Beyond the Ties of Blood

by Florencia Mallon

  It was a relief when, for her fifteenth birthday, her mother gave her a new Walkman. She had just started high school, and all the kids were getting them. She and Marcie compared favorite albums. But the best part was that when her mama dreamed, she could put on the earphones and turn up the music. The louder her mama dreamed, the more she turned it up. At first she listened mainly to the same music they played at their parties, like Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” and “Beat It,” or Madonna’s “Express Yourself.” Prince’s “When Doves Cry” tore her heart out every time.

  One day, when she was at the music store, she heard a different sound coming over the loudspeaker. It was not the kind of music her friends listened to. There was a twang to it that was almost like country music, the kind that made Marcie roll her eyes. It was mixed with some heavy rock guitar, and the combination really intrigued her even though she knew she could never share it with her best friend. The singer’s voice was just a bit ragged, but the energy, the anger, she didn’t know exactly what it was, but it called out to her. And then she began to listen to the words. It was something about a family, a broken home. Then the singer said he wished he knew where his father was. She walked up to the counter. The young man at the cash register had long hair and was wearing a flannel shirt. Marcie would have called him a refugee from the sixties.

  “Excuse me. Can you tell me what album’s playing right now?”

  “It’s Neil Young,” he said. “His new album ‘Freedom.’”

  “I’d like to buy it,” Laura said.

  At the beginning of December, the elections heated up in Chile. Laura was not paying too much attention, though occasionally she’d catch bits of the reports on the public radio station her mother listened to. It was then that her mother’s dreams turned violent. There were nights when she’d get home and her mother was moaning so loudly, she was afraid the neighbors would hear. Finally, one night when she got home to hear her mother howling, she decided it was enough. She took a glass of water in with her to her mother’s bedroom and set it on the night table. She came in close to the bed and placed her hand briefly on her mother’s shoulder. A sharp intake of breath, and her mother propelled herself into a sitting position. Luckily Laura managed to jump back before Mama’s whirling arm hit her right in the jaw.

  “Mama. Mama! Wake up!”

  “Ah! What?”

  “Mama, you’re dreaming. You’re howling so loud, you’re going to wake the neighbors.”

  Slowly, as her mother woke up, she calmed down. Laura felt secure enough then to sit on the edge of the bed. Her mom reached out for her and put her head on Laura’s shoulder.

  “Ay, Laurita. I can’t stand it anymore. The elections, I don’t know, they’ve just brought all these things back, I …”

  Laura felt strange with her mom’s head on her shoulder, almost as if she were the parent.

  “Is it your torture you’re dreaming about? You’ve been so loud recently, howling and everything.”

  Her mother sat upright and moved away slightly.

  “I don’t know,” she said, her face turned to the wall. “By the time I wake up, it’s gone.”

  “Have you thought about seeing a doctor? Maybe you could get some sleeping pills or something that would make you sleep deeper and not dream so much.”

  Her mama didn’t answer her, so Laura went back to turning up the volume on her Walkman.

  In the summer of 1990, Laura and Marcie discovered the Chilean group Inti-Illimani. When Laura saw an advertisement for a concert they were giving in Boston, she asked her mother if they could go.

  “Ay, Laurita, yes,” Mama said, looking up from the journal she always seemed to be writing in lately. “They’re wonderful. You’ll love them. They’d just started out when—” She cut herself off.

  “Do you want to come?” Laura asked, regretting it the moment the words were out of her mouth.

  “I don’t think so, m’hijita. The memories … I don’t know, I think I have all I can handle right now.” Laura was embarrassed at how relieved she felt.

  Marcie’s mother dropped them off at the theater. Laura couldn’t believe the number of people there who were speaking Spanish. She linked arms with Marcie, because she could see that her friend was feeling a bit disoriented and out of place. As they pushed through the crowd to find their seats, Laura felt her chest fill with a new kind of exhilaration.

