In all that horrible time in Las Vegas, my Popo came to see me just once. I had got some heroin that was so cheap I should have suspected it wasn’t safe. I knew of addicts who’d been poisoned and killed by the shit dealers sometimes cut the drugs with, but I was really desperate and couldn’t resist. I snorted it in a disgusting public washroom. I didn’t have a syringe to inject it with; maybe that’s what saved me. As soon as I inhaled it, I felt like I’d been kicked in the temples by a mule. My heart bolted, and in less than a minute I saw myself wrapped in a black blanket, suffocated, unable to breathe. I slumped to the floor, in the foot and a half between the toilet and the wall, on top of used paper that stank of ammonia.
I vaguely understood that I was dying, and far from being frightened, I felt flooded with great relief. I was floating on black water, sinking deeper and deeper, more detached, as if in a dream, happy to fall softly to the bottom of that abyss and put an end to the shame, to go, go to the other side, escaping from the farce my life had become, from my lies and justifications, from that despicable, dishonest, and cowardly being I’d become, that being who blamed my father, my grandmother, and the rest of the universe for her own stupidity, that unhappy creature who at just barely nineteen years old had already burned all her bridges and was ruined, trapped, lost, that skeleton covered in rashes and lice, that miserable wretch who’d go to bed for a drink, who’d robbed a destitute mother. I wanted to escape forever from Joe Martin and Chino, from my own body, from my whole f*cking existence.
Then, when I was already gone, I heard shouts from very far away: Maya, Maya, breathe! Breathe! Breathe! I hesitated for a good long while, confused, wanting to lose consciousness again so I wouldn’t have to make a decision, trying to disengage from myself and fly off like an arrow into the void, but I was held to this world by that urgent voice calling to me. Breathe, Maya! Instinctively I opened my mouth, swallowed some air, and began to inhale, the shallow gasps of someone breathing her last. Bit by bit, astonishingly slowly, I came back from the final sleep. There was nobody with me, but in the small space between the stall door and the floor I could see a man’s shoes on the other side, and I recognized them. Popo? Is that you, Popo? There was no reply. The English moccasins remained in the same place for an instant and then left noiselessly. I stayed sitting there, breathing with difficulty, my legs shaking and refusing to obey me, calling him: Popo, Popo.
Daniel didn’t find it at all strange that my grandfather would have visited me and didn’t try to give me a rational explanation for what had happened, as most of the psychiatrists I’ve met would have. He didn’t even give me one of those mocking looks that Manuel Arias tends to give me when I start to get what he calls esoteric. How was I supposed to not fall in love with Daniel, who as well as being gorgeous is so sensitive? Most of all, he’s gorgeous. He looks like Michelangelo’s David, but his coloring is much more attractive. In Florence, my grandparents bought a miniature replica of the statue. In the shop they were offered a David with a fig leaf, but what I liked best were his genitals; I hadn’t seen those parts in a real human yet, only in my Popo’s anatomy book. Anyway, sorry, I got distracted—back to Daniel, who believes that half the world’s problems would be solved if every one of us had an unconditional Popo instead of a demanding superego, because the best virtues thrive with affection.
Daniel Goodrich’s life has been a gift in comparison with mine, but he’s had his troubles too. He’s a serious guy with serious goals, who has known since he was young what his itinerary would be, unlike me, who’s always drifting. At the first deceptive glance, he seems like a rich kid who smiles too easily, the smile of someone satisfied with himself and the world. That air of eternal contentment is strange, because in his medical studies and hospital internships and on his travels, on foot and with a backpack, he must have seen a lot of poverty and suffering. If I hadn’t slept with him, I’d think he was another aspiring Siddhartha, another man unplugged from his emotions, like Manuel.
The Goodrich story would make a good novel. Daniel knows that his biological father was black and his mother white, but he doesn’t know them and hasn’t ever had any interest in looking for them, because he adores the family who raised him. Robert Goodrich, his adoptive father, is a titled Englishman, although he doesn’t get called “sir” in the United States because it would be ridiculous. But as proof, there’s a color photograph of him greeting Queen Elizabeth II, and he’s wearing an ostentatious medal hanging from an orange ribbon. He’s a very renowned psychiatrist, with a couple of books published and a knighthood for services to science.
Sir Robert married Alice Wilkins, a young American violinist who was temporarily in London, and moved to the United States with her. The couple settled in Seattle, where he set up his own clinic, while she joined the symphony orchestra. When they found out that Alice couldn’t have children, after much hesitation, they adopted Daniel. Four years later, Alice unexpectedly got pregnant. At first they thought it was a hysterical pregnancy, but it soon proved to be genuine and in due time Alice gave birth to little Frances. Instead of being jealous at the arrival of a competitor, Daniel fell absolutely and exclusively in love with his little sister, a love that only increased over time and that was fully requited by the little girl. Robert and Alice shared a love for classical music, which they inculcated in both their children, as well as a fondness for cocker spaniels, which they’ve always had, and mountain climbing, which would lead to Frances’s misfortune.
Daniel was nine and his sister five when their parents separated and Robert Goodrich moved ten blocks away to live with Alfons Zaleski, the Polish pianist in the orchestra Alice played in. He’s talented and brusque, with the physique and manners of a lumberjack, an unruly mop of hair, and a vulgar sense of humor, in stark contrast with Sir Robert’s subtle British irony and courtesy. Daniel and Frances received a poetic explanation about their father’s flamboyant friend and were left with the idea that it was a temporary arrangement, but nineteen years have passed, and the two men are still together. Meanwhile Alice, promoted to first violin, carries on playing with Alfons Zaleski like the good colleagues they actually are, because the pianist never intended to steal her husband, just to share him.
Alice stayed in the family home with half the furniture and two of the cocker spaniels, while Robert moved to a similar house in the same neighborhood with his lover, the rest of the furniture, and the third dog. Daniel and Frances grew up going back and forth between the two homes with their suitcases, spending one week in each. They always went to the same school, where their parents’ situation didn’t attract attention. They spent holidays and birthdays with both and for a while believed that the numerous Zaleski family, who traveled from Washington and arrived en masse for Thanksgiving, were circus acrobats, because that was one of the many stories invented by Alfons to win the children over. He could have saved himself the trouble, because Daniel and Frances loved him for other reasons: he’s been a mother to them. The Polish man adores them, devoting more time to them than their actual parents do. He’s a cheerful bon vivant, who puts on shows for them of athletic Russian folk dances wearing pajamas and Sir Robert’s medal.
