Beyond the Ties of Blood

by Florencia Mallon

  She heard movement, then water running off the master bedroom as Sara and Samuel began to stir, then to shower and dress. She wandered into the kitchen to put the coffee on. Samuel came out, as he did every morning, to put the bread he had brought from his bakery into the oven to warm.

  “Ah, my dear, you are up early today,” he said, giving her a peck on the cheek.

  “Yes,” Eugenia answered, not sure how much Sara had told him. “Laura’s alarm is about to go off, so I thought I would get breakfast going.”

  By the time they’d finished breakfast and everyone was dressed and ready to go, it was nearly nine o’clock. At the last minute, Sara decided to go with Laura, and this delayed the departure even longer. Complaining that she was going to be late, Laura ushered her grandmother out the door to catch the bus.

  Tonia rang the bell an hour and a half later. Eugenia let her in at the gate and took her along the side of the house, directly to the inside patio. “I have the jar out here,” she said.

  “It’s good you kept it in the shade,” Tonia said, picking it up. “Laurita seemed to be in a decent mood when she got to the office this morning, though I can see what you mean about the circles under her eyes.”

  Eugenia nodded. “Do you need anything else?” she asked.

  Tonia shook her head. “Do you mind going back inside and waiting for me there? It’s easier if I can do this by myself.”

  Eugenia headed for the door off the kitchen. “I’ll heat up some water for tea,” she said. She saw Tonia lift up the jar, the mid-morning light reflecting through the citron-yellow liquid. Then Tonia took off the top and smelled the contents. After placing the top back on, she put it up to the light again and moved the jar back and forth.

  Eugenia had boiled water, prepared and drunk two cups of tea, and put another kettle on the stove by the time Tonia walked in. She looked up, worry lines etched along her mouth.

  “That took longer than expected,” she said. The kettle began to boil again. “Do you want a cup of tea?”

  Tonia nodded, then emptied the urine into the sink, washing out the jar and the sink before she threw the jar into the garbage pail. Eugenia looked up from the teapot she was filling.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’ve already read it, I know what it says, so I don’t need to keep it around anymore.”

  “And what did it say?” Eugenia tried to clear her throat.

  “The odor was quite strong,” Tonia said. “But I’m not surprised. With all the death there’s been in this country, most people’s urine smells strong these days. But she’s not pregnant, and she’s not taking drugs.” Her voice was almost too light.

  “Did you see anything else?” Eugenia asked.

  “Can I have some tea? Suddenly I feel really hungry. Do you have some bread?”

  “Tía …”

  The older woman ignored her, filling a cup with liquid from the teapot. She stirred in three teaspoons of sugar and took a sip. “The bread?” she asked.

  Eugenia took out the remaining pieces of baguette from breakfast and put them on a plate. Then she opened the refrigerator door, took out some butter and jam, and placed all the items on the kitchen table. She brought out two breakfast plates, silverware and paper napkins, and set two places. Then she pulled out two of the chairs, sat in one, and offered the other to Tonia.

  “What else did you see?” she asked.

  Tonia sat down and began covering a slice of bread with jam. “It’s really not that important,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “She’s physically healthy, and as I said before, no drugs and no pregnancy. Now, when I moved the urine, it was sluggish and heavy. This is probably her tiredness, and the stress she’s been under.”

  “It sounds like there’s something else.”

  “Trust me, it’s not important.”

  “What do you mean it’s not important? Shouldn’t I be the judge of that?”

  Tonia took another bite of her bread, washed it down with tea, and looked up. When her eyes met Eugenia’s, they had turned from honey to a silty shade of olive green.

  “Believe me, m’hijita, some things are better left alone.”

  Eugenia sat up straighter in her chair, staring at Tonia. The older woman looked down again, stirring her tea and bringing the cup to her lips. Then she put the cup back on the saucer and picked up the paper napkin, folding it into thin strips, then unfolding it again. When she put it back down on the table, it looked like a tiny accordion. She refused to look up.

