Maya's Notebook: A Novel (7 page)

Chiloé’s traditional dish is
curanto
, and our island’s is the best. The idea of offering
curanto
to tourists was one of Manuel’s initiatives to break the isolation of this little village, where visitors rarely venture, because the Jesuits didn’t leave one of their churches here, and we don’t have any penguins or whales, only swans, flamingos, and
toninas
, the white-bellied dolphins that are so common around here. First Manuel spread the rumor that La Pincoya’s cave was here, and nobody had the authority to refute it; the exact site of the grotto is up for discussion, and several islands claim it. The grotto and
curanto
are now our tourist attractions.

The northeast shore of the island is wild and rocky, dangerous for boats, but excellent for fishing. A submerged cavern over there, only visible at low tide, is perfect for the kingdom of La Pincoya, one of the few benevolent beings in the frightening mythology of Chiloé, because she helps fishermen and sailors in trouble. She’s a beautiful young woman with long hair draped in kelp, and if she dances facing the sea, the fishing will be abundant, but if she faces the beach as she dances, there will be scarcity and the fishermen must look for another place to cast their nets. But since almost nobody’s ever seen her, this information is useless. If La Pincoya appears, you have to close your eyes and run in the opposite direction, because she seduces the lustful and takes
them to the bottom of the sea.

It’s just a twenty-minute walk along a steep uphill path from the village to the grotto, as long as you’re in decent shoes and good spirits. On the top of the hill are a few solitary monkey-puzzle trees dominating the landscape, and from up there you can appreciate the bucolic panorama of the sea, sky, and nearby uninhabited small islands. Some of these are separated by such narrow channels that at low tide you can shout from one shore to the other. From the hilltop the grotto looks like a big toothless mouth. You can scramble down the seagull-shit-covered rocks, at the risk of breaking your neck, or you can get there by kayak, skirting along the coast of the island, as long as you know the waters and the rocks. You need a bit of imagination to appreciate La Pincoya’s underwater palace, because beyond the witch’s mouth of the cave, you can’t see anything. In the past some German tourists tried to swim inside, but the carabineros have banned it because of the treacherous currents. It would be very inconvenient for us if foreigners started drowning here.

I’ve been told that January
and February are dry, hot months in these latitudes, but this must be an odd summer, because it rains all the time. The days are long, and the sun’s still in no hurry to set.

I go swimming in the sea in spite of Eduvigis’s warnings about the undertows, the carnivorous salmon escaped from the cages, and the Millalobo, a mythological being, half
man and half seal, with a golden pelt, who could abduct me at high tide. To that list of calamities Manuel added hypothermia; he says only a gullible gringa would think of swimming in these freezing waters without a wetsuit. I haven’t actually seen anybody go into the water by choice. Cold water is good for you, my Nini always used to insist when the water heater broke down in the big house in Berkeley—that is, two or three times a week. Last year I abused my body so much, I could have died out in the street; I’m here to recover, and there’s nothing better for that than a swim in the sea. I just hope my cystitis doesn’t come back, but so far so good.

I’ve been to some other islands and towns with Manuel to interview the really old people, and I have a general idea of the archipelago now, although I haven’t been to the south yet. Castro is the heart of the Isla Grande, with more than forty thousand people and a buoyant economy. Buoyant is a slight exaggeration, but after six weeks here, Castro is like New York. The city pokes out of the sea, with wooden houses on stilts all along the shore, painted bright colors to cheer people up during the long winters, when the sky and the water turn gray. There Manuel has his bank account, dentist, and barber; he does his grocery shopping there, orders books and picks them up at the bookstore.

If the sea is choppy and we can’t make it back home, we stay in a guesthouse run by an Austrian lady, whose formidable backside and big round chest make Manuel blush, and stuff ourselves with pork and apple strudel. There aren’t many Austrians around here, but lots of Germans. The immigration policies of this country have been very racist—no Asians, blacks, or indigenous people from else
where, only white Europeans. A nineteenth-century president brought Germans from the Black Forest and gave them land in the south—land that wasn’t his to give, but belonged to the Mapuche Indians—with the idea of improving the gene pool; he wanted the Germans to impart punctuality, a love of hard work, and discipline to Chileans. I don’t know if the plan worked the way he’d hoped, but in any case Germans raised up some of the southern provinces with their efforts and populated them with their blue-eyed spawn. Blanca Schnake’s family is descended from those immigrants.