The Goodriches separated without going to the trouble of getting legally divorced and have managed to stay friends. They’re united by the interests they shared before Alfons Zaleski showed up, except for mountain climbing, which they both gave up after Frances’s accident.
Daniel finished high school with good grades when he’d just turned seventeen and was accepted into a premed course at the university, but his immaturity was so obvious that Alfons convinced him to wait a year and, in the meantime, to get a little weather-beaten. “You’re just a kid, Daniel—how are you going to be a doctor when you don’t even know how to blow your own nose?” In the face of Robert and Alice’s solid opposition, his Polish stepdad sent him to Guatemala on a student program to learn Spanish and become a man. Daniel spent nine months living with an indigenous family in a village on the shores of Lake Atitlán, growing corn and spinning sisal rope, without sending any news, and came back the color of tar, his hair an impenetrable tangle, with a guerilla’s revolutionary ideas and speaking Quiché Mayan. After that experience, studying medicine seemed like child’s play to him.
The cordial triangle of the Goodriches and Zaleski might possibly have disintegrated once the two children grew up, but the need to care for Frances has united them more than ever. Frances is completely dependent on them.
Nine years ago, Frances Goodrich suffered a spectacular fall when the whole family, except for Alfons, was mountain climbing in the Sierra Nevada. She broke more bones than they could count, and despite thirteen complicated operations and continuous physical therapy, she can still barely move. Daniel decided to study medicine when he saw his sister smashed to bits in a bed in the intensive care unit, and chose psychiatry because she asked him to.
The girl was in a profound coma for three long weeks. Her parents considered the irrevocable idea of disconnecting her from life support, because she’d suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and, according to the doctors, would remain in a vegetative state. Alfons Zaleski wouldn’t allow it; he felt in his heart that Frances was suspended in limbo, but if they didn’t let go of her, she’d come back. The family all took turns spending the day and night in the hospital, talking to her, touching her, calling her, and when she finally opened her eyes, one Saturday at five in the morning, it was Daniel who was with her. Frances couldn’t speak, because she’d had a tracheotomy, but he translated what her eyes were expressing and announced to the world that his sister was happy to be alive, and they’d better abandon the compassionate plan of helping her to die. They’d grown up together like twins, knew each other better than they knew themselves, and needed no words to understand each other.
The hemorrhage hadn’t damaged Frances’s brain in the way they’d feared; it only produced a temporary loss of memory, made her cross-eyed, and left her deaf in one ear. But Daniel noticed that something fundamental had changed. Before, his sister had been like their father—rational, logical, with an inclination toward science and mathematics—but since the accident she thinks with her heart, according to him. He says that Frances can guess people’s intentions and moods; it’s impossible to hide anything from her or deceive her, and she gets sparks of premonitions so accurate that Alfons Zaleski is training her to guess the winning lottery numbers. Her imagination, creativity, and intuition have developed in a spectacular way. “The mind is much more interesting than the body, Daniel. You should be a psychiatrist, like Daddy, to find out why I have so much enthusiasm for life, and other perfectly healthy people commit suicide,” Frances said to him, when she could talk again.
The same courage that enabled her to practice hazardous sports has helped Frances endure suffering; she swore she’d recover. For the moment her life is entirely occupied by physical rehabilitation, which takes up many hours a day, her amazing social life on the Internet, and her studies; she’s going to graduate this year with a degree in art history. She lives with her odd family. Deciding it would be easier if they all lived together, the Goodriches and Zaleski—with all the cocker spaniels, of which there are now seven—moved to a big one-story house, where Frances can get around in her wheelchair more comfortably. Zaleski has taken several courses to help Frances with her exercises, and nobody really remembers anymore what the exact relationship is between the Goodriches and the Polish pianist; it doesn’t matter, they’re three good people who respect and care for a daughter, who love music, books, the theater, and fine wine, who share the same dogs and the same friends.
Frances can’t brush her hair or her teeth by herself, but she moves her fingers and operates her computer, so she’s connected to the university and the world. We went online, and Daniel showed me his sister’s Facebook page, where there are several photos of her before and after the accident: a cheerful, delicate, freckled redhead with a cute little squirrel’s face. On her page are several comments, photos, and videos from Daniel’s trip.
“Frances and I are very different,” he told me. “I’m quite laid-back and sedentary, while she’s a firecracker. When she was little she wanted to be an explorer, and her favorite book was Cabeza de Vaca’s Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America, by Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, a sixteenth-century Spanish adventurer. She would have liked to go to the ends of the earth, to the bottom of the sea, to the moon. My South American journey was her idea; it’s what she had planned and won’t be able to do. So I have to try to see with her eyes, hear with her ears, and film with her camera.”
I feared, and still fear, that Daniel was frightened off by my confidences and will reject me as unbalanced, but I had to tell him everything; nothing strong can be built on a foundation of lies and omissions. According to Blanca, with whom I’ve been talking this through nonstop, everybody is entitled to their secrets, and this eagerness of mine to show myself in the worst light possible is a form of arrogance. I have thought of this too. The arrogance would be in expecting Daniel to love me in spite of my problems and my past. My Nini says that people love their children and grandchildren unconditionally, but not their partners. Manuel keeps quiet on this subject, but he has warned me against the imprudence of falling in love with a stranger who lives far away. What other advice could he give me? That’s how he is: he doesn’t run emotional risks, he prefers the solitude of his hovel, where he feels safe.
In November of last year, my life in Las Vegas was so out of control and I was so sick that I get the details confused. I went around dressed like a man, with the hood of my sweatshirt over my eyes, my head down between my shoulders, moving quickly, never showing my face. To rest I leaned against a wall, or better, in an angle between two walls, hunched up, with a broken bottle in my hand that wouldn’t have been much use if I’d needed to defend myself. I stopped asking for food at the women’s shelter and started going to the men’s, waiting at the end of the line, taking my plateful, and wolfing it down in a corner. In that male crowd, to look directly at someone could be interpreted as a sign of aggression, and a word out of place might be dangerous. They were anonymous, invisible beings, except for the old men, who were somewhat demented and had been coming there for years; that was their territory, and nobody messed with them. I passed as just another drugged-out boy of the many who showed up there, dragged in by the tide of human misery. So vulnerable did I seem that sometimes someone with a shred of compassion would greet me with a “Hi, buddy!” I never answered; my voice would have given me away.