  When the lights went down in the theater, the boisterous crowd was suddenly silent. All at once the curtain went up and the theater was filled with a cacophony of musical sounds. When the stage lights came up, seven men appeared. They had long hair and dark clothes, and some of them wore black ponchos. The lights at first only illuminated their craggy, serious faces, a startling contrast with the upbeat tempo of their guitars, drums, reed pipes, and other instruments. After a short hush, the audience was on its feet, cheering and clapping. One of the older members of the band, his long white mane reflecting blue and silver in the stage lights, approached the microphone. Again the crowd hushed.

  “Buenas noches.”

  The crowd responded in kind. The singer continued in Spanish.

  “My apologies to the members of the audience who cannot understand me. I’m sure their friends will translate for them.” He waited a minute for the translations, which could be heard as a muffled murmur through the crowd. Laura translated for Marcie.

  “My compañeros and I are filled with hope tonight.” A cheer went up from the crowd. “About six months ago, we Chileans inaugurated a civilian president for the first time in almost twenty years.” Another cheer. “We are honored to pass through Boston, a city that always welcomed us warmly during our long exile, on our way back down to our country to celebrate the formation of a Truth Commission.” Thunderous applause. “To mark this historic moment, we will play for you tonight a combination of some of our old favorites, with recent songs that speak directly to the situation today. We dedicate this concert to the Chilean people, and to our future as a democratic country.”

  They played for over two hours without a break. Occasionally they rested by playing quiet songs, and the audience sang along. Sometimes Laura sang words that she had never heard, and yet she knew them. She turned to Marcie from time to time and translated softly.

  After an especially energetic version of “Samba Landó,” a song about the African heritage in South America, the white-haired leader stepped again to the microphone. His hair was now plastered with sweat.

  “Don’t worry,” he said to the hushed crowd. “We’re not done yet. We’ll take a short break, and then bring out a surprise guest. And after we play a couple of songs with her, we will finish with two other songs that we know you will like.”

  They returned fifteen minutes later with a red-haired woman whom they introduced as Holly Near. The first ballad they played, by Cuban songwriter Silvio Rodríguez, brought tears to Laura’s eyes. She translated some of the words for Marcie: “I give you a song when I open a door / And you appear from the shadows / I give you a song at daybreak / When I most need your light / I give you a song when you appear, / The mystery of love, / And if you don’t appear, it doesn’t matter, / I give you a song.”

  “Why are you crying?” Marcie asked. Laura knew then that the song was about her father, his shadowy presence at daybreak when her mother woke from a dream, the mystery of her love for him.

  Holly Near stayed for one more song, a version of Violeta Parra’s “Thanks Be to Life,” transparent as a mountain stream. Then the leader was at the microphone again.

  “We want to thank you for being such a wonderful audience tonight,” he said, holding up his hand to stop the applause. “You carried us on your backs when we got tired, and I think we did a bit of the same for you. But now we are really, really exhausted. So we are going to play our encore for you now, and then leave, so there’s no point in trying to bring us back again. You can see my head, the sweat sticking to each blessed inch of each strand of hair, and my compañeros
are all in the same condition. Still, one last thank-you. With your love and energy you inspire us as we return once again to our beautiful country. We will sing three songs appropriate to the occasion: ‘Vuelvo’; ‘Llegó volando’; and ‘Las caídas.’”

  As Laura whispered to Marcie at the beginning of the first song, its title meant “I Return” and it was about an exile returning to Chile. That was all she could tell her, because after that she was once again carried on the crest of this strange-familiar music. But it was the last two songs that brought down the house. The first of the two was about dictatorship, not only in Chile but in all of Latin America, and it ended with the promise that the day would soon come when the people would fight back and bring a new dawn to the continent.

  The last song Inti-Illimani played that night was about falling dictators: “And they’ll keep falling, / there’s no doubt. / Freedom works, / suffers and sweats / and finally cleans / our land / of the sterile excrement / of the little tyrant. / Oh, what a relief!”