  “I can’t believe it,” Eugenia said. “You’re actually not going to tell me, are you?”

  The older woman stood up and took her empty teacup to the sink. She rinsed it out and set it down inside the deep white cavity. “Sometimes,” she breathed, “one moment, one thing said or not said, done or not done, it changes everything. And not always for the better.”

  “I can’t believe it! You and doña Sara, more than ten years now, marching, demanding to know the truth about your children! Now you tell me some things are better left alone? I just don’t get it! You must be joking; is this some kind of cruel joke? Tía, don’t do this!”

  Tonia stood looking into the sink for a good long while, almost as if she could find an answer beneath its porcelain surface. When she finally stood up straight and turned back around, her eyes were blazing.

  “All right, then,” she hissed. “I guess then you must know. Everybody must know everything now, truth and reconciliation and all that. I told Sara, I said, some of that truth is not going to be good. Truth is that way sometimes. It can hurt more than a lie. But I guess you must know, you insist on knowing it all.

  “Her urine is very heavy and sluggish. It doesn’t flow normally when I move the bottle, and there are small, dark pieces in it. These pieces tell me there is a man, but the heaviness and darkness say he is not a good man. There is a bad man in Laurita’s past.”

  “But tía, how can that be? There haven’t been many men in Laura’s life, and they have all been good men—Manuel, Ignacio, don Samuel … wait a minute, what about Joaquín?”

  “The man’s presence in her urine is very large. It couldn’t be someone she’s only known for a short while. This man has been with her a long time, probably her whole life.”

  “That’s impossible. Who could it be?”

  Tonia came back and sat down at the table. She picked up the accordion napkin and began tearing it into thin strips.

  “You know something else you’re not telling me,” Eugenia said. “Please, tía.”

  When Tonia looked up and met her eyes, Eugenia no longer saw any anger in them, but instead an immense sadness. “There is only one possible explanation,” Tonia whispered, “especially when I put it together with the nightmares. Every night Laurita has a visitor. It’s her father. But it’s not Sara’s son. No, it is an evil man, someone who has caused much death. He must have hurt you when you were in jail, and that’s why Laura was born. He haunts Laura now, because she has lived a lie. She is not Manuel’s child.”

  They entered suspended time, an empty place where nothing moved. The silence was so complete that the sounds of daily life began to trickle in through the windows, around the small cracks in the doors, through the curtains still drawn against curious eyes. The whoosh of a car passing on the street. The whistle of a vegetable vendor plying his trade on the sidewalk. A group of boys arguing over where they would play soccer. Even two birds fighting over a crust of stale bread on the patio. Sunny, lively sounds that bounced against the walls and, frightened by what they found, ricocheted out the way they had come in.

  “No,” Eugenia finally croaked. “This is the lie. You can’t see something like that in urine. How can you say this to me?”

  Tonia sat with Eugenia for hours. Her strong hands rubbed along Eugenia’s temples, massaging from the crown of her head down to the nape of her neck. Occasionally Eugenia would let out a sigh, sometimes a moan, but mainly she was silent. Afte
r Tonia had discovered a particularly tense mass along the side of her neck, Eugenia spoke.

  “The math,” she mumbled. “Why is it always the math?”

  Tonia sat up a little taller, trying to see Eugenia’s face. “What is this math?” she asked.

  “All these years. I never did the math.”

  “I still don’t understand.”

  “Laura was born on September 15, 1974.”

  “And?”

  “And Manuel and I were arrested on October 7, 1973. The times I thought about it, well, between October 7 and September 15 there’s more than nine months, but babies are late a lot. That’s as far as I ever got. Or ever let myself get.”

  “I still don’t understand.”

  “The problem is, tía, the coup was September 11, more than a year before Laura was born. No baby is three months late. Manuel was evicted from his last apartment less than a week before that, and with the small bed in the room we moved to, the horrible tension in the air even before the coup, we never had sex after that. So it was more than a year. You were right, tía,” she trembled. “Truth isn’t always good.”

