She said she’d come and pick him up on her motorbike in the evening. Tomás said that he’d rather take the metro or the bus, that he’s used to it, but she just answered that it wouldn’t bother her. And after holding hands for so long on the hill, Tomás thought it best to just keep quiet and accept, because she said ‘This is nice’ even though they had been soaking with rain and Tomás didn’t want to spoil the moment for her.
But now, inside the tent and wearing his ski goggles and gardening gloves, he’s not too sure it’s such a good idea. No one can look manly sitting behind a girl on a motorcycle, grabbing her with your legs spread out just under hers. He knows it’s macho bullshit and he knows that’s such a dickish thing to worry about and Eva would give him hell (and he’d have another frozen feathered chicken in his freezer) for thinking like this but in a way he likes to know that he’s still young and stupid enough to care about stuff like that, which he calls his ‘dignity’ but in fact is something much, much less…
He should probably put on some trousers or at least check the time but the sleeping bag’s comfortable and every time he moves, it makes a long ‘shhh…’ as if he were telling someone to be quiet. And then he stops moving and everything does go quiet, and he thinks it funny that even when Eva’s not with him, and even without a job, he still finds a way to order himself around. Again, such a dickish…
The trousers can wait. He gets up and phone-lights his way into his smoking window, where he now decided to keep his cigarettes loose and in a line. Spreading them out will make him notice how much he smokes and make him feel guilty, so that he can then find it easier to want to stop. He takes his gloves off, turns the radio on and opens the window, hoping it’s still raining as hard as it had been last night. It isn’t, but then again rain is never hard, there’s just either a lot or very little of it. It’s all the same really, and the streets are just as empty.
He smokes and leans out so that his goggles can catch a few raindrops in order to test them. They work, nothing touches his face and all the lights outside become circles of gold blurring into each other and it reminds him of last night, when the sky cleared away for a few minutes, and from the hill Santiago became dots of wet colour, dispersed and untidy like a teenager’s bedroom, before disappearing again behind the fog.
He looks behind him at his room, still without a bed and the clothes just piling up but he won’t start tidying now because Matilde might arrive at any moment. Still, when did he stop caring about himself like this? People always say that when you’re single you should enjoy having your own time again, to do all the things you lost touch with over the years: videogames, clubbing, getting hammered, seeing old friends you no longer care about so you can care about them again, learning to cook, achieving something at work, shaving for yourself. But he knows he stopped doing these things because he never really loved them anyway and Eva was the way out. Then again, he might not want to start any of these activities because he’s not really single and that is just yet another…
On the radio, the speaker is introducing Fármacos’s new album, and Tomás lights up a new cigarette. Yiyo’s on the radio. Yiyo’s on the fucking radio.
‘What are your influences?’ the radio woman asks him.
‘I don’t really believe in influences,’ Yiyo starts. ‘I wanted to add,’ he continues, ‘that I’m selling a great drum kit, if anyone’s…’
Tomás rolls his eyes and turns off the radio. He should have known this would happen. He should have kept playing music with Yiyo. Then maybe he too could have stopped believing in influences.
As he flicks his cigarette out the window someone knocks at the door. Tomás pulls out a pair of black jeans from the pile and when he puts them on he fills his right pocket with loose cigarettes. He opens the door and Matilde is standing there, wearing a black dress and an open motorcycle helmet.
‘Hi,’ she laughs.
‘Hi,’ he says.
‘I brought you a helmet but it looks like you have that covered.’
‘Oh,’ he says, taking his ski goggles off and throwing them behind him.
‘Your flat’s still a mess,’ she says looking in.
‘I’ve been packing, getting things ready,’ he says grabbing his wallet and stepping into the doorway. ‘Let’s go.’
Downstairs, Matilde gets on her bike and hands Tomás a helmet hanging from one of the handles. It’s pink with green lightning bolts on the sides. Her motorcycle’s an old blue Vespa and it only has one mirror, the left one, and a pretty small space for him to sit on.
‘How do I sit here? Both legs to one side?’ he asks, putting on his helmet.
‘No, just spread your legs around me and hold on.’
