A Scarcity of Condors

by Suanne Laqueur

  Like Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel, you lie supine atop elaborate scaffolding. One at a time, you affix diamonds to Lucy’s hair. You take tremendous care to make the sky perfect. It’s no less than she deserves.

  You lay down your tools and press your hands to the goddess’s belly. Your child is within, turning like the moon.

  (Papi’s here, little one.

  Here in the sky with diamonds.

  I’ll be gone soon.)

  “Holy shit, what is this,” Tej said, stopped short in the doorway of the bungalow’s third bedroom.

  “This is how my father survived the Villa Grimaldi,” Jude said. “He created a world in his head, and when the torture started, he went there. Wait, it’s better when you see it this way.”

  He plugged in the strings of LED lights tacked along the juncture of walls and ceiling, then dimmed the overhead switch to low. Tej’s head tilted back, his mouth parted at the simple, domed lighting fixture, now transformed into the pregnant belly of a primitive goddess. Her dark hair swirled in a whirlpool, her feet and hands joining the circle around the glowing life within her.

  “Your father made all this?”

  The ceiling goddess coiled at the epicenter of a magnificent mosaic. Individual colored squares started cerulean blue along the outline of her voluptuous body, darkening to azure, then cobalt, then navy, violet, indigo and deepest purple. Turning to black as they neared the walls.

  “How did he…” Tej turned in a slow circle, still looking up. “What are these squares made of?”

  “Paint swatches. He hit every hardware store, taking as many as they’d allow. When Home Depot opened up near us, it was like Mecca. He’d walk out of there with a shopping cart full, then spend hours cutting them down. He made the sky in separate sections, I think on pieces of MDF. They fit together like a puzzle.”

  “How long did it take?”

  “Almost a year. Every square glued one at a time. Then he added all those rhinestones to make stars. When the sections were all finished and varnished, he hired some people to screw them to the ceiling. Then he made the goddess collage on another piece of backing, cut to fit around the light.”

  Tej’s gaze slowly came down from the ceiling and noticed the collage on the walls. Drawings on scrap paper of all sizes, stuck haphazardly and overlapping. Their edges curling away from the sheetrock, like the peeling bark of birch trees.

  “He couldn’t talk about what happened in the Villa Grimaldi,” Jude said. “But he could draw it.”

  Tej’s free hand closed over his mouth and nose as his eyes swept left and right, taking in the tableaux of torture and interrogation. Prisoners bound hand and foot, being beaten with fists and sticks and chains. Men tied to bunk beds, wires trailing from their bodies to car batteries. Women being gang raped.

  Tej crouched to peer at the Post-its lining the baseboards, each drawn with a mouse or rat. He stood again to take in a revolver spilling its bullets from the round chamber. Snarling dogs. Mouths open in silent screaming. Comrades slumped in one another’s arms. Or crouched alone, curled around their despair.

  One wall had no drawings pinned to it. Just one small leaf of white paper with the words Louis made ten. I could make but one.

  “What does this mean?” Tej asked.

  “I don’t know,” Jude said, straightening the curled edges. “Something to do with my great-uncle Louis. But whenever I ask Papi, he just shakes his head. The look he gets on his face is beyond sadness or grief. It’s almost shamed.”

  Their voices had unconsciously dropped, as if the room were a library. Tej’s feet barely made a sound as he approached the large platform centered precisely under the lighting fixture. Covered edge to edge with a diorama of a strange land.

  “Reminds me of a model train exhibit I saw once,” he said. “Except nothing like it at all. I don’t understand. What is it supposed to be?”

  Jude brought him to one corner. “Start here.” He touched a trim sailboat painted shiny red. A single mast hung with a crisp white sail. A miniature easel sat in the hull and on it perched a small, gilt-framed mirror.

  “I’m still lost,” Tej said.

  “What do you see in the mirror?”

  “Myself.”

  “See yourself where?”

  “On a boat?”

  “Where’s the boat?”

