“I’m so happy,” she said in bed. “More than happy. I feel so relieved.”
“What a gift.” Cleon clicked off the light and rolled toward her. “So tell me again, who’s the hottest grandfather in Seattle?”
“I believe that’s you.”
He kissed her neck. “I’m not convinced.”
She laughed. “You can’t possibly be looking for a repeat of last night.”
“No. Yeah. Sort of.”
“Sort of.”
Well…” His fingers ran through her hair. “Maybe a little slower this time?”
Everyone is bruised and broken. You’re all marked with burns from electrodes and cigarettes. You’ve been spit on, pissed on, even ejaculated on. Every one of you has stared down the muzzle of a revolver and heard an empty click. You’re all starving on a diet of hatred, rage, pain, grief, fear, distress, frustration, resignation, powerlessness, bitterness, and disappointment.
A portion of disappointment is reserved for yourself. You of all people. You’re the grandson of Jewish refugees. The nephew of a concentration camp survivor. A journalist reporting on human suffering. You looked at the grounds of Pisagua with your own eyes, and still you didn’t believe your own country capable of such cruelty.
The sadistic glee of the interrogators doesn’t surprise or shock you anymore. When you think you’ve heard every atrocious act that could possibly be committed upon a human being, one of your mates comes back from interrogation with something new. Something worse. Something more heinous. Your mind has no more ability to process the accounts. You listen but you don’t hear. You open your arms, but the door to your palace stays closed and barricaded. It only has room for one.
You, Carlos Luis Tholet.
Thou shalt survive by building a castle in the sky with diamonds.
They’re calling you.
It’s time to go.
…
…
…
And you’re gone.
“What’s with the dogs?” Jude said, their first morning in Santiago.
Everywhere he looked, from his vantage point at the outdoor café, he saw dogs. Dozens of them. Grouped on street corners like Sharks and Jets. Sitting daintily at crosswalks, waiting for the light to change. Prowling beneath tables for crumbs. Snoozing under benches. Flirting with passers-by. Curled belly-up in puddles of sunshine.
Alex smiled as he stirred his coffee. “I arranged them for you. You like?”
“They’re all strays?” Tej asked. “They just live here?”
“Close to half a million.”
“They’re called quiltro,” Cleon said. “Or perros callejeros.”
“It was like this when you lived here?” Jude asked.
“It’s always been like this.”
“They’re everyone’s pets,” Alex said.
His smile was just short of beatific. In the short time knowing him, Jude learned his brother was something of a Dr. Dolittle. Not just a skilled veterinarian but a veritable animal whisperer. Especially with dogs. He’d charmed the grouchy Walter in six seconds and Jude would lay money that if Alex were introduced to Samson, Mireille Khoury would be out of a pet. By the end of breakfast, no less than five quiltros were piled around the legs of his chair. He leaned back in his seat, arms crossed as he surveyed the plaza, and a little bird flew in and perched on the chair back. Alex turned his head, expression unfazed as he said, “Hello.”
The bird ruffled its feathers, as if showing off a new dress.
“¿Qué onda?”
The bird gave a short cheep, then flew away.
The three couples made loose plans, with events they’d do together—exhibits and museums and memorials—and excursions that were more private. Val’s sole request was to go to La Chascona, home of Chile’s beloved poet, Pablo Neruda. Alex had his date to see his old apartment. Cleon wanted to go to the Jewish Cemetery. Penny wanted to visit the old house in La Reina. Tej just wanted to explore the food.
Jude didn’t know what he wanted. His whole life, Chile had loomed large in the background. A distant, mythical land of beauty and violence. Now that he was here, he wondered if the romance of the family narrative had gotten the better of him. The city was beautiful and he couldn’t look at the surrounding mountains without his mouth falling open. Yet he felt strangely ambivalent. A little detached and lost.
Maybe I’m just jet-lagged.
“Let’s go to the Villa,” Cleon said after breakfast the first morning.
