"The Most Chilean Man" is a story from Alejandro Zambra's story collection My Documents (McSweeney's), which comes out tomorrow. Buy it and read it on the train. See what happens. Something must happen. Zambra is one of our favorite writers. He wrote "Thank You," which we published in our November 2013 issue, and has written two novels, Bonsai and Ways of Going Home (FSG). What distinguishes Alejandro from his contemporaries is the sweetness and intimacy of his writing, and his confidence in letting himself be as he is. As you read his work, there's never the impression that he is second-guessing himself, thinking, So-and-so would do it this way, or Such-and-such editor would say that. He exhibits this remarkable confidence on the page, one that allows him to be himself and to speak, a special kind of generosity. It feels like knowing and talking to a sweetheart—it never feels like he's an author who pretends, or tries to teach, or falls into egotistical traps.
-Amie Barrodale
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In mid-2011 she received a grant from the Chilean government and set off for Leuven to start a doctoral program.
He was teaching at a private high school in Santiago, but
he wanted to go with her and live some version of "forever;" after talking it over, though, at the end of a sad night when
they had very bad sex, they decided it was better to separate.
During the first months, it was hard to tell if Elisa really missed
him, even though she sent him all kinds of signals that he thought
he interpreted correctly: he was sure that those long emails and the
erratic and flirtatious messages on his Facebook wall and, above
all, those unforgettable afternoon-nights (afternoons for him,
nights for her) of virtual sex via Skype could only be interpreted one way. The natural thing would have been to go on like that for a
while and then gradually cool off, forget each other, and maybe, in
the best of cases, run into each other again after some time, maybe
many years later, their bodies bearing the weight of other failures, this time ready to give it their all. But an executive at Banco
Santander, at the Pedro Aguirre Cerda branch, offered Rodrigo a
checking account and credit card, and suddenly he found himself
passing from one screen to another, checking boxes that said "yes"
and "I agree," entering the codes B4, C9, and F8, and that was how
he found himself, at the start of January, without telling anyone—without telling her—on his way to Belgium.
There was no connecting thread, no constant in his thoughts
during the nearly twenty-four hours he spent traveling. On the
flight to Paris, he was struck by the amount of turbulence, but since
he hadn't flown much—or never any significant distance, at least—he was, in a way, grateful for the feeling of adventure. He never
really felt afraid, and he even imagined himself saying—sounding
so sophisticated—that the flight "had been a little rough." He had a
couple of books in his backpack, but it was the first time he'd flown
on a plane with so many entertainment options, and he spent hours
deciding which movies or TV series he wanted to see, and in the
end, he didn't watch anything in its entirety; but he did play, with
a degree of skill that surprised him, several rounds of some sort of
"Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" video game.
While he was walking through Charles de Gaulle to take the
train, he had the fairly conventional thought that no, he did not
want to be a millionaire, he'd never wanted to be a millionaire.
And that trivial thought led him, who knows how, to a scorned
and maligned word, which nevertheless now glittered, or at least
shone a little, or was less dark than usual, or was dark and serious
and big but didn't embarrass him: maturity. He went on with these
thoughts on the train ride from Brussels to Leuven. Inexplicably,
using up almost all of the credit on his card to buy a plane ticket to
Belgium to visit Elisa struck him as a sign of maturity.
...she was sure of one thing: she didn't want to spend the coming days with Rodrigo, not those days or any others, none.
And what happened in Leuven? The worst. Although sometimes the worst is the best thing that can happen. It must be said
that Elisa could have been nicer, a little less cruel. But if she had
been nicer, he might not have understood. She didn't want to
leave that possibility open. He called her from the station, and
Elisa thought it was a joke, but she started walking toward him
anyway, talking to him on the phone all the while. Then, she
turned a corner and saw him, a hundred steps away, but she didn't
tell him she was there and he went right on talking, sitting on his
suitcase, half-numb and anxious, looking at the ground and then
at the sky with a mixture of confidence and innocence that was
repulsive to Elisa—she couldn't put her feelings, her thoughts, in
order, but she was sure of one thing: she didn't want to spend the
coming days with Rodrigo, not those days or any others, none.
