Maya's Notebook: A Novel (38 page)

We depend more than ever on firewood and the black cast-iron stove, where the kettle is always ready to make maté or tea; there is an ever-present scent of smoke, a fiery fragrance on clothes and skin. Living with Manuel is a delicate dance: I wash the dishes, he brings in the firewood, and we share the cooking. For a time we shared the cleaning too, because Eduvigis stopped coming to our house, though she still sent Juanito to pick up our laundry and bring it back washed, but now she’s come back to work.

After Azucena’s abortion, Eduvigis kept very quiet, going into town only when absolutely necessary and not talking to anybody. She knew there was gossip about her family, circulating behind her back; lots of people blame her for letting Carmelo Corrales rape their daughters, but there are also those who blame the daughters “for tempting their father, who was a drunk and didn’t know what he
was doing,” as I heard someone say at the Tavern of the Dead. Blanca explained that Eduvigis’s meekness about the man’s abuse is common in these cases, and it’s unfair to accuse her of complicity because she was a victim too, like the rest of the family. She was afraid of her husband and could never confront him. “It’s easy to judge others if you’ve never suffered an experience like that,” Blanca concluded. She got me thinking, because I was one of the first to judge Eduvigis harshly. Ashamed of myself, I went over to her house for a visit. I found her leaning over her sink, washing our sheets with a scrubbing brush and harsh blue soap. She dried her hands on her apron and invited me in for
un tecito
, a little cup of tea, without looking at me. We sat down in front of the stove to wait for the kettle to boil, then drank our tea in silence. The conciliatory intention of my visit was obvious, but it would have been uncomfortable if I’d asked her forgiveness and a lack of respect to mention Carmelo Corrales. Both of us knew why I was there.

“How are you, Doña Eduvigis?” I finally asked, when we’d finished our second cup of tea, all from a single tea bag.

“Getting by, that’s all. And you,
mijita
?”

“Getting by too, thanks. And your cow, is she well?”

“Yes, yes, but she’s getting old.” She sighed. “Not giving much milk. She must be getting feeble, I think.”

“Manuel and I are using condensed milk.”

“
Juesú!
Tell the gentleman that tomorrow morning Juanito will be bringing you a little milk and cheese.”

“Thank you so much, Doña Eduvigis.”

“And I guess your house isn’t too clean . . .”

“No, no, it’s pretty dirty. Why should I lie to you?” I confessed.

“
Jué!
Forgive me.”

“No, no, nothing to forgive.”

“Tell the gentleman he can count on me.”

“As usual, then, Doña Eduvigis.”

“Yes, yes,
gringuita
, as usual.”

Then we talked about sickness and potatoes, as protocol demands.

This is the recent news.
Winter in Chiloé is cold and long, but much more bearable than those winters up north in the world. Here we don’t have to shovel snow or wrap up in furs. We have classes in school when the weather allows, but they play
truco
in the tavern every day, even when the sky is shattered with lightning. There are always enough potatoes for soup, wood for the stove, and maté for friends. Sometimes we have electricity, sometimes just candlelight.

If it doesn’t rain, the Caleuche team practices ferociously for the championship in September. None of the boys’ feet have grown, and their soccer cleats still fit. Juanito is a sub, and Pedro Pelanchugay was elected as the team’s goalkeeper. In this country everything is resolved by democratic voting or by appointing commissions, somewhat complicated processes; Chileans believe that simple solutions are against the law.

Doña Lucinda had her one hundred and tenth birthday
and has started looking like a dusty rag doll in the last few weeks. She no longer has the energy to dye wool and she spends her time sitting staring toward the side of death, but she’s got new teeth coming in. We don’t have
curantos
or any tourists until spring, and meanwhile the women knit and make handicrafts, because it’s a sin to have idle hands; laziness is for men. I’m learning how to knit so I won’t look bad. For the moment I make scarves that can’t really go wrong, with thick wool and a basic garter stitch.

