The adventure began with a personal ad we vampires picked out of hundreds of similar ones:
Sugar daddy seeks daughter: white businessman, 54-years-old, paternal, sincere, affectionate, seeks young girl of any race, small, sweet, very uninhibited and comfortable in the role of little girl with her daddy, for simple, direct, mutual pleasure, for one night and, if more, I can be generous. Serious replies only, no jokes or homosexuals. Photo essential.
We sent the man a photo of Debbie, the shortest of the three, at the age of thirteen, riding a bicycle, and made a date with him in a hotel in Berkeley that we knew because Sarah had worked there in the summer.
Debbie got rid of her black clothes and deathly makeup and showed up with a shot of booze in her gut for bravery, disguised as a little girl with a school skirt, white blouse, knee socks, and ribbons in her hair. The man was a bit startled to see she was older than in the photo, but he was in no position to complain, since he was ten years older than he’d claimed in the ad. He explained to Debbie that her role consisted of being obedient and his was to give her orders and punish her, but not to hurt her—just to mend her ways, that’s a good father’s obligation. And what’s the obligation of a good daughter? To be affectionate with her daddy. What’s your name? It doesn’t matter, you’ll be Candy to me. Come here, Candy, sit here on your daddy’s lap and tell him if you moved your bowels today, it’s very important, sweetie, it’s fundamental to good health. Debbie said she was thirsty, and he ordered a soda and a sandwich from room service. While he described the benefits of an enema, she bought time examining the room with feigned childish curiosity, sucking her thumb.
Meanwhile Sarah and I were waiting in the hotel parking lot the ten minutes we’d agreed, and then we sent in Rick Laredo, who went up to the room and knocked on the door. “Room service!” announced Laredo, according to the instructions I’d given him. As soon as they opened the door, he burst into the room with his gun in hand.
Laredo, who we’d nicknamed the psychopath, because he bragged of torturing animals, had imposing muscles and gang paraphernalia, but he’d only used the gun for intimidating the underage clientele he sold drugs to and getting kicked out of Berkeley High. Hearing our plan to extort pedophiles, he got scared—such misdemeanors didn’t figure in his limited repertoire—but he decided to help us because he wanted to impress the vampires with his bravery. He gave himself courage with several shots of tequila and some crack. When he kicked open the hotel room door and burst in with a demented expression and a clatter of heels, keys, and chains, aiming with two hands, like he’d seen in the movies, the frustrated sugar daddy collapsed into the only armchair, curled up in the fetal position. Laredo hesitated—he was so nervous he’d forgotten the next step—but Debbie had a better memory.
The victim, sobbing in fright, might not have heard even half of what she said to him, but some of her words—federal crime, child pornography, attempted rape of a minor, years in prison—had the proper impact. For the sum of two hundred dollars cash he could avoid these problems, Debbie told him. The guy swore by what was most sacred that he didn’t have it, making Laredo so upset that he might have shot him if Debbie hadn’t thought to call me on my cell phone; I was the mastermind of the gang. That’s when there was another knock at the door: a hotel waiter with the sandwich and soda. Debbie took the tray at the threshold and signed the bill, blocking the spectacle of a man in his underpants sniveling in the armchair and another in black leather sticking a pistol in his mouth.
I went up to the sugar daddy’s room and took charge of the situation with a calmness obtained from a joint. I told the man to get dressed and assured him that nothing was going to happen to him if he cooperated. I drank the soda and took two bites of the sandwich, then ordered the victim to accompany us without a sound; it would not be in his interest to make a scene. I took the unhappy wretch by the arm and we walked four floors, with Laredo at his back, down the stairs, since we might run into someone in the elevator. We pushed him inside my grandmother’s Volkswagen, which I’d borrowed without asking and was driving without a license, and took him to an ATM, where he withdrew the ransom money. He handed over the money, and we got back into the car and took off. The man stayed there in the street, sighing with relief and, I suppose, cured of his vice of playing daddy. The whole operation took thirty-five minutes, and the surge of adrenaline was as fantastic as the fifty dollars we each pocketed.
