Queen Kat, Carmel and St Jude Get a Life

by Maureen McCarthy

  You promised, Mr President! You promised!

  I was arm in arm with Juan and Carmel. We were at the front of the crowd, rocking together in time with the music. Around us were university friends and different odd-bods from the cafe crowd we’d come to know over the previous five months. Inside, in the warmth and splendour of the lovely old Town Hall, the president was being entertained by business-leaders, politicians, trade ambassadors and prominent Chileans living in Melbourne. He was being wined and dined in company with the best this country had to offer so that he’d go back with a warm fuzzy feeling. And why? Maybe so the trade ties would strengthen. So we’d all be richer. I felt so proud to be part of the group outside, the wind and rain whipping our faces, our bodies inside our parkas and windcheaters slowly getting colder, as our feelings grew hotter. We sang and chanted ceaselessly, hoping our voices might drown out some of the laudatory speech-making inside.

  Two rows of police surrounded the crowd. Dressed in their plastic raincoats, they were blank-faced and seemed alternately annoyed and bored. I had to keep reminding myself that they were ultimately harmless. Up close, police and soldiers always sent shivers down my spine. I knew that they played a very different role in Australia than in Chile, but I still always found myself wondering just what each one of them might be capable of if ordered by a superior. Then I heard a young one ask the guy next to him what he’d be doing on the weekend and it made me smile. There was nothing to be afraid of. Nothing.

  Eduardo smiled and motioned for Carmel and me to join him on the makeshift stage. The other musicians backed away a little, smiling but still playing, as we reluctantly stepped forward.

  ‘I shouldn’t be up here,’ Carmel hissed. ‘I’m not Chilean. I don’t even know Spanish!’

  ‘We need your voice,’ I smiled, ‘and you do know the songs.’ ‘Half the time I don’t even know what I’m singing!’

  ‘You know.’ I laughed and she grinned back.

  It was true. Carmel had this uncanny knack of being able to pick up tunes and words from different recordings, without actually knowing what the lyrics meant. She could remember them, too. Occasionally she missed the endings of words, or put the wrong emphasis on a phrase, but mostly, when she was singing anyway, she could easily pass as a fluent Spanish speaker.

  ‘Just don’t worry, Carmeloo,’ I said. ‘Shut up, and sing!’ So she did. And beautifully, soulfully, as if every word was coming from her heart. I was so proud of her. I sang underneath her rich voice, finding the harmony where I could.

  ‘Let’s interrupt their dinner with our song!’ Carmel suddenly shouted in English when we’d come to the end of a particularly fiery number. Almost without consultation, Carmel began the Victor Jara song. Slowly, and full of inner strength, she sang ‘Herminda de la Victoria’, which was written about a real little girl – a baby of two or three who’d been shot by police when her poor peasant family, along with many others, occupied vacant land on the outskirts of Santiago. They’d come looking for work and had built a shanty-town of cardboard houses there because they had nowhere else to live. These shanty-towns were ‘cleared’ every now and again by the government authorities, and unarmed people were often killed if they didn’t immediately comply. During one such ‘clearing’ the little girl was shot through the heart by a policeman, and the place was called after her from then on.

  Herminda de la Victoria died without having fought.

  Straight to heaven she went with her chest pierced.

  The bullets of the police killed the innocent child.

  Mothers and brothers wept among the crowd of people.

  Herminda de la Victoria was born in the mud,

  Grew like a butterfly on a piece of waste land won over.

  We built our community and it has rained three winters.

  Herminda, in our hearts we will keep your memory.

  I will never forget that moment. The rain had begun in earnest. I looked over at my friend’s glowing face, her springy red curls now flat and plastered around her head, then down at the good-humoured crowd, which had begun to sing along with us. I wanted to weep, to reach out to every single one of them. We weren’t singing for ourselves. We were singing for all the people in the world without a voice, for the poor and the disappeared. The ones who had been plucked from their homes, offices, hospitals and factories, detained and tortured, maimed and killed because they had the audacity to believe that life might be different. We were singing for their suffering and the suffering of their relatives and friends who must go on without them. Not just in Chile, not just in Latin America, not just in our own time . . . for all of them, everywhere. We were singing for the man who wrote those words: a popular musician who’d had his hands smashed by rifle butts on the first day of the coup in 1973. By the end of the third day he had been shot, his body riddled with bullets. Two days later his wife had found him under a pile of other bleeding bodies in the Santiago morgue.

