Something Fierce

by Carmen Aguirre

  Then it was time to go. Ale and I pressed our faces to the window as the train pulled out, leaving Mami and Bob standing on the platform with tears running down their faces. Their girls were going back to the beloved country they were not allowed to enter, and that was difficult to bear.

  We gazed out the window in silence as the train climbed in circles up the bowl of La Paz. In the poor neighbourhoods on the hills, ladies lined up with kettles at outdoor faucets and chickens scratched in the dirt. The highlands stretched all around us as the train travelled west. We read for a while, and then I nudged Ale. She hesitated for a moment before grabbing her bag and coming with me to the bathroom.

  I made sure the door was securely locked behind us before pulling out my copy of Mami’s letter, written in English. I read to Ale in a whisper. “Girls: Please read this letter very carefully. I know you have memorized your instructions, but here they are anyway, in writing. Your passports say you were born in Santiago, Chile. If the border guards ask you, you must tell them that you left Chile for Canada in September 1970, because your parents are in the mining sector and had some work to do with Noranda. The guards will understand this to mean that you come from a right-wing, pro-Pinochet family. You will tell them that your parents are in Bolivia on business at the moment, and that you are going to visit your grandparents, who live in Iquique. Remember that you met Trinidad for the first time on the train. Never ever answer any questions from a stranger, and don’t offer any explanations to the border guards unless asked. If Trinidad is taken away at the border, stay calm and get back on the train. Once you reach Arica, watch out for a young, well-dressed couple at the station. They will be waiting for you to approach them and will take care of you. If the couple are not there, or if you think it’s not safe to approach them, use your fifty dollars to take a taxi to the bus station and buy tickets to Santiago. Your grandmother will be waiting for you there at the station. Do not under any circumstances tell your grandparents about this letter. We know your first trip back from exile will be an incredible experience for you both. Keep your eyes and ears and hearts open at all times, and in that way you will learn about life. We love you. Mami and Bob.”

  Ale was leaning against the wall of the tiny, disgusting bathroom, holding her nose. She didn’t say a word as I rummaged through her bag, then set both copies of the letter on fire, using the lighter Bob had given me. I dropped them, still flaming, through the hole that served as a toilet onto the tracks.

  My hands were trembling. Ale refused to meet my gaze. “You’ve gotta make sure you remember everything in the letter,” I said.

  “I do remember it, you fool. Let’s go.”

  I made us both brush our hair before we left the bathroom. If anybody was wondering what we’d been doing in there, they’d think we’d gone to primp. Walking back to our seats, with the letters gone, I felt a million pounds lighter. Trinidad was lost in thought, watching the landscape go by and leaving red lipstick marks on her cigarette butts. She was probably steeling herself for the border crossing into Chile, which Bob had told us was twenty-four hours away. All I knew was that soon, very soon, I’d get to see my grandma Carmen again.

  Four years earlier, my grandma and grandfather had come to Vancouver to visit us. I’d sat with Abuelita at our dining room table every afternoon while she knitted sweaters for us kids, and I savoured every scrap of her news. After the coup, she and my grandfather had moved to Limache, a small town an hour inland from Valparaíso. There my grandfather had built a yellow wooden house, and they’d succumbed to the quiet life imposed upon them now that two of their three children and half their grandchildren were exiled. As she wondered aloud how the watermelons and peaches and apricots in her orchard were coming along, my heart ached for that place I’d never seen. Their yellow house was the stuff of legend, the place we’d all go when Pinochet fell and Chile was socialist again.

  Ale had pulled a deck of cards from her bag and was shuffling them like an expert. “Señora Zamora, do you know the game Mao-Mao?” she asked Trinidad. I froze, because Ale had just put her foot in it. Mao-Mao was a game Trinidad had taught us, and anybody in the know would recognize it as one of the games, like Ho Chi Minh You’re the Bomb and Run Ché Run, that had been invented by political prisoners to pass the time in concentration camps. This train had to have at least one informer on it. But Trinidad simply stifled a laugh and shook her head no.

