Maya's Notebook: A Novel (41 page)

A week after the surgery, we took Manuel back to Chiloé, where the animals were waiting for us. Fahkeen received us with a pathetic display of choreography, his ribs sticking out because he had refused to eat in our absence, as a dismayed Juanito explained. We went back sooner than Dr. Puga recommended because Manuel didn’t want to spend a whole month convalescing in Blanca’s sister’s house in Santiago, where we were getting in the way, as he said. Blanca asked me to watch my mouth around the family about what we’d discovered of Manuel’s past; they are very right-wing, and it would go over very badly. They welcomed us with affection, and all of them, including the teenagers, made themselves available to drive Manuel to his appointments and take care of him.

I shared a room with Blanca and got to see firsthand how the rich live in their gated communities, with domestic servants, gardeners, swimming pool, purebred dogs, and three cars. Their staff brought us breakfast in bed, ran our baths with aromatic bath salts, and even ironed my jeans. I’d never seen anything like it, and I didn’t mind it one bit; I could get used to being rich quite easily. “They’re not really rich, Ma
ya. They don’t have their own plane,” Manuel joked when I discussed it with him. “You’ve got a poor man’s mentality, that’s the problem with you leftists,” I answered, thinking of my Nini and Mike O’Kelly, who have a real vocation for poverty. I’m not like them: equality and socialism strike me as vulgar.

In Santiago I felt stifled by the pollution, the traffic, and the impersonal way people treated each other. In Chiloé you can tell if someone is an outsider because they don’t say hello in the street; in Santiago someone who says anything to strangers is suspicious. When I got in the elevator at the Clínica Alemana, I said good morning like a moron, and all the other people stared at the wall, so they wouldn’t have to answer me. I didn’t like Santiago; I couldn’t wait to get back to our island, where life flows like a gentle river, and there is pure air, silence, and time to finish your thoughts.

Manuel’s recovery will take a while. He still gets headaches, and his energy level is low. Dr. Puga’s orders were explicit: he has to swallow half a dozen pills a day, take it easy until December, when he has to return to Santiago for another scan, avoid strenuous physical exertion for the rest of his life, and trust in fate or God, depending on his beliefs, because the platinum wire is not 100 percent infallible. I’m thinking that it couldn’t do any harm to consult a
machi
, just in case. . . .

Blanca and I decided to wait for a suitable opportunity to talk to Manuel about what we have discovered, without pressuring him. For the moment we’re taking care of him as well as we can. He’s used to the authoritarian ways of Blanca and this gringa who lives in his house, so our recent
kindness has him on tenterhooks. He thinks we’re hiding the truth from him, and that his condition is much more serious than Dr. Puga let on. “If you’re planning to treat me like an invalid, I’d rather you left me alone,” he grumbles.

With a map and a
list of places and people, provided by Father Lyon, I was able to reconstruct Manuel’s life in the key years between the military coup and his departure into exile. In 1973 he was thirty-six years old, one of the youngest professors in the Faculty of Social Sciences. He was married, and as far as I’ve deduced, his marriage was a bit shaky. He wasn’t a Communist, as the Millalobo believes, or a member of any other political party either, but he sympathized with the steps Salvador Allende was taking and participated in some of the huge demonstrations in support of the government. When the military coup happened, on Tuesday, September 11, 1973, the country was divided into two irreconcilable halves; no one could remain neutral. Two days after the coup, the curfew imposed for the first forty-eight hours was lifted, and Manuel went back to work. He found the university occupied by soldiers armed for war, in combat uniforms and with their faces blackened with grease paint so they wouldn’t be recognized. He saw bullet holes in the walls and blood on the stairs, and someone told him they’d arrested the students and professors who’d been in the building.

That violence was so unimaginable in Chile, proud of its democratic institutions and civil society, that Manuel, with
no inkling of the gravity of what had happened, walked into the nearest police station to ask about his colleagues. He didn’t walk back out. They took him blindfolded to the National Stadium, which had been turned into a detention center. There were thousands of people there who had been arrested in those two days, battered and hungry, sleeping on the cement floor and spending the day sitting in the stands, silently begging not to be included among the unfortunate ones taken to the infirmary to be interrogated. They could hear the victims’ screams, and at night, the gunshots of the executions. Those who’d been arrested were kept incommunicado, with no contact with their relatives, who were, however, allowed to leave packages of food and clothing, in the hope that the guards would give it to those it was intended for. Manuel’s wife, who belonged to the MIR, Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionario (Movement of the Revolutionary Left), the group most persecuted by the military, immediately escaped to Argentina and from there to Europe. She wouldn’t see her husband again for three years, when they’d both been granted asylum in Australia.

