“Carmencita shit her pants!”
The voices, machine-gun fire, snapped me back to reality. Huge and distorted like reflections in a warped amusement park mirror, the kids’ faces jutted into mine. Fingers pointing, the whole lane chanted now.
“Car-men-ci-ta shit her pants!”
I looked down. There was diarrhea running down my thighs. It had already stained my socks. Manuel’s nostrils flared at the stench, his hands still gripping my waist. He lifted me up, revealing the shit-covered bike seat. More poo ran down my legs, fresh drops landing on the tops of my white shoes, the spell that had made them glass slippers moments earlier now broken. This was no spontaneous wedding, this was spontaneous combustion. Holding me as far away from himself as possible, Manuel walked me to my front door, breathing through his mouth, his benevolent eyes on my horrified, down-turned face. He placed me on my front step, knelt down, and lifted my chin.
“Carmencita,” he asked, “are you in love with me?”
I met his encouraging eyes, paused for a moment, and jumped off the cliff. I nodded, smiled a little bit, looked back down at my now-brown white shoes, and shuffled. Caressing the back of my head, he kissed me on the cheek, while the kids ran around laughing in the background, still chanting, some of them holding their noses and crotches. Hands held to their mouths, the women, static moments earlier, giggled too, shoulders heaving in the frames of their windows and doors.
Manuel kissed my other cheek and said, “Linda preciosa.”
Beautiful, precious.
And then he walked away. I stood there for a moment, and backed up into my house, hyper-aware that the seat of my pink dress was covered in diarrhea, that my white lace bloomers were now loaded down with liquid poo. “See, I told you he loved you,” I said to my own image in the bathroom mirror before peeling the shitty clothes off with trembling hands. One thing was for sure: no one could ever accuse me of being cynical. Or pessimistic.
Experienced love bug that I was by age six, I gave Mario the San Francisco garbageman the drawing and he kissed me on the cheek too. It was clear as day that they both loved me: Manuel hadn’t cared that I’d shit my pants during my declaration, and Mario could give a shit that I was now Deaf-Mute Pee-Pee Girl in this country where adults threw rocks at brown children on yellow buses, black people were forced to take up arms against the police, and men and women came from all over the world to reinvent themselves.
Shortly after the coup, when the military raided our house, it was scientifically proven that Manuel was unequivocally a god. My father being a physicist, I had always known about the superlative importance of irrefutable scientific proof, that indeed people only took you seriously if you were able to provide it, usually in the form of a foreign language referred to as “formulas.” These filled Papi’s notebooks, but even he had to admit:
“I don’t believe in ghosts, but they do exist.”
Science had proven that the force of gravity existed, that there was no end to numbers, that the earth was beholden to the sun. This time, science—the molecules in the atmosphere, the oxygen in the air, the dark clouds that hung above, the cells of every body in that lane that bore witness—proved that a fourteen-year-old pots-and-pans vendor with holes in his shoes was veritably a god. The god of courage.
Science and its proven theories mattered, but of equal importance was that ephemeral notion, love. Although, according to my mother, love was not airy-fairy at all and could only exist in the material world, proven not with test tubes and formulas but through everyday gestures, displays, and sacrifices, what she called “actions.” The heart could overflow with all the love it wanted, but if deeds weren’t done to prove it, it meant nothing and for all intents and purposes didn’t exist, said Mami. She’d explained it after my declaration, as she’d soaked my shitty dress in the sink, when I’d asked her about love and its meanings. I hadn’t let on that I’d shit my pants due to that earth-shattering, pelvis-rocking force. Mami had explained about the abstract and the concrete, her hands grasping at the thin air like someone trying to catch a mosquito to illustrate the former and knocking on the top of the bathroom counter to drive the latter point home.
On the day the military raided our house, a year later, Manuel proved scientifically, in the material world, just how much he loved me.
