There’s one last scene that I want to write. It isn’t part of any imaginative exercise, but pure domestic reality. In this scene, water sloshes in the dishwasher as M and I scrub the day’s grime from the tile floor. M is talking about Frankenstein. He’s been rereading the book and now he remembers that at the end Mary Shelley’s monster goes to hide in the Arctic, far from the world, fleeing himself and the crimes he’s committed. He’s a monster, M says. He alone knows the horror of what he’s done, so he decides to disappear.
As I rinse the forks and spoons, I think it’s true, the monster is a monster. But there is a qualification: He didn’t choose to be what he is. He was part of a gruesome experiment. Doctor Frankenstein stitched a body out of corpses and brought to life a being haunted by its own smell of death.
M, scrubbing the dirty frying pan with steel wool, replies that this explains his actions, but it doesn’t absolve him of having been a monster. According to that logic, all monsters would be exonerated by their pasts.
I imagine the white landscape of the Arctic and a half-beast, half-human creature wandering the emptiness, condemned to loneliness and a smell he’ll never shed because it’s a part of him. The monster repented, I insist. That’s why he hides away in the Arctic. Doesn’t that mean something?
It might, says M. But that only makes him a repentant monster.
Dear Andrés,
in this new life of yours
that I find so hard to imagine,
maybe you don’t hide the way you used to.
Thirty years are enough
to learn how to blend in.
Probably by now you’re part of the landscape.
Probably your Chilean-accented French
doesn’t attract much attention anymore.
Probably this letter from me
written in your native language,
in short, curt sentences like yours,
will strike you as a message
in some indecipherable tongue.
I know your mustache is gray now.
I know you wear glasses.
I know your wife from back then is no longer your wife.
I know you’re in touch with your children and grandchildren.
I know you’ve had different jobs.
I know you drive a truck.
I know you’re sick, or you were.
I know that in the evenings you read and forage for mushrooms.
I know that Chile has faded somewhat in your mind,
but not your beach: Papudo.
Dear Andrés, Papudo is still a pretty beach.
Especially now in winter
when only a few of us are strolling
its black sands.
In this life, which is the only one I have,
I’ve chosen this place to say goodbye.
Ahead of me a dog runs alone,
fleeing the waves.
It barks and startles a flock of gulls.
The sea is tossed by the wind.
It comes and goes, like the scenes I’ve tried to imagine.
I hear voices each time a wave breaks.
Cries for help trapped in glass bottles.
Hundreds of bottles.
Maybe more.
In the distance I think I see you smoking a cigarette.
You’re young, no mustache,
probably not in military service yet.
You must be a few years older than my son.
You’ve stopped for a moment and you’re staring at the horizon
as if you know that over there, across the sea,
a hiding place awaits you and becomes your home.
As you smoke you’re interrupted by someone’s intrusive stare.
It’s me, spying on you from the future.
You wave politely.
You smile, I think, and walk on along the shore.
You don’t know who I am.
You can’t imagine the message I bring
from Christmases future.
The air is cool here in Papudo.
I’ll eat clams and dip my feet in the icy sea.
But that will be tomorrow, it’s getting dark already
and the stars are beginning to come out.
Dear Andrés,
in your new life of foraging for mushrooms
and reading in the evenings,
you’re probably in bed,
awake or asleep, dreaming of rats.
Of dark rooms and rats.
Of women and men screaming,
of letters from the future inquiring about those screams.
When I was a girl I was told that stars
were the bonfires of the dead.
I didn’t understand why the dead
lit bonfires.
I assumed it was to send smoke signals.
How else could they communicate
with no phone, no mail?
My fire has gone out here on the beach.
I’m a hazy shadow in the glow of the embers.
I pick up a piece of charcoal
and draw on a dark mustache.
It’s something I learned as a girl.
I was trained for this, I think.
Born to be a detective and a seer.
The smoke reddens my eyes.
I move in an army crawl, eyes watering,
across Papudo’s black sands.
On hands and knees I reach your pillow.
I creep into your slumbers and with a curved knife
I write the words you’ve dictated to me
so that they echo
like smoke signals sent into infinity.
This is an information post, a smoke station.
Of shared nightmares.
Of dark rooms.
Of stopped clocks.
Of twilight zones.
Of rats and ravens still shrieking.
Of mustaches painted on with soot.
And the future will come
and it will have the red eyes of a devil dreaming.
You’re right.
Nothing is real enough for a ghost.
Papudo, V Region, June 2016
Nona Fernández was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1971. She is an actress and writer, and has published two plays, a collection of short stories, a work of nonfiction, and six novels, including Space Invaders. In 2016 she was awarded the Premio Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Her books have been translated into French, Italian, German, Greek, Portuguese, Turkish, and English.
Natasha Wimmer is the translator of nine books by Roberto Bolaño, including The Savage Detectives and 2666. Her most recent translations are Nona Fernández’s Space Invaders and Sudden Death by Álvaro Enrigue. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two children.
The text of The Twilight Zone is set in Arno Pro.
Book design by Rachel Holscher.
Composition by Bookmobile Design and Digital Publisher
Services, Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Manufactured by Versa Press on acid-free,
30 percent postconsumer wastepaper.