  AS NIGHT FELL, the temperature on the train dropped to freezing. People hugged their knees to their chests. It was too cold to sleep, and by morning my whole body was numb.

  It was almost noon when a guard yelled out: “Everybody off the train with your belongings! Stand in line for inspection!”

  The small border station quickly filled up with passengers. Everybody stood nervously silent, the only sound an occasional baby crying. People had pulled combs through their hair and passed wet hankies over their faces. The ladies wore fresh lipstick. Border guards with machine guns walked up and down the lines. Directly above the head honcho, who sat at a wooden desk, hung a massive portrait of Pinochet, captioned “The Saviour of the Fatherland.” Pinochet was wearing a grey cape in the photo, and his eyes followed you wherever you went. My knees started to shake. Their accents, their impeccable uniforms had brought on the Terror. I’d been scared lots of times since we’d left Canada, but this was the kind of fear that felt as if a rat was walking up and down your spine, from your tailbone to the base of your skull. It was the kind of fear that gave you a sick, cold feeling in the pit of your stomach and made you sweat—only the sweat was ice. And the ice got you trembling like a leaf in a storm.

  A wailing baby brought me back to the border station. I looked over at Trinidad, who was standing stock still, holding her white suitcase. The head honcho shouted at a group of Bolivians. “Indians! Swine! Filthy pigs! You are a disgrace to a civilized country such as ours. Step aside.”

  A great fury strangled me. But then I remembered: my sister and I were escorting Trinidad into Chile so she could fight for a revolution that would change all this. This was her first venture back, and Ale and I were her cover. I stood straight and still just like her.

  I remembered the conversations I’d overheard many times among the adults. The thing was to hold on to any information you had for at least twenty-four hours after you were picked up, they said. The thing was not to break in the first twenty-four hours. How would you know when twenty-four hours had passed, though, I worried? How long had we been standing there in the border office? The head honcho’s eyes landed on Trinidad, Ale and me in the throng.

  “Señora, I did not see you and your lovely daughters there. Please, come forward.”

  The three of us left our place in the silent lineup and laid our passports down. Within seconds he had stamped all three, and we were waved back to the train.

  All the Bolivians who were not dressed like Indians were let back on the train. Some of the cholitas had managed to get through, too, and they were beside themselves with joy. Now they would be able to sell their onions at the Arica market the following day, trek back to Bolivia and do it all over again. As the half-empty train pulled out of the station, I saw a crying baby in her mother’s arms, left behind on the platform. The mother didn’t look much older than me.

  A river of tears started in my gut and was moving up my body. My throat stopped it with a tight knot. I thanked God for that knot. Otherwise, I might have wailed the way the Bolivian ladies did at wakes and funerals. Their wails were so loud that sometimes on Sundays it felt as if the whole city of La Paz was in mourning.

  THE NEXT DAY, Ale and I boarded a bus at the Arica station. Final destination Santiago, twelve hundred miles away. Trinidad waved goodbye from the curb, her chest heaving as she cried behind her sunglasses.

  Sometimes the road ran alongside the Pacific Ocean. Sometimes we could see the towering Andes right outside our window. The Atacama Desert stretched on for the entire first day, like a gigantic bowl of brown sugar. Being back
in Chile had unleashed a herd of wild horses deep in my chest. I sat quietly in my seat, ankles crossed, hands folded in my lap, swallowing jagged stones as my eyes took everything in. The bus stopped in every major town and city. A drunken man got on at the bus station in Antofagasta and passed out in a seat in front of us. He snored like a walrus as the bus pulled back onto the vast stretch of highway, lit only by the star-filled sky.

  In the photo album we’d left with Papi in Vancouver, there was a series of family pictures taken on the beach in Antofagasta. I’d been only a year old, wearing a white undershirt and a little white sunbonnet. My grandfather Armando was holding me in one photo, my father in another. In one shot I was reaching for my mother, who looked hilarious in cat’s-eye glasses with her hair in a beehive. Aunts, uncles and cousins sat on nearby blankets, chewing on crab legs. My first cousin Chelito, the oldest of our generation, was a beautiful boy with a luminous smile and twinkly eyes.

