Beyond the Ties of Blood

by Florencia Mallon

  “Don’t worry about it,” Eugenia answered. “I think I need to start reorienting myself in the city. It’s near a metro stop, isn’t it?” At Ignacio’s nod, she continued. “Then just give me the papers and I’ll go on my own. I’ll need to start going out by myself at some point, no?”

  Eugenia made her way through the crowd filling the metro station and found the exit, climbing the long escalator that rose slowly toward the street, passing right by the blind beggar who had managed to place himself strategically at the very top. Surely she was not the only person to ignore him, for the sound from his cup when he shook it was flat with the selfishness of that morning’s rush-hour crowd. She emerged from the subway facing north, toward the Mapocho River. The Andes, still sporting a cover of winter snow, could be seen clearly to her right now that the most recent batch of spring drizzle had passed through.

  She walked toward the west. In front of her stood the old Mapocho railroad station, its antique wrought-iron decorations standing out against the transparent blue sky. Then she turned right and crossed the bridge over the river, which was beginning to swell with the spring thaw. Almost immediately to her left she saw the old mansion, huge and past its prime, that now served as headquarters for the Investigative Police. She crossed the street, suddenly aware of a trembling in her knees. She passed through the small and ragged Plaza Neruda, named after Pablo Neruda, one of Chile’s two Nobel Prize–winning poets. Given that Neruda had been a member of the Communist Party, she was not surprised that it had been left to decay under the dictatorship. She reached the corner where the entrance to the International Police section was located. A guard blocked her path, cradling a machine gun on his right forearm.

  “Good morning, señora,” he said. “Can I help you find what you need?”

  She felt frozen in place, like a rabbit caught between the headlights of a truck, conscious of the sweating in her palms. “Good morning,” she managed to answer. “Where would I recertify my Chilean citizenship?”

  She thought she noticed a hardening along the guard’s jaw. “You’re already the fifth one this morning, señora,” he replied, as if somehow this imposition was her fault. “It’s the first window on your left as you enter the door right behind me.”

  She thanked the guard and walked in. Once her eyes grew accustomed to the dark inside the old mansion, she was able to see the window he had mentioned, where only two of the threatened five individuals were still waiting. She had all the needed documentation in the right order, so once she made it to the window the uniformed woman looked through the folder, then up at her, and nodded. “We will contact you in about four weeks,” she said, already looking behind Eugenia.

  “Excuse me, one more question,” Eugenia ventured. The woman looked back at her. “Where would I go to apply for Chilean citizenship for my daughter? She’s a Mexican citizen.”

  The woman’s eyes rested briefly on her. “Down the hall to your left and follow the signs to the Naturalization Office,” she said. “Be sure to take a number. Next!”

  Eugenia turned to the left, and almost immediately saw the promised sign ahead of her at the other end of the large indoor courtyard. After taking a number from the small red dispenser, she sat back in her chair and began to relax, examining her surrroundings. it was clearly an aristocratic mansion, the kind that had been very stylish about a century before. Two floors of rooms opened out onto the central patio, each with its own hallways. There were staircases along the edges of the common space where she was sitting. It had probably been the Santiago home of an important landowning family, and when they had lived in it, the interior courtyard must have been full of geraniums, carnations, gardenias, and potted palms, with perhaps one or two honeysuckle bushes and even a rabbit hutch. All the rooms had high ceilings, and the doors that opened up into the center of the house were all double, with glass panels on the top half that could be opened separately in order to improve the ventilation.

  The nineteenth-century ambiance quickly dissipated once she glanced at the windows of the various offices lining the courtyard, with their posters that proclaimed such slogans as: “The Investigative Police: Working to Preserve Your Security”; or “The Investigative Police: We Work So You Can Have Peace and Security in the New Chile.” Men and women in grey suits moved quickly, their chins held up at purposeful, businesslike angles, from one office to the next. While there was clearly an effort to make it all look civilian and democratic, she thought, it was hard to get beyond the presence of the soldiers, stationed one to each door, along the circumference of the courtyard. Wearing helmets and holding automatic weapons, they stared directly in front with looks that were familiar. So much so, in fact, that suddenly she could not breathe.

  She leaned back, trying to rest against the wooden chair. In an attempt to get her mind off the soldiers, she looked up toward the skylight that enclosed the courtyard from above. An attack of vertigo grabbed hold of her, and cold sweat gathered on her forehead and upper lip. The leaded glass in the skylight, she’d seen it somewhere before. And the shadows, shadows of bodies, their arms and legs spread out in all directions, woven together into human branches reflected through the glass, and from the rooms on the upper floor the screams of pain …

  “Señorita? You all right?” An anxious brown face with high cheekbones, very close to hers, cut off her view of the skylight.

  “Yes. Thank you. I’m fine.”

  “They just called your number, yes? Sixty-eight.”

  She walked into the office and found a man with kindhearted wrinkles around his eyes. When she realized she still couldn’t talk in a normal voice, she simply handed him Laura’s Mexican passport with its temporary residence visa. He looked it over silently for a few minutes.

