Read Online Navidad & Matanza by Will Vanderhyden Carlos Labb - Free Book Online Page A

house, although of course he’d be compensated. They were counting, however, on his discretion, the gentlemen told him in a low voice, while taking his hand for a second. When he withdrew his hand, in his palm, the man from the service station found a twenty-dollar bill. They asked about Dounn. The man said he didn’t know, that he’d disappeared unexpectedly. Then they got back into a luxury Japanese sedan and left. Only Elena, Juan Francisco, and Bruno. When he went back into the house the man from the service station found Alicia sitting on his living room floor, looking through the book he was reading at the time. Always science fiction, really cheap editions that he bought in Pichilemu, he told me. How boring, said Alicia, and she asked what his name was. Then she wanted to know about his job and if he had any children. The girl took a cigarette from the pack that he had in the kitchen and put it in her mouth. The man offered her a light. Alicia made a noise, her tongue against her teeth. She said she didn’t smoke, that he should leave her alone. Please, tell me where the beach is, I can’t find it.
    The man from the service station accompanied Alicia to the beach, walking two steps behind her for several kilometers through the night. She asked many questions and he answered them, aware all the time of the cash he’d make housing this strange group of people for a few days. Afterward everything would be calm and normal again. That’s what he believed, he said. But it wasn’t so. Every once in a while the girl would yell: Right? Left? And now,which way? It was like she was walking with her eyes closed, like she wanted to be guided in the darkness. Then all of a sudden the sound of the sea was very near. When the sand and docas came into view, Alicia started to run. Rising up from down below he heard a shrill, sharp sound. At first it seemed to him that a woman was screaming. Then he thought someone was doing something bad to the young girl. He quickened his pace across the beach. The night was moonless, and there were no streetlamps in the town, and so he was barely able to make out two distant silhouettes approaching the water. Little by little the shrill sound turned into a birdsong, into the gurgle of an immense stomach, and finally into a strange music. “A female robot, singing with her mouth shut in the shower,” that’s how Patrice Dounn’s theremin sounded to the man from the service station. The foreigner was standing on a dune, an open case beside him—a different case, not the one he’d opened in the kitchen—his left hand suspended above a strange gleaming, blue instrument. The other hand, the right hand, moved slowly toward and away from the object. The music was very beautiful.
    The man from the service station sat down to listen a few feet away. Soon, a third sound rose through the noise of the ocean and the song of the theremin. It was the voice of Alicia Vivar, who’d sat down silently next to the man from the service station. Resting her head on his arm she stared up at the stars. She hummed the melody that Dounn’s instrument was playing, while at the same time, with a finger, she drew concentric circles in the damp sand, each one larger than the last.
    Finally they were quiet, Alicia and the theremin. For a moment there was silence, “because the sound of the sea doesn’t exist forthose who live near it,” said the man. Then the girl told him to look out at the waves. Patrice Dounn had begun to play another song. This is my favorite, “La Mer,” by Debussy, Alicia whispered. Then she stood up and ran to embrace the Congolese.

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    D URING ONE OF MANY calm Sunday afternoon conversations in Sabado’s white bedroom, I looked up from the computer screen, where I was reviewing her chapter of the novel-game, and spoke. What I’m going to tell you is a secret: when I was young I loved that song from The Sound of