Cities of Refuge (31 page)

Marian asked Daniel about his writing and, with some prompting from Lana, he fell into a story about negotiations with an Unnamed Great Director who had been workshopping his new play on Marshall McLuhan.

“His genius is counterintuitive, but so are his faults. He wants complete control of the text. At best I’d be a collaborator in the defiling of my own creation.” He laughed at his absurd predicament. Lana called The Director “a no-talent blustery asshole” and laughed a little more meanly. Donald then steered everyone into a discussion of something he’d read about methylation and the genetic inheritance of emotional trauma, but at some point seemed to find himself having forgotten his company, and simply trailed off in the middle of a point about stress responses in rats.

When Marian got tired, Lana set her up in the guest room and then invited Kim for a hike around the farm as Donald and Daniel took up on the back porch. Lana introduced her to two sturdy young women working in the barn with the horses in their rented stalls. They did the work in exchange for wages and food and riding, they said, and because they liked their employers. “That’s more or less how I taught them to say it,” said Lana.

Everywhere in the yard were small chickens. Lana led Kim out into the pasture, where a few horses were grazing and looked up at them for a moment, and on into stands of old trees, telling stories of deer and raccoons, wild turkeys, grinning possums in
the woodpile, and coyotes scared off with shotguns. Eventually they came back, approaching the house from the side, and sat down on wooden lawn chairs by a little blue concrete swimming pool with a waterline that sat several inches too low.

“She’s worse than I pictured,” said Lana.

“Yes.”

“And how are you doing? Be honest.”

“I don’t know.”

“Marian says you’re spending a lot of time managing Donald and Harold.”

“Donald’s been on his own. I wouldn’t know how to manage him. And Harold’s kind of disappeared.”

“If only he’d done that years ago.”

“He did. But then he came back.”

When they left that night, after the duck and the wine and the conversation about how all things are unlike one another and Daniel quoted Augustine on prayer being a journey to “the land or region of unlikeness” and Kim said she could stare at horses for hours and Lana spoke of her sense of the wild and Donald had trouble keeping up with the metaphors and wondered if they were all about burritos and Marian laughed quite a lot and said it was always one ongoing party out here, always was and always would be, Kim found herself craving the silence of her room. Once they got home and Marian was put to bed with a kiss on the forehead, Kim fell hard into her own bed and allowed herself to feel the fullness of the day, though within it, a coldness coming in on the night tide of sleep that she knew would still be there the next day. Old and unresolved, brought forward by what Lana had said just before they left their poolside chairs and went in to make dinner.

She’d said to hell with Harold. He’ll stand before you at pointblank range, look you in the face, and lie. The lies will be well appointed. He will hand you over to his lies and let them lead you around like a pull toy. You underestimate him if you think he just fibs now and then, or that he lies only to protect others, or himself, out of cowardice. He lies wholeheartedly. He lies to others and to himself, yes, but also to rocks and trees and heaps of scrap metal and coffee stains on his shirt. I have never known a more thoroughgoing liar, and I have known a great many. Your mother came here once, this was the dead of summer, and she sat out by this pool in a sundress and big sunglasses. I watched her through the window, and she went over and picked free a bit of blue paint that was flaking off the side and she took it back to her chair and studied it as if it were ancient parchment. She turned it over and over again, then let it fall to her lap. And then, from behind those big glasses the tears began to stream. She barely moved, but here came the tears. And I went out to her and made her tell me what was wrong. She said the pool had made her think of a motel pool that the three of you had once played in on a road trip across the country – she couldn’t remember where it was – but there you all were, and she had stood at the end of a slide and caught you as you hit the water, and your father had sat on the deck, fully clothed but fixed on the scene with great surety and love, she said, but that isn’t what she was crying at. It was that the motel had made her think of a call she’d received from the police, this was a few years after the road trip, a few years before she was there by my pool, telling the story. Some girl had been killed in one of those lakeshore motels, a hooker, they said, and they’d gone through the desk registry and taken the licence plates of all the cars there that day, and one of them
was Harold’s, and so they were calling to see if he was in. They said all this at once, as if not imagining what they might be setting off, though of course they didn’t care. The fact that they were calling and not at her door meant they knew who they were looking for, and only wanted the liar as a witness, if he’d seen the guy there, but none of this mattered, really. What mattered was that the night of the afternoon in question Harold had come home and told a long story of his day. There’d been a trip to St. Lawrence Market that had reminded him of the day you, at the age of five, had gone missing there when each of them thought the other was watching you, and he’d dropped to his hands and knees to see you across the way, staring up at some fish on ice. Of course Marian remembered that day. And then, he said, he’d gone to some talk by a visiting French historian who wore a black turtleneck under a safari jacket and a bunch of them went out afterwards to a Spanish restaurant with flamenco dancers and they all had too much to drink and one of his colleagues who nobody liked had bought the castanets off the fingers of one of the dancers. It’s all vivid, isn’t it? That’s why I remember it. It’s vivid almost to the degree that it’s fantasy. Because there’d been no market trip, no visitor in black. He’d spent the day in a motel room, with some woman. I know you know about his escapades – your mother always regretted that you knew – still maybe I shouldn’t have said all this to you. I’ve done it to set things straight, or straighter.

