Seeing Red

by Lina Meruane

  love is blind too

  You’ll see signs, keep north. Quintero. Puchuncaví. Zapallar. When the road forks, take a dirt road that will turn to sand that right away will be the blue ocean edged with pines, swarming with albatross, strewn with pigeon shit. With our feet sunk in the beach scum we walked—me, painfully—to the table where Genaro and the other man were waiting for us. Overcoming his aversion to awkward situations with a pisco sour in hand, and surely biting his tongue to keep from saying anything about how long it had been since we’d seen each other, Genaro hugged us both simultaneously. But sit down, he says, the clams a la parmesana just got here, and there’s a bottle of white wine. Yes, echoes Genaro’s lover, a delicious white wine. Ignacio pours me a glass that I grasp tightly in my fingers, and he moves the others so I don’t knock them over with my other hand that flits over everything like a feather duster. I know Ignacio, Genaro, and the other man wield knives and forks like three musketeers and they attack the clams to which three steaming seafood stews are soon added, along with one or two reheated rolls. That, a piece of bread, is what I manage to chew, dissolve in my mouth, and swallow while they talk about people who no longer concern me. They swaddle the conversation with rigorous courtesy. They order another bottle and I drain my glass. And with the smell of salt and iodine encrusted in my nose I go back, now alone, to that long night when Genaro and I first met. The party where we’d been introduced, the immediate affinity, the emergency stairs where we went up the three floors to his apartment. Halfway up he stopped to explain. He wanted to tell me. Tell me anything you want, I said, wondering what that smell could be and thinking that it must be the floor cleaner. Tell me whatever you want, I repeated. And without altering the expression on his face Genaro told me that his boyfriend had just died of AIDS. Died in his arms like lovers die in movies, after a slow, terrible, unimaginable agony. He died without passing on the disease, but Genaro still suffered night sweats; he got up at midnight thinking about his own death. I remember that confession, and suddenly I understand that this lunch is a goodbye. Genaro will let me leave like he let the dead man go. And while I have this revelation, in my memory we’re entering his apartment together and I see that the walls are covered in pictures the dead man painted. This is a mausoleum, I’d told Genaro, alarmed. You have to take all these down, give them a last kiss one by one before wrapping them up and sending them to a storage unit from where you will never retrieve them. That dead man won’t let you breathe, he’s looking at you from every one of these portraits. Genaro looked at me in horror, and then he looked at the pictures one by one, he stared at each painted face and he said yes like a zombie waking up, yes, yes, mechanically. Yes, Lucina, it’s true, I hadn’t thought about that, and he took down the paintings, he silenced their eyes, leaned them against the wall for a few days before putting them in storage forever. And he painted his house white again, he bought sheets that didn’t smell like the deceased man, and then he gave me all the life he’d accumulated in those months of mourning. But then I’d left him, I’d traded him for a doctorate in New York and for Ignacio. Especially for Ignacio, who was so much like him. Genaro had taken me down from his friendship, he’d blindfolded me with his rage, he had turned me toward the wall. This was only a momentary truce. Here’s to love, blind love, bellows the Genaro present here, angry with wine, and I tell him yes, of course, Genaro, we must always toast to that, and I pick up the only clam on my plate and I feel like clouting him with it. I slurp the lemon juice from the shell and push the mollusk covered in now-hard cheese between my lips. Ignacio only opens his mouth to suck thoughtfully on a cigarette; his ashtray will be stuffed with broken butts. I steal a drag, seeking Ignacio’s comforting saliva on the filter, and by the time they bring us the check everything between us has turned salty and contradictory. The wind lifts up sand that the humidity adheres to our necks. Genaro roars with laughter that falls like a whip while he repeats that love is blind, that we are all blind as clams, and how can we not realize. Not so loud, his lover says discreetly, you’re making a scene. But all the seeing people are gone already, says Genaro, not a decibel lower. Be quiet anyway, that’s enough. And then Genaro’s lover turns to me, ashamed (blushing, you’ll tell me later, Ignacio). Don’t pay any attention to him, Lucina, don’t mind him, he’s been out of sorts for days, but in any case you’re going to get better, right? I’m quiet, annoyed, thinking you’re a cretin and at the same time thinking what not to say; while I consider possible combinations, whether to console Genaro or insult him, whether to be falsely polite to his lover or throw the plates at him, I hear Ignacio start talking for me as if he’d forgotten I was there. We don’t know what, he says, without finishing the thought. I snatch the words from him, saying that not even the doctor knows. But yes, says Genaro from somewhere, from all possible places, you’ll recover like economies do, first up then down. Don’t get started on the economy, I cut him off, tired of him and of the wind cracking open my skin and implacably lashing my hair over my face. What’s more, Genaro, empires also fall and they don’t rise up again, and it’s getting really cold, it’s time for us to go. Yes, Ignacio jumps in, prompted by my knee, it’s getting dark and I don’t know the roads well. We all get up at the same time and Genaro wraps me in his arms, kisses both my cheeks and my forehead, promises to call me next week, to come visit me, but I know he won’t, that our friendship has ended in that picturesque restaurant of scavenging seagulls. We got into the car. They howled a duet of bye, Lucina, and they growled a ferocious bye, Ignacio, and I waved my hand slackly toward a place where no one remained. Not even the memory of Genaro.

