Cold love

It was a summer night in Santiago in 1983, and Mateo Rossi was driving home in his Fiat 600. Like every day, he had spent it working in the lab, and like every summer day, he drove home with the windows down. Mateo worked at the faculty of sciences and was an expert in psychrophilic fungi, specifically Geomyces pannorum. He had spent several years specializing in Switzerland and traveling the world giving lectures at conferences. Winters were dedicated to Patagonia, where he conducted research and rested. That was his life, and it hadn’t changed much in the last twenty years. At home, his wife and daughters were waiting for him to have dinner. It was almost nine, the time the curfew started. Seated at the table, a plate of tagliatelle ai funghi awaited them—a coincidence that felt unnecessary. In the dining room, the clinking of cutlery mixed with the background sound of the radio tuned to the Police station. “Dad, you won’t believe it,” began Nina, his eldest daughter, speaking as fast as teenagers do. “Today we found out that Simón wasn’t just seeing Rosa—he was also seeing Tatiana! After history class, we went out to the yard with Rosa and Antonia Ramirez, whose locker is next to Tatiana’s, and she saw Simón leaving a letter in Tatiana’s locker. Antonia doesn’t like Tatiana—I think it’s because she also likes Simón—but she’s friends with Rosa, even though Rosa is Simón’s girlfriend. So, when Simón left, Antonia opened Tatiana’s locker and gave the letter to Rosa.” Mateo stared at his plate, twirling the tagliatelle around his fork, while Nina’s words and the noise of the radio filtered into his head without disrupting his thoughts, which remained fixed on lab matters. Without pausing for breath, Nina continued, “It was a birthday letter! Rosa was mad at first and even cried a little, but when we started reading it, she burst out laughing because it was full of cheesy stuff he’d also said to her. Plus, we noticed spelling mistakes all over the place. That’s when Rosa said out loud—” Mateo suddenly focused on an announcement from the radio. He stood up to turn up the volume and listened to the colonel’s voice repeating the message: “Attention: power outage on Grecia Avenue, between Tobalaba Avenue and Vicuña Mackenna.” In Mateo’s world, this meant only one thing: the university would lose power, and the fungi would lose refrigeration, endangering the environmental conditions of his Geomyces and, consequently, a year’s worth of work. With a napkin still in hand and Nina protesting about his lack of attention, Mateo rushed out of the house and got into his Fiat 600, heading toward the university. It was 8:50 p.m. At that hour, the streets were empty, and every driver on the road felt like an accomplice. Mateo was swift—there were no red lights to respect if it meant getting to the university before nine. Once there, he entered through the south gate leading to the lab parking lot, climbed the stairs, grabbed three racks of samples, and loaded them onto the front seat of his Fiat. With the windows down, he waved the napkin high in the air, driving with his hazard lights on at the fastest speed that wouldn’t raise suspicion, just in case a Police checkpoint appeared. His heart was pounding. It was past nine, and the only sound in the streets was the barking of dogs. He wondered if the FPMR could be behind the blackout. “Cowards,” he thought, and for the first time, he conceived of Science as an act of rebellion. When he arrived home, frozen despite the warm temperature, he saw the front door open and hurried to carry the samples to the kitchen. There, his wife and daughters were waiting, having emptied the freezer. “If you’d taken one more minute, I would’ve gone out to kill you,” his wife said, pointing to the freezer and adding, “It’s just until the power comes back.” Mateo, who was gradually stopping his shivering, closed the fridge door and turned to Nina. “So, what was Rosa about to say?” Nina, caught off guard by her father’s question, responded with a smirk: “She said, ‘What a fucking retard.’”