We made a special trip
so Manuel could introduce me to Father Luciano Lyon, an amazing old man who was in prison several times during the military dictatorship (1973–89) for defending the persecuted. The Vatican, fed up with slapping the wrists of the rebellious priest, ordered him to retire to a remote country house in Chiloé, but the old combatant wasn’t short of causes to make him indignant here either. When he turned eighty, his admirers from all the islands got together, and twenty buses filled with his parishioners arrived from Santiago. The party lasted for two days on the esplanade in front of the church, with roast lambs and chickens, empanadas, and a river of cheap wine. They had another miracle of the loaves and the fishes, because people kept arriving, and there was always more than enough food. The drunks from Santiago spent the night in the cemetery, paying no attention to the souls in torment.

The priest’s little house was guarded by a majestic rooster with iridescent plumage crowing on the roof and an imposing unshorn ram lying across the threshold as if it were dead. We had to go in through the kitchen door. The ram, appropriately named Methuselah, having escaped the stewpot for so many years, was so old he could barely move.

“What are you doing down this way, so far from your home, girl?” was Father Lyon’s greeting.

“Fleeing from the authorities,” I answered seriously, and he burst out laughing.

“I spent sixteen years doing the very same thing, and to be honest, I miss those days.”

He and Manuel Arias have been friends since 1975, when they were both banished to Chiloé. Being sentenced to banishment, or relegation, as it’s called in Chile, is very harsh, but less so than exile, because at least the convict is in his own country, he told me.

“They sent us far away from our families, to some inhospitable place where we were alone, with no money or work, harassed by the police. Manuel and I were lucky, because we got sent to Chiloé and the people here took us in. You won’t believe me, child, but Don Lionel Schnake, who hated leftists more than the devil, gave us free room and board.”

In that house Manuel met Blanca, the daughter of his kindhearted host. Blanca was in her early twenties, engaged, and her beauty was commented on by everyone, attracting a pilgrimage of admirers, who weren’t intimidated by the fiancé.

Manuel was in Chiloé for a year, barely earning his keep as a fisherman and carpenter, while he read about the fasci
nating history and mythology of the archipelago without leaving Castro, where he had to present himself daily at the police station to sign in. In spite of the circumstances, he grew attached to Chiloé; he wanted to travel all over it, study it, tell its stories. That’s why, after a long journey all over the world, he came back to live out his days here. After serving his sentence, he was able to go to Australia, one of the countries that took in Chilean refugees, where his wife was waiting for him. I was surprised to hear that Manuel had a family; he’d never mentioned it. It turns out he’d been married twice, didn’t have any kids, had also been divorced twice, a long time ago; neither of the women lives in Chile.

“Why did you get banished, Manuel?” I asked.

“The military closed the Faculty of Social Sciences, where I was a professor, because they considered it a den of Communists. They arrested lots of professors and students, killed some of them.”

“Were you arrested?”

“Yes.”

“And my Nini? Do you know if they arrested her?”

“No, not her.”

How is it possible that
I know so little about Chile? I don’t dare ask Manuel, as I don’t want to seem ignorant, so I started to dig around on the Internet. Thanks to the free flights my dad got us because he’s a pilot, my grandparents took me on trips for every school holiday and summer va
cation. My Popo made a list of places we should see after Europe and before we died. So we visited the Galápagos Islands, the Amazon, Cappadocia, and Machu Picchu, but we never came to Chile, as might have been logical. My Nini’s lack of interest in visiting her country is inexplicable; she ferociously defends her Chilean customs and still gets emotional when she hangs the tricolor flag from her balcony in September. I think she cultivates a poetic idea of Chile and fears confronting reality—or there may well be something here she doesn’t want to remember.

My grandparents were experienced and practical travelers. In our photo albums the three of us appear in exotic places always wearing the same clothes, because we’d reduced our baggage to the bare minimum. We each kept one piece of hand luggage packed, ready to go, so we could leave within half an hour, should the opportunity or a whim arise. Once my Popo and I were reading about gorillas in
National Geographic
, how they’re gentle vegetarians and have strong family bonds, and my Nini, who was passing through the living room with a vase of flowers in her hands, commented offhand that we should go and see them. “Good idea,” answered my Popo, picked up the phone, called my dad, arranged the flights, and the next day we were on our way to Uganda with our battered little suitcases.

