La Vida Doble (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

by Fontaine, Arturo

  Now it strikes me as a poetic trade, but not back then. The best wood is rauli beech or holm oak. Sometimes he’s contracted for a walnut door. His father still gets to the yard at six in the morning and is annoyed if his son—who must be over forty by now—isn’t there yet. My grandfather is Catalan. He’s the one who taught my father all the tricks. My father told them to me. How to use the spray gun to lacquer pine particleboard; how to work the table saw and the circular saw; how to add a hundred years to a young rauli or roble beech by darkening it with cedar extract so it passes for a strong, ancient beech; how to kill the yellow spots on chestnut by rubbing them with a soft bitumen-soaked cloth, so you can sell it as oak, which has such a similar grain; how to disguise a knot, which mordant to use, which aniline (if one is disposed to use aniline), how to get rid of the pores using a rag soaked in alcohol, powdered pumice stone, and a few drops of varnish; how to apply—just the way foreman Vicente shows him—a very thin layer of shellac, and then sand it and apply another coat, so the wood gradually takes on, layer upon layer, as the fumes evaporate, that singular caramel tone of a real lacquer. Master Vicente knows how to keep varnish from getting that fatal roughness that looks like an orange peel. He taught my father to do battle with those gray spots that form, using benzoin mixed with oil and, afterward, polishing it with the palm of the hand covered with a mixture of Venetian tripoli, water, sulfuric acid, Vaseline, turpentine, and alcohol. You have to smell the wood, my grandfather tells him, you have to touch it, love and taste it. It’s the only way the wood will give itself over to you. The finest varnish contained lacquer, sandarac, and white elemi. What his father absolutely never taught him, but Vicente did, was how to make a good “prison rotgut” by mixing tea and lemon with the alcohol for dissolving shellac. The first time my father got drunk it was in the workshop on that cocktail of Vicente’s.

  My mother is totally uninterested in this world of wood. She falls in love with a good-looking, healthy, vigorous man, who handles his Jeep well, who patiently teaches her to play tennis, and who takes her on vacation with his parents to the beach at El Quisco. They get married, they have their first child—me—and they’re happy, except that the second child takes its time in coming. Tests.

  That’s where they are when the drama unfolds. One night, when he’s told her he has to stay late at the workshop to receive a shipment of larch boards arriving from the south, she follows him, sees him go into a restaurant, waits a while, and finally, gathering up her courage, she goes in and sees him at a corner table with “another woman.” My mother goes over to them striding like a queen (according to her), and when she gets to the table she realizes she doesn’t know what she’s going to do. My father watches her, pallid. The woman is gorgeous and young. She waits, flabbergasted.

  Then my mother can think of nothing better than to introduce herself to the stranger, to reach out her hand and say: “I’m this man’s wife.” And the woman stands up, shakes her hand, lowers her eyes, and says: “I understand, ma’am.” Then my mother faces my father. She shouts: “As for you, I will not greet you, and I never will again, you little shit!” And in a single motion she grabs the glass of wine and throws it in his face. She leaves the restaurant walking like a queen, leaving a tomblike silence in her wake.

  My father will defend himself, he’ll say it was a casual fling. He will apologize. My mother will reject him. My soul will be torn in two. I tape a photo on the wall of my room of my father playing tennis, hitting a backhand. His body stretches out like a rubber band. The effort is concentrated in his face. My mother can’t forgive him. My father pursues her for months. Nothing.

  Until he finds someone else. She’s attractive, with a pretty face, and fourteen years younger than my mother. She plays tennis well. My mother is devastated. I stay with her; it’s what I have to do, but inside I’m contemptuous. I’m eleven years old. I loved and still love my father. I go to his new house in Ñuñoa with its terrace of grapevines, its apple tree, two plum trees, and, at the back, an old olive tree with gnarled branches; and there’s Master, a purebred German shepherd that I adore. I still go with my father to El Quisco, to the same rustic wooden cabin he’s always had. We take Master with us. When we arrive, I smell the salt and the stale air. We have to ease open the windows and air out the sheets. I like to see them hanging in the sun, so white, changing shape as the wind takes possession of them. They change colors, taking on a new brilliance. I like to be there by the sea, alone with him. Not with his new wife. I watch him in the mirror while he shaves. Why couldn’t my mother keep him?