‘Really? Are you sure? I’ve seen some people—’
‘Yeah, come on, just get on.’
He gets up on it and grabs her from the belly. She starts the bike and it begins to vibrate and sound like machineguns do in movies and he holds on harder as he slides down to the sides.
‘Shouldn’t you have two mirrors?’ he asks her.
‘Nah, don’t worry, that was the car’s fault, not mine. You can tell me if anything comes up from the right. Hold on!’
They start their way into the Kennedy Avenue where Matilde speeds her way, despite all the rain, between cars and lorries and buses.
‘Where are we going?’ he shouts.
‘We’re going to say goodbye.’
‘What? Who to?’
‘It’s a surprise! Hold on and be quiet or you’ll make us crash,’ she says, before passing between two taxis.
They hadn’t talked as they held hands last night, not about the rain, not about their upcoming plans, not about other people, not even about their hands. In fact, she had broken off the handholding as easily as she had grabbed onto him, and maybe things have changed beyond recognition here in Santiago, since touching someone, holding onto them, had always meant to Tomás some kind of promise, a lead up to going home and… But come on, none of that was ever true. She stood up and wiped her face with a smile and started her way back down to the lifts. Tomás stayed sitting down to see if she would wait but she didn’t. And maybe it was the noise of the rain taking hold of everything around them, making the scenery an indistinct late night TV static screen, or maybe she just wanted to be alone, but from there all the way down back to the town, it was as if he hadn’t been there at all.
From the motorbike the city is one large dimmer lamp, and it might be the helmet or the speed but all the lights look the same, faint and stretched all the way to the sky, red and purple amber rising up like thin and tall concrete trees that end in complete darkness. It’s funny that all it takes is the small engine from a Vespa bike, one girl, and the whole city just dies out.
Matilde turns away from the avenue and into little streets, and she cuts through traffic jams, people on pavements, even an old lady walking her dog. This is why Tomás will never drive. Eva said it would make him feel independent, just like her, and he told her that it wasn’t environmentally friendly and that for someone who claimed to care so much about global warming, she should have known better. But he knows better too, that the real reason for never learning to drive is that he’d feel like he’s bothering everyone he overtakes, that he’d always drive behind other people, that he’d always be so fucking boring.
‘You should be careful,’ he shouts to her.
‘Don’t worry, I’ve done this hundreds of times. Hold on!’
On the pavement she drives past kiosks and large crowds of people having dinner on small tables with umbrellas, old people playing chess with oversized pieces on black and white floor tiles, and a fried sopaipilla salesman with his trolley, and a guy taking a piss right in front of him. How does she do it? How do others do it to care so little, to just speed past everything? His problem, he thinks, has always been that he cares too much. Jesus, did he just think that out… But then again, he has so much to lose. He holds on tight and Matilde’s belly goes hard.
She turns and the little street opens to a broader one with stone tiles and the bike rattles until they stop at a traffic light.
‘We’re nearly there,’ she says.
‘OK,’ he answers, and he notices that there’s a moth standing still on Matilde’s back. How annoying it must be to be attracted to all the lights, to sit there and then wake up somewhere different, all because of a light. But then again, at night and at a distance everyone can look like a tree branch and he imagines her full of butterflies, none of them ever coming back home.
A young guy and girl at the traffic lights start throwing each other fire-lit torches and juggling them under their legs and behind their backs. Then, they walk up to car windows for change and when they get to Tomás, he says he’s sorry but the guy just stands there looking at him as if he’d said nothing at all so Tomás pretends to look for money in his pocket until the light turns green.
Tomás closes his eyes and a few minutes of driving pass and then, suddenly, they come to a stop and all the noise comes back.
‘We’re here,’ she says.
He takes his helmet off but they are nowhere in particular, just another side street in Santiago centre, and Tomás wonders whether, maybe, just maybe, she is as boring as he is.
She chains her bike to a lamppost, takes his helmet and puts it inside a box at the back. Walking to the end of the street, Tomás starts to hear someone playing a cueca, people shouting and laughing and he hopes her surprise, the whole reason they crossed half of Santiago, isn’t just another party.
