With both hands, Gracia piled her hair on the top of her head and then shook it loose. Although she was perfectly dressed for her working day, she looked tired.
“You don’t understand,” I told her for the nth time.
“Yes I do. But I’m alive, right here at your side. And she isn’t,” she declared, banging her coffee cup against her saucer.
We were sitting at the kitchen table and looking out the window. The garden, paralyzed by the cold, was covered with haze. We’d been arguing for much of the night, and we were both tired. The offenses we’d given each other were still floating in the air, wounding us with their sharp points. It had been a bitter contest, with no concessions given.
It was true that Gracia had been planning our anniversary party for weeks, that she’d already hired waiters and a caterer, and that the majority of the guests had confirmed their intention to attend, but even so, it hurt me that she didn’t understand my inability to celebrate while you were lying unconscious in that bed. The mere fact of discussing the matter constituted a defeat in advance. I would have wanted Gracia to be the one to propose canceling the party, while she, on the other hand, would have liked me to be so excited by the prospect of our celebration that I’d be able to forget you for a few hours.
“If I had agreed to let you cook, we wouldn’t be having this fight,” she pointed out.
“I’m shocked by how little you know me, Gracia. After so many years,” I said, furious and defeated at the same time. The battle was in its last throes.
When Gracia had started to talk about celebrating our anniversary, I’d toyed with the idea of preparing the feast myself. I figured it would be a good learning opportunity. But Gracia was against it, and I gave in.
“Don’t expect me for dinner. I’ve got to stay at the station later than usual,” she informed me, taking the last sip of her coffee.
I’d made breakfast—scrambled eggs and toast—which neither of us had touched.
“I can wait for you.”
“Suit yourself,” she said. She got up from the table, picked up her briefcase, and left without a good-bye, slamming the door as she went out.
I made myself another cup of black coffee and sat down again. I remembered our conversations in your study, and how you’d made me see the stuff marital relationships are made of. Stuff whose makeup includes all the ingredients they need to self-destruct. I always resisted believing you. In the end, it’s just a matter of will, I used to tell you. The will to love, and to be faithful to the object of your affection. But then you told me about the voraciousness of love, about its longing to swallow the beloved and ensure that he or she breathes only through us. But above all, you talked about love’s secret desire to be realized without transactions and without words, moved solely by its own essence, by its supposed unconditionality.
I went out into the yard with the cup of coffee in my hands. The morning frost crackled in the air. Everything was still, constrained. I heard voices. I went over to the fence that separated your house from mine and pricked up my ears. It was Detective Álvarez, talking with María. She had her checked apron on, and she was pointing out the gate that connected our yards.
I heard the detective call out to me. “Mr. Estévez,” he said. “Just the man I wanted to talk to.”
I went over to them. María gave me a suspicious look. She’d never understood our long hours behind closed doors in your study, which was now hushed and solitary and staring at us, with its little windows, from the end of the yard. Charly and Arthur emerged from the bushes and came up to me, their tails flailing the air. Detective Álvarez greeted me with forced familiarity and kept talking to María. While they conversed, I let my eyes stray to your garden. The branches of the walnut tree were looking pensively at the ground. That was when I noticed your callas. Someone had pulled up a good number of them. As I got closer, I realized that their stems had been cleanly snipped with pruning scissors. I smiled. Maybe you’d fulfilled your secret desire to steal your own flowers. I thought about Gracia again. For her, the world was divided between those who get tangled up in it and fail, and those who use it to achieve their goals and succeed.
The cell phone in my pocket began to vibrate. I didn’t need to look at the screen to know who it was. I let it ring, thinking all the while that maybe what I should do was change my number and disappear.
“Mr. Estévez.” The detective’s voice came from behind me. “Can we talk?”
“Yes, yes,” I said, embarrassed. Without knowing it, I’d walked toward the callas.
He demanded that I go over, once again, the details of the morning when I found you. He asked me if I’d seen anything or anyone suspicious. I remembered the tramp, but naming him would have been a way of accusing him, and that seemed unjust to me. I was convinced that he was harmless. The detective wanted to know if you’d received any visits or attended any kind of special event in the past weeks, and I mentioned your lunch with your friend Horacio Infante at his daughter’s house. Álvarez also asked how many days I’d been away from Santiago, and whether, during that time, I’d had any contact with you. I told him I’d left Thursday morning and returned Sunday night. Lying again. That same evening, while I was walking home after being with you in the hospital, I got a message from Gracia on my cell phone. “Everything’s canceled.” I felt immense tenderness for her, for the efforts she was making to reconcile our differences. I stopped at the supermarket and bought the ingredients to make a pot roast.
It didn’t matter that she was working later than usual, because that would give me enough time to prepare dinner with the calm I needed.
