Seeing Red

by Lina Meruane

  holes

  If you’re not exhausted, said Félix as he came tiptoeing into my room, if you’re not absolutely worn out, come take a drive with me. Downtown, he said. I have a new project I want to show you. Show me? Tell you about, he replied, editing himself, adding, let’s go for a ride! You feel like it? Do I feel like it? I yanked off my headphones, leaving half-finished the chapter of another novel I’d already read. I turned off the device and threw it onto the bed. I would have headed out into the street and crossed through blaring horns without looking, I would have forced the locks to get into any random car, I would have pressed my own foot to the accelerator just to get out of that house. I needed fresh air, even if Santiago’s was radioactive. Now we can talk about the important things, said my brother as he fastened his seatbelt and constrained my body with the passenger side belt. As the car set off and began to gather speed, I looked into the rearview mirror with my mind’s eye, the eye that later conceives memories. Félix checked behind him; my eyes were staring blankly forward. Right away Félix began talking to me about the tower he was involved in, involved up to his eyebrows, he said, with his team. But why build more towers? I thought. Towers are monuments in decline, you only have to build them and someone comes and knocks them down. But my brother unspooled his soliloquy with the modular details of the design, the widths and lengths of each floor, every one of the windows; he threw out names of materials, angles of incline, resistance calculations. He talked, absorbed in the downtown’s architectural renovation, the urgent need to make room for the new, the empty lot’s biography. I listened to him silently, thinking how at that insipid afternoon hour we would be surrounded by full buses, full taxis, maybe an empty cart coming from the central market, how we’d be traveling with an escort of shining and insolent cars destined to leave us behind. I thought about and almost saw the muddy and hostile river that Ignacio would come to feel was his, as with everything, as with too much. I struggled to listen to what my brother was saying, so young and euphoric, so indifferent. I let loose pieces of the city sprinkle over the map in my visual memory, Santiago’s dirty avenues and the contours of its corners, handwritten signs with grammatical mistakes, shops selling used American clothes, the dubious cafes con piernas in the city center, certain streets that every Chilean knows and that I was going to introduce Ignacio to later, broken phone booths, carts selling cups of cold mote con huesillo. To your left is Plaza Italia (and the plaza appeared to me, Ignacio, the one that’s now recorded by your eyes, the plaza with its Icarus carrying an excessive bronze torch), and to the right, he said, the refurbished, or rather, converted ex-Normandie, (the cinema where I watched midnight screenings of devastating Russian films, killing myself with cold, dying of fatigue), and here, Félix’s voice interrupted my memories, here is Santa Lucia hill and its mural of the founding of Santiago (each word a spadeful of color in my head), you know where we are? I simply nodded before the panoramic format of my Santiago past as it went through my head. The car shot through the city like a meteor until we reached La Moneda palace, which appeared to me white, immaculate, the way it was before military helicopters flying overhead dropped bombs on it, and in the midst of the imagined offensive, with the soundtrack of the dictator’s voice announcing his ignominious victory in the background, the live, guttural, articulate voice of my brother Félix slipped in, chronicling the square meters his tower would have, his invisible team’s tower, once it was complete. Félix, I said, interrupting him: where are the holes? In La Moneda? What are you talking about, he answered impatiently. They rebuilt it ages ago! But I was talking about the buildings across Alameda, on Paseo Bulnes, the old buildings with walls colored by time and dust, perforated especially on the highest floors by devastating bazooka fire. Oh, yes, he said, those are still there, the gaping holes, and also in the less visible buildings on nearby streets you can see the holes from the machine guns fired by sharpshooters posted on neighboring roofs. Why do you ask? I’m not sure, I heard myself answer. And I also told him that I was thinking about the shards of the coup, so many acid shards eating away at the concrete. And I also thought, but didn’t say, that those walls had witnessed everything, but were now blindfolded by a thick layer of soot that only fell away, a little every few years, in the earthquakes.

