“There were hundreds of other students. They were all wearing running shoes and bandanas over their faces. Their hands were full of Molotov cocktails and slingshots. They knew how to run, to dive, to hit the bull’s eye even while walking backwards. A group would disperse in front of my eyes, then reappear moments later, just a little down the way. The girls were especially impressive. Tough as nails, scaling walls like ninjas, throwing burning bottles at the military. I couldn’t believe these were some of the same girls I bedded on Saturday nights. As I watched, I wondered if they’d been the ones bedding me.”
A smile flickered across his face.
“Anyway, I got jammed against a wall. A few of the paramilitaries moved toward me, with their guns pulled. I thought it was my last moment on earth. Their faces were shielded by Plexiglas, but I saw one of the men’s eyes. They were ferocious. Wild. I wondered what drug he was on. He aimed his gun at my face, then lowered it to my crotch. There was an explosion, then darkness.”
When the Cousin came to, he said, he was lying in a heap of students at the back of a military bus. Whenever new students were thrown onto the pile, the paramilitaries would kick at their ribs, heads and backs. He’d been afraid the steel-toed boots would kick his brains out.
“I lost consciousness again, and when I regained it, I was receiving the beating of my life in an underground jail. I could hear blood-curdling screams all around me, and I was making sounds I didn’t recognize as my own. Once they’d finished beating me, a doctor pulled out the bullet that was lodged in my thigh. I found out later this was standard practice: Israel provides Pinochet with arms, on the condition that the evidence be removed. All but ten of us were released twenty-four hours later, and there was nothing we could do to help those left behind.” He clutched the arms of his chair, his knuckles white. “I understand now why the resistance talks about being the army for the people. Anyway, they dropped me off in a shantytown ditch at dawn. Some kids spotted me and called to their mothers, ‘Here’s another one!’ It breaks my heart to imagine the horrors they’ve seen in their short lives. The women cleaned me up, and a trucker drove me home. I live with my maternal grandmother in Concepción, as you know, and when the trucker laid me at the bottom of her stairs, she shouted, ‘This is what you get for being a Communist, you filthy ingrate.’ You know her—she held a tea party the day of the coup. She walked away, wouldn’t even help me get up. My thighs were twice their size, my face so swollen it was hard to see my features. Mami came to Concepción to nurse me back to health, and after a month in bed, I was able to return to school.”
We had a little laugh together. Neither of us cried. I knew that if I started to cry I might never stop. Seeing the Cousin again had already unleashed something deep in me. But I had survived thus far in the resistance by keeping a clamp on my heart, on my loins, on my tears. That couldn’t change now.
ON THE LAST DAY of my visit, Mario arrived with news from Santiago. Chile had been flooded with returnees since the Pope’s visit. The influx was met with disdain by some, but with great solidarity by many. Huge caravans with banners reading “Welcome Back to Your Rightful Home, Exiles!” waited at the airport for the jam-packed flights arriving daily from the United Kingdom, Australia, Sweden, Germany, Italy and Spain. Music groups like Inti-Illimani, Quilapayún and Illapu had come back from Europe, and Mario’s own band had played at some of their sold-out concerts.
That night in Puerto Montt, at a nightclub on the seawall, the Cousin took me in his arms.
“I love you, Cousin,” he whispered. “Please stay. Leave your husband and stay with me.” My heart broke clean in two.
The Cousin drove me to the bus station the next morning, but he didn’t go home after I boarded. Instead, he chased the bus in his father’s car, honking as he drove alongside. When the bus slowed at a fork in the road, the Cousin slammed on the brakes, jumped out of the car and started waving his arms. “Stay!” he shouted.
The bus driver had figured out by now that this was not the secret police ordering him to pull over, but a lover driven mad with passion, a common enough sight in Chile. When he glanced at me in his rear-view mirror, I averted my eyes. The driver stepped on the gas again, and we were gone.
