La Vida Doble (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

by Fontaine, Arturo

  But I didn’t like the way I looked. I was pained by the women whose looks I did like, the pretty ones, the ones who felt men’s eyes following them. I was saddened by other women’s beauty. I wished I could just deflower myself. My mother would stay working at the hospital until very late. Her duty was to the sick. Her daughter would just have to understand. My mother never created a relaxed atmosphere where I could be myself. She didn’t know how. This was never more obvious than when she took it upon herself to forcibly construct that “homelike atmosphere” and would start to make dinner, asking me to light a fire. My mother didn’t like how I looked, and that made her feel desperate. She would have liked to have a very beautiful daughter. Who wouldn’t? She used to inspect my hairstyle and would always suggest a change. The change that could make up for the beauty I was lacking. She says that to me with the cold calm behind which she hides her frustration. She says it while putting on her glasses and peering at me in the mirror with the same harsh seriousness she has when she looks at X-rays. She comments on my eye shadow, gives advice. She speaks like a doctor prescribing medicine. Then she smooths a lock of hair yet again, and her gaze becomes even harsher, as if she hates me for not being the beauty she wanted. That’s how I feel. The pimples that sprout on my face drive her crazy. She wants to squeeze them. She can’t resist. Same with my blackheads. She has to pinch them out of my skin. She can’t resist. She’d use her teeth if she could. She’s like a monkey picking lice.

  And finally, my great love—because desire creates the object of desire—came to me, came to me while I was studying French language and literature at university and reading that it’s the Devil holds the strings that move us, and adoring the Black Sun of Melancholy. I recited idiotically to my stupid and beautiful animal: J’ai tant rêvé de toi que tu perds ta réalité, I’ve dreamed of you so much that you’re losing your reality. And it was true. I’d been dreaming of him for so long.

  I met him on the beach at El Quisco. He hypnotized me as he played paddleball in his bathing suit. I found myself watching the deft movements of his lithe, hairless body—his legs that were firm and a little crooked, his slender back—and then lowering my gaze to his, how to put it, his unforgettable green bathing suit. Yes. The “gluteous” shapes beneath that green bathing suit were momentous for me. I don’t think that word exists. It would have to be invented for him, for his “gluteous” form. I’ve never seen anything like it since. I shivered, and felt ashamed. He lost the game but he won me over.

  And with him, I will dare to go out past the breaker zone, deep enough to swim. The feeling of floating in the ocean, as if I were free from gravity’s force. Sometimes he lets himself float, other times he swims fast, driving his arms into the waves and showing me the strength of his grown man’s shoulders before I lose him from sight. He dives underneath me, under the water, and reappears here or over there. If I got a bad cramp and doubled up and started to drown, Rodrigo would save me. It would be wonderful to be saved by him. Really, I wanted to dance with him. That’s all I wanted, for the moment.

  It makes me laugh to remember it. It makes me sad to remember. He came to pick me up to go to a bonfire at the beach. As we were leaving he said he’d left his sweater at home, and I went with him to get it. We went inside. The house was empty. His aunt and uncle had gone to Santiago and wouldn’t be back until Friday, he told me, looking at me with his calm, direct gaze. A log cabin, all very rustic. We sat down on a wicker sofa on the second floor deck, overlooking the ocean. He put on music. We drank piscola. I took off my sandals and rested my feet on a little bamboo table. And then, I don’t know how, we were dancing. Diana Ross’s voice mixed with the sound of the nearby ocean. Reach out and touch somebody’s hand.

  Over his shoulder I could see the foam shining on the waves as they broke, lit up by the moon. The floorboards of the deck were spaced apart, and they felt rough when my toes went between them. That was annoying. But it was delicious when my toes would accidentally brush against his. When had he taken off his sandals? A big toe slid over my foot and pressed at the base of my toes. I lost the rhythm and missed a step. He held me firm and I felt the muscles in his chest pressing into mine. The image of his torso in his bathing suit flashed into my mind. My stomach tightened. Here. Like this.

