Beyond the Ties of Blood

by Florencia Mallon

  When the neighbors complained about Manuel’s radical politics, they were evicted from their apartment. The polarization between the Allende government with its working-class, radical student, and peasant support, and the right-wing opposition with its coalition of urban and rural upper classes, only got worse through 1972 and the first months of 1973. As strikes and street demonstrations spread, the Allende government lost the support of the middle classes and of their political party, the Christian Democrats. By June of 1973, the smell of tear gas was constantly in the air.

  Manuel and Eugenia took to skipping classes at their respective universities. The professors weren’t there half the time, anyway. Somehow, Eugenia decided, they’d probably known that their days together were numbered. They drank coffee in bed for hours in their new third-floor walk-up, the slanting sun of winter tracing highlights in Manuel’s red beard. What she remembered most about those days, what had made her happy, was the feel of Manuel’s red locks between her fingers, the smell of freshly ground coffee at the small Italian shop on the corner, the little pot of English ivy on the windowsill that thrived in spite of their neglect.

  Even as they lingered longer in bed in the mornings, Manuel still went out in the afternoons to help build the school at the site of a new working-class community at the edge of town. He dismissed her worries about his safety, even though the more conservative upper-class students at the Catholic University, the supposedly apolitical ones who had never joined a political party or student organization before, now began arming themselves to fight the Revolutionary Left. Rumor had it that they were collaborating with the new fascist group known as New Fatherland, the one that had been started by angry landowners from the south of the country. She knew that students like Sergio, who had been in the Socialist Party, were not willing to join in, but there were still a lot of these conservative hotheads at the Catholic University.

  Her fears became all too real the night his jaw was broken in the fight with the right-wing thugs. She’d waited up for hours, and when he finally made it home, his friend Hernán almost carrying him up the stairs, she foolishly expected him to say he would give up politics. But he just stayed in bed, groggy on pain medication, and she fed him soup and mashed potatoes.

  He was all right by the time of winter vacation. He took to sitting around the apartment, looking thinner and more haggard, and sometimes he opened a bottle of wine at lunch and kept drinking it through the day. The government had taken over her family’s farm in the agrarian reform, so her mother had insisted they spend the break together in the north and she couldn’t think of a convincing excuse. Besides, after all the time she spent helping him get back on his feet, she felt as if she owed her mama at least this one holiday. And maybe, just maybe, she needed to remind him that she wouldn’t always be waiting around, her hands clenching a cold mug of tea, no matter what he did.

  She returned at the beginning of August, a little more than a month before the military overthrew the government for good. A week or so after her return, they were evicted once again. The only room they could find was a ragged little dump behind a gas station. Three weeks later, right after the military coup, the Revolutionary Left put out a statement calling for armed resistance. Even she knew what a joke that was, a few cornered guys with pistols facing the tanks and planes of the armed forces. She’d heard the planes bombing the Presidential Palace the day of the coup, and rumor had it that they’d bombed some of the working-class neighborhoods, too. But the statement meant that the military would target all members of his organization, and that made him a marked man.

  She was the only one who could walk to the corner store two blocks away to buy bread, coffee, and the two horrible newspapers whose publication the junta still allowed. Every morning, when she returned, she put the coffee and sandwiches on the table and they ate in silence. Then he turned to the last page in each newspaper to check for names he knew on the lists of those arrested. As she sat there, looking at him run his finger down the list, stopping every now and then, closing his eyes or shaking his head, she wanted to ask him what they were going to do, but she found she couldn’t ask the question out loud. She hoped she’d be able to at some point, but they ran out of time.

  They were still finishing up their sandwiches late on a Sunday morning when the crash of the front door startled her so badly that she spilled her coffee. The thought that she must get up had not even formed completely in her head before she felt a fist hit her face and she was down on the floor. Looking up through the red haze of pain, all she could see was an olive-colored form. Then the sharp stab along her side when he kicked her. She closed her eyes, wetness spreading across her cheeks.

