Once the sandwich-feeder slowed down the breakneck speed of her speech, I grasped that she was called Arabella, was six years old like me, also going into grade two, and that her older sister Gia was eight and going into grade four. Although I understood English now, I was still too shy to speak it, Lassie still the only word I’d spoken out loud in this new language, hence still Deaf-Mute Girl in the mainstream world. Both the sisters wore gold crosses on thick chains. Their immaculate house featured minimalist decor and avocado-green, geometrically patterned wallpaper. I recognized the word Italia when Arabella pointed to herself. She took me upstairs to the children’s bedroom, shared with their younger brother Luigi, and after I admired the tulle bedspreads in mint hues, I saw the witch’s costume hanging in the closet. Not only was Gia my first goddess, she was my first witch! For some reason, that combination made perfect sense to me. I caressed the mask and took the cape for a little spin.
By the time, a year later, I hit grade three at age seven, I was talking English as if I’d been born speaking it. It came out in a rush, a cascading waterfall during spring thaw, and my teacher, the beloved Miss Bouchard, was overjoyed when it happened. When it did, Deaf-Mute Girl spoke in perfect conjugations, forming even the most difficult sounds like a Royal Shakespeare Company actor reciting Hamlet’s famous monologue. I’d kept it to myself, taking it all in, even though I’d got gold stars on my spelling tests and written stories in this language that I would later find out lived in my throat, chest, and head but not in my heart, guts, and bones. One of my favourite words in the English language was fucker.
For many years, whenever I tried to explain Chilean politics to Arabella, my first non-Chilean friend in Canada, I would talk about witches and demons taking over the country. I thought she’d appreciate my parables, since her sister was half witch. In our adult lives, Arabella confessed that she hadn’t understood a thing about Chilean politics from my fables, but had rather concluded that I was a deeply disturbed individual in dire need of help. She had decided to keep me as a best friend out of empathy and because of all the fun we had playing rich ladies with the discarded nighties we found in the laundromat and dancing disco to Walter Murphy’s “A Fifth of Beethoven.” My storytelling skills had needed some honing, and the needing-help part turned out to be true.
Not only was Arabella my first friend in Canada, she was also my first co-actor. We spent all our time playing dress-up and putting on skits. Our most famous play, performed at the height of our collaboration, when we were nine, was a movement piece based on Romeo and Juliet. Arabella was lovesick for Dylan, a teenaged boy she swore looked just like Shaun Cassidy from The Hardy Boys. Dylan lived in our court, so it made perfect sense to perform our piece in the middle of the cul-de-sac so that the object of her affection could watch us from his window. All the front windows looked out on our impromptu amphitheatre. I went along with the crush, even though I had yet to get a glimpse of the boy. He was fourteen and reportedly had blond feathered hair kept in flawless condition thanks to an orange comb that lived in the back pocket of his Lee jeans. According to Arabella, watching Dylan pull said comb through his locks was orgasm-inducing. She would squeal, “I LOOOOOOOVE HIM!” and jump up and down after imitating the combing motion to me. I recognized her passion, even though it had lain dormant in me since Mario the garbageman in San Francisco, and was a willing wingwoman in solidarity with my sister.
Our rendition of Romeo and Juliet had us dancing together in a hybrid of styles—disco, tango, flamenco, with a little bit of cueca, the Chilean national dance, thrown in—and ended with the double suicide. Apparently, our only audience member was Pam, Arabella’s white, Canadian, single mother. (Her father, Carlo, was a Neapolitan concert pianist. After they’d split up, Pam had returned to Canada with the kids.) She watched our melodrama from her window while she worked on her master’s degree in French farce. When she finished her studies a couple of years later, she would get a teaching post in Port Hardy, Vancouver Island, and the family would leave the courts behind.
