Something Fierce (30 page)

As we lined up at the checkout, we noticed the man joining a line farther down. He glanced at us and smiled, keeping his lips together.

I grabbed a tabloid magazine and pretended to read about a popular television diva while we waited for our turn with the cashier.

“Now,” Alejandro whispered.

I dropped the magazine into the cart, and we walked briskly out the automatic doors. Losing ourselves in the crowd of people on the sidewalk, we slipped into the telephone company next door. We'd noted on our way into the supermarket that the phone company had mirrored windows, impossible to see through from the outside. These were things we kept track of, now that we were in the resistance. We'd locate all entrances and exits and formulate at least two getaway plans, whether we were in a restaurant, at work or on the street. We were learning to categorize people at a glance: informer, agent, possible helper, militant.

From inside the telephone company, we saw the man run outside and look in all directions. His right hand reached for something under his jacket. Was he carrying a pistol or a semi-automatic? Three men who also looked Chilean were waiting in a grey Peugeot 504 nearby, dressed in suits and dark glasses. No doubt they too were armed to the teeth. The man in the brown suit jumped into the passenger seat, and the four tore off at high speed. The car had two antennas, one in the front and one in the back: the mark of a secret police car.

Alejandro and I stood behind the glass for what seemed an eternity, in silence. My spirit left my body and hovered just above it as I caught snatches of long-distance conversations coming from the phone booths.

“Mother, please. They have supermarkets in Neuquén. In fact, there's one right next door. Where do you think I am, the Wild West?”

“I love you, I can't wait to see you...”

“Not at all like I expected—”

“Cold, windy, the biggest piece of shit—”

“I think it's safe to go now,” Alejandro said.

“What?”

“I think it's safe to go now.”

“Go where?”

“I don't know.”

It was futile to wait for my spirit to join my body again. I realized as I stood in that Patagonian phone company that maybe it never would. This was the biggest sacrifice I'd have to make. The body cannot take chronic terror; it must defend itself by refusing to harbour the spirit that wants to soar through it and experience life to the fullest. And so it was that, as we stepped outside into the glaring light, got on the first bus we saw and zigzagged our day away, my spirit was left back in the phone company along with the mirrored windows and the echo of voices connecting to far-off homes.

When Alejandro and I arrived home late that night, grocery-less, we collapsed onto the bed and fell into a desperate sleep, clutching each other like terrified children. The wind picked up, sending the metal door rattling, the dead bolt banging back and forth in its lock.

At any moment a kick could replace the howl of the wind. Four pairs of shoes could run into the house and bear our bodies away, leaving the door helplessly banging and dusty footprints on the just-waxed floor.

24

T
HE JAM-PACKED YELLOW bus wove at top speed along the Alameda in downtown Santiago. The faces on the bus were like my own, and the voices too. I inhaled the smell of diesel as my ears registered the cacophony of a late-winter city night. The bus honked constantly at the thousands of pedestrians who darted through the traffic, a classic Colombian cumbia blaring from its speakers.

Our handing off of the goods had been a success. A letter we'd received in our post office box in Neuquén, addressed to Señor Soto, had gone on and on about the weather and the vineyards in Mendoza. When we'd ironed the back, brown letters had appeared, outlining in detail how we were to make the delivery. Alejandro and I were instructed to enter Chile in jeans and jean jackets as a young couple hitchhiking through the country, a common activity for middle-class South American youth. The operation had to be completed over a weekend, a challenge since Santiago was twenty-four hours away from Neuquén by bus.

We'd arrived at Terminal North, one of three long-distance bus terminals in Santiago, on the Saturday night. The place was always teeming with secret police and informers, and we knew that everyone from the kiosk owners to the bathroom attendants was bribed to report any suspicious activity. We'd grabbed our backpacks and strolled casually to the corner. A car with the right licence plate numbers and two people inside stopped at the light. The back door swung open and we jumped in, trusting that comrades awaited us, not the secret police. Otherwise, torture would begin immediately; the first twenty-four hours were always the worst, since information was freshest then. But within minutes the exchange was over. We handed over the goods, which we'd transferred from inside the lining into the usual compartments of our packs, and were dropped off ten blocks from the terminal.

When we'd alerted our superiors in Lima about the secret policeman in the supermarket, they'd advised us to keep our check and counter-check skills honed and practise them twenty-four hours a day. If we saw a secret policeman again, we should let them know immediately. Otherwise, we were to continue as before. You couldn't crumble and throw in the towel over something like being followed. Since that time, our apartment in Neuquén had also become a safe house for resistance members passing through.

Operation Condor sowed fear in insidious ways. One was to spread rumours that the resistance was infiltrated: that behind every contact you had, every letter you received, every instruction you were given lay an infiltrator, an informer, an agent, a torturer. Because of this, it was difficult to recruit new members. The belief that the resistance was run entirely by Pinochet's dictatorship, in order to trap people, was ingrained so deeply that people laughed each time new graffiti appeared in strategic places around Santiago. Commuters passed wall after wall of red-painted slogans proclaiming that 1986 was the decisive year, but most believed the graffiti had been put there by the military to give police an excuse to raid more homes, to arrest more people, to reinstate curfew. I'd had my own doubts after seeing the secret policeman at the supermarket. How could they have got on to us so quickly in Neuquén? At what point had we shown up on their radar: Lima? La Paz? Villa María? All the way back in Vancouver? And who were Lucas and Juan, really? What if Lucas had become an informer, or had always been one? Why were they sending us to the heart of Santiago to drop off the goods? Doubts ran through my mind in an endless loop. I assumed Alejandro had his doubts, too, though neither of us expressed them to the other. We understood that the paranoia bred by the dictatorship was another way they tried to break us.

