Something Fierce (9 page)

That day, Ale and I came home to a quiet house. My mother explained that Lucas and Trinidad had gone somewhere else for a while. Tears stung my eyes, but I knew it was probably safer for everybody this way.

A month later, the school year came to an end. Things had gone back to normal, with the teachers yelling at us every chance they got and the principal ruling the school with an iron fist. We had a new art teacher, who drew pictures on the board for us to copy. On the last day of class, we danced to the Beatles and the Doors in the courtyard. Then the girls ran off to their maid jobs, kissing Ale and me goodbye. Valentina was indeed pregnant, and she wouldn't be back in March, when the new school year began. Eugenio Aguirre waved from the fender of a bus, shoeshine box strapped to his back. As I walked home alone along the cobblestones, I prepared myself for a journey Mami and Bob had described to us late one night, while most of the city was asleep.

6

I
T WAS SIX in the morning at the La Paz train station, and already the first-class section of the train heading to the border was crammed with well-dressed ladies, families from all walks of life and the odd businessman in suit and tie, fresh newspaper in hand. Christmas was only a few days away, and many people were travelling.

Bob and Mami had instructed us on the details of the journey Ale and I would be making without them. One of our instructions was to pretend we didn't know Trinidad, who'd be accompanying us part of the way. She'd been back sleeping on our floor for the past week, acting as if she'd never left. This time around, she had gotten up early every morning and readied herself to go downtown, where she was “picking up some papers,” she said. Her morning ritual began by taking a curling iron to her frizzy head. Once her hair was in ringlets, Trinidad would powder her face and apply red lipstick, blue eyeshadow and mascara. Skin-tight black jeans and a red paisley shirt completed the look, with a black corduroy blazer to keep her warm in the cold highland mornings. She'd carry out her ritual while smoking one Gitane after another and listening to the miners' radio on the shortwave. Low, so the neighbours wouldn't hear.

The four of us had taken a cab to get here. Trinidad was going to meet us on the train. Inside our brown carry-ons, stuffed with clothes, cheese rolls and grapefruits, was a typewritten letter my mother had given us, which we were to read, memorize, then burn and flush down the toilet shortly after the train left. The fifty-dollar bill at the bottom of my bag was all the cash we had.

Following Bob's lead, we were speaking English. When we arrived at our seats to see that a cholita, an urban Indian woman, had taken them over with five sacks of onions and seven children, Bob shouted at her to move, waving our tickets in her face.

“Señora! As you can see, I have paid good money for these seats so that my daughters can travel in comfort.”

“Who cares about your tickets, Mr. Gringo? I got here first,” she responded, sitting like a large oak tree rooted to the ground.

“Listen, Señora, don't make me call a policeman to have you forcibly removed.”

“Just try it!” The woman crossed her arms.

“Police!” Bob yelled at the top of his lungs. The lady grabbed her onions and her children and moved, swearing under her breath.

We could have shared our seats with the lady, but Bob was acting like the big-city guy he'd argued with on the bus back in Peru. It was a soul-destroying tactic, but as my mother had explained, if we were to keep people safe and transport goods across borders without being caught, we had to hold our beliefs inside. I could see that it cut Bob to the quick.

Trinidad arrived a few minutes later, carrying a small white Samsonite. She looked tired, maybe because she had spent a good two hours in the bathroom in the middle of the night. Trinidad had some health troubles because of the concentration camps, my mother told us; that's why nature rarely called. When it did, she had to heed it. Speaking in a perfect Mexican accent now, Trinidad greeted Ale and me and indicated she'd be sitting in the seat facing us. Bob made a huge show of asking her to keep an eye on his two daughters, who were going to Chile to visit their grandparents. That part was true.

Then it was time to go. Ale and I pressed our faces to the window as the train pulled out, leaving Mami and Bob standing on the platform with tears running down their faces. Their girls were going back to the beloved country they were not allowed to enter, and that was difficult to bear.

