A Scarcity of Condors

by Suanne Laqueur

  I don’t want you to suffer, he told himself. If you have to do this now, we can do this now. But I don’t want you to suffer.

  A photo turned over in his fingers. He and Feño in the woods of Central Park, leaning against one of their marked trees, looking up at the camera in Jude’s outstretched hand. Bursting with life. Crazy in love. Eyes shining and sated. A freshly carved J/F in the bark above Feño’s shoulder.

  Jude’s eyes were dry as he gazed on the last days of pure happiness before the Condor hunted them down.

  He had to do this now.

  They became secret lovers. Life became beautiful and dangerous.

  At school, they kept their distance. Alone, they couldn’t keep their hands off each other. The sneaking and the secrecy and the defiance made them even more crazed. They went at each other in cars, or in the woods at Central Park, or a half-dozen other hideaways they sussed out in Vancouver. Every once in a great, beautiful while, they were gifted an empty house for a few luxurious, feverish hours. Once, the planets aligned with both sets of parents out of town for a weekend, and they lived together for two days at Feño’s house. Lying around in bed. Naked and tangled with the radio playing, every song an anthem written expressly for them.

  During those precious, horizontal moments in a nest of sheets and blankets, Jude licked every inch of Feño’s body. He was so in love, so besotted with the world and music and the whorl of fine hairs around Feño’s belly button, he wanted to die. Not in despair or surrender. He wanted to resurrect. Explode out of this earthly shell and ascend to some higher plain where it felt like this all the time. Feño on him and in him and singing to him forever.

  He didn’t know such happiness existed.

  “I’d fucking die for you,” Feño said, an inky black silhouette looming over Jude. “I wish…”

  “What?”

  “I wish we could just be. I wish I could be with you without feeling like I’d be in danger. You know?”

  “I know.”

  “Being so alert and aware and paranoid all the time. It’s exhausting. This?” He gestured around his room, redolent with sex and sweat, the floor littered with condom wrappers. “This is fucking luxury. And I feel like I can’t relax all the way into it because come Monday, I have to go back to being on my guard again.” He settled on his elbows, taking Jude’s head in his big hands. “I hate it. Soon as the bell rings for first period, the minute you’re out of my sight, I start worrying if today’s the day someone gives you shit.”

  “Not the day someone gives you shit?”

  A flash of teeth as Feño’s smile unfolded. “I can handle it.”

  “Because you have it,” Jude said, biting along his neck. “Right?”

  A chuckle within Feño’s chest. “I always have it.”

  “Let me see.”

  Feño reached long for his bedside table and slid open the drawer. His hand came out filled with a milky, silvery glint.

  Rossi 461 .357 Mag, Jude thought, like a prayer.

  Braced on an arm, Feño offered the gun but Jude shook his head. He’d held it a few times. Its weight was a terrifying thrill but when he handed it back, his palm always felt slimy for a minute after.

  He didn’t like touching it. But he did like knowing Feño had it.

  Sometimes at school, or in the car, or in the park, he’d casually ask, “You have it?”

  Feño would answer, deadpan, “I always have it.”

  Really, Feño didn’t do more than have it. He found the gun in the woods and instead of turning it into the police, he kept it. He liked it. It wasn’t loaded and he didn’t have the first idea how to go about getting it loaded. Or the need. It just lived in his drawer, making him feel better. Knowing it was there comforted Jude. And during that magical cohabiting weekend, he discovered making love in the Rossi’s heavy, slick presence—even unloaded and impotent—was a sick turn-on.

  “You know I’d kill anyone who tried to hurt you,” Feño whispered in the dark.

  He never got to make good on the vow, because he didn’t have the gun the night he and Jude were ambushed by El Cóndor. It was in his drawer, doing nothing and comforting no one. And it took a long time for Jude to stop obsessively recreating the night of the attack, this time placing the Rossi in Feño’s hand.

