La Vida Doble (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

by Fontaine, Arturo

  But our rhetoric, the language that was home to our utopia, the place of our no-place: it has ended. Because that rhetoric and the liturgy of the mountain—with its walks, its bonfires and guitars—that addictive language, I’m telling you, was the forge for our brotherhood of clandestine strangers who only knew—or should know—each other’s aliases but who were prepared to die together the very next day. That’s what people today don’t believe in: the inner nobility that made our souls quiver as we felt ourselves to be among the vanguard, the chosen ones.

  During that period, Claudia invited me to meet a boy, a Chilean college student who was coming from Cuba to study for a few months. (Who today could imagine the dream Cuba embodied for us back then?) “His name is Francisco,” she told me. “His mother belonged to Red Ax, and he was raised in a home with a group of children whose parents had entered Chile clandestinely to join in the struggle.” Claudia didn’t know anything about that practice.

  “It was a safety measure,” I explain to her. “It helped to avoid moral extortion.” She opens her eyes wide. And suddenly my hands are trembling and I shout at her: “It was indispensable! How else could they do it?! Don’t you see? What world of little angels did you live in, you nitwit?” Claudia looks at me and falls silent.

  “I’m sorry,” she says, “I’m sorry.” I say nothing, of course, about how I should have sent Anita to that home for combatants’ children in Havana and I never did. I say nothing, of course, about the price I paid for it.

  “The kid,” says Claudia, hurt, “holds a grudge against his mother. He has these marvelous dark eyes, let me tell you. He understands her, he says, but he still doesn’t want to see her again. He understands perfectly, he says, but at the same time he can’t accept what she did. He’s tried and tried again, but he just can’t, he says. She wasn’t my mother, he says, and now she can never become my mother. That’s what she doesn’t understand; she thinks she can, now. She says she needs me now, that at least she could be a kind of aunt. But that’s impossible, too, he says, because she’s not my aunt, she’s the mother I never had, he says. For me, it’s better not to see her. That’s what he says.”

  Claudia asks me, as a Chilean, to talk to the boy, she wants me to tell him about our struggle, try to explain it to him, try to reconcile him with his mother. Could this Francisco be Teruca’s son? I didn’t want to meet that boy, I looked for any excuse not to meet with him. I didn’t want to see his face. I was afraid. I wonder what ever became of him?

  Claudia called me to cancel a lunch date. “Something came up last minute,” was her excuse. “Let’s get together next week,” she said. “I’ll call you to set a time.” She never called. I called her, and she never answered. The same happened a few weeks later with Mireya. I went out for coffee with Mario. He was very nice. He said he would call me and he never did. It must have been around then, I think, when the rumors started about me, and people started to edge me out. I could never find out how much they knew or what exactly the rumors were. It didn’t matter much to me. I was, finally, a free and happy woman. Roberto still loved with me and he got along well with Anita. That was enough for me.

  FIFTY-THREE

  Out of pure nosiness I find an envelope in her desk and my heart skips a beat. Nosiness? No. The truth is that she’s been a different person for some time now. She is distant. I’d like to ask her: Why did you forget how to hug me? At what moment did my body become foreign to you? I want to put my arms around her, but I don’t dare. Not like before, at least. She seems so indifferent.

  And I know that handwriting. How could I not! It’s Rodrigo’s. That’s how I find out that, after all these years, he’s found my daughter and now he exchanges letters with her. I don’t like it at all. Anita, under pressure from my questions, admits that she plans to go to Chile and live with her father. Just for a while, she tells me when she sees how my face falls in sorrow. I say a few silly things in an effort to dissuade her: education in Sweden is so much better, she’s better off graduating here . . . She says she’s leaving the following week: “My dad sent me the ticket.” She says it so casually, as if her dad had always been her dad. I’m struck by her innocence. I hug her, barely holding back the flood of tears, and I tell her that I will always want the best for her and that she should live wherever she will be happiest. I pull her to me in a long, tight, terrible embrace, which I cut short suddenly to run to my room. I throw myself onto the bed, the feather pillow in my mouth. If only my rough sobs could suffocate me.

