Once they had left Guatemala they would be Mexicans. There was no going back, and they had to obey the coyote’s instructions without fail. Evelyn would be a student at a supposed school for deaf and mute children run by nuns in Durango. The other migrants learned the Mexican national anthem and some commonly used words that were different in the two countries. This would help them pass as authentic Mexicans if they were arrested by the migration police. The coyote forbade them to address people with the word “vos” as they did in Guatemala. To anyone in authority or in uniform they were to use “usted” as a precaution and out of respect; with others they could employ the informal “tu.” Since Evelyn was meant to be mute, she was to say nothing at all. If the authorities questioned her, Berto would show them a certificate from the fictitious school. They were told to dress in their best outfits and to wear shoes or sneakers rather than flip-flops, as it would make them look less suspicious. The women would be more comfortable in pants but should not wear the torn jeans in fashion at the time. They would need to take sneakers, underwear, and a thick jacket; that was all that would fit into a bag or backpack. “You have to walk through the desert. You’re not going to be able to carry much. We’ll change your Guatemalan quetzales for Mexican pesos. Your transport costs are covered, but you’ll need money for food.”
Father Benito gave Evelyn a waterproof plastic envelope containing her birth certificate, copies of the medical and police reports, and a letter attesting to her good character. Someone had told him that this would help her gain asylum in the United States, and although this seemed to him a very remote possibility, he did not want to fail from lack of trying. He also made Evelyn memorize her mother’s phone number in Chicago, and his own cell phone number. As he embraced her, he gave her the few banknotes he had.
Concepcion Montoya tried to stay calm when she bid her granddaughter farewell, but Evelyn’s tears spoiled her good intentions and she ended up weeping as well.
“I’m very sad you’re going,” she sobbed. “You’re my angel and I’m never going to see you again . . . little one. This is the last pain I have to suffer. If God gave me this destiny there must be a reason.”
At this, Evelyn uttered the first complete sentence she had spoken in many weeks, and the last she would say for the next two months.
“Just as I am going, Grandma, so I will return.”
Lucia
Canada, 1973–1990
The night before, shaken to the core by Evelyn’s story, Richard told her how sorry he felt about the suffering she had undergone. He was well aware of the violence in the Northern Triangle of Central America, but this firsthand account gave a face to that horror. When Richard had mentioned that Lucia too had once been a refugee, Lucia said her own experience could not be compared to what Evelyn had endured. Yet the girl wanted to know more.
When her life as a refugee began, Lucia Maraz had just turned nineteen and had been enrolled at the university to study journalism. They heard nothing more about her brother, Enrique, and over time, despite all their efforts to locate him, he became just one more among all those who had vanished without a trace in Chile. Lucia spent two months in the Venezuelan embassy in Santiago, waiting for a safe-conduct that would allow her to leave the country. The hundreds of guests, as the ambassador insisted on calling them to lessen the humiliation of their being asylum seekers, slept on the floor wherever there was room, and lined up at all hours outside the embassy’s few bathrooms. In spite of the military surveillance outside, several times a week more fugitives managed to find a way in over the wall. Lucia had a newborn baby thrust into her arms, brought into the grounds hidden in a basket of vegetables in a diplomatic car, and was asked to look after him until the parents could join them.
The crowded conditions and collective anxiety could have led to disputes, but the new guests quickly accepted the rules of coexistence and learned to be patient. Lucia’s safe-conduct took longer to arrive than normal for someone with no political or police record, but once it was in the hands of the ambassador, she was free to leave. Before being escorted by two members of the diplomatic staff to the door of the plane and from there to Caracas, she managed to hand the baby over to his parents, who had finally been able to obtain asylum. She also spoke on the phone to her mother, with the promise that she would be back soon. “Don’t return until there’s democracy in Chile,” Lena replied in a firm voice.
Hundreds of Chileans began to arrive in rich and generous Venezuela. This soon turned into thousands upon thousands; before long their numbers were augmented by fugitives from the Dirty War in Argentina and Uruguay. This growing colony of refugees from the southern part of the continent gathered in certain neighborhoods, where the food and even the Spanish accents from their native countries predominated. A refugee aid committee found Lucia a room where she could live rent-free for six months and a job as a receptionist in an elegant plastic surgery clinic. The room and the job did not even last that long, because she met another Chilean exile, an anguished far-left sociologist whose harangues were a distressing reminder of her brother. He was handsome and slim as a bullfighter, with long, greasy hair; slender hands; and sensual lips that often curled into a sneer. He did nothing to hide his foul temper or his arrogance. Years later, Lucia was perplexed whenever she recalled him: she could not understand how she could have fallen in love with such an unpleasant character. The only explanation must have been that she was very young and very lonely. Her partner was so shocked by the Venezuelans’ natural exuberance, which he saw as undeniable proof of their moral decadence, that he convinced Lucia they should emigrate together to Canada, where no one breakfasted on champagne or took advantage of the slightest opportunity to get up and dance.
