Something Fierce (24 page)

And then I did the impermissible, the inconceivable.

I told him my family was running a safe house. I told him we belonged to the resistance and that I was Chilean. It came out in torrents, like a waterfall crashing down the side of a mountain during spring thaw. I gasped for breath between sentences. I told him about growing up in exile in Canada, about the Return Plan, the trip back to Chile with Trinidad, the day we'd left Bolivia behind. I told him about the starvation, the fear, the return-to-sender letter, the suicide attempt, about how I'd spent the summer swimming daily in Lake Nahuel Huapi while my parents and their Rosarino helpers scoped out the Andes trails. And finally, since it was too late to turn back, I told him about the day I first felt the Terror, something I'd never spoken about before. Icy sweat broke out all over my body, and a rat clawed its way up my spine.

One afternoon in Valdivia, when I was five and Ale was four, we'd been at home with Lucha, our babysitter, when the pictures on the walls started to sway. The china in the cupboards danced. An earthquake, I thought. But no. Military Jeeps had surrounded our house, and soon boots were pounding up the stairs. As the soldiers stormed in, closet doors flew open, drawers crashed to the floor, beds screeched out of their corners. Two soldiers dragged Lucha into the kitchen. Where were my parents? they shouted. I could hear Lucha hiccuping the words. “I don't know. I don't know.”

One of the soldiers reached for my doll. As he backed up, I followed, being careful not to step on the things strewn across the floor: the pink dress made by my great-aunt Perlita, the picture of my grandmother and me at Santa Lucía Hill, the pencil crayons that were a gift from Uncle Jaime. The soldier looked me straight in the eye as he tore my doll's head off. He threw the body down and peered inside her head, as if he might find something hiding there.

Then he produced a chocolate bar. Hershey's, just like on the American TV shows.

“Do you like chocolate?” he asked me. I nodded. Drool poured down my chin. “Where do your parents keep their papers? Tell me, and I'll give you a bite.” More soldiers had come into the room by now. Some of them were laughing so hard they had to lean against the wall.

“Everywhere,” I said. It was true. My parents were teachers and bookworms, and there were papers all over the house. I could see he wasn't satisfied with my answer, though, so I took him to my parents' bedroom and pointed to a shoebox at the back of their closet. I knew there were things in there we weren't allowed to touch.

Ale whimpered in the corner as I devoured the chocolate bar the soldier tossed me.

I glanced up, ashamed, but Alejandro just nodded for me to continue.

“After the military had gone through our stuff, they took Ale and me outside. It was so quiet out there. I figured the neighbours must be lying on their bathroom floors, crouching in their bathtubs, saying their prayers. That's what they'd done when the police raided my friend Romina's house, across the street, and took away her father and her older brother.

“A few days earlier a soldier had knocked on our door and threatened to arrest my mother for wearing pants. In the days following the coup, as you know, a warning was issued that women would no longer wear the pants in Chile. There were already women in jail for not wearing skirts, and women in the street with their pants torn to shreds by soldiers. The soldier had ordered my mother to buy a flag and raise it on the post outside, to show our allegiance to Pinochet. She complied after he left, but she'd put it up only halfway, weeping as she explained to us that it was a sign of mourning.

“The soldiers pushed Ale and me up against the wall of the house, right by the rose bush. From the corner of my eye, I caught a movement in the upstairs window of the house next door. A girl my age, Veronica, lived there with her mother and grandmother. Since the coup, she'd stopped talking to me. My parents said that was because her family was on the right. That day it was an adult looking out the window, watching the scene. Surveying our house, which was surrounded by trucks and Jeeps. Ale and I quaked in the mud as the soldiers formed in a line in front of us, lifting their guns.

