Something Fierce

by Carmen Aguirre

  Ale asked my mother if she could get some more french fries. As she dug in, I watched the long shadows created by the setting sun. Were the planes I could hear all around me coming or going, I wondered? What if I were to pick up my travel bag right now and walk to the Canadian Pacific counter and get on a plane back to Vancouver? What if I were to join the Colombian family at the next table and become one of them? What if I were to walk through the glass doors that led to the vast city of L.A. and get on a bus and just stay in the part of town that it took me to? When I looked over at my mother, she was hugging her canvas carry-on bag to her chest and gazing off somewhere unreachable. A fresh Matinée burned between her fingers.

  When the time came, we lined up at the Braniff counter with the other passengers, Peruvians and Ecuadorians. Our plane was due to stop in Quito before reaching Lima, and a lady in a beehive and pearls asked me if that’s where I was from. No, I said. I was from Santiago. The lady smiled. “Santiago is one of the jewels of South America,” she said. Wow. I hadn’t known that. But then my mother elbowed me, and I remembered I was from Vancouver now, a place so distant it was already as if it had never existed. We were no longer exiles. We were a resistance family headed who knows where.

  There was a kerfuffle at the counter up ahead, and a lady who looked like Julie from The Love Boat explained over the loudspeaker that since our plane was having technical difficulties, the airline was going to put us up at a hotel near the airport until morning. Ale and I gave each other a high-five. The only hotel we’d ever stayed in was the hotel for refugees the Canadian government had paid for when we first got to Vancouver.

  In the bus lineup, a woman who had gel nails decorated with the U.S. flag shyly approached my mother. “I’m from Ecuador,” she said in a rush, clenching her white clutch purse. “I’m twenty-five years old, and I came to L.A. to visit my uncle and auntie. He’s the baseball sportscaster on Radio La Raza. Do you know him? Anyway, my nerves have gotten the better of me because my plane is delayed. I noticed that you are a señora with two girls. Would you mind taking care of me as well?”

  My mother nodded. I’d never spoken to one of these ladies before, with their feathered hair and heavy perfume. Ladies Mami had always referred to as a “bunch of fucking idiots.” And now we’d get to share a room with one.

  The hotel was actually a motel. Just like Malibu Barbie’s house, I thought, except this motel was for economy-class Latinos whose flights had been delayed. The paint was peeling, and the Astroturf was stained. Ale and I smeared our faces with cream from the mini-containers in the bathroom and modelled the shower caps. There were so many channels on TV it made us dizzy.

  It was four in the morning by the time we got into our beige double bed. My mother was supposed to share her bed with the lady, who was called Jackie. But Jackie was stationed at the plastic-wood vanity, rollers in her hair, putting different creams on her face and then wiping them off. From where I was lying, I could see her tweezing her eyebrows and then a trail of hair that led from her belly button to her vagina. My mother always called the private parts of the body by their proper names. If you said “down there,” she would look you straight in the eye and say, “Vagina. Repeat after me: va-gi-na. Good.” I wondered if Mami was asleep or just pretending.

  Our plane took off without a hitch a few hours later. As we flew toward the equator, the passengers cheered and clapped and talked about their final destination: home. The last time Ale and my mother and I had been on a plane we’d flown north, in the middle of the night, as people wept into their hankies. Someone had spread a Chilean flag and a banner of Allende in the aisle. When the pilot announced over the loudspeaker, “We have crossed the border into Peru. We are out of Chile,” the passengers, grown men and strong women, had cried even more loudly. Someone started singing the Chilean national anthem, and everyone joined in. My parents had put their arms around us and said, “You will never forget this. You. Will. Never. Forget.” Their faces were distorted from all the crying. And now here we were, five years later, heading somewhere else. Somewhere south again.

  2

  LIMA KNEED me in the gut. This city of cathedrals was full of people who looked like me, dressed in their best and smelling of cologne. Crowds jammed the cobblestone streets, and vendors sold shakes from stationary bicycles with blenders attached, whistling boleros as they pedalled. Flies landed on the papayas as fast as the vendors could peel them, but they threw the fruit into the blenders anyway, topping it with milk that had been sitting in the sun for hours.

