“Come on, old woman, move on before I get angry,” the officer insisted, pushing her away.
Rousing themselves finally from their stupor, Andres and Evelyn took their grandmother by her arms, uprooting her, and pulled her away. Concepcion had suddenly aged, dragging her feet and hunched over like an old woman. She walked with her eyes on the ground, repeating to herself, “May God bless him and forgive him, may God bless him and forgive him.”
It fell to Father Benito to call Gregorio’s mother, inform her of her son’s tragedy, and try to console her on the telephone. Miriam sobbed without being able to understand what had happened, since the priest had followed Concepcion’s precise instructions and did not supply her with any details. All he said was that it had been an accident related to organized crime, like so many random killings that took place in Guatemala on a daily basis. Gregorio was simply another victim of the raging violence. There was no point in her coming for the funeral, he said, as she would not arrive in time, but money was needed for the coffin, a plot in the cemetery, and other expenses. He would make sure he gave her son a Christian burial and would say masses for the salvation of his soul. He did not tell Miriam that Gregorio’s body was in a morgue some thirty miles away, and would only be handed over to the family after the official report had been completed. This could take months, unless they paid something under the table, in which case the autopsy would be quietly forgotten. This was what part of the money was for; once again, he would take this unpleasant task on himself.
On the back of the sign around Gregorio’s neck was written that this was how traitors and their families died. No one knew what Gregorio’s treachery could have been. His death served as a warning to other gang members in case their loyalty was weakening, a challenge to the national police with their boasts of having crime under control, and a threat to the population at large. Father Benito learned of the message from one of the police and considered it his duty to warn Concepcion of the danger her family was in. “So what do you want us to do, Father?” was her response. She decided that Andres should accompany Evelyn to school and back, and that instead of taking the shortcut along the green path through the banana plantation they should walk along the side of the road, even though this added twenty minutes to their journey. However, Andres did not have to follow her instructions, because his sister refused to go back to school.
By then it was obvious that the sight of her brother hanging from the bridge had left a lasting mark on Evelyn’s brain and her tongue. That year she would be turning fifteen. Her body was starting to acquire a grown-up woman’s curves and she was at last beginning to overcome her shyness. Before Gregorio’s murder she had been speaking up in class, knew the latest pop songs by heart, and was just like the other girls in the village square who would glance at the boys with feigned indifference. But after the terror of that Friday, she lost her appetite and the ability to string words together. She stammered so badly that not even her grandmother’s love enabled her to be understood.
Lucia and Richard listened in horrified silence to the story of Evelyn’s ordeal. She was crying quietly, overwhelmed by those memories. Unable to comfort her, Lucia tried to distract her with her own story.
Lucia
Chile, 1954–1973
The two pillars of Lucia Maraz’s childhood and youth were her mother, Lena, and her brother, Enrique, before the latter was taken from her by the military coup in 1973. Her father had died in a traffic accident when Lucia was tiny, and it was as if he had never existed, although the idea of a father continued to float like a mist around his two children. Among the few memories Lucia had, so vague that perhaps they were not real ones but scenes her brother invented, was a trip to the zoo. She was on her father’s shoulders, clinging on with both hands to his thick black hair as they strolled between the monkey cages. In another equally hazy memory she was on a carousel astride a unicorn while he stood beside her, an arm around her waist to steady her. Her brother and mother were nowhere to be seen in either of these images.
Lena Maraz had loved her husband from the age of seventeen with unswerving devotion. When she received the news of his death she was only able to weep for him a few hours until she discovered that the person she had just identified covered with a sheet on a metal table in a public hospital was in fact a total stranger and her marriage a monumental fraud. The same highway police officer who had informed her of what had happened later returned with a detective inspector to ask questions that seemed cruel under the circumstances and bore no relation to the accident. They had to repeat their information twice before Lena understood what they were trying to tell her. Her husband was a bigamist. In a provincial city almost a hundred miles from the capital where she lived, there was another woman as much in the dark as she was, who believed she was his legitimate spouse and the mother of his only child. For years, Lena’s husband had lived a double life, shielded by his job as a traveling salesman, which offered a good pretext for his prolonged absences. Since he had married Lena first, his second relationship had no legal standing, but the son had been recognized and bore his father’s surname.
Lena’s mourning was transformed into a storm of resentment and retrospective jealousy. She spent months scouring the past for lies and omissions, piecing things together to explain every suspect act, every false word, every broken promise, doubting even the way they had made love. In her desire to find out about the other wife she went to the province to spy on her, only to discover she was an ordinary-looking young woman who dressed badly and wore glasses: someone very different from the courtesan of her imagination. Lena observed her from a safe distance and followed her in the street but never approached her. Some weeks later, the woman phoned to suggest they meet to talk about the situation as they had both suffered in a similar way and both had children by the same father. Lena told her they had nothing in common, that the man’s sins were his own business and he must surely be paying for them in purgatory. Then she hung up on her. Lena’s life was consumed by rancor until she finally realized that her husband was still harming her from the grave, and it was her anger rather than his betrayal that was destroying her. She adopted a draconian remedy and cut the faithless wretch out of her life at a stroke. She tore up every photo of him she could lay her hands on, got rid of his things, stopped seeing the friends they had in common, and avoided all contact with the Maraz family, although she herself kept his name as it was also her children’s.
