Maya's Notebook: A Novel (39 page)

We didn’t go hungry, because there were endless food stalls selling empanadas, sausages, seafood, potatoes baked in embers, and whole lambs roasted on spits as well as Chilean desserts and cheap wine, disguised in soda bottles,
because priests don’t look kindly on alcohol at religious festivals. The facilities, a string of portable toilets, were not plentiful, and after a few hours of use were disgusting. Men and boys slipped behind trees to relieve themselves, but it was a bit more complicated for the women.

On the second day Manuel had to use one of the portable toilets, and inexplicably, the door got stuck and he was trapped inside. At that moment I was wandering around the stalls lined up along the side of the church where they were selling handicrafts and bric-a-brac. I heard the commotion and went over out of curiosity, little suspecting what was going on. I saw a group of people shaking and shoving the little plastic hut to the point of almost knocking it over, while inside Manuel was shouting and pounding on the walls like he was deranged. Several people were laughing, but I realized Manuel’s anguish was that of someone buried alive. The confusion increased, until a
maestro chasquilla
pushed through the crowd and proceeded to calmly dismantle the lock with a penknife. Five minutes later he opened the door, and Manuel burst out like a meteorite and fell to the ground, clutching his chest and retching. Nobody was laughing anymore.

Father Lyon came over, and between the two of us we helped Manuel stand up, held him by the arms, and took a few hesitant steps in the direction of the tent. Alerted by the uproar, two carabineros came over to ask if the gentleman was ill, though they probably suspected he’d had too much to drink, because by then there were quite a few drunks staggering around. I don’t know what Manuel thought, but it was as if the devil had appeared. He pushed us away with an expression of terror, tripped, fell to his knees, and vom
ited a greenish froth. The carabineros tried to take control, but Father Lyon stood in front of them with the authority conferred by his saintly reputation, assuring them that it was just indigestion, and we could take care of the patient.

The priest and I took Manuel to the tent, cleaned him up with a wet facecloth, and left him to rest. He slept for three hours straight, shrunken, as if he’d been beaten. “Leave him alone,
gringuita
, and don’t pester him with questions,” Father Lyon ordered me before going to fulfill his duties, but I didn’t want to leave him. I stayed in the tent to watch over his sleep.

On the field in front of the church they’d set up several tables, and the priests were stationed there to hand out communion during mass. After that the procession began, with the image of the Nazarene carried on a platform by the faithful, who were singing at the tops of their lungs, while dozens of penitents dragged themselves through the mud on their knees or burned their hands with the melting wax of the candles, begging for forgiveness for their sins.

I couldn’t fulfill my promise to film the event for Daniel, because in the rough trip to Caguach I’d dropped my camera in the sea; a minor loss, considering that one woman dropped her dog. They rescued him from the water half frozen, but still breathing—another miracle of the Nazarene, as Manuel said. “Don’t you start up with your atheist ironies, Manuel, we could sink,” Father Lyon replied.

A week after the pilgrimage
to Caguach, Liliana Treviño
and I went to see Father Lyon, a strange, almost clandestine trip, its purpose kept secret from Manuel or Blanca. The explanations had been awkward, because I have no right to scrutinize Manuel’s past, much less behind his back. The affection I feel for him is what prompted it, an affection that keeps growing the longer I live with him. Now that Daniel’s left and winter’s settled in, we spend a lot of time alone in this doorless house, where the space is too small to keep secrets. My relationship with Manuel has become closer; he finally trusts me, and I now have full access to his papers, his notes, his recordings, and his computer. The work has given me a pretext to rummage through his drawers. I once asked why he doesn’t have any photographs of relatives or friends, and he explained that he’s traveled a lot, has started from scratch several times in different parts of the world, and along the way he’s gradually gotten rid of much of the material and sentimental burdens most people carry around. He says that you don’t need photos to remember the people who matter to you. In his archives I haven’t found anything about the part of his past that interests me. I know he was in prison for over a year after the military coup, that he was banished to Chiloé and, in 1976, left the country; I know about his wives, his divorces, his books, but I don’t know anything about his claustrophobia or his nightmares. If I don’t find out, it’ll be impossible for me to help him, and I’ll never truly get to know him.