  As soon as my father remarries, I don’t like going to his house in Ñuñoa anymore. But I go. And he worries about me. He calls me more often than I’d like. One day he takes me with him to the South. I’m fifteen years old and I love the idea of traveling alone with him. His wife is almost always with him when I see him. We’re going to look at a forest. We travel by plane to Temuco and stay in a hotel. I feel so grown up and happy. The next day a Jeep comes to pick us up. It’s a long ride up a mountain track. To one side is a ravine, to the other, dense, wet forests, immense ferns, climbing vines. My father explains that the land isn’t his, only the machinery, which, he tells me, required taking on “severe debt” to buy. We turn onto a wider road. After a few minutes the noise starts. A truck goes by carrying tree trunks, then another truck. We get out and continue on foot. My father talks to the guy who came to pick us up.

  Suddenly, horror. A machine moves among the trees, takes hold of one with two steel arms, and cuts it down. The embrace lasts about a minute. When the trunk falls, the earth trembles. Other talons grab the trunk that fell and they strip it in no time, removing its branches. The earth thunders again: another tree has fallen. A crane picks up the freshly stripped tree and throws it on the truck. In less than five minutes a life that took over eighty years to reach that immensity has ended. Another tremor: the machine felled another tree. I ask my father if we can leave. He is surprised. He’s brought me here to show me his new machinery. He tells me again that he’s gone into debt so he can buy it. I start to cry and I don’t stop until we get back to Temuco.

  My father tries to console me but he can’t. From that moment on he won’t be able to. I can’t see him the way I did before. I’m fifteen years old now. From that day on his presence in my life will gradually diminish, and later on, when I start university, he will be an enemy. But it hurts me, and he remains in my thoughts, speaking to me from there, always very close to me. If I go to him because I need something, he never fails me. Almost always what I need is money, and he gives it to me, no questions asked. He gives it to me happily.

  Some two years pass, and I find out that things are going badly for him. He’s had to turn all the tree-harvesting machinery over to the bank, and he’s barely maintaining the workshop. He’s sold his house, his stock in the tennis club, his car. Now he rents a duplex that doesn’t have a garage. He uses a canvas to cover the used Taunus he bought. He mortgaged the house in El Quisco. He’s sad, embarrassed. I know what I should feel, I try to convince myself to feel it, but the rage is stronger. I like how the anger overcomes my compassion. I’m losing sight of him. I have a boyfriend, Rodrigo, an animal, a tender animal.

  I found a notebook at my mother’s house. Eighteen, I must have been when I wrote it. I was in college. It’s a diary but not a daily one, a notebook swollen full of banal notes, dried flowers, matchbooks and scraps and napkins and cards, everything glued in. It’s one of the few things my mother sent me from Chile when I came to Sweden. A few weeks ago, when I found out you were coming, I reread it. Nothing worthwhile, I’d say. Except for a couple of folded pages that fell out of the notebook and that I don’t remember writing. But the handwriting is mine from that time. Look, if you go over to the dresser, next to the TV, you’ll see a couple of folded sheets of paper under a little statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Why a Virgin of Guadalupe? A Spanish priest brought it to me. You know, this home is part of Ersta Diakonianstalt. They’re
Protestant, but every week a Catholic priest comes. He assumed that I must be Catholic because I’m Latin American. I told him I’m not, not anymore. But he insisted. He wanted to pray with me, and finally, I gave in. He left me that little statue as a gift. To help me start praying again. Do you think it helps to pray if you’re not a believer? There! Underneath. See them? Give them to me. You won’t be able to read the writing. I’ll read them to you.

