Beyond the Ties of Blood

by Florencia Mallon

  “Manuel Bronstein.” He shook her hand briefly. Even he, freshly arrived from the provinces, knew her name had a pedigree. There were a couple of Aldunates at the University of Chile, from branches of the family that had ended up on the skids. It wasn’t unusual for this to happen in huge clans like the Aldunates, which had a bit of everything. Yet the Aldunates he’d met at the university, who didn’t have the money for a decent lunch at the subsidized student cafeteria, still looked down on those like him whose last names marked them as recent immigrants. He looked her over once again. She didn’t look like her branch had done any suffering lately.

  Annoyed by what she represented, he made some reference to how Sergio was always chasing skirts. She’d been angry, of course, but in the midst of it all she managed to exude strength and a surprising dignity. And she didn’t just walk away. He had to admit that most girls, no matter what social class they were from, wouldn’t have pulled off such dignity after some random stranger told them their boyfriend was cheating on them. So he offered to buy her a juice and they talked for a while.

  When it came time to go back to the demonstration, he was pretty sure that nothing else would come of it. She’d find Sergio, they’d make nice, and off she’d go. Even as she played at being radical, she was so much like the girls at his fancy high school in Temuco. She and Sergio deserved each other. And yet. Was it the turquoise eyes? Was it that dignified attitude, not letting him get away with anything?

  In the end, the truth was probably a lot simpler. Ever since he’d gotten to Santiago, he’d felt like one of his legs had grown longer than the other. He was constantly tripping over himself with the girls. The minute he said he was from Temuco, they’d get this strange look in their eyes, a cross between pity and disdain. This was especially true of the more political girls, who in Temuco had fallen over each other trying to get close to him. Ironic. So what was it with Santiago chicks? Maybe he’d have to settle for a greener upper-class one, more like the girls at his school.

  When he finally got Eugenia back to his apartment, it took him forever to get the key in the lock. After they climbed up the stairs he pulled her into his room and pressed her belly and thighs into him. He unzipped her jacket and pulled the turtleneck up over her head. He fumbled with the hooks on her bra, the girls he’d been with before never wore them. But then it was off, her breasts free, their large dark nipples rising up against his tongue. Only then did he see the door was still open, and managed to slam it with one kick. He turned and swept her onto his bed, removing her jeans. His large hands took off her panties and spread her thighs, her thick, musky scent inviting him in. Then she gasped and drew back.

  Armando had been right. These bourgois greenhorns were something else. She was crying. Yet when she spoke her voice was as dignified as if she had just accepted a cup of tea. Again he was off balance. What was it about this girl?

  In the first few days after the fiasco with Eugenia, Manuel spent more and more time at the café. He hadn’t been going to many of his classes anyway, but as he sat drinking red wine by himself, hours would go by and he started missing political meetings. After his buddies came by his apartment one morning to find him lying in bed, Manuel turned to the “A’s” in the telephone book, wondering idly how many Aldunates would be listed. As he thumbed through, his eyebrows slowly went up. One … two … three … five whole pages. Just out of curiosity, he told himself, to see what would happen, he started dialing from the top of the list, calling a few names a day.

  What he mainly got was irritation. Wrong number! No Eugenia here! Occasionally the person on the other end stopped for a second, then said, wait, I’ll get her. But then the voice on the other end clearly was not hers, and he would hang up. On the fourth day, twelve names in, he hit pay dirt.

  “Aldunate residence.” He could tell it was a maid.

  “Buenas tardes,” he began.

  “Buenas tardes,” she answered.

  “Is Eugenia there?”

  “May I ask who’s calling?”

  “I’m a classmate of hers at the university, I sit behind her in one of her classes. I seem to have misplaced my notebook, and I need the homework for tomorrow.”

  “Niña Eugenia is doing her homework right now. May I tell her your name?”

  “I’m in her grammar class. I’m not even sure she’ll remember me by name.”

  “All right, young man,” the maid answered. “I’ll go see if niña Eugenia is willing to talk to you.”

