Something Fierce (34 page)

“You always hear things, but nothing in particular.”

“Well, there is a resistance. An underground, armed resistance.”

“Good. I'm glad to hear it.”

There was a long pause. I kept my eyes fixed on hers, then pointed calmly toward my chest with my thumb. After a moment, her mouth dropped open. As I put my index finger to my lips, Luisa smiled broadly.

“I need your help,” I said.

“Okay.”

“But you can't ask any questions.”

“Okay.”

By the third week of July, Luisa had managed to steal as many ID cards as we needed. The message in my post office box had included a phone number, for the first time ever. When I dialled the number from a nearby telephone company, a woman answered immediately.

“This is Clara from the company calling,” I said. “Is Señor Torres there, please?”

A man came on the line. “Clarita, dear. How's the company doing?”

“It's fine. All the sales have been made.”

“Good. Let's meet in two days at 10:00 PM at the office. Do you like dulce de leche pastries?”

“Yes.”

“Wear your white pants, and we'll go dancing after.” He hung up. I figured the office was the bus terminal, though I couldn't be sure. The reference to dulce de leche pastries was clearly the password.

When I went to the bus terminal two evenings later, it was Rulo who approached me and asked about the pastries. Within minutes we were zigzagging on foot along the streets that branched off Argentina Avenue. I'd never seen anyone do what he did with such skill. One moment we were walking; the next we were ducking into a building entrance; then we were walking again, in a different direction, all without stopping our conversation. I passed him a small mesh bag that contained a man's sweater. The ID cards were in a plastic bag tucked inside.

“We'll walk for a few more blocks and then split off,” he said.

“Fine.”

I waited for Rulo to say something else, but he didn't. At a corner near the top of the main avenue, he turned to me. “This is where we part. Take care of yourself, little comrade.”

He disappeared into the night, and I never saw him again.

In late July, both Alejandro and I got notification in our post office boxes that the congress had gone ahead despite the initial security problems. It had been shortened to only twenty-four hours, and nothing concrete had been decided, other than that the resistance would stand by. Many citizens vocal about voting for the No side had taken to the streets, looking to the resistance as the vanguard, and we needed to be there for them, ready to go, in case the opportunity arose to seize power. Alejandro and I assumed the resistance leadership had gone away to strategize about exactly what being ready meant. Presumably it would involve bringing forward whatever arms were stashed and embarking on a public propaganda campaign, letting it be known through graffiti, leaflets and the resistance newsletter, which circulated secretly in poor neighbourhoods, schools and universities, that there was still a way for the No campaign to have a revolutionary outcome. In the meantime, we waited in Neuquén for instructions.

THE NO SIDE won in the October referendum in Chile by 56 per cent. I read the headline on a newspaper as I walked by a kiosk. My stomach flipped, but I kept my face still and continued on my way to work. Nobody on the street in Neuquén seemed to care, though I assumed that the Chilean shantytown was in a state of excitement. A great wave of loneliness hit me. Alejandro had gone again to Santiago at the request of the resistance, though we weren't sure why. So the joy and confusion and apprehension were mine to experience alone.

I'd learn later that Alejandro and Rulo had walked the streets of downtown Santiago on the day of the plebiscite. Alejandro figured Rulo would give him some kind of order if the situation called for it. The votes were still being counted as night fell. The military and the police patrolled the streets, with water cannons, tanks, Jeeps and military buses stationed everywhere. Rulo and Alejandro were standing in front of La Moneda Palace when thousands of people erupted from stores, restaurants and office buildings. Horns started honking, and people poured from cars and buses, yelling and screaming: “The No won! The monster has fallen!” Music started to fill the streets.

He and Rulo had continued to walk in silence, Alejandro told me, weeping and laughing. “To walk those streets, to watch that joy after fifteen years of terror... I cried so hard, watching the people taking over those streets and embracing one another, children running, old men pounding each other on the back. Oh, Skinny, that country lives inside my heart now, it lives inside my heart.”

But it was only hours before the crackdown began. The paramilitary was ordered to clean up the streets, and Rulo and Alejandro ran down a side street with thousands of others, chased by baton-wielding cops, the tear gas unbearable, the cannon spraying acid water with such force that people were thrown against walls. Sirens and explosions replaced the music. The Santiago sky swarmed with helicopters. But at the luxurious Hotel Carrera, the lobby had been turned into an international press centre, packed with media from all over the world. In a country that had been closed to the outside world for so long, it was a shocking sight.

ON A WINDY weekday morning in November, I made one of my routine visits to the Neuquén government office to ask about my Argentinian ID card. I stood in the line at one of the half-dozen wooden wickets and waited my turn. Nervous Chileans surrounded me, as usual, their worn-out clothes washed and ironed. As always, I played the part of the bourgeois bitch, sighing audibly and looking irritably at my watch. But this time, something was different. When I got to the wicket and presented my documents, the old man who was helping came back with a file. Behind him, I caught the eye of a young, blue-eyed man sitting at a typewriter. My radar went off.

“I'm sorry, Señora, but your ID card isn't ready,” the old man said.

“This is an outrage. I've been married for two and a half years to an Argentinian national, and you still can't get it together to give me an ID card.”

“Well, Señora, the reason might be this.”

He opened the folder and pushed it across the counter. The documents inside were all about me.

The old man held up a photocopy of my Bolivian passport, with its picture of me at fifteen. With his other hand he pulled out a photocopy of a second passport, this one stating that I'd been born in Santiago.

The floor shifted beneath me. A cold sweat broke out on my body, sending rat's claws up my spine. This was it. I'd finally been caught. But why now? Why after the plebiscite, when we were no longer a threat? I was hyper-aware of the blue-eyed man now. I took a deep breath and swallowed, and my underground skills kicked in.