In my suitcase were maps of underground trails from a package I’d been handed on a downtown Santiago street. Thinking of that pulled me back to reality. Once I got back to Neuquén, I’d have to break the news to Alejandro: the radar in the Andes meant we’d have to fly low through the mountains on our first delivery by air. If we were intercepted, we’d have to smash our plane against the rock face. Either that, or be shot down by the enemy. Both were better than torture, though I wouldn’t live past twenty in either scenario.
My heart fluttered in its cage like a hummingbird. It would be difficult to plunge a knife into its core, but I hadn’t figured out another way to cut through the fear. As we drew closer to the border, I put the Cousin somewhere far away. Even if I were to die in a plane crash, though, fuselage and limbs scattering so far from anywhere that our remains would never be found, at least I knew this much was true: I was still a sensual being.
“You travel in and out of Chile a lot,” the Argentinian border guard said as he studied the stamps in my passport.
“Yes, I do.”
“Why?” His eyes were steady on mine.
“Because I have family there.”
“Fine. We’re watching you.”
“Thank you.”
He stamped my passport and let me through. My tightened muscles hurt. My face, so open only hours before, was now a hardened mask.
When the bus stopped in Bariloche for an hour, I hid inside the tiny terminal. My life in Neuquén, only six hours away, could never intersect with what I’d been in Bariloche: a Bolivian girl with a Canadian father. I leaned against a wall and let my body tremble. Before I boarded the bus, a young woman approached me.
“Do you know if there are buses to Trelew?”
“No, but there are buses to Buenos Aires.”
With that, I handed her the package of maps, and we went our separate ways.
26
FLYING IS A man’s sport, and I’m taking my life into my hands by sitting in this airplane with you.”
“Yes, you remind me of that every time.”
Two other instructors had refused to teach me, but Rodolfo had begrudgingly agreed. Having just completed the pre-flight check, we’d boarded and were now about to taxi onto the runway. I turned the key in the ignition, watched the propeller come to life and radioed the control tower.
“Listen to this, buddy, that girl’s on the radio again!”
“Get her off!”
“She’s piloting the Piper Tomahawk!”
I smiled to myself as I looked down at the parcels of land on the outskirts of Neuquén, divided into perfect squares bordered by poplars. When we’d reached our desired height, Rodolfo shut off the engine. We went into a nosedive, the ground coming at us fast.
“What are you going to do now?”
“This,” I said.
I pulled the steering wheel with all my might and brought the nose up.
“Good. Good reflexes.”
He turned the ignition back on.
“Now let’s try something else. This is called Japanese eights.”
We inscribed eights in the sky, with me laughing and whooping. When it was time to land, I gauged the wind and let the wheels touch the ground at the perfect time.
“Not bad, not bad. Strong stomach, good reflexes, calm and steady. We might make a pilot out of you.”
He’d been hard on me, and I’d loved it. In just a few months, Alejandro and I would be ready to make our first delivery flight into Chile.
UPON MY RETURN from Puerto Montt, I’d been offered a job as a conversational English teacher for the tourism school at the National University of Comahue. My students were mostly older than I was, heavily involved in the student union movement, and I ached to live the life they led: debating o
ver yerba maté, hitchhiking around the country during breaks, organizing rallies and protests. To them I was a supercool young native English speaker from Canada, petit bourgeois to the core with my high-rise studio apartment, flying club antics and fashionable clothes. When the talk turned to politics, I kept my mouth shut.
My favourite of the bunch was a woman called Luisa. She’d grown up in a working-class family in the province of Paraná, in northeastern Argentina, and had hitchhiked from there to the province of Neuquén, where she’d lived on a Mapuche reserve for a year before coming to the capital. She lived at the cathedral, where the bishop—a revered human rights activist who had barely survived the dictatorship after he’d been caught using the cathedral as a hiding place for resistance members and a haven for mothers of the disappeared—let her have a small room in exchange for janitorial work. Luisa lived on nothing, so I started inviting her to our house for meals. Anytime she showed up with a slab of meat, a loaf of bread, a hunk of cheese or a jar of jam, she’d announce: “Compliments of the supermarket. I steal only from the chains, the bigger the better. Never from small businesses.”