  That present, that now drains away without us noticing. What that now holds within it is the crash of waves nearby in the night, and a man’s foot that brushes against mine and stays. Accidentally. We’re dancing. That’s all. And the separated boards of a second-floor deck torment our feet and obstruct their movement. We can’t help but dance very slowly. No matter where you are, no matter how far . . . His face is pressed against mine. His tenderness makes me melt. No wind, (no wind) no rain, (no rain) / Nor winter’s cold . . . I feel a thigh move between my legs. Its invasive touch unsettles me. He’s bringing me to a place I’d rather not go. I sense danger. Do you know where you’re going to? But there’s a hand with immense fingers that moves down my back and comes to rest along my spine with a smooth naturalness.

  When that hand pulled me toward him I had no choice but to go. And then I felt the intrusive thigh wasn’t alone, there was something else now, a firm mass. Was that what he was thinking about? My first reaction was repulsion and disgust, almost. But when I felt it so aggressive and firm and persistent, so foreign to the rest of a human being’s body, I don’t know . . . I had never imagined the curiosity that insolent, uninvited guest would provoke in me. Suddenly, I was laughing with my eyes closed and my head thrown back. Rodrigo’s lips on my neck. A shiver went down my back. This was serious. I straightened up and my mouth landed precisely on his. We kissed with a calm that we barely maintained.

  My first kiss . . . Anyone who forgets her first kiss didn’t deserve it. Don’t you think? Even if she has a degree in French literature and she’s read all her Simone de Beauvoir, her Foucault, and her Derrida. Mine was in El Quisco, like I told you. The truth is, I could never forget. I don’t want to, either. Even though Rodrigo turned out to be a bastard. But in that first encounter there was sensitivity, gentleness, tenderness. Nothing that hinted at the cruelty to come. Our heads moved apart, and the first thing I saw were his eyes narrowed in a smile. When I was able to disengage from those tender, kind eyes, my gaze went to his mouth that, also smiling, was waiting for me. No wind, no rain, / can stop me, babe . . . My stomach was being wrung like a wet towel. Something in him was escaping. My mouth sought his and I lost myself in it, I did battle with an ardent tongue, rough and formidable. We gasped for air and he held my hips and pulled me toward him calmly, surely. I don’t know: his bare foot moved slowly over mine.

  That night, back in my own room, I fell asleep with Diana Ross’s voice in my ears. I thought about Rodrigo’s sweet eyes, and I felt them next to me. It was a hot night, and every so often I woke to the buzz of mosquitoes flying over my sun-browned skin.

  The next day I didn’t see him on the beach. I was with his friends, but I didn’t dare ask about him. I searched for him as though sleepwalking. Nothing. He’d disappeared. The next day, same thing. And so on. I was eaten up by longing. I slept badly. Then I would spend the day yawning, and the yawns turned to sighs on my lips. On the fourth day, let’s see . . . Yes, I think it was the afternoon of the fourth day, I spotted him playing paddleball. I slowly brought my sun umbrella closer. While I walked over the sand I could look right at him through my dark sunglasses without disguising it. I untied my beach wrap from around my waist and carefully spread it out over the sand; I got my Nivea sunscreen from my bag and began rubbing it over my legs. I took my time. Was he watching me? I lay on my back with my straw hat over my face.

  I didn’t wait long. I heard a footstep, very close by; a dusting of sand and someone took off my hat. His chin, his nose, inches from mine, his disconcerting smile. Calmly, I got up, tied the wrap around my waist, and reached out my arm to take the paddle he was offering me, smiling, his face all full of sun. I noticed the white mark left by his sunglasses, hi
s dripping hair, his eyelashes caked with sea salt. His hand . . . the paddle was still in his big hand with its big fingers. If it was God who made them, he shaped them with a lot of love, I felt. It was a hand, I felt, that would be able to hold a just-hatched chick and lift it without frightening it. I like men’s hands. Reach out and touch somebody’s hand . . . The ball went flying and there I was, awkward, terrible, of course. And him, agile and well timed, stretching and jumping along the shore of wet sand to hit the ball gently within my reach. We played for a long time. When, sweaty and exhausted, we dunked ourselves in El Quisco’s freezing water, the sun was setting. Afterward we shivered with cold, together on my wrap watching the last reflections of light on the horizon, the beach almost empty, and we laughed and kissed with lips that were salty and trembling from the cold.

  We went into his house hugging and laughing, and he put on Diana Ross again: You see, my love is alive . . . We danced entwined, shivering in our soaked bathing suits, and no embrace was enough to satisfy us.

