Waking the Dead

by Scott Spencer

  Gutierrez was a large, melancholy-looking man. He was in his forties, an exile. While President Allende was in power in Chile, Bernardo had quit his post at the university and gone to work for the new government—writing press releases, trying his hand on speeches. He was an economist, suspicious of rhetoric, constitutionally averse to sudden excitement. But he was capable of clarity and could simplify complicated economic issues; he was given a lot to do. After the Chilean generals disposed of Allende and his regime, Gutierrez went into hiding. One by one, and, finally, dozen by dozen, everyone he knew was under arrest, missing, dead—often found in rivers with their eyes burned out, their genitals sewn into their mouth. Bernardo hid in a church outside of Valparaiso, where his sister was a nun. Eventually, he was sneaked out of the country.

  “Why did you come here?” I asked him. “I’d think you’d be angry at the United States.”

  Gutierrez pursed his lips when he listened and nodded his head. He folded his surprisingly delicate hands over his taut round belly.

  “Perhaps I’ll go to Cuba,” he finally answered, with a sigh.

  I looked over at Sarah. His answer somehow gave the impression that I had asked him to leave my country.

  “Maybe someday you’ll go back to Chile,” Sarah said to him, raising a glass. “When this nightmare ends.”

  “I didn’t mean you shouldn’t come here,” I said, feeling awkward, irritated. “I just thought you wouldn’t want to, seeing how tough we made it for your president.”

  Gutierrez stared at me. I had always flattered myself into believing there was virtually no one with whom I couldn’t easily communicate, but whatever sympathy and solace I was attempting to show the Chilean was somehow slipping into the fissure between Spanish and English, like a dog that falls into a stream and scrambles out looking like a weasel. I saw in his eyes that my saying “how tough we made it” meant that I considered myself a part of the forces that had engineered the coup: like so many deeply committed people, he took an opinion for a desire.

  We served the jambalaya. Madeline carefully separated all of the turkey out and left it in a mound on the side of her blue willow plate. Tammy, who’d been uncomfortable at first when the church people arrived, feeling it meant she would have to be on her best behavior, and who then shifted to another sort of discomfort—the discomfort of a good citizen offended by the seditious disloyalty of her table-mates—seized on the opportunity of the jambalaya’s arrival to become still more southern. She was all my mys and ooo wees and she was shaking her fork at Sarah, saying, “You done yourself proud on this one, Sister.” Mileski ate heartily; it astonished me to see the Friar Tuckian heap he’d piled on his plate. He had asked us to join hands before the meal and we did: I held Madeline’s hard, dry hand and Tammy’s soft, nervous one. We closed our eyes and silently reflected on our good fortune. Tammy seemed to be giving my hand an extra squeeze; I had a demented apprehension she was flirting with me but then realized she was trying to make contact with an ally: she was appalled by the company and assumed I shared her feelings.

  “Quite a bizarre holiday,” said Stanton, in his Rhodesian accent. “What we’re celebrating is a gang of rapacious Protestants who came here and stole a country.”

  “What I would have loved to have been,” Mileski said through a mouthful of jambalaya, his thick mustache dripping wine, “was one of those priests who came over here about the middle of the nineteenth century.”

  “Was that a good time?” Sarah asked. Her face was bright with pleasure—already.

  “Well,” said Mileski, smiling, “you might say so.” He kept his napkin next to his plate and wiped his hand on it without lifting it. “You see, the Church came over with the flock, and the flock was in the cities.” He looked at me and winked. “Working their tails off.” Back to Sarah and then, with a wave of the fork, the table. “Things were more or less together. The Church administered to the Catholics at hand and pretty much tried to keep up the ways of the old country. And helping the immigrants fit into the whole American trip. But when the west started opening up—” Mileski grinned and shook his head. “That was a whole different story. Suddenly, you had Catholics in … Nevada, Oregon, you had Catholics picking grapes all the way out in California. And no one to look after them.”

  “No one to keep them toeing the line, you mean,” said Sarah. Good-natured.

