A Scarcity of Condors

by Suanne Laqueur

  “Tell me when you do,” Tej said. “I’ll bring more wine.”

  As Jude had said, he was different. Not so frustratingly shy or cloyingly deferential as the other men Jude brought to dinner. Frank. Curious. A pleasure to feed—he didn’t compliment the food and then pick at it. Tej was genuine in his appreciation of the dinner, which was simply minestrone soup and good bread, but he closed his eyes at the first spoonful, his expression complex and expert.

  “Did you roast the vegetables before you put them in?”

  “Yes,” Penny said. “You can tell?”

  “Mm.” He took another sip. “Especially the garlic.”

  He was, Penny decided, a lovely man. Her gaze kept caressing the couple through the meal, noting how their body language mirrored. They leaned crossed forearms on the table, biceps touching. Or, done eating, sat back in their seats, an ankle on the opposite knee. Tej put an easy hand on the back of Jude’s chair. Jude said, “Hand me your plate, babe?” as he cleared the table.

  They moved into the living room with coffee and cake. Cleon had made a dessert-digestif of terremoto, composed of white wine, pisco and pineapple ice cream. “Who’s driving?” he asked the boys.

  Jude raised a finger and Cleon set the snifter in front of Tej. “Jude can have a taste.”

  “That lethal, huh?” Tej said, digging in and taking a bite. His eyes bulged above the spoon. “Oh my God, call a cab.”

  “Puts hair where hair don’t grow,” Cleon said.

  Typically at this point in the evening, Penny would ask Jude to play piano. She always loved his music, but often at these dinners, she did it to fill in and smooth over the awkward, exhausting gaps in conversation. No need tonight. Even the way Tej perused the family photo gallery and asked questions was unique. Off the bat, he zeroed in on Cleon’s favorite picture.

  “This,” he said, pointing. “This is a Pulitzer Prize right here. Who are these guys?”

  “My father and my uncle Louis,” Cleon said. “Everyone thought Louis had perished in the Holocaust, but the Red Cross found him. That picture was taken the day Louis arrived in Valparaiso.”

  “Look at how they’re holding onto each other,” Tej said.

  “They hugged so long and stayed so still, I thought they’d fallen asleep standing up.”

  “You were there?”

  “You can see me just at the side. The little boy. That’s me.”

  Tej peered closer. “Who are you with?”

  “My sister, Gloria.”

  “Where does she live now?”

  “She died in nineteen eighty-four.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. Did she die in Chile?”

  “No, in Canada,” Cleon said. “But you could say she died because of Chile. She was married to one of Salvador Allende’s chauffeurs. He was rounded up and shot in the first hours of the coup. Gloria fled for Peru but they caught her at the border. Two years she was missing.”

  “Pinochet had her in three different concentration camps before she got out and came to Canada,” Penny said. “The picture just up and to your left. Yes, there. That’s Gloria, maybe a year before she died.”

  “I see.” Tej turned from the wall, arms crossed. “I lost a brother and a sister in Lebanon.”

  A beat of silence that seemed to expand, then contract down, drawing the four refugees of war close. Cleon lifted a hand and gestured to the armchair next to him. “Sit,” he said. “Tell me.”

  Tej was four when civil war broke out in Lebanon. Like so many childhood survivors, his memories were chopped into pieces. His stories trailed off unfinished, with a shrug, an apologetic smile and, “But I don’t remember much else.”

  He recalled the sounds of explosions, the taste of fear, the layers of black within the darkness of the bomb shelter.

  “You don’t like fireworks,” Jude said, coming to sit on the floor between Tej’s feet.

  “I like them at a distance. I don’t like being under them.”

  “Or thunder.”

  Tej gave a little shiver in his skin, shaking his head. “I hate thunder. A rumble in the distance is fine. But that biblical crack that sounds like the sky ripping open? I flip right out.”

  He told of his older brother, Raymond, who served in the Christian Militia and was killed in Beirut. “I remember him a little. Mostly I remember the funeral. All the screaming and crying. It was the first time I saw my father cry. I mean really weep.”