While I chopped the carrots and the garlic cloves, I thought again about the restaurant by the sea. It was a fantasy I’d been concocting for some time. I’d drawn up the plans and even devised some recipes, keeping everything fresh and simple and using spices typical of this end of the earth but forgotten in our country. I didn’t want you to have bad feelings about Gracia, so I never told you this, but she hated the idea. She had married an architect, she used to say, not a cook in a beach bar.
I left the kitchen at midnight. I finished a bottle of pinot noir, and the stew remained untouched in the pot. Gracia hadn’t come home. I fell asleep on top of the comforter on our bed, with every light in the house blazing.
Although you never asked me about it, I always knew my relationship with Gracia was hard for you to understand.
I was sixteen and she was twenty when we met. My parents had gone away on a trip, leaving me and my little sister with an aunt and uncle. My cousin Ricardo, six years my senior, was sullen and violent. He spent most of his time shut up in his room, studying or talking on the telephone, and when he came out, he never missed the chance to make fun of me, to shove me around, or to ignore my presence. It was, therefore, totally unexpected when he came into the living room where my sister and I were watching Saturday night television and invited me to a party. “Rats need air too,” he said in his sarcastic tone.
“Rat” was what he’d called me ever since we were little. I figured Ricardo—like many of my friends—planned to crash some party and wanted me to smooth the way for him. At the time, I was a student in an all-boys’ school, and the struggle to come into contact with persons of the opposite sex occupied the greater part of my schoolmates’ time and efforts. But I’d already realized that I didn’t feel the need to go out in search of female company. I’d never had a girlfriend, not for lack of opportunities, but because something essential in me had been shattered.
I must have been twelve, or maybe thirteen, when I was sexually assaulted for the first time. We were moving house in a few days, and one of my mother’s friends had come to help her pack up. They arranged things, drank tea, went upstairs, came downstairs. Every time the woman passed the door of my room, she opened it and told me I was the cutest boy she’d ever seen. She came in at least five times, and every time she stayed a little longer. On one such occasion, she locked the door and touched me. I broke away from her violently, grabbed my soccer ball, and went out into the yard. She joined me shortly afterward. That night, I woke up with a fever. “A virus,” my mother said. But I knew there wasn’t any question of a virus. The effect I produced on other people drove me crazy and distanced me from the world. It also made my relationships with my peers difficult. They knew what was going on, and my presence made them feel uncomfortable. Some, however, had discovered that it could have a certain usefulness, for example in attracting the attention of the best-looking girls, or in saving them—the boys—from being thrown out of parties to which they hadn’t been invited. All the same, I would slip away quickly, go back out to the street, and set out for home with a sensation of defeat.
After Ricardo abandoned me at the very door of the party, I wandered around the house. In the living room, four girls were sitting on a sofa and talking excitedly. Three of them saw me and started whispering among themselves. The fourth, ignoring my presence and the murmurs of her friends, kept on talking. It was Gracia, holding a glass of beer in one hand, laughing, playing with her hair. She had sparkling eyes and a smile that made her look like someone who knew a lot about life. She spoke with assurance, and without being the prettiest, she emanated a great deal of powerful energy. For the first time, I felt the desire to get closer to a woman. But I didn’t know how. After walking around for a bit, I saw Gracia and one of her girlfriends go into the kitchen, and so I followed them. The kitchen was elongated, like a train car, and crammed with people. By the time I managed to get in, Gracia had disappeared. I drank a couple glasses of wine. I needed to get my courage up so that I could approach her when I found her again. A door opened onto a little concrete patio, where a group of people were gathered around a brazier. I joined them and warmed my hands at the fire. A woman wearing a hat that came down to her nose offered me a sip of pisco brandy from a plastic cup. I drained it in one go. A few seconds later, I began to feel queasy. In a corner of the yard, behind the only tree, I saw the girls again. Gracia was a diminutive person; the black skirt she was wearing revealed a pair of strong, shapely legs. She was the one who was doing the talking, while the other girl nodded attentively, as if receiving some lesson. In spite of the darkness, I got the impression that Gracia was gazing at me and smiling. I felt again the excitement I’d felt a little while before. I was resolved to talk to her. I asked the girl in the hat to give me another sip of pisco and once again drained the half-full cup she handed me. Ricardo appeared in the yard and headed for Gracia and her friend. He was taller and more powerfully built than the other guys. He put his arm around Gracia’s waist as though she belonged to him and kissed her on the mouth.
“Come here, Rat,” he called to me.
At that moment, we heard “Happy Birthday to You” being sung inside the house, and we went back in. A chubby young girl was carrying a cake that resembled something halfway between a sculpture and a pile of scrap. Before the song ended, I slipped through the crowd and went in search of a bathroom. I found one just in time to raise the toilet lid and expel some foul-smelling, brownish matter. I closed the lid and sat on it. Now I felt exhausted, and my nausea hadn’t dissipated at all. Somebody knocked on the door.