And maybe she was still a little in love, and she cared about him,
and liked to talk to him, but for him to show up out of nowhere,
like in some bad movie, ready to embrace and be embraced, ready
to become the star, the hero who crossed the world for love: that
was, for Elisa, much more of an affront and a humiliation than a
cause for happiness.
As she took long strides back to her house, she felt the constant
vibration of her cell phone in her pocket, but she only answered
half-an-hour later, already in bed, duly protected: "I'm not going
to pick you up," she told him. "I don't want to see you. I have
a boyfriend (lie). I live with him. I don't ever want to see you
ever again." There were another nine calls, and all nine times she
answered and said more or less the same thing, and in the end she
told him, to add a little realism to the thing, that her boyfriend
was German.
Of course there are other reasons for her reaction, there's
another story that runs parallel to this one, one that explains why
Elisa didn't ever want to see Rodrigo again: a story that talks about
the need for a real change, the need to leave behind her small Chilean world of Catholic school, her desire to seek out other paths—a
story that explains why, in the end, it was logical and also healthy
to break up with Rodrigo definitively, maybe not like that, maybe
it wasn't fair of her to leave him sitting there, eager and numb,
but she had to break it off with him. In any case, for now, she is
stretched out on her bed, listening to some album that falls some-
where on the broad spectrum of alternative music (the latest from
Beach House, for example). She feels calm.
Rodrigo tests out a quick and mindless walk around the city. He
sees twenty or thirty women who all look more beautiful than
Elisa; he wonders why Hans—he decides the German's name is
Hans—chose Elisa, who isn't so voluptuous or so dark-skinned, and then he remembers how good she is in bed, and he feels rotten.
He goes on walking, but now he sees nothing but a beautiful city
full of beautiful people. He thinks what a whore Elisa is, and other
things typical of a scorned man. He walks aimlessly, but Leuven
is too small a city to walk around aimlessly in, and after a little
while, he is back at the station. He stops in front of Fonske: it's
practically the only thing Elisa had told him about the city: that
there is a fountain with the statue of a boy (or a student or a man)
who is looking at the formula for happiness in a book and pouring
water (or beer) over his head. The fountain strikes him as strange,
even aggressive or grotesque, and he tries to avoid engaging with
the irony of a "formula for happiness." He goes on looking at the
fountain—which for some reason that day is dry, turned off—while he smokes a cigarette, the first since he 's been off the train,
the first on European soil, a pilgrim Belmont cigarette from Chile.
And although during all this time he has felt an intense cold, only
now does he feel the urgency of the freezing wind on his face and
body, as if the cold was really trying to work its way into his bones.
He opens his suitcase, finds a pair of loose-fitting pants and puts
them on over the ones he is wearing, along with another shirt, an
extra pair of socks, and a knit cap (he doesn't have gloves). For a
moment, carried along by rage and a sense of drama, he thinks that
he is going to die of cold, literally. And that this is ironic, because
Elisa had always been the cold-blooded one, the most cold-blooded
girlfriend he 'd ever had, the most cold-blooded woman he 'd ever
met: even during the summer, at night, she used to wear jackets
and shawls and sleep with a hot water bottle.
