Beyond the Ties of Blood

by Florencia Mallon

  “This is different. Come with me right now, I’ll explain on the way. You’ll need a sleeping bag, a flashlight maybe, a good supply of cigarettes, a little cash. Oh, and just in case, your identity card.”

  The mention of the identity card set off an adrenaline rush. He would only need it if he were arrested, so this could only mean one thing. Some kind of illegal action.

  “Wait here. I’ll be right back.”

  He ran up the stairs as quietly as he could. Hands shaking, he groped around for his wallet and took out his identity card and a couple small bills. He put them in the pocket of his jeans before placing the wallet on his night table. Then he jammed two packs of cigarettes, some matches, and his keys into his jacket, grabbed a flashlight, his sleeping bag, and his beret, and hurried back down the stairs. He joined Armando outside the kitchen, fumbling for his keys to relock the door. They moved quietly through the still, moonlit night. Neither of them spoke until they were a block from the house.

  “So where’s the takeover tonight?” Manuel asked. Armando laughed softly.

  “You definitely got the message, compañero. It’s that group we’ve been talking to, about twenty families right now, nobody can find a place to live they can afford, even now after Allende’s election. They’re taking over that stretch of municipal land on the southern edge of the city, by the river, and asked us to help.”

  They walked along deserted streets. The moon’s incandescent light guided them as surely as the sun. It took them a good half hour to reach the site. A group of people were huddled by the river, the men in felt hats and ponchos, the women in shawls with babies swaddled under them. Large quantities of cardboard, wood, and corrugated tin sheets lay in piles off to one side. When Manuel got close, the ragged filth of their poverty, mixed with the smell of fear rising from their bodies, was like a slap to the face. He had never seen this kind of need up close, and he was pretty sure Armando hadn’t either. One of the men recognized Armando and came forward, a tentative grin on his face. They shook hands.

  “Buenas noches, compañero Roberto. Nice night for a takeover.” Armando’s tone was light, in an effort to put the other man at ease. “Where do you want us?”

  Deep lines marked Roberto’s forehead and cheeks, standing out as shadows in the moonlight. As his grin expanded, Manuel could see he was missing one of his front teeth. He smelled of cheap tobacco and unwashed feet. “Wherever you can see best, compañero.” He spoke rapidly, with the rasping rhythm of the poor. He gestured north, back toward the center of town: “If the cops come, it’ll be from over there.”

  “Are you sure you want both of us to stand guard, compañero?” Manuel asked. “Couldn’t you use some help with the shacks while we’re at it?”

  Roberto’s eyelids came down slightly, guarding his eyes. He turned to look at the group of men behind him. They all shook their heads. He moved back to join the men, and they conferred in whispers, voices rising and falling. Manuel could make out an occasional phrase, like “how can we know” and “we didn’t agree.” At one point he thought he heard “rich kids” or something like it. Then Roberto was back, his accent even choppier than before. “Thanks, compañeros, but me and the others, we know what to do. Quicker this way than teaching you now, at the last minute.”

  Armando and Manuel set up camp where they could see the main street, sitting on their folded sleeping bags and lighting cigarettes. Manuel couldn’t shake the feeling that they weren’t welcome. The men and older boys began lifting beams of wood and pounding them together with hammer and nail, and pretty soon several uneven shacks were gleaming in the night. Not that he could have helped much anyway, Manuel thought, since he’d never even held a hammer before. All the repairs at home had been done by hired hands. But it still felt like they were being excluded.

  “Weren’t any other guys from the Temuco office going to join us?” Manuel lit his second cigarette and offered the match to his friend.

  “Good question, compadre. And I thought we were actually gonna help them build their shacks. But something changed at the last minute, I don’t know what.”

  Suddenly, Armando poked Manuel in the leg. “Over there, walking along the sidewalk to our right, a block and a half up. You see him?”

  Manuel made out a single shadow moving quickly between the patches of shade cast by the moon through the trees that lined the avenue.