“How do you keep from getting caught?”
“Nerves of steel, mi querida, nerves of steel.”
“But they have cameras.”
“Oh, I know. It’s just a matter of checking where the cameras are, making no fast movements, and never losing your composure. How do you think I’ve defied starvation all these years?”
I’d received a tear-stained letter from the Cousin within a month of my return. Since then, there’d been many more. He cracked my heart open every time. It was dangerous enough to have to lean on buildings when a wave of terror hit me. To couple that with the weak-in-the-knees sensation of illicit love was just plain stupid. And there was my secret betrayal of Alejandro. He was a comrade, a companion, a brother, a soulmate, but I’d come to realize I loved him in those ways, not as a lover. By late November 1987, the height of spring, I knew I had to leave him, and not for the Cousin. For myself. But first, the flight into Chile had to be completed.
Juan paid us a visit in Neuquén. We met him at a bus stop, then rode with him in the back seat of a bus that wound along dirt roads through the apple orchards, picking up and dropping off the peons and maids who worked in the area. We could talk safely there, as long as we kept our voices low.
“Now I want you to show me the plane,” Juan said, after we’d discussed our flight plan. “I need to see how much space there is. The first time you’ll drop off goods. The ultimate goal is to drop off people, of course.”
“Of course.”
At the flying club, we introduced him as Alejandro’s uncle, visiting from Mendoza. Juan was disappointed at how small the Tomahawk was, but he cheered up when we showed him the larger Cessna.
“So you’ll start with the Tomahawk, and we’ll see how that goes.”
“That’s right.”
“Excellent work.”
Pinochet had announced he would hold a plebiscite in 1988, now only a month away. The people of Chile would be asked a yes or no question: do you want Pinochet to govern for another eight years? If the Yes side won, all would proceed as usual. If the No side won, elections would be held a year later. The plebiscite was worrisome to people in the resistance. For one thing, the entire adult population would be required by law to register for the vote, providing personal information like addresses, phone numbers, place of work, names of family members and ID card numbers. Many believed this “registration” was just a way of collecting information for the secret police.
If the No side were to succeed—which seemed likely, since seventeen opposition parties in Chile had joined forces—the Christian Democratic leader, head of the opposition coalition, would win the elections that followed. There would be widespread euphoria at first. Most human rights abuses would undoubtedly cease. But the neoliberal economic structure of Chile would remain intact, and the new government would inherit a staggering foreign debt. As in Argentina, the IMF and the World Bank would demand that the new government set up a “structural adjustment plan” to repay that debt, meaning social services would not be reinstated and government spending would be cut back even further. The constitution put in place by Pinochet in 1980 would remain the same, barring the new government from prosecuting anyone for crimes against humanity and giving Pinochet a seat in the senate, as well as allowing him to keep his position as commander-in-chief of the armed forces. The secret police and other repressive apparatus would remain intact; probably dormant, but there all the same.
To many in the resistance, the plebiscite looked like the worst thing that could happen. The increasing polarization and unrest in Chile pointed to the possibility of radical change. If power could be seized soon through a revolution, the resulting provisional government could rip up the constitution, imprison members of the military, kick out the IMF, the World Bank and the multinational corporations, and work on re-establishing a democratically run socialist state.
The resistance, its members exhausted after fifteen years of persecution, was beginning to split. Some believed it was time to throw in the towel and join the coalition. Others believed the resistance still had a chance. For the latter group, time was of the essence.
“We need to organize this first drop-off of goods as soon as possible,” Juan informed us. “Go to the post office box every day, and the instructions will be there.”
In mid-December, Alejandro and I signed out the Tomahawk from the flying club for a day trip, loading it with goods we’d wrapped in towels and blankets and stashed inside two gym bags. A couple of young Argentinian men had dropped them off the night before at a busy greasy spoon.
Flying as low as we possibly could, we navigated through the mountain range. Alejandro had scouted the route twice earlier, accompanied by a rich daredevil skydiver who frequented the club. He made not a peep during Alejandro’s “accidental” forays across the border.
