GALLEY BEGGAR PRESS EXTRACTS  

Telenovela, by Gonzalo C. Garcia

_______

FEBRUARY 1987

Chapter 1

LUCHO

is sitting at the only desk in the house, waiting for the last of the removal lorries to arrive. He opens the cardboard box next to him again, though he already knows it’s the wrong one.

He finds stacks of wooden curtain rings, clay pots wrapped in newspaper, a framed painting of a rural pebbled street in which colourful adobe houses lie neatly stacked up against an Andean backdrop. What he actually wants is his box of notebooks, even though he knows he should never have kept them – he’s too old anyway, too different, another person altogether – but he also knows throwing them out would have only made their presence stronger, heavier. He worries about that, the sudden pull of memory.

At first he had written only descriptions in these notebooks: attempts to capture his teachers’ movements and speech, the sounds of sleepless crickets, his mother’s face. The poems began about two thirds of the way through the second one. That’s when the trouble began too.

He can’t risk anyone else finding these notebooks now, not with his new job, not in this country. Can’t risk another hand leafing through the pages, most of them failures, incomplete and scattered in their phrasing, the syncopated impatience of youth. He’d thought of burning them. He’d even got close to the fire, close enough to singe off the numbered corners on one of the books. But he couldn’t do it.

After all, he’d written those poems to be found; he had even written his name below every single one. Sometimes, if he’d been particularly proud of a verse, he had loudly underlined his name to mark the page below it, hoping its imprint would prompt a clear direction for the next poem, some sign in the vastness of the white page.

The only notebook he has now is the one he carries with him in his pocket. It’s empty.

POETRY NOTES – BOOK OF RAMONA

Preparations: Travelling the Great Sea

The boat is not what we once had.

You talk of the dark faces in the wood,

patterned cuts,

sunny splinters,

the glare of its origin tree.

As advertised, the owner says,

you will touch the sea

if you want to.

Lucho is disappointed by the stillness. He finds that he has been expecting the move to be more than simply leaving and arriving. If he didn’t have dependants, he would have left all belongings behind and even been proud to sit in the sudden emptiness of new beginnings. But then, all his hard work has led to this moment. He’s dreamt of it, of pointing at old sofas and stained, rolled-up carpets, workers talking about how good his new life will be as they carry boxes filled with old things on their shoulders to some nearby dumpster, as they scrape marks on the once white walls.

But none of that has happened. He’d even had to arrange the removal logistics himself, which didn’t seem to him much in the spirit of landing a great promotion.

Mrs Herminia, who’d recently taken over her father’s bakery by the little plaza in Manuel Rodriguez, had looked at him in silence when he told her they were moving to Santiago. She looked sleepy, gave a yawn behind the glass pane and then jolted her head awake, saying, ‘That will be five hundred pesos,’ before giving him the usual bag of hallulla bread through a plastic hatch. And when he had told the priest at the San Francisco church, he had said that no one ever really moves away from God and so he thought it unnecessary to bless any of them, not even their car.

It had taken him a while to convince his wife and son of the benefits of the move too. He’d shown Ramona pictures of the house – he thought the glass dome over the staircase would make her pack her bags that very same day – but instead she’d asked whether it would make the house too hot in the summer. He had to make all of the plans for them. And since he didn’t know the city well, they quickly became abstract, infinite.

You can do anything in the capital.

You can walk a whole day by the river and never even see its end.

We’ll be only a couple of metro stops from where History is made.

Ramona had simply asked, when he mentioned the furniture, the dumpster, an entire new start: ‘Why wouldn’t we just take everything? Are lives in the city all that different? Maybe yours – but isn’t my life going to entail all the same routines? And didn’t Doctor Ignacio say we, I had to be careful with my anxiety, with any sudden change?’

Pablo hadn’t said a thing, locked himself up to play guitar instead. And when Lucho had asked him why he was spending weekends in his room, and if things were alright with his friends, Pablo had looked him in the eye and said his band, Plagiarism, had died thanks to him.

None of this bothers Lucho, for he knows that he’s been doing what good fathers are meant to do. His own father used to say: ‘A good father understands that he must set out to plan for the hopes of others.’ Then again, Lucho isn’t sure what was truly meant by all that. He still finds it hard to unpack his late father’s confusing speeches.

To convince Ramona, then, he had had to promise everything would remain the same inside the house.

What matters is that Ramona, his wife, should soon forget their old home in San Fernando. She will be the new mistress in Santiago, in a grand old army house. She will never have to dust the tiles or curtains again, will never have to hose the horse shit off the pavement when Datrilo, the melon man Lucho hopes to never see again, passes by, selling the rotten leftovers from the fair. She will never have to lift the finger she once said she was so tired of lifting (provided Mariela, their nana, does her job right). And Lucho, because he has given his word, will make sure of it.

