Beyond the Ties of Blood

by Florencia Mallon

  “I wanted to believe him when he said it wasn’t about the math. My God, Nenita, I wanted to believe him so badly. Six years isn’t that much, really. But when I did the math last night, it came out differently. For me it’s a lifetime.”

  It was late the next evening when doña Isabel made her statement, a bomb dropping, exploding in their midst. They were having dinner, three generations of women around the long table, Laura sporting her grandmother’s pearl necklace as the gift that completed the circle. Sitting regally on one end, in a straight navy blue dress, no makeup, her hair pulled loosely into a knot on the crown of her head, doña Isabel looked absolutely majestic. The wavy wisps of silver that had fallen loose framed and decorated her face, matching the small pearls shimmering in her ears. The dense network of lines around her eyes made her look gentle, almost joyful, as if her life had left the marks of goodness in every crease.

  Laura was telling her mother about her horseback outings with Irene. “You know, Mamita,” she said, “I mentioned to tía Irene the other day how comfortable I feel here, and how things seem so familiar, even though this is my first time.”

  “That’s wonderful,” Eugenia said. “Before we came down from Boston, I told your aunt that I hoped you’d feel comfortable here. I knew leaving your friends was hard, but I was hoping you’d discover a new sense of belonging here.”

  “It’s what I’ve been telling Laurita the past several days,” Irene said. “The blood pulls.”

  Doña Isabel sat up straighter, and a single fierce line appeared between her eyebrows. “It’s not only about blood,” she said. “It’s about commitment. About staying put. About being there when you’re needed.”

  “What are you talking about?” Irene asked. “Mamita, all we’re saying is that—”

  “Ever since your papa left me, the two of you have been my only family. Where were you when I needed you most? For almost a year I thought one of you was dead. The other was driving cars, late at night after curfew, putting herself in danger, for what? To throw another subversive over an embassy wall? Then, for a few minutes on her way out of the country, I get to hold my only granddaughter. And finally, my other daughter leaves the country and only comes back for a month in the summer.

  “It’s been sixteen years, sixteen years alone, by myself. My friends asked me constantly, where are your daughters? They’re surrounded by their families, their grandchildren. And I’m all alone. Every time I look at Laura now, I think, my God. It’s been sixteen years. And where were you? I sometimes think that, maybe, it would have been better if you had died. At least then I could have shut the door and made my peace with it. And now, after all this time, you just waltz in and expect to pick up where you left off?”

  For a moment, all movement stopped. Eugenia gasped. Laura stood up and almost took the tablecloth with her.

  “Abuelita Isabel, how can you say that?”

  Her grandmother waved a trembling hand. “Niña, I know it’s harsh. I know your life hasn’t been a bed of roses. But you must see it from my point of view. I feel like I buried my family twenty years ago. Do I go now and open up the grave, just because you decide you’re ready to come back?”

  Laura walked out. Her harsh sobs echoed off the walls as she ran down the passageway to her room. With the hard closing of her door the silence was complete. Eugenia felt frozen to her chair, her lips nailed shut.

  “Mamita, how could you say that?” Irene asked.

  “You, of all people, should know. Have you ever told your sister how we cried that day after you went to her room and found they’d been taken? Does she know how much you suffered after she disappeared? How can you take her side now?”

  VIII

  On the Other Side

  of Midnight

  They left early the next morning, like refugees, bags packed quickly and carelessly, as silently as they could so no one would wake up. By mid-morning they were on the outskirts of Santiago.

  “So what do we do now, call Ignacio?” Laura asked once they returned the rented car and paid the bill.

  “I don’t think so. I didn’t have a chance to tell you before, but Ignacio and I had a fight. So we really can’t call him.”

  “What happened?”

  “It’s kind of complicated, but let’s just say that I didn’t get along very well with his parents.”

  “What’s up with all these old Chileans, anyway? Why do so many of them have a broomstick up their—”

  “Laurita!” her mother interrupted quickly.