They ransacked the house in search of my parents, who were not home, and any incriminating documents they might have stashed in the back of closets or under mattresses. In the kitchen, our babysitter was being interrogated with a machine gun to her head by two soldiers, while the rest of them turned the house upside down. I watched one tear my favourite doll’s head off and wondered where Ale had gone to. I was finally escorted outside at gunpoint, where she stood waiting. We were placed next to each other, turned around to face the front of the house, and ordered to put our hands up. The soldiers had decided to conduct a firing squad with us in our yard. The head military man started to count. Ten soldiers aimed their rifles at the backs of our heads. Our pink rose bush opened its petals and my spirit leapt into one rose’s stamen. Nose itching from the overwhelming perfume of roses, arms still raised in the air, prepared to become a human strainer with blood gushing from dozens of firing-squad holes, I heard Manuel’s toe-curling tenor from across the way.
“Cowardly motherfuckers! Go back to your mothers’ cunts!”
The head military man had just finished counting to ten, the onslaught of bullets about to ensue. Killing themselves laughing, the soldiers emitted guffaws that let on this was really only a mock firing squad. Amused no end by their joke, my sister’s and my shaking knees offered them continuing entertainment of the highest order. Who knew that if one pretended to shoot a preschooler and a kindergartener, hilarity would ensue? But the coup and its aftermath were proving that in the decidedly concrete, material world, human cruelty knew no bounds.
“Cowardly motherfuckers!” the unmistakable tenor taunted again.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him running across the way. The rest of the barrio—the children, the hard-working women and men—trembled on their bathroom floors, some curled up in the fetal position, the adults’ bodies over their children, hands spread over the crowns of their heads. That is how I imagined them. The military had already raided Jana’s house. The men in her family were fishermen and sold their catches at the Calle-Calle market, on the shores of the river that bore the same name. Her dad and oldest brother, eighteen years old, now sat blindfolded in the back of a military jeep, hands crossed over their heads. Jana’s mother clung to the doorway, a silent cry escaping from her guts, chest collapsed, Jana’s fists holding fast on to her skirt.
Manuel goaded again.
“Motherfuckers! Cowards! Come after me instead!” And then he ran to the woods that lay at the end of the lane.
The soldiers turned their heads, abandoned the mock firing squad, and followed. A taut silence overtook us, a suspension. Time, that other notion that science had come up with in order to stop everything from happening at once, stood still and everything went into slow motion. Jana’s dad and brother straightened their spines, Jana’s and her mami’s eyes followed Manuel and the soldiers, Ale and I dropped our hands and turned slowly around, ballerinas inside jewellery boxes when the battery is on its last legs. When time caught up, blows could be heard, boots on flesh and bone, moans and grunts coming from within the small triangle of Patagonian rainforest.
The military left with Jana’s father and brother in tow, their white blindfolds a sharp contrast to the green vehicles, the pewter sky, the black shoe polish on the soldiers’ faces, applied to avoid being recognized. Despite the gaping black holes at Jana’s table, life crept cautiously back into the lane, the men emerging from their doors and, after a moment’s pause, running to the woods over the fresh tire tracks in the mud. Our neighbours’ house remained shut. Pro-Pinochet, they had probably informed on us and Jana’s family, who had supported Allende since the fifties, when he’d first started campaigning.
Manuel was carried back from the woods by the lane men, bloodied and bruised, eyes still hollow with fear, but conscious. Alive.
“Motherfuckers,” he said. “They went back to their mothers’ cunts.”
SIX
We ended up staying in San Francisco for only a month.
My parents, thanks to all their new contacts, were accepted as masters students at the University of California in San Diego in January 1974, their tuition paid for with scholarships. During our first week there, while we waited for an apartment in student housing, a professor and his wife put us up in their big, airy La Jolla cul-de-sac home, full of beautiful, expensive things. The four of us slept in one room, even though Ale and I had been offered our own. Quiet as a tomb, the place was less home and more house; it felt devoid of life, even though a cat lived there.