  For a long time he waited. If it hadn’t been for the sound of the maid’s retreating footsteps, he would have been sure she’d hung up on him. Then—

  “Hello?”

  “You’re exactly the twelfth Aldunate in the phone book. I’ve been calling four a day.”

  “I can’t talk very long right now.”

  “I’ve missed you, too.”

  “No, Manuel, you don’t understand, I—”

  “It’s okay. I think we should meet, at the same place at the Plaza Baquedano. I can be there in fifteen minutes.”

  “You know it’ll take me longer, plus it’s getting late already, I don’t know if—”

  “It’s only five in the afternoon. You can tell your mom that I’m a stupid classmate who needs your help. Play up your generous side.”

  “Mama just got back from shopping. If she’s willing to have the chauffeur drop me off, I can be there in twenty-five minutes. If I’m not there by six, it means I couldn’t get away.”

  “I’ll wait till six-fifteen. And Eugenia?”

  “Yeah?”

  “If you don’t make it, I won’t call you again. But you know where to find me.”

  She did make it, and he’d waited until she arrived before he started drinking. He needed to be in control, he’d decided. And this time they made love. It was the first time he’d called it making love instead of having sex. She made fun of him for that. Not that he’d admit it to anyone else, but maybe that was part of why he fell for her. It was nice to be teased. The Revolutionary Left girls might be freer spirits than Eugenia, but they definitely took themselves a lot more seriously. After she lost her virginity, he was sure she’d be fishing for declarations of undying love, when am I going to see you again, that kind of stuff. Instead, she made fun of him. And when he got her clothes off, she put the Revolutionary Left girls to shame.

  August gave way to September, and Allende approached the first-year anniversary of his election. Cherry and apple blossoms bloomed merrily against an incandescent blue sky, and the Mapocho River swelled with the early melting snows of the Andes. The mood in the city was also springlike. People who didn’t know each other smiled in greeting on the streets and buses.

  “The shops are full and prices are so low,” Eugenia said one day when she came back to Manuel’s place with a beef tongue for dinner. “Everyone has plenty of money in their pockets.”

  Most weeks, Eugenia stayed downtown several times, saying she was sleeping at her sister’s apartment. Manuel’s organization had brought in another activist to help with the land takeovers along the edges of the city, and they managed leisurely meals most evenings she stayed over. Sometimes they’d invite Irene and her friend Gabriela and share the preparations of a chicken or lamb shank stew served with fresh bread from the corner bakery. It was the most domestic Manuel had been since David died.

  But spring was short, and things heated up everywhere as summer approached. With the Christmas holidays around the corner, the right-wing newspapers began to carry horror stories about the lack of basic goods, such as toilet paper, oil, and soap. Mainly it was propaganda, of course, an attempt to whip up a fear of shortages. One headline after another screamed about children not getting toys that year and that it was Allende and his government’s fault. In the week before Christmas, the rumored scarcity of flour, sugar, and eggs sent everyone into the stores to stock up, and thus real shortages did develop.

  “When I was home last week, I told my mother that hoarding had actually creat
ed shortages where none existed before,” Eugenia commented shortly after the New Year. “But she asked me when I’d become such a leftist, and accused me of thinking the government was doing a good job.”

  “Did you say that was exactly what you thought?” Manuel asked, laughing.

  “I don’t think that would’ve gone over very well,” Eugenia said. “She had a group of her friends over, and they were clearly plotting something. They would go quiet when Teresa or I walked into the room. They’d start talking again when we left. Only yesterday did I finally figure out what that was about.”

  Eugenia was referring to the demonstration that had marched on the presidential palace, a crowd of mainly upper-class women who had banged on empty pots to dramatize the shortages.

  “Mama was in on it, I’m sure of it,” she said.

  Manuel smiled. “If my mother were in Santiago, I’m sure that’s exactly what she’d be doing too,” he said. “It’s the class struggle. It’s supposed to deepen now, you know. It isn’t often that the workers have the upper hand.” And people like Eugenia’s and Manuel’s mothers couldn’t stand it.

