“Getting by, that’s all. And you, mijita?”
“Getting by too, thanks. And your cow, is she well?”
“Yes, yes, but she’s getting old.” She sighed. “Not giving much milk. She must be getting feeble, I think.”
“Manuel and I are using condensed milk.”
“Juesú! Tell the gentleman that tomorrow morning Juanito will be bringing you a little milk and cheese.”
“Thank you so much, Doña Eduvigis.”
“And I guess your house isn’t too clean . . .”
“No, no, it’s pretty dirty. Why should I lie to you?” I confessed.
“Jué! Forgive me.”
“No, no, nothing to forgive.”
“Tell the gentleman he can count on me.”
“As usual, then, Doña Eduvigis.”
“Yes, yes, gringuita, as usual.”
Then we talked about sickness and potatoes, as protocol demands.
This is the recent news. Winter in Chiloé is cold and long, but much more bearable than those winters up north in the world. Here we don’t have to shovel snow or wrap up in furs. We have classes in school when the weather allows, but they play truco in the tavern every day, even when the sky is shattered with lightning. There are always enough potatoes for soup, wood for the stove, and maté for friends. Sometimes we have electricity, sometimes just candlelight.
If it doesn’t rain, the Caleuche team practices ferociously for the championship in September. None of the boys’ feet have grown, and their soccer cleats still fit. Juanito is a sub, and Pedro Pelanchugay was elected as the team’s goalkeeper. In this country everything is resolved by democratic voting or by appointing commissions, somewhat complicated processes; Chileans believe that simple solutions are against the law.
Doña Lucinda had her one hundred and tenth birthday and has started looking like a dusty rag doll in the last few weeks. She no longer has the energy to dye wool and she spends her time sitting staring toward the side of death, but she’s got new teeth coming in. We don’t have curantos or any tourists until spring, and meanwhile the women knit and make handicrafts, because it’s a sin to have idle hands; laziness is for men. I’m learning how to knit so I won’t look bad. For the moment I make scarves that can’t really go wrong, with thick wool and a basic garter stitch.
Half the population of the island has a cold, bronchitis, or aches in their bones, but if the National Health Service boat is a week or two late, the only one who misses it is Liliana Treviño. Rumor has it she’s got a thing going on with the beardless doctor. People don’t trust physicians who don’t charge them anything. They’d rather treat themselves with natural remedies and if it’s something serious, with the magical resources of a machi. The priest, however, always comes to say mass every Sunday, to keep the Pentecostals and evangelicals from getting the upper hand. According to Manuel, that wouldn’t be easy, because the Catholic Church is more influential in Chile than it is in the Vatican. He told me that this was the last country in the world to legally approve the right to divorce and the law they’ve got is very complicated. It’s actually easier to murder your husband or wife than divorce them, so no one wants to get married and most children are born out of wedlock. They don’t even talk about abortion, which is a rude word, though it’s widely practiced. Chileans venerate the Pope, but they don’t heed him in sexual matters and their consequences, because he’s a well-off, elderly celibate, who hasn’t worked a day in his life, and doesn’t really know much about it.
The soap opera advances very slowly. It’s on its ninety-second episode, and we’re still in the same stories as at the beginning. It’s the most important event on the island. People suffer the characters’ misfortunes more than their own. Manuel doesn’t watch television, and I don’t understand that much of what the actors say and almost none of the plot. It seems that someone called Elisa was abducted by her uncle, who fell in love with her and has her locked up somewhere, while her aunt is looking for her to murder her, instead of killing her husband, which would be more reasonable.
My friend La Pincoya and her sea lion family aren’t at the cave. They emigrated to other waters and other rocks, but they’ll come back when the season changes. The fishermen have assured me that they’re creatures of deeply ingrained habits, and they always come back in the summer.
Livingston, the carabineros’ dog, is full-grown now, and he’s turned out to be a polyglot: he understands instructions in English, Spanish, and Chilote. I taught him four basic tricks that any domestic dog learns, and the rest he picked up on his own. He herds sheep and drunks, fetches prey when they take him hunting, raises the alarm if there’s a fire or a flood, sniffs out drugs—except for marijuana—and pretends to attack if Humilde Garay orders him to in demonstrations, but in real life he’s very gentle. He hasn’t recovered corpses, because we haven’t been fortunate enough to have any, as Garay puts it, but he did find Aurelio Ñancupel’s four-year-old grandson, who got lost up on the hill. Susan, my ex-stepmother, would pay a fortune in gold for a dog like Livingston.
