Bonsai Read online

  Very far from Emilia’s corpse, there, here, in Santiago de Chile, Anita listens to yet another of her mother’s regular confessions, her mother’s conjugal problems, that seem interminable and that Anita analyzes with angry complicity, as if they were her own problems and in some ways relieved that they were not her own problems.

  Andrés, on the other hand, is nervous: in ten minutes he’ll receive a medical check-up, and though there are no minor indications of illness, it suddenly seems clear to him that during the following days he will receive horrific news. He thinks, then, of his daughters, and of Anita and someone else, another woman whom he always remembers, including when it seems inopportune to remember anyone. Right then he sees an old man emerge with a satisfied expression, calculating his steps, patting his pockets in search of cigarettes or coins. Andrés understands that his turn has arrived, that it’s his turn for routine blood tests, and later the routine X-rays, and soon, perhaps, the routine scan. The old man that just came out is Gazmuri. They have not greeted each other, they haven’t met nor will they meet. Gazmuri is happy, as he is not going to die: he leaves the clinic thinking that he is not going to die, that there are few things in the world as pleasant as knowing that you are not going to die. Once again, he thinks, I’ve made it by the skin of my teeth.

  On the first night in the world where Emilia is dead, Julio sleeps poorly, but at that point he is already accustomed to sleeping poorly, due to anxiety. For months he’s been waiting for the moment when the bonsai will rise toward its perfect form, the serene and noble form he has foreseen.

  The tree follows the path marked by the wires. In a few years, Julio hopes, it will be, at last, identical to the drawing. He takes advantage of the four or five times he wakes that night to observe the bonsai. In between, he dreams of something like a desert or a beach, a place with sand, where three people look toward the sun or toward the sky, as if they were on vacation or as if they’d died unawares while sunbathing. Suddenly a purple bear appears. A very large bear that slowly, heavily approaches the bodies and with the same slowness starts to walk around them, until it has completed a circle.

  I want to end Julio’s story, but Julio’s story doesn’t end, that’s the problem.

  Julio’s story doesn’t end, or rather it ends like this:

  Julio finds out about Emilia’s suicide a year or a year and a half later. The news is brought by Andrés, who has gone with Anita and the two girls to the children’s book fair in Parque Bustamante. Julio is at the Editorial Recrea stand, working as a vendor, a poorly paid yet simple job. Julio seems happy, because it’s the last day of the fair, meaning that starting tomorrow he can return to caring for the bonsai. The meeting with Anita involves a misunderstanding: at first Julio doesn’t recognize her, but Anita thinks he’s faking it, that he recognizes her but is displeased to see her. She clarifies her identity with some annoyance and, in passing, points out that she’s been separated for several years from Andrés, whom Julio vaguely met during the last days or last pages of his relationship with Emilia. Clumsily, to make conversation, Julio asks for details, attempts to understand why, if they are separated, they are engaging, now, in a wholesome family outing. But neither Anita nor Andrés has a good answer for Julio’s impertinence.

  Right at the time for goodbyes, Julio asks the question he should have asked at the start. Anita looks at him, nervous, and doesn’t answer. She goes away with the girls to buy candied apples. Andrés is the one who stays, and he poorly summarizes a very long story that nobody knows well, a common story whose only peculiarity is that no one knows how to tell it well. Andrés says, then, that Emilia had an accident, and since Julio doesn’t react, doesn’t ask him anything, Andrés specifies: Emilia is dead. She threw herself in front of the metro or something like that, the truth is I don’t know. She was caught up in drugs, it seems, although not really, I don’t think. She died, they buried her in Madrid, that much is certain.

  An hour later Julio receives his salary: three ten-thousand-peso bills with which he had planned to pay his expenses for at least the next two weeks. Instead of walking to his apartment he hails a taxi and asks the driver to drive for thirty thousand pesos. He repeats it, he explains and even gives the money to the driver in advance: go in any direction, go in circles, in diagonal lines, it’s all the same, I’ll get out of your taxi when the thirty thousand pesos are spent.

  It’s a long trip, without music, from Providencia to Las Rejas, and later, for the return, Estación Central, Avenida Matta, Avenida Grecia, Tobalaba, Providencia, Bellavista. During the journey Julio doesn’t answer any of the cab driver’s questions. He doesn’t hear him.

  ALEJANDRO ZAMBRA is acclaimed as the greatest writer of Chile’s younger generation. He is a poet and critic and currently teaches literature at the Diego Portales University in Santiago. Bonsai is his first novel. It was awarded Chile’s Literary Critics’ Award for Best Novel.

  Translator CAROLINA DE ROBERTIS was raised in England, Switzerland, and California by Uruguayan parents. She is the author of the novel The Invisible Mountain.

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