(You can read the other two stories here and here. There is some continuity between the last story and this one. )

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Maco sat on the bathroom floor ruffled. The positive pregnancy tests lay strewn all around, mocking her from the floor, as if to thumb their nose at her independence. “I’m pregnant– she thought – and I live in fucking Lastarria.” Everyone in her life had raved indignantly when she had told them she was moving there; for most of them anywhere beyond Tobalaba was a land of monsters and dragons, where norms of polite society suddenly disappeared and the law of the jungle reigned unencumbered. Her mother had cried when told, and her father had refused to support her ‘idiotic juvenile behaviour’. But she did not put much stock in their objections, this was another one of those Chilean pastimes that had gotten rather tiresome; ‘the living among the rotos alarm’ of the well-heeled. Plus her mother had shed equally fervent tears when Maco had chosen Catolica over Universidad de los Andes for her undergraduate studies, same for her refusal to study law, ditto for her insistence on dedicating herself to photography. This had all been played according to some pre-written book of Chilean clichés that her kind passed down to each generation, since time immemorial. 

But this was different. Maco was pregnant and she could not tell anyone without breaking everything. There was a time, when she was an undergraduate, that her friends would whisper scandalous rumours about some poor girl who had to have an ‘appendectomy’ at Clinica Las Condes and suddenly would break up with her boyfriend. And now, years later, she was that woman, sitting on the floor of her small shabby Lastarria apartment, praying that the fifth pregnancy test finally came back negative.

She decided to call Juan and tell him right away, he was the only one that could know without beginning a process of Victorian scandals that could ruin everything. She picked up her cellphone but realized she wasn’t ready. Antonia was coming in to visit her this week and she had no idea how this could ruin things. Memories of last summer’s southern vacation came back to play havoc with her conscience. She put her phone back and got up from the floor stepping over the tragic portents dressed as pregnancy tests. She resolved to take a shower and meet with Carlos, he had been pestering her about some photographs for his new book on the estallido and she needed to get rid of him and his incessant need for an audience. Plus he kept harping on their long defunct relationship and his love for her as an intellectual equal. ‘Carlos is an incorrigible narcissist – she thought – he won’t stop talking about his moral convictions and superiority, I won’t have to think about this festering beast weighing me down”

They had been lovers immediately after Maco had graduated from university. It was an unpleasant memory for her, not in the sense of it having been a mistake, but rather the memory of her having been naïve enough to be taken in by Carlos’ act, the idea of the replacement father figure with intellectual flair and a passion for justice. It was embarrassing, the whole predictability of it all. Carlos had been an unpleasant lover, always touching her in public, making leering gestures and generally being a disagreeable degenerate. It was not that he was particularly virile, it was his constant need to seem virile that bothered her. Plus she had felt a bit guilty since she knew both his wife and his daughter, a rather skinny tall blonde girl with pretensions of being an actress. And yet the relationship had continued for a couple of years, although she discounted last couple of months as a loss. Carlos was always surrounded by young impressionable girls, far from womanhood, and he hunted along that demographic. Once his affairs got older they were either uninterested or he moved on to some younger, more impressionable girl. They had parted amicably, the relationship having ended almost naturally, and she had continued to see him as a friend, taking advice, still marveling in his intellect, like a teenager.

Lately her opinion of Carlos had turned sour, his whole shtick of the suffering intellectual with the finger pointing at the powers that be had become unbearable. It had always been there, the insufferable peacocking and the wounded hero routine, but only now had she become fully aware of it. There was a sense of doom in Chile, a sense of denial of the clear corrosion of every little piece of its reality. She had looked to Carlos to make sense of it, like a reference book for when everything starts to rot. And she had realized that he had no particular model of the world in mind, no well-constructed logical arguments, no structure, no rhyme, just pantomime. After the riots, she had asked him whether he had a plan for moving forward, a political movement or a plan that would put all of this energy to use. And he had responded with the same old arguments, the power of the people, direct democracy, no barriers to policy, constitutional change etc. etc. She had realized that people like Carlos feel uncomfortable when asked to do something that matters, they don’t like it because they have never really thought through the repercussions of their suggestions. The easiest way to have Carlos reveal the kind of monumental failure that he clearly was, is to actually allow him to perform the task that he is convinced is being performed badly. Once you give him that responsibility, he will fold immediately. Actually being in charge of things requires understanding of the mechanisms that drive the world, and this man had been too comfortable critiquing the world from the outside that he no longer had the faintest of how it actually worked.