I’ve missed two meetings of the good witches in the ruca, the first when Daniel was here and the second this month, because Blanca and I couldn’t get to Isla Grande; there was a storm in the forecast, and the captain of the port wouldn’t let any boats out to sea. I was very disappointed, because we were going to bless a newborn baby one of them had recently had, and I was looking forward to giving him a sniff; I like children when they don’t talk back yet. I’ve really missed our monthly coven in the womb of Pachamama with those young, sensual women, healthy in their hearts and minds. Among them I feel accepted; I’m not the gringa, I’m Maya, one of the witches, and I belong to this land. When we go to Castro we usually sleep over for a couple of nights with Don Lionel Schnake, with whom I would have fallen in love if Daniel Goodrich hadn’t crossed my astrological chart. He’s irresistible, like the mythical Millalobo, enormous, ruddy complexioned, mustachioed, and lusty. “What a lucky fellow you are, you Communist, to have this lovely gringuita land in your house!” he exclaims every time he sees Manuel Arias.
The investigation into Azucena Corrales’s case came to nothing for lack of proof. There was no evidence that the abortion was induced; that’s the advantage of a concentrated infusion of avocado leaves and borage. We haven’t seen the girl since, because she went to live in Quellón with her older sister, Juanito’s mother, who I’ve never even met. After what happened, Officers Cárcamo and Garay began to look into the paternity of the dead baby on their own and concluded the same as what was already known, that Azucena had been raped by her own father, just as he’d done to his other daughters. That is privativo, as they say here, and nobody feels they have the right to intervene in what goes on behind closed doors. People wash their dirty linen at home.
The carabineros tried to get the family to report the fact, so they could legally intercede, but to no avail. Blanca Schnake couldn’t convince Azucena or Eduvigis to make a formal accusation either. Gossip and blame were flying around, and the whole town had an opinion on the matter, but eventually the scandal dissipated into hot air. Nevertheless, justice was done in the least expected way when Carmelo Corrales got gangrene in his one remaining foot. The man waited until Eduvigis went to Castro to fill in the forms for the second amputation and injected himself with a whole box of insulin. She found him unconscious and held him until he died, minutes later. No one, not even the carabineros, mentioned the word suicide; by general consensus the sick man died of natural causes, so he could be given a Christian burial and avoid more humiliation for the unfortunate family.
They buried Carmelo Corrales without waiting for the itinerant priest, with a brief ceremony officiated by the church’s fiscal, who praised the deceased’s boat-building abilities, the only virtue he could pull out of his sleeve, and entrusted his soul to divine mercy. A handful of neighbors attended out of compassion toward the family, Manuel and I among them. Blanca was so furious about what happened to Azucena that she did
n’t make an appearance at the cemetery, but she bought a wreath of plastic flowers in Castro for the grave. None of Carmelo’s children came to the funeral, only Juanito was there, wearing the suit from his first communion, too small for him now, holding hands with his grandmother, who wore black from head to toe.
We’ve just celebrated the Feast of the Nazarene on the island of Caguach. Thousands of pilgrims turned up, including Argentineans and Brazilians, most of them in big barges where two or three hundred people fit, standing all squished together, but some also arrive in traditional boats. The vessels sail precariously on the rough sea, with big dense clouds in the sky, but nobody worries, because they believe the Nazarene protects the pilgrims. This is not exactly true; more than one boat has gone down in the past, and Christians have been known to drown. In Chiloé lots of people drown because nobody knows how to swim, except those in the navy, who are forced to learn.
The very miraculous Santo Cristo consists of a wire framework with a wooden head and hands, a wig of human hair, glass eyes, and a suffering face, bathed in tears and blood. One of the sacristan’s jobs is to go over the blood with nail polish before the procession. He is crowned with thorns, dressed in a purple robe, and carries a heavy cross. Manuel has written about the Nazarene, which is three hundred years old now and is a symbol of the faith of Chilotes. It’s no novelty for him, but he went with me to Caguach. For me, raised in Berkeley, the spectacle could not be more pagan.
