The Secret of Evil (8 page)

I C
AN'T
R
EAD

This story is about four people. Two children, Lautaro and
Pascual, a woman, Andrea, and another child, named Carlos. It’s also about
Chile, and, in a way, about Latin America in general.

When my son Lautaro was eight years old, he made friends with Pascual,
who was four at the time. A friendship between children of such different ages
is unusual, and maybe it was entirely due to the fact that when they met, in
November 1998, Lautaro hadn’t seen or played with another child for days on end,
because Carolina and I had been trundling him around all over the place, much to
his disgruntlement. It was Carolina’s first trip to Chile and my first trip back
since leaving in January 1974.

So when Lautaro met Pascual they immediately became friends.

I think it was when we went to have dinner with Pascual’s parents. The
second time they met was when Alexandra, Pascual’s mother, took Carolina and
Lautaro to a swimming pool. I didn’t go. And the boys might have seen each other
again later on. So twice, or three times at the most.

The swimming pool was in the foothills of the Cordillera and,
according to Carolina, the water was icy cold and neither she nor Alexandra went
in. But Pascual and Lautaro did, and they had a great time.

A strange thing happened (one of the many strange things that will
happen in this story and carry it and perhaps turn out to be what it’s really
about): when they got to the swimming pool, Lautaro asked Carolina if he could
have a pee. She, of course, said yes, and then Lautaro went to the edge of the
pool, pulled down his trunks a bit and peed into the water. That night, Carolina
said that she’d been embarrassed, not for Lautaro, but because of what Alexandra
might have thought. The fact is Lautaro had never done anything like that
before. The swimming pool wasn’t really busy, but there were a few people, and
my son is not some wild boy who pees wherever he feels like it. It was very
strange, Carolina said that night: the enormous Cordillera looming behind the
swimming pool as if it were
waiting
, the laughter and the muted voices
of the adults, oblivious to Lautaro’s surprising urination, and Lautaro himself,
wearing only his swimming trunks, peeing onto the blue surface of the water.
What happened next? I asked. Well, she got up from where she was sunbathing,
walked over to our son, and took him to the bathroom. It was like he was under
hypnosis, said Carolina. Then he felt ashamed and didn’t want to get into the
pool, where Pascual was already splashing around, though after a while he forgot
all about it and went in. But Carolina didn’t. Alexandra asked if it was because
of the pee, and Carolina said it was because of the cold, which was the
truth.

I’d met Alexandra at the airport, a few minutes after stepping off the
plane. It was almost a quarter of a century since I’d been in Chile. I’d been
invited by
Paula
magazine, as one of the judges for their short story
competition, and when we got through customs and immigration, Alexandra was
there waiting for us, along with some people I didn’t know. When she said her
name, Alexandra Edwards, I asked her if she was the daughter of Jorge Edwards,
the writer, and she looked at me, frowned slightly, as if considering how to
reply, then said no. I’m the daughter of the photographer, she explained a
little while later. By that stage I was already one of her admirers. I have to
say it’s not hard to admire her, because she’s very pretty. But it wasn’t her
physical beauty that impressed me; it was something else, a side of her that
I’ve gradually come to know and will probably never know completely, and yet I
know it well enough to be sure that we’ll always be friends. We’d arrived in the
morning, and that afternoon, I remember, I had lunch with the rest of the
judges, and I had to make a speech, and Alexandra was there, on the other side
of the table, laughing with her eyes, which is something that Chilean women
often do, or that’s how it seemed to me at the time, a mistaken impression that
must have been due to finding myself back in the country after so many years
away; women everywhere laugh with their eyes, all the time, and men do too
occasionally, and sometimes it’s actually happening, and sometimes we only think
it is, that silent laughter, which reminds me of Andrea, who is one of the main
characters in this story, Andrea and Lautaro and Pascual and Carlitos, but I
still hadn’t met Andrea, or Pascual, and I’d never even heard of Carlitos,
although the fortunate day was drawing near, as someone might have said —
myself, perhaps, in January 1974.

Anyway, in spite of the age difference, Lautaro and Pascual became
friends, and maybe it was there at the swimming pool perched in the foothills of
the Cordillera that their friendship was cemented, after the peeing incident.
When Carolina told me, I couldn’t believe it: Lautaro urinating, not
in
the pool, underwater, as almost all kids do, but from the edge, for everyone to
see.

That night, however, I fell asleep and dreamed of my son in that
landscape, which had once been mine, the landscape of my twentieth year, and I
came to understand a part of what he must have felt. If I’d been killed in
Chile, at the end of 1973 or the beginning of 1974, he wouldn’t have been born,
I thought, and the act of urinating from the edge of the swimming pool — as if
he were asleep or had suddenly been overtaken by a dream — was a physical way of
acknowledging that fact and its shadow: having been born and being in a world
that might have existed without him.

