Chasing the Sun: A Novel

by Natalia Sylvester

  Marabela has not seen herself in a mirror in weeks. It was one thing to look down at her legs, arms, and stomach, but it’s another experience altogether to have some perspective on herself. She sees her face for the first time, not knowing she’d look so different. Of course she’d seen the bruises on her wrists, her chipped and dirty nails; and she’d known from the way her shoulders hurt when she sat against the wall that she was missing the cushion of a normal amount of flesh.

  Now, Marabela realizes that her arms and legs look like candlesticks that have been left too close to a fire. Her body looks like it simply melted away.

  She turns her back to the mirror and looks over her shoulder. If she hugs herself, she can see ribs protruding through her skin. She taps them like they’re keys of a piano, her fingers stepping gently over the deep gaps between each bone. She has never felt so small, so shrunken into herself, while at the same time heavy with everything her body has held on to. It tells a story she never wants to hear again.

  The events of the past two and a half weeks are written on her skin in shades of yellow, green, blue, and black, each hinting at the chronology of her days in captivity. The first day, the men focused on her face. They wanted to hurt the most visible parts of her, the ones that would be noticed most easily and mourned. They should have known that what would hit her the hardest was not the weight of the biggest man’s fists or the steel of his boot against her cheeks when she fell to the floor. What made her collapse into herself was the sight of the grenades they hung around her neck and the guns they pointed at her face the day they photographed her.

  “Yes, they’re real,” a younger man said as he looked into her eyes and grinned. In that moment she knew there was no hiding; even her thoughts were within earshot. They took pictures of her and she remembers thinking how cruel it was, to have the camera used as a weapon against her. She’d tried to look away but it was unnecessary. By then her eyes had swollen so much that holding them open was painful, like pushing down on a bruise. The flash permeated her lids.

  The marks on her cheekbones have almost healed by now; they look like the hints of green on a slice of old cheese. The scabs on her right shoulder have hardened. The last time she got to speak to Andres on the phone, after the men claimed that he wasn’t going to pay and no one was coming for her, she’d lost her will to move. They’d dragged her over the threshold, insisting that they didn’t have to, that she should be grateful they were letting her speak with anyone, and thrust her into a wall of exposed cinder blocks. Her shoulders scraped against the cement, shaving off her skin as her body fell to the floor. She doesn’t remember what Andres said to her on the phone that day, but she remembers how the fresh wound stung.

  Marabela steps into the shower, marveling at its smooth, cold surface. She lets the water fill up to her ankles. When the water warms, she crouches down, naked, so she can scoop her hands under the stream. She takes the handfuls of water and rubs them against her body, watching as the dirt gets pulled toward the drain.

  She remembers her first summer married to Andres, how they spent the day after Christmas at the beach, fighting with the ocean as it pulled them in. When they finally came home, they realized how much the sun had toasted their skin. Within days, they’d started to peel. They drew a cold bath one night and sat with their legs crossed, removing thin layers of dead skin from each other’s shoulders and back.

  “How long do you think it takes till we grow back new skin?” he asked.

  Marabela shrugged. “Who can know for sure? I read we shed and grow it back all the time.”

  “Like snakes?” Andres said, an exaggerated excitement in his voice.

  “Exactly,” she said, laughing and rolling her eyes. She liked the idea of them constantly changing in and out of their skins, shedding old layers to make way for new ones.

  Now, as she runs her fingers over these new cracks and scrapes, she considers how long her body will take to heal. She wishes she could hurry the process along. Marabela picks at a scab by her hipbone (her captors were fond of throwing her onto the floor) and peels away several others on her palm (she tried, but failed, to fall hands first). She rubs at the dirt on her ankles, toes, and heels, and it flakes away like pieces of an old eraser. If she scrubs hard enough, it all falls away, so she rubs harder, first with her fingertips, then with her jagged nails, until she’s drawing new blood from old wounds and crying out in pain, cries she can’t hear anymore, until finally the door bursts open, as it always does. She stops and looks up and there is Andres, watching in horror.

