by AnonYMous
* * *
My family’s maid, Pascuala, was Quechua, originally from Peru. Pascuala lived in an apartment off the washroom in the garden. The washroom where she and Adelina—the maid who came every afternoon to help—washed and ironed the sheets and all the clothes. Pascuala didn’t like me to walk around the house without a bra. She cleaned my shoes when I came home from school. She dusted my books and the little clock by my bed every day. She was very superstitious. One time she broke a mirror while she was cleaning it and then immediately walked to the lake to offer the pieces. It took her two days. We went out to dinner the nights she didn’t cook for us—to a restaurant down the street with red-and-white-checked tablecloths. We ate fisherman’s stew with red eel, which was the man of the house’s favorite meal. I wasn’t very close to the family I lived with, but we grew to be affectionate and they were always kind to me. It was the first time I felt like I was in the role of a daughter. The father, Juan Vicente, treated me like a daughter.
I had a room upstairs with pink floral wallpaper and a little bed with a dark blue bedspread. Out my window I looked down at a walled lawn below, and beyond that, the street. I watched the fruit-and-vegetable vendor across the street with his apron and his scale weighing things for the maids doing the morning shopping. And the farmers who came into town in the early hours with their donkey carts.
* * *
My father and my brother came to visit me for ten days. I remember the hotel in Santiago where I went to meet them, the yellow sheets. We shared a room. My brother was fifteen years old. I gave him his first cigarette on that trip—by a fountain on Santa Lucía Hill. My father slept in the bed next to ours and I remember waking up to the sound of him moaning. I looked over and saw him with the covers off and the silhouette of his penis in the air—and he was moving it, stroking it, moaning. My kind host family there kept saying how happy I must be to have my father and brother come visit. I watched my father in the bed next to us. He wrote in a notebook—journal entries—during that trip. He left the notebook open, and the next day before we went sightseeing, I read: It feels so good to be naked with my children. In bed next to my children, feeling my sex with them sleeping soundly right next to me.
* * *
After they left, I began to see a man. A man older than my father. A man who was tall and always wore three-piece suits. A man with a neatly trimmed beard and blue eyes just like my father’s.
During a phone conversation with my father months later, he asked me if I had any love interests in Chile. I told him that I did. He asked me questions and I answered them. He asked me how old. Salvador was forty-nine. My father at the time was forty-six. I was eighteen. My father asked me about Salvador. What did this man do for a living? He was a businessman, but I didn’t know what kind. Sometimes I waited in the car for him while he went to meetings. Had I had sex with this man? I had. Where? In hotels, in restaurant bathrooms, in his house when his wife was out. My father grew angry with the things I was telling him. He said, “Now that you’re getting it from another man, you don’t need me anymore.” He hung up on me. He didn’t call me again for the remainder of the months I was there.
When I returned home, my father took me out to dinner and asked me about Salvador. How did we meet? I told my father that, early one morning, I stopped in a café for a coffee on my walk to school. I asked the man reading the newspaper at the table next to me for the time, and after he told me, I jumped up because I was late. He offered to drive me so I wouldn’t arrive late. As I got out of his car in front of the school, he said he would be there in the afternoon to pick me up.
I had seen his father playing chess at the cafés. His father, Honório, was a wily old man who liked to talk to me and my classmates after school. Honório claimed that his aristocratic Spanish mother died in childbirth, and that his huaso father hired a nanny, but she was not a wet nurse, so for comfort she put quince jam on her breasts for the infant Honório to suckle. Honório attributed his strength to having suckled jam instead of milk. He told us that he still ate quince jam on bread every evening before bed. Sometimes Honório’s wife, Gerónima, would join him after her canasta games. When he told us his stories, she would roll her green eyes while she sipped her Campari.
