The idea that Felipe should go into hiding was Nidia’s—that way they could worry less. She suggested he go down south, to stay with an aunt. Doña Ignacia was a quite peculiar octogenarian, who had spent fifty years receiving dying people in her house. Three maids, almost as old as she was, seconded her in the noble task of helping the terminally ill with distinguished surnames to die, those whose own families couldn’t or didn’t want to look after them. Nobody visited that lugubrious residence, except for a nurse and a deacon, who came twice a week to dole out medicines and communion, because the place was known to be haunted. Felipe Vidal didn’t believe in that sort of thing, but by letter he admitted to his wife that the furniture moved on its own, and it was hard to sleep at night due to the inexplicable slamming of doors and banging on the ceiling. The dining room was often used as a funeral chapel, and there was a cupboard full of dentures, spectacles, and medicine bottles left behind by guests when they departed for heaven. Doña Ignacia took in Felipe Vidal with open arms. She didn’t remember who he was and assumed he was another patient sent by God, so she was a bit surprised by how healthy he looked.
The house was a square colonial relic made of adobe and tiles, with a central patio. The rooms opened off a gallery, where dusty potted geraniums languished and hens wandered around, pecking at the floor. The beams and pillars were twisted, the walls cracked, the shutters unhinged from use and tremors; the roof leaked in several spots, and gusts of wind and souls in purgatory tended to move the statues of saints that adorned the rooms. It was the perfect antechamber to death—freezing, damp, and as gloomy as a cemetery—but to Felipe Vidal it seemed luxurious. The room he was given was as big as their whole apartment in Santiago, with a collection of heavy furniture, barred windows, and a ceiling so high that the depressing paintings of biblical scenes had to be hung at an angle so they could be appreciated from below. The food was excellent; Aunt Ignacia had a sweet tooth and spared no expense on her moribund guests, who stayed very quiet in their beds, warbling as they breathed and barely touching their meals.
From that provincial refuge Felipe tried to pull some strings to clarify his situation. He was unemployed; the television station had been taken over and the newspaper he wrote for was shut down, the building burned to the ground. His face and his pen were identified with the left-wing press. He couldn’t even dream of getting work in his profession, but he had enough savings to live on for a few months. His immediate problem was to find out if he was on the blacklist and, if so, to get out of the country. He sent messages in code and made discreet enquiries by phone, but his friends and acquaintances refused to answer him or got tongue-tied with excuses.
After three months he was drinking half a bottle of pisco a day, depressed and ashamed because while others were fighting clandestinely against the military dictatorship, he was dining like a prince at the expense of a demented old lady who stuck a thermometer in his mouth at regular intervals. He was dying of boredom. He refused to watch television, so he wouldn’t have to hear the military edicts and hymns. He didn’t read, because all the books in the house were from the nineteenth century, and his only social activity was the evening rosary when the servants and his aunt prayed for the souls of the dying, in which he had to participate, because that was the sole condition Doña Ignacia insisted on in exchange for room and board. During that period he wrote several letters to his wife, giving her the details of his existence, two of which can be read in the archives of the Vicarage of Solidarity. He began to go out gradually, first as far as the door, then to the bakery on the corner and the newspaper kiosk, and soon for a stroll around the plaza or to the cinema. He found that summer had burst out and people were preparing to go on vacation with an air of normality, as if helmeted soldiers patrolling with automatic rifles were a regular part of the urban landscape. Christmas went by, and the year 1974 began far from his wife and son, but in February, after five months living like a rat, without any proof that the secret police was on the lookout for him, he calculated that the time had come to return to the capital and put the broken pieces of his life and family back together.
Felipe Vidal said good-bye to Doña Ignacia and the servants, who filled his suitcase with cheeses and pastries, overcome with emotion because he was the first patient in half a century who instead of dying had gained twenty pounds. Wearing contact lenses, with his mustache shaved off and his hair cut short, he was unrecognizable. In Santiago he decided to occupy his time by writing his memoirs, since the circumstances were still not favorable for finding a job. A month later, his wife left work, stopping to pick up their son Andrés at school and buy something to cook for dinner. When she got back to the apartment, she found the door smashed open and the cat lying across the threshold with his head crushed.
Nidia Vidal followed the usual route, asking after her husband, along with the hundreds of other anguished people who stood in lines outside police stations, prisons, detention centers, hospitals, and morgues. Her husband was not on the blacklist; he wasn’t registered anywhere, he’d never been arrested, don’t look for him, señora, he probably ran off with his lover to Mendoza. Her pilgrimage would have continued for years if she hadn’t received a message.
Manuel Arias was in Villa Grimaldi, which had recently been inaugurated as headquarters of the DINA, in one of the torture cells, standing up, crushed against other motionless prisoners. Among them was Felipe Vidal, who everyone knew from his television program. Of course, Vidal could not have known that one of his cellmates, Manuel Arias, was the father of Andrés, the boy he considered his son. After two days they took Felipe Vidal away to interrogate him, and he never came back.
The prisoners used to communicate by tapping and scratching the wooden planks between them, which is how Manuel found out that Vidal had suffered a heart attack on the “grill” while being tortured with electric shocks. His remains, like those of so many others, were thrown into the sea. Getting in touch with Nidia became an obsession for Manuel. The least he could do for that woman he had so loved was to prevent her from wasting her life looking for someone who was already gone and warn her to escape before they disappeared her too.
It was impossible to get messages out of Villa Grimaldi, but by a miraculous coincidence, around that time the Red Cross made its first visit; the denunciations of human rights violations had gone all around the world by then. They had to hide the inmates, clean up the blood, and dismantle the electrified racks for the inspection. Manuel and others who were in better shape were cured as much as they could be, bathed, given clean clothes, and presented before the observers with the warning that their families would suffer the consequences of the slightest indiscretion. Manuel made use of the only seconds he had to whisper a couple of phrases to one of the members of the Red Cross delegation to get a message to Nidia Vidal.
Nidia received the message, knew who it came from, and had no doubt that it was true. She got in contact with a Belgian priest she knew who worked at the Vicarage, and he arranged to get her and her son into the Honduran embassy, where they spent two months waiting for safe-conduct passes to leave the country. The diplomatic residence was overrun with dozens of men, women, and children, who slept on the floor and kept the three bathrooms permanently occupied, while the ambassador tried to arrange for people to go to other countries—his own was full and couldn’t receive any more refugees. The task seemed endless; ever more people persecuted by the regime kept jumping over the wall from the street and landing in his patio. He managed to get Canada to agree to take twenty, among them Nidia and Andrés Vidal, rented a bus, put diplomatic plates and two Honduran flags on it, and, accompanied by his military attaché, personally drove the twenty exiles to the airport and then escorted them to the door of the plane.
Nidia was determined to give her son a normal life in Canada, free from fear, hatred, and bitterness. She told the truth when she explained that his father had died of a heart attack, but she omitted the horrendous details; the boy was too young to take them in. The years went by without finding an opportunity—or a good reason—to elaborate on the circumstances of that death, but now that I had dug up the past, my Nini will have to do so. She’ll also have to tell him that Felipe Vidal, the man in the photograph he’s always had on his bedside table, was not his father.
A package arrived for us at the Tavern of the Dead; we knew who had sent it before opening it, because it came from Seattle. It contained the letter I was so desperate for, long and informative, but without the passionate language that would have put my doubts about Daniel to rest. He also sent photos he took in Berkeley: my Nini, looking better than last year, because she’d dyed her hair to cover up the gray, on the arm of my dad in his pilot’s uniform, as handsome as ever; Mike O’Kelly standing up, leaning on his walker, with the torso and arms of a wrestler and legs atrophied by paralysis; the magic house in the shadow of the pines on a resplendent fall day; San Francisco Bay spattered with white sails. There was only one shot of Freddy, possibly taken unbeknownst to the kid, who wasn’t in any of the others, as if he’d avoided the camera on purpose. That sad, scrawny, hungry-eyed being looked just like the zombies in Brandon Leeman’s building. Controlling his addiction might take my poor Freddy years, if he ever manages to; in the meantime, he’s suffering.