Half the population of the island has a cold, bronchitis, or aches in their bones, but if the National Health Service boat is a week or two late, the only one who misses it is Liliana Treviño. Rumor has it she’s got a thing going on with the beardless doctor. People don’t trust physicians who don’t charge them anything. They’d rather treat themselves with natural remedies and if it’s something serious, with the magical resources of a
machi
. The priest, however, always comes to say mass every Sunday, to keep the Pentecostals and evangelicals from getting the upper hand. According to Manuel, that wouldn’t be easy, because the Catholic Church is more influential in Chile than it is in the Vatican. He told me that this was the last country in the world to legally approve the right to divorce and the law they’ve got is very complicated. It’s actually easier to murder your husband or wife than divorce them, so no one wants to get married and most children are born out of wedlock. They don’t even talk about abortion, which is a rude word, though it’s widely practiced. Chileans venerate the Pope, but they don’t heed him in sexual matters and their consequences, because he’s a well-off, elderly celibate, who hasn’t worked a day in his life, and doesn’t really
know much about it.

The soap opera advances very slowly. It’s on its ninety-second episode, and we’re still in the same stories as at the beginning. It’s the most important event on the island. People suffer the characters’ misfortunes more than their own. Manuel doesn’t watch television, and I don’t understand that much of what the actors say and almost none of the plot. It seems that someone called Elisa was abducted by her uncle, who fell in love with her and has her locked up somewhere, while her aunt is looking for her to murder her, instead of killing her husband, which would be more reasonable.

My friend La Pincoya and her sea lion family aren’t at the cave. They emigrated to other waters and other rocks, but they’ll come back when the season changes. The fishermen have assured me that they’re creatures of deeply ingrained habits, and they always come back in the summer.

Livingston, the carabineros’ dog, is full-grown now, and he’s turned out to be a polyglot: he understands instructions in English, Spanish, and Chilote. I taught him four basic tricks that any domestic dog learns, and the rest he picked up on his own. He herds sheep and drunks, fetches prey when they take him hunting, raises the alarm if there’s a fire or a flood, sniffs out drugs—except for marijuana—and pretends to attack if Humilde Garay orders him to in demonstrations, but in real life he’s very gentle. He hasn’t recovered corpses, because we haven’t been fortunate enough to have any, as Garay puts it, but he did find Aurelio Ñancupel’s four-year-old grandson, who got lost up on the hill. Susan, my ex-stepmother, would pay a fortune in gold for a dog like Livingston.

I’ve missed two meetings of the good witches in the
ruca
, the first when Daniel was here and the second this month, because Blanca and I couldn’t get to Isla Grande; there was a storm in the forecast, and the captain of the port wouldn’t let any boats out to sea. I was very disappointed, because we were going to bless a newborn baby one of them had recently had, and I was looking forward to giving him a sniff; I like children when they don’t talk back yet. I’ve really missed our monthly coven in the womb of Pachamama with those young, sensual women, healthy in their hearts and minds. Among them I feel accepted; I’m not the gringa, I’m Maya, one of the witches, and I belong to this land. When we go to Castro we usually sleep over for a couple of nights with Don Lionel Schnake, with whom I would have fallen in love if Daniel Goodrich hadn’t crossed my astrological chart. He’s irresistible, like the mythical Millalobo, enormous, ruddy complexioned, mustachioed, and lusty. “What a lucky fellow you are, you Communist, to have this lovely
gringuita
land in your house!” he exclaims every time he sees Manuel Arias.

The investigation into Azucena Corrales’s
case came to nothing for lack of proof. There was no evidence that the abortion was induced; that’s the advantage of a concentrated infusion of avocado leaves and borage. We haven’t seen the girl since, because she went to live in Quellón with her older sister, Juanito’s mother, who I’ve never even met. After what happened, Officers Cárcamo and Garay began
to look into the paternity of the dead baby on their own and concluded the same as what was already known, that Azucena had been raped by her own father, just as he’d done to his other daughters. That is
privativo
, as they say here, and nobody feels they have the right to intervene in what goes on behind closed doors. People wash their dirty linen at home.

The carabineros tried to get the family to report the fact, so they could legally intercede, but to no avail. Blanca Schnake couldn’t convince Azucena or Eduvigis to make a formal accusation either. Gossip and blame were flying around, and the whole town had an opinion on the matter, but eventually the scandal dissipated into hot air. Nevertheless, justice was done in the least expected way when Carmelo Corrales got gangrene in his one remaining foot. The man waited until Eduvigis went to Castro to fill in the forms for the second amputation and injected himself with a whole box of insulin. She found him unconscious and held him until he died, minutes later. No one, not even the carabineros, mentioned the word
suicide
; by general consensus the sick man died of natural causes, so he could be given a Christian burial and avoid more humiliation for the unfortunate family.