  “My father always sticks his nose in. I saw it all coming. He’d like to plan and control every second of my life. He thinks for me. It’s not that he wants me to be like him, not that. He wants to invent me. And so he attempts the impossible. His love suffocates me. I should just leave, I know. And when I say good-bye, I don’t know why the tears come to my eyes, tears I can barely hold back. Then his demanding, loving gaze will infiltrate me, and I forget the suffocation and my anger. What I remember then is his capacity for utter devotion to me, his conversation that comforts me, his care for me, and his blind faith in me moves me then, that hope of his that encourages and then punishes me; his unconditional nature, too, and my own confidence—less every day, of course—in his ability to take charge.

  “How to regain those earlier times when I was a little girl, those moments when we understood each other without trying, and just being with him was fun. Back then there wasn’t this pressure or these heartaches, the neglected duty, my anguish over not accomplishing what I’ve promised myself, though deep down I know it’s just my own youthful ambition and he’s to blame, he’s the one who implanted this feeling of specialness in me. Back then I didn’t have this critical and evasive gaze. I blame myself. Myself, and my mother. It’s my endless adolescence. They explained to us in school over and over what it was all about. Is it possible to return to a previous state? Or if not, when will I be old enough to leave all this behind? And it’s not a question of getting some physical distance—we already have that. He filters into my mind. The other day I was flipping through his books, which are few, and I came across a verse. It said that the father, even dead, has ‘fear within me, within my very hope.’ It was a quotation from Rilke, and he had underlined it himself. It was a self-help book for fathers. I think it must have been a gift from his wife, who isn’t very intellectual, shall we say. But the only parts that were underlined had been underlined by him. In my solitude, that uncertainty of his sneaks in and I can be, in part, how I think he might want to be if he were me. Only by keeping my distance can I manage to be myself and also coincide with him. And be at peace. But only partially. Because there’s an equally strong and insistent force that makes me want to be definitively separate from him, that urges me to live as though he had never existed. And when the good-bye comes, the very moment I’ve been looking forward to, sometimes my eyes fill with tears. And it’s not that the separation is going to be long, no. Because it’s not my departure from that duplex of his, with Master playing in the front yard, that separates us. My departure is just a pretext for that long embrace that we give each other always and never.”

  That’s it. Well, you can tell I was in college and I was trying to write with a certain style, right? How pretentious . . .

  NINE

  I come out of my childhood room and I search among my mother’s jars and bottles. I draw an almost boiling bath, a bubble bath. I use her verbena soap, her shampoo, her conditioner with pure olive oil, I dry off with her fluffy towel, I spread her almond-scented lotion over my legs, my arms, over my diminished breasts. I trim my toenails, I use her lotion for cracked heels. I take the top off her bottle of nail polish; its smell would make me dizzy now. I open her makeup box and that palette of colors calls out to me; I’d like to make an abstract painting with my hands. But its shades confuse me, I don’t know how to begin, and I go back to bed with my hair wet.

  I return to the apricot tree. I try to imagine the way those ripe apricots looked shining in the afternoon light. As I said already: beyond the curtains I don’t open there are no apricots yet, there are flowers plastered against my window. I glance at the bedside table: a pile of pages stuck to old glue. No covers. Dry, yellow pages: “Would I find la Maga? Most of the time it was just a case of putting in an appearance, going along the rue de Seine to the arch leading into the Quai de Conti, and I would see her slender form against the olive ashen light . . .” I turn to page 48: “I touch your mouth, I touch the edge of your mouth with a finger, I am drawing it as if it sprang forth from my hand . . . ,” and to page 428: “As soon as he began to amalate the noeme, the clemise began to smother her and they fell into hydromuries, into savage ambonies, into exasperating sustales.” So many times I had dreamed with open eyes over this book . . . I start to fall asleep. It’s wonderful to be able to doze like that.

  Suddenly, I hear my father’s voice.