The package also included a book about organized crime, which I’ll read, and a long magazine article about the most wanted counterfeiter in the world, a forty-four-year-old American called Adam Trevor, arrested in August at the Miami airport en route from Brazil, trying to enter the United States with a fake passport. He’d fled the country with his wife and son in mid-2008, outwitting the FBI and Interpol. Incarcerated in a federal prison, facing the possibility of spending the rest of his life behind bars, he worked out that he might as well cooperate with the authorities in exchange for a shorter sentence. The information provided by Trevor could lead to the dismantling of an international network capable of influencing the financial markets from Wall Street to Beijing, said the article.
Trevor began his counterfeit industry in the southern state of Georgia and then moved to Texas, near the permeable border with Mexico. He set up his money-manufacturing machine in the basement of an old shoe factory, closed down several years earlier, in an industrial zone that was very active during the day and dead at night, when he could transport the material without attracting attention. The bills he made were as perfect as Officer Arana had told me in Las Vegas; he acquired offcuts of the same starch-free paper used for authentic money, and he’d developed an ingenious technique to incorporate the metallic security band. Not even the most expert teller could detect them. Furthermore, one part of his production was fifty-dollar bills, which were rarely subject to the same scrutiny as higher-denomination bills. The magazine repeated what Arana had said: that the counterfeit dollars were always sent outside the United States, where organized criminals mixed them with legitimate money before putting them into circulation.
In his confession, Adam Trevor admitted the error of having given his brother in Las Vegas half a million dollars to look after; this brother had been murdered before telling him where he’d hidden the loot. Nothing would have been discovered if his brother, a small-time drug dealer who went by the name Brandon Leeman, hadn’t started spending it. In the ocean of cash in the Nevada casinos the bills would have passed for years without being detected, but Brandon Leeman also used them to bribe police officers, and with that clue the FBI began to get to the bottom of things.
The Las Vegas Police Department had kept the bribery scandal more or less under wraps, but something leaked to the press. There was a superficial cleanup to calm the public’s indignation, and several corrupt officers were fired. The journalist finalized his report with a paragraph that scared me:
Half a million counterfeit dollars are irrelevant. The essential thing is to find the printing plates, which Adam Trevor gave his brother to hide, before they fall into the hands of a terrorist group or a government like that of North Korea or Iran, interested in saturating the market with counterfeit dollars and sabotaging the American economy.
My grandmother and Snow White are convinced that there is no longer any such thing as privacy. People can find out the most intimate details of other people’s lives, and no one can hide; all you have to do is use a credit card, go to the dentist, get on a train, or make a phone call to leave an indelible trail. Nevertheless, every year hundreds of thousands of children and adults disappear for different reasons: kidnapping, suicide, murder, mental illness, accidents; many are running away from domestic violence or the law; some join a sect or travel under a false identity; not to mention the victims of sex trafficking or those exploited and forced to work as slaves. According to Manuel, there are actually twenty-seven million slaves right now, in spite of slavery having been abolished all over the world.
Last year, I was one of those disappeared persons, and my Nini was unable to find me, although I didn’t make any special effort to hide. She and Mike believe that the U.S. government, using terrorism as a pretext, spies on all our movements and intentions, but I doubt they can access billions of e-mail messages and telephone conversations; the air is saturated with words in hundreds of languages, it would be impossible to put the hullabaloo of that Tower of Babel in order and decipher it all. “They can, Maya. They have the technology and millions of insignificant bureaucrats whose only job is to spy on us. If the innocents need to watch out, there’s even more reason for you to. Mind what I’m saying, I mean it,” my Nini insisted as we said good-bye in San Francisco in January. It turns out that one of those innocents, her friend Norman, that hateful genius who helped her hack into my e-mail and cell phone in Berkeley, started sending jokes about bin Laden around the Internet, and within a week two FBI agents showed up at his house to interrogate him. Obama has not dismantled the domestic espionage mechanisms set up by his predecessor, so no precaution is too great, my grandmother maintains, and Manuel Arias agrees.
Manuel and my Nini have a code for talking about me: the book he’s writing is me. For example, to give my grandma an idea of how I’ve adapted to Chiloé, Manuel tells her that the book is progressing better than expected, hasn’t yet come up against any serious problem, and the Chilotes, normally so insular, are cooperating. My Nini can write to him with somewhat more freedom, as long as she doesn’t do so from her own computer. That’s how I found out that my dad’s divorce had been finalized, that he was still flying to the Middle East, and that Susan came back from Iraq and was assigned to the security detail at the White House. My grandma keeps in touch with her; they became friends in spite of the run-ins they had at first, when she butted in on her daughter-in-law’s privacy too much. I’ll write to Susan too as soon as my situation gets back to normal. I don’t want to lose her. She was very good to me.
My Nini is still working at the library, volunteering at the hospice, and helping O’Kelly. The Club of Criminals was in the news all over the States because two of its members discovered the identity of an Oklahoma serial killer. Through logical deduction they achieved what the police, with their modern investigation techniques, had not managed to. This notoriety has provoked an avalanche of applications to join the club. My Nini thinks they should charge the new members a monthly fee, but O’Kelly says they’d lose the idealism.
“Those printing plates of Adam Trevor’s could cause a cataclysm in the international economic system. They’re the equivalent of a nuclear bomb,” I told Manuel.
“They’re at the bottom of San Francisco Bay.”
“We can’t be sure of that, but even if they were, the FBI doesn’t know it. What are we going to do, Manuel? If they were looking for me before on account of a bundle of counterfeit bills, now that they know about the plates, they have even more reason to look. They’re really going to mobilize to find me now.”
Friday, November 27, 2009. Third woeful day. I haven’t gone to work since Wednesday, haven’t left the house, taken off my pajamas, or eaten. I’m not speaking to Manuel or Blanca. I’m inconsolable, on a roller coaster of emotions. A moment before picking up the phone on that damned Wednesday I was flying way up high, in the light of happiness, then came the fall, like a bird shot through the heart. I’ve spent three days beside myself, screaming and wailing about my love and my mistakes and my aching heart, but today, finally, I said: Enough! I took such a long shower I emptied the water tank, washed away my sorrows with soap, and sat in the sun on the terrace to wolf down the toast with tomato marmalade that Manuel made and which had the virtue of returning me to sanity, after my alarming attack of romantic dementia. I was able to tackle my situation with something approaching objectivity, though I knew the calming effect of the toast would be temporary. I have cried a lot and will carry on crying as much as necessary, self-pityingly, for my unrequited love, because I know what will happen if I try to be brave, as I did when my Popo died. Besides, nobody cares if I cry: Daniel doesn’t hear it, and the world carries on spinning, unmoved.
Daniel Goodrich informed me that “he values our friendship and wants to keep in touch,” that I’m an exceptional young woman, and blah-blah-blah; in other words, that he doesn’t love me. He won’t be coming to Chiloé for Christmas—in fact he never commented on that suggestion, just as he never made any plans for us to meet up again. Our adventure in May was very romantic, and he’d always remember it, more and more hot air, but he has his life in Seattle. When I received this message at [email protected], I thought it was a misunderstanding, a confusion caused by the distance, and I phoned him—my first call, damn my grandmother’s security measures. We had a brief, very painful conversation, impossible to repeat without writhing in embarrassment and humiliation, me begging, him backing away.
