Maya's Notebook: A Novel (16 page)

About four in the morning
Manuel and I went back to our house, cold by then, because the stove had been out for a while. He went to get kindling while I lit some candles and heated up water and milk on the little paraffin ring. I hadn’t noticed, but I was trembling, not so much from the cold as from the tension of that night, the gale, the bats, the dying man, and something I sensed in the Corraleses’ house and didn’t know how to explain, something evil, like hatred. If it’s true that houses get permeated with the life lived within their walls, in the Corraleses’ house there is wickedness.

Manuel quickly lit the fire, and we took off our wet clothes, put on our pajamas and thick slipper-socks, and wrapped up in Chilote blankets. He drank his second cup of tea and I drank my milk, both of us standing up, drawn to the stove. Then he checked the shutters, in case they’d come undone in the wind, filled my hot water bottle, left it in my room, and went into his. I heard him go to the washroom, come out again, and get into bed. I stayed up listening to the last grumblings of the storm, the claps of thunder, which were moving off, and the wind, which was starting to tire of blowing.

I’ve developed various strategies to overcome my fear of nighttime, and not one of them works. Since I arrived in
Chiloé I’m physically and mentally healthy, but my insomnia has gotten worse, and I don’t want to resort to sleeping pills. Mike O’Kelly warned me that the last thing an addict recovers is normal sleeping patterns. I avoid caffeine in the evenings and things that might get me worked up, like books or movies with violent scenes, which might later come to haunt me at night. Before I go to bed I drink a glass of warm milk with honey and cinnamon, the magic potion my Popo used to give me when I was a little girl, and a tranquilizing infusion that Eduvigis makes for me of lime flower, elder, mint, and violet. But no matter what I do, and even though I go to bed as late as possible and read until I can’t keep my eyes open, I can’t deceive my insomnia, which is implacable. I’ve spent many nights of my life not sleeping. I used to count sheep; now I count black-throated swans or white-bellied dolphins. I spend hours in the darkness, one, two, three in the morning, listening to the house breathing, the whispering of ghosts, monsters scratching under my bed, fearing for my life. I get attacked by my lifelong enemies, sorrow, loss, humiliation, and guilt. Turning on the light is the equivalent of giving in. Then I won’t sleep for the rest of the night; with the light on, the house doesn’t just breathe, it also moves, palpitates, its protuberances and tentacles come out, the ghosts acquire visible outlines, the frights get worked up. This would be one of those endless nights. I’d had too much and very late stimulation. I was buried under a mound of blankets, watching swans fly by, when I heard Manuel arguing in his sleep in the room next door, as I’d heard so many other times.

Something provokes these nightmares, something related
to his past and maybe to this country’s past. I’ve discovered a few things on the Internet that might be significant, but I’m just taking shots in the dark, with very few clues and no certainty. It all started when I wanted to find out about my Nini’s first husband, Felipe Vidal, and I was led to sites about the 1973 military coup, which changed Manuel’s whole life. I found a couple of articles published by Felipe Vidal about Cuba in the 1960s, when he was one of the few Chilean journalists who wrote about the revolution, and other reports of his from different parts of the world; he seemed to travel a lot. A few months after the coup he disappeared; that’s the last thing that comes up on the Internet about him. He was married, and he had a son, but the names of his wife and son do not appear. I asked Manuel where exactly he’d met Felipe Vidal, and he answered curtly that he didn’t want to talk about that, but I have a feeling that the stories of these two men are connected somehow.

In Chile, many people refused to believe in the atrocities committed by the military dictatorship, until irrefutable evidence emerged in the 1990s. According to Blanca, no one can deny that abuses were committed anymore, but there are still those who justify them. You can’t touch this subject in front of her father or the rest of the Schnake family, for whom the past is best kept buried. According to them the military saved the country from communism, imposed order, eliminated the subversives, and established the free market economy, which brought prosperity and obliged Chileans, lazy by nature, to work. Atrocities? They’re inevitable in war, and that was war: a war against communism.

