Something Fierce (35 page)

Within minutes we were aboard the subway, making out like desperate teenagers. I had one night before I went back to Neuquén to await orders. We rode the subway until closing, and then walked the streets of Las Condes, one of the richest neighbourhoods in the city. According to the Cousin, most of Santiago's poor neighbourhoods were inaccessible because of the burning tires and rows of nails that littered the streets to keep the military at bay. Elections had been called for December, but Pinochet's brutal reign would continue until then.

From Santiago, I flew to Mendoza, where I was scheduled to change planes. After flashing my passport, I retrieved my bags and was looking for a decent place to await my flight to Neuquén when a severe-looking woman in a light blue smock approached.

“You're coming with me,” she ordered.

I followed her, the Terror colonizing my body in an instant.

The woman opened the door to a pitch-black room. I waited for her to turn on the light, but she pointed me in with her chin, enjoying the fear she caused. As the door closed behind me, I braced for the inevitable first blow.

A female voice came at me from behind. “Take your clothes off. All of them.”

The adrenalin caused me to shake uncontrollably. Sweat poured out of me, feeling like pinpricks on my goosebumps. I fumbled at my buttons with fingers suddenly thick.

“Hurry up, and tell me when you're done.”

She was still behind me, closer now. I tried to sense whether there were other people in the room. Secret police cars, airports, bus terminals and designated neighbourhood houses were often equipped as little torture chambers to save the hours it might take to transport a new prisoner to a concentration camp. All I could hear was my teeth chattering.

“I'm done,” I said.

The woman flicked on a flashlight and aimed it at my crotch. She was in front of me now.

“Put your hands behind your head and squat.”

I did as I was told. I could feel my sweat forming a puddle on the floor as I struggled to control my bowels.

My captor shone the light in my eyes, then knelt and plunged her gloved fingers into my vagina. My spirit fled through the top of my head and landed on the ceiling.

“Cough,” she ordered. I did so.

“Turn around.”

From my place on the ceiling I could hear myself whimper like a small child, a high, plaintive sound. It could be part of a sonata, maybe.

The Terror Sonata, I'd call it. There'd be whimpers, screams, pleading, begging, crying, moaning—

The woman shoved her finger into my anus, interrupting my composition. “Put your clothes on. We'll be conducting a full search of your belongings as well.”

After I'd dressed in the darkness, the woman led me by the arm through the airport. The shock of the light and the sight of fellow humans going about their business were almost too much to bear.

Three men in plain clothes waited in the next room under fluorescent lights. They searched methodically through my bags and purse, opening every package and reading every piece of paper. I stood breathing shallowly as they brought in two German shepherds. One of them jumped up on me, growling. I steeled myself for whatever was coming next. For the first time on a border crossing, I wasn't carrying any goods or secret documents. But would they plant something in my luggage, or pull out a file on all the resistance correspondence I'd sent and received in the last three years?

“You're free to go,” one of the men said finally, after he'd flipped through my passport again.

I waited for a moment to see if it was a trick. Then I gathered up my things, stuffing them into my suitcases with shaking hands. When I was ready, the female guard opened the door and let me out, closing the door behind me. I found a bathroom, where I threw up green bile. In the big mirror over the sink, I saw a well-dressed young woman with red eyes and a trembling jaw.

Earlier that month, armed members of a new Argentinian movement called Todos por la Patria (All for the Homeland) had attacked an army base in Buenos Aires. The battle at La Tablada had lasted for hours, and most of the attackers had been killed. The attack had been meant to quash yet another coup attempt against Alfonsín. The militants were left-wing but misguided, with no grassroots support for their actions. Since the Easter 1987 coup attempt, Alfonsín had passed the Due Obedience Law, which allowed torturers who had been following orders to go free, and a law called the Final Point, which put an immediate deadline on the trials. In spite of this legislation, the generals were far from pacified. In Neuquén, a fifteen-year-old student union leader had been picked up by secret police, raped and let go again. Inflation was out of control, and Alfonsín's popularity had plummeted. Since La Tablada, the clampdown at Argentina's borders had been intense.

