One morning as I sat on the toilet, about to pee, the doorbell to my grandparents’ house rang. There were loud hellos, and I could hear my first cousin, Chelito, being escorted into the kitchen, where a pot of tea, apricot jam and fresh-baked bread awaited. My heart started pounding in a way I’d never experienced. I twisted and turned on the toilet, too embarrassed to pee until I finally reached over and turned on the taps.
I scrambled to the mirror and took a good look at my face. For the first time in my life, I saw that I wasn’t pretty. Mami had always told me I was the most beautiful girl in the world, but mothers lied, I realized now. My teeth were bigger than a horse’s, my lips were chapped, and I had a unibrow and a moustache. The Cousin’s voice moved up the back of my neck, causing my toes to curl.
My grandmother was knocking on the bathroom door, demanding that I come out. As I did, I was hit by a sight that shook me from soles to crown. Chelito was sixteen, and he glowed like a circus tent in the night. His eyes were green; suddenly, the whole room was emerald. There was a flash of white teeth and dimples, and a smooth bronze chest revealed itself through the undone buttons of his crumpled shirt. The Cousin was perched on a wooden stool, his palms pressed on strong thighs. His pelvis reached out and up, with the force of an orca parting the waters, and then his arms were around my back, his pelvis jammed against my belly.
“Cousin, cousin, exiled cousin!” His breath smelled like condensed milk and tobacco.
He set me down, and I stood swaying. “The typhoid’s hit me,” I said faintly.
The Cousin stuffed a piece of buttery toast in his mouth as my grandmother’s hand landed on my forehead. She shook her head; there was no fever. “Hurry and eat before the tea and bread go stone cold,” she scolded.
That afternoon the Cousin leaned next to the round wooden radio in the living room, searching for the perfect station from Viña del Mar, the one that played “Mama Maremma” and “Boogie Wonderland.” He hummed along to the music, his pelvis a corkscrew. My disco dancing classes in that musty church basement in Vancouver were paying off now. The Cousin smiled as I did a kick ball change around him, never forgetting to snap my fingers on the kick.
From then on, wherever he went, I followed. If he was lying in the orchard surrounded by exploding watermelons, I sat cross-legged next to him. If he was on his bed leafing through old magazines, I leaned against the door frame. At first Ale trailed after me, asking if I wanted to play cards or dice. But eventually she got bored of bringing up the rear and spent her afternoons with our grandmother, watching talk shows or fetching the eggs the chickens laid.
I stayed up late so I could sit at the dining room table with the Cousin and my grandfather. They smoked cigarettes, played cards and talked about loose women. They thought I didn’t understand. But I did. I understood everything now.
When siesta came each day, Ale dozed in her bed. My grandfather dreamed in his. My grandmother snored at the dining room table as a Brazilian soap opera blasted from the TV. The Cousin would slide on his motorcycle jacket, slip a cigarette into the corner of his mouth and sneak out the front door. Only after I’d seen him walk all the way down the sidewalk from my station at the kitchen window did I enter his room and begin the feast of smells and textures. I would inhale the armpits of his lifeless shirt and the crotch of his empty jeans until I was light-headed. One afternoon, as he pulled his black jacket on, he looked back at me over his shoulder and moved his head in the direction of the outside world. I followed him into the forbidden universe of Limache at siesta.
He led the journey to the plaza in his tight jeans. Every so often a tiny flame would travel from his hand to a fresh Lucky Strike. The match flew into the gutter as a stream of smoke left his generous mouth. I stayed two steps behind, matching my pace to his.
I’d strolled around Limache before, with Ale and my grandparents. It was a sleepy town with one general store along the main strip. The store was owned by Señor Perez, a kind, gentle man who was also a Pinochet supporter. He let my grandparents use the store’s phone whenever they called Canada collect, but politics was never spoken between them. The plaza was beautiful, with a yellow fountain at its centre. The buses from Santiago arrived there, and the plaza was where the cathedral stood, with its ancient bell.