Sitting near the station, in front of a small waffle shop, he
remembers the joke about the most cold-blooded man in the world,
the only joke his father ever used to tell. He remembers his father
beside the bonfire, on the wide open beach at Pelluhue, many
years ago: he was a distant and taciturn man, but when he told
that joke, he became another person, every sentence coming out of
his mouth as though spurred by some mysterious mechanism, and
upon seeing him like that—wisely setting up his audience, preparing for the imminent peals of laughter—one might think that
he was a funny and clever man, maybe a specialist in telling these
types of long jokes, which can be told so many different ways,
because the important thing isn't the punch line but, rather, the
flair of the teller, his feeling for detail, his ability to fill the air with
digressions without losing the audience 's interest. The joke started
in Punta Arenas, with a baby crying from cold and his parents desperately wrapping him up in blankets of wool from Chiloe. Then,
surrendering to the obvious, they decide they must find a better
climate for the baby, and they start to climb up the map of Chile in
search of the sun. They go from Concepción to Talca, to Curicó,
to San Fernando, always heading north, passing through Santiago
and, after a lot of adventures, heading up to La Serena and Antofagasta, until finally they reach Arica, the so-called city of eternal
spring, but it's no use: the boy, who by now is a teenager, still
feels cold. Once he 's an adult, the coldest man in the world travels
through Latin America in search of a more favorable climate, but
he never—not in Iquitos or Guayaquil or Maracaibo or Mexicali
or Rio de Janeiro—stops feeling a profound and lacerating cold.
He feels it in Arizona, in California, and he arrives and departs
from Cairo and Tunis wrapped in blankets, shivering, convulsing,
complaining interminably, but in a nice way, because, in spite of
how bad a time he had of it, the coldest man in the world always
remained polite, cordial, and perhaps because of this, when the
much-feared ending finally came—when the coldest man in the
world, who was Chilean, finally died of cold—no one doubted
that he would go directly, without any major trouble, to Heaven.
Cairo, Arizona, Tunis, California, thinks Rodrigo, almost
smiling: Leuven. It's been months since he's seen his father—
they've grown apart after some stupid argument. He thinks that,
in a situation like this one, his father would want him to be brave.
No, he doesn't really know what his father would think about a
situation like the one he is in. His father would never have a credit
card, much less travel irresponsibly thousands of miles to be given
a kick in the stomach. What would my father do in this situation? Rodrigo wonders again, naively. He doesn't know. Maybe
he should go back right away to Chile; or maybe he should stay in
Belgium for good, make a life here? He decides, for the moment,
to go back to Brussels.
People travel from Leuven to Brussels, or from Brussels to Antwerp, or from Antwerp to Ghent, but they are such short journeys
that it's almost excessive to consider them travel in the proper
sense of the word. And even so, to Rodrigo, the half hour to Brus-
sels seems like an eternity. He thinks about Elisa and Hans walking around that city, such a university town, so European and correct. Again he remembers Elisa's body: he recalls her convalescing
after she had her appendix out, receiving him with a sweet, pained
smile. And he remembers her some time later, one Sunday morning, completely naked, massaging rose hip oil into the scar. And
maybe that same night, playing with the warm semen around that
scar, drawing something like letters with his index finger, hot and
laughing.
He gets off the train, walks a few blocks, but he doesn't look
at the city, he goes on thinking about Elisa, about Hans, about
Leuven, and something like forty minutes go by before he realizes
he has forgotten his suitcase on the train, he's left it in a corner
next to the other passengers' luggage, and he's gotten off carrying only his backpack. He says to himself, out loud, energetically:
ahuevonado, you stupid asshole.
He buys some French fries near the station, and he stops on
a corner to eat. When he stands up again he feels dizzy, or something like dizziness. He was planning on buying cigarettes and
then walking for a while, but he has to stop because of this feeling,
which just seems like a nuisance at first, an impression of vertigo
that he has never felt before, but which immediately starts to grow,
as if freeing itself from something, and soon he feels that he is
going to fall, but he manages, with a lot of effort, to maintain the
minimum stability necessary to move forward. The backpack
weighs next to nothing, but he slings it over one shoulder and takes
five steps, to test himself. The dizziness continues and he has to
stop completely and support himself against the window of a shoe store. He moves forward slowly, propping himself up against one
shop window after another, like Spiderman's cowardly apprentice,
while he looks out of the corner of his eye at the interiors of the
stores, overflowing with different kinds of chocolates, beers, and
lamps, some of them selling strange gifts: drumsticks that are also
chopsticks, a mug in the shape of a camera lens, an endless array
of figurines.
