The Rhythm of Memory

by Alyson Richman

  When Salomé had first arrived in Sweden, she was initially pleasantly surprised at how large their apartment was. When the agency had informed her and Octavio that the family would receive subsidized living quarters until they were able to afford to live on their own, she had imagined a cramped, squalid place—a dark and dirty, crowded tenement reminiscent of one of the Santiago barrios. But in fact, the apartment was spacious and filled with light. Each of the children would have his or her own room, and at the end of the hallway was a large master bedroom with a private bath.

  Yet the architect’s generous and flowing floor plan that, at first, seemed a blessing to her would later be a curse. Each of the four rooms had a door that could be closed; each had its own four walls that could be employed as a personal fortress. And that is what Salomé and Octavio ultimately used the rooms for—they shut each other out.

  During the early evenings when Salomé returned home from her eight-o’clock walk, she would usually find her husband sound asleep on the couch and the children studying alone in their rooms.

  So even though over a year had passed since her abduction, and even though she had traveled thousands of miles from Chile, she still felt like that imprisoned woman. The bruised and fragile ghost who slept coiled in a corner in a neatly starched bed.

  Salomé wore her misery silently and cryptically. It was as if the two months she had endured in the Villa Grimaldi had taught her how to be a master of disguise, an artist of deception. It wasn’t that her ability to deceive was rooted in actual deceit but, rather, in survival. For, just as she had once pretended that she was a lady of great wealth and power to gain the favor of one of her guards, she now pretended to her family that all was well with her. That the tragic past was behind her, and that her life with her children and Octavio would be just as it had been before the coup.

  Since their arrival in Sweden, she had learned how to smile even when her spirit felt destroyed. She had mastered the ability to awaken silently from her nightmares without disturbing her slumbering husband, who slept next to her, his body curled like a kitten’s, his face smiling, and his fingers nestled against her side.

  One thing, however, she could not disguise: her inability to be intimate with Octavio.

  She knew that he had been as patient as he could. He had been respectful of her and hadn’t initiated any overtures of lovemaking while they still remained in Chile. In a gesture of genuine sensitivity, he had slept in the guest room so she could recuperate more comfortably.

  She could see that he was still hungry for her; he still looked at her with the same tenderness and same sense of passion that he had had for her since they’d first met so many years before. But she no longer felt like that young, naive girl in the field of oranges. The men at the Villa Grimaldi had made sure of that.

  Octavio waited nearly two months before he got up the courage to kiss his wife passionately on the mouth. By that time, they had already moved into their new apartment in Vesterås.

  “I’ve missed you,” he said tenderly as he placed his hand gently on her breast. “I want to take this slowly with you.” He was looking at her with deep affection.

  “I’m not ready,” she told him.

  He could feel how her entire body tensed when he went to touch her. How it seemed as though the slightest gesture upon her body was received as an invasion.

  He retracted his hand and pulled his mouth away from hers. A great sadness was in his eyes, as if he were helpless to soothe her and remind her that he was gentle, he was kind, and he was her husband. But his voice faltered and he was too full of self-loathing and insecurity now to say anything. He didn’t try to be intimate with her again for at least another week.

  “Salomé.” He tried this time to be even softer with his voice. “I’ve nearly forgotten what it’s like to hold you.”

  He was turned on his side, the white pillow contrasting with his salt-and-pepper hair.

  “I’m not ready, Octavio,” she told him. She could tell he wanted her to talk to him—to tell him what she was thinking. But how could she?

  How could she tell him how they had raped her. That they had forced themselves on her as sometimes more than one of them looked on as the other one did with her what he wanted.

  How could she explain that they had placed wires on her—in those places he used to kiss her most, the ones he had always reminded her playfully were his.

  Now, the truth was they were no longer his. They had made sure of that. And they were no longer hers, either. The truth was, what wasn’t empty in her was filled over by a large, ugly scar. She had become a fortress of tissue and bone, and the mere thought of anything entering her was enough to make her scream.

  Salomé, however, never articulated any of this to Octavio. She thought he could interpret her without further explanation. After all, he had always prided himself on his sensitivity. Couldn’t he see she didn’t know how to tell him that they had taken what was so pure and tainted it? That she was no longer that girl stepping out of the convent school, that she was no longer a woman who had only been with her husband? She didn’t even know how he could want her. She wondered when he might realize that they may have returned her to him and the children, but the person whom they’d sent back was not the woman he had once known. That person was dead.

  Octavio, however, failed to give up so easily on his wife. He thought if he persisted that eventually she would open up to him. He still tried to be tender to her and to solicit some affection from his obviously still suffering wife. Salomé, however, always seemed to have an excuse to shut him out. “I’m exhausted physically and emotionally from this move,” she said during their first few months in Sweden. After another three months had passed, she told him, “I still need time to heal.” And now, her response, when he slid next to her and placed his hand on her waist—something that she had always loved before her abduction—was far more direct. She just flatly told him, “No.”

