will you two be ok?
In Santiago it’s cold, but it’s even colder at the beach. More knives in the air and words of warm vapor. More mold stuck to the walls and the window frames, more bars and wood to protect the glass from rocks. We had to get to the house and unwrap it, dust it, air it out, light the chrism of the little heater, dry out all the wet towels, the damp curtains. Same thing we’d done every time on arriving over the years. Sweep out the dead moths on the linoleum and the cow skin my grandmother had brought from Patagonia. Make the beds. See to the light and the water. My father drove the car the exactly one hundred and seventy-two kilometers of the Pan-American highway to Concón, giving all kinds of instructions to Ignacio that I also memorized, just in case. Following us for the same number of meters and centimeters came my mother, her brow furrowed, thinking who knows what thoughts that would wound like whips: the work it had cost her to be a woman and choose the trap of maternity, the anguish of having engendered a problem and not having known how to solve it: all of that would be making a deafening roar in her conscience while in the background, unheard, Beethoven’s sonatas or maybe Mozart’s would be spinning round and round. My mother and my father driving toward the same place in different cars so they could leave one for us. We’d have to be grateful. And we thanked them, so much, especially Ignacio. (Why thank them so much, Ignacio, why, since it was my mother and I who were going to owe you everything.) But don’t thank us, dear, she said, it’s the least we. And she interrupted herself, as if she went blank, as if bewildered, and then I heard my father, who saved us from that tight spot saying, ok kids, to the table, food’s served, and then, when he saw me surely with my hair a mess and a lost expression on my face: Lucina, dear, fix yourself up a bit for lunch, huh? No, dad, there’s no fixing me, but I ran my hand over my head, combed my hair with my fingers, and when I smelled the food I started to take an imaginary tour of our old beach vacations. I went back years in the vortex of time, catching balls of fuzz between my toes, and leaves, dust, sawdust, crust, salt, loose earth on the steep streets full of potholes, and through eucalyptus trees that the most ferocious winters later uprooted, I saw hundreds of sunsets swirling before my eyes. I wandered through those landscapes with steps I would have liked to be precise but that were instead erratic, abstract, steps lit by naked and hostile stars, steps that led me to beaches where I’d gone swimming, where the waves swelled crisscrossed with seaweed and thick foam, bilious, where I dove under and reappeared with my hair covered in garbage, supermarket bags, diapers dripping shit. And in the background some man hawking egg bread or wafers. I heard the sound of the chairs, the silverware. It smelled of just-toasted bread. And the same screen started to show my cousins sitting around the table before a hodgepodge of eggs, sausage, tomatoes, and mortadella on marraqueta rolls, eating with the hunger of the beach, bathing suits wet and hair stiff with salt, black sand stuck to their ankles, señora Alicia bringing in more cheese. These days the doors squealed, off kilter from the humidity, the refrigerator in its old age didn’t keep things cold, the washing machine no longer worked. And the four of us lunched on grilled steaks with potatoes like the close-knit family we were but would also never entirely be. And then my mother offered instant coffee that only she wanted; and through the steam of the kettle señora Alicia emerged, fifteen or twenty years older. She pronounced my name with a señorita before it and there she stopped, maybe afraid, the soles of her shoes squeaking against the linoleum. She couldn’t kiss me when I stood up, she couldn’t reach; she’d always been almost a dwarf, and with age she had shrunk like my memory. There was so little distance between her head and the floor, but I had forgotten. It had been useless to bend over in search of her cheek’s hard, shiny, dark skin, impervious to time. In search of her wrinkled fingers. Rather than try a kiss, she turned her back to me. She merely greeted me from afar, covering her mouth a little, and she shut herself in the kitchen to cry as if she were bidding me farewell. But I only heard of señora Alicia’s sobs, like so many things, too late. I only understood the blows, the stomping, the fingers caught in the trunk of the car when my father stored a broken umbrella they’d bring back to Santiago with them. I preferred the tenacious pain in my groin, which spoke to me in a comprehensible language. It was a dry and crude warning, a concrete message with which to hold a solitary conversation. I felt Ignacio’s finger between my ribs. Your father is talking to you, he said. He’s talking to us. Will you two be all right? repeated my father before leaving. My mother said nothing, she stayed quietly beside us until my father reminded her of the time. There was a salty wind blowing over the patio, over the unsettled tops of the pines, over our unsettled heads. My father honked the horn twice while the Dodge disappeared into swirling sands.
oysters without pearls
My memory’s visual laws dictated the landscape to me. Screeching seagulls rose up over the esplanade, leaving a sedentary pelican run aground; they flew up along the sunset and then dove down, they drowned in eddies while the tide rose with the moon to cover the black beach. The moon was lost behind the trees; you could tell it was there, barely, from its shine. Judging by the light, Ignacio told me, the moon must be back there, and he took my hand to make me point my index finger toward a starry but dreadfully orphaned sky. But I couldn’t care less about the moon, I was more interested in how the world’s spinning on its axis was speeding up, how the wait was growing ever shorter. Ignacio recovered a bent cigarette and he smoked it slowly. I’m hungry, he said, blowing out the smoke. He felt like eating some Chilean shellfish. Why are you raising your eyebrows? No reason, I answered, lying, telling myself that if they hurt him I wouldn’t be able to help. I directed him toward the fisherman’s cove, bumbling along a road full of holes disguised in the night. It’s so dark, Ignacio said, straining his eyes. Keep going straight, I replied indifferently. Where are you taking me? Is it close? Along the beach, after the oil refineries, turn left when you see the gas stations. The Oyster or the Pearl of the Pacific. There, I see it, cried Ignacio, and his stomach growled. That’s where we’re going. And when we got out of the car it was Ignacio who guided me, a rock, a step, now straight ahead, and the wicker chair pushed over the hard earth beneath me. The waitress. The menus. A plastic bread bowl, napkins. We ordered sea urchins, but they were banned. We asked for locos, but they were banned too. Oysters? We’ve never had those here. Lobsters? None left at that hour. What they had were choritos al pil pil, spicy mussels, and maybe a choro zapato, Chilean blue mussel, and since Ignacio was kneeing me I gave him a simultaneous interpretation: small and giant mejillones. And maybe some clams. That’s all the seafood you have? Those and the fish, all very fresh, sir, said the woman, dragging out the sir in a trill. Let’s get ceviche, suggested Ignacio. I ordered conger eel soup instead. We started to nibble a bit of hard bread and sip a slightly warm wine, and as soon as they brought our food I realized what I’d forgotten. (My purse. The syringe with insulin. I forgot it because I couldn’t see it, Ignacio, but I also forgot it to put you to the test.) Ignacio went rushing out along the darkened road toward the prefab house with its red roof, and I sat smelling the steam rising from the conger eel without tasting it, patiently kneading breadcrumbs over the tablecloth. The waitress came and went, coming and going again, would you like me to heat up the soup a little while you wait? And I nodded so she would be entertained and stop spying on me, because the minutes passed and Ignacio didn’t come back, he was lost in unknown neighborhoods, turning down dead-end streets. But I didn’t have any way to pay for the food if Ignacio didn’t come back. I had no money for a taxi, I thought, which in any case you couldn’t get around there; I didn’t even have keys. There’s your husband, breathed the waitress, bringing me the reheated soup, the fish now in shreds. And it was him, a panting, annoyed, hungry but victorious Ignacio whom I, sacking my memory, constructed in my mind: Ignacio brandishing the ampule of insulin like a flag that he planted on the table. I put my hand on the tablecloth. There was no syringe.