  “Here.” Beneath the hull was another mosaic, a thin ribbon assembled from fragments and wedges in all shades of blue. “On a river,” Tej said, his finger tracking the line of blue as it serpentined before the red boat, starting a journey.

  “Now put it together,” Jude said.

  Tej’s brows wrinkled. “I see myself. On a boat on a riv— Oh my God.”

  “Get it?”

  He moved along the edge of the diorama, eyes wide with revelation.

  “See it now?” Jude said.

  “I see it.” Tej bent, gazing through the orchard of trees planted along the sloping, grassy banks of the mosaic waters. Each tree graced with dozens of tiny orange fruits. “Boat on a river. Tangerine trees.” He looked up at the goddess overhead, smiling benevolently from her diamond-studded heavens. “This whole thing is ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.’”

  He beamed a smile that made Jude’s chest pull apart with longing and pride and things he didn’t have words for.

  “He made a world based on the song?” Tej said. “And that’s where he escaped when he was being tortured?”

  “Yeah.” Jude touched the figure hiding among the tangerine trees. A girl molded from clay, with unnaturally large eyes meticulously painted in geometric shapes.

  “This is incredible.” Tej’s hand hovered above the bower of flowers arching over the river, making them rustle. Each was crafted from wire and covered with yellow or green cellophane. “This belongs in a museum. An exhibit. When did he make all this?”

  “He started when I was a freshman in college.”

  “Why then?”

  “Well.” The room had no chairs, so Jude sat on the floor, back to a papered wall. “After I left for school, my mother had a bit of a breakdown.”

  “A bit? Or a colossal breakdown?”

  “Colossal. Once I was safely out of the nest, everything that had happened hit her. Starting from when I was born up until my leg was broken. The bottom just fell out from under her. She actually ended up hospitalized for a few weeks. And it was a massive wake-up call for Papi.”

  “Like it made him contemplate what would happen if she were gone?”

  Jude nodded. “Also, she was digging into the really painful parts of her life and you know how it is with therapy—you can’t selectively unearth issues. You dig up one and you dig up all of them. Not to tell tales out of school, but I think my parents’ marriage had some bedroom problems. PTSD and the meds decimated my father’s sex drive and…” Jude waved away what wasn’t his business. “Anyway. He started going to counseling like he was finally serious about it. He and Mami went to a therapist together, too.”

  “Were they in their fifties by that time?”

  “Late forties.”

  “Still. It’s huge that they went. Lot of people are set in their ways by that stage of life.” His hand gestured toward the diorama. “That’s when all this happened?”

  “It started with the drawings. Papi’s psychiatrist is from Argentina. Her family was caught up in that country’s political terror and she knew exactly where Papi was coming from. She spoke his languages. She got him to tell the stories behind the sketches. Literally put them out in the open, pin them to the walls, let them be seen. He’d never done that before. He collected the testimonies of so many survivors. He wrote four books about dozens of Chileans’ experiences under Pinochet, but never his own.

  “So, once he hung all this shit up on the walls, his therapist asked how he survived it. Where did the str
ength and mental fortitude come from, how did he find the means to stay alive? And finally, Papi answered that question.” Jude pointed to the sky.

  “He’d never told anyone about this song-world? Not even your mother?”

  “No. It was secret. Not a shamed secret but I think…”

  “Holy?”

  “Kind of. It was a secret the way knowing how to breathe is secret. Or the way you walk around with a constant inner monologue is secret. Nobody shares every stream of consciousness thought in real time. We move to our own soundtrack, to our own background music of thought. ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ is Papi’s background music.”

  Tej went around the perimeter of the table, following the verses of the Beatles song. Expression charmed as his fingertip teetered the crowd of rocking horse people. Jude’s gaze followed, a secret of his own on the tip of his tongue. “You know, not a lot of people have seen this room.”

