Maya's Notebook: A Novel (42 page)

“I have the impression that this little party is a bit of a ruse,” Manuel said eventually. “For days now there’s been something floating in the air. Let’s cut to the chase, girls.”

“You’ve thwarted our strategy, Manuel. We were planning to broach the subject diplomatically,” said Blanca.

“What is it you want?”

“Nothing, just to talk.”

“About what?”

And then I told him that over the past few months I had taken it upon myself to investigate what had happened to him after the military coup, because I thought his memories were poisoning him from within, inflamed like an ulcer. I begged his forgiveness for meddling, I’d only done it because I cared for him so much; I was so sad to hear him suffering in his sleep when the nightmares assaulted him. I told him that the rock he was carrying on his shoulders was too heavy; it was crushing him, only letting him live half a life. It was as if he was just marking time till he died. He’d closed up so much he couldn’t feel joy or love. I added that Blanca and I could help him to carry that weight. Manuel didn’t interrupt me. He’d turned very pale, breathing like a tired dog, holding Blanca’s hand, with his eyes closed. “Do you want to know what
gringuita
discovered, Manuel?” Blanca asked in a murmur, and he nodded silently.

I confessed that in Santiago, while he was recovering from the operation, I had combed through the archives of the Vicarage of Solidarity and talked to the people Father Lyon had put me in touch with—two lawyers, a priest, and one of the authors of the Rettig Report, compiled by the
National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation, which documents more than 3,500 human rights violations committed during the dictatorship. Among those cases was that of Felipe Vidal, my Nini’s first husband, and also that of Manuel Arias.

“I didn’t participate in that report, didn’t testify before that commission,” said Manuel, his voice cracking.

“Father Lyon gave a statement on your behalf. You told him the details of those fourteen months you were detained, Manuel. You’d just come out of the Tres Álamos concentration camp and you were banished here, to Chiloé, where you stayed with Father Lyon in Don Lionel’s home.”

“I don’t remember that.”

“The priest remembers, but he couldn’t tell me, because he considers it a secret of the confessional. He only pointed me in the right direction. Felipe Vidal’s case was reported by his wife, my Nini, before she went into exile.”

I told Manuel what I had discovered during that vital week in Santiago and that Blanca and I had visited Villa Grimaldi. The name of the place didn’t provoke any reaction from him. He had a vague notion that he’d been there, but in his mind he mixed it up with other detention centers. In the thirty-some years since then, his mind had eliminated that experience from his memory. He remembered it as if he’d read it in a book, not as something personal, although he has scars and burn marks on his body and can’t lift his arms above shoulder height, because they were dislocated.

“I don’t want to know the details,” he told us.

Blanca explained that the details were intact somewhere inside him, and it would take immense courage to enter that place, but he wouldn’t be going alone; she and I would ac
company him. He was no longer a powerless prisoner in the hands of his torturers, but he would never be truly free if he didn’t confront the suffering of his past.

“The worst things happened to you in Villa Grimaldi, Manuel. At the end of our tour, the guide took us to see the reconstructed cells. There were some cells that were four feet by six, where several prisoners were kept standing up, wedged in together, for days, even weeks, and only taken out to be tortured.”

“Yes, yes . . . I was in one of those with Felipe Vidal and other men. They didn’t give us water . . . it was an unventilated box, we were soaking in sweat, blood, excrement,” Manuel stammered, doubled over, his head on his knees. “And there were other cells that were individual niches, tombs, kennels . . . the cramps, the thirst. . . . Get me out of here!”

Blanca and I wrapped him in a circle of arms and chests and kisses, holding him, crying with him. We had seen one of those cells. After a lot of begging, the guide had allowed me to go inside. I had to crawl in on my knees, and once inside I stayed cringing, crouching, unable to change position or move, and after they closed the door I was trapped in total darkness. I couldn’t bear more than a couple of seconds and started shouting until they pulled me out by my arms. “The prisoners were kept buried alive for weeks, sometimes months. Few made it out of here alive, and they often went crazy,” the guide had told us.

“Now we know where you are in your nightmares, Manuel,” said Blanca.

