A Scarcity of Condors

by Suanne Laqueur

  The women Penny worked tirelessly alongside and the women for whom she tirelessly worked had turned against her. It was a betrayal. The betrayal was a coup on her life. She didn’t leave Canada, she fled. Again. For the second time she picked up her family and in a state of emergency with the irrefutably real fear of physical harm, she escaped the country she had looked upon as her home.

  And goddammit, the loss of her sex life was not a fair or acceptable trade-off.

  It was then Penny crafted a motto and personal credo: True. And. Dot-dot-dot. Who are you going to be now?

  “I can’t live like this anymore,” she said to Cleon. “This is not who I am, this is not who I’m going to continue to be. When I come home, things have to change. No more telling me we’re too clean to talk about what happened in Chile. It’s time to get dirty.”

  She didn’t believe in God but she did believe in a divine order. Things happened for a reason. Her breakdown gave Cleon his own come-to-the-divine-order moment, realizing Penny could no longer be and never should have been the basket in which he placed all his broken eggshells without revealing how they’d been shattered in the first place.

  He began to tell her things. Or rather, he started by showing her.

  “Under one condition,” he said. “Not in the house. I don’t want any of this associated with any part of our house. Not the kitchen table, not the living room floor, not the basement.”

  So they got a hotel room. Cleon brought a box he’d stored in the garage all these years, filled with dozens of sketches. Every piece of paper was an ear Cleon had whispered into, using pens and pencils as his voice. Over twenty years, he’d drawn a secret museum of memories. A gallery of nightmares. A stomach-turning display of torture and misery and agony and fear. One by one, he and Penny took them out and spread them on the hotel room floor.

  They discovered their respective survivor’s guilt, rooted in different experiences in Chile, bore the same poisoned fruit: You are alive, while so many others are dead.

  You suffered nothing compared to them.

  Shut up and do something.

  “Let’s try a new way,” Penny said. “We get rid of shut up. We keep do something. Do something and be someone.”

  Cleon went for counseling, which he’d tried before, but this time he stuck with it. He found a psychiatrist who hailed from Argentina. Dr. Saavedra had witnessed death and detention and disappearance. She spoke all of Cleon’s languages and understood the birthplace of his trauma. She helped leech out some of the silent, potent venom lingering in his bones. The unresolved grief for the loss of his beloved uncle Louis, whom he never saw again. The guilt for attempting to survive the Villa Grimaldi the way Louis survived Sachsenhausen, and failing.

  “Failing how?” Penny asked.

  “He made a palace with ten rooms,” Cleon said. “He bonded with ten other men to survive and made himself the steward of their stories. I did it alone. I let no one else in. My palace only had room for one. I cared about my survival and mine alone, and…” He looked at Penny and forced up a secret that made his teeth chatter as it passed. “Dr. Saavedra says maybe I’ve been…unconsciously castrating myself for it ever since.”

  Penny went still and quiet. She cupped her hands, made them soft, and let Cleon set down the rotten teeth he was yanking from the jaws of the past. She held them a minute. Saw them. Weighed and measured them.

  Then she handed them back.

  They weren’t for her to fix or keep. They simply asked their existence be acknowledged.

  Not all the emotional gangrene could be exised from Cleon’s soul, but thank God it was the early nineties and the emergence of third-generation antidepressants. It took time and patience, but finally Dr. Saavedra found the right combination and dosage of SSRIs that could hold Cleon’s anxieties at bay without sacrificing his sex drive.

  Penny and Cleon renewed their wedding vows and Seattle became the Florence of a marital renaissance. They discovered kayaking, which freed Cleon from the prison of his injuries, gave him physical movement and adventure and a new group of friends at the marina. He started art classes, a what-the-hell-why-not impulse that led to him re-creating the secret, one-room palace from the Villa Grimaldi. This fortress was an act of creative survival so extraordinary, Cleon’s consciousness had declared it inconsequential. Un-noteworthy. He buried it and didn’t think to dig it up until someone suggested he could.

  It saved his life.