Estéban, my basketball player boyfriend, had been traded to a Córdoba team. The city felt different without him and Luisa, who had continued hitchhiking to Brazil. Alejandro had put up resistance members in his apartment all through the summer, he told me, but other than the notes he got in his post office box with the details of people's arrivals, there'd been no word from the resistance. I picked up my privileged Neuquén existence: swimming in the river during the day, meeting friends for coffee in the evening, dancing all night. The blue-eyed man was nowhere to be seen. When the school year started again, I resumed my full-time position and checked my post office box religiously. There was nothing, even as the elections in Chile drew near. Then, one morning, a note: “Meet me at El Tío's steak house near the bus terminal at 11:00 PM on Sunday night.”

I let out a sigh of relief. Silence—no contact, no tasks, no instructions—had been the scariest thing of all.

Trinidad walked into the steak house right on time, carrying her battered Samsonite, fresh lipstick on her ripe mouth. She sat down heavily and ordered a glass of wine, tucking into a plate of mashed potatoes with gravy. When she'd finished eating, she reached across the table to take my hands in hers.

“It's over, Carmencita. The resistance has dissolved. We are each to go our own way now. We tried hard, but it's time to state the obvious: we lost. Maybe in ten, twenty, a hundred or a thousand years, the society we dream of will come to be. But we've lost this round.”

We gripped each other with all our might. I'd met her when I was eleven. Now I was twenty-one. She'd been the first to take me across the border into Chile. Since then I'd fed her mashed-up rice and offered her a floor to lay her tortured bones on whenever she'd shown up at my door, sometimes breathing hard and sweating, unannounced.

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

She shrugged.

“Do you have family?”

“Yes, I do.”

She reached for her wallet and let a dozen baby pictures unfurl. She pointed at one: “This is Lalito when he was a newborn. I've kept him here all this time. How old is he? Nine now? These are the babies of the families who have hidden me. I look at them to remind myself why we're doing this. My babies have given me more strength than you can imagine, and they've kept me company during the lonely times. Baby pictures are of no use to the secret police, either, since they all look the same. So these babies are my family. Do I have a man? Of course not. Do you know of many men willing to wait for seventeen years while their woman goes off to be in the underground?”

We smoked her entire pack of Parliaments as we sat there holding hands across the table.

“If I ever see you on a Santiago street, can I stop and say hello?” I asked her.

“No.” She glanced at her watch.

“So, that's it? What am I going to do now?”

“Oh, I'm sure you'll think of something. You've got your whole life ahead of you. As for me, I'll get to see my mother for the first time in sixteen years.”

I remembered a distant time and place, the swing set in my old backyard. My best friend Arabella and I had swung on it for the last time when we were both eleven. Swinging and swinging and swinging, then jumping down from the greatest height and walking together to the waiting car, the VW Bug that would take my mother, Ale and me to the airport.

“Everything will change now,” Arabella had said as we passed our favourite huckleberry bush.

“Yes, it will.”

“Goodbye, baby sparrow.”

“Goodbye, baby sparrow.”

The farewell was our ritual ever since the day we'd found a fallen baby bird and tried in vain to nurse it back to health.

Trinidad picked up her suitcase, winked and walked away, her lopsided gait so familiar. Glued to my seat, I took in the overflowing ashtray, the empty bottle of wine, the white napkin stained with her lipstick. The tango legend Carlos Gardel, framed in a picture above the table, looked to the side with his perfect white smile, wearing a fedora and black tie. Beneath his photo, the lyrics to “Volver” (To Return) were handwritten in silver ink.

To return with my withered brow, my hair whitened by the snow of time. To feel that life is a breath, that twenty years is nothing...

I was falling from a great height, and the ground was coming up fast.

I am afraid of the nights peopled by memories, chaining my dreams... And although my old illusions have been destroyed by oblivion, I hide ahumble hope in my heart...

The floor opened up beneath me, and I was falling, chair and all, sucked into a black hole.

“Are you all right, Señorita?” an old gentleman asked.