Enrique and Lucia were given a simple explanation: their father had died in an accident, but life went on, and it was unhealthy to go on thinking of those no longer there. They had to turn the page. It was enough for them to include him in their prayers so that his soul could rest in peace. Lucia was only able to imagine how he looked thanks to a couple of black-and-white photographs her brother rescued before Lena found them. In them their father was a tall, thin man with intense eyes and brilliantined hair. In one he was very young, wearing the uniform of the Chilean navy, where he had studied and worked as a radio engineer for a while. In the other, taken several years later, he was with Lena and holding a few-months-old Enrique in his arms. He had been born in Dalmatia and emigrated to Chile with his parents as a young child, as was the case with Lena and hundreds of other Croatians who entered Chile as Yugoslavs and settled in the north of the country. He met Lena at a folk festival, and the discovery of how much they had in common created the illusion of love, but they were fundamentally very different. Lena was serious, conservative, and religious, while he was cheerful, bohemian, and irreverent. She stuck to the rules without questioning them, was hardworking and thrifty; he was lazy and a wastrel.
Lucia grew up knowing nothing about her father; the topic was taboo in her house. Lena never expressly forbade it but avoided the subject with pursed lips and knitted brow. Her children learned to control their curiosity. It was not until the final weeks of Lena’s life that she could talk freely about him and answer Lucia’s questions. “Y
ou’ve inherited your sense of responsibility and strength from me; you can thank your father for being likable and mentally alert, but you have none of his defects.”
In Lucia’s childhood the lack of a father was like having a locked room in the house, a hermetically sealed door that might contain who knew what secrets. What would it be like to open that door? Who would she find in that room? However much she studied the man in the photographs, she was unable to relate to him; he was a stranger. Whenever asked about her family, the first thing Lucia said, adopting a doleful expression to avoid any further questions, was that her father had died. That aroused pity—the poor girl was a half orphan—and no one asked anything more. In secret she envied her best friend, Adela, the only daughter of separated parents. She was spoiled like a princess by her father, a surgeon specializing in organ transplants who was constantly traveling to the United States, bringing back dolls that spoke English and had sparkly red shoes like those Dorothy wore in The Wizard of Oz. He was affectionate and great fun, and took Adela and Lucia to the tearoom in the Hotel Crillon to have ice-cream sundaes topped with whipped cream, to the zoo to see the seals, and to the Parque Forestal to ride horses, but the outings and the toys were the least of it. What Lucia most enjoyed was to hold hands with her friend’s father in public, pretending that Adela was her sister and that they shared this fairy-tale father. With the fervor of a novice, she prayed that this perfect man would marry her mother so that she could have him as her stepfather, but the heavens ignored this wish, as they did so many others.
At that time, Lena Maraz was still a young, beautiful woman, with broad shoulders, a long neck, and sparkling, spinach-colored eyes. Adela’s father never dared try to court her. Her severe suits with masculine jackets and chaste blouses could not entirely hide her seductive curves, but her demeanor commanded respect and distance. If she had so wished, she could have had more than enough suitors, but she clung to her widowhood with the haughtiness of an empress. Her husband’s lies had created in her a definitive mistrust for the entire male gender.
THREE YEARS OLDER THAN HIS SISTER, Enrique Maraz did retain a few idealized or invented memories of his father, but over time this nostalgia faded. He was not interested in Adela’s father, with his gifts from America or ice cream at the Hotel Crillon. He wanted a father of his own, someone he could resemble when he was older, someone he could identify with when he looked in the mirror when he was of an age to start shaving, someone to teach him the basic lessons of manhood. His mother kept telling him he was the man of the house, responsible for her and his sister, because it was a man’s role to protect and look after the family. When he once ventured to ask her how he could learn that without a father, she replied curtly that he should improvise, because even if his father were alive, he would be no model. Enrique would have nothing to learn from him.
The brother and sister were as different from one another as their parents had been. Whereas Lucia got lost in the maze of a feverish imagination and boundless curiosity, constantly wearing her heart on her sleeve, weeping for suffering humanity and mistreated animals, Enrique was a cerebral type. From childhood on he demonstrated an ideological fanaticism that at first provoked laughter but soon became irritating. No one could bear this kid who was far too vehement, thought too highly of himself, and was too preachy. In his Boy Scout days he went around for years in short trousers trying to convince anybody who had the misfortune to bump into him of the virtues of discipline and fresh air. Later on he transferred this pathological insistence to the philosophy of Gurdjieff, liberation theology, and the revelations brought on by LSD, until he found his definitive vocation in Karl Marx.