There’s a window in front of him that almost touches the edge of his desk. From there he can see Pablo sitting and listening to music on the marble bench on the patio, looking at his own shoes. His son who had also resisted the move. ‘My whole life is here,’ he had said. ‘My band is here. Why would you do that to me now?’

But in Santiago, Pablo would become someone, would finally focus on studying instead of hanging around the sons of Marxists who no longer remembered what life was really like and who now dedicated themselves to wearing each other’s tattered ponchos and unnecessary satchels. None of them worked and they had nothing to carry.

Pablo would forget all about San Fernando, the old music, the songs that no longer mattered. In Santiago, in this concrete ode to Chile, new things would be done. And as it was with Lucho’s writing, back when he still wrote, the ideas that built the new country would manifest in images; the sea, the sky and land, its people and their voices together in verses devoid of the unnecessary clutter of feelings and the lies of his predecessors, and verses whose power would only be grasped in their final lines, a last clue to ground a reader’s interpretation, for if Chile was a country in the midst of rebuilding, then his writing could only justify itself at the end.

But it was also true that having spent so much time and energy convincing others of the advantages of moving away from that shithole town, Lucho hadn’t thought enough about himself. His Comandante at the regiment in San Fernando had told him it would be a step up, ‘pa’ arriba’. Although when Lucho had asked how that might be the case, how much more he’d get paid, whose boss he would now be, the Comandante said it wouldn’t be a different rank or anything like that.

‘Up, huevón, up as in North,’ he had laughed, ‘up in Santiago.’

And then he had signed Lucho off.

_____

In San Fernando, Lucho, who’d entered the regiment academy at seventeen, had quickly become the platoon joke. It wasn’t like he had no friends, but as soon as the other cadets had found out his father was none other than Captain Angel Diaz – the hero, the leader, the man – they had started to be careful about what they said around Lucho, how they acted around him. And as it happens when distance grows between people, cruelty becomes a simpler endeavour. Poor man’s Neruda turned to faggot poet, and then – when Lucho stopped writing altogether – the faggot.

But Lucho tries not to think too much about all that, these days. He’s in Santiago now, while those in his old regiment are stuck in a dying town with nothing but past glories. (And even those glories are so far in the past that they are more like legends, statues; stories no one living can take credit for, even if credit is due.) Yes, yes, he’s here. And it’s precisely because those bastards knew he could write that the transfer had come up. The government needed someone to keep product records in Santiago, a national inventory, and to personally manage the press releases about that inventory. His father (the hero, the leader, the man) had bought The Region in 1973, a newspaper in San Fernando, the voice of Colchagua Valley. And it was there that Lucho, while he was still at school, had his first job at the printer’s office. Then, after 73, he’d become his father’s editor, reading the newspaper’s articles through the night. (He never changed a word.) Not many at the San Fernando regiment could even spell.

And now Lucho will write up the nation’s inventory, and there will be nothing but abundance. Never a queue for basic needs. Never a school teaching children how to make toothpaste at home. Never instability. Never fear. An invisible government is a good government. More shops selling more. Luxuries, which should not be called that since they are the things that make life worth living. More like objectives. Like missions. Like aspirations. Like foreign cars. Like flattened hills to make room for modern apartment complexes. New roads. New bridges. His product reports will shape a new and connected country. A miracle for the hardworking middle classes, for anyone tired of the past, for anyone who dreams of the future. And he’ll no doubt be able to rise through the ranks. He’s always known he could do so much more, so much better, and that knowledge is finally taking the form of truth.

And now, Lucho is sitting in what he will soon declare to be his permanent study. His desk lies against a colonial window adorned by a plaster grapevine with two cherubs on each side. Here, facing the Great Andes, Lucho will finally be able to think of himself as part of Santiago’s growing light when it shines right on his desk. Despite his desire to write, to continue writing (and writing things other than product reports), poetry is now out of the question. His father had been right that day, when he’d told Lucho that poets could not run a country, for they too often turned a crooked table into allegories of love, or a decaying house into the voices of those who would never read poetry in the first place. ‘Poets suffer from a kind of schizophrenia,’ he’d said, ‘one that is more dangerous than the recognised condition because it insists on forcing their own delusions on everyone else. Real beauty is much clearer, and much more efficient.’