“I’m an ugly, stupid alcoholic! No wonder Daniel doesn’t want anything to do with me,” I sobbed.
“Very good, Maya, flagellate yourself,” Manuel advised me, having sat down beside me with his coffee and more toast.
“Is this my life? Descend to the darkness in Las Vegas, survive, be saved by chance here in Chiloé, fall totally in love with Daniel, and then lose him. Die, revive, love, and die again. I’m a disaster, Manuel.”
“Look, Maya, let’s not exaggerate, this isn’t an opera. You made a mistake, but it’s not your fault—that young man should be more careful of your feelings. And he calls himself a psychiatrist! He’s a jerk.”
“Yeah, a very sexy jerk.”
We smiled, but I soon burst into tears again. He handed me a paper napkin to blow my nose and hugged me.
“I’m really sorry about your computer, Manuel,” I murmured, buried in his sweater.
“My book is safe, Maya. I didn’t lose anything.”
“I’m going to buy you another computer, I promise.”
“How do you think you’re going to do that?”
“I’ll ask the Millalobo for a loan.”
“Oh, no you won’t!” he warned me.
“Then I’ll have to start selling Doña Lucinda’s marijuana. There are still several plants in her garden.”
It’s not just the destroyed computer I’ll have to replace. I also attacked the bookshelves, the ship’s clock, the maps, plates, glasses, and anything else in reach of my fury, shrieking like a two-year-old brat, the most outrageous tantrum of my life. The cats flew out the window, and Fahkeen hid under the table, terrified. When Manuel came home, about nine o’clock that night, he found his house devastated by a typhoon and me on the floor, completely drunk. That’s the worst, what I’m most ashamed of.
Manuel called Blanca, who ran over from her house even though she’s not really up to that sort of exertion at her age, and between the two of them they revived me with very strong coffee, washed me, put me to bed, and tidied up the damage. I’d drunk a bottle of wine and the rest of the vodka and licor de oro I found in the cupboard, and was utterly intoxicated. I started drinking without a second thought. I, who bragged about overcoming my problems, who could go without therapy and Alcoholics Anonymous because I had more than enough willpower and wasn’t really an addict, reached for the bottles automatically as soon as that Seattle backpacker dumped me. I admit the cause was a crushing blow, but that’s not the point. Mike O’Kelly was right: addiction is always lying in wait, looking for its chance.
“I was so stupid, Manuel!”
“It’s not stupidity, Maya. It’s what’s called falling in love with love.”
“What?”
“You don’t know Daniel very well. You’re in love with the euphoria he produces in you.”
“That euphoria is the only thing that matters to me, Manuel. I can’t live without Daniel.”
“Of course you can live without him. That young man was the key to opening your heart. An addiction to love won’t ruin your health or your life, like crack or vodka, but you need to learn how to distinguish between the object of your love, in this case Daniel, and the excitement of having your heart opened.”
“Go on, man, you’re talking like the therapists in Oregon.”
“You know I’ve spent half my life closed up like a tough guy, Maya. I only recently started opening up, but I can’t choose my feelings. Fear gets in through the same aperture as love. What I’m trying to tell you is that if you’re able to love very much, you’re also going to suffer a lot.”
“I’m going to die, Manuel. I can’t bear this. It’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to me!”
“No, gringuita, it’s a temporary misfortune, small potatoes compared to your tragedy last year. That backpacker did you a favor—he gave you the opportunity to get to know yourself better.”
“I don’t have a f*cking idea who I am, Manuel.”
“You’re on your way to finding out.”
“Do you know who you are, Manuel Arias?”
“Not yet, but I’ve taken the first steps. You’re already farther along and have a lot more time ahead of you than I do, Maya.”
Manuel and Blanca endured this absurd gringa’s crisis with exemplary generosity; they soaked up tears, recriminations, moans of self-pity and guilt, but they wouldn’t tolerate me swearing or my insults or any threats of smashing up any more of other people’s property, in this case Manuel’s. We had a couple of loud fights, which all three of us needed. Everything can’t always be so Zen. They’ve had the good grace not to mention my drunkenness or the cost of the destruction, knowing that I’m ready and willing to pay any penance to be forgiven. When I calmed down and saw the computer on the floor, I had a fleeting urge to jump into the sea. How was I going to be able to look Manuel in the face? He must love me a lot, this new grandpa of mine, who should have chucked me out on my ass! This will be the last tantrum of my life; I’m twenty years old now, and it’s not cute anymore. I have to get him another computer somehow.
Manuel’s advice about opening myself up to my feelings keeps ringing in my head; it could have come from my Popo or Daniel Goodrich himself. Oh! I can’t even write his name without bursting into tears! I’m going to die of sadness, I have never suffered so much. . . . No, it’s not true, I suffered more, a thousand times more, when my Popo died. Daniel is not the only one who has broken my heart, like in the Mexican rancheras my Nini hums. When I was eight, my grandparents decided to take me to Denmark to nip in the bud my fantasy of being an orphan. The plan consisted of leaving me with my mother so we could get to know each other, while they went on holiday in the Mediterranean; they would pick me up two weeks later and we’d go back to California together. That would be my first direct contact with Marta Otter, and to make a good impression they filled my suitcase with new clothes and sentimental gifts, like a locket with some of my baby teeth and a lock of my hair. My dad, who was opposed to the visit at first and only gave in after combined pressure from me and my grandparents, warned us that the teeth and hair fetish wouldn’t be appreciated: Danes don’t collect body parts.
Though I did have several photographs of my mother, I imagined her to be like the otters at the Monterey Aquarium, because of her last name. In the photos she sometimes sent me at Christmas, she looked thin and elegant and had platinum blond hair, so it was quite surprising to see her in her house in Odense, looking a bit chubby in track pants, her hair badly dyed the color of red wine. She was married and had two children.
According to the guidebook my Popo bought at the station in Copenhagen, Odense is a charming city on the island of Funen, in central Denmark, birthplace of the famous writer Hans Christian Andersen, whose books occupied a distinguished place on my shelves, beside Astronomy for Beginners, because it belonged to the letter A. This had sparked an argument; my Popo insisted on alphabetical order, and my Nini, who worked at the Berkeley library, assured him that books should be organized by subject. I never found out if the island of Funen was as charming as the guidebook claimed, because we didn’t get to see it. Marta Otter lived in a neighborhood of identical houses, with a patch of grass in front, hers set apart from the rest by a clay mermaid sitting on a rock, just like the one I had in a glass ball. She opened the door with an expression of surprise, as if she didn’t remember that my Nini had written to her months in advance to announce the visit, had done so again before we left California, and had phoned her the previous day from Copenhagen. She greeted us with formal handshakes, invited us in, and introduced us to her sons, Hans and Vilhelm, four and two years old, little boys so white they probably glowed in the dark.
Inside it was tidy, impersonal, and depressing, in the same style as the hotel room in Copenhagen, where we hadn’t been able to shower because we couldn’t find the taps, just smooth minimalist surfaces of white marble. The hotel food turned out to be as austere as the decor, and my Nini, feeling swindled, demanded a discount. “You’re charging us a fortune, and there aren’t even any chairs here!” she complained at reception, where there was only a big steel desk and a floral arrangement consisting of an artichoke in a tall glass. The only decoration in Marta Otter’s house was the reproduction of quite a good painting by Queen Margrethe; if Margrethe weren’t a queen, she’d be more appreciated as an artist.
