Navidad & Matanza (6 page)

I don't have a strong opinion about the problems you brought up in your email. To my taste everything is fine as we set it up, and I like the idea of people landing on the same square. Forced intertexuality. Goodbye and thank you.

Domingo
           

45

I
MUST ADMIT THAT
I abhor articles that begin this way: Life imitates art. I deplore equally both pretentious and self-referential journalism, and above all, journalism that lacks documentation. Art—I am not saying anything particularly original—doesn't imitate life, nor vice versa, for the same reason that people normally hang mirrors in the bathroom or behind the door and not on the bedroom wall facing the bed. This circumlocution serves to justify me: as I listened to Carmen Riza, Alicia Vivar's first grade teacher, an image of myself in this particular moment that I had eight years ago came into my mind. The certainty—though that sounds emphatic—that I'd spend a great deal of time in front of the computer writing an article about an international child-trafficking network.
Narrative anticipation
, a term I'd not heard since my days in university.

When she disappeared, Alicia Vivar was going into eighth grade at Santiago College, where she'd been enrolled since she was four years old. The teacher, Carmen Riza, taught her to read and write, to add and subtract, to know the differences between the kingdoms of the natural world, and also to cut paper with scissors. But mostly she remembered Alicia's exceptional work in violin class.
For more than three years, Alicia composed the variations that a group of fifteen young violinists, accompanied by the teacher on piano, performed during the school's award ceremonies each December. According to Carmen Riza, her Song of the Sand is still played in a civic performance at the end of the year. She didn't excel as a violinist—says Riza—in fact she was the third chair of the second row. But I appreciated her solemnity and that she never placed importance on her ability to invent melodies. She didn't even talk about it. On any given day she'd come in with her lined staves and hand them to me: This is the Song of the Sun, she'd say, this is the Song of the Bush, of the Mean Bear, the Song of Hands, the Song of Evening, those are the ones I remember. It must've been about twenty songs. The only one we didn't perform was the Song of the Corridor. She gave me the sheet and started to cry. She wouldn't tell me what was wrong. Before I sent her home she said quietly: it's just so hard to play.

Alicia Vivar left music behind. When she was ten years old she stopped attending violin class. Instead, according to her classmates, she became interested in rhythmic gymnastics and field hockey. On the topic, Carmen Riza claims to not understand the change, because “the girl had a special ear. It was a loss for the class.” But what could Alicia Vivar's musical activities have to do with her disappearance? That is something I can only illustrate with a personal anecdote.

Eight years ago, for no particular reason, I attended a performance by the Santiago College violin class. I went in and sat down without knowing why. It was a Friday afternoon in mid June; it was very cold and the days were passing quickly. I'd recently gotten my degree in journalism and I was looking for a job. Many
other things had, regrettably, become much less important. One of those things was fun, just fun, in the abstract, without adjectives or adverbs. What I'd call now, from a certain distance, pleasure. I enjoyed writing stories, novels, poetry, letters to women, Greek comedies, scripts for documentaries. I also enjoyed talking about my writing and the writing of others. To that end, five friends of similar interests and I had come up with a system that, in the beginning, seemed like an original and fascinating discovery. A novel-game. In short, it involved rolling dice, moving your token to a space with prefigured plotlines and formal constraints, writing a text according to those constraints and, that night, mailing this text to the other participants. Everyone had been assigned a day of the week, except Sunday, a day of rest. It was a game of complex rules and seduction. And the result was out of control. However, weeks passed and participants started deserting, for various reasons that were occulted by shame, that “crossroads of love and fear,” in the words of a little-known French philosopher we were reading at the time. Already three of my friends—those assigned Monday, Wednesday, and Friday—had stopped participating in the novel-game. A fourth had announced an upcoming trip to New York. We had to decide what was going to happen to the project in light of these desertions.

We decided to meet that Friday, at four in the afternoon, at the Youth and Children's Book Fair, which in those days was held at the Parque Bustamante, in Providencia.

