A revolutionary Swede lived in their attic, and he spent copious amounts of time pounding away on a typewriter. When the coup happened, James’s house was raided and the military, led by plain-clothed secret policemen, tore the attic apart. But the Swede was nowhere to be found. They even combed the river, where they discovered the famous typewriter lying under the currents. The evening before the raid, Giovanna and James had had the presence of mind to let themselves into the attic and burn every last document found in boxes upon boxes belonging to the Swede, who they assumed was in hiding somewhere. As they incinerated the papers through the night, they skimmed over the writing. The documents made it clear that the Swede was unequivocally in the MIR, had extensive military schooling, and was one of those in charge of arming and training the Mapuche people in the nearby Indigenous community of Neltume. The documents stated in no uncertain terms that the coup had been planned far in advance, and even correctly predicted its date. It was evident that the MIR had infiltrators in the highest echelons of the Chilean military, because the documents went into minute detail about said preparations, and named CIA members who had come from the United States for the purpose of overseeing the coup.
Reading the contents of those documents before setting them ablaze cracked Giovanna’s mind wide open. She had been an apolitical jet-setter when she’d arrived only three years earlier at the age of twenty-three, had quickly fallen in love with Allende’s socialist project, and now found herself reading the top-secret documents of the most-wanted revolutionary organization in Chile.
It was later said by exiled MIRistas that the Swede managed to cross the Andes into Argentina after keeping the military at bay for days in Neltume. Once on the other side of the border, he joined the Revolutionary People’s Army. Three years later, in 1976, he was arrested by the Argentinian secret police. He remains disappeared.
On the day of the raid in 1973, James and Giovanna were thrown into the back of a secret-police car while James’s wife and daughters looked on. INTERPOL had taken over the military offices in downtown Valdivia, and Giovanna and James were driven there in order to sign a book. All foreigners had to sign on a daily basis from then on, so their movements could be tracked; not doing so was breaking the law. After they signed, James and Giovanna were informed that they were now under arrest. Giovanna had eighty-six charges laid against her, James ninety-seven. They ranged from marching to “talking politics” to signing petitions. The INTERPOL offices, now a makeshift jail, held every leftist foreigner in Valdivia. Giovanna was the only American there. The wife of the head of the secret police, obsessed with American pop culture, would visit her every day in an exquisite lamb-leather jumpsuit and get Giovanna to regale her with tales of life in the United States.
A week after their arrest, James was transferred to the Valdivia jail. He spent months there, his family paying daily visits, until his release and their expulsion to England, with orders never to come back. Giovanna was given the choice of voluntary departure with a promise never to return to Chile or military trial. She chose the former and was transferred to the Santiago Women’s Prison. There, she shared a cell with two terrified Bolivian teenagers while she awaited the airplane ticket from her father, a powerful right-wing Bay Area lawyer. Knowing it was only a matter of time before Mami fell too, Giovanna made a promise before she left:
“I will not rest until I get you guys to San Francisco.”
And she kept her word. In December 1973, four days after Giovanna managed to bring us to the States, the spot where my mother would have been hiding was raided by the military.
For some reason, every time I heard the words San Francisco, I imagined an enormous red rose. “San Francisco” fell from everyone’s lips, more often than not in conspiratorial whispers. It was the place we were going to, and I just kept thinking, “We’ll arrive onto a petal and then just kind of work our way around this huge red rose.” Who knows where, why, or how I fastened on to that image, but these were the ruminations of a six-year-old who had only ever lived in Chile, spending summers in Valparaíso and my father’s hometown of Paihuano in the Elqui Valley. We belonged to Chile. Our Spanish and Basque blood had been there for centuries, and our Indigenous blood since time immemorial. So when it was mentioned in hushed tones that we would be going to San Francisco, a city not only in another country but in another hemisphere where everyone spoke English, not just my mother and her university friends, all I could come up with was the image of a velvety red rose. It was clear that this San Francisco place was somehow safer for us than our current geographical location, so perhaps my mind conjured the image of a rose because when our house had been raided a few weeks before our departure by a dozen armed soldiers, and Ale and I had been banished to the front yard, it was our pink rose bush that had provided comfort. My spirit that time hadn’t fled to the crowns of cedars, firs, and cottonwood trees, as there were none in the vicinity of our yellow Huacho Copihue house, but had instead taken only one step out of my body to the rose bush, diving so far into the centre of its buds that the overpowering scent of those flowers had managed to provide some light in what was undeniably the darkest hour of my tender young life.
When we arrived in San Francisco, Giovanna awaited us with her brother Giancarlo. This airport was like a blasé afternoon at the plaza compared with the one in Santiago. It had been teeming with military men wielding submachine guns, and one could barely move due to the hundreds of families present, most of them in states of despair, as few were there by choice. There was so much crying and embracing going on at Santiago airport, it had seemed like a funeral. I could tell that my parents almost died of a coronary when some military men had taken us aside and forced us to put our luggage in a circle so they could count it.
“That seems like a lot of baggage. Are you moving away forever? Why do you want to leave Chile? Don’t you like our new General?”