We sat on an uncomfortable gray plastic sofa. My suitcase, at my Popo’s feet, looked enormous, and my Nini held on to me by one arm so I wouldn’t run away. I’d been bugging them for years to take me to meet my mother, but at that moment I was ready to flee, terrified at the idea of spending two weeks with that stranger and those albino bunnies, my little brothers. When Marta Otter went to the kitchen to make coffee, I whispered to my Popo that if he left me in that house I’d commit suicide. He whispered the same thing to his wife, and in less than thirty seconds they both decided that the trip had been a mistake; it would have been better for their granddaughter to go on believing the legend of the Laplander princess for the rest of her life.
Marta Otter came back with coffee in cups so minimalist they had no handles, and the tension relaxed a bit with the ritual of passing the cream and sugar. My whiter-than-white little brothers started watching an animal show on TV with the sound turned down, so they wouldn’t bother us. They were very polite. The grown-ups started talking about me as if I were dead. My grandmother pulled out the family album and told my mother about the photos one by one: naked two-week-old Maya, curled up on one of Paul Ditson II’s giant hands, three-year-old Maya in a Hawaiian dress with a ukulele, seven-year-old Maya playing soccer. Meanwhile I was devoting excessive attention to the study of the shoelaces of my new sneakers. Marta Otter said I looked a lot like Hans and Vilhelm, although the only similarity I could see was that all three of us were bipeds. I think my appearance was a secret relief to my mother, because I showed no evidence of my father’s Latin American genes; in a pinch I might even pass for Scandinavian.
Forty minutes—which felt like forty hours—later my grandfather asked to borrow the phone to call a taxi, and soon we were saying good-bye, with no mention at all of the suitcase, which had been growing and now weighed as much as an elephant. At the door Marta Otter gave me a shy kiss on the forehead and said that we’d be in touch and that she’d come to California in a year or two, because Hans and Vilhelm wanted to see Disney World. “That’s in Florida,” I explained. My Nini shut me up with a pinch.
In the taxi my Nini stated her frivolous opinion that the absence of my mother, far from being a misfortune, had turned out to be a blessing; I got to be raised free and spoiled in the magic house in Berkeley, with its colorful walls and astronomical tower, instead of having to grow up with minimalist Danish decor. I took the glass ball with the little mermaid inside it out of my bag, and when we got out, I left it on the seat of the taxi.
After the visit to Marta Otter I was sullen for months. That Christmas, to cheer me up, Mike O’Kelly brought me a basket with a checked tea towel on top. When I pulled off the cloth I found a little white puppy the size of a grapefruit sleeping placidly on top of another tea towel. “She’s called Daisy, but you can give her another name if you want,” the Irishman told me. I fell head over heels in love with Daisy, and ran home from school every day so I wouldn’t miss a minute in her company. She was my confidante, my friend, and my toy. She slept in my bed, ate off my plate, and went everywhere in my arms. She only weighed about four pounds. That animal had the ability to calm me down and make me happy, and I didn’t think about Marta Otter anymore. Daisy went into heat for the first time when she was a year old; instinct overcame her shyness, and she slipped outside and ran onto the street. She didn’t get very far. A car hit her at the corner and killed her instantly.
My Nini, unable to give me the news, phoned my Popo, who left his work at the university to go and pick me up from school. They took me out of class, and when I saw him waiting for me, I knew what had happened before he had a chance to tell me. Daisy! I saw her running, saw the car, saw the inert body of the little dog. My Popo picked me up in his enormous arms, hugged me to his chest, and cried with me.
We put Daisy in a box and buried her in the garden. My Nini wanted to get another dog, as much like Daisy as possible, but my Popo said that it was not a question of replacing her, but of trying to live without her. “I can’t, Popo. I loved her so much!” I sobbed inconsolably. “That affection is inside you, Maya, not in Daisy. You can give it to other animals, and what’s left over you can give to me,” my wise grandpa answered. That lesson about grief and love will be useful now, because it’s true that I loved Daniel more than I loved myself, but not more than my Popo or Daisy.
Bad news, very bad. When it rains it pours, as they say here when misfortunes pile up; first Daniel and now this. Just as I feared, the FBI is on my trail, and Officer Arana showed up in Berkeley. That doesn’t mean he’s going to come to Chiloé, as Manuel reassures me, but I’m scared; if he’s gone to the trouble of looking for me since last November, he’s not going to stop now that he’s traced my family.
Arana turned up at my grandmother’s door, in civilian clothes, but flashing his badge. My Nini was in the kitchen, and my dad invited him in, thinking it was something to do with Mike O’Kelly’s delinquents. He got a disagreeable surprise when he found out that Arana was investigating a counterfeiting case and needed to ask Maya Vidal, alias Laura Barron, some questions; the case was practically closed, he added, but the girl was in danger, and he had an obligation to protect her. My Nini and my dad’s fright would have been much worse if I hadn’t told them that Arana is a decent cop and had always treated me well.
My grandmother asked him how he’d tracked me down, and Arana had no objection to telling her, proud of his bloodhound’s nose, as she put it in her message to Manuel. The police officer began with the most basic clue, revising the lists of missing girls from all over the country during 2008 on the police department computer. It seemed unnecessary to investigate previous years, because when he met me he could tell I hadn’t spent much time living on the street; runaway teenagers acquire an unmistakable stamp of abandon very fast. There were dozens of girls on the lists, but he limited his search to those between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five, in Nevada and bordering states. In most cases there were photographs, though some were not all that recent. He had a good memory for faces and was able to narrow the list down to just four girls, one of whom caught his attention, because the notice coincided with the date when he’d first met Brandon Leeman’s so-called niece, June 2008. As he studied the photo and information available, he concluded that Maya Vidal was the one he was looking for. That’s how he found out my real name, that of my relatives, and the addresses of the academy in Oregon and my family in California.
It turns out that my dad, contrary to what I’d assumed, had looked for me for months and sent my description to every police station and hospital in the country. Arana made a call to the academy, talked to Angie to get the details he lacked, and thus arrived at my dad’s old house, where the new occupants gave him the address of my grandparents’ big multicolored house. “It’s lucky that they assigned me to this case instead of another officer, because I’m convinced that Laura, or Maya, is a good girl, and I’d like to help her, before things get complicated for her. I think I can prove that her participation in the crime was insignificant,” the officer told them as he wrapped up his explanation.
In view of Arana’s conciliatory attitude, my Nini invited him to stay for dinner, and my dad opened his best bottle of wine. The policeman pronounced the soup perfect for a foggy November evening. Was it perhaps a typical dish from the lady’s country? He’d noticed her accent. My dad told him that the chicken stew was Chilean, as was the wine, and that his mother and he had been born in that country. The officer wondered if they often went back to Chile, and my dad said they hadn’t been there in over thirty years. My Nini, hanging on the policeman’s every word, kicked her son under the table for talking too much. The less Arana knew about the family, the better. She’d sniffed a little lie in what the officer said, and it had put her on her guard. How was the case going to be closed if they hadn’t recovered either the counterfeit money or the plates? She had also read the magazine article about Adam Trevor and had studied the international traffic in counterfeit money for months, considered herself an expert, and knew the commercial and strategic value of those plates.
Showing her willingness to cooperate with the law, my Nini gave Arana the information that he could have obtained on his own. She told him that her granddaughter had run away from the Oregon academy in June of last year. They searched for her in vain, until they received a call from a church in Las Vegas and she went to pick her up, because at that moment Maya’s father was at work far away. She found her in terrible shape, unrecognizable. It was very tough to see their little girl, who’d been beautiful, athletic, and smart, turned into a drug addict. At this point in the story my grandmother could barely speak from sadness. My dad added that they put his daughter into rehab in a clinic in San Francisco, but a few days before finishing the program, she had escaped again, and they had no idea where she could be. Maya had turned twenty, and they couldn’t stop her from destroying her life, if that’s what she was set on doing.
