Maya's Notebook A Novel

Autumn



April, May





The repairs to the school are finished. People take refuge there in emergencies, because it’s the safest building, aside from the church, that is. The church’s weak wooden structure is held up by God, as was proven in 1960, when the strongest earthquake ever recorded in the world—9.5 on the Richter scale—struck. The sea rose and was on the verge of swallowing the village whole, but the waves stopped at the church door. In the ten minutes of tremors lakes shrank, entire islands disappeared, the earth opened, and train tracks, bridges, and roads collapsed. Chile is prone to catastrophes—floods, droughts, gales, earthquakes, and waves capable of putting a ship in the middle of a town square. People have a resigned philosophy toward these—trials sent by God, they call them—but they get nervous if time goes by without a misfortune. My Nini’s like that, always expecting the sky to fall on her head.

Our school is prepared for nature’s next temper tantrum. It’s the island’s social center: the women’s circle meets there, the crafts group, and Alcoholics Anonymous, which I attended a couple of times because I promised Mike O’Kelly I would, but I was the only woman among four or five men, who wouldn’t dare speak in front of me. I don’t think I need it, having been sober for four months. We watch movies at the school, resolve minor conflicts not important enough to need the carabineros’ intervention, and discuss impending matters, such as sowing and harvest times, the price of potatoes, and seafood. Liliana Treviño gives vaccinations and imparts the fundamentals of hygiene, which the older women find amusing: “Begging your pardon, Señorita Liliana, but how are you going to teach us to cure and medicate?” they say. The women assure her, and rightly so, that pills from a bottle are suspicious, as someone’s getting rich by selling them, and they opt for home remedies, which are free, or tiny homeopathic sachets. At the school they explained the government’s birth control program, which scared several grandmothers, and the carabineros handed out instructions to combat lice in case of an epidemic, as happens every two years. Just the thought of lice makes my scalp itch. I prefer fleas, because they stay on Fahkeen and the cats.

The computers at the school are pre-Columbian, but they’re well maintained, and I use them for everything I might need, except for e-mail. I’ve grown accustomed to living incommunicado. Who am I going to write to when I don’t have any friends? I get news from my Nini and Snow White, who write to Manuel in code, but I’d like to tell them my impressions of this strange exile. Chiloé can’t be imagined: it has to be experienced firsthand.

I stayed at the academy in Oregon, waiting until the cold let up a little before I escaped, but winter had come to stay in those forests, with its crystalline beauty of ice and snow and its skies, sometimes blue and innocent, other times leaden and enraged. When the days got longer, temperatures went up, and outside activities began, I started thinking about running away again, but then they brought the vicuñas, two slender animals with upright ears and the flirtatious eyelashes of a bride, the expensive gift from a grateful father of one of last year’s graduates. Angie put me in charge of the vicuñas, arguing that no one was better qualified than I to take care of these delicate creatures, since I’d grown up with Susan’s dogs. I had to postpone my escape: the vicuñas needed me.

In time I adapted to the schedule of sport, art, and therapy, but I didn’t make any friends, because the system discouraged friendship; at most, we inmates were accomplices in some pranks. I didn’t miss Sarah and Debbie, as if due to the change in atmosphere and circumstances my friends had lost their importance. I envied them, however, and thought of them living their lives without me, just as all of Berkeley High would be, gossiping about that crazy Maya Vidal, an inmate in a loony bin. Maybe another girl had already replaced me in the trio of vampires. In the academy I learned psychological jargon and the way to get around the rules, which weren’t called rules, but agreements. In the first of many agreements I signed with no intention of observing, I committed myself, like the rest of the students, to keep away from alcohol, drugs, violence, and sex. There were no opportunities for the first three, but some kids figured out ways to practice the latter, in spite of the constant scrutiny of the counselors and psychologists. I abstained.

To stay out of trouble it was very important to appear normal, although the definition of normality fluctuated. If you ate too much you were suffering from anxiety; too little, and you were anorexic; if you preferred solitude you were depressive, but any friendship aroused suspicion; if you didn’t participate in an activity, you were sabotaging, and if you participated enthusiastically you were desperate for attention. “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t,” is another of my Nini’s favorite sayings.

The program was based on three concise questions: Who are you? What do you want to do with your life? And how are you going to achieve it? But the therapeutic methods were less clear. A girl who had been raped was made to dance, dressed up as a French maid, in front of the other students; they took a suicidal guy up the forest fire watchtower to see if he’d jump, and another who suffered from claustrophobia was regularly locked in a closet. They submitted us to penances—purification rituals—and collective sessions when we had to act out our traumas in order to overcome them. I refused to act out my grandfather’s death, and the other kids had to do it for me, until the current psychologist declared me cured or incurable, I can’t remember which. In long group therapy sessions we confessed—we shared—memories, dreams, desires, fear, intentions, fantasies, our most intimate secrets. To bare our souls, that was the aim of those marathons. Cell phones were forbidden, the telephone monitored, correspondence, music, books, and movies censored, no e-mail or surprise visitors allowed.

Three months after being sent to the academy, I had my first visit from my family. While my father discussed my progress with Angie, I took my grandmother to see the park and meet the vicuñas, who I’d decked out with ribbons on their ears. My Nini had brought a small laminated photo of my Popo, three years or so before he died, with his hat on and his pipe in his hand, smiling at the camera. Mike O’Kelly had taken it at Christmas when I was thirteen. That year I gave my grandfather his lost planet as a present: a little green ball with a hundred numbers marked on it, corresponding to maps and illustrations of what must exist on his planet, according to what we’d devised together. He liked the gift a lot; that’s why he was smiling like a little kid in the photo.

“Your Popo is always with you. Don’t forget that, Maya,” my grandma told me.

“He’s dead, Nini!”

“Yes, but you carry him inside, although you don’t know it yet. At first my grief was so huge, Maya, that I thought I’d lost him forever, but now I can almost see him.”

“You’re not grieving anymore? Lucky you!” I answered in anger.

“I am grieving, but I’ve accepted it. I’m in much better spirits.”

“Congratulations. I’m in worse spirits every day in this asylum of imbeciles. Get me out of here, Nini, before I go completely insane.”

“Don’t be tragic, Maya. This is much nicer than I thought it would be. These people are understanding and kind.”

“Because you’re here visiting!”

“Are you telling me that when we’re not here they treat you badly?”

“They don’t hit us, but they psychologically torture us, Nini. They deprive us of food and sleep, they lower our defenses, then they brainwash us and put things in our heads.”

“What things?”

“Terrible warnings about drugs, venereal diseases, prisons, mental hospitals, abortions—they treat us like idiots. Does that seem trivial to you?”

“It seems like way too much. I’m going to give that dame a piece of my mind. What’s her name? Angie? She’s about to find out who she’s dealing with!”

“No!” I shouted, grabbing her arm.

“What do you mean, no! You think I’m going to allow my granddaughter to be treated like a Guantánamo prisoner?” And the Chilean mafia marched off toward the director’s office. Minutes later Angie called me.

“Maya, could you please repeat in front of your father what you told your grandmamma?”

“What?”

“You know what I’m referring to,” insisted Angie without raising her voice.

My father didn’t seem too shocked, and simply reminded me of the judge’s sentence: rehabilitation or jail. I stayed in Oregon.

On the second visit, two months later, my Nini was delighted: finally she’d got her little girl back, she said, none of that Dracula makeup or gang member’s manners, she saw me looking healthy and in good shape. That was due to the five miles I was running a day. They let me because no matter how far I ran, I wouldn’t get anywhere. They didn’t even suspect that I was in training for my escape.

I told my Nini how we inmates outwitted the psychological tests and the therapists, so transparent in their intentions that even the new arrivals can manipulate them, and it wasn’t even worth talking about the academic level: when we graduated, they’d give us a diploma of ignorance to hang on the wall. We were sick of documentaries about the warming of the poles and excursions up Mount Everest; we needed to know what was going on in the world. She informed me that nothing worth telling was happening, just bad news with no solutions—the world was ending, but so slowly that it would last until I graduated. “I can’t wait for you to come home, Maya. I miss you so much!” she sighed, stroking my hair, dyed several colors unknown in nature with dyes she had mailed me herself.

In spite of my rainbow hair, I looked discreet compared to some of the other kids. To compensate for the innumerable restrictions and give us a false sense of liberty, they let us experiment with our clothes and hair according to our own fantasies, but we couldn’t add any piercings or tattoos to what we already had. I had a gold ring in my nose and my tattoo of 2005. A guy who had overcome a brief neo-Nazi phase before opting for methamphetamines had a swastika branded into his right arm, and another had the word f*ck tattooed across his forehead.

“He’s a vocational f*ckup, Nini. They’ve forbidden us to mention his tattoo. The psychiatrist says he could get traumatized.”

“Which one is he, Maya?”

“That lanky guy with the curtain of hair across his eyes.”

And off went my Nini to tell him not to worry, there’s a laser treatment now that can erase the swear word from his forehead.

Manuel has taken advantage of the short summer to collect information, and then, in the dark hours of the winter, he plans to finish his book on magic in Chiloé. We get along really well, it seems to me, although he still grunts at me every once in a while. I don’t pay any attention. I remember that when I met him, he struck me as surly, but in these months of living together I’ve discovered he’s one of those guys who’s ashamed of his own kind heart. He makes no effort to be nice and gets frightened when someone grows fond of him; that’s why he’s a little scared of me. Two of his previous books were published in Australia in large formats with color photographs, and this one will be similar, thanks to the backing of the Ministry of Culture and several tourism outfits. The editors commissioned an upper-crust painter from Santiago to do the illustrations. He’s going to find himself in difficulties trying to represent the horrifying beings of Chilote mythology. I hope Manuel gives me more work, so I can return his hospitality. If not, I’m going to be indebted to him until the end of my days. The worst thing is, he doesn’t know how to delegate; he assigns me the simplest tasks and then wastes his time checking up on me. He must think I’m a doofus. Worst of all, he’s had to give me money, because I arrived with nothing. He assured me that my grandmother wired some money to his bank for that purpose, but I don’t believe him; such a simple solution would never occur to her. It would be more in keeping with her character to send me a shovel to dig for buried treasure. There are treasures hidden here by pirates from way back, everybody knows. On June 24, Saint John’s Eve, you see lights on the beaches, indicating chest burial sites. Unfortunately the lights move, which throws off the greedy ones, and besides, it could be that the light is a trick of the brujos. No one has ever gotten rich yet from digging up the beaches on Saint John’s Eve.

The weather’s changing quickly, and Eduvigis knit me a Chilote hat. Doña Lucinda, who’s at least a hundred years old, dyed the wool with plants, bark, and fruits of the island. This ancient little old lady is the resident expert. No one else gets colors as strong as hers—different tones of brown, red, gray, black, and a putrid green that suits me really well. With very little money I was able to outfit myself with warm clothes and sneakers—my pink boots rotted in the humidity. In Chile everyone can dress decently: there are all kinds of places that sell secondhand clothing and American or Chinese stuff left over from sales, where sometimes I can find things in my size.

I’ve acquired respect for the Cahuilla, Manuel’s boat, so frail in appearance and so brave at heart. She’s carried us galloping across the Gulf of Ancud, and once the winter’s over we’ll go farther south, to the Gulf of Corcovado, visiting the coves along the coast of the Isla Grande. The Cahuilla is slow but safe in these tranquil waters; the worst storms come out on the open sea, in the Pacific. In the villages on the most remote islands live the antiguos, old-fashioned people who know the legends. Those traditional folks live off the land, the animals they raise, and fishing, in small communities, where the fanfare of progress has not yet arrived.