Enrique’s incendiary diatribes as a young man disturbed his mother, who thought the Left did nothing but make a huge racket, and did not impress his sister, a carefree schoolgirl more interested in ephemeral boyfriends and rock singers than anything else. With his wispy beard, long hair, and black beret, Enrique imitated the famous guerrilla fighter Che Guevara, who had been killed in Bolivia a couple of years earlier. He had read Che’s writings and constantly quoted him, even when it was not relevant, to his mother’s explosive annoyance and his sister’s fascinated admiration.
Lucia was finishing high school at the end of the sixties when Enrique joined the groups supporting Salvador Allende, the Socialist Party’s candidate for the presidency, who was the devil incarnate to many in Chile. In Enrique’s view, the only salvation for humanity lay in overthrowing capitalism by a revolution that pulled the whole edifice down. This meant that elections were a circus, but since they provided a unique opportunity to vote for a Marxist, they had to be taken advantage of. The other candidates were promising reforms within a well-known framework, whereas the Left’s program was radical. The Right unleashed a fear campaign prophesying that Chile would end up like Cuba, that the Soviets would snatch Chilean children and brainwash them, destroy churches, rape nuns and execute priests, steal the land from its legitimate owners, and put an end to private property, and that even the most humble peasant was going to lose his hens and end up a slave in a Siberian gulag.
Despite the campaign of fear, Chile opted for the left-wing parties, who got together in a coalition known as Popular Unity, led by Salvador Allende. In 1970, to the horror of those who had traditionally held power and of the United States, which viewed the election in terms of Fidel Castro and his Cuban revolution, the Popular Unity Coalition won. Allende himself was probably the most surprised of all. He had run for president three times before and liked to joke about his epitaph reading Here lies the future president of Chile. The second-most-surprised person was Enrique Maraz, who overnight found he had nothing to fight against. That changed almost as soon as the initial euphoria died down.
The triumph of Salvador Allende, the first Marxist elected by a democratic vote, attracted the interest of the entire world, and in particular the CIA. However, it proved impossible for him to govern with the support of parties of widely differing tendencies and in the teeth of an all-out war declared by his political enemies. This rapidly became obvious, and unleashed a storm that would last three years and shake Chilean society to its very foundations. No one could remain indifferent.
To Enrique Maraz, the only possible revolution was the Cuban one; Allende’s reforms simply served to postpone that indispensable upheaval. His far-left party sabotaged the government with the same fervor as the Right. Shortly after the election, Enrique abandoned his studies and departed from his mother’s home without leaving an address where she could find him. They had sporadic news of him, when he turned up on a visit or phoned, always in a hurry, but his activities remained secret. He still had his beard and long hair but had given up the beret and boots, and seemed more thoughtful. He no longer leapt into damning attacks on the bourgeoisie, religion, and Yankee imperialism. He had learned to listen with feigned politeness to what he saw as his mother’s reactionary opinions and his sister’s nonsense.
Lucia had decorated her room with a poster of Che Guevara her brother had given her, but only because the guerrilla fighter was sexy, and to annoy her mother, who thought he was a delinquent. She also had several records by Victor Jara. She knew his protest songs by heart and also some of the slogans of the “Marxist-Leninist vanguard of the working-class and oppressed sectors,” as Enrique’s party defined itself. She would join in huge marches in defense of the government, shouting until she was hoarse that the people united would never be defeated. Days later, with equal enthusiasm, she would go with her girlfriends to equally large protest demonstrations against the same government she had defended a few days earlier. She was much less interested in any cause than in the fun of shouting at the top of her voice in the street. Enrique reproached her one day when he caught sight of her in the distance at an opposition march, saying her ideological coherence left a lot to be desired. The fashion then was miniskirts, platform boots, and thick black eye makeup, all of which Lucia adopted. Also in vogue were hippies
and flower children, whom some young Chileans imitated, dancing in a stoned haze with their tambourines and making love in the parks, just as they did in London or California. Lucia never went that far, because her mother would never have allowed her to mix with those bucolic degenerates, as she called them.
Since the only topic of conversation in the country was politics, which produced violent breakups between families and friends, Lena imposed a law of silence on the matter in her own house, just as she had done regarding her husband. To Lucia, who was at the height of adolescent rebelliousness, the ideal way to anger her mother was mentioning Allende. Lena would get back in the evening exhausted from her day at work, the dreadful public transportation, traffic held up by strikes and demonstrations, not to mention endless lines to buy a scrawny chicken or the cigarettes she could not live without, and yet she would recover sufficiently to bang on saucepans in her backyard with her women neighbors as an anonymous way of protesting about shortages in particular and socialism in general. The noise of these saucepans began with a single clang in one yard, taken up by others until it became a deafening chorus that spread through the middle- and upper-class neighborhoods as if heralding the apocalypse. Lena would come home to find her daughter sprawled in front of the TV or chatting with her friends on the phone with her favorite songs blasting in the background. Although she was worried about her irresponsible daughter, who had a woman’s body but a child’s brain, she was far more concerned about Enrique, fearing that her son was one of those hotheads who sought power through violence.
In the Midst of Winter Page 5