A Manual for Cleaning Women (17 page)

The next dive was out in the open sea. Eloise waited in the boat with Madaleno. He sang, she watched the frigate birds, dozed, lying against the slippery fish. Her dreams dissolved with shatters of spray, a yell from a diver, surfacing with his catch.

The men were jubilant on the way back, except for Luis. Sure it was a good catch, but they needed catches like that twice a day if they were going to keep
La Ida.
They were behind two payments, still owed 20,000 pesos. Their old boat had carried only four divers, tanks enough for only one dive.
La Ida
was a good idea, he said, if his father would let go of the three old men. The viejos catch two fish for every ten of ours. With three good divers we’d pay off the boat in months.

“Luis really wants to buy a speedboat,” César said, “to take gringas waterskiing.
Que se vaya a Acapulco
. I would never tell them they couldn’t dive. And don’t you ever tell me.”

Eloise went every morning with César for clams and on the first dive every day. They still didn’t take her down on the deep second dive of the day, although she was becoming surer and stronger, beginning to shoot her own good portion of fish. In the evenings she sat with the old men. Luis and César went over accounts, argued. Sometimes the sons went into town. There were consultations between Luis and Eloise about his clothes. Believe me, the white cotton pants are nicer than those green dacron ones. Of course leave the shark’s teeth around your neck.

One night César cut everyone’s hair. Even hers. She longed for a mirror, but it felt good, light, curling.

“Berry pretty,” Luis said.
Very
, she corrected him but knew he had discovered the charm of an accent.

Usually they sat silent as the sunset came, night fell. She listened to the click click of dominos, the creaking of the anchor rope. A few times she tried to read or work on the poem, but gave it up. I may never read again. What would she do when she got home? Who knows—maybe Denver will be entirely underwater. She laughed out loud at the thought.

“
Estás contenta,
” César said.

She shouted to him above the generator the next day.

“Can I go on a deep dive before I leave?”

“You need a bad dive first.”

“How do I get one?”

“You will. Maybe today. It’s rough. Rained all night.”

*   *   *

The first dive was in a rocky spot, with many sea urchins and moray eels. The water was murky; cold strong currents made it hard to see or to swim. A needlefish jabbed her in the arm. Ramón and Raúl surfaced with her, binding the cut tight with rags to keep blood from attracting sharks. Underwater again she lost sight of them; she hadn’t seen César at all. I hope this qualifies for a bad dive, she joked to herself, but she was terrified. She couldn’t see anyone, anything. She treaded water, like being lost in the woods. Her air ran out. She pulled the reserve cord but nothing happened. Don’t panic. Surface slow. Slow. But she was panicked, her lungs bursting. She surfaced slowly, jerking frantically on the cord. No air. César was there in front of her. She grabbed his mouthpiece away from him and put it into her own mouth.

She gulped air with a sob of relief. He waited, then calmly took the mouthpiece back, breathed himself. He led her to the surface, passing the air hose back and forth between them.

They broke water. Air, light. She was shaking; Madaleno helped her into the boat.

“I’m so ashamed. Please forgive me.”

César held her head in his hands. “I tied your reserve tank shut. You did exactly what you were supposed to do.”

The divers teased her on the way back but all agreed she could go to Los Morros the next day. “
Pues, es brava,
” Raúl said. “
Sí.
” César grinned. “
Ella podría ir sola.
” She could go alone. He must think her one of those aggressive competent American women. I am competent, she thought, her head lying on the edge of the boat, tears swept away by the high waves. She closed her eyes and thought about the poem, knew how to end it.
And thus all blood arrives
/
to its own quiet place.

*   *   *

The next day was dazzling clear. Los Morros was a stark monolith far out to sea, almost out of sight of land. White with guano, the island palpitated dizzily with a million birds.
La Ida
anchored far off but even above the shattering waves, the shrieking of the birds, was the ghostly flap and flutter of wings. The stench of urine and guano was nauseating, as intoxicating as ether.

