Beyond the Ties of Blood

by Florencia Mallon

  “But why are you angry at your dad? Did he take land away from the Indians?”

  “Well, no. But he was never home. My mom raised me, basically, and I spent a lot of time with her mom and dad, Grandma Myriam and Grandpa David, who were immigrants from Russia. They had a tailor shop, and they lived very simply. My grandpa had been a socialist back in Odessa, before the Russian Revolution, and I looked up to him, I guess, as a father figure. The longer we lived in the big house, and they had me in that awful school … I don’t know. Sometimes I wished I was poor.”

  She stood for a moment and dragged her chair closer to his, pulling her place mat, food, and wine along with her. After sitting back down she put her right arm through his left, leaning into his side. “I’m getting cold,” she said. He leaned over, put his right hand under her chin, and brought her face up to kiss her.

  “So your grandpa David made you a socialist,” she said after she caught her breath.

  His right index finger traced a corkscrew in the hair along her left temple. “Well, maybe. Not exactly. It was more the times, what everyone else was doing, wanting to fit in at first. But when so many homeless families began invading municipal lands on the outskirts of the city, guys not much older than me, with kids, their wives already missing teeth, without a roof over their heads, I really woke up to the reality of poverty. Somehow, helping them under cover of night, building shacks before the sun came up, getting the government to agree to build them houses, it seemed like I could make a difference. It seemed so much more important than the stupid classes I had in school, or the disgusting amount of money my father made.”

  “Sergio said you came to Santiago running from the police.”

  He poured them each a last glass of wine and called the waiter over. “Another bottle, please, compadre. Surprisingly, he’s almost right. I got into a disagreement with the socialists over the land invasions and joined the Revolutionary Left organization. Then me and one of my buddies ended up running from the cops and actually got shot at. So technically, it’s true. After that point, my organization pulled me out, then I got a high score on the university aptitude test, and here I am.”

  The waiter appeared with the new bottle, uncorked it, and left it on the table. Eugenia ran her hand along the side of Manuel’s face, rubbing her thumb back and forth across his cheek right above the line of his beard. “So you’re a member of the Revolutionary Left,” she said. “Does that mean you carry a gun?”

  Manuel laughed softly and caressed the side of her neck, then pushed lower past the neckline of her denim shirt until he heard her sharp intake of breath. “No,” he said softly. “The Revolutionary Left fights with actions, not with guns.” Their kiss deepened, and they were unable to find a way to get close enough with the chairs in the way. He stood up, fumbling in his pocket for some bills, tossed enough on the table and picked up the recently opened wine bottle.

  “I have two glasses in my room,” he said, offering his free hand to help her up.

  They walked across the bridge in the glimmer of the late-afternoon sun. The two blocks took a long time because they kept stopping. Once inside his room, he closed the door, put the bottle down on the table near the makeshift kitchen, and began rummaging through the cupboard for the glasses. He took out a couple of candles, lighting them and using their own wax to set them in two ashtrays. Then he put out two glasses and filled them with wine. They sat down together in the candlelight.

  “Looks like you’re more prepared for romance now,” she said.

  He stood up, refilled their glasses and carried them over to the night table. He placed the candles next to the glasses. They cast a warm blush across the wall and onto the pillows of the bed. He came back one last time, pulling her up and folding her into his arms.

  “Yes,” he whispered into her ear. “This is much better.”

  They lay down together in the reflected glow of flame and sunset. He peeled back her clothes, revealing golden highlights along the curves of her breasts. By the time he entered her and she felt the pain, she was no longer afraid; and he stopped and waited, lips grazing her ears and neck, until she began to move. Then they moved together, and she felt his sharp release but he kept moving, and she tried to wait, not to let it come, but it did. For a long time they lay side by side in the flickering dusk.

  As darkness began to gather around them, he sat up, reaching to the night stand for a cigarette. “It’s after eight,” he said as he blew out the first mouthful of smoke and offered her a puff.

  She inhaled deeply, letting the fragrant black tobacco smoke out through her nose before handing it back. “What happens now?” she asked.

  “Well, you could take a shower, and then we could find a taxi.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “What, then?”

  “I’ve never done this before. But it feels like we should know what comes next.”

  “It depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On what you want.”

  “I don’t know what I want.”

  “Well, then we don’t know what happens next. The old problem of the script,” he said.

  She turned over with her back to him. “Don’t make jokes.” Her voice was muffled by the pillow.

  “It’s not a joke,” he said, putting out the cigarette. He ran an arm under her neck and shoulders and pulled her gently back toward him so that her head was on his chest. “It’s kind of new for me, too.”

  “Come on. Even I know that’s not true.”

  “No, no, I’m serious. For one thing, I’ve never been anyone’s first before. All the other girls … well, mainly they’ve been older, but … I don’t know, it was different this time.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, one way to put it might be that I’ve never made love before. Until now what I’ve done is have sex.”

  “I might be inexperienced, but I’m not stupid,” she said into the hair on his chest. “We did have sex.”

