Lucia
Chile, 2008–2015
When her mother died in 2008, Lucia Maraz felt an inexplicable sense of insecurity, even though she had not depended on Lena since leaving for exile at the age of nineteen. In their relationship, she had offered Lena emotional protection, and in her final years economic support as well, as inflation ate away at her pension. Yet when Lucia found herself without her mother the sensation of vulnerability was as sharp as the sadness at her loss. Since her father had vanished from her life very early on, her mother and her brother, Enrique, were the only family she had. With neither of them there anymore, she realized the only person she had left was her daughter, Daniela. Carlos lived in the same house, but remained emotionally absent. Lucia began to feel the weight of her years for the first time. Though well into her fifties, she believed she was still thirty, suspended in time. Until then, growing old and dying had been abstract notions, something that happened to others.
She went with Daniela to pour Lena’s ashes into the sea. Her mother had made the request without any explanation, and Lucia presumed she wanted to be in the same waters of the Pacific as her son. Like so many others, Enrique’s body might have been thrown into the sea tied to a length of rail track, but the spirit that visited Lena in her final days did not confirm this. They hired a fisherman to take them out beyond the farthest rocks, where the ocean became the color of petroleum and there were no seagulls. Standing in the boat, bathed in tears, they improvised a farewell for the grandmother who had suffered so much, as well as for Enrique. They had never had the courage to bid him goodbye before then, as Lena had refused to acknowledge his death out loud until the end, although perhaps she had done so years earlier in a secret corner of her heart. Lucia’s first book, published in 1994 and read by Lena, gave details of the murders under the dictatorship, none of which were subsequently denied. Lena had also accompanied Lucia when she testified before a judge as part of an investigation into the use of army helicopters. Lena must have had a fairly clear idea of her son’s fate, but to acknowledge it meant renouncing a mission that had obsessed her for more than three decades. Enrique would have remained forever in a dense fog of uncertainty, neither dead nor alive, had it not been for the miracle of his appearance at his mother’s side in her final days to lead her into the next life.
In the boat, Daniela held the ceramic urn while Lucia scattered handfuls of ashes and prayed for her mother, her brother, and the unknown young man who still lay in the Maraz family niche in the cemetery. Over all those years, no one had identified the body in the Vicariate’s archives, and Lena had come to think of him as another member of her family. The breeze kept the ashes floating in the air like stardust, until they slowly fell onto the surface of the sea. Lucia suddenly understood that she should replace her mother; she was the eldest in her tiny family, the matriarch. At that moment she felt her age, but it did not overwhelm her until two years later, when she had to come to terms with her losses and it was her turn to confront death.
WHEN SHE LATER TOLD RICHARD BOWMASTER about this period in her life, Lucia left out the shades of gray and concentrated on the brightest and darkest events. The rest was almost erased from her memory, yet Richard wanted to know more. He was familiar with Lucia’s two books, where Enrique’s story provided the starting point and lent a personal touch to what was a lengthy political analysis, but he knew little of her private life. Lucia explained that her marriage to Carlos Urzua had never really been intimate, but her romantic vocation or simple inertia meant she could never make a decision. They were two people wandering around in the same space, so distant from one another that they got along well, since to fight there has to be proximity. Her cancer led to the end of their marriage, which had been in the making for years.
Following her grandmother’s death, Daniela had left for the University of Miami in Coral Gables, and Lucia began a feverish correspondence with her, similar to the one she had had with her mother when she lived in Canada. Her daughter was overjoyed at her new existence, fascinated by the sea creatures, and keen to explore the vagaries of the oceans. Several people of both sexes were in love with her and she could enjoy a freedom she would never have had in Chile, where she would have been constantly scrutinized by a narrow-minded society. One day she announced to her parents over the phone that she did not define herself as either a woman or a man and had polyamorous relationships. Carlos asked if she meant she was promiscuously bisexual and warned her it would be better not to advertise the fact in Chile, where few would understand. “I see they’ve changed the name of free love. That has always failed, and it won’t work this time,” he predicted to Lucia following the conversation.