Manuel and I leave at daybreak, and if the distance is short we try to get back before it gets dark, but if it’s more than three hours away we sleep over, because only navy ships and the ghost ship El Caleuche sail by night. According to the antiguos, everything there is on land also exists underwater. There are submerged cities in the sea, in lakes, rivers, and ponds, and that’s where the pigüichenes live, bad-tempered creatures able to provoke swells and treacherous currents. Much care is required in wet places, they warned us, but it’s a useless piece of advice in this land of incessant rain, where everywhere is always drenched. Sometimes we find traditional people willing to tell us what their eyes have seen and we return home with a treasure trove of recordings, which are later a pain to decipher, because they have their own way of talking. At the beginning of the conversation they avoid the subject of magic; those are old wives’ tales, they say, nobody believes in that anymore; maybe they fear the reprisals of those “of the art,” as they call the brujos, or just don’t want to contribute to their own reputation as superstitious people, but with persistence and apple cider Manuel worms their secrets out.

We had the most serious storm so far, which arrived with giant strides, raging against the world. There was lightning, thunder, and a demented wind that rushed at us, determined to send the house sailing away in the rain. The three bats let go of the beams and started flying around the room, while I tried to get them out with the broom and Dumb-Cat swatted futilely at them in the trembling candlelight. The generator hasn’t been working for several days, and we don’t know when the maestro chasquilla will come—if he comes at all, that is; you never know, nobody keeps regular hours down here. In Chile they call any handyman or jack-of-all-trades a maestro chasquilla if he can half-fix something with a piece of wire and a pair of pliers, but there aren’t any on this island and we have to rely on outsiders, who make us wait for them as if they’re dignitaries.

The noise of the storm was deafening—rocks rolling, tanks, derailed trains, howling wolves, and suddenly an uproar that came from deep in the earth. “It’s shaking, Manuel!” but he was unperturbed, reading with his miner’s lamp on his forehead. “It’s just the wind, girl. When there’s an earthquake the pots fall down.”

At that moment Azucena Corrales arrived, dripping wet, in a plastic poncho and fishing boots, to ask for help because her father was very sick. In the fury of the storm there was no signal for cell phones, and it was impossible to walk into town. Manuel put on his raincoat, hat, and boots, took the flashlight, and got ready to leave. I was out the door right behind him, not about to stay there on my own with the bats and the gale.

The Corraleses’ house is near, but it took us ages to cross that distance in the darkness, soaked by the waterfall from the sky, sinking into the mud, and struggling against the wind pushing us back. For a few moments I thought we were lost, but soon the yellow glow of the Corraleses’ window came into view.

The house, smaller than ours and more run-down, seemed barely able to stand, its loose planks rattling, but inside it was cozy. By the light of a couple of paraffin lamps I could see old furniture in disarray, baskets of knitting wool, piles of potatoes, pots, bundles, clothes drying on the line, buckets to catch the drips from the roof, and even cages with rabbits and hens that couldn’t be left outside in the storm. In one corner was an altar with a lit candle in front of a plaster Virgin Mary and an image of Father Hurtado, the Chilean saint. The walls were covered in calendars, framed photographs, postcards, publicity posters for ecotourism, and the Nutrition Manual for Seniors.

Carmelo Corrales had been a burly man, a carpenter and boat builder, but he’d been laid low by alcohol and diabetes, which had been undermining his body for a long time. At first he paid no attention to the symptoms; later his wife treated him with garlic, raw potatoes, and eucalyptus, and when Liliana Treviño finally forced him to go to the hospital in Castro, it was already too late. According to Eduvigis, the doctors’ intervention made him worse. Corrales didn’t change his way of life; he kept drinking and abusing his family until they amputated one of his legs, in December of last year. He can no longer catch his grandchildren to whip them, but Eduvigis often has a black eye, and nobody ever mentions it. Manuel advised me not to inquire, because it would be embarrassing for Eduvigis. Domestic violence is kept pretty quiet here. It’s not something that ever gets discussed.

They’d moved the ailing man’s bed over near the woodstove. From the stories I’d heard about Carmelo Corrales, his drunken fights and the way he mistreated his family, I imagined him as an abominable man. But there in that bed was an unthreatening, emaciated old man with his eyes half closed, mouth open, breathing with an agonizing rasp. I thought diabetics were always given insulin, but Manuel gave him a couple of spoonfuls of honey, and with that and the prayers of Eduvigis, the sick man came round. Afterward Azucena made us a cup of tea, which we drank in silence, waiting for the storm to abate.

About four in the morning Manuel and I went back to our house, cold by then, because the stove had been out for a while. He went to get kindling while I lit some candles and heated up water and milk on the little paraffin ring. I hadn’t noticed, but I was trembling, not so much from the cold as from the tension of that night, the gale, the bats, the dying man, and something I sensed in the Corraleses’ house and didn’t know how to explain, something evil, like hatred. If it’s true that houses get permeated with the life lived within their walls, in the Corraleses’ house there is wickedness.

Manuel quickly lit the fire, and we took off our wet clothes, put on our pajamas and thick slipper-socks, and wrapped up in Chilote blankets. He drank his second cup of tea and I drank my milk, both of us standing up, drawn to the stove. Then he checked the shutters, in case they’d come undone in the wind, filled my hot water bottle, left it in my room, and went into his. I heard him go to the washroom, come out again, and get into bed. I stayed up listening to the last grumblings of the storm, the claps of thunder, which were moving off, and the wind, which was starting to tire of blowing.

I’ve developed various strategies to overcome my fear of nighttime, and not one of them works. Since I arrived in Chiloé I’m physically and mentally healthy, but my insomnia has gotten worse, and I don’t want to resort to sleeping pills. Mike O’Kelly warned me that the last thing an addict recovers is normal sleeping patterns. I avoid caffeine in the evenings and things that might get me worked up, like books or movies with violent scenes, which might later come to haunt me at night. Before I go to bed I drink a glass of warm milk with honey and cinnamon, the magic potion my Popo used to give me when I was a little girl, and a tranquilizing infusion that Eduvigis makes for me of lime flower, elder, mint, and violet. But no matter what I do, and even though I go to bed as late as possible and read until I can’t keep my eyes open, I can’t deceive my insomnia, which is implacable. I’ve spent many nights of my life not sleeping. I used to count sheep; now I count black-throated swans or white-bellied dolphins. I spend hours in the darkness, one, two, three in the morning, listening to the house breathing, the whispering of ghosts, monsters scratching under my bed, fearing for my life. I get attacked by my lifelong enemies, sorrow, loss, humiliation, and guilt. Turning on the light is the equivalent of giving in. Then I won’t sleep for the rest of the night; with the light on, the house doesn’t just breathe, it also moves, palpitates, its protuberances and tentacles come out, the ghosts acquire visible outlines, the frights get worked up. This would be one of those endless nights. I’d had too much and very late stimulation. I was buried under a mound of blankets, watching swans fly by, when I heard Manuel arguing in his sleep in the room next door, as I’d heard so many other times.

Something provokes these nightmares, something related to his past and maybe to this country’s past. I’ve discovered a few things on the Internet that might be significant, but I’m just taking shots in the dark, with very few clues and no certainty. It all started when I wanted to find out about my Nini’s first husband, Felipe Vidal, and I was led to sites about the 1973 military coup, which changed Manuel’s whole life. I found a couple of articles published by Felipe Vidal about Cuba in the 1960s, when he was one of the few Chilean journalists who wrote about the revolution, and other reports of his from different parts of the world; he seemed to travel a lot. A few months after the coup he disappeared; that’s the last thing that comes up on the Internet about him. He was married, and he had a son, but the names of his wife and son do not appear. I asked Manuel where exactly he’d met Felipe Vidal, and he answered curtly that he didn’t want to talk about that, but I have a feeling that the stories of these two men are connected somehow.

In Chile, many people refused to believe in the atrocities committed by the military dictatorship, until irrefutable evidence emerged in the 1990s. According to Blanca, no one can deny that abuses were committed anymore, but there are still those who justify them. You can’t touch this subject in front of her father or the rest of the Schnake family, for whom the past is best kept buried. According to them the military saved the country from communism, imposed order, eliminated the subversives, and established the free market economy, which brought prosperity and obliged Chileans, lazy by nature, to work. Atrocities? They’re inevitable in war, and that was war: a war against communism.

What was Manuel dreaming of that night? I sensed the evil presences of his nightmares again, presences that have scared me before. Finally I got up and, feeling along the walls, went to his room, which was faintly illuminated by the distant glow from the stove, barely enough to discern the outlines of the furniture. I had never been in that room. We’ve cohabited closely; he helped me when I had colitis—there’s nothing as intimate as that—we run into each other in the bathroom, he’s even seen me naked when I get out of the shower distractedly, but his bedroom is forbidden territory, where only Dumb-Cat and Literati-Cat can enter without an invitation. Why did I do it? To wake him up so he wouldn’t keep suffering, to deceive my insomnia and sleep with him. That’s it, nothing else, but I knew I was playing with fire. He’s a man and I’m a woman, even if he is fifty-two years older than me.

I like to look at Manuel, wear his old sweater, smell his soap in the bathroom, hear his voice. I like his ironic sense of humor, his confidence, his quiet company, I like that he doesn’t know how fond most people are of him. I’m not attracted to him, none of that, but I feel a huge affection, impossible to put into words. The truth is, I don’t have many people to love: my Nini, my dad, Snow White, two who I left in Las Vegas, no one in Oregon, apart from the vicuñas, and a few who I’m starting to love too much on this island. I approached Manuel, without being careful not to make noise, slipped into his bed, and hugged his back, with my feet between his and my nose in the nape of his neck. He didn’t move, but I knew he’d woken up, because he turned into a block of marble. “Relax, man, I’ve only come to breathe with you,” was the only thing that occurred to me to say. We stayed like that, like an old married couple, bundled up in the warmth of the covers and the warmth of us both, breathing. And I fell soundly asleep, like the times when I used to sleep in between my grandparents.

Manuel woke me up at eight with a cup of coffee and toast. The storm had lifted and left the air washed clean, with a fresh scent of wet wood and salt. What had happened the night before seemed like a bad dream in the morning light that bathed the house. Manuel was clean-shaven, his hair wet, dressed in his usual way: misshapen pants, high-collared shirt, sweater frayed at the elbows. He handed me the tray and sat down beside me.

“Sorry. I couldn’t sleep, and you were having a nightmare. I guess it was stupid of me to come into your room . . . ,” I said.

“Agreed.”

“Don’t pull that old maid’s face on me, Manuel. Anyone would think I committed an irreparable crime. I didn’t rape you or anything even close.”

“Thank goodness,” he answered me seriously.

“Can I ask you something personal?”

“That depends.”

“I look at you, and I see a man, even though you’re old. But you treat me the same way you treat your cats. You don’t see me as a woman, do you?”

“I see you as you, Maya. That’s why I’m asking you not to come back to my bed. Never again. Are we clear on that?”

“We are.”

On this bucolic island in Chiloé, the agitation of my past seems incomprehensible. I don’t know what that inner disquiet was that used to give me no respite, why I jumped from one thing to the next, always looking for something, never knowing what. I can’t manage to clearly remember those urges and feelings from the last three years, as if the Maya Vidal of that time was another person, a stranger. I told this to Manuel in one of our rare more or less intimate conversations, when we’re alone, it’s raining outside, there’s a power cut, and he can’t take refuge in his books to escape from my chatter. He told me that adrenaline is addictive, a person gets used to living on tenterhooks, can’t do without the melodrama, which is after all more interesting than normality. He added that at my age nobody wants spiritual peace, I’m at the adventurous age, and this exile in Chiloé is a pause, but it can’t turn into a way of life for someone like me. “So in other words, you’re insinuating that the sooner I get out of your house, the better, right?” I asked him. “Better for you, Maya, but not for me,” he answered. I believe him, because when I leave, this man will feel lonelier than a clam.