  In Jude’s early revisionist fantasies, the gun remained unloaded. Feño merely brandished its empty threat, de-escalated the situation and made the Condor take to the skies in terror. Nobody was hurt. Laced with the adrenaline of a narrow escape, Feño and Jude fell on each other like spoils of war, laughing and rutting in the playground dirt.

  But after he gave Feño his breakup, his closure and his goodbye, Jude changed the scenario. Now the gun was loaded. Feño fired in the air. Again, just to scare the Condor. Nobody was hurt. But soon the dose wasn’t enough to fix the addict. The scene shifted again, and Feño started shooting to maim.

  Then to kill.

  I’d kill anyone who tried to hurt you.

  In each progressive version, Jude made Feño’s aim train higher and higher along the Condor’s body as he kept the promise. He shot Juan-Mateo’s knees out. Then he shot him in the ass. In the back. Through the heart. At Jude’s lowest point, Feño aimed highest and blew the Condor’s head off, sending blood and brains through the diamonds of the chain link fence.

  Jude added courtroom drama to the script, playing judge, jury and witness. It would be ruled self-defense. Feño would be sentenced to probation. Fine, maybe a little bit of jail in a minimum-security facility. Or time served. But then he’d be free, and he and Jude would run away to Toronto or Montreal and be together forever.

  I wish he had it.

  I wish he killed El Cóndor that night.

  It took a long time to stop doing this.

  Jude sat in the dark, surrounded by souvenirs of the past. His eyes fixed on his own bedside table drawer, which never held a gun within.

  Down low with nothing to aim for, he wished he had it.

  “What are you reading?” Cleon said drowsily, reaching for the corner of Penny’s book and turning it toward him. “Oh, you’re reading me. How kind.”

  Cleon had written four books on human rights abuse in South America, but it was his magnum opus in Penny’s hands. The Witches of Killarney: The Women of Vancouver’s Chilean Community.

  “Reading that for any particular reason,” he asked. “Or is it just to bask in my pedantic bullshit?”

  “I’m basking in your pedantic bullshit.”

  “I’m so glad I married you.” He moved up closer against her hip and slid the stump of his right leg into the nest of warmth under her knees.

  “Cold?” she asked.

  “Mm.”

  “Put clothes on.”

  “Don’t want to.”

  She tugged the comforter higher, leaned and buried her face in his thick, white hair for a long inhale. Then she went back to reading, resting a hand on Cleon’s broad, bare back. Outside was damp, grey chill, with a mean wind off Puget Sound making the tips of lilac bushes scrape and rattle against the window. Inside was a snug siesta, with soft sheets, pillows piled high and empty mugs of tea on the side tables.

  Penny believed in the power of taking to one’s bed.

  Once her children knew how to make a sandwich, she would occasionally announce to her family, “I am taking to my bed. Fend for thyself. I shall rise in twenty-four hours, a better woman.”

  To which Cleon, bless his soul, would always reply, “Impossible.”

  Penny would put out the Do Not Disturb sign. Amass every pillow in the house, stack books, magazines, snacks and the remote within easy reach. She donned soft clothing and ceremoniously placed herself between the covers. The ceremony was key, it highlighted the deliberate nature of taking to the bed, as did setting a time limit. A running clock told the world I am having a breakdown,
I shall return. Without it, you were giving up.

  “Mami invented self-care before self-care was a thing,” Serena said.

  Self-care. This generation had such good terminology. Penny would never say surviving the trauma of a murderous dictatorship would’ve been easier in the here and now, only that the language was better. Nobody knew what PTSD was in the seventies, now it was a household acronym. Maybe mental health and depression weren’t completely de-stigmatized, but they were no longer spoken in whispers. Half the people you knew went to therapy, had been in therapy or joked they could use therapy. Television commercials hawked antidepressants more often than cold medicine. Penny would’ve given anything to have had just the vocabulary back in the seventies, let alone the prescriptions.

  “I’m taking to my bed in self-care,” she said to Cleon today, after a morning of boring errands and billpaying and housecleaning.

