It was the time of apprehensive mothers, of taciturn fathers, and of burly older brothers, but it was also the time of blankets, of quilts, and of ponchos, and so no one thought it strange that Carla and Gonzalo would spend two or three hours every evening curled up on the sofa beneath a magnificent red poncho made of Chiloé wool that, in the freezing winter of 1991, seemed like a basic necessity.
In spite of all the obstacles, the poncho strategy allowed Carla and Gonzalo to do practically everything, except for the famous, the sacred, the much feared and longed-for penetration. Carla’s mother’s strategy, meanwhile, was to feign the absence of a strategy. At most she would occasionally ask them, trying to chip away at their confidence with almost imperceptible irony, if perhaps they weren’t a little warmish, and they would reply in unison, their voices faltering like a couple of terrible acting students, that no, in fact, it really is freezing cold in here.
Then Carla’s mother would disappear down the hall and turn her attention back to the TV drama she was watching in her room, on mute—the TV in the living room was loud enough, because Carla and Gonzalo were watching the same show, which they weren’t all that interested in, but the unspoken rules of the game stipulated that they had to pay attention, if only so they could respond naturally to Carla’s mother’s comments when she reappeared in the living room, at uncertain and not necessarily frequent intervals, to arrange flowers in a vase or fold napkins or carry out some other task of questionable urgency. Then she would glance sidelong toward the sofa, not so much to look at them as to make them feel that she could see them, and she’d slip in phrases like, Well, she was pretty much asking for it, or That guy’s a few cards short of a deck, and then Carla and Gonzalo, always in unison and scared stiff, practically naked under the poncho, would answer, Yeah, or Totally, or She’s so in love.
Carla’s intimidating older brother—who did not play rugby, but whose size and demeanor could easily have gotten him drafted to the national team—usually came home after midnight, and the rare times he arrived earlier he locked himself in his room to play Double Dragon, though there was still the risk he would come downstairs for a salami sandwich or a glass of Coke. Luckily, when that happened Carla and Gonzalo could count on the miraculous help of the staircase, in particular the second—or penultimate—step: from the moment they heard its strident creak until the instant the older brother landed in the living room exactly six seconds went by, which was long enough for them to get situated under the poncho so they looked like two innocent strangers weathering the cold together out of simple solidarity.
The futuristic theme song of the evening news marked, every night, the end of the session: the couple would go to the front yard and play out a passionate goodbye that sometimes coincided with the arrival of Carla’s father, who would flash the Toyota’s headlights and rev its engine, either as a greeting or as a threat.
“This little romance is lasting a bit too long, if you ask me,” he would add with an arch of his eyebrow, if he was in a good mood.
—
The bus ride from La Reina to Plaza de Maipú took over an hour, which Gonzalo spent reading, though it was hard in the dim light of the streetlamps, and sometimes he had to content himself with catching a glimpse of a poem when the bus stopped on an illuminated corner. He was scolded every night for coming home late, and every night Gonzalo swore, without the slightest intention of keeping his word, that from then on he would come home earlier. He went to sleep thinking about Carla, and when he couldn’t sleep, as often happened, he thought about her and he masturbated.
To masturbate while thinking about one’s beloved is, as we all know, the most ardent proof of fidelity, especially if one jacks off to fantasies that are, as a movie trailer might put it, based on a true story: far from getting lost in unlikely scenarios, Gonzalo pictured them on the same sofa as always, covered by the same chilote poncho as always, and the only difference, the only fictional element, was that they were alone, and then he entered her and she embraced him and delicately closed her eyes.
The surveillance system seemed inviolable, but Carla and Gonzalo trusted that their opportunity would soon present itself. It happened toward the end of spring, right when the stupid warm weather was threatening to ruin everything. A screeching of brakes and a chorus of howls interrupted the eight o’clock calm—a Mormon missionary had been hit on the corner, and Carla’s mom hightailed it outside to gossip, and Carla and Gonzalo understood that the moment they’d yearned for had arrived. Counting the thirty seconds the penetration lasted and the three and a half minutes they spent cleaning up the drops of blood and assimilating the insipid experience, the entire process took a mere four minutes, after which Carla and Gonzalo went, without further ado, to join the crowd of curious onlookers gathered around the blond youth who lay on the sidewalk beside his mangled bike.
If the blond boy had died and Carla had gotten pregnant, we would be talking about a slight tipping of the world’s scales in favor of brown people, because any child of Carla’s, who was pretty dark, with even darker Gonzalo, could hardly have turned out blond, but none of that happened: the incident left the Mormon with a limp and Carla withdrawn, so sore and sad that for two weeks, making ridiculous excuses, she refused to see Gonzalo. And when she finally did, it was only to break up with him “face-to-face.”
