A Week in October by Elizabeth Subercaseaux

Author:Elizabeth Subercaseaux [Subercaseaux, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2021-05-04T00:00:00+00:00

* “I have no trouble seeing the difference between black and white,” a line from Parra’s song “Gracias a la Vida.”

{The Notebook}

On March 5, the doctors removed Clara’s uterus. Clemente could not bring himself to listen to the doctor’s explanations. He was sorry that he had not been able to convince her not to let them operate right away. He had wanted to go to Houston first, to consider other options. He had wanted a second opinion. But the doctors told Clara that the operation might prolong her life a few years, and that was enough for her.

“I feel empty,” she said when she regained consciousness, as if her uterus had contained the essence of her being.

Clemente spent ten days at her side in the hospital after the operation. He would return home late at night after Clara had fallen asleep. During this period he did not open the notebook. He felt that it would have been a betrayal, another betrayal, to read her words while she was still in the clinic. He waited for her to return.

One night in April—Clara had been home for a week and was able to get out of bed—he opened the notebook and found she had written another chapter. “She must write when I’m out of the house,” he thought. He had never seen her with the notebook, and in fact he had never seen the notebook anywhere other than in that drawer in the kitchen. Her read the fifteen new pages slowly and as his eyes scanned Clara’s pointy, neat handwriting he felt more and more surprised. He had no idea Clara could write so well. Her writing was fluid and made him want to keep reading, to know more. There was still something strange about all of this, something unreal that continued to surprise him. As far as he knew, Aunt Luisa did not have a cousin by the name of Eulalia. And if a close friend of hers had died in the past few months, he would have known about it. She came over for lunch almost every Sunday, and she usually spent at least one afternoon with them every week and stayed for dinner. She was one of the few people who knew that Clara was sick. In fact, she was the only family member who knew. This so-called Eulalia—a lesbian to boot—existed only in Clara’s effervescent imagination. How could he “not stand” this aunt who didn’t even exist? And why did Clara always have to make him look like a fool? He was the idiot of the story, the exasperating husband who approves of nothing and is irritated by everything, the mediocrity who is constantly shocked. It made him angry that she painted him this way, but even so he could not deny she had a fertile imagination, as well as a knack for storytelling. If he had not known the real story, this pile of lies would have seemed true. But the fact that Clara included so many

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