  darkened highway

  And we headed back to Santiago on a highway where night had fallen at six in the evening. What did you think of Genaro? I asked, my bare feet over the heater. What about you? And the questioning stopped there. Already Genaro was crawling off with his lover toward the past that was a select social club; we were fleeing that closed circle, we were going forward and not looking back, we were present, hurtling into the future at hundreds of miles per hour along a road that had pretensions of being a highway. I opened the window and sniffed the air for the singed smell of burning. But there were no garbage bonfires at that hour. Not even flies. But we were traveling with a swarm in our heads, going back over conversations that wouldn’t be repeated, anticipating situations. For an instant I had the impression that Ignacio was nodding, though I also thought he might be shaking his head no. I heard him shift ever more clumsily, felt him slow down sharply, put on the brake; I noticed we were zig-zagging. What’s happening? Why are you speeding up and slowing down? It’s pitch black, there’s fog, you can’t see a single light out there, and, as if that weren’t enough, I can’t see a damn thing in the dark. So don’t go weaving in and out and passing cars. But I’m not passing, that’s not it, said Ignacio, raising his voice. It’s just that I don’t understand a thing in this goddamned country, the road just melted into a high-speed throughway, and we almost ended up, just now, stuck under a wagon—a wagon pulled by cows on a highway! Explain that to me! Cows? I sighed, buying time to think. Cows or oxen or donkeys or idiot peasants or whatever you call those damned animals that almost killed us! They didn’t have lights and they were going very, very slow through an impossible fog. And wait, joder, I can’t believe it, there ahead of us is a truck right across the road, trying to make a U-turn! Are all Chileans crazy? Crazy, I murmured cynically, of course we’re crazy, so better be careful with us. I must be even crazier, he said, shifting badly for the umpteenth time, braking, going around the truck’s tail. Crazy to go on vacation with a blind woman. I bristled at Ignacio’s head-on blow, but he started to laugh and that was his way, bewildering as it was, of apologizing for the anger he felt sometimes, for feeling sometimes like a prisoner of the Chile that was me, and then I also started to laugh and cry a little from the laughter and above all from exhaustion. Ignacio went on reading the signs and driving in a straight line, and only when we were getting close to
the city did I have to tell him what would be the next marker to look for, which exit, which ascent, which right turn to reach the house on a desolate Sunday at midnight. My parents were resting on their pillows, resting their skulls one against the other, their glasses on, the newspaper spread out, the computer propped against my mother’s knees turned on. Asleep with the door open, whispered Ignacio. Olga was sleeping, on the other hand, locked in her room with the TV on full volume and the radio on as well. We reached the second floor and threw our sandy shoes as far from us as we could. We smelled of the ocean, of shellfish, of dirty socks, of Ignacio’s sweaty feet. Are you tired? Yes, he said, exhausted. And then he lit a cigarette that ended up being for both of us, and inhaling slowly he started to tell me, between pauses, aspirating his words, how that afternoon. During that lunch. Between the clams and the chupe de loco. And the chopped onion and the hallullas, Ignacio, we can’t forget those. Then, he said. Then? I asked. Then I started to think, he said. (What would it take for you to stop thinking so much, all the time?) It was nebulous at first and I kept thinking it more clearly after we went through the toll, while I was driving next to you, he said. The ideas wandered from one point to another, and I felt I was driving in the air. And then. Then the word possibility emerged. The phrase the possibility exists, although I know it’s remote. Remote, I said, it’s still remote. And I know, we shouldn’t think about it, about this thing we’ve talked about so many times. Only that it’s one thing to talk about it, I thought, and something very different to suddenly open your eyes. Ignacio went on laboriously, saying maybe. Maybe never. You understand? Yes, I answered, of course I do. You’re the one who took a long time to understand. And I said to him, so what do you want to do? And without giving him time to answer I told him it was going to rain. There’s going to be a storm, a torrential downpour. Can’t you smell it? I said. It’s in the air.

