Enrique and Lucia were given a simple explanation: their father had died in an accident, but life went on, and it was unhealthy to go on thinking of those no longer there. They had to turn the page. It was enough for them to include him in their prayers so that his soul could rest in peace. Lucia was only able to imagine how he looked thanks to a couple of black-and-white photographs her brother rescued before Lena found them. In them their father was a tall, thin man with intense eyes and brilliantined hair. In one he was very young, wearing the uniform of the Chilean navy, where he had studied and worked as a radio engineer for a while. In the other, taken several years later, he was with Lena and holding a few-months-old Enrique in his arms. He had been born in Dalmatia and emigrated to Chile with his parents as a young child, as was the case with Lena and hundreds of other Croatians who entered Chile as Yugoslavs and settled in the north of the country. He met Lena at a folk festival, and the discovery of how much they had in common created the illusion of love, but they were fundamentally very different. Lena was serious, conservative, and religious, while he was cheerful, bohemian, and irreverent. She stuck to the rules without questioning them, was hardworking and thrifty; he was lazy and a wastrel.
Lucia grew up knowing nothing about her father; the topic was taboo in her house. Lena never expressly forbade it but avoided the subject with pursed lips and knitted brow. Her children learned to control their curiosity. It was not until the final weeks of Lena’s life that she could talk freely about him and answer Lucia’s questions. “You’ve inherited your sense of responsibility and strength from me; you can thank your father for being likable and mentally alert, but you have none of his defects.”
In Lucia’s childhood the lack of a father was like having a locked room in the house, a hermetically sealed door that might contain who knew what secrets. What would it be like to open that door? Who would she find in that room? However much she studied the man in the photographs, she was unable to relate to him; he was a stranger. Whenever asked about her family, the first thing Lucia said, adopting a doleful expression to avoid any further questions, was that her father had died. That aroused pity—the poor girl was a half orphan—and no one asked anything more. In secret she envied her best friend, Adela, the only daughter of separated parents. She was spoiled like a princess by her father, a surgeon specializing in organ transplants who was constantly traveling to the United States, bringing back dolls that spoke English and had sparkly red shoes like those Dorothy wore in The Wizard of Oz. He was affectionate and great fun, and took Adela and Lucia to the tearoom in the Hotel Crillon to have ice-cream sundaes topped with whipped cream, to the zoo to see the seals, and to the Parque Forestal to ride horses, but the outings and the toys were the least of it. What Lucia most enjoyed was to hold hands with her friend’s father in public, pretending that Adela was her sister and that they shared this fairy-tale father. With the fervor of a novice, she prayed that this perfect man would marry her mother so that she could have him as her stepfather, but the heavens ignored this wish, as they did so many others.
At that time, Lena Maraz was still a young, beautiful woman, with broad shoulders, a long neck, and sparkling, spinach--colored eyes. Adela’s father never dared try to court her. Her severe suits with masculine jackets and chaste blouses could not entirely hide her seductive curves, but her demeanor commanded respect and distance. If she had so wished, she could have had more than enough suitors, but she clung to her widowhood with the haughtiness of an empress. Her husband’s lies had created in her a definitive mistrust for the entire male gender.
THREE YEARS OLDER THAN HIS SISTER, Enrique Maraz did retain a few idealized or invented memories of his father, but over time this nostalgia faded. He was not interested in Adela’s father, with his gifts from America or ice cream at the Hotel Crillon. He wanted a father of his own, someone he could resemble when he was older, someone he could identify with when he looked in the mirror when he was of an age to start shaving, someone to teach him the basic lessons of manhood. His mother kept telling him he was the man of the house, responsible for her and his sister, because it was a man’s role to protect and look after the family. When he once ventured to ask her how he could learn that without a father, she replied curtly that he should improvise, because even if his father were alive, he would be no model. Enrique would have nothing to learn from him.
The brother and sister were as different from one another as their parents had been. Whereas Lucia got lost in the maze of a feverish imagination and boundless curiosity, constantly wearing her heart on her sleeve, weeping for suffering humanity and mistreated animals, Enrique was a cerebral type. From childhood on he demonstrated an ideological fanaticism that at first provoked laughter but soon became irritating. No one could bear this kid who was far too vehement, thought too highly of himself, and was too preachy. In his Boy Scout days he went around for years in short trousers trying to convince anybody who had the misfortune to bump into him of the virtues of discipline and fresh air. Later on he transferred this pathological insistence to the philosophy of Gurdjieff, liberation theology, and the revelations brought on by LSD, until he found his definitive vocation in Karl Marx.
Enrique’s incendiary diatribes as a young man disturbed his mother, who thought the Left did nothing but make a huge racket, and did not impress his sister, a carefree schoolgirl more interested in ephemeral boyfriends and rock singers than anything else. With his wispy beard, long hair, and black beret, Enrique imitated the famous guerrilla fighter Che Guevara, who had been killed in Bolivia a couple of years earlier. He had read Che’s writings and constantly quoted him, even when it was not relevant, to his mother’s explosive annoyance and his sister’s fascinated admiration.
Lucia was finishing high school at the end of the sixties when Enrique joined the groups supporting Salvador Allende, the Socialist Party’s candidate for the presidency, who was the devil incarnate to many in Chile. In Enrique’s view, the only salvation for humanity lay in overthrowing capitalism by a revolution that pulled the whole edifice down. This meant that elections were a circus, but since they provided a unique opportunity to vote for a Marxist, they had to be taken advantage of. The other candidates were promising reforms within a well-known framework, whereas the Left’s program was radical. The Right unleashed a fear campaign prophesying that Chile would end up like Cuba, that the Soviets would snatch Chilean children and brainwash them, destroy churches, rape nuns and execute priests, steal the land from its legitimate owners, and put an end to private property, and that even the most humble peasant was going to lose his hens and end up a slave in a Siberian gulag.