Loquela Read Online Free PDF Page B

discover that your body exists and functions on its own, that if at some point you’re lucky enough to be sleeping with your wife breathing deeply a few centimeters away, you’ll dream of another woman, in spite of this you must wake yourself up, slowly pull her close, and repeat that you love her, that you live together.
    (Abuse of “that,” the self-indulgences of my writing “that,” the colon, and the semicolon. Proof that I write poorly but that I say something, always with the same words, yet saying something that matters. I reread this. My head hurts [abuse of “but”], but for the first time in many days I’ve been able to recover a passinghappiness. I’m alone, I repeat to myself, and yet there are so many pages, so many names, so many years.) You lie down with a book clutched tightly in your hands. The book has done all of this to you: weeping. Real tears, really. Not like the ones that you shed during the drunken display in Alicia’s car, the sea that ran down your face, rupturing the false desire that was growing between the two of you, too soon, too forced. I abuse repetitions, I lose plotlines. You wake up early, the faces stop screaming at you, that hand retracts from your body, the albino girl from the dream evaporates. You know that today it is an anxious Carlos. You do everything quickly; you don’t sing or think about Alicia in the shower, no breakfast, the micro comes by on the hour and you find a seat next to the girl with the curly hair, the really attractive one who’s always talking to people by the water fountain in the corner of the quad. You show up to your seminar, still tasting the novel, wanting to open up to the professor and tell him, with complete respect, that during the part when the guy and young girl have their encounter in the middle of the jungle (or was it in the middle of the dance floor dressed up as beggars or transvestites?), you got a phone call from Alicia. The funny thing, you’d tell the professor, is that, for a second, Alicia’s voice was J’s voice (it’s possible, both voices are deep and delicate), which made you shiver; the book fell from your hands and the glass of red powdered juice that you were drinking slid off the table. The professor might smile at the anecdote because he’s a good person, you know you’re not that funny, you’re already tired of playing the fool. So that’s it, the professor’s smile injects a soft warmth into your body, tomorrow will be less gray, the time not so early, the dream will have vanished. Even when the professor takes attendance, in the moment that he asksif anyone knows a certain individual who has never attended class and you suggest that perhaps it’s a pseudonym, you think you hear a burst of laughter. The professor didn’t get the joke, the other students keep staring at the floor with empty expressions though this time they’re firmly griping their book bags, getting ready to leave as soon as possible. Someone laughs, but you see that there’s no one left in the classroom. “Funny,” you think absurdly, walking and promising yourself to try to write more entertaining paragraphs; I promise to find out what it is that’s hidden in my books: the warm slap, the irresistible phrase with which Alicia wakes my eyes from their lethargy.

THE NOVEL
    Sitting on a bench in the plaza, Carlos was drawing a tree. He groaned and crumpled up the paper, realizing that every day his lines were getting worse; the tree he was sketching looked nothing like the one in front of him, it was more like a building or a statue. A few days ago, his little sister had asked him to teach her to draw hands. To start with he showed her how to copy her own, the left. But in the end, Josefa looked at his drawing and narrowed her eyes: that’s not a hand, she said, it’s the claws of a beast. He put the sketch down beside him and looked around