Bonsai Read online

  Praise for BONSAI

  “Zambra’s book has already been canonized as a new classic.”

  —VARIETY

  “A delightful work. A love story that’s both wry and melancholy … Zambra is indeed the herald of a new wave of Chilean fiction.”

  —MARCELA VALDES, THE NATION

  “Undeniably fascinating. The kind of story that lingers in the mind for weeks after being read.”

  —ELIZABETH WADELL,

  THE QUARTERLY CONVERSATION

  “Bonsai won the Chilean Critics Award for best novel of the year … and it’s easy to understand why.

  —JONATHAN MESSINGER,

  TIME OUT CHICAGO

  “One of the greatest literary events of recent years.”

  —ALFONSO CORTÍNEZ,

  LAS ÚLTIMAS NOTICIAS

  “The publication of Bonsai … marked a kind of bloodletting in Chilean literature. It was said (or argued) that it represented the end of an era, or the beginning of another, in the nation’s letters.”

  —MERCURIO

  “An unclassifiable object of unusual beauty … one of the best Chilean novels of recent times.”

  —DAVID LACALLE, CAPITAL

  “Bonsai is an appealing miniature, a novella that, despite its brevity, feels airy and full … an enjoyable, pleasantly surprising, and clever read.

  —THE COMPLETE REVIEW

  “What is remarkable about Zambra’s novella is the space between ending and beginning—the progressive prose that relates a true story with emotional and artistic implications extending far beyond its 83 pages.”

  —BOOKSLUT

  “Zambra flexes some serious artistic muscle.…”

  —RAIN TAXI

  “… a complex and sophisticated story.…”

  —THE PHOENIX (PA)

  First published in Spanish as Bonsái (Anagrama).

  Copyright © Alejandro Zambra

  Translation © Carolina De Robertis 2008

  Cover photo courtesy of Network Releasing

  First Melville House Printing: October 2008

  Melville House Publishing

  145 Plymouth Street

  Brooklyn, NY 11201

  www.mhpbooks.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the

  paperback edition of this book as follows:

  Zambra, Alejandro, 1975-

  [Bonsái. English]

  Bonsai / by Alejandro Zambra; translated from the Spanish by Carolina de Robertis.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-1-61219-161-4

  I. Robertis, Carolina de. II. Title.

  PQ8098.36.A43B6513 2008

  863’.7–dc22

  2008009938

  v3.1

  For Alhelí

  Years passed, and the only

  person who didn’t change was

  the young woman in the book.

  Yasunari Kawabata

  Pain is measured and detailed.

  Gonzalo Millán

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  I. MASS

  II. TANTALIA

  III. LOANS

  IV. SPARES

  V. TWO DRAWINGS

  About the Author

  I. MASS

  In the end she dies and he remains alone, although in truth he was alone some years before her death, Emilia’s death. Let’s say that she is called or was called Emilia and that he is called, was called, and continues to be called Julio. Julio and Emilia. In the end Emilia dies and Julio does not die. The rest is literature:

  The first night they slept together was an accident. They had an exam in Spanish Syntax II, a subject neither of them had mastered, but since they were young and in theory willing to do anything, they were willing, also, to study Spanish Syntax II at the home of the Vergara twins. The study group turned out to be quite a bit larger than imagined: someone put on music, saying he was accustomed to studying to music, another brought vodka, insisting that it was difficult for her to concentrate without vodka, and a third went to buy oranges, because vodka without orange juice seemed unbearable. At three in the morning they were perfectly drunk, so they decided to go to sleep. Although Julio would have preferred to spend the night with one of the Vergara sisters, he quickly resigned himself to sharing the servant’s quarters with Emilia.

  Julio didn’t like that Emilia asked so many questions in class, and Emilia disliked the fact that Julio passed his classes while hardly setting foot on campus, but that night they both discovered the emotional affinities that any couple is capable of discovering with only a little effort. Needless to say, they did terribly on the exam. A week later, for their second chance at the exam, they studied again with the Vergaras and slept together again, even though this second time it was not necessary for them to share a room, since the twins’ parents were on a trip to Buenos Aires.

  Shortly before getting involved with Julio, Emilia had decided that from now on she would follar, as the Spanish do, she would no longer make love with anyone, she would not screw or bone anybody, and much less would she fuck. This is a Chilean problem, Emilia said, then, to Julio, with an ease that only came to her in the darkness, and in a very low voice, of course: This is a problem for Chilean youth, we’re too young to make love, and in Chile if you don’t make love you can only fuck, but it would be disagreeable to fuck you, I’d prefer it if we shagged, si follaramos, as they do in Spain.

  At that time Emilia had never been to Spain. Years later she would live in Madrid, a city where she’d shag quite a bit, though no longer with Julio, but rather, mainly, with Javier Martínez and with Ángel García Atienza and with Julián Alburquerque and even, but only once, and under some pressure, with Karolina Kopeć, her Polish friend. On this night, this second night, on the other hand, Julio was transformed into the second sexual partner of Emilia’s life, into, as mothers and psychologists say with some hypocrisy, Emilia’s second man, while Emilia in turn became Julio’s first serious relationship. Julio avoided serious relationships, hiding not from women so much as from seriousness, since he knew seriousness was as dangerous as women, or more so. Julio knew he was doomed to seriousness, and he attempted, stubbornly, to change his serious fate, to pass the time waiting stoically for that horrible and inevitable day when seriousness would arrive and settle into his life forever.

