by Lucia Berlin
She showed us movies and slides about the condition of the Chilean miners and dock workers, all of it the USA’s fault. The ambassador’s daughter was in the class, a few admirals’ daughters. My father was a mining engineer, worked with the CIA. I knew he truly believed Chile needed the United States. Miss Dawson thought that she was reaching impressionable young minds, whereas she was talking to spoiled American brats. Each one of us had a rich, handsome, powerful American daddy. Girls feel about their fathers at that age like they do about horses. It is a passion. She implied that they were villains.
Because I did most of the talking I was the one she zeroed in on, keeping me after class, and one day even walked with me in the rose garden, complaining about the elitism of the school. I lost patience with her.
“What are you doing here then? Why don’t you go teach the poor if you’re so worried about them? Why have anything to do with us snobs at all?”
She told me that this was where she was given work, because she taught American history. She didn’t speak Spanish yet, but all her spare time was spent working with the poor and volunteering in revolutionary groups. She said it wasn’t a waste of time working with us … if she could change the thinking of one mind it would be worthwhile.
“Perhaps you are that one mind,” she said. We sat on a stone bench. Recess was almost over. Scent of roses and the mildew of her sweater.
“Tell me, what do you do with your weekends?” she asked.
It wasn’t hard to sound utterly frivolous, but I exaggerated it anyway. Hairdresser, manicurist, dressmaker. Lunch at the Charles. Polo, rugby or cricket, thés dansants, dinners, parties until dawn. Mass at El Bosque at seven on Sunday morning, still wearing evening clothes. The country club then for breakfast, golf or swimming, or maybe the day in Algarrobo at the sea, skiing in winter. Movies of course, but mostly we danced all night.
“And this life is satisfying to you?” she asked.
“Yes it is.”
“What if I asked you to give me your Saturdays, for one month, would you do it? See a part of Santiago that you don’t know.”
“Why do you want me?”
“Because, basically, I think you are a good person. I think you could learn from it.” She clasped both my hands. “Give it a try.”
Good person. But she had caught me earlier, with the word revolutionary. I did want to meet revolutionaries, because they were bad.
Everyone seemed a lot more upset than necessary about my Saturdays with Miss Dawson, which then made me really want to do it. I told my mother I was going to help the poor. She was disgusted, afraid of disease, toilet seats. I even knew that the poor in Chile had no toilet seats. My friends were shocked that I was going with Miss Dawson at all. They said she was a loony, a fanatic, and a lesbian, was I crazy or what?
The first day I spent with her was ghastly, but I stuck with it out of bravado.
Every Saturday morning we went to the city dump, in a pickup truck filled with huge pots of food. Beans, porridge, biscuits, milk. We set up a big table in a field next to miles of shacks made from flattened tin cans. A bent water faucet about three blocks away served the entire shack community. There were open fires in front of the squalid lean-tos, burning scraps of wood, cardboard, shoes, to cook on.
At first the place seemed to be deserted, miles and miles of dunes. Dunes of stinking, smoldering garbage. After a while, through the dust and smoke, you could see that there were people all over the dunes. But they were the color of the dung, their rags just like the refuse they crawled in. No one stood up, they scurried on all fours like wet rats, tossing things into burlap bags that gave them humped animal backs, circling on, darting, meeting each other, touching noses, slithering away, disappearing like iguanas over the ridges of the dunes. But once the food was set up scores of women and children appeared, sooty and wet, smelling of decay and rotted food. They were glad for the breakfast, squatted, eating with bony elbows out like praying mantises on the garbage hills. After they had eaten, the children crowded around me, still crawling or sprawled in the dirt, they patted my shoes, ran their hands up and down my stockings.
“See, they like you,” Miss Dawson said. “Doesn’t that make you feel good?”
I knew that they liked my shoes and stockings, my red Chanel jacket.
Miss Dawson and her friends were exhilarated as we drove away, chatting happily. I was sickened and depressed.
