Rebel Mother

by Peter Andreas

  Roberto countered, “Peaceful coexistence isn’t any easier.”

  My mother continued to hound them about housework and lecture them about the importance of men sharing domestic responsibilities with women. One evening, as a sort of peace offering to the men in the house, my mother made an enormous pizza and brought slices of it along with a glass of wine to each of them in their rooms. For the time being, anyway, that peace gesture put an end to the arguments about women’s liberation. Still, the men often teased my mother by calling her gringa or flaca (skinny). They also complained that I always forgot to lock the front door. Our most communal activity was trying to house-train a boxer puppy, which I named Pepe. Since I had been the one pushing for the dog, because I’d been missing Sunny (our old beagle–basset hound we had left with Joel in Berkeley), my domestic chore was cleaning up Pepe’s messes. But I was seven years old, which meant the house soon smelled of messes I’d missed. No one seemed particularly bothered.

  Even as my mother and Roberto fought over how to run the house, they made peace behind closed doors. Once, while I was climbing up the bars on the front windows, I peered into my mother’s bedroom and saw her naked in bed with Roberto, chatting casually. At least this time she was being private about it: during the weeks of sharing a room with her in the downtown Santiago hotel, I occasionally awoke in the middle of the night to the sounds of my mother screaming, whimpering, and moaning, only to realize when the sun came up that someone was sharing her bed. At first, it terrified me: I thought she was being beaten, but in the morning she never had bruises. In time, I learned to cover my head with a pillow to try to block it all out, then lie frozen in the morning, feigning sleep, until our overnight guest had left the room. My mother and I never spoke about it. I have no idea if she ever realized I knew; perhaps she felt better thinking I was sound asleep. Now that we had left the hotel and rented a house, I was relieved to have my own room.

  Playing with Pepe in the backyard of our Santiago home

  With neighborhood kids in front of our Santiago home, 1973

  * * *

  One afternoon, our landlady suddenly stormed in with her brother, her son, and three young thugs armed with knives. They ransacked the place and tried to forcibly evict us. “Get out, you goddamn communists,” she screamed over and over again. “Go back to wherever you came from. I don’t want to rent to any goddamn communists.”

  My mother refused to budge. “You can’t come in here and force us out like that,” she told the landlady slowly, in broken Spanish, with a calm, firm voice, clenching a long stick in her hand by her side. “We’re not scared of you. We’re not leaving.”

  She and the landlady just stood there, glaring at each other. The landlady was upset that we had reported the excessive rent she charged to a government price-control office and planned to start making lower payments at the official rate. The police finally arrived to sort things out and determined that we could continue living there until a court date was set to settle the matter. The landlady and her accomplices finally gave up and left—but not before she and her son took with them the stash of cigarette cartons and other black-market items they had secretly stored in the back of the house without our knowledge.

  * * *

  Almost every weekend my mother and I joined volunteer work brigades in the countryside, a short bus ride from Santiago, and sometimes managed to coax some of our housemates to join us. I always looked forward to these weekend outings, getting out of the polluted city and being part of a group activity alongside my mother. The front page of the November 13, 1972, Chilean leftist newspaper El Siglo included a picture of my smiling mother proudly holding a bundle of sticks, with the caption “Yo trabajo por Chile” (I work for Chile). The story read: “An urban North American, recently arrived in the country, worked yesterday alongside the militants . . . planting vine sticks.” She told El Siglo, “I want to be part of the struggle.”

  During our first weekend doing trabajo voluntario, we boarded buses and traveled eighty-five kilometers south to a small town called Graneros to load bags of flour and bring them back to the city. When we unloaded the flour at bakeries, people in the neighborhood brought us food and told us about their problems getting supplies amid widespread hoarding and black marketeering. On our way back to Santiago at the end of the day we stopped for water at a farmhouse and sat around on the grass for about an hour while members of the work brigade sang revolutionary songs and made political speeches.

