I never loved anyone again the way I loved Rodrigo. You only love that way once. I felt him next to me all day. Everything that happened to me happened only so I could tell him about it later. I fell asleep imagining his eyes upon me. He liked me, he thought I was pretty, he cared about me. And I felt I was, then, a beautiful woman. I looked at myself in the mirror and I liked how I looked. When I got dressed up, people thought I was gorgeous. I knew it. I felt the way men looked at me. And I liked that they looked, of course, but far and away what I liked the most was for Rodrigo to look at me. The mere idea of kissing another man someday made me nauseous. I was so sure that no one and nothing would ever come between us. . He used to steal flowers for me, jumping over garden walls. More than once he was charged by a boxer or Doberman when he went into someone’s yard like a thief to cut the first red camellia of that winter or the first flowering white almond branch of spring. “My love,” I wrote him on a restaurant napkin or a sky blue card that I paid too much for at the bookstore or on a simple sheet of notebook paper. “My love”. . Mon amour, and those two words had urgency, intimacy, an incomprehensible ardor: Je t’aime. Anything more was unnecessary. Je t’aime. To be able to say “my love” to Rodrigo and for it to be the truth, that I was, for him, “my love,” was a flight, a state of suspension, a miracle of fire. Nothing bad mattered as long as the two of us loved each other as we loved each other, as long as we could love each other a little more every day. That kind of love doesn’t happen twice.
But little by little, in some imperceptible way, my romance was transformed by his demands for rough sex, for surrender, passion and punishment, possession and loss, by incomprehension. And Rodrigo ran when he found out I was pregnant. This was when we had been together almost three years: he had fallen in love with someone else.
This is the raw truth, and I repeat it, trying to convince myself: Rodrigo wants to leave me for her. But he doesn’t acknowledge it. He needs it to be my fault. He needs me to believe it in order to truly believe it himself. He has to persuade me that I was the one who ruined everything. Not him. And so he makes up stories.
And this was the same man who in El Quisco, kneeling down with tears in his eyes, gazed at my goddess breasts while I melted for him. . Who would have thought he would abandon me like that? It’s my own fault. Me, who got pregnant and didn’t want an abortion and sacrificed his future, of course, Rodrigo’s, no less. And on top of that, my own and ours together. I made him into a victim. That was it. Rodrigo didn’t want to be tied down. No. That was the point. And the other? And me? In the morning my eyes were so vacant and my face so dead, that the people I met may not even have seen me. It wasn’t, then, that he’d stopped loving me. It was that he couldn’t love me anymore and was suffering by attempting the impossible. I smashed the vessel. He felt sorry for himself. And I was three months pregnant. I had wounded him permanently. It was beyond repair. He had the right to go on being young, he told me. That’s what he told me. And he split. And I was split in two.
ELEVEN
I stopped seeing the few high-school girlfriends I still met up with on occasional afternoons. I was ashamed to tell them. A friend from university materialized, Rafa, with his big belly, his candid laugh and friendly gaze, and he took me with him to a demonstration. I walked along beside him, jostled and confused and with that ridiculous ball where another being, an abusive invader, was growing at my body’s expense. I felt lost in the mass of workers with their overpowering smell, and I repeated to myself that a hand on the plow was worth as much as a hand on the pen. Then, one of those days I felt myself suddenly caught up in something big, an enormous collective body; we sang together and I was part of the hope harbored by those who suffered, the poor of the earth. The men and women who were Rafa’s friends accepted me. I met Teruca during that time, and we became inseparable. She had a three-year-old son: Francisco. A chubby boy with enormous eyes, mild and dark. She was studying history. She had a long, black braid that hung down to her waist, and she was thin with very small breasts. Her wide, full-lipped smile could win you over completely.
Was Rafa interested in me? He never said so. He thought I was pretty. He did tell me that, and I loved that he told me, but I didn’t believe him. I didn’t feel pretty. And to me, Rafa was a great friend and nothing more. If he’d taken one wrong step. . Several times I thought he was about to. It would have ruined our friendship. During that time, I pulled down the posters of Mick Jagger, Robert Redford, Peter Fonda, Julio Iglesias, and Led Zeppelin from the walls of my room. Now the faces looking down on me were Violeta Parra, “La Negra” Mercedes Sosa, and two great bearded men, Karl Marx and Che Guevara.
We were a guild of students who studied almost nothing but the Sacred Scriptures of Marx (those of the young Marx more than the older) and Engels (I remember soporific afternoons trying to get through the Anti-Dühring) and, of course, our church fathers: Lenin, Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Gramsci, Althusser, Sartre, De-bray, speeches and articles by Mao, by Che. . The job was harder because we knew so little of the history that most of these works presupposed. I don’t know how much we understood, but the thing was to carry those huge volumes under our arms and quote them every chance we got. We did political and organizational — now I would call it “evangelical”—work among the peasants and workers who, armed with red banners, knives, shovels, chains, and a few sawed-off shotguns, forcibly seized urban terrain and agricultural fields. But Rafa would rant and rave against the “extremists” who, with their “military apparatus,” as he said in an ironic tone, with their bank heists and Vietnamese IEDs, were just playing into the hands of the reactionaries who wanted a military coup. In the evenings we drank red wine and sang along to songs by Violeta, Mercedes, Ángel, Isabel, by Víctor Jara, Quilapayún. . To sing is to wait. And we were living in a time of Advent.
Months later the presidential palace, La Moneda, was in flames. I’ll never forget that image framed by the television: the strength of its walls resisting the fire, the structure’s sheer will to survive. I was tormented by thoughts of those who died, but above all by thoughts of Rafa, Teruca, and the other comrades, men and women, friends I didn’t dare call. I shut myself in, fell into bed, and wasted away. When Anita was born, it was an unimaginable joy that was, moreover, egalitarian. Almost any woman, I thought recklessly, has this happiness within her reach. My mother, always so cold, welcomed Anita like her own child. She was more loving with Anita than with me, I think.
Then one day Rafa showed up at my house and he was fine, which disappointed me a little. Teruca was safe, too. He’d be calling me soon, he told me. He hadn’t called before for reasons of security. Some weeks later we met up with Teruca at Rafa’s mother’s house, which was on Calle Los Gladiolos. I brought my Anita with me wrapped in layers of shawls. Teruca, who had cut off her thick, black braid, made such a fuss over her you would have thought she was my older sister. Francisco, her son, watched her with his big, dark eyes. She told me in private that Rafa had been arrested. He’d been held in the Ritoque concentration camp. Of course, he’d taken a bad beating. He didn’t talk about that. Didn’t want to.
It was Rafa who put me in touch — years later, of course — with Canelo. Rafa had changed by then. Now he believed only in armed resistance. We met at Tavelli for a coffee. It was a dangerous meeting, he told me, and I was pleased.