The Caregiver

by Samuel Park

  “How are they going to get to the consulate? Did you hear any mention of security detail, leaked itineraries?”

  “I heard them talk about homemade bombs, Molotov cocktails,” said my mother, consulting the sheets again. “They plan on blowing up the consulate.”

  “I find that hard to believe. That is too bold, even for those micks,” said Carlos, who was greeted by some hissing. Carlos broke character and shrugged.

  “I heard very clearly, sir. The walls are very thin.”

  Carlos hesitated for a moment, and reached for his sheets, but my mother came to his rescue.

  “They usually meet right now. They’ll probably still be there for the next couple of hours,” said my mother, allowing for a melodramatic flourish of her head. I wondered which American actress she was mimicking. If she wanted him to follow her on a wild-goose chase, she would have to reject in a flash of a second a tactic that wasn’t working and choose another one, on the spot. She would have to create, out of thin air and words, a bond between herself and the Police Chief.

  Carlos leaned forward in his chair. “What is the address?”

  “Sir, you know very well we don’t have addresses in the favela. No street names, no numbers posted, and all the units look the same. I’d have to show you myself.”

  Someone near me called out, “Pigs.” Someone else sneered, but then stopped right away, silenced by a look from Octopus. I was surprised that there wasn’t more heckling, more interruptions. I was surprised that they let the scene go on for as long as it did. I felt proud of my mother as she stood there, posture rigid, a look of determination on her face. But so much seemed to fall on her shoulders, I suppose I wasn’t the only one who wanted her to succeed.

  Then, all of a sudden, Pacifier got up. He’d been sitting in the audience, watching her. Both Carlos and my mother looked at him, confused.

  “Aren’t you Ana?” Pacifier called out, adding himself unexpectedly into the scene. My mother looked visibly shocked to hear her own name, as though she’d been unmasked. “Don’t you live in Selma’s building? What’re you doing here? Do you still work doing voices on TV?”

  Pacifier was acting as though he was trying to help with the preparation, so they’d know what to do if an unexpected wrench got thrown into the proceedings. But there was something aggressive in his tone.

  A succession of emotions registered on my mother’s face: confusion, fear, anger. But she settled finally on an unexpected choice: warmth. She smiled at Pacifier as though he was her long-lost brother.

  “Yes, yes, it’s me, Lana! From Telma’s building!” she said effusively. “You’re Luis, right? I’m so glad to see you working as a cop. It’s so much better than being a shoeshiner. How’s your mom? Does she still have the gout?”

  Pacifier looked taken aback, as though he’d expected her to get flustered, and the fact that she wasn’t flustered made himself so. “No, I’m not Luis, you’re confusing me with someone else.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” said my mother, putting her hands over her mouth. “My mistake. You have the kind of face that makes you think we’ve met before. My mistake.”

  Stunned, the oversized Pacifier now seemed disadvantaged by having too much height and width. He sat back down a little awkwardly.

  Carlos turned to my mother, still in character. “You know that young man?”

  “I don’t, but who wouldn’t want to know a man as handsome as that?” said my mother, smiling her charming smile. “A lot of handsome men in this precinct. But I suppose you have to be fit to work at a job like this. Anyway, I just played along because I didn’t want to embarrass him.”

  I turned to Octopus, and saw that he was smiling at my mother with a mixture of delight and amusement, while Pacifier seemed a bit disgruntled.

  As the day went on, the rehearsal continued. They’d start from the top, Carlos throwing at her different variations of what might happen. But my mother never hesitated, never contradicted her own claims. By the time the end of the afternoon crept in, the observers left one by one, until it was just she, Carlos, and Octopus. After taking it so many times from the top, my mother sneaking a quick smile my way each time, as if to say I’m okay, we’re okay, I left to use the bathroom.

  Instead of returning to the rehearsal room, I wandered off into the hallway to peek at what the rest of the house looked like. All the doors were left open, and some of the rooms were doorless.

