Space Invaders by Nona Fernández

Author:Nona Fernández [Fernández, Nona]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781644450079
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 2019-11-15T05:00:00+00:00

IV

The game is simple and we have an hour to play it. Everybody knows and that’s why we all show up on time. Our mothers and fathers are in the parent meeting and we shut ourselves in here, in this dark classroom belonging to the grade above or the grade below, never our own classroom. We like to come at night, though we aren’t invited. Our parents sit at our desks, answer to our names on the attendance list, and discuss things involving us with our teacher. Meanwhile, here, a few yards away, we’ve changed out of our uniforms and we’re wearing other clothes, our own clothes, real clothes, ready to be real and play our own game.

The light is off in the classroom and the air thickens. Amid a darkness as black as night or death, we, the usual someones, stop being ourselves. Now no one is who they claim to be. No name is embroidered on the lapel of any smock. We’re different people. Shadows, hushed ghosts moving silently with arms and hands outstretched, trying to run into something. Donoso goes after Maldonado. He touches her shoulder, then her neck, he tangles his fingers in a mop of hair that he thinks is hers. Bustamante finds an elbow that’s connected to someone’s right hand—whose hand he doesn’t know, and he doesn’t ask, either. Fuenzalida’s face meets Riquelme’s, nose to nose. They breathe together, registering each other’s smell and taste, testing each other’s saliva. Zúñiga moves around the dark room in search of González. He pats heads, legs, arms, and he wants to call out, but names don’t work here, attendance-taking is left outside of the dark room, and González is no longer González, because now she’s part Maldonado, part Fuenzalida, part Acosta too. And a tongue slips into Zúñiga’s mouth. It’s a little tongue, though very intrusive, a tongue that could be anyone’s. And somebody laughs and somebody hides, and somebody laughs again, while someone else sneezes in a corner and someone collides with the chalkboard at the front of the room. Bustamante’s ears are burning, he feels like he’s about to burst. Donoso bites Maldonado’s neck, apparently he can’t help himself, and Maldonado howls like a cat. Zúñiga laughs because of the tickling, someone is tickling him or maybe no one is and it’s just laughter, pure laughter that seizes us all, while the quartz watch with the little light on somebody’s wrist counts down the minutes until the end. Then, in the last seconds of the game, come the clutches, the crushes, the squeezes, the tongues licking and seeking and not speaking, because here there are no words, no names, we’re just one body with many paws and hands and heads, a little Martian from Space Invaders, an octopus with multiform arms playing this game in a darkness that’s about to lift.

The light suddenly comes on and the monitor is watching us from the doorway. We’re all exactly where we’re supposed to be, boys to the right and girls to the left.

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