  One of the work brigades we joined was part of an organization called the Women’s Patriotic Front; others were recruited from schools and from Communist Youth and Socialist Youth groups. I was proud to be working alongside the adults weeding fields and planting grapevines and fruit trees. Though I was only seven, I felt like I was actually participating in this revolution.

  One day as the morning’s work began, I picked up a bundle of the reeds that a small group of us were using to tie grapevines. A brigade leader who had not been there on other days stopped me, thinking I wanted to play with the reeds. “Those are for grown-ups. Put them down,” she told me sternly, staring at me and wagging her skinny finger.

  “No.” I gripped my bundle of reeds tightly.

  She called to a man nearby, asking him to cut the cord that held my bundle together, to force me to drop it. My Spanish wasn’t yet good enough for me to know what she’d asked. When the man drew his knife and loomed closer, I was terrified and did the only thing my instincts had taught me: I reached into my back pocket and brought out my own pocketknife, opened the blade, and waved it at him to stay away. I don’t know if I would have actually used the knife—I would not have even had a knife back in the U.S., let alone had the guts to threaten to use one—but fortunately I didn’t have to find out. Startled by my defiance, the man stopped and looked at the woman for guidance. She huffed loudly and ran off to find my mother. “Foreigners and children are not welcome in the Women’s Front,” she told us after my mother defended me instead of apologizing.

  We didn’t go back to the work brigades for a long time after that incident. By the time we did return, the woman had resigned, and the fields were now dotted with foreigners and children who had come in solidarity. My mother and I felt triumphant. If this is joining the revolution, I thought, then I am all for it.

  Around this time, my mother wrote a poem about me, which I would discover years later, hidden away in her diary:

  Fragile child

  Far from innocent

  The other side of me—angry, selfish, curious, insistent.

  You are my world—everything I am fighting for, everything I am fighting against.

  Pockets full of candy, eyes full of tears.

  Don’t give up, don’t give up.

  You know more than anyone

  The size and shape of the enemy

  Your father and your mother in mortal conflict.

  Pedrito, my son, don’t forget your mama.

  Renaico

  “WE NEED TO experience the real life of the Chilean campesino,” my mother announced one day. The weekend stints with the voluntary work brigades were just not enough. As she had in Berkeley, she was getting politically restless living in Santiago, and was itching to see how the rest of the country was changing under Allende. Real revolutions, she liked to say, were made in the countryside, not just in the cities. “Let’s find a revolutionary collective farm where the old landowners are no longer in charge and the peasants are being empowered. You’ll like it better than Santiago,” my mother assured me as I ran around the backyard, playing with the puppy.

  All I cared about were the animals, which she promised in abundance: “Pigs and cows and sheep and horses. And they’re owned by the people, not some rich landlord who exploits everyone like before.”

  We packed our duffel bags and headed south in the Chilean summer of January 1973. It was our first time hitchhiking, and it took us two days on the road. Although having me by her side made things more complicated for my m
other, it also made it easier to get people to offer help. We slept outdoors, rode with truck drivers, and got a ride with a schoolteacher who gave me a straw hat. As she placed it on my head she ruffled my messy, unwashed hair, saying, “Here, this will help launch your career as a compañero.” It was at moments like these that I felt like I was finally starting to belong.

  The next day we stopped for directions at a farm near the small town of Renaico. My mother tried to explain to the farmers what type of collective farm she was looking for. Her Spanish was still pretty basic but good enough to get by, and they nodded and seemed to understand what she meant. They took us by horse cart to the nearby Centro Reforma Agraria Che Guevara. The dozen or so peasant families there had claimed the land in late 1971. Under Chile’s new laws, the Allende government allocated each family a piece of land closest to their house and brought in electricity to the homes.