  And in a very real way I was singing for my father. I had never before felt quite as close to him. It was as though his spirit was sitting like an angel at my shoulder. I would turn around every now and again and sort of expect to see him there. When Carmel and I got down I went and stood next to Juan. I looked up at his profile, lit only by flashing streetlights – this man who’d shared so much with my father all those years ago – and was overcome again with a sense of my father’s presence; an almost unbearable stab of grief mingled with the flooding wave of joy pulsing right through me.

  Inside I was crying: I am with you . . . my father . . . I am with you, always!

  It was nearly midnight. The president’s limo was gliding off. We couldn’t get very near; the rows of police had surrounded him from the building to the car. Someone had put up a black umbrella so he wouldn’t get wet. I saw his face though, small and very grave, staring at us from the warmth and protection of his car. Expressionless. A man who’d done his best to bring down a democratically elected leader and was now in power himself. A man who made deals with thieves and thugs and torturers. A man who, although president, had no real authority over the military, which had grown enormously in power and influence over the previous twenty years.

  The night had ended, but I felt like I could have gone on singing forever.

  ‘Where shall we go then?’ cried Eduardo. Most of the crowd had dispersed. There were just a dozen of us left, soaking wet and ebullient in the damp city street. We were the organisers and, without being able to articulate it, we wanted somewhere to rage, somewhere to mull over what we’d achieved, what had happened. There was Juan’s place, but his wife hadn’t been well since she’d come back from overseas. We stared around at each other. It was impossible to think that we would simply go home to bed.

  ‘Our place!’ Carmel said suddenly, looking at me.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said immediately. ‘Of course. Come to our place. Everyone’s welcome!’

  ‘I need something to eat!’ Eduardo’s father Miguel growled. We all turned to this old, rather quiet man and laughed. He was easy to forget because he seldom spoke, but he was always there, at the cafe among the men yarning with Juan, at all our meetings. It was Miguel who quietly got things done while everyone else was wasting time gossiping. I looked at Carmel. ‘Is there food at home?’

  ‘I think so,’ she said, in a way that made me think she wasn’t sure at all.

  ‘So we’ll pick up some stuff on the way,’ suggested Eduardo.

  ‘And drink,’ the old man said. ‘I want wine tonight.’

  ‘We all do, Pop,’ Eduardo said, casually slipping one arm around his father’s shoulders, and using the other to lift his guitar up onto his head. Crossing one leg jauntily over the other he grinned at the rest of us, ‘Like my hat?’

  That silly little action made me think, made me see Eduardo properly for the first time: the ruddy face, the white straight teeth and dark curly hair, the whole directness of him. His face was prickly. I’ve always liked the look of men who haven’t shaved for a coup
le of days, as if they’ve been too busy to worry about such mundane things. I looked into his bright eyes and wanted to reach out and run my fingers from the bottom of his ear to his chin. Instead, I said exactly what I was thinking.

  ‘I think I could love you,’ I said quite loudly, looking straight into his eyes.

  Everyone heard. They all stopped talking and laughing and looked quietly from me to him. Rain was still spitting down between us. Eduardo gulped in shock. I looked away in extreme embarrassment, praying that the concrete underneath my feet might give way. Why couldn’t I ever keep my trap shut? My only excuse this time was that we were all still so high. It had seemed exactly the right moment to tell the truth. Suddenly everyone began to laugh. Eduardo’s friends and father began to thump me on the back.

  ‘Good for you, Jude!’ old Miguel chuckled.

  ‘Well said, Jude!’

  ‘Watch out, Eduardo!’

  But Eduardo had turned away. And when I next caught a glimpse of his face, he wasn’t smiling. He was walking on ahead of the rest, his shoulders hunched over and the hand that wasn’t holding his guitar pushed deeply and angrily into the pocket of his old coat.

