Spring
September, October, November
And a Dramatic December
The island is cheerful and lively because the parents have arrived to celebrate the Fiestas Patrias, the Chilean equivalent of the Fourth of July, and the beginning of spring; the winter rain, which seemed poetic to me at first, became unbearable after a while. And it will be my birthday on the twenty-fifth—I’m a Libra—I’ll be twenty years old, and my adolescence will be over with once and for all. Juesú, what a relief! Normally on the weekends some young people come to see their families, but in September they start arriving en masse, the boats full every day. They bring gifts for their children, who in many cases they haven’t seen for months, and money for the grandparents to spend on clothes, things for the house, new roofs to replace those damaged by the winter storms. Among the visitors was Lucía Corrales, Juanito’s mother, a kind, nice-looking woman, far too young to have an eleven-year-old son. She told us that Azucena got a cleaning job at a guesthouse in Quellón, and that she doesn’t want to go back to school or come back to our island, so she won’t have to face people’s malicious comments. “Often in rape cases, the victim gets the blame,” Blanca told me, corroborating what I’d heard at the Tavern of the Dead.
Juanito is shy and wary around his mother, whom he only knows through photographs. She left him in the arms of Eduvigis when he was two or three months old and wouldn’t come back to the island while Carmelo Corrales was alive, although she did phone him often, and she’s always supported him financially. The kid’s talked to me about her a lot, with a mixture of pride, because she sends him good gifts, and anger that she left him with his grandparents. He introduced her to me with his cheeks aflame and his eyes glued to the floor: “This is Lucía, my grandma’s daughter,” he said. Then I told him that my mother left me when I was a baby, and my grandparents raised me too, but I was very lucky—my childhood was a happy one and I wouldn’t trade it for any other. He looked up at me for a long time with his big dark eyes, and then I remembered the belt marks he had on his legs a few months ago, when Carmelo Corrales could still catch him. I hugged him sadly; I can’t protect him against that. He’ll carry those scars for the rest of his life.
September is Chile’s month. Flags wave all the way up and down the country, and even in the most remote places they erect ramadas, four wooden posts and a roof of eucalyptus branches, where everybody gathers to drink and shake their bones to American rhythms and cueca, the national dance, which looks like an imitation of the courting ritual of roosters and hens. We made ramadas here too, and there were empanadas to your heart’s content and rivers of wine, beer, and chichi. The men ended up snoring spread-eagled on the ground, and at dusk the carabineros and the women threw them into the greengrocer’s cart and dropped them off at their houses. No drunk gets arrested on September 18 or 19, unless he pulls out a knife.
On Ñancupel’s television I saw the military parades in Santiago, where President Michelle Bachelet reviewed the troops amid cheering crowds, who venerate her like a mother; no other Chilean president has been so beloved. Four years ago, before the elections, nobody thought she’d win, because it was assumed that Chileans would not vote for a woman, let alone a socialist, agnostic single mother, but she won the presidency as well as everyone’s respect, or the respect of Moors and Christians, as Manuel puts it, although I’ve never seen any Moors in Chiloé.
We’ve had some warm days with blue skies, as winter has retreated at the onslaught of patriotic euphoria. Now that spring is arriving, a few sea lions have been seen in the waters around the cave. I think they’ll soon settle back where they were before and I’ll be able to rekindle my friendship with La Pincoya, if she still remembers me. I walk up the hill toward the cave almost every day, because I usually find my Popo up there. The best proof of his presence is that Fahkeen starts to get nervous and sometimes runs away with his tail between his legs. It’s just a vague silhouette, the delicious smell of his English tobacco in the air, or the feeling that he’s embracing me. Then I close my eyes and give in to the warmth and security of that broad chest, that big round belly, and those strong arms. One time I asked him where he was when I needed him most last year, and I didn’t have to wait for his reply, because deep down I already knew: he was always with me. While alcohol and drugs dominated my existence, no one could reach me, I was an oyster in its shell, but when I was at my lowest ebb, my grandfather picked me up in his arms. He never lost sight of me, and when my life was in danger, when I was doped up on tainted heroin on the floor of a public washroom, he saved me. Now, without all the noise in my head, I sense him always near. Given the choice between the fleeting pleasure of a drink or the memorable pleasure of a walk on the hill with my grandpa, I prefer the latter hands down. My Popo has finally found his star. This remote island, invisible in the world’s conflagration, green, evergreen, is his lost planet; instead of looking so hard in the sky for it, he could have just looked south.
People have taken off their sweaters and gone out to catch some sun, but I’m still wearing my putrid-green hat—we lost the school championship soccer match. My unfortunate and downcast Caleuches have taken full responsibility for my shaved head. The game was played in Castro in front of half the population of our island, who went along to root for the Caleuches, including Doña Lucinda, whom we transported in Manuel’s boat, tied into a chair and wrapped in shawls. Don Lionel Schnake, ruddier and louder than ever, supported our team with discordant shouts. We were about to win—a tie would have been enough—when fate played a dirty trick on us at the last moment; with only thirty seconds left in the game, they scored. Pedro Pelanchugay headed the ball away, amid the deafening cheers of our supporters and the enemies’ hisses, but the blow left him a bit stunned, and before he could recover, a little squirt came up and poked the ball into the back of the net with the tip of his toe. Everyone was so astonished that we were all paralyzed for a long second before the explosion of warlike screams and beer cans and pop bottles started flying through the air. Don Lionel and I were on the verge of suffering simultaneous heart attacks.
