The Secret of Evil by Roberto Bolaño Page B

and immigration, Alexandra was
there waiting for us, along with some people I didn’t know. When she said her
name, Alexandra Edwards, I asked her if she was the daughter of Jorge Edwards,
the writer, and she looked at me, frowned slightly, as if considering how to
reply, then said no. I’m the daughter of the photographer, she explained a
little while later. By that stage I was already one of her admirers. I have to
say it’s not hard to admire her, because she’s very pretty. But it wasn’t her
physical beauty that impressed me; it was something else, a side of her that
I’ve gradually come to know and will probably never know completely, and yet I
know it well enough to be sure that we’ll always be friends. We’d arrived in the
morning, and that afternoon, I remember, I had lunch with the rest of the
judges, and I had to make a speech, and Alexandra was there, on the other side
of the table, laughing with her eyes, which is something that Chilean women
often do, or that’s how it seemed to me at the time, a mistaken impression that
must have been due to finding myself back in the country after so many years
away; women everywhere laugh with their eyes, all the time, and men do too
occasionally, and sometimes it’s actually happening, and sometimes we only think
it is, that silent laughter, which reminds me of Andrea, who is one of the main
characters in this story, Andrea and Lautaro and Pascual and Carlitos, but I
still hadn’t met Andrea, or Pascual, and I’d never even heard of Carlitos,
although the fortunate day was drawing near, as someone might have said —
myself, perhaps, in January 1974.
    Anyway, in spite of the age difference, Lautaro and Pascual became
friends, and maybe it was there at the swimming pool perched in the foothills of
the Cordillera that their friendship was cemented, after the peeing incident.
When Carolina told me, I couldn’t believe it: Lautaro urinating, not
in
the pool, underwater, as almost all kids do, but from the edge, for everyone to
see.
    That night, however, I fell asleep and dreamed of my son in that
landscape, which had once been mine, the landscape of my twentieth year, and I
came to understand a part of what he must have felt. If I’d been killed in
Chile, at the end of 1973 or the beginning of 1974, he wouldn’t have been born,
I thought, and the act of urinating from the edge of the swimming pool — as if
he were asleep or had suddenly been overtaken by a dream — was a physical way of
acknowledging that fact and its shadow: having been born and being in a world
that might have existed without him.
    In the dream I understood that when Lautaro peed in the pool, he was
dreaming too, and I understood that although I would never be able to approach
his dream, I would always be there beside him. And when I woke up I remembered
that one night, when I was a boy, I got out of bed and urinated abundantly in my
sister’s closet. But I was a sleepwalker, and Lautaro, fortunately, is not.
    During that trip, which took up almost all of November 1998, I
didn’t see Andrea. Well, I did, but without really seeing her.
    I met Alexandra and Alexandra’s partner, Marcial, both of whom became
friends, and whatever I say about them will be conditioned by the friendship
that binds us, so perhaps it’s better that I don’t say too much.
    But I didn’t see Andrea. If I think back, all I can remember is a
smile, like the smile of the Cheshire Cat, in the corridor of Alexandra and
Marcial’s apartment, a voice emerging from the shadows, a pair of dark and very
deep eyes that were laughing as Alexandra’s eyes had laughed when I made my
first speech, just after arriving in Chile, but with a significant difference:
Andrea, unlike Alexandra, was an invisible woman. I mean, she was invisible for
me; at some point I saw her without really seeing her; I heard her, but I
couldn’t tell where her voice was coming from.
    One of the things that Lautaro did around that time was to invent