Something Fierce (23 page)

Within a couple of days of their return, my mother and Bob retreated into their world of documents, meetings and plans. Ale continued to sleep over at Vero's most nights, coming home only to pick up more clothes. Bob joked that she'd turned into a ghost. But her absence made things more lonely for me. I'd written to Ernesto shortly after we arrived in Bariloche, reassuring him he was still the love of my life. As soon as I was of age, I promised, we'd be together forever, just as we'd pledged in the stairwell. A response had taken months to come, and one morning there it was, in the form of a note scrawled across the envelope stating that the post office box no longer existed.

I placed the unopened letter on my pillow, went to the kitchen and retrieved the final can Jacques had delivered. I'd left it untouched at the back of the cupboard for superstitious reasons, even through my last days of hunger. Now I opened it and took the jagged lid into the bathroom. Sitting on the edge of the bathtub, I turned on the taps and pulled my sleeve back. Then I sawed through the skin on my left wrist. The blood appeared immediately. I continued to cut.

“Bob!”

My voice was new to me, the cry of a wounded animal.

He appeared in the doorway and moved quickly through the steam-filled bathroom. He clasped my wrist tight as he let out a howl.

“I want to go home.” Words I'd never spoken. Words that had been stuck in my throat since our long-ago stopover at LAX. Now that they'd finally come out, I couldn't stop saying them. “I want us to go home.”

Bob rocked me, his face tight with pain. “We can't go, Carmencita.” He didn't ask what I meant by home: Vancouver, Bolivia or Chile? I wouldn't have known the answer if he had.

When Mami got home that night, she came to sit on the edge of my bed, where I lay with a bandage around my wrist, drinking a fresh cup of tea Bob had made. He'd turned back into the Bob I used to know, before the constant rage and darkness, holding my hand all day, taking care of me like the child I was. Now it was my mother who was angry.

“Bob told me what you did. I don't think you really wanted to kill yourself. Otherwise, you wouldn't have called for him. We'll see what we can do about getting you some help, Carmencita. But don't ever try that again. Think of the consequences. Think of us. Suicide is a selfish act. In the end you're gone, but the others are left behind.”

The help my mother promised came in the form of a few visits to the best psychiatrist in town. The doctor lived in a mansion with a stunning view of the lake and mountains. After giving me an IQ test, she verified what she'd already suspected, she said: I was below average in intelligence, which explained my suicide attempt and allround rebelliousness. Since I couldn't tell her anything that was true, I stopped going, but I found some relief in knowing I wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer. Now, if Mami or Bob accused me of being bourgeois, I could retort with: “I'm sorry, what was that again? Let me check the dictionary.”

Bob and Mami were careful to ask how I was doing, and Bob took me to a couple of movies. Mami got a nice haircut, put on a conservative skirt and agreed to have tea with some of my girlfriends' mothers. She was trying hard to be more like them, for my sake, but eventually her resistance work drew her in again, and Bob disappeared back into his anger. I took refuge in Michael Jackson's Thriller, sent by my father along with fleece-lined jean jackets and off-the-shoulder sweatshirts for both Ale and me.

“I'M A VIRGIN and will make love only when I'm in love,” I said.

“I'm in love with you.”

“Okay. Let's go.”

I'd known him for less than twenty-four hours. His name was Dante, and he'd asked me to dance the night before at By Pass, the newest nightclub in Bariloche. It was September 21, the first day of spring and the Day of Lovers. In my borrowed miniskirt, my look was cutting-edge. Being dark and curly-haired was all the rage, thanks to Jennifer Beals in Flashdance. And so it was that Dante, eighteen years old and the most coveted playboy in town, hadn't let me go all night. I found it shocking. I'd been invisible since our arrival in Argentina; no boy had even glanced my way, much less put the moves on me, until now. Dante and I made out on the seawall as the sun rose.