In Gonzalo’s defense it must be said that information was scarce in those wretched years, with no help from parents or advice from teachers or guidance counselors, and without any assistance from governmental campaigns or anything like that, because the country was too worried about keeping the recently recovered and still shaky democracy afloat to think about such sophisticated First World issues as an integrated policy on sex education. Suddenly freed from the dictatorship of their childhoods, Chilean teenagers were living through their own parallel transitions into adulthood, smoking weed and listening to Silvio Rodríguez or Los Tres or Nirvana while they deciphered or tried to decipher all kinds of fears, frustrations, traumas, and problems, almost always through the dangerous method of trial and error.
Back then, of course, you didn’t have billions of online videos promoting a marathon idea of sex; while Gonzalo had seen publications like Bravo or Quirquincho, and had once or twice “read,” let’s say, a Playboy or a Penthouse, he had never seen a porno, and as such had no audiovisual material that would help him understand that, any way you looked at it, his performance had been disastrous. His whole idea of what should happen in bed was based on his ponchoistic practice sessions and on the boastful, vague, and fantastical stories he heard from some of his classmates.
—
Surprised and devastated, Gonzalo did everything he could to get back together with Carla, although everything he could do amounted only to calling her every half hour and wasting his time on the fruitless lobbying of a couple of duplicitous intermediaries who had no intention of helping him, because, sure, they thought he was smart, kinda cute in his own way, and funny, but compared to Carla’s countless other suitors they found him lacking, a weirdo outsider from the periphery that was Maipú.
Gonzalo had no other option than to go all in on poetry: he locked himself in his room and in a mere five days produced forty-two sonnets, moved by the Nerudian hope of managing to write something so extraordinarily persuasive that Carla could not go on rejecting him. At times he forgot his sadness; at least for a few minutes, the intellectual exercise of fixing a crooked verse or finding a rhyme took precedence. But then the joy of an image he found masterly would be crushed under the weight of his bitter present.
Unfortunately, none of those forty-two compositions held genuine poetry. One example is this completely unmemorable sonnet that must nevertheless be among the five best—or the five least bad—of the series:
The telephone is red as is the sun
I couldn’t sleep, was waiting for your call
I look and look for you but find no one
I’m like a zombie walking through this mall
I’m like a pisco sour sans alcohol
I’m like a lost and twisted cigarette
Ne’er to be smoked, this treacherous Pall Mall
Abandoned in the street so sad and wet
I’m like a wilted flower in a book
I’m like a threaded screw without a drill
A dead dog sprawled beside the road—don’t look
But I’m just like that sorry-ass roadkill
Everything hurts, from feet to face to eye
And nothing’s certain but that I will die
The only presumable virtue of the poem was its forced adherence to the classical form, which for a sixteen-year-old could be considered praiseworthy. The final stanza was, by far, the worst part of the sonnet, but also the most authentic, because, in his lukewarm and oblique way, Gonzalo did feel like he wanted to die. There’s nothing funny about mocking his feelings; let us instead mock the poem, its obvious and mediocre rhymes, its schmaltz, its involuntary humor. But let us not underestimate Gonzalo’s pain, which was real.
While Gonzalo was battling tears and iambic pentameter, Carla was listening over and over to “Losing My Religion” by R.E.M., a contemporary hit that she claimed perfectly summed up her state of mind, though she only understood a few of the English words (life, you, me, much, this), plus the title, which she connected with the idea of sin, as if the song were really called “Losing My Virginity.” Though she did go to Catholic school, her torment was not religious or metaphysical, but rather absolutely physical, because, all symbolism and shame aside, penetration had hurt like hell: the very same penis she used to furtively, happily put in her mouth, the same one she stroked daily and pretty creatively, now seemed to her like a brutal, deceitful power drill.
“No one is ever going to put another one of those in me, never. Not Gonza or anyone else,” she told her girlfriends, who visited her every day, contrary to what Carla herself wanted; she proclaimed to the four winds that she wanted to be left alone, but they still kept showing up.
Carla’s girlfriends could be divided into two camps: the angelical, boring, and larger group of those who were still virgins, and the scant motley crew of those who were not. The virginal group was divided, in turn, into the smaller subset of those who wanted to wait until marriage, and the bigger, more fickle subset of the not yets, to which Carla had belonged until recently. Among the non-virgins, two in particular really stood out, and Carla referred to them, with irony and admiration, as “the leftists,” because they were, in nearly every sense, more radical or maybe just less repressed than anyone else Carla knew. (One of them insisted Carla change her favorite song, since she felt that the Divinyls song “I Touch Myself,” also a hit in those days, was more appropriate to the current situation than “Losing My Religion.” “You don’t choose your favorite song,” replied Carla, right as rain.)
