THE DEEP CRISIS DIVIDING CHILE became unsustainable. Peasant farmers invaded land to set up agricultural cooperatives, banks and industries were expropriated, the copper mines in the north, which were in the hands of American corporations, were nationalized, shortages became endemic. There were no needles or bandages in the hospitals, no spare parts for machinery or milk for babies; everyone lived in a state of paranoia. Business owners sabotaged the economy by withdrawing essential items from the market. In response, the workers formed committees, threw out the bosses, and took over industries. In the city center, pickets could be seen around bonfires guarding offices and stores from right-wing gangs. In the countryside, the peasants kept watch day and night to protect themselves from the former landowners. There were armed gunmen on both sides. Despite the bellicose atmosphere, the Left increased its percentage of the vote in the March 1973 legislative elections. It was then that the opposition, which had been plotting for three years, understood that sabotage was not enough to overthrow the government. They turned to arms.
On Tuesday, September 11, 1973, the military rose against Allende’s government. That morning, Lena and Lucia heard helicopters and squadrons of planes roaring low above the rooftops. When they looked out, they saw tanks and army trucks in the nearly deserted streets. None of the television channels was functioning: all they showed was a geometric pattern. On the radio people heard the military pronouncement, but only understood what that meant several hours later when the state TV channel resumed broadcasting and four generals in combat uniforms appeared on the screen in front of a flag of Chile to announce the end of communism in the beloved homeland and issue edicts that the population was called on to respect. Martial law was declared; Congress was indefinitely suspended, as were civil rights, until the honorable Armed Forces restored law, order, and the values of Western, Christian civilization. They explained that Salvador Allende had hatched a plan to execute thousands upon thousands of opponents in an unprecedented genocide, but that they had stepped in first and succeeded in preventing this.
“What’s going to happen now?” Lucia asked her mother nervously, because Lena’s joyous outburst and the way she opened a bottle of champagne to celebrate the occasion seemed to her daughter misplaced: the news meant that somewhere her brother, Enrique, could be in desperate straits. “Don’t worry, daughter, soldiers in Chile respect the constitution; they’ll call elections soon,” Lena replied, little imagining that more than sixteen years were to go by before this happened.
Mother and daughter remained shut up in their apartment until the curfew was lifted a couple of days later and they could emerge briefly to buy provisions. There were no lines in the stores anymore, and they saw mountains of chickens, although Lena did not buy any, because they seemed to her too expensive. She did though stock up on cartons of cigarettes. “Where were the chickens yesterday?” Lucia asked. “Allende was keeping them in his private warehouse,” her mother said.
They learned that the president had died when the government palace was bombarded, an event they saw repeated on television until they were tired of it. They heard rumors of bodies floating through the city in the Mapocho River, big bonfires where banned books were burned, and thousands of suspects being thrown into army trucks and taken to hastily prepared detention centers like the National Stadium, where only days before, soccer matches had been played. Lena’s neighbors were as euphoric as she was, but Lucia was scared. A chance comment she overheard reverberated inside her like a direct threat to her brother: “They’re going to put those damned communists into concentration camps, and anyone who protests will be shot, just like those bastards were planning to do to us.”
When word got around that the body of Victor Jara, his hands mutilated, had been tossed into a poor district of Santiago as a lesson, Lucia cried disconsolately for hours. “It’s just gossip, sweetheart, it’s all exaggerated. They go out of their way to invent things to dishonor the armed forces, who have saved our country from the clutches of communism. How can you think something like that could happen in Chile?” Lena told her. On television there were cartoons and military edicts; the country was calm. The first seed of doubt was sown in Lena’s mind when she saw her son’s name on one of the blacklists instructing people to hand themselves in at the police barracks.
THREE WEEKS LATER, several armed men in civilian clothes raided Lena’s apartment. They had no need to identify themselves. They were looking for her two children: Enrique was accused of being a guerrilla fighter, and Lucia a sympathizer. It had been months since Lena had received news of her son, and even if she had, she would not have told these men. Because of the curfew, Lucia had spent the night at a friend’s place, and her mother was smart enough not to allow herself to be cowed by the threats and slaps she received during the raid on her home. With astounding calm she informed the intruders that her son had distanced himself from the family and they knew nothing about him, and that her daughter was with a tour in Buenos Aires. The men left with a warning; they would come back for her unless her children appeared.
Lena guessed that her phone was being tapped and so waited until five in the morning, when the curfew was lifted, to go and warn Lucia at her friend’s house. Immediately after that she went to see the cardinal, who had been a close family friend before he ascended the celestial stairs of the Vatican. Although she had never before asked any favors, she no longer felt any sense of pride. The cardinal, overwhelmed by the situation and the long lines of petitioners, was good enough to see her and to obtain asylum for Lucia in the Venezuelan embassy. He advised Lena to leave the country as well, before the secret police carried out their threat. “I’m staying here, Your Eminence. I’m not going anywhere until I know what’s happened to my son, Enrique,” she said. He replied, “If you find him, come and see me, Lena, because the boy is going to need help.”