That afternoon I turned up at his house to pay my debt. “Don’t even think of it, gringuita! That bet was just a joke,” the Millalobo assured me gallantly, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned in Ñancupel’s tavern, it’s that bets are sacred. I went to a humble barbershop, one of those staffed by its owner, with a tricolored striped tube outside the door and a single ancient and majestic chair, where I sat with a bit of regret; Daniel Goodrich wasn’t going to like this at all. The barber very professionally shaved off all my hair and polished my head with a strip of chamois leather. My ears look enormous, like the handles of an Etruscan jug, and I have colorful stains on my scalp, like a map of Africa, from the cheap dyes I used in the past, according to the barber. He recommended rubbing it with lemon juice and bleach. The hat is necessary, because the stains look contagious.
Don Lionel feels guilty and doesn’t know how to make it up to me, but there’s nothing to forgive: a bet’s a bet. He asked Blanca to buy me some cute hats, because I look like a lesbian in chemotherapy, as he actually said, but the Chilote hat suits my personality better. In this country, hair is the symbol of femininity and beauty; young women wear their hair long and care for it like a treasure. What can I say about the exclamations of sympathy in the ruca, when I showed up there as bald as an alien among those gorgeous golden women with their abundant Pre-Raphaelite manes?
Manuel packed a bag with a few items of clothing and his manuscript, which he’s planning to discuss with his editor, and called me to the living room to give me some instructions before going to Santiago. I came out with my backpack and my ticket in hand and announced that he’d be enjoying my company, compliments of Don Lionel Schnake. “Who’s going to stay with the animals?” he asked weakly. I explained that Juanito Corrales was going to take Fahkeen to his house and would come over once a day to feed the cats. It was all arranged. I didn’t tell him anything about the sealed letter from the extraordinary Millalobo that I had to discreetly hand to the neurologist, who turned out to be related to the Schnakes, as he was married to one of Blanca’s cousins. The network of relationships in this country is like my Popo’s dazzling spiderweb of galaxies. Manuel couldn’t get anywhere by arguing and finally resigned himself to taking me. We went to Puerto Montt, where we caught a flight to Santiago. The trip that had taken me twelve hours by bus on my way to Chiloé took an hour by plane.
“What’s the matter, Manuel?” I asked when we were about to land in Santiago.
“Nothing.”
“What do you mean, nothing? You haven’t spoken to me since we left home. Are you feeling okay?”
“Yes.”
“So you’re mad.”
“Your decision to come with me without consulting me is very invasive.”
“Look, I didn’t consult you because you would have said no. It’s better to ask for pardon than for permission. Forgive me?”
That shut him up, and soon he was in a better mood. We went to a little hotel downtown—separate rooms because he doesn’t want to sleep with me, even though he knows how hard it is for me to fall asleep on my own—and then he invited me to go for pizza and to the cinema to see Avatar, which hadn’t yet reached our island and I was dying to see. Manuel, of course, would rather see a depressing movie about a postapocalyptic world, covered in ash and populated with roaming bands of cannibals, but we flipped a coin, which landed face up so I won, as usual. It’s an infallible trick: heads I win, tails you lose. We ate popcorn, pizza, and ice cream, a feast for me, who’s been eating fresh, nutritious food for months and missing a bit of cholesterol.
Dr. Arturo Puga sees patients in the morning at a public hospital, where he saw Manuel, and in the afternoons at his private practice at the Clínica Alemana, in the rich neighborhood. Without the Millalobo’s mysterious letter, which I passed to him through the receptionist behind Manuel’s back, they might not have allowed me to sit in on the appointment. The letter opened the doors wide for me. The hospital seemed like it was out of a World War II movie, antiquated, enormous, and messy, with pipes showing, rusty sinks, broken tiles, and peeling walls, but it was clean and efficiently run, considering the number of patients. We waited almost two hours in a room with rows of wrought-iron chairs, until they called our number. Dr. Puga, head of the neurology department, received us kindly in his modest office, with Manuel’s file and his X-rays on the table. “What is your relation to the patient, señorita?” he asked me. “I’m his granddaughter,” I answered without an instant’s hesitation, ignoring the stunned look on the aforementioned patient’s face.
Manuel has been on a waiting list for a possible operation for two years, and who knows how many more will go by before his turn comes, because it’s not an emergency. They suppose that if he’s lived with the bubble for more than seventy years, he can easily wait a few more. The operation is risky, and due to the characteristics of the aneurysm it’s advisable to postpone it as long as possible, in the hope that the patient will die of something else, but given the increasing intensity of Manuel’s migraines and dizziness, it seems the time has come to intervene.
The traditional procedure consists of opening up the skull, separating the brain tissue, inserting a clip to impede the flow of blood to the aneurysm, and then closing it up again; the recovery takes about a year and can have serious consequences. In short, not a very reassuring picture. However, at the Clínica Alemana they can resolve the problem with a tiny hole in the leg, through which they introduce a catheter into the artery, reach the aneurysm by navigating the vascular system, and fill it with a platinum wire, which rolls up like an old lady’s chignon inside. There is much less risk, the patient need only stay in the clinic for thirty-six hours, and convalescence takes about a month.
“Elegant, simple, and completely out of reach on my budget, Doctor,” said Manuel.
“Don’t worry, Señor Arias, that can be resolved. I can operate without charging you anything. This is a new procedure I learned in the United States, where it’s now performed on a routine basis, and I need to train another surgeon to work on my team. Your operation would be like a demonstration class,” Puga explained.
“Or, in other words, a maestro chasquilla is going to stick a wire in Manuel’s brain,” I interrupted, horrified.
The doctor burst out laughing and winked at me. Then I remembered the letter and realized it was a conspiracy the Millalobo had cooked up to pay for the operation without Manuel finding out about it until afterward, when he can no longer do anything about it. I agree with Blanca: between owing one favor or owing two, what difference does it make? In short, Manuel was admitted to the Clínica Alemana, underwent the necessary examinations, and the following day Dr. Puga and his supposed apprentice performed the procedure with complete success, as they assured us, although they cannot guarantee that the bubble will remain stable.
