Something Fierce (21 page)

We were crossing the lawn of the cathedral. It overlooked enormous Lake Nahuel Huapi, where the waves were crashing today.

“Who?”

“Hitler.”

“Oh. Yeah. Sure.”

“I'll bring over the wedding edition of Mein Kampf the next time I come to see my oma. It's an original given to a family friend when he got married back in Düsseldorf. Or maybe you can come visit me sometime in Valdivia. I can show you Chile.”

“Sure.”

“Chile puts a spell on people. That's why so many Germans went there and never left. It's a special place. I've been here only three weeks, and I have only one week to go, but I'm already dying of homesickness. You know, if it wasn't for you, friend of my soul, I would have left early.”

“I feel the same way about you. But of course I have nowhere to return to.”

“You can come home with me. There's still a month left before school starts. That's it! Come with me next week. We'll have so much fun!”

“I don't think my parents would let me.”

“Let's ask them.”

She entwined her arm with mine, and together we marched home, savouring the intoxicating aroma every time we passed one of the chocolate factories Bariloche was famous for.

JACQUES AND MARCIA were the local resistance contacts. He was French, she was Brazilian. They had a baby called Micaela, and Ale and I fought over who would get to hold her. Bombing around town in a four-by-four, they fit in perfectly with the many bohemian couples in Bariloche who lived in log cabins, strummed guitars by the fire at night and spent their weekends camping and hiking. Jacques was hilarious, and I enjoyed his spot-on impersonations of Shirley Temple singing “On the Good Ship Lollipop” and Tiny Tim's “Tiptoe through the Tulips.”

Marcia would lend Ale and me books to read—Isabel Allende's
The House of the Spirits
, Eduardo Galeano's
Open Veins of Latin America
—and then we'd go over to her place, on the top floor of a typical downtown Bariloche house, to discuss them. Marcia's informal style contrasted so sharply with that of Rulo and Soledad that I didn't think Ale realized these were political meetings. Sometimes Marcia would take us to a movie. Pixote, about the street boys of Brazil, left all three of us a wreck.

“That movie is about survival,” Marcia said. “Isn't it incredible that millions and millions of the world's children don't get to live life, but simply go through each day hoping to survive?” And with that, she pulled the car over to the side of the road, broke down and cried. “Nothing is sacred, for fuck's sake, nothing is sacred.”

Ale rubbed Marcia's back until she calmed down.

“Girls, always know this: it's your human right to be happy.”

I lay in bed that night in the room I shared with Ale, staring at the ceiling. I'd always thought revolutionaries didn't cry. At least not when they were in the role of revolutionary. And I'd never heard a revolutionary use the word
sacred
. That was a word reserved for religious fanatics and hippie dumbbells. But she'd used it to mean that children were sacred. That children shouldn't have to think about certain things, like survival. Did that mean children shouldn't have to think about revolutions, or safe houses, or being tortured to death, I wondered? Then there'd been her final statement: it was our human right to be happy. I'd known it was our human right to have food, health, shelter and education, but happiness? What would that be for someone like me? I thought back to those rainy nights in Vancouver when my uncle Boris and all us kids would end our meetings by gorging on Big Macs and milkshakes. And then, for the first time since we'd left Bolivia, I cried. Not just for Pixote and all the street children of the world, but for Ale and me. And I wondered, was it my human right to cry for us?

WE SPENT MUCH of that summer camping, setting up base at the bottom of a mountain while Jacques and Bob disappeared into the dense foliage for days at a time. Mami and Marcia, Micaela, Ale, Lalito and I held down the fort. Ale and I would be bored to tears by the end of these trips. The water in the mountains was too cold to swim in, so there wasn't much to do. The return of the men would be met with intense relief by Marcia and my mother, and once darkness set in, the four adults would huddle around the fire and speak in muted voices about maps, compasses, weather conditions, landmarks, rivers and streams.

That first night of the broken dam had led to many more like it. My eyes welled up constantly, but I'd hold back the flood of tears until I was safely locked in the bathroom or until night fell and I could let it rip in our bedroom till I was hollow, while Ale slept like a log. Griselda had gone back to Chile almost a month earlier.

Our food was rationed, since Bob had paid a year's rent on our house up front, leaving us cash-strapped. Neither he nor Mami had found work yet, but inflation was high, and Bariloche was outrageously expensive. Bob had always had temper tantrums, but now they were constant, explosive and unpredictable. Sitting at the kitchen table, he would fume so hard you could almost see his nostrils steaming. Often the eruption would fail to materialize, but the possibility had our forks trembling in our hands. When Ale and I were sullen, which was often, he'd jeer: “What's the matter? You poor little rich girls can't get used to living on the wrong side of the tracks? Your bourgeois tastes can't fathom this dirt road with these ignorant German fascists?”

He'd shake his head in disgust, darting accusatory glances at my mother. These days, she sat silent during his outbursts, lost in her own world. Lalito would play extra cute to diffuse the tension.

“Do you think Mami's in love with Bob?” Ale asked me one night in our room.

“I guess so. Why else would she put up with him?”

“Well, if I ever get married I won't call that love.”

“Mami says we have to understand that Bob is depressed. That he's in a crisis. That he's tired and broken, and we have to understand.”

“She should just leave him,” Ale said.

“She'll never do that. They're revolutionaries together, running a safe house.”

“Yeah, right. Here's a revolutionary thought: provide for your children and pay attention to them.”

“Maybe Bob will fall off the side of the mountain on one of his treks and split his head open and die,” I offered.

“Maybe.”

One late summer afternoon I lay on the floor in the living room, exhausted after another bout of sobbing. Ale was playing in the yard with Lalito, and Mami and Bob were holed up in their bedroom at the back of the house. Someone knocked on the door. Three knocks, then a pause, three knocks, then a pause. I hauled myself up and staggered to the door.