“What good does it do to feed them once a week? It doesn’t make a dent in their lives. They need more than biscuits once a week, for Lord’s sake.”
Right. But until the revolution came and everything was shared you had to do whatever helped at all.
“They need to know somebody realizes they live out here. We tell them that soon things will change. Hope. It’s about hope,” Miss Dawson said.
We had lunch in a tenement in the south of the city, six flights up. One window that looked onto an air shaft. A hot plate, no running water. Any water they used had to be carried up those stairs. The table was set with four bowls and four spoons, a pile of bread in the center. There were many people, talking in small groups. I spoke Spanish, but they spoke in a heavy caló with almost no consonants, and were hard for me to understand. They ignored us, looked at us with amused tolerance or complete disdain. I didn’t hear revolutionary talk, but talk about work, money, filthy jokes. We all took turns eating lentils, drinking chicha, a raw wine, using the same bowls and glass as the person before.
“Nice you don’t seem to mind about dirt,” beamed Miss Dawson.
“I grew up in mining towns. Lots of dirt.” But the cabins of Finnish and Basque miners were pretty, with flowers and candles, sweet-faced Virgins. This was an ugly, filthy place with misspelled slogans on the walls, Communist pamphlets stuck up with chewing gum. There was a newspaper photograph of my father and the minister of mines, splattered with blood.
“Hey!” I said. Miss Dawson took my hand, stroked it. “Sh,” she said in English. “We’re on a first-name basis here. Don’t for heaven’s sake say who you are. Now, Adele, don’t be uncomfortable. To grow up you need to face all the realities of your father’s personae.”
“Not with blood on them.”
“Precisely that way. It is a strong possibility and you should be aware of it.” She squeezed both my hands then.
After lunch she took me to El Niño Perdido, an orphanage in an old stone ivy-covered building in the foothills of the Andes. It was run by French nuns, lovely old nuns, with fleur-de-lis coifs and blue-gray habits. They floated through the dark rooms, above the stone floors, flew down the passages by the flowered courtyard, popped open wooden shutters, calling out in birdlike voices. They brushed away insane children who were biting their legs, dragging them by their little feet. They washed ten faces in a row, all the eyes blind. They fed six mongoloid giants, reaching up with spoons of oatmeal.
These orphans all had something the matter. Some were insane, others had no legs or were mute, some had been burned over their entire bodies. No noses or ears. Syphilitic babies and mongoloids in their teens. The assorted afflictions spilled together from room to room, out into the courtyard into the lovely unkempt garden.
“There are many things that need doing,” Miss Dawson said. “I like feeding and changing babies. You might read to the blind children … they all seem particularly intelligent and bored.”
There were few books. La Fontaine in Spanish. They sat in a circle, staring at me, really blankly. Nervous, I began a game, a clapping and stomping kind of game like musical chairs. They liked that and so did some other children.
I hated the dump on Saturdays but I liked going to the orphanage. I even liked Miss Dawson when we were there. She spent her time bathing and rocking babies and singing to them, while I made up games for the older children. Some things worked and others didn’t. Relay races didn’t because nobody would let go of the stick. Jump rope was great because two boys with Down’s syndrome would turn the rope for hours on end without stoppi
ng, while everybody, especially the blind girls, took turns. Even nuns jumped, jump jump they hovered blue in the air. Farmer in the Dell. Button Button. Hide-and-go-seek didn’t work because nobody came home. The orphans were glad to see me, I loved going there, not because I was good, but because I liked to play.
Saturday nights we went to revolutionary theater or poetry readings. We heard the greatest Latin American poets of our century. These were poets whose work I would later love, whom I would study and teach. But then I did not listen. I suffered an agony of self-consciousness and confusion. We were the only Americans there, all I heard were the attacks against the United States. Many people asked questions about American policy that I couldn’t answer, I referred them to Miss Dawson and translated her answers, ashamed and baffled by what I told them, about segregation, Anaconda. She didn’t realize how much the people scorned us, how they mocked her banal Communist clichés about their reality. They laughed at me with my Josef haircut and nails, my expensive casual clothes. At one theater group they put me onstage and the director hollered, “Okay, gringa, tell me why you are in my country!” I froze and sat down, to hooting and laughter. Finally I told Miss Dawson I couldn’t go out on Saturday nights anymore.