  But they began to wonder if the workers really did have the upper hand. As summer faded into the Chilean fall and winter of 1972, the lines to buy bread, milk, oil, and soap, while everywhere, were still the longest in the working-class neighborhoods. Inflation kept getting worse, and it was clear that supplies of basic goods could not keep up with the new demand caused by workers’ increasing incomes.

  “It’s ridiculous,” Gabriela said one day when they were eating stew at Irene’s apartment, the half-chicken they’d begged through Manuel’s contacts in the Revolutionary Left cut up into tiny pieces among the four of them. “My mama says she doesn’t know how she’s gonna make it to the end of the month. Prices keep going up, and even if Papa’s getting paid better than ever before, it doesn’t go half as far.”

  Eugenia and Manuel began to see the wear and tear on people’s bodies, the way they walked, the glassy stares in their eyes. There was a tightness, a tension right below the surface. In restaurants, on street corners and buses, the slightest misunderstanding would lead immediately to a shouting match, even to physical confrontation, especially when the people involved were from different social classes.

  One afternoon in August, when the rains were hard and cold, Manuel and Eugenia came running up the stairs to the apartment, shaking the water from their umbrellas and laughing. They stopped short at the sight of the landlady, a brawny, square-bodied woman with worn hands and missing teeth.

  “Buenas tardes,” she said, her stance squared off like a boxer’s.

  “Buenas tardes, señora,” Manuel answered respectfully. “It’s really cold and wet today.”

  She nodded in agreement, then stiffly in Eugenia’s general direction, before passing him a slim envelope. “I’m sorry, but I need the apartment for someone else. You’ll have to be out by Monday.”

  “But señora, according to the law you must give people a month’s notice, I can’t find something by—”

  She cut him off abruptly with a chop of her hand in the air. “This isn’t about the law. Some of the people who come up to see you, well … the neighbors are complaining.” She rushed down the stairs and out the door, not seeming to mind the downpour as she hurried across the street.

  Manuel stood still for a moment, staring at the envelope in his hand. Shaking his head, he took out the key and opened the door. They started the heater in silence and put a kettle of water on for tea. Manuel put the tea leaves to steep in the pot and walked slowly over to where Eugenia was setting out the bread and jam, her face clouded.

  “People are getting scared,” he said.

  “What do you mean?” Eugenia asked, although the undertone to her voice hinted that she probably suspected.

  “Well, you know the stories coming out in the opposition papers. That the Left is organizing a coup in order to get rid of Congress and the right wing. That we’re planning another Cuba.”

  They sat down at the kitchen table. Eugenia put some jam on a piece of bread and stirred some sugar into her tea. “That’s not what she said. What about the time I came back unexpectedly last month? All those dirty, rowdy guys, smoking black tobacco and drinking cheap wine. It was a mess! You don’t think the neighbors could hear you?”

  They were quiet for a while, neither of them wanting to remember that moment in too much detail. When Manuel spoke, his voice was low.

  “You’re right, mi amor. But we’re part of the world-historical struggle for socialism. We can’t just give up because a landlady gets scared. Everyone has to do their part.”

  “I know,” Eugenia answered softly. “But I would be willing to wager a lot of money that the world struggle for socialism will not repay your loyalty by finding you a new place to live.”

  Classes started late in the fall of Allende’s third year in office. A confrontation between right-wing and left-wing students closed down the Catholic University at the beginning of the semester, and the leftist majority at the University of Chile went out on strike in solidarity with their comrades. As a result, both institutions called a delay in the start of classes until the end of April. Manuel had managed to find a new apartment, a third-floor walk-up composed of a single room with a tiny sink and gas-powered hotplate. The bathroom was out in the hall, and there wasn’t space for their couch or coffee table. Eugenia had been angry, but they’d made up and she was staying over again most nights.

  The first Tuesday in June began normally enough. Eugenia’s class didn’t start until ten, so they lingered longer in bed, drinking coffee. By the time he got to the new shantytown along the eastern side of the city, the one taking shape from the takeover the week before, it was close to eleven.