Today, the colours were so vivid it hurt. The voices that surrounded us belonged to creatures beyond beautiful. There was a bearded lady strumming her guitar outside the Jehovah’s Witnesses Hall. Two Mormons, unmistakable with their buzz cuts, blindingly white shirts and American drawl, sipped orange Fantas as they strode by, Bibles held to their hips. Señor Perez, in his smock and spectacles, was heading home for siesta. We passed my grandmother’s neighbours, the ones she’d warned us were informers. We passed the fortress on the corner that everyone whispered was one of Pinochet’s weekend getaways. The hot breeze in the trees, the smell of raw sewage and dirt, the doe-eyed girl who sold the bread, the shoeshine boys resting on their wooden boxes, the ice cream man singing out “Chocolate, strawberry, vanilla and chirimoya” in his lazy tenor: it was as if I was discovering it all for the first time.
The pinball arcade, our destination, was dark and smoke-filled, a cacophony of whistles, bells, steel marbles crashing and the hoots of wild boys. I was the only girl in a sea of them. The Cousin, the king of them all, stood at a machine crowned by a tiny-waisted mermaid with massive boobs. Her nipples lit up whenever a marble hit a trigger point. The Cousin placed his palms on my waist and steered me in front of him. He took my wrists and showed me how to play, his pelvis in the small of my back. His laughter reached me from very far away.
On the seventh day of his visit, hoping the Cousin would ask me to the pinballs again, I checked my buck teeth in the bathroom mirror and brushed my frizzy hair a hundred times. I perched on the toilet to pee, but as I got up I noticed something alarming: the toilet water was crimson. My underwear was already soaked. I knew what this was, thanks to my mother. If she had been there, she’d have marched me to the general store, holding my hand in hers, and demanded maxi-pads at the top of her lungs.
The Cousin was waiting at the front door when I peeked out of the bathroom. He gestured for me to join him, but I shook my head. He shrugged his shoulders as he left, the screen door clicking behind him. Isaura, the White Slave climbed to its crisis on TV. My grandmother had missed it all, her head thrown back, her mouth wide open, snoring so loud the trinkets in the cabinet trembled.
“Abuelita. Abuelita!”
Her eyes popped open. It took her a moment to place me. “You startled me, Carmencita. What is it?”
“Abuelita, I just got my period.”
She fumbled for her Coke-bottle glasses. She was always losing them, mumbling, “Incredible. It’s gotta be Uncle Mario’s ghost that took them,” only to discover that they’d been on the top of her head the whole time. As I explained about the period situation again, she raised her index finger to her mouth.
“Shhhh.”
She got me to sit on the edge of the tub, then pulled my dress up and the stained underwear down. Glasses perched on the tip of her nose, she peered between my legs and made thinking noises. After a few moments she emerged, announcing that I was to wait in the bathroom.
My grandmother reappeared, holding a few old undershirts of my grandfather’s and a large pair of scissors. She cut the shirts into long strips that she turned into little pads. Once she’d finished, she produced a fresh pair of underwear from her pocket. They looked like a beige girdle. She pinned one of her homemade pads to the crotch of the heirloom underwear, and as she helped me pull them on, she explained how things were to be done.
“When a strip gets stained, come to the bathroom and lock the door behind you. Then wash it in the sink with very hot water and soap. Wring it out, roll it into a ball, and take it in your fist to the armoire. Hang it at the back. Keep blood out of sight at all times, because men are squeamish.”
Abuelita took me by the hand, and together we made our way to the b
ack of the orchard. There we kneeled before the Virgin, who was surrounded by rusty old horseshoes. A lone red flower rested in a blue vase.
“Dear Virgin,” my abuelita prayed, “it has been six years since I quit smoking, on the day my children and grandchildren went into exile. I made a promise that I would no longer smoke if you kept them safe and brought them back to me. Thank you for bringing two of my granddaughters back to me, Virgin, and for making one a woman while in my presence.”
Her voice cracked and she cried and cried, kneeling like that. I squeezed her hand and rested my head on her shoulder.
MY UNCLE CARLOS, Chelito’s father, was my mother’s oldest brother. He was married to my aunt Vicky, a Chilean of German descent, and they lived in Concepción, a coastal city a day’s drive south of Limache, with the Cousin and his siblings Mario, Elena and Gaston. Before the coup, we’d been like any other Chilean family, a clan. But now we greeted each other as if we’d never met, nervous and excited. My aunt and uncle had come to take Ale and me back to Concepción. My grandfather came along at my grandmother’s insistence. She’d taken to giving me chores that kept me by her side and away from the Cousin.
