Multiple Choice

(8) You ruined my life.

(9) Now I am words you cannot erase.

A) None

B) A

C) B

D) C

E) D

59.

(1) They found the breast cancer when she was sixty-five years old.

(2) They had to remove one of her breasts.

(3) Not long after that, the Alzheimer’s started.

(4) She didn’t recognize her children, or her grandchildren, not anyone.

(5) She didn’t even recognize me.

(6) But she never forgot she was missing a breast.

A) None

B) 1

C) 2

D) 4

E) 5

60.

(1) I only saw my mother’s father three times in my life. It’s unclear how many children he had: more than twenty, fewer than thirty, according to my mother’s calculations.

(2) The first time I saw him, he came to our house at night, when we were about to go to bed. He introduced us to Verónica, his youngest daughter. She was four or five years old, younger than I was.

(3) “Say hi to your aunt Verito,” he said to me and my sister. And then: “I’ve got your birthdays written down. I never forget my grandchildren.”

(4) They left around midnight, driving away in a Renoleta. It was cold. My mother had to lend Verito one of my sister’s sweaters.

(5) “They’ll never give that sweater back,” my mother told my sister over breakfast, containing her rage, or maybe just resigned.

(6) The second time I saw him, some time later, was on my mother’s birthday.

(7) She was happy. I remember that absurd and true sentence: He will always be my father.

(8) The last time I saw him was in a hospital. He shared a room with three other dying old men. My mom told me to go in and see him, to say good-bye.

(9) I looked at the old men; all of them looked alike. I tried to recognize my mother’s father, but I couldn’t. I stared at them for a while, and then I left.

A) None

B) 3

C) 4 and 5

D) 7

E) 8 and 9

61.

(1) While we’re making tea, Mariela tells me that when she was in school, there was a pregnant nun.

(2) I ask her when, where. “At Mater Dei. I was really little, in the fourth grade.”

(3) Mariela’s eyes are brown. For a second, I manage to picture her face when she was little.

(4) “They kept her hidden away, but we saw her once. They asked us to keep the secret.”

(5) I ask her if they kept the secret. “I don’t know about my friends,” she replies, “but I did.”

(6) “You’re the first person I’ve told,” she says.

(7) “Thirty years later?”

(8) “Yes, thirty,” she says.

(9) She looks down at her hands. I also look at her hands.

(10) She pinches or caresses a breadcrumb. She lights a cigarette.

(11) “No,” she says then. “Thirty-five.”

A) None

B) 3

C) 9

D) 10

E) 11

62.

(1) In Chile, no one says hi to each other in elevators. You get in and pretend you don’t see anyone, you pretend you’re blind. And if you say hello, people look at you strangely, sometimes they don’t even return the greeting. You share your fragility in silence, like a sacrifice.

(2) How hard would it be to say hello, you think, while the door opens on an in-between floor. There are already nine, ten people, and no one else can fit. Someone’s headphones are playing a song that you know and like.

(3) It would be easier to embrace the woman standing there in front of you. What you and she share is the effort to avoid touching each other.

(4) You remember getting punished once when you were little, maybe eight years old: you’d been caught in the girls’ bathroom swapping kisses with a little classmate. It wasn’t the first time you and she had kissed each other. It was a game, a kind of dare. A teacher saw you, scolded you, brought you to the principal’s office.

(5) Your punishment was to stand face-to-face, staring into each other’s eyes and holding both hands, in the middle of the playground for the entire recess, while the other children yelled and teased you.

(6) She cried from the shame. You were on the verge of tears, but you kept your eyes on her face, you felt a kind of sad fire burning. Her name, the girl’s, was Rocío.

(7) How long was that recess? Ten minutes, maybe fifteen. You never again spent fifteen minutes looking into another person’s eyes.

(8) It would be easier to just embrace the stranger there in front of you. You are both looking down; you are taller than she is. You focus on her black, still-wet hair.

(9) The tangled strands of that long, straight hair: you think about the hair that you used to untangle, carefully, on certain mornings. You learned the technique. You know how to untangle the hair of another person.

(10) Now almost everyone has gotten off the elevator, and only she and you are left. With each new space that opens up, you take the opportunity to move apart. You could stand even farther apart, each of you clinging to your corner, but that would be demonstrating something. It would be the same as embracing.

(11) She gets off one floor before you. And it’s strange and somehow horrible that when you see your body multiplied in the mirrors you feel the immense relief that you feel now.