Blanca Schnake left the school in the care of a substitute and flew to Santiago as soon as I called her to tell her about the operation. She stayed with Manuel to care for him like a mother during the day, while I was carrying out my investigation. At night she went to her sister’s house, and I slept in Manuel’s room in the Clínica Alemana on a sofa that was more comfortable than my bed in Chiloé. The cafeteria food was also five-star quality. I got to have my first shower behind a closed door for many months, but with what I now know, I can never be annoyed with Manuel for banning doors from his house.
Santiago has six million inhabitants and keeps growing upward in a delirium of high-rises under construction. The city is surrounded by hills and high, snow-capped mountains. It’s clean, prosperous, and busy, with well-maintained parks. The traffic is aggressive, because Chileans, apparently so friendly, take their frustrations out behind the wheel. People swarm among the vehicles, selling fruit, television antennae, mints, and whatever else they can think of, and at every stoplight acrobats perform death-defying circus tricks, hoping for a coin. We were lucky with the weather, though some days we couldn’t see the color of the sky for the smog.
A week after the surgery, we took Manuel back to Chiloé, where the animals were waiting for us. Fahkeen received us with a pathetic display of choreography, his ribs sticking out because he had refused to eat in our absence, as a dismayed Juanito explained. We went back sooner than Dr. Puga recommended because Manuel didn’t want to spend a whole month convalescing in Blanca’s sister’s house in Santiago, where we were getting in the way, as he said. Blanca asked me to watch my mouth around the family about what we’d discovered of Manuel’s past; they are very right-wing, and it would go over very badly. They welcomed us with affection, and all of them, including the teenagers, made themselves available to drive Manuel to his appointments and take care of him.
I shared a room with Blanca and got to see firsthand how the rich live in their gated communities, with domestic servants, gardeners, swimming pool, purebred dogs, and three cars. Their staff brought us breakfast in bed, ran our baths with aromatic bath salts, and even ironed my jeans. I’d never seen anything like it, and I didn’t mind it one bit; I could get used to being rich quite easily. “They’re not really rich, Maya. They don’t have their own plane,” Manuel joked when I discussed it with him. “You’ve got a poor man’s mentality, that’s the problem with you leftists,” I answered, thinking of my Nini and Mike O’Kelly, who have a real vocation for poverty. I’m not like them: equality and socialism strike me as vulgar.
In Santiago I felt stifled by the pollution, the traffic, and the impersonal way people treated each other. In Chiloé you can tell if someone is an outsider because they don’t say hello in the street; in Santiago someone who says anything to strangers is suspicious. When I got in the elevator at the Clínica Alemana, I said good morning like a moron, and all the other people stared at the wall, so they wouldn’t have to answer me. I didn’t like Santiago; I couldn’t wait to get back to our island, where life flows like a gentle river, and there is pure air, silence, and time to finish your thoughts.
Manuel’s recovery will take a while. He still gets headaches, and his energy level is low. Dr. Puga’s orders were explicit: he has to swallow half a dozen pills a day, take it easy until December, when he has to return to Santiago for another scan, avoid strenuous physical exertion for the rest of his life, and trust in fate or God, depending on his beliefs, because the platinum wire is not 100 percent infallible. I’m thinking that it couldn’t do any harm to consult a machi, just in case. . . .
Blanca and I decided to wait for a suitable opportunity to talk to Manuel about what we have discovered, without pressuring him. For the moment we’re taking care of him as well as we can. He’s used to the authoritarian ways of Blanca and this gringa who lives in his house, so our recent kindness has him on tenterhooks. He thinks we’re hiding the truth from him, and that his condition is much more serious than Dr. Puga let on. “If you’re planning to treat me like an invalid, I’d rather you left me alone,” he grumbles.
With a map and a list of places and people, provided by Father Lyon, I was able to reconstruct Manuel’s life in the key years between the military coup and his departure into exile. In 1973 he was thirty-six years old, one of the youngest professors in the Faculty of Social Sciences. He was married, and as far as I’ve deduced, his marriage was a bit shaky. He wasn’t a Communist, as the Millalobo believes, or a member of any other political party either, but he sympathized with the steps Salvador Allende was taking and participated in some of the huge demonstrations in support of the government. When the military coup happened, on Tuesday, September 11, 1973, the country was divided into two irreconcilable halves; no one could remain neutral. Two days after the coup, the curfew imposed for the first forty-eight hours was lifted, and Manuel went back to work. He found the university occupied by soldiers armed for war, in combat uniforms and with their faces blackened with grease paint so they wouldn’t be recognized. He saw bullet holes in the walls and blood on the stairs, and someone told him they’d arrested the students and professors who’d been in the building.
That violence was so unimaginable in Chile, proud of its democratic institutions and civil society, that Manuel, with no inkling of the gravity of what had happened, walked into the nearest police station to ask about his colleagues. He didn’t walk back out. They took him blindfolded to the National Stadium, which had been turned into a detention center. There were thousands of people there who had been arrested in those two days, battered and hungry, sleeping on the cement floor and spending the day sitting in the stands, silently begging not to be included among the unfortunate ones taken to the infirmary to be interrogated. They could hear the victims’ screams, and at night, the gunshots of the executions. Those who’d been arrested were kept incommunicado, with no contact with their relatives, who were, however, allowed to leave packages of food and clothing, in the hope that the guards would give it to those it was intended for. Manuel’s wife, who belonged to the MIR, Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionario (Movement of the Revolutionary Left), the group most persecuted by the military, immediately escaped to Argentina and from there to Europe. She wouldn’t see her husband again for three years, when they’d both been granted asylum in Australia.