Mami and Papi had bowed their heads, shuffled, and stuttered, and my heart had broken for the millionth time since the coup, for nothing hurt more than seeing them denigrated. They’d just shown the authorities the letter that would get us out, an invitation by the dean of Stanford University to teach there for a semester. It was a fake, of course, because although the letter had been written by the dean, there was no invitation. Upon arriving in San Francisco, Giovanna had gone to Stanford and told the dean about our situation. Needing little prompting, he had written the letter and Giovanna’s father had loaned her the money for our airplane tickets, which she never let my parents pay back. We had managed to get tourist visas to the States. The plan was to come back to Chile within six months, because Pinochet would only ever last that long, according to my parents (they would have scoffed at the notion of him staying in power for seventeen years), and when a provisional government was set up, we would return to the yellow wooden house in Huacho Copihue. We were visiting San Francisco while things sorted themselves out in Chile. Exile, a word that only existed in literary, abstract settings, such as Shakespeare’s plays, was not part of our vocabulary.
As we made our way to Giancarlo’s Russian Hill bachelor suite on Lombard, the crookedest street in the world, I realized that San Francisco really wasn’t a large rose. Oddly, it was a city whose citizens did not walk on its streets, where the few people you saw seemed to have a bubble around them, where there were no signs of life. A cold feeling seized my gut and I swallowed hard.
Not only was Giancarlo putting Giovanna up in his tiny apartment, now he was also housing a family of four. Many nights were spent around his table with Bay Area leftists. We were the first Chileans to arrive after the coup, and my parents were like celebrities. For Christmas, Joan Baez invited us over to her house, and my parents were introduced to Ginette Sagan, the regional president of Amnesty International, an Italian woman who had been in the resistance during the Nazi occupation. After that, much time was spent with her, going over names of the disappeared, the arrested, the dead.
“Give me all the names of prisoners yo
u know of German descent. I may be able to pressure the German government. Same with Chileans of French and Italian descent. Let’s try and look at every angle here.”
Lists were drawn up at her house while Ale, Joan Baez’s son—Gabriel, and I ran up and down the long, gleaming hallways, and Mami tried to avoid having a nervous breakdown every time the Ming dynasty vases shook as we dashed by.
As for Ale and me, within a week we were enrolled in school, where she adapted to kindergarten with flying colours, making fast friends and communicating without a problem, and I was known as Deaf-Mute Pee-Pee Girl in my grade one class. It wasn’t just the culture shock, lack of English, lingering trauma from the coup, friends being imprisoned, murdered, or forced to flee, or our own tenuous circumstances that made me pee my pants numerous times a day; it was also the unfortunate reality of the buses. The night before our first day of school (“It’ll be so much fun!” my mother had promised while jumping up and down and clapping her hands with forced glee), we’d been watching the evening news. Boston images of black and Latino kids cowering on yellow school buses as white people threw stones at them, breaking windows and denting the vehicles, dominated the TV screen. Mami explained that a thing called the “civil rights movement” had taken place in the United States, and that it was very very good. In fact, right here in the Bay Area there was a group called the Black Panthers that had taken up arms in order to defend themselves from police brutality. On top of that, they provided free breakfasts for Oakland kids.
“Isn’t that great?” Mami asked.
As a result of this civil rights movement, another thing called “affirmative action” had been set in motion. What this meant for us was that a yellow bus just like the one on TV would pick us up and, along with other Latino and black kids, take us to an upper-class neighbourhood where white kids went to school. Evidently, we brown and black kids were the first to attend this white school.
My head was reeling.
First of all, I had never heard the word Latino until I got to San Francisco, which was looking to me more and more like the thorns of a rose rather than the petally part. Apparently I was a Latino, but I had no clue what that was. Then there was the part about ducking rocks. I hoped I’d be able to get out of the way of the onslaught and not be hit on the head and pass the rest of my life as a vegetable, saliva dribbling down my chin. There had been a kid like that in Huacho Copihue, and also a couple of kids with polio, who walked with their collapsed legs in braces. At least my legs would probably be spared in the rock attack.
In any case, my day began with my peeing my pants on the way to school, while the bus stopped at the ghettos and picked up the brown and black kids and then made its way to the wealthy white neighbourhood, where, in spite of having lost control of my bladder, I was stolidly prepared for the angry white people waiting with rocks. Luckily, this never happened. While at school, I peed my pants repeatedly, mainly because I didn’t know how to ask where the bathroom was, and also because I was too shy to leave my desk and have everybody see that I’d peed my pants. A vicious circle it was; a Catch-22 situation.
Ale would skip into her classroom and disappear until the end of the day, arriving home dry as a bone, licking a lollipop given to her by her new friends, chattering away about the jungle gym and tube slide in the playground, unlike anything she’d ever seen before. I’d be soaking wet and reeking of rancid pee, only to find Mario, my current crush, Giovanna and Giancarlo’s twenty-year-old brother, sitting at the table listening to yet another story about how many children had disappeared in Chile or how Kissinger had ordered another ten union leaders to be shot in the firing squad of Chacabuco concentration camp.
