by Lina Meruane
so I tell her, she said
And the door opened, pushed by an inopportune voice. May I? And it was Olga, her nasal undertone trailing a legitimate resentment toward the idleness of others. Her job consisted of cleaning and cooking, but there were unwritten rules: be available at all hours, sleep in fits and starts, get up at dawn to wake my parents with breakfast and the newspaper. In exchange, every day she undertook minuscule revenges that she justified as her duty. You two are still in bed? And she was beside us, loudly shaking out the rug. Come on, get up, it’s ten o’clock. I’m not going to spend all day waiting for you. But you don’t have to wait for us, Olga, we know how to make the bed, I said, finally opening my blindest eye, thinking, while I mentally told her off, that I was wasting my breath protesting. Olga would never concede to change the rules of the house, her rules, which she imposed with more authority than anyone when she wanted, and when she didn’t, she shielded herself behind her old age. I make the beds in this house, she said, that’s my job. It’s what I get paid for, she added, opening the windows next to us without caring that we were sleeping or naked in the bed, clutching the edges of the sheets. Olga, could you give us a minute to get dressed? And what for? she said, utterly immune to the cold air. As if I haven’t seen you in the buff since you were a little thing, you and your brothers and even your father, your dad who still wears those old pajamas. But Olga, that was ages ago, now we have hair, some of it gray, now we have rolls of fat, too-black moles, our feet are covered in calluses. Plus, what about Ignacio? Olga went on talking, making the most of that deafness of hers. She sounded like a preacher when she said, who bathed you all when you were little, huh? One at either end of the bathtub, I washed your hair, scrubbed you with the sponge, and rinsed you off, and then I dressed you. Your mother didn’t even have the patience to feed you, she went running off to the hospital and left all her work for me. Because your mother was sure good at running off. As if the devil were after her. Olga accused my mother of foisting her work onto her, and secretly also blamed her that I’d left home so young, going first to a precarious room in a different neighborhood, then to Mexico and then Madrid on the pretext of writing, and finally to New York with the excuse of continuing my studies on a scholarship. And we were allies in our resentment toward my mother. Only I didn’t resent her professional passion, I didn’t hold her maternal distance against her during work hours; the impossible thing was how she’d brought the hospital home, how she’d turned me into her patient and my incurable illness into her personal disgrace. How shed tormented me with her torment. How she’d never let me be her daughter, simply. To be her daughter I’d had to run away. Ignacio was still in a haze from the anti-flu medicines that he also took to help him sleep. A draught of air blew in. Lethargic, I pulled on the shirt I had within reach, but shivered when I stood up next to Olga, and I decided to get back into bed. No, she said, you two are getting up right now so I can make the bed and then, if you want, you can get back in it, but you can’t stay in this mishmash of sheets. Haven’t you seen how your mother gets mad at me for this mess? And I tell her it’s not fair, said Olga; now that’s really not fair. OK, Olga, I conceded, but give us a minute to get dressed. And she agreed but kept talking on her own from the other side of the door, raising her voice to be sure I heard her: and another thing I tell your mom, she said. If the girl wants to have a baby with things how they are with her, she should have it, I’ll take care of it. Ignacio handed me a sweater while he buttoned his jeans and threw on his shirt, and it was me she was talking to. (Me but also you, Ignacio, about the babies, she was talking about the child that she wanted us to have so she could raise it.) May God bless you two with children so I can care for them. Babies, no, I said very much to myself. What I want are eyes, newborn eyes, nothing more. Yes, said Olga, pushing the door open and coming back in, as if she’d heard me and wanted to reply, you don’t have to worry about anything. Plus, I know God is going to help you with this problem of yours. Cure her with your power, I tell him, and he tells me he will, he’ll cure you if you believe in him. Olga was talking a bit to herself now, almost absently. I tell your mother that but she never listens to me; believe in God, I tell her, she went on, quoting herself. If she’d open her heart to God she wouldn’t suffer, because God is going to cure those eyes of Luci’s. That’s what I pray for every day and night, that’s what I pray for when I put potatoes in the pan and fry up onions, I even pray while I iron your father’s underwear, Olga went on, a little out of it, why do you think I learned to read? So I could understand the Bible, honor God, so I could ask him for things. I even ask him for money sometimes when I need it. I know he’s going to exchange those broken eyes and he’s going to give you new ones, like they were just brought home from the store. And will I be able to pay for them on installment, interest-free? Don’t go making fun of me, says Olga very seriously, you’ll just see how what I’m saying is true, she says again, threateningly. You’ll see, she says, pretending to be furious while I hug her.
will you two be ok?
