Suddenly, horror. A machine moves among the trees, takes hold of one with two steel arms, and cuts it down. The embrace lasts about a minute. When the trunk falls, the earth trembles. Other talons grab the trunk that fell and they strip it in no time, removing its branches. The earth thunders again: another tree has fallen. A crane picks up the freshly stripped tree and throws it on the truck. In less than five minutes a life that took over eighty years to reach that immensity has ended. Another tremor: the machine felled another tree. I ask my father if we can leave. He is surprised. He’s brought me here to show me his new machinery. He tells me again that he’s gone into debt so he can buy it. I start to cry and I don’t stop until we get back to Temuco.
My father tries to console me but he can’t. From that moment on he won’t be able to. I can’t see him the way I did before. I’m fifteen years old now. From that day on his presence in my life will gradually diminish, and later on, when I start university, he will be an enemy. But it hurts me, and he remains in my thoughts, speaking to me from there, always very close to me. If I go to him because I need something, he never fails me. Almost always what I need is money, and he gives it to me, no questions asked. He gives it to me happily.
Some two years pass, and I find out that things are going badly for him. He’s had to turn all the tree-harvesting machinery over to the bank, and he’s barely maintaining the workshop. He’s sold his house, his stock in the tennis club, his car. Now he rents a duplex that doesn’t have a garage. He uses a canvas to cover the used Taunus he bought. He mortgaged the house in El Quisco. He’s sad, embarrassed. I know what I should feel, I try to convince myself to feel it, but the rage is stronger. I like how the anger overcomes my compassion. I’m losing sight of him. I have a boyfriend, Rodrigo, an animal, a tender animal.
I found a notebook at my mother’s house. Eighteen, I must have been when I wrote it. I was in college. It’s a diary but not a daily one, a notebook swollen full of banal notes, dried flowers, matchbooks and scraps and napkins and cards, everything glued in. It’s one of the few things my mother sent me from Chile when I came to Sweden. A few weeks ago, when I found out you were coming, I reread it. Nothing worthwhile, I’d say. Except for a couple of folded pages that fell out of the notebook and that I don’t remember writing. But the handwriting is mine from that time. Look, if you go over to the dresser, next to the TV, you’ll see a couple of folded sheets of paper under a little statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Why a Virgin of Guadalupe? A Spanish priest brought it to me. You know, this home is part of Ersta Diakonianstalt. They’re Protestant, but every week a Catholic priest comes. He assumed that I must be Catholic because I’m Latin American. I told him I’m not, not anymore. But he insisted. He wanted to pray with me, and finally, I gave in. He left me that little statue as a gift. To help me start praying again. Do you think it helps to pray if you’re not a believer? There! Underneath. See them? Give them to me. You won’t be able to read the writing. I’ll read them to you.
“My father always sticks his nose in. I saw it all coming. He’d like to plan and control every second of my life. He thinks for me. It’s not that he wants me to be like him, not that. He wants to invent me. And so he attempts the impossible. His love suffocates me. I should just leave, I know. And when I say good-bye, I don’t know why the tears come to my eyes, tears I can barely hold back. Then his demanding, loving gaze will infiltrate me, and I forget the suffocation and my anger. What I remember then is his capacity for utter devotion to me, his conversation that comforts me, his care for me, and his blind faith in me moves me then, that hope of his that encourages and then punishes me; his unconditional nature, too, and my own confidence — less every day, of course — in his ability to take charge.
“How to regain those earlier times when I was a little girl, those moments when we understood each other without trying, and just being with him was fun. Back then there wasn’t this pressure or these heartaches, the neglected duty, my anguish over not accomplishing what I’ve promised myself, though deep down I know it’s just my own youthful ambition and he’s to blame, he’s the one who implanted this feeling of specialness in me. Back then I didn’t have this critical and evasive gaze. I blame myself. Myself, and my mother. It’s my endless adolescence. They explained to us in school over and over what it was all about. Is it possible to return to a previous state? Or if not, when will I be old enough to leave all this behind? And it’s not a question of getting some physical distance — we already have that. He filters into my mind. The other day I was flipping through his books, which are few, and I came across a verse. It said that the father, even dead, has ‘fear within me, within my very hope.’ It was a quotation from Rilke, and he had underlined it himself. It was a self-help book for fathers. I think it must have been a gift from his wife, who isn’t very intellectual, shall we say. But the only parts that were underlined had been underlined by him. In my solitude, that uncertainty of his sneaks in and I can be, in part, how I think he might want to be if he were me. Only by keeping my distance can I manage to be myself and also coincide with him. And be at peace. But only partially. Because there’s an equally strong and insistent force that makes me want to be definitively separate from him, that urges me to live as though he had never existed. And when the good-bye comes, the very moment I’ve been looking forward to, sometimes my eyes fill with tears. And it’s not that the separation is going to be long, no. Because it’s not my departure from that duplex of his, with Master playing in the front yard, that separates us. My departure is just a pretext for that long embrace that we give each other always and never.”
That’s it. Well, you can tell I was in college and I was trying to write with a certain style, right? How pretentious. .
NINE
I come out of my childhood room and I search among my mother’s jars and bottles. I draw an almost boiling bath, a bubble bath. I use her verbena soap, her shampoo, her conditioner with pure olive oil, I dry off with her fluffy towel, I spread her almond-scented lotion over my legs, my arms, over my diminished breasts. I trim my toenails, I use her lotion for cracked heels. I take the top off her bottle of nail polish; its smell would make me dizzy now. I open her makeup box and that palette of colors calls out to me; I’d like to make an abstract painting with my hands. But its shades confuse me, I don’t know how to begin, and I go back to bed with my hair wet.
I return to the apricot tree. I try to imagine the way those ripe apricots looked shining in the afternoon light. As I said already: beyond the curtains I don’t open there are no apricots yet, there are flowers plastered against my window. I glance at the bedside table: a pile of pages stuck to old glue. No covers. Dry, yellow pages: “Would I find la Maga? Most of the time it was just a case of putting in an appearance, going along the rue de Seine to the arch leading into the Quai de Conti, and I would see her slender form against the olive ashen light. .” I turn to page 48: “I touch your mouth, I touch the edge of your mouth with a finger, I am drawing it as if it sprang forth from my hand. .,” and to page 428: “As soon as he began to amalate the noeme, the clemise began to smother her and they fell into hydromuries, into savage ambonies, into exasperating sustales.” So many times I had dreamed with open eyes over this book. . I start to fall asleep. It’s wonderful to be able to doze like that.
Suddenly, I hear my father’s voice.
My door opens and he’s really there, sitting at the edge of my bed, his big hand caressing my hair. He looks younger than my mother. I smell his same old Yardley cologne. It smells of lavender; it is what remains of his old life. That, and his suit made of good cloth that’s grown shiny and worn with use. He’s a youthful and handsome old man, with his shock of white hair falling over his ears. It’s strange to see him there in my mother’s house.