Passage I

LITERARY NARRATIVE: This passage is from the short story “Long Distance" by Alejandro Zambra.

Portillo was a good boss, a generous guy; I rarely saw him, sometimes only on the twenty-ninth, when waited, with some stupendous circles under my eyes, to pick up my paycheck. What I remember most about him is his voice, so high-pitched, like a teenager's—a common enough tone among Chileans but, for me, a disconcerting one to hear from a Spaniard. He would call me very early, at six or seven in the morning, so I could give him a report on what had happened the previous night, which was pretty much pointless, because nothing ever happened, or almost nothing: maybe some call or other from Rome or Paris, simple cases from people who weren't really sick but who wanted to make the most of the medical insurance they had bought in Santiago. My job was to listen to them, take down their information, make sure the policy was valid, and connect them to my counterparts in Europe.

Portillo let me read or write, or even doze off, on the condition that I always answer the phone in good time. That's why he called at six or seven—although, when he was out partying, he might call earlier. "The phone should never ring more than three times," he would tell me if I took too long picking up. But he didn't usually scold me; on the contrary, he was quite friendly. Sometimes he asked me what I was reading. I would say Paul Celan, or Emily Dickinson, or Emmanuel Bove, or Humberto Diaz Casanueva, and he always burst out laughing, as if he had just heard a very good and very unexpected joke.

One night, around four in the morning, I received a call from someone whose voice sounded mock-serious or disguised, and I thought it was my boss pretending to be one else. "I'm calling from Paris," said the voice. The man was calling direct, which increased my feeling that it was a prank of Portillo's, because clients usually reversed the charges when they called. Portillo and I had a certain level of trust between us, so I told him not to mess with me, that I was very busy reading. "I don't understand, I'm calling from Paris," the man responded. "Is this the number of the travel insurance?"

I apologized and asked him for his number so I could call him back. When we talked again I'd become the nicest phone operator on the planet, which wasn't really necessary, because I've never been impolite, and because the man with the unrealistic voice was also unrealistically nice, which was not usual in that job: it was more common for clients to show their bad manners, their high-handedness, their habit of treating phone operators badly, and surely also laborers, cooks, salespeople, or any other of the many groups made up of their supposed inferiors.

Juan Emilio's voice, on the other hand, suggested the possibility of a reasonable conversation, although I don't know if reasonable is the word, because as I was taking down his information (fifty-five years old, home address in Lo Curro, no preexisting conditions) and checking his policy (his insurance had the best coverage available on the market), something in his voice made me think that, more than a doctor, he just needed someone to talk to, someone who would listen.

He told me he'd been in Europe for five months, most of that time in Paris, where his daughter—whom he called la Mono—was working on her doctorate and living with her husband—el Mati—and the kids. None of this was in response to my questions, but he was talking so enthusiastically that it was impossible for me to break in. He told me how the kids spoke French with charmingly correct accents, and he also threw in a few commonplace observations about Paris. By the time he started talking to me about the difficulties la Mono had been having lately meeting her academic obligations, about the complexity of the doctoral programs, and about what kind of sense parenthood made in a world like this one ("a world that sometimes seems so strange nowadays, so different," he told me), I realized we'd been talking for almost forty minutes. I had to interrupt him and respectfully ask him to tell me why he was calling. He told me he was a little under the weather and he'd had a fever. I typed up the fax and sent it to the office in Paris so they could coordinate the case, and then I started the long process of saying good-bye to Juan Emilio, who fell all over himself in apologies and politeness before finally accepting that the conversation had ended.

Back then I'd picked up a few evening hours teaching at the technical training institute. The schedule fit perfectly.

From Alejandro Zambra's "Long Distance," In My Documents (Mcsweeney's, 2015).