What most shocked my Nini was my lack of scruples. In the e-mails that came and went at the rate of a hundred or more a day, she found not the tiniest inkling of remorse or fear of consequences, just the barefaced cheek of a natural-born hustler. By then we’d repeated this method of extortion three times, stopping only because we got fed up with Rick Laredo, his gun, his clingy poodle devotion, and his threats to kill me or denounce us if I wouldn’t agree to be his girlfriend. His feelings were running high, and he could lose his head at any moment and murder someone in an outburst of rage. Besides, he thought we should give him a bigger percentage of our profits, because if something went wrong, he would go to prison for several years, while we’d be tried in juvenile court. “I’ve got the most important thing: the pistol,” he told us. “No, Rick, I’ve got the most important thing: a brain,” I answered. He held the barrel of his gun against my forehead, but I pushed it aside with one finger, and we three vampires turned our backs on him and walked away, laughing. That’s how our profitable little pedophile business ended, but I didn’t get rid of Laredo, who kept begging so insistently that I ended up hating him.
During another inspection of my room, my Nini found more drugs, bags of pills, and a thick gold chain the source of which she couldn’t construe from the messages she and Snow White had intercepted. Sarah had stolen it from her mother, and I was hiding it while we tried to figure out a way of selling it. Sarah’s mother was a generous source of income for us, because she worked for a big corporation, earned a lot of money, and liked to shop; she also traveled, came home late, was easy to fool, and didn’t notice when something went missing. She boasted of being her daughter’s best friend and that Sarah told her everything, though she actually had no idea what her daughter’s life was like, and hadn’t even noticed how malnourished and anemic she was. Sometimes she invited us to her house to drink beer and smoke weed with her, because it was safer than doing it on the streets, as she said. I couldn’t understand why Sarah spread the rumor of a cruel stepfather, when she had such an enviable mother; compared to that lady, my grandmother was a monster.
My Nini lost what little tranquillity she had, convinced that her granddaughter would end up facedown in the streets of Berkeley among drug addicts and homeless people or in jail with the juvenile delinquents Snow White hadn’t managed to save. She’d read that part of the brain develops late, which is why teenagers are so deranged, and why it’s useless to try to reason with them. She concluded that I was stuck at the stage of magical thinking, as she herself had been when she was trying to communicate with the spirit of my Popo and fell into the hands of the psychic in Oakland. O’Kelly, her faithful friend and confidant, tried to calm her down with the argument that I was being swept up by the tsunami of my hormones, like all teenagers, but that I was basically a decent kid and I’d eventually be okay, as long as they could protect me from myself and from the dangers of the world, while implacable nature took its course. My Nini agreed; at least I wasn’t bulimic, like Sarah, and didn’t cut myself with razor blades, like Debbie, and wasn’t pregnant, or infected with hepatitis or AIDS.
That and much more Snow White and my grandma had found out, thanks to the vampires’ indiscreet electronic communications and Norman’s diabolical abilities. My Nini struggled between the obligation to tell my father everything, which might have unpredictable repercussions, and her desire to help me quietly, as Mike suggested, but she didn’t get the chance to make up her mind; the whirlwind of events swept her aside.
Among the most important people on this island are the two carabine
ros—they call them pacos—Laurencio Cárcamo and Humilde Garay, in charge of keeping the peace, with whom I’m good friends because I’m training their dog. Before, people didn’t like the pacos because they were very brutal during the dictatorship, but in the twenty years since the country returned to democracy, they’ve been gradually recovering the confidence and esteem of the citizens. In the time of the dictatorship Laurencio Cárcamo was a child, and Humilde Garay hadn’t been born yet. On the official posters of the Carabineros Corps of Chile, the uniformed men appear with magnificent German shepherds, but here we have a mutt called Livingston, in honor of Chile’s most famous soccer player, who’s now ancient. The puppy just turned six months old, the ideal age to start his training, but I’m afraid with me he’s only going to learn to sit, shake a paw, and play dead. The carabineros asked me to teach him to attack and to find bodies, but the first requires aggression and the second patience, two opposite characteristics. Forced to choose, they opted for finding bodies, since there’s nobody to attack here, and people do tend to disappear under the rubble when there’s an earthquake.
