“I see you didn’t know my father.”
Araya smiled with a falsely conciliatory air.
“Listen, let me tell you something. Okay?”
At first Alberto wondered if he should just leave, but astonishingly, as the other talked, he found himself more and more rooted to the spot out of curiosity and lassitude. He listened as Araya talked about the political circumstances surrounding his parents’ return to Chile at the beginning of the 1990s, when Patricio Aylwin’s coming to power inspired a wave of hope. He was going to rebuild the country, to restore dignity to the people who had been held in contempt by the military regime, we were going to open ourselves to the world, and to welcome hundreds and thousands of exiles with open arms. In point of fact, after seventeen years of dictatorship, just telling the population that it was now free was enough to raise its spirits. And then bit by bit the celebrations dissolved into day-to-day life. And with the simple power of words, Araya conjured up Roberto getting down from a train that had arrived from the capital. While a morning mist wrapped the streetlights in an aura of mystery, his father advanced along the sidewalks of Temuco, trailing a small black suitcase on wheels, oblivious to the taxi drivers and their honking.
He passed in front of the Pinto feria where the empty stalls, under the gallery’s deep arcades, stood next to piles of wooden crates, and where the wind swept cardboard boxes along the ground and sent a newspaper flying into the air. He passed through the centre of town, past the university he had attended forty years earlier and that no longer had the same name, and turned onto Calle San Martin leading west.
“He walked like that,” said Araya, “from the centre of town to here. As if there were nothing to it, a good hike. In front of the house he must have noticed all the cars double-parked. Then he went up the path. He rang the bell, but there were so many people that nobody heard. He pushed open the door, and that’s when I saw him. It was not the first time I’d seen him since he’d been back in the country, and right away I was astonished to see how much the news seemed to have affected him. His eyes were frozen, shining, like those of a madman. People went up to him and embraced him. They pretended to be surprised that Carmen had not come with him, but they knew their marriage was going from bad to worse. I remember, he took a good look at the weeping women. It’s true they were laying it on a bit thick, swaying from side to side, and crying as if they were really sad that the old man was gone,” Araya said, smiling. “It must have reminded him of his childhood. In a corner, the old man’s friends, those mad for Yahweh, dressed in black and all wearing skullcaps, were talking softly. Then he went up to the coffin. I was watching him, and I saw right away that he had something in mind. And just like that, there, in front of everybody, the man opened the coffin’s lid. The women stopped weeping, discussions shut down, and they all threw themselves at him. Don’t you know, you don’t do that, it’s forbidden! But he’d had time to open the coffin, and we all saw the old man’s bony face and silver hair. That gave me a jolt, because he had a gentle air about him, something you never saw during his lifetime. Then, as Noemi, I think, was taking him by the hand, Roberto fell to the ground, all at once, just like that, knocking his head against the coffin. Four of us picked him up and carried him to the sofa.”
Alberto had no trouble imagining his father opening his eyes, laid out on the sofa. He imagined him blinking on seeing the maid bent over him, fanning him, while behind him the weeping women had resumed their plaints. His father got up, unsteady, and went into the kitchen, where sitting beside the wood stove he found Abuela, her eyes motionless, muttering away as usual. He knelt down before her and listened: “Why is the house full of strangers,” she complained. “Mamá, soy yo,” he said to her, but she kept on moving her lips, gazing into space as if she had just lost her sight. He rose and placed a kiss on his mother’s brow, before Noemi burst in to announce that it was time to leave for the synagogue.
Outside, the mist deepened his melancholy, as he held up one corner of the coffin and onlookers joined the procession. At intersections, traffic stopped to let them pass. He recognized the synagogue immediately, the two-storey stone building with its balcony and modest dome on which one could make out a Star of David. In a city so eager to tear everything down, this dignified building is a kind of miracle, thought Roberto.
As the ceremony began, he was surprised to find that his Hebrew came back to him quickly, but he soon tired of the rabbi’s psalms. He cast his eyes around and studied the faces that once peopled his childhood, today ravaged by time and the South’s harsh climate. Aunts, uncles, distant cousins, friends of the old man, his colleagues and his suppliers, in short Temuco’s entire Jewish community had turned out. Who would have thought that the old man was so much appreciated? And Araya reported what he had learned from his sister Noemi: that towards the end of the ceremony the rabbi, by a coincidence that left Roberto speechless, had proclaimed aloud what he himself had been trying to express for days: “To turn your back on his past is as vain as wanting to fell a tree with your bare hands.”