Carlos had chosen a table overlooking the park on Plaza de Valdivia. Fully self-aware of the people that recognized him, his signature receding hair line and scruffy beard, he let the crowd take him in. This being Chile no one would actually talk to him directly, but he was willing to bask in some form of distant adulation. As Maco approached, he adjusted the empty chair and smiled. She had put on a little weight, but she looked as good as she did when they had first met at Catolica. He stood up, kissed her on the cheek and gestured towards the empty chair. Maco seemed a bit lost, but her composure was intact, her Teutonic genes working overtime to keep up the façade. They chatted for a while over small things and old comrades and, as always, Carlos dispensed with inaccurate judgments about everyone and everything. His pontificating was unsurprising to Maco, she had seen him flirt with self-aggrandizement before, but today she felt vexed by his inflated ego.

• I heard you had an altercation with some musicians – she knew this would take him down a peg and she was surprised at her own need to pick a fight. She had come here to relax under the soothing dulcet tone of Carlos’ pontificating. And yet her brain wanted conflict.
• Who told you? – came the immediately bitter response
• Manu, I saw her at Felipe’s party last week
• It was nothing – he waved his hand in the air as he did whenever he was confronted with what he considered to be trivialities.
• Manu said you had yelled at those poor guys – she dug in, there was no need to retreat now, he was at the precipice of a diatribe and she knew it. Plus she had a need to prick something and listen to the disinflationary noise the wounded male ego would make. It was not malicious, just sport.
• Maco, why are you interested in this – Carlos was trying his best to appear reconciliatory although he knew that she was looking for a fight.
• I am curious as to what made you scream at some poor musicians
• I was not screaming
• Raise your voice in contempt, whatever
• I am tired of the idiocy in this country Maco! Tired of trying to explain to morons what they can’t understand. Those two were just at the wrong place at the wrong time
• The downtrodden don’t understand you’re trying to help them?
• Let go of this childish attempt at sarcasm, this is beneath you
• Not even a little bit Carlito, you just don’t like to answer to reason
• Reason? You’re talking about reason? Last week a lady selling alfajores on the street was complaining on TV that the protests were interrupting her work. She whined that she needed the money to pay for her cancer treatments. These people do not understand that the whole point is so that she doesn’t have to sell alfajores to pay for life saving medicine – Carlos took a deep breath
• She knows best what’s good for her, and at this point what’s good for her is to be able to make money so that she can pay for her treatments. Are you or the mass of bus-burning halfwits going to pay for her treatments? You are asking her to give up her life today for some promised future nirvana that we all know you won’t be able to achieve.
• Why not? – Carlos arched his lip
• Because the lot of you are too self-involved. You haven’t the slightest clue as to how these people live, you scorn them whenever they come close enough. To you they are some abstract characters out of some Neruda verse, and if they do not behave with the deference and wide eyed adoration that you think you deserve, you fling derision their way, because they did not conform to your idea of what a poor person is. This bullshit one dimensional character does not exist Carlos, he is a figment of your imagination. Wake up! They hate you and me, they hate our kind, no matter how much we profess our devotion to them. Chileans hate themselves for their dependence on the same white faces that look nothing like them, whichever political stripe they come from. They look up at the people that give them advice or tell them what they want to hear, and they always have the same hue. It must infuriate them to no end and it drives them to occasional madness. Each one of them is fighting over which cuico represents them best; the Vitacura poto colorado or the Chicureo pseudo-libertarian with a leftie mistress. They are tired of being second grade citizens who are continuously told they are too stupid to understand. – she finally stopped talking, Carlos was nearly in tears and she had not meant to go that far.
• I did not know you felt this way Maco, you should have told me
• I did not, not until this summer, when I tried to take these photographs. It felt unpleasant to be reminded of my place
• You seemed so different at university
• Yeah, so did you, but time has a way of clearing things up.
• So you don’t believe in our discussions when we were together? That’s all gone now?
• What? Marx and all that? That’s academic masturbation, irrelevant for Chile. It was a way for you to sweet talk your students into adoring you, nothing more. You’re a narcissist Carlos, ideology is irrelevant. You would have been an anti-communist narcissist in some drab Eastern European capital. And you would have seduced pretty little architecture students with your quotations of Adam Smith and anti-Soviet rants. Your whole personality functions to feed your ego, you optimize your discourse to fulfill that function, nothing more. If a government of smurfs was in power, you would pontificate about the evils of the colour blue and the superiority of yellow as the true revolutionary colour. Your only saving grace is that you’re semi-eloquent in doing so. But once you’re put to the test, once you’re asked to paint in any other colour, you shrink like a virgin confronting her first penis. You and your ego is what’s wrong with all of this, you have no actual desire for progress that isn’t designed to inflate you. – she had truly let it go. At this point it would have been better to just leave, but she wanted to hear the old dandy whimper.
• You’re a spoiled brat Maco, an ungrateful spoiled brat – his spittle landed on her beer. – You and your lover, who lives by sucking the blood of working people, have no conscience. Yeah, I know you’re fucking him, people talk. You deserve each other, like dogs and fleas. How dare you question my motives, you have no idea how much I have suffered with every passing year. Every white hair, every wrinkle is a righteous path not taken by this country. I am here, like a Cassandra screaming in the wind, watching the rest of this miserable place reject my predictions. And you? You were never in the struggle, it was something you did to fit in, but it was never something that you truly…
• Drop it Carlos, I’ve heard it before, from people much better than you. I am who I am, I am fully aware of it. My stupid juvenile infatuations do not make your narcissism any less putrid. But it is better that I go, I have a million things to do and I have no appetite for sermons by someone whose whole raison d’etre is to be venerated like a demigod. Have a good night

