“But you’ve always taken us with you.”
“Not this time. We’ve been given the order to send you back. It’s become too dangerous, like after the García Meza coup in Bolivia.”
“We need a plan,” I said to Ale as we lay in our bunks later that night.
“I’ve told you. I’m gonna get Vero’s family to adopt me.”
“Well, I’m going to arrange for Alejandro to be my legal guardian. He’s twenty-two, a legal adult.”
“Maybe you guys should get married.”
“We don’t believe in marriage.”
“It’s not about believing in marriage, you idiot. It’s about staying here. You think I believe in being adopted at fifteen? Open your eyes.”
“But I’d need Mami and Papi’s approval to get married. I’m only sixteen.”
“So figure it out.”
“How will you get them to approve Vero’s parents adopting you?”
“Easy. In three years I can do what I want anyway. I’ll lay out my case: I’ll be happy, safe and well taken care of, and I can see Mami and Bob and Lalito anytime. They won’t have to worry about me, so they can dedicate themselves to the cause without being sidetracked. Voila. Everybody’s happy.”
“But what about Papi? What do you think he’ll have to say?”
“Papi’s on the other side of the world. It’s not like he knows us anymore.”
But no amount of begging, pleading or tears could convince Bob and Mami to let us stay. I was not to marry Alejandro, and Ale was not to be adopted by Vero’s family. On the twenty-four-hour bus trip to Buenos Aires, Ale sobbed so loudly the stewards checked to see if she was okay. I sat in a silent rage as the vast country of Argentina passed outside our window.
As the airplane to Vancouver took off, Ale grabbed my hand.
“You have only two years before you reach adulthood. I have only three. Before we know it,” Ale said, “we’ll be masters of our own destiny, Carmen. We’ll be our own bosses, and we’ll come back here to stay.” She loved Argentina more than anything.
As our plane crossed the equator and left the South American winter behind, I kept hearing Alejandro’s final words: “Don’t worry, Skinny. I’ll get to Canada come hell or high water. I’ll bring you back here, and together we’ll join the resistance.”
PART THREE
THE
DECISIVE
YEAR
20
IT WAS A hot July afternoon when Ale and I landed in Vancouver. Papi and Aunt Tita had moved into a housing co-op, where Uncle Boris, Aunt Magdalena, my cousins Gonzalo and Macarena, and other Chileans were waiting with a barbecue. It was three years since Papi had completed his doctorate in physics. He was thinking about changing his surname to McGuire, he’d told us, since prospective employers refused to give him the time of day when they saw the Spanish name at the top of his resumé.
“To the return of my daughters!” Papi toasted with a pisco sour.
“To the return from the Return!” offered my uncle Boris.
“To the return,” I repeated as I took a sip of lemonade. I studied the new grey in Papi’s hair. He’d been furious when he’d found out that Ale wanted to be adopted by a rich, right-wing Argentinian family and I wanted to marry a twenty-two-year-old man. Anything to avoid coming back and living with our father, as he saw it. I could see the terrible hurt in his eyes.
Two months later, Mami, Bob and Lalito returned to Vancouver as well. The secret police had come close to capturing them, they confessed. If Bob and my mother had looked discouraged before, now they looked defeated, grief-stricken, on the verge of collapse. It wasn’t long before Bob moved into a place of his own, and Mami wailed on the couch for weeks. They’d been through so much in their seven-year relationship, she sobbed. How could any couple survive so much danger and terror, such superhuman expectations? As for Lalito, he was only four and had already seen it all.
Papi was at a loss now that his two malleable girls had turned into young women with minds of their own. Ale was constantly sullen and withdrawn. I was in love. True to his promise, Alejandro arrived in Vancouver at the end of the year with plans to take me back as soon as I turned eighteen. He’d jumped through hoops to get there. First he’d gotten himself fired from the nuclear plant so he could collect fifteen hundred dollars in severance pay. Then he’d hitchhiked to Buenos Aires, where he besieged the Canadian consulate for a tourist visa. Finally a receptionist took pity on him and told him he had forty-eight hours to produce a return ticket to Canada and five thousand U.S. dollars in spending money. He’d gone to a rich Buenos Aires aunt to borrow the cash, which he planned to return as soon as he’d flashed it at the consulate. Then he’d obtained a reduced-fare ticket through a friend with connections to the Mob. When he’d presented his ticket two days later at the Aerolíneas Argentinas counter, not sure if it was real or a forgery, he’d sweated right through his winter jacket. His ticket was accepted, though, and for the first time in his life he’d seen the world from the sky.