  “How long till it grows back?” she asks. “Do you remember?”

  Andres and the kids are afraid to speak while she’s asleep. Together, they make dinner in near silence—a simple chicken soup with a ham sandwich—setting the table with so much care that the plates and silverware hardly make a sound as they are placed on the table.

  Andres and the kids work in an assembly-line fashion: Cynthia sets the place mats and folds the napkins into triangles; Ignacio presses the forks and knives down, diffusing the clinking of the metals; and Andres lays the plates in the center. It’s a soothing routine; Andres understands now why Consuelo often hummed as she worked, why she and Carla gossiped as they folded laundry or dried the dishes. The mind memorizes the movements to free up the brain. It’s a dance that needs musical accompaniment. But not today.

  When they’re done, Ignacio clears his throat, standing behind the chair at the foot of the table, the only one with arms at the side, like a throne. He gives a quick, violent nod in the direction of Marabela’s room.

  “Are you going to wake her?” he whispers.

  Andres shakes his head multiple times and wrinkles his face at the absurdity of it. Why would he do that? They’ll wait until she is ready. He indicates this with a stiff hand in the air. He pulls out a chair, lifting it half an inch off the ground, and lets his body slide down its back. Ignacio follows his lead and takes a seat, his arms stretched over the chair as if held by puppet strings.

  “What now?” he says.

  They’ve waited so long for Marabela to come back, it’s hard not to remain in a state of perpetual anticipation. Andres can’t stop trying to predict what she’ll need before she needs it, can’t stop thinking of answers to questions she’s sure to ask. At times he feels he’ll never be able to do enough for her, then worries his attempts will only smother her. How long till he is not afraid to touch Marabela, or ask how she’s doing for fear she’ll actually answer? How long till the sight of her no longer hurts?

  “Tomorrow I’ll take her to the doctor,” he tells Ignacio once Cynthia leaves the dining room to get her drink. “Her health is the most important thing right now.”

  From behind them, a voice breaks in. “What if she doesn’t want to go?” In all his efforts to keep quiet, Andres forgot to listen, and he’s surprised that Marabela managed to get through the living room and into the dining room without a sound.

  Andres rises to help Marabela to her chair, but she makes a point of doing it herself.

  “It’s just a simple checkup. Just to make sure everything’s—”

  “I’m fine. You can take my word for it.” As proof, she leans over the table and reaches for a sandwich, but quickly pulls back her arm when her sleeve starts riding up, exposing a greenish patch of skin around her wrist. She looks first to Ignacio and then to Cynthia, who stands with two glasses of Inka Cola, trying to gauge if her bruise has been noticed.

  Andres frowns. “Guillermo suggested this would be best. He says this doctor is excellent and very experienced.”

  “What does he know? I don’t even know the man. And I’m not comfortable having him here. What is he still doing here anyway?”

  “Mi amor,” Andres says. Now he feels like he’s rehearsing lines in a play. “Maybe we should talk about this later. We don’t want it to ruin your appetite.”

  Dinner is quiet and cautious. Andres watches Marabela as she eats, how her eyes travel the house; he wonders
what she sees and what she doesn’t see, what she thinks is missing. The children keep an eye on them, and every once in a while Cynthia tests the tension in the room. She peels the crust off her sandwich and rolls it into a ball, biting into it like an apple.

  “Want some?” She giggles as she offers it to her brother, who just smiles and rolls his eyes.

  “Don’t play with your food, sweetie,” Marabela says. Andres is surprised by how easily she slips back into her role. It gives him hope.

  She takes small bites of her sandwich and wipes her mouth with the napkin resting on her lap. When she’s done, she holds her empty plate with both hands and lets her gaze wander to the kitchen. “So, where are the girls?” she asks. He’s never understood why she calls them “the girls” when Consuelo is an old woman and Carla is a teenager.