  All around us there were people hawking jackets and gold chains and little trinkets, explaining that they needed money for the bus ticket to their grandma’s funeral, and that’s why they were selling this unique cuckoo clock that had been in the family for forty years. Indian peasant ladies sold seeds arranged in little mounds. Beggar children missing arms and legs were pushed around on homemade skateboards by bigger children whose feet were black with dirt. The boys who passed by winked their eyes and made kissing sounds, murmuring “Mamita” in your ear. Everywhere you looked, even on the cathedral steps, there were couples making out. Church bells rang and nuns asked for donations. Music blasted from every store, and groups of yelling men pressed up against shop windows to watch a soccer game on TV. Buses never stopped honking their horns. The honking and the yelling and the traffic noise made you think you were going to go deaf, but then you got used to it. The air stank of sewers and diesel. You got used to that, too. I stuck close to my mother, taking it all in with a quivering chest.

  We had checked into a hotel for rich people in the centre of the city. We spent our days walking through the crowds, my mother in her white pantsuit, Ale and I in our new Adidas sweatshirts and Pepsi shoes. At night we stayed inside, because downtown Lima was the most dangerous place in the world when it was dark, my mother said, especially if you were a girl pretending to be rich. Night was when the uniformed men we saw during the day, driving around in their green trucks and monitoring everything with their machine guns, disappeared into the shantytowns.

  It was still just the three of us. Mami hadn’t said a word about how long we’d be there or where Bob was. She lit one cigarette after another up in our room, watching the news on TV non-stop, while Ale begged me to play Monopoly or Parcheesi, both of which she’d made sure to pack in her suitcase. I’d hit her on the arm when my mother wasn’t looking, because I was trying to read my book, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. Also, I had a lot to chew on. Now I realized what I’d been missing in Vancouver all those years: human heat. Heat coming from strangers, shoulder rubbing against shoulder, full eye contact with every person you passed. Here it was as if everyone on the street was a house with its windows wide open. By the end of the day, you’d encountered a thousand souls and looked into their hearts. Memories were flooding me now that we were south of the equator again. Before the coup, my grandmother Carmen, the person I loved most in the world, had lived in a big wooden house overlooking the ocean in Valparaíso, with my grandfather Armando, my uncle Boris—the greatest storyteller of all time—my aunt Magdalena and my cousins Gonzalo and Macarena. My uncle had been the first Chilean refugee to arrive in Vancouver after an epic solo journey that took him from Valparaíso to Santiago to Seattle and then across the border into Canada. My aunt and cousins had joined him there a few months later. But before all that happened, Mami, Papi, Ale and I would get into our yellow Citroën every summer and drive all the way from Valdivia, where my parents taught at the university, to Valparaíso, the biggest port in Chile, to spend the summer in that wooden house on top of the hill. One morning, my grandmother had woken me up at the crack of dawn and quietly got me dressed, so no one else would hear. We’d walked to the train station together, and she’d taken me on an outing to Santiago, where she’d bought me churros at Santa Lucía Hill and cotton candy and glazed peanuts and anything else my heart desired. We’d come back late at night, and I’d slept on her lap on the train. It had been the happiest day of my li
fe thus far.

  On our third day in Lima, we were out walking when suddenly the crowds pressed into us full force. Mami, knocked off balance in her platforms, screamed out our names as we slammed against a wall. There was smoke everywhere, something like acid in my eyes, a cougar in my throat clawing it raw. Explosions, breaking glass, sirens so loud your ears popped and a stampede of feet.

  “Whatever happens, don’t let go of my hand!” my mother yelled at us.