The same dealer that would sometimes let me trade cigarettes for crack also bought electronics, CDs, DVDs, iPods, cell phones, and video games, but they weren’t easy to come by. To steal stuff like that, you need to be very daring and very fast, neither of which I was anymore. Freddy had explained his method to me. First you had to pay a reconnaissance visit to study the locations of the exits and security cameras; then, wait till the store is full and all the employees busy, which happens especially when they have sales, on holidays and paydays, at the beginning and middle of the month. That’s all well and good in theory, but when in need, a person can’t always wait for ideal circumstances.
The day Officer Arana caught me had been a day of constant suffering. I hadn’t managed to get anything, and I’d had cramps for hours, shivering from withdrawal and doubled over in pain from the cystitis, which had gotten a lot worse and was only calmed by heroin or pharmaceuticals that were very expensive on the black market. I couldn’t last another hour in that state, and I did exactly the opposite of what Freddy had recommended: I went in a state of desperation into an electronics store I didn’t know, the only advantage of which was the absence of an armed guard at the door, like others had, without worrying about the staff or the cameras, stupidly and crazily searching for the games section. The way I looked and was acting must have drawn attention. I found the section, grabbed a Japanese war video game that Freddy liked, hid it under my T-shirt, and rushed toward the exit. The security tag on the game set off the alarm with a noisy squawking as soon as I got near the door.
I took off running with surprising energy, given the pathetic shape I was in, before the employees had time to react. I kept running, first down the middle of the street, dodging cars, and then on the sidewalk, shoving and shouting and swearing at people to get out of my way, until I realized nobody was following me. I stopped, panting, out of breath, with a stabbing pain in my lungs, a dull ache in my waist and bladder, and the hot damp feel of urine between my legs, and sat down on the sidewalk, hugging the Japanese box.
Moments later, two heavy and firm hands grasped me by the shoulders. When I turned around, I was facing a pair of clear eyes in a very tanned face. It was Officer Arana, who I didn’t immediately recognize because he was out of uniform and I couldn’t focus, on the verge of fainting. Thinking of it now, it’s surprising that Arana hadn’t found me sooner. Beggars, pickpockets, prostitutes, and addicts keep to certain neighborhoods and streets that the police know only too well and keep tabs on, just as they have their eyes on the homeless shelters, where sooner or later all the hungry people end up. Defeated, I took the video game out from under my shirt and handed it over.
The police officer picked me up off the ground by one arm, and he must have held me up, because my legs were buckling. “Come with me,” he said, more kindly than I would have expected. “Please . . . don’t arrest me, please,” I babbled.
“I’m not going to arrest you, calm down,” he replied. He took me twenty yards down the street to La Taquería, a Mexican diner, where the waiters tried to keep me from entering when they saw my pitiful state, but they gave in when Arana showed them his badge. I collapsed into a chair with my head on my arms, shaking with incontrollable tremors.
I don’t know how Arana recognized me. He’d seen me a couple of times, and the wreck sitting across from him didn’t look anything at all like the fashionably dressed, healthy girl with hair like little platinum feathers he’d met before. He realized straight away that it wasn’t food I needed most urgently and, helping me as if I were an invalid, took me to the washroom. He glanced around to make sure we were alone, put something in my hand, and pushed me gently inside, while he stood guard at the door. White powder. I blew my nose with toilet paper, anxious, hurrying, and sniffed the drug, which hit me in the forehead like an icy knife. An instant later I was invaded by the huge sense of relief that every junkie knows, I stopped trembling and moaning, and my mind cleared.
I splashed some water on my face and tried to fix my hair a little with my fingers, not recognizing that red-eyed cadaver with greasy two-tone hair in the mirror. I couldn’t stand the smell of myself, but it was futile to wash if I couldn’t change my clothes. Outside Arana was waiting for me with folded arms, leaning on the wall. “I always carry a little something with me for emergencies like this,” and he smiled at me with his eyes like little slits.
We went back to the table, and the officer bought me a beer, which went down like holy water, and forced me to eat a few bites of chicken fajitas before giving me two pills. They must have been a very strong analgesic, because he insisted I couldn’t take them on an empty stomach. In less than ten minutes I was resurrected.
“When they killed Brandon Leeman, I looked for you to take a statement and get you to identify the body. It was just a formality, because there was no doubt who it was. It was a typical drug-related crime: dealers killing each other to defend their turf,” he told me.
“Do you know who did it, Officer?”
“We have an idea, but no proof. He took eleven bullets, and somebody—lots of people—must have heard the shooting, but nobody cooperates with the police. I thought you must have gone home to your family, Laura. What happened to your plans for college? I never imagined I’d find you in this kind of shape.”
“I got scared, Officer. When I heard they’d killed him, I didn’t dare go near the building, and so I hid. I couldn’t call my family, and I ended up on the street.”
“And an addict, I see. You need—”
“No!” I interrupted him. “I’m fine, really, Officer, I don’t need anything. I will go home. They’re going to send me the bus fare.”
“You owe me some explanations, Laura. Your so-called uncle was not called Brandon Leeman or any of the other names on the half dozen pieces of fake ID he had on him. He was identified as Hank Trevor, with two prison sentences in Atlanta.”
“He never told me about that.”
“Did he ever tell you about his brother Adam?”
“He might have mentioned him, I don’t remember.”
The cop ordered another beer for each of us and then told me that Adam Trevor was one of the world’s greatest counterfeiters. At the age of fifteen he started working for a printer in Chicago, where he learned the ink and paper trade, and later he developed a technique to falsify dollar bills so perfect that they passed the pen test and ultraviolet rays. He sold them at forty or fifty cents to the dollar to the mafias from China, India, and the Balkans, who mixed them in with real bills before introducing them into circulation. The business of counterfeit money, one of the most lucrative in the world, demands total discretion and sangfroid.
“Brandon Leeman, or rather Hank Trevor, lacked his brother’s talent or intelligence. He was just a two-bit delinquent. The only thing the siblings had in common was their criminal mentality. Why should they break their backs at an honorable job if criminality pays better and is more fun? Can’t blame them, can we, Laura? I confess a certain admiration for Adam Trevor; he’s an artist, and he’s never hurt anyone, except the American government,” Arana concluded.