  In one empty room I saw a sewing machine, with a pedal. To me, the machine resembled a horse, with a distinguishable head, and a saddleback. There was thread of all colors, and large scissors next to them. On a basket, I saw policemen’s uniforms. They looked pristine, unwrinkled and unworn, and reminded me of my school uniforms on the first day of school. They looked like they were made of the same fabric, polyester, though these seemed thicker, more fitted. I’d never seen a fake police uniform before, and it seemed odd to me that a policeman and a policeman’s uniform were two separate things, independent of each other. In my head, their uniforms were glued to their bodies, a second skin. I wondered which of the men I’d seen in the house would fill out these uniforms. I wondered who would make those decisions, assign those parts. Octopus, no doubt.

  I noticed, on the far side of the wall, a beautiful treasure chest. With a rich-looking cherrywood top and thick brass-covered borders, it looked out of place in that sparsely furnished house. It was the first beautiful thing I’d seen there, the first thing that made this seem like a home rather than a group’s gathering place. After checking if anyone was nearby, I walked to the chest and touched it. I could sense its heaviness without even lifting it. I could tell by the fine engravings its considerable age, its heirloom status to someone who lived in that house. It was not locked.

  Inside, there were guns. Small, large. Handguns, rifles. I’d never seen a gun outside of my TV screen before. I swallowed dry. I felt a rush of fear that I was transgressing on someone’s property. Though I could see no thumbprints, I sensed that each gun belonged to a particular person, by their shape, their coloring. Each of these had been chosen. Each of these was taken care of by someone.

  Suddenly, I heard the sound of someone’s voice out in the hallway and I let go of the top, which fell thunderously and startled me. I turned around and saw no one. For a moment, I couldn’t focus on anything but my heart, racing, beating, and the guns staring up at me from behind the heavy lid.

  At dinner, my mother and I sat squeezed at the end of a picnic bench outside in the backyard. The group carried themselves in the manner of a very large, familiar family—twenty or so shout-speaking, waving their arms, talking over one another, getting up to reach for things on the table instead of asking politely for someone to pass it to them. They didn’t seem to be related by blood, but the outside world’s rules of kinship, of family, seemed to apply here.

  All the food was served in the pans and pots that they were cooked in. There were fried chicken drumsticks, cheese bread balls, tomato-sauce spaghetti with meat and potatoes, rice and feijoada bean and sausage stew. My mother ate ravenously, alternating bites from the crispy chicken and the spaghetti, effectively mixing them both in her mouth. I had a bellyful of cheese bread balls, and was happy when the cook brought a second warm batch from the oven. My mother was, as far as I could tell, the only adult not drinking alcohol. Everyone else had a caipirinha, lemons drowning in their cups. I wondered if their meals were like this every night—a party. They seemed content. Happy in their isolation. It would be hard to give this up and live with only one or two other people, back in the city.

  I could tell by their words, their cadences, that they were well-educated. The teasing, almost always directed at Octopus, was tribute to his power. The camaraderie had an intoxicating quality that washed over my mother and me, relaxing us. Their bond didn’t seem like the kind to have grown slowly and quietly over a period of years, trickling into the jar of friendship a little at a time. Their bond was the kind that was cauterized from spending many
hours of many consecutive days together, building not friendships but extensions of the self. My mother would later explain that they’d all met at the same college, been radicalized by the same professors, held the same dog-eared copies of Marx and Che Guevara’s autobiography in front of their noses.

  Throughout the dinner, there was constant, raucous laughter. There were flies, of course, though no mosquitoes. Across from my mother, a woman who’d already finished her meal lit up a cigarette.

  “You did very well today,” she said, exhaling some smoke. The woman was younger than my mother, with chin-length hair and prominent cheekbones.

  “Thank you,” my mother replied, putting a hand over her mouth to cover her chewing. “And who do I have the honor of pleasing?”

  “I’m Claudia, but the cops call me Brigitte, or La Bardot, because they think I look like Brigitte Bardot.”

  “I don’t see it,” said my mother, and I wanted to kick her for being too honest.