I got there half an hour early. The place was overflowing with red and blue balloons. There were clowns, and people dressed as characters from fairytales, and techno music. I passed by the various editorial stands. At the Pehuen stand, for five hundred pesos,
I bought an anthology of contemporary Canadian poets, which interested me because of the inclusion of Margaret Atwood, one of my favorite novelists at that time. I looked at my watch: it was already four fifteen and no one else had arrived. Then over the loudspeaker they announced that in five minutes the Santiago College violin class would be performing in the amphitheater. I walked toward the venue, deciding to pass the time in one of the plastic chairs. To my left, two mothers were taking pictures; to my right, a little brown-haired girl whose feet didn't reach the floor was applauding soundlessly. On the stage there were three rows of young violinists. Behind them, sat more than fifteen prepubescent girls, whispering, their cheeks burning with embarrassment; they were part of the choir that would accompany the violinists on their last song.

The audience was almost entirely made up of children from different schools, carefree, eating cotton candy. There were some teachers, parents and other relatives who were filming and photographing the musicians. Except for me, lifting my head every five minutes to look around for one of my friends, the only person out of place was a very elegantly dressed man. He stood for the entire performance, arms crossed, wearing dark sunglasses, and a smile that appeared every time the third girl in the second row frowned or glanced at him. I don't remember much about her; she wasn't striking. She was just another girl among those strange, six-year-olds: hair pulled back in a ponytail, thin hands vibrating with the bow, cold face angled over the wood surface of the little violin. The teacher shouted instructions that only the children could hear. F, up down, bow to the audience, next, remember Caro, you begin, louder Alicia. The last song was announced: This is the Song of
Sand, thank you. One three-year-old girl, dressed ridiculously in green, took two steps forward, looked with disturbing seriousness at the teacher, placed the violin under her chin. She waited for two chords from Carmen Riza's electric piano before she began to move her bow. A clean sharp sound lead into a scale, across which the entire section of children's violins joined together in something that sounded to me like Schubert, but sadder, and sicker. Like a child who imagines the music of Schubert after he has learned about Schubert's biography. That's how I felt. I don't know if they were already there, but all of a sudden I noticed that the floor of the stage was covered with pink balloons. In the final crescendo, when the choirgirls stood up and sang, a string on the violin of the little girl alone in the front row broke. Applause erupted. In that moment, without taking the violin from her shoulder, the girl in the second row—who I know now was Alicia Vivar—was the only performer who didn't bow. All alone, she lifted her foot and kicked one of the balloons off the stage, right at the man dressed in the elegant suit, who uncrossed his arms to catch the balloon. I stood, looking at the stage. And in the confusion of congratulating mothers, crying children, and people running from one side to the other, I watched as the girl walked calmly down the steps, went up to the man, and took his hand. He bent down and kissed her cheek. The man was around thirty years old, my age now, I realize. Watching them, I knew where I'd be eight years later, what story I'd be writing right now at my computer. His name was Boris Real. I'm certain that Alicia never composed a single song for the violin. The scores Alicia gave to her teacher were written by Boris Real so that she could perform them. Gifts, you might say. That afternoon they left the Youth and Children's Book Fair
holding hands. I felt dirty for what I thought in that moment, and I feel dirty for thinking it now: twenty-four years separated the two of them.

49

W
E STOPPED THE CAR
at a service station along the highway. We got out to buy a big bottle of ginger ale and took the opportunity to call home. When mother answered we were silent until she started to cry. Then we cried too, and she listened. She always listens though she knows we'll say nothing. Sometimes she laughs, out of pleasure we imagine, because she feels less alone. Then we hang up. It's been twenty-nine years; we'd love to see her. But not father.

We paid the service station attendant to wash the windshield with that tool that collects everything but the last bit of foam. As his face appeared in a corner of the glass, he looked shamelessly inside, and we asked each other if we should make faces at him or direct our gaze toward the infinite. Later we rewrote my last poem, we added an attention grabber, “you remember,” which we didn't know if we'd keep. We always do that, add something or remove something when we're bored. Or we read a strange novel aloud, with a flashlight, as we drive through the night. And later we discuss over and over what it was all about.

