En route, we spent a night in Concepción, where the Cousin, Carlos’s eldest, was attending law school. When we’d phoned from Limache to tell him we’d be stopping to see him, his landlady had offered us, free of charge, the vacant rooms at the boarding house left by students gone home for the holidays. The Cousin had stayed to spend the summer with his girlfriend.
I’d fallen head over heels in love with my cousin at the age of twelve, during my first trip back to Chile, and had only seen him once since then. Although we’d made out on both those visits, we had yet to consummate our decade-old love.
At five in the morning, just as I was falling asleep, he appeared at the narrow cot I was sharing with eight-year-old Sarita.
“Exiled Cousin,” he whispered in my ear.
Drunk, he was still standing—or in this case, kneeling—after an all-night bender with Uncle Boris.
“Let me into the bed, baby. It’s now or never.”
I contemplated his assertion. Concluding that it was probably true, I surveyed how best to make it happen, for there was no way he was coming into the cot with Sarita and me.
“Okay,” I whispered back. “But we have to go to your bed.”
“We can’t. The whole house will wake up,” he murmured through his pisco-sour breath.
This was true. The house had the creakiest floors I’d ever heard, due to the effects of the great earthquake of 1985. The building had been spared, but ever since that terrifying day, it leaned alarmingly to one side. When you walked, you had to bend your knee and cock your head in order to feel parallel to the floor.
“Just let me in. She’s on the fifth dream by now,” the Cousin insisted.
After I convinced him that sealing the deal in a squeaky cot with our little cousin in it was far from optional after a ten-year-long wait, we made our way to his room. Our family slept nearby, and the walls shook with Uncle Boris’s snoring. The Cousin was hammered, and I was stifling a laughing fit. We hugged the hallway walls on tiptoe, the floor a minefield of creaks to avoid. It was critical that nobody wake up. First, there was the scandal of us being first cousins, and second, there was the fidelity issue. I was with Estéban, and although the Cousin’s illegitimate children could be found scattered from Limache’s central region to the tip of Patagonia, for absolutely no one could resist his charms, it was imperative that his girlfriend remain in the dark, as it were, about his affairs.
When we finally reached his bed (the final stretch of the journey done on all fours), we tore each other’s clothes off, the Cousin jumped on top of me, and, before anything could happen, he passed out cold. A minute later, the light of dawn brought the room into sharper focus. Uncle Boris’s alarm clock went off, as we were to continue our voyage as soon as the sun came up, and a minute after that he was stumbling into the shower. Heart pounding like a bombo drum, I managed to extricate myself from beneath the dead weight of the Cousin, throw my nightgown back on, and creep my way back to the cot, just in time for my uncle’s entrance, announcing that the bathroom was now unoccupied and that the house boasted no hot water.
In Puerto Montt, copious amounts of wine and pisco were imbibed, laughter abounded, story upon story was told, and I only wished my cousins Macarena and Gonzalo, who had yet to make a trip back to Chile, and my sister Ale could have been there too. It was the first time my mother and her brothers had been back together inside Chile since the times of Allende, because Mami and Boris had been blacklisted by the Chilean consul in Vancouver for their solidarity work and forbidden to return for the entire dictatorship. They’d even been denied a special permit to go bury their father, Armando, when he died in 1985. Hence the all-night sessions recollecting their childhood, as well as life under Pinochet and anecdotes of exile. They told stories of the 1960 Valdivia earthquake, the worst in recorded history, which all three had lived through. “Remember how the earth actually rolled and split and the mountains moved, and that ship was catapulted through the air and landed in the middle of the valley?!” Then there were all the times my cousins had broken curfew and their parents hadn’t known whether to slap them or congratulate them. “Was he fucking one of his many girlfriends or blowing up a tower for the resistance?! I’ll never know!” exclaimed my uncle Carlos. And Uncle Boris’s countless tragicomic Vancouver janitor stories. “This gringo spends fifteen minutes explaining how to use the supersonic vacuum cleaner, but I don’t know how to tell him that I don’t speak English, so it takes me the whole shift to figure out how to turn the fucking thing on, for fuck’s sake!” He’d been an accountant in Chile; Canada had de-skilled him and reinvented him as a cleaner.
