by Lina Meruane
connections
Sunk once again in another wheelchair, I wanted to be a ghost stealthily returning to settle old scores, to cross through the world without feeling it instead of bumping awkwardly into it all. But as it was, rolling through the tube of the airport, the specter I hoped to be realized, overwhelmed and amazed, that I had materialized again. I’d been recognized. Someone was bawling the Lucina that the calendar of saints records only as an etymological error, like Lucila or Lucita or Lucía, or even Luz, which is so close to Luzbel, the demon of light. Under the hallucinogenic effects of anesthesia, my mother—who until then had professed nothing beyond the doctrines of pediatrics—thought she heard the child I was starting to be babble a name. Lucina! my mother called out when she heard me cry between her legs, and in ecstasy she repeated it to be sure. Lucina. The delirium was getting to me too, since that was the very word I thought I was hearing there in the passageway. Lucina. It grew in decibels. Lucina! Anticipating the body that emitted it like a lightning bolt that comes seconds ahead of the thunder. It was following me at full speed. Lucina? it said, doubting, ever closer, with an inquisitive nasal inflection, opening its way through the people. I heard panting breath and then a spasmodic what…? happened to you…? And without waiting for the answer I didn’t plan to give, the same thing again, more formally this time: what happened to you, Lucina?, still agitated from the run. Why are you in a wheelchair? Did you break your leg? I would have liked to leap with all my wheels and handles into the future, or jump into the past as off a cliff; but no, I take it back, I thought ipso facto, not into the past. The bearer of that voice could only come from a preterite tense to which I didn’t want to return. There was no escape. The employee in charge of pushing me stopped so the excruciating interrogation could continue. I pricked up my ears but could not place the voice anywhere in the fog of my adolescence. Without asking, so as not to give myself away, I followed what he was saying in search of clues. He almost hadn’t recognized me in those black glasses. They look straight out of DINA, he said, and then corrected himself. Are you going incognito? More like blind alter ego, I said to myself, praying he would leave. And as if sensing the impatience that was growing weedlike inside me, he corrected himself again. But they look great on you, are they from New York? From China, I murmured to myself, made in China or Taiwan or someplace in India. Imported direct from the street. (You gave them to me, Ignacio, and now you’re wearing a pair just like them.) We were silent. The employee got the chair moving again but my interrogator refused to give up on the scene of our failed reencounter. He followed, filling the pauses, saying aloud that New York was a fan-tas-tic city, that the things happening there were in-cre-di-ble, ab-so-lute-ly crazy, how could people so immeasurably rich live on the same island with the kind of beggars you didn’t even see in Chile anymore? He’d gotten on the subway with a troupe of hobos who had surely hopped the turnstiles, and later he realized that they slept in the cars or on the platforms or among rats so obese they looked like nutria. I heard him asking me if I hadn’t heard of unbridled capitalism, the bankruptcy of the state, the successive closing of shelters. I didn’t say anything, because he was already talking about the reason for his trip. September 11th. The first anniversary. A special report. If only I’d known you were there, he said—because you were there, right?—because no one had wanted to talk to him, no one, not until he’d pulled at some threads and finally tracked some people down. You can’t even imagine, he said, cutting himself off. And then he placed between us the word success. I imagined a swollen reporter drowning in emotion while he said. I found overlooked people, illegal immigrants, some of them Chilean! Dis-a-ppeared, he said, and I thought about that worn-out word while wishing for a moment to disappear myself. We were going down an escalator and he was behind me saying, no one has shown this yet, and I’m going to do it, my team and I, though it’ll be my name on it. His name. Who could he be? I thought. And though I didn’t really care, my left hemisphere was running through the archives of old names and forgotten faces, while the right, just as vehement, was wondering shamelessly, if this was the guy who back in his day had sold us on the glories of a harmonious transition. I had masturbated his success in the backseat of a Citroneta before disappearing without explanations, leaving my name behind. And when does your report air? I asked just to say something, without realizing that the only possible date was September 11th. In two months. The people, he exclaimed, will know the truth! And the employee, who had sped up the chair’s pace, braked all of a sudden and launched me forward. What truth, if I might ask? he asked defiantly, as if he were reading my thoughts but pronouncing my question in a Peruvian accent. The connections between our September 11th and theirs! What don’t you understand? And the reporter addressed me once again, as if demanding professional complicity from me as an ex-journalist, to crown the conversation: doesn’t it strike you as an amazing coincidence, 9/11? It’s not a coincidence and it’s not repetition, I told him, annoyed. It’s nothing but a strange double image.