I’ll never know how much Officer Arana believed. “It’s very important I find Maya soon. There are criminals anxious to get their hands on her,” he said, and warned them in passing what kind of sentence could be expected for covering up or being an accessory to a federal crime. The officer drank the rest of the wine, praised the crème caramel, thanked them for dinner, and before leaving gave them his card, in case they got any news of Maya Vidal or remembered any detail that might prove useful to the investigation. “Find her, Officer, please,” my grandmother begged him at the door, her cheeks wet with tears, holding him by the lapels. As soon as the cop was gone, she dried her histrionic tears, put on her coat, grabbed my father, and took him in her jalopy to Mike O’Kelly’s apartment.
Freddy, who had been submerged in an apathetic silence since his arrival in California, snapped out of his lethargy when he heard that Officer Arana was sniffing around Berkeley. The kid hadn’t said anything about what his life was like between the day he left me in the arms of Olympia Pettiford, in November of last year, and his kidney operation, seven months later, but the fear that Arana might arrest him loosened his tongue. He told them that after helping me, he couldn’t return to Brandon Leeman’s building, because Joe Martin and Chino would have made mincemeat out of him. He was tied to the building by a strong umbilical cord of desperation, since nowhere else could he find such an abundance of drugs, but going near it posed too great a risk. He’d never have been able to convince those thugs he’d had nothing to do with my escape, as he had after Brandon Leeman’s death, when he got me out of the gym just in time.
From Olympia’s house, Freddy took a bus to a town on the border where he had a friend, and he got by with great difficulty for a while, until the need to return became unbearable. In Las Vegas he knew the terrain, could move around with his eyes closed, knew where to score. He took the precaution of staying far away from his old haunts, to avoid Joe Martin and Chino. He survived by dealing, robbing, sleeping outside, getting sicker and sicker, until he ended up in the hospital and then in the arms of Olympia Pettiford.
When Freddy was still on the street, the bodies of Joe Martin and Chino were found inside a burned-out car in the desert. If the kid was relieved to be free of the thugs, the feeling couldn’t have lasted; according to the rumors going around the druggy and delinquent world, the crime had all the hallmarks of a police vendetta. The first bits of news of police department corruption had appeared in the press, and the double murder of Brandon Leeman’s associates had to be related. In a city of vice and mafias, bribery was common, but in this case there was counterfeit money involved, and the FBI had stepped in. The corrupt officers tried to contain the scandal every way they could; the bodies in the desert were a warning to those who were thinking of talking more than they should. The guilty parties knew that Freddy had lived with Brandon Leeman and weren’t about to let a snotty-nosed drug addict ruin them, though in fact he couldn’t identify them, as he’d never seen them in person. Brandon Leeman had given one of those policemen the order to get rid of Joe Martin and Chino, said Freddy, which coincided with what Brandon confessed to me on the trip to Beatty, but he was stupid enough to pay him with counterfeit money, thinking it would circulate without being detected. Things went bad, the money was discovered, the cop took revenge by revealing the plan to Joe Martin and Chino, and that very day they murdered Brandon Leeman. Freddy heard the gangsters receiving their instructions over the phone to kill Leeman, and later deduced that they’d come from a cop. After witnessing the crime, he ran to the gym to warn me.
Months later, when Joe Martin and Chino kidnapped me on the street and drove me to the apartment to force me to confess where the rest of the money was, Freddy helped me again. The kid didn’t find me tied up and gagged on that mattress by chance, but because he heard Joe Martin talking on his cell and then saying to Chino that they had found Laura Barron. He hid on the third floor, watched them on tenterhooks as they arrived with me, and then saw them leave a short time later. He waited for more than an hour, not knowing what to do, until finally he decided to go into the apartment and find out what they’d done with me. We still didn’t know if the voice on the phone that ordered them to kill Brandon Leeman was the same as the one that later told the murderers where to find me. We didn’t even know if that voice belonged to the corrupt cop, or even if it was a single person; it could quite easily have been several.
Mike O’Kelly and my grandmother didn’t go so far in their speculations as to accuse Officer Arana without proof, but they didn’t rule him out as a suspect either, just as Freddy didn’t rule him out and for that reason was trembling. The man—or men—who’d gotten rid of Joe Martin and Chino in the desert would do the same to him if they got their hands on him. My Nini argued that if Arana were that villain, he would have gotten rid of Freddy in Las Vegas, but according to Mike it would be difficult to murder a patient in the hospital, not to mention a protégé of the fearsome Widows for Jesus.
Manuel went to Santiago for his appointment with Dr. Puga, accompanied by Blanca. In the meantime, Juanito Corrales came to stay with me in the house, so we could get through the fourth Harry Potter. More than a week had passed since I broke up with Daniel, or rather, since he broke up with me. I was still going around sniveling and dazed, feeling as if I’d been beaten up, but I’d gone back to work. We were into the last weeks of classes before summer vacations, and I really couldn’t miss them.
On December 3, Juanito and I went to buy some wool from Doña Lucinda, because I was planning to knit one of my horrendous scarves for Manuel. It was the least I could do. I took our scale—one of the things spared from my destructive rampage—to weigh the wool, because on hers the numbers have disappeared with the tarnish of time, and to sweeten up her day I took her a pear tart; it came out flat, but she’d appreciate it anyway. Her door got jammed in the 1960 earthquake, and since then she uses the back door. You have to go through the patio, past the marijuana plantation, the stove, and the tin drums for dyeing wool, in the midst of the chaos of hens wandering around, rabbits in cages, and a couple of goats, who once provided milk for cheese-making and are now enjoying an obligation-free retirement. Fahkeen was following us at his sideways trot with his nose in the air, so he got wind of what had happened before going inside and started howling urgently. Soon all the dogs within earshot were imitating him, and their howling was heard even farther away, until a short while later dogs were howling all over the island.
In the house we found Doña Lucinda already cold, sitting in her cane chair beside the fire, which had gone out, dressed in her Sunday best, a rosary in her hand and her scant hair neatly done up in a tight bun. Having a premonition that it was her last day in this world, she’d got herself ready so she wouldn’t be any bother to anyone once she was dead. I sat on the floor at her side, while Juanito went to tell the neighbors, who were already on their way, alerted by the dogs’ chorus.
On Friday nobody on the island went to work because of the wake, and on Saturday we all went to the funeral. The death of Doña Lucinda was a surprise despite the fact that she was well over a hundred years old; nobody ever imagined that she might be mortal. For the wake the neighbors brought chairs, and the crowd increased steadily until the patio, and then the whole street, was full. They laid the old lady out on the table where she used to weigh out wool and eat, in a plain coffin, surrounded by a profusion of flowers in jugs and plastic bottles—roses, hydrangeas, carnations, irises. Age had so shrunken Doña Lucinda that her body only took up half the casket, and her head on the pillow was like an infant’s. They’d put a couple of brass candlesticks on the table with stubs of candles and her wedding portrait, hand-colored, in which she stood in a wedding dress, holding the arm of a soldier in an antiquated uniform—the first of her six husbands, ninety-four years ago.
The island fiscal led the women in a rosary and some out-of-tune hymns, while the men, sitting at tables in the patio, soothed their grief with pork and onion stew and beer. The next day the itinerant priest arrived, a missionary nicknamed Three Tides for the length of his sermons, which began when the tide was coming in and didn’t end until it had gone out and come back again three times. He said mass in the church, which was so crammed with people, smoke from the candles, and wildflowers that I started seeing visions of coughing angels.
