Such a Pretty Fiction: Chapter 1
This is the first chapter my novel, Such a Pretty Fiction.
The sunlight streaming in the window was the gold of early evening. Voices in the street floated up through the glass door on the patio. From the table I could see the Andes peeking over the roofs of the other apartment buildings. Something about the light and the noise of the city felt like spring. On fall evenings at home in Seattle, the sounds out my window were of people hurrying home. But in the spring it was the sound of people off to be somewhere, to do something, calling me to join them. And soon enough I would. Sophie was on her way home. We would go down to the crisp evening air, the people on the sidewalks, and the rushing of the cars.
Sophie and I had lived together eight years earlier in Buenos Aires. My first job after college. Without Sophie, I wouldn’t have come back to South America. A month earlier, she’d emailed me. She’d gone to school with Soledad in France, and Soledad wanted to build an app to help her nonprofit work as a doctor. Soledad was in the news. I argued with Candace that it would be great publicity for the company. Let me build the app and go to Chile. I would stay with Sophie, then travel with Soledad to make sure it all went smoothly.
At first, Candace had been jealous, asking questions about what had happened between me and Sophie. I told her the truth. Nothing. We had shared an apartment, a bathroom, and the landlord’s cat in a condo overlooking the Puente de la Mujer, the Women’s Bridge, built with a cantilever kicked up like the leg of a dancer. Eventually, Candace agreed. I’d put everything else on hold to get the app ready. Then four days before my flight, Candace and I had fought again, our biggest ever. I told her we couldn’t go on the way we had been, and I left for the airport.
For three days I’d been staying with Sophie in Santiago, putting the final touches on the app and catching up with everything she had done since leaving Argentina. As I followed her out of the elevator and through the lobby, it felt like I had stepped into a day from eight years before.
She led me down the sidewalk, past the thronging escalators out of the metro stations, through the people finishing their days and starting their evenings. To them, the city was familiar. Their homes glittered in the hive of apartment buildings towering up around us. A kiss on the cheek, a change of clothes, and they would go back out into their city. I walked among them, a traveler. Everything was fresh. New. I was liberated, a boat cast off and starting out into the ocean. Sophie steered me through the city. It was an evening smuggled out of our past, as if I had found it, pristine and forgotten, in the bottom of my backpack as Candace shouted at me from the doorway. It was like a day before I met Candace. Before we started the company. Before my life had constricted, and the possibilities become fewer. I was with an old friend, going to meet someone famous. Santiago felt like a beginning.
“How did you find the city today, Logan?” Sophie grew up in Paris. She had a French accent I found endearing.
“Great.”
A car honked at a man talking on his phone. He held up his hand and sauntered across the street. “I went to the Plaza de Armas and watched the old men play chess.” The boards had been set up in a building I wanted to call a grandstand, or maybe a gazebo. When I tried to think of the word in Spanish, I realized I wasn’t sure of the word in English.
“All day you watched the men play chess?” Sophie asked.
“No. Before lunch I was there.”
She nodded. “And did you play?”
“Just watched.”
“Always intimidating to play with strangers.”
I smiled. It was hard to imagine Sophie being intimidated. She left France to live in Buenos Aires, learned Spanish, moved alone to San Francisco and then alone to Santiago, where she worked as a librarian at a French school lending books to the children of expats.
“In Buenos Aires,” I said, “I would watch them play chess in the Plaza de Mayo. I tried to get up the courage to join them, but I never did.” Sophie turned and I followed her in front of a café throwing light onto the street. “Here?” I was excited to finally meet Soledad. Through the window I tried to pick her out at one of the tables.
“Not yet.”
“Back in Seattle, I thought about how I never played chess with the men in Argentina. I felt like a coward. When I was standing there today, it didn’t seem important.”
“Another day. Maybe you will play them tomorrow.”
We were on an avenue lined with wide trees, three feet across. The branches stretched out above the road over the tops of black lampposts made to look like cast iron.
Suddenly the lamps switched on, flickering before catching. As the light hit the street the last bit of dusk disappeared. A moment earlier, the sky was gray. Now it was dark beyond the halos of the streetlights. Gravel crunched under our feet, and a chill breeze blew across my face. It felt like winter.
“The café has a very nice tea,” Sophie said. “Very nice for cold evenings.”
I tried to guess which door would be ours. The shops lining the avenue had been converted from old houses. Low walls protected small yards. Light spilled out of windows onto the path. A brass placard announced a bookstore. Beyond it was a wine shop brimming with neatly stacked bottles.
“Here we are.” She turned into a small gate beside a sign for a coffee shop. I followed her up a walk into one of the houses. Inside, the café had been decorated to feel like someone’s home. The door opened onto what had been the living room. The counter was set up along the wall.
“Do you see her?” I scanned the tables.
“She will not be here yet.” Sophie smiled. “Soledad is always early. She likes to tease me for being just a little late. So tonight I told her to meet us at six thirty, but you see it is six ten.”
I laughed. “Can I tell her how we beat her?”
“No of course not, or else it will all be for nothing.”
We reached the front of the line. Sophie recommended her tea. “The rooibos has many antioxidants. Good against the cold weather.”
I followed her into the back room. It had been decorated to feel like a study. Bookshelves lined the walls and leather chairs crowded around the tables. A fire crackled in a fireplace.