  “Manolito!” The creases along Sonia’s cheeks folded together into pleats as she smiled, opening the door to her shack and inviting him in. She was from Temuco, too, and he’d told her about his grandma’s pet name for him. “Sit down! A mate tea will help warm you up, then you can go to the construction, help the compañeros build the school.” Between the mates and the homemade bread Sonia took out of the wood-burning oven in her potbellied stove, he didn’t make it to the construction site until noon. He settled into the hard rhythm of the work, and the hours passed quickly. The next thing Manuel knew, it was close to six.

  “Shit. I’m gonna be late again,” he told Hernán, his buddy from the Revolutionary Left who’d been working next to him. “Eugenia’s already been on my case about this, but I can’t help it, the buses are damn full this time of day and—”

  A shout went up from the guard on duty. They always had a guard at the new shantytowns, especially in this part of town where the neighbors were notoriously hostile.

  “Momios! At two o’clock!”

  All the men working on the school stood up in unison, looking around for sticks of wood just in case. It was hard to tell who was coming and how many through the late afternoon light. As they marched through the empty field, dust billowed up around them, forming a curtain that caught the flat undertones of the setting sun. Besides, momios was a pretty general term, meaning conservatives, people opposed to the government, anyone who seemed even remotely upper-class.

  These momios were goons from the New Fatherland, the fascist political party that formed as soon as Allende got elected. As things had heated up over the previous six months, their influence had spread to the more upper-class, right-wing student groups at the Catholic University. Rumor had it that they were behind the recent wave of confrontations there, and responsible for the increasing violence on the streets. This group looked pretty young, probably all university students, and there were lots of them. The yells and blows, the dust. The taste of blood between his lips. His fall to earth was in slow motion, only one thought sharp in his mind: how’d the son of a bitch get ahold of my hammer?

  He woke to Sonia’s worried face as she placed another cold rag on his cheek. “I think the cheekbone’s b
roken,” she whispered. “It’s very swollen.” And then the pain nearly made him pass out again.

  By the time he was revived enough to try standing, Hernán at his side to keep him from falling, it was pitch black outside. Fortified by several mates laced with cheap pisco, he was able to walk, if a bit wobbly, with Hernán’s help. They made it to the bus stop, and the fresh air helped him walk straighter. Hernán stayed with him till his stop, and continued to prop him up as they walked the three blocks to his building. Making it up to his apartment was definitely a stretch. Hernán was staggering under his weight by the last flight of stairs. But Eugenia must have heard them, because the door was open by the time they reached it.

  It all came back at him in her gasp—his swollen face caked with blood, the haggard look on Hernán’s face. “Oh, God,” was all she said. Then she had him by the waist, taking over from his friend, her sobs stabbing through his temples. Behind her, he just made out Irene and Gabriela, sitting at the table, leaping to their feet as he stumbled in.

  It took Manuel’s cheekbone a full month to heal. A friend of Irene’s at the University of Chile Medical School saw him for free and gave him pain medication that made him useless to his comrades at the land takeovers.

  “Don’t worry about it, compadre,” Hernán told him during a visit in the middle of June. “There’s not much we can do there anymore, there aren’t enough of us. The party’s pulling us from all those resettlement projects anyway. We gotta concentrate on the New Fatherland goons. They’re getting bolder all the time, you know, and they’re even trying to recruit at the University of Chile now. They’re like sharks that smell blood in the water. We have to defend ourselves every day on the streets.” No kidding, Manuel thought to himself.

  As his comrades got more and more involved in street fighting, Manuel had trouble seeing the connection to the rights they were supposed to be defending. He was reminded of his high school friends in Temuco, who had seemed more interested in sex than in justice. In this case, they seemed more interested in the confrontation itself. True, the images on television, with most reporters and stations in opposition to the government, were sensationalist and put the Revolutionary Left in the worst possible light. Yet too often his compañeros just seemed to enjoy the violent rush of the moment, the thrill for blood. He moved further and further into the background, his injury the excuse and Eugenia his refuge. They talked late into the night about the solidarity that had seemed so palpable even a few short months before. He could still trace its shape between her shoulder blades and along the moonlit curve of her back.