It’s true that adrenaline is addictive. In Oregon there were some fatalistic guys who were very comfortable with their disgrace. Happiness is slippery, it slithers away between your fingers, but problems are something you can hold on to, they’ve got handles, they’re rough and hard. In the academy I was my very own Russian novel: I was bad, impure, and damaging, I disappointed and hurt those who loved me, my life was f*cked up. On this island, however, I feel good almost all the time, as if by changing the scenery I’d also changed my skin. Nobody knows my past here, except Manuel; people trust me, think I’m a student on vacation who’s come to help Manuel with his work, a naive and healthy young girl who swims in the freezing sea and plays soccer like a man, a bit of a silly gringa. I don’t plan to disappoint them.

Sometimes during the hours of insomnia my conscience niggles me about all that I did before, but it fades at dawn with the smell of the wood burning in the stove, Fahkeen’s paw scratching at me to take him outside, and Manuel with his allergies clearing his throat on his way to the bathroom. I wake up, yawn, stretch in bed, and sigh with contentment. I don’t have to beat my chest or walk on my knees or pay for my mistakes with tears and blood. As my Popo used to say, life is a tapestry we weave day by day with threads of different colors, some heavy and dark, others thin and bright, all the threads having their uses. The stupid things I did are already in the tapestry, indelible, but I’m not going to be weighed down by them till I die. What’s done is done; I have to look ahead. In Chiloé there’s no fuel for bonfires of despair. In this house of cypress the heart is calmed.

In June 2008 I finished the academy program in Oregon, where I’d been trapped for so long. In a matter of days I could leave through the front door and would only miss the vicuñas and Steve, the favorite adviser of the female half of the student body. I was vaguely in love with him, like the rest of the girls, but too proud to admit it. Others had slipped into his room secretly at night and had been sent kindly back to their own beds; Steve was a genius at rejection. Freedom, at last. I could rejoin the world of normal beings, gorge myself on music, movies, and forbidden books, open a Facebook page, the latest thing in social networks, which we all wanted at the academy. I swore I’d never again set foot in the state of Oregon as long as I lived.

For the first time in months I thought of Sarah and Debbie, wondering what had become of them. With luck they’d have finished high school and would be in the stage of finding their first jobs. It wasn’t likely they’d go to college; they weren’t smart enough for that. Debbie was always terrible at school, and Sarah had too many problems; if she hadn’t gotten over her bulimia, she was probably in the cemetery.

One morning Angie invited me to go for a walk among the pines, which was quite suspicious, because it wasn’t her style. She told me she was satisfied with my progress, that I’d done the work on my own, the academy had just facilitated it, and now I could go on to college, although there might be a few gaps in my studies. “Chasms, not gaps,” I interrupted. She tolerated my impertinence with a smile and reminded me that her mission was not to impart knowledge—any educational establishment could do that—but something much more delicate: to give young people the emotional tools to help them realize their maximum potential.

“You’ve matured, Maya, that’s the important thing.”

“You’re right, Angie. At sixteen my plan was to marry an elderly millionaire, poison him, and inherit his fortune, and now my plan is to raise and sell vicuñas.”

She didn’t find that funny. She proposed, after beating around the bush a little more, that I should stay on at the academy as a sports instructor and assistant in the art workshop for the summer; then I could go directly to college in September. She added that my dad and Susan were getting divorced, as we already knew, and that my dad had been assigned to a Middle East route.

“Your situation is complicated, Maya, because you need stability in the transition phase. Here you’ve been protected, but in Berkeley you’d lack structure. It’s not good for you to go back into the same environment.”

“I’d live with my grandmother.”

“Your sweet grandmamma is no longer at an age to—”

“You don’t know her, Angie! She’s got more energy than Madonna. And stop calling her grandmamma—her nickname is Don Corleone, like the Godfather. My Nini raised me with the back of her hand; what more structure can you ask for?”

“We’re not going to argue over your grandmother, Maya. Two or three more months here could be decisive for your future. Think it over before you answer.”

Then I understood that my dad had made a pact with her. He and I had never been very close. In my childhood he was practically absent; he arranged things so he’d be far away, while my Nini and my Popo dealt with me. When my grandpa died and things got ugly between us, he sent me away to be confined in Oregon and washed his hands of me. Now he’s got a Middle East route, perfect for him. Why did they even bring me into the world? He should have been more careful when he was with the Laplander princess, since neither of them wanted children. I imagine even way back then there were condoms. All this passed through my head like a flash, and I rapidly arrived at the conclusion that it was useless to defy him or try to negotiate with him; he’s as stubborn as a mule when he gets something in his head. I’d have to resort to another solution. I was eighteen years old, and he couldn’t legally force me to stay in the academy. That’s why he’d sought the complicity of Angie, whose opinion had the weight of a diagnosis. If I rebelled, it would be interpreted as a behavioral problem, and with the signature of the resident psychiatrist they could keep me there by force or in another similar program. I accepted Angie’s proposition so swiftly that anyone less sure of her authority would have been suspicious, and I immediately began to prepare my long-postponed escape.

During the second week of June, a few days after my walk with Angie through the pines, one of the students started a fire by smoking in the gym. The forgotten cigarette butt set fire to a mat, and the flames reached the ceiling before the alarm went off. Nothing so dramatic or diverting had happened at the academy since it was founded. While the instructors and gardeners connected the hoses, the young people took advantage to scatter in all directions and jump around and shout, giving vent to all the energy built up over months of introspection, and when the firefighters and police finally arrived, they found a mind-blowing picture, which confirmed the widespread idea that the place was an asylum for crazy kids. The fire spread, threatening the nearby forests, and the firefighters requested support from a light aircraft. This increased the kids’ manic euphoria, and they ran beneath the streams of chemical foam, deaf to the authorities’ orders.

It was a splendid morning. Before the smoke from the fire clouded the sky, the air was warm and clear, ideal for my escape. First I had to move the vicuñas to safety, since no one had remembered them in the confusion, and I lost almost half an hour trying to get them to cooperate; their legs were locked in fright at the smell of everything burning. Finally it occurred to me to wet a couple of T-shirts and cover their heads, and I managed to drag them to the tennis courts, where I left them tied up and hooded. Then I went to my room, put the bare essentials in my backpack—my Popo’s photo, a few bits of clothing, two energy bars, and a bottle of water—put on my best running shoes, and ran toward the woods. It wasn’t an impulse—I’d been waiting for such an opportunity for ages—but when the moment arrived I left without a reasonable plan, without identification, money or a map, with the deranged idea of vanishing for a few days and giving my father an unforgettable scare.

Angie waited forty-eight hours to call my family, because it was normal for the inmates to disappear every once in a while; they’d wander down the road, hitchhike to the nearest town, twenty miles away, enjoy a bit of freedom, and then come back on their own, because they didn’t have anywhere to go, or be brought back by the police. Those escapades were so routine, especially among recent arrivals, that they were considered a sign of mental health. Only the most apathetic and depressed ones resigned themselves meekly to captivity. Once the firefighters confirmed that there hadn’t been any victims in the fire, my absence was not a reason for particular concern, but the next morning, when all that was left of the excitement of the fire was ashes, they started looking for me in town and organizing patrols to comb the woods. By then I had quite a few hours on them.

I don’t know how I got my bearings without a compass in that ocean of pines, and zigzagged out to the highway. I was lucky—there’s no other explanation. My marathon lasted hours: I left in the morning, saw the sunset and nightfall. I stopped a couple of times to drink water and nibble on the energy bars, dripping with sweat, and kept running until the darkness forced me to stop. I crouched down between the roots of a tree for the night, begging my Popo to intercept any bears. There were lots in those woods, and they were bold; sometimes they came up to the academy looking for food, completely untroubled by the proximity of humans. We watched them through the windows, no one daring to shoo them away, while they knocked over the garbage cans. Communication with my Popo, ephemeral as froth, had suffered serious ups and downs during my stay at the academy. In the early days after his death he used to appear to me, I’m sure; I’d see him standing in the threshold of a door, on the sidewalk across the street, through the window of a restaurant. He’s unmistakable, there’s no one who looks like my Popo, neither black nor white, no one as elegant and theatrical, with his pipe, gold-rimmed glasses, and Borsalino hat. Then my drug and alcohol debacle began, noise and more noise. I was bewildered and blinded and didn’t see him again, but on certain occasions I believe he was near; I could feel his eyes fixed on my back. According to my Nini, you have to be very quiet, in silence, in an empty and clean space, with no clocks, to perceive spirits. “How do you expect to hear your Popo if you walk around plugged into a set of headphones?” she used to say.

That night, alone in the woods, I experienced the irrational fear of my childhood nights of insomnia all over again. The same monsters from my grandparents’ big house resumed their attack. Only the embrace and warmth of another being could help me to sleep, someone bigger and stronger than me: my Popo or a bomb-sniffer dog. “Popo, Popo,” I called, my heart thumping in my chest. I squeezed my eyelids shut and covered my ears to keep from seeing the shifting shadows or hearing the menacing sounds. I dozed for a while, which must have been very short, and woke up startled by a flash between the tree trunks. It took me a little while to get my bearings and realize that it could be the lights of a vehicle and that I might be near a road; then I jumped to my feet, shouting in relief, and started running.

Classes started several weeks ago, and now I have a job as a teacher, but without a salary. I’m going to pay Manuel Arias for my room and board by way of a complicated barter formula. I work at the school, and Auntie Blanca, instead of paying me directly, repays Manuel with firewood, writing paper, gasoline, licor de oro, and other amenities, like movies that don’t get shown in town because they lack Spanish subtitles or because they’re “repugnant.” It’s not her who applies the censorship, but a residents’ committee, who find American movies with too much sex “repugnant.” That adjective is not applied to Chilean movies, where the actors tend to roll around naked and moaning without the audience on this island taking much notice.

Barter is an essential part of the economy in these islands: fish are exchanged for potatoes, bread for wood, chickens for rabbits, and many services are paid for with products. The baby-faced doctor from the boat doesn’t charge, because he works for the National Health Service, but his patients still pay him with hens or knitting. Nobody puts a price on things, but everyone knows what things are worth and what’s fair and keeps track in their minds. The system flows elegantly; debts are never mentioned, neither is what’s given or what’s received. Those not born here could never fully understand the complexity and subtlety of the exchanges, but I’ve learned to pay back the endless cups of maté and tea I’m offered in town. At first I didn’t know how, because I’ve never been as poor as I am now, not even when I was begging on the street, but I realized that my neighbors appreciate me keeping the children entertained or helping Doña Lucinda dye and wind her wool. Doña Lucinda is so ancient that nobody remembers anymore what family she belongs to, and they take turns looking after her; she’s the great-great-grandmother of the island and still active, romancing the potatoes with her songs and selling wool.

