Surviving Santiago (5 page)

“Didn't you promise you'd stay this afternoon for Tina?”

Tell him, Tía Ileana. Would he have ditched Daniel the same way? Or would he have invited my brother to the station?

“I have to edit that interview for the evening news. And I'm going out with the campaign staff tonight.” Papá pats me on the back. I force myself to smile, lips pressed tightly together. “Get some rest,
m'ija
. You've had a long trip.”

N
ight comes early in the middle of winter, and after dark the house turns cold. My aunt reheats the leftover
pastel de choclo
for supper. It has even less appeal the second time around. I curl up on the sofa under a wool blanket and watch a stupid game show on TV. It's good practice for my Spanish, if nothing else.

The TV set is like a shameful secret in the room, small and tucked into a corner of the floor-to-ceiling bookcase that covers the wall next to the stairs. It's an hour earlier in Madison, and on a Monday night like tonight my friends and I would get together at Petra's house, cook marijuana brownies, and eat them while watching reruns of
St. Elsewhere
on her big TV. We'd try not to drool over Boomer, who suddenly became a single father after his wife tripped and hit her head in the shower. Poor Boomer. All of us girls wished we could give him a hug.

Tía Ileana sits on the sofa next to me. I pull my legs up to make room for her. She holds a folder with lots of pictures, front and back. “Remember the condominium we saw driving here?” I nod. She says, “I put together the publicity for the company that's building it.”

I flip the folder, glance at the drawing of a tower with balconies. There are even pots with flowers. Surrounding the drawing are photos of living rooms, kitchens, bedrooms,
and a bathroom. “Where did these rooms come from? I thought the place wasn't built yet,” I say.

“They're from my company's other condo in the same neighborhood.”

“Do you like working for them?”

“I like that things are happening. Your father calls me Material Girl, but I like the new malls and restaurants. And the fact that people are going out again.”

I stretch and yawn. Material Girl—Madonna. I'm amazed Papá even knows about her. And Tía Ileana has turned out to be a lot cooler than I remember her from when I was a little kid. “So no more curfews late at night?” I ask her. We used to have to stay indoors or risk getting shot, but sometimes when people needed help or a ride, my old
papá
would go out anyway.

“No. And people aren't as afraid as they used to be. Even though
he's
still in power.”

Around midnight, a couple of hours after I get to bed, I awaken to talking and laughing downstairs. I put my clothes back on and creep to the top of the stairs. The living room is full of men. They eventually leave in groups of twos and threes. Papá and one other guy stay. I hear something about the political campaign, but since their words all run together and I'm tired, I can't make out most of what they're saying. A cloud of cigarette smoke hovers just below the ceiling. And they match each other—shots and beer chasers—littering
the coffee table with their butts, ashes, and empty bottles. Finally, the other guy passes out sitting in a corner of the sofa, snoring so loudly that I can hear him from upstairs. Papá raises a fist in triumph, announces, “Journalist outdrinks politician any day,” and turns off the light.

My old
papá
wouldn't have won a drinking contest. He wouldn't have even tried.

I decide to count the days until I go home.

C
HAPTER
4

Tuesday, June 13: 69 days until I go home

I
expect Papá to drag himself around the house hung over the entire next day, but he's gone to work by the time I wake up. Also gone are Tía Ileana and the politician who crashed on the sofa.

At least Tía Ileana returns for
la comida
.

After she leaves, I decide to explore the neighborhood. I figure it's hard to get lost because the mountains on the eastern edge of the city always tell you which direction you're headed, even if clouds cover their peaks. Still, I recheck the number in front of Papá's house because the duplexes on his street look exactly the same behind their cement walls and high fences, and I don't want to try the gate key on every house.

By the middle of the second block the sky turns dark and huge raindrops pelt me. I pull my hood up and turn back. I don't know what I'll do for the rest of the day until Papá and Tía Ileana get home from work. A motorcycle speeds past, its rider's jacket a flash of orange in my
peripheral vision. When it's gone, I realize the bottoms of my jeans are soaking wet. I break into a run.

Graciela meets me at the door. “Would you like me to wash your clothes?” she asks.

Mumbling
gracias
, I strip off my soggy sweatshirt and hand it to her, but I don't want to take off my pants in front of her. I did it all the time for my
nana
when I lived with Mamá's family, but I was younger then, and my
nana
wasn't part of an underground resistance along with the person she worked for.

I change clothes in my room, take my waterlogged jeans downstairs to Graciela, and write a letter to Petra, telling her about the flight and the movies I saw on the plane. I ask her to fill me in on last night's
St. Elsewhere
even though it's a summer rerun and I've probably seen it already. Ten episodes—that's how many I'm missing while stuck at the ends of the earth.