—
After considering the abundant advice from both sides and giving special preference to the opinions of the leftists, Carla decided that actually, the most reasonable thing was to erase her first sexual experience as soon as possible, for which purpose she logically, urgently, needed a second one. On a Friday after school she called Gonzalo and asked him to meet her downtown. He was beside himself with joy: he ran out to the bus stop, which was very unusual for him, because he thought people who ran in the street looked ridiculous, especially when they were wearing long pants. The bus he caught had no empty seats, but even standing he still managed to reread a good number of the forty-two poems he’d brought with him in his backpack.
Carla greeted him with an eloquent smack on the lips and told him, straight up, that she wanted to get back together and she wanted to go to a motel, which was something she herself had refused to do for almost an entire year, alleging indecency, lack of money, illegality, bacteriophobia, or all of the above. But now she assured him, in a somewhat exaggeratedly sensual tone, that she did want to, that she was dying to go.
“I heard there’s one near the craft market and I got some condoms and I have the money,” said Carla in a single rapid-fire phrase. “Let’s go!”
The place was a sordid hole-in-the-wall that smelled of incense and reheated grease, because you could order fried cheese or meat empanadas delivered to the room, as well as beers, pichuncho cocktails, or pisco and Cokes, all options that they refused. A woman with dyed-red hair and blue-painted lips took their money and of course did not ask for ID. As soon as they closed the door to the tiny room, Carla and Gonzalo took off their clothes and looked at each other in astonishment, as if they had just discovered nudity, which in a way they had. For some five minutes they limited themselves to kissing, licking, and biting, and then Carla herself put the condom on Gonzalo—she’d practiced on a corncob that very morning—and he slowly slid inside her with the restraint and emotion appropriate in a person who wants to treasure the moment, and everything seemed to be going swimmingly, but in the end there wasn’t much improvement, because the pain persisted (in fact, it hurt Carla even worse than the first time), and the penetration lasted about as long as it would take a hundred-meter sprinter to run the first fifty meters.
Gonzalo half opened the blinds to look at the people heading home from work with a slowness that seemed fantastical from afar. Then he knelt down beside the bed and looked very closely at Carla’s feet. He had never before noticed that feet had lines, that there were lines on the soles of feet: for a full minute, as if he were trying to solve a maze, he followed those chaotic lines that branched into invisibility and thought about writing a long poem about someone who walks barefoot along an endless path until the lines on their feet are completely erased. Then he lay down beside Carla and asked if he could read her his sonnets.
“Sure,” replied Carla, distracted.
“But there are forty-two of them.”
“Read me your favorite.”
“It’s hard to choose. I’ll read you twenty.”
“Three,” Carla negotiated.
“Five.”
“Okay.”
—
Gonzalo started to read his sonnets in a solemn singsong, and although Carla wanted to think they were good, the truth is they said nothing to her. While she listened, she thought about Gonzalo’s neck, his chest, which was smooth as a sheet of ice but so warm, about his graceful, nearly visible skeleton, his eyes that were sometimes brown, other times green, and always a little strange. She thought he was beautiful and it would have been great if she also liked the poems he wrote, though in any case she listened respectfully, with a smile that was meant to appear serene and relaxed but actually just looked melancholy.
Right as Gonzalo was starting in on the fifth sonnet, the sound of moaning began to filter in from the room next door, through the thin partition wall. The unsought intimacy with those strangers produced a disparate effect in them: Gonzalo felt something like gratitude for the privilege of gaining access to a true porno, live and in person—real, crude sex, with a pounding bed and semi-synchronized grunts, which surely corresponded to some truly memorable thrusts. For Carla, on the other hand, such proximity was disturbing at first, and she even thought about banging on the wall to ask for a little discretion. But then she started to focus on those moans and speculate about whether the stranger so enjoying herself was on top or on the bottom or in one of those weird positions her classmates drew hastily on the blackboard during breaks. The idea of grunting like that, like an invincible champion at the French Open, seemed magnificent, and yet, for the moment, impossible, because the moans she was hearing were from pleasure, and though at times pain and pleasure can mix together, that was not Carla’s case—what she felt was purely and exclusively pain.