It’s not essential to pay back the favor directly to the person who helped you; the favors can be cannoned off one another, as Blanca and Manuel do with my work at the school. Sometimes it’s a double or triple cannon: Liliana Treviño gets glucosamine for the arthritis of Eduvigis Corrales, who knits woolen socks for Manuel Arias, and he cashes in his copies of National Geographic for ladies’ magazines at the bookstore in Castro and gives them to Liliana Treviño when she arrives with medicine for Eduvigis, and round it goes and everybody’s happy. As for the glucosamine, I should clarify that Eduvigis takes it reluctantly, just so she won’t offend the nurse, because the only infallible cure for arthritis is rubbing with nettle leaves combined with bee stings. With such drastic remedies, it’s not strange that people here get worn down. Also, the wind and the cold harm the bones and the dampness seeps into the joints; the body tires of collecting potatoes from the earth and shellfish from the sea and the heart becomes melancholy, because children go far away. Cider and wine combat sorrows for a while, but in the end weariness always wins. Existence isn’t easy here, and for many, death is an invitation to rest.

My days have begun to get more interesting since school started. Before I was the gringuita, but now that I teach the children I’m Auntie Gringa. In Chile older people receive the title uncle or auntie, even if they’re not. Out of respect, I should call Manuel uncle, but I didn’t know that when I got here and now it’s too late. I’m putting roots down in this island—I never would have imagined it.

In the winter we start class around nine in the morning, depending on the light and the rain. I jog to school, accompanied by Fahkeen, who leaves me at the door and then goes home, where it’s warm. The day begins with the raising of the Chilean flag with everybody lined up and singing the national anthem—Pure, Chile, is your blue sky, pure breezes cross you as well—and then Auntie Blanca gives us the day’s guidelines. On Fridays she names those who’ve earned prizes or reprimands and raises our morale with an edifying little speech.

I teach the children basic English, the language of the future, according to Auntie Blanca, with a textbook from 1952 in which the airplanes have propellers and the mothers, always blonde, cook in high heels. I also teach them to use the computers, which work well enough when there’s electricity, and I’m the official soccer coach, although any of these brats plays better than I do. There is an Olympian vehemence in our boys’ team, El Caleuche, because I bet Don Lionel Schnake, when he bought us the cleats, that we’d win the school championship in September, and if we lost I’d shave my head, which would be an unbearable humiliation for my players. La Pincoya, the girls’ team, is terrible, and it’s better not to mention it.

El Caleuche rejected Juanito Corrales, nicknamed “the Runt” because he’s a bit sickly, even though he runs like a hare and has no fear of getting hit by the ball. The boys make fun of him, and if they can, they beat him up. The oldest student is Pedro Pelanchugay, who has repeated several grades; the general consensus is that he should earn a living fishing with his uncles, instead of wasting the bit of a brain that he’s got learning numbers and letters that will never be much use to him. He’s a Huilliche Indian, heavyset, dark-skinned, stubborn, and patient—a good guy, but nobody messes with him, because when he does finally lose patience, he attacks like a tractor. Auntie Blanca put him in charge of protecting Juanito. “Why me?” he asked, looking at his feet. “Because you’re the strongest.” Then she called Juanito over and ordered him to help Pedro with his homework. “Why me?” stuttered the boy, who hardly ever speaks. “Because you’re the smartest.” With this Solomonic solution she solved the problem of bullying against the one and the bad marks of the other and at the same time forged a solid friendship between the two boys, who have become inseparable in both their own best interests.

At midday I help to serve the lunch provided by the Ministry of Education: chicken or fish, potatoes, a vegetable, dessert, and a glass of milk. Auntie Blanca says that for some Chilean children it’s their only meal of the day, but on this island that’s not the case; we’re poor, but we don’t lack food. My shift finishes after lunch; then I go home to work with Manuel for a couple of hours, and the rest of the afternoon I have free. On Fridays Auntie Blanca awards the three best-behaved students of the week a little yellow piece of paper with her signature, which entitles them to have a jacuzzi—that is, soak in hot water in Uncle Manuel’s wooden barrel. At home we give the prizewinning children a cup of cocoa and cookies baked by me, we make them take a shower with soap, and then they can play in the jacuzzi until it gets dark.

That night in Oregon left me indelibly marked. I escaped from the academy and ran all day through the woods without any plan whatsoever, without a thought in my head other than to hurt my father and free myself of the therapists and their group sessions, I was fed up with their sugarcoated friendliness and their obscene insistence on sounding out my mind. I wanted to be normal, nothing more.

I was woken up by the car speeding past, and I ran, tripping over shrubs and tree roots and pushing the pine branches away from my face, but when I finally found the road, which was less than fifty yards away, the lights had disappeared. The moon lit up the yellow line in the middle of the highway. I figured other cars would come past, because it was still relatively early, and I wasn’t wrong; I soon heard the noise of a big engine and saw two headlights shining in the distance. As they got closer the lights turned out to belong to a gigantic truck, with wheels as tall as me and two flags flapping from the chassis. I ran in front of it, waving my arms desperately. The driver, surprised by this unexpected vision, slammed on the brakes, but I had to jump out of the way, because the enormous mass of the truck kept running along for another twenty yards before it came to a complete stop. I ran to the vehicle. The driver leaned out the window and shone a flashlight over me from head to toe, studying me, wondering whether this girl could be the decoy for a gang of raiders—it wouldn’t have been the first time something like that happened to a truck driver. When he checked that there was nobody else around and saw my Medusa hairstyle with sherbet-colored highlights, he relaxed. He must have concluded that I was an inoffensive junkie, another silly druggie. He motioned me to the other door, reached over, and unlocked it, and I climbed up into the cabin.

Seen up close, the man was just as overwhelming as his vehicle: big, burly, with the arms of a weight lifter, a tank top, and an anemic little ponytail sticking out the back of his baseball cap, a caricature of a macho brute, but it was too late to back out. In contrast to his threatening appearance, a little baby bootie hung from the rearview mirror, as well as a couple of religious pictures. “I’m going to Las Vegas,” he informed me. I told him that I was going to California and added that Las Vegas was just as good, since no one was expecting me in California. That was my second mistake; my first was getting in the truck.

The next hour went by in an animated monologue delivered by the driver, who exuded energy as if he was charged up on amphetamines. He kept himself entertained during his eternal hours behind the wheel by communicating with other drivers to exchange jokes and comments about the weather, the asphalt, baseball, their trucks, and the roadside restaurants, while on the radio the evangelical preachers foretold the second coming of Christ at the top of their lungs. He smoked nonstop, sweated, scratched himself, drank water. The air in the cabin was unbreathable. He offered me french fries from a bag on the seat and a can of Coke, but he didn’t ask my name or what I was doing on a desolate road in the middle of the night. However, he told me all about himself: his name was Roy Fedgewick, he was from Tennessee, he’d been in the army, until he had an accident and they discharged him. In the rehabilitation hospital, where he spent several weeks, he found Jesus. He kept talking and quoting passages from the Bible, while I tried in vain to relax, my head leaning against the window, as far as possible from his cigarette; I had cramps in my legs and a disagreeable tingling on my skin from the strain of my day’s run.

Fifty miles on, Fedgewick turned off the road and stopped in front of a motel. A blue neon sign, with several bulbs burned out, showed the name. There were no signs of activity, just a row of rooms, a pop machine, a pay phone, a truck, and two cars that looked as if they’d been there since the beginning of time.

“I’ve been driving since six this morning. We’re going to spend the night here. Get out,” Fedgewick announced.

“I’d rather sleep in your truck, if you don’t mind,” I said, thinking of how I didn’t have money for a room.

The man reached over me to open a compartment and took out a quart of whisky and a semiautomatic pistol. He grabbed a canvas bag, got out, turned around, opened the door on my side, and said I better climb down if I knew what was good for me.

“We both know why we’re here, you little slut. Or did you think the ride was going to be free?”

I obeyed instinctively, although in our self-defense course at Berkeley High they’d taught us that in circumstances like this the best thing to do was to throw yourself on the ground and scream like a lunatic, never to collaborate with the aggressor. I noticed he was limping, and he was shorter and heavier than he looked when he was sitting down. I could have run away, and he wouldn’t have been able to catch up to me, but the thought of the pistol stopped me. Fedgewick guessed my intentions, gripped me firmly by the arm, and practically carried me up to the reception window, which was protected by thick glass and bars, shoved several bills through a hole, received a key, and asked for a six-pack of beer and a pizza. I didn’t manage to see the employee or make any signal; the trucker kept his carcass in the way.

With the man’s grip crushing my arm, I walked toward number 32, and we entered a room that stank of damp and creosote, with a double bed, striped wallpaper, television, an electric heater, and an air conditioner that filled the only window. Fedgewick made me shut myself in the washroom till they’d brought the beer and pizza. The bathroom contained a shower and sink with rusty faucets, a toilet that didn’t look very clean, and two frayed towels; there was no lock on the door and only a small skylight for ventilation. I cast an anxious glance around my cell and understood that I’d never been so helpless. My previous adventures were a joke compared to this. They’d happened on familiar territory, in the company of my friends, with Rick Laredo looking out for us in the rearguard, and the certainty that in an emergency I could always run home to my grandma.

The trucker received what he’d ordered, exchanged a couple of words with the employee, closed the door, and called me to come and eat before the pizza got cold. I couldn’t put a thing in my mouth; my throat had seized up. Fedgewick didn’t insist. He looked for something in his bag, went to the washroom, without closing the door, and returned to the room with his fly undone and a plastic cup with a finger of whiskey in it. “Are you nervous? You’ll feel better after this,” he said, passing me the cup. I shook my head, unable to speak, but he grabbed me by the back of the neck and held the cup to my lips. “Drink it, you little bitch. Or do you want me to make you?” I swallowed it, almost choking, my eyes watering; I hadn’t tasted any alcohol for over a year, and I’d forgotten how it burned.

My kidnapper sat on the bed to watch a comedy on television and wolf down three cans of beer and two-thirds of the pizza, laughing, burping, apparently having forgotten all about me, while I stood waiting in a corner, leaning against the wall, feeling faint and dizzy. The room kept moving, the furniture changing shape; the enormous mass of Fedgewick blended in with the images from the TV. My legs were buckling under me, and I had to sit down on the floor, struggling against the desire to close my eyes and give up. I couldn’t think, but I realized I’d been drugged: the whiskey in the plastic cup. The man, bored of the comedy, turned off the TV and came over to check what state I was in. His thick fingers lifted up my head, which weighed a ton; my neck couldn’t hold it up anymore. His repulsive breath hit me in the face. Fedgewick sat down on the bed, poured a line of cocaine on the bedside table, straightened it with a credit card, and snorted the white powder with evident pleasure. Then he immediately turned and ordered me to take my clothes off, while rubbing his crotch with the barrel of his gun, but I couldn’t move. He lifted me off the ground and tore my clothes off. I tried to fight him off, but my body wouldn’t do what it was told; I tried to scream, and my voice wouldn’t come out. I was sinking into a thick quagmire, with no air, drowning, dying.

I was half unconscious during the hours that followed and unaware of the worst humiliations, but at some point my spirit returned from afar and I observed the scene in the sordid motel room as if it were on a black-and-white screen: the long, thin, inert female figure, open like a cross, the minotaur mumbling obscenities and thrusting over and over again, the dark stains on the sheet, the belt, the gun, the bottle. Floating in the air, I finally saw Fedgewick collapse facedown, exhausted, satisfied, drooling, and instantly starting to snore. I made a superhuman effort to wake up and return to my painful body, but I could barely open my eyes, much less think. Get up, ask for help, escape, were all meaningless words forming like soap bubbles and disappearing in the cotton of my dulled mind. I sank back down into a merciful darkness.

