Something Fierce

by Carmen Aguirre

  SOMETHING FIERCE

  SOMETHING

  MEMOIRS OF A

  REVOLUTIONARY DAUGHTER

  FIERCE

  CARMEN AGUIRRE

  Douglas & McIntyre

  D&M PUBLISHERS INC.

  Vancouver/Toronto

  Copyright © 2011 by Carmen Aguirre

  Published in the United Kingdom

  by Granta Publications/Portobello Books Ltd.

  11 12 13 14 15 5 4 3 2 1

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For a copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  Douglas & McIntyre

  An imprint of D&M Publishers Inc.

  2323 Quebec Street, Suite 201

  Vancouver bc Canada V5T 4S7

  www.douglas-mcintyre.com

  Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada

  ISBN 978-1-55365-462-9 (cloth)

  ISBN 978-1-55365-791-0 (ebook)

  Editing by Barbara Pulling

  Jacket design by Peter Cocking

  Jacket and interior photographs courtesy of Carmen Aguirre

  We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council, the Province of British Columbia through the Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

  For my son, Santiago, love of my life, the greatest teacher of all

  In memory of Bob Everton, 1949–2004

  VALOR

  Te dije:

  “Se necesita mucho valor

  para tanta muerte inútil.”

  Pensaste que me refería a América Latina.

  No, hablaba

  de morir en la cama,

  en la gran ciudad,

  a los ochenta o a los noventa años.

  CRISTINA PERI ROSSI, Estado de Exilio

  COURAGE

  I said to you:

  “One needs a lot of courage

  for so much useless death.”

  You thought I was referring to Latin America.

  No, I was talking

  about dying in bed,

  in a great city,

  at eighty or ninety years old.

  CRISTINA PERI ROSSI, State of Exile

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE THE RETURN PLAN

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  PART TWO THE FALL

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  PART THREE THE DECISIVE YEAR

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  EPILOGUE February 2010

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  PART ONE

  THE

  RETURN

  PLAN

  1

  AS MY MOTHER bit into her Big Mac, her glasses caught the reflection of a purple neon light somewhere behind me. Barry White’s “Love’s Theme,” my favourite song, blasted from the loudspeaker. Mami looked hilarious in her new aqua eyeshadow. Her plucked eyebrows gave her a surprised expression. Then there was her frosted pink lipstick, which was smeared across her chin now, and the unfamiliar scent of Charlie. I’d helped her choose that perfume. The picture on the box showed one of Charlie’s Angels doing the splits in mid-air, wearing a white pantsuit and platform shoes. In dressing for our trip that morning, my mother had followed her lead, though not the splits part, because she was four foot ten and round. Now here we were in a food court at Los Angeles International Airport, which my mother referred to as “L-A-X.” She and I and my sister, Ale, had walked for ages through the terminal, looking for our gate, and the whole time she’d rubbed the palms of her hands into the small of her back, muttering, “Firing squad to the woman hater who invented heels.”

  It was June 1979, and the day before, in Vancouver, Mami had been a hippie. She’d been a hippie for as long as I’d been her daughter, in fact, which was eleven years now. That’s why Ale and I had giggled when we saw her this morning, and why we’d been shocked a few weeks earlier when Mami announced we were going to a mall. She’d tried on most of the inventory at Suzie Creamcheese before settling on the white polyester pantsuit and some matching platforms at Aggies. She was usually dressed in frayed jeans with patches on the ass and a pair of old clogs. But this was a special occasion, requiring a new wardrobe to go with it, my mother had explained. We’d found her in the kitchen that morning blowing on her toenails, which were wet with red polish, humming Victor Jara’s famous song “The Right To Live in Peace.” Our passports were laid out like a fan on the table. The three of us hadn’t looked back as we left our basement suite. Canada had taken us in after the coup in Chile five years earlier, but my mother had made it clear from day one that the refugee thing in the imperialist North was not for us. So our suitcases had been packed again, and our posters of Ho Chi Minh, Salvador Allende and Tupac Amaru taken down and given away. Rulo drove us to the airport in my mother’s orange VW Bug, and Mami had several attacks of the giggles along the way, because he’d only just learned to drive. “Clutch, Rulo, clutch, you idiot!” she yelled. I’d never seen Rulo so excited, and I knew it was because he’d get to keep the car from that day on.

  This part of the imperialist North, LAX, was very different from anything I’d seen so far. In Vancouver, we and the few dozen other Chilean families had been the only Latinos. That city, where you could buy tropical fruit in the dead of winter, was full of white people who kept their bodies and faces perfectly still when they talked. At LAX we were surrounded by the sound of Mexican Spanish, and there were black people everywhere. I could see palm trees and turquoise sky just beyond the glass walls of the airport. The lady who’d sold me a cheeseburger with no patty (I’d been a strict vegetarian since I was eight) had touched my cheek and spoken to me in Spanish. She’d recognized herself in me, and somehow I understood that. For the first time in five years, I thought maybe I belonged somewhere. But it couldn’t possibly be here, because the North was the forbidden place of belonging.

