Daniel is traveling around Chile, and before he got to Chiloé he was in the Atacama Desert, with its lunar landscapes of salt and its columns of boiling water, in Santiago and other cities, which didn’t interest him much, in the forest region, with its smoldering volcanoes and emerald-color lakes, and he’s planning to carry on down to Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, to see the fjords and glaciers.
Manuel and Blanca, who’d gone shopping in town, came back far too soon and interrupted us, but Daniel made a good impression on them, and to my delight, Blanca invited him to stay at her house for a few days. I told him nobody can pass through Chiloé without tasting a real curanto, and on Thursday we’d be having one on our island, the last of the tourist season, the best in Chiloé, and he couldn’t miss it. Daniel didn’t wait for us to beg—he’d had time to get used to Chileans’ impulsive hospitality, always ready to open their doors to any bewildered stranger who chances to cross their path. I think he accepted only because of me, but Manuel told me not to be so vain, Daniel would have to be an idiot to turn down free food and lodging.
We left in the Cahuilla, crossing the calm sea with a nice stern breeze, and arrived in good time to see the black-necked swans that float in the channel, slender and elegant like Venetian gondolas. “Steadily pass the swans,” said Blanca, who talks like a Chilota. In the evening light the landscape looked more beautiful than ever; I felt proud to be living in this paradise and to be able to show it to Daniel. I made a sweeping gesture, encompassing the entire horizon. “Welcome to the island of Maya Vidal, my friend,” said Manuel with a wink I managed to catch. He can tease me all he likes in private, but if he thinks he can get away with it in front of Daniel, he’s going to be sorry. I let him know that as soon as we were alone.
We went up to Blanca’s house, where she and Manuel immediately started cooking. Daniel asked if he could take a shower, which he badly needed, and wash a few clothes, while I jogged to our house to get a couple of bottles of good wine, which the Millalobo had given Manuel. I got there in eleven minutes, a world record, having wings on my heels. I had a quick wash, made up my eyes, put on my only dress for the first time ever, and ran back in my sandals with the bottles in a bag, followed by Fahkeen with his tongue hanging out and dragging his bad leg. I was gone for a total of forty minutes, and in that time Manuel and Blanca had improvised a salad and a pasta dish with seafood, which in California is called tutti mare and here noodles with leftovers. Manuel greeted me with a whistle of admiration; he’d only ever seen me in pants and must have thought I have no style. I bought the dress in a secondhand clothing store in Castro, but it’s almost new and not too out of date.
Daniel came out of the shower freshly shaven, his skin shining like polished wood, so handsome that I had to force myself not to stare too much. We put on ponchos to eat on the porch, because it’s already getting chilly. Daniel was very grateful for the hospitality. He said he’d been traveling for months with a minimal budget and he’d slept in the most uncomfortable places or out in the open. He appreciated the table, the good food, the Chilean wine, and the landscape of water, sky, and swans. The slow dance of swans was so elegant against the violet color of the sea that we sat in silence admiring it. Another flock of swans arrived from the west, darkening the last orange shimmerings of the sky with their huge wings, and kept going. These birds, so dignified in appearance and so fierce in their hearts, are designed for sailing—on land they look like fat ducks—but they never look so splendid as when they’re in flight.
They polished off the Millalobo’s two bottles, and I drank lemonade. I didn’t need any wine; I was half drunk on the company. After dessert—baked apples with dulce de leche—Daniel asked naturally if we wanted to smoke a joint. It sent a shiver down my spine—this proposition wasn’t going to go over well with the old folks—but they accepted, and to my surprise, Blanca went to look for a pipe. “You won’t mention any of this at school, gringuita,” she said to me with a conspiratorial air, and added that she sometimes smoked with Manuel. It turns out that on this island there are several families that grow first-class marijuana; the best is great-great-grandmother Doña Lucinda’s, who’s been exporting it to other parts of Chiloé for decades. “Doña Lucinda sings to her plants—she says you have to romance them, like the potatoes, so they give us their best, and it must be true, because nobody can compete with her grass,” Blanca told us. I’m not very observant; I’ve been in Doña Lucinda’s yard a hundred times, helping her dye her wool, without ever noticing the plants. In any case, seeing Blanca and Manuel, that pair of old fogies, passing the water pipe was hard to believe. I smoked too—I know I can without it turning into a need—but I don’t dare try alcohol. Not yet, maybe never again.