It's hard to know if it's day or night: 5:15 p.m. and the lights of apartments and cars are already on.
An hour later he has only made it seven blocks, but fortunately,
at a kiosk, he finds a blue umbrella that costs him ten Euros. At first
he still feels unstable when he walks, but the umbrella gives him
confidence, and after a few steps, he feels like he's gotten used to
the wobbling. Only then does he look at or focus on the city; only
then does he try to understand it, start to understand it. He thinks
it's all a dream, that he's near Plaza de Armas, near the Cathedral, in the Peruvian neighborhood, in Santiago de Chile. No, he
doesn't think that: he thinks that he thinks he's in Plaza de Armas.
He thinks that he thinks it's all a dream.
The stores are starting to close. It's hard to know if it's day or
night: 5:15 p.m. and the lights of apartments and cars are already
on. He starts to walk away from downtown, but instinctively he
goes into a laundromat and decides to spend some time there—he
doesn't really decide this, actually, but this is where he ends up,
along with two guys who are reading while they wait for their
clothes. It isn't exactly warm there, but at least it isn't cold. It's
absurd—he knows that he's short on money, that he's going to
need every coin—but still he decides he is going to wash one of
the pairs of pants, the second shirt, and the extra pair of socks. It takes him a while to figure out how the washing machines work—they're old and look sort of dangerous—but he figures it out and
throws in the clothes and this small victory gives him a stupid
and absolute feeling of satisfaction. He sits there looking at the
tumbling clothes, entranced or paralyzed, focused like someone
watching the end of a championship game on TV, and maybe for
him this is even more interesting than the end of a championship
game, because while he 's watching the tumbling clothes pushed up
against the glass, soaked in soapy water, he thinks, as if discovering
something important, how these clothes are his, how they belong
to him, how he has worn those pants a hundred times, those socks
too, and how once upon a time that shirt, a little faded now, was his
best, the one he picked out on special occasions; he remembers his
own body washing that shirt with pride, and it's a strange vision,
vain, awkward. It's perhaps his kitsch idea of purification.
Then he goes into a pizzeria called Bella Vita, which looks
cheap. He's attended to by Bülent, a very friendly and cheerful
Turk who speaks some French and a little Flemish but no English,
so they have to communicate exclusively through gestures and a
reciprocal murmur that perhaps only serves to demonstrate that
neither of them is mute. He eats a Napolitano pizza that tastes out
of this world to him, and then he sits there, drinking a coffee. He
doesn't know what to do, he doesn't want to go on wandering, but
he can't make up his mind to look for a cheap hotel or a hostel.
He tries to ask Bülent if the the place has wifi, but it is truly difficult to mime the idea of wifi, and at this point, he is already so
helpless that he doesn't think of the simplest option, which would have been to say "wifi" and pronounce it in all possible ways until
Bülent understood. Luckily Piet arrives just then; he's a very tall
guy who wears glasses with thick, red rims and has an unspecifiable number of piercings in his right eyebrow. Piet knows English
and a little Spanish—he has even been to Chile, for a month, years
ago. Rodrigo finally has someone to talk to.
