The medical treatments came to an end in late 2010. For months she had avoided looking at herself in the mirror, and until Daniela threw it into the garbage she had worn a fisherman’s woolly hat pulled down over her eyebrows. Daniela had just turned nineteen when her mother was diagnosed and had postponed her studies to return to Chile and be with her. Although Lucia had begged her not to, she later understood that her daughter’s presence during the ordeal was indispensable. When she first saw her arrive, she hardly recognized her. Daniela had left in wintertime, a pale young woman wearing too many layers. When she returned she was a caramel color, her head half shaven and the other half with long dyed strands of hair, wearing military boots and shorts that showed her hairy legs. She immediately began to take care of her mother and entertain the other hospital patients. She would appear on the ward blowing kisses to everyone reclining in armchairs plugged into chemical drips, handing out blankets, nutrition bars, fruit juices, and magazines.
She had been at the university for less than two years, yet talked as if she had navigated the oceans with Jacques Cousteau among blue-tailed mermaids and sunken galleons. She taught the patients the term “LGBT”—“lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender”—and explained the distinctions between them. The term had come into recent use among young people in the United States; in Chile no one even suspected what it meant, least of all the cancer patients on this ward. She told them she was of neutral or fluid gender because there was no obligation to accept being categorized as man or woman on the basis of your genitals. You could define yourself however you liked, and change opinion if some time later another gender seemed more appropriate. “Like indigenous people in certain tribes, who change their names at different stages in their lives, because the one they were given at birth no longer represents them,” she added by way of explanation, which only added to the patients’ general confusion.
Daniela stayed with her mother throughout her convalescence and during the long, irritating hours of each chemo session, as well as through the divorce process. She slept next to her, ready to jump out of bed and help her if need be, buoyed her up with her brusque affection, her jokes, her hearty soups, and her skill at navigating through the bureaucracy of ill health. She dragged her out to buy new clothes and made her follow a reasonable diet. And once she had left her father settled in his new bachelor life and her mother steady on her feet, she said goodbye without fuss and left as joyfully as she had arrived.
Prior to her illness, Lucia had led what she called a bohemian existence that Daniela viewed as unhealthy. She had smoked for years, never exercised, drank two glasses of wine every evening with dinner, and had ice cream for dessert. She was several pounds overweight, and her knees ached. When she was married she had ridiculed her husband’s way of life: whereas she began the day propped up in bed with a milky coffee and two croissants reading the newspaper, he would drink a thick green liquid containing bee pollen, then run like a fugitive to his office, where Lola, his faithful secretary, would be waiting for him with clean clothes. Despite his age, Carlos Urzua kept fit and walked with no sign of a stoop. Thanks to Daniela’s iron authority, Lucia had begun to imitate him, and the results were soon evident from the bathroom scales and a vitality she had not felt since adolescence.
When Lucia and Carlos saw each other to sign the papers for the divorce, which had only recently become legal in Chile, it was still too soon for Lucia to say she was in remission, but she had regained strength and her breasts had been reconstructed. Her hair had turned white, and she decided to leave it short, tousled, and in its natural color except for some purple streaks that Daniela added before leaving for Miami. When he saw her on the day of the divorce, weighing twenty pounds less, with a young girl’s breasts beneath a low-cut blouse and neon hair, Carlos gave a start. Lucia thought he looked more handsome than ever and felt a fleeting stifled pang for their lost love. In reality she felt nothing for him apart from gratitude that he was Daniela’s father. She thought it would have been a healthy sign if she was at least a little angry but could not even manage that. Not even a lingering disappointment remained of the passionate love she had felt for him for many years.
JULIAN CAME INTO LUCIA’S LIFE at the start of 2015, several years after she had grown resigned to the lack of love and thought her fantasies of romance had dried up in the chemotherapy reclining chair. Julian taught her that curiosity and desire were renewable resources. If her mother, Lena, had still been alive she would have warned Lucia about the ridiculousness of this kind of pretension at her age, and she would perhaps have been right, because with each passing day the opportunities for love lessened and those of looking ridiculous increased. And yet Lena would not have been entirely right, because when Julian appeared he offered Lucia love when she was least expecting it. Even though their love affair ended almost as quickly as it had begun, it served to show her that she still had embers inside her that could be rekindled. There was nothing for her to feel sorry about. She had no regrets about anything she had experienced and enjoyed.
The first thing she noticed about Julian was his appearance. Without being exactly ugly, it seemed to her he was not that attractive. All her lovers, especially her husband, had been good-looking. Not that this was intentional, more a matter of chance. As she told Daniela, Julian was the best proof of her lack of prejudice toward ugly men. At first glance he was an ordinary Chilean, with bad posture and an ungainly way of walking. His clothes looked as if they were borrowed: baggy corduroy trousers and a grandfather’s knitted cardigans. He had the olive skin of his southern Spanish forebears, gray hair and beard, the soft hands of someone who had never worked with them. But underneath this loser’s facade was someone of exceptional intelligence and an experienced lover.