  They left her alone after that, focusing on Manuel. She was afraid to open her eyes. She heard, again and again, the hard thud of military boots hitting human flesh, his grunts and moans mixing with the curses of his attackers, all of it punctuated by the sound of glass shattering against the floor. When they finally hauled her up, they tied a blindfold over her eyes and half-dragged, half-carried her out into a waiting car. She was thrown into the back, her head hitting the door on the opposite side.

  After they were picked up, Eugenia realized her mistake in taking him back. She was in love with him, but he loved politics. That’s why she ended up on that metal frame, the electricity crashing through her until all she wanted was to die. To escape the searing pain. She couldn’t tell them anything because she really didn’t know anything. She just happened to be in love with a political leader. And then that horrible day, when they took her into the room where they had him and she saw how badly they had tortured him. She was sure the only reason they brought them together was to taunt him one last time. She knew that, after that moment, he’d be gone. She wasn’t sure what was worse, having lost him, or seeing him again, in the state he was in, right before losing him forever.

  But then she became aware she was pregnant. The sickness started coming every morning, and pretty soon it was clear that she wasn’t just suffering delayed effects from the beatings and electric shock. Her breasts got large, and her stomach grew round and full. When the young girl with whom she had shared a cell was released from Villa Gardenia and let Irene know where she was, her sister moved heaven and earth to get her out. Eugenia remembered the cold wetness of the winter morning when she was transported to the Mexican embassy in the old VW van that smelled of gasoline. She shivered all the way, nauseous from the fumes, her swelling belly making it hard to get in and out of the back seat where they’d put her. Irene had been waiting at the embassy gate with a large poncho to drape over her shoulders.

  Even after they took her to the embassy, she had to wait until the Chilean government accepted the Mexican request for political asylum. She took to strolling back and forth among the tables of exiles waiting to leave the country, watching their endless chess games, their disputes over a hand of bridge. Irene came every day, bringing treats to still her cravings, new clothes as her belly got larger. Yet every day, when she woke up, she wondered how things could just go on as normal. There were people dying, she thought, being tortured, beaten, and killed all around them. She didn’t even want to think about how much Mama must have suffered, her daughter disappeared and tortured, and now, pregnant, about to go into exile. And people were arguing over cards? Every time the baby kicked she felt like the ultimate, and most banal, symbol of how life goes on, even in the midst of tragedy and grief. Her baby was a flower growing on earth made spongy with human blood.

  The contractions began one evening while she was still waiting for approval from the Chilean government. After all, there weren’t that many countries that, like Mexico, were still accepting exiles. The large number of petitions made the wait so much longer. Canada had filled its quota, and the United States accepted no one. She had never really had Manuel, but now she would have his child. Irene was there, too, when Laura was born, the first person to hold her, tears streaming down her cheeks. Because Laura was born in the embassy, she wa
s a Mexican citizen. In any case, Chile wouldn’t want her, the child of two subversives, one of them gone and the other damaged beyond repair. Her birth certificate read: “Laura Bronstein Aldunate, born on Mexican soil, Mexican embassy, Santiago, Chile, September 16, 1974.” Only later, after they’d lived in Mexico for several years, did the full irony of that date strike Eugenia. Her daughter had been born on Mexican Independence Day.

  Mexico City, 1974

  A month later, she and Laura were booked on a flight to Mexico City, where they were picked up at dawn by representatives of the Revolutionary Left exile organization. The young man who drove the tattered station wagon into which they put her two small bags still sported the large, dark moustache and long hair that had been marks of Revolutionary Left militants. His voice took on a hushed, awestruck tone when he spoke about Manuel.

  “You were there, compañera,” he said respectfully, “so I don’t have to tell you how much he suffered. But one of our guys who was also in there with him, and got out by some miracle, he said that compañero Bronstein became a legend in the torture camp. They tortured him every day in Villa Gardenia, compañera, for hours and hours. And he never said a word. Not one. Here in Mexico, compañera, well … we consider him a hero.”