What was Manuel dreaming of
that night? I sensed the evil presences of his nightmares again, presences that have scared me before. Finally I got up and, feeling along the walls, went to his room, which was faintly illuminated by the distant glow from the stove, barely enough to discern the outlines of the furniture. I had never been in that room. We’ve cohabited closely; he helped me when I had colitis—there’s nothing as intimate as that—we run into each other in the bathroom, he’s even seen me naked when I get out of the shower distractedly, but his bedroom is forbidden territory, where only Dumb-Cat and Literati-Cat can enter without an invitation. Why did I do it? To wake him up so he wouldn’t keep suffering, to deceive my insomnia and sleep with him. That’s it, nothing else, but I knew I was playing with fire. He’s a man and I’m a woman, even if he is fifty-two years older than me.

I like to look at Manuel, wear his old sweater, smell his soap in the bathroom, hear his voice. I like his ironic sense of humor, his confidence, his quiet company, I like that he doesn’t know how fond most people are of him. I’m not attracted to him, none of that, but I feel a huge affection, impossible to put into words. The truth is, I don’t have many people to love: my Nini, my dad, Snow White, two who I left in Las Vegas, no one in Oregon, apart from the vicuñas, and a few who I’m starting to love too much on this island. I approached Manuel, without being careful not to make noise, slipped into his bed, and hugged his back, with my feet between his and my nose in the nape of his neck. He didn’t move, but I knew he’d woken up, be
cause he turned into a block of marble. “Relax, man, I’ve only come to breathe with you,” was the only thing that occurred to me to say. We stayed like that, like an old married couple, bundled up in the warmth of the covers and the warmth of us both, breathing. And I fell soundly asleep, like the times when I used to sleep in between my grandparents.

Manuel woke me up at eight with a cup of coffee and toast. The storm had lifted and left the air washed clean, with a fresh scent of wet wood and salt. What had happened the night before seemed like a bad dream in the morning light that bathed the house. Manuel was clean-shaven, his hair wet, dressed in his usual way: misshapen pants, high-collared shirt, sweater frayed at the elbows. He handed me the tray and sat down beside me.

“Sorry. I couldn’t sleep, and you were having a nightmare. I guess it was stupid of me to come into your room . . . ,” I said.

“Agreed.”

“Don’t pull that old maid’s face on me, Manuel. Anyone would think I committed an irreparable crime. I didn’t rape you or anything even close.”

“Thank goodness,” he answered me seriously.

“Can I ask you something personal?”

“That depends.”

“I look at you, and I see a man, even though you’re old. But you treat me the same way you treat your cats. You don’t see me as a woman, do you?”

“I see you as you, Maya. That’s why I’m asking you not to come back to my bed. Never again. Are we clear on that?”

“We are.”

On this bucolic island in
Chiloé, the agitation of my past seems incomprehensible. I don’t know what that inner disquiet was that used to give me no respite, why I jumped from one thing to the next, always looking for something, never knowing what. I can’t manage to clearly remember those urges and feelings from the last three years, as if the Maya Vidal of that time was another person, a stranger. I told this to Manuel in one of our rare more or less intimate conversations, when we’re alone, it’s raining outside, there’s a power cut, and he can’t take refuge in his books to escape from my chatter. He told me that adrenaline is addictive, a person gets used to living on tenterhooks, can’t do without the melodrama, which is after all more interesting than normality. He added that at my age nobody wants spiritual peace, I’m at the adventurous age, and this exile in Chiloé is a pause, but it can’t turn into a way of life for someone like me. “So in other words, you’re insinuating that the sooner I get out of your house, the better, right?” I asked him. “Better for you, Maya, but not for me,” he answered. I believe him, because when I leave, this man will feel lonelier than a clam.

It’s true that adrenaline is addictive. In Oregon there were some fatalistic guys who were very comfortable with their disgrace. Happiness is slippery, it slithers away between your fingers, but problems are something you can hold on to, they’ve got handles, they’re rough and hard. In
the academy I was my very own Russian novel: I was bad, impure, and damaging, I disappointed and hurt those who loved me, my life was fucked up. On this island, however, I feel good almost all the time, as if by changing the scenery I’d also changed my skin. Nobody knows my past here, except Manuel; people trust me, think I’m a student on vacation who’s come to help Manuel with his work, a naive and healthy young girl who swims in the freezing sea and plays soccer like a man, a bit of a silly
gringa
. I don’t plan to disappoint them.