  organize

  Undershirts, tights with holes, threadbare clothes and dreams, skirts, unraveled cassette tapes, novels listened to and misplaced, and long hairs, bras, sheets twisted up on the mattress. And my fingers with their open eyes beneath the nails choosing and separating the clothes by material and size: the wool goes at the bottom of the suitcase because I’m leaving winter behind; on top the cotton and polyester fibers to bear the northern summer. I pause on each garment, reconstructing the memory of its stitches and zippers, sketching out where I got it or bought it, who gave it to me, what was happening when I wore it for the first time. I leave everything on the bed to settle for a few minutes while I shower and gather up the last of my things, the insulin and medicines for all my neurotic pains. It’s only five minutes, or maybe ten—my time now is always approximate. Wrapped in a towel, I go back to the room and detect in the air the indescribable and unforgettable but always fleeting perfume of my mother. Mom? What are you doing? Nothing, she says with a sorrowful voice. I called upstairs but you didn’t answer. I came up to help you, your clothes were still on the bed, but don’t worry, everything’s organized in your suitcase now, she finishes with industrious maternal resignation. A silence opens between us that I fill with resentment. Those clothes, Mom, I say caustically, still wrapped in the towel. The clothes were already organized. I chose them and folded them and organized them myself with these hands, with these ten fingers that now have their own lidless eyes on their tips. You see them? Who? Who asked you? Who asked you to do anything? I’m barking at my mother, baring anxious teeth, I’m going to sink my fangs into her, smear her with bitter saliva. Kneeling on the floor, doubled over, agitated and angry, showing no mercy to my mother who has just turned into a trembling little girl. I look intermittently at her with my very blind and very wide eyes, and I grab the suitcase and dump it over the rug. I touch the clothes all unfolded, gravely injured, mauled by my mother and the perfume that reminds me of my childhood. I identify each article of clothing, slowly, in a silence full of daggers, and I again put polyester with polyester, cotton with cotton, denim with denim, then the wool and at the bottom, the Argentine leather gloves, the sheep leather coat, the belt. The boots. The impossible tapes of books that I’ll never have the patience to listen to again. Everything so that afterwards my hands can find it. My mother is so quiet she seems to have stopped breathing, but I know, as if I were seeing it, that she’s biting her lips until they’re white. Finally from between them slips the word daughter, and then another aphonic syllable, without letters, as if my mother were so poor she didn’t even have sounds to pronounce. But my mother has never been so poor she had nothing to say, and she says dear, I only wanted. To help, I say, finishing her phrase. To help me do things the way other people would do them. How I used to do them myself. But don’t you understand? I go on with inherited insolence. I don’t know if I’m going to get better. I have to learn how to be blind. You’re not helping. But dear, my mother whispers as if to her own shadow, knowing that everything she says can and will be used against her. Your help invalidates me, I repeat, giving no quarter to my mother who is innocent but also, in a way, terribly guilty. She receives the stones I hurl at her like a martyr, and she starts to cry. It’s a crying that is unforeseen and turned inward, a tense crying that includes all the miseries of life I’ve brought her. I hear her cry as I close the suitcase with all the clothes, the tapes, my slings and arrows inside. I get up from the floor and go over to her. I don’t feel anything and it’s better not to feel, better to simply let my fingers softly caress her face, her disheveled hair.