  “Yeah. But he’s alone. You think it’s the cops?”

  “Dunno. But go tell Roberto. We need to keep an eye on him.”

  Manuel ran over to the work crew and tapped the leader on the shoulder.

  “There’s a guy. Only one. Coming up the street, about a block away.”

  The men stopped working and formed a wall, their women and children behind them. Manuel went back and stood next to Armando. When the guy was even with the two of them, they shone their flashlights in his face, blinding him momentarily. Then Armando heaved a sigh of relief in the shape of a name.

  “Mario. What the hell?”

  The man lowered his hands from his eyes when they turned off their flashlights. Manuel recognized him as one of the leaders from the central office.

  “Glad I caught up with you, Armando. We can’t stay here. We’re not helping with this action anymore. Decision came down from the top.”

  “What the—what the hell are you talking about?” Armando spluttered in disbelief.

  “We can’t. Seems these guys have been talking with the Revolutionary Left. They got help from them and didn’t tell us. We can’t work on an action when the Revolutionary Left is involved, you know that. They’re not part of the coalition. decision came down from Santiago.”

  “That’s news to us, compañero.” Roberto talked straight at Mario, rasping ironically over every word. “So we’re not all working together now? One group’s not in the government, and so you can’t help us out? Seems being in the government has made you just another bureaucrat.”

  Even Mario was embarrassed into silence for a moment. He grabbed Armando by the arm and walked him out of earshot. The two gestured wildly back and forth for a few minutes, a passionate pantomime Manuel could not understand. Then Armando came back.

  “I’m really sorry, compañero,” he said, a hand on Roberto’s shoulder. “Problem with party discipline. Sometimes the guys giving the orders have been sitting at their desks too long.”

  Motioning to Manuel with his head, Armando picked up his things. As he began to walk with Mario toward town, he looked back and noticed Manuel wasn’t following. After gesturing once more and receiving a shaken head in response, Armando shrugged his shoulders and fell into step behind Mario. They disappeared up the street.

  For a moment Manuel just watched them go. He remembered Allende on the campaign trail, wading into crowds of people very much like these compañeros. Then the huge celebrations in Temuco with drum and horn, so many people believing that things could be different. But no one could be Che Guevara from the presidential palace, even if it was the poor who had put him in the Moneda in the first place. Well, he thought, then I guess it’s up to us to remind him that it’s about more than political parties, and who is in or out of the coalition.

  “Well, compañero,” Manuel said, turning back to face Roberto. “I think I’ll be looking for a new organization come daybreak. Seems I’ve just been kicked out of the Socialist Party. You willing to lend me a hammer and some nails? I promise not to do too much damage.”

  Roberto looked Manuel up and down, then handed him some tools and went back to work. When the sun came up, a small settlement had appeared on the bank of the river, Chilean flags fluttering from every tin roof. As he looked out across those rooftops, Manuel felt a rush of blood to the head, a burning pleasure that made his fingertips tingle. So this was what the world-historical movement for socialism felt like.

  He got home at eight-thirty that morning. His mama was sitting at the dining room table drinking a cup of tea, still in her nightgown and robe. The smudges under her
eyes suggested she’d been up a good part of the night. When she saw him, tears of relief ran down her cheeks, but her voice was anything but grateful.

  “You thankless, selfish brute. How dare you?” He stopped dead in his tracks and just looked at her.

  “Where have you been? I was up at one in the morning and noticed a light on in your room. Your wallet was on the night table, but when I looked inside your identity card was missing. Where in the hell have you been?”

  He didn’t know what to say. But she didn’t leave him much room to talk in any case.

  “Your papa went off at five in the morning, as usual, not knowing if you were alive or dead. Do you have even a scrap of human consideration left in your body?”

  He thought of all the ways he might answer that question. That all the people he’d been with since last night thought he was pretty considerate, seeing as he had just risked arrest and personal injury to help folks like them who needed a roof over their heads. That all he ever felt he really needed in his life … but she was talking still.