  His laughter had a rich rumble to it, a tremor from deep inside that came up slowly to the surface. Her head bobbed up and down slightly. “Who’s joking now?” he asked. “Give me a break, Eugenia. What I’m trying to tell you is … well … it’s possible that I could end up falling in love with you.”

  “That settles it, then,” she said. “What happens now is that we fall in love.”

  Boston, 1990

  Several weeks after she had begun writing in her journal, she accepted an appointment with a student who wanted to talk to her. Though Eugenia wasn’t teaching, the student had been in her class the previous semester, was the daughter of Guatemalan exiles, and spoke Spanish. She had introduced herself as Elena Manríquez and emphasized she was interested in learning more about culturally sensitive reporting. Her eyes sparkled as she sat in Eugenia’s office, and she seemed ready to write down anything Eugenia said.

  “I’ve been doing research in Mexican newspapers,” Elena said. “I ran across your article on the leader of the human rights group in Mexico, and then some of your portraits of survivors of the 1985 earthquake. I must confess, Professor Aldunate, I just don’t know how you do it.”

  The first thing that crossed Eugenia’s mind was that this student, a native Spanish speaker, was the only one who had known how to pronounce her name. But the young woman was looking at her expectantly, waiting for an answer.

  “I’m sorry, Elena,” she said, “I’m not sure I understand what you mean.”

  Elena looked puzzled for a moment. “You know,” she finally answered, “how it is you get these women to talk to you so openly, from the heart. I’ve been reading a lot of politically committed journalism from the early-to-mid eighties. But there’s something different about your work, a spark, like empathy, or maybe vision. I don’t know. Somehow, you get women to talk to you like a friend instead of a journalist or interrogator. Do you have a particular strategy, a method, that you can share with me?”

  Eugenia leaned back in her chair. El
ena’s long dark hair was pulled into a ponytail on her neck, showing off large silver earrings. She was dressed in jeans and a Guatemalan textile shirt, and wore no makeup. Eugenia felt a tightness in her chest as she realized she did not know what to say. She had to clear her throat several times before she felt she could answer.

  “I must confess, Elena, that I’m really not sure,” she began, her voice sticking slightly along her tongue. “I’ve never asked myself this question. Excuse me just a second.” She picked up the earthenware mug she kept filled with water on her desk and took a long swallow. “Once or twice I’ve wondered about the connection, though,” she continued in what felt like a more normal tone. “I have to say that the only thing that occurs to me might seem a bit obvious. I’m sure you know that I was arrested in Chile after the coup and spent some time in jail. My daughter’s father was disappeared by the military. Perhaps it’s just this commonality of experience that generates a natural empathy.”

  For a while Elena just sat there looking at Eugenia, a puzzled, vaguely disappointed look on her face. “But Professor Aldunate,” she said, almost apologetically, “in class you always tell us that being a good cross-cultural reporter doesn’t require that you have the same experience as the people you write about. Why, last semester you said that if this were necessary, there would be no point in communicating beyond our own culture. You said that—”

  “I’m sorry, Elena.” Eugenia cut her off, standing up and looking at her watch. “I have another appointment right now that I can’t miss. This is really fascinating, and I hope we can continue the conversation another day. My apologies.”

  After she closed the door behind the retreating student, Eugenia returned to her chair and sat down. Her mouth felt very dry. She reached for her water and found that her hands were trembling as she brought the mug to her mouth. After taking a couple of shaky swallows she put it back on her desk, stood up, and walked across the room. She turned off the lights, locked the door, and went back to her chair.

  Santiago, 1971

  After they made love, Eugenia began spending more and more time at Manuel’s apartment. The new socialist government was in its honeymoon period, and so were they. She no longer felt like such an impostor in the radical crowd. Not that she really understood the politics, and she didn’t join a student organization. But the fact that they were a couple somehow made everything better. When she saw those radical hippie girls with the see-through blouses and no bra, she no longer felt inferior, because everyone could see Manuel had chosen her.

  Irene came back from Boston and took up a research position at the University of Chile, renting an apartment downtown near her lab. Although their mother was disappointed at not having Irene back in the house, Eugenia found that Irene’s apartment provided a good excuse when she decided to stay over with Manuel. She was gripped by an irresistible urge to redecorate his one-room flat, and when she did not have classes she roamed the secondhand stores and flea markets looking for suitable items.

  She managed to make the most of the space available, sprucing up his old couch with a batik bedspread she bought from a young girl with henna-tinted braids at an open-air market downtown. A week later she went back and bought a second one, using it to make curtains for the one large window facing the street. But she was proudest of the Andean rug in earthen shades that matched the brick-colored lines in the batiks, which she bought secondhand along with a small battered coffee table that she sanded and refinished by hand. By the time the cold of winter took hold of the city in the second half of June, she had created a small, warm oasis where she and Manuel could hide out and make love under warm quilts.

  “You’ve really made some changes in this apartment,” he said one afternoon when they were sitting at the kitchen table drinking tea and eating fresh rolls from the corner bakery.

  “What’s the matter, don’t you like them?”

  “Sure,” he said after a pause. “You’ve put a lot of work into them, and I like the fact you want to make us a comfortable place to live.”