Caguach Island is just three or four square miles in size and has five hundred inhabitants, but during the January and August processions the devout swell the population by thousands. They require the presence of the navy and the police to keep order during the navigation and the four days of ceremonies, during which the devout come en masse to pay for their vows and promises. The Santo Cristo does not forgive those who don’t pay their debts for favors received. During mass the collection plates fill to the brim with money and jewelry. The pilgrims pay however they can; there are even those who part with their cell phones. I was scared, first onboard the Cahuilla, bouncing over the swells for hours, pushed by a treacherous wind, with Father Lyon singing hymns in the stern, then again on the island, among the fanatics, and finally as we were leaving, when the pilgrims attacked us to get on our boat, because there wasn’t enough transport for the multitude. We brought eleven standing people in our fragile Cahuilla, holding each other up, several of them drunk and five children sleeping in their mothers’ arms.
I went to Caguach with a healthy skepticism, just to witness the festival and film it, as I’d promised Daniel, but I have to admit that religious fervor is contagious, and I ended up on my knees in front of the Nazarene, giving thanks for the two pieces of fantastic news my Nini had sent. Her persecution mania leads her to compose cryptic messages, but since she writes frequently and at length, I can guess what she’s saying. The first news was that she finally recovered the big painted house where I spent my childhood, after a three-year legal battle to evict the Indian businessman, who never paid the rent and took shelter in the Berkeley laws, biased on the side of tenants. My grandmother decided to clean it up, do the most necessary repairs, and rent out rooms to university students in order to finance it and live there herself. I’m so looking forward to walking through those wonderful rooms! And the second bit of news, much more important, is about Freddy. Olympia Pettiford showed up in Berkeley, accompanied by another lady as imposing as herself, dragging Freddy between them, to hand him over into Mike O’Kelly’s care.
In Caguach Manuel and I camped in a tent, because there weren’t enough rooms to rent. They should be better prepared for the invasion of believers that’s been happening every year for more than a century. The day was damp and freezing, but the night was much worse. We were shivering, fully dressed, inside our sleeping bags, with woolen hats on, thick socks, and mittens, while rain fell on the canvas and pooled under the plastic floor. Finally we decided to zip the two sleeping bags into one and sleep together. I stuck myself to Manuel’s back, like a rucksack, and neither of us mentioned the agreement we’d made in February that I would never get into bed with him again. We slept like angels until the racket of pilgrims started up outside.
We didn’t go hungry, because there were endless food stalls selling empanadas, sausages, seafood, potatoes baked in embers, and whole lambs roasted on spits as well as Chilean desserts and cheap wine, disguised in soda bottles, because priests don’t look kindly on alcohol at religious festivals. The facilities, a string of portable toilets, were not plentiful, and after a few hours of use were disgusting. Men and boys slipped behind trees to relieve themselves, but it was a bit more complicated for the women.
On the second day Manuel had to use one of the portable toilets, and inexplicably, the door got stuck and he was trapped inside. At that moment I was wandering around the stalls lined up along the side of the church where they were selling handicrafts and bric-a-brac. I heard the commotion and went over out of curiosity, little suspecting what was going on. I saw a group of people shaking and shoving the little plastic hut to the point of almost knocking it over, while inside Manuel was shouting and pounding on the walls like he was deranged. Several people were laughing, but I realized Manuel’s anguish was that of someone buried alive. The confusion increased, until a maestro chasquilla pushed through the crowd and proceeded to calmly dismantle the lock with a penknife. Five minutes later he opened the door, and Manuel burst out like a meteorite and fell to the ground, clutching his chest and retching. Nobody was laughing anymore.