We gazed out the window in silence as the train climbed in circles up the bowl of La Paz. In the poor neighbourhoods on the hills, ladies lined up with kettles at outdoor faucets and chickens scratched in the dirt. The highlands stretched all around us as the train travelled west. We read for a while, and then I nudged Ale. She hesitated for a moment before grabbing her bag and coming with me to the bathroom.

I made sure the door was securely locked behind us before pulling out my copy of Mami's letter, written in English. I read to Ale in a whisper. “Girls: Please read this letter very carefully. I know you have memorized your instructions, but here they are anyway, in writing. Your passports say you were born in Santiago, Chile. If the border guards ask you, you must tell them that you left Chile for Canada in September 1970, because your parents are in the mining sector and had some work to do with Noranda. The guards will understand this to mean that you come from a right-wing, pro-Pinochet family. You will tell them that your parents are in Bolivia on business at the moment, and that you are going to visit your grandparents, who live in Iquique. Remember that you met Trinidad for the first time on the train. Never ever answer any questions from a stranger, and don't offer any explanations to the border guards unless asked. If Trinidad is taken away at the border, stay calm and get back on the train. Once you reach Arica, watch out for a young, well-dressed couple at the station. They will be waiting for you to approach them and will take care of you. If the couple are not there, or if you think it's not safe to approach them, use your fifty dollars to take a taxi to the bus station and buy tickets to Santiago. Your grandmother will be waiting for you there at the station. Do not under any circumstances tell your grandparents about this letter. We know your first trip back from exile will be an incredible experience for you both. Keep your eyes and ears and hearts open at all times, and in that way you will learn about life. We love you. Mami and Bob.”

Ale was leaning against the wall of the tiny, disgusting bathroom, holding her nose. She didn't say a word as I rummaged through her bag, then set both copies of the letter on fire, using the lighter Bob had given me. I dropped them, still flaming, through the hole that served as a toilet onto the tracks.

My hands were trembling. Ale refused to meet my gaze. “You've gotta make sure you remember everything in the letter,” I said.

“I do remember it, you fool. Let's go.”

I made us both brush our hair before we left the bathroom. If anybody was wondering what we'd been doing in there, they'd think we'd gone to primp. Walking back to our seats, with the letters gone, I felt a million pounds lighter. Trinidad was lost in thought, watching the landscape go by and leaving red lipstick marks on her cigarette butts. She was probably steeling herself for the border crossing into Chile, which Bob had told us was twenty-four hours away. All I knew was that soon, very soon, I'd get to see my grandma Carmen again.

Four years earlier, my grandma and grandfather had come to Vancouver to visit us. I'd sat with Abuelita at our dining room table every afternoon while she knitted sweaters for us kids, and I savoured every scrap of her news. After the coup, she and my grandfather had moved to Limache, a small town an hour inland from Valparaíso. There my grandfather had built a yellow wooden house, and they'd succumbed to the quiet life imposed upon them now that two of their three children and half their grandchildren were exiled. As she wondered aloud how the watermelons and peaches and apricots in her orchard were coming along, my heart ached for that place I'd never seen. Their yellow house was the stuff of legend, the place we'd all go when Pinochet fell and Chile was socialist again.

Ale had pulled a deck of cards from her bag and was shuffling them like an expert. “Señora Zamora, do you know the game Mao-Mao?” she asked Trinidad. I froze, because Ale had just put her foot in it. Mao-Mao was a game Trinidad had taught us, and anybody in the know would recognize it as one of the games, like Ho Chi Minh You're the Bomb and Run Ché Run, that had been invented by political prisoners to pass the time in concentration camps. This train had to have at least one informer on it. But Trinidad simply stifled a laugh and shook her head no.

AS NIGHT FELL, the temperature on the train dropped to freezing. People hugged their knees to their chests. It was too cold to sleep, and by morning my whole body was numb.

It was almost noon when a guard yelled out: “Everybody off the train with your belongings! Stand in line for inspection!”