When Araya paused, Alberto interrupted him:
“Fine. But what are you getting at with all this?”
“Just be patient. The next day, all the brothers and sisters were seated here, in the dining room. At one end, her eyes half open, Mama smiled, she barely understood what was going on. At the other end, Noemi held an envelope in her hands. Everyone understood immediately, you could have heard a fly on the wing. Noemi coughed, she tore open the envelope, and brought out a sheet of squared paper, on which I recognized the old man’s elongated, flowing script. She began reading. The letter went something like this, in the old man’s inimitable style. (Here he assumed a stentorian voice): ‘So as to honour the will of Yahweh, so as to give thanks to my beloved family and to ensure our perpetuity in this lost corner of the world, I leave …’ Noemi stopped reading, not believing her eyes, then she pulled herself together and went on in a halting voice: ‘… I leave all of my assets in the hands of Roberto, my son, who is free to dispose of my inheritance as he deems best …’ Can you imagine? I, who in his last years, had spent whole days with the old man, talking to him, going with him to fetch his wine at the botelleria, sometimes even reading to him from his Zionist journals, I was dumbstruck, I have to admit. What had I done to him to deserve this slap in the face? What had Roberto done to so enter into his good graces? I decided to find out. And you know what? Nothing. Roberto had not lifted his little finger for the old man.”
For a few moments, his shoulders hunched, wholly absorbed in his story, he looked at Alberto without seeing him, his gaze passing through him as if he were a ghost.
“The truth,” he continued in an absent voice, “is that in that instant Roberto was as stupefied as we were. He hadn’t seen it coming, either.”
Roberto got to his feet, walked shakily into the middle of the living room, leaned on the back of an armchair. He felt, thought Alberto, everyone’s eyes burning into his back. Until that day his life had been a woeful mistake, a comedy with no rhyme or reason. The old man, having understood him, wanted to give him a chance to redeem himself. Was that it?
“Don’t worry, everyone will get his fair share,” said Araya, trying to mimic Roberto’s voice. “That’s word for word what he said, you can check it with the others. And then everyone went to embrace him.”
The following Saturday, stuffed like sardines into two white vans Araya had borrowed from his boss, they all left, the dozen of them, for the old man’s land. It had been years since any of them had been back there. Everyone was in a good mood in the vehicle where Araya was riding, and where Roberto found himself as well. Crude jokes flew back and forth, along with some pointed jibes. They sang tonadas from the South, vaunting the serenity of country life, the virtues of nature in its lushness, the proverbial hospitality of people from the region. Irony warred with nostalgia as, with humour, they relived childhood’s hard times, lingering over t
heir daily ordeal: nearly four kilometres to navigate on foot, through the forest, to get to school.
“But as for Roberto, nyet,” said Araya. “He didn’t say a word.”
When the van’s tires started spinning in the mud at the bottom of a slope, everyone got down to continue on foot. They scaled hills strewn with stones, stepped over clear streams whose gurgling never stopped, asked permission to cross through corrals where wary sheep gave them a wide berth. Along the way most complained of sore feet, and took long pauses, sitting on rocks or lying on the pastures’ green grass. At the top of a mound dividing two properties, Roberto stopped, shading his eyes with his hand. He recognized far off, dominating another height, the old man’s white house with its tile roof and the forest of eucalyptus surrounding it.
“Suddenly, I confess, I almost stopped breathing,” said Araya. “The house was magnificent. We had been wrong to resent it. It was all because of the old man and his stubbornness.”
Once on the property, Araya saw that the structure needed a good coat of paint, that inside a film of dust covered the rustic furniture, that the arable land was overgrown with weeds, and that the eucalyptus trees had attained dizzying heights. But those were only details requiring minor work. Opening the shutters, Araya was taken aback by the extent of the old man’s lands, with its meadows for cows and a dense eucalyptus forest. To the left, he could make out in the distance the high wooden steeple of the church at Cunco, the little town where, as children, they went to school; to the right, nearer by, on the edge of a wood, a group of houses and straw huts belonging most likely to a Mapuche community.