A hooded man passed through the stands in the stadium, weighed down by a burden of guilt and grief, closely guarded by two soldiers. The man pointed out supposed Socialist or Communist Party members, who were immediately taken into the bowels of the building to be tortured or killed. By mistake or out of fear, the ill-fated hooded man pointed to Manuel Arias.
Day by day, step by step, I traced the route of his torment, and in the process I felt the indelible scars the dictatorship left in Chile and on Manuel’s soul. Now I know what is hidden behind appearances in this country. Sitting in a park facing the Mapocho River, where tortured corpses used to float past in the seventies, I read the report of the commission that investigated the atrocities, an extensive tale of suffering and cruelty. A priest, a friend of Father Lyon’s, gave me access to the archives of the Vicarage of Solidarity, an office of the Catholic Church that helped the victims of the repression and kept track of the disappeared, defying the dictatorship from within the very heart of the cathedral. I examined hundreds of photographs of people who were arrested and then vanished without a trace, almost all of them young, and the reports from women who were still looking for their children, their husbands, and sometimes their grandchildren.
Manuel spent the summer and fall of 1974 in the National Stadium and other detention centers, where he was interrogated so many times that nobody was keeping track anymore. Confessions meant nothing and ended up lost in bloodstained archives, of interest only to mice. Like many other prisoners, he never knew what it was his torturers wanted to hear, and finally he understood that it didn’t matter; they didn’t know what they were looking for either. These weren’t really interrogations, but punishments to establish an oppressive regime and root out any glimmer of resistance in the population. The pretext was weapons caches, which Allende’s government had supposedly handed over to the people, but months later they hadn’t found any, and no one believed in those imaginary arsenals anymore. The people were paralyzed by terror, the most efficient method to impose the icy order of the barracks. It was a long-term plan to completely change the country.
During the winter of 1974, Manuel was held in a mansion on the outskirts of Santiago that had belonged to a powerful family called the Grimaldis, of Italian origin, whose daughter was arrested so they could later trade her freedom for the house. The property fell into the hands of the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (National Intelligence Agency), the infamous DINA, the Chilean secret police, whose emblem was an iron fist. The DINA was responsible for many crimes, including some outside the country, such as the assassination in Buenos Aires of the ousted commander in chief of the armed forces and of a former government minister in the heart of Washington, a few blocks from the White House. Villa Grimaldi became the most feared of the interrogation centers, where 4,500 prisoners were held, many of whom did not come out alive.
At the end of my week in Santiago, I paid my obligatory visit to Villa Grimaldi, which is now a quiet garden haunted by the memory of those who died there. When the moment came, I just couldn’t go by myself. My grandmother believes that places get marked by human experiences, and I didn’t have the courage to face this one without a friendly hand. Evil and pain are forever trapped in that place. I asked Blanca Schnake, the only person other than Liliana and Father Lyon I’d told about what I was trying to find out, to accompany me. Blanca made a weak attempt to talk me out of it—“Why keep delving into something that happened so long ago?”—but she had a feeling that the key to Manuel Arias’s life was there, and her love for him was stronger than her reluctance to confront something she’d rather ignore. “Okay, gringuita, let’s go right away, before I change my mind,” she said.
Villa Grimaldi, now called the Park for Peace, is a couple of green acres of sleepy trees. Not much is left of the buildings that existed when Manuel was there, which were demolished by the dictatorship in an attempt to erase any trace of the unforgivable things that went on in them. Nevertheless, the tractors could not raze the persistent ghosts or silence the moans of agony, still lingering in the air. We walked among images, monuments, large canvases showing the faces of the dead and disappeared. A guide told us about the way the prisoners were treated, the most common forms of torture used, with schematic drawings of human shapes hanging by their arms, or with their heads submerged in water barrels, iron cots rigged up to electricity cables, women raped by dogs, men sodomized by broom handles. One of the 266 names I found on a stone wall was that of Felipe Vidal, and so I was able to fit the last piece of the puzzle into place. In the desolation of Villa Grimaldi, the professor Manuel Arias met the journalist Felipe Vidal; there they endured terrible suffering together, and one of them survived.
Blanca and I decided that we have to talk to Manuel about his past. We wish Daniel were here to help us; in an intervention of this kind the presence of a professional could come in very handy, even if it’s a rookie psychiatrist like him. Blanca maintains that Manuel’s experiences should be treated with the same care and delicacy his aneurysm requires; they’re encapsulated in a memory bubble that, if it suddenly bursts, could destroy him. That day Manuel had gone to Castro to look for some books, and we took advantage of his absence to make dinner, knowing he always comes back at sunset.
I started to bake bread, as I tend to do when I’m nervous. It calms me down to knead the dough firmly, shape it, wait for the big raw loaf to rise under a white linen tea cloth, bake it until it’s golden brown, and then serve it to my friends still warm, a patient and sacred ritual. Blanca cooked Frances’s infallible chicken with mustard and streaky bacon, Manuel’s favorite, and brought chestnuts in syrup for dessert. The house was cozy, fragrant with the scent of bread fresh from the oven and the stew cooking slowly in an earthenware pot. It was quite a chilly afternoon, calm, with the sky gray and no wind. Soon there would be a full moon and another meeting of sirens in the ruca.