I woke up at ten to three in the morning, according to the fluorescent clock on the nightstand, with my mouth dry, my lips split, tormented by a terrible thirst. When I tried to sit up, I realized I was immobilized; Fedgewick had secured my left wrist to the bedstead with handcuffs. My hand was swollen and my arm was rigid, the same arm I’d broken before in the accident on my bike. The panic I was feeling cleared a little of the dense fog from the drug. I moved carefully, trying to find my way in the darkness. The only light came from the blue glow of the motel sign, which filtered in between the filthy curtains, and from the green reflection of the luminous numbers on the clock. The telephone! It was right there, beside the clock, very close, as I discovered when I turned to see what time it was.

With my free hand I pulled the sheet and cleaned the slime off my belly and thighs, then I turned onto my left side and slid slowly, arduously, down onto the floor. The tug of the handcuffs on my wrist made me groan involuntarily, and the creaking of the bedsprings sounded like a train slamming on the brakes. Kneeling on the rough carpet, my arm twisted into an impossible position, I waited in terror for my captor’s reaction, but above the deafening noise of my own heart I could hear him snoring. I waited five minutes before daring to pick up the phone to make sure he was still sprawled in a deep drunken sleep. I crouched down on the floor, as far away as the handcuffs would let me, and dialed 911 to ask for help, muffling my voice with a pillow. There was no outside line. The room phone only rang at the reception desk; to make an outside call you had to use the pay phone in the lobby or a cell phone, and the trucker’s was out of my reach. I dialed the number for reception and heard it ring eleven times before a male voice with an Indian accent answered. “I’ve been kidnapped, help me, help me . . . ,” I whispered, but the employee hung up the phone without giving me time to say anything else. I tried again, with the same result. Desperate, I drowned my sobs in the grimy pillow.

More than half an hour went by before I remembered the pistol, which Fedgewick had used like a perverse toy, cold metal in my vagina, in my mouth, tasting of blood. I had to find it, my only hope. To get back on the bed with one hand cuffed I had to go through contortions worthy of a circus performer, and I couldn’t keep the mattress from bouncing under my weight. The trucker emitted a few snorts like a bull, rolled over onto his back, and his hand fell on my hip like a brick, paralyzing me, but he soon went back to snoring, and I could breathe again. The clock showed twenty-five past three: time was dragging, there were hours to go before daybreak. I understood these were my last moments; Fedgewick would never let me live. I could identify him and describe his vehicle. If he hadn’t killed me yet, it was because he was not finished with me. The idea that I was condemned, that I was going to be murdered and they’d never find my remains in these woods, gave me unexpected courage. I had nothing to lose.

I shoved Fedgewick’s hand off my hip and turned to face him. I was struck by his smell: beastly breath, sweat, alcohol, semen, rancid pizza. I looked at his awful face in profile, his enormous chest, the bulging muscles of his forearms, the hairy crotch, leg as thick as a tree trunk, and I swallowed the vomit that rose in my throat. With my free hand I began to feel under his pillow for the pistol. I found it almost immediately, within my reach, but wedged there by Fedgewick’s big head. He must have been very confident of his power and my resignation to have left it there. I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, grasped the barrel with two fingers and began to pull it inch by inch, without moving the pillow. Finally I managed to remove the pistol, which was heavier than I’d expected, and held it against my chest, trembling from the effort and the anxiety. The only weapon I’d ever seen was Rick Laredo’s, and I’d never touched it, but I knew how to use it; movies had taught me that.

I aimed the pistol at Fedgewick’s head: it was his life or mine. I could barely lift the weapon with one hand, trembling with nerves, with my body twisted and weakened by the drug, but it was going to be a single shot at point-blank range and I couldn’t fail. I held my finger to the trigger and hesitated, blinded by the deafening pounding in my temples. I calculated, with absolute clarity, that I was not going to have another chance to escape from that animal. I forced my index finger to move, felt the slight resistance of the trigger, and hesitated again, anticipating the blast, the recoil of the weapon, the nightmarish explosion of bones and blood and bits of brain. “Now, it has to be now,” I murmured, but I couldn’t do it. I wiped off the sweat that was running down my face and clouding my vision, dried off my hand on the sheet, and picked up the weapon again, put my finger on the trigger, and aimed. Twice more I repeated the gesture, unable to fire. I looked at the clock: three thirty. Finally, I left the pistol on the pillow, beside my sleeping tormentor’s ear. I turned my back on Fedgewick and curled up, naked, numb, crying with frustration at my scruples and from relief at having freed myself from the irreversible horror of killing.

At dawn Roy Fedgewick woke up, burping and stretching, with no sign of a hangover, talkative and in a good mood. He saw the pistol on the pillow, picked it up, held it to his temple, and pulled the trigger. “Boom! You didn’t think it was loaded, did you?” he said, and burst out laughing. He stood up naked, checking out his morning erection with both hands, thought for a moment, but gave up the urge. He put the gun in his bag, took a key out of his pants pocket, unlocked the handcuffs, and set me free. “You wouldn’t believe how handy these handcuffs come in. Women love them. How do you feel?” he asked me, patting my head with a fatherly gesture. I still couldn’t believe I was alive. I’d slept dreamlessly for a couple of hours, as if I were anesthetized. I rubbed my wrist and hand to get my circulation flowing again.

“Let’s go have breakfast, the most important meal of the day. After a good breakfast I can drive for twenty hours,” he told me from the toilet, where he was sitting with a cigarette in his mouth. After a while I heard him take a shower and brush his teeth, then he came back in the room, got dressed, humming, turned on the TV, and rested his imitation alligator-skin cowboy boots on the bed. I gradually moved my numb limbs, stood up like an ungainly old lady, stumbled to the bathroom, and closed the door. The hot shower felt comforting. I washed my hair with the cheap motel shampoo and scrubbed my body furiously, trying to erase with soap the despicable things that had happened during the night. My legs, breasts, and waist were bruised and scratched; my wrist and hand were deformed by the swelling. I felt burning pain in my vagina and anus, a trickle of blood ran down my legs; I improvised a dressing out of toilet paper, put on my underwear, and got dressed. The truck driver put two pills in his mouth and swallowed them with half a bottle of beer, then he offered me the rest of the bottle, the only one left, and another two pills. “Take these. It’s just aspirin, helps get rid of the hangover. Today we’ll get to Las Vegas. You might as well stay with me, girl, you’ve already paid the toll,” he said. He picked up his bag, made sure he wasn’t leaving anything behind, and left the room. I followed him weakly to the truck. The sky was just starting to brighten.

A short time later we stopped at a roadside restaurant, where there were already other big transport trucks parked, and a trailer. Inside, the smell of bacon and coffee whetted my appetite. I’d only eaten two energy bars and a handful of french fries in over twenty-four hours. The driver walked into the place bursting with bonhomie, joking with the other customers, who he seemed to know, kissing the waitress, and greeting the two Guatemalans doing the cooking in terrible Spanish. He ordered orange juice, eggs, sausages, pancakes, toast, and coffee for both of us, while I took in at a glance the linoleum floor, the ceiling fans, the piles of pastries under the glass bell on the counter. When they brought the food, Fedgewick held both my hands across the table, bent his head theatrically, and closed his eyes. “Thank you, Lord, for this nutritious breakfast and this beautiful day. Bless us, oh Lord, and protect us for the rest of our journey. Amen.” I observed hopelessly the other men eating noisily at the other tables, the woman serving coffee with her dyed hair and her weariness, the Mayans flipping eggs and bacon in the kitchen. There was no one to turn to. What could I say? That I’d asked for a lift and he’d charged me for the favor in a motel, that I was stupid and deserved my fate. I bent my head like the trucker and prayed silently: “Don’t let me go, Popo. Take care of me.” Then I devoured my breakfast down to the last scrap.

Due to its position on the map, so far from the United States and so close to nowhere, Chile is off the usual narcotics trafficking route, but drugs have arrived here as well, like everywhere else in the world. You see some kids lost in the clouds; I saw one on the ferry, when I crossed the Chacao Channel on my way to Chiloé, a desperate kid who was already in the stage of seeing invisible beings, hearing voices, talking to himself, gesticulating. Marijuana is within anybody’s reach, more common and cheaper than cigarettes, on sale on street corners. Coca paste or crack circulates more among poor people, who also sniff gasoline, glue, paint thinner, and other poisons. For those interested in variety there are hallucinogens of various kinds, cocaine, heroin, and their derivatives, amphetamines, and a full menu of black-market prescription drugs, but on our little island there are fewer options, just alcohol for anyone who wants it and marijuana and coca paste for the young people. “You have to keep very alert with the children, gringuita, no drugs in the school,” Blanca Schnake told me, and then proceeded to give me instructions on what symptoms to watch out for. She doesn’t know that I’m an expert.

When we were supervising recess, Blanca told me that Azucena Corrales hasn’t come to class, and she’s afraid she’s going to drop out like her older brothers and sisters, none of whom graduated. She never met Juanito’s mother, who’d already left the island when Blanca arrived, but she knows she was a very bright girl, who got pregnant at fifteen, left after giving birth, and never came back. Now she lives in Quellón, in the south of Isla Grande, where most of the salmon farms used to be, before the virus arrived that killed the fish. During the salmon bonanza, Quellón was like the Wild West, a land of adventurers and single men, who tended to take the law into their own hands, and women of easy virtue and enterprising spirit, able to earn more in a week than a worker could in a year. The women in most demand were the Colombians, called itinerant sex workers by the press and black bottoms by their grateful clients.

“Azucena was a good student, like her sister, but she suddenly turned shy and started avoiding people. I don’t know what could have happened to her,” Auntie Blanca said to me.

“She hasn’t come to clean our house either. The last time I saw her was the night of the storm, when she came looking for Manuel, because Carmelo Corrales was very ill.”

“Manuel told me. Carmelo Corrales had an attack of hypoglycemia, quite common among alcoholic diabetics, but giving him honey was a risky decision for Manuel to take; it could have killed him. Imagine what a responsibility!”

“He was already half dead, anyhow, Auntie Blanca. Manuel is a cool dude. Have you noticed that he never gets angry or worried?”

“It’s because of the bubble in his brain,” Blanca informed me.

It turns out that a decade ago Manuel was diagnosed with an aneurysm, which could burst at any moment. And I only just found out! According to Blanca, Manuel came to Chiloé to live out his days to the full in this magnificent landscape, in peace and silence, doing what he loves, writing and researching.

“The aneurysm is like a death sentence, and it’s made him detached, but not indifferent. Manuel uses his time wisely, gringuita. He lives in the present, hour by hour, and he’s much more reconciled to the idea of dying than I am, who also has a time bomb inside. Other people spend years meditating in a monastery without attaining the peace of mind that Manuel has.”

“So you think he’s like Siddhartha too.”

“Who?”

“Nobody.”

It occurs to me that Manuel Arias has never had a great love, like my grandparents did, and that’s why he’s content with his solitary, lone-wolf existence. The bubble in his brain serves as an excuse to avoid love. Does he not have eyes to see Blanca? Juesú! as Eduvigis would say—it seems like I’m trying to hook him up with Blanca. This pernicious romanticism of mine is the result of the slushy novels I’ve been reading lately. The inevitable question is, Why did Manuel agree to take in someone like me, a stranger, someone from another world, with suspicious customs and a fugitive besides? How could it be that his friendship with my grandmother, who he hasn’t seen for several decades, weighed heavier on the scales of life than his indispensable tranquillity?

“Manuel was worried about you coming,” Blanca told me when I asked. “He thought you were going to cause chaos in his life, but he couldn’t deny your grandmother the favor, because when he was banished in 1975, somebody gave him shelter.”

“Your father.”