  Mileski bowed toward her, gladly conceding the point. I half stood up, refilling all the glasses. I realized I was doing a lot of that. Stanton was already looking a little lopsided and Madeline Conners’ eyes were pale red, like the inside of hot-house tomatoes.

  “There weren’t enough priests in America to send them out of the cities. So the bishops had to take emergency measures.” Mileski glanced at his plate but decided to continue with his story before taking another bite. He filled his fork and then laid it on the side of the plate. “They had to import priests from Europe and send them after the American Catholics. Not a bad solution, you might say. But the problem was that the only priests they could lure over here were priests who had fallen on hard times. We’re talking about priests who’d become total juicers, priests—” Mileski started to laugh. “Priests who were maybe a little strange in the head. Priests who’d gotten themselves caught in some pretty embarrassing situations. And when they came over here and they got themselves sent out into the wilderness—well, some pretty strange things went down. As far as the bishops were concerned it was terrifying.”

  “And this is what you’re nostalgic for?” asked Sarah. She indicated to me it was time to pour a little more wine for Father Stanton.

  “Those are my roots,” said Mileski. “That’s my pastoral tradition. You realize how sublimely crazy this Church has got to be to let a Polack like me put on a collar.”

  We were all getting drunk, though I wondered if the alcoholic oblivion I was headed toward was anything similar to the expansive ease and relaxation the others seemed to be drinking their ways into. I drank as if to keep an appointment in Samara, first quickly and then slowly and then quickly again. Mileski seemed to drink in order to expand, whereas Sarah drank to quicken her responses, to play at spontaneity. Stanton drank to escape memory and Madeline Conners drank simply to relax. Tammy, as far as I could tell, drank to wash down her food. And the Chilean Bernardo Gutierrez, I saw, drank to make his fear bearable.

  “When do you think you’ll be able to get those generals out of the presidential palace and give Chile back its democracy?” I asked him.

  Bernardo moved his eyes in my direction. His gestures were slow, careful; he drove the engine of self as if it were falling to pieces. He dabbed his lips with the edge of his napkin and then took a sip of ice water. “I expect to return to my country very soon,” he said.

  “The rest of South America has to rise up,” said Sarah. “Argentina, Peru.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Tammy, quite unexpectedly. “Those places down there are always having revolutions. They have a new president every week, don’t they?”

  There was a silence with a spine of disapproval. Madeline Conners finally said, “That’s what the press would have you believe. But that’s largely propaganda. No reason to fall for it, ah … ah … ”

  “Tammy,” said Tammy.

  “Tammy,” said Madeline, nodding.

  “This guy you were working for,” Tammy said, pointing at Gutierrez. “How long did he have it?”

  “Have it?” asked Bernardo.

  “You know. Power. How long was he in?”

  “A little under two years, unfortunately,” said Bernardo.

  “Until our guns and money got him out,” said Sarah.

  Tammy shushed Sarah with a wave. “That’s not the point,” she said.

  “Yes it is,” said Sarah. Although I couldn’t see it, I knew there was now a line of blank space between her body and the seat of her chair. Her sense of argument was different from my own. My instinct was always to leave the other person with the impression that not
very much separated us, whereas Sarah’s intelligence and outrage seemed always to widen the gap. If she was arguing with you about women’s fashions she would end up suggesting you were sympathetic to rapists; if you didn’t care for the Rolling Stones she would prove to you you didn’t really like rock and roll. She leaned across the table toward Tammy and said, “Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of the CIA. You know, the age of innocence was over some time ago. Our government depends on people not caring and looking the other way.”

  “According to you,” Tammy said, in a deliberately weird, sweet voice, “no one in the world cares—except you.” Her hands dropped into her lap and she squeezed them together.

  “Just tell me what you think our government does in countries down there,” said Sarah.

  “I don’t know,” Tammy said, as if she’d been asked to describe the function of some disgusting part of the anatomy.

  “That’s right,” said Sarah, shaking her head. “You don’t know.”

  “Well, does that mean we’re the bad guys and the rest of the world is hunky-dory?”