  “Mm.” Tej was examining the fleet of taxis collaged from newspapers. Each had a sunroof through which emerged a clay torso. Where heads should’ve been was a poof of cotton-ball clouds. Tej looked up at the ceiling, his mouth moving around silent lyrics.

  “What I mean is, I’ve never showed it to a boyfriend.”

  Across the diorama, Tej stared for a beat. “Never?”

  “No.” Jude got up and went to him. “It’s not only me asking Papi if I could show you, but him saying yes. He said ‘Creo que la entenderá,’ which means, I think he’ll understand her.”

  Their fingers twined and squeezed. Tej’s free hand closed over his mouth and nose as his eyes made a slow circuit around the room and back up to the ceiling.

  “Why this particular song?”

  “My mother’s real name is Lucille.”

  “For real?”

  Jude nudged against him. “Don’t ever call her that. I mean it. Only my dad is allowed.”

  “Well, shit, I wonder why.” He pointed at Lucy’s round, electric belly. “So she’s not some random goddess, she’s your mother.”

  “Mmhm.”

  “And she’s pregnant with you.”

  “Well. He thought it was me.”

  Tej squeezed his eyes shut. “I’m sorry, I keep doing that.”

  “It’s all right.” Jude put both arms around him from behind. “I keep doing it too.”

  Tej exhaled roughly. “I’m beyond honored you showed me this. It’s unbelievable. The ceiling and the diorama blow my mind, but what’s on the walls is breaking my heart and your parents are the sweetest people and… I’m just so fucking sorry.”

  “I know you are.” Jude leaned on Tej’s hard, warm body. Rested their temples together, twining their fingers on top of his chest. “You grew up in a war. Your mind didn’t make a secret world to hide in, it made a dog for you to hold. I think that’s how Papi knew you would understand.”

  Jude’s research led him down all kinds of rabbit holes and he followed every tunnel. Not knowing what he was looking for made everything curious and full of potential.

  Tej’s offhand comment from the other night—For better or worse, this bird seems to have followed your family around—made Jude curious about the Andean condor, the largest flying predator in the world.

  “Damn, that is ugly,” Tej said, looking over Jude’s shoulder at the computer screen.

  “Technically it’s a vulture.”

  “I don’t know, man. In terms of spirit animals, I think you can do better.”

  Jude disagreed. True, when photographed up close, the condor had a hideous mug and a hunchbacked silhouette. But in flight, with its wingtips touching the edges of the sky, the bird could only be called majestic.

  “El Cóndor pasa,” he said.

  “Isn’t that the Simon and Garfunkel song?”

  Jude looked it up and discovered the tune was written in 1913 by Daniel Alomía Robles, based on folk music from Peru. Simon and Garfunkel put their own words to it.

  He listened to the song on a loop while he was at the gym, but if a message were within, he wasn’t receiving it.

  “Then again,” he said to Phil. “Simon and Garfunkel wrote it in nineteen seventy, three years before the coup, so…”

  “Well, speaking of messages,” Phil said. “My son’s AP English class is reading Jude the Obscure.”

  “Really?”

  Phil got up and went to his desk. “I was helping him with some homework and came across a quote. I’ll be damned if Thomas Hardy didn’t have you in mind when he wrote it.” He handed Jude a slip of paper.

  The beggarly question of parentage—what is it after all? What does it matter, when you come to think of it, whether a child is yours by blood or not?

  “Wow,” Jude said. “That’s… Wow.”

  “My words exactly.”

  “Can I keep this?”

  Phil gestured assent.

  Jude read it one more time before slipping it in his pocket. “You ever hear of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo?”

  “That’s the organization that locates missing children in Argentina?”

  Naturally, fucking Phil had heard of everything.

  “They’ve identified over two hundred missing children,” Jude said. “Actually found about fifty of them and reunited a couple dozen with their families. Plus they’ve found about a hundred grandchildren. Just by DNA testing.”

  Phil raised his eyebrows.

