Something Fierce

by Carmen Aguirre

  “Do you think Mami’s in love with Bob?” Ale asked me one night in our room.

  “I guess so. Why else would she put up with him?”

  “Well, if I ever get married I won’t call that love.”

  “Mami says we have to understand that Bob is depressed. That he’s in a crisis. That he’s tired and broken, and we have to understand.”

  “She should just leave him,” Ale said.

  “She’ll never do that. They’re revolutionaries together, running a safe house.”

  “Yeah, right. Here’s a revolutionary thought: provide for your children and pay attention to them.”

  “Maybe Bob will fall off the side of the mountain on one of his treks and split his head open and die,” I offered.

  “Maybe.”

  One late summer afternoon I lay on the floor in the living room, exhausted after another bout of sobbing. Ale was playing in the yard with Lalito, and Mami and Bob were holed up in their bedroom at the back of the house. Someone knocked on the door. Three knocks, then a pause, three knocks, then a pause. I hauled myself up and staggered to the door.

  Trinidad stood there with her beaten-up white Samsonite in her faded black jeans.

  “Carmencita. How you’ve grown!”

  I shook out my legs, unable to speak.

  She smiled. “Are your parents here? I arrived a little earlier than expected.”

  I finally found my voice. “Oh, my God.” We hugged each other. “Come in. Come in. I always wondered—”

  “If I was still alive? I am, little comrade, I am. You really are a young woman now. But look at you. You’re thinner than a ghost. Don’t your parents feed you?”

  It was true. My bones protruded all over the place. I ate only once or twice a day, and tiny portions at that. Sometimes I wouldn’t eat at all and would just subsist on tea.

  Trinidad slipped off her corduroy blazer and hung it on the back of a kitchen chair. As soon as she put out the cigarette she’d been smoking, I picked the ashtray up, dumped the butt in the garbage, washed out the ashtray, dried it and put it back on the table. Our house sparkled. Nothing was out of place. And it was all thanks to me. I took a teacup down from the cupboard—thank God I’d bleached them the day before—and put on the kettle, which I’d Ajaxed to a shine that morning.

  “I’ll go get Mami,” I said.

  The following day an American woman named Mitzi showed up. She and Trinidad seemed close, and for the next week the two of them slept on our living room floor. The meetings would go on for hours, while Ale looked after Lalito and I disinfected the bathroom and kitchen. One thing was clear: this Mitzi was Mami and Bob’s superior. They seemed to be undergoing some kind of exam, because every time the living room door opened, I’d hear them being drilled.

  “So: show me again where this trail begins, how wide it is and how long it would take fifteen people to reach the border,” Mitzi would say in her Brooklyn accent.

  “Well, as far as I can tell, the trail starts here—”

  “Not good enough, comrade. I want exact locations.”

  “Okay, well, the trail starts here. You drive to Villa La Angostura, take a boat across this stretch of lake, get off right here, and then hike to the edge of this river. This is a good place to set up base camp. From there you cross the river and work your way up through the bush. After about five hours you will find the trail, which is really a sliver used by cattle smugglers.”

  “Good, good, comrade. Now here’s the key question: is it possible to navigate this in the winter?”

  “In the winter?”

  “Yes, comrade, I’ve asked you to prepare these trails for winter crossing. Is it possible?”

  “Well, it will be twenty degrees below zero. There will be two to three metres of snow.”

  “And that’s when the enemy will least expect us to be crossing.”

  “Right.”

  “Good. We have to figure it out.”

  Sometimes Socorro, the trucker’s wife from two doors down, would come over and ask to use our phone. Phones were a most coveted possession in Argentina, so hard to come by that even doctors spent years on a waiting list to get one. Miraculously, our house had one, and the neighbours would leave behind a peso after using it, the cost of a local call. Socorro was the resident gossip, and the phone was the perfect excuse to get past our door. We were the new family on the block, and a mysterious bunch at that. Socorro liked to look around our place, then report on what she’d seen at the corner store. Now that Mitzi and Trinidad were here, she needed to get an update. Whenever she knocked at the door, I’d let the adults know, and they’d quickly hide their maps and documents before Socorro came into the living room to dial the number.