“Yes. At that time it was risky to help those persecuted by the dictatorship, and my father was warned—he lost friends and relatives, even my brothers were angry about it. Lionel Schnake giving refuge to a Communist! But he said if you can’t help your neighbor in this country, we might as well go somewhere else. My daddy thinks he’s invulnerable—he said the military wouldn’t dare touch him. The arrogance of his class allowed him to do good in this case.”

“And now Manuel pays back Don Lionel by helping me. The rebounding Chilote law of reciprocity.”

“That’s right.”

“Manuel’s fears about me were justified, Auntie Blanca. I arrived like a bull in a china shop—”

“But that did him a lot of good!” she interrupted me. “I can see he’s changed, gringuita. He’s more open.”

“Open? He’s closed up tighter than a sailor’s knot. I think he’s depressed.”

“That’s his nature, gringuita. He was never a clown.”

By her tone of voice and faraway look I guessed how much she loved him. Manuel told me he was thirty-nine years old when he was banished to Chiloé and lived in Don Lionel Schnake’s house. He was traumatized by having spent more than a year in prison, by the banishment, by the loss of his family, his friends, his job, everything, while for Blanca it was a wonderful time: she’d been crowned as beauty queen and was planning her wedding. The contrast between the two of them was very cruel. Blanca knew almost nothing about her father’s guest, but was attracted by his tragic, melancholy air; in comparison, other men, including her fiancé, struck her as insubstantial. The night before Manuel went into exile, the very same evening the Schnake family was celebrating the return of their expropriated land in Osorno, she went to Manuel’s room to give him a little pleasure, something memorable that he could take with him to Australia. Blanca had made love with her fiancé, a successful engineer, son of a rich family, supporter of the military government, Catholic, the opposite of Manuel and suitable for a young woman like her, but what she experienced with Manuel that night was very different. Dawn found them entwined in a sad embrace, like two orphans.

“The gift was his, not mine. Manuel changed me, gave me another perspective on the world. He didn’t tell me what had happened to him when he was in prison—he never talks about that—but I felt his suffering in my own skin. A little while after that I broke off my engagement and went abroad,” Blanca told me.

Over the next twenty years she heard news of him, because Manuel never stopped writing to Don Lionel; so she learned about his divorces, his time in Australia, then in Spain, his return to Chile in 1998. She was married then, with two teenage daughters.

“My marriage was in all sorts of difficulty, my husband was one of those chronic philanderers, raised to be waited on by women. You’ll have noticed how sexist this country is, Maya. My husband left me when I got cancer; he couldn’t stand the idea of going to bed with a woman who had no breasts.”

“And what happened between you and Manuel?”

“Nothing. We met again here in Chiloé, both of us rather wounded by life.”

“You love him, don’t you?”

“It’s not that simple—”

“Then you should tell him,” I interrupted. “If you’re going to wait for him to take the initiative, you’d better make yourself comfortable.”

“My cancer could come back at any moment, Maya. No man wants to get tied down to a woman with this.”

“And at any moment Manuel’s f*cking bubble could burst, Auntie Blanca. There’s no time to lose.”

“Don’t you even think of sticking your nose in this! The last thing we need around here is a gringa matchmaker,” she warned me, alarmed.

I’m afraid that if I don’t stick my nose in, they’re going to die of old age without resolving this matter. Later, when I got home, I found Manuel sitting in his easy chair in front of the window, editing some loose pages, with a cup of tea on the end table, Dumb-Cat at his feet and Literati-Cat curled up on top of the manuscript. The house smelled of sugar; Eduvigis had been making apricot jam with the last fruit of the season. The jam was cooling in a line of recycled jars of various sizes, ready for winter, when the abundance ends and the earth goes to sleep, as she says. Manuel heard me come in and waved vaguely, but didn’t lift his eyes from his papers. Oh, Popo! I couldn’t stand it if anything happened to Manuel, take care of him for me, don’t let him die on me too. I tiptoed over and hugged him from the back, a sad embrace. I lost my fear of Manuel after that night when I climbed into his bed uninvited; now I hold his hand, give him kisses, take food off his plate—which he hates—rest my head on his knees when we read, ask him to scratch my back, which he does in terror. He doesn’t scold me anymore when I wear his clothes or use his computer or correct his book; the truth is, I write better than he does. I nuzzled my nose in his coarse hair, and my tears fell onto him like little pebbles.

“Something up?” he asked me, surprised.

“What’s up is that I love you,” I confessed.

“Don’t harass me, señorita. A bit more respect for this old man,” he mumbled.

After the abundant breakfast with Roy Fedgewick, I traveled in his truck for the rest of the day, hearing country music and evangelical preachers on the radio and his interminable monologue, which I barely listened to, because I was drowsy from the aftereffects of the drug and the fatigue of that terrible night. I had two or three opportunities to escape, and he wouldn’t have tried to stop me—he’d lost interest—but I didn’t have the energy. My body felt slack and my mind confused. We stopped at a gas station, and while he bought cigarettes, I went to the washroom. It hurt to pee, and I was still bleeding a little. I thought of staying inside that washroom until I heard Fedgewick’s truck leaving, but the exhaustion and fear of falling into other cruel hands drove the idea out of my head. I returned to the vehicle with my head hanging, curled up in my corner, and closed my eyes. By the time we arrived in Las Vegas, at dusk, I was feeling a little better.

Fedgewick dropped me off right on the Boulevard—the Strip—in the heart of Las Vegas, and gave me a ten-dollar tip, because I reminded him of his daughter, he said. He showed me a photo of a blond five-year-old on his cell phone to prove it. When he left, he stroked my hair and said good-bye with a “God bless you, dear.” I realized he feared nothing, and his conscience was at peace; that had been just one more of many similar encounters for which he was always prepared with the pistol, handcuffs, alcohol, and drugs; within a few minutes he’d have forgotten me. At some point in his monologue he’d let me know that there were dozens of teenagers, boys and girls, runaways, who offered themselves on the road for truck drivers to use however they wished; it was a whole culture of child prostitution. The only good thing that could be said about him is that he took precautions so that I wouldn’t infect him with a disease. I’d rather not know the details of what happened that night in the motel, but I remember in the morning there were used condoms on the floor. I was lucky—he practiced safe sex while raping me.

At that time of day the air in Las Vegas had cooled off, but the sidewalk still held the dry heat of the daylight hours. I sat on a bench, aching from the recent excesses and overwhelmed by the scandal of lights in this unreal city, risen like an enchantment from the desert dust. The streets are lively, a nonstop festival: traffic, buses, limousines, music; people everywhere—old men in shorts and Hawaiian shirts, grown women wearing cowboy hats, sequin-studded blue jeans and chemical tans, ordinary tourists and poor ones, lots of obese people. My decision to punish my father remained firm—I blamed him for all my misfortunes—but I wanted to call my grandma. In this age of cell phones it’s almost impossible to find a public pay phone anywhere. When I finally found a phone booth in working order, the operator either couldn’t or wouldn’t let me make a collect call.

I went to change the ten-dollar bill for coins in a hotel-casino, one of the vast citadels of opulence with palm trees transplanted from the Caribbean, volcanic eruptions, fireworks, colored waterfalls, and beaches without any sea. This display of splendor and vulgarity is concentrated in a few blocks, where brothels, gambling dens, bars, massage parlors, and X-rated cinemas are also plentiful. At one end of the Boulevard it’s possible to get married in seven minutes in a chapel with twinkling hearts, and at the other end you can get divorced in the same length of time. That’s how I described it months later to my grandma, although it would be an incomplete truth. In Las Vegas there are rich communities with mansions behind high fences, middle-class suburbs, where mothers walk with their baby buggies, run-down neighborhoods with panhandlers and gangsters; there are schools, churches, museums, and parks that I only glimpsed from afar, for I lived my life by night. I phoned the house that used to be my father’s and Susan’s and where my Nini now lived alone. I didn’t know if Angie had notified her of my absence yet, although two days had passed since I disappeared from the academy. The phone rang four times, and the recording came on to tell me to leave a message; then I remembered that Thursdays my grandma did a volunteer night shift at the hospice, paying back the help we received when my Popo was dying. I hung up; no one would answer until the next morning.

That day I’d had a very early breakfast, and didn’t want to eat anything at lunch with Fedgewick, so by then I felt a huge emptiness in my stomach, but I decided to save my coins for the phone. I started walking in the opposite direction from the casino lights, away from the throng, from the fantastical brightness of the illuminated billboards, the noise of the cascade of traffic. The mind-blowing city disappeared to give way to another, quiet and somber. Wandering aimlessly and disoriented, I came to a sleepy street, sat down on a bench inside a bus shelter, leaning on my knapsack, and settled down to rest. Exhausted, I fell asleep.

A little while later, a stranger woke me up, touching my shoulder. “Can I take you home, sleeping beauty?” he asked me, sounding like a horse whisperer. He was short, very skinny, with a stooped back, a hare’s face, and greasy straw-colored hair. “Home?” I repeated, disconcerted. He held out his hand, smiling with stained teeth, and told me his name: Brandon Leeman.

On that first encounter, Brandon Leeman was dressed entirely in khaki, a shirt and pants with several pockets and rubber-soled shoes. He had the calming air of a park ranger. The long sleeves covered tattoos with martial art themes and needle marks, which I wouldn’t see until later. Leeman had served two terms in prison, and the police in several states were still looking for him, but in Las Vegas he felt safe, and he’d turned it into his temporary hideout. He was a thief, a heroin dealer and user. Nothing distinguished him from others like him in that city. He was armed out of precaution and habit, not because he was prone to violence, and when necessary he could count on two thugs, Joe Martin, from Kansas, and Chino, a guy from the Philippines, covered in smallpox scars, who he’d met in prison. Leeman was thirty-eight years old, but he looked fifty. That Thursday he’d just come out of the sauna, one of the few pleasures he allowed himself, not out of austerity but having arrived at a state of total indifference toward everything except his white lady, his snow, his queen, his brown sugar. He’d just shot up and felt fresh and dynamic as he began his nightly round.

From his vehicle, a gloomy-looking van, Leeman had seen me dozing on the bench. As he told me later, he trusted his instinct to judge people, very useful in his line of work, and I struck him as a diamond in the rough. He went around the block, drove past me again slowly and confirmed his first impression. He thought I was about fifteen, too young for his purposes, but he was in no position to be too demanding, because he’d been looking for someone like me for months. He stopped a short way down the block and got out of the car, ordering his henchmen to make themselves scarce until he called them and approached the bus stop.

“I haven’t eaten yet. There’s a McDonald’s three blocks from here. Would you like to come with me? I’ll buy you dinner,” he offered.

I analyzed the situation quickly. My recent experience with Fedgewick had left me wary, but this loser dressed up as an explorer didn’t seem like anything to be scared of. “Shall we go?” he insisted. I followed him a little doubtfully, but when we turned the corner and the McDonald’s sign appeared in the distance I couldn’t resist the temptation; I was hungry. We chatted along the way, and I ended up telling him I’d just arrived in the city, that I was just passing through and was going to return to California as soon as I could call my grandmother and get her to send me some money.

“I’d lend you my cell to call her, but the battery needs charging,” Leeman said.

“Thanks, but I can’t call her till tomorrow. My grandma’s not home tonight.”

In the McDonald’s there were a few customers and three employees, a black teenage girl with fake nails and two Latino guys, one of them with a Virgin of Guadalupe T-shirt. The smell of grease revived my appetite, and soon a double hamburger with fries partially restored my self-confidence, the strength to my legs, and my clarity of mind. Calling my Nini no longer seemed so urgent.

“Las Vegas looks pretty fun,” I commented with my mouth full.