  Emilia’s first boyfriend was dim, but there was authenticity in his dimness. He made many mistakes and almost always knew enough to acknowledge them and make amends, but some mistakes are impossible to make amends for, and the dim one, the first one, made one or two of those unpardonable mistakes. It’s not even worth mentioning them.

  Both of them were fifteen years old when they started going out, but when Emilia turned sixteen and seventeen the dim one was still fifteen. That’s how it went: Emilia turned eighteen and nineteen and twenty-four, and he was fifteen; twenty-seven, twenty-eight, and he fifteen, still, until her thirtieth, since Emilia did not keep having birthdays after thirty, and not because she at that point decided to conceal her age, but rather because a few days after turning thirty Emilia died, and so she no longer turned older because she began to be dead.

  Emilia’s second boyfriend was too white. With him she discovered mountaineering in the Andes, bicycle rides, jogging, and yogurt. It was, in particular, a time of a lot of yogurt, and this, for Emilia, turned out to be important, because she was emerging from a period of a lot of pisco, of long and complicated nights of pisco with Coca-Cola and pisco with lemon, and also of pisco straight up, dry, no ice. They groped each other a lot but never arrived at coitus, because he was very white and this made her distrustful, despite the fact that she herself was very white, alm
ost completely white, with short hair that was very black, she did have that.

  The third one was, in fact, a sick man. From the start she knew the relationship was doomed to failure, but even so they lasted a year and a half, and he was her first sexual partner, her first man, when she was eighteen, and he was twenty-two.

  Between the third and the fourth there were several one-night stands, spurred, as it were, by boredom.

  The fourth was Julio.

  In keeping with a deep-seated family custom, Julio’s sexual initiation was negotiated, at ten thousand pesos, with Isidora, with cousin Isidora, who after that point was no longer called Isidora, nor was she Julio’s cousin. All the men in the family had been with Isidora, who was still young, with miraculous hips and a certain leaning toward romanticism, who agreed to attend to them, although she was no longer what is referred to as a whore, a whore-whore: now, and she always strove to make this clear, she worked as a lawyer’s secretary.

  At the age of fifteen Julio met cousin Isidora, and he continued to meet with her during the years that followed, in the context of special gifts, when he insisted on it enough, or when his father’s brutality abated and, as a result, the period came known as the period of fatherly remorse, immediately followed by the period of fatherly guilt, whose most fortunate consequence was economic generosity. It goes without saying that Julio nearly fell in love with Isidora, that he cared for her, and that she, briefly moved by the young reader who dressed in black, treated him better than the others she was with, that she spoiled him, that she educated him, in a fashion.

  Only at the age of twenty did Julio begin to approach women his age as potential lovers, with limited success but enough to decide to leave Isidora. To leave her, of course, in the same way one quits smoking or gambling at the racetrack. It wasn’t easy, but months before that second night with Emilia, Julio already considered himself safe from the vice.

  That second night, then, Emilia was in competition with a unique rival, although Julio never went so far as to compare them, in part because there was no possible comparison and also due to the fact that Emilia turned out to become, officially, the only love of his life, and Isadora, barely, an old and agreeable source of pleasure and suffering. When Julio fell in love with Emilia all the pleasure and suffering previous to the pleasure and suffering that Emilia brought him turned into simple imitations of true pleasure and suffering.

  The first lie Julio told Emilia was that he had read Marcel Proust. He didn’t usually lie about reading, but that second night, when they both knew they were starting something, and that that something, however long it lasted, was going to be important, that night Julio made his voice resonant and feigned intimacy, and said that, yes, he had read Proust, at the age of seventeen, one summer, in Quintero. At that time no one spent their summers in Quintero anymore, not even Julio’s parents, who had met on the beach at El Durazno, who went to Quintero, a pretty beach town now invaded by slum dwellers, where Julio, at seventeen, got his hands on his grandparents’ house and locked himself up to read In Search of Lost Time. It was a lie, of course: he had gone to Quintero that summer, and he had read a lot, but he had read Jack Kerouac, Heinrich Böll, Vladimir Nabokov, Truman Capote, and Enrique Lihn, and not Marcel Proust.

  That same night Emilia lied to Julio for the first time, and the lie was, also, that she had read Marcel Proust. At first she only went so far as to agree: I also read Proust. But after that there was a long period of silence, which was not so much an uncomfortable silence as an expectant one, such that Emilia had to complete the story: It was last year, recently, it took me five months, I was so busy, you know how it is, with the courseload at the university. But I undertook to read the seven volumes and the truth is that those were the most important months of my life as a reader.

  She used that phrase: my life as a reader, she said that those had been, without a doubt, the most important months of her life as a reader.