  I break down. I have to learn how to live all over again. Without Anita. With this sadness. She calls me on the phone the day after she gets to Santiago. She’s delighted. Her father has a house with a giant yard, he works as a real estate agent, his wife is charming, so are her brothers and sisters. “Hello, hello. Hello! Hello, Mom, are you there?” I can’t talk. If I open my mouth I’ll burst into tears.

  Nostalgia gnaws at me. In the morning as I make breakfast, I can almost see her sitting at the table, eating her muesli with honey and cold milk, her hair falling forward over her sleepy face. In the afternoon, after work, I find myself going through photo albums, postcards, notebooks, school report cards. When I used to come home from work, she would run to me and hang around my neck before I even got my coat off, and she would press her warm little face against mine, cold from the wind and snow outside. Like before, it’s hard for me to get out of bed. It’s too much. I try to go on sleeping, but I can’t do that either. Only silence awaits me, and in the evenings the same silence when I come home.

  I think about my parents. All the times they must have been waiting for a letter from me . . . I write them rarely, if ever, to tell the truth. I don’t want to. I’m not interested in reading their letters, either. There are envelopes I don’t open for weeks. I imagine Anita peering at an envelope from me, full of distrust. I think: Maybe she’d rather not open it. In fact, she doesn’t answer my letters. I think: How does she get along with Rodrigo? That sudden friendship that snatched her away from me fills me with rage. I don’t like it. She looks like her father, her nose, her slender figure, her slightly curved legs, her unsettling smile, her tranquil eyes. Incestuous images come into my mind. My therapist is interested in those. She turns them around: it’s me I’m imagining there with my own father. They are explanations. Understanding isn’t enough to exorcise the ghost. Anita, she’s the one who matters to me. And Anita isn’t with me. She left me, just as her father did when as she was beginning to grow in my belly. I never could have imagined this. I started to love her right from that moment. He didn’t. He never even wanted to meet her. Until now, until this sudden whim. It’s not fair. My soul is torn away along with her.

  When I dream about her—and now that happens a lot—she’s always a little girl and we’re in Stockholm. She never appears in my dreams as the woman she is now, always as she used to be. I wake up: Could it be true? I look into her room. Everything just as it was: the same bedspread, the curtains, the books, the clothes in her closet, her CDs. Her photos, photos of her as a little girl, cause me pain. She’s the same little girl who visits me when I sleep. I try to convince myself that the little girl in those photos doesn’t exist anymore, she’s changed and it couldn’t be any other way, and she’ll never again be the person she was before. I have to resign myself to this new person. I put the photos away. I don’t want to suffer. I put them all away except for one. It shows us here in Stockholm with a ship in the background, and we look so happy. So much time ahead for the two of us. Like never before, like never again. I’m suffering a lot, I say to myself. I try to forget her and I can’t. Can a mother hate a daughter? I catch myself starting to hate her, and I’m horrified.

  And if I dared to ask her: Are you still my daughter? What would happen if I asked her that over the phone? I have to accept her as she is. But it would be easier if she hadn’t changed so much. I can’t stop thinking that the real Anita is someone else, the one I lost, the one she let escape.

  FIFTY-FOUR />
  And she’s not here. The one who is with me is Roberto. Without him, I don’t know what would have become of me. His accent caresses and numbs me. I don’t want to make love, I want his voice to pacify me, I want him to sing into my ear: Bésame, bésame mucho / como si fuera esta noche / la última vez . . . And he smiles and starts to sing softly, almost in a whisper, and it lulls me to sleep. Que tengo miedo a perderte, / perderte después.

  Could someone else accept me if I couldn’t accept myself? “You’re too suspicious, too susceptible,” Roberto tells me. It’s true. I know it. Thanks to therapy I understand it all. But understanding isn’t enough. My therapist asks me if I think of myself as the daughter of a good-looking and absent father and an intelligent professional who wanted me to be the beauty she wasn’t. My psychiatrist likes to ask questions. Too many. From his chair behind me, while I’m below, on the divan. Him above and me below. And he asks his questions in a neutral voice, as if it wasn’t him I’m answering but God. I’m just a case. It isn’t a conversation. He’s giving me his professional services. That’s what he’s paid for, obviously, to listen to me.

