run into each other again after some time, maybe many years later, their bodies bearing the weight of other failures, this time ready to give it their all. But an executive at Banco Santander, at the Pedro Aguirre Cerda branch, offered Rodrigo a checking account and credit card, and suddenly he found himself passing from one screen to another, checking boxes that said “yes” and “I agree,” entering the codes B4, C9, and F8, and that was how he found himself, at the start of January, without telling anyone — without telling her — on his way to Belgium.

There was no connecting thread, no constant in his thoughts during the nearly twenty-four hours he spent traveling. On the flight to Paris, he was struck by the amount of turbulence, but since he hadn’t flown much — or never any significant distance, at least — he was, in a way, grateful for the feeling of adventure. He never really felt afraid, and he even imagined himself saying — sounding so sophisticated — that the flight “had been a little rough.” He had a couple of books in his backpack, but it was the first time he’d flown on a plane with so many entertainment options, and he spent hours deciding which movies or TV series he wanted to see. In the end he didn’t watch anything in its entirety but he did play, with a degree of skill that surprised him, several rounds of some sort of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? video game.

While he was walking through Charles de Gaulle to take the train, he had the fairly conventional thought that no, he did not want to be a millionaire, he’d never wanted to be a millionaire. And that trivial thought led him, who knows how, to a scorned and maligned word, which nevertheless now glittered, or at least shone a little, or was less dark than usual, or was dark and serious and big but didn’t embarrass him: maturity. He went on with these thoughts on the train ride from Brussels to Leuven. Inexplicably, using up almost all of the credit on his card to buy a plane ticket to Belgium to visit Elisa struck him as a sign of maturity.

And what happened in Leuven? The worst. Although sometimes the worst is the best thing that can happen. It must be said that Elisa could have been nicer, a little less cruel. But if she had been nicer, he might not have understood. She didn’t want to leave that possibility open. He called her from the station, and Elisa thought it was a joke, but she started walking toward him anyway, talking to him on the phone all the while. Then she turned a corner and saw him, a hundred steps away, but she didn’t tell him she was there and he went right on talking, sitting on his suitcase, half-numb and anxious, looking at the ground and then at the sky with a mixture of confidence and innocence that was repulsive to Elisa — she couldn’t put her feelings, her thoughts, in order, but she was sure of one thing: she didn’t want to spend the coming days with Rodrigo, not those days or any others, none. And maybe she was still a little in love, and she cared about him, and liked to talk to him, but for him to show up out of nowhere, like in some bad movie, ready to embrace and be embraced, ready to become the star, the hero who crossed the world for love: that was, for Elisa, much more of an affront and a humiliation than a cause for happiness.

As she took long strides back to her house, she felt the constant vibration of her cell phone in her pocket, but she answered only half an hour later, already in bed, duly protected: “I’m not going to pick you up,” she told him. “I don’t want to see you. I have a boyfriend [lie]. I live with him. I don’t ever want to see you ever again.” There were another nine calls, and all nine times she answered and said more or less the same thing, and in the end she told him, to add a little realism to the thing, that her boyfriend was German.

Of course there are other reasons for her reaction, there’s another story that runs parallel to this one, one that explains why Elisa didn’t ever want to see Rodrigo again: a story that talks about the need for a real change, the need to leave behind her small Chilean world of Catholic school, her desire to seek out other paths — a story that explains why, in the end, it was logical and also healthy to break up with Rodrigo definitively, maybe not like that, maybe it wasn’t fair of her to leave him sitting there, eager and numb, but she had to break it off with him. In any case, for now, she is stretched out on her bed, listening to some album that falls somewhere on the broad spectrum of alternative music (the latest from Beach House, for example). She feels calm.

Rodrigo tests out a quick and mindless walk around the city. He sees twenty or thirty women who all look more beautiful than Elisa; he wonders why Hans — he decides the German’s name is Hans — chose Elisa, this Chilean woman, who isn’t so voluptuous or so dark-skinned, and then he remembers how good she is in bed, and he feels rotten. He goes on walking, but now he sees nothing but a beautiful city full of beautiful people. He thinks what a whore Elisa is, and other things typical of a scorned man. He walks aimlessly, but Leuven is too small a city to walk around aimlessly in, and after a little while he is back at the station. He stops in front of Fonske — it’s practically the only thing Elisa had told him about the city: that there is a fountain with a statue of a boy (or a student or a man) who is looking at the formula for happiness in a book and pouring water (or beer) over his head. The fountain strikes him as strange, even aggressive or grotesque, and he tries to avoid engaging with the irony of a “formula for happiness.” He goes on looking at the fountain — which for some reason that day is dry, turned off — while he smokes a cigarette, the first since he’s been off the train, the first on European soil, a pilgrim Belmont cigarette from Chile. And although during all this time he has felt an intense cold, only now does he feel the urgency of the freezing wind on his face and body, as if the cold was really trying to work its way into his bones. He opens his suitcase, finds a pair of loose-fitting pants, and puts them on over the ones he is wearing, along with another shirt, an extra pair of socks, and a knit cap (he doesn’t have gloves). For a moment, carried along by rage and a sense of drama, he thinks that he is going to die of cold, literally. And that this is ironic, because Elisa had always been the cold-blooded one, the most cold-blooded girlfriend he’d ever had, the most cold-blooded woman he’d ever met: even during the summer, at night, she used to wear jackets and shawls and sleep with a hot-water bottle.

Sitting near the station, in front of a small waffle shop, he remembers the joke about the most cold-blooded man in the world, the only joke his father ever used to tell. He remembers his father beside the bonfire, on the wide open beach at Pelluhue, many years ago: he was a distant and taciturn man, but when he told that joke he became another person, every sentence coming out of his mouth as if spurred by some mysterious mechanism, and upon seeing him like that — wisely setting up his audience, preparing for the imminent peals of laughter — one might think that he was a funny and clever man, maybe a specialist in telling these types of long jokes, which can be told so many different ways, because the important thing isn’t the punch line but, rather, the flair of the teller, his feeling for detail, his ability to fill the air with digressions without losing the audience’s interest. The joke started in Punta Arenas, with a baby crying from cold and his parents desperately wrapping him up in blankets of wool from Chiloé. Then, surrendering to the obvious, they decide they must find a better climate for the baby, and they start to climb up the map of Chile in search of the sun. They go from Concepción to Talca, to Curicó, to San Fernando, always heading north, passing through Santiago and, after a lot of adventures, heading up to La Serena and Antofagasta, until finally they reach Arica, the so-called city of eternal spring, but it’s no use: the boy, who by now is a teenager, still feels cold. Once he’s an adult, the coldest man in the world travels through Latin America in search of a more favorable climate, but he never — not in Iquitos or Guayaquil or Maracaibo or Mexicali or Rio de Janeiro — stops feeling a profound and lacerating cold. He feels it in Arizona, in California, and he arrives and departs from Cairo and Tunis wrapped in blankets, shivering, convulsing, complaining interminably, but in a nice way, because in spite of how bad a time he had of it the coldest man in the world always remained polite, cordial, and perhaps because of this, when the much-feared ending finally came — when the coldest man in the world, who was Chilean, finally died of cold — no one doubted that he would go directly, without any major trouble, to heaven.

Cairo, Arizona, Tunis, California, thinks Rodrigo, almost smiling: Leuven. It’s been months since he’s seen his father — they’ve grown apart after some stupid argument. He thinks that, in a situation like this one, his father would want him to be brave. No, he doesn’t really know what his father would think about a situation like the one he is in. His father would never have a credit card, much less travel irresponsibly thousands of miles just to be kicked in the stomach. What would my father do in this situation? Rodrigo wonders again, naively. He doesn’t know. Maybe he should go back right away to Chile, or maybe he should stay in Belgium for good, make a life here? He decides, for the moment, to go back to Brussels.

People travel from Leuven to Brussels, or from Brussels to Antwerp, or from Antwerp to Ghent, but they are such short journeys that it’s almost excessive to consider them travel in the proper sense of the word. And even so, to Rodrigo, the half hour to Brussels seems like an eternity. He thinks about Elisa and Hans walking around that city, such a university town, so European and correct. Again he remembers Elisa’s body: he recalls her convalescing after she had her appendix out, receiving him with a sweet, pained smile. And he remembers her sometime later, one Sunday morning, completely naked, massaging rose-hip oil into the scar. And how, maybe that same night, she’d played with the warm semen around that scar, drawing something like letters with her index finger, hot and laughing.

He gets off the train, walks a few blocks, but he doesn’t look at the city, he goes on thinking about Elisa, about Hans, about Leuven, and something like forty minutes go by before he realizes he has forgotten his suitcase on the train, he’s left it in a corner next to the other passengers’ luggage, and he’s gotten off carrying only his backpack. He says to himself, out loud, energetically: “Ahuevonado,” you stupid asshole.

He buys some french fries near the station, and he stops on a corner to eat. When he stands up again he feels dizzy, or something like dizziness. He was planning on buying cigarettes and then walking for a while, but he has to stop because of this feeling, which just seems like a nuisance at first, an impression of vertigo that he has never felt before, but which immediately starts to grow, as if freeing itself from something, and soon he feels that he is going to fall, but he manages, with a lot of effort, to maintain the minimum stability necessary to move forward. The backpack weighs next to nothing, but he puts it down and takes five steps, to test himself. The dizziness continues and he has to stop completely and lean against the window of a shoe store. He moves forward slowly, propping himself up against one shopwindow after another, like Spider Man’s cowardly apprentice, while he looks out of the corner of his eye at the interiors of the stores, overflowing with different kinds of chocolates, beers, and lamps, some of them selling strange gifts: drumsticks that are also chopsticks, a mug in the shape of a camera lens, an endless array of figurines.

An hour later he has made it only seven blocks, but fortunately, at a kiosk, he finds a blue umbrella that costs him ten euros. At first he still feels unstable when he walks, but the umbrella gives him confidence, and after a few steps he feels like he’s gotten used to the wobbling. Only then does he look at or focus on the city; only then does he try to understand it, start to understand it. He thinks it’s all a dream, that he’s near Plaza de Armas, near the Cathedral, in the Peruvian neighborhood, in Santiago de Chile. No, he doesn’t think that: he thinks that he thinks he’s in Plaza de Armas. He thinks that he thinks it’s all a dream.