He explained that the fundamental counterfeiter’s rule is never to spend the money he makes but to sell it as far away from him as possible, without leaving any clues that might lead to its author or the press. Adam Trevor violated that rule by giving a large sum to his brother, who instead of hiding it, as he was surely instructed to, started spending it in Las Vegas. Arana added that he had twenty-five years of experience in the police department and knew very well what Brandon Leeman was up to and what I did for him, but he hadn’t arrested us because junkies like us were unimportant; if they detained every drug addict and dealer in Nevada, there wouldn’t be enough jail cells to put them all in. Nevertheless, when Leeman put fake money into circulation, he put himself into another category, way out of his league. The only reason not to arrest him immediately was the possibility that through him they might be able to find the origin of that money.
“I’d been watching him for months, hoping he’d lead me to Adam Trevor. Imagine how frustrating it was when they murdered him. I’ve been looking for you because you know where your lover hid the money he received from his brother . . .”
“He wasn’t my lover!” I interrupted.
“That doesn’t matter. I just want to know where he put the money and how to find Adam Trevor.”
“If I knew where there was money, Officer, do you think I’d be on the street?”
An hour earlier I would have told him without a moment’s hesitation, but the coke, the pills, the beers, and a shot of tequila had temporarily cleared away my anguish, and I remembered I shouldn’t get involved in this mess. I didn’t know if the bills in the lockup in Beatty were fake, authentic, or a mixture of the two, but in any case it would not do me any good to have Arana thinking I had anything to do with those bags. As Freddy used to advise me, it was always safer to keep quiet. Brandon Leeman had died brutally, his murderers were still on the loose, the policeman had mentioned the mafias, and any information I spilled would provoke Adam Trevor’s revenge.
“How could you think Brandon Leeman would confide something like that to me, Officer? I was his errand girl. Joe Martin and Chino were his associates—they participated in his business deals and accompanied him everywhere, not me.”
“They were his partners?”
“I think so, but I’m not sure, because Brandon Leeman never told me anything. Until this very moment I didn’t even know his name was Hank Trevor.”
“So Joe Martin and Chino know where the money is.”
“You’d have to ask them. The only money I ever saw were the tips Brandon Leeman used to give me.”
“And what you charged for him in the hotels.”
He kept interrogating me to find out details of the living arrangements at the den of delinquents that was Brandon Leeman’s building, and I answered him cautiously, without mentioning Freddy or giving him any clues about the El Paso TX bags. I tried to implicate Joe Martin and Chino, with the idea that if they were arrested, I’d be free of them, but Arana didn’t seem interested in them. We’d finished eating a while ago. It was close to five in the afternoon, and in the modest Mexican restaurant there was only one guy working there and waiting for us to leave. As if he hadn’t already done enough for me, Officer Arana gave me ten dollars and his cell phone number, so we could keep in touch and I could call him if I got into trouble. He warned me that I should let him know before I left the city, and he told me to take care; there were some very dangerous neighborhoods in Las Vegas, especially at night, as if I didn’t know. As we said good-bye, it occurred to me to ask him why he was out of uniform, and he confided that he was collaborating with the FBI: counterfeiting was a federal crime.
The precautions I took that allowed me to hide out in Las Vegas were futile in the face of the Force of Destiny, in capital letters, as my grandfather would say, referring to one of his favorite Verdi operas. My Popo accepted the poetic idea of destiny: What other explanation could there be for having found the love of his life in Toronto? But he was less fatalistic than my grandma, for whom destiny is something as sure and concrete as genetics. Both, destiny and genes, determine what we are, and cannot be changed; if the combination is virulent, we’re f*cked, but if not, we can exercise a certain amount of control over our own existence, as long as our astrological chart is favorable. The way she explained it is that we come into the world with certain cards in our hand, and we play our game; with similar cards one person might lose everything and another excel. “It’s the law of compensation, Maya. If it’s your destiny to be born blind, you’re not forced to sit in the subway playing the flute; you could develop your nose and turn out to be a wine taster.” That’s one of my grandmother’s typical examples.
According to my Nini’s theory, I was born predestined to addiction. Who knows why, since it’s not in my genes: my grandma is teetotal, my father has only a very occasional glass of white wine, and my mother, the Laplander princess, made a good impression on me the only time I saw her. Of course it was eleven in the morning, and at that hour almost everyone is more or less sober. In any case, in my cards addiction somehow figures, but with willpower and intelligence I could play my game in a way that kept it under control. However, the statistics don’t encourage optimism; there are more blind wine tasters than rehabilitated addicts. Taking into account other dirty tricks destiny has played on me, like having met Brandon Leeman, my possibilities of leading a normal life were minimal before the opportune intervention of Olympia Pettiford. That’s what I told my Nini, and she answered that you can always cheat at cards. That’s what she was doing by sending me to this little island in Chiloé: cheating the cards.
The same day of my encounter with Arana, a couple of hours later, Joe Martin and Chino finally caught up with me, a few blocks from the Mexican diner where the officer had helped me. I didn’t see the scary black van, and I didn’t sense them approaching until they were right on top of me; I’d spent the ten dollars on drugs, and I was high. They grabbed me, picked me up, and forced me into the vehicle, while I screamed and kicked in desperation. Some people stopped, but no one interceded. Who’s going to mess with two dangerous-looking thugs and a hysterical homeless girl? I tried to jump out of the van while it was moving, but Joe Martin paralyzed me with a punch in the neck.
They took me back to the building I knew all too well, Brandon Leeman’s patch, where they were now the bosses, and in spite of my bewildered panic I could see that it was in even worse shape. The obscenities daubed on the wall, garbage, and broken glass had multiplied, and it smelled of excrement. Between the two of them they dragged me up to the third floor, opened the gate, and we went into the apartment, which was empty. “Now you’re going to sing, you f*cking slut,” Joe Martin threatened me, an inch from my face, squeezing my breasts with his apelike hands. “You’re going to tell us where Leeman hid the money, or I’ll break every bone in your body, one at a time.”
At that instant Chino’s cell phone rang, and he talked for a couple of seconds and then told Joe Martin that there’d be plenty of time to break my bones, but they had orders to get going. They were waiting for them, he said. Joe Martin and Chino gagged me with a rag in my mouth and adhesive tape, threw me down on one of the mattresses, tied my ankles and my wrists together with an electric cord and then tied them to each other, so I was bent backward. They left, after warning me again what they’d do to me when they got back, and I was left alone, unable to scream or move, the cord cutting into my ankles and wrists, my neck sore where Joe Martin had hit me, suffocating from the rag in my mouth, terrified at what was going to happen to me at the hands of those murderers, and as the effects of the alcohol and drugs wore off. In my mouth I had the rag and the aftertaste of the chicken fajitas. I tried not to vomit, though I was gagging and could feel it coming up my throat, afraid I would die of asphyxiation.
