He crossed a bridge that, in the darkness, resembled a steel beast frozen in place for eternity, its frail limbs gangrened with rust. Far off, on the horizon, the opaque shapes of boats swayed this way and that, limned here and there by a sprinkling of lights. They drove by sawmills with their high brick walls, and warehouses where cranes stood motionless. When he saw the little wood dwellings of Padre Las Casas perched on the hill, one leaning against the other, he had the distinct feeling that it would take very little (a sudden wind, a slight shifting of the ground) for them all to tumble into the roadway like so many houses of cards. Then there surged into view the red serpent, undulating, snaking down his father’s violated body. The reptile was headless, a long scarlet cylinder twisting at will, lascivious, encrusted on his father’s skin. The beast was there, before his eyes. He saw it on the derelict, ill-lit fountain in a square, he saw it when a motorcycle swerved and the headlight dazzled him with its immaculate white glare. And so when he thought he heard a covert exhalation, he almost lost control of the vehicle. A truck coming towards him honked furiously. Turning away from the driver’s volley of curses, he became aware of a silhouette in the passenger seat, sitting with legs spread, a thin grey coil of smoke rising from the cigarette between its fingers. He saw it, in profile, chortling.
“You want to get us killed or what?”
Alberto kept his eyes glued to the road. He heard the laugh again, a hearty one this time. His father’s shade took a puff from his cigarette.
“Take it easy Alberto,” he said, softly, “No point getting yourself in a state.”
Alberto thought: How am I supposed to take it easy?
“There’s no point, I’m telling you. It’s the most banal story you could imagine. Of no interest, if you ask me.”
Alberto exhaled noisily.
“What are you trying to say?”
“I’m saying that I, who thought I was pretty clever, got caught like a chump. Like a clueless greenhorn.”
And he stopped laughing.
“Who did that to you?”
“Oh, you’ll find out.”
Silence again. Then, after a moment, not knowing quite why, Alberto felt his eyes well up.
“Shit. What now?”
Alberto didn’t look at him.
“Please, that’s not how I raised you …”
He had to stifle his sniggering.
Alberto realized that he had driven around the square twice, a few streets away from his Aunt Emma. Afraid that his father might vanish, Alberto didn’t look at him, and it seemed that he had never seen so clearly what he was, all feigned composure; this game, this façade suddenly seemed so real. He parked his car in front of his aunt’s house, circled the vehicle to take Marco in his arms, and shut the door with his elbow. He made his way towards the bungalow, built like its neighbours on a small rise, and saw his mother on the doorstep, looking worried, rolling her eyes. Carmen climbed the steps, and without asking him any questions, opened the door for him.
“WHAT?” SHE CRIED.
Her back propped against the head of the bed, his mother lay before him, her face round, thick, and devoid of makeup. The beige lampshade was a few centimetres above her head. Her wrinkles, at the temples and around the mouth, were like spider legs. She wore what she always wore when he imagined her: a synthetic pink nightgown. She was reclined as if at her ease, but her large brown pupils betrayed her: there was fear in her eyes. Her right arm was out of sight under the covers, but her hand, as if by magic, reappeared beneath Marco’s shoulder, as he slept, turned towards the unlit bed lamp.
Alberto repeated what he had just said about his father’s scar. Whispering, she asked him who had done that, why and how, but without really giving him a chance to answer. She whispered, he thought, less not to wake Marco, than to be sure that Pedro and Emma would not hear. Pedro could never stand Roberto being talked about in his house. Now silent, she was unmoving, her lips set, dignified, her gaze questioning.
He had come to tell her what he knew, but soon realized, a bit shamefully, that he did not know much. For a long time his eyes roamed over the purple flagstones.
“Perhaps you have things to tell me,” he offered. “Did you know about his relationship with this woman? Why didn’t you say anything?”
Suddenly his mother’s face changed completely.
“What, it was for me to tell you about this relationship? Why didn’t he do it?”