  “Now it can no longer be good or not good,” Tonia said. “Now it’s just truth.”

  “But the rape … and doña Sara and don Samuel. They love Laura so much. She’s given them a second chance. Doña Sara says she’s like Manuel was with his Grandma Myriam and Grandpa David. The bond is closer than with parents, she says. Laura will lose that now, and so will doña Sara. And I’ll lose them both. What am I going to do?”

  “Do they have to know?”

  “But you just said that now truth is truth! And besides, the dream. Don’t you think that, at some level, Laura must already know? Plus my mother’s constant comments about her looks, and how she doesn’t resemble Manuel.”

  “Yes,” Tonia said, “and maybe Sara knows, too, in her own way. But sometimes, hija, well … sometimes blood is not the only thing.”

  “Now I don’t understand.”

  “Me and Sara, we’re like sisters, we grew up together. We don’t see each other for more than forty years. But when I walked up to the door of the Committee, and we stood face to face, we were sisters again. It’s not always the blood. And I think that Sara will see this the same way, because Laura grew up as Manuel’s child. She sees the love for her son in your daughter’s eyes.”

  “But it’s just not the same. We’re talking about children now, mothers and children, Manuel and Sara, you and Renato, me and Laura. Sometimes it is about the blood. And what about Laura’s dreams? The blood talks, Tonia.”

  “Not always with a single voice. Take me and Renato. He’s not really my son, did you know that? My Florindo and I adopted him. But after he was killed, who died of grief? My Florindo, not his blood papa! Whose dreams did he haunt? His blood mama’s? No! He haunted mine! He haunted me! No one else could help him cross the river of tears to his eternal rest. That’s why I’ve worked with the Committee. Sometimes,” and Tonia’s voice became a breeze whispering through the room, “sometimes, it just goes beyond the ties of blood.”

  They heard the gate clang shut, then a key in the front door. “Hallo! Anyone home?” It was Sara. She stopped short when she saw Tonia and Eugenia still on the couch, Eugenia’s head in the other woman’s lap, the curtains drawn against the early afternoon sun.

  “I left Laura at the Committee offices,” Sara said, a quizzical tone at the end of her sentence. After neither woman answered her, she continued: “Joaquín’s mother came by to help with the accumulated files and said she’d stay and close up later on. Joaquín was going to meet her there anyway, and—” her voice faded out, and she just stood there. The silence deepened, until it seemed to echo off the walls.

  “What is it?” Sara finally asked.

  The room folded them into a hush soaked with the stillness of a graveyard. For a long time nothing moved. Then Tonia and Eugenia spoke together, syncopated stabs of sound.

  “Laura—”

  “Manuel, he’s not—”

  “The dreams—”

  “Her father!”

  Sara made it to an armchair. Silence again, drenched with dread. By the time she finally spoke the filtered light inside the room had gone flat. “Yes,” she said. And after a long pause: “I think I knew. I think maybe I’ve known for quite a while.”

  “What are you going to do?” Tonia asked.

  “Do? What is there to do? I’ll tell Shmooti, of course. Though maybe he already knows. Sometimes he surprises me. And then Laura must know. In some deep place inside she probably already does. But we must tell her that it doesn’t make any difference to us.”

  “But doña Sara,” Eugenia began.

  The older woman raised a hand. “No, hija, “she said, standing up from the chair. “There’s been enough loss already, enough mourning. Tonia, remember the last time the curtains were closed like this? It was when Manuel was confirmed dead. That’s when we found out about you, hija, and we started looking for you. Shmooti and I spent three months, do you remember, Tonia? Three months with the curtains drawn, sitting shivah, Jewish mourning. We had so many people to mourn, you see. His parents, my parents, Manuel. We were surrounded by loss, by death. But enough is enough.”

  She began pacing then, and as she moved around her voice got softer, then stronger, depending on the way she turned, wave after murmuring wave, a current that wandered through the room punctuated by pauses.

