Free Loquela by Carlos Labbé Page B

these men had been standing in Valparaiso, but now that paper circle was an all-encompassing sun that didn’t resemble the sun of that city. It was the sun of Neutria. Elisa sat watching how her boyfriend’s cousin pronounced this unfamiliar word: Neutria. Neutria still retained a coastal charm, unlike Valparaiso or Puerto Aysén. Industries had not yet overrun its beaches, a neighboring city hadn’t robbed it of its grasses, its flowers, its tranquility, because there was nothing, not even a country house, for a hundred kilometers in any direction. Bernarda asked them what they were talking about: she brought in some bottles of beer, peanuts, three glasses. Elisa got up and went to put a tape in the stereo. That night the heat was unbearable.
    â€œDancing Queen” played at full volume. They’d already been drinking, they were dancing almost without realizing it. Another song and another bottle of beer, until the tape stopped and, with the silence, came the certainty that they hadn’t gotten any work done. Alicia picked up her scissors and papers again. Jars of latex paint with brushes inside them and some plaster figures were waiting for Bernarda, while Elisa, squatting, was coating rusty old pieces of iron with concrete. At a certain point in the night, a rush of air slammed the door to Carlos’s room and, little by little, the window pushed open. Elisa and Bernarda glanced up and the tools fell from their hands: a strange face was peering in from the street, watching them. All three gazes were fixed until Elisa, all at once, shut the window and the curtains, and Bernarda turned off the light. A light from the street outlined the silhouette of the watcher on the curtain, immobile, in profile, waiting for a few seconds. The door to the house was opened from outside. It was Alicia coming in, she called to them in a high-pitched voice. She came into the room and sat down on the floor next to them. She was frightened, she said: before going to bed she’d gone to take the trash out to the street; she was putting the bags next to the neighbor’s when she noticed a man sitting on the sidewalk, smoking, staring at the ground. The guy commented that if there was any music that could wake the dead, it was ABBA. Alicia started walking faster toward the door, imagining that any hesitation would result in a heavy hand on her arm, then he’d be inside the house, in the darkness. She managed to turn the key, go inside, shut the door, and stay still waiting for the furious rattling of the doorknob. But the man decided to leave. Alicia, Elisa, and Bernarda sighed, they didn’t move, they talked until they fell asleep right there, leaning against the wall, huddled together.

THE SENDER
    I want you to know that if I die young I’m going to stick around.
    Like the foam on a wave photographed in black and white one winter afternoon, a photograph I found in a library book by one of the Corporalists: gray sky, white spots from errors in the developing process, stripes cutting across the photographic paper. And in the background, the horizon, black like a thick wall of water that should still be, should have been, moving, forming part of time, water that will never be in the same position again, a faint glimmer and life, or better, each second’s passing reminding me that I’m going to die. The distant glimmer—no suggestion of color, just a glimmer streaking across the black water—is not foam, delicious foam running toward me without ever wetting my feet, foam dissolving in the surf that leaves without leaving. The rocks, another shadow on the sea, I can’t walk on that beach; to enter that place is to inevitably leave another place behind; seeing myself sitting on a beach wearing a black dress and dark sunglasses is to no longer see myself standing, naked, walking into the sea, bent over this notebook, dancing with you at a party. I choose one image, I lose the rest.
    I