“The Villa Grimaldi?” Jude said. “Now?”
“Now. If I don’t go straight back to La Reina, it’ll be looming over the whole trip like the angel of death. Let’s just go and get it over with, and then go see the house.”
What Jude assumed would be the culmination of the trip ended up being the overture. They’d rented an SUV that could seat all six comfortably. Tej drove east out of the city with Jude navigating.
“I don’t recognize anything,” Penny said over and over, craning out her window or ducking to look across through Cleon’s side. “It’s so built up. La Reina was basically still a ranch when we lived there. Our street wasn’t even paved. Now it’s a suburb.”
Tej turned off Tobalaba onto José Arrieta. A high, red brick wall loomed up on the passenger side, broken by an arched entrance, fit with a heavy, grilled door. The number 8401 at the apex. A large sign to the side:
Museo De Sitio — Parque por la Paz
VILLA GRIMALDI
Ex Centro Clandestino de Detención Tortura y Extermino
Lugar de memoria y promoción
De los Derechos Humanos
“Look at that,” Cleon said under his breath. “Just look at that.”
He was leaving the parking lot before everyone was out of the car, his uneven gait barely stopping to look both ways before crossing the street. When they caught up to him, he was paused in the arched gate, a hand on the concrete. A gladiator entering the arena.
With his cane and Panama hat, he looked like Hemingway, Jude thought. He reached for his phone to take a picture but stopped. It seemed cheap. Irreverent. Today wasn’t a social media post. He made a sudden decision to do this the old-fashioned way. Be mindful and present and conscious about taking it all in. These would be his first memories of Chile. He’d pay attention to the act of remembering.
“Vámos.” Cleon walked into the courtyard. An open, green space spread out before them, bisected with paths. Birds darted and swooped among the trees and flower beds.
“This way,” Cleon said, heading straight ahead, toward a tall, red tower in a corner of the park. “That’s it.”
Val fell into step beside Jude. “That’s where he was imprisoned?” she said quietly.
“I have no idea,” Jude said, looking around.
“They were all locked in a fucking tower?” Tej murmured.
“Look,” Cleon said, pointing to a swimming pool, lined with pale blue tiles. Leaves and debris collected in its corners. “Children of the DINA would come swim in the evenings. You could hear them shouting and laughing from the cells.”
Jude stared, imagining the surreal juxtaposition. The screams of the tortured against the sound of kids splashing and horsing around. Sick, broken prisoners locked up in their own filth and misery, while healthy children dove into cool, clear water.
They walked closer to the tower, which rose up like a squared barn silo. A plaque nearby informed it was a replica of the original tower, torn down in the 1980s in an attempt to cover up the atrocities. The tower was painted red with white trim. Each side had three narrow windows at the top.
It made no sense to Jude.
“How did they fit all the prisoners there?” he asked Cleon.
“They didn’t,” Cleon said. “This was where the torture took place.”
“Oh.”
At the base of the tower were two concrete steps leading up to an opened double door.
“Are you going in?” Jude asked.
A foot on the step, Cleon looked up to the top of the tower. He peered within at the exhibits. “No,” he said, then smiled at Jude. “I choose not to go this time.”
He turned to face the park. Their party had split off and was meandering through the sights. Val and Penny stood together in the park’s exact center. A circular plaza built around a fountain. The water jets were turned off, revealing the inlaid mosaic flower.
“Is it recognizable?” Jude asked.
“The original villa is gone,” Cleon said. “See where the ground is excavated over there and the steps are exposed? It was right there. The cells were inside old wine cellars and outbuildings. Or new ones were built freestanding.”
All around the dry fountain, tourists sat on the low wall, everyone quiet and contemplative. The open space was filled with a hallowed yet peaceful sadness.
Yes, it said. Yes, this happened. Sit a moment and think about it. Give it your attention.