  I had to admire her willingness to stay in there and take it, though I did wish Tammy would merely relinquish the point. She scarcely cared anyhow; she was taking the abuse with nothing to win.

  “Ask Father Stanton what our country is up to in southern Africa,” said Sarah. “Or ask Bernardo. Bernardo isn’t even allowed to be here. He has to live his entire life underground, as if he were a criminal.”

  Obediently, Tammy looked across to Stanton. The handsome, silver-haired priest was slumped in his seat; his fine blue eyes seemed to be drowning in a mist. “I must admit,” he said, “the Americans weren’t of awfully much use.”

  “When I travel,” said Madeline Conners, “I sometimes tell people I’m Canadian. I just can’t take the embarrassment, you know?”

  “Sometimes we don’t know when history will choose us,” said Bernardo softly. His eyes rested on Tammy with a mothlike delicacy. He clearly wanted to put her at ease; he was offended by the Nordic aggression of the others. “Before President Allende, I cared very little for matters of politics. I tended my own garden.” He touched the rim of his glass with his fingertips. “I miss those days. It was a good time. But then—” He shrugged. “Life changes. We change. It’s how it goes.”

  “Goddamnit,” said Madeline Conners, running her fingers through her short, wiry hair, “it makes me so angry, Bernardo. I don’t understand why you’re not coming to Maryland with me.”

  He shrugged and gestured philosophically. “I can’t,” he said. “That whole province of the country is very dangerous right now. Washington is filled with—very dangerous men.”

  “We should know,” said Mileski, in an abundantly cheerful voice. “We put them there.”

  “He means killers,” said Madeline. “Chileans from the junta tracking down anyone from the old regime who might speak out and tell the truth.”

  “Well, if you know that,” said Sarah, “why are you asking him to come with you? What if something happened? He’s our responsibility.”

  “Precautions could be taken,” said Madeline.

  Tammy pushed her chair back and got up. She drank the rest of her wine while standing and then asked, “Is there a telephone in the kitchen, Fielding?”

  I said there was and felt relief she was taking herself away for a moment. By the time she returned, the focus of the conversation would have shifted a few more times and she’d be perfectly safe, free to continue her dinner and her vacation away from Derek. I listened to what Stanton was trying to say, but he was seriously drunk now and his accent was going opaque.

  Tammy’s asking me if there was a phone in the kitchen seemed odd. She had used that phone twice already. She’d called home with Sarah and they’d both spoken to their parents and their sister. She knew perfectly well there was a phone in the kitchen. It struck me that she hadn’t been asking me a question at all—she’d been making an announcement.

  “I’ll get another bottle of wine,” I said, getting up.

  “Bring the one we brought over,” said Mileski. “We’re mellow enough now so it won’t burn too much to drink it.”

  “Steven,” Sarah said, “why do you buy that crap?”

  “I believe if it’s too pure an enjoyment, it becomes a venial sin,” Mileski said, just as I was leaving the room and pushing my way into the kitchen.

  Tammy was sitting on a three-legged stool with the telephone directory in her lap. Though the kitchen was a wreck, she’d made herself a cup of instant coffee. She seemed to have been waiting for me.

  “What’s up?” I said.

  “How can you stand it?” she asked me, her voice, despite the weight of the meal and the wine, shaking with feeling.

  “We all have our opinions,” I said. “Points of view. Mine’s not very far from theirs.”

  “You’re just saying that because you love her. You were in the service. You’re … regular. These people are just a bunch of crazies.”

  “I don’t know, Tammy. They’re doing what they believe in. You have to respect that.”

  “I’m calling the FBI,” she said.

  “That’s a terrific idea,” I said. “It’s a call we should have made long ago.”

  “I’m serious, Fielding. And so are they. That guy from Chile is in the country illegally. I mean, why do you think our government didn’t want him here? Because of some old library fines? I mean, Sarah might think I’m just an overweight featherbrain—well, I don’t even want to think about her goddamned opinions of me. I may not read all the right magazines or sit around having the right conversations with all the fashionable people. But I do know that the reason our government didn’t want that little beaner in our country is he’s a Communist.” She grabbed the phone off the wall and then leaned over her lap, squinting, trying to make out the number in the directory.