  He’s thought of many ways to break the news to her since she arrived, but at the last moment he decides on the straightforward approach: “I sent them home.”

  “For the day or for good?”

  He stops his spoon midway. “Why do you ask?” Without thinking, he resorts to his business instincts to field the question.

  “Their room is cleared out. I checked on my way into the kitchen. Except for the bed, of course. Guillermo seems to have made himself very comfortable.”

  On her way up from the dining room, Marabela notices the door to the darkroom cracked open; light is sneaking through it. The sight is so foreign to her, she might as well be seeing toxic sludge ooze out of the room. She tries to remember what she last shot, before all of this, but the experience of that life appears before her like a desire, not as a coherent memory.

  Marabela remembers a roll of film she’d just finished developing, a series of pictures of hands and feet along the street. Several weeks ago, as she reached into her pocket for a few centimos to buy a paper fan, she accidentally snapped a picture of a little girl’s shoes. At first, Marabela had been upset—each exposure is precious, not to be wasted—until she saw the film against the light, how the tiny image of two feet, awkwardly tilted at the toes, revealed a story she hadn’t realized was there. This little girl’s shoes were open-toed, but her feet barely poked through. They had yet to grow into the shoes, but for now they could hide from the sun that was so hot it could burn her skin. From then on Marabela developed an interest in shooting hands and feet. In these extremities, she looked for clues into a person’s life. On the feet, a person’s entire existence bears down, grounds them and carries them through life. In the hands, she can see everything they’ve touched, reached for, accomplished. The rest of the body can be shielded, but hands and feet can tell no lies. Marabela began snapping them everywhere she went.

  She had a nonchalant way of shooting that put people at ease. People trusted her, even with the scrutinizing eye of her lens. Every once in a while, when she got a truly breathtaking image, she’d frame it and gift it to the subject.

  She wonders if that film is even here anymore. She approaches the room with the same caution as someone returning to her home, knowing full well it’s been robbed.

  “Hello?” she says when she hears a rustled footstep.

  Inside Guillermo is standing with his hands crossed over his chest, staring at a wall of cards and maps where there used to be images.

  “What the hell are you doing in here?” she says.

  “Andres didn’t tell you?” He reaches for a stack of papers and sorts through them on a desk where her tub of chemicals used to sit. He is unapologetic. He goes about his business like a man who’s been interrupted by a secretary or a coworker.

  “Tell me? No. He failed to mention a lot of things. Like why you’re still here and not the people who could really be of use.”

  “I’m sorry you feel that way, señora. I know this is an adjustment for you.”

  “You don’t know shit.”

  “I’m sorry. I was just saying, in my experience with these things—”

  “I don’t care about your experience.” She hates that he wants to lump her together, label her a victim and file her away into a drawer along with all his other cases, as if they each aren’t unique.

  “We thought this would be the safest place to conduct our efforts. I’ll clear out now that my services are no longer necessary.”

  She walks past him to the enlarger and twists the knob that focuses film negatives in and out.

  “I can’t believe you turned on the lights,” she says. The room looks different to her, all its faults exposed. In the dark it’d been a sanctuary, a quiet, still place where life took its time showing her its true colors. Seeing it like this is like seeing the lights turned on at a favorite nightclub.

  “I’ll put it back the way it was,” Guillermo says reassuringly.

  She laughs because even she can’t remember exactly what that looked like. “What does it matter? It won’t be the same.”

  He sets down his papers and walks right toward her, his eyes never leaving hers. He comes close enough to hold her against the wall with his body. Her breath gets suspended in her lungs, heavy and still as he reaches behind her. “Permiso,” he says. And turns the light off.

  The darkness brings panic for a moment, but she can hear him moving through the space—not clumsily like a person stumbling through the dark, but with the confidence of a blind man who’s memorized a room. Within seconds he’s turned on the safelight, and his skin takes on a warm hue, his features softened by a reddish glow that casts shadows across his face.