  He asks me if I feel as though my mother has failed me, if I feel guilty for not having been able to keep my father from leaving home and marrying someone else, if I feel resentful toward my father, if that’s why I’m attracted to rough men and their guns . . . I let him ask. Even here in Stockholm you have to put up with those banalities. In exchange for a prescription for sleeping pills and antidepressants that otherwise I couldn’t get in the pharmacy. My mind wanders somewhere else.

  He tells me that “terrorists” suffer from “free-floating anxiety,” that they suffer from “personality disorders,” that in order to stabilize the “ego” they join the movement, that the collective cause becomes greater than the “ego.” Now I’m the one who asks: And?

  And Roberto is there. He goes on being there, he goes on taking me to visit islands on the weekends. One day he takes me to Gotland. A forty-minute flight. From there we go to Faro. Roberto wants me to see the stones with etchings left by the Vikings in Bunge. “You always loved the Vikings, right?” But I’m more impressed by the beauty of some cows with clean and shining hides, an old windmill made of stone, and, of course, the rocks. We walk along a pebble beach, and there are those strange, dark, rock sculptures rising up, chiseled by millinery winds. The sea is dark gray or very white. I’m startled by a ship’s siren. They have the tonalities, I think, the spiritual atmosphere of Persona. It occurs to me that we should find out where Bergman’s house is and go past it. But I discard the idea before suggesting it to Roberto, which is for the best. He would have been capable of ringing the doorbell once we got there.

  “I know I’m not capable of inspiring love,” I tell him out of the blue, and I lean against one of those bleak, forsaken rocks. “I always know I’ll be abandoned and betrayed, it’s what I deserve.” But he caresses me in silence, he wants to redeem me. He thinks his love can save me. “I’d like to believe you,” I tell him.

  I know I’m lying to myself. I want someone to forgive me and love me unconditionally, exactly as I was and am and will be. But I’m afraid. I defend myself. I don’t want to tie myself down. I care for Roberto a lot. I need him, but maybe because of that, it’s difficult for me. I defend myself before the fact, in anticipation of rejection. I demand too much, I’m insatiable, I know it. I demand unconditional and absolute love in exchange for nothing. First I want to be loved just because. Then I can start to love. I want to put my misery on display and to be loved for it before anything else. I don’t just want to be loved. Someone also has to pay, someone has to suffer for me, and it will fall to whoever wants to love me now. It falls, though it’s not what I want, to Roberto.

  I make the one who loves me submit to tests because I don’t want to believe in his love, and I give little in return because I’m afraid of disappointing him, of boring him. I’m so insecure. I hide inside myself.

  Roberto talks to me. He tells me I’m not well, he tells me I’m sick, I need to take my pills. Roberto is so naive sometimes . . . I ask him: “How do you know?” He says from my face. “And what is my face like?” I ask. He tells me I’m not going to like the answer. I insist. He says I look ravaged, sometimes: my jaw droops, I breathe roughly through my mouth, my gaze is emptied out as though I’m looking at the void. I say: “The void? Death?” I start to laugh and I look at myself in the mirror. I don’t see what he sees. I’m skinny and gaunt with dark bags under my eyes; ugly, in a word. “That’s what you’re seeing,” I tell him, “I’m ugly. That’s my ‘illness’ you’re so worried about.” He denies it.

  But I’m afraid that he won’t find me attractive and I’ll be punished. Roberto is attractive to other women. I realize that. More than to be with him myself, what I want is for him not to be with anyone else. Jealousy consumes me at the mere thought of him with another woman. So I punish him. He doesn’t love me enough. That’s how I feel and I tell him so. I would have liked for him to love me until my jealousy and my fears dissipated. We fought and made up. Obviously. Who doesn’t?

  One wretched night, out of pure rage, before he gets into bed, I dump a glass of water on Roberto’s side. When he feels the cold wetness he’s furious. I am forcing him to sleep on the sofa. From then on the fights happen more and more often. We can go weeks without speaking. And I manage it: Roberto, the only person I have, gets tired and leaves me. I am once again what I am . . .