“There they are!” Alejandro said now, pointing from the pilot’s seat.
Two people below waved from an open field.
Thanks to Alejandro’s skill, we landed safely. We unloaded the bundles and handed them to a man and a woman. They were clearly Mapuche. Within a minute it was done, with no words spoken. Everybody’s hands shook.
My heart was in my mouth as we flew back. Not only because at any moment our lives could end, but because we’d achieved what we set out to do: deliver goods for a revolution whose goal was that the poor could eat, would have access to medical care and education and shelter. The other lives I constantly imagined gave way to this one. I was coasting in a plane through the Andes with a man who loved me unconditionally, a compañero who was squeezing my hand now as tears rolled down his face.
THAT CHRISTMAS EVE, my grandmother was reunited with her three children for the first time since the days of Allende. Mami and Uncle Boris had flown to Chile, filled with emotion, when the noreturn list was finally erased, thanks to the Pope’s continued pressure. At dinner, I sat between Alejandro and the Cousin, symbols of the two halves of my heart. Joining us around the dining room table, to which the kitchen table had been added, were Ale, who’d reinvented herself as the head aerobics instructor at Vancouver’s trendiest gym; Lalito; my cousin Elena, hiding an out-of-wedlock pregnancy from my grandmother; my uncle Carlos and aunt Vicky; my aunt Magdalena; my little cousin Sarita; my mother’s new partner, Bill; and the Cousin’s eight-year-old daughter, Princesa, whom he’d had with the maid I’d met in Concepción on my first visit to his home.
My grandmother beamed during the whole week-long visit. We went through the boxes she’d stored in the back, every object we uncovered inspiring an anecdote. The adults told story after story of Chile during the dark years. My grandmother was still shaken up by the broadcast on national television a few weeks earlier of a young resistance member making a confession.
“They accused that young woman of being an accomplice in the abduction of a high-ranking military man an
d interrogated her for the whole country to see,” my grandmother said. “Her scalp was oozing pus, her eyes were swollen shut, her head was held up by a hand at the base of her skull, and they shone a light in her face while making her say into the camera that she was a terrorist, that she had helped with the abduction and she regretted it. They put her on during María Belongs to Nobody, the siesta soap opera, when they knew everyone would be watching. And she was rich, with a German last name, from a well-to-do family, well connected, a brilliant student from Las Condes.”
There was silence at the table as my grandmother wiped her eyes. After a moment, Uncle Carlos remarked on the perfect comedic timing of the resistance: when Miss Chile had won the Miss Universe contest that winter, there’d been a blackout just as Pinochet had come on TV to use the win as a huge media vehicle for himself. Everyone laughed as we remembered that.
We dreamed about what the future might hold for our family. We made outings to Viña del Mar and Valparaíso, both packed with returning exile families. All around us, parents translated for children conversing in English, Swedish, German and French. The fifteen of us posed for pictures on the seawall and bought fresh seafood at the port, as Uncle Boris cracked one joke after another. Both he and my mother found a moment to nod knowingly at Alejandro and me. When everyone left again for Canada, my heart broke for the millionth time.
Soon after we got back to Neuquén, I told Alejandro I wanted to end our marriage. Our conversation stretched over twelve hours, during which no food or drink was consumed. Finally, lost in the maze of words that tried to make sense of what had gone wrong, he went numb. I doubled over in pain.
I left Alejandro, but I remained true to the resistance, staying in Neuquén and continuing to follow orders. I rented a downtown apartment with a roommate named Fabiana, a fellow English teacher. She was right-wing, the daughter of a decorated military man. She was a hard worker and a party girl, and we’d go dancing together. Through her I met a professional basketball player who was the antithesis of Alejandro: a macho playboy from the Argentinian middle class, with centrist politics and an anti-feminist stance. With Estéban, it was all about wining and dining, dancing and sex. He had no idea about my resistance side. I got a separate post office box, but Alejandro and I remained in constant touch. My life and heart were now completely compartmentalized.
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