Mario was a garbageman and I found that supremely sexy. So I drew a picture of him throwing garbage into a truck and gave it to him. It was my first love letter. But not my first declaration of love. That had been in Huacho Copihue two years earlier, when I was four and, fortunately, not drenched and stinking of stale piss, but rather of Coral cologne dabbed on my wrists. I had donned my white patent-leather shoes, white knee socks, pink frilly dress with white lace accents given to me by my great-aunt Charo, and the necklace my abuelita Carmen had helped me make with the buttons from her formidable sewing kit—really more of a treasure chest—with its bottomless arsenal of porcelain, wooden, mother-of-pearl, and bejewelled buttons.
My first love was called Manuel and he was a full ten years older than me. But age was just a number and I knew deep down that he loved me. He just needed to see me first. Really really see me. At fourteen, Manuel was already a man, getting up early and going to work at the market, where he sold kitchenwares. He left the house across the way at the crack of dawn, loaded down with pots, pans, and kettles that hung from his body on ropes, just like Ekeko, the Aymara god of abundance. He clinked and clanked his way along the dirt road, holes in the elbows of his lambswool sweater, the knees of his burlap pants worn to a shine. Thick jet-black hair combed to the side, his copper skin glowed in the pouring rain, the downpour cascading from his prominent cheekbones, for Valdivia was smack in the middle of the Chilean temperate rainforest, and rain was the order of almost every other winter day.
Manuel had proven himself to be a god many times over. First, there was the fact that he was a kitchenware vendor at the market. And then there was the bike. My man worked so hard that he had been able to buy himself a vehicle. It was the first bicycle in Huacho Copihue, and its introduction was a coup—in the good sense of the word, like the miniskirt being the fashion coup of the sixties. I’d read all about that in Paula, Chile’s most popular women’s magazine, which featured, among other things, a satirical column by Isabel Allende called “How to Civilize Your Troglodyte.” To top things off, Manuel actually knew how to manoeuvre the bike, and if the butterflies in my stomach weren’t already out of control, then witnessing him mount his new vehicle and ride it in a little circle around the dirt road made me almost shit my pants with excitement. I watched him from my bedroom window as every kid in the lane ran around shrieking and pointing, demanding to have a turn. He was the biggest kid on the block, although he of course was no child, providing for his family at the tender age of fourteen, being the god of abundance—abundance of pots, pans, and kettles, abundance of beauty, and now abundance of organizational skills. A union leader in the making!
Just as I thought he couldn’t get any sexier, my beloved outdid himself: he lined the kids up and let each of them have a turn, helping them keep their balance.
“That’s good! You can do it, Jana! You can do it!” he called encouragement in his tenor, a twinkle in his tender, almond-shaped eyes.
This was it. Spurred on by his kindness, I’d declare my love in front of all the children, even the mothers and grandmothers who hung out of their windows and leaned lethargically in their doorways, brooms in hands, aprons around waists, the odd gold tooth flashing in their smiles as they looked on at the bicycle miracle, the one performed by Manuel, the god of everything.
The outfit I modelled had never been worn, only to be turned out on special occasions and solely with my mother’s permission. If declaring one’s love to the love of one’s life didn’t count as a special occasion, then I was at a loss to know what did.
I emerged from my house, Aphrodite floating on my shell, on tiptoe, arms slightly raised, a Swan Lake prima ballerina. Floating my way to the centre of the universe, I was led by chirping chucao birds, rainbows, and winged cupids strumming golden harps, fireworks lighting up the sky above. Manuel came into sharp focus, and everything else—the kids, the leaning women, the dirt road, the brightly coloured houses and grey sky—dissolved into the background, washed out by his overpowering light, the children’s shouts reduced to static in the presence of Manuel’s tummy-tickling voice. I landed next to the bike. His obsidian eyes found mine.
Crouching, he rested his hand on my shoulder and asked, “Carmencita, do you want a turn?”
His palm had the force of a lightning bolt that turned me
into stone. Motionless, unable to nod or shake my head, tongue-tied too, I was a statue, my pounding heart in my ears the only sign I was still alive. I ordered my mouth to open and proclaim the rehearsed words, “I love you,” so that he could answer that he loved me too, that he had always loved me but hadn’t been able to appreciate me in all my stupendous goddess glory until that moment. But stubborn as a mule my mouth was, and my lips remained clamped tighter than a clam. Never fear, I thought, as his eyes continued to probe mine, the words will come out and it will be like a surprise wedding, what with the women and children of the barrio bearing witness and me in my white lace undies. A bouquet will be improvised and I’ll throw it and perhaps Jana, my best friend, will catch it and she’ll get married next.
“Do you want a turn, Carmencita?” Manuel, the god of lightning bolts, repeated.
I nodded, my tongue a useless old shoe. His hand moved down to my waist. The other followed. The god of abundance of lightning bolts and winged creatures he was; the butterflies in my stomach went wild, multiplying to millions in moments, the cupids’ wings fluttered, the strumming of their harps invading the chambers of my galloping heart, and I was seized by a distinct, pleasurable new sensation similar to peeing. He lifted me up, the brown muscles in his forearms flexing, and placed me ever so gingerly on the seat, while my heart exploded in my chest and my insides liquefied.
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