by Lina Meruane
pure Chile
It was too late to back out now: I would fly to Santiago on the date we’d agreed, and Ignacio would fly to Buenos Aires to give his speech. When he was finished, he promised, he would come to Chile to get me. The airline tickets, already printed and folded in the drawer, were our pledge to meet again. We had left the purchase of the Bolivian leg of our trip pending, but that flight had crashed and burned in the eye doctor’s office. Boulivia, Lekz had said, making an effort to imitate my pronunciation, Boulivia, better we didn’t go there, the high pressure and lack of oxygen would not only lead to altitude sickness, it could also burst my veins. But it hadn’t been necessary to reach the heights of La Paz; all it took was a ninth floor with a view of the hollow left by the twin Manhattan towers. The red I saw, first in one eye, then the other, had settled the question of that trip. We would not go to Bolivia. And I wouldn’t go to Argentina, either. Now I’d only fly to Santiago, I’d go without doubt, without hesitation, without delay: I was leaving in just a few days, and still. The phone calls from Chile started up, with a calling card or charges reversed, calls insisting that I travel sooner. That I should have the surgery there, where they were: my family, that turbulent clan of Mediterranean origins, armed to the teeth with love. Have it where they, all together or in shifts, could take care of things. Come with me to surgery, if necessary. Give instructions to the specialists. Advise me during my convalescence. Without realizing, they were conspiring against the little inner peace I had, against my powerful need to be a little alone with my fears and my enormous ingratitude. With myself and my dark purposes. But they were having none of that. They interrupted me. They held forth without listening to me. They promised prayer chains and homemade remedies without giving a thought to the agonizing state of my phone bill. They swore my anxiety would disappear under the weight of their own. Don’t worry about a thing, they repeated in a chorus, a rowdy and tense chorus, not a thing, because added and multiplied and all tallied up, the balance of my family’s anxiety would crush my own, which only went up and up, swelling like yeast and secreting a suffocating bile. Red lights were flashing everywhere: the word care stung, loss of control burned, return was dangerous and have surgery in Chile a punishment to which I didn’t plan to subject myself. I had already agreed once before to see that other doctor, with his inflated cheeks, who diagnosed eyes from atop an imperious podium. You’re about to burst, he’d told me, putting on determinist airs. I don’t know how you aren’t already completely blind, because any minute now. Here there is nothing to do except remove them, he finally said, looking at me fixedly and inflexibly, with impatience, letting me know that other patients were waiting. I would never go back. I’d promised myself. I’d told them that and yet, possessed of an atomic energy, they exhorted me to give him another chance. The no I gave them was round. An uppercase no. At the other end of the line they complained about my lack of willpower, my lack of consideration, my lack in general: my absence, my dispassion, my contempt for religion. They reproached me for their rushed and perhaps wrong but now old decision, at thirty years old—years that had been happy until then—to return to Chile when I. To suspend all their plans when I. And the phrase hung suspended, encrusted in all of their teeth. No one said: that disease, yours. No one said the tests, the diagnosis, the daily injections, the special diet, my mother’s exhaustive care, and a life far from family support. They didn’t talk about the difficult decision to leave splendid jobs in that hospital where overspending was the norm, nor of the fortune my parents would have amassed if only I. They didn’t say it, but there were truths hanging by the thread of that pause. Truths swinging in the breeze. It was an insult that I’d returned to the same city three decades later, at the age my parents were when they’d left it. And I was paying for that affront with a new technical glitch in my anatomy. They insinuated that returning to Chile to be with my parents was the right thing to do. They half-said it while the timer ran on my international bill and they finally said it while I visualized my body being sucked out into an abyss, my skeleton covered in its muscle and fat falling vertiginously toward Chile, my skin stretched ever tighter, my hair electrified, all my parts attracted by the law of national gravity, as I turned into an amorphous substance that, when it fell, would flatten the rest of my numerous family. I would crash into them, they would fall one after the other in a line across the tabletop. They’d knock one into the other, propelled by the weight of my mother, the stoutest of all our dominos and at the same time the most fragile.
