blackmail
(Urgent for us to take a break. We’ll be right back after this pause, as the movies during the dictatorship used to announce before kidnapping the steamy scenes that never returned. A long break and then we’ll see, I thought in all my uneasiness. A period without seeing each other and without talking on the phone, so you can think. I was the one who decided on the break, wagering that the interruption would work like an evil love potion. That’s what I thought, but who knows what you were thinking when you unhappily accepted that pact of silence. We were thinking separately, but simultaneously. We thought differently, but at times we thought the same thing. And you also had your friends thinking for you. How it was necessary to resolve that long-distance mess, that ethical dilemma, the emotional blackmail the blind woman was subjecting you to. They all thought about it in their own way. Carmen corrected tests with one hand and used the other to stir and taste her ají de gallina, while her mouth complained about her son’s villainous father. Osvaldo was planning a marriage celebration that we wouldn’t be attending. Gaetán, training for his next ballet without focusing on the steps but laughing, nervous, shouting before the mirror. In his house, Julián smoked another cigarette slowly and gossiped through the keyboard with Carmen, who took a while to respond and copy Osvaldo, who would tell Gaetán, the other groom. Laura answered her emails preparing her summer classes, exhausted or maybe bored. Mariana put on lipstick, attending to her eyelashes that coiled like spiders; she smiled, pursed her mouth, making faces at herself in the mirror, choosing just the right one, the correct way to think about this matter. Piously? Perfidiously? And she talked to the mirror of your bad luck. Your bad eye. Of your becoming my seeing eye dog. That’s what they said to each other but only Arcadio dared say it to you, in the cafe on the corner, without making a scene. No flailing or gesticulating, not even mussing his hair since he’d just shaved it all off. Biting into a waffle cookie thin as a host, dropping a pinch of sugar into his espresso and a drop of cream or maybe skim milk, pausing briefly, dazzled by the shine of his own skull. That woman, he said, with a calculated and dramatic pause, she isn’t your girlfriend, she’s a blackmail artist. And he took another sip of his coffee. When you heard that you lost it, you turned into another Ignacio, and the new Ignacio’s eardrums flinched, his gums winced, his tongue dried out. He sat for a moment petrified with the cigarette hanging from his lips, afflicted by a sudden pain in the pit of his stomach. That Ignacio paid his part of the bill and took off, livid but most of all dizzy, secreting acid, overcome with disgust. His brain recoiled like a live oyster drenched in lemon juice. But in his own way, that pitiless way, that cold and offensive, son-of-a-bitch way of Arcadio’s, he spoke something of the truth, something I had also seen in all my blindness. He’s right, I told you after hearing you kick the door and then unscrew the lid from the antacid tablets. He’s right, I repeated, consciously sowing resentment toward your friends. They all think it but they don’t say it to you, or haven’t you noticed the way they speak to you lately, or what they talk about when they call, how I don’t exist in their conversations? And I went on struggling to separate my socks from the wool stockings designed to endure Chile’s raw winter. Arcadio hasn’t said anything you didn’t already know, I added then to your stern silence, without for an instant stopping my folding, long- and short-sleeved shirts, my jacket. All black, literally black but also black like the hate I professed for all of them, especially Arcadio. That friend of yours, I insisted in all frankness, feeling you were filling up with gasses, that you almost weren’t breathing, that Arcadio has hit the nail on the head. And then, kicking my half-empty suitcase you said, violent, the nail, that motherfucker, me cago en Dios.)
wheelchair
Time was speeding up. A shower. A brushing of teeth. A drying of the face. Full suitcases that exhale on closing. A Dominican taxi ordered by telephone and the subsequent arrival of a taxi that would be anything but yellow. The driver, who spoke a Caribbean Spanish, barely said a word to us, turned up the radio and muzzled us with a merengue that could have been bachata. My head had already set off on its own trip, and only the shell of my body remained, disregarded in the backseat. We were starting to put mental miles and silence between us, although we were still tied with an invisible and elastic cord. I could barely make anything out through the fog, but what I saw in that moment in horror, in terror, with true consternation, was that I was about to lose everything Ignacio gave me. I would no longer have his arms to guide me, his legs to direct me, his voice to warn me. I wouldn’t have his sight make up for the absence of my own. I would be left even more blind. I realized I had been clinging to Ignacio like ivy, wrapping him up and entangling him in my tentacles, suctioning him like a leech stubbornly stuck to its victim. That imminent flight was like a knife slicing between us as the taxi approached the airport, and my adrenaline started flowing. The cut was happening, it was turning into a deep wound, and the taxi left us at the terminal and Ignacio paid and took charge of my suitcase. The laceration was happening, had happened, in the security line as we moved forward in slow motion. Then, in fast forward. Ignacio took care of my passport check, he showed them my university student visa, the appropriate I-20, he asked them to give me an aisle seat, though in other times I would have chosen a window so I could watch the clouds during takeoff, and then he gave my luggage to the workers at the conveyor belt, took my hand and announced that the wheelchair had arrived. What wheelchair? I started to laugh, but, don’t laugh, Ignacio told me, I’m serious about the chair. A chair? A wheelchair? Why did you ask for that? I have two legs! Ignacio put his arms around me while I fought him, elbows flapping, but he put his arms firmly around me and soon he was a straightjacket, one that smelled of ashtrays and old, acidic sweat, a straightjacket that not only squeezed me until I cracked, it covered me in kisses: my temple, my nose, my ear. The straightjacket talked into my ear in a barely audible voice, and convinced me it was better for an airport employee to take me through immigration and go with me to the gate. That way I wouldn’t have to hold anyone’s hand. Wheelchair, I grumbled, swallowing saliva and brushing a lock of hair roughly from my face. Lina, panted my straightjacket again, cutting off or squeezing my name, Lini, everything will be all right, I promise, don’t cry, por favor, that makes me feel like shit. In the blink of an eye you’ll have crossed the mountains and you’ll be in Chile, Ignacio went on, as if that were any consolation. And I’ll be there in a few days, he finished, finally loosening his arms. And then I nodded and sat down and plugged some excessive sunglasses onto my face, and the chair started sliding backwards, and his voice gradually dissolved in the crowd while I finally sobbed freely.