Alejandro got an under-the-table job on the assembly line of a tofu wiener factory, and the two of us moved in with my mother and Lalito. As in the past, our household regularly put up speakers and musicians from Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador and Chile who were passing through town. And as before, I had nothing in common with my Canadian classmates.
“Wanna go to McDonald’s after school?”
“No, I have to go home.”
“Why?”
“Ernesto Cardenal, this revolutionary Nicaraguan poet and pastor, who’s now the minister of culture for the Sandinista government, is staying at our house, and my boyfriend and I are gonna drive him to his speaking engagement at the United Church tonight. You’re welcome to come, he’s—”
“Naw. I have to pick up some drugs at my dealer’s, and then there’s a pool party at Todd’s. You could bring the poet if you want. Oh, right, he’s a pastor too. Sorry about that.”
At the tofu factory, Alejandro met four Guatemalan refugees who were survivors of the dictator Efraín Rios Montt’s torture chambers. He learned about the United Fruit Company’s coup against Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in 1954 (Arbenz’s crime had been to nationalize the banana plantations) and the revolutionary efforts in Guatemala since then. Hearing that many of Argentina’s torturers had fled the country only to offer their expertise in Guatemala and El Salvador filled him with shame and rage. He immersed himself in Vancouver’s Chilean exile community, where solidarity work was the reason to live. He didn’t have to return to his beloved Argentina, he decided. He would go wherever the two of us were needed for the revolution.
Bob, who’d remained in our lives as my stepfather, was in charge of our political education. We studied Chilean resistance documents and writings on other revolutions around the world: Algeria, Vietnam, the ongoing struggle in El Salvador. The Return Plan was still in full force. The hundreds of Chilean resistance members who had fought alongside the Sandinistas in Nicaragua were confident the same outcome could be achieved in Chile. As Bob had intimated back in Bariloche, there was talk of an assassination attempt against Pinochet. Many hoped his death would be followed by an armed insurrection, which would enable a provisional government to be set up. Even those resistance members who believed in protracted war rather than insurrection—the only two successful insurrections in history had been the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 and the Sandinista triumph in 1979, we learned in our readings—were preparing for the outcome of a successful assassination.
Comrade Marcela trained Alejandro and me for life in the underground. She’d held a high position in our movement at the time of the coup and been trapped in downtown Santiago for weeks. It was there she had honed her survival skills. Her version of “hiding” had involved going out often, dressed like a businesswoman. After a while, the military men who patrolled the streets were greeting her warmly. Her check and counter-check skills (the ability to decipher when you are being followed and to lose the tail i
n the calmest manner possible) became so refined that she knew exactly when to get on or off a bus, duck into a store or disappear into a church. When the time was right for her to seek asylum at the Canadian Embassy in Santiago, she’d done so. Alejandro and I knew there were other resistance members preparing to go back, but we could only guess who they were. Even in Vancouver, each cell was trained separately and by different people. Alejandro and I constituted a cell of our own. During my grade twelve year, I mastered advanced algebra and acted in the school play, but I also learned the most crucial lesson about surviving in the underground: the importance of security must never, ever be underestimated.
As part of our preparations, Alejandro and I set up a small network of helpers who each promised to send us twenty U.S. dollars a month once we left, to be used at our discretion: for bribes when dealing with corrupt civil servants and border guards, for post office box rentals, for materials to make fake documents, for bus tickets and long-distance phone calls, for extra food when we had people to hide. We quit volunteering for a non-profit radio station’s Latin American news show and stopped attending political events. Instead, we hung out with my classmates. While my mother interpreted for Rigoberta Menchú, a Guatemalan activist, during her stop in Vancouver, Alejandro and I went to parties crammed with teenagers in a drunken or drug-induced stupor.
