As Bibi’s story goes on, Liv’s face, listening, becomes larger. The hand with her cigarette covers her thirsty mouth. It’s a kind of modesty that gives us pause. Later that night, Bibi goes on saying, she made love with her fiancé and it was better than it had ever been before or would be again. She can’t understand how the whole thing happened.
The silent profile of Liv’s face continues filling the screen. The light seems to sculpt that face in stone. The forehead, the eye, the outline of the nose, the contour of the lips, all chiseled by light. It’s an inhibited and emotional face. Moved by what she hears. Her full lips, made for kissing, are hesitating, about to open. Something is transforming her from inside, but she holds it back.
It’s extraordinary! Liv just listens. And that’s what Bergman filmed: a woman listening.
Time is beginning to stick to the curtains. Beyond them, hidden, are the flowers of the apricot tree. A black claw reaches into my stomach and squeezes me from inside. If this doesn’t stop, I know what I have to do, I tell myself. It doesn’t make me sad. It’s not revenge. I think that I should prepare my mother, my father, Anita. But how?
So, how did it come to this? I tell myself: I have to go back to my mother. I must. My mother: smart, ugly, but well shaped, good breasts, good legs. I’ve told myself this story before. A woman who works in Radiology at the Salvador Hospital feels that her face doesn’t belong to her, she’s insecure about her looks — but not about her intelligence. She wins the love of a tall, muscular, beautiful man. He’s a talented tennis player but not, of course, a professional. He’s a businessman. He works with his father in a small workshop in the neighborhood of Carrascal. He buys tree trunks in the south, brings them by train to Santiago, and makes them into boards, planks, and panels. For doors and windows, for floors. That’s what my father makes and sells: doors and windows.
Now it strikes me as a poetic trade, but not back then. The best wood is rauli beech or holm oak. Sometimes he’s contracted for a walnut door. His father still gets to the yard at six in the morning and is annoyed if his son — who must be over forty by now — isn’t there yet. My grandfather is Catalan. He’s the one who taught my father all the tricks. My father told them to me. How to use the spray gun to lacquer pine particleboard; how to work the table saw and the circular saw; how to add a hundred years to a young rauli or roble beech by darkening it with cedar extract so it passes for a strong, ancient beech; how to kill the yellow spots on chestnut by rubbing them with a soft bitumen-soaked cloth, so you can sell it as oak, which has such a similar grain; how to disguise a knot, which mordant to use, which aniline (if one is disposed to use aniline), how to get rid of the pores using a rag soaked in alcohol, powdered pumice stone, and a few drops of varnish; how to apply — just the way foreman Vicente shows him — a very thin layer of shellac, and then sand it and apply another coat, so the wood gradually takes on, layer upon layer, as the fumes evaporate, that singular caramel tone of a real lacquer. Master Vicente knows how to keep varnish from getting that fatal roughness that looks like an orange peel. He taught my father to do battle with those gray spots that form, using benzoin mixed with oil and, afterward, polishing it with the palm of the hand covered with a mixture of Venetian tripoli, water, sulfuric acid, Vaseline, turpentine, and alcohol. You have to smell the wood, my grandfather tells him, you have to touch it, love and taste it. It’s the only way the wood will give itself over to you. The finest varnish contained lacquer, sandarac, and white elemi. What his father absolutely never taught him, but Vicente did, was how to make a good “prison rotgut” by mixing tea and lemon with the alcohol for dissolving shellac. The first time my father got drunk it was in the workshop on that cocktail of Vicente’s.
My mother is totally uninterested in this world of wood. She falls in love with a good-looking, healthy, vigorous man, who handles his Jeep well, who patiently teaches her to play tennis, and who takes her on vacation with his parents to the beach at El Quisco. They get married, they have their first child — me — and they’re happy, except that the second child takes its time in coming. Tests.
That’s where they are when the drama unfolds. One night, when he’s told her he has to stay late at the workshop to receive a shipment of larch boards arriving from the south, she follows him, sees him go into a restaurant, waits a while, and finally, gathering up her courage, she goes in and sees him at a corner table with “another woman.” My mother goes over to them striding like a queen (according to her), and when she gets to the table she realizes she doesn’t know what she’s going to do. My father watches her, pallid. The woman is gorgeous and young. She waits, flabbergasted.
Then my mother can think of nothing better than to introduce herself to the stranger, to reach out her hand and say: “I’m this man’s wife.” And the woman stands up, shakes her hand, lowers her eyes, and says: “I understand, ma’am.” Then my mother faces my father. She shouts: “As for you, I will not greet you, and I never will again, you little shit!” And in a single motion she grabs the glass of wine and throws it in his face. She leaves the restaurant walking like a queen, leaving a tomblike silence in her wake.
My father will defend himself, he’ll say it was a casual fling. He will apologize. My mother will reject him. My soul will be torn in two. I tape a photo on the wall of my room of my father playing tennis, hitting a backhand. His body stretches out like a rubber band. The effort is concentrated in his face. My mother can’t forgive him. My father pursues her for months. Nothing.
Until he finds someone else. She’s attractive, with a pretty face, and fourteen years younger than my mother. She plays tennis well. My mother is devastated. I stay with her; it’s what I have to do, but inside I’m contemptuous. I’m eleven years old. I loved and still love my father. I go to his new house in Ñuñoa with its terrace of grapevines, its apple tree, two plum trees, and, at the back, an old olive tree with gnarled branches; and there’s Master, a purebred German shepherd that I adore. I still go with my father to El Quisco, to the same rustic wooden cabin he’s always had. We take Master with us. When we arrive, I smell the salt and the stale air. We have to ease open the windows and air out the sheets. I like to see them hanging in the sun, so white, changing shape as the wind takes possession of them. They change colors, taking on a new brilliance. I like to be there by the sea, alone with him. Not with his new wife. I watch him in the mirror while he shaves. Why couldn’t my mother keep him?
As soon as my father remarries, I don’t like going to his house in Ñuñoa anymore. But I go. And he worries about me. He calls me more often than I’d like. One day he takes me with him to the South. I’m fifteen years old and I love the idea of traveling alone with him. His wife is almost always with him when I see him. We’re going to look at a forest. We travel by plane to Temuco and stay in a hotel. I feel so grown up and happy. The next day a Jeep comes to pick us up. It’s a long ride up a mountain track. To one side is a ravine, to the other, dense, wet forests, immense ferns, climbing vines. My father explains that the land isn’t his, only the machinery, which, he tells me, required taking on “severe debt” to buy. We turn onto a wider road. After a few minutes the noise starts. A truck goes by carrying tree trunks, then another truck. We get out and continue on foot. My father talks to the guy who came to pick us up.