But, as always, he’s right about the wrong things. They stand outside a large black double-door and Matilde rings the bell and it buzzes open. Inside, the music’s real loud and the tapping noises upstairs sound like microwave popcorn. They walk up a staircase, the handle lined with miniature plastic Chilean flags, upside down crosses and signs that say ‘Happy 18th of September’ even though it’s still only August. It’s dark upstairs, but Matilde walks into a corridor just as fast and stops at the end by another door.
‘Sounds busy,’ she tells Tomás.
‘Yeah, what is it?’
‘It’s a fonda party. I know it’s early but…’
She opens the door and it’s full of people and noise. Most in the crowd are goths all in black but there are also a few hipsters with black-framed glasses, beards and Nazi-youth haircuts. In the middle of the room, couples are dancing cueca, waving handkerchiefs and all (some even have their ponchos on), and they stomp on the floor and the crowd around them clap to the rhythm directed by an old dude playing guitar and singing on a stool on the stage in the corner, and another guy slapping a wooden box in between his legs. There’s also an older man with an accordion hanging from his neck, but he’s waving a glass of wine and shouting the song instead of playing.
In the middle, there’s a table with bottles of wine and pisco and chicha and Coke and plates of fried empanadas. Matilde walks up to the table and Tomás follows her. In all the parties of his youth, Tomás always somehow ended up alone by the drinks table. This is why he can now make perfect piscolas and even mojitos. Or at least he could, until he discovered that he had to pretend, like he’s sure most men do, to enjoy dancing and talking to strangers just so he could get laid, because people like to see that everyone likes the same things, that they are willing to give up their desires for the greater desire to have them. And so when Eva said they should dance at a party, that all her friends and their boyfriends were dancing, he just said ‘after you.’
He serves himself a heavy piscola and then makes one for Matilde but with less pisco.
‘Here, a light one for you, since you’re driving and all,’ he says.
‘Thanks,’ she says smiling, taking the bottle of pisco and pouring herself more until the Coke becomes almost transparent.
Tomás looks around to see if anyone’s smoking but no one is.
‘Can I smoke here?’ he asks Matilde.
‘Hm?’ she looks at him and then behind him where Jesús is standing and drinking Cristal from the bottle. She puts her drink on the table. ‘Hey Jesús! This looks awesome,’ she says, hugging him.
‘Thanks,’ he says, adjusting his Tarot card-inspired rings on his right hand.
‘Hey man,’ Jesús says to Tomás. ‘Didn’t know you’d come.’ He laughs and grabs his shoulder, balancing himself against him.
‘Hi, hi,’ Tomás says. ‘Can I smoke in here?’
‘Dude, it’s a Satanist party,’ Jesús says to him, taking Tomás’s piscola and downing it.
‘Does that mean yes?’
Jesús laughs and Tomás lights a cigarette.
‘If you could put some money in the bucket over there, that’d be great. The astronomer in Vicuña says he’ll soon find out exactly when the world will end so we need to keep raising funds.’
‘Sure, of course,’ Matilde says with a smile. ‘Where’s Lucas?’
Jesús laughs and turns to face the dance floor.
‘Look at him, just look at him. It’s like he’s doing the robot or something. He hasn’t stopped since he arrived.’
Matilde laughs because Lucas is dancing all stiff with an old goth who’s a real good dancer, but he still swings his handkerchief and stomps and his shirt’s half open and the sweat on his chest shines blue and red with the disco lights. Matilde and Tomás put some change in the bucket.
‘Why organise a fonda so early?’ Tomás asks Jesús as he makes himself another piscola.
‘Well, we want it all done by Christmas, right? And we’ll start selling shit,’ he shows Tomás his rings, ‘in October. The earlier you party the more money you make, and people give more when there’s a reason to party,’ he says between sighs, and then he goes to the dance floor and starts dancing in front of another dude with a tight necklace full of spikes. Matilde laughs too.
Tomás looks at Lucas doing the robot cueca. He will definitely get laid because if a girl stays with you while you look like that, then it’s a done deal. The song ends and everyone claps and Lucas gets a kiss. Even without any music he just keeps on dancing.
