Lucia
Brooklyn, New York, 2016
At the end of December 2015 winter had not yet reached Brooklyn. As Christmas approached with its jangle of bells, people were still in short sleeves and sandals, some of them celebrating nature’s oversight and others fearing global warming, while to the confusion of squirrels and birds, artificial trees sprinkled with silver frost appeared in house windows. Three weeks after New Year’s Day, when no one gave any further thought to how out of step the calendar was, nature suddenly awoke from its fall torpor and unleashed the worst snowstorm in living memory.
Lucia Maraz was cursing the cold in her Prospect Heights basement apartment, a cement-and-brick cave with a mountain of snow blocking the doorway. Blessed with the stoic character of her people, accustomed as they are to earthquakes, floods, occasional tsunamis, and political cataclysms, she grew worried if no disaster occurred within a given length of time. Yet she was unprepared for this Siberian winter that seemed to have struck Brooklyn in error. Storms in Chile are limited to the Andes Mountains and the deep south of Tierra del Fuego, where the continent crumbles into islands torn to shreds by the austral wind, where ice splits bones and life is brutal. Lucia was from Santiago, undeservedly renowned for its benign climate, although its winters are damp and cold, its summers hot and dry. The capital lies nestled among purple mountains that at dawn are sometimes covered in snow, and then the purest light on earth is reflected from their dazzling peaks. On very rare occasions a sad, pale dusting falls over the city like ashes, never managing to turn the urban landscape white before melting into dirty slush. Snow is always pristine from a distance.
In Lucia’s Brooklyn cave, largely below street level and with poor heating, snow was a nightmare. The frost-covered glass impeded light from entering through the small window, and the inside gloom was hardly dispelled by the naked bulbs dangling from the ceiling. The apartment contained only the essentials: a jumble of shabby second- or thirdhand furniture and a few kitchen utensils. Richard Bowmaster, the owner, was not interested in either decor or comfort.
The storm began on Friday with a heavy snowfall followed by a fierce squall that lashed the nearly deserted streets. The force of the wind caused trees to bend and the freezing weather killed many birds who had forgotten to migrate, fooled by the previous month’s warmth. When the cleanup operation began, sanitation trucks carted away frozen sparrows along with the scattered debris. However, the mysterious parakeets in Green-Wood Cemetery survived the blizzard, as was confirmed three days later, when they reappeared intact, pecking for crumbs among the gravestones. On Thursday, television reporters with funereal expressions and the solemn tone usually reserved for news about terrorism in far-off countries had predicted the upcoming storm as well as dire consequences for the weekend. A state of emergency was declared in New York, and the dean at NYU, where Lucia worked, had heeded the warning, informing all faculty that Friday classes were canceled. It would have been an adventure to reach Manhattan in any case.
LUCIA TOOK ADVANTAGE of that day’s unexpected freedom to prepare a life-restoring cazuela, a Chilean soup that lifts downhearted spirits and sick bodies. By now she had been in the United States more than four months, eating mostly at the university cafeteria and with no reason to cook for herself except on a couple of occasions when she did so out of nostalgia or to celebrate a friendship. For this traditional dish she made a hearty, well-seasoned stock; she fried onion and meat, cooked vegetables, potatoes, and pumpkin separately, and finally added rice. Although she used all the pots in the kitchen and it looked as if a bomb had exploded there, the result was well worth it. For it dispelled the feeling of loneliness that had overwhelmed her since the storm began. That loneliness, which in the past used to arrive unannounced like an unwelcome visitor, had now been relegated to a distant corner of her mind.
That night, as the wind roared outside, whipping up the snow and filtering in impudently through the chinks, she felt a visceral childhood dread. She knew she was safe in her cave, that her fear of the elements was absurd, and that there was no cause to disturb Richard, apart from the fact that he was the only person she could turn to in circumstances like this, because he lived on the floor above. At nine in the evening she gave in to her need to hear a human voice and phoned him.
“What are you doing?” she asked, trying to conceal her apprehension.
“Playing the piano. Is the noise disturbing you?”
“I can’t hear your piano. The only noise down here is the crash of the end of the world. Is this normal here in Brooklyn?”