  suicide techniques

  We’re on our way back. Between one stoplight and another my brother is compelled to ask for clinical details about my eyes. The technicalities of the surgery. The quality control of the instruments. The documentation required by the insurance company before they’ll authorize surgery. He asked what options the doctors were considering: the outlook or the prognosis, that word that sounds more like an incurable disease than a remedy. And what are you going to do? asks my brother. If…without daring to finish the sentence. If things don’t go well? I ask, not daring to be more precise. No one has ventured a hypothesis. I’ve suspended the future while I squeeze, thirstily, all I can from the present. But what are you going to do? insists my brother, if the thing doesn’t go well? The Thing is the operation and it won’t be one but two. I have two chances, I say. And if both operations fail? I pretend to reflect for a moment but I’m blank, and in that cloud appears an answer that I’d never considered. Kill myself? Another cloud now, a cloud of silence. My brother’s face must be annoyed; his dim eyes blink in slow motion, while mine have forgotten to. I can tell from his measured but sarcastic voice that he doesn’t think I could do it. And how would you do it, do that, in your condition? You wouldn’t have anyone to lend you a hand, or at least an eye. My brother’s words stick into me like safety pins, they wake me up. Lend me an eye, I say to myself, treasuring the image all I can. Silence. You’re very quiet, says Félix, aren’t you? Yeah? I say, leaving a lot of air between his question and mine. Yes, very quiet. You haven’t told me how you’re supposedly going to do it, do that, he says, and he emphasizes the word so much I can see it in cursive, crushed by irony. How am I going to do it? I wonder secretly while I rewind suicidal tape in my memory. I press play on the paradoxical suicides. The lyrics of the song explain: what makes you live can kill you in excess. The refrain repeats: too much sun, too much sugar, too much water, too much oxygen. Too much maternal love. Too much truth. What are you talking about? interrupts Félix, who isn’t one for subtleties while he’s driving. I was remembering a friend who in the deep depression of a stampeding manic phase called me to ask for insulin. Twice I’ve gotten that call, from two different girlfriends, I tell him. And what did you do? asked my brother, wondering why those things never happened to him, confessing that he wouldn’t know what to do. And he stops. What else could I do but send them to the pharmacy to buy their own poison? I say. To the pharmacy? In Chilean pharmacies, I say, they sell insulin without a prescription. You didn’t know? Then it’s my brother who sinks into a long silence, from which he emerges minutes later with aplomb, with self-possession, putting his hand on mine before he takes it away again to shift gears and assure me that I’m not going to do that. Commit suicide. He’s right but I don’t tell him so; nor do I clarify that neither of my friends went ahead with the insulin. My brother doesn’t ask the question I expect, and I wonder why but don’t have an answer. Fleeing the morbidity, employing his emergency humor, Félix says instead. I can only accept that in extreme cases. But Félix, since when do you defend assisted suicide? I ask, holding back an admiring smile. I start reminding him of angry arguments with my parents, because death, in our family, has always been a dinner-table topic. We’ve attended medical classes in every after-dinner conversation. You’re right, I wasn’t serious, my brother says now, annoyed; just ignore me. Oh, but Félix, I think aloud, regretting that I can’t see his face, regretting above all that I can’t caress his eyelids, feel his eyes with my fingertips, Félix, I murmur, lightening things, I don’t have any plans to do it, but you could really work things in your favor. Maybe there’s an inheritance, and without me there’d be more for you two. It’s so easy for a blind woman to fall from a bal
cony. So quick, such a sure ending. It’s not a bad idea, says Félix, taking a sharp turn and speeding up; still, he objects, there’s one problem we haven’t considered. Who would take care of the cleanup? He honks the horn and brakes at a light and waits for a moment, he explains, for the light to change and me to answer. It’s a somewhat peculiar worry, I tell him in a stagey voice. But fundamental, he says, without dropping his new character, and then he doesn’t say anything more about that and instead opens his mouth to announce that we’re there, and I hear a suddenly sad or mournful tone, I feel an awkward kiss between my eyebrows. You need help, sis? he murmurs, his voice as though strumming a chord in the air. No, I say, I’m good. And he tells me, too late, be careful not to bump your head.