My best friend in school was Dewi. She was from Berkeley, California, and her father was a renowned photographer and musician. Dewi and I also spent all of our time putting on plays, and we were given ample time and space to do that at University Hill Elementary School. Every day at two o’clock, we’d be released to the lunchroom so we could create a play to be presented to the class at ten to three. Our peers relished our performances, what with their slapstick comedy and variety-show feel, which I later realized was a type of vaudeville. Dewi and her older sister Andrea, both geeky hippie kids, were often bullied by the cool element, and that is when my adored word fucker came in handy. Once, during recess, I spied a group of grade seven boys from Chancellor Boulevard, one of the richest parts of town, surrounding Andrea, who was paralyzed with fear, her crazy, curly mane of hair sticking out in all directions. I ran over, yelled, “You leave her alone, fuckers!“, punched the future frat boys in the chest, and watched them recoil in fear at this brown grade three girl with fuzzy braids. As I grew older, fucker morphed into motherfucker, much to the dismay of my radical feminist mother.
A few times a year, the police would visit our school to warn us about dangerous men—strange men who might pull over in their vans or sedans, who might offer rides or candy or even money, who might look nice and sweet and clean-cut but were to be immediately reported to the police. We were warned about dangerous men in the woods, who might wait behind a tree and attack unsuspecting children. We were told never to talk to strangers, to always run away and tell our parents at once if a suspicious-looking man came near us.
My gaggle of girls at school—Dewi, and girls from Bermuda, China, Japan, Jamaica, as well as First Nations, some of whom lived in the courts—took it upon ourselves to hunt these men down and turn them in to the police. They had all read Nancy Drew, and although I had no idea who that was, I caught on quickly that she was some kind of detective. We formed our own clue club and would sprint to the woods surrounding the school as soon as the recess bell rang. Once there, we’d examine broken twigs, decide they’d been stepped on by the bad men, and gasp in horror when we saw a scratched rock that the evil men had sharpened their knives on. Candy wrappers had been discarded by said men, and they’d probably crossed the ravine so that police dogs would lose their scent.
We’d finish our hard work by chewing on Indian gum, taken from the trees, or, if it was early September, huckleberries from the many bushes in the area. Sometimes we’d sit on a circle of rocks, probably set up by First Nations people long ago for meetings, the librarian, Ms. Singh, had explained. Julie, our First Nations friend, had shrugged at this observation. She’d been adopted by a white family during the infamous Sixties Scoop, when First Nations children had been taken from their homes and handed over to middle-class white families to be raised in a “safer” environment, and hence had no knowledge of her roots’ cultural practices.
One Saturday in 1976, a new Chilean family, consisting of a single mother with four kids, showed up at one of our solidarity fundraisers at a preschool next to Salmo Court, rented often by my parents for these events. My cousins Gonzalo and Macarena were there, as always. They lived on the other side of town, just off Kingsway in East Vancouver. Uncle Boris did the janitorial night shift at a steel mill, Aunt Tita worked the assembly line of a fish cannery, and my cousins fled from school every day and waited on the steps of their house until she got home because they were mistreated by the teachers and bullied by the kids.
After the latest documentary on the situation in Chile had been shown, speeches made, songs sung, and empanadas eaten, the cumbia dancing got under way. The single mother had introduced herself by saying, in a quivering voice, “There are no words to describe how happy I am to meet you all, but I must admit that I’m working for the enemy: Canadian Pacific Airlines, owned by Noranda.” The adults laughed and feigned horror and then forgiveness. Noranda was one of the Canadian multinationals that had helped fund the coup. It had mi
ning interests in Chile and wanted the mines to go back into private hands after they’d been nationalized by Allende.
As the adults drank their wine and danced to “Tiburón a la Vista,” I went up to the youngest child, a boy about my age, and said:
“Wanna see a secret?”