  We passed between the long rows of tall eucalyptus trees that marked the wide entrance to Che Guevara and soon stopped to talk to a stocky middle-aged woman standing by the side of the road. Her name was Rosa. She spoke quickly in staccato and was especially hard to understand because she had no upper teeth. She seemed flattered that we were so interested in the farm. Rosa gestured for us to come into her home and meet her family—her husband, Mauricio, and their three boys, Sebastian (six), Octavio (fourteen), and Pedro (eighteen). Since it was getting late, Rosa invited us to spend the night. We all slept in the same room, two to each single bed, and covered ourselves with odd assortments of threadbare sheets, blankets, and old clothes. My mother and I spent the whole night fighting off fleas, but no one else seemed bothered by them. Fleabites aside, the sleeping arrangement made me feel like we were in the midst of a wonderful adventure.

  The next morning we got up early and joined the dozen or so men clearing weeds from a field of beans. Like at the weekends of trabajo voluntario, I was always eager to participate in a group outdoor activity of mostly adults. Without hoes we couldn’t help much—and the men hardly seemed to notice our presence—but we tried to show our commitment by doggedly pulling weeds by hand. Finally, my mother started chatting them up, telling them she’d grown up in Kansas farm country, and that “Che Guevara is the most beautiful farm I’ve ever seen.” She left out the fact that she had never actually done any farming. As usual, her charm and sincerity had an immediate effect: a couple of the men headed off to find hoes for us.

  One of the men we impressed with our enthusiasm for farm work was Rosa’s eighteen-year-old son, Pedro. As we arrived home from the field that evening, Pedro asked, “Why don’t you stay here? Maybe you can live with us?”

  Rosa nodded enthusiastically, even though there was really no room for us in their tiny house. I looked to my mother, who, to my surprise, agreed.

  Rosa was always first to rise, and she blared the news on the radio as a sort of alarm clock to rouse the rest of us. Pedro was always the last out of bed, and once he was up, I eagerly joined him to check on the animals. I loved helping him tend to all the chickens and pigs and cows and horses, and unlike my own brothers, he didn’t mind my tagging along. Pedro, more than twice my age and almost twice my size, was my hero. He could do pretty much anything—fix fences, lasso a cow, hunt birds and rabbits, make a slingshot out of a twig and a piece of rubber. I followed him everywhere, and tried to walk and talk confidently like him. We even had the same name. Pedro called me Pedrito, which pleased my mother even more than me.

  On the farm in Chile. Pedro is in the middle, and I’m standing to his left.

  My mother helped Rosa around the house, cleaning and making breakfast, though she struggled at chopping wood and milking the cow. Her only complaints were that Rosa hung everyone’s washed clothes on barbed wire that left tear marks and insisted on emptying the chamber pot in the vegetable garden—where much of our food, including tomatoes, corn, beans, and potatoes, came from—instead of in the outhouse. After a long day in the fields, our reward was a cleansing swim in the river, which everyone, young and old, enjoyed.

  The main meal of the day was lunch, with only bread and milk typically served in the evening. The kitchen was always the center of activity. On the walls hung a peculiar mix of pictures—Che, Allende, Frank Sinatra, JFK. The only thing these famous male faces had in common was that they were Rosa’s idols. There was also a blond pinup girl calendar that belonged to Pedro, which no one other than my mother seemed to mind. There were huge bags of dried corn and beans on the dirt floor, firewood was neatly stacked head-high along one wall, and onions were strung from the rafters. Two chickens roosted above the firewood, and the family’s pig, Guerrillero, lived in a box in the corner but spent much of his time foraging for food under the kitchen table. He would inevitably bump into someone’s legs and be sent back to his box—from which he would appear again a few minutes later.

  Rosa’s husband, Mauricio, a tall, big-boned man with a hunched back and only a few strands of hair left on his leathery head, always drank heavily at the end of the day. Once, after a trip into town to deliver a gift to the church for All Saints’ Day, he got so drunk that he lost a suitcase full of groceries and necessities for the house. Rosa and my mother ran back to town, and they spent hours checking the bars for the missing suitcase, to no avail. Mauricio managed to find it somewhere the next day, and the crisis was averted, but I couldn’t believe that someone would deliberately do that to himself. Despite all of my adventures so far with my mother, I’d never before seen anyone drunk and was terrified by the sight of him stumbling around and mumbling unintelligibly, and forgetting where he had been or what he had done.