  “But?”

  He ran a finger along the edge of his mug. “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s just that the place feels really different.”

  “Isn’t change good sometimes?”

  “Yeah. But don’t get me wrong. Especially when you put up the curtains, you made me think of my mother.”

  Eugenia stood up from the table and walked over to the window framed by the offending curtains. She looked out at the tree that was now completely denuded of leaves.

  “Now you’re mad,” he said. She was silent. “I told you not to get me wrong,” he continued. “But quite frankly, I don’t think the time and money you’ve been spending on this is really worth it. There are a lot of other things to be done right now that are more important.”

  She turned to look at him. “That might be,” she said. “But I’m not an activist. All I wanted to do was to make us more comfortable. I haven’t spent a lot of money, and even if I had, it’s mine, not yours.”

  He stood up and came over to her, trying to put his arms around her. She pulled away. “Okay,” he said. “I get it. I’m sorry.”

  Though she knew Manuel was with the Revolutionary Left, and there were nights when he didn’t come home until very late, reeking of cheap wine, Eugenia hadn’t wanted to get involved. Though sometimes she wondered what he was doing late at night, why he came home drunk, mainly she’d seen his politics as through a veil, vague outlines and figures with a certain mystery to them that she had never been able to figure out. That changed one night in July, right before winter vacation. She’d been feeling guilty about not going to the country house with her mother over the upcoming break, so she’d gone home to spend the weekend with her. When they got into a fight, she had decided to go back to the apartment and surprise Manuel.

  She could hear the noise from the ground floor as soon as she let herself in. She climbed the stairs. When she opened the door the stench of sweat, black tobacco, and cheap wine was like an uppercut to the jaw. She stood there for a moment. The floor of their one-room apartment, newly swept only a few hours before, was now covered with crumpled pieces of paper and overflowing ashtrays. The ashes and cigarette butts that could no longer fit in the containers were being kicked around by muddy hiking boots as scruffy, long-haired young men moved between the kitchen and her coffee table. Whenever they passed over her Andean rug they ground a fresh mixture of mud and cigarette ash deeper into its formerly brick-colored pattern. The batik spread on the couch had been crumpled into a corner.

  They didn’t notice her at first. Then a shout went up. “Hey! Manuel!” He looked up and came running to the door.

  “Mi amor. Weren’t you going to—”

  “We got into a fight, so I thought I’d come back and surprise you. Looks like I was very successful.”

  “We needed to get out an emergency leaflet, and since you weren’t going to … Just give me about five minutes. I’ll clear them out, and then I can clean up and …”

  “Don’t worry. It’ll take a lot longer than that for the stink to clear out. I’ll go stay at my sister’s.”

  She called her mother from Irene’s downtown apartment and said her plans had changed. She would go to the country for winter vacation. She returned in time for classes and continued sleeping on the couch in Irene’s living room. She was unable to return to the one-room place where they had fallen in love and that she had spent months making comfortable and pleasant. She could not fully explain her sense of betrayal, but she felt as if Manuel himself had caused each ash stain on the carpet for which she had scoured the secondhand stores, each scuff on the coffee table she had refinished by hand. For the first time she could see clearly that what mattered most to her was not as important to him. She felt a stab of pain every time it occurred to her that his politics were more important to him than she was.

  On the Friday of the first full week of classes, she got back to Irene’s to find Manuel sitting on the front steps
of the building. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days, and he gave off an odor of stale wine. When he saw her, he stood with difficulty, swaying slightly. He was drunk.

  “Please. Mi amor. Just listen for a moment. Please.”

  She stopped, but kept her distance.

  “I’m sorry. I’ve cleaned the whole place up, kept the windows open, aired it out. I promise they won’t come over again. I’m so sorry. Please come back, I …” He took a step toward her, but she stepped back. He stopped. “Eugenia,” he said, the roughness of tears palpable in his voice. “I love you. I don’t know what I’d do without you. Please come back.” Then he sat back down on the steps, his head in his hands. And he began to sob.

  She wasn’t entirely sure why she’d gone back. Had it been that vulnerable streak of his, that from the first time at the Plaza Baquedano had mixed with the hint of danger emanating from the Revolutionary Left? Was it the smell of burnt oranges and black tobacco? What he knew how to do with his fingers, his lips? How every nerve ending in her body stood up, when he simply walked into the room? Until she met Manuel, she hadn’t known what real pleasure felt like. But part of it, too, was the allure of the prohibited, her knowledge of how shocked her mother would be if she found out. And she had to admit how good it felt that, out of all the girls, the leader of the Revolutionary Left had chosen her.

  Whatever it was, her decision had sealed her fate. After that, their story accelerated along with the political events in Chile. As the economic crisis got worse and the government still refused to send in police against demonstrators taking over farms and factories, the right-wing opposition got more and more militant. At first it was mainly landowners in the countryside whose farms were being taken over by peasants or expropriated by the agrarian reform. Then factory owners and other members of the investing classes got involved. They were encouraged by the women from the upper class who went out into the streets, banging on pots to protest the shortages of goods.