Catalina

Catalina is the wife of Lucas Pereyra and the mother of their son, Maiko. Seen through Lucas’s retrospective account, she is both a partner worn down by the strain of their marriage and a person who names a desire the marriage cannot contain. Her decision to stop concealing her relationship with a woman precipitates their separation; her later willingness to imagine a cooperative family around Maiko gives that rupture a shape beyond simple loss.

Marriage, parenting, and financial strain

One morning, Maiko had climbed into the couple’s bed before the six o’clock alarm. Catalina and Lucas spoke in whispers, careful not to wake him. Lucas remembers the intimacy of the exchange, but also the possibility that they avoided facing each other because of their stale morning breath. The small scene holds both parental tenderness and marital distance: their son lies between them, while even an ordinary conversation is shaped by what they do not quite want to confront.

The household was under sustained financial pressure. Lucas had not been working, and for a period they lived on Catalina’s salary. As his projects stalled, domestic problems accumulated alongside overdue expenses: the kitchen sink came loose and was propped up with cans; the washing machine broke; the old oven began to smell; a living-room light failed; and the car’s steering wheel shook. Lucas postponed repairing a tooth because the crown was expensive, and the couple put off an IUD. They fell behind on Maiko’s kindergarten fees and household charges, and their health-insurance payment was also late. When both cards were declined at Walmart, Maiko protested on the floor while they returned the groceries in the cart. Lucas recalls their anger and embarrassment, but the inventory also shows how economic insecurity entered the ordinary maintenance of their home and family.

Exhaustion and conflict

Lucas describes the marriage as a cycle of mismatched energy. After evenings out, he sometimes imagined accepting the attention of women he met, but says he went home instead. Catalina, meanwhile, was often exhausted by work and wanted to go to bed; Maiko sometimes joined them during the night, and the family’s mornings revolved around preparing his drink and taking him to kindergarten. Lucas experienced the repeated pattern as sexual frustration and accumulated resentment. That account is his, not an independent explanation of Catalina’s feelings: what it does make clear is that he turned a shared domestic routine into a grievance about intimacy.

Their arguments brought that imbalance into the open. Lucas remembers Catalina crying after a dispute, sitting on the kitchen counter with crossed legs and ice over her eyes because she had to go to work the next day. She told him she was tired of his defeated mood and could not understand what he wanted. He says he felt cornered and answered by complaining about their sex life, describing it as reduced to two encounters a month. His account reveals how readily he made his frustration the center of the conversation, while Catalina’s fatigue and anger appeared as a response to the atmosphere he had helped create.

The disclosure that changes the marriage

After a night in the hospital, Lucas returned with X-rays of a cracked rib. Catalina told him that Maiko would sleep at her mother’s house and raised the need for them to discuss what they wanted from their relationship. She asked who Magalí Guerra Zabala was. Lucas explained his distant attachment, which he regarded as relatively childish; he understood Catalina to be asking because she had something of her own to disclose.

Catalina told him that she was in love with a woman, a friend, and that she did not intend to keep the relationship hidden. She described her partner as a doctor, recounted meeting her at a foundation cocktail event, and said that they had exchanged emails and messages, met privately, and smoked cannabis together. By then, she said, they had loved each other for almost a year. She was unsure whether the label lesbian described her, but she was certain that she loved this woman. The distinction matters: Catalina does not present a settled identity category as a prerequisite for speaking about her desire.

Lucas admits that he had assumed she was seeing a male doctor connected with the foundation. Her disclosure therefore unsettled not only his marriage but also his expectations about what kind of rival he was facing. He remembers feeling physically unwell as he walked through closed streets, and describes himself as shocked and sexually wounded. His reaction is part of the scene’s significance, but it does not displace Catalina’s agency: she had reached a point at which secrecy was no longer acceptable to her.

Separation and a changed family

Lucas recalls Catalina’s decision as a shock, and reports that it reverberated among their relatives and friends. Her mother asked him about the situation; her father did not speak to her for two months; and their cousins and friends were initially unsettled. Lucas says that people gradually began to understand. These consequences underline that Catalina’s disclosure changed more than the terms of the couple’s private relationship: it challenged the assumptions through which their wider circle had understood her and the family.

After the separation, Lucas says he has no objection to Maiko living with Catalina and her partner on the weekdays when Maiko is not with him. He also wants to meet her partner and imagines inviting the two women to his home for a meal, so that Maiko can see the adults in his life together without nervousness or silence. He extends the possibility to shared outings and perhaps even holidays, while acknowledging that such arrangements might be too much. These are Lucas’s stated hopes, not proof that every proposal has been adopted, but they mark a change from treating separation as the destruction of a single family arrangement to considering how Maiko’s family might be organized differently.

Narrative role

Catalina is chiefly rendered through Lucas’s recollection, which gives the account emotional intensity but also sets limits on what can be known about her: the reader receives her words and choices as he remembers and interprets them. His narration sometimes admits that he misread her, most plainly when he expected a male lover and was wrong. Against that fallibility, Catalina’s disclosure stands as a decisive act of self-definition. Her willingness to end concealment forces Lucas to reconsider a family model that had already become a source of anguish. In the aftermath, he imagines family not as a structure that must remain intact in its old form, but as a relationship among people who may share care, meals, and time across new arrangements.