Ends are losses,
cuts, marks on a territory;
they draw up a border, divide.
They conceal and split experience.
But at the same time,
in our most intimate conviction
everything continues.
Ricardo Piglia
Glance and my own silhouette against blueness, the afternoon dissipating in the sky. I was going to write about speed, but a headstrong flock of starlings escaping winter distracted me and became the text and then there was nothing else but their migration. From their roosts in search of the next season they form an arrow and above my head a storm brews, the name with which the wind whips up snow. Climate phenomena silence me. Glance at the sky and the afternoon closes in. Golden hues give in. The waves insist on pointing out the limit where the city simultaneously starts and finishes. The starlings’ plumage is purpled bronze and I, wrapped in a long coat, am still watching the way the clouds roil the sky. I’m alone here. The stars snuff out and now the bulbs hanging from the posts on the dock blink on. The water crashes persistently against the wooden stakes.
Ten years ago I went to Paris. It was also winter, I was also on a verge, I was also alone when I saw something that stayed with me, that is still in my memory. Two boys walking together. They walked away from the river and from me. I imagined that they had met each other that same afternoon, while one was taking research notes on the metro. He would be called Aurelien; he would be a science student and would carry a notebook in his hands. Glance at the ground. The other would be called Maxime. The water finds a way to continue its course between the rocks. Underground crashing. Glance into the abyss, human thoughts and face of an angel. The carriage was passing through a tunnel, the metal rails creating the sleepy impression of continuity. The shore is pronouncing, the waves are always the same. Aurelien closed the cover of his notebook because he didn’t want Maxime to see what was written inside. The insistence of Maxime’s gaze had begun to irritate him but the excess of past in those eyes calmed him. His sadness balanced out how beautiful he was. Sturdy, broad and determined. Seemingly inoffensive. His skin was covered in what had once been pimples. Maxime, without looking away from him, suggested they get off and gestured with his fingers as if drawing an arch mid-air. Then, out of the blue, Aurelien considered the possibility of cancelling the plans he had with his dad that evening. An outward abduction amidst the interlinking of words and sentences which were not being said. Train tracks rattling, train tracks rattling. They left the station behind and crossed the underground wind, together.
A long, deep sigh of strangeness stepping out onto the street. Ah, the water soaks the stones’ surface, but in the centre they stay dry, dark, a mystery. Outside it was drizzling and the pavement reflected the upside-down cathedral, the bridge seemed surrounded by a halo of death. It was an ice-cold night in December. The river was there too. Attracted by this moving mirror, Aurelien, who still had his notebook in his hands, leaned against the railing and new interval. Suspension systems are composed of a flexible element and another muffled one which neutralises the oscillations of what is suspended. Just like us, said Maxime pointing out the two figures reflected and distorted on the water’s surface. It’s freezing, said Aurelien and turning back towards the Seine he thought, What am I doing here? Thick purple clouds ruffled the horizon above the Paris rooftops. He flipped up the collar of his jacket. That December night he had arranged to meet his dad, but the river, the river was an iridescent continuum. Along it the gazes of other men had also slipped, those of men who had come out to walk in the night before them. The boy with the notebook saw the other drop tobacco on the floor and fumble with the cigarette paper. He felt like rolling it himself, but then he had the impression that between this boy’s palms a portal was opening. Glance at the strands playing with fingers that change from one figure to another: triangle and polyhedron. New suspended structure. Short, fair hair and eyes encircled with deep shadows.
It’s possible, everything is strange. The weather, the silence. He didn’t know how much time to let pass before it got uncomfortable. Aurelien blinked. He found this boy’s seriousness strange, stood in front of him, determined. He watched him exhale a cloud of smoke high into the air. With their fingers they passed the cigarette between them, their fingertips promising another, more intimate touch. A minute passed and they didn’t laugh. Glance at the deep well inside. Stones that find no end. It’s not that the boy with the notebook wanted the night to turn into a drama, but it seemed that abandoning impostures calmed him. He stretched. Another minute and ten passed. Maxime stayed still, committed to contemplating the river. Although they didn’t know what to say to one another, they were comfortable with the novelty of silence. The wind was ice-cold. Maxime coughed and asked what he was doing. Aurelien told him that he was researching Haicheng numbers. Hai-what? The only earthquake in history that has been predicted.
We have to go and see it, said Maxime. For the first time that night the boy with the notebook laughed with pure enthusiasm. To China?, he asked seriously. Journey to where the light is unable to touch the traces of the light before. It was snakes that predicted it, that knew that there would be a disaster. With the cigarette in his mouth he said alright, let’s go. Let’s go to China. And he told him that more than two thousand people had died in that earthquake. From where I’m now watching the sunset and setting sun (which are not the same thing), the dock seems to show some kind of resistance to the waves. My melancholy wasn’t letting me resist, either. I was still for a long time, without moving. On top of the water there is foam breaking and figures that disappear as soon as they have formed. Let’s go to Haicheng, said the boy with the notebook, the other raised his eyebrows and sucked in smoke. Snakes? They looked at opposite points in the sky.
I think about a story slowly fading away. A relay of replacements where each phrase replaces the following and at the end the only legible part is the last line. The storm drawing closer above the city where I live, pushed by an ancient force. Glance at the century when men sculpted the stones of that cathedral by the French bridge: they avoided the void. In my story the opposite would happen, the blanks taking shape in the calligraphy would gradually accumulate until the end. The rocks remain unchangeable. Glance at the bridge, face of a worn-out angel and fingers trembling. It’s too cold, let’s go, said the boy with the notebook. Filament of light between the clouds suddenly illuminating the sky. Constant advance of that plane ignoring the storm. The waves insist on melting over the stones, it’s getting late. I forecast a trip to China, said Maxime laughing. The other liked that his laugh was like that: terrible. That his skin seemed eroded, that he was apparently immune to the cold.