Trinidad stood there with her beaten-up white Samsonite in her faded black jeans.

“Carmencita. How you've grown!”

I shook out my legs, unable to speak.

She smiled. “Are your parents here? I arrived a little earlier than expected.”

I finally found my voice. “Oh, my God.” We hugged each other. “Come in. Come in. I always wondered—”

“If I was still alive? I am, little comrade, I am. You really are a young woman now. But look at you. You're thinner than a ghost. Don't your parents feed you?”

It was true. My bones protruded all over the place. I ate only once or twice a day, and tiny portions at that. Sometimes I wouldn't eat at all and would just subsist on tea.

Trinidad slipped off her corduroy blazer and hung it on the back of a kitchen chair. As soon as she put out the cigarette she'd been smoking, I picked the ashtray up, dumped the butt in the garbage, washed out the ashtray, dried it and put it back on the table. Our house sparkled. Nothing was out of place. And it was all thanks to me. I took a teacup down from the cupboard—thank God I'd bleached them the day before—and put on the kettle, which I'd Ajaxed to a shine that morning.

“I'll go get Mami,” I said.

The following day an American woman named Mitzi showed up. She and Trinidad seemed close, and for the next week the two of them slept on our living room floor. The meetings would go on for hours, while Ale looked after Lalito and I disinfected the bathroom and kitchen. One thing was clear: this Mitzi was Mami and Bob's superior. They seemed to be undergoing some kind of exam, because every time the living room door opened, I'd hear them being drilled.

“So: show me again where this trail begins, how wide it is and how long it would take fifteen people to reach the border,” Mitzi would say in her Brooklyn accent.

“Well, as far as I can tell, the trail starts here—”

“Not good enough, comrade. I want exact locations.”

“Okay, well, the trail starts here. You drive to Villa La Angostura, take a boat across this stretch of lake, get off right here, and then hike to the edge of this river. This is a good place to set up base camp. From there you cross the river and work your way up through the bush. After about five hours you will find the trail, which is really a sliver used by cattle smugglers.”

“Good, good, comrade. Now here's the key question: is it possible to navigate this in the winter?”

“In the winter?”

“Yes, comrade, I've asked you to prepare these trails for winter crossing. Is it possible?”

“Well, it will be twenty degrees below zero. There will be two to three metres of snow.”

“And that's when the enemy will least expect us to be crossing.”

“Right.”

“Good. We have to figure it out.”

Sometimes Socorro, the trucker's wife from two doors down, would come over and ask to use our phone. Phones were a most coveted possession in Argentina, so hard to come by that even doctors spent years on a waiting list to get one. Miraculously, our house had one, and the neighbours would leave behind a peso after using it, the cost of a local call. Socorro was the resident gossip, and the phone was the perfect excuse to get past our door. We were the new family on the block, and a mysterious bunch at that. Socorro liked to look around our place, then report on what she'd seen at the corner store. Now that Mitzi and Trinidad were here, she needed to get an update. Whenever she knocked at the door, I'd let the adults know, and they'd quickly hide their maps and documents before Socorro came into the living room to dial the number.

“Hello? Hello? Yes, this is Socorro, Pancho's woman. Fine. Life treats me well. As for Pancho, he's working on his truck so he can go pick up a load of mussels in Chile. Yes, always on his back that one, all I see is his feet, and at the end of the day the hands and face black from grease. Ayayay. Anyway, I better go now.”

As she hung up, she'd nod at Mitzi, Trinidad, Bob and Mami, taking note that Mitzi was a Yank (
gringo
here meant Italian; North Americans were Yanks). Everyone exchanged niceties to make it all look natural.

One afternoon Socorro nonchalantly invited me over for tea, and from that moment on we had tea every day, demolishing a baguette and a whole block of cheese as we gossiped about the military man who lived alone next door—apparently he had the hots for our landlords' eldest daughter, who was attending university in La Plata—and about the landlords themselves: poor as church mice, but rich in land, since the man's brother owned prime property right on the lake out by Villa La Angostura, where he made his living conducting boat tours to the Arrayanes Forest. I was an agoraphobic fifteen-year-old skeleton with obsessive-compulsive disorder, and she was a stout, working-class housewife in her late forties. Once we'd found each other, we didn't let go.

16

I
T WAS FIRST RECESS, and my classmates were yelling at the sons of the military from atop their wooden desks.

“Where are they?!”

The demand was punctuated by three stomps of their feet.

“Where are they?!”

Three more stomps. My classmates' blue school smocks created the illusion of a choppy sea. Half of them were taking part in the impromptu protest; the other half watched or looked out the window. The military men's sons, three of them, leaned against the blackboard, facing the onslaught. They lived on the military base on the edge of town, which meant they came from low-ranking families. These boys were mestizo, poor and destined to become military men themselves. Irma Weiss was the first to jump down from her desk and walk with menace toward the shrimpy boy in the middle. Six feet tall, all knees and elbows, with eyes that bore down into his upturned gaze. “You military pig. You've committed genocide in this country for the last seven years, and you will pay, you son of a thousand whores. You will pay.” Irma lived in a mansion overlooking the city. Her parents owned a five-star chalet right on Cathedral Hill, which boasted the best ski slopes in the country.

“Where are the thirty thousand disappeared? I'm sure your daddy knows, you little piece of shit.” She spit in the shrimp's face.

“Everybody off their desks! Now!”
The men in charge of monitoring the school hallways had raided our classroom. These warders had the authority to issue warnings, add your name to their list of bad kids and suspend or expel you if they caught you vandalizing school property.