  I wasn’t thinking as clearly as I ought to have been. I didn’t have the mental stamina to argue with her and so I just walked across the kitchen and yanked the telephone wire right out of the wall. Like a gangster. The finality of the gesture formed a pleasant cloud of sensation within me. I stood there holding the beige wire and I smiled at Tammy. She was holding the dead receiver next to her ear; it took her a couple of moments to process what had just happened. And when she did she put her hand over her eyes. The veins on her neck stood out. I went to her side and put my arm around her. She had a wonderful, fresh-baked scent. She didn’t resist my touch. I held her to me and stroked her hair. I thought she was acting badly but I couldn’t help but understand what was making her feel this way. Sarah was rough on her and those priests frightened her. She felt she had stumbled into something dangerous and wrong. And in fact she had her own political feelings: she’d voted twice for Nixon and in college had worn a Goldwater button. “Take it easy,” I murmured to her. “You don’t want to be like this.”

  “They have no right,” she said.

  “Of course they do,” I said. “But it’s OK. Come on, Tammy. Sorry about the phone but … you know we’ve all had too much to drink.”

  “I want to go home,” she said in a small voice.

  Good, I thought, but didn’t say anything. I held her a little more tightly. Just then, the kitchen door pushed open and Sarah came in, empty-handed. She saw us—Tammy with her face against my chest, me with my arm around Tammy—and stood still for a moment. “Ooops,” she said, and then quickly turned and pushed her way out the kitchen door again.

  CHRISTMAS WE SPENT with a chaos of radical Catholics but I got Sarah to myself for New Year’s Eve.We bought a half pound of Scotch salmon and two bottles of Mumm’s and rented a TV to watch Casablanca and then the celebration on Times Square. There was a readout on the bottom of the screen showing the seconds going by, as if we were going to be launched like a rocketship into the ether of unused time. We finished the champagne and I went into the kitchen and came back with a half bottle of vodka and another cheaper vodka, about a quarter full
. We are really tapped out, I said. “It’s no wonder,” she said. “Every night you stay up late studying, you end up drinking half a bottle of something.” I’m doing very well in school, I countered. “I’m sure you are,” said Sarah. “But what about in bed?” A slow pulsating chill went through me and I just managed to say, What’s that supposed to mean? “I hate to be gross,” she said. “I hate when people talk about sex technically.” But tonight is a special occasion, I said with a drunken wave. The weight of what was going to be said was already on my chest like a rock—the cornerstone in a soon-to-be-constructed temple of grief. “Come on,” she said. “Everyone knows drinking is terrible for you.” You never seem to mind it in Stanton and Mileski and that crew, I said, truly grasping at straws. “It’s different for celibates,” she said. She reached up for me, took the bottles out of my hand, and pulled me next to her on the sofa. She draped a leg over my lap and put her arms around me. Tell me the worst, I whispered. “Sometimes you just can’t get rock-solid hard like you used to,” she said, “and it’s not because of me and not because of you. It’s the fucking alcohol.”

  That night, in a competitive sexual fury, feeling as if my erotic life was on the line, I made love to her. I made a ceremony out of pouring all the vodka down the drain and then the vermouth, the retsina, the little bottle of Pernod, and, finally, the bottle of Smirnoff I kept in my desk. The landlord was in a magnanimous mood and the radiator in our bedroom sang with steam, though it was two in the morning. I made love to her and then I made love to her again and then again after that. She felt so soft beneath me; she gave herself over with a selflessness that was almost meek, but which held within it her enormous sensual drive, the fierce, radiant power of her genitals. Finally, we lay next to each other. The radiator was silent now; the wind and snow there blowing against the window and cold entered our room thread by thread. Sarah took my hand and placed it very gently over her wet and open center, as if she were inviting me to touch something newly born. “Yikes,” she said. I kept my hand there; I could feel the heat rising out of her. Then she whispered, “I’m not going to be able to take this, Fielding. I think you’d better start drinking again.”