How long was I on that mattress? It’s impossible to know with any certainty, but it felt to me like several days, although it could have been less than an hour. Very soon I began to tremble violently and to bite the rag, now soaked with saliva, so I wouldn’t swallow it. With every shudder the wire dug deeper into my skin. The fear and the pain kept me from thinking. Running out of air, I started to pray for Joe Martin and Chino to return, so I could tell them everything I knew, take them personally to Beatty, see if they could shoot those locks off, and if they then shot me in the head, that would at least be preferable to being tortured to death like an animal. I didn’t care about that damn money—why hadn’t I just confided in Officer Arana? Now, months later in Chiloé, with the calm of distance, I understand that was their way of making me confess. They didn’t have to break my bones; the torment of withdrawal was enough. That was, I’m sure, the order Chino had been given by phone.
Outside the sun had set. No light filtered in between the boards over the windows, and inside the darkness was total. Meanwhile, sicker and sicker, I kept praying the murderers would come back. The force of destiny. It wasn’t Joe Martin or Chino who turned on the light and leaned over me, but Freddy, so skinny and demented that for a moment I didn’t recognize him. “Shit, Laura, f*ck, f*ck,” he was mumbling as he tried to get the gag off my mouth with a trembling hand. He finally got the rag out, and I could take a massive breath and fill my lungs up with air, retching and coughing. Freddy, Freddy, sweet Freddy. He couldn’t get me untied. The knots had turned to stone, and he only had one good hand; he was missing two fingers on the other one and had never recovered the use of it entirely after that beating. He went to get a knife from the kitchen and started fighting with the electric cord until he managed to cut it and, after eternal minutes, free me. My ankles and wrists were bleeding, but I didn’t notice until later. In those moments I was overcome by the anguish of withdrawal. My next hit was the only thing that mattered to me.
It was useless to try to stand up; I was shaken by convulsive spasms, with no control over my extremities. “F*ck, f*ck, f*ck, you have to get out of here, f*ck, Laura, f*ck,” the boy was repeating like a litany. Freddy went to the kitchen again and came back with a pipe, a blowtorch, and a handful of crack. He lit it and put it in my mouth. I inhaled deeply, and that gave me back a bit of strength. “How are we going to get out of here, Freddy?” I murmured; my teeth were chattering. “Walking is the only way. Stand up, Laura,” he answered.
And we walked out the simplest way, through the front door. Freddy had the remote control to open the gate, and we slipped down the stairs in the darkness, glued to the wall, him holding me up by the waist, me leaning on his shoulders. He was so small! But his brave heart more than made up for his fragility. Maybe some of the phantoms of the lower floors saw us and told Joe Martin and Chino that Freddy had rescued me, I’ll never know. If nobody told them, they probably guessed—who else would risk his life to help me?
We walked a few blocks in the shadow of the houses, getting away from the building. Freddy tried to stop several taxis, but when they saw us they kept going or sped up; we must have been a dreadful sight. He took me to a bus stop and we got on the first one that came, without noticing where it was going or paying any attention to the expressions of repugnance on the faces of the passengers or the driver’s glances in the rearview mirror. I was disheveled, smelled of piss, had smears of blood on my arms and shoes. They could have ordered us off the bus or called the police, but we had a little luck there and they didn’t.
We got out at the last stop, where Freddy took me to a public washroom and I cleaned myself up as best I could, which wasn’t much, because my clothes and hair were disgusting, and then we got on another bus, and then another, and we went around and around Las Vegas for hours to shake them off. At last Freddy took me to a black neighborhood where I’d never been. The badly lit streets were empty at this time of night, lined with humble working-class houses, porches with wicker chairs, yards full of junk and old cars. After the terrible beating that boy had taken for going into a neighborhood he didn’t belong in, it took a lot of courage to take me there, but he didn’t seem worried, as if he’d walked down these streets many times.
We arrived at a house, no different from all the rest, and Freddy rang the bell several times, insistently. Finally we heard a thundering voice: “Who’s got the nerve to bother us so late!” The porch light came on, the door opened a few inches, and an eye inspected us. “Praise the Lord, is that you, Freddy?”
It was Olympia Pettiford in a plush pink bathrobe, the nurse who had taken care of Freddy in the hospital when he got beaten up, the gentle giant, Madonna of the defenseless, the splendid woman who ran her own church of the Widows for Jesus. Olympia opened her door wide and hugged me in her African goddess’s embrace, “Poor girl, poor little girl.” She carried me to the sofa of her living room and laid me down there with the delicacy of a mother with a newborn baby.
In Olympia Pettiford’s house I was completely trapped in the horror of withdrawal, worse than any physical pain, they say, but less than the moral agony of feeling I was despicable or the terrible pain of losing a loved one, like my Popo. I don’t want to even think of what it would be like to lose Daniel . . . Olympia’s husband, Jeremiah Pettiford, a real angel, and the Widows for Jesus, a group of bossy, generous, older black women, with sorrows of their own, took turns supporting me through the worst days. When my teeth were chattering so much that my voice could barely be heard begging for a drink, just one drink of something strong, anything just to survive, when the tremors and stomach cramps were tormenting me and the octopus of anguish wrapped its thousands of tentacles around my temples and squeezed, when I was sweating and struggling and fighting and trying to escape, those marvelous widows held me down, rocked me, consoled me, prayed and sang for me, and didn’t leave me alone for a single second.
“I’ve ruined my life, I can’t go on, I want to die,” I sobbed at one moment, when I could articulate something more than insults, pleading, and swear words. Olympia grabbed me by the shoulders and forced me to look her in the eye, to focus, to pay attention, to listen to her: “Who told you it was going to be easy, girl? Endure it. Nobody dies of this. I forbid you to talk of dying, that’s a sin. Put yourself in the hands of Jesus and you’ll live decently for the seventy years you still have ahead of you.”
Somehow Olympia Pettiford managed to get me some antibiotics, which cured the urinary tract infection, and Valium to help me with the symptoms of withdrawal. I imagine she brought them from the hospital with a clean conscience; she counted on Jesus Christ’s forgiveness in advance. The cystitis had gone into my kidneys, she explained, but the injections she gave me got it under control in a few days, and she gave me a bottle of pills to take for the next two weeks. I don’t remember how long I was agonizing through withdrawal; it must have been two or three days, but it felt like a month.