The stores are starting to close. It’s hard to know if it’s day or night: 5:15 p.m. and the lights of apartments and cars are already on. He starts to walk away from downtown, but instinctively he goes into a Laundromat and decides to spend some time there — he doesn’t really decide this, actually, but this is where he ends up, along with two guys who are reading while they wait for their clothes. It isn’t exactly warm there, but at least it isn’t cold. It’s absurd — he knows that he’s short on money, that he’s going to need every coin — but still he decides he is going to wash one of the pairs of pants, the second shirt, and the extra pair of socks. It takes him a while to figure out how the washing machines work — they’re old and look sort of dangerous — but when he finally gets the apparatus going the victory gives him a stupid and absolute feeling of satisfaction. He sits there looking at the tumbling clothes, entranced or paralyzed, focused like someone watching the end of a championship game on TV, and maybe for him this is even more interesting than the end of a championship game, because while he’s watching the tumbling clothes pushed up against the glass, soaked in soapy water, he thinks, as if discovering something important, how these clothes are his, how they belong to him, how he has worn those pants a hundred times, those socks too, and how once upon a time that shirt, a little faded now, was his best, the one he picked out on special occasions; he remembers his own body wearing that shirt with pride, and it’s a strange vision, vain, awkward. It’s perhaps his kitsch idea of purification.

Then he goes into a pizzeria called Bella Vita, which looks cheap. His waiter is a man named Bülent, a very friendly and cheerful Turk who speaks some French and a little Flemish but no English, so they have to communicate exclusively through gestures and a reciprocal murmur that perhaps serves only to demonstrate that neither of them is mute. He eats a Napolitano pizza that tastes out of this world to him, and then he sits there, drinking a coffee. He doesn’t know what to do, he doesn’t want to go on wandering, but he can’t make up his mind to look for a cheap hotel or a hostel. He tries to ask Bülent if the place has Wi-Fi, but it is truly difficult to mime the idea of Wi-Fi, and at this point, he is already so helpless that he doesn’t think of the simplest option, which would have been to say “Wi-Fi” and pronounce it in all possible ways until Bülent understood. Luckily Piet arrives just then; he’s a very tall guy who wears glasses with thick red rims and has an unspecifiable number of piercings in his right eyebrow. Piet knows English and a little Spanish — he has even been to Chile, for a month, years ago. Rodrigo finally has someone to talk to.

A couple of hours later they are in the living room of Piet’s beautiful apartment, across from the pizzeria. While his host makes coffee, Rodrigo watches from the window as Bülent, with the help of the waitress and another man, closes the place up for the night. Rodrigo feels something like the pulse or the pain or the aura of daily life. He turns on his laptop and connects to the Internet; there are no messages from Elisa, but he wasn’t really expecting any. He tries to find a friend from high school who, as he remembers, has lived in Brussels for several years. He finds him easily on Facebook, and the friend responds right away but says that he’s in Chile now, taking care of his sick mother, and although he plans to come back to university, for now he’s going to stay in Santiago, he doesn’t know for how long. Ten minutes later he gets another message in which the friend recommends that he not be afraid to drink peket (“It’s a good buzz, but a bad hangover”), that he avoid the grilled endive (“No to the grilled endive, yes to the boulettes de viande and to the moules-frites”), that he try the hot dogs with warm sauerkraut and mustard, that he buy chocolates at Galler, near the Grand Place, that he go to the Tropismes bookstore, and that he shouldn’t miss the Musical Instrument or the Magritte Museums — to Rodrigo, all of these details seem remote, almost impossible, because this isn’t a vacation, it never was. He feels desperate. He doesn’t have much credit left on his card, and he has only a hundred euros left in his wallet.

That’s when Bart arrives, Piet’s editor, who lives in Utrecht. Only then does Rodrigo find out that Piet is a writer, that he has published several books of short stories and a novel. He likes that Piet showed this kind of discretion, that he was so reserved. He thinks that if he were a writer, he wouldn’t go around proclaiming it to all the world either.

Bart is even taller than Piet, he’s a giant of almost two meters. Along with a friend, who is also named Bart, he runs a small press that publishes emerging writers, almost all of them fiction writers, almost all of them Dutch, but there are a few Belgians, also. The other Bart, oddly, lives in Colombia (because he fell in love with a woman from Popayán, Rodrigo learns), but he handles everything online from there: his job is to manage distribution — to a series of small bookstores, none of them commercial — and to organize small events and readings where he sells the books himself.

Bart is friendly and he tells his story in pretty fluent English, though he is also helped by his emphatic gestures and a certain talent for mimicry when words fail him. It’s almost ten; they walk for a few blocks. Rodrigo feels better, he leans on the umbrella-cane, but it’s more of a precaution than a necessity. They reach La Vesa, a somewhat gloomy bar that has poetry readings on Thursdays, but today isn’t Thursday, it’s Tuesday, and the patrons are scarce, which is better, thinks Rodrigo, who enjoys this feeling of intimacy, of routine camaraderie, this sensible chatting with new friends, and the comments — short but laden with slight ironies — that come every once in a while from Laura, an Italian waitress who isn’t beautiful at first sight, but who becomes beautiful as the minutes pass, and not from the effect of the alcohol, but because you have to look at her really closely to discover her beauty. His friends are drinking Orval and Rodrigo orders wine by the glass; Piet asks him if he dislikes beer, and he replies that he likes it, but he’s still too cold and he prefers the warmth of wine. They start talking about Belgian beer, which is the best in the world. Piet tells him it’s not so cold out, that there have been many worse winters. Then Rodrigo wants to tell them the joke about the coldest man in the world, but he doesn’t know how to say friolento, “cold-blooded,” in English, so he says “I am” and makes the gesture of shivering, and Bart tells him, “You’re chilly,” and it all gets tangled up because Rodrigo thinks they’re talking about Chile, about whether he’s from Chile, which supposedly they already knew, until, after several misunderstandings that they celebrate thunderously, they understand that the joke is about the chilliest man on earth, and Rodrigo adds that the most cold-blooded man on earth is definitely Chilean, he’s the chilliest man on earth, and he laughs heartily, for the first time he laughs on Belgian soil the way he would laugh on Chilean soil.

Rodrigo starts the joke uncertainly, because as he strings the story together, he thinks that maybe in Belgium and Holland they have the same joke, that maybe there are as many versions of the joke as there are countries in the world. His listeners react well, however, giving themselves over to the story: they enjoy the enumeration of the cities, whose names sound so strange to them (“‘Arica’ sounds like ‘Osaka,’” says Bart), and when the chilliest man in the world, who is Chilean, dies of cold under the burning sun of Bangkok, his friends let out an anxious giggle and grab their heads in a mournful gesture.

The chilliest man in the world had been a good son, a good father, a good Christian, so Saint Peter accepts him into Heaven without delay, but the problems start immediately: incredibly, even though in heaven hot and cold don’t exist — at least not in the way we understand them down here — and even though all the rooms in that formidable hotel that is Heaven automatically adjust to the needs of their guests, the Chilean still feels cold, and in his friendly but also effusive manner he goes on complaining, until the blessed patience that reigns in Heaven runs out, everyone gets fed up, and they all agree that the chilliest man in the world should go find a truly beneficial climate. It is God himself who decides to send him to Hell, where it’s unthinkable that he could go on feeling cold. But in spite of the unquenchable fires, the burning waters, the scorching coals, and the human heat, which in such an overcrowded place is intense, the chilliest man in the world still feels cold, and the case becomes so famous that it reaches the ears of Satan, who sees it as an amusing challenge and decides to take matters into his own hands.

One morning, Satan himself leads the Chilean to nothing less than the hottest place imaginable: the center of the sun. It’s so hot there that Satan has to put on a special suit or else he’ll get burned. Once inside the center of the sun, they come to a small two-by-two-meter cubicle, and Satan opens the door. The Chilean enters and he stays there, hopeful and deeply grateful. Weeks pass, months, years, until one day, moved by curiosity, the Devil decides to pay the Chilean a visit. He puts on his special suit again — even reinforces it with two additional layers, because he thinks he may have singed himself on the previous trip — and he heads off to the sun. He has scarcely opened the door to the cubicle when he hears the Chilean shout from inside: “Please close the door, it’s chilly in here!”

“Please close the door, it’s chilly in here!” says Rodrigo, and his performance is a success.

“I think that you are the chilliest man in the world,” Bart tells him, “and I want the chilliest man in the world to try the best beer in the world.” Piet proposes they go to a bar where they sell hundreds of beers, but in the end they decide to go somewhere closer, where they clandestinely sell Westvleteren, the so-called best beer in the world, and on the way Rodrigo leans on the umbrella, but he doesn’t know if it’s necessary, he feels like he doesn’t need it anymore and could throw it away, but he goes on using it anyway while he listens to the story of the Trappist monks who make the beer and sell it in modest quantities, a story he finds amazing. He hopes he likes the beer a lot and he does, although they buy only one for the three of them, because the bottle costs ten euros.

They go back to the apartment at two in the morning with their arms around each other, so Rodrigo doesn’t have to use the umbrella: they look drunker than they are. Later, in the living room, they go on drinking for a while, they half listen to each other, they laugh. “You can stay, but only for tonight,” says Piet, and Rodrigo thanks him. They drag in a mattress while Bart stretches out on an old chaise lounge and covers himself with a blanket. Rodrigo thinks about what he will do if Bart tries something in the middle of the night. He considers whether he will reject him or not, but he falls asleep, and Bart does too.

He wakes up early; he’s alone in the living room. He’s a little hungover, and the coffee he finds in the kitchen does him good. He looks at the street, he looks at the buildings, the silent facade of the pizzeria. He wants to say good-bye to Piet, and he cracks open the door to his room: he sees him sleeping next to Bart in a half embrace. He leaves them a note of thanks and goes down the four flights of stairs. He has absolutely no plan, but he’s encouraged by the idea of walking without a cane, and once in the street he tries it, like in a happy ending. But he can’t do it, and he falls. It’s a nasty fall, a hard fall, his double pants rip, his knee bleeds. He stays on the corner, thinking, paralyzed by pain, and it starts to rain, as if he were a character in a cartoon with a cloud hanging above him — but this rain is for everyone, not just him.