  A Colombian family at the table next to us argued and laughed and broke into spontaneous cumbia. When I went up to the counter for a second banana milkshake, one of the Colombian ladies asked me if I was going to Bogotá, like her. I shook my head. I couldn’t explain where I was going or where I was coming from. There were too many winding roads leading each way. But she had recognized herself in me, too, and I swallowed down some tears hard and fast.

  Back at our table, Mami was finishing her hamburger, her eyes far away. I’d never seen her eat a Big Mac before. McDonald’s was the ultimate symbol of imperialism, so we had always boycotted it. Ale showed off a new helium balloon featuring a portrait of Ronald McDonald. It had been given to her by Ronald himself, who’d passed through moments ago. Two years before, when she was eight, Ale had run away from home. My parents and the other adults had never learned about my sister’s bold attempt at a new life; they’d been too busy printing Victoria Final (Final Victory), the monthly newsletter they put out from our dining room table. It was my cousins Gonzalo and Macarena and I who followed Ale down the street and brought her back. She’d been clutching her Easy-Bake Oven, given to us by a church group that helped refugees. I su
cked the airport milkshake past the knot in my throat.

  Our stepfather, Bob, had left Vancouver a few months earlier, and now we were flying to join him in Costa Rica, revolutionary Central America. Goodbye to my elementary school city, to the land of late-night janitor work, hand-me-down Barbie dolls and Salvation Army clothes. Goodbye to my father, who was staying behind.

  My mother and father had gotten a divorce, joining so many other Chileans whose marriages had not withstood exile. One afternoon when Ale and I got home from school, my parents were waiting for us at opposite ends of the living room. Mami’s glasses were all steamed up, and Papi was staring out the window, his chin quivering. My mother explained that she was moving out, that she couldn’t be with my father anymore but she’d always be our best friend. She was going to live with some other women in a communal apartment, and we could visit her there and go to the park. After a long hug, she drove away in the orange VW, its trunk held down by a coat hanger, and just like that, our family was broken forever. The next time we saw Mami, she was on stage, singing with Rulo, my uncle Boris and the other Chileans with whom she’d formed the folk group Revolución. When we met up with her after the show, a terrible shyness hit me. I’d never had to meet my mother anywhere before, the way you meet a stranger.

  Our house got filthy, and my father and Ale and I ate hot dogs for weeks. But the plants always looked nice, because Papi watered and trimmed them. Whenever we walked through the botanical garden at the university, where he worked part time as a gardener, he would point out his favourite ferns. Then he’d ask us how to spell cloud and ocean and highway, because he was revalidating his physics degree and studying English at the same time. He was a car washer at a Toyota dealership and had a paper route and janitor gigs, but his favourite job was at the botanical garden. Papi was a great admirer of nature. That’s what he always said. A couple of months after the separation, he’d found solace in the arms of another Chilean exile who had split with her husband. We called her Aunt Tita.

  Ale was licking ketchup off her fingers. My mother looked around, lit up a Matinée, then cleared her throat.

  “Girls, we’re not going to Costa Rica,” she said.

  Ale and I stared at her, one of us mid-swallow, the other mid-lick.

  “We were never headed to Costa Rica, actually. That was a facade.”

  “What’s a facade?” Ale asked. Ronald McDonald spied on us from the balloon bobbing above her head.

  “A facade is when you make up a story because it’s dangerous to tell the truth,” Mami said. “It’s a story you make up when you’re involved in something bigger than yourself and you don’t want to risk your life or the lives of others.”

  My mind raced back to the afternoon in Seattle when my mother had addressed a crowd wearing a long-haired wig and cat’s-eye glasses. The organizers had introduced her as María. She’d explained to us later that it was safer that way; she’d been talking about the struggle in Chile, and not all of the photographers in the crowd had been with the newspapers. We’d stayed at a communal hippie house there, and a couple of the men had shaved off their beards and cut their long hair before we left for the rally. The men were in solidarity with us, my mother said. They were activists against the war in Vietnam, and they understood the danger of the situation.

  Ale said, “You mean a facade is when you tell a big fat lie.”

  My mother looked weary. Her eyes moved around, as if she was searching for the right words. She shifted in her seat, crossing her legs as she sucked on her cigarette. Finally, she said, “It’s not quite like that.”

  “Well, where are we going then?” I asked.

  She reached for our hands.

  “I wish I could tell you, my precious girls, but I can’t. Right now, we’ll be taking a plane to Lima, Peru. Nobody else has this information about us. It has to do with being in the resistance, and I know you’ll understand because you are both so strong and so smart and so mature.”

  I hadn’t realized we were in the resistance. I’d just thought we were in solidarity with the resistance. But I felt too embarrassed to say that.

  The plane to Lima wasn’t leaving for two more hours, my mother told us. She leaned in close, her face super-serious. I knew better than to look away or to practise the hustle in my mind, as I sometimes did when I was worried. The resistance was underground, my mother said in a low voice. That meant it was top secret. We couldn’t tell anybody, under any circumstances. There was a story we had to memorize, and she was going to go over it with us many times, so that when somebody asked us about ourselves, we’d know exactly what to say.