And because I’m telling the truth here, I might as well add that I’ve always wanted to run him through with a burning sword.

K
im,

Once when you were about fourteen I showed you photos of yourself as a six-year-old. Do you remember? A former neighbour in Mexico City found them and mailed them to me at the university. We were in our courtyard (or was it theirs?). In one of them, you were in the act of battering me with a plastic baton of some kind. I’m sitting in a chair, rearing back, afraid that you’ll hurt me. My expression would be familiar to you, I suppose. I remember showing you the pictures when you came home from school. You claimed not to remember Mexico City at all.

I can tell you that in some ways you haven’t changed much. You were born a batterer of authorities. I’ve always admired and feared that in you. And feared for you because of it.

Because it’s not clear to me yet whether I’ll ever send you this letter, I just might see it through. I’ll take your place as the reader while I write. I remember you also accusing me once of not sounding like myself in the letters I sent you in New York. I was someone else when I wrote, you said. A little smarter, and less prone to complaint, and less passionate. It’s odd that you find me at all passionate in person, or once did. It seems a risky word,
somewhat accusatory, as if it was my appetites only that had hurt us all. And anyway you and your mother have always been more truly passionate. Even your intellects had all of you down to your toes. The two of you running out in “the sudden rain of a deep conversation just to smell the air.” Did I get that right? Do you know whom I’m quoting? I remember things you’ve said all your life, and how you said them. I don’t have a brain for metaphors – I’m not even all that strong on analogy – but I have a memory for yours.

Do you recall defending me in that bleak driveway scene when I’d dropped you off and there were Marian and Donald out front, waiting by their car to take you somewhere else? He made as if to compliment me on my new book and then added that he hoped to get a contract for a book of his own (we’re still waiting) on Gödel, with “crossover appeal,” that a non-academic publisher might be interested in. Beware dumbing down, I said (or just plain dumb, I didn’t). He said my own book would have been strengthened had it been written in “a less mandarin prose.” And I likely said that simplified language is a tool of tyrants and so on, and then Marian stopped us. We are such a couple of brats together, he and I.

And they got into the car, and then you gave me a hug and told me (I wish they could have heard you) that you weren’t an expert but you liked my book and wanted to talk with me about it sometime. We never did have that talk, but you should know how much that moment means to me.

People like me are always marvelling at people like you, those who connect directly, effortlessly, who passionately batter and compassionately embrace. I don’t want you ever to lose that passion. But there are signs, I think, that you’re following it blindly,
letting it undermine you. It was a mistake for you to drop out of school. And, yes, I think you dropped out to hurt me. You’ve always assumed I’ve withheld myself from you – and I have, parts of my past, and my very presence for those months when I was more or less lost to myself, having left you both. But it was never my intention to withhold love. In fact, it was love for you and your mother that kept me closed.