At seven thirty, Papá and Tía Ileana return. The first thing Papá does when he gets home is feed his birds. Then he brings Pablo into the house for a conversation, downing a shot of whiskey and a beer chaser while Pablo sprays drops of water all over the kitchen and squawks, “
Curado!
” This new
papá
thinks it's funny that his parrot calls him a drunk. After he takes Pablo back to the cage outside, he wipes the kitchen cabinets and counters while my aunt reheats leftovers in the microwave for her and me. She pops two slices of bread
into the toaster and mashes an avocado with lemon for Papá. He eats with no appetite, only the need to line his stomach for the tumbler of straight whiskey he drinks before he goes to sleep.

We have about an hour and a half before he's glassy-eyed and drooling and Tía Ileana has to help him upstairs to bed.

It rains again on Wednesday. I sleep on and off throughout the day, and while lying in bed, I think of things to do with Papá at night. Maybe he'll let me read to him. Or we can work on a jigsaw puzzle or play board games. I saw a couple of puzzle boxes on top of the bookshelf in the living room and Clue and Jenga on the mantle above the fireplace.

I remember how my old
papá
used to read to me before bedtime. He drank only a glass of red wine with supper because sometimes he'd have to go back to work at night. Even then, he would wake me up and kiss me on the head as soon as he came home, letting me know that he made it back all right.
I'm here
, he would say.
I hope you dream of something nice.

Tía Ileana returns at seven to eat with me, but Papá doesn't even come home until I'm asleep, and then he and his friends wake me up with their drinking games. I don't bother to get up and find out who won.

Thursday is dry but still cloudy and the coldest day since I arrived. And since Papá's house has a washing
machine but no dryer, my sweatshirt is still damp, which means I'm stuck inside another day. The good news is that I find
The House of the Spirits
in the original Spanish and discover that I understand nearly everything. I make a small pile of other books I'd like to read and bring them upstairs to my room. In one of them, I learn about the tapestries on my walls. They're called
arpilleras
and have been made by women whose family members were killed or disappeared under the dictatorship.

After supper, I sit with Papá in the dining room because it's my only chance all day to see him. Tía Ileana is upstairs in the master bedroom looking over plans for a shopping center that her company is building.

I sort through the pieces of one of the jigsaw puzzles. No one has opened it before, and a bunch of pieces are stuck together. I go into the kitchen for a paring knife to separate them, but I can't find any knives in the drawers or on the drying rack.

“Papá?”

My father looks up from the magazine he's reading. “Yes?”

“Do you know where they keep the knives around here?”

“No.” He takes a long drag from his cigarette and stares at the stream of smoke he blows out. I'm not surprised. At home Evan and my mother cook together all the time, but I never saw Papá or Daniel as good for anything more than boiling water.

“I'll ask Tía Ileana.” I start toward the stairs.

“If her door is closed, she doesn't want to be bothered,” he tells me before returning to his magazine.

The door to the master bedroom is shut, so I go across the hall to my room and get a deck of cards for solitaire. I think about writing some of my other friends besides Petra, but there'll be time after my father and aunt go to sleep. And tomorrow. And the day after that.

I slip inside the half-opened door to Papá's bedroom. It's hardly big enough for a bed, a chair, and a dresser. On top of the dresser are a small TV and a boom box. The chair faces the dresser but sits under an open closet door where there is a flimsy-looking pulley, the same kind Papá used to exercise his bad arm in Madison. His bed has a black, brown, and tan woven blanket that matches the one on mine. Unframed posters of rallies and concerts cover the walls. The bareness of the space and the faint disinfectant smell make me think of the nursing home where Petra and I did a community service project last fall.

“Tía Ileana was busy,” I say when I get downstairs.

Papá nods. His splinted left arm rests on the table and he squeezes an orange ball while counting out a rhythm. A few rounds of solitaire later, he asks me, “What do you think about your aunt?” He has trouble pronouncing his words. Less than a quarter of the glass of whiskey remains.

“I like her. She's nice.” I flip over the first three cards to start a new round.

“You know she never married.”

I shrug and place the nine of clubs under the ten of diamonds. I didn't know that, though I could have guessed, seeing as she was available to move in with Papá when he needed someone to help take care of him.

“Do you know why she never married?”

I'm not thinking of an answer because I'm thinking of her name. Ileana Aguilar Gaetani.
De
Nobody. Belongs to herself and herself only. Not like Mamá, who used to be Victoria Fuentes de Aguilar and is now officially Mrs. Evan Feldman everywhere but at work.

“Es tortillera.”
He pauses, then spits the next word out as if it's a bad taste in his mouth.
“Maricona.”

Pretending not to hear him, I lay the two of hearts over the ace. Lovers of the same gender. Fine with me. Obviously not fine with him.

Papá swallows the rest of his drink and slams the glass on the table. I jump.

“What do you think about that?” he slurs.

I flip three cards from the pile to reveal an eight of diamonds. I add it to the row under the nine of clubs, and move three cards from another row underneath. “I don't think anything about it,” I say, wanting to remind him that Tía Ileana has at least bothered to come home in the middle of the day to keep me company.