  Bless his soul, he came with her. When the Sound was too rough for kayaking, he liked to make love in the afternoons, followed by a long nap.

  It wasn’t always this way. For two painful decades, their sex life had been erratic at best, non-existent at worst. One bad year in their thirties, they had intercourse exactly four times. The fourth time produced Aiden.

  Penny had always been a sexualized creature and in Cleon she found a bespoke lover. She loved being married to him and she loved going to bed with him. Naturally after he was released from prison and they fled Chile, sex was out of the question. The man couldn’t stand unassisted, let alone roll around under the sheets. He was ill, traumatized, learning to walk again, navigating a new homeland and a new language. They had an infant and were dodging all the wrenches of new parenthood. Sex? Sex was expendable ballast on this ship of madness. Penny would rather sleep.

  But as the seas calmed and she got control of the vessel, Penny woke up. She wanted to go to bed with her man, her partner and best friend.

  He didn’t seem to want her. And it hurt.

  In all other aspects, he was an ideal mate. Verbal with affection, with compliments on her appearance, praise for her accomplishments. Gratitude for how she helped him over the mobility obstacles, navigated him through health problems, soothed him down from anxiety and woke him up from nightmares.

  “You saved me,” he said, reaching out to touch her. Always hugging her, holding her hand, brushing her arm as she walked by. “Every day you’ve been saving me.”

  He never failed to tell and show her his love and she never once, ever, doubted he loved her.

  But when it came to matters of the bedroom, Cleon was as disinterested as a fixed cat. Even when the interest was there, it carried an underlying current of take-it-or-leave-it. It was easy to blame the meds—doctors had warned decreased libido was a common side effect. But the things they prescribed to take the edge off, or rather, to give Cleon some kind of edge, didn’t seem to work. Which made Penny sense something else was going on. Something deeper and more sinister spawned in the Villa Grimaldi.

  “Did something happen?” she asked her husband carefully. Casually. Never in bed. Always in a neutral place with no distractions.

  But as verbally lavish as he was with his love, Cleon was equally stingy with anything having to do with Chile.

  “Leave it be,” he said. “I know what you’re asking and no, nothing like that happened. I don’t want to talk about what happened. I don’t want to bring it into this house. It’s too clean.”

  He was forever describing their life post-Chile as clean and Penny couldn’t get him to open up about that any more than she could get him to talk about the imprisonment. He knew he frustrated her, but his psyche was too far into this spiral to pull up out of it.

  “I’m sorry,” he said in the dark, when he didn’t want to make love, or when his best attempt felt like the bare minimum. “I can’t help it. I’m trying. I do what I can, I love you with everything I got, Pen. I swear…”

  She was afraid if she pressed too hard, she’d push him away and be left with nothing. She had no other skills. No other language. She backed down, took the sex as it came, and threw her leftover passion into motherhood and the Chilean ex-pat community.

  Life moved on a loop between her home, the co-op on School Avenue, the new co-op on Commercial Drive and the nearby La Quena Coffee House. In between mothering her trio of children, being a helpmeet to her husband, and caretaking the old farmhouse on Ormidale Street, Penny organized events. She presided meetings. She chaired committees. She welcomed, advocated, translated. Oiled wheels and paved ways. She kept her spare bedroom and bath cleaned and ready for any newly arrived exile who needed to put their head down for a night. She kept extra canned goods and bags of rice for any family caught short between paychecks. She raised awareness while she raised her children and took children of exhausted, traumatized parents under her wing. Among them Feño Paloma. Rare was the Saturday night he didn’t sleep in Jude’s top bunk, then sit at the Sunday table for pancakes or waffles.

  “Do you two remember meeting at the airport,” Penny would ask the boys, just so she could watch the minuscule exchanged glance before they answered, “No.”

