Free Navidad & Matanza by Will Vanderhyden Carlos Labb Page A

before bedtime. He loved listening to those stories, but when his father would say goodnight and turn out the light, the shadows that came in from the street would keep him from sleep.
    It was impossible to tell whether Alicia’s offer was sincere or in jest. The man asked her how she knew about the biblical Joseph; outside the sun was coming up and they could hear the roosters crowing. The girl laughed and said that obviously she hadn’t learned about it in her religion classes in high school. The man started toasting some bread. Alicia laughed again. She told him that his dream was simple: the sea was the world, parties, commerce. The city was the same. High places were high places. The sky. And her, why’d she make an appearance? Asked the man. At that moment they heard the honking of a car horn. The man and the girl looked out the window. In front of the house was parked the Japanese car of Juan Francisco Vivar. He was accompanied by his son Bruno and, asleep in the backseat, was Patrice Dounn.

75
    I DIMLY remember what came next in the story told by the man from the service station that night at Miriada , in the town of Matanza. The truth is I’d finished three or four glasses of brandy, and he’d covered the table with more than a square meter of empty pilsner bottles. The light bulbs in the bar had faded gradually. Everything turned yellower, browner, blacker. Including the voice of my interlocutor. Still, I remember the dazzling young body of the waitress, who watched me out of the corner of her eye from another table, making calculations in a notebook. That’s what I thought, with a total lack of intuition: the girl was making calculations. I’d only brought a ninety-minute tape, so by that point the conversation was empty air. Misleading human memory. The wind blew in through the cracks of a large, old window to myright. Progressively—mea culpa—the story of the disappearance of the Vivar siblings told by the temporary assistant of Patrice Dounn became, in my memory, a collage of blurry images. Without a doubt, the events that took place at the Transensorial Beyond Seasons Celebration were, in reality, much more impressive than how my alcohol-muddled mind recalls them.
    That morning, Juan Francisco Vivar and his son made breakfast in the kitchen of the man from the service station. Patrice Dounn, half asleep, walked to his room and shut the door. Alicia went in with him, although after half an hour she came back out. She’d changed into a very thin green dress, her hair tied up with knitting needles. She sat down at the table. She drank chocolate milk and responded to a couple jokes Bruno made about the color of her outfit. Their father drank his coffee in silence without saying or doing anything. He just looked out the window. The man from the service station watched everything very nervously; it was difficult for him to understand the words the siblings spoke to one another. At one point, Juan Francisco stretched out his arm and pinched the soft flesh of his daughter’s shoulder. Alicia didn’t cry out or seem upset, according to the man from the service station. On the contrary, she tilted her head slightly as if it pleased her. Then Bruno and Alicia stood up at the same time and said they were going to the beach to go swimming. They retrieved two towels from the trunk of the car and left.
    Even though it was cloudy, the man emphasized, the beach was full of tourists of all nationalities. This was apparent at first glance, in the varieties of hair and skin. It was the same burning sun, the same freezing sea, but all of a sudden one was no longer in Chile, in the same suffocating, monotonous summer as always,but on a gringo or European beach where everyone spoke loudly, where there were barely any children, and women were stretched out in the sun, their breasts in plain sight. They’ve told me that’s how it is there, said the man. The beach of Babel, I