There were stories that were not shared, such as the rape. The Chilean part of the clan didn’t know about it and the exiles never spoke of it.
Day after day, dawn caught us around the table, the odd silence coming over us as we realized that, from now on, anything was possible. The unspoken question of our longed-for, definitive return hovered in the loaded air, for it was too soon to speak of our family being an inseparable clan again, like most Chilean families. We had been torn apart, half remaining where our roots lay in the southernmost reaches of the Americas, the other half flung so far north that social signals were the opposite of everything we’d ever known. Touching was welcomed in the South, in the North it was shunned; lingering eye contact with strangers was friendly in the South, in the North it aroused suspicion; flirting with strangers was a compliment in the South, in the North it was unacceptable and verged on harassment; pleasure was far more important than work in the South, in the Protestant North work was a surefire way to heaven, hence held in higher regard than almost anything else.
Now that the dictatorship was virtually over (elected president Patricio Aylwin would take charge in March), the lives of the exiled family hung in limbo, the future less like the light at the end of a seventeen-year tunnel and more like a black hole. The long-awaited return was no longer a pipe dream but a here-and-now reality within our reach, yet exile’s end tasted surprisingly bittersweet. Little did we know that what awaited us was a long process of de-exile. Ironically, it would inflict a dull pain not unlike the torment of exile itself.
At the end of the visit, my mother and the rest of the no-longer-exiled-but-still-feeling-disoriented-and-rootless family returned to Canada, and I to Santa Fe, Argentina, and my basketball-girlfriend persona, where my year of extended nervous breakdown—there was no other way to label my daily sobbing sessions—would reach fever pitch. Now there was no excuse: I could go back to Chile and be master of my own destiny in the country of my birth, the country that was imprinted in the deepest layer of my being, the country that I’d flown all my flags for, that we’d fled from and now offered a tentative hand, where my flailing roots could be planted again and a new Chilean me, the one I had always wanted to meet and be, could be born and promenade down those streets. And yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that returning would be less like setting down roots and more like walking on quicksand and grasping at straws. Even though its doors were now open, Chile was far from free, and, with its unbridled neo-liberalism, hyper-consumerism, and fervent, powerful right wing, the opposite of revolutionary. The dream that Allende had spoken of in his last speech, of marching on Santiago’s great liberated avenues alongside millions of comrades, the dream of living in the Chile I had fought for with all my being, was not meant to be.
So what could going back possibly look like? I was at a loss to know, for I had only ever allowed myself to imagine a triumphant, glorious return, waving a red flag, left fist pumping the air. I had never expected exile to end with no pomp and circumstance, for it to dwindle and disappear imperceptibly, sand between my fingers. Just as no map had been provided to help us find our way through the trials of exile, I was completely unprepared for the crossroads I now found myself at. Either I became an immigrant, a label implying that uprootedness was not only a choice but a welcome one at that, and yet the only label available if I were to stay outside Chile’s borders, o
r I returned to a homeland where my sacrifice would not be celebrated, revered, or respected. On the contrary, my revolutionary activity would be not only something to hide but something to be ashamed of, that some comrades would apologize for in order to be embraced by the new, “free” Chile, now referring to itself as the Tiger of the South.
Back in Santa Fe, the boiling hot 1990 Southern Cone summer reached temperatures as high as fifty-two degrees Celsius with the humidex, causing several people to die. I swam daily in the chocolate-brown Paraná River, passing palometa fish nipping at my skin, a weeping willow on Piedras Blancas beach providing refuge when the afternoon sun was too much to bear.
