In the Midst of Winter

The crowded conditions and collective anxiety could have led to disputes, but the new guests quickly accepted the rules of coexistence and learned to be patient. Lucia’s safe-conduct took longer to arrive than normal for someone with no political or police record, but once it was in the hands of the ambassador, she was free to leave. Before being escorted by two members of the diplomatic staff to the door of the plane and from there to Caracas, she managed to hand the baby over to his parents, who had finally been able to obtain asylum. She also spoke on the phone to her mother, with the promise that she would be back soon. “Don’t return until there’s democracy in Chile,” Lena replied in a firm voice.

Hundreds of Chileans began to arrive in rich and generous Venezuela. This soon turned into thousands upon thousands; before long their numbers were augmented by fugitives from the Dirty War in Argentina and Uruguay. This growing colony of refugees from the southern part of the continent gathered in certain neighborhoods, where the food and even the Spanish accents from their native countries predominated. A refugee aid committee found Lucia a room where she could live rent-free for six months and a job as a receptionist in an elegant plastic surgery clinic. The room and the job did not even last that long, because she met another Chilean exile, an anguished far-left sociologist whose harangues were a distressing reminder of her brother. He was handsome and slim as a bullfighter, with long, greasy hair; slender hands; and sensual lips that often curled into a sneer. He did nothing to hide his foul temper or his arrogance. Years later, Lucia was perplexed whenever she recalled him: she could not understand how she could have fallen in love with such an unpleasant character. The only explanation must have been that she was very young and very lonely. Her partner was so shocked by the Venezuelans’ natural exuberance, which he saw as undeniable proof of their moral decadence, that he convinced Lucia they should emigrate together to Canada, where no one breakfasted on champagne or took advantage of the slightest opportunity to get up and dance.

In Montreal, Lucia and her unkempt theoretical guerrilla were received with open arms by another committee of well-meaning people, who installed them in an apartment equipped with furniture, kitchen utensils, and even the right-size clothes in the closet. This was in the depths of January, and Lucia soon thought the cold had penetrated into her bones forever. She lived hunched up, teeth chattering, wrapped in layers of wool, convinced that hell was not a Dantesque inferno but a Montreal winter. She survived the first months by seeking refuge in stores, in heated buses, in the underground tunnels connecting buildings, at her work, anywhere except the apartment she shared with her companion, where the temperature was adequate but the tension could have been cut with a knife.



MAY ARRIVED WITH AN EXPLOSION OF SPRING. By then the guerrilla’s personal story had evolved until it became a hyperbolic adventure. It turned out he had not left the Honduran embassy in a plane thanks to a safe-conduct, as Lucia had thought, but had passed through Villa Grimaldi, the notorious torture center of the Chilean secret police. He emerged from there damaged in body and soul and escaped the country through dangerous Andean mountain passes in the south of Chile to neighboring Argentina, where he narrowly avoided becoming another victim of that country’s Dirty War. With such a painful past it was normal that the poor man was traumatized and unable to work. Fortunately the committee completely understood, and offered him the means to undergo therapy in his own language and to take the time necessary to write a memoir about his sufferings. Lucia meanwhile immediately took on two jobs, because she did not think she deserved the committee’s charity when there were other refugees in far more pressing situations. She worked twelve hours a day and when she got home she found herself cooking, cleaning, washing clothes, and trying to raise her companion’s spirits.

Lucia stoically endured this for several months, until one night she came back to the apartment half-dead with fatigue and found it in darkness, airless and smelling of vomit. Her guerrilla had spent the day in bed, drinking gin, so badly depressed he found it impossible to get up: he was stuck on the first chapter of his memoirs. “Did you bring anything to eat? There’s nothing here and I’m dying of hunger,” the aspiring writer groaned when she switched on the light. It was then that Lucia finally realized how grotesque their relationship was. She ordered a pizza on the phone and took up her nightly chore of struggling with the mess that the guerrilla had created. That same night, while he was sleeping a deep, gin-induced sleep, she packed her bags and left. She had saved some money and had heard that a colony of Chilean exiles had begun to flourish in Vancouver. The next day she caught a train that took her all the way across to the west coast of Canada.

Lena Maraz visited Lucia in Canada once a year. She stayed with her daughter for three or four weeks, but never any longer because she was still trying to find Enrique. Over the years, her desperate search had become a way of being, a series of routines she fulfilled religiously and that gave her existence meaning. Shortly after the military coup, the cardinal of Santiago had opened an office, the Vicariate of Solidarity, to help those who were being pursued and their families. Lena would go there every week, always in vain. She met other people in the same situation as herself, made friends with the religious and volunteers, and learned how to pick her way through the bureaucracy of sorrow. She stayed in contact with the cardinal as best she could, because he was the busiest man in Chile. The military government only barely tolerated the mothers and subsequently grandmothers who paraded with photos of their children and grandchildren around their necks and stood in silence with placards demanding justice outside the barracks and detention centers. These troublesome old women refused to understand that the people they were asking after had never been detained. They had gone elsewhere or had never existed.

At dawn one wintry Tuesday, a patrol car came to Lena Maraz’s apartment to inform her that her son had been the victim of a fatal accident, and that she could receive his remains the following day at an address they gave her. They also warned her she must arrive at exactly seven in the morning in a vehicle big enough to transport a coffin. Lena’s knees buckled and she collapsed to the floor. For years she had been waiting for news of Enrique, and now, confronted with the fact of having found him, even if he was dead, she could not breathe.