“The soldier who'd given me the chocolate bar laughed. ‘Oh, well,' he said. ‘I guess it's the firing squad for you two.' The other soldiers laughed too, as if that was the funniest thing they'd ever heard. ‘Turn around,' he ordered Ale and me. I took her shoulders and turned her so she faced the wall. Then I did the same. ‘Hands up. Both of you,' the soldier yelled. Ale raised her arms. I did too. An intense aroma of roses reached my nose, and all of a sudden I was cold. I heard my teeth chattering in my skull, and then the soldier's voice from very far away: ‘Ready. Aim. Fire.' I was shaking so hard I thought I'd fall down. Ale and I stood there, swaying in the mud, as the soldiers got in their vehicles and drove away. We stayed there until Lucha ran out of the house to get us.”

By the time I was done talking, hours had passed. My yerba maté sat stone cold in its gourd. I was still wearing my jacket, and yet I was frozen solid, shaking uncontrollably. After a moment, I said, “I'm scared.”

It was a long time since I'd uttered those words, and now I couldn't stop. I repeated them like a mantra: “I'm scared, I'm scared, I'm scared.”

Alejandro reached across the space between us to take me in his arms. When the shaking had calmed down, he flipped open the book I'd returned to his bedside table and read me a poem written while Hernández was fighting with the Republicans in Spain. It was about a starving peasant child, with the final lines, “Who will save this child smaller than an oak seed? Who will break the chain that binds him? Let it be the hearts of labourers, who were chained children before they were men.”

Alejandro closed the book and looked me in the eye: “You are that child. I've been waiting for you all my life.”

I'd met my first compañero.

19

I
BUMPED INTO ALE after school on Mitre Street. She was wearing her smock, giggling with her friends, but she pulled me aside.

“Come home today. I need to talk to you. Don't worry, Mami and Bob aren't there.”

I nodded and kept walking. I was with a Malvinas War vet, so everyone on the street was giving us dirty looks. It was June 1984, and I hadn't shown up at school for weeks. Soon after I met Alejandro, I'd basically moved in with him. I'd leave our family's apartment on the Atomic Centre grounds on the school bus every morning, then get off downtown and sleep the day away in his bed while he worked twelve-hour shifts at the nuclear plant. In the afternoon I'd take the school bus back home. For the past few weeks I'd rarely bothered to go home at all, spending the nights at Alejandro's. Mami and Bob had given up on me, shouting that I was the most stubborn, rebellious person they'd ever met. Their apartment was a disaster since I'd let my cleaning duties go.

Alejandro and the ten Malvinas War vets he'd taken in were my new family. Many vets lived on the street and were addicted to drugs. Bariloche had tried everything to get rid of them. They were in and out of jail for vagrancy. Business owners barred them from the sidewalks. Public meetings called for their expulsion. Hanging out on Mitre, the vets harassed tourists for money and complained openly that there was no social safety net for them. I was the only girl at Alejandro's place, and the only teenager. We spent our evenings smoking black tobacco and passing the yerba maté gourd around while the vets swapped stories about the war. We passionately debated democracy, dictatorship and the explosion of pornography now that Argentina's censorship laws had been demolished. The big bang theory, nature versus nurture, the revolution and polyamory were also hot topics. Alejandro was the breadwinner for us all. I'd always considered it my destiny to be part of the revolution, but Alejandro was coming to that choice for himself. We dreamed of being urban guerrillas together.

A few hours after seeing Ale on the street, I took a bus out to the Atomic Centre. As I strolled toward our building, a sense of doom seized me. I made myself climb the stairs to the second floor. The apartment was a mess, as always. Ale was at the table doing homework. I sat down opposite her.

“Mami has disappeared.”

I blinked.

“She left a week ago. She didn't say where she was going or when she'd be back, and obviously I didn't ask. Bob was in and out all week, so I looked after Lalito a lot. Then yesterday afternoon Bob took off, all serious, with Lalito on his shoulders. He said that Mami had gone off to the mountains to try out a trail they'd charted in the summer. She was supposed to meet him back on this side four days ago. But she hasn't come back. And there's no sign of her.”

“Aren't the Andes under six feet of snow right now?”

“Yup. Bob said he's gonna wait at the agreed-on place for a while. Then he'll go in and start looking for her.”