  My door opens and he’s really there, sitting at the edge of my bed, his big hand caressing my hair. He looks younger than my mother. I smell his same old Yardley cologne. It smells of lavender; it is what remains of his old life. That, and his suit made of good cloth that’s grown shiny and worn with use. He’s a youthful and handsome old man, with his shock of white hair falling over his ears. It’s strange to see him there in my mother’s house.

  When he heard me crying he put his arms around me. The only thing I wanted was to again be the little girl whose father could make everything right with the world. I’m sure that’s what he wanted too. It felt wonderful to burst into tears in his arms; I felt myself growing calm little by little, though I didn’t stop crying, pressed close to him and wanting to never let go. I wanted to go with him to El Quisco, I told him, that very day, to swim in the sea, play paddleball on the beach with him . . . I made him lie down next to me on the bed. I laid my head on his chest. I felt the thin cotton of his shirt and the cold silk of his tie on my cheek. I felt his beating heart against my ear. “Daddy,” I said to him.

  It was dusk when I woke up. How long had I slept? There was barely a trace of light floating behind the curtains. Then he started talking to me, he told me he loved me so, so much, and that for all these years he had thought of me every day, every day. He was talking in a soft murmur, and I took refuge in his tenderness. I felt that, like an incubator coaxing chicks out of shells, his warmth was bringing me back to myself, to what I had been, to a lost peace. Happiness had existed, and I could get it back.

  Suddenly he was asking, in the same sweet and masculine tone, why I had gotten myself into this trouble; he said he had told me not to get mixed up in politics, it was a foolish thing to do under a dictatorship. I jerked away roughly and ordered him to leave the room. My teeth were chattering in rage. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t control my jaw. He tried to soothe me, he told me he was sorry. I wouldn’t relent, and I threw him out of my room. He told me that no matter what happened or what I did, he would always love me and I could always count on him. He closed the door gently. I tried to cry, but I couldn’t.

  TEN

  My inability to coincide with myself, when did that begin? The distance from myself that I seem to have always felt, what caused it? And my resentment? I go back, then, inevitably, to the rupture that came from my parents’ divorce, my harsh disdain for my mother after my father left—my mother, who didn’t know how to keep him with her. Her efforts to be motherly only seemed like signs of her impotence. I go back to my father, the love I felt—the resentful love of an only child for the man who had left us both—my jealousy of his new wife, who was not my mother but who wanted to be something like it, and thus let me punish both him and her in revenge for my scorned mother. I go back to my intense devotion to Mary, virgin and mother who never knew a man’s sex. She was my solace, she and my grandmother, my grandmother with her white hair that would turn yellow and her natural, easy laugh, whom I went to visit every afternoon.

  And I’m haunted by my terror of the nuns, of their sparse moustaches and their rancid odor, their severity that intimidated and disciplined me; later, my disdain for them would grow, for their irredeema
ble infantilism, their sinful vigilance. I feel the desolation of the day of my first period, my disconsolate sobbing. I didn’t want to stop being a little girl yet, I was still very short, and I couldn’t, just couldn’t accept that my childhood had ended so suddenly and with such strange discomfort, a pain down low in my belly, and this dark blood, viscous, foul-smelling, and mine—no, I didn’t want to be a woman, not yet. But it was forced on me, just like my parents’ divorce and the sudden death of my grandmother, who took the Virgin with her. She left me her embossed silver mirror. I still have it.

  And then the fear of my body; fear of its desires, then, the desire at its core, in its hidden depths and cavities. And the humiliation of that market of little virgin whores in the parties and clubs, which our mothers prepared us for—with help from hairdressers, stylists, makeup artists, and aestheticians—marinating our bodies as if in a stew, transforming them so we could seduce brutish teenagers who dream of animal sex and flee from intimacy. I certainly couldn’t make friends with either boys or girls at those animal markets.

  I grew up alone and separate. I had the feeling that I was inert, and I needed to keep myself soft like clay, always soft, waiting and waiting for the man to arrive who would be able to give me shape. Because in spite of everything, I wanted my Pygmalion to appear, even if he was nothing but a beautiful animal.