  the unconditional

  (If I don’t mention my older brother, it’s because I never saw him. I didn’t see anyone well through the fog in my eyes, but I only heard from Joaquín secondhand: messages sent with a secretary, a call while he sped home to pack and say goodbye to his wife, who also complained of his absence, and his kids one after the other, almost clones, and his two maids. He’d rush out and arrive just in time to catch the plane taking off for China. He never managed to come by and say hi. I’m sorry, he told me, I’m dying to see you. Yes, don’t worry, I answered, furious and resentful, offended as a mistreated lover. Have a nice trip, I told him, knowing in my whole body, from hair to feet, that he was running away from me again. I decided to let him go, forget him so much that I never even mentioned you to my brother: a good boy with bad luck, a good guy with a much better eye than you, Ignacio. Was it that I forgot him, or that it was better for you to know nothing about him? About how he started to run away from me when we were children, the day I came home from the hospital and fell on him like dead weight? Because the never-written contract of being an older brother made him into my slave. He took my hand and dragged me through the too-eternal snows of New Jersey, both of us wrapped in radiant orange raincoats with synthetic fur around the hoods; he would guide me like an eskimo to the bus stop, help me onto the yellow bus that picked us up every day, hand me the book I was reading so I’d be entertained during the ride; he carried my lunchbox and made sure I ate my food and sometimes his before he examined the leftovers. My brother was never more scrawny than in those photos, never more silent, more insomniac, more possessed and cornered. How old were we? Nine and seven? Eight and six? Ten and eight? Any and all ages, and in the background a bridge lit up to offset the winter afternoons. From the windows he surveyed the burning lights while I read some book from the school library and my mother cooked dinner. Joaquín went on observing the steel bridge, counting every one of its light bulbs while his body stretched and swelled, emerging from viscous childhood as from an egg. And he sat there one night with the bridge as his ally, finishing his homework, though really he was waiting for my mother to finish washing the dishes so he could tell her, his adolescent voice breaking, that studying and working at the same time was too much. Working? said my mother, looking at my father who was looking, cowed, at Joaquín. He was handing in his resignation and they accepted it because they weren’t brave enough to make him be my nurse and my school tutor in addition to having to be my brother, which he hadn’t even agreed to. No one had ever consulted him. He only wanted to study, he explained, his head sinking down between the blue lapels of his jacket, strangled by the striped tie, with pride and shame, frightened of himself. In exchange he promised to be the best in his class, restore their pride as parents. And then my mother lowered her head and said yes in a frightened voice; she was afraid of my brother, so circumspect, so gaunt, so forged of scrawny dignity, and my father gave him two little pats on the back to tell him sure, son, of course, of course, you could have said something sooner. And then I was left alone with them, at their mercy, terrified of the vigilance they called care, suffocated by the weight of improvised sins entirely of their making. I was left without the shield of my older brother. Félix, when he was born so much later—such a vulnerable tadpole—could never give me the same protection. Gradually I became a good girl at school and a spoiled brat at home, spending my time locked in my room with a pile of books. Joaquín disappeared into his math exercises, the three set squares, the circular ruler, the compass, alone; downcast and resentful, my brother walked through the halls at school solving equations and not noticing me, moving deeper into hard sciences, more and more like my father but afraid of girls because they all seemed too much like me, they all wanted something from him. So you’ll understand why I haven’t told you about my brother abandoning me and my parents abandoning him and later how I also abandoned them all, everyone, in search of someone with a true vocation for sacrifice, someone drowning in love or indoctrinated in the need to love, someone with an absurdly heroic passion, some guy with a pure and absolutely unconditional death wish.)