Maco left him there like a lump, leaving the photographs on the table too,. She had grown tired of the prints, every time she looked at them she felt nauseous. There was something that did not fit. She had started the project with the idea of doing a collage of the struggle for truth in a neoliberal oppressive state and she ended up hating every moment of it. This was not some project for making things better for anyone, just a tired and angry mass of people being told to burn their own house down by people who lived in mansions. It felt so unkind, so regressive, so drained of purpose, so empty. The injustice was clear, but the egos of provincial petty tyrants clearly got in the way of anything good. There was a sense of lucidity in her head, this was all coming together, untidily, but coming together nonetheless. She had embarked on a project of getting to know her own countrymen and women, people who were as alien to her as the Chinese. She had come in, guns blazing, taking in the flames and the tear gas as her down payment in blood for the new Chile to come. Maco had believed, almost religiously, that there is something purifying in the flames of mass anger, it is not hate but rite, the godly rising above the mundane, the eternal above the earthly. She had gone through the rituals almost in a trance, dancing through Alameda with the drums roaring in the background, opening her arms around a fogata in Plaza Italia as if to personify and embrace the ancients who had come back to break the chains once again. All of this she had believed without irony, without a trace of doubt. And she had come out wanting to cry at her own stupidity. This had been a massive fraud that she had perpetuated on herself with the help of the likes of Carlos, men and women whose cups had always been full with someone else’s wine, always. Maco had been taken in by these frauds, taught to parrot incessantly nonsensical talking points for the sole purpose of feeling less guilty about her own station in life. She had been a true revolutionary tourist, a passenger on someone else’s train, with a destination she had not signed up for. This became apparent to her immediately upon seeing Carlos for who he was; the feeding trough for young, impressionable idiots with fair skin and ample breasts. God’s gag gift for the weakling’s need to feel something other than aimlessness and boredom. Maco had finally unglued herself from her idiocy, from Carlos, from the mass hysteria she had only recently participated in, and, for the first time in years, felt at peace, a glorious awakening, a lesson in humility.

She called Juan, who answered immediately and invited her to a nice dinner in some swanky place in Vitacura the next day. She accepted without hesitation, they had much to discuss. She did not dread the conversation anymore, somehow unburdening herself with Carlos had cleared her head. “I’ve been wasting time with these shriveled provincial mini despots – she told herself – and all I’ve gotten in return is a full belly and empty lectures delivered with religious fervor.’