  The family left in 1978, after Syrians ruthlessly bombed the Christian neighborhood of Achrafiyeh and Tej’s younger sister Lulu was killed.

  “I don’t remember it at all,” Tej said. “It’s shut up tight somewhere. Peeks out when I hear thunder, I guess.”

  Then he described a strange false memory he created, of carrying a dog with him on the flight from Lebanon. “We didn’t own a dog. I didn’t have a stuffed animal or anything like that. My sister Mireille looks at me like I’m insane when I describe it, but I swear to God, I had a dog with me.” His arms curved around an imaginary pet. “I can feel it. It’s so real in my head, the fur and the panting and the weight in my lap. Holding onto this dog. I swear it happened but…”

  “I worry about that sometimes,” Penny said. “That I made up false memories around the day Jude was born.”

  “You barely remember anything from when I was being born,” Jude said.

  “No, I mean what happened before.”

  Tej leaned and set down his snifter of terremoto. “Tell me?”

  In 1973, the neighborhood of La Reina was only ten years old. The Tholets’ street wasn’t yet paved and only four houses were built on it.

  “Nigel Rudd lived closest to the main road,” Cleon said. “He was a British journalist. His girlfriend lived with him, Daniela Portales. Further down were the Silva-Merinos. The husband was an economics professor. His wife’s name was…Fernanda?”

  “Francesca,” Penny said. “They had four children. Kitty corner across the street were the Godoys. The husband was Pablo, a civil servant. The wife was Trinidad. They had just one son.”

  “And then us,” Cleon said. “Down at the end of the street. The double-lot of property. The main house and two efficiency bungalows. Across from us was Uncle Louis’s plot of land.”

  “Where Ysidro had his new masonry workshop,” Jude said.

  With two journalists, a professor and a civil servant, the street was a raft of sitting ducks for Pinochet’s hunters. By November of 1973, all the adult men had been arrested, except for Uncle Louis, Ysidro and Tatán.

  “Why weren’t they picked up?” Tej asked.

  “Tradesmen often weren’t,” Cleon said. “It was the intellectuals who were viewed as the troublemakers. A city in revolt still needs the lights to turn on and the toilets to flush and the buses to run.”

  “And the dead to be buried.”

  On November 25, 1973, the soldiers came back to La Reina. Six or seven low-ranking grunts. A captain in charge.

  “And Héctor Godoy,” Penny said. “Pablo and Trinidad’s son, who was in the army.”

  “Can you imagine,” Jude said. “Héctor’s regiment had arrested his own father. Now they were scoping out his neighborhood again.”

  “Jesus,” Tej said. “What kind of position did that put him in?”

  “A very bad one,” Penny said. “It was obvious he was trying to protect his family because the soldiers pulled everyone into the street except Trinidad. It was me, Daniela Portales and Francesca Silva-Merino. The four children. And Uncle Louis.

  “Ysidro wasn’t in his workshop?” Jude asked.

  “He’d gone to pick up a shipment of marble. Tatán was at work.”

  The soldiers lined the eight neighbors up against the Tholets’ high garden wall. White-faced women and shivering, sobbing children on their knees. The gringa Penny and her round belly. And Tholet,
el judío. The Jew.

  The soldiers lined up as well. Raised their rifles and the captain gave the order.

  A volley of shots. A cacophony of screaming.

  And then uproarious laughter. The rifles were loaded with blanks.

  “Jesus Christ,” Tej said.

  The children were hysterical. Daniela vomited in the street. The soldiers loaded up again, making a display of the ammunition, showing it was real this time. Jeers and taunting.

  Penny knelt on the dirt road, one of Silva-Merino kids huddled against her round belly. Her other hand clasped tight with Uncle Louis’s.

  “I will never forget,” Penny said slowly, “how Louis looked twenty years younger. Back straight. Face composed. Chiseled in stone. He whispered to me, ‘Look at Héctor.’”

  Héctor Godoy was following orders, but with a grim expression and a mouth pressed tight. His eyes flicking toward his mother’s house as the firing squad assembled.

