Something Fierce (29 page)

“Oh well, then, you'll both have jobs within the hour. I'll tell you what. For 170 australes I'll throw in the damage deposit and I'll cosign. Seventy years ago there was nothing here. Now look at us! Hop in the car and we'll drive out to your new place. If you like it, you'll hand me the money, sign a few papers and we'll be all set.”

The austral, the new currency introduced in 1985 by Argentina's president, was now worth more than the U.S. dollar. Alfonsín had frozen wages and cut government spending, and much of the country had fallen into private hands. The plan, referred to as “structural adjustment,” had been imposed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which had agreed to refinance Argentina's $50-billion foreign debt if Alfonsín followed their conditions. Most Argentinians had urged Alfonsín to refuse the deal. The debt, accumulated by Argentina's military during the dictatorship, had been used mainly to buy arms to terrorize the population and to fatten the military leaders' Swiss bank accounts. But the military still held a great deal of power, and Alfonsín worried that refusal would mean another coup, financed and orchestrated by Washington. As we'd learn, the situation was the talk everywhere—in cafés, on buses, at work.

We drove through town in the agent's tiny Fiat till we crossed the Transnational Highway. A few fat prostitutes in neon spandex leaned against posts, waving lethargically at the passing trucks. Now we were on dirt roads, and the tumbleweeds were plentiful. There were few finished houses here, just half-built structures and huge circular tents. Children in ripped sweaters ran through the streets as packs of dogs followed. Women in multicoloured skirts with gold teeth leaned in the open doorways of rooms just large enough to accommodate the bedding on the floor.

“Gypsies,” the agent informed us. “Originally from Romania. Just ignore them, and they won't bother you. They deal in cars, and they can be trusted to sell you a good one. For everything else, stay as far away as possible. They'll steal your money and your children, and tell you lies.”

We turned onto one of the dirt roads, and the agent stopped in front of a completed house. He went to the front door and came back with a woman in her fifties, who led us around the side of the house. We passed five metal doors along a dirty passageway. She opened the sixth one.

“This is it.”

The door banged against its flimsy frame as clouds of dirt flew in. It was a tiny apartment with a ceramic floor. The kitchen consisted only of a sink. The bathroom had a lidless toilet, a sink and a pipe protruding from high on the wall that served as a shower. The bedroom was barely big enough for a double bed. There were no closets or cupboards. The lone window looked out onto a dumping ground, where small children and dogs played in mounds of garbage.

“It'll go by the end of the day,” she said.

“Okay. We'll take it.”

“You kids married?”

“Yes. We got married yesterday.”

“Okay, I'll throw in a small stove and fridge. Consider it my wedding present.”

The rental agent dropped us off at the bus terminal so we could pick up our packs. It took us forever to walk back to our new place. Exhausted after our journey, we collapsed on the bedroom floor and fell into a deep sleep. When I awoke two hours later and stepped out into the “yard,” I saw a newborn puppy lying dead a few feet from our window.

BY FIVE THAT AFTERNOON Alejandro and I were having coffee and croissants on Argentina Avenue, Neuquén's main street. The downtown was bustling after siesta, in spite of the wind. We studied a map of the city.

“Okay, Skinny. You go your way, and I go mine. We'll meet back at the house at ten o'clock. Let's hope we'll both have jobs by then.”

As I walked along Argentina Avenue, I noticed that all the jeans in the store windows were the same price as our rent: 170 australes. (“Pay in 17 monthly installments of 10 australes!”) Even underwear cost 12 australes. (“Pay in 4 monthly installments of 3 australes!”)

Within two blocks of the main artery, I spotted a bronze plaque on the door of a small white building that read: “English Institute of British Culture.”

A young woman wearing a blue smock clanged away at an ancient typewriter behind the reception desk, using only her index fingers. She was chewing on a great wad of bubble gum, and she completely ignored me as she sought out the next letter on her keyboard. I cleared my throat.

“Hello. I'm here to inquire about a possible job.”