The casket was in front of the altar on top of a metal frame, covered by a black cloth with a white cross and two candelabras, with a basin underneath “in case the body leaked,” as they told me. I don’t know what that means, but it doesn’t sound pretty. The congregation prayed and sang Chilote waltzes to the sound of two guitars, and then Three Tides took the floor and didn’t give it up for sixty-five minutes. He began by praising Doña Lucinda and soon veered off onto other subjects like politics, the salmon industry, and soccer, while the faithful nodded off. This missionary had arrived in Chile fifty years ago and still speaks with an accent. When it came time for communion several people began to shed tears, which was contagious, and soon we were all crying, even the guitarists.
When mass had finished and the bells tolled for the deceased, eight men picked up the coffin, which weighed almost nothing, and carried it outside at a solemn pace, followed by the whole town, carrying the flowers from the chapel. At the cemetery, the priest blessed Doña Lucinda one more time, and just when they were about to lower her into the ground, the boat builder and his son arrived, all out of breath. They brought a miniature replica of her house to mark the grave, made in a hurry, but perfect. Since Doña Lucinda didn’t have any living relatives, and Juanito and I had discovered the body, people filed by, giving us condolences with a somber squeeze of hands callused from work, before going en masse to the Tavern of the Dead to drown their sorrows in the time-honored way.
I was the last to leave the cemetery, as the fog began to rise off the sea. I thought about how much I’d missed Manuel and Blanca during those two days of mourning, about Doña Lucinda, so beloved by the community, and about how solitary, by comparison, Carmelo Corrales’s burial had been. But most of all I thought about my Popo. My Nini wanted to scatter his ashes on a mountain, as close as possible to the sky, but four years have passed, and they’re still in the clay urn on her dresser, waiting. I walked up the hill along the path to La Pincoya’s cave, hoping to sense my Popo in the air and ask his permission to bring his ashes to this island, bury them in the cemetery looking out to sea, and mark the grave with a miniature replica of his tower of the stars. My Popo doesn’t come when I call him, though, only when he feels like it, and this time I waited in vain on top of the hill. I’ve been very susceptible since the end of my love affair with Daniel, easily frightened by ominous premonitions.
The tide was coming in, and the mist was getting thicker, but the entrance to the cave could still be glimpsed from above; a little farther away were the heavy shapes of the sea lions snoozing on the rocks. The cliff is a sheer twenty-foot drop, cut like a mineshaft, which I’ve climbed down a couple of times with Juanito. You have to be both agile and lucky, as it would be terribly easy to slip and break your neck. That’s why tourists are forbidden to try it.
I’ll try to sum up the events of these days, as I was told and from what I remember, though my brain’s only half functioning, because of the blow. Some aspects of the accident are incomprehensible, but nobody here has any intention of investigating seriously.
I spent a long time gazing down at the view, which was rapidly vanishing into the fog; the silver mirror of the sea, the rocks, and the sea lions had disappeared in the gray mist. In December some days are bright and others cold, like this one, with fog or an almost impalpable drizzle that can turn into a heavy shower in no time. That Saturday dawn had broken with a radiant sunrise, but over the course of the morning it began to cloud over. In the cemetery a delicate mist floated, giving the scene an appropriate touch of melancholy for our farewell to Doña Lucinda, the whole town’s great-great-grandmother. An hour later, on the hilltop, the world was wrapped in a cottony blanket, like a metaphor for my state of mind. All the rage, embarrassment, disappointment, and tears that unhinged me when I lost Daniel had given way to a vague and changeable sadness, like the fog. This is called unrequited love, which according to Manuel Arias is the most trivial tragedy of human history, but he should see how it hurts. The fog is worrisome; who knows what dangers lurk a few feet away, as in the London crime novels that Mike O’Kelly likes, in which the murderer counts on the protection of the fog that rises off the Thames?
I felt cold, as the dampness started to seep through my sweater, and fear, because the solitude was absolute. I sensed a presence that was not my Popo, but something vaguely threatening, like a large animal. I ruled it out as another product of my imagination, which plays dirty tricks on me, but at that moment Fahkeen growled. He was at my feet, alert, the fur on his back bristling, his tail stiff, showing his teeth. I heard stealthy footsteps.
“Who’s there?” I called out.
I heard two more steps and made out a blurred human silhouette in the fog.
“Hold the dog, Maya, it’s me . . .”
It was Officer Arana. I recognized him at once, in spite of the fog and his strange attire, for he seemed disguised as an American tourist, in plaid pants and a baseball cap, a camera hanging in front of his chest. I felt overcome by great weariness, an icy calm: so this is how my year of flight and hiding, a year of uncertainty, was going to end.
“Good evening, Officer. I’ve been expecting you.”
“How’s that?” he said, approaching.
Why should I explain what I’d deduced from my Nini’s messages, and what he knew all too well; why should I tell him I’d been visualizing each inexorable step that he would be taking in my direction, calculating how long it would take him to reach me, awaiting this moment with anguish? When he visited my family in Berkeley, he discovered our Chilean roots. Then he must have checked the date I left the rehab clinic in San Francisco. With his connections it would have been very easy for him to find out that my passport had been renewed and then look through the passenger lists for those days of the two airlines that fly to Chile.
“This is a very long country, Officer. How did you end up in Chiloé?”
”Experience. You’re looking very well. The last time I saw you in Las Vegas, you were a beggar called Laura Barron.”
His tone was friendly and informal, as if the circumstances in which we found ourselves were normal. He told me in a few words that after his dinner with my Nini and my dad he waited outside, and just as he’d expected, saw them leave five minutes later. He easily got into the house, had a quick look around, found the envelope of photos Daniel Goodrich had brought, and confirmed his suspicion that they had me hidden somewhere. He noticed one of the photos in particular.
“A house being pulled by oxen,” I interrupted.
“That’s the one. You were running ahead of the oxen. I found the flag on the roof of the house on Google, and then typed in ‘house transport by oxen in Chile,’ and up popped Chiloé. There were several photos and three videos of a tiradura on YouTube. It’s incredible how much a computer can simplify an investigation. I got in touch with the people who’d filmed the scenes, and that’s how I found a certain Frances Goodrich, in Seattle. I sent her a message saying I was going to Chiloé and would be grateful for any information. We chatted for a while, and she told me that it wasn’t her but her brother Daniel who’d been in Chiloé, and she gave me his e-mail address and phone number. Daniel didn’t reply to any of my messages, but I found his page, and there was the name of this island, where he’d spent more than a week at the end of May.”
“But there was no reference to me, Officer. I’ve seen that page too.”
“No, but he was with you in one of those photos in your family’s house in Berkeley.”
Until that moment I was reassuring myself with the absurd idea that Arana couldn’t touch me in Chiloé without an arrest warrant from Interpol or the Chilean police, but the description of the long journey he’d spent tracking me down brought me back to reality. If he’d gone to so much trouble to find my refuge, he undoubtedly had the power to arrest me. How much did this man know?
I backed away instinctively, but he grabbed me almost gently by one arm and reiterated what he’d assured my family, that he only wanted to help me and that I should trust him. His mission concluded when he found the money and the plates, he said. The clandestine press had been dismantled; Adam Trevor was in prison and had given them all the necessary information on the counterfeit dollar trade. He had come to Chiloé on his own account, out of professional pride; he intended to close the case personally. The FBI didn’t know about me yet, but he warned me that the mafia linked to Adam Trevor had just as much interest in getting their hands on me, as did the U.S. government.
“You realize that if I was able to find you, those criminals could too,” he said.
“Nobody can connect me to that,” I challenged him, but my tone of voice betrayed my fear.
“Of course they can. Why do you think that pair of gorillas, Joe Martin and Chino, kidnapped you in Las Vegas? And by the way, I’d like to know how you got away from them, not just once, but twice.”
“They weren’t that smart, Officer.”
