Free Loquela by Carlos Labbé

finished on the penultimate page, when at last the book reveals her to me as an extraordinary woman, it also takes her away from me, takes her right out of my hands, because I long to carry her with me beyond the confines of the paragraph. She’ll never be held by the reader, only by Mario. Alicia, on the other hand: I could get up right now, get on a micro , get off in front of her building, buzz the intercom, go up, she opens the door, surprised; she’s alone, I pull her to me; pressure, tangible and ephemeral desire, if I so desired. All things considered, I know more about Estela than I do about Alicia. And I’m more adventurous with her, of course, it’s easy if the woman is invented, she doesn’t have a body. Saying her name in the flesh, Estela, I don’t feel the death rattles that Alicia provokes, each breath I use to name her is something lost, a wasted chance to hold her, kiss her all over, to speak and to be silent two inches from her face, breathe her tobacco smell before she departs for somewhere else, some faraway place, for Neutria, for old age, where my hands will only touch her in writing.)
    Soon another hand goes up among the listeners in the class. A gringa is talking now. In the face of the general stupor, her question, which is heard out of context, seems to reveal a doubt that was burning inside all of us before we came into the classroom; I smile hearing her poorly pronounced Spanish: “Excuse me, professor, but do you know what happened to the student Violeta Drago?” The professor goes pale, looks at the floor, unbuttons the collar of his shirt. He swallows and answers: “It’s good of you to ask. The truth is my conscience won’t let me work. I know Violeta’s hidden story, she was, of course, a very dear student. It’s a tragedy, but I want to assure you that if I didn’t say anything it wasonly because I didn’t want to get myself in any trouble. Besides, no one has come to me to talk about it, no one has asked me anything.”
    (And so, in all my apathetic infatuations, as a reader and as a body, where do I locate the attraction I feel for Violeta? She was a living human being, reliant on blood like myself or any other, and yet she has now become a memory. [And where are the pictures of her, the video footage, the sound of her voice captured on a cassette, her high school yearbook, where is she?] That main character in her deliriums, as fictional as Donoso’s monsters, although she insists they were lived experiences. Alicia moves her head, angry. Would I ever be able to get anywhere near that albino girl—though she has appeared so often in my dreams of white walls in recent nights—if she weren’t dead? The answer is no. Because when she died, the pages she’d written came to me. [Alicia reads this and says not a word.] We living beings are cursed, we can’t know ourselves without the existence of inanimate objects: a novel, a personal diary, a letter. Another paradox: whoever claimed that the dead don’t communicate is the one who is dead.)
    In my dream the professor kept on explaining himself. “She showed me a few stories she was writing, very interesting. We met at a café on the fisherman’s cove. She was ridiculously nervous when she showed up, barely hanging onto a pile of loose papers, she told me they were dreams (dreams within the dream), not stories, and that she couldn’t stay to talk because she had to hurry to go help a friend. A friend of hers was going to be killed within a half hour, or have stones thrown at him, or get turned over to the police, I can’t remember. She ran off down the street. Ifollowed her of course, in my car at a safe distance. Suddenly I was stopped by the sound of a gunshot. I saw Violeta and a boy clinging to each other, the boy—I don’t know if you know him—who walks around out on the quad with his books and notebooks; he was pale from