‘Oh – my – God,’ Matilde says, laughing harder.
Tomás downs his drink and gets another. Then, as always, he has nothing to talk about so he downs four piscolas more and he leans on the drinks table and neither of them say a thing. But then the guitars start a sad slower tune and the guy sitting on the wooden box starts playing a pan flute and then they sing:
A country I’m leaving with lost,
A country I’m leaving with lost.
When I sleep it appears to me,
In my dreams like an enemy.
As if in my chest there struck
A sea that gives into silence,
And to my eyes there looms past,
The life I just lived.
• • •
IDEAS BOOK P. 81:
A sports game. Isn’t it odd that they’re called sports games when really you’re binging on Doritos and What makes them so popular? What makes people buy pretty much the same game every year? Fifa 11, 12, 13, they will go on forever. But the box says it all. The last two years have featured Messi on the box art. They’re popular because unlike platformers and adventure games, they’re a constant reference to the real world. When you buy a Fifa game, you buy into corruption and tax avoidance becoming Messi, into his ability to make otherworldly plays and improbable pirouettes. You buy your way into becoming players that outperform you in every way.
And how will our version be any different? How will it change the game? Well, we’ll take the realism one step further. We won’t be able to afford official patents (it will be, after all, a ‘free’ mobile game) and so we’ll simulate school sports instead. It will only feature one mode: Career Mode. You will be given a random character with a set of random attributes (it has to seem random but really you’ll be a fat nerd with acne issues no matter what you do) and no one will like you. The taller, better-looking kids will never pick you for their teams. You will be everyone’s last choice. They will roll their eyes at you when no one else remains by the schoolyard wall. Your jersey is too tight (they only had up to XL) and you look like a fucking burrito, a burrito limping this way and that until they put you as goalkeeper, but only because you take up so much fucking space… And still the other team scores a goal, one where the ball hits you on the shins before going in, and you can’t hide it, because you got those red fat-people slap marks which take bloody ages to melt away back to skin colour. We could even use a remodelled version of Bimbo the elephant for the protagonist. It might save Jaime some time.
And then, just when you think things will never improve, a new kid arrives, a French kid, and SHIT THERE IS A GOD, this kid is twice your size, twice the Bimbo. He is so fat his steps leave a low hum echoing in the Andes, so fat your nerdy science classmates find him to be an interesting source of negative energy, a walking stellar devourer, a black hole with its own gravitational pull that is so strong the moon looks a little larger tonight, and shit you feel cool, shit you ARE cool. This is you:
You: THE SHIT Him: dookie
And no one makes fun of you anymore. The controls that at first seemed so stiff are now smooth extensions of yourself. You score goals. Your friends, FRIENDS, tell you that they’re going out for drinks after the game and they invite you, and fuck it, you go and you get hammered and all because of that fat fucking bastard that you now find yourself hating as much, no, MORE than your FRIENDS do, and you want him dead… And on the next game you shoot a real hard fireball shot to his face and connard! you burn him up, leaving behind only the puddle of goo that was his life.
And you turn around and everyone’s cursing at you in French, laughing at your fat feet full of ash.
• • •
And then the guitars get loud and the pan flute blasts high notes and Tomás can’t breathe, he can’t drink, and all the people moving about shining in frozen poses with the strobes of light, all of it makes him want to cry. But he doesn’t, because just at that moment, when the lyrics get repeated louder As if in my chest there struck and the dancers join in, A sea that gives into silence Matilde taps him on the shoulder and faces him with two paper napkins hanging from her hand. The life I just lived.
‘Let’s go,’ she says, and she takes his hand and walks straight into the middle of the crowd. He’s dizzy and she gives him a napkin and starts dancing in front of him so he starts swinging the napkin and stomping to what he believes is the rhythm, and he closes his eyes and hears the crowd shouting the lyrics and he feels light, so light he could disappear. And suddenly it makes sense to him that The End of the World is this, it is here starting already, a cueca always ending and everyone singing and dancing and then disappearing and then…
Matilde turns with her napkin behind her and then comes closer to him, smiling and looking at him. They switch places as soon as the singer shouts Vuelta! Turn! and everyone else does the same. Then, Lucas and Jesús come dancing next to them and Lucas hugs Matilde and Tomás is left dancing with Jesús, who also looks at him with a smile.