blackmail
(Urgent for us to take a break. We’ll be right back after this pause, as the movies during the dictatorship used to announce before kidnapping the steamy scenes that never returned. A long break and then we’ll see, I thought in all my uneasiness. A period without seeing each other and without talking on the phone, so you can think. I was the one who decided on the break, wagering that the interruption would work like an evil love potion. That’s what I thought, but who knows what you were thinking when you unhappily accepted that pact of silence. We were thinking separately, but simultaneously. We thought differently, but at times we thought the same thing. And you also had your friends thinking for you. How it was necessary to resolve that long-distance mess, that ethical dilemma, the emotional blackmail the blind woman was subjecting you to. They all thought about it in their own way. Carmen corrected tests with one hand and used the other to stir and taste her ají de gallina, while her mouth complained about her son’s villainous father. Osvaldo was planning a marriage celebration that we wouldn’t be attending. Gaetán, training for his next ballet without focusing on the steps but laughing, nervous, shouting before the mirror. In his house, Julián smoked another cigarette slowly and gossiped through the keyboard with Carmen, who took a while to respond and copy Osvaldo, who would tell Gaetán, the other groom. Laura answered her emails preparing her summer classes, exhausted or maybe bored. Mariana put on lipstick, attending to her eyelashes that coiled like spiders; she smiled, pursed her mouth, making faces at herself in the mirror, choosing just the right one, the correct way to think about this matter. Piously? Perfidiously? And she talked to the mirror of your bad luck. Your bad eye. Of your becoming my seeing eye dog. That’s what they said to each other but only Arcadio dared say it to you, in the cafe on the corner, without making a scene. No flailing or gesticulating, not even mussing his hair since he’d just shaved it all off. Biting into a waffle cookie thin as a host, dropping a pinch of sugar into his espresso and a drop of cream or maybe skim milk, pausing briefly, dazzled by the shine of his own skull. That woman, he said, with a calculated and dramatic pause, she isn’t your girlfriend, she’s a blackmail artist. And he took another sip of his coffee. When you heard that you lost it, you turned into another Ignacio, and the new Ignacio’s eardrums flinched, his gums winced, his tongue dried out. He sat for a moment petrified with the cigarette hanging from his lips, afflicted by a sudden pain in the pit of his stomach. That Ignacio paid his part of the bill and took off, livid but most of all dizzy, secreting acid, overcome with disgust. His brain recoiled like a live oyster drenched in lemon juice. But in his own way, that pitiless way, that cold and offensive, son-of-a-bitch way of Arcadio’s, he spoke something of the truth, something I had also seen in all my blindness. He’s right, I told you after hearing you kick the door and then unscrew the lid from the antacid tablets. He’s right, I repeated, consciously sowing resentment toward your friends. They all think it but they don’t say it to you, or haven’t you noticed the way they speak to you lately, or what they talk about when they call, how I don’t exist in their conversations? And I went on struggling to separate my socks from the wool stockings designed to endure Chile’s raw winter. Arcadio hasn’t said anything you didn’t already know, I added then to your stern silence, without for an instant stopping my folding, long-and short-sleeved shirts, my jacket. All black, literally black but also black like the hate I professed for all of them, especially Arcadio. That friend of yours, I insis
ted in all frankness, feeling you were filling up with gasses, that you almost weren’t breathing, that Arcadio has hit the nail on the head. And then, kicking my half-empty suitcase you said, violent, the nail, that motherfucker, me cago en Dios.)