In the kitchen people bustled about, while in the garden a simple wine in a carafe was passed around the table. As people were asking what had happened to the Jewish families in the environs, Araya saw Roberto slip away behind the house. Stealthily, he followed him, saw him turn around several times, and plunge into the trees. He wandered about for a while, looking up, as though in contemplation of the odorous eucalyptus greenery overhead. He stopped at the foot of a steep slope to admire the view: a happily babbling river, shimmering, flowed rapidly along past a scattering of rocks and their necklaces of foam.
“What do you suppose he was thinking about?” asked Araya, his eyebrows raised. “Of going fishing with the old man, when we were ten years old? We pulled our jeans up to our knees, we held our bamboo fishing rods in both hands as if our lives depended on it, and we followed the old man’s instructions to the letter. After all, he was a master fisherman.”
Suddenly, Roberto placed the flat of his hand on the trunk of a tree and lowered his head. Then he fell to his knees, his arms trembling.
“Yes, he was sobbing like a child,” said Araya, lost in the memory. “I’d have given anything to know what was going through his mind at that moment. If you ask me, he saw what a huge mistake he’d made, leaving the South thirty years earlier. It came to him that life can be unjust and cruel if you take too long finding your way. He thought about all the time he had lost, and he cracked.”
Alberto had a clear vision of his father rising, dazed, his face wet with tears, hesitant in his movements, powerless to stem the flood of emotion that swept through him.
“As he started back,” Araya went on, “I understood everything, and the next days proved me right. That’s when he made up his mind. That afternoon, as if it were of no particular importance, he informed us of his decision to sell the land. Of course, on the one hand, we were sad. We were going to lose our own little paradise, part of the family history would be gone forever. We were not oblivious to that. But on the other hand, many of us had serious financial problems. Why hide the fact? The South is not what you see on television, this Eldorado where you get rich overnight. I wanted my share, I’m not ashamed to say so.”
Alberto easily imagined the twelve brothers and sisters eating in silence, under a gentle sun, while a mild and perfumed breeze stirred their hair. From time to time they clinked glasses, their cheeks flushed from wine, from fatigue, and from nostalgia. Someone brought up Roberto’s heroics at football, long ago. Another remembered his fondness for lamb, which had him holding onto the handle of the spit so as to be able to bite into the roasting animal as soon as the old man was out of sight. Finally, there was his constant thirst that woke him at night, forcing him to go out and kneel over the rain barrel. Roberto listened to these reminiscences without turning his head towards any of the speakers.
Three days later, Araya, like the others, received a registered letter from a notary, explaining that since Roberto was the only lawful owner of the land, it was pointless, legally, to oppose him. The letter, brief, written in a direct, unadorned style, ended by wishing them peaceful and prosperous lives.
“That’s your father,” said Araya. “That’s who he really was.”
His cheeks burning with shame, Alberto lowered his eyes.
“Of course, I was furious,” said Araya. “You wouldn’t have been, in my place? I know you know the rest, your father told you. The truth is that I went to see him several times so we could talk. And you know what he did? He set his dogs on me. Look,” he said, rolling one of his sleeves up to the elbow.
On his forearm Alberto saw a vague calligraphy of scars, like a child’s scribbling.
“That’s why you wanted to burn down the house?” asked Alberto.
Araya raised his eyes.
“What did you expect me to do? Just sit there and keep my mouth shut? I wanted him to pay for what he was able to do because no one dared to face up to him!”
He paused.
“Hijo de puta,” said Araya. “He’d hired a guard. A brute. A Mapu. He laid into me like I was …”
Fixed on the wild grass, his eyes shone. He gritted his teeth.
“A man who does that, for me there’s something wrong with him. A brother who does that, don’t ask me to go to his funeral.”