She paused, as if really awaiting an answer.
“He didn’t say anything because he was ashamed of what he was doing. Because he knew he was behaving badly.”
She surveyed the room, triumphant and at the same time wounded. But bit by bit, as if she saw that this self regard was inappropriate, she lowered her eyes.
“I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want you to judge your father. I didn’t want you to learn about how he had taken up with those people …”
“With the Mapuches, you mean?”
She closed her eyes, then she cleared her throat, as if to stifle some ill-defined feeling that was creeping up on her. In the past, he remembered, he sometimes surprised her lying on the bed in the master bedroom, crying hot tears. He made a point of passing by the room, looking away. But over the last ten years, she had hardened: tears almost never came. She began by talking about a night when she was sleeping alone in her Santiago apartment, a few months after her final separation from Roberto. A night when the phone rang, echoing through the rooms, half-empty because Roberto had kept for himself most of the furniture. A long conversation ensued, disjointed, full of incomplete sentences and hesitations, and punctuated by nervous exhalations on the part of his father. He was then living alone in the South, in the country house, persuaded that his view of the world was incompatible with that of others, especially his wife. It seemed he was seeking, not so much advice as the sympathetic ear of his “best friend,” as he called her when he left her, looking for a way to spare her, but in fact only wounding her even more. As the telephone conversation proceeded, she began to take in what he was trying to say:
“Your father had found himself at the far end of his land that day. You know, high up, where the grass hardly grows. He was driving the pickup, full speed. From time to time, clouds of smoke obscured the windshield. Behind him the blue of the sky made his eyes smart, while Llaima held itself erect, with its snowy peak. Your father began to think about his time in prison. Of those terrible days after the coup d’état. He was obsessed by this period, I’m not telling you anything new. He saw himself standing, surrounded by fifteen other men who shared his cell. He remembered Chico Sagardia, Lalo Echeverria, Pato Gonzalez, his colleagues and friends, whom he was seeing, within those four walls, for the last time. He was mad to be thinking back on those moments, he told me on the phone. He was there before them, he was breathing, they too were breathing, and all knew that some of them would never come out of that jail alive. He told himself that such memories lead nowhere. Memory and imagination only exacerbate suffering, become prisons themselves. That is why, with the years, he had repressed all thoughts of that period.”
Before going on, she cleared her throat again, this time as if to excuse herself for what she was going to say.
“And I don’t know if you knew this, but the soldiers never let anyone go to the bathroom. Except those who were collaborating. In your father’s cell, no one was collaborating. And so as the days passed, their pants soaked with urine, the smell of excrement ever stronger, some of them cracked. They became aggressive, sad, you get the idea. Lalo in particular rolled around on the ground, had fits as if he were asthmatic. It seems he was claustrophobic. But despite everything, people got along. They made a common front, and when they had to they banged their cups against the bars.”
It was the first time someone had told him about his father’s experience in prison. Forced for so many years to imagine this incarce
ration, he had ended up inventing an account that had nothing to do with what he was hearing.
“And so your father was there, his hands on the steering wheel of the pickup, and the memory came back to him of the days when he and Chico Sagardia were put in solitary confinement. You remember Chico, no? He took care of communications in the Arica hospital, when your father was director. He was his right-hand man. In the evening Chico often came to eat with us, and sometimes he brought along Yiyo his son, who went with you to the hospital daycare. You remember, don’t you?”
Alberto had vague memories of all that, and he wondered whether those images were not the product of his imagination. On the other hand, he had a vivid recollection of the feelings that companioned him, constantly. A kind of shame, and a persistent chill. This was paradoxical given that Arica, the country’s northernmost city, was also its hottest. It was there that he learned about deception, humiliation, and the pains of love, as when his mother found out about his father’s longstanding relationship with his secretary, a volatile woman with black curly hair who bent down to Alberto to offer him a sucker as he gazed into her bottomless décolleté.
