Beyond the Ties of Blood

by Florencia Mallon

  One Sunday, when his mama was out somewhere and he was alone in the house, he took a walk in the warm afternoon sunlight. Without really thinking about it, he ended up at the plaza next to his school. As he drew close to the statue in the garden near the middle of the park, he heard someone calling his name.

  “Hey, Manuel! Compañero!”

  It was one of the guys from the twelfth-grade class, tall and gangly, with a German last name and a long blond mane. He was sitting on a bench next to a bed of petunias, smoking a cigarette, a black beret perched rakishly on the side of his head. Manuel could see he was trying to look like Che Guevara, but the peach fuzz along his chin that was imitating a beard only made him look younger, and vaguely clownish. Still, Manuel knew him as the leader of the most radical student faction, a charismatic speaker who’d earned the admiration of most leftists at the school. The classmates Manuel envied most, the ones who never tripped over chair legs or bumped into desks, spoke admiringly, almost in hushed tones, about this guy. Once, when he’d been walking unnoticed behind a group of popular twelfth-grade girls, he’d heard this guy’s name come up in conversation. The girls had giggled, breathless, as if they were talking about a movie star.

  Manuel approached the bench and sat down on the other side.

  “Hey, Ricardo. How come you’re by yourself? Where are the rest of the compañeros?”

  “They’re on their way. We have important plans for this afternoon. Wanna join us?”

  “What’s up?”

  Ricardo leaned back on the bench, letting the cigarette smoke out through his nose.

  “We’re starting a student group affiliated with the Socialist Party. This guy who’s big in the Temuco branch is meeting us at the tea house across the street in an hour. You interested?”

  The socialist from the Temuco branch, a university student dressed in blue jeans, hiking boots, and an olive-green shirt that looked like he’d gotten it off a barbudo marching into Havana, had treated them all to mugs of tea and black tobacco cigarettes. Though Manuel had coughed a bit at first, he’d actually taken a liking to the sweet, acrid taste of the cigarette and how it mixed with the black, unsweetened tea. For hours the university student had talked about changes in the world, students marching, oppressed people rising up to throw off their chains. It was their moral obligation, he said, to join the others fighting for world justice. Then, as the late-afternoon sun angled through the dusty windows, scattering luminescent patterns along the black tile floor, he pushed his guerrilla cap off his forehead and reached into his olive-colored pack.

  “Here, little compañeros, I have one last present for you.” He took out a bundle of small mimeographed booklets and passed them around. “There’s enough for everyone. Just one apiece, though; I need to save the extras for other interested people.”

  Manuel picked up his and examined the cover page. An amateurish drawing of a pair of hands breaking the chain between the manacles attached to the wrists covered the majority of the space. Below the drawing were stenciled the words “Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!” Above the picture, in larger block letters, was the title: The Communist Manifesto. He looked up as the organizer began talking again.

  “This is where it all started, little compañeros. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote this more than a hundred years ago. It has inspired the poor and dispossessed across the world. We are all part of this world-historical movement for socialism, justice, and equality. We must all contribute our little grain of sand.

  “Even though we support the principles of the Manifesto, we have big differences with the Communist Party. You’ll soon learn why, but for now, just read this pamphlet over. It will help to read it several times, maybe discuss it in your group. Its principles of equality and solidarity are the principles we socialists live by. They’re your principles now, too.”

  Why do the Socialists and Communists have differences? Manuel suddenly wanted to ask. Had this world-historical movement been going on the whole time since this document was written over a century before? How come there still wasn’t more equality and solidarity? But as he got ready to open his mouth, the college student got up from his chair and, after straightening his cap and picking up his pack, began shaking everyone’s hands on his way out the door.

  “All right, little compañeros. Welcome to the Young Socialists. I’m late for my next meeting, so I gotta run. I’ll be in touch with Ricardo in a couple of weeks to see how you’re doing.”

  The door closed softly behind him. A long silence settled into the glittering dusk of the room. Then the new socialists filed quietly out into the cold of the rising moon.

  Manuel was always in a rush after that, and enfolded in a cloud of black tobacco smoke. His mama complained about the smell, and she still nagged him about how he was never home for dinner. But he was too busy to be Manolito the bullfighter anymore. There were leaflets to write and hand out, statements to mimeograph, meetings to attend. They argued late into the night. What position should the Young Socialists take on the Vietnam War? The kidnaping of the American ambassador by urban guerrillas in Brazil? The Mexican student movement? The massacre at Tlatelolco? What about the limitations of the Chilean Agrarian Reform law? And should the police evict the homeless families that were taking over Temuco’s municipal land and building shacks on it? Every day there was a new issue, a new statement to make, a new leaflet to explain the historical context for their position.

  But he also had to admit, while combing himself just so in the mirror one morning, that even as he tried to look like Che Guevara, in the end he looked most like Grandpa David, red hair and all. He couldn’t go to the shop that often anymore. There were too many demonstrations to attend and pamphlets to distribute. He drank his tea unsweetened now. Sometimes, when he dropped by on a Friday, he only had time to give his grandma a quick hug. She stopped baking rugelach. Now that he didn’t come by that much, she told him, she just wasn’t strong enough to haul the wood and start the oven in the back. All she could do was cook soup on the new gas-powered stove his mama had brought in. When he remembered, he took her a tray of good European pastries from his papa’s bakery on the other side of town.