Now it was the following evening, and Dante leaned in closer. We were at the Stratus Café on Mitre, a place too swanky for the likes of me, but a regular hangout for him.

“Another Cinzano, ché!” he called, with a smile at the distinguished old waiter.

Three hours later, we climbed through his bedroom window and I spread my legs while his uncle snored in the next room. Afterwards, I shook so hard it was as if I'd had a seizure. At six in the morning, I climbed out the window and walked home along the icy sidewalks, an ache between my legs that reached up through my centre, filled my heart and beamed out through my toes and fingertips. The moon breathed over the lake.

Dante stayed in my life for the next two months. On weekends we'd go dancing at By Pass, the Brain or Grisu, which was right on the lake, and on weeknights he'd help me with my homework. He took it upon himself to fatten me up, and within weeks I'd gained twenty pounds, thanks to generous portions of gnocchi, french fries, pizza and grilled provolone cheese. Dante paid for it all. He'd walk me home at the end of the evening, have a glass of wine with Mami and Bob, and then leave, only to walk around the back of the house and let himself in through my bedroom window. With Ale at Vero's so much, I had the room to myself. Bob and Mami caught me once and grounded me for a month, but Dante just kept coming back. For my sixteenth birthday, he threw me a costume party. Spring draped Bariloche in red, yellow and orange flowers.

On October 30, Raúl Alfonsín, the Radical Party candidate, won the national elections in Argentina. My school was mayhem. Students and teachers cried for joy in the classrooms and hallways. Even the poor students joined in, adding their voices to the chanting. “Que viva la democracia! No mas vivir bajo la bota! Con la democracicia comeremos!” (Long live democracy! No more living under the boot! With democracy we'll eat!) The sons of the military men locked their jaws as they looked on.

Dante was beside himself with elation. Then the military service came calling, ordering him to report to a Buenos Aires base in mid-December. Before he left, I learned from my classmates that Dante had continued sleeping with half the town—locals and tourists—the whole time he'd been with me. To preserve my dignity I broke up with him, but the betrayal didn't destroy me, because Dante had saved my life. He'd fed me, loved me and showed me what it was like to have guilt-free fun. On the day he left, we met at the cathedral and made out on a pew one last time. I walked him to the bus station and waved as the bus pulled out. Hanging out the window, he cheered, clapped and blew me kisses.

At the kiosk on the corner, a crowd had gathered around a TV. Alfonsín was addressing a million people in the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires. It was December 10, the day he officially took power, inheriting the biggest social crisis the country had ever seen and a harrowing financial collapse, thanks to neo-liberalism gone wrong. A third of the population was living in abject poverty and thirty thousand people had disappeared. An uneasy military was waiting to see how Alfonsín would respond to the clamour for trials for crimes against humanity and rumours about secret Swiss bank accounts, where millions in stolen state funds had been stashed by the top military men and their advisers.

“May democracy reign, goddammit,” the kiosk owner muttered under his breath, tears welling up behind his Coke-bottle glasses.

The bus disappeared around a corner, and that was the last I saw of Dante.

18

I
T WAS FEBRUARY 1984, and the Bariloche summer was coming to a close. At the beginning of the holidays, I'd joined the local theatre troupe as the lone teenage member. I hadn't acted in any plays yet, but the director had taken me on as his intern. I sat by his side, drinking in all I could during rehearsals for a scathing piece that exposed Argentina's class system. When the lead actress didn't show up for rehearsal one evening, I figured I'd have to wander the downtown streets until one in the morning, the time my mother was picking me up. My family had moved to the apartment complex on the Atomic Centre grounds, so I could no longer walk home. Just as I was about to head off, the troupe's volunteer lighting designer called out to me.

“Hey, Skinny, let's go for coffee.”

