Mariana and Ibarra Are Waiting

HOW WILL I survive without you by my side?

Asún had never dared to ask her that question and now that she was not able to hear it, let alone console him with an answer, now he knows why, he knows he had been right to fear what lay ahead if he was ever forced to voice what have turned into the only words that have existed for the last six months: How will I survive without Beatriz by my side?

No other question since the onset of her sudden, devastating illness, just the certainty, repeated endlessly, as if to a mirror inside, that he is lost. It is painful for him to even sit at his desk, be mocked by the promise of a blank piece of paper to be filled, the promise of a pen for his hand to write with, useless to even give it a try.

Even so, inspiration comes, unannounced and unexpected.

One night, in his dreams, as he lay asleep by her barely breathing body in the bed where they had met in so many ways for decade after decade, he was visited by the vision of someone writing. Not Asún, someone else: a man called Ibarra was writing in that dream. Asún saw him there, in a small, murky room in Santiago, saw him as he wrote a letter to his wife. Mariana—yes, that was her name—was in Pisagua, a concentration camp in the far north of the country, a prisoner of the Junta that had