I gradually began to emerge from the pit and peered at the surface. I could swallow a spoonful or two of soup or oatmeal with milk, rest and sleep a bit; the clock mocked me, and one hour stretched out into a week. The Widows bathed me, trimmed my nails, and deloused me, cured my inflamed injuries from needles and from the cords that had cut through my wrists and ankles, gave me massages with baby oil to loosen the scabs, got me clean clothes, and watched over me to keep me from jumping out a window and going to look for drugs. When I could finally stand up and walk on my own, they took me to their church, a shed painted sky blue, where members of the tiny congregation gathered. There were no young people. All of them were African Americans, most of them women, and I knew that the few men who were there were not necessarily widowers. Jeremiah and Olympia Pettiford, dressed up in violet satin robes with yellow trim, conducted a service to give thanks to Jesus in my name. Those voices! They sang with their whole bodies, swaying like palm trees, their arms raised to the heavens, joyful, so joyful that their singing cleansed me from within.
Olympia and Jeremiah didn’t want to know anything about me, not even my name. Freddy having brought me to their door was reason enough for them to take me in. They guessed that I was fleeing from something, and they preferred not to know what, in case someone asked them compromising questions. They prayed for Freddy daily, asked Jesus to look after him, to help him through detox and to accept help and love, “but sometimes Jesus is slow to answer, because he receives too many requests,” they explained. I couldn’t get Freddy out of my head either, worrying that he’d fall into the clutches of Joe Martin and Chino, but Olympia had confidence in his cunning and his amazing capacity for survival.
One week later, when the symptoms of the infection had cleared up and I could stay more or less quiet without Valium, I asked Olympia to call my grandma in California, because I couldn’t bring myself to do it. It was seven in the morning when Olympia dialed the number I gave her, and my Nini answered immediately, as if she’d been sitting by the telephone for six months, waiting. “Your granddaughter is ready to go home. Come and pick her up.”
Eleven hours later, a red van pulled up in front of the Pettifords’ house. My Nini leaned on the horn with the urgency of love, and I fell into her arms before the satisfied gaze of the householders, several Widows, and Mike O’Kelly, who was getting his wheelchair out of the rented vehicle. “You little shit! If you only knew what you put us through! How hard could it have been just to call to tell us you were alive!” was my Nini’s greeting, shouted in Spanish, as happens when she’s agitated, and then: “You look awful, Maya, but your aura’s green, the color of healing, so that’s a good sign.” My grandma was much smaller than I remembered. She’d shrunk in a few months, and the purple circles under her eyes, which used to be so sensual, now made her look old. “I told your dad. He’s flying back from Dubai and will be waiting for you at home tomorrow,” she told me, clinging to my hand and staring at me with owl eyes to keep me from disappearing again, but she abstained from overwhelming me with questions. Soon the Widows called us to the table: fried chicken, french fries, breaded and fried vegetables, fritters, a feast of cholesterol to celebrate my family reunion.
After dinner, the Widows for Jesus said good night and left while we gathered in the little living room, where the wheelchair could barely fit. Olympia gave my Nini and Mike a summary of my state of health and advised them to get me into a rehabilitation program as soon as we got back to California, something Mike, who knows a lot about these matters, had already decided for himself, and then she discreetly left the room. I brought them up to date briefly on what my life had been like since May, skipping the night with Roy Fedgewick in the motel and the prostitution, which would have destroyed my Nini. As I told them about Brandon Leeman, or rather, Hank Trevor, the counterfeit money, the murderers who kidnapped me, and all the rest, my grandma writhed in her chair, repeating between clenched teeth, “You little shit,” but Snow White’s blue eyes shone like the headlights of an airplane. He was delighted finally to find himself in the middle of a real police investigation.
“Counterfeiting money is a very serious crime, with longer sentences than for premeditated murder,” he cheerfully informed us.
“That’s what Officer Arana told me. I better phone him and confess everything. He gave me his number,” I suggested.
“Great idea! Only my idiot granddaughter could come up with such a brilliant plan!” exclaimed my Nini. “Would you like to spend twenty years in San Quentin and end up in the gas chamber, you silly girl? Go on then, run and tell the cop you’re an accomplice.”
“Calm down, Nidia. The first priority is to destroy the evidence, so they won’t be able to connect your granddaughter to the money. Then we’ll take her to California without leaving any trace of her time in Las Vegas, and then, once she’s recuperated, we’ll make her disappear—what do you reckon?”
“How are we going to do that?” she asked him.
“Everyone here knows her as Laura Barron, except for the Widows for Jesus, right, Maya?”
“The Widows don’t know my real name either,” I said.
“Excellent. We’ll go back to California in the van we rented,” Mike decided.
“Good thinking, Mike,” interjected my Nini, whose eyes were starting to twinkle as well. “To fly, Maya would need a ticket in her name and some form of ID—that leaves a trail—but we can cross the country by car without anybody finding out. We can return the van in Berkeley.”
In this simple way the two members of the Club of Criminals organized my escape from Sin City. It was late; we were tired and needed to sleep before putting the plan into action. I stayed that night with Olympia, while Mike and my grandmother stayed in a hotel. The next morning we got together with the Pettifords for breakfast, which we stretched out for as long as possible, sad to say good-bye to my benefactors. My Nini, extremely grateful and in eternal debt to the Pettifords, offered them unconditional hospitality in Berkeley—“My house is your home”—but to be on the safe side they didn’t want to know my last name or our address. However, when Snow White told them he had saved boys like Freddy and could help the kid, Olympia accepted his card. “The Widows for Jesus will look for him until we find him and then we’ll bring him to you, even if we have to tie him up,” she promised. I said good-bye to that adorable couple with a huge hug and a promise that we’d see each other again.
My grandma, Mike, and I headed for Beatty in the red van, arguing on the way about how to open the locks. We couldn’t put a stick of dynamite in front of the door, as my Nini suggested; if we did manage to do that, the explosion would call attention to us, and besides, brute force is the last thing a good detective resorts to.
They made me repeat ten times the details of the two trips I’d made to the storage lockup with Brandon Leeman. “What exactly was the message you were supposed to give his brother over the phone?” my Nini asked me once again.