In the dream I understood that when Lautaro peed in the pool, he was
dreaming too, and I understood that although I would never be able to approach
his dream, I would always be there beside him. And when I woke up I remembered
that one night, when I was a boy, I got out of bed and urinated abundantly in my
sister’s closet. But I was a sleepwalker, and Lautaro, fortunately, is not.

During that trip, which took up almost all of November 1998, I
didn’t see Andrea. Well, I did, but without really seeing her.

I met Alexandra and Alexandra’s partner, Marcial, both of whom became
friends, and whatever I say about them will be conditioned by the friendship
that binds us, so perhaps it’s better that I don’t say too much.

But I didn’t see Andrea. If I think back, all I can remember is a
smile, like the smile of the Cheshire Cat, in the corridor of Alexandra and
Marcial’s apartment, a voice emerging from the shadows, a pair of dark and very
deep eyes that were laughing as Alexandra’s eyes had laughed when I made my
first speech, just after arriving in Chile, but with a significant difference:
Andrea, unlike Alexandra, was an invisible woman. I mean, she was invisible for
me; at some point I saw her without really seeing her; I heard her, but I
couldn’t tell where her voice was coming from.

One of the things that Lautaro did around that time was to invent a
method for approaching automatic doors without making them open. So in a way — I
don’t know if it was before or after our first trip to Chile (shortly before, I
think) — he too began to play at being invisible, and quite successfully
too.

The first time I saw him demonstrate this skill was in Blanes,
at a bakery in Blanes, before that trip to Chile. I can’t remember which writer
said that if God was omnipresent, automatic doors should always be open. And
since they’re not, God doesn’t exist. As well as being remarkable in itself, my
son’s method put paid to that argument. Lautaro didn’t approach from the sides.
Sometimes the sensors are placed in such a way that they don’t register a
sidelong approach and the doors remain closed. That’s the easy or tricky way
(though there’s really not much of a trick to it), but my son chose the hard
way; that is, he confronted the doors head on, refusing to stack the odds in his
favor, adopting a direct approach, which the sensors are bound to detect and
react to, opening the doors to let you in or out.

The originality of his technique lay in the movements that he made as
he came toward the automatic doors. He would start off slowly, as if measuring
the sensor’s range, tapping his feet intermittently, as if the sensor could pick
up vibrations in the ground, and moving his arms like the slowly turning sails
of a windmill. Then the door would open, allowing him to gauge the critical
distance. He would step back immediately and the door would close again, and
then the real approach would begin. Each movement was slowed down as far as
possible. His feet, for instance, didn’t leave the ground; he slid them
imperceptibly. His arms, held away from his torso, moved very slightly, like
insects or auxiliary craft, as if unattached, as if this approach were being
made not by a single body but by a shadow and two phantom shadows, two pilot
shadows, and even his face was transformed; it seemed to blur but also to be
concentrating on invisibility, on stasis and movement, on insubstantiality and
paradox.

Once, in a big department store in Barcelona, I tried, in vain, to
imitate him; the sensor kept detecting me, the doors opened every time. Lautaro,
however, could go right up and touch the glass, reinforced or not, with the tip
of his nose, unnoticed by the electronic eye, and this couldn’t be explained, as
I thought at first, by his height, because at eight my son was relatively tall,
or by his slimness, since he’s quite solidly built, but only by his aptitude,
determination and skill.

Something else that I remember vividly from our first trip to Chile,
and which enters unexpectedly into this story, is a bird. This bird was not
invisible, but when it appeared one afternoon, I’m sure that I was the only one
to see it.

We were staying in a serviced apartment in Providencia, on the eighth
or the ninth story, and one afternoon when I had nothing to do I noticed a bird
perched on one of the balconies of a neighboring building. For a while the bird
sat still and seemed to be surveying the city as I was from the balcony of my
apartment, except that the bird was looking at the city and I was looking at it.
I’m myopic, my distance vision is poor, but at some point I reached the
conclusion that this strange and solitary bird was a raptor, a falcon or
something like that (I’m an ornithological ignoramus, except when it comes to
parrots). Very soon after that, the falcon or whatever it was went plummeting
down, which dispelled any doubts I might have still had. But then came the
really surprising part: the bird began to fly toward my balcony. I was afraid
but I didn’t move. It came to rest on the flat roof of a building right next to
ours, and for a while we examined each other. Until I couldn’t bear it any
longer and went back inside.