It’s a cold and copious rain and he should look for a place to take shelter. He has very little money left, but he has no choice but to buy another umbrella. This is the moment to think of Elisa and curse her, but he doesn’t do it. Now he has two umbrellas, the blue one for balance and the black one for the rain; he says it out loud, in the same calm tone in which he would say his name, first and last, his birthplace. “Now I have two umbrellas, blue for balance and black for rain,” he repeats, as he starts to walk, with no other purpose than that, simply: to walk.

FAMILY LIFE

It’s not hot out, it’s not cold. A shy, sharp sun overcomes the clouds, and the sky looks, at times, truly clean, like the sky blue of a child’s drawing. Martín is in the last seat of the bus, listening to music, bobbing his head like the young folks do, but he’s not young anymore, not by a long shot: he’s forty years old, his hair fairly long, black, and a little curly, his face extremely white — well, there ’ll be time later to describe him. For now he’s just gotten off the bus, carrying a backpack and a suitcase, and he is walking a few blocks in search of an address.

The job consists of taking care of the cat, running the vacuum cleaner every once in a while, and watering some indoor plants that seem destined to dry out. I’m not going to go out much, hardly at all, he thinks, with a trace of happiness. Only to buy food for the cat, to buy food for myself. There is also a silver Fiat that he has to drive every so often (“So it can breathe,” they’ve told him). For now, he’s spending time with the family: it’s seven in the evening, and they’ll be leaving very early, at five thirty a.m. Here is the family, in alphabetical order:

Bruno: sparse beard, blondish, tall, smoker of black tobacco, literature professor.

Consuelo: Bruno’s partner, not his wife, because they never married, although they act like a married couple, perhaps worse than a married couple.

Sofía: the daughter.

She’s just run past, the little girl, chasing after the cat toward the stairs. She doesn’t greet Martín, doesn’t look at him; these days kids don’t say hi, and maybe that’s not such a bad thing, because adults say hi too much. Bruno explains to Martín some of the details of the job while, at the same time, arguing with Consuelo about how to organize a suitcase. Then Consuelo approaches Martín with a friendliness that unsettles him — he isn’t used to friendliness — and shows him the cat’s bed, the litter box, and a piece of pressed cloth where the cat can sharpen its claws, although none of these things get much use, according to Consuelo, because the cat sleeps wherever he feels like it, does his business in the yard, and scratches on all the chairs. Consuelo also shows him how the little door works, the mechanism that allows the cat to go out but not come in, or come in but not go out, or come in or out as it likes. “We always leave it open,” says Consuelo, “so she can be free — it’s like when our parents finally gave us the keys to the house.”

To Martín, the existence of that door is fantastic — he’s only ever seen one like it in Tom and Jerry cartoons. He almost asks how they got it, but then he thinks that maybe Santiago is full of pet doors and he’s just never noticed before.

“Sorry,” he says at the wrong time. “What did you say about our parents?”

“What?”

“You said something about ‘our parents,’ I think?”

“Oh, that this door is like when our parents gave us the keys to the house.”

The laughter lasts for two seconds. Martín goes out to smoke and sees an empty area in the yard: two and a half meters of disheveled grass where there should be a few plants and maybe a bush, but there’s nothing. He flicks his ashes furtively onto the grass, puts out the cigarette, and wastes an entire minute thinking about where to throw it: in the end he leaves it under a yellowed weed. He looks at the house from the threshold, thinks that it isn’t so big, that it’s manageable, though it seems full of nuance. He tentatively observes the shelves, the electric piano, and a large hourglass on the end table. He remembers that when he was a child he liked hourglasses, and he turns it over—

“It lasts twelve minutes,” says the little girl, who then, from the top step where she is trying to hold on to the cat, asks him if he’s Martín.

“Yes.”

And if he wants to play chess.

“Okay.”

The cat wriggles out of the girl’s grasp. It’s an uneven gray color, with short, dense fur, a thin body, and fangs that protrude slightly. The little girl goes up and down the stairs several times. And the cat, Mississippi, seems docile. He goes up to Martín, who wants to pet him but hesitates: he’s not so familiar with cats, has never lived with one before.

Sofía comes back, she’s in her PJs now and she walks clumsily in her big slippers from Chiloé. Consuelo asks her to not bother them and to go to her room, but the girl is carrying a heavy box, or a box that’s heavy for her, and she sets up the chessboard on the living-room table. She is seven years old, and she has just learned how to move the pieces, as well as the game’s mannerisms or affectations: she looks cute with her brow furrowed, her round face in her hands. She and Martín start to play, but after five minutes it’s clear that they’re getting bored, him more so than her. Then he proposes to Sofí that they play at losing, and at first she doesn’t understand, but then she explodes in sweet, mocking laughter — the one who loses wins, the goal is to give up first, to leave Don Quixote and Dulcinea unprotected, because it’s a Cervantes chess set, with windmills instead of rooks, and courageous Sancho Panzas as pawns.

How idiotic, thinks Martín. A literary chess set.

The pieces on the board look tarnished, tasteless, and although he’s not one to form quick impressions, the whole house now makes him a little anxious and annoyed, but not because of anything he sees: the placement of each object surely answers to some obscure theory of interior design, but an imbalance persists nonetheless, a secret anomaly. It’s as if the things don’t want to be where they are, thinks Martín, who is nevertheless grateful for the chance to spend some time in this luminous house, so different from the small, shadowy rooms he tends to live in.

Consuelo takes the girl upstairs and sings her to sleep. Though he listens from afar, Martín feels that he shouldn’t be eavesdropping, that he is an intruder. Bruno offers him some ravioli, which they eat in silence, with a phony masculine voracity. Something like, Well, there are no women around — let’s not use napkins. After the coffee, Bruno pours a couple of vodkas on the rocks, but Martín opts to keep downing the wine.

“What’s the name of the city where you’re going to live?” asks Martín, to have something to say.

“Saint-Étienne.”

“Where we played?”

“Who’s we?”

“The Chilean soccer team, France, ’98.”

“I don’t know. It’s an industrial city, a little run-down. I’m going to teach classes on Latin America.”

“And where is it?”

“Saint-Étienne or Latin America?”

The joke is so easy, so rote, but it works. Almost without trying, they draw out the after-dinner conversation, as if discovering some belated affinity. Upstairs the little girl sleeps, and they can also hear what might be Consuelo breathing or snoring slightly. Martín discovers that he’s been thinking about her the whole time he’s been in the house, from the moment he saw her in the doorway.

“You’re going to be here four months,” Bruno tells him. “Make use of that time to have a go with one of the neighbors.”

I’d much rather have a go with your wife, thinks Martín, and he thinks it so forcefully he’s afraid he has said it out loud.

“Enjoy it, cousin,” Bruno goes on affectionately, slightly drunk, but they aren’t cousins. Their fathers were, though: Martín’s has just died, and it was at the wake that they saw each other again for the first time in years. To treat one another like family now makes sense, it’s perhaps the only way to build a hasty sense of trust. The idea had originally been to rent out the house to someone who wouldn’t change it too much. But they couldn’t find anyone suitable. After a lot of finagling, some of it pretty desperate, Martín was the most reliable person Bruno could find to housesit. They’ve seen each other very little over the course of their lives, but maybe they were friends at one point, when they were still children and were compelled to play together on some Sunday afternoon.

Bruno lays out for him again what they’ve already talked about over the phone. He gives him the keys, they test the locks, he explains the doors’ quirks. And again he lists the advantages of being there, although now he doesn’t mention any neighbors. Then he asks if Martín likes to read.

“A little,” says Martín, but it’s not true. Then he turns overly honest: “No, I don’t like to read. The last thing I would ever do is read a book.” After a pause he says, “Sorry,” and looks at the overflowing shelves. “It’s like I’ve gone to church and said I don’t believe in God. Plus, there are a lot of worse things. Even worse than the things that’ve already happened to me.” He gives Bruno a placating smile.

“Don’t worry about it,” Bruno says, as if approving the comment. “A lot of people think the same thing, but they don’t say it.” Then he picks out some novels and puts them on the end table beside the hourglass. “Still, if you ever feel like reading, here are some things that might interest you.”

“And why would they interest me? Are they for people who don’t read?”

“More or less, ha.” (He says this, ha, but without the inflection of laughter.) “Some of them are classics, others are more contemporary, but they’re all entertaining.” (When he says this last word, he doesn’t make the slightest effort to avoid a pedantic tone, almost as if he were making air quotes.) Martín thanks him and says good night.

He doesn’t look at the books, not even at their titles. Lying on the couch, he thinks: Books for people who don’t read. He thinks: Books for people who have just lost their fathers and had already lost their mothers, people who are alone in the world. Books for people who have failed in the university, in work, in love (he thinks this: failed in love). Books for people who have failed so badly that, at forty years old, taking care of someone else’s house in exchange for nothing, or almost nothing, seems like a good opportunity. Some people count sheep, others recite their misfortunes. But he doesn’t sleep, sunk too deep in self-pity, which, in spite of everything, is not a suit he is comfortable wearing.

Just when sleep is about to overcome him, the alarm clocks go off; it’s five in the morning. Martín gets up to help the family with their suitcases. Sofí comes downstairs, sulking, but right away she finds, who knows where, a surge of energy. Mississippi is nowhere to be seen and Sofí wants to say good-bye. She cries for two minutes but then stops, as if she has simply forgotten she was crying. When the taxi arrives she insists she wants to finish her cereal, but then leaves the bowl almost untouched.

“Kill all the robbers,” she tells Martín before getting into the car.

“And what should I do with the ghosts?”

“Martín is joking,” says Consuelo immediately, throwing him a nervous look. “There are no ghosts in the house — that’s why we bought it, because we were guaranteed there were no ghosts. And not in France either, in the house where we’re going to live.”

As soon as they are gone, Martín stretches out in the big bed, which is still warm. He searches in the sheets for Consuelo’s perfume or the smell of her body, and he sleeps facedown, breathing deeply into the pillow, as if he’s discovered an exclusive and dangerous drug. The noise of the street starts up, the commotion of people going to work, the school buses, the motors revved by drivers anxious to avoid the traffic. He dreams that he’s in the waiting room of a hospital and a stranger asks him if he’s gotten his results yet. Martín is waiting for something or waiting for someone, but in the dream he doesn’t remember exactly what or who and he doesn’t dare ask, but he knows that what he’s waiting for isn’t test results. He tries to remember, and then he thinks, It’s a dream, and he tries to wake up, but when he wakes he is still in the dream and the stranger is still waiting for an answer. Then he wakes up for real and feels the immense relief of not having to answer that question, of not having to answer any questions. The cat is yawning at the foot of the bed.