“Sin City, they call it. You haven’t told me your name,” said Leeman, without having tasted his food.

“Sarah Laredo,” I improvised, unwilling to tell my name to a stranger.

“What happened to your hand?” he asked me, pointing to my swollen wrist.

“I fell.”

“Tell me about yourself, Sarah. You haven’t run away from home, have you?”

“Of course not!” I said, choking on a french fry. “I’ve just graduated from high school, and before starting college I wanted to check out Las Vegas, but I lost my wallet, that’s why I have to call my grandma.”

“I see. Now that you’re here, you should see Las Vegas—it’s a Disney World for adults. Did you know it’s the fastest-growing city in the States? Everybody wants to come and live here. Don’t change your plans because of a minor inconvenience. Stay a while. Look, Sarah, if the money order from your grandmother takes a while to arrive, I can lend you a little money.”

“Why? You don’t even know me,” I responded guardedly.

“Because I’m a good guy. How old are you?”

“Going on nineteen.”

“You look younger.”

“So it seems.”

At that moment two police officers came into the McDonald’s, one young, with dark mirrored glasses, even though it was nighttime, and wrestler’s muscles straining at the seams of his uniform, and the other about forty-five, without anything worth noticing in his appearance. While the younger one gave their order to the girl with the fake nails, the other came over to say hello to Brandon Leeman, who introduced us: his friend, Officer Arana, and I was his niece from Arizona, here visiting for a few days. The cop looked me over with an inquisitive expression in his blue eyes; he had an open face, with a quick smile, and skin the color of bricks from the desert sun. “Take care of your niece, Leeman. In this city a decent girl can easily get lost,” he said and went to sit at another table with his partner.

“If you want, I can give you a summer job, until you start college in September,” Brandon Leeman offered.

A blaze of intuition warned me against such generosity, but I had the whole night ahead of me and no obligation to give an immediate answer to this plucked bird. I thought he must be one of those rehabilitated alcoholics who go around saving souls, another Mike O’Kelly, but without any of the Irishman’s charisma. We’ll see how things play out, I decided. In the washroom I washed up as best I could, checked that I wasn’t bleeding anymore, changed into the clean clothes I had in my backpack, brushed my teeth, and, refreshed, got ready to see Las Vegas with my new friend.

When I came out of the washroom, I saw Brandon Leeman talking on his cell phone. Hadn’t he told me the battery was dead? Whatever. I must have misunderstood. We walked back to his car, where two suspicious-looking guys were waiting. “Joe Martin and Chino, my partners,” said Leeman, by way of introduction. Chino got behind the wheel, the other beside him, Leeman and I in the back seat. As we drove away, I started to get worried; we were heading into a seedy-looking part of town, with uninhabited or really run-down houses, garbage, groups of young people lounging around in doorways, a couple of homeless guys in filthy sleeping bags beside their shopping carts crammed full of junk.

“Don’t worry, you’re safe with me. Everybody knows me around here,” Leeman reassured me, guessing that I was getting ready to make a run for it. “There are better neighborhoods, but this one’s discreet, and I have my business here.”

“What kind of business?” I asked.

“You’ll see.”

We stopped in front of a decrepit three-story building, the windows broken, the walls covered in graffiti. Leeman and I got out of the van, and his partners drove around the block to the building’s parking lot. It was too late to back out; resigned to following Leeman, I tried not to appear distrustful, which might provoke an unfortunate reaction on his part. He led me to a side door—the main entrance was boarded up—and we found ourselves in a barely lit foyer in a state of absolute neglect, with dim bulbs hanging from bare wires. He explained that the building was originally a hotel and then it had been divided up into apartments, but it was badly run, an explanation that fell somewhat short of the visible reality.

We went up two flights of a dirty, smelly stairway, and on each floor I glimpsed several doors twisted off their hinges, and cavernous rooms. We didn’t meet anybody on the way up, but I heard voices and laughter and saw motionless human shadows in those open rooms. Later I found out that in the two lower floors, addicts got together to snort, shoot up, f*ck, deal, and die, but nobody went up to the third floor without permission. The last flight of stairs was closed with a gate, which Leeman opened by remote control, and we came to a relatively clean hallway, in comparison to the pigsty of the lower floors. He unlocked a metal door, and we entered an apartment with boarded-up windows, illuminated by bulbs on the ceiling and the blue glare of a screen. An air conditioner kept the temperature at a bearable level; it smelled of paint thinner and mint. There was a three-cushion sofa in good shape, a couple of battered mattresses on the floor, a long table, some chairs, and an enormous modern television, in front of which a boy who looked about twelve was lying on the floor, eating popcorn.

“You locked me in, you bastard!” the kid said without taking his eyes off the screen.

“So?” replied Brandon Leeman.

“If there’d been a f*cking fire I would’ve been cooked like a hot dog!”

“Why would there be a fire? This is Freddy, future king of rap,” he introduced the boy to me. “Freddy, say hi to this girl. She’s going to be working with me.”

Freddy didn’t look up. I walked around the strange dwelling, where there wasn’t much furniture, but old computers and other office equipment were piled up in all the rooms. There were several inexplicable butane blowtorches in the kitchen, which looked like it had never been used for cooking, and boxes and bundles all along the hallway.

The apartment was connected to another on the same floor by a big open hole in the wall that looked as if it had been made with sledgehammers. “My office is in here, and I sleep over there,” Brandon Leeman explained. We ducked through the hole and came into a room identical to the other one, but without furniture, also with air conditioning, the windows boarded up and several locks on the door that led outside. “As you can see, I have no family,” said my host, with an exaggerated gesture at the empty space. In one of the rooms there was a wide unmade bed, a pile of crates and a suitcase in one corner, and another top-of-the-line TV. In the bedroom next to it, smaller and just as dirty as the rest of the place, I saw a narrow bed, a chest of drawers, and two nightstands painted white, like a little girl’s room.

“If you stay, this will be your room,” Brandon Leeman told me.

“Why are the windows blocked up?”

“Out of precaution—I don’t like busybodies. I’ll explain what your job would be. I need a smart-looking girl to go into top-class hotels and casinos. Someone like you, who doesn’t arouse suspicion.”

“Hotels?”

“It’s not what you’re imagining. I can’t compete with the prostitution mafias. That’s a brutal business, and there are more hookers and pimps here than there are clients. No, none of that—you’ll just make deliveries where I tell you.”

“What kind of deliveries?”

“Drugs. Classy people appreciate room service.”

“That’s really dangerous!”

“No. The staff of the hotels take their cut and look the other way—it’s in their interest for their guests to get a good impression. The only problem could be an undercover agent from the vice squad, but none have ever shown up, I promise. It’s really easy, and you’ll have more money than you know what to do with.”

“As long as I sleep with you?”

“Oh, no! It’s been a long time since I stopped thinking about that and you should see how it’s simplified my life.” Brandon Leeman laughed sincerely. “I have to go out. Try to get some rest, we can start tomorrow.”

“You’ve been really kind to me, and I don’t want to seem ungrateful, but actually I’m not going to be of use to you. I—”

“You can decide later,” he interrupted. “Nobody is forced to work for me. If you want to leave tomorrow, you have every right, but for the moment you’re better off here than on the street, aren’t you?”

I sat down on the bed, with my backpack on my knees. I had an aftertaste of grease and onions in my mouth, the hamburger was sitting in my stomach like a rock, my muscles ached, and my bones felt soft, I was wiped out. I remembered the strain of my run to escape from the academy, the violence of the night in the motel, the hours traveling in the truck, dazed by the residues of the drug still in my system, and realized I needed to get my strength back.

“If you prefer, you can come with me, to get to know my patch, but I warn you it’ll be a long night,” Leeman offered.

I couldn’t stay there alone. I accompanied him until four in the morning around hotels and casinos on the Strip, where he delivered little bags to various people, doormen, parking lot attendants, young women and men who looked like tourists, who waited for him in the darkness. Chino stayed behind the wheel, Joe Martin was the lookout, and Brandon Leeman made the deliveries; none of the three entered the establishments because they had records or were under observation, having been operating in the same zone for too long. “It’s not advisable for me to do this work personally, but it’s not convenient for me to use intermediaries either—they charge a disproportionate commission and they’re not very reliable,” Leeman explained. I understood the advantage to this guy in hiring me, because I showed my face and ran the risks, but didn’t receive a commission. What was my salary going to be? I didn’t dare ask him. At the end of the run, we went back to the dilapidated building, where Freddy, the boy I’d seen before, was sleeping on one of the mattresses.

Brandon Leeman was always up front with me. I can’t claim that he misled me about what kind of business and lifestyle he was offering. I stayed with him knowing exactly what I was doing.

Manuel sees me writing in my notebook with the concentration of a notary, but never asks me what I’m writing. His lack of interest contrasts with my curiosity. I want to know more about him: his past, his love affairs, his nightmares, I want to know what he feels for Blanca Schnake. He never tells me anything; whereas I tell him almost everything, because he is a good listener and doesn’t give me any unsolicited advice. He could teach my grandmother a thing or two about these virtues. I still haven’t told him about the disgraceful night with Roy Fedgewick, but I think I might at some point. It’s the kind of secret that ends up festering in your mind if you keep it. I don’t feel guilty about that, the guilt belongs to the rapist, but I am embarrassed.

Yesterday Manuel found me absorbed in front of his computer reading about the Caravan of Death, an army unit that in October 1973, a month after the military coup, traveled all over Chile from north to south murdering political prisoners. The group was under the command of someone called Arellano Stark, a general who chose prisoners at random, had them summarily shot, and then blew their bodies up with dynamite, an efficient method of imposing terror on the civilian population and on indecisive soldiers. Manuel never talks about that era, but seeing my interest, he lent me a book about that sinister caravan, written a few years ago by Patricia Verdugo, a brave journalist who investigated those events. “I don’t know if you’ll understand it, Maya. You’re so young and from so far away,” he said. “Don’t underestimate me, compañero,” I answered. He was startled, because nobody uses that term these days, which was in vogue when Allende was president and then banned by the dictatorship. I found that out from a Web site.

Thirty-six years have gone by since the military coup, and for the last twenty this country has had democratic governments, but there are still scars and, in some cases, open wounds. People don’t talk about the dictatorship much. Those who suffered it try to forget it, and for young people it’s ancient history, but I can find as much information as I want. There are lots of Web pages and books, articles, documentaries, and photographs, which I’ve seen in the Castro bookstore, where Manuel buys his books. That period is studied in universities and has been analyzed from the most varied angles, but in society it’s bad taste to talk about it. Chileans are still divided. The father of Michelle Bachelet, the current president, an air force brigadier, died at the hands of his own comrades-in-arms because he didn’t want to join the uprising. Then she and her mother were arrested, tortured, and sent into exile, but she never talks about that either. According to Blanca Schnake, that piece of Chilean history is mud at the bottom of a lake, and it mustn’t be stirred up or it’ll cloud the water.

The only person I can talk to about this is Liliana Treviño, the nurse, who wants to help me investigate. She offered to accompany me to visit Father Luciano Lyon, who has written essays and articles on the dictatorship’s repression. Our plan is to go and see him without Manuel, so we’ll be able to talk openly.