All four of them stomp their way through several songs, and then Tomás goes back to the drinks table to light another cigarette and have another piscola. He’s sweating and he wishes he could be home, naked and inside the tent. He looks at Matilde dancing with Jesús and Lucas, still clapping and singing and Tomás thinks that she’s beautiful, her black dress spreading out at the knees when she turns as if she had wings, and this is beautiful, this is what it’s like to be young.
After another cueca ends and two piscolas later, Matilde appears next to him.
‘Everything OK?’ she asks.
‘Yeah, I’m totally going to quit smoking after this.’
‘He’s wasted,’ Jesús says behind Matilde, who is also finding it hard to stand without swaying backwards.
‘I’ll never smoke again!’ Tomás shouts. ‘I’ll never be boring.’
Matilde and Jesús laugh.
‘Thank you for the surprise. But I’m going to have to go home,’ Tomás tells Matilde.
‘No, no, your surprise comes now. Let’s go. I just wanted to party one last time with them, to say goodbye, you know?’
‘I know!’ he says.
‘Let’s go,’ she says waving at Jesús, and she takes Tomás by the arm and they walk out of the room. The stairs are hard and Matilde walks slow next to Tomás, still holding onto him.
‘Thank you,’ he says, and when they reach the bottom, he leans towards her and tries to kiss her but she moves him into a hug instead.
‘Sorry,’ he says, now feeling so sober he could… ‘It’s just, the dark stairs, drunk, you know?’
‘It’s OK, don’t worry, I know.’
They come out of the house and the streets are empty and quiet and Tomás’s ears are ringing and his mouth’s real dry and he’s cold and tries to walk straight along the lines in the pavement.
They get to the Vespa and Matilde takes his helmet out of the box at the back and he puts it on. When he breathes out, he can smell the booze and it makes him sick. He swallows hard.
‘Don’t worry, we’ll get there quickly. It’ll be worth it, I promise.’
‘OK,’ he says, concentrating on his swallowing.
He sits behind her and they tremble with the engine.
The darkened lights, the spots beaming past like shooting stars all silent and gold, the stone bridges arching over the Mapocho. He can hear it, he thinks, he can hear the river of shit, but it’s really just the fact that he knows it all too well, but he’s still surprised that at night it looks blue. At night it becomes a real river, that is, just like any other river.
They get to Plaza Italia and Matilde parks next to a lamppost facing the Feria Artesanal.
‘Come,’ she says, opening a thick padlock with a key.
They walk into the long outdoor corridors where all the shop counters are now covered by tin curtains that rattle in the wind. They get to Abdul’s shop. Matilde lifts up the curtain and walks in. Inside and in the dark everything looks different. The shelves that in the day are so full it’s impossible to find anything now look empty, invisible, and they’re all alike, just stands holding shadows pushing against one another. And the hanging crucifixes and rosaries and the tiny wind-bells sway slowly but he can still hear them. They sound like wood creaking about to break.
‘Here,’ she says by the red door in the corner, the one Abdul keeps locked.
‘I don’t think we’re meant to go in there.’
‘It’s fine,’ she says, showing him a lock of Abdul’s hair with the key attached to it.
She goes in and Tomás follows her.
‘Close the door.’
‘OK,’ he says and closes it. In the dark and with the damp heat inside the room, Tomás thinks for a moment that he’s home in his flat, and that the different door at the entrance, like the river, can change at night but inside everything’s always the same.
• • •
What is it about the beach that makes it so inviting? Is it the waves? There are studies out there suggesting that the frequency of the crashing waves, their tonal evolution from the low fall of water to the high sizzle of the foam is not unlike the sonic transformations we undergo the moment we’re born. And so the sea is as close as we’ll ever get to birth again, the beginning of it all, the first connections of your inner wiring, the creation of your very own universe. But, again, what about the beach, the part that the water refuses to touch? Why build houses, no, whole towns, why watch the tides in and out, maybe even the sunset, if what we really want is to drown under the crushing immensity of our first memories?