Having grown up under the wings of the Club of Criminals, with a paranoid grandma and an Irishman who lent me his detective novels and taught me Sherlock Holmes’s deductive method, had to come in handy at some point. How did Officer Arana know that Joe Martin and Chino had been after me when Brandon Leeman was killed? Or that they kidnapped me the same day that he caught me shoplifting a video game? The only explanation was that the first time he was the one who’d ordered them to kill Leeman and me, when he discovered he’d been bribed with counterfeit bills, and the second time it was him who called them to tell them where to find me and how to get the location of the rest of the money out of me. That day in Las Vegas, when Officer Arana took me to a Mexican diner and gave me ten dollars, he was out of uniform, and he wasn’t wearing it when he went to visit my family or at this very moment on the hill. The reason was not that he was collaborating undercover with the FBI, as he’d said, but that he’d been fired from the police department for corruption. He was one of the men who’d accepted bribes and done deals with Brandon Leeman; he’d come halfway across the world for the loot, not out of a sense of duty, and much less to help me. I suppose from the expression on my face, Arana realized he’d said too much. Before I could run away down the hill, he seized me in an iron grip.
“You don’t think I’d go away from here empty-handed, do you?” he said. “You’re going to give me what I came looking for, one way or another, but I’d rather not have to hurt you. We can make a deal.”
“What kind of deal?” I asked, terrified.
“You can have your life and freedom. I’ll get to close the case, your name won’t appear in the report, and no one will be after you anymore. I’ll even give you twenty percent of the money. See how generous I can be.”
“Brandon Leeman put two bags of money in a storage lockup in Beatty, Officer. I took them out and burned the contents in the Mojave Desert, because I was afraid I’d be accused of being an accomplice. I swear it’s the truth!”
“Do you think I’m an idiot? The money! And the plates!”
“I threw them into San Francisco Bay.”
“I don’t believe you! F*cking slut! I’m going to kill you!” he shouted, shaking me.
“I don’t have your f*cking money or your f*cking plates!”
Fahkeen growled again, but Arana kicked him away viciously. He was a muscular man, trained in martial arts and used to violent situations, but I’m no fainthearted damsel in distress, and I stood up to him, blind with desperation. I knew there was no way Arana was going to let me get away alive. I’ve played soccer since I was a little girl, and I have strong legs. I aimed a kick as hard as I could at his testicles, but he guessed my intention just in time to dodge, and it landed on his leg. If I hadn’t been wearing sandals, maybe I could have broken his leg; instead the impact crushed my toes, and the pain shot up to my brain like a white explosion. Arana took advantage to knock the wind out of me with a punch to the gut; then he was on top of me, and I don’t remember anything else. Maybe he punched me in the face—I have a broken nose, and I’ll have to get some teeth replaced.
I saw my Popo’s hazy face against a translucent white background, layers and layers of gauze floating on the breeze, a bride’s veil, the tail of a comet. I’m dead, I thought happily, and abandoned myself to the pleasure of ascending into the void with my grandpa, incorporeal, detached. Juanito Corrales and Pedro Pelanchugay assure me there was no sign of any black gentleman in a hat around there; they say I woke up for an instant, just when they were trying to lift me, but then I fainted again.
I came around from the anesthesia in the Castro hospital, with Manuel on one side, Blanca on the other, and carabinero Laurencio Cárcamo at the foot of the bed. “When you’re able, little lady, no sooner, you can answer a few little questions for me, okay?” was his cordial greeting. I wasn’t able until two days later; apparently the concussion knocked me right out.
The carabineros’ investigation determined that a tourist, who didn’t speak Spanish, arrived on the island after Doña Lucinda’s funeral, went to the Tavern of the Dead, where everyone had congregated, and showed a photo of me to the first person he met at the door, Juanito Corrales. The boy pointed to the steep, narrow path leading up to the cave, and the man set off in that direction. Juanito Corrales went to look for his friend Pedro Pelanchugay, and together they decided to follow the man, out of curiosity. They heard Fahkeen barking at the top of the hill; that led them to the place where I was with the foreigner, and they arrived in time to witness the accident, though due to the distance and the fog, they weren’t sure about what they saw. That explained why they contradicted each other about the details. As far as they saw, the stranger and I were leaning over the edge of the cliff, looking at the cave. He stumbled, I tried to catch him. We lost our balance and disappeared. From above, the dense fog prevented them from seeing where we’d fallen, and since we didn’t answer their calls, the two boys climbed down, holding on to rocks and projecting roots. They’d done it before, and the earth was more or less dry, which makes the descent easier; it gets very slippery when it’s wet. They approached carefully, for fear of the sea lions, but they found that most of them had dived into the water, including the big male that normally guards his harem from a rock.
Juanito explained that they found me lying on the narrow strip of sand between the mouth of the cave and the sea. The stranger had landed on the rocks, and half his body was in the water. Pedro wasn’t sure he’d seen the man’s body; he was frightened by seeing me covered in blood and couldn’t think, he said. He tried to pick me up, but Juanito remembered Liliana Treviño’s first aid course, decided it would be better not to move me, and sent Pedro to get help, while he stayed with me, holding me, worrying that the tide would reach us. It didn’t occur to them to help the man. They were pretty sure he was dead; nobody would survive a fall from that height onto the rocks.
Pedro climbed the cliff like a monkey and ran to the carabineros’ post, which was empty, and from there he went to raise the alarm at the tavern. In a few minutes the rescue was organized: several men headed up the hill and someone found the carabineros, who arrived in the jeep and took charge of the situation. They didn’t try to hoist me up with ropes, as some who’d had too much to drink were suggesting, because I was bleeding profusely. Someone handed over their shirt to wrap up my split head, and others improvised a stretcher. A lifeboat was on its way, but it took a while, since it had to go halfway around the island. They started to look for the other victim a couple of hours later, when the excitement of getting me moved had died down, but by then it was already dark, and they had to wait till the next day.
The report written by the carabineros is a masterpiece of omission:
The undersigned noncommissioned officers, Laurencio Cárcamo Ximénez and Humilde Garay Ranquileo, herewith testify to having rescued yesterday, Saturday, December 5, 2009, the United States citizen Maya Vidal, of California, temporary resident of this town, who suffered a fall over the cliff known as the Pincoya, on the northeast side of this island. Said lady is now in stable condition in the Castro hospital, to which she was transported by navy helicopter, summoned by the signatories. The accident victim was discovered by Juan Corrales, eleven years of age, and Pedro Pelanchugay, fourteen years of age, natives of this island, who were to be found on the aforementioned cliff. Having been duly interrogated, said witnesses claim to have seen a second presumed victim fall, a male, foreigner. A photographic camera in bad shape was found on the rocks of the so-called Pincoya cave. Due to the fact that said camera was of the Canon brand, the undersigned conclude that the victim was a tourist. Isla Grande carabineros are presently attempting to determine the identity of said foreigner. The minors Corrales and Pelanchugay believe that the two victims slipped on the edge of said cliff, but due to deficient visibility on account of climatic conditions of fog, they are not sure. The young lady, Maya Vidal, landed on the sand, but the gentleman tourist landed on the rocks and died due to the impact. When the tide came in the body was carried out to sea by the current and has not been found.
The undersigned noncommissioned officers repeat the request for the installation of a security barrier on the Pincoya cliff due to its conditions of dangerousness, before other ladies and other tourists lose their lives, with serious damage to the reputation of said island.
Not a word about the foreigner looking for me with a photograph of me in his hand. Nor did they mention that never has a tourist shown up on our little island on his own account, where there are few attractions, aside from the curanto; they always arrive in groups, brought by the ecotourism agencies. However, no one has questioned the carabineros’ report; maybe they don’t want any trouble on the island. Some say the salmon ate the drowned man, and maybe the sea will spit his clean bones up onto the beach one of these days. Others swear that he was taken away in the Caleuche, the ghost ship, in which case we won’t even find his baseball cap.