Mami, who taught adult literacy in Vancouver, was getting ready for her first trip to Contra territory. The Reagan-backed counter-revolutionaries, made up mostly of death squad members from the Somoza years, were invading Nicaragua from their Honduras base, and she planned to offer her services as a popular educator in that region of the country. Uncle Boris and Aunt Magdalena had started a non-profit coffee house in East Vancouver that presented music groups, poets, plays and speakers from all around the world. My aunt managed the front of house. My uncle ran the information centre in the back, where he set up a library of revolutionary books and held political education meetings for young people. For income, he still worked as a janitor at night. While I studied for my final exams, Alejandro saved every penny he made at the tofu factory for our return south.
I WAS EIGHTEEN YEARS and seven months old, seated in a Lima café, the day I took the resistance oath. My voice low, I leaned in and spoke: “I am committed to giving my life to the cause. I will die for the cause if need be. From now on, my entire life is dedicated to the cause, which takes precedence over everything else. If I am captured by the enemy, I vow to reveal no information, even if that means being tortured to death. If I realize I am going to break under torture, however, I will hang on to any information I have for the first twenty-four hours after my capture, to allow my comrades time to hide. If I give my comrades away within the first twenty-four hours of capture, I will be executed by the organization. I will always follow the orders of my superiors. I will never speak of the organization or of my involvement in it to anybody.”
Lucas and Juan, the men to whom I addressed the oath, gazed calmly at me from across the table. I’d almost cried with excitement when I first met them; I’d recognized Lucas immediately from the days when my family had housed him in La Paz. He’d pretended not to know me, but the sight of his nails, crooked from torture, still produced a sharp pain in my chest. Juan, a bespectacled full-blooded Quechua Indian, had scars from bullet wounds on his forearms, as if he’d held his arms up to protect his face.
Just as I finished reciting the oath, a bomb went off down the street. The café’s windowpanes shook furiously. My knees hit the table so hard that our papaya milkshakes almost went flying. Lucas and Juan grabbed the glasses a millisecond before they slid off the table. Not a hair on their bodies moved, not a single goosebump formed on their skin. I looked around. The necking teenage couples necked harder. The Indian-blooded waiters in their starched jackets kept whistling as they wiped tables and counters. I heard military boots behind me, running past the open door of the café. I didn’t pass out, which would have been humiliating. Lucas and Juan were big fish, and I was just a tadpole. But as they took a final sip of their drinks, I knew I’d passed the test.
“Welcome to the resistance,” Juan said, raising his glass.
Alejandro had taken his oath in an unfaltering voice. My admiration for his courage grew daily. I was gripped by fear: of torture, of a hideous death, of betraying my comrades. I worried that my political convictions weren’t strong enough for me to keep my commitment, even to a cause I believed in so deeply. My politics and my personal life had always been enmeshed, but they’d also been at odds with each other. I kept these fears to myself, though, trying outwardly to match Alejandro’s bravery. As of this day in May 1986, we were both revolutionaries in our own right.
Lead in the mouth, a queasy, cold feeling in the pit of the stomach: these were everyday feelings we’d grow accustomed to, according to Juan. He reassured us we’d get to the point where he was. A secret policeman had followed him through three countries, he told us, sitting directly behind him on every long-distance bus ride he took, until he’d confronted the culprit at a midnight station stop in the Argentinian pampas: “If you have a problem with me, tell me now. Otherwise, get out of my fucking face.” And that was the end of the secret police agent. He’d disappeared into the bathroom, never to be seen again. Juan told the anecdote as if it was the most natural thing in the world to confront a torturer in public while Operation Condor was in full swing. But I wondered whether I could endure a life in which the Terror never abated.