  Liquid poured from our eyes and noses. Ale was whimpering, and I knew I was going to puke any minute. But then a lady dressed like a secretary in patent-leather spike heels grabbed us and shouted: “All the women come with me!” The secretary was pressing an embroidered hanky to her mouth, smearing her red lipstick. She was about twenty, and obviously an expert on how to get out of sticky situations. We ran behind her through a set of bronze doors. She locked them just as some peasant Indian women were trying to get in, and the whole group of us ran up the spiral stairs with their gold railings to the top floor. When we stopped, I swallowed the puke that was sitting in my mouth, and it burned my insides all the way down. The tear gas wasn’t so bad up here, the secretary was explaining. She looked Indian, though she acted and dressed as if there was no Indian in her at all. She was pretending to be something else, just like us.

  From the windows we could see hundreds of teenagers, boys and girls both, fighting with the paramilitary, the militarized police force commonly deployed against protesters. Bandanas over their faces, the youths were hurling little balls with nails sticking out of them, tossing flaming Molotov cocktails made from Coke bottles and firing stones from slingshots. When the paramilitaries got their hands on a teenager, they’d beat the kid down with their batons and then drag him or her to a waiting military truck. They kept shooting tear gas, and their machine guns were at the ready. A water cannon drove by slowly, spraying acid water with so much force that it threw people to the ground. Some trapped bystanders had covered their faces with their hands, pressing the fronts of their bodies against the buildings. I could see them retching, and their legs wobbled like noodles. Street vendors had had their tables overturned and their trinkets smashed. The women scurried away with their babies on their backs. The men ran with their broken blender bicycles held up to protect their faces. A short man in a beat-up suit jacket dashed around opening up his jacket to display a collection of hankies. Some of them were big and striped, for men, and some were delicate and white, for ladies. People would give him a coin, snatch a hanky and then clamp it over their mouths and noses. Within a few minutes he was out of stock.

  “There’s a protest in Lima every day,” the secretary informed us with a sigh. “Today it’s these kids, who’ve marched for hours from the shantytowns. They’re mad because the hike in bus fare is meant to stop them from going to school. It’s the third hike in fares this year. They’ll go to the presidential square and light a few buses on fire.” A gold tooth flashed in her mouth as she spoke.

  The women around us were talking excitedly about the high cost of living, inflation, corruption and the escalating price of milk. It was impossible to come downtown anymore, they complained. If it wasn’t the peasants protesting, it was the teachers, and if it wasn’t the teachers, it was the students or the domestic workers or the miners or the doctors or the priests. My mother listened closely, but she kept her mouth shut and her face still as she clung to Ale and me. Ale stood with her back to the window, but I was transfixed by the scene below. The teenagers didn’t look scared. They just kept getting up from the ground when they fell, adjusting their bandanas and firing off another stone with their slingshots. The secretary popped a piece of gum into her mouth and blew a bubble half the size of her face. My mouth watered as the tear gas started to clear from my sinuses.

  The fighting moved down the street, block by block, and after a while the secretary announced in her expert tone of voice that the path was clear. As we emerged into the aftermath, my mother took our hands again. I felt a tug on my jeans and looked down into the black eyes of a small boy.

  “Do you have a Sublime, señorita?” he asked. His eyes had hooks that wouldn’t let me go.

  I’d been eating a Sublime chocolate bar, my new favourite snack, when the protest hit us. He must have seen me and been waiting outside the building the whole time. I knew my mother would disapprove of me buying the little boy a chocolate bar, because that would be charity, and we didn’t believe in charity. Charity was vertical, keeping the relationship between the haves and have-nots intact. We believed in revolution. Back in Vancouver, when I’d come home from school once and said, “Please help UNICEF,” my uncle Boris had declared he’d rather take a shit in the little box of coins I was holding up. “Hold that box still, Carmencita. Don’t move it till I’m done taking a shit in it.” He’d started unbuckling his belt, and my mother had fallen to the floor laughing. I laughed too. The image of my uncle, who was five foot five and weighed over three hundred pounds, trying to balance his big behind over the teeny box was just too much. A classless society was what we were fighting for, so I leaned down and kissed the boy all over his round face instead. We kept walking, and his little fingers clutched my jeans the entire way. When we reached the hotel, the guard at the door scared him away with the open palm of his hand: “Shoo, boy, shoo!” Before he dashed out of sight, the boy mouthed the words “No Sublime?” He shrugged his shoulders.