Richard
Brooklyn
That snowy January morning, Richard was the first to awaken. It was six o’clock and still dark outside. After spending hours drifting between sleeping and waking, he had finally slept as if anesthetized. All that was left of the fire was a few embers; the house was an icy mausoleum.
He had spent Saturday night wedged against the wall, his legs numb from the weight of Lucia’s head, awake some of the time, the rest dreaming in a dazed fashion thanks to the magic brownie. Still, he could not recall being so happy in a long while. The quality of the brownies varied a lot, which made it hard to calculate how much you could consume to produce the desired effect without becoming high as a kite. It was better to smoke it, but that gave him asthma. The last stash had been very strong; he would need to divide it into smaller pieces. The weed helped him relax after a hard day’s work or to drive away ghosts of the vindictive kind. Of course, being a rational man, he did not believe in ghosts. And yet he saw them. In Anita’s world, which he had shared for several years, life and death were linked inextricably, and good and bad spirits roamed everywhere. Long ago he had admitted to himself that he was an alcoholic, which was why he had avoided liquor all these years. He did not think he was addicted to any other substances or had any major vices, unless cycling was an addiction or vice, and the small quantities of weed he used definitely did not fall under that category. The piece of brownie he had eaten had affected him powerfully; otherwise, he would have gotten up as soon as the fire went out in the hearth and gone to bed, instead of spending the night sitting on the floor and waking the next morning with sore muscles and a weakened will.
His back ached and his neck was stiff. Only a few years before, he and his friend Horacio Amado-Castro used to go camping upstate, spending the night in sleeping bags on the hard ground, but now he was too old for such a lack of comfort. Curled up alongside him, Lucia, however, had the placid expression of someone sleeping on feather down. Evelyn, stretched out on the cushion and wrapped up in her parka, boots, and gloves, was snoring lightly with Marcelo on top of her. It took Richard several seconds to
recognize her and remember why this tiny young woman was in his house, their collision, the snowstorm. After hearing part of Evelyn’s story the previous night, he once more felt the moral outrage that in the past had stirred him to defend migrants and still made his father’s blood boil. Richard had ultimately distanced himself from taking action, ending up enclosed in his academic world, far from the harsh reality of the poor in Latin America. He felt certain that Evelyn’s employers were exploiting and possibly mistreating her, which would explain her terror at such a slight accident.
He pushed Lucia aside somewhat brusquely to get her off his legs and out of his mind, then shook himself like a wet dog and struggled to his feet, his mouth parched. He reflected that the brownie had been a bad idea: it had led to the revelations of the previous night, to Evelyn’s story, Lucia’s as well—and God knew what he had told them. He did not recall having let slip any details about his own past, something he never did, but he must have mentioned Anita, because Lucia had commented that all those years after losing his wife, he still missed her. “I’ve never been loved like that, Richard, love has always been in half measures for me,” she had added.
Richard looked down at Lucia and felt a sudden rush of tenderness. She was still asleep on the floor and her sprawling limbs gave her a vulnerable, adolescent look. This woman who was old enough to be a grandmother reminded him of his Anita when she was resting, his twentysomething Anita. For a second he was tempted to stoop down, take Lucia’s head in his hands, and kiss her. Disconcerted by this dangerous impulse, he controlled himself at once.
Whenever Richard turned on his computer, a screen saver of Anita and Bibi appeared, their expressions accusatory or smiling at him depending on his mood. It was not a reminder; he had no need of that. If his memory were to fail him, Anita and Bibi would be waiting for him in the timeless dimension of dreams. Occasionally a vivid one would stick with him, and he’d spend the entire day with one foot in this world and the other in the shifting sands of a dreadful nightmare. Each night when he switched off the light before going to sleep, he would summon Anita and Bibi in the hope of seeing them. He knew he was the one who created these nocturnal visions, and so if his mind was able to punish him with nightmares, it could also reward him, although he had not discovered a sure way of producing those consoling dreams. Over time, his mourning had changed in tone and texture. In the beginning it was red and piercing; then it became gray, thick and rough like burlap. He became used to this dull pain and incorporated it into his everyday discomforts, along with heartburn. The guilt though remained the same, as cold and implacable as glass. His friend Horacio, always ready to celebrate the good and minimize the bad, had at one point accused him of being in love with misfortune. “Tell your superego to fuck off, man. The way you examine every single action, past and present, is twisted. The sin of pride. You’re not that important. You have to forgive yourself once and for all, just like Anita and Bibi have forgiven you.”
Half-jokingly, Lucia Maraz had once told him he was turning into a fearful old hypochondriac. “I already am one,” he replied, trying to adopt her joking tone, and yet he felt hurt, because it was undeniably true. They were at one of those dreadful social events in their department, this time to bid farewell to a retiring professor. He came over to Lucia with a glass of wine for her and mineral water for himself. She was the only person he’d had any desire to talk to there. And she was right, he lived with a constant feeling of anxiety. He swallowed handfuls of vitamin supplements because he thought that if his health failed everything would go to hell and the whole edifice of his existence would come crashing down. He protected his house with burglar alarms, because he’d heard that in Brooklyn, as everywhere else, robbers were active in broad daylight. He protected his computer and his cell phone with such complicated passwords that every so often he forgot them. Then there were the elaborate car, health, and life insurance policies. In the end the only insurance he lacked was against his worst memories, which would assail him the moment he stepped outside his routines, threatening to overwhelm with disorder. He preached to his students that order is an art rational beings possess, a ceaseless battle against centrifugal force, because the natural dynamic of all living things is to expand, multiply, and end in chaos. As a proof you only had to observe human behavior, the voracity of nature, and the infinite complexity of the universe. To maintain at least a semblance of order, he never let himself go, but kept his existence under control with military precision. That was why he had his lists and a strict timetable, which made Lucia laugh out loud when she discovered them. The bad thing about working with her was that nothing escaped her.