He unpacks his suitcase in the master bedroom, but there’s not much room in the wardrobes. There are several plastic bags and boxes full of clothes meticulously packed up, but there are also some unboxed garments. He finds an old Pixies T-shirt with the cover from Surfer Rosa on it. “You’ll think I’m dead, but I’ll sail away,” he thinks — of course, that’s from a different album, he’s got it wrong. He tries to picture Consuelo in that shirt and he can’t, but it’s a medium so it must be hers and not Bruno’s. In any case, he puts it on — he looks funny, it’s too tight on him. Wearing only the T-shirt and a pair of sweatpants, he heads out to the nearest supermarket, where he buys coffee, beer, noodles, and ketchup, plus some cans of horse mackerel for Mississippi, because he’s hatched a demagogical plan, thinking the cat will see the situation like this: they’re gone, they left me alone with a stranger, but I sure am eating great. He comes back practically dragging the bags: it’s several blocks away and he knows he should have taken the car, but he’s terrified of driving. Back in the house, as he’s putting away the groceries in the kitchen, he looks at the cereal and milk the girl left behind. He finishes what’s left of the girl’s bowl, while thinking that he can count on the fingers of one hand the times he’s eaten cereal. Men from my generation don’t eat cereal, he thinks — unless their children eat it, unless they are fathers. When did they start selling cereal in Chile? The nineties? Suddenly, this question seems important. He sees an image of himself as a child, drinking a glass of plain milk, like he always did, and then rushing off to school.

Afterward, he inspects the second floor, where Bruno’s study is — a large room, perfectly illuminated by a skylight, with books in strict alphabetical order, countless desk supplies, and degrees on the wall: undergraduate, master’s, doctorate, all hanging in a line. Next he takes a look at the girl’s room, full of drawings, decorations, and, on the bed, some stuffed animals with their names written on tags. She’s taken some of her animals with her, but they’ve made her store others in her closet or chest; she left five on her bed and insisted on giving them name tags so Martín could identify them (one brown bear wearing sports clothes catches his attention — its name is Dog). Then he finds, in the upstairs bathroom, in with a pile of magazines, a pamphlet with sheet music for beginners. He goes downstairs and sits at the electric piano, which doesn’t work; he tries to fix it, with no luck. Still, he reads the music and presses the keys. He has fun imagining that he is an impoverished piano player, one with no money to pay the electricity bill who has to practice like this, by touch.

The first two weeks pass uneventfully. He lives just as he had planned. At first the days seem eternal, but gradually he fills them with certain routines: he gets up at nine, feeds Mississippi, and, after breakfast (he goes on eating cereal after he discovers a love for Quaker Oatmeal Squares), he goes into the garage, starts the car’s motor, and plays a bit with the accelerator, like a pilot waiting for the signal to take off. At first he moves the car timidly, but then he dares to take it out for a spin, for multiple spins, each one longer than the last. When he comes back, he tunes the radio to the news, opens the window in the living room, and turns the hourglass upside down; while the grains, the minutes, fall, delicately and decisively, he smokes the day’s first cigarette.

Then he watches TV for a few hours, and the effect is narcotic. He comes to feel affection for the rhetoric of the morning shows, of which he becomes something of a scholar; he compares them, considers them seriously, and he does the same with the celebrity shows. Those take a bit more effort, because he doesn’t know the characters — he’s never paid attention to that world — but eventually he comes to recognize them. He eats his lunch of noodles with ketchup in bed, always watching TV.

The rest of the day is uncertain, but it tends to be spent walking. He has a rule not to go to the same café twice, or to buy his cigarettes from the same corner shop, in order to avoid building any sense of familiarity: he has the vague impression he is going to miss this life, which isn’t the life he’s dreamed of but is a good life nonetheless; it is a beneficial, restorative time. But all of that changes the afternoon he discovers that the cat has disappeared. It’s been at least two days since he’s seen Mississippi, and the bowl of food is untouched. He asks around with the neighbors: no one knows anything.

He spends several hours desperate, frozen stiff, not knowing what to do. In the end he decides to make a flyer. He searches on the computer erratically, incoherently, for a photo of Mississippi, but he finds nothing; before leaving, Bruno cleared all personal files from the hard drive. Anxiously, he ransacks the entire house, taking a certain pleasure in the disarray, the chaos he is sowing. He searches carelessly through trunks, bags, and boxes, dozens of books, flipping frenetically through the pages, or shaking them with something like rage. He finds a little red suitcase hidden in the wardrobe of the study. Instead of money or jewelry it holds hundreds of family photos, some of them framed and others loose, some with dates on the back of them and even some short, loving messages. He likes one photo in particular, a large one in which Consuelo poses, blushing, with her mouth open. He takes a diploma Sofí received from a swimming course out of its frame and replaces it with the photo of Consuelo, and then he hangs it on the main wall of the living room. He thinks that he could spend hours stroking that straight, black, shining hair. Since he can’t find any photos of Mississippi, he searches online for images of gray cats and chooses one at random. He writes a brief message, prints some forty copies, and puts them up on lampposts and trees all along the street.

When he comes back, the house is a disaster. Especially the second floor. He is annoyed that he is the author of the mess. He looks at the half-opened boxes, the clothes strewn across the bed, the many dolls, drawings, and bracelets scattered over the floor, the solitary LEGO blocks lost in corners. He thinks that he has profaned the space. He feels like a thief or a cop, and he even thinks of that horrible, excessive word: raid. He begins, reluctantly, to straighten up the room, but suddenly he stops, lights a cigarette, and blows some smoke rings like he used to do as a teenager, all while imagining that the little girl has just been playing here with her friends. He imagines he is the father who opens her door and indignantly demands she clean up her room, and that she nods but goes right on playing. He imagines going into the living room, where a very beautiful woman, a woman who is Consuelo, or who looks like Consuelo, hands him a mug of coffee, raises her eyebrows, and smiles, showing her teeth. Then he goes and makes that cup of coffee for himself, which he drinks in quick sips while he thinks about a life with children, a wife, a stable job. Martín feels a sharp jab in his chest. And then a word that is by now inevitable looms and conquers: melancholy.

He contents or distracts himself with the memory that he too, long ago, had been the father of a girl of the same age, seven. For a day, at least. He was nineteen and he lived in Recoleta with his father and his mother, neither of whom had gotten sick yet. One afternoon he went down to the kitchen and he heard Elba, the woman who helped around the house, complaining that she could never go to the parents’ meetings at her daughter’s school. He offered to go in her place, because he cared about Elba and Cami, but also out of a sense of adventure, which, in those days, was much more pronounced in him. He had long hair then and he looked very young — in no way did he look like a father — but he went into the school and sat at the back of the room next to a guy who was almost as young as him, although a little more of a man; more worldly, as they say.

On his right arm the man had a brown tattoo that was barely darker than his skin. It said: JESÚS.

“What’s your name?” Martín asked the man. He responded by indicating the tattoo. He seems nice, Martín thought.

“You look really young,” he told Martín.

“You too,” Martín said. “I was still a kid when I had my kid.” Just then the teacher closed the door and started to talk; some parents came in late and the door got stuck once, twice. None of the parents acknowledged this until a fat blond woman in the third row got up and, with an enviably resounding voice, interrupted the teacher: “How can this be? What would happen if there was an earthquake or a fire? What would become of the children?”

The teacher fell into the silence of one who knows she should think carefully about what she is going to say. It was precisely the moment when she could have blamed her bosses, the system, the municipalization of public education, Pinochet, the ineffectiveness of the Concertación party, capitalism — it was clearly not the teacher’s fault, but she didn’t think fast enough, she wasn’t brave: the voices accumulated and she let them build, everyone was complaining, everyone was shouting, and to make matters worse, right then someone else arrived late and the door jammed again. Even Martín was about to start yelling, but then the teacher asked that they show some respect and let her talk. “I’m sorry,” she said, “this is a poor school, we just don’t have the resources, I understand you are angry but keep in mind that if there is a fire or an earthquake, I’ll also be trapped in here with the children.” The effect of this grim observation lasted two or three seconds, until Martín got up furiously and pointed his finger at her and said, with a full sense of drama: “But you, ma’am, are not my daughter!” Everyone supported him, enraged, and he felt very good about himself.

“That was rad,” said Jesús later, congratulating him on the way to the bus. As they said good-bye, Martín asked him if he believed in Jesus. And Jesús responded with a smile: “I believe in Jesús.”

“You, ma’am, are not my daughter,” murmurs Martín now, like a mantra. That night he writes to Bruno, saying: All’s well.

One afternoon, on the way back from the supermarket, he finds that someone has put up posters right on top of the ones he made. He goes up and down the street and confirms that right where he’d posted his flyers, there are now signs announcing the disappearance of a Siberian and German mix named Pancho. There is a decent reward of twenty thousand pesos. Martín jots down the number and the name of Pancho’s owner: Paz.

There is a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in the kitchen. Martín drinks only beer or wine, he’s not used to liquor, but on a whim he pours a glass, and, with each sip, he discovers that he likes Jack Daniel’s, that he is spellbound by it. By the time he decides to call Paz, he’s fairly drunk. “You put your dog over my cat” is the first thing he says to her, awkwardly, vehemently.

It’s ten thirty at night. Paz seems surprised, but she says she understands the situation. He regrets his heated tone, and the conversation ends in charmless mutual apologies. Before hanging up, Martín catches a voice in the background, a complaint. A child’s voice.

The following morning Martín watches through the window as a young woman on a bicycle rides up and sets herself to the time-consuming task of moving the Pancho posters. He goes out to the street and looks at her from a certain distance — she isn’t beautiful, he thinks, decisively; she’s just young, she must be twenty years old, Martín could be her father (although he doesn’t think this last part).

Paz pulls down her posters and finds space for them above or below his. She disguises the torn corners by folding them, and, while she’s at it, she adjusts Martín’s posters, too. She works skillfully, and he wonders if she does this for a living. She must be part of a squad of lost-animal seekers, Martín thinks, like those people who professionally walk dogs. This is not the case.