Tomás is looking at the beach house with Eva’s old telescope. It has a front porch with hanging flowerpots arranged under two neat windows. Daisies, there are a crap-ton of daisies in the pots and lining the walls of the house.
‘We could stay there for a while,’ he tells her.
‘If that’s where the sea is taking us, then sure, fine by me,’ she says.
The ship keeps getting nearer, breaking ice as it does so. The noise is unbearable. It’s the volume, the tension, it’s what an amplified tooth-removal surgery would sound like, and so Tomás feels it at the ends of his mouth.
They are too close to the island for the ship to keep going. They will have to row their way there with one of the safety boats that Serge keeps on board. Tomás has never had to row before. ‘It’s simple,’ Eva explains, straightening her back against the front of the little wooden boat. ‘You pull back, use your legs, stretch your legs and then use that weight to move your arms. It’s not really your arms doing it all, it’s the things you do before the oar even touches the water that count.’ Tomás does it, out of synch, and they start to turn instead of advancing. Eva just watches him. She believes in him, in his capacity to get them both wherever she wants to be, which is where he also…
He’s getting the hang of it now. He stirs past dead ice, past the bulks of rock that stick out like black frozen tumours, like gathered piles of ash in a smoker’s basement, secret and unnecessary, and he rows until his back aches, his arms ache, his butt and his legs ache, and what level of pain do you have to be in before you can say that you, the whole of you, your very soul or any of that shit that you believe is located at your very core, how much pain until you can announce to the world that you hurt, that your soul aches?
Tomás has only been rowing for twenty minutes or so and he’s ready to give up. But Eva motivates him, ‘Go,’ she says, ‘we’re so close,’ but Tomás has no way of knowing how close they really are. She told him to keep rowing and to keep facing the ship they left behind with Serge waving at them and making an O, a U, and an I with his arms. Then a C and… ‘We’re so close.’
Suddenly, they hit land. It’s a surprise to Tomás that when he turns around, the once tiny island is now just part of a much larger world, where ancient civilisations have come and gone, where strange animals he’s probably never seen before will have evolved according to their instinctive desire to make even the most secluded of places their homes. But even then he knows, just as much as she does, that right now they are completely alone.
‘Look at that house,’ she says. ‘That’s our house. We can get settled in and keep searching for the holes in the ice from here.’
‘That’s our house,’ he repeats.
‘It has daisies.’
‘And a front porch.’
‘You could write your stories here.’
‘And you could live yours.’
‘Right, but first I’ll make us something to eat.’
Tomás takes a Zelda beach towel from a stack of Zelda beach towels in the corner of their bedroom. He lays it flat on the sand and takes his IDEAS book out. He’ll write something about her, something better than Zelda, and as he begins to brainstorm ideas about saving people, saving Eva, he notices that the ice caps are breaking, splitting with a thick and dark crack that leads straight into the setting sun which this time, he just knows it, will set for good.
• • •
But then Matilde lights an old gas lamp. Surrounding the room is a shelf filled with cassette tapes, old cameras and reels of film. And in the centre, there’s a red couch and a film projector on a coffee table. The projector is facing a white bed sheet spread out over a clothes hanger line attached to both ends of the room. On the floor there are old toys, a train set, farm animals and plastic soldiers, and old rubber truck wheels, like those in the shop, piled up in the corners.
‘What is this?’ he asks.
‘My dad made this room when Mum died. He used to be a filmmaker. I mean, that’s what he said when he was young and she was still around but he never finished a film. He’s been trying to make one ever since. Pretty sad isn’t it? The way old people never move on, and become so ashamed of it they lock it all up.’
‘Yeah,’ he says, stepping carefully past the toys on the floor to sit on the couch.
‘Anyway, I found this for you,’ she says, showing him an old reel of film.
‘What is it?’
‘I told you, it’s a surprise.’
‘OK.’
‘But first,’ she says, walking to a stack of shelved old records. ‘Stravinsky or Max Richter?’