They finally took Manuel out
of his tomb, to lock another prisoner in it. They got tired of torturing him and sent him to other detention centers. After completing his sentence of banishment in Chiloé, he was able to go to Australia, where his wife was. She hadn’t heard any news of him for more than two years, and had assumed he was dead. She’d started a new life into which the traumatized Manuel did not fit. They soon got divorced, as did most couples in exile. In spite of it all, Manuel had more luck than a lot of refugees, because Australia is a welcoming country. He found work there in his profession and wrote two books, while he kept himself numbed with alcohol and fleeting adventures that only accentuated his abysmal solitude. With his second wife, a Spanish dancer he met in Sydney, he lasted less than a year. He was incapable of trusting anyone or of surrendering to a loving relationship. He suffered episodes of violence and panic attacks. He was irretrievably trapped in his cell in Villa Grimaldi or naked, tied to a metal cot, while his jailers amused themselves with electrical charges.

One day, in Sydney, Manuel crashed his car into a reinforced concrete post, an improbable accident even for someone stupefied by liquor, as he was when they found him. The doctors in the hospital, where he spent thirteen days in critical condition and a month immobilized, concluded that he’d tried to commit suicide and put him in contact with an international organization that helped victims of torture. A psychiatrist with experience in cases like his visited him while he was still in the hospital. He wasn’t able to unravel his patient’s traumas, but he did help him to
manage his mood swings and episodes of violence and panic, to stop drinking, and to lead an apparently normal existence. Manuel considered himself cured, playing down the importance of his nightmares and his visceral fear of elevators and enclosed spaces. He went on taking antidepressants and got used to solitude.

As Manuel was telling us all this, the electricity went off, as always happens on this island at that time, and none of us had gotten up to light the candles. We were sitting very close together in the dark.

“Forgive me, Manuel,” murmured Blanca after a long pause.

“Forgive you? I have only gratitude for you,” he said.

“Forgive me for my incomprehension and blindness. No one can forgive the criminals, Manuel, but maybe you can forgive me and my family. We sinned by omission. We ignored the evidence, because we didn’t want to be complicit. In my case it’s worse, because I traveled a lot during those years, and I knew what the foreign press published about Pinochet’s government. Lies, I thought, that’s Communist propaganda.”

Manuel pulled her close, embraced her. I stood up and felt my way through the darkness to find some candles, put a bit of wood in the stove, and get another bottle of wine and more tea. The house had cooled down. I put a blanket over their legs and curled up on the dilapidated sofa on the other side of Manuel.

“So your grandma told you about us, Maya,” Manuel said.

“That you were friends, nothing else. She never talks about that time, hardly ever mentions Felipe Vidal.”

“Then how did you know I’m your grandfather?”

“My Popo is my grandfather,” I replied, taken aback.

His revelation was so outrageous that it took me a long minute to grasp it. The words were slashing their way through my muddled mind and my confused heart, but their meaning escaped me.

“I don’t understand . . . ,” I murmured.

“Andrés, your dad, is my son,” Manuel said.

“That can’t be. My Nini wouldn’t have kept that quiet for more than forty years.”

“I thought you knew, Maya. You told Dr. Puga that you were my granddaughter.”

“So he’d let me sit in on your appointment!”

In 1964 my Nini was the secretary and Manuel Arias the assistant to the same professor. She was twenty-two and recently married to Felipe Vidal; he was twenty-seven and had a grant to study for a doctorate in sociology at NYU. They’d been in love as adolescents, but had stopped seeing each other for a few years. Meeting again by chance at the university swept them up in a new and urgent passion, very different from the virginal romance they’d had before. That passion would end in a heart-rending way when he went to New York and they had to separate. Meanwhile Felipe Vidal’s career as a journalist was starting to take off. He spent time in Cuba, oblivious to his wife’s deception, and never suspected that the child born in 1965 might not be his. He didn’t know of the existence of Manuel Arias until they shared an odious cell, but Manuel had followed the reporter’s successes from afar. Manuel and Nidia’s love suffered several interruptions, but inevitably reignited whenever they met, until he got married in 1970, the year that Salva
dor Allende was elected president and the political cataclysm began to gestate that would culminate three years later in the military coup.

“Does my dad know?” I asked Manuel.