“How do you see yourself in old age?” Lucia had asked him.
“I’m already in it.”
“No, you’ve got a good ten years yet.”
“I hope I don’t live too long, that would be awful. The ideal would be to die still in perfect health, say at around seventy-five, when my body and mind are functioning properly.”
“Sounds like a good plan,” she said cheerfully.
To Richard it was a serious plan. At seventy-five he would have to find an effective way of putting an end to it all. When the moment arrived, he would travel to New Orleans, where he could hear the music of the French Quarter’s quirky characters. He intended to finish out his days playing the piano with some stupendous musicians, who would allow him to join their band out of pity, and lose himself in the blare of the trumpet and the saxophone, the exuberance of the African drums. And if this was too much to ask, well then he wanted to leave this world silently, seated beneath a dilapidated ceiling fan in an old-fashioned bar, comforted by the rhythms of a melancholy jazz tune, quaffing exotic cocktails with no thought of the consequences, because he would have the lethal capsule in his pocket. It would be his last night, so he could permit himself a few drinks.
“Don’t you ever feel the need for female company, Richard?” Lucia asked with a mischievous wink. “Someone in your bed, for example?”
“Not at all.”
He saw no need to tell her about Susan. That relationship was not important either for Susan or for him. He was sure he was one among several lovers who helped her bear an unhappy marriage, which he considered should have ended years before. This was a topic they both avoided: Susan said nothing about it, and he did not ask. They were colleagues, good companions, linked by a sensual friendship and intellectual pursuits. Their encounters were straightforward: always the second Thursday of the month, and always in the same hotel; she was as methodical as he was. One afternoon a month was enough; each of them had their own life to live.
Three months earlier, the idea of finding himself with a woman at a reception of this kind, searching for topics of conversation and testing out the ground for the next step, would have made Richard’s ulcer explode, but ever since Lucia had been living in his basement he had found himself imagining dialogues with her. He wondered why with her exactly, when there were other more suitable women available, such as his neighbor, who had suggested they become lovers because they lived so close to each other and because she occasionally looked after the cats. The only explanation for these imaginary conversations was that loneliness was starting to weigh on him: another symptom of old age, he told himself. There was nothing more pathetic than the sound of a fork on a plate in an empty house. Eating alone, sleeping alone, dying alone. What would it be like to have female company, as Lucia had suggested? To cook for her, wait for her in the evening, go out hand in hand with her, sleep curled up together, tell her what he was thinking, write her poems. Someone like Lucia. She was a mature, stable, intelligent woman who had a ready laugh. She was wise because she had suffered, but did not cling to suffering the way he did. And she was pretty. But she was also bold and bossy. A woman like her took up a lot of room: it would be like struggling with a harem; too much work, a bad idea. He smiled, thinking how presumptuous it was of him to suppose she might accept him. She had neve
r given any sign of being interested in him, except the occasion when she had cooked for him, but back then she had just arrived and he was on the defensive or his mind was elsewhere. I behaved like an idiot, I’d like to start over with her, he concluded.
On a professional level, Lucia had proved to be an excellent choice. A week after her arrival in New York he asked her to give a seminar for the faculty and students. They had to hold the session in a big lecture hall because more people enrolled than they had expected. It fell to him to introduce her. The topic was CIA interventions in Latin America. Richard sat in the audience while Lucia spoke in English without notes, in that accent of hers he found so beguiling, detailing how the agency helped to overthrow democracies, replacing them with the kind of totalitarian government no North American would accept. When she finished, the first question was from a colleague who referred to the economic miracle in Chile under the dictatorship. From the tone of his comment, it was obvious he was justifying the repression. The hair stood up on the back of Richard’s neck, but he forced himself to remain silent. Lucia did not need anyone to defend her, and replied that the supposed miracle had evaporated, while the economic statistics conveniently ignored the enormous inequality and poverty.
A visiting professor from the University of California mentioned the violence in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, and the thousands of unaccompanied children who crossed the US border either to escape or to search for their parents. She suggested reorganizing the Sanctuary Movement of the 1980s. Richard took the microphone in case there was anyone in the audience unaware of what she was referring to. He explained that it was an initiative by more than five hundred American churches, lawyers, students, and activists to help the Central American refugees, who were treated as delinquents and deported by the Reagan administration. Lucia asked if anyone there had taken part in the movement, and four hands were raised. During that period Richard had been in Brazil, but his father had become so involved that on a couple of occasions he was put in jail. Those were some of the most memorable moments in his elderly father’s existence.