This was the poem:

DOLLHOUSE

           
When I'm not looking he comes toward me, when I'm looking he stays over there, at a distance, watching me. If I could carry him alone into the silence without cracking my hands
beneath the bark, between the bars, into the hole, open like a grave. And later we move away to a place where I've never been, opening myself in front of him, a telescope kept in an old shoebox, we see only a gray room without paintings or corners. It's the dollhouse, you remember, out in the rain there live three bears who do not sleep because someone may be in one of their beds, who do not wake up because during the day they had to find honey, before it hardened, and they are tired.

52

I
N THE AREA OF
Navidad—Cardenal Caro Province in Region Six of the Liberator Bernardo O'Higgins—few locals have any desire to remember the summer of 1999. So, when questioned about the international event that took place in the neighboring town of Matanza, the residents look out to sea and murmur: Hmmm, yes, it was entertaining, there were so many gringos. I just did my thing, you know, I can't ignore my work, especially these days, everything's so hard. So I didn't see much. Like I've got the time to be worrying about some tourists. But yeah, I think a friend of mine had something to do with it.

The first time I traveled to the area, during the final months of 1999, I was disappointed not to find physical traces of the
Transensorial Beyond Seasons Celebration,
which I'd learned about from a television news program—the only one—investigating the disappearance of the Vivar siblings, before the coverage disappeared as quickly as they had. I thought that in Navidad and Matanza I'd find a trail left by the organization, propaganda on the walls,
who knows, maybe some building that was built specifically for the event that had later been donated to the community. I searched wasteland areas, abandoned fruit stands, and at the municipal dump without luck for the detritus that, according to what I read in the international press, this transnational organization often left behind: posters, wax replicas of Hollywood actors, chicken carcasses without heads or extremities, jars of oil and acrylic paint, digital TVs, hair, overalls, suntan lotion, empty bottles, seaweed, used rolls of film, T-shirts and visors, burnt oil, stickers, lights, fast food wrappers, blankets, containers, colored lights, mirrors, plugs for American voltage, rubber gloves, tablecloths, Taiwanese cuddly toys, costumes of seventeenth-century French aristocracy, magazines, preservatives, exercise machines, microphones and headphones, sheets, holographic recordings, bicycles, beef jerky, unicycles and tricycles, dry leaves, towels, Styrofoam, bins of Panamanian fruit and vegetables, computers with biological processors, large white shirts, novels from every age in eight different languages, syringes, rackets, clay, encyclopedias, balls for various sports, fossils, hovercrafts, soaps, shampoos, DVDs and CD-ROMs, fetuses, straps and belts, couches, tons of tofu, folding parchment screens, car parts, bags of chalk, dozens of Catholic and Protestant Bibles, copies of Enuma Elish, Korans, Angas, Vedic books, Popol Vuhs, Mormon books, Tanajas, books of the origin of the Sikhs, Mishnas, books of Chilam Balam, Tao Te Chings, Talmuds, Bhagavad Gitas, Dhammapadas, Confucionist books, Kijikis, Nihongis, Tibetan and Egyptian Books of the Dead, Engishikis, Upanishads, books of Urantia, triptychs, eddas; kilos and kilos of sand.

I asked more than thirty locals what they remembered about the previous summer, and invariably they told me about their families
or about the lack of opportunities in the province, and sent me to some neighbor who may have been involved in the event. Finally, at a service station, strategically located between the towns, the attendant—a man of forty-some years, who preferred not to make his identity public—told me that, although he wasn't directly involved with the organization (as his friend had said), he'd gone to “the mobile party” four nights in a row, where he worked as an assistant to a Chilean-African musician who played “a peculiar instrument.” Or at least he thought the instrument was peculiar—he told me, later, sitting in the service station's cafeteria—because the sound it made was so sharp that it made something move in the pit of his stomach, like being tickled. Except for the last time, because he was too furious, he said with a smile, anticipating my series of questions. The instrument in question was the theremin of the Congolese Patrice Dounn, the other identity of the man I prefer to call Boris Real.