Humiliation Read online

  International Praise for Humiliation

  “A debut that marks the arrival of a powerful figure in Chilean letters . . . We must celebrate it wholeheartedly.”

  —JUAN ANTONIO MASOLIVER RÓDENAS, Cultura/s, La Vanguardia

  “Every once in a while one encounters a new voice and thinks: they will last . . . Twelve months from now, Humiliation will still be one of the best books of the year.”

  —JAVIER RODRÍGUEZ MARCOS, El País

  “Fiction that is as alive as Chekov’s and as vibrant as Munro’s.”

  —CARLOS PARDO, Babelia

  “Nine perfect stories that form an extraordinary collection.”

  —ALOMA RODRÍGUEZ, Letras Libres

  “While Paulina Flores’s approach is radically political, her stories explore a world of nuance and complexity, brought to life through the author’s relentless quest for the humanity in each of her characters.”

  —LORENA G. MALDONADO, El Español

  “The great surprise of contemporary Chilean letters descends onto Spain, endorsed by Alejandro Zambra, with a brilliant and daring collection of stories.”

  —INÉS MARTÍN RODRIGO, ABC

  “With elegance, strength, and the eye of a hunter, Paulina Flores writes as though she’s lived twice as long as her age.”

  —KARINA SAINZ BORGO, Vozpópuli

  “Some of the characters call to mind Lorrie Moore’s early books.”

  —Diario Ahora

  “Flores’s style is minimalist and sparse, deprived of artificiality, aiming straight at the heart.”

  —Libros y Literatura

  “Paulina Flores’s vision is unique and, like only good literature can, it will confront, disturb, and dazzle you.”

  —Mujer Hoy

  “Stories through which life flows with astonishing ease.”

  —RAMÓN ROZAS, Librújula

  “A work that is as original as it is strong, as it is delicate.”

  —GEMA BEGEGA, TenMag

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2016 by Paulina Flores

  Copyright © 2016 by Editorial Planeta Chilena S.A under

  Seix Barral imprint—Grupo Planeta

  English translation copyright © 2019 by Megan McDowell

  First published in Chile in 2015 by Hueders

  First published in the United States in 2019 by Catapult (catapult.co)

  All rights reserved

  Cover design by Nicole Caputo

  Book design by Wah-Ming Chang

  ISBN: 978-1-948226-24-0

  Catapult titles are distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West

  Phone: 866-400-5351

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018965037

  Printed in the United States of America

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  For Elizabeth

  Contents

  Humiliation

  Teresa

  Talcahuano

  Forgetting Freddy

  Aunt Nana

  American Spirit

  Laika

  Last Vacation

  Lucky Me

  Humiliation

  Are we almost there?” moaned Pía. “I’m tired.”

  Simona watched her younger sister panting and dragging her feet. “Shhhh,” she said, “quit whining.”

  They had been walking for over an hour on the side of the street where the sun beat down hardest. Their father was a few steps ahead. He had realized too late that the shade was on the other side, and the cars speeding down Bellavista wouldn’t let them cross now. In any case, the uneven number they were looking for was on this side, the sunny one, and they were nearly at their destination.

  “Dad! I’m tired!” said Pía, and she sat down on the hot ground with her legs outstretched.

  Simona watched her father. He didn’t seem to hear Pía and went on walking.

  “Dad!” Pía shouted.

  This time he turned around, came back, and picked her up. As he went on walking resignedly, Pía’s head peeked over her father’s shoulder like a puppet taking the stage. She hugged his neck tightly and smiled in victory.

  Simona raised her eyebrows and shot her sister an angry look, letting her know just how much work she gave other people by being so little. Still, she couldn’t help feeling a little bitter.

  Simona was tired too, but she was too big for her father to carry her.

  The year was 1996. The girls were nine and six years old. Their father was twenty-nine, and unemployed.

  Simona had to hurry to catch up. Her father’s strides grew even longer and faster. His jaw was clenched as he walked, or at least it looked that way from what she could see of him. He was nervous, thought Simona. But seeing him tense today didn’t make her sad like other times; instead, her chest filled with pride. It meant that her father cared about what was happening. And what was happening, what was about to happen, was her idea. She put her hand in the pocket of her dress and squeezed the ad and the map as if they were winning lottery tickets.

  Her pride also stemmed from the satisfaction of knowing that she did understand what her father was feeling, and that her little sister didn’t. Simona was the one who had spent all those nights with her ear pressed to the wall, listening to her parents fight. And the next morning she would get out of bed to look up in the dictionary all the words they had said to each other that were new to her. Sometimes she even looked up ones she had heard before, but that in her opinion didn’t apply to her father: loser, coward, selfish.

  Simona suffered, but at the same time she loved feeling part of the solemnity of adult conflicts. This was the kind of responsibility that came with the position of older sister.