In Montreal, Lucia and her unkempt theoretical guerrilla were received with open arms by another committee of well-meaning people, who installed them in an apartment equipped with furniture, kitchen utensils, and even the right-size clothes in the closet. This was in the depths of January, and Lucia soon thought the cold had penetrated into her bones forever. She lived hunched up, teeth chattering, wrapped in layers of wool, convinced that hell was not a Dantesque inferno but a Montreal winter. She survived the first months by seeking refuge in stores, in heated buses, in the underground tunnels connecting buildings, at her work, anywhere except the apartment she shared with her companion, where the temperature was adequate but the tension could have been cut with a knife.
MAY ARRIVED WITH AN EXPLOSION OF SPRING. By then the guerrilla’s personal story had evolved until it became a hyperbolic adventure. It turned out he had not left the Honduran embassy in a plane thanks to a safe-conduct, as Lucia had thought, but had passed through Villa Grimaldi, the notorious torture center of the Chilean secret police. He emerged from there damaged in body and soul and escaped the country through dangerous Andean mountain passes in the south of Chile to neighboring Argentina, where he narrowly avoided becoming another victim of that country’s Dirty War. With such a painful past it was normal that the poor man was traumatized and unable to work. Fortunately the committee completely understood, and offered him the means to undergo therapy in his own language and to take the time necessary to write a memoir about his sufferings. Lucia meanwhile immediately took on two jobs, because she did not think she deserved the committee’s charity when there were other refugees in far more pressing situations. She worked twelve hours a day and when she got home she found herself cooking, cleaning, washing clothes, and trying to raise her companion’s spirits.
Lucia stoically endured this for several months, until one night she came back to the apartment half-dead with fatigue and found it in darkness, airless and smelling of vomit. Her guerrilla had spent the day in bed, drinking gin, so badly depressed he found it impossible to get up: he was stuck on the first chapter of his memoirs. “Did you bring anything to eat? There’s nothing here and I’m dying of hunger,” the aspiring writer groaned when she switched on the light. It was then that Lu
cia finally realized how grotesque their relationship was. She ordered a pizza on the phone and took up her nightly chore of struggling with the mess that the guerrilla had created. That same night, while he was sleeping a deep, gin-induced sleep, she packed her bags and left. She had saved some money and had heard that a colony of Chilean exiles had begun to flourish in Vancouver. The next day she caught a train that took her all the way across to the west coast of Canada.
Lena Maraz visited Lucia in Canada once a year. She stayed with her daughter for three or four weeks, but never any longer because she was still trying to find Enrique. Over the years, her desperate search had become a way of being, a series of routines she fulfilled religiously and that gave her existence meaning. Shortly after the military coup, the cardinal of Santiago had opened an office, the Vicariate of Solidarity, to help those who were being pursued and their families. Lena would go there every week, always in vain. She met other people in the same situation as herself, made friends with the religious and volunteers, and learned how to pick her way through the bureaucracy of sorrow. She stayed in contact with the cardinal as best she could, because he was the busiest man in Chile. The military government only barely tolerated the mothers and subsequently grandmothers who paraded with photos of their children and grandchildren around their necks and stood in silence with placards demanding justice outside the barracks and detention centers. These troublesome old women refused to understand that the people they were asking after had never been detained. They had gone elsewhere or had never existed.
At dawn one wintry Tuesday, a patrol car came to Lena Maraz’s apartment to inform her that her son had been the victim of a fatal accident, and that she could receive his remains the following day at an address they gave her. They also warned her she must arrive at exactly seven in the morning in a vehicle big enough to transport a coffin. Lena’s knees buckled and she collapsed to the floor. For years she had been waiting for news of Enrique, and now, confronted with the fact of having found him, even if he was dead, she could not breathe.
She did not have the courage to go to the Vicariate, fearing that any intervention on their part might spoil this unique opportunity to recuperate her son, but imagined that perhaps the church or the cardinal himself had worked this miracle. Unable to face the shock on her own, she contacted her sister and they went together, dressed in mourning, to the address she had been given. In a square courtyard, its walls stained by the damp and by time, they were met by men who pointed to a pine coffin and instructed them to complete the burial before six that evening. The coffin was sealed. The men told them it was strictly forbidden to open it; they handed them a death certificate for the cemetery authorities, and gave Lena a receipt to sign that stated that the procedure was legal and correct. She was given a copy of the receipt and they helped her load the coffin onto the market truck the women had rented.
Lena did not drive directly to the cemetery as ordered, but instead went to her sister’s house on a small plot of land on the outskirts of Santiago. The truck driver lent a hand to carry the coffin into the house and lay it on the kitchen table. Once he had left, they broke open the metal seal. They did not recognize the corpse: it was not Enrique, although the death certificate was in his name. Lena felt a mixture of horror at the state of the dead young man and relief it was not her son. That meant there was still hope of finding him alive. Thanks to her sister’s insistence, she decided to run the risk of reprisals and called a Belgian priest who was one of her friends in the Vicariate. An hour later, he arrived on his motorbike, and brought a camera with him.