They buried Carmelo Corrales without waiting for the itinerant priest, with a brief ceremony officiated by the church’s
fiscal
, who praised the deceased’s boat-building abilities, the only virtue he could pull out of his sleeve, and entrusted his soul to divine mercy. A handful of neighbors attended out of compassion toward the family, Manuel and I among them. Blanca was so furious about what happened to Azucena that she didn’t make an appearance at the ceme
tery, but she bought a wreath of plastic flowers in Castro for the grave. None of Carmelo’s children came to the funeral, only Juanito was there, wearing the suit from his first communion, too small for him now, holding hands with his grandmother, who wore black from head to toe.

We’ve just celebrated the Feast
of the Nazarene on the island of Caguach. Thousands of pilgrims turned up, including Argentineans and Brazilians, most of them in big barges where two or three hundred people fit, standing all squished together, but some also arrive in traditional boats. The vessels sail precariously on the rough sea, with big dense clouds in the sky, but nobody worries, because they believe the Nazarene protects the pilgrims. This is not exactly true; more than one boat has gone down in the past, and Christians have been known to drown. In Chiloé lots of people drown because nobody knows how to swim, except those in the navy, who are forced to learn.

The very miraculous Santo Cristo consists of a wire framework with a wooden head and hands, a wig of human hair, glass eyes, and a suffering face, bathed in tears and blood. One of the sacristan’s jobs is to go over the blood with nail polish before the procession. He is crowned with thorns, dressed in a purple robe, and carries a heavy cross. Manuel has written about the Nazarene, which is three hundred years old now and is a symbol of the faith of Chilotes. It’s no novelty for him, but he went with me to Caguach. For me, raised in Berkeley, the spectacle could
not be more pagan.

Caguach Island is just three or four square miles in size and has five hundred inhabitants, but during the January and August processions the devout swell the population by thousands. They require the presence of the navy and the police to keep order during the navigation and the four days of ceremonies, during which the devout come en masse to pay for their vows and promises. The Santo Cristo does not forgive those who don’t pay their debts for favors received. During mass the collection plates fill to the brim with money and jewelry. The pilgrims pay however they can; there are even those who part with their cell phones. I was scared, first onboard the
Cahuilla
, bouncing over the swells for hours, pushed by a treacherous wind, with Father Lyon singing hymns in the stern, then again on the island, among the fanatics, and finally as we were leaving, when the pilgrims attacked us to get on our boat, because there wasn’t enough transport for the multitude. We brought eleven standing people in our fragile
Cahuilla
, holding each other up, several of them drunk and five children sleeping in their mothers’ arms.

I went to Caguach with a healthy skepticism, just to witness the festival and film it, as I’d promised Daniel, but I have to admit that religious fervor is contagious, and I ended up on my knees in front of the Nazarene, giving thanks for the two pieces of fantastic news my Nini had sent. Her persecution mania leads her to compose cryptic messages, but since she writes frequently and at length, I can guess what she’s saying. The first news was that she finally recovered the big painted house where I spent my childhood, after a three-year legal battle to evict the Indian business
man, who never paid the rent and took shelter in the Berkeley laws, biased on the side of tenants. My grandmother decided to clean it up, do the most necessary repairs, and rent out rooms to university students in order to finance it and live there herself. I’m so looking forward to walking through those wonderful rooms! And the second bit of news, much more important, is about Freddy. Olympia Pettiford showed up in Berkeley, accompanied by another lady as imposing as herself, dragging Freddy between them, to hand him over into Mike O’Kelly’s care.

In Caguach Manuel and I
camped in a tent, because there weren’t enough rooms to rent. They should be better prepared for the invasion of believers that’s been happening every year for more than a century. The day was damp and freezing, but the night was much worse. We were shivering, fully dressed, inside our sleeping bags, with woolen hats on, thick socks, and mittens, while rain fell on the canvas and pooled under the plastic floor. Finally we decided to zip the two sleeping bags into one and sleep together. I stuck myself to Manuel’s back, like a rucksack, and neither of us mentioned the agreement we’d made in February that I would never get into bed with him again. We slept like angels until the racket of pilgrims started up outside.