‘What?’ Tomás asks back, not knowing who the fuck Max Richter is.
‘Just answer the question.’
He supposes that like any question between men and women who do not know each other well, it is a trick question. He also supposes that it has to be about a contrast, for the answer to mean completely opposite things, or she wouldn’t ask it. In fact, he doesn’t know much about Stravinsky either, but he thinks he was most active in the 20s or near the 20s, or was it maybe… Matilde is asking him how old he is, how old he feels, if he is also active and part of his 20s, or if he relates to the classics as if they were his contemporaries, but none of it matters. Listen to Stravinsky’s Elegy on cello in Santiago and the streets will still cry out songs meant for Swiss Springs and somehow make sense and…
‘Max Richter,’ he says.
‘I fucking knew it,’ she says.
He will have to hear the city in another way now, in ways meant by Max, and whether the guy was barely a caveman hitting skins with bones or a trendy twenty-first century German electronica genius, it doesn’t change the fact that the streets will still sing HERE – NOW – ALONE – OLD whenever you are here, now, alone and old.
And she knew it. She fucking knew it. And what does that even mean? Should he have surprised her? He remembers that Eva once said that you can only surprise someone once you really know them. She didn’t say how long this took or how you decide you really know someone. He asked her. He said, ‘Surely when you first meet someone everything’s a surprise. Don’t you think this is why they call it honeymoon phase? Surely you fall in love because you like the surprises. They like books? Wow, you do too. They like coffee black and out of an expensive capsule machine? Wow, so do you. You like fucking from behind because it’s rough but do not mean any disrespect? Wow, you are soul mates!’ He had said all of this during breakfast and Eva just watched him as she spread Bonne Maman apricot jam on her halved baguette. She paused for a few seconds, sat up straight, and then she said, ‘You don’t know the difference between discovery and surprise, Tomás.’ She only ever used his name when he’d done something wrong, and it made him feel like a child. ‘You might never understand it,’ she continued, and he intervened. He said, ‘But what about all those forty-year-olds, those tired, sad-looking sleepwalkers who can only ever talk about getting up, getting their children up, going to work, what they had for lunch – always the same – and how they sleep – always badly? What about them? How are they supposed to be surprised?’ Eva looked at her halved toasted baguette and put it back on her small plate. That’s right, he took her appetite away. Then she said, ‘After all those years, what people miss are the surprises, not the discovery,’ and she stood up and left him to pay for their uneaten breakfast.
Matilde fixes the needle on the record player and Max Richter comes on in a dark ambient hum. She puts the film reel in an opening on the side of the projector and turns it on, and then switches the lights off and sits by him on the sofa, covering him and herself with an alpaca blanket.
It’s a silent film, and it starts with writing:
It is possible to only give a brief mention
of the hardships of that perilous
journey down the great ice-fall.
Onscreen: a black and white ship full of people and horses and dogs. The sailors are dancing while the ship remains stationed by the harbour and people outside are waving handkerchiefs like one massive cueca dance by the sea. Eva must have shown everyone her new ballet moves on her way there, she joined a ballet school and… Then there’s a sailor getting a haircut and he laughs as the hairdresser passes him a mirror because he just lost all of his hair.
Oh, I think he should stick to grooming the horses
before trying his hand with the Captain.
They were the happiest days for the company.
And then they left New Zealand and there was
silence and the loneliness of the vast ocean.
The image of the ship fades out and the title screen shows up: THE GREAT WHITE SILENCE. Tomás is worried. Not because of the silence or the vastness of the ocean. No, what he’s worrying about is the fact that there are only men on the ship, and they’re all good dancers and then there’s the loneliness of the ocean which, like the loneliness of the city, would break anyone given enough time in those circumstances and then love and fucking would become a logical… Eva on a ship full of men and full of loneliness, like anyone else, would find it easier to forget about him and then she had stopped smoking, got herself new… Of course, he’s worrying for nothing because he’s pretty sure she left on a plane, or even better (because it’s less crowded), a helicopter.
During the next ten days, they had
to fight for their lives. More than once they lost
their way, and found themselves in ice that
for miles was broken by pressure
into the most appalling confusion.