  “Sorry, but it’s true! The only ones I’ve met so far who are different are tía Irene, who doesn’t count because she lives in Boston, tía Tonia, who’s Mapuche, Bobe Sara … Wait! That’s what we do! We call Bobe Sara!”

  Over Eugenia’s protests Laura went back into the rental car office and asked to borrow the phone. After first trying the offices of the Committee, she found Sara at home.

  “Bobe? It’s me, Laura. Yes, we’re back in Santiago. Well actually, my mama and me, we came back by ourselves. No, there’s nothing wrong. Well … actually, Bobe, we don’t have a key to Grandma Isabel’s house, and we were wondering … No, we just returned the rental car, we’re downtown, and … Oh, Bobe, that’s so sweet. We’ll just take a taxi out, okay? Yes. And Bobe? Thanks so much. Kisses from both of us. Yeah. See you soon.”

  Sara was waiting by the gate when the taxi drove up. Once the driver brought the suitcases up to the front door and Eugenia paid him, they took their bags into the guest room.

  “I’m sorry, darlings,” Sara fussed, “but the house is small. Shmooti and I … well, we never expected to have a lot of guests. There are two beds, but you’ll have to sleep together in the same room. And the guest bathroom, it doesn’t have a shower. I guess we’ll just have to share the one off the master bedroom, but I can get you fresh towels and—”

  “Bobe.” Laura put her arms around her grandmother. “Don’t worry so much. You’re a lifesaver.”

  By lunchtime they’d washed their clothes and made the beds. Samuel wanted to barbecue, so he and Laura went to the local butcher in search of some chicken or lamb.

  “It better be juicy, Zeyde Shmooti,” Laura said as they were heading out. “Can you tell at the store if it’s gonna be juicy?”

  “Shmooti always takes forever at the butcher,” Sara said when they closed the door. “He has to catch up on the local gossip, argue over the fine points of each cut, you know. Let’s go sit outside. There’s a nice cool breeze, and we can have some orangeade. I just made it fresh with oranges from the tree.”

  For a while they were busy setting up the chairs and table, trying to get the right angle so they could have both sun and shade. Sara poured them each a glass of the sweet liquid. It was delicious, Eugenia thought as they sat down and she took her first sip.

  “So what happened, really?” Sara asked.

  Eugenia took another sip of the orangeade. She put the glass down on the table, picked up a napkin and wiped her mouth. She looked down at her hands for a moment, rubbing the fingers of one along the top of the other, then rubbing her thumbs together. She crossed her hands between her thighs, interlacing the fingers.

  “It’s hard to talk about it,” she finally said.

  “I can understand that, m’hija, believe me.”

  “I know you can. I’m sure you can understand that my mama, well, what happened back then, you know, she hasn’t been able to … she’s still angry. But it isn’t Laura’s fault, and I—”

  “You don’t have to say anything else, really. I get the general idea. You can stay here as long as you want, you know.”

  “Thank you so much, doña Sara. But you understand that we’ll have to get our own apartment, we can’t be relying on you, and we’ll have to find Laura a school for this March, if possible, and—”

  “I can help with all that. I know some people who work at a good progressive school; it’s quite near here. Nowadays it isn’t easy to find openings at the private schools, but I�
�m sure they can help Laurita. Now I don’t presume to know if Laura is baptized, but that doesn’t matter at this school. It’s often a problem at the private schools here, they’re run by Catholic orders, you know. But don’t worry about it anymore today, hija, let’s just enjoy the afternoon.”

  “Thank you. One last thing before they come back. When we got in this morning, we were wondering who to call. It was Laura who immediately thought of you.”

  “Thank you, hija, for saying that. What a gift she is. I don’t know exactly how to say this, but—I’m not sure, my dear, if your mother knows how lucky she really is.”

  As it turned out, doña Isabel did not feel lucky at all. The phone rang the next day, and it was Irene. Eugenia was the one to pick up.