Their first kiss and what followed that night were enough for Lucia to surrender to adolescent infatuation that was fully reciprocated by Julian. At least for a while. During the early months Lucia welcomed with open arms everything that had been lacking in her marriage. Her new lover made her feel cherished and desirable; thanks to him she rediscovered her joyful youth. At first Julian also appreciated her sensuality and sense of fun, but it was not long before the emotional intensity began to frighten him. He would forget their rendezvous, arrive late, or call at the last minute with an excuse. Or he’d drink an extra glass of wine and fall asleep in the middle of a sentence or between two caresses. He complained of how he had no time to read and how his social life had dwindled, resenting the attention he had to pay Lucia. He was still a considerate lover, more concerned to give than to receive pleasure, but she noticed he was holding back, no longer surrendering wholeheartedly to love. He was sabotaging the relationship. By this time Lucia had learned to recognize failing love as soon as it raised its gargoyle head. She no longer put up with it as she had done through the twenty years of her marriage in the hope that something would change. She was more experienced and had less time to waste. She realized she ought to call it quits before Julian did, even though she would miss his sense of humor terribly, his puns, the pleasure of waking up tired beside him knowing it would take only a whispered enticement or nonchalant caress for them to embrace once more. It was a break without drama, and they stayed friends.
“I’ve decided to give my broken heart a rest,” she told Daniela on the phone, in a tone of voice that did not sound humorous, as she had intended, but more like a complaint.
“How kitsch can you get, Ma? Hearts don’t break like eggs. And if yours is an egg, isn’t it better for it to be broken and for feelings to pour out? That’s the price for a life lived to the full,” her daughter replied implacably.
A year later, in Brooklyn, Lucia still occasionally fell prey to a certain degree of nostalgia for Julian, but it was no more than a slight itch that did not really bother her. Could she find another love? Not in the United States, she thought—she was not the kind of woman who attracted Americans, as Richard Bowmaster’s indifference demonstrated. Sh
e could not imagine seduction without humor, but her Chilean irony was not only untranslatable but perceived as frankly offensive by North Americans. In English, as she told Daniela, she had the IQ of a chimpanzee. She could only laugh out loud with Marcelo, at his stumpy legs and lemur face. That dog permitted himself the luxury of being both completely self-centered and grumpy, just like a husband.
The sadness she felt at breaking up with Julian manifested itself in an attack of bursitis in her hips. She spent several months taking analgesics and waddling like a duck, but refused to see a doctor, convinced the condition would disappear once she had gotten over her bitterness. And so it would eventually prove, although she arrived at the airport in New York limping. Richard Bowmaster was expecting the active, cheerful woman he knew. Instead he had to greet a stranger wearing orthopedic shoes and using a cane, who sounded like a rusty hinge whenever she stood up from a chair. However, a few weeks later he saw her without the cane and wearing fashionable ankle boots. He could not have known it, but this miracle was thanks to Julian’s brief reappearance.
In October, a month after Lucia installed herself in his basement, Julian came to New York for a conference, and they spent a wonderful Sunday together. They had breakfast in Le Pain Quotidien, took a stroll in Central Park that was even slower because she still dragged her feet, and went to a Broadway musical matinee hand in hand. Afterward they had dinner in a small Italian restaurant with a bottle of the best Chianti and drank to friendship. Their complicity was as fresh as on the first day. They effortlessly regained the secret language and double entendres that only they could understand. Julian apologized for having made her suffer, but she replied sincerely that she could hardly recall it. That morning, when they had met over their mugs of milky coffee and fresh bread, Julian had aroused a festive delight in her. She wanted to smell his hair, straighten his jacket collar, and suggest he buy a pair of trousers that fitted him. Nothing more. In the Italian restaurant she left her cane under the table.
Lucia, Richard, Evelyn
Upstate New York
By five in the afternoon, when Lucia and Richard met Evelyn back at the cabin, the winter day was already at an end, and a bright moon was shining. They were smeared with mud and snow from toppling the car into the lake, and had taken longer to return than calculated, because the Subaru had skidded out of control and ended up in a pile of snow. They had to use the shovel once again to clear the snow from around the wheels, then tore off some pine branches to place on the ground. Richard put the Subaru into reverse and at the second attempt it jerked backward. The tires gained traction on the branches and they were able to move forward again.
By that time night was falling and their earlier tracks were invisible. They had to drive on slowly, guessing where they were headed. They got lost a couple of times, but fortunately for them Evelyn had disobeyed their instructions and lit a kerosene lamp in the doorway that guided them over the last stretch.
After this adventure the cabin interior seemed like a welcoming nest, even though the stoves hardly managed to temper the cold that crept in through the gaps in the old wooden planks. Richard felt responsible for the poor state the primitive dwelling was in; over the two years it had been shut, it had deteriorated as if a century had passed. He resolved to come back every summer to air it out and have repairs made so that Horacio could not accuse him of negligence when he returned to the United States. Negligence: the word still made him shudder.