  “… I’ve been through all this once before, up all night with mugs of tea going cold on the table, not knowing if someone is alive or dead. Once is enough. I saw the book out in your room, looks like you were studying for the aptitude test. If you can concentrate long enough to get a good score, maybe you can go to Concepción, or even to Santiago. That’ll be better, you won’t have to bother about us anymore.” Her voice broke on the last phrase, but she pushed away his attempt to hug her and walked quickly upstairs.

  His last two months of school were a blur of meetings, leaflets, and demonstrations. He became quite a specialist in the Revolutionary Left’s urban takeovers since that fateful night with Roberto, and quickly became an ace with a hammer and nails. The mayor of Temuco, a member of Allende’s governing coalition, refused to send the police against the poor, and the takeovers multiplied. His skills were in great demand every day, and his reputation spread.

  This was also true with the ladies, he found. Maybe it was the risk, the scent of danger. Or maybe the women were just wilder, freer, in the Revolutionary Left. Like Erminda, thirty, maybe thirty-five, with a four-year-old son. She’d had several compañeros, and wasn’t sure who was her son Camilo’s father. But it didn’t matter, because everyone in the organization was his parent. We don’t own our kids, she said; it’s a collective project. This was a new concept for Manuel. He couldn’t help but compare Erminda to his mama, so protecting and enveloping. But he learned more from Erminda in bed than about parenting. Sometimes he wondered if he was falling in love. But they both slept with other people, because love, too, as Erminda reminded him, was a collective project.

  As things heated up in the first few weeks of January, after his graduation from high school, the police began cracking down on illegal takeovers and arresting more people, targeting the actions and actors of the Revolutionary Left and their allies among the poor. One night in a small town west of Temuco, he and Roberto, together again for another takeover, were shot at by a group of cops on the payroll of the local landowner. They ran across a field through a cloud of bullets, jumped in the river, and swam to the other side. As they climbed out, shivering, on the other bank, Roberto’s raspy voice trembled with cold and fright.

  “Too close for comfort, compañero.”

  Manuel’s voice was also a bit shaky. “No kidding, compadre. What the hell went wrong?”

  “Who the hell knows. But I bet someone had a loose mouth on this one.”

  When the Revolutionary Left investigated the case, they found that one of the peasants involved in the action had told his wife, a marketwoman in Temuco. After that, they all agreed, there were a hundred different ways the information could have gotten to the police, since the cops had many friends and connections at the central market. A friend of the Revolutionary Left who worked in police headquarters also let them know that everyone was looking for Manuel, especially after that last adventure. The red hair and beard made him stand out like a sore thumb, even at night. When the leadership decided to pull him out, he couldn’t decide if he was mainly disappointed at not being allowed to participate in more actions, or proud that he had become so notorious.

  That next week he got the results of his academic aptitude test. He’d scored high enough that he could attend school wherever he wanted. Everyone in his group agreed that Santiago would be the best choice. The University of Chile could not be beat, they all said. It was the public university that had the largest radical student population. Of course, if he’d consulted his mother, she would have picked the Catholic University, the most prestigious private school. But he agreed with the Revolutionary Left. He’d be a big asset to them at the University of Chile.

  Classes started at the beginning of March, so he only had a couple of weeks to prepare the move. There were books, documents, and Revolutionary Left position papers to transport. He packed a suitcase of clothes, taking special care with his berets. The hardest thing was to say good-bye to Erminda. Two nights before he left, they stayed awake until dawn. Between bouts of passion, they talked about the future, the new society that was taking shape, and all the work to be done. She said he was lucky to be going to Santiago, the hub of the student movement.

  His mama and papa had been watching him pack, but he just left them a note with an address where he could be reached. He did stop to see his grandma one last time on his way to the train station, Grandpa’s copy of the Communist Manifesto folded carefully into the deepest corner of his knapsack. He sat in the orange-scented patio for a long time, holding her hand as she dozed. When she opened her eyes, he told her he was going to Santiago. “My friends tell me I have no other choice,” he explained. “I’ve been helping people, Grandma, just like Grandpa. So the police aren’t happy with me. Maybe in Santiago I won’t stand out quite as much, with all my red, curly hair and a name like Bronstein.”