  She had nearly killed him that evening he’d returned home to their apartment with an armload of oranges and scattered them on their bed.

  He had wanted to surprise her, to re-create the scene in which they’d first fallen in love. It was such a desperate gesture. He was floundering—almost to the point that it was embarrassing—but he was at the end of his rope and he could feel the only thing he had ever loved—besides his children—floating away from him.

  He wanted to lasso her back. Force her to yell at him, scream at him, tell him how horrible he was to have let this be done to her. But at least, let her tell him! Because this silence between them, this distance that was increasing between them with every passing month, and every night feeling lonelier and lonelier for him, was breaking him into a thousand pieces.

  He felt as though he had come to Sweden with nothing but his love for his family, and now he felt as though that which he loved most in the world was abandoning him.

  He couldn’t be angry with the children. They were facing their own challenges with a new school, a new language, but Salomé seemed to be withdrawing from him completely.

  He didn’t want to complain to her. He knew how much she had suffered because of his actions. He also realized that the family wouldn’t even be in Sweden if it weren’t for his stubborn refusal to support the Pinochet regime, but a part of him couldn’t help but feel hurt and dejected.

  He was now in a country where no one even knew his name. Octavio Ribeiro meant nothing to anyone except perhaps the career counselor who was trying to match him with a suitable profession or the social worker who knew his needs only as a newly arrived immigrant who needed time to adjust.

  He despised having to wait on unemployment lines and to meet with a counselor every week. After all, in the past, people like the great Allende and Neruda had come to him for his talent; it had never been the other way around.

  Forty-nine

  VESTERÅS, SWEDEN

  MARCH 1975

  Salomé hadn’t wanted to admit that her need for therapy w
asn’t just about her inability to listen to music, but also about her inability to be intimate with a man she had always loved. The only reason she even went to her first session with Samuel Rudin was because she had grown weary of living without any sense of joy in her life. She had always loved music, she had always considered herself passionate and one who enjoyed the sensual things in life. Now she only knew pain.

  She had never expected her therapy to change her as much as it had. Initially, she thought that she would visit Samuel for a few sessions, discuss her inability to disassociate her love of music with the memory of being tortured by its sound, and gradually be healed of her terror. What she hadn’t anticipated was how interwoven her experiences in the Villa Grimaldi were with the way she now felt toward Octavio.

  She had not wanted to be angry with him. She had struggled to repress her resentment toward him. But therapy was making her unearth all of these emotions, and suddenly, Salomé realized how different she was from that person Octavio had proposed to so many years before. No longer was she that naive seventeen-year-old girl who could so easily be seduced. Now, she was a mature woman decimated by emotional and physical scars. And she was angry. Octavio had sacrificed her. She had been raped and beaten because of his actions, not hers. And although she still loved Octavio, she had not yet forgiven him.

  She sometimes had dreams where she fell upon him and shook him with all her might. “Don’t you see? Don’t you see?” she envisioned herself screaming at him, his eyes staring at her blankly. In her dream, her linen nightgown opens at the breast, revealing her scars from where the electrical wires were attached. “Don’t you see, Octavio, what they have done to me?”

  But he refuses to see what she speaks of. He insists that he sees nothing. “What darling?” he murmurs to her, his tone sugar-sweet and slightly confused. “I don’t see anything at all.” He reaches to caress the long, brown stretch of her thighs, ignoring the areas of her body that still have ladders of scars.

  She would awaken at night in a sweat, the scene in her dream obviously revealing what was in her heart. Is it so difficult, she would wonder to herself, for him to acknowledge that he wronged me in Chile? Is it too much of a struggle for him to say that he’s sorry? If only he could accept that she was not the same as before. If only he could love and care for her wholly, as a woman who had endured something terrible because of his actions. To acknowledge that she had been kidnapped and beaten, to understand that she was forced, in less than two weeks’ time, to abandon her home and parents. To recognize that, as a family, their situation had clearly and terribly changed.

  And consequently, Salomé found herself withdrawing from the man she had once loved so dearly. The man she suddenly found herself feeling intimately about was the man she talked to every week about her most private thoughts. She soon began to long for her sessions with Samuel. He was the only person who knew her completely, and that intimacy contributed to her burgeoning attraction to him. Samuel Rudin soon began to find his way into her thoughts even after she had left his office. Sometimes she felt he was like smoke, gathering at the base of her neck, traveling underneath her clothes, and clinging to her skin.

  At night, it was as though his whisper of a voice followed her home. She could anticipate his answers to the things she envisioned herself revealing to him. She could imagine his gaze as she fidgeted on the low leather couch, her fingers rearranging her skirt. How sometimes his eyes fell upon a stretch of her leg. How he seemed visibly unnerved when she ran her fingers through her hair.