The method, which I’ve never actually put into practice but read about in a manual, consists of soaking a rag in cadaverine, a fetid essence of rotting meat, giving it to the dog to smell before hiding it and then getting him to find it. “This cadaverine stuff might be a bit complicated, young lady. Couldn’t we use rotten chicken guts?” Humilde Garay suggested, but when we did, the dog led us straight to Aurelio Ñancupel’s kitchen in the Tavern of the Dead. I keep trying with different improvised methods, in front of the jealous eyes of Fahkeen, who doesn’t like other animals on principle. I’ve spent hours at the post on this pretext drinking instant coffee and listening to the fascinating stories of these men at the service of their nation, as they describe themselves.
The post is a little cement hut painted white and green, the police colors, and with the fence decorated with strings of razor clam shells. The carabineros speak very oddly: they say negative and affirmative instead of “no, no” and “sí, sí,” as the Chilotes do; I’m a lady, and Livingston’s a canine, also at the service of the nation. Laurencio Cárcamo, who has the higher rank, was stationed in a tiny village way out in the province of Última Esperanza—Last Hope—where he had to amputate the leg of a man trapped in a landslide. “With a handsaw, young lady, and without anesthesia. Hard liquor was all we had.”
Humilde Garay, who strikes me as the most suitable handler for Livingston, is very good-looking. He resembles that actor from the Zorro movies, what’s his name? Can’t remember. There’s an army of women after him, from the occasional tourists seduced by his presence to persistent girls who travel from the mainland to see him, but Humilde Garay is doubly serious, first because of the uniform he wears and second because he’s an evangelical Christian. Manuel had told me that Garay saved some Argentinean mountain climbers who were lost in the Andes. The rescue patrols had given them up for dead and were getting ready to abandon the search when Garay intervened. He simply marked a point on the map with his pencil; they sent a helicopter, and in that very spot they found the climbers, half frozen but still alive. “Affirmative, young lady, the location of the presumed victims from our sister republic was adequately indicated on the Michelin map,” he answered, when I asked him about it, and showed me a press cutting from 2007 with the news and a photo of the colonel who gave him the order: “If noncommissioned officer on active service Humilde Garay Ranquileo can find water in the subsoil, he can find five Argentineans on the surface,” says the colonel in the interview. It turns out that when the carabineros need to dig a well in any part of the country, they consult Garay by radio, and he marks the exact spot on a map and the depth they’ll have to go to reach water and then sends them a photocopy of the map by fax. These are the sorts of things I should write down, because one day they might be useful to my Nini as raw material for her stories.
These two Chilean carabineros remind me of Sergeant Walczak in Berkeley: they’re tolerant of human weakness. The two cells in the post, one for ladies and the other for gentlemen, as the letters on the bars indicate, are mostly used to accommodate drunks when it’s raining and impossible to get them home.
The last three years of my life, from the age of sixteen to nineteen, have been so explosive they almost destroyed my Nini, who summed it up in a single sentence: “I’m glad your Popo is no longer in this world to see what you’ve become, Maya.” I almost answered that if my Popo were still in this world, I wouldn’t have become what I am, but I shut up in time. It wasn’t fair to blame him for my behavior.
One day in November 2006, fourteen months after my Popo’s death, the county hospital phoned at four in the morning to notify the Vidal family that Maya Vidal had arrived by ambulance in the emergency ward and at that moment was in surgery. The only one home was my grandmother, who managed to communicate with Mike O’Kelly to ask him to locate my father before racing to the hospital. I’d snuck out that night to go to a rave in a closed-down factory, where Sarah and Debbie were waiting for me. I couldn’t take the Volkswagen, because my Nini had crashed it again and it was at the garage, so I took my old bike, which was a bit rusty and had bad brakes.