Sometimes during the hours of insomnia my conscience niggles me about all that I did before, but it fades at dawn with the smell of the wood burning in the stove, Fahkeen’s paw scratching at me to take him outside, and Manuel with his allergies clearing his throat on his way to the bathroom. I wake up, yawn, stretch in bed, and sigh with contentment. I don’t have to beat my chest or walk on my knees or pay for my mistakes with tears and blood. As my Popo used to say, life is a tapestry we weave day by day with threads of different colors, some heavy and dark, others thin and bright, all the threads having their uses. The stupid things I did are already in the tapestry, indelible, but I’m not going to be weighed down by them till I die. What’s done is done; I have to look ahead. In Chiloé there’s no fuel for bonfires of despair. In this house of cypress the heart is calmed.

In June 2008 I finished the academy program in Oregon, where I’d been trapped for so long. In a matter of days I could leave through the front door and would only miss the vicuñas and Steve, the favorite adviser of the female half of the student body. I was vaguely in love with him, like the rest of the girls, but too proud to admit it. Others had
slipped into his room secretly at night and had been sent kindly back to their own beds; Steve was a genius at rejection. Freedom, at last. I could rejoin the world of normal beings, gorge myself on music, movies, and forbidden books, open a Facebook page, the latest thing in social networks, which we all wanted at the academy. I swore I’d never again set foot in the state of Oregon as long as I lived.

For the first time in months I thought of Sarah and Debbie, wondering what had become of them. With luck they’d have finished high school and would be in the stage of finding their first jobs. It wasn’t likely they’d go to college; they weren’t smart enough for that. Debbie was always terrible at school, and Sarah had too many problems; if she hadn’t gotten over her bulimia, she was probably in the cemetery.

One morning Angie invited me to go for a walk among the pines, which was quite suspicious, because it wasn’t her style. She told me she was satisfied with my progress, that I’d done the work on my own, the academy had just facilitated it, and now I could go on to college, although there might be a few gaps in my studies. “Chasms, not gaps,” I interrupted. She tolerated my impertinence with a smile and reminded me that her mission was not to impart knowledge—any educational establishment could do that—but something much more delicate: to give young people the emotional tools to help them realize their maximum potential.

“You’ve matured, Maya, that’s the important thing.”

“You’re right, Angie. At sixteen my plan was to marry an elderly millionaire, poison him, and inherit his fortune,
and now my plan is to raise and sell vicuñas.”

She didn’t find that funny. She proposed, after beating around the bush a little more, that I should stay on at the academy as a sports instructor and assistant in the art workshop for the summer; then I could go directly to college in September. She added that my dad and Susan were getting divorced, as we already knew, and that my dad had been assigned to a Middle East route.

“Your situation is complicated, Maya, because you need stability in the transition phase. Here you’ve been protected, but in Berkeley you’d lack structure. It’s not good for you to go back into the same environment.”

“I’d live with my grandmother.”

“Your sweet grandmamma is no longer at an age to—”

“You don’t know her, Angie! She’s got more energy than Madonna. And stop calling her grandmamma—her nickname is Don Corleone, like the Godfather. My Nini raised me with the back of her hand; what more structure can you ask for?”

“We’re not going to argue over your grandmother, Maya. Two or three more months here could be decisive for your future. Think it over before you answer.”

Then I understood that my dad had made a pact with her. He and I had never been very close. In my childhood he was practically absent; he arranged things so he’d be far away, while my Nini and my Popo dealt with me. When my grandpa died and things got ugly between us, he sent me away to be confined in Oregon and washed his hands of me. Now he’s got a Middle East route, perfect for him. Why did they even bring me into the world? He should have been more careful when he was with the Laplander
princess, since neither of them wanted children. I imagine even way back then there were condoms. All this passed through my head like a flash, and I rapidly arrived at the conclusion that it was useless to defy him or try to negotiate with him; he’s as stubborn as a mule when he gets something in his head. I’d have to resort to another solution. I was eighteen years old, and he couldn’t legally force me to stay in the academy. That’s why he’d sought the complicity of Angie, whose opinion had the weight of a diagnosis. If I rebelled, it would be interpreted as a behavioral problem, and with the signature of the resident psychiatrist they could keep me there by force or in another similar program. I accepted Angie’s proposition so swiftly that anyone less sure of her authority would have been suspicious, and I immediately began to prepare my long-postponed escape.