connections
Sunk once again in another wheelchair, I wanted to be a ghost stealthily returning to settle old scores, to cross through the world without feeling it instead of bumping awkwardly into it all. But as it was, rolling through the tube of the airport, the specter I hoped to be realized, overwhelmed and amazed, that I had materialized again. I’d been recognized. Someone was bawling the Lucina that the calendar of saints records only as an etymological error, like Lucila or Lucita or Lucía, or even Luz, which is so close to Luzbel, the demon of light. Under the hallucinogenic effects of anesthesia, my mother — who until then had professed nothing beyond the doctrines of pediatrics — thought she heard the child I was starting to be babble a name. Lucina! my mother called out when she heard me cry between her legs, and in ecstasy she repeated it to be sure. Lucina. The delirium was getting to me too, since that was the very word I thought I was hearing there in the passageway. Lucina. It grew in decibels. Lucina! Anticipating the body that emitted it like a lightning bolt that comes seconds ahead of the thunder. It was following me at full speed. Lucina? it said, doubting, ever closer, with an inquisitive nasal inflection, opening its way through the people. I heard panting breath and then a spasmodic what…? happened to you…? And without waiting for the answer I didn’t plan to give, the same thing again, more formally this time: what happened to you, Lucina? still agitated from the run. Why are you in a wheelchair? Did you break your leg? I would have liked to leap with all my wheels and handles into the future, or jump into the past as off a cliff; but no, I take it back, I thought ipso facto, not into the past. The bearer of that voice could only come from a preterite tense to which I didn’t want to return. There was no escape. The employee in charge of pushing me stopped so the excruciating interrogation could continue. I pricked up my ears but could not place the voice anywhere in the fog of my adolescence. Without asking, so as not to give myself away, I followed what he was saying in search of clues. He almost hadn’t recognized me in those black glasses. They look straight out of DINA, he said, and then corrected himself. Are you going incognito? More like blind alter ego, I said to myself, praying he would leave. And as if sensing the impatience that was growing weedlike inside me, he corrected himself again. But they look great on you, are they from New York? From China, I murmured to myself, made in China or Taiwan or someplace in India. Imported direct from the street. (You gave them to me, Ignacio, and now you’re wearing a pair just like them.) We were silent. The employee got the chair moving again but my interrogator refused to give up on the scene of our failed reencounter. He followed, filling the pauses, saying aloud that New York was a fan-tas-tic city, that the things happening there were in-cre-di-ble, ab-so-lute-ly crazy, how could people so immeasurably rich live on the same island with the kind of beggars you didn’t even see in Chile anymore? He’d gotten on the subway with a troupe of hobos who had surely hopped the turnstiles, and later he realized that they slept in the cars or on the platforms or among rats so obese they looked like nutria. I heard him asking me if I hadn’t heard of unbridled capitalism, the bankruptcy of the state, the successive closing of shelters. I didn’t say anything, because he was already talking about the reason for his trip. September 11th. The first anniversary. A special report. If only I’d known you were there, he said — because you were there, right? — because no one had wanted to talk to him, no one, not until he’d pulled at some threads and finally tracked some people down. You can’t even imagine, he said, cutting himself off. And then he placed between us the word success. I imagined a swollen reporter drowning in emotion while he said. I found overlooked people, illegal immigrants, some of them Chilean! Dis-a-ppeared, he said, and I thought about that worn-out word while wishing for a moment to disappear myself. We were going down an escalator and he was behind me saying, no one has shown this yet, and I’m going to do it, my team and I, though it’ll be my name on it. His name. Who could he be? I thought. And though I didn’t really care, my left hemisphere was running through the archives of old names and forgotten faces, while the right, just as vehement, was wondering shamelessly, if this was the guy who back in his day had sold us on the glories of a harmonious transition. I had masturbated his success in the backseat of a Citroneta before disappearing without explanations, leaving my name behind. And when does your report air? I asked just to say something, without realizing that the only possible date was September 11th. In two months. The people, he exclaimed, will know the truth! And the employee, who had sped up the chair’s pace, braked all of a sudden and launched me forward. What truth, if I might ask? he asked defiantly, as if he were reading my thoughts but pronouncing my question in a Peruvian accent. The connections between our September 11th and theirs! What don’t you understand? And the reporter addressed me once again, as if demanding professional complicity from me as an ex-journalist, to crown the conversation: doesn’t it strike you as an amazing coincidence, 9/11? It’s not a coincidence and it’s not repetition, I told him, annoyed. It’s nothing but a strange double image.