2
In the middle of the afternoon, tired of waiting for Noemi to come back, tired of the stale odour in the house, Alberto took off in the pickup with Marco. His elbow propped on the open window, he watched, through the rear-view mirror, the light wind at play in his son’s hair. When he turned into the Avenida Pablo Neruda, a flash of sunlight created a blinding spot on the windshield, with a rainbow-coloured aura. He passed square after square, and although on many of them youngsters were playing football or marbles, although the benches shone bottle-green, although no litter was lying about, they all seemed drab, desolate. Was it the concrete covering the ground? Or the smog that, like an ulterior motive, darkened the city in full daylight?
He parked the pickup in front of a glass building, in which were reflected the movie theatre’s heavy columns, encrusted with dirt. He bought some fried cheese empanadas, Marco’s favourite, in a nearby grocery store, and they ate them in the shade of a palm tree, on a bench in the Plaza de Armas. As the fountain shot its jet of water towards the sky in a deafening cloud, he scanned an election poster on a lamppost. “Francisco Huenchumilla, Concertación candidate for mayor of Temuco. Para un ciudad próspera.” He wondered if Temuco had ever had a native mayor. Behind them, music from another time, childlike and gay, drifted into the square. A man with a hand organ was drawing all eyes. On his shoulder, a monkey munched peanuts and made faces. When he saw Marco watching the show, wide-eyed, Alberto remembered his first impressions of the city when, after having left Chile at the age of four, he returned with his family. At the time everything seemed dirty and old-fashioned; the cars, the excessive pollution, the shifty faces of the street children, the cadaverous features of the women kneeling on the sidewalk, selling Kleenex or mote con huesillo. And then, during the same visit, he went from one extreme to the other: he suddenly felt as if he were being reunited with a buried part of himself. He didn’t want to leave. But this honeymoon didn’t last: people, his extended family above all, made him understand that he was not quite one of them, that in certa
in respects, perhaps the most important, he was too gringo, a remark they let drop, sometimes in jest, at other times in all seriousness. Since then, he had never felt at home either here or back there.
A little girl, her hair held back with pink ribbons, was walking with her mother, a balloon in her hand. He bought one for Marco, and made a knot for him at his wrist with the string; from that point on his son kept his eyes on the balloon, a smile on his lips. They strolled, and soon came on itinerant sellers of every age, set up in front of a shopping centre, behind wool blankets on which were displayed miniature tanks, lighters, ballpoint pens, underpants. Alberto told himself that Araya’s story was not at all surprising. He was like that, his father, totally unpredictable, loving to spring surprises and to make a scene, seeking always to protect his moral and material independence.
“And what are going to do now your papa’s dead?” asked Marco.
The question pulled him up short.
“Don’t worry about me.”
And he tried to smile.
“Fleurette says we go up to heaven when we die.”
Fleurette was his schoolteacher.
“You think Abuelo’s going to heaven?”
“If he behaved well, yes. If not, perhaps no.”
“Did he behave well?”
Alberto shrugged his shoulders.
Then, a bit farther on:
“Papa, but why did he die, Abuelo?”
He met his son’s eyes.
“Are you going to die one day, too?”
He nodded, yes.
Seeing his son’s concern, he added:
“Don’t bother about that. It won’t be for many years. We’ve lots of good times ahead of us.”
He gripped his hand a little more tightly.
BACK IN HIS GRANDPARENTS’ HOUSE, he went upstairs with Marco to the room where his father was laid out. Abuela, still sitting in front of the window, raised her head and blinked her eyes when they appeared, her wine-red manta accentuating her slumped shoulders. She stared at them, knitting her brows, then with a movement of her chin she ordered Alberto to introduce himself. When he revealed his identity, she repeated to herself, “Roberto’s son,” as if she no longer remembered Roberto but didn’t want to admit it. After a moment, as Alberto became conscious of the dim light surrounding him, she asked him curtly to leave, because the real Alberto was a boy living in Canada “who’s no bigger than that,” she said, stretching out the fingers of one hand. He replied that he was the boy, that he had visited her four years earlier. But she made a dismissive gesture with her index and middle fingers, indicating that he should leave. Then he took out of his pocket a watch with a chain, a present from his grandfather, went up to her and held it out. She took it, weighed it, and stared for a long time at the motionless hands, as if memories were working their way bit by bit up to the surface of her mind.
Eucalyptus Page 2