‘Imagine how scary it must have been to get completely lost out there on your own,’ Matilde says.
‘Yeah, but it’s kind of their fault for leaving.’ Max Richter is still looping the wave of piano notes. The melody never changes. Is there a melody? The volume, what they can and can’t hear, the direction of the notes and the origin of arpeggios, that’s always changing.
She laughs but he really means it. Why must people always try to prove how far they can go? Is it because they can then come back and tell you that you’ve always had everything and that you should appreciate even the things you hate because actually, they’re not so bad, not as bad as the EXTREME things they’ve done. Must we really have a death wish so we can then say we, and everyone else, should love life? That’s right, he’d been right all along. Eva left just so she could then come back and tell him, as she always did, that he complained for nothing, that gas bills don’t matter. But then she’ll say that she actually even missed them on her time away. And just like you can’t argue with the dead, you can’t argue with those who come back from nearly dying. All these sailors, all these male sailors, when they got home, they spent their time proving that everyone else’s lives were small and petty and stupid and they can prove it by preaching the unarguable sadness of the sea.
‘I bet they missed their homes so much. I’ll miss Lucas and Jesús and my dad so much. It’ll be hard,’ she says. ‘You know something, I’ll even miss you.’
‘So don’t go,’ he says, ‘stay here.’
‘There’s nothing here for me to do though. I can’t stay here my whole life.’
At times it was almost impossible to find a way
out of the awful turmoil in which they found
themselves. Then, we saw one solitary penguin
Roosting in the rays of the midnight sun.
‘You can’t possibly know that,’ he says, ‘that there’s nothing here for you.’
‘Don’t judge me. You’re leaving too. And at least I’m leaving because I worked my ass off to leave. I want stuff to write about. You’re just going for a girl.’
‘That’s not entirely true,’ he says, wondering what the hell he can say next but he doesn’t have to say anything because it’s dark and no one wants a long and full explanation in front of a movie screen. He looks at her with the lights of the film making shadows under her eyes and under her nose and mouth and she’s looking straight at the screen, so beautiful and dark she could be anyone and Tomás could kiss her. But then, the loud noise of waves breaking against the ship fills the secret room.
If the ship failed to break the ice,
she was put in a stand some distance away.
Then, with more way on her,
she would ram again, and usually split it.
The ship breaks the ice and sails past the cracks leaving behind it nothing but floating ice cubes in what used to look like part of a whole continent. Tomás doesn’t understand how such a miserable sight could make anyone happy.
Matilde’s holding her knees up to her chest and she’s so still.
‘Sorry,’ Tomás says. ‘I think I’m just nervous about leaving. But it looks like an amazing place. Thanks for showing me this. It makes me want to go even more and you’re right, there’s nothing for us to do here in Santiago.’
She looks at him and smiles but Tomás knows that despite her meaning well, she’s smiling because she made his life here seem pointless even before she’s even left.
We took risks, we knew we took them.
Things have come out against us and
therefore we have no cause for complaint
but bow to the will of providence.
We are weak, writing is difficult,
But for my own sake I do not regret
this journey…
And then the film cuts to a handwritten note left by some sailor who died trapped in a snowstorm saying the same thing: I DO NOT REGRET THIS JOURNEY…
‘Tragic, huh? It kind of bummed me out,’ Matilde says as the violins kick in mixed with Max Richter’s piano. The film comes to an end without even a credits screen. Then, the projector comes to a stop too and the end of its hum leaves the dark room feeling empty.
‘Thank you,’ he says.
‘I thought you’d appreciate it. How did it make you feel?’ she asks, lifting the needle from the record player.
How did it make him feel? The ship leaving, the on-board dancing, the splitting ice and the lonely ocean, how did it all make him feel? He has no fucking clue but he…
‘I feel like I’m there already,’ he says.
She takes his hand again and they hold hands in silence for a few minutes.
‘What are you going to do now?’
‘What are you going to do?’ she asks back, looking at him with the same shadows on her face as before.
‘I’m going to go home.’
‘Then I’ll go home with you.’