  The whole theater was on its feet when they were done. As the band filed off the stage, the audience locked arms and swung back and forth, chanting the last line of the song in Spanish, over and over, “Ay, qué consuelo.” Though Marcie and Laura had to leave, threading and pushing their way through the swaying crowd, it showed no signs of letting up.

  Laura rushed out the door of their apartment, a piece of bagel still in her mouth, the zipper to her backpack at half-mast. She waved acknowledgment at whatever advice her mother was giving her, not interested really in knowing what it was. She hated oversleeping and having to rush for the bus. It made her feel out of control, and unable to get ready for the day. At least she didn’t have to find a coat. After a short respite during the last week of vacation, the blazing temperatures of the August drought had returned for the first week of school.

  She managed to catch the bus, though she had to knock on its already closed door. She settled in her usual seat, the sweat stinging her eyes. Thankfully the bus was air-conditioned. Opening her backpack all the way, she felt relieved to see that her Walkman was there, one of her favorite tapes of Inti-Illimani still in it. After she and Marcie had gotten back from their concert at the end of July, she’d started collecting their albums as quickly as money permitted. Putting on her headphones, she settled back into the cool seat and closed her eyes.

  The tape had ended by the time she got to the high school, so she took off her headphones and stashed away her equipment before getting off the bus. As she stepped onto the sidewalk, Marcie came running up.

  “Laura, guess what!” Her wavy light-brown hair was caught up in a high ponytail, and she was wearing a short-sleeved blouse over a halter top. “I just ran into Simon and he asked about you. He’s hanging out with this guy Brandon, a transfer student from another high school, and they were wondering if we’d like to meet up after school. You think you can come? Do you have to ask your mom first?”

  “I don’t ask my mom anymore,” Laura said. “I just tell her.” But things turned out a little differently that day. When Laura called her mother from the public telephone near the school, her voice sounded strange and excited, but also like she’d been crying.

  “What is it, Mamita?” Laura asked.

  “No, it’s fine, Laurita, go with your friends, I’ll be all right.”

  But Laura could hear, from long experience, that her mother was not all right. She told her she’d come right home and went to find her friends. Marcie and Brandon were already talking up a storm, standing very close to each other. All three looked up when she approached, and Simon put out an arm to wrap around her shoulders.

  “Sorry, guys, I can’t go,” Laura said. “I’ll catch up with you next time.”

  When she reached their apartment, her mother was sitting in the armchair in the living room. Her eyes were red and swollen, but she was smiling. On the couch near her was a man Laura had never seen before. He seemed quite young, and a lock of his dark hair kept falling over one eye. He was sweating in his suit and tie, but one side of his jacket, from the collar to the shoulder, looked damper than the rest.

  “Laurita,” her mother said, “this is Ignacio Pérez. He’s a lawyer from the Chilean Truth Commission.”

  Ignacio stood and walked toward her, as if to give her a peck on the cheek. Laura put out her hand. He stopped himself in time and took her hand in his. “Pleased to meet you, Laura,” he said formally. Laura shook hands with him and looked back at her mother.

  “Hijita, Ignacio came because your grandparents have brought your papa’s case before the Truth Commission that has just formed in Chile. Remember when you came back from the Inti concert? They’d mentioned it and you asked me what it was? The Commission wants me to come to Chile and testify.”

  All of a sudden Laura felt like the ground was moving under her feet. She sat down on the other side of the couch.

  “Maybe the two of us can go together, Laurita. You can meet your grandparents, see Chile …”

  “What about school?” Laura asked. “I’ve just started the year.”

  “We can figure that out later, hijita. You’re so good in school, I think if you miss a month, or maybe two, you’ll have no trouble making it up. When we came from Mexico you adapted so fast and made good friends, and you learned English, and—”

  “Mama. I lost a year.”

  “You know what,” Ignacio said, making a move toward the door. “We can adapt to whatever the two of you decide, as long as you come down sometime in the next four months. Maybe during vacation? No, no, don’t worry,” he continued as Eugenia made a move to escort him down the stairs. “I know my way out. I’ll call you in the morning, all right?”

