Doppelgänger (chapter 2)
- Hello? I'd like to speak to Lucia.
- She's speaking.
- This is Ludmila. I got a message from a physiotherapist friend of mine, asking me to call you.
- Shall we meet? I'd really like to meet you and I think we have a lot to talk about.
- All right! What do you say we go for a walk along the Copacabana promenade? Is an hour from now good for you?
- Yes, see you then!
Based on our first conversation, I realized that my double was as simple and straightforward as I am. When we met for the first time, she burst into tears. Unlike me, she wasn't ashamed to show her emotions in public... Although at first her reaction took me aback, it was like a release. When we started telling each other our stories, we never stopped. We spent hours and hours sitting on a bench on the promenade, next to the statue of Drummond. Every now and then, someone would pass by whispering and pointing their finger at us: we were so similar and so absorbed in our conversation that we drew the attention of other passers-by.
We really were very similar, despite having different mothers. We were born eight months apart. Ludmila's mother was a nurse who worked on an oil rig with my father. When they met, my father was already married, but said he was in the process of getting divorced. The divorce never came through, but the two of them moved in together when Ludmila was born. My father spent part of his days off living with his official wife, and part with 'the other'.
We discovered that he called both of us Lulu, his princesses, but the similarities stop there. The father Ludmila knew was a soap opera lover, liked to cook and was affectionate towards her mother. At least in the early years he was like that, but then things changed. His favorite TV show was "Sister Wives", a reality show about the life of a bigamous man and his four wives. "At the end of each chapter, my parents would always start fighting," Ludmila confided to me, "I thought it was so stupid! I never understood why. Their fight invariably ended with my mother leaving the room and slamming the door. At this point, my father would always flash me one of his endearing smiles and say 'Why complicate life? Everything could be so simple!' I didn't really understand what my father was talking about, but I was sure that fight was just another one of Mom's 'crazy things'.
The father I knew was a bohemian. When he got off the oil rig, he was eager to resume his social life. During these periods, he would often come home at dawn, half drunk. Ludmila told me that in the last six years of his life, he had changed. Even during the periods when he lived with her and her mother, he would leave the house for several hours and come home drunk at dawn. "Sometimes he was so out of sorts that he got my name mixed up. Instead of Lulu, he called me Luciana. But I never took any notice, I knew that by breakfast time, everything would be back to normal." "Luciana?" asked Lucia, "Funny, he used to make the same mistake with me."
Although Lucia and Ludmila were shocked to discover their father's double life and all his tricks to maintain a semblance of normality in their lives, they excused him. "The poor thing must have been very unhappy in his marriage and didn't have the courage to leave me to live alone with my mother, a woman more concerned about her lovers than her family," Lucia once commented to her sister. What's more, nothing could have been more gratifying than their discovery, in adulthood, that they had a sister, with whom they shared many affinities. Especially as they were only children, accustomed to a lonely childhood and adolescence.
They started meeting twice a week and talking to each other every day on the phone. Their topics of conversation seemed inexhaustible. On one of these days, when Ludmila went to her half-sister's house to have an afternoon snack, the phone rang just as Lucia was making the coffee. "Please, I'd like to speak to Lucia," said a young woman when Ludmila answered the phone. "Who is this?" she asked. "My name is Luciana and she doesn't know me, but I have a very delicate matter to discuss with her."
Ludmila, with the white face of a ghost, dropped the phone on the floor.
- Son of a bitch, she screamed, as she threw a glass ashtray at the picture of her father hanging on the wall.
- What's wrong? Lúcia asked as she rushed into the room as soon as she heard the sound of shattering glass.
- I think there are only four more to find now," Ludmila replied tearfully.
- What are you talking about?
- The look-alikes, Lucia, the look-alikes.