The Girls Resembled Each Other in the Unfathomable

Clearly the Alicia I’m talking to you about isn’t the same girl of fourteen, at least not the Alicia Vivar the investigators are still seeking. She got up, she went running into the sea. And she managed to kick sand in my eyes. For peeping! she shouted. Then I had to go running after her, grabbing her where the waves were already over our shoulders and forcing her down under the full weight of my body for the space of half a minute. She came up half drowned and wouldn’t speak to me. Then I took her face in my hands to say: my little girl, my lost one, my unreadable book. Right, moron, in your dreams, she answered, before coming closer to bite my lip. That’s what I was fated to discover. That we’ll never be allowed to experience a desire that we simply can’t handle. I’m writing this for her, wherever she is. For me this report can’t be neutral: hundreds of associations come between us, just because I was naive enough to believe that love had something to do with words, with the correct use of them. Now I’m afraid to talk; I’ll just turn into a professional. But one thing is true. I loved Alicia. Most importantly: I still love her. Whatever the name she’s got now.

That’s why I’m writing at this time of night. Back from forty hours of work at the laboratory. Drunk. Alone. Lost. Staring into the grave. I know what’s right, what awaits me and the splendour. Glimpses. I know, too, that sometimes, in the Cadillac, Francisco Virditti opened his eyes and watched Bruno head for the beach wearing nothing but a bathing suit. Virditti knew perfectly well which girl Bruno had chosen that afternoon, all of them different but resembling each other in the unfathomable. Bruno worked things so as to dive in next to them, make some charming joke, laugh – sidelong glance – and brush against them, as if by chance, in the salt and the spray. So that ten minutes later the girl felt sorry for Bruno Vivar when she noticed his purple lips and offered to share her towel with him. That was the key moment, when they got back to where her things were and she turned pale upon discovering that her towels had been stolen. The shaken look on her face. She reminded me of my sister, or rather my father’s daughter, Bruno would tell me much later, between two whiskeys, under the weight of a death threat: my threat. Arrogant twisted idiot, fucking hell, if I had him in front of me this instant he wouldn’t get a word out. I’d spit on him; kick the shit out of him. And that’s all there is to say. Because at the same time Virditti was laughing his head off in the car. He had crossed the beach, taken the towels, and coolly returned to the passenger seat of the Cadillac as Bruno plied his charms amid the waves. But the game was interrupted when Alicia chose to wait for Francisco Virditti in the back seat of the Cadillac and greet him: idiot, you’re the one I wanted to see. I realize that there was nothing I could do to stop her. Then he started the car and sped toward the highway. Where death so often dwells.