After a quick walk around La Moneda Palace, which still bore signs of bombing on the day of the coup—“I have to see it, Skinny, I just do,” Alejandro had pleaded—we boarded a midnight bus to Osorno. From there, we'd take a bus to Neuquén, crossing back over the snowy Andes, arriving late Sunday night, just in time for work on Monday. It was hard to watch the country I was dedicating my life to pass by outside the window.

BY MAY 1987, Alejandro and I had moved into an apartment on the top floor of a high-rise on the most coveted corner of downtown Neuquén, where we continued to lodge resistance members on a regular basis. Although I liked our more comfortable central quarters, I'd felt a pang the day we left the wrong side of the tracks. Sometimes when I'd walked the dark roads at night, I'd heard men murmur, “There she is,” in Spanish, not Romanian, so I'd understood they were looking out for me. That neighbourhood had been a safe place for us. The police steered clear of those roads, afraid of a people who leapt to defend themselves if one of their own was hurt. Chilean labourers had no such luck with the police or other authorities, as I saw when I made my weekly pilgrimage to the government building in pursuit of my Argentinian national identity card. While I stood in line for hours with the requested paperwork, some U.S. dollars for bribe money tucked in my hand, I watched the Chileans who were trying to get a work permit—which would end their undocumented status—be publicly humiliated again and again.

We were renting our new place from our closest friend at the flying club for the same sum we'd been paying in the Gypsy neighbourhood. His father had given him the place for dalliances, he said, but now that he was engaged, he wouldn't be needing it. Once we had a presentable apartment in an appropriate location, I started giving private English classes in the mornings and on weekends, charging a pretty penny.

I'd become friends with many of the teachers at the English Institute of British Culture, and one in particular seemed perfect for recruitment as a helper. Alejandro and I shared many meals with Ximena and her husband, Agustín, who taught electronics at the technical high school. They were both leftists from Córdoba; her father was a military man who had refused to participate in Jorge Videla's 1976 coup and so had been kept in jail for the entirety of the dictatorship, tortured almost to death. Now someone in Neuquén would know if we'd fallen and could notify the right people as soon as possible. “To the great avenues opening again,” Agustín said, tears in his eyes, as we raised a toast.

Alejandro was well on his way to becoming a licensed private pilot, learning on Tomahawks and Cessnas. We'd already done a preliminary flight into the Chilean Andes, planning to play dumb if we were intercepted. We couldn't afford flight training for me yet, so I did two more border runs by land—dropping off goods each time—wearing fashionable clothes paid for in monthly instalments. That was my everyday look now. My hair was permed and streaked with blond highlights, my makeup heavy, my shoulder pads huge. Documents arrived regularly in our post office box, and we'd spend hours poring over them: in-depth analyses of the situation in Chile, instructions about our next move and information on world politics to contextualize it all.

The Terror came in waves, sometimes forcing me to hang on to walls as I walked down the street. Once it hit me as I waited in a bank lineup. The world started to spin, but before I could faint and draw unwanted attention, I'd sat down cross-legged on the marble floor and dropped my head into my hands. When people inquired, I explained I suffered from terrible migraines. I'd made my way home slowly, covered in cold sweat.

The much-anticipated assassination attempt against Pinochet had happened the previous September. His convoy had been ambushed on a quiet country road in the Maipo Valley, an hour out of Santiago, where Pinochet kept a weekend home. The eighteen-strong guerrilla force managed to kill five of the general's men, but the rocket launcher meant for the dictator had jammed. A grenade tossed under his car had also failed to go off. The window of Pinochet's bulletproof limousine was riddled with submachine-gun fire, but to no avail. Within minutes the attack was over. The resistance fighters escaped in their fake secret police cars, M-16s pointed out the open windows. Their disguises were so convincing, all the military roadblocks opened up for them as they sped through.

Two hundred people had contributed their skills to the assassination attempt. It had been modelled on similar actions, most notably the assassination of Nicaraguan strongman Anastasio Somoza in Asunción, Paraguay, in 1980, and was so carefully planned it had seemed foolproof. Its failure wasn't the first major blow for the resistance during the decisive year. In mid-1986, a ship carrying $30 million worth of arms for the resistance had been seized by the Chilean military after people broke under torture and released key information.

The assassination attempt had unleashed a wave of repression that extended to the Chilean shantytowns in Neuquén. Many were arrested in nighttime raids and sent back into the hands of Pinochet. The Cold War was still the excuse for suppressing workers' movements in the rest of Latin America, but change was in the air. Mikhail Gorbachev's anti-Stalinist approach as the Soviet Union's Communist Party general secretary pointed to the end of the Cold War soon. Right-wing dictatorships were falling in every country from the Philippines to Paraguay. It looked as if Nelson Mandela's release from jail was imminent, making a future African National Congress government in South Africa a real possibility. The first intifada was raging in Palestine; the Sandinistas had prevailed in Nicaragua, despite the Reagan-backed Contra war; and the FMLN was likely to seize power in El Salvador. As for Argentina, we'd just survived the first coup attempt against Alfonsín.

Alejandro and I had awoken on Easter Sunday 1987 to the news that a coup was well under way. While we burned all our documents and flushed the ashes down the toilet, millions took to the streets around the country. In Neuquén, forty thousand people, a third of the city's population, congregated outside the government building to protest the coup, clasping hands and singing the national anthem. It was a strange sight to behold: the rich mixing with the poor, illegal Chilean construction workers singing the Argentinian anthem alongside wealthy women in Vidal Sassoon haircuts. We watched from our high-rise, longing to be on the street below. Our radio was tuned to the live broadcast from the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, where a million people had gathered and the sound of warplanes flying overhead could be heard. Dozens of secret police agents lay on the tops of the buildings around us, invisible from below, taking pictures of the faces in the crowd with their high-tech zoom lenses.