“There’s bad weather every so often in winter, Lucia.”
“I’m scared.”
“What of?”
“Just scared, nothing specific. I guess it would be stupid to ask you to come and keep me company for a while. I made a Chilean soup.”
“Is it vegetarian?”
“No. Well, never mind, Richard. Good night.”
“Good night.”
She drank a shot of pisco and buried her head beneath her pillow. She slept badly, waking up every half hour with the same fragmented dream about being shipwrecked in a substance as thick and sour as yogurt.
BY SATURDAY THE STORM had continued on its raging path toward the Atlantic, but the weather in Brooklyn remained cold and snowy. Lucia did not want to venture out as many streets were still blocked, although efforts to clear them had begun at first light. She would have plenty of time to read and prepare her classes for the coming week. On the news she saw that the storm continued wreaking havoc wherever it went. She was pleased at the prospect of some peace, a good novel, and a rest. Eventually someone would come and clear the snow from her door. That would be no problem, the neighborhood kids were already out offering to work for a few dollars. Lucia appreciated her good fortune, realizing she felt at ease living in this inhospitable Prospect Heights cave, which wasn’t so bad after all.
As evening fell, she began to feel bored with being shut in. She shared some of the soup with Marcelo, the Chihuahua, and the two of them settled down together in the bed on the floor, on a lumpy mattress under a mountain of blankets, to watch several episodes of their favorite TV crime series. The apartment was freezing. Lucia put on her wool hat and gloves.
In the first weeks, when her decision to leave Chile had hung heavy on her—there at least she could employ her sense of humor in Spanish—she had consoled herself with the certainty that everything changes. By tomorrow, all of today’s misfortunes will be ancient history. In fact, her doubts had been short-lived: she was enjoying her work; she had Marcelo; she’d made friends at the university and in her neighborhood; people were kind everywhere; after going three times to any coffee shop, she would be treated as one of the family. The idea Chileans had that Yankees were cold was a myth. The only person she had to deal with who was somewhat cold was Richard Bowmaster, her landlord. Well, the hell with him.
Richard had paid a pittance for this large Brooklyn brownstone, which was similar to dozens of other houses in the neighborhood. He bought it from his best friend, an Argentinian who suddenly inherited a fortune and returned to his own country to administer it. A few years later, the same house, but more run-down, was worth over three million dollars. He became the owner just before young professionals from Manhattan arrived en masse to buy and refurbish these picturesque dwellings, raising the prices to ridiculous levels. Before this, the neighborhood had been an area of crime, drugs, and gangs where no one dared to walk at night. But by the time Richard moved in, it had become one of the most sought-after areas in the country, despite the garbage cans, the skeletal trees, and all the junk in the yards. Lucia had joked to Richard that he should sell this relic with its rickety stairs and dilapidated doors and grow old living like royalty on a Caribbean island, but Richard was a gloomy man whose natural pessimism was reinforced by the demands and drawbacks of a house with five large empty rooms, three unused bathrooms, a closed-off attic, and a first floor with such high ceilings that you needed an extension ladder to change a lightbulb.
Richard Bowmaster was Lucia’s boss at New York University, where she had a one-year contract as a visiting professor. Once the year was over, her life was a blank slate: she would need another job and somewhere else to live while she decided on her long-term future. Sooner or later she would return to end her days in Chile, but that was still quite a way off. And since her daughter, Daniela, had moved to Miami to study marine biology, and was possibly in love and planning to stay, there was nothing to draw Lucia back to her home country. She intended to enjoy her remaining years of good health before she was defeated by decrepitude. She wanted to live abroad, where the daily challenges kept her mind occupied and her heart in relative calm, because in Chile she was crushed by the weight of the familiar, its routines and limitations. Back there she felt she was condemned to be a lonely old woman besieged by pointless memories; in another country, there could be surprises and opportunities.