“With Lalito on his shoulders?”

“Yeah. I think Miguel was going to join him.”

She closed her books and looked at me.

“They've agreed to adopt me.”

“Who?”

“Vero's parents. And they'll take Lalito, too. I often take him there.

They love him, and he loves them, too.”

I nodded. I wasn't sure if Vero's parents had literally agreed to adopt Ale, or if she was reading that into their incredible hospitality. In any case, I wasn't about to burst her bubble. I lit a cigarette and watched the streams of smoke billow under the silver dome of the dining room light. There was nothing we could do. We couldn't go to the police, because then we'd all be dead. We couldn't tell any friends, because then we'd all be caught. We couldn't tell the other helpers; compartmentalization was such that no information could be passed on unless explicit orders had been left to do so. All we could do was try to act normal, so that the neighbours wouldn't suspect something was up.

I climbed into the top bunk of the bed I shared with Ale. The heater in our room wasn't working, and ice had formed on the inside of the windows. We shivered in the dark, tuned into every sound. On the bus the next morning I ran into Dalia.

“Where have you been, Carmen? The philosophy teacher asked me the other day if you'd moved back to Canada. I miss you, my friend. If you've decided to drop out of school, at least come over some time.”

“I will. I promise.” I couldn't look her in the eye, for fear I'd fall to pieces.

After Alejandro left for work, I wandered aimlessly around town, diverting my eyes from the Andes shining on the other side of the lake. Mami must be dead. I prayed she hadn't been caught but had died of hypothermia. People said it wasn't a bad way to go; you simply lost consciousness and then froze to death.

Alejandro and I hitchhiked together to the Atomic Centre grounds once his shift was over. Ale sat at the lone table in the apartment, poking at a plate of pasta. She nodded at Alejandro; they'd met many times on Mitre Street. After that, there was nothing to do but wait—we weren't sure for what. My body was so numb I had no sensation in the tips of my fingers. My heartbeat filled my ears. When we heard the door open, Ale glued her eyes to mine. Lalito's footsteps echoed in the hallway, and then there he was in front of us. I jumped up and wrapped him in my arms; his little-boy scent was like no other. Bob limped behind him, body stooped, backpack tattered. He seemed to have aged ten years since I'd last seen him. And behind Bob was my mother. It had to be her. She was holding herself up on the wall as she inched along, her breathing laboured. Her face was purple. And black. And blue. Her eyes were so bloodshot no white was visible. Her face was severely swollen, but not evenly; it was as if she had two hard-boiled eggs stuck to her cheeks. Her hands were purple, too, and some of her nails were gone. Her clothes hung in shreds. Her hair looked like straw. Mami's eyes reached for mine. I opened my mouth, but there was something stuck in my chest. Was it my childhood? A war? A lost country? Who knew? It wouldn't let me breathe or swallow or scream or speak. Ale was holding Lalito. Alejandro had collapsed onto the couch and I could hear Bob in the bathroom throwing up.

A voice reached me from a distance. I was so cold, as if I was trying to shake myself out of my old skin and into a new one. The heater still wasn't working, and it was twenty below zero outside. The voice got closer. My mother's. She was saying that she had died and then come back into her body because she knew she couldn't leave us alone.

I struggled to make sense of her words. For as long as I could remember, she had left us alone. During Allende's years in power, she'd gone to Mapuche land with a literacy campaign. During the exile years in Vancouver, she'd been out day and night organizing for the solidarity movement. After the divorce, she'd left us with our father. Since the Return Plan had come into effect, she'd continually come and gone. So why not leave us once and for all? But now she was talking about wild boars chasing her through the night, under the canopy of the winter forest; about her limp body being carried by a violent river and a male voice, distinctly Chilean, calling to her from the shore.

Mami asked us for help getting into her bed. I couldn't rid myself of the shakes, so Ale had to do it. Bob had left the apartment by now, and soon he returned with Judith and Felicia. As they entered the bedroom, I heard them break into sobs.