The fantasy-oriented narrative usually points in several cardinal directions. One approach is to shape into the everyday and the normal startling, unusual phenomena. And there arise there the hesitations felt by a character before an event, which lead him to doubt whether that bewilderment or that fear respond to a natural law or to patterns that escape the logic to which we have grown accustomed. For example, a man already in his forties who lives with his sister in a deep, ancient house, generations old, where an imprecise and unknown noise begins to repeat itself and steadily take over everything day by day, firmly. Perhaps it is the crucial and decisive protagonist of the story who vacillates. And that character ends up reflecting those of us who read.
There can also be a narrative that threads through the alteration of the course of time. A narrative, regardless of its length, driven by a compass that is not always precise nor well magnetized, capable of going back calendars, of showing ups and downs of dates and of stacking one circumstance on another, of lying “face up,” lying down. Or even repeating days and superimposing parallel planes of time with their curves and contortions. Contortions not only of time but of settings. As happens to that man riding a motorcycle who runs over a woman and is the one who suffers serious injuries in the accident. I glimpse how they carry him on a stretcher from the site to the ambulance, then to the hospital, and to an operating room, between an ancestral stupor and a confused dream where an indigenous person flees enemies of another lineage who want to trap him to offer him as a victim of a millennial sacrifice. He escapes the “infinite lie of that dream.”
Another vein is the duplication of the self. It can manifest a divided or even multiplied identity. It hints at the ambiguity between what is hidden and what is visible, the exterior and the interior, and it can sometimes lead to absolute destruction. Or to a splitting of reality. It hints at a situation that is not fully clarified.
Because another one of the cases heads straight toward that uncertainty about reality. It seeks to make us think. Doubt. Poe, a pioneering master of the short story, wove in one of his tales the story of someone who uses the first name and patronymic surname, “William Wilson”, and will feel pursued by another who increasingly resembles him. Among his opening words, these: “The pristine page before me must not be stained with my true name.”
As you will understand, these theories do not amount to much. The theories are woven and that silent night Penelope comes and unthreads the fabric that later begins again with other principles. Penelope are those who write. Every person who creates a story. And shares it with readers.
And he is the author of this precise “Double of Time”, where his swift narrator recounts in the present tense what, to him, it means to live an anomaly. He bears witness to what is happening before him. Time, our temporal logic, behaves in a strange way. That anonymous narrator leaves his house in a hurry at the end of the day and wants to get back as soon as possible. But he will not arrive in a straightforward manner. Although haste and urgency sharpen this microfiction from the start. Perhaps the rush is the cause of the abnormality, of the perplexity, of what escapes ordinary life and the life we have always known. A young scholar, Jorge Concha Quintrileo, asserted that the endings of some of Diego Muñoz Valenzuela’s micro-stories do not always contribute to definitively clarifying the phenomenon that disrupts everyday events. And that is why this literary will makes the reader a “co-creator in the sense-making” of the narrative. The writer seeks to “influence the reader’s critical capacity toward reality and toward oneself.”
Certainly. One cannot explain whether the protagonist has traveled to the past, whether he has created a duplicate of himself, whether he is trapped in a time loop, or whether it is a different dimension. We are left as the narrator and protagonist of that displacement of time. As if the beginning were about to start again.
The title “Double of Time” has several senses: not only an alter ego or a fold in the clock or the coexistence of two chronological moments or two versions of the same minute…
And it proposes—perhaps—a consideration: precisely the one who wants to control the advance of time, with all haste and acceleration, arrives before having left.
The last three lines are to be read slowly. Not just twice but several times. With triple intensity. And perhaps to take it with humor. Without looking at the time.
*****
Double of Time
I leave my house in a rush, I want to return soon. I see that the sunset is beginning and I hurry even more. I run to the market and buy in haste, without haggling prices or demanding brands. I pay and set off in long strides with my bags. I am surprised that it is not night; on the contrary, it is brighter than when I left. I jog until I reach in front of the house. Through the window I see myself getting ready to go out. I sit on a bench, dazed. I pass by myself, running, and I do not even notice myself. I disappear around the corner. I do not know what to do. ■
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