  “Hello? Hello? Yes, this is Socorro, Pancho’s woman. Fine. Life treats me well. As for Pancho, he’s working on his truck so he can go pick up a load of mussels in Chile. Yes, always on his back that one, all I see is his feet, and at the end of the day the hands and face black from grease. Ayayay. Anyway, I better go now.”

  As she hung up, she’d nod at Mitzi, Trinidad, Bob and Mami, taking note that Mitzi was a Yank (gringo here meant Italian; North Americans were Yanks). Everyone exchanged niceties to make it all look natural.

  One afternoon Socorro nonchalantly invited me over for tea, and from that moment on we had tea every day, demolishing a baguette and a whole block of cheese as we gossiped about the military man who lived alone next door—apparently he had the hots for our landlords’ eldest daughter, who was attending university in La Plata—and about the landlords themselves: poor as church mice, but rich in land, since the man’s brother owned prime property right on the lake out by Villa La Angostura, where he made his living conducting boat tours to the Arrayanes Forest. I was an agoraphobic fifteen-year-old skeleton with obsessive-compulsive disorder, and she was a stout, working-class housewife in her late forties. Once we’d found each other, we didn’t let go.

  16

  IT WAS FIRST RECESS, and my classmates were yelling at the sons of the military from atop their wooden desks.

  “Where are they?!”

  The demand was punctuated by three stomps of their feet.

  “Where are they?!”

  Three more stomps. My classmates’ blue school smocks created the illusion of a choppy sea. Half of them were taking part in the impromptu protest; the other half watched or looked out the window. The military men’s sons, three of them, leaned against the blackboard, facing the onslaught. They lived on the military base on the edge of town, which meant they came from low-ranking families. These boys were mestizo, poor and destined to become military men themselves. Irma Weiss was the first to jump down from her desk and walk with menace toward the shrimpy boy in the middle. Six feet tall, all knees and elbows, with eyes that bore down into his upturned gaze. “You military pig. You’ve committed genocide in this country for the last seven years, and you will pay, you son of a thousand whores. You will pay.” Irma lived in a mansion overlooking the city. Her parents owned a five-star chalet right on Cathedral Hill, which boasted the best ski slopes in the country.

  “Where are the thirty thousand disappeared? I’m sure your daddy knows, you little piece of shit.” She spit in the shrimp’s face.

  “Everybody off their desks! Now!” The men in charge of monitoring the school hallways had raided our classroom. These warders had the authority to issue warnings, add your name to their list of bad kids and suspend or expel you if they caught you vandalizing school property.

  “All of you troublemakers form a line. I’ll take down your names, and you’ll go to the principal’s office to explain yourselves. But even if Madame Principal decides to go easy on you, rest assured: your names will remain in my book.”

  The twenty protesters formed a line, Irma Weiss standing defiant at the front.

  “Hey, German! The thirty thousand disappeared you’re so worried about? They’re sunbathing in the Caribbean,” the shrimp yelled, now that he had some backup.
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  “Aren’t you going to take down their names, too?” Irma demanded of the warders.

  “Mind your own business, Señorita Weiss. Those three have done nothing wrong.”

  “Right. Other than defend the dirty work of their genocidal fathers, who run the torture chambers.”

  “If it wasn’t for their fathers, this country would have been taken over by Communist terrorists. You should be on your knees thanking them for defending the motherland.”

  I sat stock still at my desk in the back of the classroom, fingers braided, eyes focussed on a Charly García verse etched on my desk: “Don’t bomb Buenos Aires, we cannot defend ourselves. The kids in my neighbourhood are hiding in the sewers, spying the sky... Today I’m afraid of a blond, tomorrow I don’t know who I’ll fear.” That was one good thing about the Malvinas War: the ban on all things English had meant an explosion of national rock, with Charly García, one of Argentina’s biggest rock stars, at the forefront. The conflict had also brought people into the streets en masse to demand freedom from the dictatorship that had led them into war in the first place. The fear that had gripped the country for years was still there, but people had had enough, and they were willing to speak out, despite the danger. It was halfway through the school year, 1983, and the shit was hitting the fan. Emotions ran so high that during the frequent protests in the classroom half the class would be crying with rage or sadness.