  miles away

  The irritating sound of the phone rang out at all hours in that house of doctors and patients. It rang during the day like nighttime alarms; it rang because my mother wasn’t there, or because she was, but was taking a nap before leaving again to attend patients at her private practice, and in any case the phone could just go on ringing because my mother was a little deaf in one ear and Olga, completely. I pressed headphones over my ears, trying to focus on another drama about a suicidal heroine that went on turning uselessly in the cassette player while I debated whether to move on to the next novel. It rang and rang, but answering always entailed a risk. The risk that at the other end was a patient pleading desperately for help without stopping to wonder who he was asking. My father’s patients were old men, decrepit but still strong enough to insist on spelling out their newest symptoms for me, the list of medicines prescribed, tests and their results, clinical histories. They were slavering old folks, they wouldn’t stand for interruptions, they wielded their ellipses with sly intelligence. They weren’t familiar with the full stop. What did they care that the doctor wasn’t there, that I wasn’t a secretary but only a daughter—a reluctant one, at that—and this wasn’t the office but rather his private home? What they wanted was to smear someone with their dread of the imminent death creeping up on their heels. Other times through the receiver I heard the voices of the mothers of my mother’s patients, and these also refused to stop and listen to my explanations, and insisted on asking, their hearts shattered or deeply grooved—asking themselves more than anyone else—what to do, my god what do I do, my daughter swallowed a bottle of pills, the snails in the garden, the potato peelings, she’s ingested the paraffin from the heater in large, suicidal swallows. And then it was my turn to ask them questions: what were they doing on the phone with me and not in the emergency room? Hang up and run to the stomach pump. Not only was the telephone my parents’, the calls were also for them. Only every once in a while did it ring for me, first the voice from a call shop establishing the connection, then Ignacio’s voice from Buenos Aires, then my voice saying but no, no, you’re breaking our agreement, didn’t we say we weren’t going to talk? Don’t call me again. And then we would be quiet but we wouldn’t hang up, Ignacio and I, punished by a strictly voluntary agreement. You’re right, Ignacio would say, aggrieved, but I wanted to hear your voice, to know you were alive in the enigma of Chile. I’m alive, barely, but I’m alive, but we’ll talk about what we’ve been thinking when we see each other again. I finally cut the conversation off, and when we hung up I wanted to cut my wrists a little, but I turned instead to my novel. The phone rang again. It rang and rang but no one answered. I was having a hard time finding where I’d left the handset, fumbling along the surface of the bedside table, bumping my long nails into the bottom of a lamp and meeting indiscernible obstacles until finally I found the phone. It had stopped ringing but I picked it up anyway, driven by the hunch it was Ignacio again, defeated by the anxiety that I myself was causing him, cruelly. I heard a Spanish accent, but it wasn’t his. It was sprinkled with h sounds and strident s’s and with z’s so unmistakably madrileño. A rou
gher accent, much more emphatic than Ignacio’s Galician, and it crossed through time and its turbulences. It was Raquel’s hard voice talking to my mother’s despondent one, trying to console her convincingly. With resigned patience. I’m sure, Raquel was saying, the operations are going to work. My mother stayed quiet for a moment, as if she couldn’t breathe or it hurt her enormously. She gulped down air and dampened it inside her lungs, preparing her answer with the coldness she used when talking about the hopeless. Without seeing what was coming, Raquel repeated her candid señora, I’m sure, whatever happens she’s going to be fine. Fine, I repeated to myself, overwhelmed by her certainty, unable to interrupt them. I let myself be carried along by those voices I knew so well but that were soon to become unrecognizable to each other. My mother let out an asthmatic whistle and said to her. You, what do you know? Are you an eye specialist? In the pause that followed I saw Raquel’s disconcerted gesture, her immediate annoyance; I saw rocks falling from the ceiling onto her skirt. I thought about Raquel breaking her nails in that cave-in my mother had provoked. No ma’am, she replied then, drily, raising her voice just enough, I’m no specialist, I’m only a poet. And it’s poetry that makes me sure. I heard the indecipherable stuttering of one of them, Raquel or my mother, or maybe what I heard was another conversation getting mixed up in the wires. Raquel? I said, because the conversation between them had died. Raquel, hi, what a surprise to hear from you.