He nodded and I took him to Cedar, my refuge and watchtower. I could spy on everyone and observe the planes in the sky from there, while dipping my finger in Tang powder and sucking the delicious orange sprinkles off. Cedar was mine for two years now, and my treasures hung in little plastic bags from his branches. Mostly, these were Aero bars and jawbreakers, but there was also the odd knick-knack, such as Ken Dryden hockey cards from my cousin Gonzalo, or Chilean one-peso coins given by recent arrivals that reminded me of going to the kiosk in Valdivia or Valparaíso to buy guaguitas, a delicious type of marshmallow. I also took Hawaiian Barbie there, bought by Mami after much whining and pleading that had begun two years earlier in San Diego after my first visit to Lassie’s. Since then, I’d been given second-hand Salvation Army Barbies. When my mother finally agreed to buy me a new one, she had refused to get me a blond Barbie on the grounds that it perpetuated the very narrow and white-supremacist North American standard of beauty. The brownness of Hawaiian Barbie, in her hula skirt and flower leis, rendered her null in my eyes and therefore invisible to the world. I was so ashamed of her, she was relegated to Cedar’s top branches.
I wasn’t in the habit of showing Cedar, much less to a complete stranger, but there was something about this boy that made me want to share everything with him. It was close to nine at night but still light out, for it was early summer in Vancouver, and complete darkness wouldn’t set in for a while.
“What’s your name?” I asked, kicking a pebble along the way.
“Lucho.”
Lucho was quite formal, and impeccably turned out, with his perfect hair, clean nails, ironed clothes, and shined shoes. Fresh off the Chilean boat, I thought to myself. In Chile, kids were like this, but not here. I noticed him taking note of my messy braids and tomboy attire of dirty jeans and worn-out North Stars. I blushed and offered him a jawbreaker. He politely refused with a “Thank you very much, but no thank you.”
I showed him how to climb the tree, he did so with impressive ease, and when we reached the top, I pointed out the sturdiest branches to sit on, the good ones to swing from, and the one that could be walked on like a tightrope. We discovered we were both eight, and that his family was from Ñuñoa, the middle-class Santiago neighbourhood where I had been born, when my mother was still a student and my father, a recent graduate, taught high school. Lucho and his family had arrived only a couple of months earlier and were finally coming to an MIR event, also known as the Solidarity With Chile Committee, although they’d certainly met many Chilean families at the Refugee Hotel.
“Wanna see another secret now?”
“Okay.”
Reaching around Cedar’s trunk, I untied a brown plastic bag hanging from one of his branches. Inside was a small tin box. I opened it and pulled out a postcard with the picture of a boy, about five years old, and showed it to him. The boy was wearing a birthday hat and the sun was on his face, giving him squinty eyes. Behind him stood a man, his hands resting on the boy’s shoulders. They both looked into the camera, the boy’s expression revealing some kind of mischief, the man wearing a Mona Lisa smile.
This was one of hundreds of similar pictures. Each was of a disappeared person in Chile. Each picture had been turned into a postcard. There were hundreds of copies of each postcard. My parents, uncles, and aunts had made them that spring, our dining room table converted into a printing press of sorts. We kids had helped out, just as we did when the monthly newsletter Venceremos (“We Will Triumph”) was printed. The postcards were addressed to Canada’s minister of External Affairs and came with a little paragraph asking that he pressure Pinochet into disclosing the whereabouts of the disappeared person featured on the front. They were also addressed to Chile’s minister of the interior, with the same demand. The pictures had been provided by Families of the Disappeared, an organization in Chile. They were of men, women, children, teenagers, couples, families, people as old as my grandparents, lots of people my parents’ age, working-class people, middle-class people, some upper-class people, city people, country people, a cross-section of Chilean society, all with one thing in common: they were on the left, or were poor.
Of all the postcards, I had chosen two. One was of a young woman reading a book at a desk. When I had turned the postcard around, it said, “Carmen Bueno Cifuentes, age 24, actress. Disappeared on November 29th, 1974, with her companion Jorge Muller Silva, age 27, filmmaker. Where is she?” My whole body had frozen. I had discovered my calling at the age of three, was already putting on plays in the centre of our court with Arabella and at school with Dewi, and here was this namesake actress who had disappeared. I asked my mother about her. She responded that Carmen Bueno Cifuentes had acted in film and theatre and had been active in the now-outlawed Actors’ Union. She had also fought for the rights of poor people, and was probably dead, although she could possibly still be in an underground detention centre. Mami also explained about the importance of putting the word out, of holding the Chilean government accountable, of letting the world know that this was happening, of speaking up.