Dinner and dancing at Marcelo Errazuriz’s. Martinis consommé in little cups on the terrace, fragrant gardens beyond us. A six-course dinner that began at eleven. Everyone teased me about my days with Miss Dawson, begged me to tell them where I went. I couldn’t talk about it, not with my friends nor my parents. I remember someone making a joke about me and my rotos, “broken” meant poor people then. I felt ashamed, aware that there were almost as many servants in the room as guests.
I joined Miss Dawson in a workers’ protest outside the United States Embassy. I had only walked about a block when a friend of my father’s, Frank Wise, grabbed me out of the crowd, took me to the Crillon Hotel.
He was furious. “What in God’s name do you think you are doing?” He soon understood what Miss Dawson didn’t … that I had not the faintest idea of politics, of what any of this was about. He told me that it would be terrible for my father if the press found out what I was doing. I understood that.
On another Saturday afternoon I agreed to stand downtown and collect money for the orphanage. I stood on one corner and Miss Dawson on another. In only a few minutes dozens of people had insulted and cursed me. I didn’t understand, shifted my sign for “Give to El Niño Perdido,” and rattled the cup. Tito and Pepe, two friends, were on their way to the Waldorf for coffee. They whisked me away, forced me to go with them to coffee.
“This is not done here. Poor people beg. You are insulting the poor. For a woman to solicit anything gives a shocking image. You will destroy your reputation. Also no one would believe you are not keeping the money. A girl simply can’t stand on the street unescorted. You can go to charity balls or luncheons, but physical contact with other classes is simply vulgar, and patronizing to them. Also you absolutely cannot afford to be seen with someone of her sexual persuasion in public. My dear, you are too young, you don’t understand…”
We drank Jamaican coffee and I listened to them. I told them I saw what they were saying but I couldn’t just leave Miss Dawson alone on the corner. They said they would speak to her. The three of us went down Ahumada to where she stood, proudly, while passersby muttered “Gringa loca” or “Puta coja,” crippled whore, at her.
“It is not appropriate, in Santiago, for a young girl to do this, and we are taking her home” was all Tito said to her. She looked at him with disdain, and later that week, in the hallway at school, she told me it was wrong to let men dictate my actions. I told her that I felt everybody dictated my actions, that I had gone with her on Saturdays a month longer than I had first promised. That I wasn’t going anymore.
“It is wrong for you to return to a totally selfish existence. To fight for a better world is the only reason for living. Have you learned nothing?”
“I learned a lot. I see that many things need to change. But it’s their struggle, not mine.”
“I can’t believe you can say that. Don’t you see, that’s what is wrong with the world, that attitude.”
She limped crying to the bathroom, was late to class, where she told us we were excused for the day. The six of us went out and lay on the grass in the gardens, away from the windows so no one could see that we weren’t in class. The girls teased me, said that I was breaking Miss Dawson’s heart. She was obviously in love with me. Did she try to kiss me? This really made me confused and mad. In spite of everything I was beginning to like her, her dogged naive commitment, her hopefulness. She was like a little kid, like one of the blind children when they gasped with pleasure, playing in the water sprinkler. Miss Dawson never flirted with me or tried to touch me all the time like boys did. But she wanted me to do things I didn’t want to do and I felt like a bad person for not wanting to, for not caring more about the injustice in the world. The girls got mad at me because I wouldn’t talk about her. They called me Miss Dawson’s mistress. There was nobody I could talk to about any of this, nobody to ask what was right or wrong, so I just felt wrong.
