Editor’s Note: Megan McDowell’s translation of “Cyclops” by Alejandro Zambra will be included as one of five additional stories in the soon-to-be-released new edition of My Documents from Penguin Books. We are happy to share the story as part of this issue’s feature on Zambra’s work. It appears exclusively in English as a preview of the forthcoming publication.
First, you have to live, Claudia said, and it was hard not to agree: before you could write, you had to live the stories, the adventures. Back then, I wasn’t interested in telling stories. She was, or actually she wasn’t, not yet: what she wanted was to live the stories that maybe years or decades later, in an uncertain and tranquil future, she would tell. Claudia was Cortazarian as could be, although her first experience with Cortázar had been, in reality, a disappointment: when she reached chapter 7 of Hopscotch, she recognized, in horror, the very text that her boyfriend would often recite to her as his own. As a result, she broke up with him and began a romance with Cortázar that perhaps continues to this day. My friend was not, is not, named Claudia: I’m protecting her identity, just in case, and also that of her ex‐boyfriend, who in those days was a teacher’s assistant and surely today teaches classes on Cortázar or Lezama Lima or intertextuality at some university in the United States.
At that point, in 1993 or 1994, Claudia was already, no doubt about it, the protagonist of a long, beautiful, and complex novel, worthy of Cortázar or Kerouac or anyone else who might dare to follow her fast, intense life. Other people’s lives—our lives—on the other hand, could fit easily onto one page (double‐spaced, at that). At eighteen years old, Claudia had already been there and back several times: from one city to another, one country to another, one continent to another, and also, above all, from pain to joy and joy to pain. She filled her notebooks with what I always supposed were stories or sketches for stories or maybe a diary. But the one time she read some of the pieces to me, I discovered, to my astonishment, that she wrote poems. She didn’t call them poems, but rather annotations. The only real difference between those annotations and the texts that I wrote back then was the level of imposture: we transcribed the same sentences, described the same scenes, but she promptly forgot them or at least claimed to, while I recopied them neatly and wasted hours trying out different titles and structures.
You should write stories, or a novel, I told Claudia that afternoon of cold wind and chilled beer. You’ve lived through a lot, I added, clumsily. No, she replied, categorically: you’ve lived more, you’ve lived much more than me, and then she started to tell my life story as if she were reading my palm, past, present, and future. She exaggerated, as all fiction writers (and all poets) do: random childhood anecdotes became fundamental, every event signified a decisive loss or advancement. I half identified myself in the protagonist, and could partially recognize the decisive secondary characters (she herself was, in the story, a secondary character who took on importance little by little). I wanted to match that novel by improvising Claudia’s life story, too: I talked about travel, about her difficult return to Chile, her parents’ separation, and I would have kept going, but suddenly Claudia told me to be quiet and went to the bathroom or said she was going to the bathroom, and she didn’t come back for ten or twenty minutes. She returned with slow steps, masking, just barely, a fear or shame I hadn’t seen in her before. I’m sorry, she said, I don’t know if I’d like for someone to write my life story. I’d like to tell it myself, or maybe not have it told at all. We lay in the grass and exchanged apologies as if we were competing in a good manners contest. But, in reality, we were speaking a private language that neither of us knew how to translate, or wanted to.
That was when she told me about chapter 7 of Hopscotch. Because I knew that particular TA and I knew he’d been Claudia’s boyfriend, the story struck me as even more comic; I pictured him as the cyclops Cortázar spoke of (“. . . and then we play cyclops, we look at each other closer each time and our eyes grow, they grow closer, they overlap . . .”). I suppressed my laughter until Claudia let out a guffaw and told me it wasn’t true, but we both knew it was. I don’t really like Cortázar, I blurted out suddenly, maybe just to change the subject. Why not? I don’t know, I just don’t really like him, I repeated, and we laughed again, this time for no reason, now free of the stifling seriousness.
It would be easy, now, to refute or confirm those clichés: if you have lived a lot you write novels, if you’ve only lived a little you write poems. But that wasn’t exactly our argument, which wasn’t an argument, or at least not the kind where one person wins and the other loses. We wanted, perhaps, to tie, to go on talking until they set the dogs on us and we had to run away, drunk, leaping over the sky‐blue fence. But we weren’t drunk yet, and the guard couldn’t care less whether we left or went right on talking all night long.