  “Chenyita?” Irene’s voice was hard to distinguish through all the static. “Thank God I found you. Look, I’m calling from San Jacinto. When Mama found the two of you gone, she prohibited my using the phone at the house to call you. Then she went back in her room and hasn’t come out since.”

  “She must be pretty mad.”

  “I think she’s hurt more than mad. She wanted to apologize, she said, she knew she’d gotten carried away, but when she got up you were gone.”

  “I know she has a right to be mad at me. But not Laura. Why is it she’s always there in the middle, taking the potshots meant for me? It’s not fair.”

  “I know, sweetie. But families, you know … and ours especially, don’t you think?”

  “Well, look. For now, we’re doing fine. So let’s just wait a while, maybe when Mama gets back to Santiago. Maybe then she’ll see things differently.”

  “Are you going to live with Manuel’s parents?”

  “No, mi amor. We’ll find an apartment, a school for Laura. Once we’re independent, maybe then it’ll be easier to mend fences.”

  “Hopefully that will happen before February.”

  “How’s that?”

  “That’s when I go back to MIT. My vacation only goes through the end of this month. And now that it’s just me and Mamita, she’s agreed to come back to Santiago by then.”

  “But Nenita, you and I have barely had any time alone.”

  “I know, sweetie, and especially now that so much is happening. But you know, my job … and besides, if I stay any longer, Amanda will …”

  “You’re right. Of course. By the beginning of next month I need to have Laura signed up for school, anyway, and we should be moved into our own place.”

  “So you’ve decided to stay for good?”

  “Ay, Nenita, I don’t even know what ‘for good’ means anymore. Laura seems so happy with Manuel’s parents, and I just don’t have the heart to suggest we move again. Yet I don’t have a job here, and at some point I’ll have to make a decision about Carmichael College. But we do need our own place. At least for now, until we can figure out what to do next.”

  Over the next two weeks, Laura and Sara took a bus every morning to the Committee offices to help with filing and paperwork. When Samuel left for the bakery, Eugenia would leave with him and spend the morning looking for apartments. It was a bad time of year to look, since peak rental season was between September and November, for the next calendar year. Only small furnished apartments were still on the market, designed for single travelers, usually businessmen, on short trips to Santiago.

  “You wouldn’t believe the dives I’m seeing!” Eugenia exclaimed in the afternoons when they were all back at the house. “The kitchens haven’t been used in years, maybe never! I think the knobs on the stoves are rusted in place by now!”

  “You’ll have more luck if you don’t need a furnished place,” Samuel suggested. “Perhaps you should buy some used furniture?”

  “But don Samuel, we don’t know yet what will happen in the long run. Laura isn’t in school yet, I don’t have a job. I’d rather wait before spending money on something like that.”

  “But Mamita,” Laura protested, “we’re staying, aren’t we? You’re not planning to take us back to Boston, are you?”

  “M’hijita, we don’t know yet, do we? I don’t feel ready to make that kind of decision, things are still so unsettled.”

  “I don’t want to move again,” Laura said. “I don’t feel unsettled. I’m just beginning to feel at home. And before, whenever I started to feel at home, you picked up and took us someplace else. I don’t want that again.”

  The following week, with Sara’s help, Laura and Eugenia got an interview at the local progressive school. They were lucky to get in before the end of January, when the school administration closed everything up for the February holiday. The principal was impressed at how bilingual Laura was, and marveled at what she called the multicultural sensibilities of Laura’s family. These were code words for the unusual combination of last names. The Chilean obsession with last names didn’t disappear, Eugenia realized, even in this supposedly freer milieu. It just got reinvented as multiculturalism. But then the principal lowered the boom.

  “As you know we don’t require a baptismal certificate,” she explained, “but because we see ourselves as a service for our own citizens, we do require some proof of Chilean citizenship. There’s no problem with that, is there?”

