Something Fierce (25 page)

Throughout the night, Judith tended to my mother, asking for hot compresses, painkillers and rubbing alcohol. At one point she asked Bob for a glass of whiskey and gave my mother that too. The adults conferred, deciding that the three of them would take turns looking after Mami, while Ale and I kept going to school and Lalito went back to daycare. Bob had told the Atomic Centre Mami had the flu; now he would report it had turned into pneumonia.

At some point I went into the bedroom, and I stayed at Mami's bedside all night. She was drunk from the whiskey, or delirious from the fever, or both. She jabbered about life and death, and her story came out in pieces.

“I was gone, Carmencita. I'd fallen off the side of a mountain and banged my way down a cliff, landing on jagged rocks and tree trunks. Funny how the beating of my life came not from the military but from the Andes. I hit my head so hard I lost consciousness. When I came to, it was night, and I stumbled around the freezing cold forest in the pitch black. The boars nearby were sniffing, sniffing. Days and nights passed like that. I watched my fingers turn purple, the nails falling off from the cold, my eyes swollen almost shut. I could hear the crash of a river in the distance, so I followed the sound, knowing the river would lead me somewhere. I didn't know if I was still in Argentina or had made it to the other side. All I could think about was you, my big girls and little boy. I couldn't let you down. So I found my way to the river, but when I saw it, at the bottom of the world, I fell and landed in it face down. I knew that was it. So I gave in, letting that river take me, but then I heard a voice say so distinctly, ‘Señora? Señora?' I knew he was Chilean, with that lilt. I felt relief that I was going to die back in the country I came from. But the boy wouldn't leave me alone, kept calling, and then there were other voices. Next thing I knew they were pulling me by the hands and feet toward the shore. They laid me down, and one of them left and came back with two women, a mother and a grandmother. Mapuche mountain people. The women carried me to their house, a shack, really, in the middle of the mountains. A fire was burning in the wood stove, and they laid me down on their hay mattress and kept me there, boiling water with herbs, cleaning the infections, trying to bring down the fever. I was in and out of consciousness. The boys kept a lookout, and on the third day, one of the women said, ‘Señora, the police are coming. They come here every few days, and my oldest boy tells me they're only a couple of hours away now. You must leave. My boy will walk you through the cattle trail and leave you at the border.' They hugged me goodbye and gave me a walking stick and waved me off. I said to them, ‘I'm from here.' And they nodded and covered their mouths with their hands to contain their emotion, and the boy took me along the trail and told me when we'd reached the Argentinian side and said to keep walking, Señora, just keep walking, and you'll reach the dirt road. So I did, and when I got to the road I saw Bob standing there with Lalito on his shoulders. And now here I am, my beloved girl, my daughter whom I love so much.”

WITHIN A WEEK, my mother was back to teaching. She was our family's sole breadwinner, and she'd missed so many days at the Atomic Centre that she was afraid of getting fired. At the last minute the adults had decided the pneumonia story wouldn't hold water. Now the story was this: Mami had felt so much better after being bedridden with the flu that she, Bob and Lalito had gone for a little winter hike. She had slipped in the snow and fallen down a small cliff. Judith pointed out that any outdoorsy type would know my mother's missing nails and blue fingers were signs of extreme hypothermia, but there was no alternative. Staying in bed while refusing visitors and never seeing a doctor would be even weirder. People had begun to ask questions, and Mami and Bob knew it was only a matter of time before the secret police would close in on us.

I had moved back home for the time being, and on a rare night when Bob and I found ourselves alone at the table, we had a political discussion, just like old times.

“Carmencita, there's so much happening in Chile right now. The international solidarity movement has done a superb job of raising consciousness around the world. This is thanks to the work of the exiles, including your father and your uncle and aunt and cousins and all the rest of the community in Vancouver. Thanks to the election of Alfonsín here, Pinochet is completely isolated. Chile is the only country in South America living under a dictatorship now, and this makes the Yanks nervous as hell. The last thing Ronald Reagan wants is a revolution in Chile. He's pushing Pinochet to take a softer approach, call elections there. Many young people have joined the resistance but they don't want a protracted war. They are calling for an insurrection, like what happened in Nicaragua. So even though we all still have the same goals—to topple Pinochet and install a revolutionary government—and we are still working together, they have taken some matters into their own hands. They are very good. They've already performed numerous armed propaganda actions: bombed electrical towers and U.S. banks, taken over radios and TV stations to broadcast their platform, carried out a massive graffiti campaign with the high school kids. They have a series of kidnappings of major military men planned, and I wouldn't be surprised if they go for the big guy himself very soon. If insurrection is what they have in mind, they know it'll have to be quick and dirty, and the best way to get there is to go after Pinochet himself. Every month there's a million-strong rally in Santiago and all the other major cities. The poor have never been poorer or more numerous. After eleven years of living under a state of siege, people have had enough. The time is coming, Carmencita, it's coming, and precisely because of that the repression has become even more brutal.”

“So what are we going to do?”

“You and Ale are going back to Canada, to be with your father. Your mother and Lalito and I won't be in Bariloche long. We'll go wherever the resistance tells us to go.”

“But you've always taken us with you.”

“Not this time. We've been given the order to send you back. It's become too dangerous, like after the García Meza coup in Bolivia.”

“We need a plan,” I said to Ale as we lay in our bunks later that night.

“I've told you. I'm gonna get Vero's family to adopt me.”

“Well, I'm going to arrange for Alejandro to be my legal guardian. He's twenty-two, a legal adult.”