My Popo got invited to conferences and to give lectures, and whenever he could, he took us with him; my Nini feared some misfortune would befall us if we were separated. Chile is an eyelash between the mountains of the Andes and the depths of the Pacific Ocean, with hundreds of volcanoes, some with the lava still warm, that could wake up at any moment and bury the territory in the sea. This might
explain why my Chilean grandmother always expects the worst. She’s always prepared for emergencies and goes through life with a healthy fatalism, supported by her favorite Catholic saints and the vague advice of her horoscope.

I used to miss a lot of classes, because I’d go traveling with my grandparents and because school got on my nerves; only my good marks and the flexibility of the Italian method kept me from getting expelled. I was extremely resourceful, and could fake appendicitis, migraine, laryngitis, and, if none of those worked, convulsions. My grandpa was easy to fool, but my Nini cured me with drastic methods, a freezing shower or a spoonful of cod-liver oil, unless it was in her interest that I miss school, for example, when she took me to protest against whatever war was on at the time, or put up posters in defense of laboratory animals, or chained us to a tree to piss off the logging companies. Her determination to inculcate me with a social conscience was always heroic.

On more than one occasion, my Popo had to go and rescue us from the police station. The police department in Berkeley is fairly indulgent, used to demonstrations in favor of all sorts of noble causes, fanatics with good intentions capable of camping for months in a public square, students determined to occupy the university in aid of Palestine or nudists’ rights, distracted geniuses who ignore traffic lights, beggars who in another life graduated summa cum laude, drug addicts looking for paradise—in short, to as many virtuous, intolerant, and combatant citizens as there are in this city of a hundred thousand inhabitants, where almost everything is permitted, as long as it’s done with good manners. My Nini and Mike O’Kelly tend to
forget their good manners in the heat of battle in defense of justice, but if they do get arrested, they never end up in a cell. Instead, Sergeant Walczak personally goes and buys them cappuccinos.

I was ten when my
dad remarried. He’d never introduced us to a single girlfriend and was such a champion of the advantages of independence that we never expected to see him give it up. One day he announced he was bringing a friend to dinner. My Nini, who for years had been secretly looking for girlfriends for him, prepared to try and make a good impression on this woman, while I prepared to attack her. A frenzy of activity was unleashed in the house: my Nini hired a professional cleaning service that left the air saturated with the smell of bleach and gardenias, and complicated her life with a Moroccan recipe for chicken with cinnamon that came out tasting like a dessert. My Popo recorded a selection of his favorite pieces so we’d have background music, which sounded to me like dentist’s waiting room music.

My dad, who we hadn’t seen for a couple of weeks, showed up on the appointed night with Susan, a freckle-faced and badly dressed blonde. This surprised us, because we had the idea that he liked glamorous women, like Marta Otter before she succumbed to motherhood and domestic life in Odense. Susan seduced my grandparents in just a few minutes with her easygoing nature, but not me; I was so rude to her that my Nini dragged me into the kitchen on
the pretext of serving the chicken and offered me a couple of smacks if I didn’t change my attitude. After eating, my Popo committed the unthinkable crime of inviting Susan to the astronomical turret, where he never took anyone but me, and they were up there for a long time observing the sky, while my grandma and my dad scolded me for insolence.

A few months later, my dad and Susan were married in an informal ceremony on the beach. That sort of thing had gone out of fashion a decade earlier, but that’s what the bride wanted. My Popo would have preferred something a little more comfortable, but my Nini was in her element. A friend of Susan’s officiated, having obtained a mail-order license from the Universal Church. They forced me to attend, but I roundly refused to dress up as a fairy and present the rings, like my grandma wanted me to. My dad wore a white Mao suit that didn’t suit his personality or his political sympathies at all, and Susan wore a string of wildflowers in her hair and some diaphanous garment, also very passé. The guests, standing barefoot on the sand, shoes in hand, put up with half an hour of foggy weather and sugarcoated advice from the minister. Later there was a reception at the yacht club on the same beach and everybody danced and drank until after midnight, while I locked myself in my grandparents’ Volkswagen and only poked my nose out when good old O’Kelly came over in his wheelchair to bring me a piece of cake.