rescue operation
My father comes to the rescue and pulls me out of my introspection. It’s his bony tourniquet hand that falls onto my shoulder. His debilitated skeleton, his long femur I hold on to. He leans over to kiss my forehead and I extend my fingers to run them over his face, trying to trace his face into my palm. I touch him like the professional blind woman I’m becoming. My father is alive, I think, he’s alive in there, inside his body. Then his voice, the word daughter, winds its way through the crush of passengers waiting for suitcases, and in my ear drum his relieved words echo: I had to insist before they’d let me come in and look for you. I imagine he gives a tip to the employee so he’ll disappear, and then he says, as though bewildered, together again, Lucina, daughter. He says it in a voice of hope and sorrow, and I know that the hopeful tone is for daughter and the sorrow is for Lucina. No one but my father uses his saliva to glue those two words together into a single compound word: Lucina-daughter. That daughter is adhered to me, stuck like a throbbing shadow on my back. That daughter and I are for him the same person with a single dilemma. He must be observing us very seriously, trying not to feel anything, my father, pretending to be a tin man. If you probed him you’d hear his words echoing against the walls of his body. But my father’s core is not totally empty. At the level of his eyebrows and just behind his eyes there are machines of all kinds: a magnificent motor that propels him, slowly, forward; an extremely punctual clock, a colossal memory fit for details both indispensable and useless. There is also a punished heart in a dark corner that no one notices, except maybe, in secret, my mother. But among all these mechanisms lurks the risk of a malfunction. If the tension rises. If some sharp emotion. Danger sign, and then. Right now I’m afraid to think my father’s silence could be a short circuit. An interruption in speech called going mute, cut-off concentration that could keep us from reaching his house. It’s no secret that my father gets through difficult situations using distraction. He gets into his old Dodge like a crew member boarding a spaceship, and in that trance he holds long conversations with himself, or gives lessons in internal medicine, or delivers speeches, and he argues, discusses, gesticulates, until he finds himself in the parking lot of the hospital where he still works. He’s on time but he doesn’t know how he did it, which streets he took, which red lights stopped him. He could have run over a cat and not realized. But he gets out of the car and his true function begins: a doctor infallible in matters of the heart. Of organically rickety hearts. Hearts in need of pacemakers. Clogged carotids. Blocked arteries. And because my father is exclusively dedicated to non-amorous cardiac catastrophes, he doesn’t know anything about ailing retinas. I know he’ll ask for my test results out of habit; still sitting in my wheelchair, I prepare myself to tell him I didn’t bring them. I didn’t bring anything, Dad, I tell him. None of them? he asks, and I say no, not the angiography or the optical tomography or the fundus of the eye. I left hundreds of brutal images behind. I left the perimetry behind because it was depressing. I didn’t ask for copies of any reports. It wouldn’t do any good for you to have them, I tell him, shutting down the conversation. My father stands possibly thoughtful and then he murmurs an I see, Luci, hija, dear, which is almost a rebuke. I’ve never wanted you to be my doctor, it’s enough for you to be my father. The silence after that is so weighty that it seems to creak; my father dispels it by saying. It wasn’t so I could look at them. I wouldn’t understand, he confirms in a mournful tone. Because eyes today are not what they used to be. He falls silent again and glances, I’m sure, at the conveyer belt, motionless and still empty of suitcases. Then he says to me, although really he says it to himself because his murmur is almost inaudible: half a century ago eyes were different. We looked at them with naked eyes and we saw so little. The medicine I studied is outdated, he explains, and it’s true. It was all left behind at the side of a rocky road with twisted, rusted-out signs blowing in the wind. My father is a species going extinct. All he can do is come to the baggage claim and find my suitcase for me. The belt starts to move, regurgitating shapes of different sizes, and my father asks me what color my suitcase is with that serenity so like him. Blue, I say, with wheels. That’s all and it’s enough. Here it is. Now let’s get going.