Prior to her illness, Lucia had led what she called a bohemian existence that Daniela viewed as unhealthy. She had smoked for years, never exercised, drank two glasses of wine every evening with dinner, and had ice cream for dessert. She was several pounds overweight, and her knees ached. When she was married she had ridiculed her husband’s way of life: whereas she began the day propped up in bed with a milky coffee and two croissants reading the newspaper, he would drink a thick green liquid containing bee pollen, then run like a fugitive to his office, where Lola, his faithful secretary, would be waiting for him with clean clothes. Despite his age, Carlos Urzua kept fit and walked with no sign of a stoop. Thanks to Daniela’s iron authority, Lucia had begun to imitate him, and the results were soon evident from the bathroom scales and a vitality she had not felt since adolescence.
When Lucia and Carlos saw each other to sign the papers for the divorce, which had only recently become legal in Chile, it was still too soon for Lucia to say she was in remission, but she had regained strength and her breasts had been reconstructed. Her hair had turned white, and she decided to leave it short, tousled, and in its natural color except for some purple streaks that Daniela added before leaving for Miami. When he saw her on the day of the divorce, weighing twenty pounds less, with a young girl’s breasts beneath a low-cut blouse and neon hair, Carlos gave a start. Lucia thought he looked more handsome than ever and felt a fleeting stifled pang for their lost love. In reality she felt nothing for him apart from gratitude that he was Daniela’s father. She thought it would have been a healthy sign if she was at least a little angry but could not even manage that. Not even a lingering disappointment remained of the passionate love she had felt for him for many years.
JULIAN CAME INTO LUCIA’S LIFE at the start of 2015, several years after she had grown resigned to the lack of love and thought her fantasies of romance had dried up in the chemotherapy reclining chair. Julian taught her that curiosity and desire were renewable resources. If her mother, Lena, had still been alive she would have warned Lucia about the ridiculousness of this kind of pretension at her age, and she would perhaps have been right, because with each passing day the opportunities for love lessened and those of looking ridiculous increased. And yet Lena would not have been entirely right, because when Julian appeared he offered Lucia love when she was least expecting it. Even though their love affair ended almost as quickly as it had begun, it served to show her that she still had embers inside her that could be rekindled. There was nothing for her to feel sorry about. She had no regrets about anything she had experienced and enjoyed.
The first thing she noticed about Julian was his appearance. Without being exactly ugly, it seemed to her he was not that attractive. All her lovers, especially her husband, had been good-looking. Not that this was intentional, more a matter of chance. As she told Daniela, Julian was the best proof of her lack of prejudice toward ugly men. At first glance he was an ordinary Chilean, with bad posture and an ungainly way of walking. His clothes looked as if they were borrowed: baggy corduroy trousers and a grandfather’s knitted cardigans. He had the olive skin of his southern Spanish forebears, gray hair and beard, the soft hands of someone who had never worked with them. But underneath this loser’s facade was someone of exceptional intelligence and an experienced lover.
Their first kiss and what followed that night were enough for Lucia to surrender to adolescent infatuation that was fully reciprocated by Julian. At least for a while. During the early months Lucia welcomed with open arms everything that had been lacking in her marriage. Her new lover made her feel cherished and desirable; thanks to him she rediscovered her joyful youth. At first Julian also appreciated her sensuality and sense of fun, but it was not long before the emotional intensity began to frighten him. He would forget their rendezvous, arrive late, or call at the last minute with an excuse. Or he’d drink an extra glass of wine and fall asleep in the middle of a sentence or between two caresses. He complained of how he had no time to read and how his social life had dwindled, resenting the attention he had to pay Lucia. He was still a considerate lover, more concerned to give than to receive pleasure, but she noticed he was holding back, no longer surrendering wholeheartedly to love. He was sabotaging the relationship. By this time Lucia had learned to recognize failing love as soon as it raised its gargoyle head. She no longer put up with it as she had done through the twenty years of her marriage in the hope that something would change. She was more experienced and had less time to waste. She realized she ought to call it quits before Julian did, even though she would miss his sense of humor terribly, his puns, the pleasure of waking up tired beside him knowing it would take only a whispered enticement or nonchalant caress for them to embrace once more. It was a break without drama, and they stayed friends.
“I’ve decided to give my broken heart a rest,” she told Daniela on the phone, in a tone of voice that did not sound humorous, as she had intended, but more like a complaint.
“How kitsch can you get, Ma? Hearts don’t break like eggs. And if yours is an egg, isn’t it better for it to be broken and for feelings to pour out? That’s the price for a life lived to the full,” her daughter replied implacably.
A year later, in Brooklyn, Lucia still occasionally fell prey to a certain degree of nostalgia for Julian, but it was no more than a slight itch that did not really bother her. Could she find another love? Not in the United States, she thought—she was not the kind of woman who attracted Americans, as Richard Bowmaster’s indifference demonstrated. She could not imagine seduction without humor, but her Chilean irony was not only untranslatable but perceived as frankly offensive by North Americans. In English, as she told Daniela, she had the IQ of a chimpanzee. She could only laugh out loud with Marcelo, at his stumpy legs and lemur face. That dog permitted himself the luxury of being both completely self-centered and grumpy, just like a husband.