  black box

  (At night, headed north like weightless particles. Crossing the cloudy sky over the mountains. Cruising speed: eight hundred kilometers per hour. Ten or twelve thousand meters high. Minimum friction, minimum consumption of the oil that causes the wars you study. We were traveling in the pressurized and hermetic cabin unafraid of the windows exploding, or any bottles or our own circulatory systems. Cabins specially designed to prevent everything but thrombosis. Those seats don’t induce sleep, nor did the captain help, that loquacious pilot set on tormenting us with supplementary information: the height of the peaks and the cubic meters of pure water deposited in them, pure ice, he said, addicted to the loudspeaker. I don’t know if you remember the stewardesses interceding with a rolling cart of drinks, after which we heard the captain return to the speakers to point out, stentorian, that soon we would head straight northward, that we would pass along the heights and the desperate depths of the Bolivian natives, before landing in Lima, where we could get off the plane or not. That no one should feel pressured to visit the mestizos at the duty free—do you remember? the cholas wrapped in their skirts—not even to find out how much they still hate, with deserved hostility, us Chileans. The laughter grated in the microphone, and with that he wished us good night for good. Finally, he shut up, you said, dozing from the cocktail of pills you’d taken for vertigo or air sickness, for your fear of planes mangled in flight, your black-box anxieties. You’d taken out pills for acid reflux and you’d also swallowed those, without water. You put it all in your mouth without disgust and before the stupor knocked you out, you carefully took off your glasses and asked me to put them away. Do you remember that, Ignacio? I covered that head of yours with the blanket, and I also covered my own. Ignacio, I whispered, and I blew on your face, and then raising my voice I repeated your name and squeezed your arm. But you didn’t respond, you’d drugged your will away; you were as though dead, but a dead man who was completely mine. I rested your head on my shoulder and I went against the only rule you’d imposed on me. I was improvising as I went, running my fingers calmly, greedily, over your sleeping eyelids, feeling on my fingertips the soft touch of the eyelashes, feeling your skin opening and letting me touch the cornea, damp, rubbery, exquisite, and then my avid fingers ignited, they ignited but you didn’t realize it, and I couldn’t tell you now that I couldn’t stop. I separated your eyelids and I ran the tip of my tongue along that naked edge that I felt like my own nakedness, and soon I was licking the whole thing, I was sucking on your w
hole eye softly, with my lips, with my teeth, making it mine, delicately, intimately, secretly, but also passionately, your eye, Ignacio, until the stewardesses came down the aisle imposing breakfast on us and I thought you would wake up. They left and then came back to take away trays, and little by little you began to resuscitate. I felt you stir, stretch forward, rescue a smile, and sink a finger into my cheek. How’d you sleep? I asked cautiously, and you said with nostalgia and presentiment that it had been weeks since you’d slept like that, so deeply, so happy not to be anywhere, forgetting about a wait that was still gathering. If only it weren’t for your eye that was burning. It’s so irritated I almost can’t open it, and you cursed the plane’s dry air with your voice still somewhere else, rubbing the eyelid a bit and putting on the glasses I handed you. The plane touched down lightly and slid forward. I, on the other hand, didn’t sleep a wink, I told you, smiling with a sad happiness. I wove my fingers between yours and there we stayed, together, until all the passengers had left the plane and you stormed the aisle full of pillows.)