  The woman smiled. “It’s okay. It’s because I’m not wearing my blond wig. I like to wear a wig and sunglasses for our missions.”

  My mother took this in and nodded. She swallowed. “If you’re so comfortable with disguises, maybe you should be the one playing this part.”

  “Oh, don’t worry. There’s no competition. Octopus gave me that role originally, but when we rehearsed, I couldn’t pull it off,” she said, smiling, rolling her eyes at the memory. “I can distract someone for five minutes, lie about who I am. But a whole hour? That takes a trained actress. I saw what you did today. I couldn’t do it.”

  Concern streaked across my mother’s face, perhaps wondering if she’d done the wrong thing by taking someone else’s job. The woman added, in a friendly manner, “Don’t worry. I’m the one who told him to find someone else, a professional. And it’s a good thing he found you.”

  I hadn’t had a chance to tell my mother about the guns I’d found. Seeing the woman being friendly to us, I couldn’t help but blurt out, “But isn’t it dangerous? What he’s asking my mother to do?”

  The smile on the woman’s face vanished, and she took a long drag of her cigarette. I wondered if she was going to tailor her answer to someone my age and I wanted to tell her that that wasn’t necessary. I knew about drugs and guns and women of the night. I lived in Copacabana, after all. Like all other eight-year-olds in my grade, I knew all the bad words and I knew about sex, but I pretended not to, always, so as not to upset my mother. It was one of the things that I learned to do from early on—to pretend to know less than I actually did. But I needed to protect my mother, who couldn’t fathom how alert I was. How could she possibly function, if she knew how deeply her child was capable of pain, how intensely I felt her fears, how ravenously I loved, to the point that my small body might shake, my tear ducts the junction of a river that started in my heart. I didn’t cry because I was weak, or spoiled, or ignorant. It wasn’t that I didn’t understand what was happening, but quite the opposite.

  “Ana will be long gone before they realize what happened,” said La Bardot. She then turned her eyes back to my mother. “Your daughter is smart. I like her. But if I were you, I wouldn’t have gotten her involved; it could be dangerous. Although we’re recruiting students younger and younger these days, so maybe it’s a good thing . . .” My mother tensed beside me and shot La Bardot a silencing look. “Anyway, the genius of the plan is that you’ll show up there to warn them. You’ll be there as a rat for the police, not as one of us. If, for some reason, you’re ever questioned later, you can plausibly deny your actual role. You can say, ‘I went there to warn the Police Chief. It’s too bad we arrived there too late to catch them.’ ” She exhaled smoke and gave us a wry, superior smile.

  It seemed La Bardot hadn’t sat across from us by accident. She’d been placed there to reassure us, to field questions. She played some kind of important role in this group. I could tell by the self-assurance of her poise, her purposeful glances. La Bardot smiled and laughed a lot, as if she had enough of everything, and didn’t mind sharing. She was the prototypical Copacabana girl, in the suntanned, careless way my mother wasn’t, and I already knew I would never be. She seemed both out of place and completely at home in that crowd of activists, these actors.

  My mother nodded. “I guess that’s a better answer than ‘I was there to distract you while they snuck the prisoners out.’ ”

  “You were smart to figure that out. Yes, our friends who are in the prison are scheduled to be transferred. But the deputy doesn’t know what the men in charge of it look like. Instead of the real police, it’ll be us. Like a Trojan horse, no?”

  I realized the people around us had stopped talking. My mother suddenly pushed her plate—still half full of spaghetti—away.

  “But what if,” my mother asked, “they see right through me? What if I get nervous and come across like an idiot?”

  “Too many ifs,” said La Bardot, shaking her head and blowing smoke. She changed positions, placing her left hand under her right elbow, and leaning back a little. “And you’re not, and you won’t be, on their list. There are too many bigger fish than you to fry.”

  I glanced over at my mother, who seemed to be taking this in. She nodded slightly, quietly. She glanced over at me, and returned my gaze. I wanted to tell her, don’t do this. We can figure out some other way to live. Life was so expensive, but we could find some other way to pay for it.