  Ten of us squeezed into two small cars. Eduardo made sure he wasn’t with me and Carmel. I didn’t say much on the way back to our place because I was too mortified by my own crassness. On the way we stopped at a 7-Eleven and bought cheese and bread, milk and sweet biscuits. The others had gone to pick up some wine from a late-night bottle-shop.

  Although the outside light was on when we opened the door to the house and trooped down the hallway into the lounge, it seemed that the place was deserted.

  ‘I’m glad Queen Kat’s not here,’ Carmel whispered to me as we brought in glasses from the kitchen. ‘Something tells me she wouldn’t approve of a late-night party.’ I shrugged. Katerina was the last person I cared about at that moment.

  Carmel turned on the heater and went back into the kitchen to put the food onto plates. Everyone pulled off their coats, plonked themselves into chairs, and began talking animatedly in Spanish. Eduardo, still glowering, kept his coat on and huddled by the heater, rubbing his hands, as if his life depended upon not looking at anyone else in the room. Carmel handed around glasses of wine and we all drank to each other’s health. No one must have noticed the tension between Eduardo and me, because the mood was buoyant and lighthearted as we discussed the highlights of the past week.

  ‘What about that woman on the ABC asking you if you were a communist?’

  ‘I wish I’d said yes,’ I said, grinning.

  ‘What about the crowd tonight, even in the rain?’

  José, the joke-teller of the group, could hardly find anyone prepared to listen. Everyone wanted to talk. Except Eduardo and me.

  Juan, Miguel, Carmel and I sat in a group a little further away. I longed to get nearer to the heater, but I was too nervous about Eduardo. Our midnight feast was spread out on the small coffee table. What we’d bought was supplemented with whatever Carmel and I could raid from the fridge: more cheese, tomatoes and onions, Polish sausage, Greek cakes, and some sliced green apple. As I warmed up physically, I began to relax. Too bad about what I’d said. For all Eduardo knew, I could have meant it as a joke. Yeah. That’s right. It was a joke! Everyone laughed, didn’t they? With every sip of wine I felt more confident. Damn it. The protest week had gone splendidly. Nothing was going to spoil tonight!

  ‘You did well on the radio, chiquilla,’ Miguel said, touching my shoulder. ‘How come you’re so good with the bloody English?’ Everyone laughed. ‘My wife saw you on TV,’ he went on drily. ‘On that Good Morning Australia show. She said they couldn’t shut you up!’

  ‘I grew up here, Miguel,’ I said. ‘Have you forgotten?’ He nodded slowly, his eyes twinkling, and took another deep gulp of wine.

  ‘I forget a lot, chiquilla,’ he said. A burst of laughter came from the other group. José stood up, obviously having found an audience for his latest convoluted story. This guy was a teller of tales in the old way. There was usually nothing intrinsically funny in the story itself, only in the way he told it. This time he was talking about what he had heard his mother telling the family budgie when she thought no one could hear. He broke off and turned to me.

  ‘I have to go to the toilet,’ he said. ‘Where is it?’

  ‘Nooo!’ the others howled. ‘You’ve got to finish! Give us the punchline, you wanker!’ José laughed and held up his hand.

  ‘Compañeros,’ he joked. ‘I will be back!’

  ‘Piker!’

  ‘Dickhead!’

  ‘Straight through the kitchen,’ I said, pointing. ‘It’s in the bathroom.’

  I got up to replenish everyone’s wine. When I got to Eduardo I noticed his expression had improved a little. He didn’t exactly look at me or smile, but there was a faint twist at one end of his mouth when he grunted thanks. Fifty-fifty, I thought. He might be going to forgive me.

  Suddenly José was back in the room, his face flat.

  ‘Jude! Carmel! There’s someone in your bathroom!’

  ‘What?’ we replied in unison.

  ‘A girl,’ he went on. ‘She doesn’t look too well! I think she’s . . . she’s collapsed.’

  Carmel and I rushed in. Most of the others followed us. Sure enough, there was someone sprawled over the bathroom floor – Katerina. Her face was as white as a sheet and she was lying against the bath. One of her temples was grazed and her woollen skirt was bunched up around her thighs. Her breath was coming irregularly in deep sudden gasps. Carmel and I looked at each other in shock.