She had agreed to teach at NYU’s Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies in order to get away from Chile for a while and be closer to Daniela. Also, she had to admit, because Richard Bowmaster intrigued her. She was just emerging from a failed romance and thought Richard could be the cure, a way of definitively forgetting Julian, her last love, the only one to leave any kind of imprint on her since her divorce in 2010. In the years since then, Lucia had learned how few suitors were available for a woman her age. Before Julian appeared, she had had a few insignificant flings. She had known Richard for more than ten years, while she was still married, and had been attracted to him ever since she met him, although she could not have clearly said why. They had contrasting characters and little in common beyond academic matters. Although they had met here and there at conferences, spent hours talking about their work, and kept up a regular correspondence, he had never shown the slightest romantic interest in her. Uncharacteristically, as she lacked the boldness of flirtatious women, Lucia had even hinted at it on one occasion. Before she came to New York, Richard’s thoughtful, shy demeanor had been a powerful attraction, for she imagined that a man like him must be deep and serious, noble spirited: a prize for whoever succeeded in overcoming the obstacles he placed in the way of any kind of intimacy.
Lucia still entertained the fantasies of a young girl despite the fact that she was almost sixty-two. She had a wrinkled neck, dry skin, and flabby arms; her knees were heavy; and she had become resigned to watching her waist disappear because she did not have the discipline to combat the process in the gym. Although she had youthful breasts, they were not hers. She avoided looking at herself naked, because she felt much better when she was dressed. Aware of which colors and styles favored her, she kept to them rigorously and was able to purchase a complete outfit in twenty minutes, without ever allowing curiosity to distract her. Like photographs, the mirror was an implacable enemy, because both showed her immobile, with her flaws mercilessly exposed. She thought that if she had any attraction, it lay in movement, for she was flexible and had a grace that was unearned, since she had done nothing to foster it. She was as sweet-toothed and lazy as an odalisque, and if there had been any justice in the world, she would have been obese. Her forebears, spirited and probably hungry people, had bequeathed her a fortunate metabolism. In her passport photograph, where she was staring straight ahead with a dour expression, she looked like a Soviet prison guard, as her daughter, Daniela, said to tease her, but nobody ever saw her looking that stiff. She had an expressive face and knew how to apply makeup.
In short, she was satisfied with her appearance and resigned to the inevitable damages of age. Her body was growing old, but inside she still kept intact the adolescent she once was. She could not imagine the old woman she would be. Her desire to get the most out of life grew greater as her future shrank, and part of that enthusiasm was the vague hope of having someone to cherish, even if this clashed with the reality of a lack of opportunities. She missed sex, romance, and love. The first of these she could obtain every so often, the second was a matter of luck, and the third was a gift from the gods that would probably never happen, as her daughter had told her more than once.
ALTHOUGH LUCIA WAS SOMEWHAT SAD that she had broken off her affair with Julian, she never regretted it. She wanted stability, but even though he was seventy years old he was still flitting from one relationship to another, like a hummingbird. Despite the advice of her daughter, who advocated the advantages of free love, for Lucia intimacy was impossible with a man distracted by other women. “What is it you’re after, Mom? To get married?” Daniela had laughed when she learned her mother was finished with Julian. No, but Lucia wanted to make love in a loving way, for the pleasure of her body as well as the tranquility of her spirit. She wanted to make love with someone who felt as she did. She wanted to be accepted without concealing or pretending anything, to get to know the other person deeply and to accept him in the same way. She wanted somebody she could spend Sunday mornings in bed with reading the newspapers, somebody to hold hands with at movies, to laugh with at nonsense, to discuss ideas with. She had gotten beyond any enthusiasm for fleeting adventures.
However, now that Lucia had grown accustomed to her space, her silence, and her solitude, she had concluded it would be a high price to pay to share her bed, bathroom, and closet, and that no man would be able to satisfy all her needs. In her youth she had thought she was incomplete without being in a loving couple, that something essential was missing. In her maturity she was thankful for the cornucopia of her existence, although she had vaguely thought of turning to an Internet dating site simply out of curiosity. She gave this up at once, because Daniela was sure to find out from Miami. Besides, Lucia did not know how to describe herself so that she seemed more attractive without lying. She guessed that the same thing happened with others; everyone lied.