Since the aneurysm operation, something has changed between Manuel and Blanca; their aura is shining, as my grandma would say, they have that twinkling light of the recently dazzled. There are also other less subtle signs, like the complicity in the way they look at each other, touching all the time, the way they both guess each other’s intentions and desires. On the one hand I’m very happy, as it’s what I’ve been trying to bring about for many months, and on the other hand I’m a bit worried about my future. What’s going to happen to me when they decide to plunge into that love they’ve been postponing for so many years? The three of us won’t fit in this house, and Blanca’s would be a tight squeeze too. Well, I hope by then my future with Daniel Goodrich will be clearer.
Manuel arrived with a bag of books, which his bookseller friends had ordered for him, and some novels in English my grandmother had mailed to Castro.
“Are we celebrating someone’s birthday?” he asked, sniffing the air.
“We’re celebrating friendship. This house has changed so much since our gringuita got here!” Blanca remarked.
“You mean the mess?”
“I mean the flowers, the good food, the company, Manuel. Don’t be ungrateful. You’re going to miss her a lot when she goes.”
“Is she planning on leaving?”
“No, Manuel. I plan on marrying Daniel and living here with you and the four kids we’re going to have,” I said sarcastically.
“I hope your beau approves of that plan,” he said in the same tone.
“Why wouldn’t he? It’s a perfect plan.”
“You two would be bored to death on this craggy island, Maya. Outsiders who retire here are disenchanted with the world. Nobody comes here before they’ve even started to live.”
“I came to hide, and look what I’ve found: you two and Daniel, safety, nature, and a town of three hundred Chilotes to love. Even my Popo is at home here; I’ve seen him walking on the hill.”
“You’ve been drinking!” exclaimed Manuel in alarm.
“I haven’t touched a drop, Manuel. I knew you wouldn’t believe me, that’s why I haven’t told you.”
That was an extraordinary night, when everything conspired to enable confidences—the bread and the chicken, the moon peeking out from between the clouds, the tried and true sympathy we had for each other, the conversation peppered with anecdotes and little jokes. They told me how they’d met, the first impression each had made on the other. Manuel said that when she was young, Blanca was very beautiful, and she still is; back then she was a golden Valkyrie, all legs, shiny hair, and white teeth, who radiated the security and cheerfulness of someone who has been very spoiled. “I should have detested her, she was so privileged, but she won me over with her kindness. It was impossible not to love her. But I was in no shape to court anyone, much less a young woman as far out of my league as she was.” For Blanca, Manuel had the attraction of the forbidden and dangerous. He came from a world that was opposite to hers, belonged to another social sphere, and represented the political enemy, although she was prepared to accept him as a guest of her family. I told them about my house in Berkeley, about why I look Scandinavian, and about the only time I saw my mother. I told them about some of the characters I met in Las Vegas, about a woman who weighed four hundred pounds and had a fondling voice, who earned her living doing phone sex, or a couple of transsexual friends of Brandon Leeman’s, who got married in a formal ceremony, her in a tuxedo and him in white organza. We took our time over dinner and then sat, as we usually did, to watch the night through the window, them with their glasses of wine, me with a cup of tea. Blanca was on the sofa close to Manuel, and I was on a cushion on the floor with Fahkeen, who’s been suffering from separation anxiety ever since we left him to go to Santiago. He keeps his eye on me all the time and never leaves my side. It’s a drag.
“I have the impression that this little party is a bit of a ruse,” Manuel said eventually. “For days now there’s been something floating in the air. Let’s cut to the chase, girls.”
“You’ve thwarted our strategy, Manuel. We were planning to broach the subject diplomatically,” said Blanca.
“What is it you want?”
“Nothing, just to talk.”
“About what?”
And then I told him that over the past few months I had taken it upon myself to investigate what had happened to him after the military coup, because I thought his memories were poisoning him from within, inflamed like an ulcer. I begged his forgiveness for meddling, I’d only done it because I cared for him so much; I was so sad to hear him suffering in his sleep when the nightmares assaulted him. I told him that the rock he was carrying on his shoulders was too heavy; it was crushing him, only letting him live half a life. It was as if he was just marking time till he died. He’d closed up so much he couldn’t feel joy or love. I added that Blanca and I could help him to carry that weight. Manuel didn’t interrupt me. He’d turned very pale, breathing like a tired dog, holding Blanca’s hand, with his eyes closed. “Do you want to know what gringuita discovered, Manuel?” Blanca asked in a murmur, and he nodded silently.
I confessed that in Santiago, while he was recovering from the operation, I had combed through the archives of the Vicarage of Solidarity and talked to the people Father Lyon had put me in touch with—two lawyers, a priest, and one of the authors of the Rettig Report, compiled by the National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation, which documents more than 3,500 human rights violations committed during the dictatorship. Among those cases was that of Felipe Vidal, my Nini’s first husband, and also that of Manuel Arias.
“I didn’t participate in that report, didn’t testify before that commission,” said Manuel, his voice cracking.
“Father Lyon gave a statement on your behalf. You told him the details of those fourteen months you were detained, Manuel. You’d just come out of the Tres Álamos concentration camp and you were banished here, to Chiloé, where you stayed with Father Lyon in Don Lionel’s home.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“The priest remembers, but he couldn’t tell me, because he considers it a secret of the confessional. He only pointed me in the right direction. Felipe Vidal’s case was reported by his wife, my Nini, before she went into exile.”
I told Manuel what I had discovered during that vital week in Santiago and that Blanca and I had visited Villa Grimaldi. The name of the place didn’t provoke any reaction from him. He had a vague notion that he’d been there, but in his mind he mixed it up with other detention centers. In the thirty-some years since then, his mind had eliminated that experience from his memory. He remembered it as if he’d read it in a book, not as something personal, although he has scars and burn marks on his body and can’t lift his arms above shoulder height, because they were dislocated.
“I don’t want to know the details,” he told us.