It was windy my last day at the dump. Sand sifted into the porridge in glistening waves. When the figures rose on the hills it was with a swirl of dirt so they looked like silver ghosts, dervishes. None of them had shoes and their feet crept silently over the soggy mounds. They didn’t speak, or shout to each other, like most people do who work together, and they never spoke to us. Beyond the steaming dung hills was the city and above us all the white Andes. They ate. Miss Dawson didn’t say a word, gathering up the pots and utensils in the sigh of wind.
We had agreed to go to a farm workers’ rally outside of town that afternoon. We ate churrascos on the street, stopped by her apartment for her to change.
Her apartment was dingy and airless. The fact that her hot plate for cooking was on the toilet tank made me feel ill, as did the odor of old wool and sweat and hair. She changed in front of me, which I found shocking and frightening, her naked, distorted blue-white body. She put on a sleeveless sundress with no brassiere.
“Miss Dawson, that would be all right at night, in someone’s home, or at the beach, but you just can’t go around bare like that in Chile.”
“I pity you. All your life you are going to be paralyzed by What Is Done, by what people tell you you should think or do. I do not dress to please others. It is a very hot day, and I feel comfortable in this dress.”
“Well … it makes me not comfortable. People will say rude things to us. It is different here, from the United States…”
“The best thing that could happen to you would be for you to be uncomfortable once in a while.”
We took several crowded buses to get to the fundo where the rally was, waiting in the hot sun and standing on the buses. We got down and walked down a beautiful lane lined with eucalyptus, stopped to cool off in the stream by the lane.
We had arrived too late for the speeches. There was an empty platform, a banner with “Land Back to the People” hanging askew behind the mike. There was a small group of men in suits, obviously the organizers, but most of the people were farm laborers. Guitars were playing and there was a crowd around a couple dancing La Cueca in a desultory fashion, languidly waving handkerchiefs as they circled one another. People were pouring wine from huge vats or standing in line for spit-roasted beef and beans. Miss Dawson told me to find us a place at one of the tables, that she would bring our food.
I squeezed into a spot at the end of a table crowded with families. Nobody was talking politics, it seemed that these were just country people who had come to a free barbeque. Everyone was very, very drunk. I could see Miss Dawson, chattering away in line. She was drinking wine too, gesticulating and talking very loud so people would understand her.
“Isn’t this great?” she asked, bringing two huge plates of food. “Let’s introduce ourselves. Try to talk to the people more, that’s how you learn, and help.”
; The two farmworkers we sat by decided with gales of laughter that we were from another planet. As I had feared, they were amazed by her bare shoulders and visible nipples, couldn’t figure out what she was. I realized that not only did she not speak Spanish, she was nearly blind. She would squint through her inch-thick glasses, smiling, but she couldn’t see that these men were laughing at us, didn’t like us, whatever we were. What were we doing here? She tried to explain that she was in the Communist party, but instead of partido she kept toasting the “fiesta,” which is a festive party, so they kept toasting her back, “La Fiesta!”
“We’ve got to leave,” I said, but she only looked at me, slack-jawed and drunk. The man next to me was halfheartedly flirting with me, but I was more worried about the big drunk man next to Miss Dawson. He was stroking her shoulders with one hand while he ate a rib with the other. She was laughing away until he started grabbing her and kissing her, then she began to scream.
Miss Dawson ended up on the ground, sobbing uncontrollably. Everyone had rushed over at first, but they soon left, muttering, “Nothing but some drunken gringa.” The men we had sat by now ignored us totally. She got up and began to run toward the road; I followed her. When she got to the stream she tried to wash herself off, her mouth and her chest. She just got muddy and wet. She sat on the bank, crying, her nose running. I gave her my handkerchief.
“Miss Perfect! An ironed linen handkerchief!” she sneered.
“Yes,” I said, fed up with her and only concerned now with getting home. Still crying, she staggered down the path toward the main road, where she started to hail down cars. I pulled her back into the trees.