“They transferred them to windowless cells,” went on his mother. “Two metres by one metre, side by side. Your father was driving faster and faster. The pickup’s steering wheel was shaking in his hands. He saw again the eyes of the officer who came to check up on him through the slit in the door. His eyes were pale, steel green. He uttered the same sentence, over and over: ‘And the worst is, that we think we’re better than animals …’ And then he moved on with a deep laugh, barely to be heard. Your father remembered that he sometimes bolted wide awake in the frigid blackness of the cell and strained his eyes, but to no purpose, the darkness was so complete. He told me that he had never spent so much time meditating on the essence, the true nature of the odour of shit. Many years later, any anus, his own, that of a baby, brought back the painful memory of the days spent in that cell, looking to death as a deliverance. And so he was there, at the wheel of his vehicle, turning this over in his mind, when he came to himself and saw, through the lowered window, the panicked appearance of his men. He slammed on the brakes, and red dust rose up in his wake like a ghostly presence.”
Roberto got down from the pickup, his men drew back to let him pass, and it was then that he saw a formless shape on the ground. After long seconds, he made out the fallen calf that, God in heaven, had hurled itself against the fence’s barbed wire as if it had wanted to jump over! Stunned, he stared at the blood-soaked fur of the animal, its glassy eyes, its tongue that, like a foreign body, protruded from its mouth.
“Who did that, for Christ’s sake?” he asked his men, all of whom turned their heads away. And the fact that they didn’t even have the courage to look him in the eyes, that they seemed not unhappy that he lose an animal, made him see red.
“Then,” Carmen went on, “a boy, the youngest of the workers, stepped out from the group. He was small, moved like someone in a drunken stupor, and he wore his cap very low as if to hide the fact that he was cross-eyed.”
Roberto approached the boy, looked him up and down, and into his mind came the officer’s eyes, bright as a razor blade. At once he froze, because he thought he had buried those memories forever. He saw himself again, on his hands and knees in the cell. No, never again, he had said, between two sobs. I promise, I swear. But the officer insisted, he wanted the names of those who, in protest, after the coup d’état, had pillaged the hospital. The problem was that he had known nothing about this assault, nor the names of the individuals involved. I don’t know anything, I swear. And the officer: Watch it, that’s a bit too much swearing for my tastes. My experience has taught me that liars love to swear. You want us to start in again, with the cigarettes? A calculated laugh then, quickly cut short. You know, I’m counting on you. It was you or Sagardia. And Sagardia, well, now he’s just rotten meat … And in fact, for two hours, or three, or even four, there had been no sound at all from the neighbouring cell. Utter silence. When he came to his senses, the boy at his feet was squirming like a worm, spitting blood. Around him, men were staring at him, horrified, while others had lowered their heads or were wiping their brows with the backs of their wrists. And behind the boy, there was still the dead animal’s glistening, wide-open eye.
“The boy was hospitalized immediately,” said Carmen. “He lay in bed for ten days. Then,” she added, almost inaudibly, “he died.”
Alberto didn’t immediately feel the blow.
“I wish I could tell you that it’s all a hideous joke,” she said.
He looked at his mother’s sunken cheeks and saw her angry demeanour. He was astounded that, despite all his father had put her through, she could still muster some sympathy for him.
In a voice that seemed to have travelled an enormous distance, she went on with her story. And Alberto had no trouble at all imagining his father, an autumn evening, enjoying a cigarette on a garden chair. He was so exhausted, so sore after his hard day, that he didn’t even take notice of the persistent wind that was making him shiver. Diego, at his feet, rose up to sniff the air and began barking angrily. Three silhouettes, outlined against the bright sky, were coming straight towards them, machetes in hand. His father stood, seized the shotgun that never left his side. He took his time aiming and pressed the trigger. The bullet buried itself in the earth just short of the men’s boots. He heard the insults that issued forth. Everything you could think of, his whore of a mother, his balls, his anus. They swore to their gods on high that they would avenge the boy. Roberto lowered the shotgun, spat to the side, and offered himself the luxury of turning his back on them as he sat back down.
