Beyond the Ties of Blood

by Florencia Mallon

  She got off the bus at a stop two blocks further up from the gas station where their room was located. It was about three in the afternoon. She sat down on a bench at the stop for a few minutes, trying to figure out her plan. Then she saw Eugenia walking toward the gas station, carrying what looked like a bag of food. Of course. They had mentioned they really didn’t have a kitchen. She got up quickly and crossed the street.

  “Chenyita,” she said softly, falling into step with her on the block before the gas station.

  “Oh! Nenita!” Her sister jumped, then seemed to want to hug her, but managed to control herself and keep walking. “I’m sorry,” she said, looking straight ahead. “I can’t call attention to myself.”

  “Wait a minute,” Irene said, “just stop walking for a minute. Are you all right?”

  Eugenia stopped at the corner of her block and stood, looking back and forth across the street, as if she were trying to decide whether or not to cross. “Yes,” she said. “At least for the moment. Manuel’s holed up in the room. Some of his compañeros have already been taken, according to the tabloids, but he may be lucky. You know when he broke his cheekbone? The distance he took from the group then may have helped him. At least we’re hoping it will.”

  “But what are you going to do in the long run? Living in this room, eating out of paper bags, maybe for a month or so, but then what?”

  Eugenia shook her head and turned to go. “Can’t think that far ahead,” she whispered. In the brief moment she met her sister’s eyes, Irene saw nothing but the grey of a tomb.

  The day after Irene saw Eugenia, the Canadian embassy called with the news that Gabriela’s father was next in line for asylum. One of the human-rights networks that had developed clandestinely over the previous weeks was in charge of getting refugees into the embassy, and Gabriela took one of its members to visit her family and work through the details of exile.

  “They’re happy but nervous,” Gabriela reported when she got back to the apartment. “The woman who came to the house with me explained that only Papa would go through the embassy. The rest of us can just go to the airport and meet him there. They’ll arrange visas to Canada, and have a place for us in Toronto.”

  “Us?” Irene asked. “Since when are they us?”

  They were finishing dinner. Gabriela stood up and took the plates to the sink. She busied herself washing and rinsing, then drying, then putting everything away. Irene stood next to the table, watching silently.

  “Since when is it us with them?” she asked again when Gabriela was done and had lit a cigarette. “For a while now, when I’ve heard the word us, it’s meant you and me.”

  Still standing by the sink, Gabriela smoked quietly for a while. After putting out the cigarette in some cold water from the sink, she threw the butt in the trash, walked over, and took Irene’s hand. She brought Irene’s arm around her own waist and held on tightly.

  “It’s still you and me, Nenita,” she whispered. The exhale of breath tickled the right side of Irene’s collarbone, and the smell of fresh smoke filled her nose.

  “Then I don’t get it,” Irene said.

  “I don’t have to tell you that Chile’s changed,” Gabriela said, pulling away.

  “But what does that have to do with us?”

  “It’s not something you’ll have noticed, Nenita, because it won’t happen to you. But now, people with my coloring, my background, we’re suspect. We have working-class written all over us.”

  “But your job is safe, so is your life with me. Dr. McKinley and I, we’d protect you if something were ever to—”

  “I know that, mi amor.”

  “Then why?”

  “It’s the weirdest thing. During the last government, there was so much talk about class struggle and everything, yet I felt class differences didn’t matter as much. I could be where I wanted, do what I wanted. Now, that doesn’t seem possible. And the idea of not seeing my family, any part of my family, for who knows how long? It’s just unbearable.”

  “And me? What about me?”

  “If I really had a choice, Nenita, I’d always choose you. But whatever changes were going on in Chile, however much my family was a part of them, you and I could never really be open about our relationship.”

  “I can understand that with my mother. But your mama and papa, they were always so accepting.”

  “They like you a lot, and I think deep down, even though they’d never say so openly, they know we’re living together. But now it’s different. They’re leaving the country, and they may never come back. If you were a man, if I were about to get married, have children … they might accept that. But if I stayed behind because of you, they would never speak to me again.”