  As the widow and child of a hero, she and Laura were given a place to live and she was put into contact with several newspapers, where she learned slowly but surely to be a journalist. She had always loved reading and had dreamed of becoming a journalist, and this was a way for her to take her mind off Manuel. And Mama. Even Papa. Loved ones she would never see again. By focusing on the stories of others, she didn’t have to think about her own.

  Slowly they settled into a life in Mexico City. They moved to a small second-floor apartment in Coyoacán, a southern neighborhood full of artists and cobblestone streets. A bougainvillea grew up the side of the balcony, spreading its luxuriant purple blossoms along the edge of the wrought-iron railing. On her third birthday, Eugenia bought Laura a small stuffed porcupine made of pink velvet. They called him Paco. A Zapotec woman from Oaxaca, not more than eighteen years old, helped in the kitchen, washed and ironed their clothes, and took care of Laura when Eugenia had to go in to the office at the newspaper.

  Mostly Eugenia wrote at home, clacking out articles on a small Olivetti portable typewriter. Over time, her byline, which at first had felt like charity from the exile community, developed a prestige of its own. The change came after she landed an exclusive interview with the mother of a young leftist disappeared by Mexican authorities the same year she and Laura arrived in Mexico. Hundreds of letters poured in at her newspaper, lavishing praise. From that moment, her editor always sent her when a story had to do with human rights. Between her arrival in Mexico City in 1974 and the beginning of the 1980s, the horrors of military massacres in Nicaragua, Guatemala, and El Salvador—not even to mention Chile and Argentina—kept her very busy.

  As the widow of a revolutionary hero and an expert on human rights, Eugenia could not shake the feeling that she was an impostor. After all, she had never done anything truly revolutionary herself, except be in love with Manuel. And what had made Manuel such a hero, anyway? She pretended to know, but she really had no idea. He hadn’t talked under torture, everyone kept repeating. Not a word, they said in awestruck whispers. What she never mentioned was that she, too, had never said a word. But that was because she had nothing to say. And it didn’t matter to the soldiers. They tied her down and sent electric currents through her anyway, until welts formed on her burning flesh that would mark her forever.

  Whenever these thoughts came into her head, Eugenia locked herself in the bathroom and took off her blouse. In the mirror she looked at the purple marks on her arms, the scars from where the electricity had seared her skin. She ran an index finger over each one, felt the raised edges, the points at each end that were still slightly tender to the touch, even after several years. More than anything else, she thought, these made her an expert on human rights. The nightmares did too, full of nameless and faceless beings who did horrible things to her. Things she still managed to suppress during her waking hours.

  The first night that Laura brought her the blanket, then the glass of water after another one of her night terrors in 1984, Eugenia felt happy that her daughter wanted to take care of her. In fact, Laura used the same words to comfort her mother after her nightmare that Eugenia had used a few weeks before when their roles had been reversed and Laura had been sick. If only Eugenia had been able to comfort her mother back when Papa left, but Mama had locked her door during the time she was ill. Then she and Laura had talked about Manuel. For the first time, Eugenia realized, she was able to tell Laura about their daily life together, things she thought about constantly but had never been able to share with her daughter before. Now that Laura was ten, perhaps it was easier for her to understand.

  She wondered if Laura had seen the scars on her arms that night. She’d been wearing a sleeveless nightgown. When Laura didn’t say anything, Eugenia relaxed. But when it happened again, Eugenia bought a new wardrobe of nightgowns, all with long sleeves. They were especially useful after the earthquake, when she found she could not sleep at all.

  One September morning in 1985, Eugenia woke to the worst earthquake she had ever experienced. By the time she became conscious, her bed was on the opposite side of the room from where she’d fallen asleep and the walls were changing shape. She was unable to stand until the first shock passed, and found Laura crying under her bed.