  In a bizarre way, Jude’s attack saved all their lives.

  On the one hand, it seemed appalling to think so much beneficial change was conceived in the belly of a hate crime. On the other, if Jude’s leg hadn’t been broken, if the family hadn’t pulled up stakes and fled Vancouver, if they hadn’t come to Seattle, if Penny hadn’t had a breakdown, if one of Cleon’s colleagues hadn’t referred him to Dr. Saavedra…

  “Put down the pedantic bullshit,” Cleon murmured, taking The Witches of Killarney out of Penny’s hands and tossing it.

  Like a creature from the primordial deep, his arms wormed around Penny’s waist and dragged her down beneath the covers. Into the warm lair of their bizarre, golden-year rebirth, where they had a lot of time to make up for, a lot of revolting developments to reverse.

  It was who they were now.

  At the Estadio de Chile, you and the hundreds of other detainees are kept in the stands, spectators to your own misery. You are utterly helpless. Your hands tied, your body’s every move tracked by the muzzle of a machine gun. The lights are constantly on, so you lose track of time. You only know it’s day or night by what the guards are eating.

  You eat nothing.

  Thoughts of your wife tear your heart in two. You lament her name into the cup of your cuffed hands, whisper it in the tiniest, most secret folds of your mind. In public, to the world, she is Penny. Only you are allowed to use her real name, and in only tiny, secret, whispers.

  (Lucy.)

  (Lucy, my love, we were going to grow old together.)

  You must survive. For her and the baby. And for the five days you’re detained at the Estadio, you try Uncle Louis’s way. You imagine yourself in a house and associate each room with a memory or anecdote of your life.

  (It was supposed to be our life, Lucy.)

  Stop that. Concentrate.

  It’s hard. Fear and anxiety make the roof collapse, the walls cave in and the foundation crumble.

  You try again.

  (Lucy, Lucy.)

  Basta. Imagina.

  A kitchen. The center of a house. Its heart and soul. A table and chairs. Sit down. Smell what’s baking in the oven. Now think of a time in your life when you were happy. Tell a story.

  Stell dir vor.

  Imagine yourself.

  It’s 1963. You’re twenty-one. Both the Beatles and the new neighborhood of La Reina emerge onto the scene, giving you a new home and a new obsession.

  The Fab Four will never play any country in Latin America. Mexico is mad for “Los Bitles,” but the country’s dictatorship denies a concert to its children during the 1964 world tour.

  1964? Shit, you’ve jumped ahead. No matter, this will be a saga, not a tale. So be it.

  You and your friends beg, nag, cajole and convince the owner of the local record store to order the albums. Beatles lyrics are the first English words you learn and you teach them all to Uncle Louis.

  “Lucy in a sky?” he says. “With diamonds? What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Who cares,” you say, hands behind your head, staring up at the ceiling, which transforms into an immense, indigo bowl of night sky, the stars arranged in the shape of a woman.

  But no stars are visible over the Estadio because the lights are always on.

  Your hands are tied. You’re helpless, enraged and terrified. Lucy isn’t in the sky. She’s at home, pregnant like a berry and no doubt frightene
d out of her mind.

  Lucy, you think, your cuffed hands trembling.

  (Lucy, my love…)

  As the Tholets read the results of their second DNA tests, the kitchen became quieter than the space between symphony movements. Only the pitter-patter of rain outside. The tick of the clock as the appliances glanced sideways at each other and shrugged their shoulders.

  Iberian Peninsula: 44%

  Italy: 30%

  Greece & The Balkans: 15%

  France: 11%

  The silence became unbearable. Penny was pale as ash, her mouth caught up in her hand. Cleon, who had been standing, sat down carefully, rubbing one palm against the other, staring into space. Serena’s arms were crossed and her lips pressed into a razor-thin line.

  They jumped in their chairs when Jude chuckled. “Well, this is a revolting development.”

  “Juleón.” Penny’s voice was a thick, choked bubble.