  Since summer vacation started, every morning was a long, grueling walk. Downtown, Providencia, Las Condes. All pretty places, clean and modern. Far away from the neighborhood where they lived. The father had lost his job a while ago, but with the girls home on summer vacation, he had no choice now but to take them with him when he went to drop off résumés or attend interviews. Their mother said they couldn’t be left alone. She used the word abandon: “You can’t abandon them in the house.”

  At first the father had found it a nuisance. He saw it as his wife taking revenge on him—after all, she could have made more of an effort to find some old neighbor lady with time on her hands who could take care of the girls. Then he decided it wasn’t really such a bad idea. Maybe they would give him an advantage. If people saw him come in with two little girls in tow, maybe they’d take pity on him and give him the job.

  “Remember, think about something sad,” he’d say to his daughters before they entered the office buildings.

  “Like if Mom and you died?” asked Pía, confused, the first time her father said it. Her eyes grew watery and intense.

  The father corrected himself. “No, no. Not that. Not so sad. What I mean is that you can’t go around laughing or playing or cracking jokes while you wait for me. I want you to pretend to be sad. Fake sad, like the actresses on TV . . . and then I’ll take you out for french fries and the three of us will laugh by ourselves.”

  Pía smiled in relief, happy at the idea of french fries. But her eyes filled up with tears again when Simona told her: “You know what I think about to get sad? I imagine Mom and Dad are going to break up.”

  Simona raised her eyes to look defiantly at the sun. She’d been warned so often not to do that, but now she felt utterly confident, capable of absorbing all the sun’s rays. Because this morning would be different. This morning they would triumph, and all the effort and failure that had come before would be worth it. And she had planned
it all. Finally, her help would do some good.

  She’d been trying to contribute for a long time. In the afternoons, she sat at the kitchen table next to her father with her own pile of newspapers in front of her, and she went through them looking for any and all job advertisements. She marked them with a fluorescent highlighter, cut them out carefully, and glued them onto a white page. Once the page was covered in pasted ads, she filed it in a folder labeled CLASSIFIED ADS FOR DAD. At the end of the day, she handed the folder to him with all the gravity the situation called for.

  She was driven and enthusiastic, but not because she wanted her father to find a job. Nor because she wanted to end her parents’ fights, or the family’s economic straits. Rather, she longed for her father to be again the way he used to be.

  At first, when she found out he’d been fired, she couldn’t help but feel satisfied. She didn’t tell a soul, but she was pleased. Finally, she would have fun with her father all day long! Every day! And it was summer vacation, too—it was like a dream. Nothing would get in the way of their games: not work, which left him so tired at night; not her mother, either.

  Because her mother seemed like the biggest obstacle. She never let Simona spend time with her father: she took over and dominated every aspect of her life, and her little sister’s life. She made them food, brought them to school, to birthday parties, took them shopping for clothes. When her father came home from work, her mother went on taking charge of everything herself: checking the girls’ homework and their backpacks, drying their hair after their baths, making sure they brushed their teeth well, tucking them in and turning out the light. Simona received a “good night” from her father only when he got up to lock the doors. And then there were Sundays. The day she and her father could finally have fun, her mother would butt in with her scolding. “Don’t bother her, Alejandro,” she said when he lunged at Simona to start a tickle war. “She’s a little girl!” The same thing at lunch, when her father started in with the jokes: “Hey, look over there!” he’d say, and then steal food from her plate. “Let them eat in peace,” her mother said. But Simona didn’t want him to leave her alone, she didn’t want her mother to defend her. She knew they were games, and she liked them. But her mother didn’t understand, and she complained to her girlfriends that it was “like having three kids instead of two,” or that “he always makes me into the bad guy.”

  But as it turned out, things only got worse after he lost his job. And then Simona realized that there was an even bigger wall that separated her from her father.

  The first day he was home, she got up very early, eager to snuggle up with him in bed. She ran to his room, but when she turned the knob she found it was locked. She knocked a few times, gently, but the door stayed closed until lunchtime. When her father finally appeared he was in a bad mood, and he complained that her mother hadn’t left anything to eat. After making some gluey noodles with half-cooked hot dogs, he told her and Pía that, starting now, they’d have to make the beds and divide up the housework. Then he locked himself in his room again. There were no jokes or tickle wars. Her father came out only to go to the bathroom, his face scruffy and ever less healthy. And everything they did made him mad. Things that had never bothered him before, like when she sang the songs from The Little Mermaid, her favorite movie. Before, they’d always sung those songs together, and they’d recited the dialogue from memory. “Poor Unfortunate Souls” was her favorite, and the one they sang the best.

  “Here’s the deal,” her father would say, imitating the malevolent voice of Ursula the witch. “I’ll make you a potion that will turn you into a human for three days. Got that? Three days. Before the sun sets on the third day, you’ve got to get dear old Princey to fall in love with you. That is, he’s got to kiss you. Not just any kiss—the kiss of true love!” Her father just loved that last line, and so did she.

  “If I become human,” Simona would reply, playing the innocent and dubious Ariel, “I’ll never be with my father or sisters again.”

