Waking the Dead

by Scott Spencer

  We were awfully glad to see each other but it wasn’t long after her return from Santiago that we began to fight. They weren’t only the ordinary fights that lovers have. We were discovering the places in which our paths were dividing and each discovery made us a little more desperate, a little meaner. Behind both of us was a pit of sanctimony. I had all the dreadful assumptions of male supremacy luring me back—that LaBrea of wounded pride and obsession with my own path. And Sarah had behind her the equally alluring trap of feeling absolutely that she was no longer speaking just for herself but for God.

  The only time after her trip to Chile that she held me as tightly as I wanted her to was a few weeks later when she awoke from a nightmare. It was just past daylight and she rolled toward me and put her hands on my shoulders, her leg between my thighs, her breasts flat and hard against my chest. She was wearing a pajama top and she was naked beneath that. Her pubic hairs were matted and hard around her opening. As she stirred, the scent of our having made love the night before also stirred, as if it had been trapped beneath the bedclothes like a cloud. “Please wake up,” she said. “Please.” She was cold with panic. Her eyes were immense and seemed devoid of any human intelligence. Her breath was brackish but it would be wrong to say merely I didn’t mind when in fact I liked it: all signs of her reality, the overpowering truthfulness of her body, struck a chord of gratefulness and desire in me. I felt a twinge of regret each time she bathed.

  “I was in a chair,” she was saying. “And then the chair fell into something, a hole in the ground, the floor. I guess I was in a house. It was so quiet. Just—I don’t know. Just so quiet. When the chair started falling I thought, Oh-oh, they got me. But I didn’t think it was serious. I figured I could get out of it. But then I realized if I got out of the chair I’d be in blackness, nowhere, and I would still keep falling. So I just held on and there was terrible noise, like a train coming into a station, like a subway, getting louder and louder, and I wanted so much to hold my ears but if I let go of that chair then I’d be sucked into space and that’s when I realized what had happened. I was dying.”

  “Yikes,” I said, caressing her face. I could feel how much she needed me just then and my heart was pounding. I wanted somehow to seize this moment and use it as a rudder to change our course.

  “Yikes? After all your studies with the great Harvard professors, this is what I get? I want to know what you think it means.”

  “Your dream?” I held her closer still. A little umbrella of air suddenly opened between us where she moved her stomach away from mine. I slid next to her again. “I think your dream means you think your life is dangerous but you don’t know how to get out of it.”

  “Is that what you believe? Honestly?”

  “Honest injun.”

  “That’s a disgusting phrase.”

  “Sarah, it’s seven o’clock in the morning. I can say anydring I want to.”

  That evening we went to Resurrection House for a dinner in honor of Francisco and Gisela Higgins. Francisco Higgins had been part of the Chilean delegation to the United Nations and then Chilean ambassador to Mexico during the Allende regime. After the coup when the generals took over the government, Higgins had been arrested, along with thousands of others. He was beaten, tortured, yet later he maintained he was among the lucky ones. There was an international protest on his behalf and the generals had him released from the prison on Dawson’s Island. He was expelled from Chile, along with his wife, who had been under house arrest all of that time. They moved to Cuba, then to Romania, and then to Mexico City. Now they were in the United States, following a lengthy battle with U.S. Immigration. Both Francisco and Gisela had accepted positions with something called the Christian Ecumenical Conference on Latin America. They had an office in a building in Washington that was filled with tiny foundations. They were in Chicago now on their way to Minnesota, where Francisco was going to speak at the university about the Allende experiment and after that they were both going to give a talk at a church in St. Paul called Our Lady of the Miracle. What I did not know was that Sarah would be going with them.