After Lucia fell ill with cancer in 2010, Daniela interrupted her studies and sexual experiments. It was a year of losses and separations for Lucia, a year of hospitals, fatigue, and fear. Carlos left her, claiming he did not have the courage to witness her devastation. He felt ashamed, but his mind was made up. He refused to see the scars crisscrossing her breasts, felt an atavistic repulsion toward the mutilated creature she was becoming, and instead left the responsibility of looking after her to their daughter. Indignant at her father’s behavior, Daniela confronted him in an unexpectedly fierce manner: she was the first to mention divorce as the only decent way out for a couple who did not love one another. Carlos adored his daughter, but his horror at Lucia’s double mastectomy was stronger than his fear of disappointing her. He announced he was moving temporarily to a hotel because the tension at home was affecting him too much and preventing him from working. Though well past retirement age, he had decided he would only leave his office feet first. Lucia and Carlos said goodbye with the tepid courtesy that had characterized the years they had lived together, without any show of hostility but without clarifying anything. Within a week, Carlos rented an apartment, and Daniela helped him settle in.
At first, Lucia felt the separation as a gaping void. She was accustomed to her husband’s emotional absence, but when he left for good she found she had time to spare, the house seemed enormous, and the empty rooms were filled with echoes. At night she could hear Carlos’s footsteps and the water running in his bathroom. This break with her established routines and small daily ceremonies gave her a great sense of abandonment, and added to the worry of the months she spent suffering from the effects of the drugs she was taking to overcome her illness. She felt wounded, fragile, naked. Daniela thought the treatment had destroyed both her body and her spirit’s immunity. “Don’t make a list of what you haven’t got, Ma, but focus on what you do have,” she would tell her. In Daniela’s view, this was a unique opportunity for Lucia to cleanse her mind as well as her body, to rid herself of the unnecessary burdens of her rancor, complexes, bad memories, impossible desires, and all the rest of the garbage. “Where do you get this wisdom from, daughter?” Lucia asked her on one occasion. “From the Internet,” replied Daniela.
Carlos left so definitively that even though he only lived a few blocks from Lucia it was as if he had moved to the far end of another continent. Not once did he ask about her health.
WHEN LUCIA ARRIVED IN BROOKLYN in September 2015, she was hoping that the change of surroundings would revive her. She was tired of routines; it was time to shuffle the cards of her destiny, to see if she would be dealt a better hand. She wanted New York to be the first stop on a long journey and was planning to look for other opportunities to travel the world while she still had the strength and funds to do so. Above all, she wanted to leave behind the losses and sorrows of recent years. The hardest part had been her mother’s death, which affected her more than the divorce or cancer. Although at first she had felt her husband’s departure as a stab in the back, she soon came to see it as a gift of freedom and peace.
It took more of an effort to recover from her illness, which was what had finally made Carlos flee. The months of chemo and radiation left her gaunt and bald, with no eyelashes or eyebrows, blue circles around her eyes, and numerous scars, but she was healthy and the prognosis was good. Her breasts were reconstructed with implants that inflated gradually as the muscles and skin adjusted to accommodate them. This was a painful process that she endured without complaining, buoyed by her vanity, feeling that anything was preferable to the flat chest scarred with knife wounds.
The experience of that year lost to illness gave her a burning desire to live, as if the reward for her suffering was to have discovered the philosopher’s stone, that elusive substance of the alchemists that was capable of turning lead into gold and restoring youth. She had already lost her fear of dying when she witnessed her mother’s elegant passage from life to death. Once more she experienced with complete clarity the irrefutable presence of the soul, that primordial essence that neither cancer nor anything else could destroy. Whatever happened, the soul would win out. She imagined her possible death as a threshold and was curious to know what she would find on the other side. She was not afraid of crossing that threshold, but while she was in this world she wanted to live life to the fullest, without worrying about anything, to be invincible.
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. She 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.