  We were the only exiles among our friends lucky enough to have personal pictures from Chile. My grandparents had brought them when they came to visit us that time in Vancouver. They’d brought Chile with them in their pockets, their suitcases, their eyes and voices. I’d smelled a country on them when we greeted them at the airport, a country that still clung to my own skin and hair. It was something fierce, that country. My abuelita had taken my hand, interlocked her fingers with mine and stuffed both our hands into her grey coat pocket. I’d discovered gold: a stick of bubble gum. As the coating dissolved in my mouth, I’d been on the streets of Valparaíso again.

  The bus continued along the highway at top speed. The Southern Cross led the way in the pitch black. I sat motionless, legs like noodles, skin tingling. Brief bouts of sleep took me on adventures filled with bullets, torrential downpours and snowy peaks. The sound of flapping wings, like an eagle taking flight, woke me with a start. The bus had pulled into a station, and passengers clogged the aisles, ready to exit.

  “Last chance for La Serena,” the bus driver yelled on the platform. “We depart in three minutes.”

  As we wove out of La Serena, a great boulevard displayed its name prominently: Aguirre. Seven years ago, I’d spent a summer here. This was the region where my father was born, and his parents, and their parents, all the way back to the Conquest. In our photo album there was a picture of my parents, Ale and me on the beach here, too, sharing Popsicles.

  The streets of Santiago were jammed with buses, taxis, ice cream vendors walking through the traffic and hundreds of necking teenage couples. The heat had rotted the garbage, and the smell was unfathomable. This city was the most beautiful, dangerous and exciting place I could imagine, the place where my mother had carried me in her womb in the student days of the sixties and where a midwife had pulled me into the world.

  A weary-looking woman was standing on the station platform, purse clutched to her chest. Our eyes met hers. It took a split second for her to realize who we were, but once she did, she leapt a foot off the ground. Her face broke into a smile, bringing a dancing light into her eyes. She ran alongside the bus, yelping and laughing. My palms pressed hard against the glass, leaving their imprint behind. The doors of the bus flew open, and we ran down the aisle. The woman stood at the bottom of the steps, a hanky in her fist. She was wearing her Sunday best: a flowery dress, knee-high stockings and black shoes, her grey coat nestled in the crook of her arm. Her thick hair, cropped close to her jaw, was freshly combed. I smelled Coral cologne as we were enveloped in Grandma Carmen’s embrace.

  7

  MY GRANDMOTHER’S VIRGIN sisters lived with their mother in a mini-Parthenon in Santiago’s Barrio Alto. A set of marble steps led to the entrance, which was framed by marble columns on either side. The floors inside were marble, as were the walls. Even the twenty-foot-long dining room table was gleaming white marble. Every surface in the house was adorned with crocheted white doilies, and upon every doily sat a glass poodle. From the top of the second floor, a real poodle barked at us.

  My great-grandmother Dulcinea had suffered a stroke, and the left side of her face was frozen solid. She ignored this weakness, pride being her staple diet. Bisabuela sat at the head of the table, flanked by her four daughters, two great-granddaughters (Ale and me) and my grandfather Armando, her hated son-in-law. Even though he later became a school principal, my grandfather was the son of a nitrate miner and a seamstress, both of whom had died young. He’d earned his keep shining shoes from the age of four and was now the sole survivor of a brood of thirteen. My grandmother Carmen had run away with Armando from her family’s big locked-up house in the north of Chile. Her father, now dead, had been a brutal military man. Those who’d suffered most at his hands had been his own wife and children. He beat them regularly, and he’d leave the house for days on end, locking the door from the outside and leaving his family to starve.

  My great-aunts Milagros, Remedios and Perlita had made a blood pact back then to remain virgins, so that no man would ever control their lives. Their pact also required them to make a fortune, which they had done: while still in their teens, the three sisters had moved to Santiago and become smugglers of precious jewellery and fine leather goods from Argentina. Now they owned a mini-mall in the Plaza de Armas, facing the back of the seat of government, La Moneda Palace, from which they operated a boutique that sold crystal poodles. The factory that made these poodles belonged to them too. They were prepared to defend their riches at gunpoint, as long as they didn’t have to do the actual shooting. They supported Pinochet through an organization called Fatherland and Liberty and masturbated to the portrait of him that hung in their house. Mami had explained all of this to me, including the masturbation part.