But since childhood, Lucho had been consumed by the stories of Chilean heroes. He’d learnt to read using the volumes of Chilean history his father, Captain Angel, had written. The story which captivated him the most – and still did – was that of Arturo Prat, the navy hero who died in the Battle of Iquique in the War of the Pacific. Arturo had leapt off the Esmeralda to board an enemy ship, knowing he’d die; an act of desperation in the face of likely defeat. That’s what it had said in the book. But, as Lucho often asked himself in his poetry, what kind of unfathomable love isn’t also followed by despair? Arturo was 31. Lucho is 42, but he too has made sacrifices. The very desk on which his empty notebook lies open is a testament to everything he’s lost; a loss of words and phrases which now return to him, slow and difficult, making him abandon any hope of becoming the next Neruda. He knows that every success is marked by the quiet ambush of failures, that despite this great house, he wants more from life than to be locked in a basement writing orders for potatoes and bread and, whenever his numbers are below the government’s targets, telling his superiors tales about Marxist crimes; making up stories like his father had done for The Region. Marxist Terrorists Steal a Supply Lorry! Anarchists Burn Tyres in New Attempt at Blockade! New Buses Become Unserviceable After Stones Rain on New Station! Death of Policeman at Hands of Terrorists Linked to Increased Defence Spending!

And he’s also grown apart from Ramona – there is that too. They barely speak, except to ask each other whether they want a cup of water on their bedside tables. They care so little about the answer that they often end up with two cups each.

On Lucho’s wedding day, his father’s gift had been to warn him of the common phrases uttered by soft men and women. He had said: ‘There’s no such thing as a long and happy marriage, but there sure are long ones.’ Lucho had laughed it off, but was beginning to suspect, as he often did these days, that his father had been right in the wrong places. The problem, as Lucho sees it now, is that he and Ramona know each other too well because they’d talked so much, too much, in the beginning. What they have now isn’t unhappiness, but the silence following joy, like sleeping well and forgetting all the remnants of a dream. So he doesn’t know why he still feels like it needs fixing, that in their nightly untouched cups there are also restless waters.

He stretches on his chair and takes out a picture of Arturo Prat from the back of his notebook. It’s the classic military bust: Arturo with a hand slipped between the two golden buttons of his coat, eyes fixed away from the viewer, as if indifferent to his own portrait. Lucho wonders whether Arturo also had trouble communicating with his wife, whether they also offered each other unnecessary cups of water, whether they too forgot their dreams. Whatever the answers, he writes:

At 10, Arturo joins the regiment.

Too young to understand gunpowder,

but already his bravery was—

Lucho, at 10, read Neruda and Mistral while hiding in the bathroom. His mother, Olga, used to conceal books in his bedsheets for him to read. Their arrangement had been a silent one – she never even once mentioned it before leaving Angel (such was her fear of the Captain), and Lucho only knew it had been her who had left the books because some of the pages had paint prints on them. His mother painted colourful landscapes; the vineyards in Santa Cruz, the avocado farms just out of San Fernando, the fruit stands in the highway near Melipilla, and countless panoramic setups of the domed chapel in Rengo, along with the wicker furniture stands, in sepia. Lucho was young back then, and as children tend to do, he confused his parents’ routines, his mother’s persistence in remaining locked away in the shed that had been once reserved for chickens, with happiness. Olga had complained about the lack of space to work in the house and Angel, who didn’t want to hear anything more about painting and his failure to provide space, had killed the hens one by one with his bare hands – a story he would bring up every now and then whenever Olga complained about the quality of supermarket eggs.

And she would always show them her finished paintings, and though there weren’t enough walls to hang them on, his father hadn’t said anything about the oily smells coming from the growing piles of colour in every corner of the house, or the fact that he had to shit facing a miserable depiction of the annual pilgrimage to Rengo, in which she’d decided to paint the blood on the pilgrims’ knees black, like they were bleeding their own shadows. His father had let the paintings accumulate, and so Lucho learnt to live with it all too. Then Allende had come to power and, as Lucho would later confirm as another one of his father’s messianic truths, it wasn’t the country that had made a pact with the devil but the people within it – the homes, the families. That’s where Satan hides, Angel had said. In our homes. He comes in through the front door, invited, and he feeds in clean kitchens with the children.

And so Satan, who’d by then become a Marxist, hid in the chicken shed and held his mother’s brush.

But was that bravery?

If all he knew, all he learnt,

was how to have enemies –

does a coward have to mourn

the lives he didn’t end?

After Allende came, his mother spent all her days working on a single painting she wouldn’t let anyone see. And Lucho is certain – or had he dreamt it? – certain he’d heard her make her way to the shed some nights too. She went so far as to install a steel padlock on the shed door, which made the other army wives in San Fernando, who would never think of killing their own chickens, gossip about the room’s purpose. She went from town witch to communist conspirator to communist conspirator witch, but Lucho knew these to be lies because she would often make him go and buy her paint tubes and brushes at the ferreteria.

When she abandoned them, Lucho’s father kicked the shed door in. The painting, it turned out, was not a landscape, for once. There were layers and layers of red and black spirals, the paint almost as thick as the canvas, and in the upper left-hand side, she had carved out three crosses.