  On the way to Resurrection House Sarah and I stopped at a little peeling wooden shack over which loomed a large painting of a primitive-looking hot dog—a hot dog fit for a Katzenjammer Kid. We bought twenty hot dogs, each wrapped in waxed paper along with a pickle and a handful of soggy fries. The mustard and relish showed through the opaque paper like a deep bruise. Though all he was serving was hot dogs and Pepsis, the old fellow who worked the counter wore a chef’s cap. His eyes were small dark bullet holes, his face misshaped and unshaved. He looked like a madman pretending to be a famous cook.

  “What a crazy-looking guy,” Sarah said as we carried the sacks of frankfurters back to the car. We were parked beneath a street lamp and snow poured past the light.

  “What if he is Jesus?” I asked.

  She stepped on my toe. Hard.

  I wasn’t used to Sarah’s other neighborhood at night and as we drove through the narrow brown streets, with the boarded-up windows, the Salem ads in Spanish, the unexpected vacant lots, the unseen but palpable sense of contested turf, I felt a wild swing of impatience. I may not have been raised in the lower depths, but I knew more about treacherous neighborhoods than Sarah did: her courage suddenly seemed like a kind of willful, perpetual half-blindness. She may have been leagues braver than I was, but my caution was born at least in part of experience and her courage was born at least in part of sheer inexperience. The horror of Sarah’s childhood was that her father was a moneygrubber, that her sisters were synthetic, thoughtless, that her grandparents had slave-master mentalities. It was a lot to recoil from—but it prepared you for a life of poetry, not for a life on the streets.

  “It’s very grim around here, Sarah. I hate the thought of you walking these streets at night.”

  “I’m careful.”

  “I’m sure you’re not. There are at least a thousand guys in this neighborhood who could rape you and not feel the slightest remorse.”

  “That kind of thinking makes me sick. And it’s so annoying. You can see where it leads. With the world in flames, I’m not going to decide to be a shut-in.”

  “I’m not asking you to stay home. It’s just a matter of accepting reality.”

  “Why is it always a certain kind of person who asks you to accept reality?” Sarah asked.

  “Is that what you think I am?”

  “No. I’m sorry. I don’t know why I said that. It was dumb. I just don’t know why you’re saying things like that. You know this is where my work is. It’s not going to do me any good to be afraid all the time. And I don’t want to feel like an alien.”

  “I only want you to be safe.”

  “It’s not enough. Not when I want so much more.”

  “I don’t know what I’d do if someone attacked you.”

  “Male fantasy time. Anyhow, the truth is, people around here know who I am. And whatever else you might think about them—”

  “I don’t think anything about them. What are you making me out for?”

  “Whatever else, they’re very religious. They think of me practically as if I were a nun.”

  “There’s a case right now, right here in town, about two guys who attacked a nun, a fifty-eight-year-old nun, kept her prisoner in an abandoned building, raped her innumerable times, and then cut off her fingers and carried them around in a little box, showing them to their friends.”

  “Why did you have to tell me that?”

  “Because it’s true, it happened.”

  “I think the kind of work you’re going into is much more deadly than whatever I’m doing,” Sarah said. “It just warps your view of everything. Deals, crimes, bargains—I don’t know how you expect to remain a human being.”

  “I’ll leave it to you to keep me straight,” I said.

  I said it quickly. We seemed to have established a pace: tough talk, bang bang bang. But suddenly Sarah broke the rhythm. It made everything
a little more awful when she stopped to consider what she was going to say: off the cuff, anything could be overlooked, but in the silence I knew that what she said next was really going to count. “That’s more than I can do, Fielding. I can’t accept that responsibility.”

  “Then I’ll just have to change you,” I said, making it fast again.

  She looked at me and then shook her head. And then she looked away. I took a deep breath; the car stunk of hot dogs and mustard.

  The hot dogs were in honor of Francisco and Gisela. They adored Yanqui junk food. During the Allende years, Francisco and Gisela had come to Chicago—Francisco to lecture at Roosevelt University on Chile’s Path to Democratic Socialism and Gisela to open an exhibition of Chilean weavings. They had somehow been served a meal of Carl’s Vienna Hot Dogs and this time they’d sent advance word that they were looking forward to the same type of meal.

