Humiliation. Paulina Flores
back, rose up.
“It doesn’t matter how many times you come back, Teresa. It doesn’t matter that you’re sad, because I’m sad too. We’re all sad . . .”
And then she started to laugh.
Her laughter, quiet at first, then louder. “It’s too late to talk about this.”
He silenced her with a kiss.
It was nighttime when she woke up. Bruno lay beside her, asleep. She felt a bit dizzy, but she knew perfectly well where she was and what she’d done. She moved closer to him and breathed in his scent one last time. “My love,” she wanted to whisper into his ear. But she didn’t. Because it wasn’t true, he wasn’t her love. Nothing that had happened between them had the slightest importance now. This wasn’t her life and it never would be. She got up carefully so as not to wake him. She gathered her clothes from the bed and floor, silent and agile the way a cat goes about its business. She zipped up her dress and went over to the window. Outside, she saw the window of another building, and a red light filtered through its curtains, bright and demonic. She looked at her reflection in the glass. She had circles under her eyes and her skin was shiny. Her hair a mess. What a strange face, she said to herself. Was it the face of a thief or a ghost?
A faint smile appeared.
She left the room, moving quickly, feeling like she couldn’t catch her breath. She opened the door of the next room with determination, like a person making an entrance. The little girl was sitting on the carpet watching cartoons on TV. The glow from the set backlit her silhouette. Claudia looked closely at a drawing on the wall. It looked like a vampire, a vampire in the shape of a bird. She felt terror at the sight of that image, but then she looked at the girl, and the girl looked at her, and her eyes, like the girl’s, clouded over. Claudia went over to her, ran her hands through the girl’s hair, then separated it into two ponytails, one on either side of her neck, and secured them with hairbands. She smoothed the girl’s dress and tied the laces of her sneakers. Then she took the little girl’s hand, and together, in a matter of seconds, they were out the apartment door.
We lived in one of the poorest areas of one of the ugliest cities in the country: the Santa Julia neighborhood in Talcahuano. A port town that no one liked: gloomy skies, factory soot that turned everything gray, and air that famously stank of fish. But it didn’t bother us to live in a place people considered ugly; I, at least, felt strangely proud of it. We all—Pancho, Camilo, and Marquito Carrasco, and I—felt strong and satisfied. We enjoyed those days, sitting on the Carrasco brothers’ front stoop and looking out at the shacks that spilled down the hillside toward the sea, making plans and eating watermelon. That was how we spent the whole summer of 1997. We ate watermelon every day. Pancho and Marquito got a bunch of them from a trucker they’d hitched a ride from in Concepción. The trucker said it had been a long time since he’d laughed so hard, and he let them keep as many watermelons as they wanted. That afternoon, between the four of us, we carried fourteen of them to the Carrascos’ house. And when we finished, we sat at the foot of the steps putting half moons of rind over our faces to flash brazen grins at the ruinous place we called home.
I can see us clearly, our happiness on display in our pulpy watermelon smiles. Laughing in the faces of our neighbors, so tired and distraught. Especially that year, when the fishing industry was in crisis and no one had jobs, and unemployed people would wander the streets with servile and defeated expressions, as if they belonged to a vanquished battalion of soldiers.
But my father was the only real military man among them. After fifteen years at the marina, they’d laid him off. But even though it happened at the worst possible moment, it wasn’t the crisis that kept him from finding another job. In a way, it was his own decision. He didn’t want to start over.
Before summer break started, my parents had a sort of fight. I say sort of because, as was usual between them, there was no direct argument, or even—in this case—an exchange of words. This is another clear memory. The family—my parents, my two sisters, and me—sitting around the kitchen table. A bowl of hard bread in the middle, and a mug of watery tea for each of us. Food had been scarce in our house for days. My mother tells us she’d toasted the bread to soften it a little. No one responds. The bread had burned, and now, in addition to being stale, it’s black as coal. We drink our tea in silence. Suddenly, my mother stands up, grabs one of the rolls, and throws it against the wall, screaming. I see the rage in the movement of her arm, as if she were throwing a rock instead of hard bread. And when it hits the floor, it does sound like a rock. My sisters and I stare at the bread on the floor. My mother sits back down like nothing happened, but when she picks up her mug her hands are shaking. As soon as she takes a sip she stands up again, this time to go to her room. We can hear her sobbing. My sisters follow right behind her; they sit beside her on the bed—I can see them from where I’m sitting—and hug her.
My father, who has kept his eyes on his tea throughout the scene, keeps drinking it without a word. And I just sit there in the kitchen with him and drink mine, too. I stay with my father and not with my mother and sisters, but not because I’m taking his side. I’m not on anyone’s side. Back then I participated in family problems as if I were watching a movie. One whose unfortunate story couldn’t affect me beyond the seconds I spent looking at it, and that I could easily leave behind. I wasn’t worried by my father’s silence, or his empty face as he gazed at his tea. I was happy to remain on the sidelines. I was sure I could get along just fine on my own, with my friends.
That’s why I spent almost all day at the Carrascos’ house, where Camilo and Pancho lived. We had the place to ourselves. Their father was a miner in the north—the only dad of our group who had a job—and their mother spent the whole day at the Carrascos’ grandmother’s house with her newborn daughter. Pancho was the younger brother, and my best friend. His barely there neck, broad back, and short legs gave him a rigid look that didn’t correspond in the slightest with the torrent of energy he gave off. Ever since he was little, he’d had a talent for concocting adventures and getting into trouble. Nothing dangerous, just childish mischief.
Pancho and I were both thirteen, but there were seven months between us and I would turn fourteen soon. We lived just a couple blocks apart, and we had spent almost every day of our lives together. The Carrascos’ house was on Pichidegua, which means “Little Mouse,” and I lived on Malal, “Corral.” All the streets in the neighborhood were named in Mapudungun. Years before, Pancho and I and a classmate who was half Mapuche had translated the names of almost all the streets. We harbored the illusion that we were discovering meaningful names for those narrow dirt alleys we lived on—I guess we had the idea that Mapudungun was heroic. In the end they were mostly names of animals common to the region, but we still took a certain pride in our streets, especially if we compared them to the industrial neighborhoods around us, where the streets were numbered.
Talcahuano, “Thundering Sky,” was the only name that lived up to our expectations.
Santa Julia was born from a land occupation in Los Cerros de Talcahuano, and almost all of its houses had been built by their owners with wooden planks and metal sheeting. The Carrascos’ house was one of the biggest, with a second floor, concrete steps leading up to it, and cement walls enclosing the back patio. My house was very small, because my father had built it on the same plot of land as his mother’s house. He’d decided to live in Santa Julia rather than accept one of the houses in the Naval Village, which he had a right to as a marine. It’s not that he was ashamed of being in the navy—he, more than anyone, possessed the pride typical of military men—but he said he didn’t want his children to get used to that environment. Meaning, I thought, that he didn’t want any of us to end up in the navy like him. In addition to our house itself, my father made many of the things inside it, from the furniture to our toys. He liked to work with wood, but he could manage with any kind of trash he found lying around: bottles, aluminum caps, powdered milk cans, spools of thread. He used to say that if he’d had more options, he would have been an engineer. My mother used to try to convince him to start a workshop so he could earn some extra money.