A couple of hours later they are in the living room of Piet's
beautiful apartment, across from the pizzeria. While his host
makes coffee, Rodrigo watches from the window as Bülent, with
the help of the waitress and another man, closes the place up for
the night. Rodrigo feels something like the pulse or the pain or
the aura of daily life. He turns on his laptop and connects to the
Internet; there are no messages from Elisa, but he wasn't really
expecting any. He tries to find a friend from high school who, as
he remembers, has lived in Brussels for several years. He finds him
easily on Facebook, and the friend responds right away, but says
that he 's in Chile now, taking care of his sick mother, and although
he plans to come back to university, for now he's going to stay
in Santiago, he doesn't know for how long. Ten minutes later he
gets another message in which the friend recommends that he not
be afraid to drink peket ("It's a good buzz, but a bad hangover"),
that he avoid the grilled endive ("no to the grilled endive, yes to
the boulettes de viande and to the moules et frites"), that he try the
hot dogs with warm sauerkraut and mustard, that he buy chocolates at Galler, near the Grand Place, that he go to the Tropismes
bookstore, and that he shouldn't miss the Music or the Magritte
Museums—to Rodrigo, all of these details seem remote, almost impossible, because this isn't a vacation, it never was. He feels
desperate. He doesn't have much credit left on his card, and he
only has a hundred euros left in his wallet.
He tries to ask Bülent if the the place has wifi, but it is truly difficult to mime the idea of wifi.
That's when Bart arrives, Piet's editor who lives in Utrecht.
Only then does Rodrigo find out that Piet is a writer, that he has
published several books of short stories and a novel. He likes that
Piet showed this kind of discretion, that he was so reserved. He
thinks that if he were a writer, he wouldn't go around proclaiming
it to all the world either.
Bart is even taller than Piet, he's a giant of almost two meters.
Along with a friend, who is also named Bart, he runs a small press
that publishes emerging writers, almost all of them fiction writers,
almost all of them Dutch, but there are a few Belgians, also. The
other Bart, oddly, lives in Colombia (because he fell in love with a
woman from Popayán, Rodrigo learns), but he handles everything
online from there: his job is to manage distribution—to a series of
small bookstores, none of them commercial—and organize small
events and conferences where he sells the books himself.
Bart is friendly and he tells his story in pretty fluent English,
though he is also helped by his emphatic gestures and a certain
talent for mimicry when words fail him. It's almost ten; they walk
for a few blocks. Rodrigo feels better, he leans on the umbrella-cane, but it's more of a precaution than a necessity. They reach La
Vesa, a somewhat gloomy bar that has poetry readings on Thursdays, but today isn't Thursday, it's Tuesday, and the patrons are
scarce, which is better, thinks Rodrigo, who enjoys this feeling of
intimacy, of routine camaraderie, this sensible chatting with new friends, and the comments—short but laden with slight ironies—that come every once in a while from Laura, an Italian waitress
who isn't beautiful at first sight, but who becomes beautiful as the
minutes pass, and not from the effect of the alcohol, but because
you have to look at her really closely to discover her beauty. His
friends are drinking Orval and Rodrigo orders wine by the glass;
Piet asks him if he dislikes beer, and he replies that he likes it, but
he's still too cold and he prefers the warmth of wine. They start
talking about Belgian beer, which is the best in the world. Piet tells
him it's not so cold out, that there have been many worse winters.
Then Rodrigo wants to tell them the joke about the coldest man in
the world, but he doesn't know how to say friolento, cold-blooded,
in English, so he says "I am" and makes the gesture of shiver-
ing, and Bart tells him "you're chilly", and it all gets tangled up
because Rodrigo thinks they're talking about Chile, about whether
he 's from Chile, which supposedly they already knew, until, after
several misunderstandings that they celebrate thunderously, they
understand that the joke is about the chilliest man on earth, and
Rodrigo adds that the most cold-blooded man on earth is definitely
Chilean, he 's the chilliest man on earth, and he laughs heartily, for
the first time he laughs on Belgian soil the way he would laugh on
Chilean soil.
Rodrigo starts the joke uncertainly, because as he strings the
story together, he thinks that maybe in Belgium and Holland they
have the same joke, that maybe there are as many versions of the
joke as there are countries in the world. His listeners react well,
however, giving themselves over to the story: they enjoy the enumeration of the cities, whose names sound so strange to them
("Arica sounds like Osaka," says Bart), and when the chilliest man
in the world, who was Chilean, dies of cold under the burning sun
of Bangkok, his friends let out an anxious giggle and grab their
heads in a mournful gesture.
