Navidad & Matanza Read Online Free PDF Page B

Goodbye.
    Juan Carlos Montes hung up. I never heard from him again. The old woman who answered the phone at the number from which the call had been made swore at me every time I told her who I was. After what happened in Navidad and Matanza I thought there was an obvious link between the disappearance of the Vivar siblings and Juan Carlitos Montes. But I was wrong. One night in April of 1999, after eating dinner with a friend, I told him about the bizarre story I was interested in writing. My friend, a salesman for a pharmaceutical company, was surprised when I mentioned Juan Carlos Montes.
    â€“ Montes? I know Juan Carlos Montes. He hasn’t disappeared. He won’t leave me alone. He’s the product manager of Masters Lab in Chile.
    According to my friend, this individual’s father, Juan Carlos Montes senior, lived in California; he owned the business.
    â€“ A man of means; there’s a reason you can’t track him down.
    Of course, the game’s pieces didn’t fit together. If this were the same Juan Carlos Montes who’d been kidnapped, according to the story of the man on the telephone, he’d be nineteen years old now. Maybe he was a whiz kid. A boy genius, I said. No, my friend responded, with a smile that reflected the words the man from the telephone had repeated. Hate, fear.
    â€“ You have to understand the side effects of hadón, the extremely addicting and popular drug: rapid aging and then death.
    I asked him if there was a cure for this addiction. My friend raised his wine glass and made a toast:
    â€“ There is nothing that frees us from death, but yes, there is something that frees us from its side effects.
    I looked at him, waiting.
    â€“ Only perfect love dispels all fear, he quoted.

39
    F ROM : Lunes
    T O : Domingo
    D ATE :
    S UBJECT : I heard Alicia singing softly in the elevator, I slipped out and disappeared silently down the stairway, like a disease I felt and continue to feel. The virus of language, the constant use of the illative connotes an obsession.
    As always, she’ll remove her keys from her backpack full of books, put the key in the lock, enter. But the dark apartment will be filled with a damp, heavy odor that’ll make her think of death by drowning, about the water that might exist after such a death, at least about the water that existed before.
    I made the horrible sacrifice of ascending in that frightening elevator, and it was all in vain! At any rate, I ran into a cousin of mine in the hallway, such is life. I’m not even sure if this is the right apartment.
    XOXO             
    Lunes            
    â€¢
    F ROM : Martes
    T O : Domingo
    CC: Lunes
    D ATE :
    S UBJECT : I might kill her. Better yet: she might never die.
    I THINK I HAVE DISAGREEMENTS WITH THE DIRECTION THE NOVEL IS GOING.
    Before sending you my chapter (I’ve arrived in the silver room to write my chapter and I notice a disastrous absence: I left the sheet the board is printed on in my dorm), I wanted to send you my observations about the novel-game. It seems necessary to better define the connections, the movement the connections engender, and the trajectory of the characters. Causes-connections-characters. To me it seems useful to compare the mass of connections to a tree. The coherence of each bifurcation (ramification-connection) is stable at the outset, when they are branches. But as the growing tree branches out and bifurcates, in addition to specifying the content of each point, the branches begin to intermingle and cross over each other. But this only works when the origin of each branch is well defined. In this way, you can better sketch out the direction of a novel, with characters and stories, without having a surprising connection distort the narration. This makes the movement of the story easier to follow for the reader, and narrows down the millions of interrelations that appear when looking