I contemplated my immigrant future. I loved Estéban, and wondered how I could stay in Santa Fe playing the part of basketball girlfriend and eventual wife. In order to be happy there, I knew I had to let go of the persona and just be myself, but I had no idea how to do that. There was just too much to be undone. For starters, I’d have to tell his circle that I was a Chilean who’d grown up in exile and then explain why I’d kept this key part of my identity from them. My entire existence in Argentina had consisted of living a double life, and I had no idea how I was to insert my integrated, non-compartmentalized self into mainstream society. In the underground, I’d had two confidants who knew it all: my ex-husband Alejandro, whom I’d lost all contact with when I’d left Neuquén a year earlier, and my loyal friend and resistance helper Luisa. She had also moved from Neuquén, back to her hometown of Paraná. Thankfully, it was just across the river, an hour away from Santa Fe. It was this soul sister who got me through my year of post-loss-of-revolution exile. As for Estéban, he was at his wits’ end as to what to do with the crying fits, which only grew worse after my return from Chile. As did my violent outbursts, for it was not unheard of for me to pound on his chest during an argument.
I had met Estéban in Neuquén in 1988, when I was twenty years old. I was still in the resistance, and married to Alejandro, a man whom I loved but with whom I hadn’t been sexually involved for a year. He was a husband, a brother, my best friend and soulmate, a comrade whom I had married at eighteen at the MIR’s request so I could get my Argentinian residency papers. He was everything to me, except a lover. The thought of making love with him had become repulsive to me, and when he would raise the rape as the possible culprit, I would stare at him blankly. I secretly blamed the fear that had taken over my visceral brain—no doubt it did have something to do with my frigidity—and now occupied my pleasure centres. I lived in fear of being arrested, tortured, and murdered for my underground activities, and had concluded that the Terror had not only shut down my stomach (I was dangerously thin from not eating) but had rendered me asexual and had me playing dead in bed with the man I was married to. It had got so bad that I wouldn’t go to bed at all, “I have to study these documents” my go-to excuse, magnifying glass held to the tiny print on the top-secret MIR correspondence, only retiring at six in the morning, when he got up to go to work. Although I had grappled with leaving him, as we were both equally unhappy with our lack of sexual intimacy, the thought of being alone was scary, so I had made peace with what I was sure would be a lifetime without sex.
Until I went to a basketball game.
It all started when Alejandro and I visited the phone company’s office—the only place in town for long-distance calls—to make a resistance call. “We’ll take the presents to Aunt Lili’s house on the surprise date,” code for something else entirely, of course, was the line we were rehearsing in our heads while we waited for our booth. A seven-foot-tall black man with a high-top haircut, fake nerd glasses, and gold chains with diamond-encrusted charms in the shapes of the letters M and A around his neck walked into the joint. Standing in the biggest black and red Jordan Nikes I’d ever seen, he drawled, “New York,” to the man behind the counter.
“I’m sorry, Señor, I have no idea what you’re saying,” responded the clerk, mouth hanging open.
Apparently, he’d never seen a black man before, much less a towering one, and neither had the rest of the customers. A dead silence overtook the room. Some of the booths opened and heads popped out to get a good look. People walking by came in to gaze at him too. Impressively unfazed by the blatant stares, he repeated, “New York.” The clerk stammered again that he had no idea what the man was saying. I stepped up and translated. From that day on, Martin, also known as Miles Away because of his height, clung to me like a koala.
Miles Away, who explained we could call him M for short, was twenty like me, hailed from Brooklyn, and had only been in Neuquén a month when we met him on that fateful day. To say that he was an alien in that small Patagonian city would be an understatement. First there was the fact of his seemingly being the only black man in town. Add to that his height, the bling, the high-top haircut, and his puckered-lip, rhythmic, head-back-and-forth gait reminiscent of Weird Harold from Fat Albert, and it was fair to say that M came from another planet. The citizens of Neuquén had of course seen men like M countless times on the big and small screens, just not in person. For M, New York was the centre of the universe—an opinion admittedly difficult to argue with—and the Neuquinos were the aliens.
“Do the women have asses here?” he’d often ask in semi-earnest shock and dismay at the lack of big round booty.