Silence. This Guaitecas cypress house has the longest silences. It’s taken me four months to adapt to Manuel’s introverted personality. My presence must be a nuisance to this solitary man, especially in a house without doors, where privacy depends on good manners. He’s nice to me in his own way: on the one hand he ignores me or answers in monosyllables, and on the other he hangs my towels by the stove to warm up when he thinks I’m going to have a shower, brings me my glass of hot milk in bed, takes care of me. The other day he lost his temper for the first time since I met him, because I went out with two fishermen to set their nets, and we got caught by some bad weather, rain and a choppy sea, and got back really late, soaked to the skin. Manuel was waiting for us on the wharf with Fahkeen and one of the carabineros, Laurencio Cárcamo, who had already been in radio contact with the Isla Grande to request they send out a navy ship to look for us. “What am I going to tell your grandma if you drown?” Manuel shouted furiously at me, as soon as I stepped on dry land. “Calm down, man. I can take care of myself,” I told him. “Of course, that’s why you’re here!’ Cause you take such good care of yourself!”

Laurencio Cárcamo was kind enough to drive us home. In the jeep, I took Manuel’s hand and explained that we’d gone out after checking that the weather forecast was good and with the permission of the captain of the port; no one was expecting that sudden storm. In a matter of minutes, the sky and the sea both turned brownish gray and we had to pull in the nets. We were lost for a couple of hours, because it got dark and we lost our bearings. There was no cell phone signal, so I couldn’t let him know; it was just an inconvenience, we weren’t in danger, the boat was well made and the fishermen know these waters. Manuel didn’t deign to answer or look at me, but he didn’t pull his hand away either.

Eduvigis had made us salmon with baked potatoes, a blessing for me, as I was very hungry, and in the shared routine of sitting down together at the table, his bad mood evaporated. After eating we settled down on the worn-out sofa, him to read and me to write in my journal, with our big mugs of sweet and creamy coffee with condensed milk. Rain, wind, the tree branches scratching on the windowpane, wood burning in the stove, purring cats, that’s my music now. The house closed up, embracing us together with the animals.

It was the early hours of the morning by the time I returned with Brandon Leeman from my first excursion around the casinos of the Strip. I was collapsing from exhaustion, but before going to bed I had to pose in front of a camera; they needed a photo to get my new identity started. Leeman had guessed that I wasn’t actually called Sarah Laredo, but my real name didn’t matter to him. Finally I was able to go to my room, where I lay down on the bed without sheets, with my clothes and shoes on, disgusted by the mattress, which I imagined had been used by people with less than stringent standards of hygiene. I didn’t wake up until ten. The bathroom was as repugnant as the bed, but I took a shower anyway, shivering, because there was no hot water, and the air conditioner blasted out Siberian drafts. I got dressed in the same clothes as the day before, thinking I should find somewhere to wash the few bits of clothing I had in my backpack, and then I peeked through the hole in the wall at the other apartment, the “office,” where there was no one to be seen. It was dark, only a tiny bit of light finding its way in between the planks across the windows, but I found the switch and turned on the overhead bulbs. In the fridge there was nothing but small packages sealed with tape, a half-empty bottle of ketchup, and several out-of-date yogurts with green mold starting to grow on them. I went through the rest of the rooms, dirtier than the other apartment, not daring to touch anything, and discovered empty bottles, syringes, needles, rubber bands, pipes, burned glass tubes, trails of blood. Then I understood what the butane torches in the kitchen were used for and confirmed that I was in a den of drug addicts and dealers. The most sensible thing would be to get out of there as soon as possible.

The metal door was unlocked, and there was nobody in the hallway either; I was alone on the floor, but I couldn’t leave because the electric gate in the stairwell was locked. I went over the apartment from top to bottom again, cursing my nerves, and didn’t find the remote control for the lock or a telephone to call for help. I began to tug on the planks across one of the windows in desperation, trying to remember what floor I was on, but they were nailed down securely, and I couldn’t even manage to loosen any of them. I was about to start screaming when I heard voices and the creaking of the electric gate on the stairs, and a moment later Brandon Leeman came in with his two associates and the boy, Freddy. “Do you like Chinese food?” Leeman asked me as a greeting. On the verge of panic, I couldn’t speak, but only Freddy noticed my agitation. “I don’t like it when they lock me in either,” he said, with a friendly wink. Brandon Leeman explained that it was a security measure—nobody should enter the apartment in his absence—but if I stayed I’d get my own remote control.

His bodyguards—or associates, as they preferred to be called—and the boy settled down in front of the television to eat with chopsticks, straight from the cartons. Brandon Leeman shut himself in one of the rooms to shout at someone on his cell phone for a long time and then announced that he was going to lie down and disappeared through the hole into the other apartment. Soon Joe Martin and Chino left. I was left alone with Freddy, and we spent the hottest hours of the afternoon watching TV and playing cards. Freddy did a perfect imitation of his idol, Michael Jackson, for me.

At about five Brandon Leeman reappeared, and a little while later the Filipino guy brought a driver’s license belonging to a certain Laura Barron, twenty-two years old, from Arizona, with my photograph.

“Use this while you’re here,” Leeman told me.

“Who is she?” I asked, examining the license.

“From now on, Laura Barron is you.”

“Yes, but I can only stay in Las Vegas until August.”

“I know. You won’t regret it, Laura, this is a good job. One thing, though, nobody can know you’re here—not your family, not your friends. No one. Is that clear?”

“Yes.”

“We’re going to spread the word that you’re my girlfriend, to avoid problems. Nobody will dare to bother you.”

Leeman ordered his associates to buy a new mattress and sheets for my bed, then he took me to a lavish hair salon in a private health club, where a man with earrings and raspberry-colored pants exclaimed in disgust at the strident rainbow of my hair and diagnosed that the only solution would be to cut it off and bleach it. Two hours later I looked in the mirror and saw a long-necked Scandinavian hermaphrodite with mouse ears. The chemicals in the bleaching products had left my scalp in flames. “Very elegant,” said Brandon Leeman approvingly, and drove me on a pilgrimage from one mall to the next on the Boulevard. His shopping method was disconcerting: we’d go into a shop, he’d make me try on various outfits, and in the end he would choose just one article of clothing, paying with large-denomination bills. Then he’d take the change and we’d go to another place, where he’d buy something I’d already tried on in the previous one but that we hadn’t bought. I asked him if it wouldn’t be easier to buy everything in the same place, but he didn’t answer.

My new trousseau consisted of several sporty outfits, nothing provocative or bright—a simple black dress, daytime sandals and another gold, high-heeled pair, a bit of makeup, and two big handbags with the designer logo clearly visible that cost, according to my calculations, as much as my grandmother’s Volkswagen. Leeman got me a membership at his club, the place where I’d had my hair done, and he advised me to use the gym as much as possible, since I would have more than enough leisure time during the day. He paid in cash from rolls of dollar bills held together with an elastic band, and nobody thought it strange; from the looks of things in this city cash flowed like water. I noticed Leeman always paid with hundred-dollar bills, although the price might be a tenth of that, and I couldn’t find an explanation for this eccentricity.

At ten that night it was time for my first delivery. They dropped me off at the Mandalay Bay hotel. Following Leeman’s instructions, I headed for the swimming pool, where a couple approached me, having identified me by the brand of handbag I was carrying, which was apparently the sign Leeman had given them. The woman, wearing a long beach dress and a necklace of glass beads, didn’t even look at me, but the man, in gray pants, white T-shirt, and bare ankles, shook my hand. We chatted for a minute about nothing; then I discreetly passed them their order and received two hundred-dollar bills folded inside a tourist brochure, and we went our separate ways.

From the lobby I called another client on the internal hotel phone, went up to the tenth floor, passed under the nose of a guard stationed beside the elevator who didn’t give me a second glance, and knocked on the door. A man of about fifty, barefoot and in a bathrobe, told me to come in, took the little bag, paid me, and I left in a hurry. At the door I crossed paths with a tropical vision, a beautiful mulatta in a leather corset, very short skirt, and needle heels; I guessed that she was an escort, as high-class prostitutes are called these days. We looked each other up and down, without a word.

In the immense hotel lobby I finally took a deep breath, satisfied with my first mission, which had turned out to be very easy. Leeman was waiting for me in the car, with Chino at the wheel, to drive me to other hotels. Before midnight I’d collected more than four thousand dollars for my new boss.

At first glance, Brandon Leeman was different from other addicts I met during those months, people who’d been destroyed by drugs: he looked normal, although fragile, but living with him, I understood how sick he really was. He ate less than a sparrow, could keep almost nothing down, and sometimes lay so still in his bed that I didn’t know if he was asleep, unconscious, or dead. He gave off a peculiar odor, a mix of cigarettes, alcohol, and something toxic, like fertilizer. His mind was going, and he knew it; that’s why he kept me at his side—he said he trusted my memory more than his own. He was a nocturnal animal, spending the daylight hours resting in his air-conditioned room, in the evenings usually going to the club for a massage, a sauna, or a steam bath, and at night tending to his business. We saw each other around the gym, but we never arrived together, and the order was to pretend not to know each other; I wasn’t allowed to talk to anybody, which was very difficult, since I went every day and always saw the same faces.

Leeman was demanding with his poisons, as he said, the most expensive bourbon and the purest heroin, which he injected five or six times a day, always with brand-new needles. He had as much as he wanted at his disposal and kept to his routines, never falling into the unbearable desperation of withdrawal, like other poor souls who dragged themselves to his door in the final stage of need. I witnessed the ritual of the white lady—the spoon, the flame of a candle or a lighter, the syringe, the rubber strip tied around the arm or leg—admired his skill at jabbing collapsed, invisible veins, even in his groin, stomach, or neck. If his hand was trembling too much, he’d resort to Freddy, because I could not bring myself to help him; the needle made my hair stand on end. Leeman had used heroin for so long that he tolerated doses that would have been lethal for anyone else.

“Heroin doesn’t kill, it’s the addicts’ lifestyles that do: poverty, malnutrition, infections, dirt, used needles,” he explained.

“Then why won’t you let me try it?”

“Because a junkie is no use to me whatsoever.”

“Just once, just to know what it’s like . . .”

“No. Be content with what I give you.

He gave me booze, marijuana, hallucinogens, and pills, which I took blind, not caring too much what effect they’d have as long as my consciousness was altered enough to escape from reality, from my Nini’s voice calling me, from my body, from my anguish about the future. The only pills I could recognize were orange sleeping pills; those wonderful capsules defeated my chronic insomnia and gave me some hours of dreamless rest. The boss let me use a few lines of coke to keep me lively and alert at work, but he wouldn’t let me try crack, and wouldn’t let his bodyguards use it either. Joe Martin and Chino had their own addictions. “That junk is for depraved addicts,” Leeman said scornfully, although those were his most loyal customers, the ones he could wring out till death, force them to steal and turn tricks, any degradation to procure the next hit. I lost count of how many of those zombies there were around us, snotty skeletons with ulcers, agitated, trembling, sweaty, imprisoned in their hallucinations, sleepwalkers pursued by voices and bugs that crawled into their orifices.

Freddy went through states like that, poor kid; my heart broke seeing him in a crisis. Sometimes I helped him bring the welding torch up to the pipe and awaited with the same anxiety he suffered for the flame to break the yellow crystals with a dry sound and the magic smoke to fill up the glass tube. In thirty seconds Freddy would fly to another world. The pleasure, the grandiosity and euphoria, lasted just a few moments, and then he’d be agonizing again in a deep, absolute abyss, from which he could only emerge with another hit. He needed more each time to keep going, and Brandon Leeman, who was fond of him, would give it to him. “Why don’t we help him to detox?” I asked Leeman one time. “It’s too late for Freddy—there’s no going back from crack. That’s why I had to get rid of other girls who worked for me before you,” he answered me. I interpreted that as his having fired them. I didn’t know that in that atmosphere, “get rid of” usually has an irrevocable meaning.