I had seen Salvador before and he had seen me. I thought he was elegant and powerful. He said that he had noticed me and liked me because of the plain and modest clothes that I wore, and that I looked like a paisana from another place, another time, he told me the next morning when we met at the café again and he drove me to school. It began like this. We met at the café in the morning and he drove me to school. When the bell rang and the kids ran out of school at the end of the day, he was there waiting for me. He would drive me home. One day, after a week or so, he didn’t go the usual way to my house. We went to a restaurant and he asked for a table in the back. We ate soup made of raw seafood. He put his hand on my thigh under the table and afterward we kissed in his car. The next evening we ate sea urchin and swordfish. Then we went for a drive afterward—he wanted to show me a view—and we were stopped at two roadblocks by military men with machine guns. As soon as Salvador rolled his window down, they nodded at him and waved us through. We had sex for the first time that night in the backseat of his car.
My father wanted to know more. I told him about driving to the top of a volcano in the middle of the night. I told him about Salvador showing me a campamento—one of the tent towns. I told my father about meeting Salvador’s family. And his wife, I knew her and I liked her. She had a lover, too. A young Indian man who rode a motorcycle. He was tall for a Guarani—big and strong with long dark hair. She was a beautiful woman, always smiling. The mother of Salvador’s children—his twin girls and the little boy, Federico. They spoke Spanish, Italian, and French. They had large gatherings every Sunday at their house. Family and friends of all kinds gathered for asados on their porch. The men roasted meats while the women sipped wine spritzers by the pool, watching the children swim and the dogs chasing kids through the vineyard.
My father wanted to know more. I told him about Pinochet. Salvador had lost several friends and family members. University students who were kidnapped, tortured, and killed. Salvador was studying medicine. After one of his friends was found gagged and castrated on the shore near La Serena, he fled to Spain, where he changed his studies to business. He moved to Milan, where he met Octavia, who became his wife. She had fled Chile because of Pinochet, too. They stayed there until they felt that it was safe to go back.
My father asked me if I was in love. I said we had a nice time together. I didn’t tell my father that the man asked me to marry him the week before I left. I said to him, “But you’re married.”
“Details,” he replied. I asked him if he would give me two days to think about it. Part of me wanted to stay. I loved being in Chile. I had good friends. I liked the food, I liked his family and his house. I saw myself as a thirty-year-old sitting topless by his pool with his topless ex-wife, and us watching our children play, complaining about the new maid who didn’t properly iron the shirts and who was maybe nicking things from Honório and Gerónima.
After the two days, I told him thank you, but no, I have to go to school.
* * *
When I got home, my father wanted to know about the sex. He asked if we could smoke cigarettes out by the car. We left the Italian restaurant and I gave him a Camel. We smoked. I was angry and uncomfortable and I told him that no, the man in Chile wasn’t circumcised, after my father asked me. He asked if I used birth control. I told him yes.
* * *
The man in Chile was me trying to break with my father and me going closer. I didn’t see it then. I understood my great rebellion to be something all mine and something new. Something entirely separate from my past. But Salvador was a part of it. He was the next phase of my love affair with my father. After many Sundays with the family, I affectionately called his parents my abuelos. I was close to his sisters, his nieces and nephews, his c