The day this happened was also the day when Lautaro showed Pascual his
knack of approaching automatic doors without making them open, and Pascual gave
Lautaro an airplane. Lautaro loved the airplane; it had been one of Pascual’s
favorite toys, and maybe it was because of that gift that Lautaro showed him how
to make like the invisible man, or, in Pascual’s low-tech version, like an
Indian.

I saw the boys from a café terrace where I was sitting with Alexandra,
Carolina and Marcial. The others didn’t see. I can’t remember what we were
talking about; all I remember is that Pascual and Lautaro approached a clothing
store, unsuccessfully at first, because the door kept opening, and a woman with
dyed blonde hair, wearing gray trousers and a black jacket, came out and said
something to them, something I couldn’t hear, partly because I was listening to
what my wife and friends were saying, and partly because the store was a fair
way off, on the far side of that covered square, and I remember Lautaro and
Pascual running away at first, then I remember them standing, looking up,
listening to that slim bottle blonde, who was probably telling them off, but
then, when the woman disappeared back into the store, Lautaro resumed the
operation while Pascual observed him from a predetermined spot, and at some
point — I wasn’t watching them all the time — my son succeeded in touching the
glass of the closed door with his nose, and it was only then, two days before
our flight back to Europe, that I knew I’d arrived in Chile and that everything
would be all right. It was an apocalyptic thought.

In 1999, the following year, I went back to Chile at the invitation of
the Book Fair. Almost all the Chilean writers decided to attack me
en
patota
, as they say in Chile: that is, in a gang. I guess it was their
way of congratulating me for winning the Rómulo Gallegos Prize. I
counterattacked. A woman of a certain age, who all her life had relied on the
alms distributed to artists by a charitable state, called me a toady. Since I’ve
never been a cultural attaché or held a sinecure, I was surprised by this
accusation. I was also called a
patero
, which is not the same as a
patota
. A
patero
doesn’t necessarily belong to a
patota
, as you might be forgiven for supposing, although there are
always
pateros
in a
patota
. A
patero
is a sycophant,
a flatterer, a brownnose, an asslicker. The amazing thing about these
accusations is that they were made by left- as well as right-wing Chileans who
were busy licking ass nonstop to hang onto their scraps of fame, while
everything that I’d accomplished (not that it amounts to much) was down to me
and no one else. What was it that they didn’t like about me? Well, someone said
it was my teeth. Fair enough; I can’t argue with that.