“Maybe you guys should get married.”

“We don't believe in marriage.”

“It's not about believing in marriage, you idiot. It's about staying here. You think I believe in being adopted at fifteen? Open your eyes.”

“But I'd need Mami and Papi's approval to get married. I'm only sixteen.”

“So figure it out.”

“How will you get them to approve Vero's parents adopting you?”

“Easy. In three years I can do what I want anyway. I'll lay out my case: I'll be happy, safe and well taken care of, and I can see Mami and Bob and Lalito anytime. They won't have to worry about me, so they can dedicate themselves to the cause without being sidetracked. Voila. Everybody's happy.”

“But what about Papi? What do you think he'll have to say?”

“Papi's on the other side of the world. It's not like he knows us anymore.”

But no amount of begging, pleading or tears could convince Bob and Mami to let us stay. I was not to marry Alejandro, and Ale was not to be adopted by Vero's family. On the twenty-four-hour bus trip to Buenos Aires, Ale sobbed so loudly the stewards checked to see if she was okay. I sat in a silent rage as the vast country of Argentina passed outside our window.

As the airplane to Vancouver took off, Ale grabbed my hand.

“You have only two years before you reach adulthood. I have only three. Before we know it,” Ale said, “we'll be masters of our own destiny, Carmen. We'll be our own bosses, and we'll come back here to stay.” She loved Argentina more than anything.

As our plane crossed the equator and left the South American winter behind, I kept hearing Alejandro's final words: “Don't worry, Skinny. I'll get to Canada come hell or high water. I'll bring you back here, and together we'll join the resistance.”

PART THREE
THE
DECISIVE
YEAR

20

I
T WAS A hot July afternoon when Ale and I landed in Vancouver. Papi and Aunt Tita had moved into a housing co-op, where Uncle Boris, Aunt Magdalena, my cousins Gonzalo and Macarena, and other Chileans were waiting with a barbecue. It was three years since Papi had completed his doctorate in physics. He was thinking about changing his surname to McGuire, he'd told us, since prospective employers refused to give him the time of day when they saw the Spanish name at the top of his resumé.

“To the return of my daughters!” Papi toasted with a pisco sour.

“To the return from the Return!” offered my uncle Boris.

“To the return,” I repeated as I took a sip of lemonade. I studied the new grey in Papi's hair. He'd been furious when he'd found out that Ale wanted to be adopted by a rich, right-wing Argentinian family and I wanted to marry a twenty-two-year-old man. Anything to avoid coming back and living with our father, as he saw it. I could see the terrible hurt in his eyes.

Two months later, Mami, Bob and Lalito returned to Vancouver as well. The secret police had come close to capturing them, they confessed. If Bob and my mother had looked discouraged before, now they looked defeated, grief-stricken, on the verge of collapse. It wasn't long before Bob moved into a place of his own, and Mami wailed on the couch for weeks. They'd been through so much in their seven-year relationship, she sobbed. How could any couple survive so much danger and terror, such superhuman expectations? As for Lalito, he was only four and had already seen it all.

Papi was at a loss now that his two malleable girls had turned into young women with minds of their own. Ale was constantly sullen and withdrawn. I was in love. True to his promise, Alejandro arrived in Vancouver at the end of the year with plans to take me back as soon as I turned eighteen. He'd jumped through hoops to get there. First he'd gotten himself fired from the nuclear plant so he could collect fifteen hundred dollars in severance pay. Then he'd hitchhiked to Buenos Aires, where he besieged the Canadian consulate for a tourist visa. Finally a receptionist took pity on him and told him he had forty-eight hours to produce a return ticket to Canada and five thousand U.S. dollars in spending money. He'd gone to a rich Buenos Aires aunt to borrow the cash, which he planned to return as soon as he'd flashed it at the consulate. Then he'd obtained a reduced-fare ticket through a friend with connections to the Mob. When he'd presented his ticket two days later at the Aerolíneas Argentinas counter, not sure if it was real or a forgery, he'd sweated right through his winter jacket. His ticket was accepted, though, and for the first time in his life he'd seen the world from the sky.

Alejandro got an under-the-table job on the assembly line of a tofu wiener factory, and the two of us moved in with my mother and Lalito. As in the past, our household regularly put up speakers and musicians from Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador and Chile who were passing through town. And as before, I had nothing in common with my Canadian classmates.

“Wanna go to McDonald's after school?”

“No, I have to go home.”

“Why?”

“Ernesto Cardenal, this revolutionary Nicaraguan poet and pastor, who's now the minister of culture for the Sandinista government, is staying at our house, and my boyfriend and I are gonna drive him to his speaking engagement at the United Church tonight. You're welcome to come, he's—”

“Naw. I have to pick up some drugs at my dealer's, and then there's a pool party at Todd's. You could bring the poet if you want. Oh, right, he's a pastor too. Sorry about that.”

At the tofu factory, Alejandro met four Guatemalan refugees who were survivors of the dictator Efraín Rios Montt's torture chambers. He learned about the United Fruit Company's coup against Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in 1954 (Arbenz's crime had been to nationalize the banana plantations) and the revolutionary efforts in Guatemala since then. Hearing that many of Argentina's torturers had fled the country only to offer their expertise in Guatemala and El Salvador filled him with shame and rage. He immersed himself in Vancouver's Chilean exile community, where solidarity work was the reason to live. He didn't have to return to his beloved Argentina, he decided. He would go wherever the two of us were needed for the revolution.