Cleon took Jude’s arm and they continued on the path, walking toward the corner opposite the tower. A pair of heavy iron gates were set into the brick perimeter wall. They were closed. A plaque told visitors this was the main entrance of the Villa compound. Prisoners were driven through and dumped out here. The gates were permanently locked now. A large concrete sculpture of a leaf blocked the wide, black doors, ensuring they could never be opened again.
“Is it a leaf?” Jude walked around to get a different vantage. “Or a flame?”
Cleon poked at the edge of the sculpture with his cane. “Point is it’s growing. Not dying.” He pushed back his hat and looked around, taking it all in.
“You all right, Papi?”
“I don’t know what I am.”
“Same.”
“It’s surreal. And strange. Seeing it out here in the sunshine. Rearranged and made beautiful. It doesn’t match my memory, which I guess is ideal.”
“You had the right idea, starting out with this.”
Cleon drew a deep breath and held it for an unusually long time. Then exhaled slow. “Remember when Dr. Mezeritz said we may never learn the whole truth? That the best we’ll get is a story made from pieces of truth?”
“A story that’s the closest thing to the truth. A story we can believe in. I remember.”
Cleon nodded, eyes narrowed at the giant leaf blocking the compound gates. “I believe you were born here,” he said. “I believe we were here at the same time. Me and Clementina Vilaró. We never saw each other, but we heard each other in the night. I believe this. I was transferred here from the Estadio because it was necessary. It was important I be present when you were born.”
His gaze met Jude’s then. “I have nothing to back that up. I couldn’t take it to court. But it’s the story I’ve assembled from bits of truth. And I like it. It feels good in my heart.”
Jude blinked, pressed his mouth hard and fought to hold himself together.
“Everything that happened to me,” Cleon said, “happened so you could be my boy.” He took Jude in his burly arms and held him tight. “Do you hear me, hueón? It happened for a reason.”
Jude nodded.
“Everything happened so you could be my boy.” He ran his cheek along Jude’s hair. “¿Sómos compañeros?”
“Compañeros,” Jude whispered. “Por siempre.”
Cleon kissed his face. “Let’s go see the rest of it.”
They walked by a huge cube made from plates of copper and balanced on an edge. Inside, Tej and Alex stood looking at cases displaying large pieces of rusted metal.
“Railroad ties,” Alex said. His arms were crossed tight, his face a closed fist. “They were used to weigh down victims thrown out of airplanes into the Pacific Ocean.”
“Christ,” Jude said, holding his own sides.
“This was always my recurring nightmare. All my life I had bad dreams about my parents being thrown out of planes. It’s why I hate flying so much.”
Jude half smiled, recalling how Alex had unapologetically knocked back two Xanax during the flight safety talk and was out cold as they taxied to the runway.
“Telling you though, soon as their remains were identified and I knew for certain they weren’t rotting away on the ocean floor, the dreams stopped.”
Jude kept holding his sides as he read about María Ugarte, one of the many murdered victims who disengaged from their deadly anchors and washed up on Chile’s shores, revealing another layer in Pinochet’s sadistic terror. Other dissidents were thrown from planes inland. Even today, women were searching the Andes Mountains and the Atacama Desert, looking for remains of their disappeared ones. Even today, they were still finding fragments of bones and teeth and bringing them in to be analyzed, hopefully identified.
There but for the grace, Jude thought, freeing an arm to slide it around his father’s hunched shoulders.
“Te quiero, hueón,” Cleon said, not looking up from the display case.
Val put her head inside. “Here you are. Come see something.”
One section of the park was a rose garden memorializing the women of the Villa Grimaldi. A riot of white, red, pink and orange making concentric circles around a bubbling fountain. Stuck into the ground between blooms were oval markers, each with a woman’s name. After visiting Chile a few years ago, Alex had sponsored one for his mother. Val and Penny found it by a cluster of bright coral blooms, the name etched in pretty script:
MARÍA CLEMENTINA VILARÓ
“Would you look at that,” Cleon said.
