Something Fierce (32 page)

“Take off your coat and hat, Son, before you come to the table,” my aunt ordered.

My cousin removed his tuque and bookish glasses. Smoothing his hair, he sat down across from me and winked. My body, frozen for so long, came to life with a jolt. My squashed-up heart ballooned.

When I'd made the arrangements to spend four days with my uncle and aunt, I'd had no idea the Cousin would be there on his winter break. We ran errands for my aunt and talked every night until the break of dawn. The fire ignited in me at the breakfast table raged and raged as my spirit nestled back into the centre of my body. Cocooned in my aunt and uncle's house, it seemed sometimes as if I'd never left Chile. Maybe all that existed, all that had ever existed, was the here and now: my relatives and me in the pink wooden house, going to the market every day for fresh fish and bread, conversing with one another in the shorthand families have.

But my underground life was never far from my mind. One day I asked the Cousin to drive me to the Puerto Montt flying club, located at the town's small airport. Alejandro hoped eventually to fly us both to Puerto Montt to visit Chelito's family, I told him. The man in charge came out to greet us with a warm handshake.

“My husband is only now getting his licence and will need a lot of help crossing the mountains,” I explained. “Is there radar all along the way?”

“Oh, yes, Señora, tell your husband not to worry. The Chilean mountain range is one of the most radar-heavy in the world. There's no way we'll let him get lost. The radar will lead him by the nose all the way to our door.”

“Thank you so much.”

“Give our regards to Tomás and Andrés at the Neuquén flying club.

And we look forward to meeting your husband, Señora.”

“I'm sure he'll look forward to meeting you.”

As we pulled up in front of the pink house, the Cousin spoke quietly. “Be careful, my little Marxist.”

“I'm not a Marxist—”

“That's all I'm going to say.”

A bitter laugh escaped the Cousin's lips whenever one of Pinochet's promotional spots came on TV. Outfitted in a nylon track suit, he'd wave to the camera as a deep paternal voice intoned: “The saviour of the fatherland jogs every day.” Or maybe he'd be wearing his general's uniform while cradling a baby in his arms: “The saviour of the fatherland visits the Children's Hospital.” Or perhaps he'd be in his cape, marching away from the camera, only to turn around at the end and salute. The night of our visit to the airport, the Cousin went further.

“Fucking old man. I was so happy when we heard there had been an attempt on his life. We hid in our houses, quiet as mice, waiting for confirmation that the monster was dead, waiting to erupt from our doors like volcanoes in celebration. I ran it in my head over and over again: which neighbour I'd hug first, which vendor I'd take in my arms, which beggar I'd kiss on the cheeks. I cannot tell you what it felt like to fall back into the abyss when we found out he'd survived. But something did change on that day. Something changed in the Chilean psyche, and that change has been growing ever since.”

The Cousin cleared his throat, then glanced out the window. We were alone in the living room, each of us seated in an armchair. I kept my gaze on him, holding him fast with my eyes.

He continued, shifting his eyes to meet mine. “Last year, I went to a protest at the university in Concepción. I hadn't planned on going, but this protest was big. The head of the secret police was coming in from Santiago to give a talk on national security. The student body declared war, and before I knew it, I was shuffling to get away in my leather loafers, like an idiot, gagging from the tear gas.”

He laughed and looked out the window again. I stayed stock still, not wanting to change a single molecule in the air.

“There were hundreds of other students. They were all wearing running shoes and bandanas over their faces. Their hands were full of Molotov cocktails and slingshots. They knew how to run, to dive, to hit the bull's eye even while walking backwards. A group would disperse in front of my eyes, then reappear moments later, just a little down the way. The girls were especially impressive. Tough as nails, scaling walls like ninjas, throwing burning bottles at the military. I couldn't believe these were some of the same girls I bedded on Saturday nights. As I watched, I wondered if they'd been the ones bedding me.”

A smile flickered across his face.

“Anyway, I got jammed against a wall. A few of the paramilitaries moved toward me, with their guns pulled. I thought it was my last moment on earth. Their faces were shielded by Plexiglas, but I saw one of the men's eyes. They were ferocious. Wild. I wondered what drug he was on. He aimed his gun at my face, then lowered it to my crotch. There was an explosion, then darkness.”

When the Cousin came to, he said, he was lying in a heap of students at the back of a military bus. Whenever new students were thrown onto the pile, the paramilitaries would kick at their ribs, heads and backs. He'd been afraid the steel-toed boots would kick his brains out.

“I lost consciousness again, and when I regained it, I was receiving the beating of my life in an underground jail. I could hear blood-curdling screams all around me, and I was making sounds I didn't recognize as my own. Once they'd finished beating me, a doctor pulled out the bullet that was lodged in my thigh. I found out later this was standard practice: Israel provides Pinochet with arms, on the condition that the evidence be removed. All but ten of us were released twenty-four hours later, and there was nothing we could do to help those left behind.” He clutched the arms of his chair, his knuckles white. “I understand now why the resistance talks about being the army for the people. Anyway, they dropped me off in a shantytown ditch at dawn. Some kids spotted me and called to their mothers, ‘Here's another one!' It breaks my heart to imagine the horrors they've seen in their short lives. The women cleaned me up, and a trucker drove me home. I live with my maternal grandmother in Concepción, as you know, and when the trucker laid me at the bottom of her stairs, she shouted, ‘This is what you get for being a Communist, you filthy ingrate.' You know her—she held a tea party the day of the coup. She walked away, wouldn't even help me get up. My thighs were twice their size, my face so swollen it was hard to see my features. Mami came to Concepción to nurse me back to health, and after a month in bed, I was able to return to school.”