I get along really well with Liliana Treviño. Her personality is very much like my grandma’s—energetic, idealistic, intransigent, and passionate—but not so bossy. She arranged it so we could go to see Father Lyon discreetly in the National Health Service boat, at the invitation of the doctor, her
boyfriend, who’s called Jorge Pedraza. He looks much younger than he actually is. He’s just turned forty and has been working in the archipelago for ten years. He’s separated from his wife; they’re going through drawn-out divorce proceedings and have two children, one with Down’s syndrome. He plans to marry Liliana as soon as he’s free, although she doesn’t see any reason to do so; she says her parents have lived together for twenty-nine years and raised three children without any papers.

The trip took forever, because the boat stopped in several places, and when we got to Father Lyon’s it was already four in the afternoon. Pedraza dropped us off there and carried on his normal rounds, promising to pick us up an hour and a half later to take us back to our island. The iridescently plumed rooster and the obese ram I’d seen last time were in the same places, guarding the priest’s little tiled house. The place looked different to me in the winter light; even the plastic flowers in the cemetery looked faded. He was waiting for us with tea, pastries, freshly baked bread, cheese, and ham, served by one of his neighbors, who takes care of him and orders him around as if he were a child. “Put on your little poncho and take an aspirin, priesty. I’m not here to look after sick little old men,” she instructed, complete with Chilean diminutives, while he grumbled. The priest waited till we were alone and then begged us to eat the pastries, because if we didn’t he’d have to eat them, and at his age they landed like rocks in his stomach.

We had to get back before it got dark, and since we didn’t have much time, we got straight to the point.

“Why don’t you just ask Manuel what you want to know,
gringuita
?” the priest suggested, between sips of tea.

“I have asked, Father, but he brushes me off.”

“Then you have to respect his silence, child.”

“Forgive me, Father, but I haven’t come here to bother you simply out of curiosity. Manuel’s soul is sick, and I want to help him.”

“And what might you know about soul sickness,
gringuita
?” he asked me, smiling sarcastically.

“Quite a bit, actually, because I arrived in Chiloé with a sick soul, and Manuel took me in and has helped me to get better. I have to return the favor, don’t you think?”

The priest talked to us about the military coup, the implacable repression that followed, and his work at the Vicarage of Solidarity, which didn’t last long, because he was arrested too.

“I was luckier than others,
gringuita
, because the cardinal rescued me in person in less than two days, but he couldn’t keep them from banishing me.”

“What happened to people who were detained?”

“It depends. You might fall into the hands of the political police, the DINA or the CNI, the carabineros or the security services of one of the branches of the armed forces. Manuel was first taken to the National Stadium and then to the Villa Grimaldi.”

“Why does Manuel refuse to talk about it?”

“It’s possible he doesn’t remember,
gringuita
. Sometimes the mind blocks out traumas that are too serious as a defense against dementia or depression. Here, I’ll give you an example of something I saw at the Vicarage of Solidarity. In 1974 I had to interview a man just after they’d released him from a concentration camp, and he was physically and morally destroyed. I recorded the conversation, as we always did. We
managed to get him out of the country, and I didn’t see him again for a long time. Fifteen years later I went to Brussels and I looked him up, because I knew he was living in that city, and I wanted to interview him for an essay I was writing for the Jesuit magazine
Message
. He didn’t remember me, but he agreed to talk to me. The second recording didn’t resemble the first in any way.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“The man remembered that he’d been arrested, but nothing else. The places, dates, and other details had been erased from his mind.”

“I guess you made him listen to the first recording.”

“No, that would have been cruel. In the first recording he told me about the torture and sexual brutality he’d been subjected to. The man had forgotten in order to go on living with integrity. Maybe Manuel has done the same.”

“If he has forgotten, then what Manuel has repressed surfaces in his nightmares,” interrupted Liliana Treviño, who was listening to us very closely.

“I need to discover what happened to him, Father. Please help me,” I begged the priest.