  In the story of Emilia and Julio, in any case, there are more omissions than lies, and fewer omissions than truths, truths of the kind that are called absolute and that tend to be uncomfortable. Over time, of which there was not much but enough, they confided their least public desires and aspirations with each other, their disproportionate feelings, their brief and exaggerated lives. Julio confided in Emilia about matters that only Julio’s psychologist should have known about, and Emilia, in her turn, turned Julio into a kind of retroactive accomplice for each decision she had taken in the course of her life. That time, for example, when she decided that she hated her mother, at fourteen: Julio listened attentively and opined that yes, that Emilia, at fourteen, had made a good decision, that there had been no other possible option, that he would have done the same, and, without doubt, if back then, at fourteen, they had been together, he certainly would have supported her.

  The relationship between Emilia and Julio was riddled with truths, with intimate revelations that rapidly established a complicity that they wanted to understand as definitive. This, then, is a light story that turns heavy. This is the story of two students who are enthusiasts of truth, of scattering sentences that seem true, of smoking eternal cigarettes, and of closing themselves into the intense complacency of those who think they are better, purer than others, than that immense and contemptible group known as the others.

  They quickly learned to read the same things, to think similarly, and to conceal their differences. Very soon they formed a conceited intimacy. At least during that time, Julio and Emilia managed to merge into a single kind of mass. They were, in short, happy. There is no doubt about that.

  II. TANTALIA

  From then on, they kept follando, shagging in borrowed houses and in motels with sheets that smelled of pisco sour. They shagged for a year and this year seemed brief to them, although it was extremely long, and after that Emilia went to live with Anita, her childhood friend.

  Anita didn’t like Julio, as she considered him spoiled and depressive, but nevertheless she had to allow him in at breakfast time and even, once, perhaps to demonstrate to herself and her friend that at the core Julio did not displease her, she made him boiled eggs, which were the favorite breakfast of Julio’s, that permanent guest of the narrow and rather inhospitable apartment that Emilia and Anita shared. What bothered Anita about Julio was that he had changed her friend.

  You changed my friend. She wasn’t like that.

  And have you always been like that?

  Like what?

  Like that, the way you are.

  Emilia intervened, conciliatory and understanding. What’s the purpose of being with someone if they don’t change your life? She said that, and Julio was present when she said it: that life only had purpose if you found someone who changed it, who destroyed your life. It seemed a dubious theory to Anita, but she didn’t argue. She knew that when Emilia spoke in that tone it was absurd to contradict her.

  Julio and Emilia’s peculiarities weren’t only sexual (they did have them), nor emotional (these abounded), but also, so to speak, literary. On a particularly joyful night, Julio read, in a joking tone, a Rubén Darío poem that Emilia dramatized and turned banal until it became a genuinely sexual poem, a poem of explicit sex, with screams, with orgasms included. It became a habit, this reading aloud—in a low voice—every night, before shagging. They read Marcel Schwob’s Monelle’s Book, and Yukio Mishima’s The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, which turned out to be reasonable sources of erotic inspiration. However, very soon the readings diversified significantly: they read Perec’s A Man Asleep and Things, various stories by Onetti and Raymond Carver, poems by Ted Hughes, by Tomas Tranströmer, by Armando Uribe and by Kurt Folch. They even read fragments of Nietzsche and Émile Cioran.

  One fine or dark day, chance led them to the pages of the Anthology of Fantastic Literature by Borges, Bioy Casares, and Silvina Ocampo. After imagining vaults or houses without doors, after taking inventory of the traces of unnameable ghosts, they arrived at “Tantalia,” a short story by
Macedonio Fernández that affected them profoundly.

  “Tantalia” is the story of a couple that decides to buy a small plant and keep it as a symbol of the love that unites them. They realize too late that if the plant dies, the love that unites them will die with it. And as the love that unites them is immense and they are not willing to sacrifice it for any reason, they decide to lose the little plant in a multitude of identical little plants. Later comes the despair, the misfortune of knowing they will never be able to find it.

  She and he, Macedonio’s characters, had and lost a little plant of love. Emilia and Julio—who are not exactly characters, though maybe it’s convenient to think of them as characters—have been reading before shagging for months, it is very pleasant, they think, and sometimes they think it at the same time: it is very pleasant, it is beautiful to read and talk about the reading just before tangling legs. It’s like doing exercise.

  It isn’t always easy to find, in the texts, some impetus, however small, to shag, but in the end they manage to locate a paragraph or verse that, when whimsically stretched or perverted, works for them, gets them hot. (They liked that expression, to get hot, that’s why I use it. They liked it almost enough to get hot from it.)

  But this time it was different:

  I don’t like Macedonio Fernández anymore, Emilia said, shaping her sentences with inexplicable timidity, as she caressed Julio’s chin and mouth.

  And Julio: Me neither. I enjoyed it, I liked him a lot, but not anymore. Not Macedonio.

  They had read Macedonio’s story in a very low voice and talked on in a very low voice:

  It’s absurd, like a dream.

  Because it is a dream.

  It’s stupid.

  I don’t understand.

  Nothing, just that it’s absurd.