  not the damnedest idea

  Ipso facto, my mother would come. Not two days would pass, two or three days spent consuming another novel, me, and filling the refrigerator with food, Ignacio. But what am I saying? There was the work of preparing ourselves for the worst. Calls to the insurance company that doubtless would send us around in circles, to my thesis director to let her know my recovery promised to be long, the department head to put my registration indefinitely on hold, to the dean to beg him not to cut off my grant because I’d be left without insurance, and then. All delicate tasks, those and others we would undertake during those too-brief days in the muggy south of Manhattan. Visiting the eye doctor and bringing him an unlikely souvenir. Lekz made us wait while Doris demanded we fill out forms and hand over detailed descriptions of the situation in writing. I dictated to Ignacio. Yuku greeted me with her learned Japanese courtesy, but saved herself the bows before dropping in the paralyzing drops. My hand slid some fingers along the plastic petals of the plastic flowers in some pots of the same material, and returned to plant itself nervously on my knee while my body rocked slightly, forward, backward, like a tireless rubber doll. Stop doing that, Ignacio demanded or implored. Please, he said, stop rocking. I didn’t know why I was doing it, I didn’t realize I was until he pointed it out, maybe I did it to be sure I was still there, sitting in the chair. And I was still moving when Lekz came out of his office and approached me. He was standing in front of me, but he didn’t call me by my name but rather said, ceremoniously and mechanically, welcome back missus…Missus, I repeated mentally, realizing he had completely forgotten my name. Follow me, he said, like a false missionary, missus… ashamed, not daring to ask. Lucina, doctor, I told him officiously, knowing he’d be unable to pronounce it, while I reached out my hand, but you can call me Lina. He doesn’t know who the hell I am, I murmured then in Spanish to Ignacio, he doesn’t have the damnedest idea, this doctor to whom I’ve handed myself over in body and practically soul for two whole years. Ignacio pinched my arm because Lekz spoke a little Spanish, in addition to English and Russian. He understood something because his wife, an eye doctor like Lekz, had been born in Galicia, like Ignacio. It was all true, his pinch and Lekz’s wife’s Galician Spanish. It was also true that my doctor did not remember my name. I smiled at him like an African doll, showing all my teeth, showing my tonsils if I had to, and I said again to Ignacio. Not the damnedest idea. Lekz must have already been deep in his illegible notes, because suddenly he seemed to remember and he said, surprised and happy, weren’t you the writer? Aren’t you in Chile? We were, for a whole month, corrected Ignacio, self-importantly. We saw the city, she showed it to me, it’s not a pretty city at all, in fact it’s pretty ugly, though it does have its corners, and he stopped, suddenly uncomfortable at seeming ungrateful. I ignored him; I’d been thinking about the word writer next to a verb in the past tense, the past of the books I’d written and that I wasn’t sure I would go on writing. One eye would be enough, I thought for a second, until I felt Lekz’s fingers taking my hand like a dancer and leading me on tiptoe toward the chair crowned with lenses. I opened my eyes resolutely and I let myself be looked at through the same apparatus as always. And from there I moved to the reclining chair and I leaned my head back, giving myself to the most potent magnifying lens, exercising my neck, preparing my ear to hear that the blood had not dissipated. There even seemed to be more of it, and it could already be coagulating. I think, said Lekz, with a slight cough, and I could imagine him stretching his lips into one of his Russian grimaces. I think, he said again without rounding out his idea, I think these malignant veins have gone on bursting. I think, he said, thinking again, that hopefully you aren’t anemic, because the lack of iron would be an impediment to an operation. You will operate! I howled inside, you will operate, even if I’m dying. But Lekz went on thinking out loud, and next he asked, with calculated calmness, how have things? and I, without letting him finish, whinnied: good, very good, healthy as a horse, doctor. I’m full of energy, I could go to the operating room now carrying you on my shoulders. I’d carry you on my back or drag you, I’d take off running unchecked, wearing blinders so I wouldn’t be distracted, I’d barrel past the signs saying do not enter, I’d break the window of the operating room, jump onto the cot, I’d separate my eyelids with my own fingernails so you could stick in the blades, I’d offer myself to the needles strung with thread so you could finish sewing me up. You’ll need tests, he said, to rule out anemia. Tests! I don’t want tests. I want you to operate. Right now. But Ignacio got tangled up in my arm and he dragged me off to the laboratory and when we got there, in spite of his sqeamishness, he stood firm beside me: roll up your sleeve and stretch out your arm. And I obeyed, swearing vengeance, and I made fists so my veins would pop. Ignacio’s stomach turned when he saw how that blood of mine flowed, a blood that is always so like itself, my blood, like his but different only because it was mine, filling the tubes. And after the blood we went mutely to his apartment that was also my waiting room, which would be my mother’s campsite when she arrived the next morning to interrupt the peace of the worried. Of course you’ll have the operation, my mother reassured me as soon as she’d planted her high heel on the apartment’s only rug and hugged me. Don’t worry, dear, she repeated with absolute certainty, you have more than enough iron in you. They didn’t have to bleed you to know that. Look at her face, she said to Ignacio, look at her fingernails, and she squeezed my finger. And then, without warning me, she stuck her long nail in my lower eyelid. She turned it inside out. She peered into it and said, you see, Ignacio? It’s pink. That’s irrefutable proof, she said, still not letting go of that insensitive bit of hide. Ignacio was taking nervous steps over the bare tiles, pacing to get away from my mother who went on saying, these doctors are so specialized they don’t understand anything that’s happening in the rest of the body. Only in the organ they study. They don’t know anything. I agreed: they don’t have the damnedest idea.