  “Actually,” Eugenia said, “Laura was born in the Mexican embassy on our way out of the country. She’s always been a Mexican citizen. I put in an application for her Chilean citizenship months ago, but with the inevitable delays, plus the summer vacation, we haven’t heard yet.”

  “But certainly you, señora. You’re obviously a Chilean citizen.”

  “Yes, of course, but given my status as an exile I don’t have a passport. Because I was classified as a political subversive, I was never able to update my old one. And all my papers are presently with the government as part of my petition for recertification.”

  After a short silence the principal sat back in her chair, running a hand through her carefully coifed blond mane. “Well,” she said, “Laura can have a spot in our school for this coming March. But I’m afraid we need one of the two petitions to come through before she can formally attend. Perhaps you can see if one of them can be hurried along?” Then she stood up, signaling the end of the interview.

  When they got back to the house Laura went straight to their room. She got out her Walkman, put in a tape, and lay down on the bed with her earphones on and Paco clutched to her chest. Though she did not lock the door, there was no use in trying to talk to her. Eugenia sat down with Samuel and Sara.

  “You need help down at the Ministry,” Samuel said. “One of the higher-ups, he goes to our temple. We’ll talk to him.”

  “Thank you so much, don Samuel,” Eugenia said. “I’m sure that will help. But I’m beginning to wonder about all this. I can’t find an apartment. Laura can’t go to school until one of us gets certified as Chilean. And here we are, in your house, imposing on your hospitality. It’ll be coming up on a month pretty soon. It’s getting toward the end of January, and school starts at the beginning of March. I’m not sure we’re going to make it.”

  Sometime after midnight, Laura had the dream. It started off the same, on a warm, sunny day on the trail where she and tía Irene had gone horseback riding. A fog came down, and the same man loomed up from the shadows. He was dressed in olive green, and he reached out to grab her arm with his hairy paw. She refused to look in his eyes because she knew they had no pupils. But suddenly, from behind a tree, a young man with red hair and a beard jumped out and grabbed the man around his neck. Her papa. They struggled, and the man without pupils finally got loose and ran away. She reached out to her papa, but just as she thought she got hold of his hand, his image began to fade. No! She shouted, wanting him to come back. No!

  At first Eugenia didn’t know what had awakened her. It took her a heartbeat to realize where she was, still in the guest room in Sara and Samuel’s house. It was pitch black, and then she heard Laura breathing, moaning. The small electric clock on the night table said three A.M.

/>   “No, no … please … no …” she got up, afraid to turn on the light. Groping where she thought her daughter’s bed began, she tried to find something, a leg, her head, gently trying to touch her awake. Then Laura’s flailing arm scored a direct hit on her jaw.

  “NO!” Laura roared.

  Eugenia got up, first on her hands and knees, found the end of the floor and slowly stood up, running one hand along the wall searching for the light switch. She had to close her eyes against the first blaze of light. When she was able to open them back up, she saw her daughter sitting up in bed. The sweat had matted her hair down against her scalp. Her eyes were open, but she was not awake. As Eugenia approached, Laura moaned, then whined, then whispered “no, no, no …” She was still asleep. Her eyes, open still, had gone so black they had no pupils.

  The dream came every night after that. It was always after midnight and went on for what seemed like hours. Eugenia did not try to wake Laura, but lay in bed listening to the moaning and roaring, then the descent into whines and finally whispers. All Laura ever said was no. In the mornings, when her increasingly sleep-deprived mother would ask her if she remembered anything, Laura said no. Their conversations fell into a pattern that repeated itself, like the dream, over and over.

  “Are you sure?” Eugenia asked. “Maybe if you try to remember, if you tell someone, you’ll begin to get to the other side.”

  “I never wake up,” Laura answered, avoiding her mother’s eyes. “How should I know what it is I’m dreaming?”

  “I know what it’s like, m’hijita. Remember? In Mexico, and again in Boston?”

  “That was different.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Because you were arrested and tortured, my papa disappeared. This is just a dream.”