I had never seen a pet up close before. In Chile, dogs and cats in the circles we moved in lived in yards, were fed leftovers, had jobs to do, such as guarding the house or eating mice, and were left to their own devices. Although appreciated by their owners, one could hardly have referred to them as pets. Seeing a cat live inside, with its own bed, bowl, and toys, caused a discomfort in me that I couldn’t quite put my finger on, but it had something to do with the knowledge that millions of people in the world had nothing to eat, much less a place to live. In San Francisco I had seen black people living out of shopping carts, and here in San Diego entire Mexican families lived on the streets (my mother had explained that these US cities had Spanish names because we were actually on Mexican land, taken by the United States only a hundred and twenty years ago). The cat had its own little bell necklace and was brushed to a shine. Spoken to like a newborn baby, it was given immunization shots like one too, according to Mami. It spent its days lolling around the furniture and, thankfully, had its claws cut regularly, for it tried to scratch me the one time I tried to pet it.
One day, when the couple was out, we left the bedroom and my parents played a record they had brought from Chile on the living room turntable. It was the first time we’d played it since fleeing, and once the needle hit the vinyl, Violeta Parra singing “Que Pena Siente El Alma” (What Sorrow Feels My Soul) emanated from the speakers. As the record played, our parents took our hands and wept. Once the first side was done, Papi flipped it in silence, and we listened to the other. After placing the record back in its sleeve with the kind of care reserved for rare anthropological finds, we went back to our room when the professor and his wife’s wood-panelled station wagon pulled into the driveway.
The day before we left, I caught the wife crying into the kitchen sink. Mami offered comfort in the form of her hand on the woman’s back, but was swiftly turned down, the wife stating she wished to be left alone with her grief. We retreated to our room and I wondered what had happened. My mother said that the cat had been hit by a car.
On our first day in student housing, there were endless knocks on our new door, the neighbours offering sheets, towels, kitchenware, food, even some clothes and dolls for Ale and me. Mami hadn’t brought any warm-weather wear from Chile, but she found a couple of dresses in the giveaway bin at the laundromat and rotated between the two. We slept on donated mattresses on the floor and, as we had no money for groceries, the cafeteria workers at the students’ union smuggled us the day’s leftovers.
My parents’ new student visas allowed full-time international students to be teaching assistants, and my mother managed to wangle a position a few weeks after we got there. Our trickle of money came from her stipend, as well as under-the-table cleaning work they both did at La Jolla mansions. My mother spent nights correcting first-year English essays, while my father studied his ESL tomes; he was starting to revalidate his physics degree in a language he spoke not a word of. He and I explored the area, listening for rattlesnakes in the tall grass and coming across abandoned barracks with the toilets still intact.
“These are left over from the Second World War,” he decided.
I learned about wars that day and how they were different from coups, although both left lots of displaced people, my father explained, hands clasped behind him, eyes fixed on the setting sun.
Grade one in San Diego was another series of humiliating, unfortunate events, although I’d managed to figure out where the bathroom was (as luck would have it, right next to my classroom), so now I was only Deaf-Mute Girl, not Deaf-Mute Pee-Pee Girl. The prettiest girl I’d ever seen was in my class. Every last inch of her was the colour of honey—hair, skin, eyes, freckles. She wore tiny gold hoops in her ears, a Minnie Mouse watch on her wrist, denim bell-bottoms, and Adidas Kegler sneakers. In awe of her beauty and fashion sense, all I could do was admire her from afar.
It was glaringly obvious to me that, unlike in San Francisco, where Latino and black kids were bussed to the white school, here I was the only brown kid in class. I was beginning to grasp the concept of Latino. It wasn’t only someone from Latin America, it was also someone who was brown. Unbeknownst to me, I had always been brown. Compared with white, which was also a colour. My father had taught me that white and black weren’t colours, but simply the abundance or absence of light. But in this country, white was certainly a colour, and it held all the power. Blacks and browns had been fighting that for centuries, according to Mami. The war raged on, what with the yellow buses and the rock throwing. In any case, I was the only brown-slash-Latina in my class, and apparently that also meant I was poor. Because in this country, black and brown meant poor, although we were definitely not poor. We had food, shelter, health, and education. All our basic human needs were met, and then some, for we even had our own phone—a first for us.