“I don’t think so. Nidia felt guilty about what had happened between us and was prepared to keep it secret at any cost. She tried to forget and wanted me to forget too. She never mentioned it until December of last year, when she wrote to me about you.”

“Now I understand why you took me in, Manuel.”

“In my sporadic correspondence with Nidia over the years I learned of your existence, Maya. I knew that as Andrés’s daughter, you were my granddaughter, but I didn’t dwell on it. I didn’t think I’d ever meet you.”

The reflective, intimate atmosphere of minutes before became very tense. Manuel was my father’s father. We shared the same blood. There were no dramatic reactions, no emotional embraces or tears of recognition, no choking up over sentimental declarations; I felt that bitter toughness of my hard times, something I’d never felt in Chiloé. The months of fun, study, and cohabitation with Manuel vanished; suddenly he was a stranger whose adultery with my grandmother disgusted me.

“My God, Manuel, why didn’t you tell me? The soap opera has nothing on this,” concluded Blanca with a sigh.

The spell was broken and the air cleared. We looked at each other in the yellowish candlelight, smiled timidly, and then burst out laughing, first hesitantly and then enthusiastically, at how absurd and insignificant this was. Apart from donating an organ or inheriting a fortune, it doesn’t matter who my biological grandfather is; only affection
matters, and we’re lucky to have each other.

“My Popo is my grandfather,” I repeated.

“Nobody’s questioning that, Maya,” he replied.

Through my Nini’s messages, which
she sends to Manuel by way of Mike O’Kelly, I found out that Freddy had been found unconscious on a street in Las Vegas. An ambulance took him to the same hospital where Olympia Pettiford had first met him, one of those lucky coincidences that the Widows for Jesus attribute to the power of prayer. The boy remained in the intensive care unit, breathing through a tube connected to a noisy machine, while the doctors tried to control his double pneumonia, which had him at the gates of the crematorium. Then they had to remove one of his kidneys, which had been crushed in last year’s beating, and treat the multiple ailments caused by living rough. Eventually he ended up in a bed on Olympia’s ward at the hospital. In the meantime she had set in motion the saving forces of Jesus and her own resources to prevent Child Protective Services or the law from getting their hands on the kid.

By the time Freddy was discharged, Olympia Pettiford had obtained judicial permission to take care of him, alleging some illusory kinship and thus saving him from a juvenile detention center or prison. It seems that Officer Arana
helped her, after discovering that a boy matching Freddy’s description had been admitted to the hospital and, when he had a free moment, going to see him. He found his access blocked by the imposing Olympia, determined to monitor any visits to the patient, who was still drifting in that uncertain territory between life and death.

The nurse was afraid Arana was intending to arrest her protégé, but he convinced her that he only wanted to ask him if he had any news about a friend of his called Laura Barron. He said he was willing to help the kid, and since they were both interested in that, Olympia invited him for a juice and a chat in the cafeteria. She explained that toward the end of last year Freddy had brought a very ill drug addict called Laura Barron to her house, and then he’d vanished. She didn’t hear any more about him until he came out of surgery with a single remaining kidney and ended up in a ward on her floor. As for Laura Barron, all she could tell him was that she looked after her for a few days, and as soon as the girl recovered a bit, some relatives took her away, probably to put her in rehab, as she herself had advised them. She didn’t know where, and she no longer had the number for the grandmother that the girl had given her. Freddy needed to be left alone, she warned Arana in a menacing tone; the boy knew nothing about that Laura Barron.

When Freddy got out of the hospital, looking like a scarecrow, Olympia Pettiford took him to her home and placed him in the hands of the fearsome commando team of Christian widows. By that point the kid had been off drugs for two months and only had enough energy to watch television. With the Widows’ diet of fry-ups he gradually began to recover his strength, and when Olympia reckoned he
might be able to run away and return to the hell of addiction, she remembered the man in the wheelchair, whose card she kept between the pages of her Bible, and called him. She withdrew her savings from the bank, bought the tickets, and with another woman for reinforcement took Freddy to California. According to my Nini, they showed up in their Sunday best in the airless little office near the juvenile prison where Snow White, who was waiting for them, works. The story filled me with hope; if anyone in this world can help Freddy, that someone is Mike O’Kelly.