He introduces himself and apologizes again for having called her so late. He accompanies her the rest of the way down the street. At first she seems reticent, but then the conversation begins to take shape. They talk about Mississippi and about Pancho and also about pets in general, about the responsibility of owning pets, and even about the word pet, which she doesn’t like because she finds it derogatory. Martín smokes several cigarettes while they talk, but he doesn’t want to toss the butts. He holds them in his hand as if they were valuable.

“There’s a trash can over there,” Paz tells him, suddenly, and the sentence coincides with the corner where they have to part ways.

That night he calls her and tells her that he’s covered dozens of blocks looking for Mississippi, and that he’s also kept an eye out for Pancho. It sounds like a lie, but it’s true. She thanks him for the gesture, but she doesn’t let the conversation flow from there. Martín begins to call her daily, and though the conversations stay short, he feels good about them, as if those few sentences will be enough to establish himself as a presence in her life.

A week later he sees a dog that looks like Pancho close to the house. He tries to approach it, but the dog runs away, scared. He calls Paz, but he has trouble talking. What he has to say sounds like a lie again, like an excuse to see her. But Paz accepts it. They meet and patrol the streets for a while, until it’s time for her to go pick her son up from kindergarten. Martín insists on going with her.

“I can’t believe you have a son,” he says.

“Sometimes I can’t believe it either,” answers Paz.

“Another boyfriend” is the first thing the boy says when he sees Martín. He drags his little backpack expressively behind him without looking Martín in the face, but Paz tells him Martín thinks he’s seen Pancho and this gets the boy’s hopes up; he insists they keep looking for the dog. They cover many blocks, looking for all the world like a perfect family. They say good-bye when they reach Paz’s house. Both of them know that they will see each other again, and maybe the boy knows it too.

It’s been over a month since Mississippi’s disappearance, and Martín doesn’t hold out any hope of finding him. He even types up a confused e-mail to Bruno, full of apologies, but he doesn’t dare send it. The cat returns, however, one morning at dawn, barely able to push through his little door; he’s covered in wounds and has an enormous ball of pus on his back. The vet is pessimistic, but he does an emergency operation and prescribes some antibiotics that Martín has to give Mississippi daily. He has to feed the cat baby food and clean his wounds every eight hours. The poor cat is so bad off, he doesn’t have the strength to move, or to meow.

Martín focuses on Mississippi’s health. Now he loves the cat, takes care of him for real. He forgets to call Paz for a few days. One morning, she is finally the one to call him, and she’s happy when she hears the good news. Half an hour later they are sitting beside the cat, petting him, commiserating with him.

“You told me you lived alone, but this seems like a family’s house.” She throws the sentence at him suddenly, looking at the photo of Consuelo. Martín gets nervous and delays his answer. Finally he tells her, downcast and murmuring, as if it were painful to remember: “We separated some months ago, maybe a year ago. My wife and our daughter went to live in an apartment, and I stayed here with the cat.”

“Your wife is beautiful,” says Paz, looking at the photo on the wall.

“But she’s not my wife anymore,” answers Martín.

“But she’s beautiful,” repeats Paz. “And you never told me you had a daughter.”

“We just met, we can’t say words like never and always yet,” says Martín. “And I don’t like to talk about her,” he adds. “It makes me sad. I’m still not over the separation. The worst part is that Consuelo doesn’t let me see the girl, she wants more money.”

Paz looks at him anxiously, her mouth half-open. He must be feeling the adrenaline that sustains the liar, but he’s getting distracted by those small, slightly separated teeth, the aquiline nose, those thin but well-formed legs that seem, to him, perfect.

“You had your daughter very young,” Paz says.

“Not really,” he replies. “Or maybe so. Maybe I was too young.” Now he is completely wrapped up in the lie.

“I was a mom at sixteen, and I almost had an abortion,” says Paz, maybe to balance out Martín’s confessions.

“Why didn’t you?” Martín asks. It’s a stupid, offensive question, but she’s unfazed.

“Because abortion is illegal in Chile,” she says very seriously, but then she laughs, and her eyes shine. “That year,” she goes on, “my two best friends got pregnant. I was going to get an abortion at the same place they did, but at the last minute I changed my mind and decided to have the baby.”

They have sex on the armchair, and at first it seems like a good lay, but then he comes quickly, and apologizes.

“Don’t worry,” she answers. “You’re better than most boys my age.” Martín thinks about that word, boys, which he would never use but which, coming from her, sounds so appropriate, so natural. She has almost no freckles on her face or arms, but her body is covered in them. Her back looks like it was spattered with red ink. He likes it.

They start seeing each other every day, and they keep looking for Pancho. The possibility of finding him is by now remote, but Paz doesn’t lose hope. After each search they go back to the house and tend to Mississippi together. The cat’s wounds are healing slowly but favorably, and, on the spot on his back where the doctor shaved his fur, they can already see a finer, lighter fur growing in. The romance also advances, at an accelerated speed. Sometimes he likes this acceleration, he needs it. But he also wants it all to end: he wants to be forced to tell the truth, and for it all to go to shit.

One day Paz realizes that Martín has taken the photo of Consuelo down. She asks him to hang it up again. He asks her why.

“I don’t want us to get confused,” she says. He doesn’t understand very well, but he hangs the photo up again. “If it bothers you to screw in the house where you slept with and screwed your wife,” Paz tells him, “I’d understand.” He shakes his head emphatically and tells her that for some time now — that’s the expression he uses, “for some time now”—he hasn’t thought about his wife.

“Really, sorry to insist,” she says, “but if it bothers you to fuck here, you have to tell me.”

“But she and I were really almost never having sex anymore,” answers Martín, and they fall silent until she asks him if he ever had sex with his wife on the table in the living room. He gives her a horny smile and says that he didn’t. The game continues, vertiginous and fun. She asks if his wife ever dipped his dick in condensed milk before sucking it, or if perhaps, by chance, his wife liked him to stick three fingers in her ass, or if there’d been a time when she asked him to come on her face, on her tits, on her ass, in her hair.

One of those mornings, Paz shows up with a rose bush and a bougainvillea. He gets a shovel and together they construct a minimal garden in the empty plot by the house’s entrance. He digs clumsily, so Paz takes the shovel away from him, and, in a matter of minutes, the job is done.

“Sorry,” Martín tells her. “I know the guy is supposed to do the hard part.”

“No worries,” she answers, and she adds, cheerfully: “I was born under democracy.” Later, apropos of nothing, maybe as a way of anticipating his confession, Martín launches into a monologue about the past, in which brushstrokes of the truth are mixed with some obligatory lies, as he searches for a way of being honest, or at least less dishonest. He talks about pain, about the difficulty of building long-lasting, simple ties with people. “I’m addicted to the drug of solitude,” he tells her, sounding like a slogan on a plaque. She listens to him attentively, compassionately, and she nods several times in affirmation, but after a pause in which she adjusts her hair, settles into the armchair, and takes off her tennis shoes, she says it again, mischievously: “I was born under democracy.” And at lunch, when she sees him cutting his pieces of chicken with a knife and fork, she says she’d rather eat with her hands because she was “born under democracy.” The phrase works for everything, especially in bed: when he wants to do it without a condom, when he asks her not to yell so loud or to be careful about walking around the living room naked, and when she moves so savagely and eagerly on top that Martín can’t hide the pain in his penis — to all of these things, she responds that she was born under democracy, or she simply says, shrugging: “Democracy!”

Time goes by with happy indolence. There are hours, maybe entire days, when Martín manages to forget who he really is. He forgets he is pretending, that he’s lying, that he’s guilty. On two occasions, however, he almost lets the truth slip out. But the truth is long. Telling the truth would require many words. And there are only two weeks left. No! One week.

Now he’s driving, nervously: it’s Friday, and tomorrow he has to go to a wedding as Paz’s date. She asked him if they could take the car, so now he has only one day to practice — he has to seem like a seasoned driver, or at least he has to obey the traffic laws. At first it all goes well. He stalls at a red light, as he tends to do, but he has some courage in reserve, and, for a little bit, he achieves a certain fluidity. Then he gets carried away and decides to go to the mall to buy two plates and three cups to replace the ones that he’s broken, but he’s unable to change lanes at the right time, or move ahead of the other cars, and he gets stuck in his lane for ten minutes, until the exits run out. Now he’s headed southward on the highway, and there’s nothing to do but attempt a U-turn.

He pulls over onto the median and decides to wait until he calms down. He turns off the radio and bides his time until he can make the turn, but, when the opening comes, the car stalls again, and he’s left at the mercy of an oncoming truck. The driver swerves to avoid him and leans on the horn.

He backs up and continues south, and every once in a while he thinks about trying another U-turn, or trying to get off the highway, but he’s frozen dead with fear and all he can do is keep going in this straight line. He comes to a tollbooth and slams on the brakes; the toll collector smiles at him, but he’s incapable of smiling back at her. He is forced to keep going, like a slow automaton, until he reaches Rancagua.

I’ve never been to Rancagua, he thinks, ashamed. He gets out of the car, looks at the people, tries to guess the time from the movement in the Plaza de Armas: twelve — no, eleven. It’s early, but he’s hungry. He buys an empanada. He stays there an entire hour, parked, smoking, thinking about Paz. Such weighty names annoy him — they’re so full, so directly symbolic: Paz, Consuelo — peace and consolation. He thinks that if he ever has a child, he’s going to come up with a name that doesn’t mean anything. Then he takes twenty-four turns around the plaza — though he doesn’t count them — and some teenage girls playing hooky eye him strangely. He parks again and his phone rings; he tells Paz he’s at the supermarket. She wants to see him. He replies that he can’t because he has to pick his daughter up from school.

“Finally, you can see her?” she asks, overjoyed.

“Yes. We came to an agreement,” he says.

“I’d love to meet her,” says Paz.

“Not yet,” replies Martín. “Down the road.”

Not until four in the afternoon does he start heading back. The trip is calm this time, or less tense. I’ve just learned to really drive, he thinks that night before going to sleep, a little bit proud.

And yet, on Saturday, on the way to the wedding, he stalls the car. He says his eyes feel “caustic”—he’s not sure that’s the right word, but he uses it. Paz takes the wheel — she doesn’t have a license, but it doesn’t matter. He watches her drive, concentrated on the road, the seat belt between her breasts. He drinks a lot at the wedding. A lot. And even so, it all turns out well. People like him, he dances well, he cracks some good jokes. Paz’s friends congratulate her. She takes off her red shoes and dances barefoot, and he thinks it’s absurd that he doubted her beauty at first: she’s beautiful, she’s free, she’s fun, marvelous. He feels the desire to tell her right there, in the middle of the dance floor, that all is lost, irreversible. That the family is returning on Wednesday. He goes back to the table, watches her dance with her friends, with the groom, with the groom’s father. Martín orders another Jack Daniel’s and drinks it in one gulp. He likes the grating pain in his throat. He looks at the chair where Paz’s purse and shoes are: he thinks about keeping those red shoes, like a caricature of a fetishist.