  “That’s right . . . but . . . you’ll have your man. Life’s full of tough choices, innit?”

  Simona was sure that her father loved her, but she could also tell that something was making him feel lonely, and that all the love she could give him didn’t help; quite the opposite, in fact. In some strange and inexplicable way it seemed to weaken him and make him feel more alone. She thought that solitude was related to one of the words her mother had said in their fights, one she’d also looked up in the dictionary: humiliation.

  So, when she’d seen the casting call a couple of days earlier, it was as if a miracle had come down from heaven. How had she not realized? How had she not thought of it sooner, when it was so obvious? All that time looking at classified ads for carpenters, bakers, assistants, watchmen, salesmen, drivers, and more watchmen, never realizing how bad those ads must make her father feel.

  Now, while she walked, she took the clipping from her pocket and read it one more time:

  GREAT OPPORTUNITY: Casting Call. Ad agency seeks women and men of all ages for publicity campaign—prestigious international brand. Tryouts: Monday–Wednesday, Bellavista 0550 . . .

  Simona loved TV. She always paid special attention to the commercials, because her sister never understood them and asked her to explain.

  There were many reasons her father was destined to triumph in the casting, but two in particular stood out. The first and most obvious: people in commercials were much less handsome than her father. To say less handsome, in fact, was an understatement. It’s just, her father was beautiful! He looked like Luis Miguel, the most beautiful man on the face of the earth. She told everyone: “My dad is like Luis Miguel’s twin.” And he knew it too, and he seemed to like it, because he always sang to her “Será que no me amas,” imitating Luis Miguel’s haughty flirtatiousness as he danced. He turned his face in profile, grabbed his hair, gave a kick and a turn. He moved forward with little jumps, swaying his hips, while Simona did the backup singers’ chorus: “Noche, playa, lluvia, amas.”

  And that was the other reason: her father had a flair for performance. At least, that was what her mother always said: “Alejandro missed his calling. He should have studied acting or something, it’s in his nature.” Simona caught the mockery behind the comment. And not only because her mother’s tone implied it was a joke, and not as serious and tragic as Simona saw it: her father’s talents wasted. She knew something about what her mother thought of actors, and it wasn’t good. To be extroverted, to draw attention, to show off. After so many reprimands from her mother, Simona had eventually learned that being extroverted was a kind of defect. A flaw that she’d been born with, like the original sin inherited from the first disobedient parents, but without the possibility of redemption. She was a girl who attracted attention and it made her feel small, minuscule. That’s why she tried to imitate her little sister, who tended to be quieter and more enigmatic. When Pía wasn’t whining she had the gift of seeming simply uninterested, letting herself be loved, never feeling the need to seek out affection. Pía’s personality seemed much more appropriate. But it was almost impossible for Simona to be like her; she couldn’t help the way she was. And although it had been painful to bear that burden, now, as she walked beside her father, it was something that honored her and filled her with happiness. Because being extroverted was a quality she shared with him. Something that brought them closer, that could destroy any obstacle that came between them.

  “We have arrived,” said Simona ceremoniously, and she bowed toward the enormous house that stood before them.

  “Finally!” said Pía, still in her father’s arms.

  He set her down with a sigh and asked Simona for the map. He looked it over nervously and then peered at the house, doubtful. It was a big, old three-story mansion, with all the darkness and cold typical of an aging construction, but painted a modern, strident green. A getup that inspired distrust.

  Simona saw the hesitation in her father’s eyes. It hadn’t bee
n easy to convince him about the GREAT OPPORTUNITY. She couldn’t let him get cold feet now that they were almost there; she took his hand and tugged on it, saying, “Let’s go in, let’s go in. They’re waiting for us. They’re waiting.”

  “Are you sure it’s here? There’s not even a sign. What’s the production company called?”

  “It’s just so they won’t get so many people bothering them,” said Simona quickly. “Can you imagine all the people who would come if they knew the casting calls happened here?” And she pulled harder on her father’s hand. “Let’s go,” she insisted, practically begging.

  “Yeah, let’s go in, Dad, it’s really hot out here,” said Pía, not so much excited as imploring a resolution.

  “Okay,” said their father. “We’ve come this far, what’ve we got to lose?”

  They rang the bell on the intercom, and there was no Who is it? or Can I help you? from inside; the door simply opened.

  After so many hours in the sun, the darkness inside blinded and disoriented the father for a moment. When he could see better, he realized right away that the inside of the house was also suspicious. Its original structure had clearly been altered. Where the living or dining room should surely start, there was a wall, a thin partition put up to create more offices. He felt ill at ease in the gloom of a small false foyer that allowed a steep staircase as the only possible path. The floor was of gray stone, the only element that seemed to have resisted the changes. The worst part was the silence. Too much silence. Not like a place where people were working. And there he was, cornered, with his daughters. Halfway between the front door and the staircase, with no one to receive them or to ask what they wanted.

  The father lifted the girls onto the second step and knelt down in front of them. He took a deep breath, looked up at them. They both smiled back at him.