  For many weeks, she had tried to deny her attraction to him. She tried to convince herself that the reason she grew despondent between her sessions was that she was making so much progress in her therapy that she wanted immediate continuity. Finally, she told herself, she had been able to find a safe space in which she could air out her feelings (in Spanish no less) and discuss what she had stuffed down deep inside her and willed herself to forget. And finally she had located a person—a willing listener and sympathizer—to whom she could relate all the difficulties she’d encountered as she’d tried to resume a relationship with her husband.

  She was discovering that, yes, she could feel like an attractive and viable woman again. But somehow, she always felt most attractive when she was with Samuel, not Octavio. Perhaps it was because only with her doctor did she feel she was being honest with herself.

  As her mind began to stray, and her thoughts lingered over Samuel, Salomé’s detachment from her husband intensified. She no longer made excuses for why she didn’t want to make love with him. She no longer felt guilty that she couldn’t perform her “wifely duties” for him. He didn’t know what kind of woman was sleeping in his bed! But Samuel—he knew she had been raped—that her body was riddled with razor-thin, red scars, and she could not help but wonder if, knowing all that, he could still find her beautiful.

  Fifty

  VESTERÅS, SWEDEN

  MARCH 1975

  Octavio never anticipated what befell him when he arrived in Sweden. All he had thought about was getting his family out of Chile. In Sweden, he wanted Salomé and the children to be safe, to be free from the evil that he had seen for the first time.

  He believed Sweden would afford them a new life. A clean slate, the chance to start over.

  Clearly the suffering Salomé had endured in the Villa Grimaldi had affected and transformed her from the young, idealistic girl she had been when he’d first met her. But Octavio too had endured a life-altering experience, although on the surface it was less obvious than Salomé’s.

  He had nearly lost what was most precious to him in the world: his one, all-consuming love. He had spent countless nights lying in bed wondering if his wife was dead or alive. Wondering if she was undergoing horrific beatings and brutal interrogations due to his actions. He had been humiliated in front of his in-laws by his inability to protect their daughter; he had shamed himself by not realizing that he had placed both their lives and his wife’s and children’s in grave danger.

  He had rescued her and did not want to reveal the dramatic lengths he had undergone to get her back. But once in Sweden, Octavio felt as though Salomé had completely left him. She might have shared an apartment with him physically, but emotionally she had disappeared. Without Salomé’s companionship, without his career, he no longer had an identity. No one recognized his face. No one was impressed by his name or the movies he had made in a country on the other side of the world. He could not speak the language, and his dark, South American coloring only exacerbated his foreignness.

  Months passed. The children began school, Octavio remained unemployed, and Salomé strove to reconcile what had happened to her back in Chile months before.

  He had foolishly thought that her therapy would bring them closer, that she would have an outlet to discuss her trauma and that she would eventually confide in him. But the reverse seemed to occur. Salomé appeared to become even more withdrawn from both him and the children.

  Often, when Octavio returned home from meeting with his counselor at the employment agency, he would discover that Rafael, far wiser than and sensitive beyond his years, had tidied the house, made his sisters’ beds, and begun preparing dinner. Octavio would try to tell his son how grateful he was for the assistance, but he too struggled to communicate his feelings.

  Indeed, he felt terribly guilty toward his children. Not only had his actions harmed his wife, but his son and two daughters had also been forced to come to this cold, strange country where they would have to learn a new language and make new friends.

  So there was more than one night when Octavio lay sleepless in bed, his eyes staring wide at the ceiling, his body restless, drowning in his feelings of failure.

  Fifty-one

  VESTERÅS, SWEDEN

  MARCH 1975

  “Last week, you indicated that you were thinking of leaving your husband,” Samuel said as he began his session with Salomé. The tape recorder hummed in the background as he fingered through his
writing pad.

  “Yes, and I’m pretty sure I am going to do it this week.”

  “Have you really thought this through, Salomé?”

  “Yes, of course I have! I can’t stand it anymore—this constant charade.”

  “A charade?”

  “Yes, didn’t I just say that?” She bit one of her nails and slid herself lower into the leather couch.

  “Salomé, you know it’s important to be absolutely clear with these things…”

  Salomé exhaled deeply, her chest deflating as she sighed. “Every day I’m pretending that I’ve adjusted to this new life. That I’ve put my children in a safe, secure environment where they’re better off than they were with their old friends and grandparents in Chile.”

  Samuel nodded.

  “I feel I must keep my spirits high for everyone else, because they’re all relying on me to hold the family together. My husband still hasn’t found a job he’s happy with. The employment agency has suggested various options for him, but none of them ever seem to satisfy him…the great actor.… Now, he’s saying that he wants to be a housepainter because all the identical, little red houses here are driving him mad!”

  “It sounds as though he’s having problems adjusting here as well.”

  “But it was his idea that we come here in the first place! And even worse…it was his stubbornness that got us in such danger in Chile.”

  Samuel nodded.