Lucía

“Look at you,” Anastasia had pointed out. “You’re so mentally strong, and I’m not.” That much was true, Lucía had agreed. Her father had taken care of it. To transcend what the largest but weaker percentage of the world’s population expected to ever accomplish, she had to be. “I guess I can thank my father for his personal training into the family business,” Lucía had replied, wishing he had spared her from those meetings and those people. “Let me tell you something,” Lucía had warned. “Being my father’s daughter isn’t easy. My expensive education expands my horizon beyond ordinary aspirations. I’m thankful for that. The price, my price, is that he expects me to reach the top. And the scary thing is that I actually want to.” Lucía had understood that prepared and successful women, many of whom had sat on powerful chairs that had demanded execution of very critical decisions, had confronted tough hurdles and had delivered implacable verdicts. Groomed like them, Lucía had felt the impulse to enhance their legacy in every way she could. It had only been a day earlier that Lucía had tried to cheer up Anastasia. Putting her friend’s sadness aside for the moment, alone in her house, she struggled to find something to smile about. Although determined to stay composed, she felt a revolting, nauseating sensation in her gut. Stay, the commanding voice said. Don’t move. Prompting a stormy state of mind, repugnant visions she had once endured and forgotten were resurrecting. As a seven-year-old she had been unable to understand them; as a woman conscious of the escalating brutality in the world, though, their interpretation had become repulsive. Let’s play. A boy’s friendly voice echoed. Let’s play. Through hideous flashes of repressed memories, her life tasted sourly. She walked into the dining room and sat at the end of the long table, facing her laptop. There, a need to know the reason for the voices and the images pressed her deep into her subconscious. She had to unearth what remained buried. Lost in the murkiness of childhood recollections, she looked right through the computer and traveled back in time to uncover the missing visions, and explain her sickening gut feelings of physical abuse and psychological torture. A thin rim of light delineating a barn’s door straight ahead and a faint buzzing of bees had created a sinister property. To the right, going deep like a malevolent forest, a cluster of pine trees that grew immensely high had blocked all celestial light from view. To the left, between the house and the barn, scattered trees with crooked claws for branches had accentuated an ominous pitch-black night. As she had drawn closer to a woman’s aching voice, seven-year-old Lucía Calderón had sensed lurking shadows and menacing silhouettes watching her under a starless sky. She had hunched. With head slightly submerged in dreadful expectation, she had crossed her arms to clutch herself tight, to shrink away from the staring shadows, to gather strength. “Stupid bitch,” a man had yelled. The fury of a violent slap had traveled the air. Bold as always, Lucía had taken one step, then another. Her eyes had enlarged to capture every detail. The agonizing and frightening weeping ahead had sounded like some awful wailing from a victim that had been condemned to eternal suffering. Lucía could have stayed put and listen to the bellowing beyond, but fear had never deterred her. She had to find out the reason for the suffering and the wicked. When Lucía had stood at the door the tormented woman had cried out, “Stop, please!” The instant Lucía had pulled the door open, the raging man in his madness had grabbed the woman by the arm, had viciously slapped her with the big palm of his hand, and had furiously ejected the flimsy bodyaway. Like a rag doll with torn clothes and flying hair, the woman had fallen hard on the ground, sprawled and motionless, face distorted and twisted in agony. That’s when the jerk Lucía had dreaded happened. As if everything had converged into that moment in time, a hand had covered her mouth and she had been taken away into darkness, into a loud noise that had blocked everything else, into a sound of bees buzzing harshly in her head. Twenty-four-year-old Lucía shuddered on the chair’s edge, one hand over her mouth. Those unnerving and never-shared images had come back. It bothered her not to know exactly why, because each time they repeated a revolting feeling inside sickened her. She stood, walked to the French doors facing the back of the house and stared at the garden, colorful, diverse, and beautiful. Mom’s presence radiated in the warmth of every placid detail of the house as well as in every stage of her life, influencing each decision. Thank God, because without her mom’s feminine touch, life under her father’s scrutiny felt too demanding, too tough, too unyielding. She looked at her reflection on the glass, at her rough beauty, at her kind and fiery big dark eyes. Whether she liked it or not, she embodied her mother’s delicate looks and her father’s raw strength, both in genes and training.