In Santiago it’s cold, but it’s even colder at the beach. More knives in the air and words of warm vapor. More mold stuck to the walls and the window frames, more bars and wood to protect the glass from rocks. We had to get to the house and unwrap it, dust it, air it out, light the chrism of the little heater, dry out all the wet towels, the damp curtains. Same thing we’d done every time on arriving over the years. Sweep out the dead moths on the linoleum and the cow skin my grandmother had brought from Patagonia. Make the beds. See to the light and the water. My father drove the car the exactly one hundred and seventy-two kilometers of the Pan-American highway to Concón, giving all kinds of instructions to Ignacio that I also memorized, just in case. Following us for the same number of meters and centimeters came my mother, her brow furrowed, thinking who knows what thoughts that would wound like whips: the work it had cost her to be a woman and choose the trap of maternity, the anguish of having engendered a problem and not having known how to solve it: all of that would be making a deafening roar in her conscience while in the background, unheard, Beethoven’s sonatas or maybe Mozart’s would be spinning round and round. My mother and my father driving toward the same place in different cars so they could leave one for us. We’d have to be grateful. And we thanked them, so much, especially Ignacio. (Why thank them so much, Ignacio, why, since it was my mother and I who were going to owe you everything.) But don’t thank us, dear, she said, it’s the least we. And she interrupted herself, as if she went blank, as if bewildered, and then I heard my father, who saved us from that tight spot saying, ok kids, to the table, food’s served, and then, when he saw me surely with my hair a mess and a lost expression on my face: Lucina, dear, fix yourself up a bit for lunch, huh? No, dad, there’s no fixing me, but I ran my hand over my head, combed my hair with my fingers, and when I smelled the food I started to take an imaginary tour of our old beach vacations. I went back years in the vortex of time, catching balls of fuzz between my toes, and leaves, dust, sawdust, crust, salt, loose earth on the steep streets full of potholes, and through eucalyptus trees that the most ferocious winters later uprooted, I saw hundreds of sunsets swirling before my eyes. I wandered through those landscapes with steps I would have liked to be precise but that were instead erratic, abstract, steps lit by naked and hostile stars, steps that led me to beaches where I’d gone swimming, where the waves swelled crisscrossed with seaweed and thick foam, bilious, where I dove under and reappeared with my hair covered in garbage, supermarket bags, diapers dripping shit. And in the background some man hawking egg bread or wafers. I heard the sound of the chairs, the silverware. It smelled of just-toasted bread. And the same screen started to show my cousins sitting around the table before a hodgepodge of eggs, sausage, tomatoes, and mortadella on marraqueta rolls, eating with the hunger of the beach, bathing suits wet and hair stiff with salt, black sand stuck to their ankles, señora Alicia bringing in more cheese. These days the doors squealed, off kilter from the hum
idity, the refrigerator in its old age didn’t keep things cold, the washing machine no longer worked. And the four of us lunched on grilled steaks with potatoes like the close-knit family we were but would also never entirely be. And then my mother offered instant coffee that only she wanted; and through the steam of the kettle señora Alicia emerged, fifteen or twenty years older. She pronounced my name with a señorita before it and there she stopped, maybe afraid, the soles of her shoes squeaking against the linoleum. She couldn’t kiss me when I stood up, she couldn’t reach; she’d always been almost a dwarf, and with age she had shrunk like my memory. There was so little distance between her head and the floor, but I had forgotten. It had been useless to bend over in search of her cheek’s hard, shiny, dark skin, impervious to time. In search of her wrinkled fingers. Rather than try a kiss, she turned her back to me. She merely greeted me from afar, covering her mouth a little, and she shut herself in the kitchen to cry as if she were bidding me farewell. But I only heard of señora Alicia’s sobs, like so many things, too late. I only understood the blows, the stomping, the fingers caught in the trunk of the car when my father stored a broken umbrella they’d bring back to Santiago with them. I preferred the tenacious pain in my groin, which spoke to me in a comprehensible language. It was a dry and crude warning, a concrete message with which to hold a solitary conversation. I felt Ignacio’s finger between my ribs. Your father is talking to you, he said. He’s talking to us. Will you two be all right? repeated my father before leaving. My mother said nothing, she stayed quietly beside us until my father reminded her of the time. There was a salty wind blowing over the patio, over the unsettled tops of the pines, over our unsettled heads. My father honked the horn twice while the Dodge disappeared into swirling sands.