Manuel and Blanca didn’t need me to confess the impact Daniel made on me; they guessed as soon as they saw me in a dress and makeup, accustomed as they are to my refugee look. Blanca, a romantic by vocation, is going to make things easy for us, since we don’t have a lot of time. Manuel, on the other hand, insists on being an old stick-in-the-mud.
“Before you die of love, Maya, you might want to find out if this young man is suffering as acutely from the same malady, or if he’s planning to carry on his journey and leave you in the lurch,” he advised me.
“With caution like that, nobody would ever fall in love, Manuel. You’re not jealous, are you?”
“Quite the contrary, Maya, I’m hopeful. Maybe Daniel will take you to Seattle; it’s the perfect city to hide from the FBI and the Mafia.”
“You’re kicking me out!”
“No, girl, how could I kick you out, when you’re the light of my sad old age?” he said in the sarcastic tone that makes me furious. “I’m just worried you’re going to fall flat on your face in this love business. Has Daniel given you any hint about his feelings?”
“Not yet, but he will.”
“You seem very sure.”
“Love at first sight like this one can’t be unilateral, Manuel.”
“No, of course, it’s an encounter of two souls . . .”
“Exactly, but it’s never happened to you, that’s why you mock it.”
“Don’t offer opinions on things you don’t know anything about, Maya.”
“You’re the one who’s giving your opinion on something you know nothing about!”
Daniel is the first American of my age I’ve seen since I arrived in Chiloé and the only interesting one I remember; the snotty-nosed kids at high school, the neurotics in Oregon, and the addicts in Las Vegas don’t count. We’re not the same age—I’m eight years younger—but I’ve lived a century more and could give him classes in maturity and life experience. I felt comfortable with him from the start. We have similar tastes in books, movies, and music, and we laugh at the same things. Between the two of us we know more than a hundred crazy jokes: half of them he heard at college, and the other half I learned at the academy. In everything else we’re very different.
Daniel was adopted a week after he was born by a well-off, well-educated liberal white couple, the kind of people sheltered under the big umbrella of normality. He’d been a passable student and a good athlete, led an orderly existence, and been able to plan his future with the irrational confidence of someone who hasn’t really suffered. He’s a healthy guy, sure of himself, friendly, and relaxed; it would be annoying if not for his inquisitive spirit. He’s traveled with an open mind, which keeps him from being just another tourist. He decided to follow in the footsteps of his adoptive father and study medicine, finishing his psychiatric residency in the middle of last year, and when he gets back to Seattle, he’ll have a job waiting for him in his father’s rehabilitation clinic. How ironic: I could have been one of his patients.
Daniel’s natural, understated happiness, like the happiness of cats, makes me envious. In his wanderings around Latin America he’s lived with the most diverse kinds of people: filthy rich in Acapulco, Caribbean fishermen, Amazonian woodcutters, coca growers in Bolivia, indigenous Peruvians
, and also gang members, pimps, drug smugglers, criminals, cops, and corrupt soldiers. He’s floated from one adventure to another with his innocence intact. I, however, have been scarred, scraped, and bruised by all that I’ve lived through. He’s a lucky man, and I hope that won’t be a problem between us. He spent the first night in Auntie Blanca’s house, where he slept on linen sheets under a down-filled comforter, that’s how refined she is, but then he came over to ours because she found some pretext to go to Castro and leave the guest in my hands. Daniel unrolled his sleeping bag in a corner of the living room and slept there with the cats. We have a late dinner every night, soak in the Jacuzzi, talk and talk. He tells me about his life and his trip. I show him the constellations of the southern hemisphere, tell him about Berkeley and my grandparents, also about the academy in Oregon, but for the moment I’ve kept quiet about Las Vegas. I can’t tell him about that before we have complete confidence in each other. I don’t want to scare him off. It seems to me that last year I descended headlong into a dismal world. While I was underground, like a seed or a tuber, another Maya Vidal struggled to emerge; slender filaments seeking moisture arose, then roots like fingers seeking nourishment, and finally a tenacious stem and leaves seeking light. Now I must be flowering; that’s how I can recognize love. Here, in the south of the world, the rain makes everything lush and fertile.