“The address of where the bags were.”
“That’s all?”
“No! Now I remember. Leeman kept insisting that I should tell his brother where his El Paso TX bags were.”
“Was he referring to the city of El Paso in Texas?”
“I suppose so, but I’m not sure. The other bag was just a regular travel bag, without any logo on it.”
The two amateur detectives deduced that the combination to the locks was in that brand name, and that was why Leeman had been so insistent on me getting the message exactly right. It took them three minutes to translate the letters into numbers, such a simple code that it was disappointing; they were expecting a challenge worthy of their abilities. All they had to do was look at a telephone: the eight letters corresponded to eight digits, four for each combination, 3572 and 7689.
We stopped to buy rubber gloves, a cloth, a broom, matches, and rubbing alcohol, then went to a hardware store for a plastic container and a shovel, and finally to a gas station to fill up the tank and the container. We went on to the lockup, which luckily I recognized, because there were several in the same place. I found the right door, and my Nini, wearing gloves, opened the locks on her second attempt; I’ve rarely seen her more pleased. Inside were the two bags, just as Brandon Leeman had left them. I told them that on the two previous visits I hadn’t touched anything. Leeman was the one who opened the locks, took the bags out of the car, and locked up again when we left, but my Nini thought that since I’d been on drugs, I couldn’t be sure of anything. Mike wiped all the surfaces where there might be fingerprints with alcohol, from the door on in.
Out of curiosity, we glanced inside the crates and found rifles, pistols, and ammunition. My Nini suggested we should leave there armed like guerrilla fighters, since we were already in the criminal world up to our eyeballs, and Snow White thought it was a splendid idea, but I wouldn’t allow it. My Popo never wanted to own any firearms. He said the devil loaded them, and if you had one, you ended up using it and later regretting it. My Nini believed that if her husband had owned a weapon, he would have killed her when she threw his opera scores in the garbage, a week after they got married.
What the members of the Club of Criminals wouldn’t have given for those two crates of lethal toys! We threw the bags in the van, my Nini swept the ground to erase our footprints and the wheelchair tracks, and we closed up the locks and drove away, unarmed.
With the bags in the van, we went to rest for a few hours in a motel after buying water and provisions for the trip, which would take us about ten hours. Mike and my Nini had arrived by plane and rented the van at the Las Vegas airport. They didn’t know how long, straight, and boring that highway was, but at least at that time of year it wasn’t the boiling cauldron it is in other months, when the temperature goes up over a hundred degrees. Mike O’Kelly took the bags of treasure to his room, and I shared a king-size bed in the other room with my grandma, who held my hand all night. “I’m not even thinking of running away, Nini, don’t worry,” I assured her, collapsing with exhaustion, but she didn’t let go. Neither of us could sleep very much, so we made use of the time to talk. We had a lot to say to each other. She told me about my dad, about how he’d suffered when I ran away, and repeated that she’d never forgive me for having left them without news for five months, one week, and two days. I’d destroyed their nerves and broken their hearts. “Forgive me, Nini, I didn’t think . . .” And it’s true that it hadn’t occurred to me. I’d only thought about myself.
I asked her about Sarah and Debbie, and she told me she’d attended the graduation of my class at Berkeley High, invited by Mr. Harper, with whom she’d become friends, because he’d always been interested in how I was doing. Debbie graduated with the rest of my class, but Sarah had been taken out of school and had been in a clinic for months, in a terrible state, weak and skeletal. At the end of the ceremony, Debbie went over to my grandma to ask her about me. She was wearing blue, looking fresh and pretty; nothing remained of her goth rags or deathly makeup. My Nini, annoyed, told her I’d married the heir to a great fortune and was in the Bahamas. “Why should I tell her you’d disappeared, Maya? I didn’t want to give her the pleasure, after all the harm she did you with her awful habits,” announced the unforgiving Don Corleone of the Chilean mafia.
As for Rick Laredo, he’d been arrested for something so stupid it could only have occurred to him: dognapping. His operation, very badly planned, consisted of stealing some pampered pet and then calling the family to demand a ransom for the mutt’s return. “He got the idea from the kidnappings of Colombian millionaires, you know, those insurgents, what are they called? The FARC? Well, something like that. But don’t worry, Mike is helping him, and they’ll soon let him out,” my grandmother concluded. I pointed out that it didn’t worry me the slightest little bit that Laredo was behind bars. On the contrary, I thought that was his rightful place in the universe. “Don’t be so hard on him, Maya, that poor boy was very much in love with you. When they let him out, Mike’s going to get him a job at the Animal Shelter, so he’ll learn to respect other people’s puppies. What do you think?” That solution would never have crossed Snow White’s mind. It just had to be my Nini’s idea.
Mike called us from his room at three in the morning. We shared some bananas and rolls, put our meager luggage in the van, and half an hour later left in the direction of California with my grandmother at the wheel. It was very dark, a good time to avoid the traffic and the patrol cars. I was nodding off, felt like I had sawdust in my eyes, drums banging in my head, cotton in my knees, and I would have given anything to sleep for a century, like the princess in Perrault’s story. A hundred and twenty miles up the road we turned off onto a narrow track, chosen by Mike on the map because it didn’t lead anywhere, and we soon found ourselves in a lunar landscape of utter solitude.
It was cold, but I warmed up quickly by digging a hole, an impossible task for Mike from his wheelchair or for my sixty-six-year-old Nini, and very difficult for a sleepwalker like me. The earth was stony, with creeping dry and hard vegetation. My strength was failing. I’d never used a shovel, and Mike and my grandmother’s instructions just increased my frustration. Half an hour later I’d only managed to make a dent in the ground, but since I had blisters on my hands inside the rubber gloves and could barely lift the shovel, the two members of the Club of Criminals had to be satisfied with that.
Burning half a million dollars is more complicated than we imagined; we didn’t factor the wind into our calculations, or the quality of the reinforced paper, or the density of the bundles. After several attempts, we opted for the most pedestrian method: we put handfuls of bills in the hole, sprinkled them with gasoline, lit them on fire, and fanned the smoke so it wouldn’t be seen from far away, although that was pretty unlikely at that time of night.
“Are you sure all this is counterfeit, Maya?” my grandma asked.
“How can I be, Nini? Officer Arana said that they normally mix fake bills with legal ones.”
“It would be a waste to burn good money, with all the expenses we’ve got. We could save a little bit, just for emergencies . . . ,” she suggested.