The woman sang along with the tiny transistor radio by her side, tossing her head a little. Her frizzy brown hair stood out a good foot from her face. An entire can of hairspray must have been emptied to reach the desired effect.

“Is there someone I could speak to about—”

She let out a sigh and rolled her eyes. “Miss Mary!” she yelled.

A tiny, very old woman dressed in a plaid skirt suit emerged. She inhaled deeply on the cigarette as she looked me up and down.

“Come with me,” she ordered in a crisp British accent.

I followed her into an office, where a woman in her late thirties sat behind an antique oak desk. She had jet-black hair and blue eyes. A large diamond flashed on her perfectly manicured hand, the nails painted a fire-engine red.

“I'm Miss Silvina. Do sit down.” She extended her hand. Her English pronunciation was perfect, despite her heavy Argentinian accent. “Please tell me about yourself.”

“Tea?” asked Miss Mary.

I nodded.

“I am Carmen. Miss Carmen from Canada. I just arrived today—”

“Ah. A native speaker,” murmured Miss Silvina with appreciation.

Within an hour, I'd been hired as head of the institute's language laboratory, at a wage of 150 australes a month. I spent the rest of the evening installed at my post at the front of the lab, correcting the pronunciation of rows of students in headphones who listened to cassettes of English conversation and repeated phrases into small microphones.

Getting home was a feat. There was no electricity in the Gypsy neighbourhood, which meant you navigated the dirt roads by the light of the moon, if you were lucky, or by the faint light emanating from tents and open doors. The roads were packed with people. I'd played stupid when my new boss at the institute asked where I lived, pointing vaguely toward the river.

“Be sure never to go to the other side of the Transnational,” Miss Silvina had warned. “Gypsies live there. The men are rapists, and the women are whores. They're all robbers with sharp knives.” I clutched my purse to my belly as I battled the wind. Dogs ran barking at my feet. As male voices swirled around me, I couldn't decide if I was more afraid of being intercepted by secret police or of being kidnapped by one of the bands of men who loitered on the corners.

Alejandro was waiting for me in our new apartment. He'd landed a job at the hydro plant as an electrical draftsman. His shift started at 6:00 AM and finished at 2:00 PM, just when my workday began. His salary was 200 australes a month. That would leave us with 180 australes for living expenses after rent.

“There are lots of post office boxes available for rent in town, Skinny. There are also some money transfer agencies around—I guess everyone's sending their families a little something. We'll ask our bosses for advances, rent a post office box and mail a note to Lucas and Juan in Lima as soon as possible. And to our helpers.”

We never spoke out loud about the goods we were carrying, for security reasons. I looked to where Alejandro was pointing now. He had dislodged a few tiles in the bedroom and dug out a small hole underneath. I stashed the goods I had in my coat and purse alongside his.

“Let's go eat.”

As we walked back out through the Gypsy camps, the people nodded.

When we got home at midnight, we saw a light on in our apartment. Suddenly I couldn't breathe. No one here knew us. No one would care if we went missing.

“Oh, there you are,” our landlady said as she opened the apartment door from the inside. “I just thought I'd drop off a few things for you.”

She'd laid a thin mattress on the floor in the bedroom, covered with starched sheets and a couple of blankets. A pot, a frying pan and two sets of cutlery, plates, cups, and bowls rested on a small card table flanked by two folding chairs in the living area. We thanked her for her generosity.

A part of me wanted to forget it, to leave all of this behind. I'd dreamed of fighting alongside my brothers and sisters in Chile, not being stuck in this cold outpost. Alejandro was fearless, but what about me? Would I be able to survive even the loneliness?