The next day she met Juan at Borago. She was confused as to why he had chosen this particular restaurant; it was expensive, it had a very high end clientele and they were bound to see someone they both knew at the place. Nonetheless, he seemed relaxed. His long greying hair slicked back and his ever present white linen jacket gave her a sense of comfort. But it went away quickly when she remembered why she was there. They kissed, Juan gave her a routine compliment and both sat down. Juan’s demeanor was self-satisfied cockiness, he caressed her hands and brushed her hair behind the left ear. She winced and drew back, clearly uncomfortable.

• Why here Juan? – she asked almost mumbling – there are a million people around, someone we know is bound to see us.
• Ah, the proper girl is worried about her reputation
• You know what I mean, if Antonia finds out I cannot live this down. She is your daughter and my friend, a murder would be easier to explain.
• No one is getting killed mi amor. And even if someone sees us this is an innocent dinner between friends
• You are not afraid?
• Of what? People talking? Most of them are too cowardly to say anything to my face, and what they say behind my back is always pretty malicious. In the set of things I’ve been called, whatever name they would attach to this would be a mild chuckle at worst
• As always you’re untouchable – she felt her jaw tighten. This is why he had chosen the restaurant, as a simple and clear statement of superiority. He was telling her, and whoever else was free enough with their time to not mind their own business, that he couldn’t care less what the world thought of him. The world, and all of its little minions could go and unceremoniously fuck themselves to oblivion, this was an unsubtle statement of intent.
• Not untouchable, impervious dear. In this country you can insulate yourself against your own prejudices as long as people have a particular model of you in mind. 
• What do you mean?
• I am free of most constraints.
• Ah, another perk of being you
• Among many.
• Listen, I am pregnant – she just blurted it out, without much thinking. She had practiced a whole speech but she felt drained and did not want to prolong it. He stopped smiling, but nothing in his face betrayed any sense of alarm. This surprised her a bit.
• When did you find out? – his demeanor was now clinical, she got a taste of Juan the businessman.
• Yesterday, I wanted to tell you over the phone but I felt this was better. – she was expecting a less calm response, this was going much better than expected.
• You were right. This is better.
• I don’t know what to do, this is such a mess. I am nearly 30, unattached. Can’t have a baby, especially with the father of my best friend. Oh Antonia, I feel so guilty, if she knew….
• Don’t think about that now. Look, this is your decision dear, but I agree with you – this surprised her. Usually Juan tended to impose his will immediately in a situation that affected him directly. She was prepared to have a fight and he was just agreeing with her.
• Don’t think this is a sin? – she had no idea why she was pushing.
• It is a sin.
• But it is my sin, not yours?
• Our sin. This is not a fight dear, we will do whatever you want to do. I will take the consequences
• You are unbelievable. You know I really have no choices here and you are coming off as the nicest guy in Santiago.
• To whom, there is no audience.
• To me I guess.
• Listen, I am serious. I truly am indifferent as to the outcome. If you want, you can have the baby and claim it is mine. Or you can lie and say it was a stupid one night stand. Or you can have the abortion. Any of those options are on the table. I will support you either way.
• Since Antonia and I were kids you told us abortion is ungodly – she knew that he was certain she was going to have an abortion, she had no other choice, having a child with her best friend’s father would be a life altering decision. The Lo Curro rumour mill would explode. Having presented all of the choices as acceptable, Juan had clearly told her that she had no choice in the matter, having a baby with Juan, or whoever she choose to say the father was would be social suicide. He was a devious asshole
• For most people it is.
• But not for us?
• We’ve earned our indiscretions dear, some things are implicit in the social contract
• Like we can have abortions but others can’t?
• Precisely. Just as society forgives a genius his darkest desires or pedantic behaviour, it forgives its betters for minor deviations from social norms. It cannot hold everyone to the same standards, otherwise it’s chaos
• Your hypocrisy is unbounded
• It is not hypocrisy, it is a worldview
• Now you’re just playing with words
• Not at all, this is a grim truth that most people cannot abide. People like me make things work and our reward is freedom to live as we choose. The money is just a means to that end. We live free so that we can oil the miserable lives of millions. This is not hypocrisy, it is just how life works. I know you think I am being a miserable son of a bitch and I should have no surplus of rights, but you are wrong. The multitudes are not important enough to be just as free as I am, they could not handle the responsibility and would collapse under its weight. I am aware that this sounds to you like some French noble giving a dinner speech right around the revolution, but he would not have been wrong then and I am not wrong now. The two of us allow ourselves these freedoms not because we are born free human beings, but because we have taken them by sheer force of will and determination. Sure, the multitudes earn more and more personal space with each decade and they grow restless demanding more. And we often abide, but for every step they take we take three, the balance must always be positive on our side, this truth cannot be violated because it is in itself a vital aspect of a well working machine. I have never talked to you like this because I’ve never thought I needed to, and maybe that was a mistake. But you’ve known me for a long time and if you thought that I would start moralizing about how wrong an abortion would be, you’ve profoundly misunderstood who I am. I love my family and I love you, most of the rest of the world is merely resources that I must use to nurture who and what I love. Most of your professors, your friends, that Carlos character that you were seeing when you finished university, all of them think I am the enemy. The simple truth is that without me and my kind they would eat their own flesh to survive. Did you know I am one of the biggest donors to his think tank? Did you know that we grew up in the same neighbourhood? He and I are really the same person in many ways, we both believe that we are destined to be free of the constraints imposed on the unwashed masses. The only difference is that he is willing to live that reality, but not willing to admit it; that’s his failure. And as he gets older, he is going to get worse, slowly going mad, because with every year he will realize that denying his own reality is a fool’s game. That’s why everyone from his social circle is laughing at him, they see him work like a dog trying to prove to everyone that he is a man of the people and yet his behaviour belies his rhetoric. It cannot be otherwise, he cannot bend the world to his image, the world will eventually break him and chew him whole because it needs to feed on the failures of hypocrites. It needs to parade their lifeless corpses for everyone to see, so that the message is clear: “You are not to stray from your station in life, whatever the assignment. If you do, you will end up like this, a ghost of a human being mocked and bullied for your labours.”