The next day he’s hungover. He wakes up at eleven thirty and there’s strange music playing, a kind of new-age music that Paz hums along with while she cooks. She’s gotten up early, gone out to buy sea bream and a ton of vegetables, which she’s now frying in the wok, slowly stirring in the soy sauce. After lunch, stretched out naked on the bed, Martín counts the freckles on her back, on her ass, on her legs: 223. It’s the moment to confess everything, and he thinks she might even understand: she would get mad, she would mock him, she would stop seeing him for weeks, for months, she would feel confused and all that, but she would forgive him. He starts to talk, timidly, searching for the right tone, but she interrupts him and leaves to go pick up her son, who is at her parents’ house.

They come back at five. Up to this point the boy has been reticent with Martín, but this time he loosens up and is more trusting. For the first time, they play together. First they try to cheer up Mississippi, who is still convalescing, but soon they give up. Then the boy puts the tomatoes next to the oranges and tells Martín he wants some orange juice. Martín picks up the tomatoes, and when he’s about to cut the first one the boy cries, “Noooooo!” They repeat the routine twelve, fifteen times. There is a variation: before cutting the tomato, Martín catches on and feigns fury, saying that the grocer sold him tomatoes instead of oranges, pretending that he’s going to storm back and complain, all so the boy will say, intoxicated with happiness, “Nooooooo!”

Now they’re playing with the remote control. The boy pushes a button and Martín falls down, bites his own hand, shouts, or goes mute.

And if I really did lose my voice? he thinks afterward, while the child sleeps on his mother’s lap.

May they turn my volume down, thinks Martín.

May they fast-forward me, rewind me.

May they record over me.

May they erase me.

Now Paz, the boy, and Mississippi are asleep, and Martín has been locked in the study for hours doing who knows what, maybe crying.

***

They like what they see at first, when they get out of the taxi. Consuelo looks at the bougainvillea and the rose bush, and she wants to find Martín right away to thank him for that gesture. Then they are surprised to see the photo of Consuelo on the main wall, and in the confusion she even thinks, for a split second, that the photo has always been there, but no, of course it hasn’t. They go through the house, alarmed, and their confusion grows as they look into each of the bedrooms — it’s clear that Martín moved the boxes and wardrobes around, and every minute brings a new discovery: stains on the curtains, cigarette ash on the carpet. The cat is in the girl’s room, sleeping on top of the stuffed animals. They look over his wounds, which still haven’t scarred over completely, and they are furious at first, but then grateful, after all, that he’s alive. In the kitchen they find some used syringes, along with some of their medicine and prescriptions.

Martín isn’t there and he doesn’t answer his cell phone. There is no note to explain the situation at all. They can’t understand what has happened. It’s difficult to understand. At first they think Martín robbed them, and Bruno anxiously looks over the library, but he finds no evidence of theft.

He feels stupid for having trusted Martín. They had corresponded so much by e-mail, and he had no reason to be suspicious. “These things happen,” says Consuelo, for her part, but she says it automatically, without conviction. Every so often Bruno calls Martín again, leaves messages on his voice mail, messages that are sometimes friendly and other times violent.

***

A few days later, the doorbell rings very early in the morning. Consuelo goes out to answer it. “What do you want?” she asks a young woman, who is frozen, recognizing her. “What do you want?” Consuelo repeats. She takes a while to answer. She stares again, intently, at Consuelo, and, with a gesture of contempt, or of supreme sadness, she answers: “Nothing.”

“Who was it?” asks Bruno from the bedroom. Consuelo closes the door and hesitates a second before answering: “No one.”

ARTIST’S RENDITION

Yasna fired the gun into her father’s chest and then suffocated him with a pillow. He was a gym teacher, and she wasn’t anything, she was no one. But she’s something now: now she’s someone who has killed, someone who sits in jail waiting for her shitty food and remembering her father’s blood, dark and thick. She doesn’t write about that, though. She writes only love letters.

Only love letters, as if that were nothing.

But it isn’t true that she killed her father. That crime never happened. Nor does she write love letters, she never has, maybe because she knows almost nothing about love, and what she does know, she doesn’t like. What she does know is monstrous. The one doing the writing is someone else, someone urgently recalling her, not because he misses her or wants to see her but simply because he was commissioned, a few months ago now, to write a detective story. Preferably one set in Chile. And right away he thought of her, of Yasna, of that crime that was never committed, and although he had dozens of other stories to choose from, some of them more docile, easier to turn into detective stories, he thought that Yasna’s story deserved to be told, or at least that he would be able to tell it.

He took a few notes at the time, but then he had to focus on other obligations. Now he has only one day left to write it.

The innocent part of the story, the least useful part, the part he won’t include, and that he doesn’t even fully remember — since his job consists, also, of forgetting, or rather of pretending that he remembers what he has forgotten — begins in the summertime, toward the end of the eighties, when both of them were fourteen years old. He wasn’t even interested in literature yet; back then the only thing that held his interest was chasing women, with timidity but also persistence. But it’s excessive to call them women — they weren’t women yet, just as he was not yet a man. Although Yasna was several times more a woman than he was a man.

Yasna lived a few blocks away. She spent her afternoons in the messy front yard of her house, surrounded by roses, rue shrubs, and foxtails, sitting on a stool, a block of drawing paper on her lap.

“What are you drawing?” he asked her one afternoon from the other side of the fence, momentarily emboldened, and she smiled, not because she wanted to smile, but out of reflex. In reply she held up the block, and from a distance it seemed to him that there was a face sketched on the paper. He didn’t know if it was a man’s or a woman’s, but he thought he could tell it was a face.

They didn’t become friends, but they went on talking every once in a while. Two months later she invited him to her birthday party, and he, breathing happiness, going for broke, bought her a globe in the bookstore on the plaza. The night of the party he ran into Danilo, who was smoking a joint with another friend on the corner — they had a ton of weed, they’d started growing it a while ago, but they still hadn’t made up their minds to sell it. Danilo offered him the joint, and he took four or five deep drags, and straightaway he felt the dulling effect that he knew well, though he didn’t smoke with any real frequency. “What’ve you got there?” Danilo asked him, and he’d been waiting for that question, hiding the bag precisely so they would ask him. “The world,” he replied with glee. They carefully undid the cellophane wrapping and spent some time searching for countries. Danilo wanted to find Sweden, but couldn’t. “Look how big that country is,” he said, pointing to the Soviet Union. They finished the joint before parting ways.

Yasna seemed to be the only one taking the party seriously. She wore a blue dress down to her knees; her eyes were lined, her eyelashes curled and darkened, and there was a shadow of shy sky blue on her eyelids. The music came from a cassette tape played end to end, one that was no longer in fashion, or that was in fashion only for the more or less fifteen guests crammed into the living room. They were clearly all good friends, they’d change partners in the middle of the songs, which they sang along to enthusiastically, though they knew absolutely no English.

He felt out of place, but Yasna looked over at him every two minutes, every five minutes, and the rhythm of those glances competed with the lethargy from the weed. After gulping down two tall glasses of Kem Piña, he sat down at the dining-room table as a new cassette started to play, Duran Duran this time. No-no-notorious. They danced to it strangely, as if it were a polka, or one of those old ballroom dances. It all seemed ridiculous to him, but he wouldn’t have said no to joining in, he would have danced well, he thought suddenly, with an inexplicable drop of resentment, and then he focused on the chips, on the shoestring potatoes, the cheese cut up into uneven cubes, the nuts, and a few dozen multicolored crunchy balls that struck him, who knows why, as interesting.

He doesn’t remember the details, except for the sudden lash of hunger, the wound of hunger: the munchies. He made an effort to eat at a normal speed, but when Yasna came in with the tortilla chips and an immense bowl of guacamole, he lost control. Tortilla chips and guacamole had only recently been introduced in Chile, he had never tried them before, he didn’t even know that was what they were called, but after trying one he couldn’t stop, even though he knew everyone was watching him; it seemed like they were taking turns looking at him. He had bits of avocado on his fingers, and tomato, and grease from the chips; his mouth hurt, he felt half-chewed bits of food stuck in his molars, he extricated them tenaciously with his tongue. He ate the entire bowl almost by himself, it was scandalous. And still he wanted to go on eating.

Just then the door to the kitchen opened and a white light hit him right in the face. A man looked out; he was fairly fat but brawny, his parted hair divided into two identical halves combed back with gel. It was Yasna’s father. Beside him was someone younger, very similar in appearance, you might say good-looking if it weren’t for the scar from a cleft lip, though perhaps that imperfection made him more attractive. Here ends, perhaps, the innocent part of the story: when they grab him tightly by the arm and he tries desperately to go on eating, and a few moments later, after a long and confused series of hard looks and clipped sentences, of scraping and dragging, when he feels a kick in his right thigh followed by dozens of kicks on his ass, his shins, his back. He’s on the floor, enduring the pain, with Yasna’s sobbing and some unintelligible shouts in the background; he wants to defend himself, but he barely manages to shield his groin. It’s the second man who is beating him, the one Yasna will later call the assistant. Yasna’s father stands there and watches, laughing the way bad guys laugh in lousy movies and sometimes also in real life.

Although none of this, in essence, interests him for his story, he tries to remember if it was cold that night (no), if there was a moon (waning), if it was Friday or Saturday (it was Saturday), if anyone tried, in all the confusion, to defend him (no). He puts his clothes on over his pajamas, because it’s the middle of winter and much too cold, and as he drives to the service station to buy kerosene, he thinks with confidence, with optimism, that he has all morning to work on his notes and in the afternoon he will write nonstop, for four or five hours, and then he’ll even have enough time, in the evening, to go with a friend to try out the new Peruvian restaurant that has opened up near his house. He fills the gas cans and now he’s at the Esso market, drinking coffee, chewing on a ham-and-cheese sandwich, and thumbing through the newspaper he got for free for buying a coffee and a ham-and-cheese sandwich. What they want from him is simply a blood-soaked Latin American story, he thinks, and in the margins of the news he jots down a series of decisions that take shape harmoniously, naturally, like the promise of a peaceful day at work: the father will be named Feliciano and she will be Joana; the assistant and Danilo are no good, nor is the marijuana, maybe a hard drug instead, and though he doesn’t really want to make Feliciano into a drug trafficker — too hackneyed — he does think it’s necessary to move the protagonists down in class, because the middle class — and he thinks this without irony — is a problem if one wants to write Latin American literature. He needs a Santiago slum where it’s not unusual to see teenagers in the plazas cracked out or huffing paint thinner.