  One Friday, Grandma asked him to clean out the sewing room in the back. “Since David got ill, I haven’t touched it,” she said. “Can’t look at it. Full of ghosts.”

  Full of dust is more like it, he thought. He took a broom and dustpan and began in the corners farthest from the old sewing machine, working his way toward the center of the back wall. He borrowed a fruit crate from the grocery store next door and gathered up the junk and old clothes lying in mounds along the sides. Once he was done picking up all the junk and had given the whole room an initial sweeping, he began again from the same corners, washing the floor with soap and water. Making his way toward the middle of the room again, he scrubbed and scraped first, then used the cloth he kept wetting in the bucket to finish picking up the grime. After rinsing the brush and cloth out, he moved to a new position. During one of the moves, he happened to look up and his eyes fell upon a small, dusty, forgotten book jammed in between wall and table, right behind the sewing machine.

  Brush, cloth, and bucket forgotten behind him, he stood up and moved closer. Giant dustballs flew up as he struggled to dislodge it, but it seemed glued to the spot. Coughing and sneezing, he pulled at it for a while, but his fingers kept slipping on the accumulated dust. Finally it burst free, and when his eyes stopped running he used the brush to get some of the settled grime off the cover, enough to glimpse the familiar title. It was different from his own thumbed-through, well-worn copy, but it was the Communist Manifesto without a doubt. The design was from an earlier time and it looked like it was written in German, not Spanish. He could just make out the title cobbling together familiar letters. The authors’ names were the same in any language, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Grandpa’s original copy, from Odessa, all those years ago. So this was what the world-historical mov
ement for socialism looked like.

  At least that’s what he told Armando, the Young Socialist from the university, when he came by the school to leave off a fresh bundle of leaflets. Armando seemed impressed when Manuel showed him the booklet. He held it gingerly.

  “Wow,” he said. “This was behind the old man’s sewing machine? What did you say his name was?”

  “David Weisz. He was my grandfather.”

  “Wow. I don’t know the name, little compañero, but that doesn’t mean anything. I’m not originally from here, you know. I’ll ask some of the old guys at party headquarters if they ever heard of him. This is quite a family heirloom, my friend.”

  Armando reported back on his next weekly visit. “There’s one old guy who knew your grandpa,” he said. “They worked together further north a long time ago. Says your grandpa had just been thrown off a farm he was in charge of, because he sided with the little guy. Mainly he remembered the stories your grandpa told him about the workers’ movement in Russia. They set up a group together in a town named Angol, where it seems David Weisz had a dry-goods store.

  “Back then, there was no Socialist or Communist Party in Chile. The old Democratic party had the only credible organization, so they started talking with the bigwigs in the local branch. But they got frustrated pretty quickly. Seems there was a feud with the anarchists in the coal mines, and folks spent their time infighting instead of working for the small fry who needed them most. Not long after, your grandpa sold his store and moved to Temuco to open a tailor shop, so the two guys lost touch. But you come from good stock, my friend.”

  He wanted to tell Grandma Myriam about the old codger in Armando’s central office. But when he dropped by for tea the following Friday, the shop was closed. In panic, he stumbled back through the alleyway and pounded on the old door of the Weisz residence. He thanked the nurse who opened the door and ran down the hallway into the patio full of orange trees. She was sitting in her wicker rocking chair, a shawl over her legs, warming herself and napping in the afternoon sun. It was the first time he had truly noticed how she much she had aged since Grandpa David’s death.

  After that, he tried to stop by every day and help her drink her soup. She talked about Moldavanka, her old neighborhood in Odessa, and how she knew everyone from the boys who shined shoes to the shaggy man who pushed his cart down the street, calling on his whistle for the ladies to bring out their kitchen knives to be sharpened. “Ach, Manolito,” she repeated over and over, “sometimes, when Temuco smells of wet smoke, I think I’m back in Odessa.”

  By the beginning of twelfth grade, Manuel was chain-smoking black tobacco cigarettes, the unfiltered kind. He grew his beard long to match his hair, and found that his thick red curls made him look very revolutionary. The popular girls at his school gathered in groups near him, giggling and whispering among themselves when he passed by. Occasionally, before or after class as they all milled around near the school building or along the exit gate, he singled one of them out. He would greet her by name as he came up close to her, leaning slightly sideways with his right arm against the wall or fence behind her in an inviting, yet casual, pose. He relished her quick intake of breath as he brushed lightly against her, the way his belly burned in response.

  “I could have any of them,” he boasted one day to Armando, by now a perpetual student at the university, like many other activists. “It’s amazing what a bit of revolutionary beard, plus the smell of black tobacco, can do.”