Maco sat stunned, her breathing becoming heavy. They had gone through about ten courses of the meal by this time and she was feeling light headed from the carmenere. She had nothing more to add really, she did not see herself being able to argue with Juan any more. For most of her life she had argued with him as a matter of principle, they had argued over what to her now seemed like minor details. The redistribution of wealth, merit, good government, fairness. But she had never seen this much filth in any of their conversations, ever. She looked as if she’d seen the devil himself and he had handed her a membership card into some club she already belonged to. This realization made her want to run as far away from this conversation as possible. Juan had always seemed arrogant, prepotent and impervious to the regal nature of his stance. But she had always taken this in as an affectation, a minor character flaw in an otherwise agreeable human being. Not once had she thought of him as this; a person who truly believed that his existence is above it all, like a ghost haunting the mass of humanity, ready to appear as a nightmare in its collective sleep. “God is an odd caretaker – she thought – he sends the world Carlos and Juan, two fully functioning psychopaths with sufficient intelligence and lets us bounce between the two of them, like a pendulum of misery between violently opposing poles. In the meanwhile he hectors us about modesty and temperance, while we oscillate between them, holding on to our souls for dear life.” Maco realized she had listened to him as one listens to an announcer describing an open sore wound dripping with abscess. Her face must have revealed at least a bit of discomfort with what she was hearing, because Juan’s face, for the first time since she’d known him, seemed terrified. She felt like she had been present in the birth of a multi-headed horrid monster, a creature she had nurtured most of her life. And here he was, a cruel reminder of her own impetuousness and gullibility, a grown woman, accidentally impregnated by a deviated human. Maco realized that the horror in her face must have been visible so she forced a smile and caressed his hand gently, she did not want Juan to become hostile, that would be a whole new set of problems. She relaxed and feigned lightness, a simple girl whispering lovely nothings to her love, but stayed mostly quiet for the rest of the dinner. Juan took this as a sign that all was well and that her mood had only been a small bump in their reconciliation. He seemed fully relaxed.

At the end of the dinner, Maco had resolved, irreversibly, that she would go to Miami to have the abortion. It seemed convenient, she could fit in a shopping trip. 

Raul Barahona-Svartz

Santiago, 10 December, 2020