  As soon as the door closed behind Ignacio, her mother turned her back on her and moved into the kitchen, washing some things in the sink.

  “What do you want for dinner, Laurita?” she asked when she was done.

  “Nothing,” Laura answered. She went to her room and closed the door, and her mother didn’t even try to come and talk to her. Over the next few weeks as her mother and tía Irene packed up the apartment and she said goodbye to her friends, she spent a lot of time in her room listening to Neil Young’s album “Freedom.” She brought Paco out of retirement and cuddled him as she lay on the bed. But she found that she could no longer listen to Inti-Illimani.

  PART II

  VI

  Testimony

  The plane traveled on through an endless night sprinkled with stars. Like she had done for the previous two weeks, on the plane ride from Boston to Miami Laura had shut her mother out by putting on her earphones and turning up the volume on the Walkman. When the flight attendant requested that she turn it off for landing, Eugenia saw her chance and pulled the guidebook out of her bag.

  “Laurita,” she ventured, “do you want to take a look at this book? It has some really great pictures of Santiago.”

  Laura took the book from her mother’s hands and leafed through it, carelessly at first. But she was drawn to the dramatic picture of the city at sunrise, its new skyscrapers gathered in the middle of the shot like mystical towers, the snow-covered Andes mountains glowing orange with the dawn.

  “Are the mornings always like this?” she asked.

  “They were when I was growing up. But now, according to your tía Irene, the city’s grown so much that the smog often covers the mountains unless it’s been raining.”

  “Bummer,” she muttered, but kept looking through the book.

  When they switched planes in Miami, Laura had kept the book in her backpack and taken it back out once they were settled in their new seats. She asked Eugenia questions about several other pictures, including the central market, the Santa Lucía hill, and the Moneda. At least she hadn’t brought her Walkman back out, Eugenia thought.

  After the food was served and the lights dimmed, Eugenia suggested that Laura move into the unclaimed aisle seat. They’d lifted up the armrests between the seats in their row to make Laura more
comfortable, and she’d fallen into a deep sleep, her stork-like adolescent legs stretching out into the aisle, her head at an angle against Eugenia’s ribs. Now Eugenia felt trapped against the window. She couldn’t even go to the bathroom, she feared, without waking her daughter up.

  As she sat looking at the moon’s glimmering reflection on the wing outside her window, she thought back to the last two weeks of frantic preparations. As usual, Irene had been a godsend, opening up a space in the attic of her ragged old house so they could store the things they couldn’t take with them.

  “Once we’re settled I can always ask you to send anything we need,” Eugenia had said as they squeezed the last box into the corner.

  “That’s true,” Irene answered, “but you might not need these. Especially if you decide to come back.”

  Eugenia had let that last remark go. She was optimistic that, maybe, Laura would feel happy in Chile. Irene just shook her head, repeating again and again that Chile had closed up like a fist under dictatorship.

  “If you think our country was uptight under socialism, Chenyita,” Irene had said, “you should see people now. You couldn’t go back before,” she added, “but I could. I know what I’m talking about.” Eugenia had decided that she’d just wait and see.

  Ignacio told her the country was opening back up. “It’s almost like a fresh spring morning,” he said, “when you open up the window in the living room. People are breathing in the fragrance of the first honeysuckle blossoms. They know democracy is on its way back.”

  Eugenia hoped Ignacio was right. Ever since he’d held her in his arms in her Boston apartment, the need to return had been kindled somewhere deep inside. They smoldered together now, her desire for home and maybe for Ignacio, incandescent, fusing distinct memories into a single yearning. How the Andes looked on a winter morning, covered with snow after a hard rain in the city. The weeping willows of the parque forestal. The look on her mother’s face that misty morning as she held Laura, barely a month old, on the way to the airport. The roughness of Ignacio’s linen jacket on her cheek as she sat sobbing in the armchair in her Boston living room, and the way he smelled, that mix of cologne and expensive soap. She had to admit she was attracted to him.