  And it’s the force of that thigh between my legs, I don’t know, shivers going down my spine. His “gluteous” form through the wet bathing suit, I don’t know, my rough breathing and the sighs that escape me and that I try to hide. His kisses on my neck, his hands on my back, pressing me against him, and me sustaining the pressure, and the threat of that insistent mass that was unmistakable to me now. Ain’t no river wide enough / To keep me from you . . . I felt a tug at my back, and in no hurry, gently, he unclasped the top of my bikini, which fell to the floorboards like the skin of a lifeless fish. I put my arms around him. I didn’t dare let him look at me. Shame intermingled with desire made my lips tremble. I felt flushed spots burning on my cheeks. He held me tight, my breasts against his firm body, and now I could tell he was breathing hard too, and that disarmed me.

  He moved away from me and held me by the waist, he put one knee on the floor and let his eyes move over my breasts. He stayed there a moment, kneeling, motionless, looking at me. For a few seconds I knew what it felt like to be a goddess. His lips moved a little, almost imperceptibly. I sunk my hands into his hair. When I saw that yes, it was true, a tear was sliding down his cheek, I pulled his head closer and he let me, I held it against my stomach. I felt the tip of his tongue in my belly button and we burst out laughing.

  I never loved anyone again the way I loved Rodrigo. You only love that way once. I felt him next to me all day. Everything that happened to me happened only so I could tell him about it later. I fell asleep imagining his eyes upon me. He liked me, he thought I was pretty, he cared about me. And I felt I was, then, a beautiful woman. I looked at myself in the mirror and I liked how I looked. When I got dressed up, people thought I was gorgeous. I knew it. I felt the way men looked at me. And I liked that they looked, of course, but far and away what I liked the most was for Rodrigo to look at me. The mere idea of kissing another man someday made me nauseous. I was so sure that no one and nothing would ever come between us . . . He used to steal flowers for me, jumping over garden walls. More than once he was charged by a boxer or Doberman when he went into someone’s yard like a thief to cut the first red camellia of that winter or the first flowering white almond branch of spring. “My love,” I wrote him on a restaurant napkin or a sky blue card that I paid too much for at the bookstore or on a simple sheet of notebook paper. “My love” . . . Mon amour, and those two words had urgency, intimacy, an incomprehensible ardor: Je t’aime. Anything more was unnecessary. Je t’aime. To be able to say “my love” to Rodrigo and for it to be the truth, that I was, for him, “my love,” was a flight, a state of suspension, a miracle of fire. Nothing bad mattered as long as the two of us loved each other as we loved each other, as long as we could love each other a little more every day. That kind of love doesn’t happen twice.

  But little by little, in some imperceptible way, my romance was transformed by his demands for rough sex, for surrender, passion and punishment, possession and loss, by incomprehension. And Rodrigo ran when he found out I was pregnant. This was when we had been together almost three years: he had fallen in love with someone else.

  This is the raw truth, and I repeat it, trying to convince myself: Rodrigo wants to leave me for her. But he doesn’t acknowledge it. He needs it to be my fault. He needs me to believe it in order to truly believe it himself. He has to persuade me that I was the one who ruined everything. Not him. And so he makes up stories.

  And this was the same man who in El Quisco, kneeling down with tears in his eyes, gazed at my goddess breasts while I melted for him . . . Who would have thought he would abandon me like that? It’s my own fault. Me, who got pregnant and didn’t want an abortion and sacrificed his future, of course, Rodrigo’s, no less. And on top of that, my own and ours together. I made him into a victim. That was it. Rodrigo didn’t want to be tied down. No. That was the point. And the other? And me? In the morning my eyes were so vacant and my face so dead, that the people I met may not even have seen me. It wasn’t, then, that he’d stopped loving me. It was that he couldn’t love me anymore and was suffering by attempting the impossible. I smashed the vessel. He felt sorry for himself. And I was three months pregnant. I had wounded him permanently. It was beyond repair. He had the right to go on being young, he told me. That’s what he told me. And he split. And I was split in two.