ousins. I became a part of the family. Our sex was a secret. His daughters, Génesis and Anaís, and his little boy, Federico, knew me, they knew I was close to their family, but they didn’t know that sometimes during the family lunches on Sundays, when I went into the bathroom downstairs, the one down the hall past the mud entrance, the one near the mops and brooms, the dog bowls and the hanging leashes, the bathroom with the bathtub and shower that his niece and I sometimes bathed in together after we went swimming, washing each other with his wife’s French rose soap and his turtle-oil hair conditioner, he would follow me in when I had to pee and he would push me up against the sink and we would watch ourselves in the mirror. He watched me, and I watched myself, too. I looked at my eyes, not his. I watched my eyes open and close. I watched my mouth, not his, open and close and gasp. The girls didn’t know that. And they didn’t know that their father would lie to them and tell them he was having a meeting with Mr. Ruíz, but he wasn’t meeting Mr. Ruíz, he was taking the American girl to dinner, to teach her about fish, to correct her appalling grammar, teach her proper Chilean slang and history—the word for grill comes from the torture device—to have her try the braided lamb intestines, and to tell her she drinks too much before taking her to a hotel by the hour. The one not too far from the sea. And the girl, the American girl, would put a towel over the television that you couldn’t turn off, with the pornography she didn’t want there in the background. Their father would laugh at this silly girl putting a towel over the television. And he laughed even harder when he discovered that she didn’t know how to properly use a bidet and that she sprayed herself in the face. And he laughed, too, when the condom got stuck up inside her and he had to carefully fetch it out with his fingers, and she was worried, so worried that she would be pregnant. And he wasn’t worried. If she were, she’d stay. She’d sleep in his upstairs bedroom in the bed near the dresser with a pistol hidden in the third drawer down. She would look over the railing on the staircase landing at the large living room below, and the dining room with people coming and going, always people in that happy house, women dancing to the radio, slicing green olives to cook with the ground beef for empanadas, rolling out the dough, listening to Luis Miguel, Violeta Parra, the Beatles, and La Bohème and swaying their hips to the Colombian music, and the salsa, the cumbia. The cousins and aunts and nieces cooking inside the large open kitchen. Roasting the tomatoes, peeling the garlic, hand-cutting the pasta that dried on wooden racks overnight. Whipping the cream for the fruit mousse. Slicing the cherimoya, the lucuma, the white strawberries and placing them on large platters. Scoring the whipped potato in a grid with fork tines on top of the meat pie. Stuffing the big avocados, stuffing the crabs inside their own shells. Cleaning the fish for soup. Placing raw clams on plates with ice and lemon slices. Placing the kneaded bread in baskets covered with linen napkins and carrying them out to the tables along the porch where the men stand drinking and talking, turning the beef and the pork and the alpaca and the roasting chickens on the giant grill with their long pokers and tongs. Camila the maid exasperatedly picking up after the wild boys, men coming over to talk business in low whispers. The life-size antique horse in the dining room would listen. Listen to the wife complain to Camila about her husband. Her husband, that impossible man, always doing what he pleased. First his cousin Valentina, and now that American girl.
Salvador and Valentina were thrilled by the fact that she looked just like his mother when she was young and he looked just like her dead father. Octavia referred to her husband and his cousin Valentina as Akhenaton and Nefertiti. They would have married each other, but they wanted babies. And they didn’t want babies with tails. I liked that he was in love with a woman because she looked like his mother and he like her father. It all fit neatly. They were secrets, their bond was sex and family. If I got close to him, I got close to their secret of sex and family. That disturbed me, comforted me.
I asked him about his first time. He didn’t tell me about his first time, but he says that he took his cousin Valentina’s virginity. He says she came to him one afternoon when no one else was there, took down her hair, and unbuttoned her dress and let it drop to the floor.
* * *
One day at his house, I saw Octavia being followed by little Federico, who was just the height of her ass. They didn’t see me and she didn’t think anyone could see them. He followed his beautiful mother and asked her to please fart on his face. “Please, Mama!” he pleaded, laughing and begging her to fart on his face. And then you could see that she did. And he doubled over with delight. “Again, Mama! Again!”