Blanca explained that the details were intact somewhere inside him, and it would take immense courage to enter that place, but he wouldn’t be going alone; she and I would accompany him. He was no longer a powerless prisoner in the hands of his torturers, but he would never be truly free if he didn’t confront the suffering of his past.
“The worst things happened to you in Villa Grimaldi, Manuel. At the end of our tour, the guide took us to see the reconstructed cells. There were some cells that were four feet by six, where several prisoners were kept standing up, wedged in together, for days, even weeks, and only taken out to be tortured.”
“Yes, yes . . . I was in one of those with Felipe Vidal and other men. They didn’t give us water . . . it was an unventilated box, we were soaking in sweat, blood, excrement,” Manuel stammered, doubled over, his head on his knees. “And there were other cells that were individual niches, tombs, kennels . . . the cramps, the thirst. . . . Get me out of here!”
Blanca and I wrapped him in a circle of arms and chests and kisses, holding him, crying with him. We had seen one of those cells. After a lot of begging, the guide had allowed me to go inside. I had to crawl in on my knees, and once inside I stayed cringing, crouching, unable to change position or move, and after they closed the door I was trapped in total darkness. I couldn’t bear more than a couple of seconds and started shouting until they pulled me out by my arms. “The prisoners were kept buried alive for weeks, sometimes months. Few made it out of here alive, and they often went crazy,” the guide had told us.
“Now we know where you are in your nightmares, Manuel,” said Blanca.
They finally took Manuel out of his tomb, to lock another prisoner in it. They got tired of torturing him and sent him to other detention centers. After completing his sentence of banishment in Chiloé, he was able to go to Australia, where his wife was. She hadn’t heard any news of him for more than two years, and had assumed he was dead. She’d started a new life into which the traumatized Manuel did not fit. They soon got divorced, as did most couples in exile. In spite of it all, Manuel had more luck than a lot of refugees, because Australia is a welcoming country. He found work there in his profession and wrote two books, while he kept himself numbed with alcohol and fleeting adventures that only accentuated his abysmal solitude. With his second wife, a Spanish dancer he met in Sydney, he lasted less than a year. He was incapable of trusting anyone or of surrendering to a loving relationship. He suffered episodes of violence and panic attacks. He was irretrievably trapped in his cell in Villa Grimaldi or naked, tied to a metal cot, while his jailers amused themselves with electrical charges.
One day, in Sydney, Manuel crashed his car into a reinforced concrete post, an improbable accident even for someone stupefied by liquor, as he was when they found him. The doctors in the hospital, where he spent thirteen days in critical condition and a month immobilized, concluded that he’d tried to commit suicide and put him in contact with an international organization that helped victims of torture. A psychiatrist with experience in cases like his visited him while he was still in the hospital. He wasn’t able to unravel his patient’s traumas, but he did help him to manage his mood swings and episodes of violence and panic, to stop drinking, and to lead an apparently normal existence. Manuel considered himself cured, playing down the importance of his nightmares and his visceral fear of elevators and enclosed spaces. He went on taking antidepressants and got used to solitude.
As Manuel was telling us all this, the electricity went off, as always happens on this island at that time, and none of us had gotten up to light the candles. We were sitting very close together in the dark.
“Forgive me, Manuel,” murmured Blanca after a long pause.
“Forgive you? I have only gratitude for you,” he said.
“Forgive me for my incomprehension and blindness. No one can forgive the criminals, Manuel, but maybe you can forgive me and my family. We sinned by omission. We ignored the evidence, because we didn’t want to be complicit. In my case it’s worse, because I traveled a lot during those years, and I knew what the foreign press published about Pinochet’s government. Lies, I thought, that’s Communist propaganda.”
Manuel pulled her close, embraced her. I stood up and felt my way through the darkness to find some candles, put a bit of wood in the stove, and get another bottle of wine and more tea. The house had cooled down. I put a blanket over their legs and curled up on the dilapidated sofa on the other side of Manuel.
“So your grandma told you about us, Maya,” Manuel said.
“That you were friends, nothing else. She never talks about that time, hardly ever mentions Felipe Vidal.”
“Then how did you know I’m your grandfather?”
“My Popo is my grandfather,” I replied, taken aback.
His revelation was so outrageous that it took me a long minute to grasp it. The words were slashing their way through my muddled mind and my confused heart, but their meaning escaped me.
“I don’t understand . . . ,” I murmured.
“Andrés, your dad, is my son,” Manuel said.
“That can’t be. My Nini wouldn’t have kept that quiet for more than forty years.”
“I thought you knew, Maya. You told Dr. Puga that you were my granddaughter.”
“So he’d let me sit in on your appointment!”
In 1964 my Nini was the secretary and Manuel Arias the assistant to the same professor. She was twenty-two and recently married to Felipe Vidal; he was twenty-seven and had a grant to study for a doctorate in sociology at NYU. They’d been in love as adolescents, but had stopped seeing each other for a few years. Meeting again by chance at the university swept them up in a new and urgent passion, very different from the virginal romance they’d had before. That passion would end in a heart-rending way when he went to New York and they had to separate. Meanwhile Felipe Vidal’s career as a journalist was starting to take off. He spent time in Cuba, oblivious to his wife’s deception, and never suspected that the child born in 1965 might not be his. He didn’t know of the existence of Manuel Arias until they shared an odious cell, but Manuel had followed the reporter’s successes from afar. Manuel and Nidia’s love suffered several interruptions, but inevitably reignited whenever they met, until he got married in 1970, the year that Salvador Allende was elected president and the political cataclysm began to gestate that would culminate three years later in the military coup.
“Does my dad know?” I asked Manuel.