A hooded man passed through the stands in the stadium, weighed down by a burden of guilt and grief, closely guarded by two soldiers. The man pointed out supposed Socialist or Communist Party members, who were immediately taken into the bowels of the building to be tortured or killed. By mistake or out of fear, the ill-fated hooded man pointed to Manuel Arias.

Day by day, step by step, I traced the route of his torment, and in the process I felt the indelible scars the dictatorship left in Chile and on Manuel’s soul. Now I know what is hidden behind appearances in this country. Sitting
in a park facing the Mapocho River, where tortured corpses used to float past in the seventies, I read the report of the commission that investigated the atrocities, an extensive tale of suffering and cruelty. A priest, a friend of Father Lyon’s, gave me access to the archives of the Vicarage of Solidarity, an office of the Catholic Church that helped the victims of the repression and kept track of the disappeared, defying the dictatorship from within the very heart of the cathedral. I examined hundreds of photographs of people who were arrested and then vanished without a trace, almost all of them young, and the reports from women who were still looking for their children, their husbands, and sometimes their grandchildren.

Manuel spent the summer and
fall of 1974 in the National Stadium and other detention centers, where he was interrogated so many times that nobody was keeping track anymore. Confessions meant nothing and ended up lost in bloodstained archives, of interest only to mice. Like many other prisoners, he never knew what it was his torturers wanted to hear, and finally he understood that it didn’t matter; they didn’t know what they were looking for either. These weren’t really interrogations, but punishments to establish an oppressive regime and root out any glimmer of resistance in the population. The pretext was weapons caches, which Allende’s government had supposedly handed over to the people, but months later they hadn’t found any, and no one believed in those imaginary arsenals any
more. The people were paralyzed by terror, the most efficient method to impose the icy order of the barracks. It was a long-term plan to completely change the country.

During the winter of 1974, Manuel was held in a mansion on the outskirts of Santiago that had belonged to a powerful family called the Grimaldis, of Italian origin, whose daughter was arrested so they could later trade her freedom for the house. The property fell into the hands of the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (National Intelligence Agency), the infamous DINA, the Chilean secret police, whose emblem was an iron fist. The DINA was responsible for many crimes, including some outside the country, such as the assassination in Buenos Aires of the ousted commander in chief of the armed forces and of a former government minister in the heart of Washington, a few blocks from the White House. Villa Grimaldi became the most feared of the interrogation centers, where 4,500 prisoners were held, many of whom did not come out alive.

At the end of my week in Santiago, I paid my obligatory visit to Villa Grimaldi, which is now a quiet garden haunted by the memory of those who died there. When the moment came, I just couldn’t go by myself. My grandmother believes that places get marked by human experiences, and I didn’t have the courage to face this one without a friendly hand. Evil and pain are forever trapped in that place. I asked Blanca Schnake, the only person other than Liliana and Father Lyon I’d told about what I was trying to find out, to accompany me. Blanca made a weak attempt to talk me out of it—“Why keep delving into something that happened so long ago?”—but she had a feeling that the key to Manuel Arias’s life was there, and her love for him was stronger than her reluctance to confront something she’d rather ignore. “Okay,
gringuita
, let’s go right away, before I change my mind,” she said.

Villa Grimaldi, now called the Park for Peace, is a couple of green acres of sleepy trees. Not much is left of the buildings that existed when Manuel was there, which were demolished by the dictatorship in an attempt to erase any trace of the unforgivable things that went on in them. Nevertheless, the tractors could not raze the persistent ghosts or silence the moans of agony, still lingering in the air. We walked among images, monuments, large canvases showing the faces of the dead and disappeared. A guide told us about the way the prisoners were treated, the most common forms of torture used, with schematic drawings of human shapes hanging by their arms, or with their heads submerged in water barrels, iron cots rigged up to electricity cables, women raped by dogs, men sodomized by broom handles. One of the 266 names I found on a stone wall was that of Felipe Vidal, and so I was able to fit the last piece of the puzzle into place. In the desolation of Villa Grimaldi, the professor Manuel Arias met the journalist Felipe Vidal; there they endured terrible suffering together, and one of them survived.