  A week later, Gabriela and her family left the country. Under the circumstances, Irene did not go to the airport to say good-bye. They stood in the foyer, right inside the door to their building, holding hands and waiting for the taxi.

  “I’ll look for a job in Toronto, too, you’ll see.”

  “Don’t, Nenita.”

  “I speak good English, and with my MIT background …”

  “Don’t.”

  “You’ll barely have unpacked your bag and gotten settled, when the phone will ring, and …”

  The horn of the taxi sounded. Gabriela turned and, for a long minute, took Irene’s face in her hands. She gave her a quick kiss on the lips, bent down to pick up her bag, and slammed out the door. Like a fist, a smoky wave of sandalwood hit Irene full in the face. For a very, very long time Irene would dream of that last look, the sadness and loss in Gabriela’s eyes. And she would know that only part of it was for her.

  On the Sunday afternoon after Gabriela left, unable to bear the emptiness of her apartment, Irene took the same bus over to Eugenia’s neighborhood. It was about one-thirty, when she and Gabriela were usually having a late lunch, laughing over glasses of red wine. The minute she got off the bus, she knew something was wrong. Staying on the opposite side of the street, she walked back until she was even with the gas station and looked across, behind the pumps. The door to the room was hanging crazily, like an arm broken at the elbow, halfway off its hinges.

  She ran across the street. Inside, a table and two chairs were lying on their sides. A small unmade bed against the wall had collapsed in on itself, a body with a broken spine. The two cupboards over the sink lay open, doors torn completely off their hinges, their dishes and glasses, shards now, scattered on the cement floor.

  She stepped into the room. The smell of fear floated, feather-like, across her face. They were taken, she thought, and leaned dizzily against the wall.

  “What do you think you’re doing?”

  She looked up and tried to focus. A balding, middle-aged man in overalls, the kind used by mechanics, was staring at her, arms folded angrily across his barrel chest.

  “What happened?” Her lips felt swollen shut. “Do you know what happened?”

  “What does it matter to you?”

  “Are you the owner?”

  “Who’s asking?”

  “The young woman who was living here, the one with the turquoise eyes?”

  “What about her?”

  “She’s my sister.”

  The man crumpled. “The soldiers came not more than an hour ago,” he said softly. “I’d be careful if I were you. No sense in going around yelling, getting yourself into trouble. Think of your mother. At least she still has you.”

  Irene could not bring herself to go back to her apartment. She imagined her first loss, that spiky, ugly thing that had already unpacked its bag and made a bed for itself in the middle of her living room, making room on the floor for this second one. She decided instead that, before the curfew began, she would take a taxi to her mother’s house. Besides, she realized, doña Isabel was entitled to know. Think of your mother, the man had said.

  She let herself in, using the keys to the gate and the front door that she had kept from when she was a teenager. Her mother wa
s sitting in the living room watching television.

  “Irene! What are you doing here, I wasn’t expecting you, is—” Doña Isabel’s voice trailed off when she got a look at her daughter’s face. She opened her arms and Irene fell into them, surprising them both with her sobs.

  “It’s Chenyita, isn’t it,” doña Isabel said once Irene started to calm down. “She’s gone, isn’t she?” Irene nodded. “That revolutionary boyfriend of hers, is he gone, too?”

  Irene sat up. “They’re both gone. I went by their room. The soldiers came this morning.”

  “I knew it! I knew that horrible bastard would get her killed! What came over her? What in the hell came over her?”

  “Now, Mamita, it’s not their fault, they—”

  “Don’t start with that now! Who was he? Was he the one Sergio told me about, who flirted with her at that demonstration? Was he that criminal from the south who came to Santiago running from the police? You met him, Irene, you tell me! How in God’s name could Chenyita fall for someone like that? How could she?”