With the sudden desire to cry out louder than her neighbor, Carla sat on top of Gonzalo and started to lick his neck. He grabbed her ass in both hands and felt his full erection return instantly, and it seemed inevitable that they would do it for the second time that day, the third time in their lives, and it would erase or at least take the edge off the memories of the previous times. Gonzalo tried to put another condom on himself, and although he proceeded with an almost dignified fumbling, those additional seconds were enough to make Carla desist, and the skirmish ended instead in routine and efficient mutual masturbation.
Gonzalo lay his head between Carla’s breasts and would have fallen asleep if it weren’t for the racket in the room next door, where the neighbors were still going at it like rabbits or crazy people or maybe crazy rabbits. He picked up the remote control, thinking it was almost time for their show. They’d both ended up getting into it, which was only natural, since the show wasn’t bad and was nearing its finale. But Carla, who had been staring at the ceiling for about ten minutes now, took the remote from him and not only turned off the TV but also removed the batteries and threw them against the wall. A silence fell that had little of silence about it, because the neighbors were still, as a literary theory professor would put it, in medias res.
“It can’t be,” Gonzalo said then, with sincere incredulity. “It’s too much.”
“Too much what?”
“You don’t hear it? They’re going too long. I don’t think that’s normal.”
“As I understand it, that is normal,” said Carla, trying to tone down her emphasis. “As I understand it, that’s what normal is.”
“Seems like you know a lot about sex,” stammered Gonzalo, trying to hide his shame. She didn’t answer.
—
When the panting in the room next door finally subsided, Carla and Gonzalo still had over an hour of motel time left, but they didn’t feel like doing anything. Gonzalo looked at Carla’s lovely back and caressed some faded tan lines left by the alternation of different bathing suits, which descended from her shoulders and formed a kind of inverse tattoo.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“It doesn’t matter,” said Carla.
“I’m sorry,” Gonzalo repeated.
They retrieved the batteries for the remote and caught the last few minutes of their show. Then they walked toward Alameda talking about the episode they’d just watched. And that was one of the sad scenes of the afternoon, of the week, maybe of their entire relationship: Carla and Gonzalo holding hands, headed toward Alameda, talking about the TV show. They were like two strangers searching desperately for a subject in common; it seemed like they were talking about something and were together, but they knew that really they were talking about nothing and were alone.
Gonzalo faked a stomachache so he could visit Dr. Valdemar Puppo, who was not a psychiatrist or psychologist but rather the very same pediatrician he had always gone to. Though he tended toward euphemisms and prevarications, the patient tried to be clear: the problem was with penetration. During foreplay he couldcontain himself, but as soon as he entered Carla—he didn’t specify that this had only happened twice—it was impossible. The doctor let out a slobbery and humiliatingly long cackle full of masculine complicity.
“It happens to everyone, bud, though I have to admit it’s never happened to me,” said the man, caressing his belly with both hands as if he’d just devoured a wild boar. “Penetration is overrated. You’re just nervous, champ.”
Always in that forced, odiously youthful tone, Dr. Valdemar Puppo recommended that Gonzalo relax, and he told him all about the distraction technique, which he summarized in a vague and vulgar way:
“When your pecker’s good and hard, think about your grandma,” he said.
Gonzalo understood what he meant, but he also couldn’t help but literally think about his grandmother, and thus about sadness, because the old lady had only recently died.
—
The advice was good, when it came down to it. The lovers had sex again in the same motel and at a couple of parties and even in Gonzalo’s attic, flanked by shining spiderwebs and possibly a few mice, and the distraction technique, which Gonzalo referred to as “the Puppo technique,” tended to work: of course, he didn’t actually think about his grandmother, but about women he found ugly, although his idea of ugliness included categories that were, so to speak, moral. The repulsion inspired in him, for example, by ex–Minister of Education Mónica Madariaga, or the singer Patricia Maldonado, or Lucía Hiriart de Pinochet herself, was much more ideological than physical, given that—with the possible exception of Mrs. Maldonado—they were not objectively such ugly women.
In any case, atrocious as these ladies seemed to him, at some point their skin, presumably rough, coarse, and slack, would recede before Carla’s smooth back or perfect thighs—reality overcame imagination, and Gonzalo, much sooner than later, would get off. The key, he realized then, was to concentrate on more abstract or neutral or pleasant matters that would bring a more lasting distraction, like paintings by Kandinsky or Rothko or Matta, or certain beginner-level chess exercises, or the conquest of outer space, or some very serious and dramatic poems by Miguel Arteche that he didn’t like at all but had had to analyze in school (“Golf,” “The Idiot Child”), and he even achieved notable results thanks to the cruel method of imagining a man with Parkinson’s trying to eat an artichoke.