  ELEVEN

  I stopped seeing the few high-school girlfriends I still met up with on occasional afternoons. I was ashamed to tell them. A friend from university materialized, Rafa, with his big belly, his candid laugh and friendly gaze, and he took me with him to a demonstration. I walked along beside him, jostled and confused and with that ridiculous ball where another being, an abusive invader, was growing at my body’s expense. I felt lost in the mass of workers with their overpowering smell, and I repeated to myself that a hand on the plow was worth as much as a hand on the pen. Then, one of those days I felt myself suddenly caught up in something big, an enormous collective body; we sang together and I was part of the hope harbored by those who suffered, the poor of the earth. The men and women who were Rafa’s friends accepted me. I met Teruca during that time, and we became inseparable. She had a three-year-old son: Francisco. A chubby boy with enormous eyes, mild and dark. She was studying history. She had a long, black braid that hung down to her waist, and she was thin with very small breasts. Her wide, full-lipped smile could win you over completely.

  Was Rafa interested in me? He never said so. He thought I was pretty. He did tell me that, and I loved that he told me, but I didn’t believe him. I didn’t feel pretty. And to me, Rafa was a great friend and nothing more. If he’d taken one wrong step . . . Several times I thought he was about to. It would have ruined our friendship. During that time, I pulled down the posters of Mick Jagger, Robert Redford, Peter Fonda, Julio Iglesias, and Led Zeppelin from the walls of my room. Now the faces looking down on me were Violeta Parra, “La Negra” Mercedes Sosa, and two great bearded men, Karl Marx and Che Guevara.

  We were a guild of students who studied almost nothing but the Sacred Scriptures of Marx (those of the young Marx more than the older) and Engels (I remember soporific afternoons trying to get through the Anti-Dühring) and, of course, our church fathers: Lenin, Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Gramsci, Althusser, Sartre, De-bray, speeches and articles by Mao, by Che . . . The job was harder because we knew so little of the history that most of these works presupposed. I don’t know how much we understood, but the thing was to carry those huge volumes under our arms and quote them every chance we got. We did political and organizational—now I would call it “evangelical”—work among the peasants and workers who, armed with red banners, knives, shovels, chains, and a few sawed-off shotguns, forcibly seized urban terrain and agricultural fields. But Rafa would rant and rave against the “extremists” who, with their “military apparatus,” as he said in an ironic tone, with their bank heists and Vietnamese IEDs, were just playing into the hands of the reactionaries who wanted a military coup. In the evenings we drank
red wine and sang along to songs by Violeta, Mercedes, Ángel, Isabel, by Víctor Jara, Quilapayún . . . To sing is to wait. And we were living in a time of Advent.

  Months later the presidential palace, La Moneda, was in flames. I’ll never forget that image framed by the television: the strength of its walls resisting the fire, the structure’s sheer will to survive. I was tormented by thoughts of those who died, but above all by thoughts of Rafa, Teruca, and the other comrades, men and women, friends I didn’t dare call. I shut myself in, fell into bed, and wasted away. When Anita was born, it was an unimaginable joy that was, moreover, egalitarian. Almost any woman, I thought recklessly, has this happiness within her reach. My mother, always so cold, welcomed Anita like her own child. She was more loving with Anita than with me, I think.

  Then one day Rafa showed up at my house and he was fine, which disappointed me a little. Teruca was safe, too. He’d be calling me soon, he told me. He hadn’t called before for reasons of security. Some weeks later we met up with Teruca at Rafa’s mother’s house, which was on Calle Los Gladiolos. I brought my Anita with me wrapped in layers of shawls. Teruca, who had cut off her thick, black braid, made such a fuss over her you would have thought she was my older sister. Francisco, her son, watched her with his big, dark eyes. She told me in private that Rafa had been arrested. He’d been held in the Ritoque concentration camp. Of course, he’d taken a bad beating. He didn’t talk about that. Didn’t want to.

  It was Rafa who put me in touch—years later, of course—with Canelo. Rafa had changed by then. Now he believed only in armed resistance. We met at Tavelli for a coffee. It was a dangerous meeting, he told me, and I was pleased.

  Well . . . Canelo had entered Chile secretly. Toward the end of the seventies he had been one of the founders of the Red Ax movement, which gradually absorbed groups from the Elenos,1 from Organa,2 from Bandera Roja, from Espartaco and other far left groups. They were all convinced that an unarmed revolution would never be a revolution. They were part of what was known as the “revolutionary pole,” the ones Rafa used to criticize, the ones who wanted to create one, two, three Vietnams . . . There aren’t many who want to remember the infighting of those days. Canelo didn’t avoid the issue that first day.