“A few weeks later,” Carmen said, “a policeman came to the farm.”
Opening the door, Roberto saw a youth dressed in a khaki shirt and brown pants. Noting the small eucalyptus trees in staggered rows on a sloping parcel of land, the young man, to make conversation, enquired after that year’s planting. On his arrival, you see, that stand of trees had caught his attention, and it took him right back to his own childhood. His father cultivated the same tree near Lican Ray. You might not believe this, he said, lowering his voice, but as I was coming along the little road next to the Mapuche settlement, two indios, at least that’s what they looked like, tried to bar my way. No, but who do they think they are? Soon they’ll be claiming that Araucania still belongs to them! And he burst out laughing. He took his time before getting around to the death of the boy, and when at last he broached the subject, Roberto saw that he was uneasy about the whole business.
“It seems,” said Carmen, “that he really was young. He talked freely, and he talked a lot.”
The policeman turned solemn and formal when he had to ask him for his version of the facts concerning the boy, whom he named only once. Roberto complied. He was driving his pickup, got down from his vehicle, the young worker was pushing the calf towards the barbed wire, and seeing Roberto, he came at him with a knife in his hand. Roberto had to defend himself. All through this brief account the policeman nodded his head vigorously, hastening to set everything down in a notebook, as if the sooner he preserved this version, the sooner he recorded it, then the sooner that stream of images and fantastical impressions would supplant what was real. When Roberto had finished, the policeman, to conclude, said: “That’s what we thought, self-defence.”
It all lasted just a few minutes. When he left, the officer touched his fingers to the visor of his cap, and turned about with the same alertness he had displayed all through the interview.
“Believe it or not,” said Carmen, “your father was never given any trouble in the wake of that affair. Of course, the workers, mostly Mapuches, never treated him the same way afterwards. No more bantering. They talked to him just when they had to. Several times your father surprised them plotting against him. He waited, waited for them to sabotage his equipment, to kill his animals or to set them loose, an
d he was ready to defend himself, but nothing happened.”
Alberto remained thoughtful.
“How long after the boy’s death did he meet Amalia?” he asked her.
“A year, a year and a half.”
“And how did he manage to get through it all? After all, he’d killed somebody,” he added, lowering his voice.
“He phoned me, told me about his nightmares, where he was stretched out on a mountain of bones. Where he tried to get up and couldn’t. I said to him, sorry, but for someone who’s spent his whole life denying his Jewishness, that’s rather ironic. It’s a Jewish dream. And he answered, you’re right. And it’s funny you should say that, because the older I get, the more I’m like the old man, and to tell you the truth, that terrifies me.”
Once again, Alberto was struck by the compassion in his mother’s voice. He said to himself: she always loved him.
Later, as a hint of light began to creep in behind the blinds, they shared memories of his father as a thoughtful and teasing husband, as a man acting according to his convictions. A smile brightened the face of his mother when he spoke of his childhood picture of his father: a man with a fierce smile, who, despite his modest height, was larger than life size. They spent a good hour exchanging stories, recalling humorous incidents, sometimes from Chile, sometimes from Quebec, where his father was always in the thick of the action, showing off, before the eyes wide with amazement of his Quebec friends, a pike almost a metre long, or wearing a bullet-proof vest destined for a guerrilla in the capital, and passing through Chilean customs in the middle of the 1980s, when he was still persona non grata in the country. Luckily, he was let off easy by a customs official who, like him, was from the South. His father, Alberto ventured, was the only one in the family who could have been a character out of a novel. To the point where, when he was recounting one of his exploits, his friends were frankly incredulous, assuming he exaggerated out of self-regard. But as he and his mother talked, the picture darkened, and the debonair, lively, and smiling man turned into one who was Machiavellian, wounded, and cunning. And once this second image had supplanted the first, Carmen, her voice hoarse, was unequivocal:
Eucalyptus Page 6