  At the hub of the Chilo-Canadian neighborhood of Killarney was the housing commune on School Avenue. The hub of the commune was the large hall where political events and penas, social gatherings, took place. The penas allowed the exiles to raise their children in a Chilean atmosphere. Through food, music, plays and dancing, the kids were able to sustain their Spanish and remain aware of their heritage.

  The penas were where Cleon got the idea for his first book. As a journalist, he was always looking for a good human story. His quiet, gentle-giant appearance, his attentive compassion and his ordeal in the Villa Grimaldi made him the ear that even the most reluctant survivors whispered toward. Thus Cleon Tholet, so loathe to speak of his own experience, became the curator of Killarney’s collective ordeal. At every pena, you could find him at a table in some far-off corner, listening to an exile give their testimony.

  Penny worried compiling so many blood-curling and abhorrent tales would send her husband into despair, but he seemed to thrive on the work. A holy purpose lay in being a witness and scribe. He was so enthused and consumed, Penny went all-in on the project, transcribing the tapes and typing endless drafts of the manuscript that became Echoes and Exiles.

  It was a clunky, amateur publication, but the next pena was declared a release party, and nearly everyone in the neighborhood went home with his or her signed copy. The bit between his teeth, Cleon launched into his next book, Inheritance of Fear: Women, Children and Human Rights in South America. It reached a wider audience and took Cleon on a modest book tour through the academic institutes of British Columbia and Alberta. Then came his tour de force, The Witches of Killarney: The Women of Vancouver’s Chilean Community. It won a Governor General’s award, the Hubert Evans Prize and the Lionel Gelber Prize.

  While Cleon reveled in success, Penny suffered in confused silence. She didn’t know she harbored a survivor’s guilt until acting as her husband’s research assistant unleashed it. Every story she transcribed made her own pain more insignificant. Each account put to paper only diminished and dismissed every item in her catalog of horrors.

  Her husband was arrested, tortured and nearly crippled for life.

  But he was released and he is alive.

  She was assaulted by soldiers in the street outside her own home.

  At least you weren’t tortured and gang raped.

  She watched her husband’s uncle and her neighbors shot in cold blood.

  But you were not shot.

  She was rifle-butted in the head and sent into early labor.

  But your baby is alive. He wasn’t tortured in front of you to get you to inform on your loved ones.

  She had to flee the country she loved and identified with.

  You fled to the country of your birth, straight into t
he arms of your rich father whose money greased the wheels and paved the way for your new life. You had your papers and your people. You spoke the language and knew the lay of the land. While hundreds of other exiles came with nothing and arrived at nothing.

  Her husband rarely wanted to make love to her.

  You have a husband. He adores you. Worships you. Never fails to tell you he loves you.

  Other women you know will never feel their husband’s touch, never hear those words of love again.

  You suffered nothing compared to them.

  Shut up and do something.

  She did and did. Stifling the dissatisfaction and remembering it could be worse.

  Then they got the call from the Vancouver Police Department.

  Then they were standing at Jude’s hospital bedside, gazing down on his broken body.

  Then the Witches of Killarney turned on them.

  And Penny could no longer do.

  In the wake of Jude’s attack, Cleon took action while Penny fell apart. Not right away. Her habits sustained her as they settled in Seattle. She stuffed her pain under the mattress of her son’s anguish. Staying strong and tight and silent because she suffered nothing compared to him.

  Shut up and do something.

  She did what she did best. She knew how to be a stranger in a strange land. She knew how to organize, preside, negotiate, advocate, oil, grease and pave. She did and did until the day they dropped Jude off at the University of the Pacific in Stockton. She cried the whole drive home, which was expected. But then she couldn’t stop crying. She couldn’t get out of bed.

  She couldn’t do.

  Within two weeks, she was admitted to the Ballard campus of Swedish Behavioral Health, suffering a complete nervous breakdown. For the first time, she told her story to a pair of neutral, professional ears, who, for the first time, called it what it was. Her therapist underlined certain words in the narrative, acknowledging their horrible impact and not allowing them to be dismissed.