Nor will it work for Feliciano to be a gym teacher. He imagines him unemployed instead, humiliated and jobless at the start of the eighties, or, later, surviving in the work programs of the dictatorship, endlessly sweeping the same bit of sidewalk, or turned into a snitch who informs on suspicious activity in the neighborhood, or maybe even knifing someone to the ground. Or maybe as a cop, one who comes home late and shouts for his food, and who has no qualms about threatening his daughter at night with the same billy club he used to beat back protesters at noon.

He has some doubts at this point, but they’re nothing serious. Nothing is that serious, he thinks: it’s just a ten-page story, fifteen pages tops, he doesn’t have to waste time on the backstory. Two or three resonant phrases, a few well-placed adjectives will fix any problems. He parks, takes the gas cans out of the trunk, and then, while he fills the heater’s tank, he imagines Joana splashing kerosene all over the house, with her father inside — too sensationalist, he thinks, he prefers a gun, maybe because he remembers that there was a gun in Yasna’s house, that when she said she was going to kill her father she mentioned the gun in the house.

There was a gun, of course there was, but it was only an air rifle, which had lain idle for years in the closet. It was a testament to the time when the man used to go to the country with his friends to hunt partridge and rabbit. Only once, one spring Sunday, coming back from church when she was seven years old, did Yasna see her father fire it. He was in the yard, downing a beer and taking aim with a steady hand at the kites in the sky over the park. He hit the bull’s-eye four times: the owners couldn’t understand what was happening. Yasna thought about those parents and children from other neighborhoods watching their kites founder and crash, so disconcerted, but she didn’t say anything. Later she asked him if you could kill someone with that rifle, and he answered that no, it was good only for hunting. “Though if you got the guy in the head from close up,” amended her father after a while, “you’d fuck him up pretty good.”

After the party, the writer — who at that time didn’t even dream of becoming a writer, though he dreamed about many other things, almost all of them better than being a writer — was terribly scared and didn’t make any effort to see Yasna again. He avoided the street that led to her house, all the streets that led to her house, and he didn’t go to church, either, since he knew that she went to church, and in any case this didn’t take a lot of effort because by then he had stopped believing in God.

Six years passed before their paths crossed again. He saw her by chance, in the city center. Yasna’s hair was straighter and longer; she was wearing the two-piece suit they’d given her at work. He was wearing a plaid flannel shirt and combat boots, his hair disheveled, as if he wanted to exemplify the fashion of the times — or the part of fashion that corresponded to him, a literature student. By then he could be called a writer, he had written some stories. Whether they were good or bad was not important — a writer is someone who writes, a little or a lot, but who writes, just as a murderer is someone who kills, whether they’ve claimed one person or many. And it isn’t fair to say that she was nothing, then, that she was no one, because she was a cashier at a bank. She didn’t like the work but she also didn’t think — nor does she think now — that there existed any job that she would like.

While they drank Nescafé at a diner they talked about the beating, and she tried to explain what had happened, but she said she wasn’t very clear on that herself. Then she talked about her childhood, especially about her mother’s death in a car crash, she’d barely gotten to know her, and she talked to him about the assistant, which was how her father had first introduced the man to her while they were varnishing some wicker chairs in the yard, although some days later he told her, as if it wasn’t important, that actually the assistant was the son of a friend who had died, that he didn’t have anywhere to go and so he’d be living with them for a while. The assistant was twenty-four years old then, he came home late at night, he slept most of the morning, he didn’t work or study, but sometimes he babysat the little girl, mostly on Tuesdays, when Yasna’s father got home at midnight after practicing with his basketball team, and Saturdays, when her father had games and then went out with his teammates to drink a few beers. The writer didn’t understand why she was telling him all this, as if he didn’t know (and maybe he didn’t, although, by that point, since he was already a writer, he should have known) that this was the way people get to know each other, by telling each other things that aren’t relevant. By letting their words fly happily, irresponsibly, until they reach dangerous territories.

Although the conversation wasn’t over, he asked her if she had a phone, if there was some way they could see each other again, because right now he had a party to go to. She shrugged, and maybe she was waiting for him to invite her to that party, although in any case she couldn’t go, but he didn’t invite her, and then she didn’t want to give him her number anymore. She also forbade him from showing up at her house, even though the assistant no longer lived there.

“Then how will we see each other?” he asked again, and she, again, shrugged her shoulders.

But she’d mentioned the name of the bank where she worked, which had only three branches, so he was able to track her down a few weeks later, and they began a routine of lunches, almost always at a fried-chicken place on Calle Bandera, other times at a joint on Teatinos, and also, when one of them had more money, at Naturista. He went on hoping for something more to happen, but she was elusive, she told him about a boyfriend who was so generous and understanding he seemed clearly invented. Sometimes, for long stretches, he watched her talk but didn’t listen to her. He looked most of all at her mouth, her teeth, perfect except for the stains from cigarette smoke on the front ones. He would do this until she raised or lowered her voice, or maybe let slip some unexpected bit of information, as she did one time with a sentence that, although he hadn’t the slightest idea what she’d been talking about, brought him back to the present, though she didn’t say it in the tone of a confession: on the contrary, she said it as if it were a joke, as if it were possible for a sentence like that one to be a joke. “I wasn’t happy in my childhood” was what she said, and he didn’t understand what he should have understood, what anyone today would understand, but hearing her say it still shook him, or at least it woke him up.

Did she really use that word, so formal, so literary: childhood? Maybe she said “When I was a kid” or “When I was little.” Whatever she’d said, one would have had to tell the entire story, years ago, cultivating a sense of mystery, taking care with one’s dramatic effects, building up gradual, shocking emotion. Good writers and also bad ones knew how to do this, it didn’t seem immoral to them, they even enjoyed it, to the extent that depicting a story always brings a certain kind of pleasure. But what would that mystery be good for now, what kind of pleasure could be gained when the sentence that says it all has already been let loose? Because there are some phrases that have won their freedom: phrases we have learned how to hear, to read, to write. Fifteen, thirty years back, good writers, and bad ones too, would have trusted in a sentence like that to awaken a mystery that they would reveal only at the end, with a scene of the father asleep and the assistant in the bedroom touching the nipples of a ten-year-old girl, who is surprised but, as if it were a game of Monkey See, Monkey Do, puts her own hand under the assistant’s shirt and, with utter innocence, touches his nipple back.

Another scene, two days later. The father is at basketball practice and the assistant calls her into his room, closes the door, takes off her clothes, and leaves her locked in there. The girl doesn’t resist, she stays there, she searches among his clothes, which are still in bags as if, though he’s lived there for months now, he had just arrived or were about to leave. The girl tries on shirts and some enormous blue jeans, and she’s dying to look at herself in the mirror, but there’s no mirror in the assistant’s room, so she turns on a little black-and-white TV on the nightstand, and there’s a drama on that isn’t the one she watches, but the knob spins all the way around and she ends up getting sucked into the plot anyway, and that’s where she is when she hears voices in the living room. The assistant appears with two other guys and he takes the clothes she’s found off her, threatens her with the bottle of Escudo beer he has in his left hand, she cries and the guys all laugh, drunk, on the floor. One of them says, “But she doesn’t have any tits or pubes, man,” and the other replies, “But she’s got two holes.”

The assistant doesn’t let them touch her, though. “She’s all mine,” he says, and throws them out. Then he puts on some grotesque music, Pachuco, maybe, and orders her to dance. She’s crying on the floor like she would during a tantrum. “I’m sorry,” he consoles her later, while he runs his hand over the girl’s naked back, her still shapeless ass, her white toothpick legs. That day in his room he puts two fingers inside her and pauses, he caresses her and insults her with words she has never heard before. Then he begins, with the brutal efficiency of a pedagogue, to show her the correct way to suck it, and when she makes a dangerous, involuntary movement, he warns her that if she bites it he ’ll kill her. “Next time you’re gonna have to swallow,” he tells her afterward, with that high voice some Chilean men have when they’re trying to sound indulgent.

He never ejaculated inside her, he preferred to finish on her face, and later, when Yasna’s body took shape, on her breasts, on her ass. It wasn’t clear that he liked these changes; over the five years that he raped her, he lost interest, or desire, several times. Yasna was grateful for these reprieves, but her feelings were ambiguous, muddled, maybe because in some way she thought she belonged to the assistant, who by that point didn’t even bother to make her promise not to tell anyone. The father would come home from work, fix himself some tea, greet his daughter and the assistant, then ask them if they needed anything. He’d hand a thousand pesos to him and five hundred to her, and then he’d shut himself in for hours to watch the TV dramas, the news, the variety show, the news again, and the sitcom Cheers, which he loved, at the end of the lineup. Sometimes he heard noises, and when the noises became too loud he got some headphones and connected them to the TV.

It was precisely the assistant who urged Yasna to organize her fifteenth birthday party (“You deserve it, you’re a good girl, a normal girl,” he told her). At that point he’d been disinterested for several months; he would touch her only every once in a while. That night, however, after the beating, when it was already almost dawn, drunk and with a pang of jealousy, the assistant informed Yasna, in the unequivocal tone of an order, that from then on they would sleep in the same room, that now they would be like man and wife, and only then did the father, who was also completely drunk, tell him that this was not possible, that he couldn’t go on fucking his sister — the assistant defended himself by saying she was only his half sister — and that was how she found out they were related. Completely out of control, his eyes full of hate, the assistant started to hit Yasna’s father, who, as she knew from then on, was also his father, and even gave Yasna a punch on the side of her head before he left.