Father Lyon came over, and between the two of us we helped Manuel stand up, held him by the arms, and took a few hesitant steps in the direction of the tent. Alerted by the uproar, two carabineros came over to ask if the gentleman was ill, though they probably suspected he’d had too much to drink, because by then there were quite a few drunks staggering around. I don’t know what Manuel thought, but it was as if the devil had appeared. He pushed us away with an expression of terror, tripped, fell to his knees, and vomited a greenish froth. The carabineros tried to take control, but Father Lyon stood in front of them with the authority conferred by his saintly reputation, assuring them that it was just indigestion, and we could take care of the patient.
The priest and I took Manuel to the tent, cleaned him up with a wet facecloth, and left him to rest. He slept for three hours straight, shrunken, as if he’d been beaten. “Leave him alone, gringuita, and don’t pester him with questions,” Father Lyon ordered me before going to fulfill his duties, but I didn’t want to leave him. I stayed in the tent to watch over his sleep.
On the field in front of the church they’d set up several tables, and the priests were stationed there to hand out communion during mass. After that the procession began, with the image of the Nazarene carried on a platform by the faithful, who were singing at the tops of their lungs, while dozens of penitents dragged themselves through the mud on their knees or burned their hands with the melting wax of the candles, begging for forgiveness for their sins.
I couldn’t fulfill my promise to film the event for Daniel, because in the rough trip to Caguach I’d dropped my camera in the sea; a minor loss, considering that one woman dropped her dog. They rescued him from the water half frozen, but still breathing—another miracle of the Nazarene, as Manuel said. “Don’t you start up with your atheist ironies, Manuel, we could sink,” Father Lyon replied.
A week after the pilgrimage to Caguach, Liliana Treviño and I went to see Father Lyon, a strange, almost clandestine trip, its purpose kept secret from Manuel or Blanca. The explanations had been awkward, because I have no right to scrutinize Manuel’s past, much less behind his back. The affection I feel for him is what prompted it, an affection that keeps growing the longer I live with him. Now that Daniel’s left and winter’s settled in, we spend a lot of time alone in this doorless house, where the space is too small to keep secrets. My relationship with Manuel has become closer; he finally trusts me, and I now have full access to his papers,
his notes, his recordings, and his computer. The work has given me a pretext to rummage through his drawers. I once asked why he doesn’t have any photographs of relatives or friends, and he explained that he’s traveled a lot, has started from scratch several times in different parts of the world, and along the way he’s gradually gotten rid of much of the material and sentimental burdens most people carry around. He says that you don’t need photos to remember the people who matter to you. In his archives I haven’t found anything about the part of his past that interests me. I know he was in prison for over a year after the military coup, that he was banished to Chiloé and, in 1976, left the country; I know about his wives, his divorces, his books, but I don’t know anything about his claustrophobia or his nightmares. If I don’t find out, it’ll be impossible for me to help him, and I’ll never truly get to know him.
I get along really well with Liliana Treviño. Her personality is very much like my grandma’s—energetic, idealistic, intransigent, and passionate—but not so bossy. She arranged it so we could go to see Father Lyon discreetly in the National Health Service boat, at the invitation of the doctor, her boyfriend, who’s called Jorge Pedraza. He looks much younger than he actually is. He’s just turned forty and has been working in the archipelago for ten years. He’s separated from his wife; they’re going through drawn-out divorce proceedings and have two children, one with Down’s syndrome. He plans to marry Liliana as soon as he’s free, although she doesn’t see any reason to do so; she says her parents have lived together for twenty-nine years and raised three children without any papers.
The trip took forever, because the boat stopped in several places, and when we got to Father Lyon’s it was already four in the afternoon. Pedraza dropped us off there and carried on his normal rounds, promising to pick us up an hour and a half later to take us back to our island. The iridescently plumed rooster and the obese ram I’d seen last time were in the same places, guarding the priest’s little tiled house. The place looked different to me in the winter light; even the plastic flowers in the cemetery looked faded. He was waiting for us with tea, pastries, freshly baked bread, cheese, and ham, served by one of his neighbors, who takes care of him and orders him around as if he were a child. “Put on your little poncho and take an aspirin, priesty. I’m not here to look after sick little old men,” she instructed, complete with Chilean diminutives, while he grumbled. The priest waited till we were alone and then begged us to eat the pastries, because if we didn’t he’d have to eat them, and at his age they landed like rocks in his stomach.