  “I’m having a hard time finding an equivalent organization of abuelas in Chile. It seems like Argentina took lessons from Chile on how to commit atrocities, but it doesn’t seem like Chile has taken any lessons from Argentina on righting the wrongs. Well, no, that’s unfair, they have. I found a lot of websites commemorating Los Desaparecidos and an inquiry form to fill out. But those were all grassroots. The government doesn’t seem to be stepping up as much. The whole online operation seems clumsy and primitive compared to Argentina’s interface. It’s so much more defeated.”

  “Did you fill out the inquiry form?” Phil asked.

  “Not yet.”

  “Why not?”

  “I suppose ‘I don’t know’ would insult both of us?”

  Phil smiled. “Well, we can go through the back and forth of you saying it, me pressing you, you pushing back, yadda yadda until finally we get down to it. Or we could just get down to it.”

  “I haven’t yet because I still feel in shock.”

  “That’s perfectly fair. Do you know what basic first aid for shock is?”

  “What?”

  “Keep the victim warm and elevate their feet.”

  “Which means?”

  “You need to keep your feet above your head right now. Which means doing more and thinking less. If your biological parents fled Chile with your mother’s baby, the only way to find them is going public with your DNA results on the ancestry website. If your biological parents were disappeared, you’ll have to engage a Chilean organization to help you.”

  “And neither will yield any results unless someone from my biological family is making an identical effort.”

  “True.”

  A long moment of silence.

  “I wonder if anyone’s looking for me,” Jude said softly.

  Phil nodded. “It’s a beggarly question.”

  Do more and think less.

  For the sake of doing something, Jude added Cleon’s parents to his online tree: Felix Tholet and Miriam Greenberg.

  “Did you ever meet them?” Tej asked.

  “Sure.”

  “When? How did they get out of Chile?”

  “They left years before the coup and went back to Austria.”

  “Did you visit them?”

  “Once. We did a family trip. The first time they came to Vancouver was when my Aunt Gloria died. My father’s sister. He told you about her at dinner t
he other night.”

  “Did she live in your house?”

  Jude shook his head. “She had her own place for a little while, but her physical health wasn’t good and soon it became clear her mind was…” He pressed fingertips to his brow and exploded them outward. “She was in a nursing home the last couple years of her life. My grandparents came for the funeral and stayed almost a month.”

  “What were they like, what did you call them?”

  “Oma and Opa. It was weird seeing them at first. Aunt Gloria had been this frail, meek invalid and my dad had all the problems with his legs and his physical health in general. But here come my grandparents who are in their seventies, hale and energetic, standing up straight on strong legs. Opa was down on the floor with me and Aiden, horsing around in a way my dad never could. And Oma was… Man, she was wonderful.”

  Tej brushed his knuckles along Jude’s jaw. “Your face just went all moony.”

  “I really liked her a lot.”

  Jude’s whole mind went moony, fixated on the memory of Miriam’s voice and hands. Her face had drifted beyond his reach, but he remembered her funny, German-accented Spanish. “Yudchen,” she called him, with a tousle of his hair. Yudchen or Yudlein. Little Jude. But it was her hands at the forefront of recollection, poised on the keys as she and Jude sat side-by-side at the piano, playing a duet. Holding a crochet needle and teaching Serena to make granny squares. Helping Aiden—four years old and already a researcher—trace countries out of the big atlas and label them carefully with capital cities.

  Miriam’s hands turning pages as she read aloud from a Spanish translation of The Hobbit. Her hands sandwiching one of Cleon’s as he rested. Brushing the hair back from her son’s brow as if he were a child with a fever. Miriam holding a weeping Penny in her arms, one wrinkled hand rubbing a circle between Penny’s shoulder blades, the other cradling Penny’s head on her shoulder, fingers buried in her hair. Rocking and murmuring in Spanish, German and the universal shush-soothe language of mothers.

  “She’d lost her own daughter but she was practically holding Mami in her lap. Because Mami needed a mother.” Jude sighed. “These are my memories. They’re my stories.”