And so, what to say? Where to begin?

Think of yourself in New York. Then imagine me the same age. In 1973 I won a travel scholarship to fund sixteen weeks of language instruction in a country of my choice. From this distance, I’m inclined to see myself as more naive than I was, but everywhere then students were politically aware, campuses were engaged, and I’d just completed my master’s degree that spring, and so I knew about Chile – the world’s first freely elected Marxist leader, the American attempts at “destabilization,” the bribes, the funding of armed opposition, the kidnappings intended to spark revolts. It was the place to be, a place I could never afford to visit otherwise, and I knew even then that my doctoral work would be in Latin American history. Whatever was happening in Chile was going to change that history. I don’t even recall there being a decision about where I should go. It was self-evident.

The Santiago of mid-June that year turned out to be full of young Allendistas from the Americas and Europe. Though it was quite clear from my first days there that you weren’t to make assumptions about the political allegiances of anyone who didn’t declare them, it seemed that everyone at the school was either actively in support of the government as Marxists themselves or, like myself I suppose, as fellow travellers of the cause.

I lived with a German named Armin and two Americans, Will and Carl, three of us attending the same school, though different classes. We had rooms in a small house in a once prosperous neighbourhood by then fallen to a barrio. It was off Moneda Street, at the far end of which was the presidential palace. Many houses were now apartments, in disrepair, with bright balconies and clover gardens. The jacaranda in the austral spring. The looming Andes. The city’s sheer beauty, I thought, must surely hold a promise of peace. There’s nothing like sharing joy and hope with so many in such a place.

My first couple of weeks were spent working on my Spanish and talking with my housemates about important matters such as women and politics. We cursed the Alliance for Progress, the
CIA, ITT
. Armin wrote out Kissinger quotes and taped them to the door of his room (“I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people”). Will and Carl were harder on their government than we were. Will, a short, muscular hippie from some university town in New York, I think, was prone to broad statements. He liked to say that he hoped revolution would spread north “clear to Canada.” Carl Michael Oakes was from Berkeley. An epicene kid, he looked younger than the rest of us but was in fact already two years into doctoral work, and his Spanish was far the best. He’d do running translations of TV and radio broadcasts, somehow finding places to add his own commentary.

Carl took to me because we were both budding academics, I think, and maybe I appreciated his layered, nuanced readings of even the brutal events. I was on the street with him on the day I got my first harbinger of things to come in the form of a tank brigade moving past on its way, it turned out, to the Moneda.
In its stupid manner, an ultra-rightist cell was trying to spark an uprising. While I didn’t know what was going on, Carl made sense of the whole thing as it was happening. He said we could expect more trouble, that the Americans and the business sector weren’t going to let things rest. Because of his Spanish, I assumed he was picking up better signals than some of us, but it occurred to me in time that he had connections with the government, and when I asked him directly, he said he knew one person who worked in a ministry and told him things. If this person was a lover, a man or woman, I never learned.

Carl was our interpreter, and time has proved out his talent for finding causal order in the daily chaos with an accuracy that historians of the period have needed years of research to match. It was Carl who brought home the papers to compare editorials in
La Nacion
and
Última Hora
with those in
La Tribuna
and
El Mercurio
. He explained the inevitable repercussions of the agrarian reforms. He told us who had U.S. funding – the rightist papers, the truckers’ association, and militia groups. Someone was cutting phone lines, planting bombs, using snipers. It was Carl who understood first that it was the fascist group, Fatherland and Liberty, busily building a youth militia. All of this was going on around me, and yet I wasn’t quite a part of it. There were two-or three-day stretches in which all I did was study, eat, chat with young women about exotic Canada with its forests and bears (I had never seen a bear but my stories were full of them). And yet the very ground was convulsing.