The summer ended quickly, and winter came and brought more wind, plus rain and chimney smoke. I turned fourteen. My mother and sisters came back to the house for a while. My mother explained her version of events to me and promised me things would get better, that we would all start over again together, but I knew it couldn’t be like that, and in any case I didn’t care. When a person lives through intense experiences, he has the illusion of understanding many things. I thought I understood how life worked. When I finished cleaning the house I was exhausted, and I thought that I should keep going that way from then on: tire myself out and self-impose obligations in order to get ahead. I thought that would keep me safe. I wasn’t going to drift like my father, or fearfully wonder what would become of me. I was going to fight, to sniff out threats on the wind and build a life of my own. Who knows what fate awaited me alongside the Carrascos; I never found out. I left Talcahuano as soon as I could, first to work in the north with the Carrascos’ father—my last link to Pancho—and then in Santiago. I got rid of my family and the only friends I had. And I went into debt to study, and I worked twelve hours a day and spent two more riding buses, and I did all the things that people do to achieve a certain well-being, and I got tired, I became a tired person and I lived in Renca, in Recoleta, and in Quilicura, without ever knowing what the names of all those places meant.

Forgetting Freddy

Forgetting Freddy

I’m so sad I just might start keeping a diary.

That’s what she wrote in a notebook she found in her room. Not on the first page but one in the middle, at random, so as not to give it too much importance, because even with pen in hand she still rebelled against the idea. Starting a diary now, at this point in her life, sounded like a childish and sappy thing. And dangerous, too; it seemed dangerous to write her feelings down. Of course, she’d kept diaries before, lots of them, from fifth grade through her senior year. Every day, religiously, even if she didn’t have anything to say. Back then she’d used coded language, aware of the risk the diaries ran, alone and defenseless in her bedside table drawer when her mother did the cleaning. Back then she’d written to someone, as if she were writing a letter; not to the diary or some omniscient voice, but to herself. A letter to the woman she would be in the future. For some reason she didn’t want to forget anything that happened to her. She had been sure that when she reached the age she was now, she would go back and read them, and a glint of pride would shine in her eyes, maybe a little smile of complicity. But the diaries were gone; she’d put them in a garbage bag in one of her moves. It didn’t make sense to keep lugging them around, they were too heavy.