“Do you have any idea who this poor boy could be, Lena?”
“All I can say is that he’s not my son, Father.”
“We’ll compare his photo with those in our archive to see if we can identify him and get in touch with his family,” the priest said.
“Meanwhile, I’m going to give him a decent burial, because that’s what I was told to do and I don’t want them to come and take him from me,” insisted Lena.
“Can I help you with that, Lena?”
“Thanks, but I can manage on my own. For the moment this boy can rest in a niche together with my husband in the Catholic cemetery. When you find his family, they can transfer him wherever they wish.”
The photographs they took that day did not correspond to any of the ones in the Vicariate’s archive. As they explained to Lena, maybe he was not even Chilean, but had come from another country, possibly Argentina or Uruguay. In Operation Condor, which linked the intelligence and repression services of the dictatorships of Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Brazil, and led to sixty thousand deaths, sometimes there were errors in the trafficking of prisoners, bodies, and identity documents. The youngster’s photo was pinned up on the office wall in the Vicariate in case anybody recognized him. The logic of despair convinced Lena that somewhere another mother would be opening a sealed coffin that contained Enrique’s body. She thought that if she could find the mother of the young man they had buried, in the future somebody would contact her and tell her of her own son’s fate.
It only occurred to Lena several weeks later that the young man they had buried might be Enrique and Lucia’s half brother: the son her husband had with his other wife. This possibility tormented her so much it would not leave her in peace. She began to take steps to try to trace the woman she had rejected years before, full of remorse for having treated her so badly, because neither she nor the boy was guilty; they also had been victims of the same deceit. When her efforts and those of the Vicariate proved fruitless, she hired a private detective who according to his business card specialized in finding missing persons, but he could not find any sign of mother and son either. “They must have gone abroad, señora. Apparently lots of people seem to want to travel at the moment . . . ,” the detective said.
After this, Lena suddenly aged. She retired from the bank where she had worked for many years, shut herself in her house, and only went out to insist on her pilgrimage. Occasionally she visited the cemetery and stood in front of the niche containing the remains of the unknown young man. She poured out her sorrows and asked him that if her son was anywhere near he should tell Enrique she needed a message or a sign to stop looking for him. As time went by she incorporated the youngster into her family, a discreet ghost. The cemetery’s silence, its shady avenues and indifferent pigeons, offered her solace and peace. Although this was where she had buried her husband, in all these years she had never been to visit him. Now, with the pretext of praying for the boy, she also prayed for him.
LUCIA MARAZ SPENT THE REMAINING YEARS of her exile in Vancouver, a friendly city with a much better climate than Montreal, where hundreds of exiles from the Southern Cone of Latin America settled in such closed communities that some of them lived as if they had never left their own country, refusing to mix with Canadians any more than was strictly necessary. This was not Lucia’s case. With the tenacity she inherited from her mother she learned English—which she spoke with a Chilean accent—studied journalism, and worked doing investigative reports for political magazines and television. She adapted to Canada, made friends, adopted a dog that was to be with her for many years, and bought a tiny apartment because it was more convenient than renting. Whenever she fell in love, which happened more than once, she dreamed of getting married and putting down roots in Canada, but as soon as the passion cooled, her nostalgia for Chile immediately resurfaced. That was her home, in the south of the south, in that long, narrow country that still beckoned to her. She would go back, she was sure of it. Many Chilean exiles had returned and kept a low profile without being bothered. She knew that even her first love, the melodramatic guerrilla with greasy hair, had secretly gone back to Chile and was working in an insurance company without anyone remembering or even knowing about his past. Possibly though she would not be so lucky, because she had participated tirelessly in the international campaign against the military government. She had p
romised her mother she would not try to enter the country, because to Lena Maraz the possibility that her daughter would also become a victim of the repression was intolerable.
Lena’s visits to Canada became less frequent, but her correspondence with her daughter grew so intense she began writing to her every day; Lucia wrote several times a week. Their letters crossed in midair like a conversation of the deaf, but neither of them waited for a reply before writing. This abundant correspondence was the diary of both their lives, the register of the everyday. Over time, the letters became indispensable to Lucia; what she did not write to her mother seemed not to have happened, a forgotten life. Thanks to this endless epistolary dialogue, with one in Vancouver and the other in Santiago, they developed such a close friendship that when Lucia finally returned to her mother in Chile they knew each other better than if they had lived together all that time.
During one of Lena’s trips to Canada, while she was speaking about the youngster whose body she had been given instead of her Enrique, Lena decided to tell her daughter the truth about her father that she had kept hidden for so many years.
“If the young man they handed over to me in that coffin isn’t your half brother, then somewhere there is a man more or less the same age as you who has your family name and the same blood in his veins as you,” she said.
In the Midst of Winter Page 9