The small border station quickly filled up with passengers. Everybody stood nervously silent, the only sound an occasional baby crying. People had pulled combs through their hair and passed wet hankies over their faces. The ladies wore fresh lipstick. Border guards with machine guns walked up and down the lines. Directly above the head honcho, who sat at a wooden desk, hung a massive portrait of Pinochet, captioned “The Saviour of the Fatherland.” Pinochet was wearing a grey cape in the photo, and his eyes followed you wherever you went. My knees started to shake. Their accents, their impeccable uniforms had brought on the Terror. I'd been scared lots of times since we'd left Canada, but this was the kind of fear that felt as if a rat was walking up and down your spine, from your tailbone to the base of your skull. It was the kind of fear that gave you a sick, cold feeling in the pit of your stomach and made you sweat—only the sweat was ice. And the ice got you trembling like a leaf in a storm.

A wailing baby brought me back to the border station. I looked over at Trinidad, who was standing stock still, holding her white suitcase. The head honcho shouted at a group of Bolivians. “Indians! Swine! Filthy pigs! You are a disgrace to a civilized country such as ours. Step aside.”

A great fury strangled me. But then I remembered: my sister and I were escorting Trinidad into Chile so she could fight for a revolution that would change all this. This was her first venture back, and Ale and I were her cover. I stood straight and still just like her.

I remembered the conversations I'd overheard many times among the adults. The thing was to hold on to any information you had for at least twenty-four hours after you were picked up, they said. The thing was not to break in the first twenty-four hours. How would you know when twenty-four hours had passed, though, I worried? How long had we been standing there in the border office? The head honcho's eyes landed on Trinidad, Ale and me in the throng.

“Señora, I did not see you and your lovely daughters there. Please, come forward.”

The three of us left our place in the silent lineup and laid our passports down. Within seconds he had stamped all three, and we were waved back to the train.

All the Bolivians who were not dressed like Indians were let back on the train. Some of the cholitas had managed to get through, too, and they were beside themselves with joy. Now they would be able to sell their onions at the Arica market the following day, trek back to Bolivia and do it all over again. As the half-empty train pulled out of the station, I saw a crying baby in her mother's arms, left behind on the platform. The mother didn't look much older than me.

A river of tears started in my gut and was moving up my body. My throat stopped it with a tight knot. I thanked God for that knot. Otherwise, I might have wailed the way the Bolivian ladies did at wakes and funerals. Their wails were so loud that sometimes on Sundays it felt as if the whole city of La Paz was in mourning.

THE NEXT DAY, Ale and I boarded a bus at the Arica station. Final destination Santiago, twelve hundred miles away. Trinidad waved goodbye from the curb, her chest heaving as she cried behind her sunglasses.

Sometimes the road ran alongside the Pacific Ocean. Sometimes we could see the towering Andes right outside our window. The Atacama Desert stretched on for the entire first day, like a gigantic bowl of brown sugar. Being back in Chile had unleashed a herd of wild horses deep in my chest. I sat quietly in my seat, ankles crossed, hands folded in my lap, swallowing jagged stones as my eyes took everything in. The bus stopped in every major town and city. A drunken man got on at the bus station in Antofagasta and passed out in a seat in front of us. He snored like a walrus as the bus pulled back onto the vast stretch of highway, lit only by the star-filled sky.

In the photo album we'd left with Papi in Vancouver, there was a series of family pictures taken on the beach in Antofagasta. I'd been only a year old, wearing a white undershirt and a little white sunbonnet. My grandfather Armando was holding me in one photo, my father in another. In one shot I was reaching for my mother, who looked hilarious in cat's-eye glasses with her hair in a beehive. Aunts, uncles and cousins sat on nearby blankets, chewing on crab legs. My first cousin Chelito, the oldest of our generation, was a beautiful boy with a luminous smile and twinkly eyes.

We were the only exiles among our friends lucky enough to have personal pictures from Chile. My grandparents had brought them when they came to visit us that time in Vancouver. They'd brought Chile with them in their pockets, their suitcases, their eyes and voices. I'd smelled a country on them when we greeted them at the airport, a country that still clung to my own skin and hair. It was something fierce, that country. My abuelita had taken my hand, interlocked her fingers with mine and stuffed both our hands into her grey coat pocket. I'd discovered gold: a stick of bubble gum. As the coating dissolved in my mouth, I'd been on the streets of Valparaíso again.