Men around her age wanted women who were twenty or thirty years younger, which was understandable since she herself would not want to get together with an ailing old man and preferred a younger Romeo. According to Daniela, it was a waste she was heterosexual. There were more than enough single women with rich inner lives and in good physical and emotional condition who were far more interesting than the widowed or divorced men of sixty or seventy out there. Lucia admitted her limitations in this respect but thought it was too late to change. Since her divorce she had had a few brief intimate encounters with one friend or another after a few drinks at a disco, or with strangers on her travels, or at a party. These were nothing to write home about, but they helped her overcome the embarrassment of taking her clothes off in front of a male witness. The scars on her chest were visible, and her virginal breasts belonged to a young bride. Having nothing to do with the rest of her body, they mocked her current anatomy.
Her fantasy of seducing Richard, which had seemed so enticing when she received his invitation to teach at the university, had evaporated barely a week after she moved into the basement apartment. Rather than bringing them closer, their relative proximity—meeting regularly at work, in the street, on the subway, or at the front door to the house—had quickly distanced them. The once warm camaraderie of international meetings and electronic communication had frozen when put to the test of physical closeness. No, there would definitely be no romance with Richard Bowmaster, which was a shame because he was the kind of tranquil, reliable man she would not have minded being bored with. Lucia was only a year and eight months older than him. As she often told herself, this was a negligible difference, although in secret she admitted that she was at a disadvantage. She felt heavy and was shrinking steadily as her spine contracted, but she could no longer wear very high heels without falling flat on her face. Around her, everyone else seemed to be growing taller. Her students towered over her, as gangly and aloof as giraffes. She was fed up with seeing all the nose hairs of the rest of humanity from down below. Richard on the other hand wore his years with the awkward charm of a professor absorbed in his studies.
As Lucia described him to Daniela, Richard Bowmaster was of medium height, still with enough hair and good teeth, and with eyes somewhere between gray and green depending on the reflection of light on his glasses and the state of his ulcer. He seldom smiled without a real reason, but his permanent dimples and tousled hair gave him a youthful look, even though he walked along staring at the ground, loaded down with books and bent under the weight of all his concerns. Lucia could not imagine what they could be, because he looked healthy, had reached the pinnacle of his academic career, and would be able to retire with the means to ensure a comfortable old age. The only financial burden he had was his father, Joseph Bowmaster, who lived in a senior residence fifteen minutes away, and whom Richard phoned every day and visited a couple of times a week. Although Joseph was ninety-six and confined to a wheelchair, he had more fire in his belly and mental lucidity than many half his age. He spent his time writing letters of advice to Barack Obama.
Lucia suspected that Richard’s taciturn appearance hid a store of kindness and a well-disguised wish to help without any fuss, from discreetly serving at a charity soup kitchen to volunteering to monitor the parakeets in the cemetery. Richard must surely have owed that side of his character to his father. Joseph would never allow a son of his to go through life without embracing some worthy cause. In the beginning, Lucia studied Richard to try to find any openings to secure his friendship, but as she was not drawn to the charity soup kitchen or any species of parrot, all they shared was their work, and she could not find a way to insinuate herself into his life. She was not offended by Richard’s lack of interest, because he equally ignored the attentions of his female colleagues and the hordes of young girls at the university. His hermit’s life was a mystery: Who knew what secrets it concealed? How could he have lived six decades without any unsettling challenges, protected by his armadillo’s hide?
By contrast, she was proud of the dramas in her past and wished for an interesting existence in her future. She mistrusted happiness on principle; she found it rather kitschy. She was content to be more or less satisfied. Richard had spent a long period in Brazil, where, to judge by a photograph Lucia had seen, he had been married to a voluptuous young woman, yet neither the exuberance of that country nor that mysterious woman seemed to have rubbed off on him. Despite his odd behavior, Richard always made a good impression. In her description of him to her daughter, Lucia said that he was liviano de sangre—light blooded—a Chilean expression for someone who is good natured and makes himself loved without meaning to and for no obvious reason. “He’s a strange sort, Daniela. He lives alone with four cats.” She added, “He doesn’t know it yet, but when I leave he’ll also have to look after Marcelo.” She had thought this over carefully. It would be heart wrenching, but she couldn’t drag an aged Chihuahua around the world with her.