  “I told you, my dear, when you first came to stay here, that your mama didn’t know how lucky she was. When Manuel was little, I was so tangled up in the web of my own fears that I don’t think I ever listened to him, not really. And then he left for Santiago.

  “And the thing is, I never saw this, never got a chance to figure it out, while he was still alive. The times Shmooti and I have said, why couldn’t we have a second chance, if only just to say we’re sorry. But that’s the irony of it. If he hadn’t disappeared, if he hadn’t forced us, finally, to come look for him, I don’t think I would have ever understood any of this.

  “That’s how it is, raising children. Most of what you need to know, you find out when it’s too late. That’s the way things work out most of the time. That’s why your mama’s so lucky, because she got a second chance. But so did we, with you, with Laurita.

  “Tonia knows this, too. We’ve met children through the Committee of Relatives, most of them around Laura’s age, like Joaquín, who never knew their papas. Often their mothers were so sad, so traumatized, that they hardly ever spoke to their children about them. Blood of their blood, and they can’t remember. But it’s different with the two of you. Even though Laura never saw a picture of him, somehow, growing up, she still was able to paint one in her heart.

  “I would rather have Laura than a granddaughter who is my own blood but has no idea who my son was. Even Joaquín, with the photograph of his father pinned to his mother’s blouse every day of his life, doesn’t have a clear picture of what his papa was like. You and Laura have my son’s likeness engraved in your hearts.”

  When Laura got home it was already dark. She could feel the change in the air inside the house, and goosebumps prickled right under the skin of her arms in response. Her mother and grandmother were sitting together at the kitchen table, and they jumped just a bit, startled, when she walked in. Her grandma stood and came around the table, hugging her just a little too tightly.

  “What is it, Bobe?” she asked, hoping that Joaquín’s smell was not too obvious on her neck.

  “Hijita,” doña Sara answered, “you know how much we love you.”

  This sounded serious. Had they discovered that she and Joaquín were … and then her mother stood up, too, and came around the table and hugged her too tightly.

  “What’s going on?” Laura asked in alarm.

  “Well, we’ve been worried …”

  “And it seemed that—”

  “So we asked Tonia—”

  “And she read your urine, and …”
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br />   Laura raised a hand against the sudden avalanche of words. “Wait a minute,” she said. And then the words sunk in. They’d taken a sample of her urine and Tonia’d read it. Were they afraid she was pregnant? Did they not understand that she and Joaquín … and what business did they have! “You took a sample of my urine without my permission?”

  “Well, it’s just that—”

  “We were so worried … your nightmares and everything, so we—”

  “How dare you?”

  “Laurita, wait,” her mother said. “It’s important that you know what we found. It may be that you already suspect this, with your dream coming every night, but your father is not—”

  “I may not be eighteen yet, but I’m entitled to my privacy! Even if you were wondering about me and Joaquín, you can’t just … What did you just say?”

  “Laurita,” her mother said very softly, taking her hand. “What Tonia found is that your father is not Manuel. And I’m afraid it’s true. It was one of the guards. All these years and I …”

  Laura gasped, running from the kitchen into the bedroom. She slammed the door, and Eugenia heard the loud click as her daughter locked herself in. First Eugenia knocked, and then Sara, but all they heard was crying. After a long while, when there was silence, they tried knocking again. But still there was no answer.

  Eugenia and Sara went around to the patio and found the window open. When they looked in, they saw the bedroom was empty. Eugenia climbed in through the window and unlocked the bedroom door, letting Sara in. When they opened the closet, they found one of the small duffle bags gone, along with some of Laura’s clothes. The finality of it only sank in when Eugenia realized, looking at her daughter’s bed, that the Walkman and Paco the velvet porcupine were also gone.

  The phone rang later that evening, and Sara picked it up.

  “Hello? Doña Sara?”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s Marcela, Joaquín’s mother. Doña Sara, before you say anything, I just want you to know that Laura is here, and she’s safe.”