Deep descent. Fifty feet, seventy-five, a hundred, a hundred and twenty. It was as if the mountains of Colorado were underwater. Crags and ravines, gulleys and valleys. Fish and plants that Eloise had never seen; the fish she knew were huge here, bold. She aimed at a garlopa, missed, aimed again and shot it just right. It was so big Juan helped her load it onto her stringer; the rope burned out through her fingers. Frenzied loading and shooting all around her. Loras, pargos, medregals.
Sangre.
She hit a mero and another garlopa, pleased because she hadn’t seen César, was on her own. Frightened then, but spotted him far away, flew fast down the jagged cliffs toward him. He flippered, waiting for her in the dark, then drew her to him. They embraced, their regulators clanking. She realized then that his penis was inside her; she twined her legs around him as they spun and undulated in the dark sea. When he left her his sperm drifted up between them like pale octopus ink. When Eloise was to think of this later it was not as one remembers a person or a sexual act but as if it were an occurrence of nature, a slight earthquake, a gust of wind on a summer day.

He handed her his rope of fish when he saw a mammoth pintillo, shot it, strung it on the line. There was a pargo above them, far, and she raced after him toward it, met him at the mouth of a dark cave. The pargo had gone. César motioned to her to wait, held her back in the cold darkness. Particles of gold dust filtered in the murky purple. A blue parrot fish. Silence. Then they came. A school of barracuda. There was nothing else in the sea. Endless, subliminal, hundreds of them. The dim light turned their quick slickness into molten silver. César shot, shattering them into a spill of mercury that flowed quickly back together and disappeared.

La Ida
lay low in the water, soaked in spray. The divers sprawled exhausted on the still-pulsating bodies of the fish. Beto had caught a turtle and the men dug inside her for her eggs, eating them with lime and salt. Eloise refused at first, self-righteous, turtle were out of season, but then, hungry, she ate them too. The boat was circling and recircling Los Morros. No one had said anything; at first Eloise didn’t notice that Flaco hadn’t surfaced, didn’t sense any fear until it was at least an hour after he should have been sighted. Even as the sun went down no one said he must be drowned, be dead. César finally told Madaleno to head for shore.

They ate by the light of the one lantern. No one spoke. When they finished, César, Raúl, and Ramón went back out to sea with lanterns and a bottle of raicilla.

“But they can’t hope to find him in the dark.”

“No,” Luis said.

She went to her room to pack, hang up her seersucker suit. She was leaving in the morning, a panga had been sent for. She lay awake in the damp bed, watching the pewter moonlit night through the mosquito netting. César came into her bed, held her, caressed her with his strong scarred hands. His mouth and body tasted of salt. Their bodies were land-heavy, hot, rocking. Beat of the sea. They smiled in the pale light and fell asleep, locked like turtles.

When she awoke he was sitting on her bed, dressed in trunks and a shirt.

“Eloisa, can you give me the twenty thousand for the boat?”

She hesitated. In pesos it sounded like a lot. It was a lot. “Yes,” she said. “Can you take a check?” He nodded. She wrote the check and he put it in his pocket.
Gracias
, he said and he kissed her eyelids and left.

The sun was up. César was at the generator, black oil dripped down his arm. Eloise put on lipstick at the broken mirror. Pigs and chickens scavenged in the yard, scattering zopilotes. Madaleno raked the sand. Isabel came out of the kitchen.

“
Pues ya se va?
” Eloise nodded, started to shake Isabel’s hand to say good-bye but the old woman threw her arms around her. The two women swayed, embracing; Isabel’s soapy hands were wet, warm on Eloise’s back.

The motorboat was coming in just as
La Ida
passed the Terascan wall, out to sea. The men waved across the water to Eloise, briefly. They were checking their regulators, strapping on their weights and knives. César checked the tanks for air.

Good and Bad

Nuns tried hard to teach me to be good. In high school it was Miss Dawson. Santiago College, 1952. Six of us in the school were going on to American colleges; we had to take American History and Civics from the new teacher, Ethel Dawson. She was the only American teacher, the others were Chilean or European.

We were all bad to her. I was the worst. If there was to be a test and none of us had studied I could distract her with questions about the Gadsden Purchase for the whole period, or get her started on segregation or American imperialism if we were really in trouble.

We mocked her, imitated her nasal Boston whine. She had a tall lift on one shoe because of polio, wore thick wire-rimmed glasses. Splayed gap teeth, a horrible voice. It seemed she deliberately made herself look worse by wearing mannish, mismatched colors, wrinkled, soup-spotted slacks, garish scarves on her badly cut hair. She got very red-faced when she lectured and she smelled of sweat. It was not simply that she flaunted poverty … Madame Tournier wore the same shabby black skirt and blouse day after day, but the skirt was cut on the bias; the black blouse, green and frayed with age, was of fine silk. Style, cachet were all-important to us then.

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.