Alejandro and I had landed in Lima a week earlier. By now, Peru was embroiled in civil war, which meant that bombs went off regularly in middle-class neighbourhoods, and civilian casualties were commonplace. Our plane had arrived at midnight, well past curfew. In the taxi on the way into town, we’d passed thousands of soldiers patrolling the streets, their faces blackened with shoe polish. Tanks and Jeeps inched along, the only other vehicles out at night. Soldiers shone flashlights into the taxi at roadblocks, studying our passports and the driver’s safe-conduct papers. At our colonial-style hotel, the watchman unlocked the gate with trembling hands. A helicopter circled above, its searchlight following our every move.
It was seven years since I’d been in Lima. Shortly after my family and I had passed through, the Shining Path had declared war on the government, hoping to take power and create what it referred to as a pure Communist society, complete with a cultural revolution. According to the Shining Path, other revolutions, including those in Cuba and Nicaragua, were revisionist, and the organization’s belief in armed struggle stretched to civilian targets, including peasants and union organizers who did not embrace their ideology. Triumph for the Shining Path no longer seemed far-fetched. Its strategy of circling Lima from the countryside seemed to be working, and it boasted the support of a huge part of Peru’s population, especially in the highlands.
As part of our cover, Alejandro and I had spent our first few days in Lima visiting the city’s amazing museums, which displayed solid gold Inca artifacts studded with emeralds and five-thousand-year-old intact mummies from the southern desert. We’d been caught in the middle of a protest while drinking coffee on an outdoor patio. The American businessman sitting next to us, wearing an impeccable Armani suit, kept his eyes glued to the Wall Street Journal as hundreds of women from the schoolteachers’ union passed by, waving banners and shouting for better wages. Soldiers were beating the protesters with batons. One woman, small and round like my mother, fell to the ground, hands shielding her face while four men pounded her arms, legs and ribs. She kept shouting through it all. Following the businessman’s lead, we’d stayed at our table, Alejandro in his knock-off jacket, me in my tube skirt. When the tear gas hit, we pulled out our hankies, paid the bill and strolled away from the area, trying to look nonchalant.
Back at our hotel, sobs and convulsions seized me. That had been happening since the day we’d left Vancouver. As soon as we’d boarded the plane, my body had unleashed a tsunami of tears so ferocious I was sure I’d die of dehydr
ation. There was no sign yet that the torrent of tears had come to an end. When we went out, I hid my eyes behind mirrored sunglasses. There was nothing to do but let the storm run its course.
I replayed our orders in my head.
“You will be living in Neuquén, Argentina, where you will join the flying club. You will both learn to fly small planes, and then you’ll figure out ways to fly into Chile undetected to drop off people and goods. Your house will be a safe house for comrades coming and going. As soon as you get to Argentina, you must get married, so that our comrade here can get her Argentinian papers. You will present yourselves as an apolitical, petit bourgeois, hip couple and mix with that kind of crowd. Obviously, you’ll both need to find jobs, and you’ll live in a high-end neighbourhood. Is this all clear?”
My secret dream that we’d be urban guerrillas in Santiago was dashed. But the order gave Alejandro a spring in his step. He’d be going back to the country he loved, and he’d become a pilot, the childhood fantasy profession of many boys.
Alejandro fell into a placid siesta while I lay awake next to him, turning my head whenever my ears filled with tears. Should I have accepted the invitation to Cuba, I wondered? A few months earlier I’d travelled from Vancouver to a Rebel Youth Brigade encounter in Edmonton. While the temperature outside dropped to forty degrees below zero, a group of us, teenagers from across Canada preparing for the Return Plan, spent twelve hours a day attending political education classes. We slept in sleeping bags in the basement of a Chilean family home, and the women of the community had banded together to cook us elaborate meals. At night there was singing and cumbia dancing. Some of the kids fell in love, but we were all using fake names and had been instructed to lie about which city we came from, so it wasn’t clear how “Freddy” from Regina (wink wink) was going to keep his promise of phoning “Camila” from Calgary once he got home. On our last night in Edmonton, our teachers pulled four of us aside, two girls and two boys. At sixteen and seventeen, we were the oldest of the bunch.
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