  “I’d never seen a darkroom as organized as yours. It’s a work of art.” He pauses, perhaps waiting for her to thank him. When she doesn’t, he continues quickly. “Almost everything had already been exposed, so the light wouldn’t have damaged it, but I put it all away regardless. It didn’t feel right to bring the photos out into the light without the photographer seeing them first.”

  For the first time Marabela notices there’s a small chest of drawers from Andres’s office in the room. It’s sealed shut with duct tape along the cracks to block out the light. Guillermo rips the tapes off the top drawer, revealing a tray full of photographs, testing strips, overexposed and underexposed images that she might’ve thrown out in a few days had she returned. They’ve all been guarded with care.

  “My father used to be a photographer, señora. He rarely let me in. He said the darkroom was his escape.”

  In another life she might have thanked him, but now her sense of defense is a stronger impulse than being polite. “And knowing this, you still came and took over this one.” It’s not so much a question as it is an accusation. She doesn’t expect him to answer.

  He unseals the next drawer to reveal a single blank sheet. “This one was under the enlarger. I didn’t know if it’d been exposed or not, and I was tempted to drop it into the chemicals to see what it was.”

  “How dare you . . .”

  “I didn’t. It waits for you, whenever you’re ready.” He shuts the drawer, reseals the chest, and turns the light back on.

  “I’ll have it back for you exactly the way it was by tomorrow,” he says.

  When he leaves, she’s grateful that he’s left the light on. She’s not sure she’s ready to be left alone in the dark.

  That night, Marabela stays up, listening to Andres’s deep breathing and wishing that she hadn’t taken such a long nap in the afternoon. Every once in a while he stirs and the foldout bed creaks, but eventually quiet settles over the house. The peace mocks her; she feels alone in the world, as if she doesn’t really exist. She wanders the halls, peeking into Ignacio’s and Cynthia’s rooms. Tucked tightly into their beds, they look calm, and likely soothed by the knowledge of her presence. She’s glad that her return has brought them tranquillity; she only wishes she could find it as well.

  She sits on the couch in the upstairs living room and gazes at the white walls, now gray against the darkness. Everything around her looks like the color has been leached out of it. Outside, the occasional car drives by, the sound of its engine
humming like a cold breeze. She thinks of what could be happening beyond the walls of her home. Somewhere, someone is feeling fear like the one she has lived through in the past few weeks. She gets up and goes to the window, stares at the houses lined up and down her street. Even in a well-off neighborhood like hers, the homes suffocate one another. One building starts where another ends. There is no space between them for privacy, no land available to waste.

  It is hours past curfew, but occasionally an old man or a teenager walks quietly down the sidewalk, unable to resist the night. Marabela scoots down the couch toward the window, noticing for the first time how fragile the glass is. With a small pebble thrown just so in the air, someone could crack the surface. With a determined brick, it could all explode, sending shards of glass piercing into her skin. Marabela imagines the clear, glimmering pieces swimming in small rivers of blood along her skin, and she thinks that perhaps it’s not worth the risk to watch the world through the window when her house is full of perfectly good rooms that don’t reveal her to the world beyond. She tiptoes back to her bedroom and double-checks that the windows are locked and the blinds are sealed tight.

  In time she falls into a sleep so light, she still feels aware of her surroundings—the heavy silence, the cool air outside, the suffocating anticipation of daylight. To avoid consciousness she tries to sleep for as long as possible, and surprisingly her body welcomes it, knowing what her mind has yet to comprehend: she is safe now, she is far away from those fears.

  When Marabela wakes the next morning, she doesn’t recognize anything. Someone stands at the doorway, a small silhouette creeping toward her, speaking to her in words that she doesn’t understand. Marabela sits up on the bed, pushing her body against the headboard with her legs. When she finally gains focus, she recognizes her own fear in the figure standing before her: it’s Cynthia, come looking for her mother.