  Though I’d never witnessed my father take even a sip of alcohol, something about Mauricio reminded me of him. From our cozy spot on the farm, my father felt so far away, as if Michigan were an entirely different planet. I wondered what he would think of our new life. Would he be alarmed by our primitive living conditions, or impressed by how well I was handling it all? After dinner one evening, I dictated to my mother a short note to him, a description of my daily life, as if my father and I were chatting on the phone:

  Dear Daddy,

  I miss you. I am riding on lots of horses and playing futbol and swimming in the river. We are living up in the country. We hitchhiked to Renaico. I work in the fields. Yesterday afternoon I caught a cow with a rope. I was on a horse. I helped feed the calf. We make coffee out of wheat and then we mix it with warm milk and then we drink it. We pick beans every day. We make soup out of beans. Day before yesterday I rounded up cows with a stick. There are fleas in the bed. They itch me. We eat lots of corn. We have a puppy. I feed the chickens. After we live in Chile I might visit you. I am learning the language here. Please write.

  Love,

  Peter

  I was seven and a half years old but still didn’t know how to read or write, though that was true of everyone at Rosa’s house. The family relied exclusively on their little radio for all their news. There were no newspapers, and the communist party magazines, which someone had brought as a gift, were used as toilet paper.

  A few weeks later, my mother and I returned to Santiago, where she had work to do on her book about women in Allende’s Chile. I didn’t want to leave Pedro or the animals, and would have gladly traded the relative comforts of the city for the crowded, flea-bitten nights at Rosa’s. But my mother promised we’d return. When we left the farm, Rosa and her entire family accompanied us along the dirt road to the crowded train station in town, pressing gifts of hard-boiled eggs into our hands for the journey.

  Just Passing Through

  RONALD SUDDENLY SHOWED up at our Santiago house one night, not long after we had returned from the farm. We had not heard from him in months. He looked rugged, handsome, and healthy. His Berkeley-style long hair was now short, and both he and his backpack looked like they had been around the world several times. Though he’d known little Spanish when we’d first arrived in Guayaquil back in September, now he chatted easily with our housemates. He was bare
ly fifteen.

  The tensions that had run so high the last time we’d seen him evaporated as he shared the stories of his adventures. I was mesmerized.

  Ronald told us in detail how, more than six months earlier, he first set off from Guayaquil to explore the Ecuadorian Amazon, then hitchhiked to Peru and Bolivia, and then went on to Chile and Argentina. He mostly caught rides with truck drivers or jumped freight trains. He had traveled all the water routes in the south—the Strait of Magellan, Tierra del Fuego, Cape Horn, Drake’s Pass. He made it all the way down to Antarctica—he’d managed to get hired as a kitchen helper cleaning pots and pans on a ship after befriending the captain’s daughter.

  Ronald had traveled through Patagonia, a remote area as large as Alaska that was mostly inhabited by ranchers. He explained that, with few roads for hundreds of miles, he’d had to travel through one of the most remote stretches of southern Chile by horseback, buying a horse from some sheepherders for eighteen dollars. It took him two months to make the journey between Puerto Aysén and Puerto Montt, riding seventy miles a day and letting the horse rest one day a week. As he described it, there were no towns, no roads, no electricity—nothing but giant mountain glaciers and deep blue mountain lakes. Ronald said he mostly traveled alone but at times tagged along with gauchos. He remained a vegetarian, living mostly on bread, cheese, and wine. He cut his hair short in order not to look like a hippie and to avoid being hassled by the police. He boasted, “I’ve crossed lots of borders and hung around with lots of pigs and never once been searched or arrested.” I was especially thrilled to hear about all the animals Ronald had encountered along the way—eagles, ostriches, condors, swans, mountain lions and other wild cats.