  “You need to have more confidence in yourself,” said La Bardot. “You’re a very good actress. They’re going to believe you. And you’re going to be saving the lives of seven very good men.”

  “How successful have you been in the past?” asked my mother.

  “Very,” said La Bardot, an unexpected smile brightening her face. “Just last month, we pulled off a very impressive bank robbery.”

  “Banks? You rob banks?” my mother spat out.

  I thought of the guns and felt tingling, electric, as if my insides were filled with wires instead of ligaments.

  “We need money like some people need medicine,” said La Bardot matter-of-factly. “Fast, lots of it. We need money to buy guns, which are expensive, especially with the marked-up prices of the black market.” She put a hand to her temple, as though it helped her think. “Only a few dealers are willing to supply us, the ones who aren’t happy with the rates offered by regular retail. We need money to buy cars, which often require servicing, fake plates, taking out bullet holes. Mechanics hate servicing us; we have a history of stiffing them on payments.” La Bardot let out a girlish laugh, and then continued, in a hushed tone so I couldn’t hear, though I could, “And none of us girls will deign to barter parts for sex. We also need money to pay for expertise. Chemists who can explain how to make bombs and find us the necessary substances. Former and current bodyguards who can outline the flaws and loopholes in the security details. Ex–military personnel with insight into the interrogations. So, as you can see, this isn’t the first time we’ve carried out a plan of this size. You have nothing to worry about.”

  “Really? And yet I don’t know anyone’s real names,” said my mother.

  “You know mine,” said La Bardot, blowing out some smoke. “But the code names are fun, no? Octopus is called that because he’s got his hands in everything. Pacifier, he doesn’t pacify anything, but sometimes when he gets angry, we need to soothe him, like you’d put a pacifier in a baby’s mouth.”

  The conversation was interrupted when a large plate of bon bons, chocolate batter covered in chocolate sprinkles, was passed to us. They were wonderful—moist and chewy and soft—sticking to all the right corners of my mouth. When I looked up again, I noticed that my mother was staring at me, fiddling with her fingers as she sometimes did. I must’ve had some chocolate stains around my lips, my chin. Eating the brigadeiros was a messy affair. She didn’t wipe my face, though, she just kept staring at me, and I thought how silly it was for a mother to make the mistake of falling in love with her own child.

&nbs
p; In the morning of our third day at the farm, Octopus led my mother into an alcove. He called it a “Bible room,” because it was small and shaped like the Holy Book. Over the bed, someone, certainly not Octopus, had laid out a change of clothes for my mother: a sleeveless yellow shirt with an oversized collar, and a worn-out pair of brown polyester pants. My mother stared at the outfit, resisted it. There was even a pair of sandals with fake leather straps and rubber soles. Clothes someone else had already worn for a long time.

  “I’m fine wearing my own clothes,” said my mother. It was the first time the three of us were alone, and I noticed how short Octopus was, almost as short as my mother. He was really young, too. Whatever gravitas he had, he’d earned it solely through his deeds, his intellect.

  “This is for the day of. You’re going to have to dress like a janitor. A janitor on her day off, but still a janitor.”

  My mother reached for the shirt and touched its fabric, noticing its roughness.

  “How did you know the right size?”

  Octopus shrugged. “The first time we met, in your apartment.”

  “You want me to wear this?”

  “I want you to be convincing.”

  “Should I try it on?” she asked, pretending to be seductive. “So you can see how I look in it?”

  My mother and Octopus stood on opposite sides of the bed, the costume laid out between them like a hint of my mother’s future self.

  “That’s not necessary,” he said. “Just take it with you. Pacifier’s going to take you and your daughter home now.”

  My mother looked relieved to hear this. She’d made it through her entire stay at the farm, and I could sense her entire body unclench. “And next time I see you?”

  “The day of the plan. You’ll go to the police station at the time we discussed. You’ll see La Bardot outside the station, making out with one of our men. If she drops her purse on the ground when she sees you, it means the plan is on and you go in. If she hangs on to her purse, you are to turn around and go home. It means the plan had to be aborted.”