  The sun rose and set, then rose again, and still they sat in the living room. They did not open the curtains. They did not eat. Irene watched her mother stand and pace, then sit and pound her fist against the sofa, then stand and pace again. The same questions, over and over, with the short ones providing the drumbeat: What came over her? Who was he? How could she? She did not really want an answer, it was her way of grieving. All Irene could do was listen, and compare her image of Manuel, the idealistic and scruffy refugee from a wealthy family, to her mother’s diabolical leftist, complete with fangs, claws, and tail.

  After Eugenia and Manuel disappeared, a dark curtain fell across Irene’s life. She continued working in the lab, but found it harder and harder to return each day to her apartment. Sitting at her kitchen table, she would suddenly remember an evening when she and Gabriela, Manuel, and Eugenia sat laughing over glasses of wine. If she took a cup of tea into the living room, she pictured the first night with Gabriela. Although she now visited her mother regularly, their inevitable political fights made it hard to imagine that she could ever move back in.

  The only thing that kept her sane was driving for the group that made asylum runs to the Canadian embassy. When there was a “delivery” to make, as they called it, Irene drove a late-model sedan. She varied the color and make to prevent easy identification. Sometimes she used Dr. McKinley’s dark blue Cadillac, sometimes a car belonging to a sympathetic colleague. She even persuaded her mother’s chauffeur to lend her the family car every now and then.

  The person seeking asylum hid in the trunk of the car, under some blankets and what hopefully looked like random disorder. It was easier, they found, for a younger woman, nicely dressed, to get through the numerous patrols that surrounded each embassy, so it was Irene who made most of the “deliveries.” She took a foreign man with her, often Dr. McKinley, and if the military police stopped them he pretended not to speak Spanish and showed his Canadian passport. She smiled and translated, saying she was taking her husband to the embassy to renew his visa.

  When they arrived at the embassy they both got out, speaking English, and looked to see if the front door was slightly cracked open. If it was, they opened the trunk, arguing about something or other as couples do, and quickly pulled out the “delivery,” who ran for the door. At first, before the military police near the embassy had been tipped off to expect such maneuvers, they could get the person inside, slam the trunk back down and take off, before anyone noticed. The more people sought asylum, and the more the Canadian embassy got a reputation for accepting refugees, the harder it was to use the front door. They were restricted to clandestine operations, mostly after curfew, in which several strong men would throw the “delivery” over the wall.

  Irene liked the nights with no moon or an overcast sky. She had grown up in Santiago and knew her curves by touch, almost like a lover. On dark nights, she moved from memory, guided by little more than her intuition. It was on nights like these that she could meet the city on equal terms, grabbing this sudden stranger by her murky throat, wringing revenge for the loss of the two women she loved most in the world. It was on these nights that she felt she could face down the evil dictator, and win.

  Two separate times, after they had successfully made over-the-wall deliveries, Irene had to drive like mad when they were sighted by patrols. Her knowledge of Santiago was a godsend, as was her experience driving the back roads and hairpin curves near her family farm. The first time, she escaped the soldiers by driving off the street into a plaza, swerving to avoid the benches, then out on the other end onto a side street. The second time, she crossed the Mapocho River and drove deep into the Bellavista neighborhood, pulling up between two other cars in an alleyway and turning off the lights.

  After that, Dr. McKinley said she could not continue. He worried that she had been identified. He and the others also began to suspect that she was enjoying the chase too much. On the last occasion, one of them said, she seemed to wait around a little longer than necessary, as if she wanted to be seen. So they insisted she stop driving the cars. They couldn’t afford to have the whole operation broken apart, so they put her on desk duty, keeping track of new requests and trying to persuade the embassies to increase their quotas.

  By that point, the lease had come due on her apartment. She moved back in with her mother, where she was a great deal safer and more secure. No one would suspect that she was using her mother’s phone to arrange the escape of so-called subversives, and even though she was pretty sure her mother knew about it, they never discussed it.