My aunt and uncle’s house was airy and modern. Uncle Carlos worked for a major bank, and my cousins went to private school. Mami had warned us we were not to talk politics with him. This household did not tune in to Radio Moscow late at night.
Here in Concepción, the Cousin was nowhere to be found. He was always out with his friends, and on the third day he brought his girlfriend home for lunch. She was pale, like Snow White. Jet-black hair tumbled around her face, and her body was like the mermaid’s on the pinball machine. She chatted with the adults while the Cousin fell all over her, offering her seconds, playing with a strand of her hair.
My uncle’s family had a maid, a woman who arrived at the crack of dawn every morning and didn’t leave till late. She would not allow me to wash my own cup or to set the table, and neither would my aunt. As the maid placed the dessert flan on my placemat, I understood something: I didn’t exist. I didn’t exist in the Cousin’s life, or in this country, or in the exile countries of Bolivia or Canada. I didn’t exist anywhere anymore. It was that simple.
During siesta, on the second-floor veranda outside the guest room Ale and I shared, I wept the way Dorothy had in The Wizard of Oz as the flying monkeys surrounded her. When the balcony door slid open, I straightened up and slapped the tears off my face, keeping my back turned. I felt a hand on my shoulder, and when I turned around, I met the emerald eyes that belonged to the Cousin. Something had shifted between us, and he moved in for the kill.
“Motherfucker! Where did you learn to kiss like that, exiled cousin?”
I shrugged. Pierced him with my eyes. And we kissed again. On our third night at my uncle’s house, a touch on my cheek woke me with a start. My sister slept heavily beside me.
“Exiled cousin, let me into bed with you,” the Cousin begged.
His naked body glowed like an ember in the half-light. A pod of dolphins leapt out of my solar plexus. We were already kissing as the Cousin climbed in beside me. Lifting my nightgown, he pulled down my grandmother’s 1920s underpants. I pulled them up. He pulled them down again. I pulled up.
“Come on, exiled cousin, please let me see you.”
I shook my head no, holding on to the underpants with all my might.
“Don’t be afraid, cousin. It’ll only hurt for a moment, then it’ll be like having my soul inside your secret place. Te amo, cousin. Te amo.”
My mother had said I could make love anytime I wanted to, but there was one condition: I had to be on the Pill. All I had to do was say the word, she told me, and she’d take me to the women’s clinic.
“No. I have my period now, and I’ll get pregnant. I can’t until I’m on the Pill.”
We made out all night long, with my grandmother’s underpants-turned-chastity-belt firmly in place.
Every day, my aunt Vicky took us to a private club where there was an enormous swimming pool, a golf course and a fancy restaurant with a large patio. Waiters in starched jackets scurried around serving pisco sours, the Chilean national cocktail, to club members lounging on deck chairs. People talked about their trips to Disney World, about the new malls being built in Santiago’s Las Condes neighbourhood. Ale and I were witnessing the lives of Chile’s new elite, those who benefited from and supported Pinochet’s free market economy.
For the rest of our visit, the Cousin arrived at my bed every night like a loyal husband, after having spent the day with his girlfriend. We’d make out and then fall asleep with limbs entwined, the underpants like a second skin between us. As soon as the house began to stir in the morning, he’d tiptoe back to his room. The only person who knew about our nights together was the maid. She’d glanced at me after washing, starching and ironing the sheets one day. I longed to talk to her, to ask her for her help in making sense of so much ecstasy and sorrow. But I didn’t dare approach her. I remembered my classmates in Bolivia talking about what a burden it was being confidante to the women of the house when you still had a floor to wax and a toilet to disinfect.
On the last afternoon our hosts drove my grandfather, Ale and me to the train station. We lingered on the ramp as the train tooted one last time. Every possible configuration of hugs had occurred, except the hug between the Cousin and me.
“Come on, Son, hug your cousin, for God’s sake! Can’t you see the train’s leaving?” my aunt Vicky ordered, curlers rolled tightly under her Hermès scarf.