  I try to let my work as a teacher at Berlitz save me. Once again I walk under the oak trees at the Kungsträdgården. The virgin snow on the naked oaks. I need to be accepted by a human being so that I can be a human being. Some afternoons, Agda’s old friends invite me out. They’re very kind, they take me to see a play at the Dramaten or the Folkoperan and out to eat, and I don’t know why it tends to happen on Thursday and we eat crepes with blueberry jam and they give me good cognac to drink. I go back to my apartment seeing double.

  This dull November light in Stockholm, these four hours of light. And my past returns. And my sin is always before me. And seen from the vantage of this wind and this fog, my past is incomprehensible to me. Pills? You want a list of the sleeping pills and antidepressants that I toss back every day? I’m not going to deny that I drank more vodka than I should, I drank Absolut vodka every day, and plenty of it, but I wasn’t an alcoholic. Not that.

  Suddenly, a burst of energy, and I go out shopping. At H&M I go into the dressing room and try on lots of clothes. Everything looks fantastic. At the register I have to put one dress back because my card has reached its limit. Then I go by a music store. I buy the Nocturnes. Piano by Arrau. “For when the sorrow comes back,” I say to myself. But what’s that? Georges Brassens: La Mauvaise Réputation. I leave with those two CDs. I drop the bags in the hall of my apartment and I run to put on Brassens. The eleventh song: Il suffit de passer le pont, / C’est tout de suite l’aventure! / . . . Je n’ai jamais aimé que vous. Giuseppe making omelets in his little kitchen. He stops all of a sudden and raises his glass of champagne with a mischievous smile. I sigh. I slowly gather up the bags from the floor and I start to try on one of the new dresses. No. Now I don’t like it. I try on more. In the mirror in my room nothing looks good on me anymore. I was tricked by the lights in the dressing room, I tell myself. I look terrible. I yawn. I should go return all this. I’m exhausted. Tomorrow, I think, and I fall into bed.

  I force myself to walk under the oaks at the Kungsträdgården. On their naked branches, a layer of snow has hardened. A piece of it comes off and falls with indifferent misfortune. February. The little light there is shines from underneath. There is beauty in those oaks lit up from below, and in the sea that in ancient times was a forest, and in those bees, the same as the ones today, that millions of years ago were trapped in amber. It’s not that I don’t perceive it. It’s that the beauty doesn’t move me anymore. I know it’s there and it should touch my senses, but my senses are dulled now.

  This malaise
is like that, it’s suffocating. There’s no place for that ironic distance behind which elegant young men like to hide their fear of feeling with their guts. Here there are pathos and poor taste. It’s the brittle feeling of being made of glass, of the body being dragged on and on. The feeling of disquiet eats away at me. And at night, the nightmares. And when I wake up shouting and sweating it’s because I feel Ronco’s breath in my ear. Then, insomnia. I see the color of the crows Van Gogh painted soaring over a wheat field, that truffle black . . . Then the black claw returns inside my stomach and the abyss sucks me in and old scenes of horror pile on top of me like black cars trying to run me over. And those old Furies return, as if those black events, so vivid, were happening now. The smell of fear returns: strong and sharp, decayed, old, repugnant. Voices come back to me, slamming doors. “We’ve got another ‘package,”’ shouts Rat, and Ronco laughs. And I see once again, as if it were happening that very moment, the gag, the foam . . . I can’t stop my heart from pounding, and I sweat and sweat unable to turn away from what I don’t want to see. I know, I’m in Stockholm, and I curse its skies. I’m the mangy bitch that no one wants as a friend, I tell myself. And in spite of everything, I’m proud. I’ve already told you: I contradict myself.

  Why didn’t I run from those claws? Why not one day before I gave Rafa up? The passage of time can’t undo what I did. I’m the one I want to erase from my life. Forgive myself? How could I give myself something I don’t deserve? Unhappiness has been my god. I have lain down in the mud and dried myself off in the crime-infested air. I distrust, and my distrust becomes acid in my guts. Don’t I hate all things noble? Is my spite a lying form of consolation? Because now it hurts my eyes, the light that radiates from a good man like Roberto.