Auntie Blanca returned to the island, but in spite of her linen sheets, Daniel has not suggested returning to her place and remains with us. A good sign. We’ve been together full-time, because I’m not working; Blanca and Manuel have freed me of responsibilities while Daniel is here. We’ve talked of many things, but he still hasn’t given me cause to confide in him. He’s much more cautious than I am. He asked me why I’m in Chiloé, and I answered that I’m helping Manuel with his work and getting to know the country, because part of my family is from Chile, which is an incomplete truth. I’ve shown him around town, where he filmed the cemetery, the houses on stilts, our pathetic and dusty museum, with its four bits of junk and portraits in oils of forgotten worthies, Doña Lucinda, who at 109 still sells wool and harvests potatoes and marijuana, the truco poets in the Tavern of the Dead, Aurelio Ñancupel and his stories of pirates and Mormons.
Manuel Arias is delighted; he has an attentive guest who listens to him admiringly and doesn’t criticize like I do. While they talk, I count the minutes lost in legends of brujos and monsters; minutes that Daniel could be putting to better use alone with me. He has to finish his trip in a few weeks, and he still hasn’t been to the far south of the continent and Brazil. It’s a shame he’s wasting his precious time on Manuel. We’ve had a few occasions of privacy, but very few, it seems to me, and he’s only held my hand to help me jump over a rock. We’re rarely alone, because the town gossips spy on us, and Juanito Corrales, Pedro Pelanchugay, and Fahkeen follow us around everywhere. The grandmothers have all guessed my feelings for Daniel, and I think they heaved a collective sigh of relief, because there were some absurd rumors going around about Manuel and me. People seem suspicious about us living together, even though there’s more than half a century’s age difference. Eduvigis Corrales and other women have been conspiring and trying to play matchmaker, but they should be more furtive about it, or they’ll chase away the young man from Seattle. Manuel and Blanca are also conspiring.
Yesterday we had the curanto that Blanca had announced, and Daniel was able to film the whole thing. The townsfolk are cordial to tourists, because they buy handicrafts and the agencies pay for the curanto, but when they leave there is a general feeling of relief. Those hordes of strangers make them uncomfortable, snooping around their houses and taking photos as if they were the exotic ones. It’s different with Daniel, since he’s Manuel’s guest; that opens doors for him, and they see him with me as well, so they’ve let him film whatever he wants, even inside their homes.
On this occasion most of them were third-age tourists, white-haired retirees who came from Santiago, all very cheerful, in spite of the difficulty of walking across the sand. They brought a guitar and sang while the curanto was cooking, and they knocked back gallons of pisco sours; that contributed to the general relaxation. Daniel took over the guitar and charmed us with Mexican boleros and Peruvian waltzes that he’d picked up along the way; his voice isn’t great, but he sings in tune, and his Bedouin look seduced the visitors.
After wolfing down the seafood, we drank the curanto juices in the little clay pots, which are the first thing set out on the hot stones to receive that nectar. It’s impossible to describe the flavor of that concentrated broth of the delicacies of land and sea, nothing can compare to the rapture it produces; it courses through the veins like a hot river and leaves the heart leaping. A lot of jokes were made about its power as an aphrodisiac; the old guys from Santiago who were visiting compared it to Viagra, doubling over with laughter. It must be true, because for the first time in my life I feel an overwhelming and singular desire to make love with someone very specific, with Daniel.
I’ve been able to observe him closely and explore what he believes is friendship, which I know has another name. He’s just passing through, soon he’ll go, he doesn’t want to be tied down, maybe I won’t see him again, but this idea is so unbearable that I’ve discarded it. It is possible to die of love. Manuel says it in jest, but it’s true. I’ve got an ominous pressure accumulating in my chest, and if I don’t get some relief soon, I’m going to explode. Blanca counsels me to take the initiative, advice that she doesn’t heed herself with Manuel, but I don’t dare. This is ridiculous—at my age and with my past, I could easily withstand a rejection. Could I? If Daniel rejected me, I’d dive headfirst into a school of carnivorous salmon. I’m not completely ugly, so they say. Why doesn’t Daniel kiss me?