He opened his arms. I took a step. And then another, and his arms enveloped me. That night, as the train aimed north along its tracks, and my grandfather and Ale slept in the seat across from me, I cried myself dry.
When the bus from Santiago finally pulled into the Limache plaza, the grocery boy from the general store was waiting. We piled our bags into the giant basket on the front of his bicycle, and he rode on ahead while the three of us walked to my grandparents’ house. My grandmother was waiting with a hot lunch. Before my grandfather retired for siesta, they spoke in whispers in the kitchen.
“I kept my eye on Carmencita day and night. He never got a chance to lay a hand on her.”
“You sure about that? If that scoundrel took advantage of her, he’ll have to deal with me. My kidneys may be shot, but I still have a heavy hand.”
I sat with my grandmother during the soap opera. She snored through most of it, as usual. If she only knew it was her underpants that had protected me. As I remembered the girl I’d been at eleven, back in Vancouver, lolling on tree branches, riding my banana-seat bike through rainforest trails, sucking on jawbreakers and eating Revellos four at a time, I felt small and alone.
8
“I AM DEEPLY HURT and disappointed by the letter I received from you. How do you think a mother feels when her daughter tells her that she would rather live with her grandparents?”
I peered down at the Andes from the window seat of the plane, Mami’s words tumbling around in my head like clothes in a dryer.
Halfway through our visit, my grandparents had asked Ale and me if we wanted to stay on in Limache with them. I couldn’t believe our luck. At their house, we weren’t expected to be brave and mature and revolutionary. We could just be kids. Pinochet might be in the fortress on the corner every weekend, but it didn’t matter, because the most important thing was us, and my grandparents would do anything to keep us out of harm’s way.
The invitation made Ale sullen. She withdrew into herself and spent her afternoons in the orchard. She figured our parents were trying to get rid of us. Nonetheless, unbeknownst to her, I had written to Mami from Concepción, telling her Ale and I wanted to stay in Chile. My grandfather and I had walked from my uncle’s house to the post office together to send the letter express. On the way back, he’d held my hand and whistled and asked me to challenge him with an arithmetic question. So I’d said, “What’s three hundred and twenty-five plus sixty-seven minus twelve plus thirty-
three times eleven?” He’d put his thinking face on and answered: “Four thousand four hundred and fifty-three.” Abuelito had taught himself to read by looking at the newspapers of the men whose shoes he shined. One day, while he was shining the priest’s shoes, he’d decided to show off his reading skill. The priest was so impressed that he turned my grandfather into the bell-ringer at the cathedral and put him through school. One of his favourite pastimes now was to tell us stories about his decades as a school principal. At the busy station in Santiago, a man had stopped him and said that my grandfather was the best teacher he’d ever had. My abuelito walked proudly after that and whistled even louder. He got his shoes shined and bought Ale and me some cotton candy before we caught the bus back to Limache.
Mami’s reply had reached me at the yellow house. She’d sent us to her beloved Chile even though she herself could never set foot there again, she wrote, and this was how I was rewarding her. So now here I was on the plane back to La Paz, Ale at my side. The plane crossed above the highlands, into Bolivian territory, and just like that, the last summer of my childhood was over.
Before we left Chile, Ale and I had spent a few days back in Santiago visiting our paternal grandmother, Lourdes, three aunts, an uncle and two cousins from my father’s side. My grandmother had given us some money to buy shoes, and my aunts had urged me to buy cork platform sandals, now that I was a young woman and all.
“Get the highest ones,” my aunt Lola advised. “They flatter the legs.”
Aunt Lola had been Miss Paihuano, 1965, so she knew a lot about ladies’ shoes. Paihuano was my father’s village in the Andes’ enchanted Elqui Valley. Magic things happened there, Papi had told us, involving ghosts and hidden treasure. I had been conceived in Paihuano during carnival, when my mother was eighteen and my parents were penniless newlyweds. Before the coup we’d spend part of every summer there, at the big Aguirre house with its courtyard in the centre and tall adobe rooms. During carnival women in bikinis rode in the back of trucks while cumbia bands played and people followed through the streets, dancing and hooting and drinking locally made wine and pisco.
Something Fierce Page 8