“You’ll have to go to Santiago,
gringuita
, and look in the most forgotten corners. I can put you in contact with people who will help you—”

“I’ll go as soon as I can. Thank you so much.”

“Call me whenever you want to, child. Now I have my own cell phone, but none of that electronic mail. I haven’t managed to unravel the mysteries of a computer. I’ve fallen very behind in communications.”

“You’re in communication with heaven, Father. You don’t need a computer,” Liliana Treviño said.

“Even in heaven they’ve got Facebook these days, my child!”

Since Daniel left, my impatience
has been growing and growing. Almost three interminable months have gone by, and I’m worried. My grandparents never spent time apart due to the possibility that they wouldn’t be able to find each other again. I’m afraid that’s what’s happening to Daniel and me. I’m starting to forget his smell, the feel of his hands, the sound of his voice, his weight on top of me, and I’m assaulted by obvious doubts. Does he love me? Is he thinking of coming back? Or was our encounter just a fling for a peripatetic backpacker? Doubts and more doubts. He writes to me, which should reassure me, as Manuel reasons when I drive him up the wall, but he doesn’t write enough, and his messages are too temperate; not everybody knows how to communicate in writing as well as I do, if I do say so myself, and he doesn’t say anything about coming back to Chile. That’s a bad sign.

I wish I had someone to confide in, a friend, someone my own age to pour my heart out to. Blanca gets bored with my litanies of amorous frustrations, and I don’t dare bug Manuel too much; his headaches are getting more frequent and intense. They hit him all of a sudden, and there’s nothing any painkillers, cold compresses, or homeopathy
can do to alleviate them. For a while he tried to ignore them, but at Blanca’s and my insistence he phoned his neurologist, and soon he has to go to the capital to have that damn bubble examined. He doesn’t suspect that I’m planning to go with him, thanks to the generosity of the marvelous Millalobo, who offered to pay my way and gave me a little bit more for pocket money. I can use those days in Santiago to finish putting the pieces of the puzzle of Manuel’s past into place. I need to fill in the gaps in the facts I’ve found in books and on the Internet. The information is freely available, but it’s like peeling an onion, layer after thin and transparent layer, without ever getting to the heart of the matter. I’ve found out about accusations of torture and murders, which were extensively documented, but I need to get up close to the places where they happened if I’m going to try to understand Manuel. I hope the contacts Father Lyon gave me will be useful.

It’s difficult to talk to Manuel and other people about this. Chileans are prudent, fearful of offending or giving a straight opinion. Their language is a dance of euphemisms; the habit of caution is deeply rooted, and there is a lot of resentment under the surface that nobody wants to air out. It’s as if there was a sort of collective shame, for some because they suffered and for others because they benefited, for some because they left, for others because they stayed, for some because they lost their relatives, for others because they turned a blind eye. Why does my Nini never talk about any of this? She raised me in Spanish, even though I answered in English. She used to take me to La Peña, a Chilean joint, in Berkeley, where Latin Americans congregated to listen to music and to see plays or films, and she
made me memorize Pablo Neruda’s poems, which I barely understood. I knew Chile through her before ever setting foot here. She told me about steep snow-capped mountains, dormant volcanoes that sometimes wake up with an apocalyptic shudder, the long Pacific coast with its choppy waves and foamy collar, the desert in the north, dry like the moon, which very occasionally flowers into a Monet painting, the cold forests, clear lakes, bountiful rivers, and blue glaciers. My grandma talked about Chile with the voice of a woman in love, but she never said a word about the people or the history, as if it were a virgin, uninhabited territory, born yesterday of a telluric sigh, immutable, frozen in time and space. When she got together with other Chileans, her tongue quickened and her accent changed, and I couldn’t follow the thread of the conversation. Immigrants live with their eyes on the distant country they’ve left, but my Nini never made any effort to visit Chile. She has a brother in Germany with whom she rarely communicates; her parents have died, and the myth of the tribal family doesn’t apply in her case. “I don’t have anyone left there. Why would I go?” she used to say. I’ll have to wait to ask her face-to-face what happened to her first husband and why she went to Canada.