Mami had explained that the vast majority of whites in the States were not upper-class, and in fact many were quite poor, and that they too fought for their rights, often side by side with the non-whites. That in the final analysis, oppressed people were defined more by class than by race. The point was that everyone else in my rich, white La Jolla classroom was on the cutting edge of fashion, brought their meals in Partridge Family or Star Trek lunch boxes, and had light eyes and light hair, while I was the brown-hence-poor, deaf-mute retard with the mismatched hand-me-downs. Clueless as to what the aging teacher was saying, I drew pictures when it seemed as if that’s what was required, only to have them snatched in frustration by the soon-to-be retiree. As punishment, she’d make me place my forehead on my desk for an eternity while I held my bladder, praying that I didn’t become Deaf-Mute Pee-Pee Girl in San Diego as well.
Every Thursday morning, the children brought something from home that they could share with the class, while we sat cross-legged on the carpet, which was in and of itself the strangest thing ever. In Chile, one never sat on the floor, much less cross-legged, even less so in a classroom. One sat on chairs, with legs politely crossed. In class, one sat at a desk, with fingers interlocked on its surface. After the coup, when Ale and I had been kicked out of school for having Marxist parents—the principal had hurled insults at my father and his daughters on the sidewalk, barring us from ever entering the premises again—we’d been put in a school that apparently took mini-Marxists. All the Marxist kids were held in one classroom, despite our age difference, so Ale and I were in the same class. An armed soldier stood at the door, and whenever you had to go to the bathroom, he would escort you, listening as you tinkled. For recess, the teacher would take us outside, where we’d sit on stumps on the edge of a forest and she’d remark on how sad it was that the trees had been chopped down, but at least what remained of them served as seats for us, while the bored-stiff conscript looked on.
One Thursday, while we all sat cross-legged on the La Jolla carpet, one of the boys showed us his collection of little flags from all over the world. At the end of his presentation, he unfurled a Chilean flag, looked right at me, called my name, smiled, and said:
“Chile.”
A lump formed in my throat. It was the first time since I’d arrived in the United States that a peer had
really seen me, spoken my name, said where I came from. I wondered why he’d never approached me. It was the first time since leaving Chile that I’d beheld my flag. Before we’d left, I’d seen it every day. My parents had been forced to fly it—everybody had—to show their allegiance to Pinochet. The flag had always been something to scoff at, Mami and Papi staunch anti-nationalists (in the fascist sense, not the national liberation sense), but now I wanted to take that little flag in my hand, bunch it up in my palm, and hold it to my broken heart.
Shortly after that show-and-tell Thursday, I had an interaction with the beautiful honey-coloured girl. We were in the bathroom together and I still hadn’t been able to figure out how to flush the toilet, because it was an ultra-modern one. Breaking into a sweat—this wasn’t recess and I was expected back in the classroom a minute later—I went through the frantic motions of pushing and pulling every knob that looked like a handle, praying that this time I’d hit the jackpot. But nothing happened. I looked down at the yellow urine, mortified that the honey-coloured girl would now know that I’d been leaving my Latina pee in the toilet of her gleaming white La Jolla school.
I took a deep breath, came out of the stall, and waved and pointed at her. She was washing her hands in the sink while humming Terry Jacks’s “Seasons in the Sun.” I led her to the toilet and she flushed it just like that. Then she got a huge laugh attack at my ridiculous attempts to thank her, what with all the waving of my arms after hugging her was ruled out (she recoiled as if I was the carrier of an infectious disease). Her laughter was contagious, and soon we were rolling around, smacking the tiled bathroom floor with our palms, pointing at each other. The teacher came in, hands on her hips, and yelled.
Forced to stay after school, we had to put our heads on our desks for a long time. My sentence was longer than hers. When she was released, I was left alone in the classroom forever, forehead resting on my desk, while my father waited outside in the baby-blue Chevrolet Malibu. He’d come into the classroom at bell time and the teacher had ordered him out. Speaking no English, he’d gone beet red and bowed, seeing me with my forehead on the desk.
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