“I don’t think so. Nidia felt guilty about what had happened between us and was prepared to keep it secret at any cost. She tried to forget and wanted me to forget too. She never mentioned it until December of last year, when she wrote to me about you.”
“Now I understand why you took me in, Manuel.”
“In my sporadic correspondence with Nidia over the years I learned of your existence, Maya. I knew that as Andrés’s daughter, you were my granddaughter, but I didn’t dwell on it. I didn’t think I’d ever meet you.”
The reflective, intimate atmosphere of minutes before became very tense. Manuel was my father’s father. We shared the same blood. There were no dramatic reactions, no emotional embraces or tears of recognition, no choking up over sentimental declarations; I felt that bitter toughness of my hard times, something I’d never felt in Chiloé. The months of fun, study, and cohabitation with Manuel vanished; suddenly he was a stranger whose adultery with my grandmother disgusted me.
“My God, Manuel, why didn’t you tell me? The soap opera has nothing on this,” concluded Blanca with a sigh.
The spell was broken and the air cleared. We looked at each other in the yellowish candlelight, smiled timidly, and then burst out laughing, first hesitantly and then enthusiastically, at how absurd and insignificant this was. Apart from donating an organ or inheriting a fortune, it doesn’t matter who my biological grandfather is; only affection matters, and we’re lucky to have each other.
“My Popo is my grandfather,” I repeated.
“Nobody’s questioning that, Maya,” he replied.
Through my Nini’s messages, which she sends to Manuel by way of Mike O’Kelly, I found out that Freddy had been found unconscious on a street in Las Vegas. An ambulance took him to the same hospital where Olympia Pettiford had first met him, one of those lucky coincidences that the Widows for Jesus attribute to the power of prayer. The boy remained in the intensive care unit, breathing through a tube connected to a noisy machine, while the doctors tried to control his double pneumonia, which had him at the gates of the crematorium. Then they had to remove one of his kidneys, which had been crushed in last year’s beating, and treat the multiple ailments caused by living rough. Eventually he ended up in a bed on Olympia’s ward at the hospital. In the meantime she had set in motion the saving forces of Jesus and her own resources to prevent Child Protective Services or the law from getting their hands on the kid.
By the time Freddy was discharged, Olympia Pettiford had obtained judicial permission to take care of him, alleging some illusory kinship and thus saving him from a juvenile detention center or prison. It seems that Officer Arana helped her, after discovering that a boy matching Freddy’s description had been admitted to the hospital and, when he had a free moment, going to see him. He found his access blocked by the imposing Olympia, determined to monitor any visits to the patient, who was still drifting in that uncertain territory between life and death.
The nurse was afraid Arana was intending to arrest her protégé, but he convinced her that he only wanted to ask him if he had any news about a friend of his called Laura Barron. He said he was willing to help the kid, and since they were both interested in that, Olympia invited him for a juice and a chat in the cafeteria. She explained that toward the end of last year Freddy had brought a very ill drug addict called Laura Barron to her house, and then he’d vanished. She didn’t hear any more about him until he came out of surgery with a single remaining kidney and ended up in a ward on her floor. As for Laura Barron, all she could tell him was that she looked after her for a few days, and as soon as the girl recovered a bit, some relatives took her away, probably to put her in rehab, as she herself had advised them. She didn’t know where, and she no longer had the number for the grandmother that the girl had given her. Freddy needed to be left alone, she warned Arana in a menacing tone; the boy knew nothing about that Laura Barron.
When Freddy got out of the hospital, looking like a scarecrow, Olympia Pettiford took him to her home and placed him in the hands of the fearsome commando team of Christian widows. By that point the kid had been off drugs for two months and only had enough energy to watch television. With the Widows’ diet of fry-ups he gradually began to recover his strength, and when Olympia reckoned he might be able to run away and return to the hell of addiction, she remembered the man in the wheelchair, whose card she kept between the pages of her Bible, and called him. She withdrew her savings from the bank, bought the tickets, and with another woman for reinforcement took Freddy to California. According to my Nini, they showed up in their Sunday best in the airless little office near the juvenile prison where Snow White, who was waiting for them, works. The story filled me with hope; if anyone in this world can help Freddy, that someone is Mike O’Kelly.
Daniel Goodrich and his father attended a conference of Jungian analysts in San Francisco, where the main subject was Carl Jung’s Red Book (Liber Novus), which has just been published, having been in a bank vault in Switzerland for decades, hidden from the eyes of the world and surrounded by great mystery. Sir Robert Goodrich spent a fortune on one of the luxury replica editions, identical to the original, which Daniel will inherit. On the Sunday, Daniel went to Berkeley to see my family and give them some photographs of his stay in Chiloé.
In the best Chilean tradition, my grandma insisted he had to stay the night in her house and put him up in my room, which has been painted a calmer tone than the strident mango color of my childhood and divested of the winged dragon that used to hang from the ceiling and the malnourished children on the walls. My picturesque grandmother and the big house in Berkeley, more cantankerous, rheumatic, and flamboyant than I’d managed to describe, blew the guest away. The tower of the stars had been used by the tenant to store merchandise, but Mike sent a bunch of his repentant delinquents to scrape off the dirt and put the old telescope back in its place. My Nini says that reassured my Popo, who had been wandering around the house, bumping into Indian crates and bundles. I abstained from telling her that my Popo is in Chiloé; maybe he hangs around several places at once.
My Nini took Daniel to visit the library, the aging hippies on Telegraph Avenue, the best vegetarian restaurant, the Peña Chilena, and, of course, Mike O’Kelly. “That Irish guy is in love with your grandmother, and I think she might not be totally indifferent to him,” Daniel wrote to me, but I find it hard to imagine that my grandma could take Snow White seriously, who’s a poor wretch compared to my Popo. The truth is that O’Kelly is not that bad, but anyone’s a poor wretch compared to my Popo.