We vampires knew the bouncer, a guy with a sinister look and the brain of a chicken, who let us into the party without asking our ages. The factory was vibrating with the pandemonium of the music and the crowd, disjointed puppets, some dancing or jumping up and down, others stuck to the floor in catatonic states, nodding along to the beat. Drink till you’re off your face, smoke what you can’t inject, fuck whoever’s handy and without any inhibitions, that’s what it was about. The smell, the smoke, and the heat were so intense that we had to go outside into the street to breathe. When we arrived I got into the mood with a cocktail of my own invention—gin, vodka, whiskey, tequila, and Coca-Cola—and smoked a pipe of marijuana mixed with cocaine and a few drops of LSD that hit me like dynamite. I soon lost sight of my friends, who dissolved into the frenetic mass. I danced on my own, kept drinking, let a few guys fondle me. . . . I don’t remember the details or what happened afterward. Two days later, when the effect of the tranquilizers they gave me in the hospital began to dissipate, I found out I’d been hit by a car on the way out of the rave, completely high, on my bike, with no lights or brakes. I flew through the air and landed several yards away, in some bushes at the edge of the highway. Swerving to try to avoid hitting me, the driver crashed his car into a pole and got a concussion.
I was in the hospital for twelve days with a broken arm, a dislocated jaw, and the skin of my whole body aflame because I’d landed in a patch of poison oak, and for another twenty days I was a captive in my own house, with metal rods and screws in my arm, guarded by my grandmother and Snow White, who relieved her for a few hours so she could get some rest. My Nini believed the accident had been a desperate measure of my Popo’s to protect me. “The proof is that you’re still alive and you didn’t break your leg, because then you wouldn’t be able to go back to playing soccer,” she told me. Deep down, I think my grandma was grateful, because she didn’t have to tell my dad what she’d found out about me; the police took care of that.
My Nini took leave from work for those weeks and stationed herself at my side with the zeal of a prison guard. When Sarah and Debbie finally showed up to visit me—they hadn’t dared show their faces after the accident—she threw them out of the house with fishwife screams, but she took pity on Rick Laredo, who arrived with a bouquet of wilted tulips and a broken heart. I refused to see him, and she had to listen to his troubles in the kitchen for more than two hours. “That boy sent you a message, Maya: he swore to me that he’s never tortured animals and he wants you to please give him another chance,” she told me later. My grandma has a weakness for those who suffer for love. “If he comes back, Nini, tell him that even if he were a vegetarian and devoted himself to saving tuna fish, I never want to see him again,” I answered.
The painkillers and the shock of having been
discovered broke my will, and I confessed to my Nini everything she saw fit to ask me in endless interrogations, even though she already knew, because thanks to that rodent Norman’s lessons, there were no longer any secrets in my life.
“I don’t think you’re evil by nature, Maya, or completely stupid, though you do all you can to seem it.” My Nini sighed. “How many times have we discussed the dangers of drugs? How could you extort money from those men at gunpoint!”
“They were depraved, perverted pedophiles, Nini. They deserved to be screwed. Not that we screwed them exactly, but you know what I mean.”
“And who do you think you are taking the law into your own hands? Batman? They could have killed you!”
“Nothing happened to me, Nini—”
“How can you say nothing happened to you! Look at yourself! What am I going to do with you, Maya?” And she burst into tears.
“Forgive me, Nini. Please don’t cry. I swear I’ve learned my lesson. The accident made me see things clearly.”
“I don’t believe you one damn bit. Swear to me on the memory of your Popo!”
My repentance was genuine, I was really scared, but it didn’t do me any good; as soon as the doctor discharged me, my dad took me to an academy for unmanageable teenagers in Oregon. I didn’t go along willingly; he had to get a cop friend of Susan’s to kidnap me, a hulk with the face of an Easter Island moai, who helped him in this despicable task. My Nini hid so she wouldn’t have to see me dragged away like an animal to the slaughterhouse, howling that nobody loved me, that they’d all rejected me, why didn’t they just kill me once and for all, before I did it myself.