Over hot chocolate at the Saint Nicholas Café, Alejandro told me he was from Córdoba and had moved to Bariloche to work at a nuclear plant on the outskirts of town. He had done his military service during the double-whammy times: under the dictatorship and during the war with England. His lower-middle-class family had no means to bribe him out of doing service, so he'd been stationed in La Plata, south of Buenos Aires. Boys from all over Argentina had joined him, eyes hollow with terror, mostly poor Indians from the northern provinces. The Indian boys were sent to the Malvinas first, and some had died of hypothermia and starvation, never having set eyes on an enemy soldier. Alejandro had been transferred to the Little School, he explained, a military training ground that also housed a concentration camp. Angel Face was there, a young military man notorious for infiltrating the Mothers of the Disappeared, using his cherubic face and a fake story about a disappeared brother to win their trust. After tricking them, he'd systematically had the members of the organization—mothers demanding to learn the whereabouts of their children—arrested, tortured and disappeared.

As for the military service boys, it had been all about breaking their spirit. Sent out into the freezing pampas with nothing but flimsy blankets, they'd been woken up by a whistle in the middle of the night and given three minutes to board a non-existent plane supposedly bound for the front lines. Anybody reacting with fear had been beaten.

“I'll tell you one thing, though, Skinny. I'm grateful to the military pigs for getting me into the best physical shape of my life and for teaching me how to shoot a gun. After walking across the pampas for days, with almost no food or water, carrying a forty-pound pack on my back and a rifle, I gotta thank those pigs for giving me the training to rise up against them.”

“You believe in armed struggle?”

“Of course. How could I not? I'm a great admirer of the Republicans who fought in the Spanish Civil War. My father is a Spaniard who arrived on the boats landing in La Boca, among the great masses of immigrants fleeing fascism. My aunt was holed up in a Spanish convent throughout the war, and I never tire of listening to her stories. I'm also a fervent supporter of Cuba and Nicaragua.”

“So you don't support Alfonsín?”

“I support real change. Alfonsín is no revolutionary. But I'll give him this much: our constitutional rights have been restored, and therefore I am exercising my freedom of speech and telling Skinny here that I believe in the revolution, that it is my right to believe in it, and it is my right to speak of it loud and clear.” His voice was husky now, a hoarse whisper. “On weekends I go to the shantytown to work with a literacy campaign. You should come with me sometime. The people there are all Chileans, you know.”

“Yes, I've heard that.”

“You should see the conditions in which these people live. Truth be told, my comrades and I haven't been able to get our literacy campaign off the ground yet, because from the moment we arrive on Saturday morning till the moment we leave on Sunday night, it's all about finding food, bringing doctors in and fixing roofs.”

“Who are your comrades?”

“I belong to the Intransigent Youth. But what about you? Tell me about Bolivia. Were you there when Ché Guevara was caught and killed?”

“No, I wasn't born until a week after that.”

“I've never been anywhere. Only here. The vast country of Argentina.

And I will never leave.”

“I know what it's like to love your country that much,” I said. “And I can see why you love this place.”

“A sixteen-year-old immigrant actor who loves the shittiest country in the world. You're the last person I thought I'd meet at the Dramatic Arts Institute.”

“I have to go now. My mother will be waiting for me by the library.”

“I'll walk you there.”

Just before I got into the 1950s olive-green Estanciera that Mami and Bob had been driving all summer, Alejandro pointed at the only tall building in the city.

“Apartment 901. Come by tomorrow night.”

ALEJANDRO ANSWERED his door naked, as if it was the most normal thing in the world. Rubbing a towel over his wet hair, he invited me to make myself at home. I sat on the edge of his single bed, with my jacket on, and picked up a book from his bedside table: the collected poems of Miguel Hernández. Alejandro puttered around the studio apartment. Finally, he sat opposite me on his roommate's bed, our knees touching. He offered me some yerba maté from a Thermos, then cleared his throat.

“Listen, Skinny, you probably think I'm crazy with all that stuff I said last night. But for some reason I felt I could talk to you openly. It's something I don't usually do, because I grew up under the boot. To speak like that to an absolute stranger...” His voice cracked.