  His grandma coughed and sat up straight, and her hand suddenly became a small, tight claw inside his much larger one. Her eyes darkened, then filled with tears. “Ach, Manolito,” she quavered. “But they always found your grandpa.”

  Santiago, 1971

  The three young men walked across the bridge and crossed the parque forestal, blocks of trees and lawns and wrought-iron benches along the edge of the Mapocho River. They reached the Plaza Baquedano, a large disk surrounded by an ornate black metal fence. The roundabout that surrounded it reconnected to the east and west with Santiago’s main avenue, cobblestones glistening with dew. Manuel looked up at the rider on horseback that graced the center, so much like every other heroic figure in every other park in the city. What made this statue different was that it stood at the pinnacle of a set of stairs rising majestically from the eastern side of the disk.

  After setting his knapsack against the black fence, Manuel opened it and took out the leaflets they’d brought to pass out. Hernán and Carlos, other new members of the Revolutionary Left at the University, ran up the stairs and out onto the base of the statue, scaling the front legs of the horse all the way to its neck. They unfurled their red and black revolutionary flag, hanging it over the ears and down the animal’s nose. As his friends climbed back down, the flag began to flutter lightly in the breeze, serving as a signal that the demonstration was about to begin.

  “Hey, Manuel. What’s the deal with the guys from the Catholic University?” Hernán was standing at his elbow.

  “Your guess is as good as mine, compadre. One thing we know for sure. Those manicured mama’s boys aren’t about to appear anytime soon.”

  “No kidding,” Hernán snorted, lighting a black tobacco cigarette and trying to anchor his beret more firmly on the nest of unruly chocolate-colored straw that sprung out in all directions from his scalp. He offered Manuel a cigarette, brought out a box of wooden matches, and cupped his hands around his friend’s to protect the flame. “Especially that Sergio what’s-his-name. Real piece of work, that guy.”

  “No argument here.” Manuel blew o
ut a cloud of smoke. “But we have to work with them anyway, at least for now. They have a big following, and besides, with the Left in power we have to play nice.” The two leaned on the fence, right hiking boots over left. “Good news is,” Manuel continued, “we get the place to ourselves for a while. We set the tone, and when they get here, they won’t be able to take over.” He slapped his friend on the back and they both got back up, preparing to turn on the megaphone and begin warming up the crowd.

  “The early bird gets the worm, my friend.”

  Manuel put down the megaphone and limped slowly down the stairs, the last of the adrenaline draining from his limbs. No matter how many times he led a demonstration, the feeling was still the same. It began to build slowly, as the growing throng answered his chants, and then he was riding on the crest of the collective roar, controlling its ups and downs yet being controlled by it. And then, once it was over, the quick collapse, his body a punctured balloon.

  “Excuse me. Compañero.” She was standing right in front of him. She was trying hard to look like she belonged, with the black turtleneck, faded jeans, and worn-in leather jacket. But the shiny, pointed boots, lost look, and expensive haircut screamed upper-class.

  “Compañera.” He tried to straighten up, his arms and legs resisting as if he were a puppet with broken strings.

  She seemed nervous, shifting her weight from right to left on those ridiculous boots. “Sorry to disturb you, but …” she cleared her throat. Her eyes were almost turquoise. He felt a familiar warmth rising through his legs. He leaned slightly sideways, right elbow on the fence, and noticed a small rivulet of sweat inching its way down her left temple. “Do you know Sergio Undurraga?” she finally blurted out.

  He crumpled back down, the promise of sexual adventure collapsing around him. She held out a small, square-fingered right hand. “Eugenia Aldunate. It’s just that he was supposed to meet me here at ten-thirty.”