The Rhythm of Memory (27 page)

“No. I don’t think he has any idea.”

Samuel’s head tilted slightly. “Don’t you think he envisioned the worst when you were abducted? Don’t you think it crossed his mind the terrible things that could have been done to you?.… And what about when you were returned…don’t you think he wondered how those bruises and burn marks got there?”

“I think he chose to focus on the fact that I was returned, rather than concentrate on the more troubling aspects such as my scars.”

“He’s never mentioned them?”

“No. He cannot bring himself to ask and I choose not to bring it up.”

“Perhaps you should, Salomé.”

“What good would it do to dwell on my torture? I want to forget it.”

“Do you think you can just forget such a thing? I’m afraid it’s part of your history now. The reason you’re here is so that you can find a way to live with that history.”

Salomé turned her head away from her doctor. She was beginning to find it tiresome lying on this leather couch and discussing the same feelings over and over. She wondered why it couldn’t be enough that she admitted that she was angry at Octavio. She wanted to be done with this exhausting inquisition.

“In a way, you’re no different than your husband if you choose to maintain the silence between the two of you. You both are avoiding confrontation.”

Salomé let out a deep sigh. She could not disguise her frustration. “Doctor, I am just so tired of talking. I’m just so exhausted by having my husband constantly ask how I feel. Shouldn’t it be
obvious? I was abducted, I was interrogated, I was tortured. How the hell does he think I feel? I feel awful!”

“Perhaps he still doesn’t know how to approach such a delicate subject, Salomé. Men aren’t equipped to deal with things that are as emotional and traumatic as the issues we’re discussing here. He’s probably having a hard time with it.”

Salomé shook her head. “The problem with my husband is that he lives his life as though it were a screenplay. He expects a happy ending but doesn’t want to work towards one.”

“That is a problem.” Samuel nodded his head. “I agree with you.”

Salomé cupped her palms over her face. “I love my husband, I will always love him. But the very fact that he maintains this rosy vision of the world makes it difficult for me to live with him. It’s not that I want him to lose his idealism completely.…If he were as jaded as I’ve become, then what kind of couple would we be?” Salomé took a deep breath. She could feel her skin flush underneath her blouse. “Life has its difficult and ugly moments, and I wish my husband could finally accept that.”

Samuel nodded. “I think it’s good that you’re acknowledging these feelings.”

“Is it? Now how am I going to go home and lie next to a man whom I know I’m angry with? I mean, he wasn’t even able to save me. I had to rescue myself. He failed at even that.”

“You cannot blame him for that,” Samuel said objectively. “It was an impossible situation.”

“I suppose you’re right.” She smoothed out her skirt. “I just don’t want to go home now and deal with all of this. The children have been struggling in school. Rafael has been looking after his sisters because I’ve been too exhausted to be a proper mother. And Octavio seems to be sinking deeper into depression.”

“You need to concentrate on
your
healing.”

“I know…I’ve been trying…”

“Well, try and keep your chin up, Salomé. You’re tackling some heavy things in our sessions, and you should be proud of yourself.”

She shook her head. “Sometimes I feel worse when I leave than I did when I got here.”

“I know,” Samuel said compassionately. “But we’re moving forward.”

“Yes,” Salomé said as she stood up to leave. She knew the doctor had let her speak a few minutes over her allotted fifty-minute session, so she tried to compose herself as quickly as she could. “I guess I’ll see you next week then.”

As she left, Samuel watched her exit elegantly through the door.

S
ANTIAGO
, C
HILE

J
ANUARY
1974

Octavio could no longer sleep. His mind raced. His heart beat wildly in his chest. He did not know where to begin. Octavio was crippled by a moral dilemma. His actions and his commitment to his principles had gotten him and his family into this terrible situation. He had always prided himself on his conviction, his steadfast morals. Had he supported a regime that had executed the nation’s president and ruled as a military dictatorship, he would have been a hypocrite. And just hearing that word made Octavio cringe.

Yet now, these convictions directly jeopardized his family’s safety. His wife had been kidnapped and was possibly being tortured, all because of his stubborn refusal to go against his beliefs. It was too much for him to bear.

As each hour passed and Salomé still did not surface, Octavio’s anxiety worsened. He contemplated calling up a newspaper and publicly renouncing all the criticisms he had previously launched at the new regime. He thought about writing to one of the army’s generals and arranging a secret meeting in which he would say that he had rethought his views and now believed that Pinochet was a just and rightful leader. “How wrong I’ve been,” he contemplated saying. “Just give me back my wife and I’ll be a diligent and steadfast servant of the state.”

But, eventually, Octavio reconsidered. What use would that be? The generals would know he was lying, and he and his family would still remain under suspicion. No, he would not renounce his statements, but he would also not exacerbate the situation by making any more remarks criticizing the new regime.

“Tomorrow, I will drive until I find this Villa Grimaldi,” he told himself. He would rescue his wife. He would find a way to make their lives good again.

The next morning, after his mother-in-law had told him where she suspected the Villa Grimaldi was, Octavio Ribeiro set out in his small orange Lancia to find his wife.

He gulped down a cup of coffee, kissed his children on their foreheads, and told the maid he was unsure of his exact return. “I am not sure how long I will be gone,” he said. “But I will not stop until I have found their mother.”

He still was in disbelief. He couldn’t believe that in Chile a woman could be abducted from her family and held for a crime she had not committed.

He had to maintain the hope that she was still alive and that he could save her. Without that as inspiration he wouldn’t be able to play this role that he hadn’t asked for—the role of rescuer and penitent husband. If he couldn’t get her back, how could he live with having been responsible for her abduction? He hadn’t listened to her, he knew that now. She had foreseen the trouble before he had.