Alejandro and I started to refer to M as our adopted son, as he went everywhere with us and pretty much moved into our apartment the very night we met, going home only to sleep. His services as a player had been bought by the local basketball team, and from one day to the next he had gone from playing for his Brooklyn college to battling gale force winds and tumbleweeds in Patagonia. Meeting M catapulted me into the centre of mainstream Neuquén society, for everywhere we went, doors were flung open and drinks, coffees, and sometimes even entire meals were on the house. I now understood that the stares were not only because he was black, but because he was famous.
On the next home-game day, Alejandro and I were M’s guests, seated in the VIP section, dressed in our best, cheering at the top of our lungs along with the team’s wives and girlfriends. The gym was a carnival, fans pounding on drums, blowing on horns, and singing non-stop. It was packed and many stood outside, listening to every play on radios held to their ears while jumping up and down.
In an analogous universe, Alejandro and I were preparing for a high-stakes moment of our own. We were planning a flight into Chile, carrying goods for the MIR in a Cessna to be flown low through the Andes, in order to duck the radar. On the whole, 1988 was shaping up to be a critical year. In a few months, Chileans would be asked to vote Yes or No in a plebiscite that posed the following question: Do you want Pinochet to stay? If the No side won, elections would be called. As exciting as it was to be front-row centre at the game, surrounded by a gymnasium of exuberant fans, it was impossible to forget my life-or-death situation. If our plane was intercepted, we’d have to crash it into the side of a mountain and go up in smoke with it. The Terror, like a gun to the back of the head, was master of my thoughts and movements day and night. No matter how much fun I was having, it made sure my alternate reality always clawed at my door.
Although I wanted my resistance life to seem like a dream, thus perhaps weakening the Terror’s hold on me, the opposite was true. It was as if my day-to-day existence, including my presence at that basketball game, was an illusion, a mere hologram, a physics experiment designed to trick the eye into believing that the three-dimensional image of myself cheering at that match was real, when for all intents and purposes the underground me was the truer reality. In physics terms, the all-encompassing Cause was the complex object. Despite the terrifying consequences if I was ever caught, the Cause was the one thing that gave immense meaning to all I did. It was the centre from which I operated, from which laser beams rebounded, scattering light in all directions, creating virtual, insubstantial images that didn’t stand a chance against the promise the Cause held.
The game ended with a foul. A Neuquén playe
r was to shoot three times at the basket. A gorgeous, curly-haired, quintessential Italian-Argentinian was chosen. The fans held their collective breath as he shot, taking his time between throws, breathing deeply and deliberately, landing the ball in the basket all three times. He was relaxed and focused, exuding complete confidence when he went in for the kill, not unlike a feline ready to pounce on its target. By the third shot, the Terror that stalked me like a starving predator, that had colonized my body and consumed me around the clock, surrendered to a different sensation. My stomach did a double flip. Not from fear, from ecstasy. An insurrection happened. Not in Chile, inside me. It banished the Terror from my nervous system that night. Estéban’s appearance on that court blew my compartmentalized life to pieces. My spirit, a shadow hovering next to me for so long, now claimed its rightful place: the core of my body. From there, it beamed, and together we soared.
Jubilation filled the gym when our team won. The festival atmosphere reached its crescendo, mirroring my inner life. Fans stormed the court and mobbed the players, bombarding them with hugs, kisses, and slaps on the back. As Alejandro and I smiled at M from the edge of the court, my peripheral vision, hyper-operational since I’d joined the resistance, now monitored the curly-haired team member’s every move.
Released from the fans’ grip, the drenched players disappeared into the changing rooms. When a freshly showered M emerged, he was accompanied by the object of my desire.
“This is Estéban,” he said by way of introduction.
After shaking Alejandro’s hand, Estéban kissed my cheek and said:
“M has been talking non-stop about you guys. We’re all so happy he met you.”
Looking right into my eyes, he continued,
“I hear you’re from Canada. My brother went on a student exchange there. We should all have coffee sometime.”
Mexican Hooker #1 Page 3