  ‘What do you think . . . ?’

  ‘I don’t know!’ There were no signs of an intruder. The bathroom window was still intact, and nothing had been taken.

  ‘Do you think she’s been attacked?’ Carmel asked in a small voice. I shrugged and began to feel her body for broken bones. She groaned a bit as my hands went over her legs and torso, her eyes half opening.

  ‘What is . . . it?’ she said, twisting around to the light and bringing an arm up to her face. ‘I don’t . . . know.’

  ‘Someone call an ambulance,’ I ordered. ‘Quickly!’ A couple of them disappeared back into the kitchen. Eduardo, I noticed, was still standing watching.

  ‘I think we can safely move her,’ I said to him shortly. ‘Will you help?’ He nodded. Katerina was now moving around, groaning and half sitting up.

  ‘Katerina,’ I said as firmly as I could. ‘You’ve had some kind of accident. We’re going to move you into the lounge room so you’ll be more comfortable. Okay?’

  She nodded sleepily, but shook her head when Eduardo knelt and put one arm under her knees and the other around her back in order to lift her.

  ‘No. I’m fine. Honestly.’ Her voice was stronger now and her eyes seemed more focused. ‘Honestly,’ she said again with a little laugh, ‘I’m okay. Really.’ But she couldn’t get up by herself. Eduardo and I got on either side of her and lifted. Once she was upright she was able to totter forward out of the room leaning on Eduardo and me for support. We settled her on the most comfortable chair in the lounge room. Carmel draped a shawl around her legs, but Katerina pushed it away.

  ‘No. No. Thanks, but I’m hot!’

  ‘Would you like the heater turned down?’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ she whispered, her head lolling back a little, eyes closed. I turned the heater down. José came in from the kitchen. ‘The ambulance will be here in five minutes,’ he said.

  ‘I’m not going to hospital,’ Katerina said. The rest of us turned to each other. I shrugged. I wasn’t going to argue. The ambulance officers would know what to do.

  ‘Do you know what happened?’ Eduardo ventured. Katerina shook her head and straightened up. I could see her eyes trying to focus on him.

  ‘Who are you?’ she demanded.

  ‘He’s a friend of mine,’ I butted in. Katerina looked at the food on the table, and the half-empty glasses of wine, then around at the others who we
re all watching her.

  ‘I see,’ she said coldly. ‘Is this a party or something?’

  ‘You could say that,’ Carmel said brightly.

  ‘What for?’ Katerina’s voice had become slurred again.

  ‘We had the protest tonight,’ Carmel said.

  ‘A protest?’ Katerina looked as if she didn’t understand what the word meant. ‘What . . . what about?’

  ‘Why don’t we talk about it when you’re well,’ Eduardo cut in. There was a loud knock at the door.

  ‘That will be the ambulance,’ José said. ‘I’ll go.’ Katerina gave an exasperated sigh.

  ‘There was no need to call an ambulance . . .’

  José arrived back in the room, but it was not an ambulance officer behind him, it was Anton.

  ‘Katerina’s had . . . some kind of accident,’ Carmel said slowly.

  ‘That’s no good,’ he said. ‘What happened, Kats?’

  ‘I don’t remember,’ she said.

  Anton moved over to Carmel and put an arm around her and they smiled at each other in the sweetest way. I caught a brief, very odd look on Katerina’s face as she watched them, as though their closeness was an affront to her in some way.

  ‘Look, if you all don’t mind, I think I’ll go to my room,’ she said tersely. She was now standing by herself, but tottering a little. A couple of the guys moved forward to help her, but she waved them away impatiently.

  ‘Anton. Could you please help me?’ Anton moved to her side immediately. You little racist, I thought savagely. You didn’t want any of these dark, roughly dressed strangers to touch you, did you?

  ‘I’ve been hearing strange things about you, Anton.’ Katerina gave a slurred giggle as she put one hand on his shoulder. ‘Who from?’ he asked casually. We were all watching. She knew we could all hear.

  ‘Mummy and Daddy were talking to your mummy and daddy. . .’ She was laughing and moving slowly towards the door, leaning on him.

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Well, they’re worried . . .’

  ‘What about?’