  Jude reminded himself he hadn’t cried since he was seventeen. His eyes were dry, but they burned hot when he looked at her. “You got a hell of a poker face, Mom.”

  Her cheekbones winced at the English. “I don’t understand.”

  “Neither do I. I mean, wouldn’t it have been easier to tell me I was adopted?” He flicked the card with the DNA results across the table. “You were busted six weeks ago, you could’ve come clean then.”

  “There was nothing to come clean about,” she cried. Her hand gestured at the table. “I don’t understand.”

  “It makes no sense,” Cleon said, shaking his head. “I don’t understand how this happened…”

  And all at once, Jude was done. His entire life story bubbled up in a rage that made him want to turn the table over. He stood up and yanked his jacket off the back of the chair.

  “Where are you going,” Serena said.

  “The fuck out of here.”

  “Jude, don’t,” Cleon said. “We need to talk—”

  Jude whipped around, pointing a finger at his mother. “What the hell did you do,” he said.

  Cleon’s face flushed and he pointed at Jude. “Don’t talk to her that way.”

  Penny was in tears. “Juleón, please.”

  “Don’t fucking Juleón me. Who the hell do you think you are?”

  “Jude,” Cleon said, raising his voice. “You’re not adopted.”

  Jude turned on him. “Just how stupid do you think I am?”

  He kicked the chair out of his way and walked out of his parents’ home. His phone started blowing up before his car reached the end of Alki Boulevard. He ignored the calls and texts. At a red light, he powered down the phone and tossed it on the passenger side floor.

  “Judas (not the Iscariot) said to Him,

  ‘Lord, what then has happened that you

  disclose yourself to us and not to the world?’”

  —John 14:22

  When it came to his imprisonment in the Villa Grimaldi, Cleon was adamant about telling his children only what he felt they needed to know. Only what their ages and individual psyches could stand to hear.

  Aiden’s version of the story was stripped down to bare bones, because he was the youngest and because he moved in a world with little nuance. Serena’s version didn’t need much more teasing out, at least not from Cleon. His legs and his scars and his nervous quirks were enough of a plot outline. When she needed facts and details to fill the gaps in the narrative, she got them from her mother. She and Penny had always been two remnants from the same bolt of cloth.

  “You are the sweetest, most serene child,” both Penny and Cleon said to their extraordinary daughter. Except Penny always followed up with, “And how many kittens did you drown today?”

  “None yet,” Serena said, on a good day. Or, “Fifty-six,” on a not-so-good day. On really bad days, she drowned tigers.

  Jude’s story started out the same as Aiden’s, then gained height and weight as he grew up and began asking more complex questions. He took a page from his father’s book of quirks and only wanted to know where his father was during the coup, not what happened there. He let strictly alone what went on in the Villa Grimaldi.

  He disappeared it, Penny thought.

  Sixteen was the year Jude came out to his parents. It was also the year he studied the Holocaust in social studies class. He already knew his great-uncle Louis had been in Sachsenhausen, and he knew Louis was homosexual. Now Jude was putting the two things together, both his sexual identity and his tender empathy firing on all cylinders.

  “Was he deported for being Jewish?” he asked. “Or for being gay?”

  He was alone at the table with Cleon and Penny, but his gaze instinctively flicked toward his siblings’ chairs, making sure they were empty. These things were not meant for their ears.

  “Both,” Cleon said. “If he were a straight Jew or a gay Gentile, he’d be rounded up. He was both.”

  “Kind of a miracle he survived at all.”

  “Mm. Not many did.”

  “The Nazis castrated him?”

  Cleon nodded as Penny collected plates and quietly took them to the sink. Always she and Cleon had been seamless in their handling of the children. Telepathically passing the baton between, across and within tough conversations. Each knew when to work together and when to discreetly retreat and signal to the other, You got this one. I’ll cover you.

  “Castrated, like…they cut it off?”

  “They removed his testicles. He still had a penis.”

  “Oh.” Jude’s brow knitted, obviously trying to work out the anatomical repercussions. “While he was living with you in Chile, did he have a boyfriend?”