  “Laura Bronstein Aldunate.” A smile played with the edges of his thick lips. “Excuse me, señora. Is she your daughter?” When Eugenia nodded, the smile spread across his face. “Please excuse my amusement. The name seems to be quite an unusual combination. In the fifteen years I’ve worked in this office I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  Inexplicably, his banter calmed Eugenia, and she answered with a smile of her own. “I understand,” she said. “She’s the product of a very different historical moment.” But as she remembered, her eyes filled with tears. She was startled to see the beginnings of a humid empathy in the eyes of the man behind the desk. He was suddenly very busy, taking the forms out of his desk drawer, separating each page with a carbon, tapping it all against the desktop before putting it into his old typewriter. When he looked back up at her, he had regained the manner of a typical bureaucrat, even as a warm, sweet glimmer seemed to linger in his gaze.

  “So you wish to apply for Chilean citizenship for your daughter.”

  “That’s right, señor. We’ve always thought she was Chilean. After all, she was born in Santiago, even if it was the Mexican embassy.”

  “Yes, señora. That information is reproduced clearly in the passport.”

  He had cut in rapidly, interrupting her, almost as if he were afraid she would say too much. For a few moments the slow, methodical tapping of his fingers on the keys of the manual typewriter was interrupted only by his occasional routine question. Work? Family in Chile? Long-term plans? When he reached the end of the form, he pulled the three copies off the typewriter carriage with an exaggerated flourish and handed her one of the carbons.

  “With this copy, señora, you must take Laura with you to the Foreign Relations Ministry and present a formal petition for citizenship, with two passport-size photos, plus Laura’s own signature and fingerprints. Then you wait.”

  “How long do you think …”

  “Impossible to say, it’s totally unpredictable.” He cut her off quickly, dismissing her with a single gesture of his right hand. Afterward he stood up, offering her the same hand in a more formal good-bye.

  Eugenia stood also, and after shaking his hand she left quickly, picking up speed, passing through the main door, past the g
uard, then to her right along the edge of the squalid Plaza Neruda, and out to the main avenue. She did not slow down until she reached the metro.

  His official telephone voice changed quickly once he heard her. “Eugenia? What is it? What happened?”

  “I-i-i-t’s … I j-j-ust …” She choked, and could not continue.

  “Are you all right? Is Laura?”

  “F-f-fine … I …”

  “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

  She was waiting outside the gate when he pulled up, bag over her shoulder. Her eyes filled with tears the minute she sat down next to him and, despite her best efforts, they began trickling down her cheeks. Motioning to Custodio to pull away, Ignacio put an arm around her. “Just drive along the Costanera,” he said to the driver, “and take the road up the San Cristóbal hill.”

  Rather than ask her questions, Ignacio sat quietly, rubbing a hand gently along the nape of her neck. By the time the car had climbed the hill and was near the top of the paved road, she had managed to stop crying. After signaling to Custodio to wait for them in the parking lot, Ignacio got out of the car, came around the back, and opened the door on Eugenia’s side. She took his offered hand and allowed him to help her out. He kept her hand in his, and they walked toward the patio of the new hotel that dominated the best view of the city.

  “Would you like to sit and have some coffee?” he asked.

  Eugenia shook her head. “Let’s just walk out to the terrace,” she said.

  They stood at the edge of the viewing ledge. Letting go of her hand, Ignacio put an arm around her shoulders as they looked out over the city. It was later in the day, and the clarity of the morning had disappeared. Smog now covered the horizon in all directions.

  The skyline had changed so much. The city had expanded both up and out, glass and steel skyscrapers now dominating the area east of downtown. Even further toward the mountains, large housing developments climbed into the foothills, disappearing behind the smoky curtain of pollution that hung down into the valley. She could still see the little cable cars that made their way slowly up and down, connecting the station at the edge of the Bellavista neighborhood below to the beginning of the pedestrian paths to their right. But the people riding them could no longer get that breathtaking view of the snow-capped peaks that had been there every morning as she was growing up. The memory of those mountains framed in the window of her childhood room when she woke up mixed now with the image of the bodies, also framed, arms and legs splayed, in the skylight above the patio of the Investigative Police.

  “Can you tell me what happened?” Ignacio asked.

  She felt new tears gathering in her eyes. “It was just that this morning … well, I took the metro down to the offices of the investigative Police.”

  “Did they give you trouble? They shouldn’t have. I made sure all the papers were in order, they should just have—”

  “No, there was no problem. In fact the lady took my folder without even asking me any questions.”

  “Was it the office in charge of the citizenship applications? Did the guy give you a hard time about Laura? I can find out who he was.”

  “No, he was very nice. I just need to take Laura down to Foreign Relations, and then everything will follow its normal course.”

  “So what was the problem?” Ignacio was sounding increasingly confused.

  “Well, I don’t know exactly how to put it,” she began. “Maybe it’s just the stress I’ve been under, you know, coming back, Laura, my mother and everything …”

  “Did anything happen at the police offices this morning to set it off?”