The proximity of this man I barely know is intoxicating, a term I use guardedly—I know its meaning only too well—but I can’t find another to describe this exaltation of the senses, this dependency so similar to addiction. Now I understand why lovers in opera and literature, faced with separation, commit suicide or die of grief. There is greatness and dignity in tragedy, that’s why it’s a source of inspiration, but I don’t want tragedy, no matter how immortal, I want a quiet, private, very discreet happiness, not to provoke the jealousy of the gods, always so vengeful. What nonsense I’m talking! There is no basis for these fantasies. Daniel treats me with the same kindness he treats Blanca, who could be his mother. Maybe I’m not his type. Or might he be gay?
I told Daniel that Blanca was a beauty queen in the 1970s, and there are those who believe she inspired one of Pablo Neruda’s twenty love poems, although in 1924, when they were published, she hadn’t been born yet. People talk too much! Blanca rarely refers to her cancer, but I think she came to this island to be cured of her illness and the disappointment of her divorce. The most common topic of conversation here is illness, but I was lucky enough to get the only two stoic Chileans who don’t mention theirs, Blanca Schnake and Manuel Arias, for whom life is difficult and complaining makes it worse. They’ve been great friends for many years, they have everything in common, except the secrets he keeps and her ambivalence with respect to the dictatorship. They have fun together, lend each other books, cook together. I sometimes find them sitting side by side at the window watching the swans sail past, in silence.
“Blanca looks at Manuel with desire in her eyes,” Daniel said to me. So it seems I’m not the only one who’s noticed. That night, after putting a few logs in the stove and closing the shutters, we went to bed, he in his sleeping bag in the living room, me in my room. It was very late. Curled up in my bed, wide awake, under three blankets, with my bile-green hat on for fear of the bats, who get caught in your hair, according to Eduvigis, I could hear the sighing of the house’s planks, the crackling of the firewood as it burned, the screech of the owl in the tree outside my window, the nearby breathing of Manuel, who falls asleep as soon as his head hits the pillow, and Fahkeen’s gentle snoring. I was thinking that in all
my twenty years, Daniel was the only person I’d ever looked at with desire.
Blanca insisted that Daniel stay another week in Chiloé, to go to remote villages, hike the trails through the woods, and see the volcanoes. Then he could travel to Patagonia in the private plane of a friend of her father’s, a multimillionaire who bought a third of the territory of Chiloé and is thinking of running for president in the December elections. But I want Daniel to stay with me—he’s already roamed enough. There’s no need for him to go to Patagonia or Brazil; he can just go straight back to Seattle in June.
No one can stay on this island more than a few days without being noticed, and now everyone knows who Daniel Goodrich is. The townsfolk have been especially affectionate to him; they find him very exotic, appreciate him speaking Spanish, and suppose that he’s in love with me (if only he were!). They were also impressed by his participation in the Azucena Corrales incident.
We’d gone in the kayak to La Pincoya’s cave, all bundled up because it’s getting close to the end of May, little suspecting what would be waiting for us when we came back. The sky was clear, the sea calm, and the air very cold. To get to the cave I use a different route than the tourists, more dangerous because of the rocks, but I prefer it because it lets me get close to the sea lions. It’s my spiritual practice—there’s no other term to describe the mystical ecstasy I get from the stiff whiskers of La Pincoya, as I’ve baptized my water-loving friend, a female sea lion. On the rocks there’s a threatening male, who I have to avoid, and eight or ten mothers with their cubs, sunning themselves or playing in the water among the sea otters. The first time I came here I floated in my kayak without approaching, staying still, to see the otters up close, and after a short time one of the sea lions began to court me. These animals are clumsy on land, but very graceful and quick in the water. She was diving under my kayak like a torpedo and surfacing on the other side, with her pirate’s whiskers and her big, round, black eyes, full of curiosity. With her nose she nudged my fragile craft, as if she knew that with a single puff she could hurl me to the bottom of the sea, but her attitude was entirely playful. We got to know each other gradually. I began to visit her frequently, and very soon she’d swim out to meet me as soon as she caught a glimpse of the kayak. La Pincoya likes to brush her whiskers against my bare arm.