  Before Allende, Francisco had been a lawyer, dividing his practice between plutocratic friends of the family and los pobres from the tin shantytowns on the outskirts of Santiago. Gisela was a cellist. She had studied for years with Pablo Casals and a recording she made years before called “The Romantic Cello Music of Spain” continued to sell: it attained the status of moody, left-wing makeout music.

  It seemed just a matter of time before Francisco and Gisela’s visas would be revoked. There was law prohibiting the entrance of Communists to our shores, and though the Higginses claimed to be non-Communist, it was really a matter of semantics. They were manifestly a part of that worldwide keenness for change and retribution against which our country stood poised. They made the rounds, addressing university groups, church organizations, visiting with Chilean refugees who had managed to get into America and also with those who were here in secret.They played cat and mouse with the FBI, who followed them practically everywhere.

  Francisco and Gisela were already at Resurrection House when Sarah and I arrived. Father Mileski was taking them on a detailed tour of the facilities, which Mileski called “our physical plant.” The Higginses were dressed as if for a night listening to Duke Ellington at a smart supper club, and from the looks on their faces I guessed they were ready to leap out of their skins from the boredom of it all. Mileski was pointing out the little handmade tables, the smeary do-it-yourself glazing on the thin, icy windows, and delineating which pink blankets were donated and which we picked up cheap at warehouse sales. “It’s all spit, paste, and tape, putting a place like this together,” Mileski was saying, and the Higginses nodded vigorously at whatever he said, as if a certain vehemence of agreement could end the story.

  Finally, Gisela broke from the tour by engaging a neighborhood woman in Spanish conversation. Bernardo Gutierrez appeared. He was with a new woman now that Madeline Conners was off grinding lenses in Maryland. His companion was named Kirsten; she was heavyset, in her twenties, with a Nordic braid down her back. Bernardo embraced Francisco passionately, but there was something reserved, tentative, even suspicious in Francisco’s response. Then Bernardo rushed toward Gisela to grab her hand and bring it to his lips. He sobbed, “Oh comrade, comrade, what they have done to us.” Over his bowed head, Francisco and Gisela traded worried glances but Francisco shrugged and then nodded and Gisela put her hand on top of Bernardo’s head, giving him solace.

  I helped Sarah set a long table; there would be ten of us for dinner. A Mexican woman named Maria was working the kitchen. The kitchen was filled with smoke, but Maria looked contemplative, patting the tortillas and humming to herself. Upstairs were the three Chileans whom Sarah and Mileski had spirited out of Santiago—Pablo Estevez Martinez, who had published a small left-wing newspaper called La Barricada before and during the Allende presidency, and his sister and her son. La Barricada had had a circulation under a thousand and Estevez Martinez was its sole contributor. In other words, it was nothing more than a personal broadsheet for his own opinions and reactions—a movie review here, a poem there, a scathing piece attacking agricultural inefficiency. Yet after the generals’ coup, La Barricada was banned and its publisher went into a self-imposed internal exile, hiding out in the countryside and then finally taking refuge in the home of his sister Seny. Pablo was ecstatic, manic really, now that he was out of Chile. He kept a bulging notebook for his jottings in his dark gray sports jacket and at night he dashed off essays on everything from American TV to American weather to the rhythm of the American walk.

  His sister and nephew, however, were in terrible shape. Resurrection House was dusty, chaotic, the strangers were numerous and opaque: even those who spoke Spanish spoke it in the Mexican way, and the difference made home seem further away than ever. The neighborhood was scary. Seny and Gustavo, her son, could barely sleep— waiting, if not for the Immigration agents then for Chilean thugs, and if not for them then for some neighborhood lunatic to come in through the skylight with steel tips on his lace-up boots, broken glass in his hair. Even when they slept they seemed haunted by the cold steel dreams of the Northern Hemisphere, whose unfamiliar constellations lurked behind the ominous gauze of industrial smog.