“Silence will never protect us, Carmencita. Always remember that,” my mother had instructed.
I had slipped one of the Carmen Bueno Cifuentes postcards into the back pocket of my jeans and then continued to make little piles of postcards, as per my instructions. Holly Near, one of Mami’s favourite singers, along with Mercedes Sosa and Edith Piaf, sang “It Could Have Been Me” on the turntable and I thought about how apropos the lyrics were.
The next postcard that had hit me hard was the one of the birthday-hat boy. I turned it around. It said, “Alejandro Avalos Davidson, age 30, professor and researcher at the Catholic University. Disappeared on November 20th, 1975. Where is he?” It had affected me deeply because the boy in the photo with his father was the age I had been when the coup had happened, because his dad, a university professor like mine, had disappeared, and because I was convinced he’d been picked up on the day the picture was taken, during his son’s birthday party. I imagined the festivities in the backyard, the military surrounding the house, blindfolding the father, tying his hands behind him, throwing him into the back of a jeep, and driving away with him, leaving behind overturned juice cups, stomped-on presents, a piñata swaying from the branch of an orange tree. This picture had been taken right before the arrival of the military, I decided, and a terrible lonely feeling gripped me as I thought of the silence, the gaping hole of the immediate aftermath. I pocketed one of these postcards too.
Once the postcard piles had been arranged to the adults’ liking, I grabbed a little tin box I’d been keeping in my room for an awaiting treasure, stuffed it into a plastic bag, snuck away, climbed Cedar, and pondered the postcards again. As I studied Carmen Bueno Cifuentes, reading at her desk by a window, I pictured the military breaking down her door while she was lost in the world of the book—had they burned the book after snatching it from her, adding it to the tally of books destroyed in bonfires on the grounds of so many of Chile’s universities? I wondered—and taking her away, never to be seen again. Holding both postcards to my heart on that crisp spring day, I said aloud, Cedar my only witness:
“Please, dear God, please, find this boy’s Papi, find Carmen Bueno Cifuentes. Please make sure they show up again. Thank you.”
I closed my eyes that day and envisaged them dead, their bodies lying peacefully in the fresh earth, and then dreamed them rising up and out, walking into the world of the living again, Alejandro Avalos Davidson reappearing at the birthday party so the celebration could continue, the disappearance a mere blip on that festive day, Carmen Bueno Cifuentes picking up her book—I decided it was Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America, often quoted in our house, bur
nt, flushed, or buried in many Chilean homes after the coup—and resuming her reading by the light of her window, entering the world of Latin America’s history through its pages.
Next, I’d opened the little tin box, kissed both postcards, said, “You’ll be safe here, comrades,” and placed them carefully inside.
I had put the box in the bag, tied it around the base of one of Cedar’s branches, and stayed there for a long time contemplating the sky before climbing back down. That had been only a few months earlier, and now was the first time I was sharing this secret with someone other than Cedar.
“This boy’s father disappeared,” I told Lucho as I held up the postcard.
He took it gingerly from my hands and said, “That’s me. Where did you get this?”
Dead serious, he turned the postcard around, the same little half smile from the picture appearing on his face as he recollected that day, the last birthday party with his Papi. I watched him in silence in that suspended moment, a moment of recognition for us both. We’d found each other, in a tree, in the northern hemisphere. There were no words to say.
We took each other’s hand. I explained about the postcards and he nodded as he kept his eye on the picture. Then he said:
“This is my uncle, my mother’s brother. He was like a father to me. He was a Communist. And that’s why I am one too.”
We stayed there until darkness set in. I explained about the little box and the prayer to keep him safe, showed him the Carmen Bueno Cifuentes postcard and told him her story. My namesake’s picture spoke to me because I knew I wanted to be an actor, I confessed. Lucho nodded and revealed that acting was his calling too. He became a cousin that day. Years later, while I was running the safe house in Neuquén and doing border runs for the MIR, Lucho started theatre school at the college in South Vancouver.
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