“Are you okay?” a voice asked.
Before I could say anything, Gracia was already in the bathroom. “What happened to you?” As I didn’t open my mouth, she answered her own question. “You’re not used to drinking, right?” I nodded.
I felt ashamed. The smell in there must have been appalling. Gracia sat on the side of the bathtub and lit a cigarette, probably an effort to combat the pestilential stench. She took a deep breath and then blew the smoke at the ceiling. She was sitting with her legs crossed at the ankles.
“Feeling better?” she asked me.
I explained that I’d mixed wine and pisco, which had proved to be a fatal combination. I also confessed that I’d done it so that I’d have the guts to talk to her. She remained silent. I thought she’d get up and leave the bathroom, but she disregarded my remark and, with a radiant expression on her face, asked me, “Have you thought about what you’re going to study at the university?”
In spite of the stuffiness of her question, she looked genuinely interested.
“Architecture.”
She told me she’d thought about architecture too, but in the end she’d opted for engineering because she wasn’t talented enough. “If you’re not capable of creating something memorable, it’s better to forget it,” she pointed out gravely.
I was impressed that things were so clear to her, and that she set the bar so high for herself. I had never planned things out like that. I simply relished the idea of building houses. I drew designs for them in all my exercise books and notebooks. I had some good books on architecture, and they made me think there was a language beyond words that I could use to express myself. We discovered that, like all aspirants, we both admired Frank Lloyd Wright, but that our favorites weren’t the best known of his houses; they were the ones in a minor key, such as the Robie House. Gracia asked me straightforward, interesting questions. She kept bursting into laughter, often at her own comments, not because she was self-centered—or so it appeared to me at the time—but because they represented an opportunity for celebration. She lit her third cigarette, and then we heard knocks on the door.
“Gracia, are you in there?”
It was Ricardo’s voice, coming in through the gap between the doorjamb and the door, ruining everything.
“I’ll be out in a minute,” she replied.
“But what have you been doing in there all this time? Are you with somebody?”
“I’ll be out in a minute,” Gracia repeated, without budging an inch.
A few seconds passed. A strange happiness overcame me. The life I’d been waiting for was finally beginning. Gracia opened the door. Ricardo’s face was flushed, and the pupils of his eyes were so dilated that the irises had disappeared.
“With the rat!” he shouted. “I can’t believe it!” He thrust his torso forward and accompanied his words with energetic hand gestures. He was blocking the bathroom door so we couldn’t get out.
“He felt sick. I stayed with him until he felt better,” Gracia said firmly. She leaned on the doorjamb, crossed her arms, and made an impatient face. I remained in position a few steps behind her.
“Stayed with him?” Ricardo yelled, and then he clicked his tongue. “Are you taking me for a fool? Do you really think I’m going to buy that?”
“Can you let me pass, please?”
Ricardo grabbed her by the arm and stopped her. “Where do you think you’re going? And you,” he added in my direction, “you’re going to pay for this, you understand me?”
Despite the pressure he was putting on her arm, Gracia looked at him with contempt. “Let me go!” she yelled.
Ricardo staggered. He was drunk. He glanced at me sideways, with cold disgust, as if I weren’t worth looking in the face. With a snort he pivoted around, left the bathroom, and lurched out the front door.
That night Gracia gave me a ride to my aunt and uncle’s house in her Peugeot 305. She’d saved her money and bought it. She’d been working since she was sixteen, she told me. She drove in silence through the streets of a Santiago still permeated by the late-night party spirit. She seemed a little downcast. She’d broken up with her boyfriend, and I was responsible.
“Will you be all right?” she asked me before I got out of the car. She messed up my hair the way you do with children and gave me a kiss on the cheek. I must still have stunk. She drove off, tires squealing, and disappeared into the darkness of the street.
Once I’d met her, I found it hard to get her out of my head, and in the following months, hers would be the image that accompanied my masturbation sessions. I held out hope that she would get in touch with me, that our meeting had meant something to her too. But she didn’t try, and neither did I. When I was in the fourth year of my architectural studies, we met at an art exhibition and ended up making love that same night, in the apartment she shared with two other women.
At her side, I was safe from the effect I produced on others, protected from myself, from my discouragements and my fears. At her side, everything seemed possible, as her certainties and her practical way of looking at life confirmed. When I finished my studies, we got married. In the world of television broadcast news, Gracia already occupied a prominent position. She had been capable of seeing me as I was, or so I believed. Her look gave me the conviction and the strength necessary to transform myself into the person I dreamed of being.
Vera, I’ve taken the time to tell you the details of this episode in order for you to understand that it was Gracia’s determination that attracted me to her. Maybe from the very first moment, I saw that she had the something I was missing, the thing I unknowingly longed to appropriate for myself. It’s in your novels. The hidden destiny that unites people, and whose machinery begins to operate without our noticing it.