Alex crouched down and brushed off the surface of the marker, digging the dirt out of the letters. Jude stayed still. Feeling he should be helping. Feeling it wasn’t his place. Feeling absolutely no connection to the name or the memorial.
He just felt like shit.
“A clementine is an orange,” Tej said.
“Hm?”
“Nothing, I’m just making an absurd connection to tangerine trees.”
Jude took his hand. “Come walk with me.”
Fingers twined, they ambled toward a memorial wall etched with the names of victims, offerings of red carnations heaped beneath. They kept holding hands as they moved along the tributes, and Jude could feel gazes follow. Eyes darted off as he looked up. Sideways glances lined with either benign curiosity or defensive hostility. One middle-aged man curled his upper lip and rolled his eyes as he looked away.
I was born here, Jude thought, his fingers tight between Tej’s. Right here. In this place. Think what you want, glare all you want, but I’m standing here with my lover. How you feel about it won’t make us lose any sleep tonight. We both survived things you can’t imagine. Pull any shit and my father will bludgeon you with his prosthetic leg.
The Tholets don’t come to play.
“Whatever you’re smiling about,” Tej said. “Don’t stop.”
They went into a freestanding building, its walls hung with sketches made by former detainees.
“Wow,” Tej said softly. “They’re like the ones your father drew.”
The sketches were on blank paper, lined paper, scraps of paper and one on what looked like a brown paper bag. They were penciled, charcoaled and ball-point penned. A prisoner tied spread eagle to a metal bedspring. A guard sitting with a machine gun at the end of a long hall of closed, bolted doors. Four men huddled in a space that could barely hold one. Five men blindfolded and shackled, trudging in a snake, each with a hand on the compañero ahead of him while machine-gunned guards looked on. A prisoner comforting a cellmate in a corner. A room with a bunkbed, a chair bolted to the floor, and a long table with instruments of all manner of torture.
“God,” Jude said. “I never doubted his stories. Never. But seeing these… They’re the same. They’re all
the same things he drew.”
“It confirms everything.”
“It was real. Remember he talked about people being born storytellers. Always embellishing or filling in the gaps. But he drew it just the way it happened. They all did.”
“He should…” Tej shook his head. “Forget it, I have no right to say what he should do.”
“He should send his sketches to be included here?”
Tej went on shaking his head. “Never mind.”
Jude slid his hand along the back of Tej’s neck. “I always mind.”
They were quiet on the drive to the old house. In the far back of the SUV, Alex had his head on Val’s shoulder, his eyes closed. In the middle row, Penny and Cleon held hands, looking out their respective windows. From the front passenger seat, Jude reached behind, his hand wanting in. Fifteen fingers tangled and squeezed.
“Everybody for to hold hands,” Val said softly, like a Russian countess. It was a little mannerism that Jude was growing fond of. He smiled at his sister-in-law. The corners of her eyes and her nose crinkled back.
“Is this it?” Tej said, leaning on the wheel.
“Buena Vista,” Cleon said. “The world’s most boring street name.”
Penny laughed under her breath. “It has sidewalks. Oh my God, it has blocks.”
“Wait, Jude, this isn’t right.”
“Number twenty-one,” Jude said. “This is it. It’s on the wall.”
“But we were the cul de sac.”
“Not anymore,” Tej said, pulling to the curb. “As Tolkien says, the road goes ever on.”
Out toward the mountains, Buena Vista continued onward. The Tholet’s double lot of property now sat on a defined street block, walled on all four sides. A miniature estate in the suburbs.
“Oh my God,” Penny said, stepping from the car. She turned in a slow circle. “It’s so…”
“Changed,” Cleon said, holding onto Tej’s arm as he got out.
Penny pointed across the street. “Look. Ysidro’s old workshop. It’s a café.”
A Scarcity of Condors Page 35