—
Although the sex was growing more frequent and slightly less painful, Carla was no longer sure about staying with Gonzalo. She tried to convince herself that she was more in love than ever, but the truth is she had left behind the fantasies of their early days: the idea of spending years or her whole life with Gonzalo now seemed to her increasingly daunting.
That summer, one of the leftists invited Carla to Maitencillo, and although she could have asked to bring Gonzalo along, Carla decided she would rather spend the time thinking about their relationship. And that was pretty much what she did during the nine days she spent in Maitencillo: she ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner thinking about the relationship, she stretched out on the sand to take long naps thinking about the relationship, she played volleyball or paddleball or caballito de bronce thinking about the relationship, she drank Fanta mixed with beer and danced frenetically to hits by Technotronic while thinking about the relationship, and even the night when she let a muscular Argentine kiss her and grope her ass and breasts, she was thinking about the relationship, and though it may sound a little hard to believe, the truth is that while she was sucking the Argentine’s dick, Carla was also, in a way, thinking about the relationship.
—
The story of the fling with the Argentine was told, commented on, and analyzed by many semi-present witnesses, and it was going to reach Gonzalo’s ears any minute. Overcome with remorse, Carla decided to confess her infidelity, including the blow job, which acted as a mitigating factor because it served as proof that she had refused p-in-v sex. Although—cards on the table—she hadn’t refused out of faithfulness, but because the idea of being penetrated by a member that was a couple centimeters shorter than Gonzalo’s, but considerably wider in girth, just seemed horrible.
For the next six months, their relationship was fueled solely by guilt. There were days when Carla was afraid Gonzalo would take his revenge, but other times she wished he would, because if the score were even at least she could recover her dignity. Which, of course, she had never really lost, even if Gonzalo did occasionally torment her with hostile or self-pitying comments.
Going against his faithful nature, Gonzalo decided to respond to insinuations from Bernardita Rojas, a girl from his neighborhood with whom he felt a nebulous bond, given that his last name was also Rojas. They weren’t related, of course, it was a very common last name, but she greeted him as if they were; really, it was her way of flirting. (“How’s it going, cuz?” she’d say, and her nostrils would flare like a bad actress trying to express emotion.) He thought Bernardita Rojas was unique, because she didn’t wear her bangs frozen with gel into the shape of a threatening wave, as nearly all of her peers did, Carla included; it was as if all teenage Chilean girls had gotten together and agreed to pay homage to Hokusai’s Great Wave. Another thing that attracted him to Bernardita Rojas was that she always carried a book by Edgar Allan Poe, which she reread with the kind of devotion other people showed as they deciphered A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, Open Veins of Latin America, or Your Erroneous Zones.
The false Rojas cousins went to see Night on Earth, and although the implicit idea of going to the movies was to make the most of the darkness and fool around a little, they found Jim Jarmusch’s film so entertaining that they just stared hypnotized at the screen.
“I had a great time,” Bernardita told him afterward, while they were waiting for the bus.
“Me too,” Gonzalo replied, distracted.
On the way home Gonzalo thought about Winona Ryder—he imagined her at the wheel of a Lada taxi, waiting for a green light at some Santiago intersection while she chewed gum and smoked and listened to Tom Waits. Tired of her seatmate’s monosyllabic replies, Bernardita abandoned any attempt at conversation and started to reread “Ligeia,” which was her favorite Poe story. Gonzalo watched her read for a few minutes, the city at dusk as a backdrop, and then he did feel like he wanted to kiss her. He tried to, but she rebuffed him with her characteristic tight-lipped smile.
“I’m reading,” she said.
“Read me a little,” replied Gonzalo.
“I don’t want to,” said Bernardita, who nevertheless put the book between them so Gonzalo could see it too, and they rode the rest of the way with their heads together, almost embracing, reading Poe’s story.
They reached the corner where they had to part ways, and now Bernardita accepted a quick kiss, without much tongue. Gonzalo walked home weighing the possibility of continuing with his revenge until it was more or less symmetrical. He wasn’t convinced, so he decided to take the matter up with Marquitos, a slightly older redhead who worked in the corner store, and who owed the diminutive of his name to his short, almost dwarf-like stature. Night was falling as Gonzalo helped Marquitos close up shop, and they settled at the counter with two cold one-liter bottles of Escudo beer.
“Your girlfriend is a lot hotter than Bernardita,” Marquitos told him, after considering the dilemma for a few seconds. “Why would I lie to you—your girlfriend is much, much hotter.”
This was a tic of Marquitos’s: ...
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