‘Communists don’t know how to finish anything,’ Lucho’s father said. ‘They lack a final goal.’ He then took the canvas into the house. He burnt all the other painting piles stacked around the room, all of them but that one. He hung it so that it faced Lucho’s bed. ‘So that you remember the kind of cancer we’re up against,’ he said, and then switched off the light. But Lucho hadn’t been able to sleep, that night. No, it wasn’t because she’d left – for his father had explained to him that communists didn’t understand love and commitment, that she hadn’t loved Lucho, and therefore that they, in turn, had only felt false things, been led by falsehoods, been deceived when they had provided for her (‘and,’ he had added, ‘the pain of truth was preferable to love affairs with lies’). No, no, it was the way the moon shone right on the painting. Lucho remembers the reds moving, the dried-up oily drippings abandoned midstroke, the bloody waves against that absent crucifixion. Throughout the night he’d stared at it, waiting for the red current to leave the frame and take over the bedroom walls, just as he’s looking right now, because this is where he’s hung the painting, in the only part of his house that he hasn’t allowed the movers to touch, and so this is the first piece of their lives to have a set place in it: facing his desk.

Yes, at ten, he was reading poems he came to hate. But just as in Arturo Prat’s case, Lucho felt that there was something heroic in how well he learnt to love and hate the right things:

Unlike most, Prat understood that the

greatest fears come not from seeing death

in the stormy oceans,

but from the belief that such a vision

is to be avoided.

Lucho tears out the page and chucks it in the paper basket beside him. Who the hell would want to read about a ten-year-old Prat? There’s something disturbing in describing a child as brave. No room for improvement. A reminder of the cowardice of most adults. No, what matters are the battles. What matters are Prat’s death and the language used to describe said death to make it matter.

What made Lucho start thinking about Arturo in the first place was reading his son Pablo’s history textbooks (which he checked for errors) and in which he found only one page about Arturo, which ended:

And then he commanded his men to leap onboard

the enemy ship, and then he leapt too and

died, leaving his crew to fight.

He’d asked Pablo what he thought about the fact that their heroes were being murdered all over again by lazy writers, but Pablo didn’t give a damn. Pablo even asked, when Lucho brought the subject up: ‘Wasn’t he the guy who killed himself jumping off his ship? I don’t even believe he made the jump. He fell into the sea, drowned, and that was that.’

Lucho could have beaten him. He had really felt an urge to. But then Lucho understood that, like all youths today, Pablo wanted to be punished. No, he wanted to deserve it, deserve punishment, because it’s easier to die in a fight than to live asking for forgiveness. And so Lucho took Pablo’s guitar, set it against a tree in their garden and, with his father’s rifle, shot at it. There was a chord at first, and then a collection of splinters.

He regrets shooting the guitar because despite it all, he can’t help but feel responsible for his son’s opinions, his naivety – that, and he still sees traces of childhood in Pablo’s face. God knows he never laid a hand on him growing up.

_____

Lucho sees the two lorries parking by the road. Men in blue cotona overalls climb out of them and Ramona greets them in the front porch. The workers begin by lowering a sofa – one of the few things she’d wanted to get rid of (it was his father’s) – and then the TV he’d bought her just last Christmas, when she’d begged to switch the old black and white set for a colour one.

Pablo comes out too. He doesn’t help with anything, and Lucho knows it’s because the only thing he cares about is the new guitar Lucho should have never bought him.

And what is there for Lucho to receive? He is simpler than his wife and son. He’ll think about Prat’s jump a little longer and then go downstairs for dinner and then, glass of water in hand, he’ll try and predict how his career will progress. What his boat is and the kind of ocean he’s navigating – and what the hell he’s jumping into. (Or had he lived through the jump already?)

He laughs at himself a little, because writing always leaves him with a voice in his head that isn’t his. His father once said poets love putting on voices while they perform (Neruda had just come on TV) so that they appear to see the past, present and future in ways we simple mortals can’t fathom without their help, their vision.

Lucho couldn’t have predicted this move. Arturo couldn’t have predicted the magnitude of his own name. And Lucho must abandon all poetry anyway, because in the end, he thinks, while looking at Prat’s picture, it’s a mark of stupidity to read actions as symbols and signs. It’s all much simpler: there he is dying, and here’s Lucho trying to write about it.

POETRY NOTES – BOOK OF RAMONA

Preparations: Travelling the Great Sea

Readiness, you say,

is the lonesome bird

feeding in our garden.

It will surely die,

cradled in its roots.

He closes his notebook, and looks at the red painting until there’s a knock at his door and—

‘Senor, it’s time for the once,’ Mariela says, and he follows her down. But not before shaking and pulling the new padlock on the door until he’s sure it works perfectly.

• Telenovela, by Gonzalo C. Garcia, will be published by Galley Beggar Press in November 2025. To pre-order a copy, head here.