wheelchair
Time was speeding up. A shower. A brushing of teeth. A drying of the face. Full suitcases that exhale on closing. A Dominican taxi ordered by telephone and the subsequent arrival of a taxi that would be anything but yellow. The driver, who spoke a Caribbean Spanish, barely said a word to us, turned up the radio and muzzled us with a merengue that could have been bachata. My head had already set off on its own trip, and only the shell of my body remained, disregarded in the backseat. We were starting to put mental miles and silence between us, although we were still tied with an invisible and elastic cord. I could barely make anything out through the fog, but what I saw in that moment in horror, in terror, with true consternation, was that I was about to lose everything Ignacio gave me. I would no longer have his arms to guide me, his legs to direct me, his voice to warn me. I wouldn’t have his sight make up for the absence of my own. I would be left even more blind. I realized I had been clinging to Ignacio like ivy, wrapping him up and entangling him in my tentacles, suctioning him like a leech stubbornly stuck to its victim. That imminent flight was like a knife slicing between us as the taxi approached the airport, and my adrenaline started flowing. The cut was happening, it was turning into a deep wound, and the taxi left us at the terminal and Ignacio paid and took charge of my suitcase. The laceration was happening, had happened, in the security line as we moved forward in slow motion. Then, in fast forward. Ignacio took care of my passport check, he showed them my university student visa, the appropriate I-20, he asked them to give me an aisle seat, though in other times I would have chosen a window so I could watch the clouds during takeoff, and then he gave my luggage to the workers at the conveyor belt, took my hand and announced that the wheelchair had arrived. What wheelchair? I started to laugh, but, don’t laugh, Ignacio told me, I’m serious about the chair. A chair? A wheelchair? Why did you ask for that? I have two legs! Ignacio put his arms around me while I fought him, elbows flapping, but he put his arms firmly around me and soon he was a straightjacket, one that smelled of ashtrays and old, acidic sweat, a straightjacket that not only squeezed me until I cracked, it covered me in kisses: my temple, my nose, my ear. The straightjacket talked into my ear in a barely audible voice, and convinced me it was better for an airport employee to take me through immigration and go with me to the gate. That way I wouldn’t have to hold anyone’s hand. Wheelchair, I grumbled, swallowing saliva and brushing a lock of hair roughly from my face. Lina, panted my straightjacket again, cutting off or squeezing my name, Lini, everything will be all right, I promise, don’t cry, por favor, that makes me feel like shit. In the blink of an eye you’ll have crossed the mountains and you’ll be in Chile, Ignacio went on, as if that were any consolation. And I’ll be there in a few days, he finished, finally loosening his arms. And then I nodded and sat down and plugged some excessive sunglasses onto my face, and the chair started sliding backwards, and his voice gradually dissolved in the crowd while I finally sobbed freely.
count to a hundred
Ignacio is still in the airport, a disconcerted frown on his face. Ignacio standing under the glowing screen. Departures. Arrivals. His glasses glint over his now-empty eyes. It’s an aged and ruined Ignacio. An Ignacio cracked like an old statue on the verge of collapse. His shirt with the sleeves rolled up and his linen pants utterly tattered and his dull bronze shoes fixed to the floor. Centuries have passed, I think, and there he remains, covered by the ash or dust of my departure, clutching the anxious kiss I blew to him from a distance and enduring the unintelligible, cosmopolitan whisper of the travelers around him. His hands empty, he wished like never before for a cigarette between his fingers. I had vanished and already forgotten him, and I made my way among the travelers pushed by a woman with an iron will. She must have been obese, because she dragged her feet, she shuffled and complained. But she wouldn’t give up for all that. With the canine bearing of every good civil servant, she would carry out her mission. She knew all the terminal’s nooks and crannies, all the rules of the security checkpoint, every one of the employees. Her booming black voice cleared our way of any obstacles, and she pushed me up to the very door of the cabin. And with an offhand “There you are, ma’am,” she dumped me there. I got up as though on a spring. Alone. Without asking the attendants for help, I felt my way along the backrests counting seat numbers until I reached my spot and could sink down. The passengers went on stowing their suitcases and briefcases and bags, jackets and coats and all kinds of colossal gadgets that barely fit in the overhead compartments. They talked about being overweight, they laughed, they excused themselves diplomatically for stepping on each other, Ay, sorry, thank you, pucha que no entra esta huevada; that’s what their voices said as they melded into an incoherent tangle of words. I just had my backpack with the syringe ready to inject myself, and that’s what