“Soledad!” Sophie cried. Heads snapped up to see who had shouted. “What are you doing here?” Everyone had turned to look at us except for a girl reading a book. I recognized her from pictures I’d seen online.
Soledad looked like she was finishing a paragraph, but I was sure she was just teasing Sophie. When she finally acknowledged us, she was smiling. She had brown hair that fell to her shoulders, dancing on top of a black sweater. Her golden eyes were laughing.
“Sophie.” She marked her place methodically and slowly shut the book, her finger lying languidly between the pages until the instant before it closed. “I thought I’d have some time to read before you got here. I love reading in front of the fire.”
“I cannot believe you are here so early.” Sophie’s accent was heavier after being surprised. “I was supposed to beat you.”
“Oh?” Soledad smiled, flashing white teeth. I wondered what kind of friendship these two had. This was a game they’d played before.
She turned to me. “You must be Logan. Nice to meet you in person.” She held out her hand. Her skin was soft.
“You too. I have to confess, even after emailing, it’s a little weird to finally meet you. I’ve read a lot about you.”
She smiled, pleased but not smug. “Things have been a bit surreal for me lately too. It’s weird to see yourself in magazines.”
Two years before, Soledad had become small-time famous after the New York Times ran an article about her work with indigenous women in Peru. From that she gained a following for the pictures and videos she posted online. Weather-beaten faces struggling against a system that wasn’t fair. Two months earlier she’d won a Genius Grant. That helped her secure funding for her next project, which is when Sophie put us in touch.
Soledad had gotten into Santiago the day before, back from fundraising in the US. I sat and enjoyed watching two old friends be happy to see each other. They had gone to school together in Paris. They laughed about the sexual exploits of their friend Olivier. Olivier had an on again off again boyfriend named Charlie.
“They were on until Charlie met Soledad,” Sophie confided in me, eyebrows raised at the scandal. “Olivier took it personally.”
Soledad laughed. “Olivier takes everything personally. That’s what makes him so much fun. Le drame. Besides, we didn’t last long. He preferred Olivier.” She stuck her lips out in a pout, making Sophie laugh.
Sophie had heard Charlie and Olivier were on again, Soledad that they were off. They found this uproariously funny.
I liked watching Soledad laugh. Her press photos depicted her as a young professional. They’d been retouched, giving her a glow. Her face had been made up. The pictures she posted of herself showed her in the field, doctoring.
In person she was more like the doctor than the professional. She was neatly dressed, but she wasn’t wearing makeup. Her skin had imperfections that had been brushed out of the press releases. A tiny red spot on her temple, a mole on her chin. But they did nothing to dissuade me from the conclusion I had drawn from the articles. Soledad was beautiful.
“Logan… I’m so glad you made it down here. I’ve been playing around with Nosotras and it looks perfect.”
Nosotras was the name Soledad had chosen for the app. In Spanish the word means us, but it only refers to women. Soledad wanted an app that women could use to talk to doctors and to each other. With our company’s technology that was simple.
“My plan is to start Monday,” she said. “Does that work for you?”
“I’m here to help you, so whatever you want. Sophie and I are going to Valparaiso this weekend, but if you want to start earlier I can make that work too.”
She turned back to Sophie. “Oh, why Valpo? I’m going to be in Viña del Mar, just north of you!” Soledad pronounced the city names with a perfect Spanish accent. According to the articles, she grew up in Colorado but her family was from Chile, which is how she became interested in health in South America. Sophie had told me she was based in Santiago because she could stay with relatives, and because it was the most European of the South American capitals, which made it an easy place to live.
“Valparaiso because of Muriel,” Sophie said.
Soledad shook her head.
“My friend from San Francisco. I went to see her in Chiloe? She’d sailed from the US?”
“Oh, right. With the Spanish boyfriend. Are you going to stay on the sailboat?”
Sophie nodded. “And why will you be in Viña del Mar?”
“A conference. In two weeks my friend Guillermo is emceeing TEDx Viña del Mar. I’m speaking, and he wants everyone to come out and do a practice run. I’m going to talk about Nosotras, Logan. The practice this weekend won’t be much use, to be honest. The real talk will be about the next two weeks. Iquitos, Huaraz, then Cusco, and finally Puno. You’ll film me, we’ll film women using Nosotras, and all of that will go into TEDx Viña del Mar.”
“You will be presenting in Chile about cities in Peru?” Sophie asked.
“Sure,” Soledad said. “People will be there from all over Latin America. It’s a global event. What matters most is that people see we’re using technology. Throw in some compelling video and we’ll be set.”
The conversation drifted back and forth. They talked about their own world. I couldn’t take my eyes off Soledad. It was an effort not to stare. For the next two weeks it would be the two of us. In the jungle, in the mountains. I would be like one of the people in the stories I had read about her. One of the people that went out into the world and refused to accept it as they found it.
Our cups were empty. Soledad stood up. We walked out into the night waiting under the trees. I zipped my coat. “Still feels like winter to me.”
“Spring,” Sophie said. “In the day it is summer. In the night it is winter.”
Soledad left us a block from Sophie’s apartment. “Ciao, Sophie.” She gave her a hug. She hugged me as well, her hair brushing against my face. “Hasta lunes!” she said, slowly enough that I could understand.
Sophie and I stepped into the lobby. The air was heavy with electric heat. As we rode up the elevator, I pictured Soledad, walking through pools of yellow streetlights, disappearing into the dark.