After Lucia fell ill with cancer in 2010, Daniela interrupted her studies and sexual experiments. It was a year of losses and separations for Lucia, a year of hospitals, fatigue, and fear. Carlos left her, claiming he did not have the courage to witness her devastation. He felt ashamed, but his mind was made up. He refused to see the scars crisscrossing her breasts, felt an atavistic repulsion toward the mutilated creature she was becoming, and instead left the responsibility of looking after her to their daughter. Indignant at her father’s behavior, Daniela confronted him in an unexpectedly fierce manner: she was the first to mention divorce as the only decent way out for a couple who did not love one another. Carlos adored his daughter, but his horror at Lucia’s double mastectomy was stronger than his fear of disappointing her. He announced he was moving temporarily to a hotel because the tension at home was affecting him too much and preventing him from working. Though well past retirement age, he had decided he would only leave his office feet first. Lucia and Carlos said goodbye with the tepid courtesy that had characterized the years they had lived together, without any show of hostility but without clarifying anything. Within a week, Carlos rented an apartment, and Daniela helped him settle in.
At first, Lucia felt the separation as a gaping void. She was accustomed to her husband’s emotional absence, but when he left for good she found she had time to spare, the house seemed enormous, and the empty rooms were filled with echoes. At night she could hear Carlos’s footsteps and the water running in his bathroom. This break with her established routines and small daily ceremonies gave her a great sense of abandonment, and added to the worry of the months she spent suffering from the effects of the drugs she was taking to overcome her illness. She felt wounded, fragile, naked. Daniela thought the treatment had destroyed both her body and her spirit’s immunity. “Don’t make a list of what you haven’t got, Ma, but focus on what you do have,” she would tell her. In Daniela’s view, this was a unique opportunity for Lucia to cleanse her mind as well as her body, to rid herself of the unnecessary burdens of her rancor, complexes, bad memories, impossible desires, and all the rest of the garbage. “Where do you get this wisdom from, daughter?” Lucia asked her on one occasion. “From the Internet,” replied Daniela.
Carlos left so definitively that even though he only lived a few blocks from Lucia it was as if he had moved to the far end of another continent. Not once did he ask about her health.
WHEN LUCIA ARRIVED IN BROOKLYN in September 2015, she was hoping that the change of surroundings would revive her. She was tired of routines; it was time to shuffle the cards of her destiny, to see if she would be dealt a better hand. She wanted New York to be the first stop on a long journey and was planning to look for other opportunities to travel the world while she still had the strength and funds to do so. Above all, she wanted to leave behind the losses and sorrows of recent years. The hardest part had been her mother’s death, which affected her more than the divorce or cancer. Although at first she had felt her husband’s departure as a stab in the back, she soon came to see it as a gift of freedom and peace.
It took more of an effort to recover from her illness, which was what had finally made Carlos flee. The months of chemo and radiation left her gaunt and bald, with no eyelashes or eyebrows, blue circles around her eyes, and numerous scars, but she was healthy and the prognosis was good. Her breasts were reconstructed with implants that inflated gradually as the muscles and skin adjusted to accommodate them. This was a painful process that she endured without complaining, buoyed by her vanity, feeling that anything was preferable to the flat chest scarred with knife wounds.
The experience of that year lost to illness gave her a burning desire to live, as if the reward for her suffering was to have discovered the philosopher’s stone, that elusive substance of the alchemists that was capable of turning lead into gold and restoring youth. She had already lost her fear of dying when she witnessed her mother’s elegant passage from life to death. Once more she experienced with complete clarity the irrefutable presence of the soul, that primordial essence that neither cancer nor anything else could destroy. Whatever happened, the soul would win out. She imagined her possible death as a threshold and was curious to know what she would find on the other side. She was not afraid of crossing that threshold, but while she was in this world she wanted to live life to the fullest, without worrying about anything, to be invincible.
The medical treatments came to an end in late 2010. For months she had avoided looking at herself in the mirror, and until Daniela threw it into the garbage she had worn a fisherman’s woolly hat pulled down over her eyebrows. Daniela had just turned nineteen when her mother was diagnosed and had postponed her studies to return to Chile and be with her. Although Lucia had begged her not to, she later understood that her daughter’s presence during the ordeal was indispensable. When she first saw her arrive, she hardly recognized her. Daniela had left in wintertime, a pale young woman wearing too many layers. When she returned she was a caramel color, her head half shaven and the other half with long dyed strands of hair, wearing military boots and shorts that showed her hairy legs. She immediately began to take care of her mother and entertain the other hospital patients. She would appear on the ward blowing kisses to everyone reclining in armchairs plugged into chemical drips, handing out blankets, nutrition bars, fruit juices, and magazines.
She had been at the university for less than two years, yet talked as if she had navigated the oceans with Jacques Cousteau among blue-tailed mermaids and sunken galleons. She taught the patients the term “LGBT”—“lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender”—and explained the distinctions between them. The term had come into recent use among young people in the United States; in Chile no one even suspected what it meant, least of all the cancer patients on this ward. She told them she was of neutral or fluid gender because there was no obligation to accept being categorized as man or woman on the basis of your genitals. You could define yourself however you liked, and change opinion if some time later another gender seemed more appropriate. “Like indigenous people in certain tribes, who change their names at different stages in their lives, because the one they were given at birth no longer represents them,” she added by way of explanation, which only added to the patients’ general confusion.
Daniela stayed with her mother throughout her convalescence and during the long, irritating hours of each chemo session, as well as through the divorce process. She slept next to her, ready to jump out of bed and help her if need be, buoyed her up with her brusque affection, her jokes, her hearty soups, and her skill at navigating through the bureaucracy of ill health. She dragged her out to buy new clothes and made her follow a reasonable diet. And once she had left her father settled in his new bachelor life and her mother steady on her feet, she said goodbye without fuss and left as joyfully as she had arrived.