Italy

Italy was always reading a book. Sometimes we lay in the grass, and I rested my head on her legs, and her hair brushed my face, and she read me Lemebel stories or “The Night Face Up,” a Cortázar story where the protagonist realizes in the end that his dream is not a dream at all. He is painfully awake as he realizes it was his other consciousness that was a dream. Her voice was gravelly and calm, and I focused on her mouth, her clean, straight teeth. Italy wrote stories for the “Santiago in 100 Words” contest and took workshops at Balmaceda 1215, and sometimes I’d go look for her after her classes so we could eat ice cream in Parque Forestal. Italy was called Italy because her mom had been exiled and married an Italian, and when they returned to Chile together and had a daughter, they named her that, for the triumph of their return and to never forget what it was like to live in exile. Italy was sixteen and went to a private school. She could ride her bike there and wear street clothes. Instead of “grandparents,” she said “nonos” and spoke several languages besides Spanish and was familiar with Europe and knew that the day she finished high school, her life would continue on another continent, far from here and far from me.

The first time I saw her was at a Pilates class in a municipal gym in Providencia. She had thick bangs and a long ponytail, wavy at the end. I watched her in the mirror for the full hour. I liked her flushed cheeks, her dark eyebrows, and the hollows of her thin legs. I imagined my hand would fit there perfectly. When class ended, I talked to her, and we left on our bikes. I lived downtown, on the twentieth floor of one of those new buildings, close to the University of Chile metro station. She lived in a neighborhood with houses like in Home Alone, at the edge of San Cristóbal Hill. That first time we talked, we pedaled through Costanera, the park along the river, and I dropped her off. Her house scared me, the way unfamiliar things scare you: the chimney, the lush trees, the huge truck parked outside. We said goodbye, and I tried to smell her, and in the days that came, I tried to prolong the route from the gym to her house. A few weeks later, we were already sending texts and she would lend me books and I would twist my fingers in the end of her dark ponytail.