He said he was leaving for good and in the end he kept his word. But during the months that followed she was afraid he would return, and sometimes she also wanted him to come back. One night she went to sleep with her clothes on, next to her father. Two nights. The third night they slept in an embrace, and also on the fourth, the fifth. On night number six, at dawn, she felt her father’s thumb palpating her ass. Maybe she shed a tear before she felt her father’s fat penis inside her, but she didn’t cry any more than that, because by then she didn’t cry anymore, just as she no longer smiled when she wanted to smile: the equivalent of a smile, what she did when she felt the desire to smile, she carried out in a different way, with a different part of her body, or only in her head, in her imagination. Sex was for her still the only thing it had ever been: something arduous, rough, but above all mechanical.

The writer eats some cream of asparagus soup with half a glass of wine for lunch. Then he sprawls in an armchair next to the stove with a blanket over himself. He sleeps only ten minutes, which is still more than enough time for an eventful dream, one with many possibilities and impossibilities that he forgets as soon as he wakes up, but he retains this scene: he’s driving down the same highway as always, toward San Antonio, in a car that has the driver’s seat on the right, and everything seems under control, but as he approaches the tollbooth he’s invaded by anxiety about explaining his situation to the toll collector. He’s afraid the woman will die of fright when she sees the empty seat where the driver should be. The volume of that thought rises until it becomes deafening: when she sees that nobody is driving the car, the toll collector — in the dream it’s one woman in particular, one he always remembers for the way she has of tying back her hair, and for her strange nose, long and crooked, but not necessarily ugly — will die of fright. I’m going to get out quickly, he thinks in the dream. I’ll explain.

He decides to stop the car a few meters before he reaches the booth and get out with his hands up, imitating the gesture of someone who wants to show he isn’t armed, but the moment never takes place, because although the booth is close, the car is taking an infinite amount of time to reach it.

He writes the dream down, but he falsifies it, fleshes it out — he always does that, he can’t help but embellish his dreams when he transcribes them, decorating them with false scenes, with words that are more lifelike or completely fantastic and that insinuate departures, conclusions, surprising twists. As he writes it, the toll collector is Yasna, and it’s true that in an indirect, subterranean way, they are similar. Suddenly he understands the discovery here, the shift: instead of working at a bank, Joana will be a collector in a tollbooth, which is one of the worst possible jobs. He pictures her reaching out her hand, managing to grab all the coins, loving and hating the drivers or maybe completely indifferent. He imagines the smell of the coins on her hands. He imagines her with her shoes off and her legs spread apart — the only license she can take in that cell — and later on an inter-city bus, on her way home, dozing off and planning the murder, now really convinced that it is, as they say in Mass, truly right and just. After she’s done it she heads south, sleeps in a hostel in Puerto Montt, and reaches Dalcahue or Quemchi, where she hopes to find a job and forget everything, but she makes some absurd, desperate mistakes.

The last time he saw Yasna, they almost had sex. Up until then they’d seen each other only during those lunches in the city center; whenever he’d asked her to go to the movies or out dancing she’d pile on the excuses and talk vaguely about her perfect, made-up boyfriend. But one day she called him, and then she showed up at the writer’s house. They watched a movie and then they planned to go to the plaza, but halfway there she changed her mind, and they ended up at Danilo’s, smoking weed and drinking burgundy. The three of them were there, in the living room, high as kites, stretched out on the rug, uncaring and happy, when Danilo tried to kiss her and she affectionately pushed him away. Later, half an hour, maybe an hour later, she told them that in another world, in a perfect world, she would sleep with both of them, and with whomever else, but that in this shitty world she couldn’t sleep with anyone. There was weight in her words, an eloquence that should have fascinated them, and maybe it did, maybe they were fascinated, but really they just seemed lost.

After a while Danilo let out a laugh, or a sneeze. “If you want a perfect world, smoke another one,” he told her, and he went to his room to watch TV. Yasna and the writer stayed in the living room, and even though there was no music, Yasna started to dance, and without much preamble she took off her dress and her bra. Astonished as he was, he kissed her awkwardly, he touched her breasts, caressed her between her legs, he took off her underwear and slowly licked the down on her pubis, which wasn’t black like her hair, but brown. But she got dressed again suddenly and apologized, she told him she couldn’t, she said she was sorry, but it wasn’t possible. “Why not?” he asked, and in his question there was confusion but there was also love — he doesn’t remember it, he would be incapable of remembering it, but there was love.

“Because we’re friends,” she said.

“We’re not such great friends,” he answered, completely serious, and he repeated it many times. Yasna let out a peal of beautiful, stoned laughter, a real and delicious guffaw that only very gradually wore itself out, that lasted ten minutes, fifteen minutes, until finally she managed to find, with difficulty, the way back to a serious and resonant tone with which it would be appropriate to tell him that this was a good-bye, that they could never see each other again. He didn’t understand, but he knew it didn’t make sense to ask any questions. They sat with their arms around each other in a corner. He took Yasna’s right hand and calmly began to bite and eat her fingernails. He doesn’t remember this, but while he looked at her and bit her fingernails he was thinking that he didn’t know her, that he would never know her.

Before they left they sat for a while with Danilo, in front of the TV, to watch an eternal game of tennis. She drank four cups of tea at an impressive speed, and she ate two marraqueta rolls. “Where’s your mom?” she asked Danilo suddenly.

“Over at an aunt’s house,” he answered.

“And where’s your dad?”

“I don’t have a dad,” he answered. And then she said:

“You’re lucky. I do have one. In my house there’s a rifle and I’m going to kill my father. And I’m going to go to jail and I’m going to be happy.”

By now it’s three in the afternoon, he doesn’t have much time left. He urgently turns on the computer, annoyed by the seconds the system takes to start up. He writes the first five pages in a matter of minutes, from the moment the detective arrives at the scene of the crime and realizes he has been there before, that it’s Joana’s house, until he climbs up to the attic and finds the old boxes with clothes from the time when they were a couple, because in the story they were a couple, but not for very long, and in secret. He also finds the globe he’d given her — but without the stand that held it — and a backpack he thinks he recognizes in among the fishing rods and reels, the buckets and shovels for the beach, the sleeping bags and rusted dumbbells. He keeps looking around, impelled more by nostalgia than a desire to find evidence, and then, just like in books, in movies, and also sometimes in reality, he finds something that would not be conclusive to anyone else, but that is, immediately, to him: a box full of drawings, hundreds of drawings, all portraits of her father, ordered by date or series, but each more realistic than the one before, at first sketched in pencil, and then, the majority, in the green ink of a Bic pen, fine-point. When he sees the accentuated contours, gone over so many times that the paper is often torn, and when he notices the exaggeration of the features — though never to the point of caricature, they never lose the aura of realism — the detective understands what he should have understood a long time before, what he hadn’t known how to read, what he hadn’t known how to say, hadn’t known how to do.

The writer works at a cruising speed through the intermediate scenes, and takes great pains over the final two pages, when the detective finds Joana in a boarding house in Dalcahue and promises he will protect her. She tells him in great detail about the crime, put off so many times over the course of her life, and while she cries she seems to grow calmer. Maybe they stay together, in the end, but it’s not certain. The ending is delicate, elegantly ambiguous, though it’s not clear what it is the writer thinks is ambiguous, or delicate, or elegant about it.

It’s not a great story, but he sends it off with a clear conscience, and he even has time to drink a pisco sour and eat some yucca a la huacaína before his friends get to the Peruvian restaurant.

It’s not a great story, no. But Yasna would like it.

Yasna would like the story, though she doesn’t read, she doesn’t like to read. But if it were made into a movie, she would watch it to the end. And if she caught a repeat of it and she didn’t remember it, or even if she remembered it well, she would watch it again. She doesn’t often watch movies, in truth, nor does she often recall the writer. She doesn’t even know he is a writer. She did remember him a few months ago, though, when she was walking in the neighborhood where he used to live.

They had declared her father terminally ill, and recommended she give him marijuana to help with the pain. She’d thought of Danilo’s plants, hence that walk through the old neighborhood, which seemed erratic but was not: she enjoyed the luxury of walking around aimlessly, peripherally, even reaching the end of a street and then retracing her steps, as if she were searching for an address. But she knew perfectly well where Danilo lived, still in his family home; she merely wanted to enjoy that luxury, modest as it was. Her father was sleeping more calmly by then, with less pain than on previous days, so she could go out for a walk and take her time.

“I hope you haven’t killed your father,” he said to her when he finally recognized her, and since she didn’t remember her words from that night almost twenty years before, she looked at him with alarm. Then she remembered her plan, the air rifle, and that crazy afternoon. She felt an uncomfortable happiness when she remembered those lost details, as Danilo talked and cracked jokes. She liked that house, the atmosphere, the camaraderie. She stayed for tea with Danilo, his wife, and their son, a dark-skinned, long-haired boy who spoke like an adult. The woman, after looking at Yasna intensely, asked her what she did to stay so thin.

“I’ve always been thin,” she answered.

“Me too,” said the boy. She bought a lot of marijuana, and Danilo also threw in some seeds.

It’ll be a while before the plant flowers. She is watering it now while she listens to the news on the radio. Her father doesn’t rape her anymore, he wouldn’t be able to. She hasn’t forgiven him, she’s reached a point where she doesn’t believe in forgiveness, or in love, or in happiness, but maybe she believes in death, or at least she waits for it. While she moves the furniture around in the living room, she thinks about what her life will be when he dies: it’s an abstract feeling of freedom, maybe too abstract, and for that reason uncomfortable. She thinks of an ambiguous pain, of a disaster, calm and silent.

She hears her father’s complaints coming from the kitchen, his degraded, corrupted voice. Sometimes he shouts at her, berates her, but she pays him no mind. Other times, especially when he is high, he laughs his labored laughter, utters disjointed phrases. She thinks about the will to live, about her father clinging to life, who knows what for. She brings him another marijuana cookie, turns on the TV for him, puts his headphones on for him. She stays awhile beside him, looking at a magazine. “I didn’t believe in God, but only with his help could I overcome the pain,” says a famous actor about his wife’s death. “It’s simple: lots of water,” says a model on another page. “Don’t let public tantrums get to you.” “It’s her second TV series so far this year.” “There are many ways to live.” “I didn’t know what I was getting mixed up in.”

She hears the trash collector going by, the men’s shouts, the dog barking, the whisper of canned laughter coming from the headphones, she hears her father’s breathing and her own breathing, and all those sounds don’t alter her feeling of silence — not of peace: of silence. Then she goes to the living room, rolls herself a joint, and smokes it in the darkness.