  Protests were happening daily all over the country. Elections had been called for December, and my classroom, like the rest of Argentina, was a powder keg just waiting for a match to be thrown its way. The vast majority of Argentinians went to public school. So here at the National School, my grade ten class consisted of working-class kids who lived on the edge of the shantytowns, super-rich kids like Irma Weiss and everything in between. None of the twenty students staging the protests were poor. The poor kids knew too much was at stake for them to exercise this imminent freedom of speech they heard so much about. And despite their professed interest in democracy, Irma and the other protesters shunned the poor kids like the plague.

  Being a flawless English speaker with a Canadian father made me royalty among the rich and middle-class kids. They considered my family’s choice of dwelling a typical “eccentric North American on a Third World adventure” thing. These were the kids I hung out with, which made perfect sense for our cover. I was secretly relieved that living on the wrong side of the tracks, close to the Chileans, was so easily excused. As in Bolivia, the worst thing you could be here was Chilean, but for very different reasons. Being Chilean meant you lived with the poorest of the poor, the brownest of the brown, the dirtiest of the dirty. Chileans were considered even lower on the social scale than Gypsies, another hated group. Most of the Indians in southern Argentina had been massacred by the army in the nineteenth century, and the remaining few lived on reserves scattered around Patagonia. That left the Chileans, who were in Argentina illegally, crossing the Andes by the thousands after the coup, as the country’s source of cheap labour. Those who lived in the shantytowns were actually lucky; many lived under the rosehip bushes that lined the road leading from downtown Bariloche to Cathedral Hill.

  The maids in Argentina were Chilean, as were the construction workers and janitors. Chileans were reviled for “taking all our work,” “using our hospitals” and “sending their kids to our schools,” though no Chileans were at the National School, the only public coed school in the city. The majority of Chileans who’d fled here were Mapuche Indian. Under Allende, agrarian reform had begun the process of giving much of the land back to the Mapuches. Fighting under the banner of the Revolutionary Peasant Movement, many of them had resisted the coup for days, keeping the military at bay with a few arms. The resistance had joined them, and an internationalist referred to as the Swede (a different Swede from the one who’d stayed with us in La Paz) had been on the front lines. The Mapuches, indigenous to the land on both sides of the Andes, had retreated to the Argentinian side of Patagonia and ended up living along the border in shantytowns like the one in Bariloche. The Swede had made it out alive but been captured by the Argentinian military three years later. He’d been disappeared ever since.

  It was winter by now, and Bariloche was in a deep freeze. My posse consisted of the privileged girls from my class. We spent our afternoons at the Old Munich Café drinking coffee and philosophizing, the most popular pastime in Argentina. My best friend was Dalia, whose father was a physics professor and researcher at the Atomic Centre, a nuclear research centre several miles down the road that wound its way along the lake. Beaten regularly by her mother while her ineffectual father buried his nose in his books, Dalia had the eyes of a woman who’d lived many tough years, not the gaze of a German-Italian teenager living in an immaculate middle-class cottage. She didn’t know my real story, of course, but as a keeper of secrets herself, she never asked. She’d show up at school wearing scarves to cover the bruises left by her mother’s attempts at strangling her. Heavy makeup took care of the black eyes and scratches, and a fierce dedication to schoolwork gave her a reason to live. We spent many afternoons on top of the hill across from her house, planning our future lives in Buenos Aires, where we’d share a studio apartment and go to medical school.

  My mother was now the English teacher at the Atomic Centre. The post became available shortly after the school year began, just in time to save us from real hunger. Teachers’ pay was only slightly above that of blue-collar workers, but at least our rent was taken care of and there was no middle-class facade to maintain. At the Atomic Centre Mami met Miguel and Cristian, researchers who’d moved here from Rosario with their young families in tow. Both these men, along with their wives, Lidia and Felicia, were recruited as helpers. Felicia’s best friend, Judith, a pediatrician, was a Polish Jew whose family had barely survived the Second World War. She became a helper too.

  Now Bob and Mami had friends, people they could speak freely with. Compartmentalization had stopped us from seeing Jacques and Marcia other than for resistance matters. With the Rosarinos, there were late-night dinners during which the end of the Argentinian dictatorship was discussed, the continued success of the Sandinistas celebrated, the resistance to Pinochet toasted. Mercedes Sosa singing Violeta Parra provided the soundtrack. I deduced that Miguel had started to accompany Bob on his treks through the Andes.