  “I was just getting to that, it’s just that now—well … I feel kind of embarrassed.”

  “You know you can tell me anything. And believe me, by this point, with all the stories I’ve heard from survivors, from the families of the disappeared … nothing you can say will shock me, you can be sure of that.”

  “Well. It was when I went back to talk to someone about Laura. You’ve been there, right? It’s in the back of this old-style mansion. All the offices open up from the central patio. It looked so familiar, you know, so many of the old houses the wealthy families used to have in Santiago, that patio with the flowers, the skylight overhead. I don’t know. Maybe it was the soldiers standing guard at the doors, with their helmets and guns. There was just a moment when I must have started hallucinating, I don’t know, I looked up and—I swear, Ignacio, there were shadows of bodies reflected against the glass of the skylight, dead people, their arms and legs sort of intertwined, almost like a thicket of brambles. And then the screams—” She choked up, unable to continue.

  His arm tightened around her, and he ran a hand through her hair. “Do you remember being held there?” he asked. After she shook her head, he continued. “Some people have come into the Commission and told stories like this. They go into a government building, and even though they’ve never been there before, they break into a cold sweat. Sometimes they hear screams of pain, sometimes through a set of French doors, or a skylight, like in your case, they can see dead bodies, or heads of bodies.

  “The first time it happened, I chalked it up to psychological trauma. But after it happened a few more times, I started wondering. There isn’t much about it in the mainstream psychology literature, that’s for sure. Believe me, I checked. Then I interviewed the sister of a disappeared union leader who turned out to be one of these natural healers. You know, massage therapy, herbs, that kind of thing. And she told me that the body has a different way of storing memory than the brain. We’re not conscious of it, she said, but bodies carry the memory of earlier wounds, and when something sets them off, a connection of some sort, suddenly they remember.

  “At first it was all too New Age for me, you know? But I started to keep track. And when people told me stories like this, it turned out that they were themselves victims of torture. Their bodies were remembering. Something is still out there, lurking in the corners of this country. And it’s you, people like you, who can tell.”

  He had brought her even closer as he talked. Now he placed a hand on the side of her face and brought her lips to his for a deep kiss, mouth open. She’d forgotten what it felt like, desire coming up through her belly, not able to get close enough, his young back and shoulders, hard thighs pressing, lifting her off the ground. Then the sound of the car horn.

  “Don Ignacio!” Custodio’s voice rang out. “An urgent call on the car phone!”

  “I’m sorry. Still working.” His voice was hoarse as he walked toward the car. She followed him and caught the tail end of his side of the conversation.

  “No, I’m—there was an emergency with a witness, I … No, that’s tomorrow afternoon. Yes. Probably not. I had to go out east to handle the situation, and now it doesn’t make sense to … Oh, I’ll be in very early tomorrow, no problem. Yes. There isn’t that much more to prepare, I don’t think. Okay. See you then.”

  “Well, I guess it’s back to reality,” she said after he hung up and they moved slightly away from the car.

  “I’m not so sure about that,” he answered. “What happened here seemed a lot more real to me than this phone call.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” she said. “It was nice of you to take care of me, to deal with your witness emergency so kindly.”

  “What was happening here was not about nice or kind,” he said. “And I never handle my witness emergencies this way.”

  “But I am a witness. And there are a lot of emotions in your line of work.”

  “You’re right,” he said. “You are a witness, and a very important one at that. Next week we have your testimony before the Commission, and you’ll be meeting doña Sara and don Samuel for the first time. Plus I know that Laura and her grandparents will need to meet, get to know each other. But once you and I are done with the Commission’s work, once we’re on the other side of this and things have settled down. We’ll see.”

  She felt it the minute she closed
the gate behind her and approached the front door of her mother’s house. Something had happened. Doña Isabel was sitting in the dining room drinking a cup of tea. As soon as she saw her daughter in the foyer, she stood up quickly. The heels of her shoes clicked loudly on the marble tiles as she rushed over and took Eugenia’s hand.

  “What is it, Mamita?” Eugenia’s voice took on a concerned tone.

  “Ay, m’hijita.” Her mother looked down at their joined hands and shook her head. “I don’t understand, I really don’t.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “We were just sitting here, you know. I had just served us some tea. After all, we didn’t know when you’d be back, I wasn’t even sure when you’d gone out. In any case, we were just sitting here with Laurita, drinking tea. I’d just asked Rosa to bring us out some cake, you know, the special one I’d just made, and then …” She paused, seeming not to know what else to say.

  “And then?”

  “I honestly don’t know what happened next, Chenyita. Suddenly Laura just stood up and ran out of the room. She ran up the stairs and slammed her door. I tried going up, Chenyita, knocking on the door, but she wouldn’t answer.”

  Eugenia was already halfway up the stairs when her mother finished talking. She stood for a minute at the door to her daughter’s room and listened. Silence.

  “Laura?” She knocked gently. “Are you there? Are you all right?”

  Silence. She tried again, knocking more loudly. “Laura?” She tried the door. It was locked. After standing there for a few minutes, she went back to her own room.