  “When someone asks where you were born, for example, you say Vancouver. If somebody asks you who Bob is, you say he’s your father. In the blood sense. I know I can trust you girls to do this. That’s why I brought you along. There are many other women going back to join the resistance, and they’ve left their kids behind or sent them to Cuba to be raised by volunteer families. But children belong with their mothers. I know that if we’re careful, everything will be okay. And we’ll all be together, the way we’re meant to be.”

  Bob and my mother had moved in together after the divorce. He was a longshoreman, and he often brought us goodies from the port. He suffered from a terrible temper, but he kept a drawer full of Kit Kats in the kitchen and always offered us one after a fit of rage. We’d heard Bob’s story many times. When he was nineteen, he’d hitchhiked all over the world, and because of what he saw he became a revolutionary. After Salvador Allende was elected in Chile, Bob hitchhiked there to offer his support. Lots of foreigners had done that. Allende was the first Marxist president in the world to take power through an election. He believed it was possible to make revolutionary changes without a revolution. Bob spent a year in Santiago, helping to build houses in the New Havana shantytown. Then the coup happened, with General Augusto Pinochet, whom Allende had recently appointed commander-in-chief of the armed forces, at the helm. When the military raided New Havana, Bob was arrested and put in the national stadium, which wasn’t for soccer games anymore but had become a concentration camp. Bob had a line about that. “It was during my time there that I became a revolutionary with a capital R,” he would say. He got this look in his eye sometimes, and his Adam’s apple started quivering. My mother explained that it had to do with what had happened to Bob in the stadium during those two weeks, and what he saw happen to other people.

  Three Canadians were being held in Chile right after the coup, and the Canadian embassy got them out. Out of jail, out of the country and onto the dictatorship’s blacklist. When Bob got back to Canada, he formed a solidarity committee and organized a cross-country caravan. They set up camp on Parliament Hill until the prime minister, Pierre Trudeau, agreed to offer asylum to Chilean refugees. We’d been one of the first families to arrive, and Bob had helped us from the start. He became my gringo uncle after a while, then my stepfather. And now he was supposed to be my father, which was kind of funny. I guessed people would believe Ale and me, because Bob was Black Irish. That’s how he explained his black hair and beard. Black Irish, raised on the wrong side of the tracks. My heart burst for him, for the fact he had almost died for Chile.

  My mother continued with the new official story.

  We were to tell people she was Peruvian, she said. The Chilean blood that ran through our veins could be no more. Our family was moving south because Bob was starting an import-export company. We’d shopped at the mall for the first time ever to put together a middle-class look. It all made sense now: my mother’s Charlie’s Angels attire, Ale and I in our brand-new shoes, all the rage with their white platforms and blue suede tops, the Pepsi logo stitched on the side. We had to look normal. Mainstream. We had to stand out for the right reasons from now on, not the wrong ones.

  Lots of our friends in Vancouver had come straight from the detention centres in Chile. They’d arrived with crooked spines, missing an eye or their balls or nipples or fingernails. Like Rulo. He’d been hel
d in the Dawson Island concentration camp, near Antarctica, and he was skinny as a skeleton when we picked him up at the airport. He was carrying a charango, a little guitar made from an armadillo shell. Rulo was seventeen when he landed in Vancouver, and Bob had taken him in. Rulo had tried to teach me how to play his tiny charango, but it was too hard to get my fingers into the right position. So I’d taught him the hustle instead. He really liked that.

  I tuned back in to my mother as she squeezed our hands.

  “To be in the resistance is a matter of life and death. To say the wrong thing to the wrong person is a matter of life and death. And it’s impossible to know who the wrong person is. You must assume that everybody is the wrong person. In the resistance, we agree to give our lives to the people, for a better society. I’m asking a lot of you, but you must remember that the sacrifices you’ll have to make are nothing compared with the majority of children in this world. So many of them die of curable diseases and work twelve-hour shifts in factories, without ever learning to read and write. We are fighting for a society in which all children have the right to a childhood. I’m so proud of you girls for being a part of that.”

  I was glad my mother had chosen to take us along, because I wanted to fight for the children, for the people of the world. I thought about the sacrifices Rulo had made. He told us he’d handed his bones over to be broken methodically by the military, and he’d do it all again if he had to. He’d shown me his scars and let me touch them. Our sacrifice, my mother said, was a bit different. It would involve us acting as if we were rich, pretending to be something we were not. I swallowed past the stupid knot in my throat. It felt as if a huge vitamin pill had gotten stuck in there.

  “That’s all I can say for now,” my mother was explaining. “So please don’t ask me any questions. When one is in the resistance, one simply does what one is told to do. And for the time being, you will not be able to send letters or postcards to anybody.” Her cigarette made a sizzling sound as she stamped it out in the ashtray. She kept her gaze down, avoiding our eyes. I thought of the stationery from Chinatown in my carry-on bag. My father had given it to me, with explicit orders to write often. I remembered him that morning, seeing us off at the airport, his shoulders heaving. “My girls, my girls, my girls,” he’d murmured in our ears, his hands clutching the backs of our heads.