I did: I took off the cap, stuck the needle in wherever it fell, and pressed the pump, ignoring the uncomfortable sighs around me. Then I fastened my seatbelt in the hopes of dying for at least a little while on that overnight. But I wasn’t going to fall asleep, not yet, unfortunately. Because suddenly I noticed my legs were shaking, and that due to a strange but effective mechanical chain reaction, my whole body was trembling. My knees were clapping together like cymbals. My teeth were chattering. Wait a minute now, I said to myself. What’s this? Am I having a seizure? But it wasn’t a seizure, it was an electrical discharge that arose intermittently from my nerve center. This is just what I need, I thought, separating from myself and grabbing hold of Lucina, the Lucina who was me as I moved closer to Chile, and I grabbed her, like that, by the shoulders, and I started to shake her violently and to tell her, that is, tell myself: not now, Lucina, not a stupid panic attack, don’t put on a little show now and make them kick us off the plane and leave us at the airport. Right now, I told her, telling myself, you’re going to count to ten or a hundred, forwards or backwards, now, ok, get going, we’re counting now. And that’s what I did, but starting with uno and getting quickly to seis and when I got to diez I kept going without stopping because my disobedient body still wasn’t under control: the shaking was worse. And so it went from treinta y cinco to sesenta y siete and when I got to a hundred I started again, but in English this time: three five six, and I remembered as if I were back there, that was how I used to count when I was seven years old in the school I went to when I returned to Chile. In New Jersey I’d forgotten all my Spanish. Later, in Santiago, I’d forgotten English. Now I’m forgetting myself, I thought. I took a breath, covered my nose, went into the numerical trance of that divided childhood, and that’s how I reached a hundred again and started over, one more time, in one of my languages, thirty-three, treinta y tres, thirty-three.
claw
Count the next morning, too. Count instead of dropping pebbles that would guide my way back, or breadcrumbs that the birds would have eaten if I were crossing an enchanted forest and not walking down an airplane aisle. So I walked and counted seats, in search of the bathroom. Twenty-four. Everything under control, I told myself, balancing on the chemical toilet. On my way back the turbulence started, and my hand became a claw clutching awkwardly at the air, trying to grab hold of a backrest but landing, instead, on something warm, soft, meaty. My owl-fingers with their badly trimmed nails had come to rest on a shoulder. Or a breast. Or was it an ear? A sleeping body that I was shaking awake. I’m sorry, I stuttered, not really knowing where to direct my apology, I’m sorry, trying in vain or more like pretending I was trying to retract the claw from the mouth that opened suddenly to complain. What is this idiot doing? I heard a voice say, waking other people up. Trying not to fall over, I slid my hand up over a forehead of rough and impatient folds, and there my hand stayed, seizing up as we hit violent turbulence. Realizing the precarious balance I fo
und myself in, my torso leaning forward, the woman took a firm hold of my hand, pulled it finger by finger from her face, and forced it back to where it belonged. That’s your seat, she groused, as if I didn’t understand anything, as if I were mentally challenged or worse, to her: a gringa. Take one step back, she said, and maybe talking to her companion she murmured, if she’d take those glasses off, maybe she could see something. That accent, so unmistakably Chilean, harbored the glacial poem of the mountain peaks and their snows in eternal mid-thaw, the dark whisper of the south dotted with giant rhubarbs, the mourning of roadside shrines, the herb-garden smell, the rough salts of the desert, the sulfurous copper shell of the mine open to the sky. The entire nation embodied in the bitter, uncertain tone of that traveler who suddenly, as I lifted my glasses, understood. Blind? There was no need to explain to her I wasn’t entirely blind, that I could distinguish contrasts. That I knew the flight attendant had opened a window and it encased me in its rectangle of light, and that someone else had closed it again, that the light beams of a movie were shining intermittently. I was a blind woman capable of detecting flashes of light, and, from afar, also the compassion of others that came after surprise. Blind? That compassion made me crawl with hate. Blind! she said again. Sit down, please, repeated the woman, but I couldn’t move. That pity of hers had paralyzed me. It had me stuck there while my memory traveled quickly into the past. The woman must have thought I didn’t understand, and as if I were a dog trained in British English, she raised her voice and said sit, miss, you’re going to fall, sit! Shit, I thought, but instead of cursing her I chewed a short sí and another sí, ya le oí, I heard you, ma’am, and I even understood. I speak the same Spanish as you. I turned around and sat down diligently, turning on my walkman to listen to a book, any book, and I buckled my seat belt and tightened it to the point of asphyxiation.