  For weeks Eugenia roamed the apartment at night. Laura took to sleeping in Eugenia’s bed, Paco the porcupine clutched to her chest. Sometimes, just the regular breathing of her daughter next to her calmed her enough so that she could doze off for a while. But then she would wake up again. In the early mornings, with slivers of almost-sun peeking in through the drawn curtains, she spent hours watching her daughter sleep. The straight jet-black hair, the long raven lashes that fluttered against her cheeks as she dreamed. She did not look like Manuel. She tried to put them side by side in her mind’s eye, and found that the minute one of them came into focus, the other disappeared. It was almost as if the presence of one was conditional on the absence of the other. Again and again, in the apologetic light of early dawn, she tried to hold both together in her mind. When she finally gave up, only Manuel stood there, his red hair glowing. She shook her head back and forth to get rid of him and reached out and gently moved a finger across her daughter’s right cheekbone, imprinted now with the folds of the pillow.

  She called her sister, who now had a job as an associate chemist at a lab at MIT, and said she could no longer stay in Mexico. Irene called back a week later to tell her about the fellowship being advertised at Carmichael College, which was also in Boston. They were looking for someone with experience in cross-cultural reporting who could also teach a class to undergraduate majors. Her ten years of experience as a journalist in Mexico impressed the search committee, and somehow the school administration convinced the Immigration and Naturalization Service that no one else could do the job.

  Boston, 1990

  As she sat in her darkened office, Eugenia realized how out of place she’d felt in Mexico. Everyone presumed she shared Manuel’s political values, his passionate sense of justice. But beyond her own vague belief that the poor should have access to land, a place to live, basic rights, things like that, she had no idea what he really stood for. His romantic revolutionary figure hovered over every conversation she had with Chilean exiles, and she had to pretend she knew his politics. While others went on and on in hushed tones, all she could remember was him crying on the steps of Irene’s apartment, or his body doubled over in the torture camp.

  Her early journalistic forays had an almost desperate quality to them. Why had the poor been so important to him? Why had he been so passionate about it all? The interview with the human rights leader had been a stroke of luck. She could definitely understand the other woman’s loss, that sense of seeing her loved
one through a veil, not quite able to make out what he believed in and what it meant.

  Through her interviews, she realized, she had tried to make sense of her own loss. What was so important, so powerful, so overwhelmingly just, that he’d had no choice but to abandon her? Perhaps her grief, her desire for Manuel, her sense of being left alone—these were the things people connected to. But how could she say these things to her students? No, she had to forge a different explanation to satisfy the motivated ones like Elena, who came asking uncomfortable questions. Elena had been the first one to really put her on the spot, and she had not been prepared. How ironic that she had played the culture card, the unique experience card, so completely contradictory to everything she had ever taught them. But how ironic, too, that the truth was exactly the opposite. It was her hunger to know something she didn’t know, her desperation to explain something that had no explanation, that made her interviews stand out. A hunger, a desire, so intense that it was almost sexual.

  Even now, just thinking about it, her body awakened to a desperation she hadn’t felt for a long time. She’d spent fifteen years as the widow of a revolutionary hero, tending his flame, but she was an impostor! Aside from sexual pleasure, all they’d really had together was a mutual desire for romantic love. Sure, she raised his daughter to know his sacrifice, but it was all a story she concocted to prevent people from knowing the truth. And that was why she trembled now in her darkened office. It wasn’t the air conditioning. It wasn’t even the memories, or her inability to answer her student’s simple question. She was afraid she would finally be revealed as the liar she really was.

  The doorbell rang about nine in the morning, an hour after Laura had left for school, in a greater hurry than usual because it was the first week, still gobbling down her breakfast on her way out the door. The temperature had shot up again on Monday, threatening the hundred-degree mark by ten in the morning and making it hard to remember that school had already started. Ignacio Pérez had called the night before when he got to Boston, and she was expecting him any moment. Eugenia did not have class that day, so she had been taking advantage of the time to continue writing in her journal. In this latest entry she was focusing on the coup itself, on what had happened immediately afterward.