We had a little laugh together. Neither of us cried. I knew that if I started to cry I might never stop. Seeing the Cousin again had already unleashed something deep in me. But I had survived thus far in the resistance by keeping a clamp on my heart, on my loins, on my tears. That couldn't change now.

ON THE LAST DAY of my visit, Mario arrived with news from Santiago. Chile had been flooded with returnees since the Pope's visit. The influx was met with disdain by some, but with great solidarity by many. Huge caravans with banners reading “Welcome Back to Your Rightful Home, Exiles!” waited at the airport for the jam-packed flights arriving daily from the United Kingdom, Australia, Sweden, Germany, Italy and Spain. Music groups like Inti-Illimani, Quilapayún and Illapu had come back from Europe, and Mario's own band had played at some of their sold-out concerts.

That night in Puerto Montt, at a nightclub on the seawall, the Cousin took me in his arms.

“I love you, Cousin,” he whispered. “Please stay. Leave your husband and stay with me.” My heart broke clean in two.

The Cousin drove me to the bus station the next morning, but he didn't go home after I boarded. Instead, he chased the bus in his father's car, honking as he drove alongside. When the bus slowed at a fork in the road, the Cousin slammed on the brakes, jumped out of the car and started waving his arms. “Stay!” he shouted.

The bus driver had figured out by now that this was not the secret police ordering him to pull over, but a lover driven mad with passion, a common enough sight in Chile. When he glanced at me in his rear-view mirror, I averted my eyes. The driver stepped on the gas again, and we were gone.

In my suitcase were maps of underground trails from a package I'd been handed on a downtown Santiago street. Thinking of that pulled me back to reality. Once I got back to Neuquén, I'd have to break the news to Alejandro: the radar in the Andes meant we'd have to fly low through the mountains on our first delivery by air. If we were intercepted, we'd have to smash our plane against the rock face. Either that, or be shot down by the enemy. Both were better than torture, though I wouldn't live past twenty in either scenario.

My heart fluttered in its cage like a hummingbird. It would be difficult to plunge a knife into its core, but I hadn't figured out another way to cut through the fear. As we drew closer to the border, I put the Cousin somewhere far away. Even if I were to die in a plane crash, though, fuselage and limbs scattering so far from anywhere that our remains would never be found, at least I knew this much was true: I was still a sensual being.

“You travel in and out of Chile a lot,” the Argentinian border guard said as he studied the stamps in my passport.

“Yes, I do.”

“Why?” His eyes were steady on mine.

“Because I have family there.”

“Fine. We're watching you.”

“Thank you.”

He stamped my passport and let me through. My tightened muscles hurt. My face, so open only hours before, was now a hardened mask.

When the bus stopped in Bariloche for an hour, I hid inside the tiny terminal. My life in Neuquén, only six hours away, could never intersect with what I'd been in Bariloche: a Bolivian girl with a Canadian father. I leaned against a wall and let my body tremble. Before I boarded the bus, a young woman approached me.

“Do you know if there are buses to Trelew?”

“No, but there are buses to Buenos Aires.”

With that, I handed her the package of maps, and we went our separate ways.

26

F
LYING IS A man's sport, and I'm taking my life into my hands by sitting in this airplane with you.”

“Yes, you remind me of that every time.”

Two other instructors had refused to teach me, but Rodolfo had begrudgingly agreed. Having just completed the pre-flight check, we'd boarded and were now about to taxi onto the runway. I turned the key in the ignition, watched the propeller come to life and radioed the control tower.

“Listen to this, buddy, that girl's on the radio again!”

“Get her off!”

“She's piloting the Piper Tomahawk!”

I smiled to myself as I looked down at the parcels of land on the outskirts of Neuquén, divided into perfect squares bordered by poplars. When we'd reached our desired height, Rodolfo shut off the engine. We went into a nosedive, the ground coming at us fast.

“What are you going to do now?”

“This,” I said.

I pulled the steering wheel with all my might and brought the nose up.

“Good. Good reflexes.”

He turned the ignition back on.

“Now let's try something else. This is called Japanese eights.”

We inscribed eights in the sky, with me laughing and whooping. When it was time to land, I gauged the wind and let the wheels touch the ground at the perfect time.

“Not bad, not bad. Strong stomach, good reflexes, calm and steady. We might make a pilot out of you.”

He'd been hard on me, and I'd loved it. In just a few months, Alejandro and I would be ready to make our first delivery flight into Chile.

UPON MY RETURN from Puerto Montt, I'd been offered a job as a conversational English teacher for the tourism school at the National University of Comahue. My students were mostly older than I was, heavily involved in the student union movement, and I ached to live the life they led: debating over yerba maté, hitchhiking around the country during breaks, organizing rallies and protests. To them I was a supercool young native English speaker from Canada, petit bourgeois to the core with my high-rise studio apartment, flying club antics and fashionable clothes. When the talk turned to politics, I kept my mouth shut.

My favourite of the bunch was a woman called Luisa. She'd grown up in a working-class family in the province of Paraná, in northeastern Argentina, and had hitchhiked from there to the province of Neuquén, where she'd lived on a Mapuche reserve for a year before coming to the capital. She lived at the cathedral, where the bishop—a revered human rights activist who had barely survived the dictatorship after he'd been caught using the cathedral as a hiding place for resistance members and a haven for mothers of the disappeared—let her have a small room in exchange for janitorial work. Luisa lived on nothing, so I started inviting her to our house for meals. Anytime she showed up with a slab of meat, a loaf of bread, a hunk of cheese or a jar of jam, she'd announce: “Compliments of the supermarket. I steal only from the chains, the bigger the better. Never from small businesses.”

“How do you keep from getting caught?”

“Nerves of steel, mi querida, nerves of steel.”