Docks are temporal extensions of the brink, bridges are pauses and the waves are the same. I was going to write about simultaneity. About double things like bridges or the shore. About what starts and finishes at the same time, but the trawling of the wind breaks the smoothness of the surface and so starts the displacement of water. I was going to write about likeness, but these two boys, so beautiful and so distinct. I saw them walking away from the Seine, ten years ago. I saw their backs, in their overcoats. I felt so alone when I lost them from view. The rest is pure fiction. Now I’m facing the breaking storm. Now I know that when a wave is created the particles of water don’t ever return to the same point where they started, but rather return to another, slightly distinct. Completely unknown.
A notebook exists with a black cover worn down with use, made up of fifty hand-bound pages, which records the trip that two French boys took to Valparaíso for the millennium. On the first pages are the two plane tickets (economy seats in aisle J with Aurelien and Maxime’s full names), a fold-out map of the port and a few brief annotations. Stuck in the inside flap is the luggage ticket: each of them only carried one rucksack with them.
Juan is a Chilean student who lives in New York and is now looking for something to read on the eighth floor of the university library. He casts his gaze along the shelves disregarding the names of Latin American authors and the titles of their work until suddenly, he feels as if a torch is moving within him and illuminating something that he doesn’t want to see. With curiosity he dwells on the only one of the books on the shelf that isn’t bound with a plastic cover like the rest. The difference seems like a sign. He draws nearer, running his finger down its black spine, and pulls it out. Which is how the French boys’ notebook falls into the hands of an aspiring writer, who leafs through and finds that its pages are written entirely by hand. There is no biographical ticket stuck inside its covers, nor any stamp to indicate that the book is part of the library’s collection.
Somebody could have left it there accidentally or intentionally. Juan passes his hand over the notes and quickly discovers that the notebook is written in French, a language that he cannot speak but knows how to read. He also notes that it is missing its final pages. So he closes it, puts it in his rucksack and steps out into the corridor, praying that there is no hidden sensor that will go off when he passes through the library security barriers.
Once out on the street he regains his breath, takes the notebook out of his rucksack and thinks that there are two ways to broach it: as an unfinished story or one that’s still being written. The distance between these two possibilities is, in his eyes, similar to the vertigo that separates a climate phenomenon from the forecast predicting it. A few hours ago, Juan read on AccuWeather that it would snow in New York, but now, as he leans out of the metro carriage window, crossing the bridge from Williamsburg towards Brooklyn, he discovers only an unalterable purple sky.
The fact that the weather wants nothing to do with meteorologists’ forebodings is, for Juan, both disappointing and reassuring. Leaning against the glass he asks himself what this sequence of facades stretching out along the other side of the river will look like, when the storm breaks and the neighbourhood he lives in falls silent with white.
On page eleven of the travel logbook Juan discovers that the French boys arrived in Valparaíso on the last Sunday of 1999. They also write that the first thing they saw when they got out at the bus terminal was a puddle of fresh blood on the pavement. One entry begins with Aurelien writing and the next Maxime. Although their handwriting is similar (at first glance it might seem that the log was written by just one hand), with the passing of the pages distinctions between each of their observations begin to appear. Maxime explained his encounter with the puddle of blood in a sentence without adjectives, while Aurelien noted that on seeing it he felt disgust, then fear and then he thought about the body that had lost it.
The passage in Aurelien’s handwriting ends by saying:
Death doesn’t scare me.
(On the page is the number eleven, written in blue pencil next to an ‘A’ on the footer)
Maxime thought that the log was an opportunity to record the change of millennium, but what also seemed to be the end of his relationship with Aurelien. It was him who had insisted on keeping a record of the end. For Aurelien, on the other hand, the notebook was a distraction, a game. During the days that they spent in Valparaíso they both wrote inside, alternately, notes and occasional drawings about their outings. With these clues Juan was able to form a first impression of them: what they looked at, what they preferred. But there are also (in the margins) a few notes about what they were not able to say to each other. These entries are sparks.
The log is written in a linear fashion until page fifty when the records stop abruptly. The rehearsal is interrupted. The game is over.
The notebook has no closure.
At the start of the new millennium, the French boys stopped taking notes.
Or they decided to hide the pages.
What is certain is that the log is currently unable to narrate its own ending. Or at least that’s what Juan thinks when he sees the first flakes dragged by the wind crack like stars on the kitchen window.
With the money from a government grant Juan rents a small flat on the sixth floor of an old building in Williamsburg, opposite Marcy station on the JMZ line. It’s a studio flat with two windows from where one can see the neon lights of the Ortiz undertaker’s and the beginning of the bridge leading to Manhattan. This flat is the home of his solitude. There he eats wontons and spring rolls that he buys for a few dollars in a place over in Havemeyer. There he smokes. There he reads his horoscope and the daily weather forecast. There he reads and rereads Z-list novels that he brought from Chile and rewatches nineties films on Netflix. There he leans out of the window to look at the stars and to draw imaginary lines between them. He writes infrequently. It’s the first time that Juan sees it’s snowing and doesn’t want it to stop.
ARIES
The windows are glittery with frost. Nature exists even if you don’t notice it. When Mercury fell in your house, you also fell into a state of consciousness about something in your own way of being, what is it that makes you feel uncomfortable deep down? This planetary retrograde favours reflections about movement and about hidden identities. Mercury meets the Sun in a powerful alliance. In the cracks in the sky, furious locomotives flee. Looking within is like turning on the light in a dark room, but it’s also like finding yourself with something unexpected in an ordinary place.
Translated by Beth Hickling-Moore
Excerpt from Las olas son las mismas (Los Libros de la Mujer Rota, 2021; Paripé Books, 2022)
