Seeing Red by Lina Meruane

Author:Lina Meruane
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781941920251
Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing
Published: 2016-01-22T16:00:00+00:00

will you two be ok?

In Santiago it’s cold, but it’s even colder at the beach. More knives in the air and words of warm vapor. More mold stuck to the walls and the window frames, more bars and wood to protect the glass from rocks. We had to get to the house and unwrap it, dust it, air it out, light the chrism of the little heater, dry out all the wet towels, the damp curtains. Same thing we’d done every time on arriving over the years. Sweep out the dead moths on the linoleum and the cow skin my grandmother had brought from Patagonia. Make the beds. See to the light and the water. My father drove the car the exactly one hundred and seventy-two kilometers of the Pan-American highway to Concón, giving all kinds of instructions to Ignacio that I also memorized, just in case. Following us for the same number of meters and centimeters came my mother, her brow furrowed, thinking who knows what thoughts that would wound like whips: the work it had cost her to be a woman and choose the trap of maternity, the anguish of having engendered a problem and not having known how to solve it: all of that would be making a deafening roar in her conscience while in the background, unheard, Beethoven’s sonatas or maybe Mozart’s would be spinning round and round. My mother and my father driving toward the same place in different cars so they could leave one for us. We’d have to be grateful. And we thanked them, so much, especially Ignacio. (Why thank them so much, Ignacio, why, since it was my mother and I who were going to owe you everything.) But don’t thank us, dear, she said, it’s the least we. And she interrupted herself, as if she went blank, as if bewildered, and then I heard my father, who saved us from that tight spot saying, ok kids, to the table, food’s served, and then, when he saw me surely with my hair a mess and a lost expression on my face: Lucina, dear, fix yourself up a bit for lunch, huh? No, dad, there’s no fixing me, but I ran my hand over my head, combed my hair with my fingers, and when I smelled the food I started to take an imaginary tour of our old beach vacations. I went back years in the vortex of time, catching balls of fuzz between my toes, and leaves, dust, sawdust, crust, salt, loose earth on the steep streets full of potholes, and through eucalyptus trees that the most ferocious winters later uprooted, I saw hundreds of sunsets swirling before my eyes. I wandered through those landscapes with steps I would have liked to be precise but that were instead erratic, abstract, steps lit by naked and hostile stars, steps that led me to beaches where I’d gone swimming, where the waves swelled crisscrossed with seaweed and thick foam, bilious, where I dove under and reappeared with my hair covered in garbage, supermarket bags, diapers dripping shit.

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