  One day at the beginning of April, when as usual she answered the phone sitting in the study she’d set up on the second floor of her mother’s house, the voice on the other end was so soft that she could barely understand what the woman was saying.

  “Hello? Is this the Aldunate residence?”

  “Yes?” People looking to leave the country usually asked for “la señora Irene,” so she was on her guard at this unfamiliar salutation.

  “Could I speak with Irene, please?”

  “Who’s calling?”

  “I’m sorry, señora, but I would like to identify myself to Irene.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Let’s just say I have news about someone she’s been worrying about for a long time.”

  Had something happened to Gabriela? “I’m Irene,” she said. There was a sigh of relief on the other end of the phone.

  “Good. Irene, all I can say right now is that I have news about your sister. There’s a juice place near the Plaza Baquedano, she said you’d know which one. Tomorrow at three P.M.”

  The next afternoon, at a table under the awning of Eugenia and Manuel’s favorite place, Irene sat with a short, beige-colored young woman with brown curly hair who could not have been older than nineteen. From her, Irene learned that her sister had been taken to one of Santiago’s worst torture camps, Villa Gardenia.

  “I was a prisoner there too,” the woman said. She unbuttoned the cuffs of her blouse, rolling up the sleeves to show the purple marks of electricity. “I wasn’t an important catch. Not even my boyfriend, who was their target, was really involved in anything. They let me go, finally, into my parents’ custody, but only if I left the country. I leave for Sweden this Friday.

  “I saw your sister. We were in the same cell for a couple of nights right before I was released. They had moved her into a different part of the camp, because she’s pregnant. She’s been badly tortured, but she’s alive. She said to call and tell you she’s alive.”

  Boston, 1986

  Irene sat in her kitchen in the early-morning sun. She had grown to love this old house, its large, pockmarked eaves hanging, like protective arms, over the flowerbeds on both sides. The first summer, she’d sat out on the small porch and tried to make sense of the growth that appeared, like magic, from the soil. Were these weeds to pull out? Perennials she should nurture? The gardening book she’d bought
had insisted that when faced with an old garden, you needed to let a year go by before you could tell what you would want to keep and what you needed to pull out. She had come to believe that it was good advice for her life too.

  Irene had been back in Boston for about four years before she’d finally decided to settle down and buy a house. After Eugenia’s exile from Chile, she had allowed the frenetic routine of the Chilean human-rights community to take over her life. She continued helping exiles leave the country, but the work became increasingly bureaucratic. Finally, as the dictatorship got ready to legitimate itself and its new constitution at the polls, she decided she’d had enough.

  On the spur of the moment, she wrote her old professor at MIT and asked if she might go back to finish her degree. She started again in January of 1981, almost ten years after she’d gone back to Chile. Enough had changed in her field that she needed two and a half years to finish, but her professor was sufficiently impressed with her past work and her story to offer her a full-time assistantship in his lab when she was done.

  Two years later and less than three months after Irene had moved into her house, the earthquake hit Mexico City. Eugenia called in a panic, and it had seemed the most natural thing in the world for Irene to look around the Boston area for anything that might bring her sister and niece closer. At her suggestion Eugenia had applied for a fellowship in multicultural reporting at Carmichael College. When Eugenia got it, Irene invited them to move in with her. But she’d forgotten about the schools, which were important for Laura. So finally she’d found them an apartment just over the line into the Brookline school district.

  Toward the end of October, with Eugenia settled into her office and Laura finally placed in school, they had planned a belated party for Laura’s twelfth birthday. Irene and Eugenia bought a cake for a family celebration and, after some hesitation, Irene invited her new girlfriend Amanda. They drank cider with the cake and drove out into the countryside for a pumpkin. When Irene had explained to Laura that they must hollow it out and carve a scary face on the front, Amanda offered to help. The result was an intricate design with curlicues for eyebrows and individual teeth in the smile, and Laura had insisted it seemed happy rather than scary. But Irene thought it looked absolutely fantastic with a burning candle inside for Halloween.