Given the snow and the darkness they decided to abandon their original plan of driving to a hotel. They also thought it unwise to travel around any more than necessary with Kathryn Brown in the trunk of the Subaru. They were not concerned about the state of the body, which would stay frozen, and so they settled down to spend their Monday night wrapped up as warmly as possible. Having been through so many stressful moments in the past few days, they resolved to set aside the problem of Kathryn for now and to take their mind off things by playing a game of Monopoly, which had been left behind by Horacio’s children. Richard taught them the rules. Evelyn found the concept of buying and selling properties, hoarding money, dominating the market, and forcing rivals into bankruptcy completely incomprehensible. Lucia turned out to be an even worse player than Evelyn, with the result that they both lost miserably and Richard ended up a millionaire. But it was a hollow triumph that left him feeling he had cheated.
They managed to rustle up some dinner from what was left of the donkey food, filled the stoves with fuel, and laid out the sleeping bags on the three beds in the kids’ room. They had no sheets, and the blankets smelled of damp. Richard made a mental note that on his next visit he should also replace the mattresses, which could have been concealing bedbugs or rodents’ nests. They took off their boots and lay down fully dressed: it was going to be a long, cold night. While Evelyn and Marcelo fell asleep at once, Lucia and Richard continued talking until past midnight as they had so much to say to one another in this delicate stage of getting to know each other more closely. They began revealing their secrets, imagining the other’s features in the semidarkness. They were trapped in their cocoons, their beds so close they could easily have kissed should either of them have dared.
Love, love. Until the day before, Richard had been thinking up clumsy dialogues with Lucia. Now he was bursting with sentimental verses he would never find the courage to write. To tell her for example how much he loved her, how grateful he was that she had appeared in his life. She had been blown in like gossamer by the wind of good fortune and here she was, present and close in the midst of the ice and snow, with a promise glinting in her large eyes. Lucia realized he was covered in invisible wounds, and he could clearly see the fine cuts life had inflicted on her. “Love has always been in half measures for me,” she had confessed to him. That was over and done with. He was going to love her without any limits, absolutely. He wanted to protect her and make her happy so that she would never leave, for them to be together throughout that winter, then spring, summer, and forever. He wanted to create the deepest complicity and intimacy with her, to share the most secret parts of his being, to draw her into his life and soul. In fact he knew very little about Lucia and even less about himself, but none of that would matter if she was to reciprocate his love. In that case they would have the rest of their lives to discover one another, to grow and to age together.
Richard had not thought he could ever again be in love as he had been with Anita in his youth. He was no longer the man who loved Anita; he felt as if he had grown the scales of a crocodile, which seemed almost visible and heavy as armor. He was ashamed of having always protected himself from disenchantment, from being abandoned or betrayed; frightened of suffering the way he had made Anita suffer; terrified of life itself; cut off from the formidable adventure of love.
“I don’t want to go on living this kind of half life,” he told Lucia. “I don’t want to be this cowardly man. I want you to want me, Lucia.”
WHEN IN 1991 RICHARD turned up for the first day of his new job at New York University, Horacio Amado-Castro was amazed at his transformation. When he had met him at the airport only a few days earlier he had been a disheveled, incoherent drunk, and Horacio regretted inviting him to be part of the faculty. He had admired him when they were both students and young professionals, but that was years earlier and since then Richard had fallen very low. The death of his two children had wounded his soul, as it had Anita’s. He guessed they would eventually separate: few couples survived the death of one child, and they had lost two. As if that were not tragedy enough, Richard had been the cause of Bibi’s death. Horacio found it impossible to begin to imagine the guilt Richard must have felt; if anything similar happened to one of his own children, he would have preferred to die. He was afraid Richard would be unable to take up his academic post, and yet there he was, looking impeccable, freshly shaved and with hair recently cut, and wearing a smart summer suit and tie. His breath did smell of alcohol, but the effects of alcohol were
not obvious from his behavior or his ideas. He was appreciated from the very first day.
Richard and Anita moved into an eleventh-floor apartment for faculty members in University Village. It was small but adequate, with functional furniture and in a very convenient location, as Richard could walk to his office in ten minutes. When they arrived, Anita crossed the threshold with the same automaton-like demeanor she had had for several months. She sat at the window and stared out at the tiny corner of sky she could see among the surrounding tall buildings, while her husband unloaded, unpacked, and made a list of provisions to shop for. This set the tone for the brief length of time they lived together in New York.
“They warned me, Lucia. Anita’s family and her psychiatrist in Brazil warned me. How could I not see how fragile she was? She was destroyed by the loss of the children.”
“It was an accident, Richard.”
“No. I had spent the night partying and arrived befuddled by sex, cocaine, and alcohol. It wasn’t an accident, it was a crime. And Anita knew it. She began to hate me. She wouldn’t let me touch her. By bringing her to New York I separated her from her family and her country. In the United States she was adrift: she didn’t know anyone or speak the language, and she was far apart from me, the only person who might have helped her. I failed her in every sense. I didn’t think of her, only of myself. I wanted to leave Brazil, to escape the Farinha family, to embark on a professional career I had postponed too long. By the age I was then, I should have been an associate professor. I began very late and wanted to catch up. I was going to study, teach, and above all, publish. From the outset I knew I had discovered the perfect place for me, but while I was parading around the university rooms and corridors, Anita was spending the whole day sitting silently at the window.”
In the Midst of Winter Page 25
