Excerpt:
CHAPTER 48. TURNING POINT
That night we fled the Vitacura bubble. Tiare dragged me to Bellavista, an explosion of color and noise sprawled at the foot of Cerro San Cristóbal. We abandoned the BMW to fate in a crammed side street and plunged into a tide of people drinking pisco sours on makeshift terraces. Coming from the almost military order of Barcelona’s Eixample, the place struck me as gorgeous, exhilarating chaos. Walls drowned in graffiti, flickering streetlamps, cumbia and rock blasting at full volume. We ate empanadas de pino and queso in a ramshackle joint that shook with laughter and clatter, and she explained that Bellavista was the cradle of Santiago’s bohemia. She told me stories about Pablo Neruda, about the dictatorship, about how the city was still trying to rewrite its own scars. I realized then that she didn’t just love the tidy beauty of the cordillera; she also loved this fracture, this urban wound.
The next day, while she worked, I wandered aimlessly. My Bip! metro card almost empty, I let myself be swallowed by the city’s bowels. Plaza de Armas first, mingling with street vendors and preachers, then lost inside the commercial galleries downtown: a maze of tiny shops and hair salons. This was not the luxury mock-up I saw from the eleventh floor; this was a city that smelled of sweat, fried food, and stubborn hope. For the first time in days, my architect’s mind relaxed. I stopped judging and began, slowly, to see—and to understand.
When I returned to the apartment, Tiare was already home. She greeted me with an embrace and a kiss worth framing.
“You smell like Santiago,” she said, breathing in the street that clung to my T-shirt.
“I’ve been trying to understand the Chilean calefont. I mean, the city,” I answered, grinning.
She laughed, dropped onto the sofa, and patted the cushion beside her. I curled up against her.
“And what have you learned?”
“That I can’t plan everything. That you have to leave room for the tremor.”
“Exactly,” she murmured, stroking my hair. “And did you like the tremor we had last night between the sheets?”
In the silence that followed, with the golden afternoon light pouring through the picture window, I knew the real new chapter wasn’t the journey itself; it was this tamed, chaotic space beside her. Distance had brought us together, but proximity—sharing the cantankerous water heater and the muddy Mapocho—was what would rewrite the story entirely. The “ground wire” she claimed I was had begun to unplug itself, ready to send down a new root right here, in this apartment. Far from frightening me, the idea sparked an excitement I’d never felt before. At last I was learning to stop building and simply start being.
The first two weeks melted into a delicious, strange routine. I grew used to waking beneath the blinding sun rising over Aconcagua, to the half-hour shower dance required by the damned calefont, to the apartment’s silences broken only by the ping of a message from Vicent or the distant growl of traffic. Tiare and I became two beings who synchronized the moment evening fell. She told me office politics—an alien drama to me—and I described my incursions downtown, my failed attempts to walk around Vitacura, my observations about the omnipresent exposed brick and raw concrete.
But the architect in me refused to stay still. I had accepted the lesson of “leaving room for the tremor,” yet that didn’t mean abandoning construction altogether. I needed a project, even if only inside my head. One afternoon I found some old plans of Tiare’s from her university days and mentally redrew her entire apartment: I removed the open-plan kitchen, added a slatted-wood partition, designed a more functional terrace. It was silly, but it kept my mind alive.
“Look, what if we use the fact I’ve got a whole month and flip this place around?” I blurted one night, showing her a sketch on my tablet. I had transformed her living room. She glanced at it quickly while devouring a bowl of mote con huesillo.
“Cool. But no. I like it just as it is, with its mess. If you make it too tidy you’ll suffocate me. Besides, I don’t have the cash for renovations right now, superstar architect or not.”
A gentle wake-up call. I was still trying to fix her life when all I had to do was live it with her.
The turning point arrived on a Wednesday. Tiare was working late, finishing a report for a client in Las Condes, and warned me a couple of colleagues from the consultancy were coming over afterward for a quick dinner.
“It’s a drag, but this way you’ll meet more people,” she texted.
In the end only one showed up: Sebastián, a structural engineer who left before midnight, abandoning a half-empty bottle of Carmenère on the glass table. Tiare went to remove her makeup; I, still buzzing from work talk, picked my laptop up off the floor. I had missed an email. From Patricia. The name rang a bell: an urban planner who had worked with Vicent on a European project that never materialized. Subject line blunt: “Santiago – Downtown Opportunity.”
I opened it, curious. Patricia wasn’t Chilean, yet her Spanish was flawless, straight to the point. She was in Paris or London—I can’t remember—but scouting in Santiago.
“I’m looking for properties, or rather, ruins with potential. There’s a luxury-project bubble all around the periphery, but the center… the center is falling apart. Young people, creatives, don’t want Vitacura anymore. They want real life: Bellas Artes, Lastarria…”
My architect ears pricked up. Bellas Artes. I had loved that neighborhood: early-twentieth-century buildings, plaster moldings, wrought-iron balconies. The antithesis of the glass tower. The email went on, almost issuing orders:
“A four- or five-story building downtown with that turn-of-the-century architecture… huge potential. But nobody here will touch renovation. They’d rather demolish and build upward. I have the capital and the market vision. You have the structural know-how and—forgive my saying so—that European obsession with detail. If you feel like stopping being a tourist in an overpriced flat and getting your hands dirty, let me know. I already know where we can start.”
My pulse raced. This wasn’t Tiare’s kiss or the sight of the cordillera. This was the architect’s primal engine: the smell of wet cement, the promise of geometry. Just as I was about to reply, Tiare emerged from the bathroom wearing a nearly transparent white T-shirt that reached mid-thigh, hair tousled, face bare, radiating the absolute peace she only achieved at day’s end. She sat beside me.
“What’s got you so focused? Did Vicent dump another mess on you?...
...“
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