  Lunch was served by two maids in embroidered aprons and “el maestro,” a handyman, butler, waiter and man about the house. Two military men had joined us at the table, still wearing their guns. When Gerardo, my grandmother’s younger brother, had drunk himself to death on skid row, my great-aunts had taken his two sons away from their mother and enrolled their nephews at military academies. Now here they were, sitting at the table with their buzz cuts and decorated jackets. Nobody was saying what had happened to their mother, though Mami had heard whispers of the great-aunts locking her up in a state-run loony bin. There was so much I wanted to know but dared not ask. Mami had warned us to be careful what we said in Chile. Remember that the enemy is most likely in the heart of your family, she’d told us.

  Before lunch, the youngest and most stylish great-aunt had taken Ale and me on a tour of the house. Trying to make small talk, I’d said, “Tía Perlita, your white pantsuit is just like my Mami’s.” “Your mami?” she’d responded. “I thought that Commie liked to dress like the Indians. Why is she dressing in pantsuits now?”

  “I don’t know. Has anybody ever told you you look just like Kate Jackson from Charlie’s Angels?”

  My great-aunt was not to be diverted. “Please shut your mouth. My nerves are frayed enough listening to my own blood talk like the cholas who relieve themselves in the street. Why can’t you speak proper Chilean Spanish? And what is your family doing in Bolivia, anyway?”

  Then she’d freaked out at Ale, who’d stroked the head of a porcelain doll that sat in an armchair by Auntie Perlita’s bed. As we walked back down the stairs, I looked at Ale and whispered, “Tick-tock-tick-tock-ding-a-ling-a-cuckoo.”

  Milagros, the oldest great-aunt, dominated the conversation at the table, bragging about some new medals the military nephews had received. My uncle Boris had described the great-aunts with such accuracy that I felt as if I’d entered a fairy tale, vivid and terrifying. The poodle, called Preciosa, was now poised on my great-grandmother’s lap. Dulcinea held a fly swatter in her right hand, punctuating the conversation with rhythmic swats at the fruit flies that threatened to land on the starched white tablecloth. She governed the table in steely silence, her thick white hair held back in a bun. She wasn’t scary, though, which surprised me. At times I even caught a mischievous twinkle in her eye.<
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  As the nephews held forth on national security, my grandmother feigned interest by raising her eyebrows or murmuring softly. My grandfather kept his head down. There was no sign of the boisterous, storytelling duo I loved so well. We were here out of duty: it was the day before Christmas, and my abuelita couldn’t leave Santiago without visiting her mother. Finally Ale interrupted one of the nephews with an inopportune question.

  “Have you killed people with that gun?”

  “Shut your mouth, mini-hippie,” Milagros snapped.

  My bisabuela winked at Ale as my grandfather announced that it was time for us to be going.

  IT WAS MORE beautiful than I’d imagined, this home my grandparents had created in Limache after the coup. Beams of sunlight entered through the tall windows to shine on the dark wooden floor. A white gas stove was the centre of my grandmother’s universe, and the large kitchen table was where she rolled out dough, beat eggs, sliced fruit fresh from the orchard and decorated cakes. The back rooms of the house, built for the exiles’ eventual return, were a treasure hunter’s paradise. I spent hours going through my parents’ boxes of books, notebooks and photo albums. Even their clothes lay intact in a trunk, along with some of Ale’s and my old drawings, clothes and toys.

  The orchard was a magic place, and at the end of it was a shrine to the Virgin Mary. Chickens laid their eggs in a coop and, when special occasions called for it, were killed, plucked and cooked by my grandmother. The sky was clear and blue, the air filled with the scent of fruit and flowers. It was idyllic. After we’d all gone to bed, I could hear the shortwave playing in my grandparents’ room. Radio Moscow wasn’t popular with Pinochet. Everybody listened to it, though, because it was the only way to find out what was really going on in Chile.