  Upstairs, my mother collapsed onto the bed and pulled Ale down beside her. Ale was still whimpering a little, but before long both of them were asleep. I closed the bathroom door quietly and then crumpled onto the toilet, sobbing and sobbing. It was lifetimes since we’d left Vancouver. My father had explained to us that time and space didn’t really exist; they were human constructs for trying to make sense of things that didn’t make sense at all. Thinking of Papi, I wanted to go back to the exile land. To the solidarity dances, to the school where my friend Dewi and I climbed trees, to putting on plays with my cousins and spying on the late-night meetings where tactics and strategies were discussed. I wouldn’t be able to wear my Ché Guevara red star here, or tell the story of the murder of Allende, because we were in the resistance. Instead, Ale and I would probably have to learn to fight like those teenagers in the street. My aim was really bad. I knew I’d aim a stone at those paramilitaries and miss, and then I’d be tortured with electric shocks and sent to the firing squad like my father’s best friend, Jaime, who’d been taken from his house in Iquique during lunch for all to see.

  When I came out, my mother and Ale were still fast asleep. Mami was usually a light sleeper, but today she was out like a log. I pried her denim handbag from her grip, reached for a coin and went downstairs into the street. Tear gas still hung in the air, and it took me a while to find a kiosk that hadn’t been destroyed. But I did, and when I did I bought a Sublime, in its wax-paper wrapping with the swirly blue letters across the front. On my way back to the hotel, the teeny boy found me. His fists latched onto my shaking pants. They were shaking because I was scared to be walking alone in the centre of the city. I didn’t have the balls those teenagers had. I never would. Why couldn’t the revolution just hurry up and win? Couldn’t it see that the teeny boy was hungry and just wanted to play in a sandbox somewhere?

  ON OUR FIFTH DAY in Lima, just as Margaret in my book was getting her period, someone knocked on our hotel room door. It was nighttime, and my mother was taking a bath. I opened the door, cautiously, to see a tall man wearing a beige corduroy suit and brown suede shoes. He had pale skin and very short black hair and a dimple in his chin. He was carrying a brown suitcase and a briefcase with combination locks. The man smiled and then spoke to me in perfect English.

  “Hello, Carmencita.”

  I stared at him. I was holding the Judy Blume book close to my chest, making sure not to lose my page.

  “It’s Bob,” the man said.

  I looked at him again. Bob with the long black hair and beard to match. Bob with the lumberjack shirt a
nd kaffiyeh scarf from Palestine. Bob coming home from the port with bags full of groceries, making spaghetti and meatballs while he whistled along to a Pete Seeger album. Bob with his outbursts. Bob, who’d stay up till the wee hours working on the banner to be held up outside the grocery store, urging people to boycott the Chilean grapes sold inside. The great love I’d always felt for him flooded through me.

  Bob chuckled. “So? Are you going to let me in?”

  The next thing I knew, Mami was behind me, wrapped in the hotel robe. She pushed me aside and pulled Bob in and started climbing all over him. Ale was doing jumping jacks and Mami was crying and Bob was holding her and saying, “It’s okay. I’m okay. We’re all okay.” I understood now that my mother had been scared since we’d gotten to Lima. I couldn’t stop smiling, and I practised saying “This is my father” in my mind until this new Bob rubbed his hands together and said: “Let’s go get some fish and papa a la huancaína. I’m starving.”

  Every afternoon for the next seven days, Ale and I stayed alone in the hotel room, playing Parcheesi. We had strict orders to keep the noise down and not to open the door to anyone. Mami and Bob would leave all decked out in their new looks and come back just in time for dinner.

  Late at night, when they thought Ale and I were asleep, I’d spy them sitting cross-legged on their bed, talking in hushed tones while they studied photographs of papers and maps. It looked as though someone had covered a wall with papers and then taken a snapshot of every sheet. They would read the papers using a magnifying glass and then go into the bathroom and close the door. I’d hear the click of a lighter, then the toilet flushing over and over again.