* * *
Twice we went to Argentina for the weekend, to Buenos Aires. Salvador told his wife that he had business there, and we went to the airport separately as he’d instructed me to do, and we did not sit next to each other on the flight. He had told me that he didn’t actually have business those weekends, but he did. We drove fast along Avenida 9 de Julio, the widest avenue in the world, slipping across lanes as if we were on ice. We drove north to the Rio de la Plata, the silver river, enormous and slow, so wide it’s like the sea and so slow it’s like a lake. In the marshy, warm, sticky delta air he asked me to wait for him, for just two minutes, he promised he would be right back. For just two minutes he needed to talk to a guy about a thing. And then we would go to the opera at the Teatro Colón, and after that to supper at midnight, and after that back to his apartment with the spiral staircase. It wasn’t for two minutes that he met that guy about a thing. As the hours went by, I walked along the delta and watched the sun go down and the pretty lights decorating the docks and the restaurants over the water blink on, and the lights on the boats, little white twinkling lights everywhere. I walked away from the car, and when I couldn’t see the car anymore, just the little lights on the boats, there was a moment when no one in the world knew where I was. I was completely unreachable and unfindable. I liked to feel that way for a few minutes—I loved it. I was completely alone in the world and no one knew who I was and those who knew me had no idea where I was. But I was relieved when Salvador finally returned, and he apologized, and we headed back to the city in time for Act II. On the way to the theater he tells me that his parents saw Maria Callas sing there, and that he saw Pavarotti and Igor Stravinsky perform there. He tells me that the chandelier has a thousand lightbulbs, and the French red velvet curtain weighs seven thousand pounds. He boasts of the Stradivarius instruments in the hall, the French stained glass, the Italian mosaic floor. In the long car ride from the Tigre Delta to the downtown theater, he points out the military barracks, the infamous torture chambers from the Dirty War hidden in plain sight in the city. And he points out the buildings brought over on boats during Buenos Aires’s prime—when it was the wealthiest city in the world, he tells me. Entire buildings brought over from France and England, India and Greece. He points out the English bell tower, next to the building with the light pole on the very top. I already know that when the light pole blinks green, it means the Argentinian boxer won the fight, and when the light blinks red, it was the foreigner. He asks me how I know this, and I tell him that I have a friend at school whose brother became my friend, too—Dr. Lionel Corelli—and he told me when I was here on a school trip and he gave me a tour of the city. Salvador does not like this, he doesn’t like that I got a tour of the city from another man. But Lionel is just my friend, I assure him. He says that men and women are never just friends and it is impossible that this Dr. Lionel Corelli would take me on a tour of Buenos Aires and not want more from me. He was angry. I told him that Dr. Corelli had a fiancée. Salvador told me that gave him zero assurances that Dr. Corelli wasn’t also interested in me, and that South American men never have innocent friendships with women. I replied that North American women can have innocent friendships with men. Salvador was now driving very fast through the city. He was angry enough about me knowing about the green and red boxer lights on top of the building that we didn’t go to Act II of whatever Wagner opera we were going to see.
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* * *
But he didn’t mind Dr. Corelli being a close friend of mine the next time we snuck away to Buenos Aires, when I woke in the middle of the night in excruciating pain. I called my doctor friend at three in the morning, and he was at the apartment within twenty minutes in his pajamas with his medical bag in hand. He examined me and determined that I had a bladder infection. He went out and returned shortly with medication. He told Salvador, No sexual activity for three days. And it meant that we missed the opera again the following night, since I didn’t feel up to being out that long. I never went to the horseshoe-shaped Teatro Colón; I never saw its chandelier with a thousand bulbs.
I was better quickly, and Salvador wanted to spend the evening in bed before we ate at midnight at Don Paolo. The following morning we returned to Chile.
A week later, I was on a plane to Brazil looking over the favelas, the endless shantytowns surrounding São Paolo. And then another plane to New York, and then another plane back home. My father and my brother picked me up. It was shocking to be home. I felt a pit in my stomach. I felt terrified that I would die of thirst, starvation. My father and brother and I went to a huge grocery store, and I remember walking down the long aisles of American food feeling like I didn’t belong at all. I didn’t want to come back home, but I did. I didn’t want to be around my father, but I was. I keep returning to the scene of the crime. I can’t get away. Even in Chile, I couldn’t get away.
* * *
What the American girl didn’t see at that time was that when she was in Chile, she was doing the same thing she had always done. She had become part of Salvador’s family and their sex was secret. The man who was older than her father, the man who could very easily be her father. She didn’t mind being a secret. She didn’t want to be his wife. She wanted to be a secret. She wanted to be important, but she wanted to be a secret. And then she wanted to slip away just like she slipped in. But she would miss him. She would miss being there. A year later, she went back and they had a nice time again. And she was a secret again. This time he and Octavia would be separated and he would have a new woman living in his house. But it didn’t stop them from doing just as they had done before. And the new woman would sense it, she knew the American girl was someone to worry about. Her body broke out in rashes when the American girl arrived. I liked that she got rashes when I showed up; I liked having that power.