IT HAD BEEN four years since the collapse of Pinochet's “economic miracle” in Chile, and huge sectors of the middle class there were defaulting on mortgages and credit payments. Unemployment stood at almost 50 per cent. The monthly mass protests that had begun in 1983 hit their pinnacle in early July 1986, with a national general strike. The opposition, united in a new coalition called the Civic Assembly that included unions, political parties and grassroots organizations, had managed to rally a cross-section of Chilean society, and hundreds of thousands of people were taking to the streets in open defiance of the laws that made protests illegal. People erected barricades in the working-class neighbourhoods and shantytowns, and there was street fighting between the military and civilians who wielded slingshots and Molotov cocktails. Dozens of resistance bombings, designed to show that the dictatorship was not indomitable, had left half the country in the dark. The blackouts allowed people to bang pots and pans outside their homes without fear of being seen and created difficulties for the thousands of soldiers patrolling the country and raiding homes at night. The dictatorship responded with hundreds of arrests, ten murders and a state of siege, imposing strict censorship on the press and filing criminal charges against protesters and journalists. The Civic Assembly's attempts to start a dialogue with Pinochet about an eventual transition to democracy were also met with one of the government's most gruesome public displays of repression since the days of the coup. Two eighteen-year-olds on their way to a rally in the middle of the day were intercepted by the military, beaten, doused with gasoline and set on fire. Carmen Gloria Quintana survived; Rodrigo Rojas died four days later. Rojas, the son of exiles living in the United States who had returned to photograph the historic general strike, became a symbol for the thousands of returnees. Quintana represented all the impoverished, courageous Chileans who were willing to act in spite of their fear. Pinochet had once again defined the nature of the struggle: if 1986 was going to be the decisive year, as the resistance had dubbed it, then we'd better be prepared for full-on war. In Neuquén, where fifteen thousand undocumented Chileans lived in shantytowns and worked as peons, construction workers and maids, news of the general strike and the public burnings travelled swiftly through the streets.

On a sunny Saturday morning, Alejandro and I made our first visit to the supermarket. Advances on our wages had allowed us to buy basic food items on a daily basis, mostly bread and cold cuts, but now we'd gotten our first paycheques, and we'd be able to stock up for some real meals. Manoeuvring our cart down the crowded aisles, we behaved like children at an amusement park, jumping with joy at the prospect of buying tomato sauce, gnocchi, provolone cheese, steak, potatoes, spices, oil and a box of tea. We'd noticed a telephone company right next to the supermarket, so we planned to call my mother and Lalito as soon as we were done shopping. Then we'd go home and cook lunch, sleep siesta and spend the evening strolling around downtown with the rest of Neuquén. Maybe we'd bump into some of my workmates and have coffee with them. Penélope, the institute's rude receptionist, was turning out to be my first friend in Neuquén. She was a twenty-eight-year-old single mother, funny as hell in a deadpan kind of way. Tomorrow Alejandro and I would take the bus out to the flying club—our second trip there since our arrival—to find out more about lessons. We'd finance them with the money our helpers in Canada had started to send us. Our facade was this: Alejandro had always dreamed of flying, a common enough hobby for Patagonia's elite, and I was just along for the ride.

“We've gotta get these alfajores!” I salivated in the cookie aisle.

Alejandro, behind me with the cart, was studying a jar of maqui jam. At the end of the aisle, a middle-aged man in a brown polyester pinstripe suit with an empty cart feigned interest in a box of Criollita crackers. He looked up, and our eyes met for an instant. The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. A queasy feeling seized my gut, and my knees almost buckled. I turned slowly toward Alejandro. As I dropped the alfajores into the cart, I said in a quiet voice, “We're being followed. There's a Chilean secret police agent at the end of the aisle.”

Alejandro knew better than to look back over his shoulder. Making a superhuman effort to keep our wits about us, we continued at the same pace up and down the aisles, putting our check and counter-check skills into practice. The man followed, maintaining a half aisle between us. Brown-skinned, obviously from a poor neighbourhood, he looked like the typical torturer who did the dirty work for the dictatorship. The fact that he was here, in Neuquén, following us in a supermarket told us that Operation Condor was intact and fully functional. We knew that 179 Chilean resistance members had disappeared in Argentina since 1973.