rescue operation
My father comes to the rescue and pulls me out of my introspection. It’s his bony tourniquet hand that falls onto my shoulder. His debilitated skeleton, his long femur I hold on to. He leans over to kiss my forehead and I extend my fingers to run them over his face, trying to trace his face into my palm. I touch him like the professional blind woman I’m becoming. My father is alive, I think, he’s alive in there, inside his body. Then his voice, the word daughter, winds its way through the crush of passengers waiting for suitcases, and in my ear drum his relieved words echo: I had to insist before they’d let me come in and look for you. I imagine he gives a tip to the employee so he’ll disappear, and then he says, as though bewildered, together again, Lucina, daughter. He says it in a voice of hope and sorrow, and I know that the hopeful tone is for daughter and the sorrow is for Lucina. No one but my father uses his saliva to glue those two words together into a single compound word: Lucina-daughter. That daughter is adhered to me, stuck like a throbbing shadow on my back. That daughter and I are for him the same person with a single dilemma. He must be observing us very seriously, trying not to feel anything, my father, pretending to be a tin man. If you probed him you’d hear his words echoing against the walls of his body. But my father’s core is not totally empty. At the level of his eyebrows and just behind his eyes there are machines of all kinds: a magnificent motor that propels him, slowly, forward; an extremely punctual clock, a colossal memory fit for details both indispensable and useless. There is also a punished heart in a dark corner that no one notices, except maybe, in secret, my mother. But among all these mechanisms lurks the risk of a malfunction. If the tension rises. If some sharp emotion. Danger sign, and then. Right now I’m afraid to think my father’s silence could be a short circuit. An interruption in speech called going mute, cut-off concentration that could keep us from reaching his house. It’s no secret that my father gets through difficult situations using distraction. He gets into his old Dodge like a crew member boarding a spaceship, and in that trance he holds long conversations with himself, or gives lessons in internal medicine, or delivers speeches, and he argues, discusses, gesticulates, until he finds himself in the parking lot of the hospital where he still works. He’s on time but he doesn’t know how he did it, which streets he took, which red lights stopped him. He could have run over a cat and not realized. But he gets out of the car and his true function begins: a doctor infallible in matters of the heart. Of organically rickety hearts. Hearts in need of pacemakers. Clogged carotids. Blocked arteries. And because my father is exclusively dedicated to non-amorous cardiac catastrophes, he doesn’t know anything about ailing retinas. I know he’ll ask for my test results out of habit; still sitting in my wheelchair, I prepare myself to tell him I didn’t bring them. I didn’t bring anything, Dad, I tell him. None of them? he asks, and I say no, not the angiography or the optical tomography or the fundus of the eye. I left hundreds of brutal images behind. I left the perimetry
behind because it was depressing. I didn’t ask for copies of any reports. It wouldn’t do any good for you to have them, I tell him, shutting down the conversation. My father stands possibly thoughtful and then he murmurs an I see, Luci, hija, dear, which is almost a rebuke. I’ve never wanted you to be my doctor, it’s enough for you to be my father. The silence after that is so weighty that it seems to creak; my father dispels it by saying. It wasn’t so I could look at them. I wouldn’t understand, he confirms in a mournful tone. Because eyes today are not what they used to be. He falls silent again and glances, I’m sure, at the conveyer belt, motionless and still empty of suitcases. Then he says to me, although really he says it to himself because his murmur is almost inaudible: half a century ago eyes were different. We looked at them with naked eyes and we saw so little. The medicine I studied is outdated, he explains, and it’s true. It was all left behind at the side of a rocky road with twisted, rusted-out signs blowing in the wind. My father is a species going extinct. All he can do is come to the baggage claim and find my suitcase for me. The belt starts to move, regurgitating shapes of different sizes, and my father asks me what color my suitcase is with that serenity so like him. Blue, I say, with wheels. That’s all and it’s enough. Here it is. Now let’s get going.