The chilliest man in the world had been a good son, a good
father, a good Christian, so Saint Peter accepts him into Heaven
without delay, but the problems start immediately: incredibly, even
though in heaven hot and cold don't exist—at least not in the way
we understand them down here—and even though all the rooms
in that formidable hotel that is Heaven automatically adjust to the
needs of their guests, the Chilean still feels cold, and in his friendly
but also effusive manner he goes on complaining, until the blessed
patience that reigns in Heaven runs out, everyone gets fed up, and
they all agree that the chilliest man in the world should go find
a truly beneficial climate. It is God himself who decides to send
him to Hell, where it's unthinkable that he could go on feeling
cold. But in spite of the unquenchable fires, of the frightful burning waters, of the colossal hot water bottles and the human heat,
which in such an overcrowded place is intense, the chilliest man in
the world still feels cold, and the case becomes so famous that it
reaches Satan's ears, who sees it as a fun challenge and decides to
take matters into his own hands.
One morning, Satan himself leads the Chilean to nothing less
than the hottest place imaginable: the center of the sun. It's so hot
there that Satan has to put on a special suit or else he'll get burned.
Once inside the center of the sun, they come to a small two-by-two meter cubicle, and Satan opens the door. The Chilean enters and he
stays there, hopeful and deeply grateful. Weeks pass, months, years,
until one day, moved by curiosity, the Devil decides to pay the Chil-
ean a visit. He puts on his special suit again—even reinforces it with
two additional layers, because he thinks he may have singed himself
on the previous trip—and he heads off to the sun. He has scarcely
opened the door to the cubicle when he hears the Chilean shout
from inside: "Please close the door, it's chilly in here!"
"Please close the door, it's chilly in here!" says Rodrigo, and
his performance is a success.
"I think that you are the chilliest man in the world," Bart tells
him, "and I want the chilliest man in the world to try the best beer
in the world." Piet proposes they go to a bar where they sell hundreds of beers, but in the end they decide to go somewhere closer,
where they clandestinely sell Westvleteren, the so-called best beer
in the world, and on the way Rodrigo leans on the umbrella, but
he doesn't know if it's necessary, he feels like he doesn't need it
anymore and could throw it away, but he goes on using it anyway
while he listens to the story of the Trappist monks who make the
beer and sell it in modest quantities, a story he finds amazing; he
hopes he likes the beer a lot and he does, although they only buy
one for the three of them, because the bottle costs ten euros.
Later, in the living room, they go on drinking for a while, they half-listen to each other, they laugh.
They go back to the apartment at two in the morning with
their arms around each other, so Rodrigo doesn't have to use the
umbrella: they look drunker than they are. Later, in the living
room, they go on drinking for a while, they half-listen to each
other, they laugh. "You can stay, but only for tonight," says Piet, and Rodrigo thanks him. They drag in a mattress while Bart
stretches out on an old chaise lounge and covers himself with a
blanket. Rodrigo thinks about what he will do if Bart tries something in the middle of the night. He considers whether he will
reject him or not, but he falls asleep, and Bart does too.
He wakes up early; he 's alone in the living room. He 's a little
hungover, and the coffee he finds in the kitchen does him good.
He looks at the street, he looks at the buildings, the silent facade
of the pizzeria. He wants to say goodbye to Piet, and he cracks
open the door to his room: he sees him sleeping next to Bart in a
half-embrace. He leaves them a note of thanks and goes down the
four flights of stairs. He has absolutely no plan, but he's encouraged by the idea of walking without a cane, and once in the street
he tries it, like in a happy ending. But he can't do it, and he falls.
It's a nasty fall, a hard fall, his double pants rip, his knee bleeds.
He stays on the corner, thinking, paralyzed by pain, and it starts
to rain, as if he were a character in a cartoon with a cloud hanging
above him—but this rain is for everyone, not just him.