“What?” He was stooped over me, a steaming cup of coffee left behind at his table nearby.

“Yes, I'm fine. Thank you for your concern.”

I collected my things and stood, the old man my only witness. The night was cool and windy when I stepped outside.

EPILOGUE
FEBRUARY 2010

B
UENOS AIRES GRABBED me fiercely by the heart, as the South always does. I walked with my friend Peti—La Petiza, meaning “the short one”—through the city for hours at a time. Sometimes we passed the excavation sites of former concentration camps, and I was surprised to see recent graffiti celebrating the Chilean resistance sprayed on the walls along major avenues.

“The Chilean resistance has mythological status here,” Peti explained. “Our youth revere it. They see it as a revolutionary movement of people who fought to the death for their beliefs, without compromise.” As I inhaled the steamy air of a carnival night, I wondered for the millionth time what the hell I was doing living in Vancouver.

Peti, ten years my junior, was the daughter of parents who'd been disappeared in the 1970s for their guerrilla activity against the Argentinian dictatorship. She belonged to the so-called lost generation, coming of age at a time when ferocious neo-liberalism was eating up her country. It seemed then that our fight had truly been in vain. When I'd boarded a northbound plane in Buenos Aires on a sunny afternoon in March 1990, my heart heavy with defeat, I wasn't leaving behind only a country deep in crisis. The resistance had been spectacularly defeated in Chile. The Soviet bloc had fallen, and the Sandinistas had recently lost the elections in Nicaragua, after defending themselves against the Contras for a decade. The FMLN in El Salvador had failed in its final offensive, and just months earlier, the United States had invaded Panama. Twenty-seven thousand U.S. troops had landed in that tiny Central American country on December 20. Panama's three thousand soldiers were no match for them; El Chorrillo, a working-class suburb of Panama City, was burned to the ground by the invaders, earning it the name “Little Hiroshima.” Six thousand civilians died, and the chemical weapons used by the U.S. military caused people's bodies to melt on the spot. The ostensible reason for the invasion was to “liberate” Panama from General Manuel Noriega, who was on the cia's payroll but had become too nationalistic for the U.S. government's liking. The real purpose of the attack was to ensure that the United States retained control of the Panama Canal, due to be handed over to Panamanians ten days later.

It was the second flagrant invasion of the South during that decade. In 1983, 7,600 U.S. troops had stormed Grenada, a small Caribbean island with a population of a hundred thousand, most of them descendants of slaves. Maurice Bishop, a left-wing black-power leader, had successfully led a revolution there against Eric Gairy, a close associate of Pinochet's. Bishop set up free health care and was starting to implement agrarian reform and a literacy campaign, quite a feat in a poor nation that had gained its independence from Britain a mere five years earlier. As prime minister, Bishop aligned himself with Cuba and Nicaragua, asking for Cuba's aid in building a new international airport. Shortly after he was murdered by the head of Grenada's military, the United States stepped in to “rescue” the island from what they saw as an imminent Cuban takeover. Almost three hundred Grenadians and eighty-one Cubans (most of the latter doctors and construction workers) were killed.

I'd left it all behind, landing in Vancouver on a typically grey day. I'd gone back in pursuit of another dream: I'd decided to audition for theatre school. Once I was accepted, I threw myself into my studies. It was an interesting challenge, training my body and soul to risk vulnerability in front of strangers. During the first week of school, our voice teacher placed her palms on the ribs in my back. “When was the last time you breathed?” she asked, shaking her head. “We have our work cut out for us.” The fear was intense, and it felt familiar. I managed to get through the program, hanging on by the skin of my teeth, never sharing my resistance stories with classmates or teachers. I had sworn an oath, after all. I kept a close eye on Latin America, though, and I drew strength from the acts of resistance going on there. I became an actor and a playwright, often performing my own work, which was political in a highly personal way. I led community workshops using the techniques developed in Brazil by Augusto Boal in his Theatre of the Oppressed. I ran a theatre troupe for the Latino community in Vancouver. And life would later surprise me with a son.