Freddy was at Mike’s apartment, and it sounds like he’s changed a lot over these months; Daniel’s description doesn’t match that of the boy who saved my life twice. Freddy’s in Mike’s rehab program, sober and apparently in good health, but very depressed. He has no friends, never goes out, and doesn’t want to study or work. O’Kelly thinks he needs time and we should have faith that he’ll be okay, because he’s very young and has a good heart, and that always helps. The kid showed no interest in the photos from Chiloé or the news of me; if not for the fact that he was missing two fingers, I’d think Daniel got him mixed up with someone else.
My father arrived that Sunday at noon back from some Arab emirate or other, and had lunch with Daniel. I imagine the three of them in the old kitchen, the white serviettes frayed from use, the green ceramic water jug, the bottle of Veramonte sauvignon blanc, my dad’s favorite, and my Nini’s fragrant caldillo de pescado, a Chilean variation on Italian cioppino and French bouillabaisse, as she herself describes it. My friend concluded, erroneously, that my dad cries easily, because he got very emotional when he saw photos of me. He also concluded that I don’t take after anyone in my little family. He should see Marta Otter, the Laplander princess. Daniel experienced a day of stupendous hospitality and left with the idea that Berkeley is a Third World country. He got along well with my Nini, though the only thing they have in common is me and a weakness for mint ice cream. After weighing up the risks, they both agreed to exchange news by telephone, a means that offers minimal danger, as long as they don’t mention my name.
“I asked Daniel to come to Chiloé for Christmas,” I announced to Manuel.
“For a visit, to stay, or to come and take you away?” he asked.
“I don’t really know, Manuel.”
“What would you prefer?”
“That he stay!” I responded without a second’s hesitation, surprising him with my certainty.
Since it came to light that we’re related, Manuel tends to look at me with moist eyes, and on Friday he brought me chocolates from Castro. “You’re not my boyfriend, Manuel, and get the idea out of your head that you’re going to replace my Popo,” I told him. “It never even occurred to me, silly gringa,” he answered. Our relationship is the same as it was before, without endearments or shows of affection and with lots of sarcasm, but he seems like a different person, and Blanca has noticed it too. I hope he’s not going to get soft on us and turn into a doddering, sentimental old man. Their relationship has changed too. Several nights a week Manuel sleeps at Blanca’s house and leaves me alone, with no more company than three bats, two eccentric cats, and a lame dog. We’ve been able to talk about his past, which is no longer taboo, but I still don’t dare to be the one to bring it up; I prefer to wait for him to take the initiative, which happens with certain frequency, because now that the lid’s off his Pandora’s box, Manuel needs to get these things off his chest.
I’ve been able to sketch quite a precise picture of the fate that befell Felipe Vidal, thanks to what Manuel remembers and the detailed report his wife gave to the Vicarage of Solidarity, where they even have in their archives a couple of letters he wrote to her before he was arrested. Violating the security regulations, I wrote to my Nini via Daniel, who got the letter to her, demanding explanations. She answered me by the same route and filled in the blanks in my information.
In the chaos of the early days after the military coup, Felipe and Nidia Vidal thought that by keeping a low profile they could carry on their normal existence. Felipe Vidal had hosted a political television program during the three years of Salvador Allende’s government, more than enough reason for him to be considered suspicious by the military; however, he hadn’t been arrested. Nidia thought democracy would soon be restored, but he feared a long-term dictatorship; as a journalist he’d reported on wars, revolutions, and military coups, and he knew that violence, once unleashed, is uncontainable. Before the coup he sensed that they were on top of a powder keg ready to explode, and he warned the president in private, after a press conference. “Do you know something I don’t, compañero Vidal, or is this a hunch?” Allende asked.
“I’ve taken the country’s pulse, and I believe the military is going to rise up in arms,” he answered straight back.
“Chile has a long democratic tradition, nobody takes power by force here. I know how serious this crisis is, compañero, but I trust the commander in chief of the armed forces and our honorable soldiers. I know they’ll carry out their duty,” said Allende in a solemn tone, as if speaking for posterity. He was referring to General Augusto Pinochet, who he’d recently appointed, a man from a provincial military family, who came highly recommended by his predecessor, General Prats, who had been removed from office by political pressure. Vidal reproduced this exact conversation in his newspaper column. Nine days later, on Tuesday, September 11, he heard the president’s last words over the radio saying farewell to the people before dying, and the sound of bombs falling on the Palacio de la Moneda, the presidential palace. Then he prepared for the worst. He didn’t believe the myth of the civilized conduct of the Chilean military; he had studied history, and there was too much evidence to the contrary. He had a feeling the repression was going to be terrifying.
The military junta declared a state of war, and among the immediate measures imposed was strict censoring of the media. No news circulated, only rumors, which official propaganda did not attempt to quash; sowing terror suited their aims. There was talk of concentration camps and torture centers, thousands and thousands of people detained, exiled, and killed, tanks leveling working-class neighborhoods, soldiers shot by firing squad for refusing to obey orders, prisoners thrown into the sea from helicopters, tied to pieces of rail and sliced open so they’d sink. Felipe Vidal took note of the soldiers armed with weapons of war, the tanks, the din of military trucks, the buzzing of helicopters, people brutally rounded up. Nidia ripped the posters of protest singers off the walls and gathered up the books, including innocuous novels, and went to throw them in a garbage dump; she didn’t know how to burn them without attracting attention. It was a futile precaution; hundreds of compromising articles, documentaries, and recordings of her husband’s journalistic work existed.