  Rifles raised. The captain gave the order.

  Tej’s face was rapt, eyes wide. “And what did you… I mean, do you even remember what you thought or felt or…”

  The potent terremoto dessert had softened all of Penny’s edges and anesthetized the narrative. “You become so terrified, the fear turns inside-out and becomes apathy. Or ambivalence. Or enlightenment? I don’t know. I was crying. I guess I thought, This is it. This is how it ends.” She tugged at her hair, shaking her head. “But honestly, that’s a guess. It seems the thing to think, but it also sounds a little generic. I can remember the events, but I don’t recall the emotion. When I tell the story, like right now, I often feel like I’m decorating it.”

  “You can never re-live or re-tell the story perfectly,” Cleon said. “I think our genes are still coded to be oral historians and a story is only memorable if it’s compelling. Enchanting or riveting. We’ll always augment a part here, diminish a part there. Fill in the gaps with what probably happened when we don’t know for sure what happened.”

  “So, the captain gave the order and obviously it was another fake-out?”

  Another burst of laughter and jeering. Francesca’s eldest son, about fourteen, pissed himself with fear and the soldiers narrowed in on him. Like a pack of wolves tracking a young gazelle, they separated him from the others and started roughing him up. Shoves and cuffs at first. Then they began beating him in earnest.

  All of them except Héctor Godoy.

  Penny kept catching Héctor’s nervous eyes. Begging him with her own crazed ones.

  Don’t do this. Don’t do this. Don’t be a party to this. These are your people. We’ve never been anything but kind to you.

  Then the captain noticed the exchanged looks. Noticed his young grunt’s non-participation. He called, “You fucking the gringa, Héctor? She your old lady?”

  “No.”

  “You’re staring at her all moon-eyed. You fucking that socialist cow? Is that really why you fingered this block?”

  “No.”

  The captain called another of his privates. “Ibáñez, get his mother out here. Let’s see whose side they’re on.”

  Héctor panicked. “No, leave her alone. I turned them in, didn’t I?”

  “Show me you meant all of them.” The captain whipped out his service revolver and handed it to Héctor. “Shoot her in the head.”

  “She’s pregnant.”

  “Is it yours?”

  “N-no…”

  “Good. Shoot the kid first. Big target. You can’t miss.”

  Trinidad Godoy, Héctor’s mother, was dragged out now, disheveled and screaming. Thrown down on her knees next to Penny.

  “Choose,” the captain said. “Your mother or the socialist bitch.”

  Héctor was frantic. “I can’t—”

  “It’s easy. Watch.” The captain pivoted slightly and shot Daniela Portales. All the women screamed.

  Not a hair out of place, the captain offered the gun again to Héctor. “Now you.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Choose.”

  “I can’t.”

  Without a word, the captain placed the muzzle of the gun against the head of one of the Silva-Merino kids. His eyes cold and lifeless. His finger curled around the trigger.

  “Héctor,” Trinidad wailed, hands clenched in her hair.

  Arms around her belly, Penny’s mouth shaped her husband’s name over and over.

  Teeth bared and eyes wild, Héctor seized the captain’s gun, aimed it at Penny’s stomach and pulled the trigger.

  It was raining outside now. The four people in the living room went quiet. Cleon and Penny close together on the couch. Tej in the easy chair, Jude on the floor with his elbows draped on Tej’s knees and Walter curled in his lap.

  “What happened?” Tej finally asked

  “Another fake-out,” Penny said. “At the last second, he changed his aim.”

  Tej’s chin raised a hair. “To?”

  “He shot Uncle Louis,” Jude said.

  Tej rubbed his face. It was so quiet in the room, Penny could hear the rasp of his beard against his fingers. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Is that when Héctor hit you?” Jude asked.

  “Someone did,” Penny said. “I couldn’t say it was him.” Her hand went to the back of her head.

  I remember the feel of gravel on my hands as I pitched forward.

  The rush of fluid down my legs. I thought I’d pissed myself as well. But no, it was my water breaking.