“I have no idea what this is. I am not Bolivian, I never have been, and you people are obviously incompetent.”

“But Señora, this is your picture on the Bolivian passport. It's your name, and it's your signature.”

I raised the volume on my voice. “Do you take me for an idiot? Obviously there's someone out there who looks like me and has the same name. It's a common enough name, you fool. Do you mean to tell me that this has stopped you from giving me my ID card all this time? This country is so incompetent it's a miracle you all don't die of cholera.”

I turned and headed for the door, my heels clicking loudly on the marble floor. Nobody stopped me.

There were many ways of being followed, but if someone had been following me all this time, I certainly hadn't known it. The secret police sometimes trailed people for years, waiting to see where they'd lead them. It was impossible to know why they let some people move freely and picked up others, and you'd drive yourself crazy trying to figure it out. Alejandro and I would never know if we'd really given the secret police the slip after the supermarket incident, or if they'd meant it only as a scare tactic. I zigzagged my way home on the buses. When I got there, I burned everything in sight.

That night, as I walked down the hill after my last class at the university, I heard footsteps directly behind me. I continued walking. No rash movements, no fleeing like the guilty, I reminded myself. My spirit hovered above me, my body braced for the worst. The footsteps continued until the man behind me got so close I could feel his breath on the back of my neck. When I reached the corner, I glanced over my shoulder, and a pair of blue eyes met mine.

From then on, the blue-eyed man followed me openly, in what we called the Japanese way. He sat at the table next to me in cafés, in the seat behind me on the bus. He waited on the street across from my apartment. And he bored his eyes into me. The method was designed to break you, to make you turn yourself in or run screaming into the night.

Using her student union connections, Luisa found out who the man was. “He's in the neo-Nazi youth and works at the registry to keep tabs on Chileans wishing to get Argentinian papers. He's on the secret police's payroll.”

The harassment went on for weeks. Whether I was at the kiosk buying my morning newspaper or letting off steam dancing with my students, Fabiana or Estéban, those blue eyes were there. Sometimes days would pass without me being followed. I didn't know whether the secret police were about to pick me up in the middle of the night or they were giving me an opening to grab my stuff and flee. The sudden disappearance of those blue eyes was as terrifying as their presence. Just when I'd start to believe that the stalking was over, I'd turn a corner and the blue-eyed man would be there again. Finally, I sent a note to my superiors in Lima.

SHE WAS REFERRED to as La Chacotera (Chilean slang for “the fun girl”) in the response I received two weeks later. I was instructed to meet her on the bench of a certain plaza at 7:30 on a weekday morning. I prayed it wasn't a set-up. And if it wasn't, I prayed the blue-eyed man wouldn't follow me there. It was impossible to know when his “workday” began. Sometimes he'd be out there from first thing in the morning until deep into the night, leaving me to wonder when he slept.

You were usually required to go to a meeting place for ten days straight until contact was made. Your contact might not show up on the first day because she was being followed or because she'd been picked up. It was only during critical times, like just after the assassination attempt on Pinochet, that the rule didn't apply. Then you went only once. If your contact didn't show up, you went into hiding.

I spotted her as soon as I arrived at the plaza. She was strolling around nonchalantly, puffing on a cigarette. The blue-eyed man, whom I'd caught a glimpse of the night before, was nowhere in sight. Either his “shift” didn't start until later today, or this was a trap. I watched myself walk toward her. My spirit perched on the highest branches of a towering eucalyptus, its scent refreshing in the early morning air. Glaringly Chilean with her big brown eyes and fleshy mouth, the woman was dressed a little too alternatively for someone in the underground. Too much funky lapis lazuli jewellery, making her look like a hippie. I wondered whether to proceed. Not wanting to cave in to the paranoia, I sat on a bench, as per my instructions, and took a deep breath. The eucalyptus filled my nostrils. She approached and took a seat next to me.

“Summer's on its way,” she said.

“Yes,” I responded. “The sun will rip the earth in two.”

From there, she got straight to the point. “What's going on?” She faced straight ahead, looking at the empty bench across from us. The less she saw of me, the better. I explained my situation with the blue-eyed man.

“The Japanese way is in full force in downtown Santiago,” she said. “One of our oldest members broke down the other day and turned himself in, complete with a briefcase full of resistance documents. He'd lived underground for sixteen years and just couldn't take any more. We can't have that happen again, comrade. This is the first I've heard of the Japanese way being used on this side of the border. You are to go on a long trip as far from Chile and its bordering countries as possible. You are to lose all contact. Come back in two months, and make contact again then.”

I stayed behind for five minutes after she left, pretending to study an English text. In the mornings I taught English to children at a new private institute. As I walked in the door that day, swarmed by the eight-year-old students I adored, I noticed a car with four men in it pull up across the street. They could have been there for me, or they could have been looking for leaders of the student union from the national high school down the street.

I immersed myself in the world of “This is a table” and “That is a chair,” hoping that the classroom door wouldn't be kicked open, that I wouldn't be dragged by the hair to the waiting car, my innocent students forced to witness something that supposedly didn't happen in this country anymore.

27

I
T WAS LATE February 1989, and a real scorcher in downtown Santiago. I'd hitchhiked to Buenos Aires with Luisa a week after getting La Chacotera's orders, and flown from there to Vancouver, where I'd holed up for two months. Although I hadn't told anyone, including Bob or my mother, about the danger I was in, my stomach relaxed for the first time in years. I ate heartily and started to look healthy again. But Vancouver was rainy and cold, and I counted the days until I could leave it behind. Now here I was at the corner of Huérfanos and Ahumada, salivating over the lambada-inspired skirts in the window of the Falabella shop while I waited for the Cousin. A hand clasped my shoulder, and I spun around to meet those green eyes.