old pajamas
(This is the father I would introduce to you when you arrived, Ignacio. A man crowned by frizzy salt-and-pepper hair that had always been thick but was now becoming sparse. The breeze lifted and mussed it and left him looking like a mad or sad scientist, tall but bent by the weight of the successive deaths life had obliged him to attend. My father now went ruminating along, dragging my suitcase and taking his usual long strides impossible to match, not noticing I was limping and clutching his arm. I had aged without warning, I’d filled up with aches and pains; the neurotic stiffness in my hip had gotten worse on the flight. Every movement set off a tense spark in my groin. I can’t walk that fast, Dad, wait a second, I told him. Almost there, he replied, a little out of it, not noticing my difficulty, engrossed as he was in calculating the distance: no more than a hundred and twenty-four meters and a few centimeters to the airport entrance, then fifteen to the parking lot gate, he announced with military precision, while I went on shuffling like a penguin over the cold winter pavement. I unhooked myself from his arm and told him to go ahead. I can’t. My father slowed his stride and took advantage of my exaggerated slowness to bring up the medical issue again. Hija, he said softly, for once renouncing his authoritarian instinct, wouldn’t it be better for you to have the operation in Chile? I bit my lips, Ignacio, I bit them to keep from saying that I hadn’t come to ask for more medical opinions, I’d made the pilgrimage to enough doctors’ offices and no one had given me anything but anxiety. No, I’d come to say that I needed them, and that I never wanted to need them again. Dad, I murmured, we’ve had this conversation too many times. I was exhausted, and I knew my father was taking advantage of my weariness. I decided to let myself be carried along for a while on his deliberate, faltering but precise scientific disquisition. My father was the only person who could make me waver, but I’d learned to wear armor. Trying to elude his reasoning, my mind drifted toward my father’s least reasonable aspects, his most arguable and nostalgic facets, the most incoherent, the most inexplicable traits in a doctor of his ilk. My father in loose, worn-out pajamas, translucent from wear, in which he’d walk around the house like a nudist. My father in love with those pajamas, brought from New Jersey over thirty years before, and which he refuses to throw out in spite of my mother’s pleas and her offers of better, softer, and especially more appropriate pajamas. Decent ones, says my mother, who even offers, instead of throwing them out, to cut them up, recycle them as rags so that my father’s now very dead cells would pick up the house’s grime and be of some use. I thought of my father half-naked and half-dressed, my exhibitionist father, my father; yes, I was looking for arguments to counter his accusations that I was an unreasonable, inconsiderate daughter, stubborn like my mother. The pajamas showed his own stubbornness, his disregard toward the shame and modesty of others. The neighbors who spied through the fence. Olga, who had lost all curiosity. You yourself, when you came, would avert your eyes from him. But my dear, answered my father, his voice rising in surprise, what do my pajamas have to do with all this? It’s not the same thing to cling to pajamas as to a doctor, he added, surely blushing. Exactly, Dad, a doctor is much more crucial than a little piece of cloth. I only trust this doctor, you should understand that. And there the conversation ended. We went on walking slowly, both quiet, each chewing over our own thoughts, and suddenly I felt or I realized, Ignacio, that we had spent a long time wandering around in search of his old Dodge. Dad, I said, yielding to the role of daughter for a while. Is it far? We’re almost there, he replied, surely lying. My father had not bothered to look for the car; he’d forgotten why we were there. We were lost amid thousands of cars, but the air pushed us gently. The locks jumped up. The motor turned over. The mountains, I asked, are they snowy today? Snowy, no, it’s snowing, he told me dryly. But you can’t see anything, he added, the air is too dirty. The sky in Santiago isn’t what it used to be, my father said wistfully. I opened the window like someone opening an eyelid, and I had the impression I was seeing the mountains snowy all the way to their bases, shining blindly in my memory. And I put my head out the window to inhale the breeze full of toxic particles that reminded me I was home. I let the grime penetrate my lungs, hearing, in the distance, the barking of invisible mutts.)
