In the Midst of Winter

She did not have the courage to go to the Vicariate, fearing that any intervention on their part might spoil this unique opportunity to recuperate her son, but imagined that perhaps the church or the cardinal himself had worked this miracle. Unable to face the shock on her own, she contacted her sister and they went together, dressed in mourning, to the address she had been given. In a square courtyard, its walls stained by the damp and by time, they were met by men who pointed to a pine coffin and instructed them to complete the burial before six that evening. The coffin was sealed. The men told them it was strictly forbidden to open it; they handed them a death certificate for the cemetery authorities, and gave Lena a receipt to sign that stated that the procedure was legal and correct. She was given a copy of the receipt and they helped her load the coffin onto the market truck the women had rented.

Lena did not drive directly to the cemetery as ordered, but instead went to her sister’s house on a small plot of land on the outskirts of Santiago. The truck driver lent a hand to carry the coffin into the house and lay it on the kitchen table. Once he had left, they broke open the metal seal. They did not recognize the corpse: it was not Enrique, although the death certificate was in his name. Lena felt a mixture of horror at the state of the dead young man and relief it was not her son. That meant there was still hope of finding him alive. Thanks to her sister’s insistence, she decided to run the risk of reprisals and called a Belgian priest who was one of her friends in the Vicariate. An hour later, he arrived on his motorbike, and brought a camera with him.

“Do you have any idea who this poor boy could be, Lena?”

“All I can say is that he’s not my son, Father.”

“We’ll compare his photo with those in our archive to see if we can identify him and get in touch with his family,” the priest said.

“Meanwhile, I’m going to give him a decent burial, because that’s what I was told to do and I don’t want them to come and take him from me,” insisted Lena.

“Can I help you with that, Lena?”

“Thanks, but I can manage on my own. For the moment this boy can rest in a niche together with my husband in the Catholic cemetery. When you find his family, they can transfer him wherever they wish.”

The photographs they took that day did not correspond to any of the ones in the Vicariate’s archive. As they explained to Lena, maybe he was not even Chilean, but had come from another country, possibly Argentina or Uruguay. In Operation Condor, which linked the intelligence and repression services of the dictatorships of Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Brazil, and led to sixty thousand deaths, sometimes there were errors in the trafficking of prisoners, bodies, and identity documents. The youngster’s photo was pinned up on the office wall in the Vicariate in case anybody recognized him. The logic of despair convinced Lena that somewhere another mother would be opening a sealed coffin that contained Enrique’s body. She thought that if she could find the mother of the young man they had buried, in the future somebody would contact her and tell her of her own son’s fate.

It only occurred to Lena several weeks later that the young man they had buried might be Enrique and Lucia’s half brother: the son her husband had with his other wife. This possibility tormented her so much it would not leave her in peace. She began to take steps to try to trace the woman she had rejected years before, full of remorse for having treated her so badly, because neither she nor the boy was guilty; they also had been victims of the same deceit. When her efforts and those of the Vicariate proved fruitless, she hired a private detective who according to his business card specialized in finding missing persons, but he could not find any sign of mother and son either. “They must have gone abroad, se?ora. Apparently lots of people seem to want to travel at the moment . . . ,” the detective said.

After this, Lena suddenly aged. She retired from the bank where she had worked for many years, shut herself in her house, and only went out to insist on her pilgrimage. Occasionally she visited the cemetery and stood in front of the niche containing the remains of the unknown young man. She poured out her sorrows and asked him that if her son was anywhere near he should tell Enrique she needed a message or a sign to stop looking for him. As time went by she incorporated the youngster into her family, a discreet ghost. The cemetery’s silence, its shady avenues and indifferent pigeons, offered her solace and peace. Although this was where she had buried her husband, in all these years she had never been to visit him. Now, with the pretext of praying for the boy, she also prayed for him.



LUCIA MARAZ SPENT THE REMAINING YEARS of her exile in Vancouver, a friendly city with a much better climate than Montreal, where hundreds of exiles from the Southern Cone of Latin America settled in such closed communities that some of them lived as if they had never left their own country, refusing to mix with Canadians any more than was strictly necessary. This was not Lucia’s case. With the tenacity she inherited from her mother she learned English—which she spoke with a Chilean accent—studied journalism, and worked doing investigative reports for political magazines and television. She adapted to Canada, made friends, adopted a dog that was to be with her for many years, and bought a tiny apartment because it was more convenient than renting. Whenever she fell in love, which happened more than once, she dreamed of getting married and putting down roots in Canada, but as soon as the passion cooled, her nostalgia for Chile immediately resurfaced. That was her home, in the south of the south, in that long, narrow country that still beckoned to her. She would go back, she was sure of it. Many Chilean exiles had returned and kept a low profile without being bothered. She knew that even her first love, the melodramatic guerrilla with greasy hair, had secretly gone back to Chile and was working in an insurance company without anyone remembering or even knowing about his past. Possibly though she would not be so lucky, because she had participated tirelessly in the international campaign against the military government. She had promised her mother she would not try to enter the country, because to Lena Maraz the possibility that her daughter would also become a victim of the repression was intolerable.

Lena’s visits to Canada became less frequent, but her correspondence with her daughter grew so intense she began writing to her every day; Lucia wrote several times a week. Their letters crossed in midair like a conversation of the deaf, but neither of them waited for a reply before writing. This abundant correspondence was the diary of both their lives, the register of the everyday. Over time, the letters became indispensable to Lucia; what she did not write to her mother seemed not to have happened, a forgotten life. Thanks to this endless epistolary dialogue, with one in Vancouver and the other in Santiago, they developed such a close friendship that when Lucia finally returned to her mother in Chile they knew each other better than if they had lived together all that time.

During one of Lena’s trips to Canada, while she was speaking about the youngster whose body she had been given instead of her Enrique, Lena decided to tell her daughter the truth about her father that she had kept hidden for so many years.

“If the young man they handed over to me in that coffin isn’t your half brother, then somewhere there is a man more or less the same age as you who has your family name and the same blood in his veins as you,” she said.