  Bob’s rages still kept our household walking on eggshells. I wangled sleepovers at Dalia’s, and Ale spent every weekend she could at her best friend Vero’s. There was no job on the horizon for Bob, though he gave private English lessons a couple of times a week. Stuck at home in the bitter cold, he spent his days studying documents as the snow fell outside, simmering and chewing over whatever it was that made him so mad. Whenever there was a window of calm, I seized the opportunity, but our talks about life made me sadder than ever. Sad because of how close Bob and I had once been, because I couldn’t help him, because my mother was trying so hard to hold it all together. The rips and tears in the fabric of our little world seemed irreparable. There was no way for the four of us to talk about any of it. The only conversation acceptable to Bob and Mami centred on the misery of others.

  Outside the house I was the carefree Canadian surrounded by friends. At home, I kept things so clean that even the insides of the cupboards were scrubbed weekly. Since money was still scarce, I got good at subsisting on two pieces of toast with cheese a day. Tea with five spoons of sugar kept my stomach full, energy up and palms warm. I secretly patted myself on the back, for all this meant one thing: I could survive in a concentration camp. Having mastered the ability to carry on backbreaking physical labour and hard mental work (there were fourteen subjects at school, with four hours of nightly homework) while I was near starvation, I set as my next goal to conquer my terror of rodents. Horrific tales of torture involving rats and mice were shared at school, where chilling accounts of Argentina’s many concentration camps were making the rounds. My first step, facing the rodents, was easy. H
undreds of mice had invaded our house in deepest, darkest winter, and a mouse often jumped out when you opened a cupboard. One had even hit me in the face. I had learned to control my shrieks; now I needed to suppress the initial jerk whenever I came upon one. Mami shared my phobia, but she too was determined to overcome it. “The enemy must never know about our fear,” she’d muttered when we’d found ourselves on hands and knees on the kitchen table, screaming for Bob to get rid of a baby mouse that had scurried behind the stove. We had our work cut out for us.

  “CARMENCITA?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s your mother. How are you, my beloved girl?”

  “Fine.”

  “How are things there?”

  “Fine.”

  “I cannot tell you how much I miss you. I cannot tell you how much I love you, my dear girl.”

  “Me too.”

  “I have to go now. I don’t know when I can call you again, but I love you.”

  Mami’s voice broke as if someone had pressed a thumb into her throat. I was like a glass dropped from a great height, smashing into a thousand jagged pieces upon impact. My mouth opened, and I emitted a foreign sound. As I put the receiver back on the cradle, a ray of sunshine parted the clouds and pierced the window. The lake shone grey in the distance. Black clouds rumbled. I sucked in great gulps of air as I walked toward the cupboard. I opened it and saw that nothing had changed; there were still only two cans of food left. A can of kidney beans and a can of asparagus. I’d save them, I decided. I put the kettle on again and retrieved the soggy tea bag resting in a dish in the refrigerator.

  It was weeks since they’d left: Mami, Bob and Lalito. There was no way to get hold of them, since their destination was top secret. A friend of Jacques and Marcia’s had been hired to sleep at our house and watch over Ale and me. She thought our parents were in Canada, dealing with Bob’s ailing mother. As the days wore on and their return date was repeatedly postponed, the woman went home, dropping by our place from time to time to make sure all was well. Ale moved in with Vero’s family, owners of a local car dealership. By now, the food money had run out. Argentina’s entire trade surplus went to pay the interest on the tens of billions owed to the International Monetary Fund, and the country’s economy had collapsed after only a few years of the deregulated capitalist model installed by the dictatorship. Inflation was at 500 per cent, which meant the million pesos my mother had left us for groceries was worth almost nothing. I could have gone to Jacques and Marcia for help, but Bob had made it clear they were to be contacted only in an extreme-case scenario, and I wasn’t sure this counted as one. I shunned the neighbours; it would be too dangerous for them to find out what was going on. So I stayed at home alone, keeping up the pretense of my parents’ emergency trip, making up stories for my classmates about the regular phone calls from Canada. I was proud to know that I could survive on recycled tea bags dipped in boiling water, even though my diet had turned me into a chronic trembler.