B
EACH

I gave up heroin and went home and began the methadone
treatment administered at the outpatient clinic and I didn’t have much else to
do except get up each morning and watch TV and try to sleep at night, but I
couldn’t, something made me unable to close my eyes and rest, and that was my
routine until one day I couldn’t stand it anymore and I bought myself a pair of
black swim trunks at a store in the center of town and I went to the beach,
wearing the trunks and with a towel and a magazine, and I spread my towel not
too far from the sea and then I lay down and spent a while trying to decide
whether to go into the sea or not, I could think of lots of reasons to go in but
also some not to (the children playing at the water’s edge, for example), until
at last it was too late and I went home, and the next morning I bought some
sunscreen and I went to the beach again, and at around twelve I headed to the
clinic and got my dose of methadone and said hello to some familiar faces, no
friends, just familiar faces from the methadone line who were surprised to see
me in swim trunks, but I acted as if there was nothing strange about it, and
then I walked back to the beach and this time I went for a dip and tried to
swim, though I couldn’t, and that was enough for me, and the next day I went
back to the beach and put on sunscreen all over and then I fell asleep on the
sand, and when I woke up I felt very well-rested, and I hadn’t burned my back or
anything, and this went on for a week or maybe two, I can’t remember, the only
thing I’m sure of is that each day I got more tan and though I didn’t talk to
anyone each day I felt better, or different, which isn’t the same thing but in
my case it seemed like it, and one day an old couple turned up on the beach, I
remember it clearly, it looked like they’d been together for a long time, she
was fat, or round, and must have been about seventy, and he was thin, or more
than thin, a walking skeleton, I think that was why I noticed him, because
usually I didn’t take much notice of the people on the beach, but I did notice
them, and it was because the guy was so skinny, I saw him and got scared, fuck,
it’s death coming for me, I thought, but nothing was coming for me, it was just
two old people, the man maybe seventy-five and the woman about seventy, or the
other way around, and she seemed to be in good health, but he looked as if he
were going to breathe his last breath any time now or as if this were his last
summer, and at first, once I was over my initial fright, it was hard for me to
look away from the old man’s face, from his skull barely covered by a thin layer
of skin, but then I got used to watching the two of them surreptitiously, lying
on the sand, on my stomach, with my face hidden in my arms, or from the
boardwalk, sitting on a bench facing the beach, as I pretended to brush sand off
myself, and I remember that the old woman always came to the beach with an
umbrella, under which she quickly ducked, and she didn’t wear a swimsuit,
although sometimes I saw her in a swimsuit, but usually she was in a very loose
summer dress that made her look fatter than she was, and under that umbrella the
old woman sat reading, she had a very thick book, while the skeleton that was
her husband lay on the sand in nothing but a tiny swimsuit, almost a thong, and
drank in the sun with a voracity that brought me distant memories of junkies
frozen in blissful immobility, of junkies focused on what they were doing, on
the only thing they could do, and then my head ached and I left the beach, I had
something to eat on the Paseo Marítimo, a little dish of anchovies and a beer,
and then I smoked a cigarette and watched the beach through the window of the
bar, and then I went back and the old man and the old woman were still there,
she under her umbrella, he exposed to the sun’s rays, and then, suddenly, for no
reason, I felt like crying and I got in the water and swam and when I was a long
way from the shore I looked at the sun and it seemed strange to me that it was
there, that big thing so unlike us, and then I started to swim toward the beach
(twice I almost drowned) and when I got back I dropped down next to my towel and
sat there panting for quite a while, but without losing sight of the old couple,
and then I may have fallen asleep on the sand, and when I woke up the beach was
beginning to empty, but the old man and the old woman were still there, she with
her novel under the umbrella and he on his back in the sun with his eyes closed
and a strange expression on his skull-like face, as if he could feel each second
passing and he was savoring it, though the sun’s rays were weak, though the sun
had already dipped behind the buildings along the beach, behind the hills, but
that didn’t seem to bother him, and then I watched him and I watched the sun,
and sometimes my back stung a little, as if that afternoon I’d burned myself,
and I looked at them and then I got up, I slung my towel over my shoulders like
a cape and went to sit on one of the benches of the Paseo Marítimo, where I
pretended to brush nonexistent sand off my legs, and from up there I had a
different vision of the couple, and I said to myself that maybe he wasn’t about
to die, I said to myself that maybe time didn’t exist in the way I’d always
thought it existed, I reflected on time as the sun’s distance lengthened the
shadows of the buildings, and then I went home and took a shower and examined my
red back, a back that didn’t seem to belong to me but to someone else, someone I
wouldn’t get to know for years and then I turned on the TV and watched shows
that I didn’t understand at all, until I fell asleep in my chair, and the next
day it was back to the same old thing, the beach, the clinic, the beach again, a
routine that was sometimes interrupted by new people on the beach, a woman, for
example, who was always standing, who never lay down in the sand, who wore a
bikini bottom and a blue T-shirt, and who only went into the water up to the
knees, and who was reading a book, like the old woman, but this woman read it
standing up, and sometimes she knelt down, though in a very odd way, and picked
up a big bottle of Pepsi and drank, standing up, of course, and then put the
bottle back down on the towel, which I don’t know why she’d brought since she
never lay down on it or went swimming, and sometimes this woman scared me, she
seemed too strange, but most of the time I just felt sorry for her, and I saw
other strange things too, all kinds of things happen at the beach, maybe because
it’s the only place where we’re all half-naked, though nothing too important
ever happened, once as I was walking along the shore I thought I saw an
ex-junkie like me, sitting on a mound of sand with a baby on his lap, and
another time I saw some Russian girls, three Russian girls, who were probably
hookers and who were talking on cell phones and laughing, all three of them, but
what really interested me most was the old couple, partly because I had the
feeling that the old man might die at any moment, and when I thought this, or
when I realized I was thinking this, crazy ideas would come into my head, like
the thought that after the old man’s death there would be a tsunami and the town
would be destroyed by a giant wave, or that the earth would begin to shake and a
massive earthquake would swallow up the whole town in a wave of dust, and when I
thought about all this, I hid my head in my hands and began to weep, and while I
was weeping I dreamed (or imagined) that it was nighttime, say three in the
morning, and I’d left my house and gone to the beach, and on the beach I found
the old man lying on the sand, and in the sky, up near the stars, but closer to
Earth than the other stars, there shone a black sun, an enormous sun, silent and
black, and I went down to the beach and lay on the sand too, the only two people
on the beach were the old man and me, and when I opened my eyes again I realized
that the Russian hookers and the girl who was always standing and the ex-junkie
with the baby were watching me curiously, maybe wondering who that weird guy
was, the guy with the sunburned shoulders and back, and even the old woman was
gazing at me from under her umbrella, interrupting the reading of her
interminable book for a few seconds, maybe wondering who that young man was,
that man with silent tears running down his face, a man of thirty-five who had
nothing at all but who was recovering his will and his courage and who knew that
he would live a while longer.

Natasha Wimmer