iron hand
She threw herself on my neck. A medusa, a jellyfish, an ocean flagellum, a gelatinous organism with tentacles that would cause a rash. There was no pulling my mother off of me. Her body contracted as if she were sobbing and she gave off a substance one hundred percent lethal. That poisoning by maternal venom would have brought on a dizzy spell, would have made me fall over in a faint. But no, there were no fainting fits or swoons. No ether or hysterical outbursts. Just a little ink to give some contrast to an opaque scene: my mother waiting for me atop her high-heeled shoes in the doorway, tapping her heels on the pebbles. She’d gotten up at dawn, worked erratically during the very first hours of the morning so later on she could leave the last acute patients to a troop of aspiring pediatric internists. And carrying the smell of the hospital, the smell of children vomiting the pus of their lungs all over her, my mother had returned home. Running red lights. Cruising over crosswalks and speed bumps without slowing down. And now she was outside, clutching the gate, letting the rain drench her. It would have been a perfect reencounter with rain falling on us. Falling in buckets. Pouring down. Driving us into the ground. But had it been raining I would have remembered the drumming sound on the Dodge’s roof, I’d remember a downpour just like I remember the cutting cold of that winter. It wasn’t raining, wasn’t drizzling, there wasn’t even a miserable, murderous hail falling. Only the snow clouds emptying over the peaks of some faraway mountains. Only a wind peeling the trees, ruffling the leaves and swirling them in eddies. Fighting that gust of impertinent air, my mother would be tending her hair, fresh from the hairdresser’s hands; she’d be fluffing her mane upwards while her husband, whom she’d insisted on calling her “old man” ever since they were young, parked the car on the gravel. And maybe my mother was still smoothing a lock stiff with hairspray, nodding slightly at her own thoughts. Maybe she adjusted her glasses on her nose, maybe she stuck the tip of a painted nail in her mouth when she saw me get out of the car like a bride in black. A bride in mourning on my father’s arm. In another invented memory, some fingers appear and energetically separate me from the old man, my mother’s old man, though now she too is almost elderly. It’s her arm, her hand, and my mother’s invincible muscles that want to guide me, no limping or slipping, toward the door; she wants to save me from treacherous stairs, guide me across thresholds that lead nowhere, protect me from banging into bookcases. From obstacles crouching in corners. From the TV antenna that could pierce my eye
s. The burner on the stove, the boil of the pots, the roar of the kettle. My mother tugs me along because the entire house is armed against me. She squeezes me with an iron fist, sticking her nails in through my sweater until she buries them in my flesh. Scratches. Deep cuts. Wounds that don’t scar over: I’m gushing blood. I plead for help, but from whom? My older brother is meeting with some Mexican or maybe Colombian clients and he can’t come to the phone. He sends a message through his secretary, who must be a sublime girl in high heels and a low-cut blouse, but who could just as well be a stuffy old lady with the voice of a young woman. Whichever it is, she tells me that señor Joaquín will call as soon as he’s free. Tell him I’m in Santiago being devoured by a delicate carnivorous flower. But the woman hangs up before I say anything. Through the phone I only hear the continuous, irritating sound of a machine that records, monotonous, my cardiac arrest as it’s happening. Better this way, I think. My big brother has his own issues, his own humor, biting, too black to hear my call for help. I turn, then, to my younger brother, another aloof wunderkind who in two curt words lets me know he’s on his way, that he’s almost here, that he’s here. He honks his horn before coming in and sitting down to lunch. A sticky kiss falls on my cheek. Hey, sis, he says in English, casually. An old habit picked up in New Jersey. How was the flight, sis, could you sleep at all? He sits down at the table, stuffs a piece of bread in his mouth, and, still chewing, mutters a mom, you could let up just a little, couldn’t you? Luci can’t eat when she’s in shackles. I can call to mind those enormous black eyes of my brother’s, his deep voice and his coal-black eyes. My mother, who forgot about smiling months ago, lets out a maniacal peal of laughter and lets go of me. My father, not realizing what is happening or maybe acting the crazy a bit himself, lets his big hand fall on top of mine and handcuffs me with his fingers. And my brother, chewing something that from its crunch must be a carrot or celery stick, says, slowly, but you’re not totally blind, or are you? I hear gasps around the tablecloth and the strident music of a fork falling onto a plate, then Olga’s discreet entrance with another dish and her immediate exit backstage, not daring to interrupt and say hello to me. And unaware a brawl is about to break out full swing, my brother Félix asks, completely calm—his amputated nerves are inherited from my father—another forbidden question. Where am I going to have the operation, in the end? What do you mean where? I ask him, raising my voice but holding back. There’s never been any doubt about where. We’ll talk about this later, my mother intercedes, giving me a kick under the table that was meant for someone else. There’s nothing to discuss, I start to tell them, pushing away the plate of oily spaghetti that in any case I couldn’t bring myself to eat, and knocking over a glass of red wine. I’m not going to see that doctor, I tell them, sensing a flurry of napkins falling over the table. Don’t you remember what happened the last time I went? Hands mop up the wine; Olga reappears, lifting up my plate and wiping underneath it. And I manage to catch her and I ask her to sit down, because she is part of our life though my parents refuse to accept it, because I need her as my ally, because even if she’s against me she should be part of this conversation and not turning a deaf ear behind the door. I’m not going to see him, much less be operated on by that specialist who looks down on all his patients, I don’t care if he’s Harvard-trained or a disciple of Barraquer. My post-Soviet doctor is better, he takes the time to explain my eyes to me and he doesn’t jump to the knife like that aggressive Chilean eminence with a diploma that’s gringo anyway. Someone picks up my glass, but it isn’t Olga. Someone lets out a sigh of frustration, and I suspect it is my mother. Cancel the appointment, I insist. Because I won’t go, not even if you tie me up. Not even drugged. You all hear me? Not even dead.