He drove through the winding streets of Santiago. Past the rows of houses with their neatly manicured lawns and blossoming gardens, and past the schools with the busloads of arriving children.
How could things seem so deceptively normal?
Octavio thought to himself. If he had not known Allende personally, and had he not had his
wife abducted from their house in broad daylight, perhaps he too would have thought that life in Chile had returned to normal.

He didn’t know what he would do when he got there. He had no idea what the place looked like or how he’d get in. But he couldn’t focus on all that now. He just had to get there, and then he would decide how to proceed.

His mother-in-law had thought the villa lay north, in the dusty outskirts of the city, in an area called Peñalolen. She had told him that if he drove fifteen kilometers north and turned onto one of the side roads, he would eventually come across it. At least that was what she recalled.

He stuffed a map into his leather satchel and threw in a change of clothes as well. He didn’t know what he’d need for his journey. He only knew that he had to get moving and begin the search. Otherwise, he would go mad just waiting for a miracle to happen and Salomé to be returned.

Hours passed and he seemed to be driving with no sign of the villa that Doña Olivia had described. “There was a tower,” she remembered. “If only I could call the family and find out the exact address.” But they had agreed against doing that, as they wanted to keep news of Salomé’s abduction within the family. “We can trust no one,” Fernando agreed with Octavio. “No one can know of this, or we risk something more happening to the family.”

He asked farmers on the way there. He asked a few women sitting by a bus stop. “Somewhere up there,” they all said, and pointed. Almost everyone had heard of the place, yet no one knew the exact address.

Finally, having stopped for a small sandwich at a roadside café, Octavio found someone who gave him detailed directions. “Three
more kilometers, and you’ll find it. But it’s all lined with carabineros,” the old man told him.

Octavio nodded in thanks and left a few coins to pay for the elder gentleman’s drink.

Now that Octavio knew where the villa was, he realized that he had to come up with a strategy. If what the man was saying was true, he should keep his distance, for fear of being noticed by the police. If they suspected him of spying on their headquarters, they would surely arrest him on the spot.

Driving a few meters ahead, he opted to pull alongside the shoulder of the road to think more carefully. He thought of all the things that one would do if this were a script in a movie: He might kidnap a soldier, steal his uniform, and enter the premises in disguise. He might camouflage his car in some bushes and wait until a jeep pulled down the road, then jump on the back as it drove past, thus being driven in undetected.

But, no, none of these was a plausible plan. He knew they could only be clichés hammered out in poorly scripted films.

Large military trucks continued to drive past his parked car, one after another. Green army jeeps with billowing canvas hoods sped over the road kicking up dirt. And suddenly, Octavio realized that what the man in the café had said was true. It would be nearly impossible for him to gain entry. He would only draw attention to himself. His face now burned from the afternoon heat.

“What am I going to do?” he said. His frustration was nearly choking him. Tears began to well in his eyes.

He pounded the sides of the steering wheel with his two fists. “Jesus Christ! What the hell am I going to do!”

Suddenly, he wished he had never ever copied those damn
Pablo Neruda poems, and he cursed himself for being influenced by that poet who had introduced him to Allende. How he wished he could do it all over again. But, it was too late, the damage had been done. Frustrated and beside himself, Octavio turned on the ignition and began his way home.

S
ANTIAGO
, C
HILE

F
EBRUARY
1974

As the days passed, Octavio continued to rise every morning at half past seven, drink his coffee, kiss his children on the forehead, and make his way into the city to try to find someone who could help him get his wife out of the Villa Grimaldi.

It had been over three weeks since Salomé had been abducted, and Octavio, realizing he would be denied entry into the heavily guarded Villa Grimaldi, racked his brain trying to think of an alternative way to secure her release.

He called all of the friends he had made in the movie industry, from the highest-paid director to the lowest-paid extra. He asked if they had any connections with the military.

“I need to find my wife,” he begged them, forsaking any of his previous stubbornness and pride.

“We warned you, Octavio,” one said apologetically. “We told you to stop making those statements in public.… And now look where you’ve gotten yourself! There’s nothing we can do. We also have families we must look out for.”

Octavio slammed down the phone and cursed the dangling receiver. He kicked the glass door of the phone booth and shoved his fists into his pockets, swearing to himself like a madman.

When he returned home late at night, he hoped that the children would already have been put to bed by either Consuela or his
mother-in-law. So he wouldn’t be confronted by their faces begging to know if he had found their mother yet. He couldn’t wrestle with one more night of that: returning home without their mother, without any answers or ideas about how to rescue her.

At night, his despondency only intensified. He would lie alone in their connubial bed, her empty side streaked with shadows from the moon. He couldn’t bear the thought of how she must be suffering. Where did she sleep now? Was it in a cement cell, or in a barracks with several other prisoners?

He couldn’t believe that they could have killed his beloved Salomé because of his stubborn refusal to support their bloody regime. Could they? He heard whispers among the people that there were mass graves in the countryside—big, open craters dug by soldiers, filled with bodies whose injuries rendered them unrecognizable. Could they have possibly done that to his wife?

He no longer slept. He lay in bed, stiff as mortar, beads of sweat dotting his brow. His hands fell to his sides like slabs of wax. His eyes were a cloudy haze.

It had now been twenty-three days since he had last laid his eyes upon Salomé. He rose in the morning as usual, kissed the children good-bye, and made his way out into the city. But, this time, he had no more appointments to attend to. He had exhausted all of his contacts. No one else would take his calls.

He drove until he had nearly depleted all the gas in the tank, until he thought he would collapse from the exhaustion and terror that his wife’s abduction had caused him. Frustrated and confused, Octavio found himself not driving to the gates of the Villa Grimaldi but, instead, to the main cathedral in Santiago. With no other place to go, Octavio Ribeiro found himself drawn to a building he had neither entered nor contemplated entering for many years.