Blanca and I decided that
we have to talk to Manuel about his past. We wish Daniel were here to help us; in an intervention of this kind the presence of a professional could come in very handy, even if it’s a rookie psychiatrist like him. Blanca maintains that Manuel’s experiences should be treated with the same care and delicacy his aneurysm requires; they’re encapsulated in a memory bubble that, if it suddenly bursts, could destroy him. That day Manuel had gone to Castro to look for some books, and we took advantage of his absence to make dinner, knowing he always comes back at sunset.

I started to bake bread, as I tend to do when I’m nervous. It calms me down to knead the dough firmly, shape it, wait for the big raw loaf to rise under a white linen tea cloth, bake it until it’s golden brown, and then serve it to my friends still warm, a patient and sacred ritual. Blanca cooked Frances’s infallible chicken with mustard and streaky bacon, Manuel’s favorite, and brought chestnuts in syrup for dessert. The house was cozy, fragrant with the scent of bread fresh from the oven and the stew cooking slowly in an earthenware pot. It was quite a chilly afternoon, calm, with the sky gray and no wind. Soon there would be a full moon and another meeting of sirens in the
ruca
.

Since the aneurysm operation, something has changed between Manuel and Blanca; their aura is shining, as my grandma would say, they have that twinkling light of the recently dazzled. There are also other less subtle signs, like the complicity in the way they look at each other, touching all the time, the way they both guess each other’s intentions and desires. On the one hand I’m very happy, as it’s what I’ve been trying to bring about for many months, and on the other hand I’m a bit worried about my future. What’s going to happen to me when they decide to plunge into that love they’ve been postponing for so many years? The three of us won’t fit in this house, and Blanca’s would be a tight squeeze too. Well, I hope by then my future with Daniel Goodrich will be clearer.

Manuel arrived with a bag of books, which his book
seller friends had ordered for him, and some novels in English my grandmother had mailed to Castro.

“Are we celebrating someone’s birthday?” he asked, sniffing the air.

“We’re celebrating friendship. This house has changed so much since our
gringuita
got here!” Blanca remarked.

“You mean the mess?”

“I mean the flowers, the good food, the company, Manuel. Don’t be ungrateful. You’re going to miss her a lot when she goes.”

“Is she planning on leaving?”

“No, Manuel. I plan on marrying Daniel and living here with you and the four kids we’re going to have,” I said sarcastically.

“I hope your beau approves of that plan,” he said in the same tone.

“Why wouldn’t he? It’s a perfect plan.”

“You two would be bored to death on this craggy island, Maya. Outsiders who retire here are disenchanted with the world. Nobody comes here before they’ve even started to live.”

“I came to hide, and look what I’ve found: you two and Daniel, safety, nature, and a town of three hundred Chilotes to love. Even my Popo is at home here; I’ve seen him walking on the hill.”

“You’ve been drinking!” exclaimed Manuel in alarm.

“I haven’t touched a drop, Manuel. I knew you wouldn’t believe me, that’s why I haven’t told you.”

That was an extraordinary night, when everything conspired to enable confidences—the bread and the chicken,
the moon peeking out from between the clouds, the tried and true sympathy we had for each other, the conversation peppered with anecdotes and little jokes. They told me how they’d met, the first impression each had made on the other. Manuel said that when she was young, Blanca was very beautiful, and she still is; back then she was a golden Valkyrie, all legs, shiny hair, and white teeth, who radiated the security and cheerfulness of someone who has been very spoiled. “I should have detested her, she was so privileged, but she won me over with her kindness. It was impossible not to love her. But I was in no shape to court anyone, much less a young woman as far out of my league as she was.” For Blanca, Manuel had the attraction of the forbidden and dangerous. He came from a world that was opposite to hers, belonged to another social sphere, and represented the political enemy, although she was prepared to accept him as a guest of her family. I told them about my house in Berkeley, about why I look Scandinavian, and about the only time I saw my mother. I told them about some of the characters I met in Las Vegas, about a woman who weighed four hundred pounds and had a fondling voice, who earned her living doing phone sex, or a couple of transsexual friends of Brandon Leeman’s, who got married in a formal ceremony, her in a tuxedo and him in white organza. We took our time over dinner and then sat, as we usually did, to watch the night through the window, them with their glasses of wine, me with a cup of tea. Blanca was on the sofa close to Manuel, and I was on a cushion on the floor with Fahkeen, who’s been suffering from separation anxiety ever since we left him to go to Santiago. He keeps his eye on me all the time and never leaves my side. It’s a drag.