  “You’re right, little compañero,” Armando answered. “But why do you want one of those bourgeois greenhorns? They’re so boring, and still wet behind the ears. The revolutionary compañeras at the university, they’re the ticket. All grown up, you can talk politics with them. Plus they’ve already been broken in, if you know what I mean. No complications, no crying to mama. They can teach you a trick or two between the sheets. I’ll take you over there one of these days. They’ll really lust after that red-haired Che Guevara look of yours.”

  Yet when Armando invited him to a university party a couple of months later, Manuel begged off. He wasn’t exactly sure why, but the whole socialist youth scene was beginning to get on his nerves. It had been so exciting at first, fitting in with the popular crowd. Girls he’d never dreamed would give him a second look said hello to him in that breathless way of theirs. But then he started to notice that some of his compañeros, like Ricardo, seemed to be in it only for the girls. And as the presidential campaign began to heat up and Salvador Allende, the old-time socialist with the hornrimmed glasses, began to catch people’s imaginations, it seemed to Manuel that a lot more was at stake than intellectual posturing and seducing women.

  At first he was hesitant about this guy, this Allende. He was such a stereotypical politician, with his fancy suits and silk ties, giving inspirational speeches in the same old pompous language they had all heard time and time again. But the more Manuel saw him on TV, wading into crowds, jacket off, shirtsleeves rolled up, tie long gone, the more he began to think that, maybe, this time might be different. He wondered if the guy had more to him than his image. If he would really live up to his rhetoric.

  “I know the Socialists signed on to the Popular Unity platform, and our demands about land reform and workers’ rights are in there,” he told Armando one afternoon when they were sitting in the old tea house near his school. “But I don’t see how he’s gonna get it all done. I think maybe he’s been in the system too long.” A heavy winter rain was pounding up against the windows. Clouds of pungent cigarette smoke surrounded their table, refracting the light from the antique standing lamps.

  “I know he’s an old-style politician,” Armando admitted, “and he’s been at it thirty years. Can’t even remember the times he’s run for president. But he’s a member of our party, compañero. And the way we see it at the Temuco office is, if he wins, it’s not the end of the struggle. But it’ll make it a little easier, that’s what we think, to have someone from our organization in the presidential palace.”

  Manuel shifted in his seat and poured himself another bit of tea from the pot that sat on the warmer in the middle of the table. He lit another cigarette from the end of the one he’d been smoking and leaned back in his chair, letting the smoke out through his nose. “How much longer do people have to wait for what belongs to them?” he asked. “You think just another election will make the difference for them? The guy’s not suddenly gonna turn into a barbudo, like the bearded revolutionaries who marched into Havana, if he gets to the presidential palace. You can bet on that.”

  Armando sat forward, and as he continued talking he began tapping his open hand on the table for emphasis with every phrase.

  “Come on, compañero. You know how these things work. Is there another candidate who can get elected who would be better for us? The people are going to vote for him, even some of the Christian Democrats whose party is now in power. They promised so much after winning the last election, unions for the workers, land reform for the peasants. And then they couldn’t deliver even half of it! People started demanding more, and they still are! And once our candidate’s in the presidential palace, that’s when we strike, compañero. That’s when things heat up, mark my words.”

  Salvador Allende was elected in September, a month and a half into the second semester of Manuel’s senior year. He joined Armando in the street celebrations, thousands upon thousands of people with horns and drums, clapping and singing through the center of Temuco. As the two of them were carried away in the human crush and adrenaline rush, Manuel wished Grandpa David had lived long enough to see this, getting one of your own elected president, and peacefully at that. He knew this had not happened to the workers’ movement in Odessa—or any other place, for that matter.

  It was easy to believe that things would be different, and by the end of the evening Manuel was sure of it. Armando took him to a party at someone’s house. They were playing the Rolling Stones on a scratchy record player, and Manuel began to dance with a ta
ll university girl, long black hair in a loose braid down her back. She was not wearing a bra, and when they danced close he could feel her nipples against him through his cotton shirt. She’d been drinking. When the music stopped at the end of the record, she took his hand and led him toward the back of the apartment. They found an empty room and lay down on the bed.

  He lost his virginity to a dark-haired revolutionary beauty, on the same night his country elected a socialist president. If that isn’t poetic justice, I don’t know what is, he told his friends, though he left out the part about it being his first time. Besides, he added, when I asked her for her name she refused. We will always remember this night, she whispered. Let’s not mess it up with names. Okay. So that last part was an exaggeration. Afterwards, while smoking the best cigarette he’d ever had, he asked her name. But she shook her head, said something about free love, revolutionary sex, no strings. He couldn’t quite remember. But it sounded better when he told it the other way.

  Late on a spring evening, when the newly-elected socialist was just getting settled in his office at the Moneda, Manuel was up studying for his academic aptitude test. A series of clicks sounded against the window of his room. His parents were asleep, but he quickly opened the window and leaned out, finger to his lips. It was Armando. Manuel motioned him around to the kitchen door and tiptoed down the stairs. They whispered in the soft spring air.

  “What’s up, compañero? I wasn’t expecting you to show up tonight. Weren’t we supposed to meet tomorrow?”