oysters without pearls
My memory’s visual laws dictated the landscape to me. Screeching seagulls rose up over the esplanade, leaving a sedentary pelican run aground; they flew up along the sunset and then dove down, they drowned in eddies while the tide rose with the moon to cover the black beach. The moon was lost behind the trees; you could tell it was there, barely, from its shine. Judging by the light, Ignacio told me, the moon must be back there, and he took my hand to make me point my index finger toward a starry but dreadfully orphaned sky. But I couldn’t care less about the moon, I was more interested in how the world’s spinning on its axis was speeding up, how the wait was growing ever shorter. Ignacio recovered a bent cigarette and he smoked it slowly. I’m hungry, he said, blowing out the smoke. He felt like eating some Chilean shellfish. Why are you raising your eyebrows? No reason, I answered, lying, telling myself that if they hurt him I wouldn’t be able to help. I directed him toward the fisherman’s cove, bumbling along a road full of holes disguised in the night. It’s so dark, Ignacio said, straining his eyes. Keep going straight, I replied indifferently. Where are you taking me? Is it close? Along the beach, after the oil refineries, turn left when you see the gas stations. The Oyster or the Pearl of the Pacific. There, I see it, cried Ignacio, and his stomach growled. That’s where we’re going. And when we got out of the car it was Ignacio who guided me, a rock, a step, now straight ahead, and the wicker chair pushed over the hard earth beneath me. The waitress. The menus. A plastic bread bowl, napkins. We ordered sea urchins, but they were banned. We asked for locos, but they were banned too. Oysters? We’ve never had those here. Lobsters? None left at that hour. What they had were choritos al pil pil, spicy mussels, and maybe a choro zapato, Chilean blue mussel, and since Ignacio was kneeing me I gave him a simultaneous interpretation: small and giant mejillones. And maybe some clams. That’s all the seafood you have? Those and the fish, all very fresh, sir, said the woman, dragging out the sir in a trill. Let’s get ceviche, suggested Ignacio. I ordered conger eel soup instead. We started to nibble a bit of hard bread and sip a slightly warm wine, and as soon as they brought our food I realized what I’d forgotten. (My purse. The syringe with insulin. I forgot it because I couldn’t see it, Ignacio, but I also forgot it to put you to the test.) Ignacio went rushing out along the darkened road toward the prefab house with its red roof, and I sat smelling the steam rising from the conger eel without tasting it, patiently kneading breadcrumbs over the tablecloth. The waitress came and went, coming and going again, would you like me to heat up the soup a little while you wait? And I nodded so she would be entertained and stop spying on me, because the minutes passed and Ignacio didn’t come back, he was lost in unknown neighborhoods, turning down dead-end streets. But I didn’t have any way to pay for the food if Ignacio didn’t come back. I had no money for a taxi, I thought, which in any case you couldn’t get around there; I didn’t even have keys. There’s your husband, breathed the waitress, bringing me the reheated soup, the fish now in shreds. And it was him, a panting, annoyed, hungry but victorious Ignacio whom I, sacking my memory, constructed in my mind: Ignacio brandishing the ampule of insulin like a flag that he planted on the table. I put my hand on the tablecloth. There was no syringe.