The carabineros interrogated the boys in the presence of Liliana Treviño and Aurelio Ñancupel, who stepped up to prevent them from being intimidated. A dozen islanders gathered on the patio, waiting for the results, led by Eduvigis Corrales, who has emerged from the emotional hole she sank into after Azucena’s abortion. She’s taken off her mourning black and has turned combative. The kids couldn’t add anything to what they’d already declared. Carabinero Laurencio Cárcamo came to the hospital to ask me questions about how we’d fallen, but he omitted to mention the photograph, a detail that would have complicated matters. His interrogation took place two days after the events, and by then Manuel Arias had instructed me that the only answer I should give was: I was confused by the blow to my head, and didn’t remember what happened. But I didn’t have to lie; the carabinero didn’t even ask me if I knew the alleged tourist. He was interested in the details of the terrain and the fall, because of the security barrier he’s been requesting for five years now. “This servant of the nation had warned his superiors of the dangerousness of said cliff, but that’s how things are, you see, young lady, an innocent foreigner has to die before they pay any attention to a person.”
According to Manuel, the whole town took charge of muddling clues and throwing dirt over the accident to protect the boys and me from any suspicion. It wouldn’t be the first time that given the choice between the stark truth, which in certain cases does nobody any favors, and a discreet silence that might help their own, people opt for the second.
Alone with Manuel Arias, I told him my version of events, including the hand-to-hand combat with Arana and how I don’t remember anything about falling over the precipice together; it seems to me that we were quite far away from the edge. I’ve gone through that scene a thousand times in my head without understanding how it happened. After knocking me out, Arana might have concluded that I didn’t have the plates and that he should get rid of me, because I knew too much. Perhaps he decided to throw me over the cliff, but I’m not light, and maybe he lost his balance in the effort, or maybe Fahkeen attacked him from behind and he fell with me. The kick must have stunned the dog for a few minutes, but we know he soon recovered, because the boys were guided by his barks. Without Arana’s body, which might have given some clues, or the help of the boys, who seem determined to keep quiet, there’s no way to answer these questions. I don’t understand how the sea could have taken only him if we were both in the same place, but it could be that I don’t know the power of the marine currents in Chiloé.
“You don’t think the boys had something to do with this, do you, Manuel?”
“What?”
“They could have dragged Arana’s body to the water, so the tide would carry it out to sea.”
“Why would they do that?”
“Because maybe they pushed him over the edge of the cliff when they saw he was trying to kill me.”
“Get that idea out of your head, Maya, and don’t ever say that again, not even in jest—you could ruin Juanito’s and Pedro’s lives,” he warned me. “Is that what you want?”
“Of course not, Manuel, but it would be good to know the truth.”
“The truth is that your Popo saved you from Arana and from landing on the rocks. That’s the explanation. Now don’t ask any more questions.”
They’ve spent several days searching for the body under orders of the Naval High Command and the port authorities. They brought helicopters, sent out boats, and threw down nets, and two scuba divers swam down to the bottom of the sea. They didn’t find the dead man, but they rescued a motorcycle from 1930, encrusted with mollusks, like a Surrealist sculpture, which will be the most valuable piece in our island’s museum. Humilde Garay has covered the coastline inch by inch with Livingston without finding any sign of the unfortunate tourist. He is assumed to have been a certain Donald Richards, because an American registered for two nights under that name at the Galeón Azul hotel in Ancud, slept there one night, and then disappeared. In light of the fact that he didn’t come back, the manager of the hotel, who had read about the accident in the local newspaper, supposed it could be the same person and advised the carabineros. In his suitcase they found clothing, a Canon camera lens, and the passport of a Donald Richards, issued in Phoenix, Arizona, in 2009, looking brand-new, with a single international stamp, entry to Chile on December 4, the day before the accident. According to the form he filled in when landing in the country, the reason for the trip was tourism. This Richards arrived in Santiago, flew to Puerto Montt the same day, slept one night in the hotel in Ancud, and planned to leave the next morning; an inexplicable itinerary—no one travels from California to Chiloé to stay for thirty-eight hours.
The passport confirms my theory that Arana was under investigation by the Las Vegas Police Department and couldn’t leave the United States under his real name. Acquiring a fake passport would have been very easy for him. Nobody from the American consulate came to the island to have a look; they were seemingly satisfied by the carabineros’ official report. If they took the trouble to look for the deceased man’s family to notify them, they surely would not have found anyone; among the three hundred million inhabitants of the United States, there must be thousands of Richardses. There is no visible connection between Arana and me.
I was in the hospital until Friday and on Saturday, the twelfth, they took me to Don Lionel Schnake’s house, where I was received like a returning war hero. I was pretty smashed up, with twenty-three stitches in my scalp, and had to stay on my back, without a pillow and in semidarkness, because of the concussion. In the operating room they’d shaved half my head so they could sew me up; apparently it’s my destiny to be bald. Since the last shave in September, I’d grown more than an inch of hair and discovered that my natural color is as yellow as my grandma’s Volkswagen. My face is still very swollen, but I’ve seen the Millalobo’s dentist, a woman with a German surname, a distant relative of the Schnakes. (Is there anyone in this country who’s not related to the Schnakes?) The dentist said she could replace my teeth. She thought they’d probably be better than the originals and offered to whiten the rest of them for free out of deference to the Millalobo, who had helped her get a bank loan. Favors cannoning off each other, and I’m the beneficiary.
By doctor’s orders I was supposed to lie down and be left in peace, but there was a constant parade of visitors. The beautiful witches from the ruca came, one of them with her baby, along with the entire Schnake family, friends of Manuel’s, friends of Blanca’s, Liliana Treviño and her beau, Dr. Pedraza, lots of people from the island, my soccer team, and Father Luciano Lyon. “I brought you extreme unction for the dying, gringuita,” he said, laughing, and handed me a box of chocolates. He elucidated that the sacrament is now called unction for the sick, and you don’t have to be in your death throes to receive it. All in all, not terribly restful.
That Sunday I followed the presidential election from my bed, with the Millalobo sitting at my feet, overexcited and a bit unsteady, because his candidate, Sebastián Piñera, the conservative multimillionaire, might win. To celebrate, he drank a whole bottle of champagne by himself. He offered me a glass, and I took the opportunity to tell him that I can’t drink because I’m an alcoholic. “How unfortunate, gringuita! That’s worse than being a vegetarian,” he exclaimed. None of the candidates got enough votes, and there will have to be a second round in January, but Millalobo assures me that his friend is going to win. His explanations of politics are somewhat confusing for me: he admires the socialist president Michelle Bachelet because she has run an excellent government and she’s a very fine woman, but he detests the center-left parties, who have been in power for twenty years, and now it’s the right’s turn, according to him. Also, the new president is his friend, and that’s very important in Chile, where everything is arranged through connections and relations. The result of the voting has demoralized Manuel, among other reasons because Piñera made his fortune under the shelter of the Pinochet dictatorship, but according to Blanca things won’t change too much. This is the most prosperous and stable country in Latin America, and the new president would have to be very dim-witted to start innovating. You can find a lot of faults with Piñera, but a dimwit he’s not; he’s remarkably astute.
Manuel phoned my grandma and my dad to tell them about my accident, without alarming them with gruesome details about my state of health, and they decided to come and spend Christmas with us. My Nini has postponed a reencounter with her country for too long and my dad barely remembers it. It’s time they came. They could talk to Manuel without the complications of keys and codes, since with the death of Arana, the danger has disappeared. I no longer have to hide, and I can go home as soon as I can stand up on my own legs. I’m free.