  “That, hueón, was something of a mystery. If he had a lover or a partner, I didn’t know about it. Pen, you recall?”

  “No,” Penny said. “He had lots of friends. They went to the movies, went to the theater. Came over and drank and played cards. But if he had someone special, he kept it hidden.”

  “Too risky,” Jude said. “Maybe he felt Jews were safe but gay people were still fair game.”

  “Maybe,” Cleon said. “To that end, he collected companions, not lovers.”

  “Man, that sucks. I mean that he survived Hitler only to end up gunned down by Pinochet. What the fuck?”

  Neither Cleon nor Penny minded their kids cursing in the house (after what they endured, they were supposed to be offended by naughty language?), but all the careless bravado was swallowed up by the vacuum of Cleon’s silence. The lull stretched out so long, even Penny glanced back to assess his expression.

  This was 1989, when Cleon had exhausted the pharmacopoeia of second-generation antidepressants. He had to stop the Bupropion, because it gave him seizures. They tried Trazodone, which gave him the sexual appetite of Wilt Chamberlain, accompanied by a hostile irritability that made him utterly undesirable to be around, let alone sleep with. Now he was nicely tolerating Nomifensine. Meaning he was ambivalent in bed, but recognizable to his family. He griped about the chronic dry mouth, and Penny watched as he drained the last of his Shaftebury dark ale in one gulp.

  “¿Querido, tráeme otra cerveza, po?”

  Jude fetched another beer and opened it.

  “Chile has a dirty little secret,” Cleon said. “A concentration camp for gay men up in the north. It’s called Pisagua.”

  “A camp, a real camp? For gay people?”

  “In the thirties it was, under Ibáñez. During the war, it expanded to include citizens of enemy nations. Then after the war, in forty-eight and forty-nine, they sent socialists, communists and anarchists up there.” He raised his eyebrows over the end of the beer bottle. “Guess who ran the camp?”

  “Who?”

  “Pinochet,” Penny said.

  “The general? For real?”

  “He was a captain then.” Cleon took a long pull. “When he took o
ver the country, he put his little camp in the desert back to use.” He set the bottle down an inch from Jude’s plate. “Solo un sorbo, hueón.”

  Small sip, buddy.

  Jude took a taste and made a face. He liked being offered the sip more than the beer itself. “Nothing like the Holocaust could happen again, could it?”

  The tick of the clock was immense as Cleon chewed on an answer to the two-headed question.

  Could it happen again to Jews or could it happen again to gay people?

  “Nothing like that will ever happen to you,” he finally said.

  But then it did happen.

  When Jude came out from under the anesthesia, his face bruised and battered, his ribs broken, his leg pinned and screwed together, he looked at Cleon and said: “Ahora somos compañeros.”

  We are partners now. Compatriots. War mates.

  Penny sank weeping into a chair, but Cleon didn’t cry. His teeth were set, his eyes dry, his face a mask of stoic, revolutionary gravitas as he clasped palms with his son.

  “I promised nothing like it would happen to you,” he said. “I broke that promise. I’m sorry.”

  The apology was so ceremonious and formal, it was almost Japanese. A samurai unable to save face.

  “Cuéntame todo lo que pasó en la Villa Grimaldi,” Jude said. “Tell me. I want to know now. It can’t hurt me now.”

  They were brave and beautiful together. Compañeros in the days after the attack, before the neighborhood turned against them. Then blood flew onto the windshield of the car and Jude ejected out of bravery, into a death spiral because it was happening. It was happening to him, in this place, in this day. Pisagua was next. Followed by castration. And then it would be death.

  Cleon sat on the bungalow’s back deck, staring out at the scrap of garden and rolling his phone over and over in his hand.

  “¿Qué onda, querido?” Penny said. Rhetorically. The matter was Jude, of course. Jude inexplicably not being their biological child. Jude understandably walking out of the house two days ago. Jude ominously making zero contact since then. The last time they endured such prolonged radio silence from their son, he was on a flight to South Africa.