crosswords
Sloppy and swaddled in blankets like dogs, our ears cold, the tips of our noses damp. I opened my eyes reflexively and I understood I’d woken up, but I turned over again. A marine light was growing stronger in the hollows of the curtains, Ignacio told me, and then I finished waking up to tell him the light couldn’t be marine, we were in the middle of a town, the house surrounded by dirt and pines that shed their cones onto the roof. Don’t confuse me. Right, said Ignacio, and he tripped over a hot water bottle that had fallen to the floor like a dead child. He showered as fast as he could and I did the same, but I took longer trying to catch the soap and detect the shampoo. With our heads drying, we went out in search of lunch. Along the supermarket aisles Ignacio started hunting nouns on the cans of food—peaches were damascos and not albaricoques, peas were arvejas and not guisantes, beans were porotos and not judías. Then I stopped in front of a shelf, and moving my fingers softly over the surfaces like laser readers I told him that here cans are called tarros and not latas, and they hold choclo and not maíz. Don’t talk so loudly, said Ignacio, and then, those are olivas you’re touching. But are these aceitunas yellow? I asked. More like green, answered Ignacio. And afterwards we got in line at a register. And I know that in the afterwards of the afterwards the car stopped at a kiosk, that Ignacio got out, slamming the door, that he talked with the newsagent, held out his hand with coins on his palm and asked the man to pay himself, because Ignacio still didn’t get the money. (That’s how I remember it, as if I’d seen it with my eyes.) And still afterwards, Ignacio came back with the week’s zillionth newspaper so he could follow in detail the crisis that was shaking the world outside us. Here, this is for you, I heard him say. I touched some booklets of cheap paper. What’s this? I smiled. Porn magazines in braille? I felt Ignacio’s laughter sticking to his voice: porn magazines for the blind that also work for people who can see, if they’re trained. Schoolboys reading porn with one hand under the desk. And girls, I suggested, we shouldn’t forget about them, discovering a voyeurism of the hands. Yes, said Ignacio, them too, the schoolgirls at public schools and private and catholic schools. Yeah, but what is this? Don’t you want to guess? No, I don’t want to, I go through life guessing, all this guesswork is killing me. Crosswords, he said, and me: crosswords? What do I want those for? We want them, Ignacio corrected me, so we don’t forget words. Ignacio must have found my notebooks full of words in some box. Not books of grand quotations. Not titles of pending books and certainly not diaries. Single words that I collected so I could put them to work later on. Words that carried me from one idea to another with no need for a dictionary, which was a stopped-up dam of words. The crossword was a meaningless set of words that interlaced for no other reason than that they happened to share a letter. Sharing a letter as the only condition, I thought. Every word naked and crosscut with others in different positions. Are you sending me a coded message? And again Ignacio started laughing, inside and then out; he laughed in happy, booming peals th
at disconcerted me. I let him laugh because someone had to express happiness; and just like that, Ignacio laughing and me disconcerted, we went down, with the windows open, along roads that stretched like roots, letting ourselves be coated in dust and eucalyptus. We sat in the living room. Forget the walkman, said Ignacio, you’re turning autistic with those recorded books, and then he announced: Clothing. Seven letters, and he plopped beside me like a wet rag. Apparel? Could be, and his pen wrote it down. Arabic liquor, four letters, it would have to start with an A. Arak. Govern starting with R, four letters. Rule? I heard the pen scratching paper, filling the empty spaces. You’re not giving me time to think, Ignacio. Let’s see, silversmith’s tool used to change dimensions of an object. I have no idea what that is. Swage. Half a maniac? How many letters? If it’s three, could be Man or Iac. Female Nobel winner with seven letters, under the photo of an old lady with really short hair? Mistral! And adding up words, we ate empanadas and drank a glass of wine, and still in bed it suddenly got very cold because the fuel had run out, and when he opened the door Ignacio exclaimed joder, the sun is coming up. But the word sunrise evoked nothing. Nothing even close to a sunrise. My eyes were emptying of all the things they’d seen. And it occurred to me that words and their rhythms would remain, but not landscapes, not colors or faces, not those black eyes of Ignacio’s that I had seen spill out a love at times wary, sullen, cutting, but above all an open love, expectant, full of mirages that the crossword puzzle would define as hallucinations.