  And then…nothing…fragments of nothing…

  I woke up. Turned my head and threw up.

  Descanse, señora.

  Look, señora. He has dimples.

  “Did you ever go back?” Tej asked.

  “To Chile?”

  “I mean, to your house. After Jude was born. I mean…” His entire expression was miserable and his hands opened helplessly. “I’m sorry, I’ll just leave my foot in my mouth.”

  “It’s okay,” Jude said, running his palms along Tej’s kneecaps. “We’re still figuring out how to talk about the Baby Formerly Known as Jude.”

  “I went back to the house once,” Penny said. “With an armed guard from the Canadian embassy. He gave me twenty minutes to grab what I could.” She pointed to the gallery wall. “I broke those out of their frames, let the glass shatter onto the floor. I was like a lunatic about not leaving them behind.”

  “And you brought your condor,” Jude said.

  Penny went in her room and fetched the carved figurine of an Andean condor off her bedside table.

  “Cleon gave that to me as an engagement gift,” she said, giving it to Tej.

  “What’s the significance?”

  “First time we went away together was to Río Los Cipreses,” Penny said. “To camp out and watch the condors.”

  “Uncle Louis carved it,” Cleon said. “My first commission for him. He didn’t even give me a family discount.”

  “Funny,” Tej said, turning it over and over in his hands. “For better or worse, this bird seems to have followed your family around.”

  Penny smiled at Jude. “Este tipo aquí—vale la pena.”

  He’s a keeper.

  Cleon chuckled and Tej looked around at them, blinking. “What happened to Louis?” he asked. “I mean, tell me someone found him and buried him.”

  “Ysidro did,” Penny said. “Louis is buried in the Jewish cemetery in Santiago.”

  “What happened to those other women from the neighborhood? And their kids?”

  “Francesca and her children fled to Sweden. I don’t think her husband was ever found. I believe Trinidad never left Santiago. And Daniela… She died.”

  “I used to be in touch with her boyfriend,” Cleon said. “Nigel Rudd, the Brit. He got out, went to work for the BBC, then taught at the London Scho
ol of Journalism. I run across his name every now and again. Or sometimes hear him on NPR.”

  “I never had any idea,” Tej said slowly. “The first time I heard the name Pinochet was on Sting’s Nothing Like the Sun. It had that song. ‘They Dance Alone.’ About the Chilean women dancing in the streets with pictures of their missing men.”

  “I was fifteen when that album came out,” Jude said. “Sting was always the man but when ‘They Dance Alone’ released, he became like a God in our neighborhood.”

  “I seem to recall it playing on a loop in your bedroom,” Penny said, smiling.

  “Papi, remember I showed you the YouTube clip? The Desde Chile concert at the Estadio. Sting sings the song with about two dozen Chilean women onstage, holding photographs of lost husbands and sons. And he dances with all of them at the end.”

  Cleon nodded, tugging at one of his eyebrows. “I remember.”

  “When was that concert?” Tej said.

  “Nineteen ninety,” Jude said. “Right after Patricio Aylwin became president.”

  “When did Pinochet die?”

  “Two thousand six.”

  “And the son of a bitch never answered for any of it,” Cleon said.

  “I’m sorry.” Tej set the condor carefully on the side table. “It’s just…such a waste.”

  Jude looked up and back at him, then at Cleon. “¿Papi, le puedo mostrar a Lucy?”

  Can I show him Lucy?

  Cleon regarded the lovers a long time, considering. Then he smiled at his son. “Sí. Creo que la entenderá.”

  You spend a long time on the ceiling. It’s the most critical part of the room.

  Judaism has no graven images. No icons, no idols, no imagery, no artwork depicting God and the patriarchs. It has no goddess, either. You need one. Depicting your Lucy as a Catholic Madonna isn’t good enough. You need older, stronger feminine power. You choose Pachamama, the Andean earth mother. You paint her with luscious curves and a pregnant belly like a full moon in the center of the ceiling. Her dark hair parts in the middle and flows out in all directions, creating a night sky.