  When the Chileans came down to dinner, they were withdrawn and respectful around the Higginses. Even effusive, argumentative Pablo seemed sheepish: old class distinctions clicked in and he took his place. They seemed to trust Sarah. Somehow her involvement in their situation made them confident. She seemed to them what she had always seemed to me—a lucky person, not walking the fault line like Francisco and Gisela, nor complacent with a false sense of security like the priests. She was lovely and quick and altogether American, and they stayed near her as if her bones and background were a safer sanctuary than any church could provide. Sarah set the hot dogs down on a cracked oval platter; Maria brought the tortillas and meat in a pot covered by a damp dish towel. Sarah sat next to me and took my hand beneath the table. I was about to respond by pressing my leg against hers until I happened to notice that everyone else was holding hands, too.

  “Thank you for this day and for this meal, O Heavenly Father,” said Mileski. “Thank you for opening our hearts to the cause of freedom and may we use the calories you put before us to do your work.”

  “Amen,” said Gisela abruptly, even a little sharply. Mileski’s eyes clicked in her direction. He made a small, tight smile that was all but hidden by his beard; the whiskers around his mouth shifted like grass will when something unseen suddenly slithers through.

  “Amen,” said Mileski. He reached across the table for the pot of tortillas; Maria had twisted paper napkins onto the pot handles so they could be touched.

  “Has your Church spoken to you about your activities?” Francisco asked Mileski. The platter of hot dogs was passed his way and he accepted them with a surprised smile, as if he was just that moment noticing them.

  “I hear the rumbles,” said Mileski.

  “I’m surprised they allow you to continue your activities,” Francisco said.

  “Right now,” said Mileski, “it’s easier for them to pretend none of this is happening. I’m floundering and they know it. If I ever get it right, then the ax will fall.”

  “I wonder, Steven,” said Father Stanton. He sounded as if he was trying to recreate an argument they’d already had for the benefit of us who had missed it. “The church is in transition. Not only here but worldwide. She desperately wants to find her way through troubled times.”

  “In Chile,” said Gisela, “they dance cheek to cheek with the murderers.”

  “A terrible thing,” said Bernardo. There was something in how he said it—the speed of the response, the slightly inappropriate gusto of the reply—that made something shift in me. I looked over toward Bernardo and he avoided my eyes.

  “The Church cannot exist,” said Mileski, through a mouthful of food, “unless it can position itself as an alternative to life. Now the elders of the Church may love the capitalist state—but the Church’s first love is itself. And if people are going to rise against their leaders, the Church does not want to be caught on the wron
g side of the conflict. After all, all those poor people—those are our customers.”

  “Very cynical, Steven,” said Stanton. “Very cynical indeed.” He glanced at the rest of us, with an eager expression, as if he wanted us to pay attention to his favorite part in a piece of music.

  “Well, I don’t want to be cynical. Though I can’t deny that in my own mumbly-bumbly way, I am serving the interests of the Church, even as I challenge her.”

  “That is precisely because,” said Stanton, wagging his finger at Mileski, “the concept of Jesus Christ is inherently revolutionary.”

  “Do you really think so?” asked Gisela, raising an imperious eyebrow.

  “Oh yes, really,” said Sarah. “And Steven does, too. We all do.” Her face flushed; she had that look of absolute vulnerability laced with a love of adventure she had the night she opened her apartment window and invited me in, that first night—it seemed to have happened fifty years ago. She held the edge of the table but still swayed back and forth as she spoke. “You could interpret the Scriptures as the most revolutionary document ever written,” she said.

  “You could interpret it in a hundred different ways,” said Gisela very coolly. “And I dare say people have.”

  “Now, Gisela,” said Francisco, with a wink that made it clear he was in complete agreement with her.

  “And what about you?” Gisela asked, turning suddenly toward me. “Another good Catholic?”