“Are you crazy, Nidia? This is more dangerous than nitroglycerine,” Mike said.
They carried on a heated argument while I finished burning the contents of the first bag and opened the second. Inside I found only four bundles of bills and two packages the size of books, wrapped in plastic and sealed with packing tape. We ripped them open with our teeth and fingers because we didn’t have anything sharp and we needed to hurry; it was starting to get light, dark gray clouds sweeping across a vermilion sky. In the packages there were four metal plates for printing fifty- and hundred-dollar bills.
“This is worth a fortune!” Mike shouted. “It’s much more valuable than the money we’ve burned.”
“How do you know?” I asked him.
“According to what the police officer told you, Maya, Adam Trevor’s counterfeit bills are so perfect it’s almost impossible to spot them. The mafias would pay millions for these plates.”
“So we could sell them,” said my Nini, full of hope.
Mike stopped her with a cutting look. “Don’t even think about it, Don Corleone.”
“We can’t burn them,” I interjected.
“We have to bury them or throw them in the sea,” Mike decided.
“What a shame. They’re works of art.” My Nini sighed, and proceeded to wrap them up carefully to keep them from getting scratched.
We finished burning the loot and covered the hole with dirt. Before we left, Snow White insisted on marking the place.
“What for?” I asked.
“Just in case. That’s what they do in crime novels,” he explained. I had to go find some stones and make a pyramid on top of the hole, while my Nini paced out the distances to the nearest reference points and Mike drew a map on one of the paper bags. It was like playing pirates, but I didn’t feel like arguing with them. We did the trip to Berkeley with three stops to go to the washroom, drink coffee, fill up with gas, and get rid of the bags, the shovel, the plastic container, and the gloves in different garbage cans. The blaze of dawn colors had given way to the white light of day, and we sweated in the feverish steam of the desert; the van’s air conditioning didn’t work very well. My grandma didn’t want to let me drive because she thought my brain was still addled and my reflexes numbed, and she drove along that interminable ribbon for the whole day until night fell, without a single complaint. “Something had to come of having been a limousine driver,” she commented, referring to the era when she met my Popo.
Daniel Goodrich wanted to know, when I told him the story, what we’d done with the plates. My Nini took charge of throwing them into San Francisco Bay from the ferry.
I remember that Daniel Goodrich’s phlegmatic psychiatrist’s veneer slipped when I told him this part of my story, back in May. How have I been able to live without him for such an eternity? Daniel listened to me openmouthed, and from his expression I guessed that nothing as exciting as my adventures in Las Vegas had ever happened to him. He told me that when he got back to the United States he’d get in touch with my Nini and Snow White, but he hasn’t yet. “Your grandma sounds like a riot, Maya. She and Alfons Zaleski would make a good pair,” he commented.
“Now you know why I’m living here, Daniel. It’s no touristic whim, as you might have imagined. My Nini and O’Kelly decided to send me as far away as possible until the situation I’m embroiled in settles down a bit. Joe Martin and Chino are after the money, because they don’t know it’s counterfeit; the police want to arrest Adam Trevor, and he wants to recover his plates before the FBI gets hold of them. I am the link, and when they find out, I’m going to have them all on my heels.”
“Laura Barron is the link,” Daniel reminded me.
“The police must have figured out I’m her. My fingerprints are all over the place—in the lockers at the gym, at Brandon Leeman’s building—and if they grabbed Freddy and made him talk, heaven forbid, they’d even find them in Olympia Pettiford’s house.”
“You didn’t mention Arana.”
“He’s a good guy. He’s working with the FBI, but when he could have arrested me, he didn’t, although he was suspicious of me. He protected me. He’s only interested in dismantling the counterfeit operation and arresting Adam Trevor. They’d give him a medal for that.”
Daniel agreed with the plan of keeping me isolated for a while, but he didn’t think it would be dangerous for us to write to each other—no need to overplay the persecution complex. I opened an e-mail account in the name of [email protected]. No one would suspect the relationship between Daniel Goodrich in Seattle and a little kid from Chiloé, one of many friends made on a trip with whom he keeps in touch regularly. Since Daniel left, I’ve used the account daily. Manuel does not approve of the idea. He believes the FBI spies and their computer hackers are like God, omnipresent and all-seeing.
Juanito Corrales is the little brother I always wished I had, like Freddy was too. “Take him with you back to your country, gringuita, he’s no use to me, the little brat,” Eduvigis said to me once, as a joke, and Juanito took it so seriously that he’s making plans to live with me in Berkeley. He’s the only person in the world who admires me. “When I grow up, I’m going to marry you, Auntie Gringa,” he tells me. We’re into the third volume of Harry Potter, and he dreams of going to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and having his own flying broom. He’s proud to have lent me his name for an e-mail account.
Naturally, Daniel thought it was crazy of us to burn the money in the desert, where we could have easily been caught by the highway patrol, because Interstate 15 has a lot of heavy goods traffic and is policed by land and helicopters. Before making that decision, Snow White and my Nini weighed up different options, including dissolving the bills in Drano, like they once did with a pound of pork chops, but they all presented risks, and none was as definitive and theatrical as fire. In a few years, when they can tell the story without being arrested, a bonfire in the Mojave Desert sounds better than a liquid that unclogs sinks.
Before meeting Daniel, I hadn’t ever thought about the male body or ever stopped to contemplate one, except for that unforgettable vision in Florence of David: seventeen feet of perfection in marble, but quite a small penis for his size. The boys I used to sleep with never resembled that David at all; they were clumsy, smelly, hairy, and covered in acne. I went through adolescence with crushes on movie actors whose names I don’t even remember, only because Sarah and Debbie or some girls at the academy in Oregon did too, but they were as incorporeal as my grandma’s saints. It was easy to doubt whether they were actually mortal, so white were their teeth and so smooth their waxed and bronzed torsos. I would never see them up close, much less touch them; they’d been created for the screen, not for the delicious handling of love. None of them figured in my erotic fantasies. When I was little, my Popo gave me a delicate cardboard theater with cutout characters in paper costumes to illustrate the complicated storylines of operas. My imaginary lovers, like those cardboard figures, were actors without identities of their own who I moved around on a stage. Now they’ve all been replaced by Daniel, who occupies my nights and my days. I think and dream only of him. He went away too soon, before we managed to get anything really established.
Intimacy needs time to mature—a shared history, tears shed, obstacles overcome, photographs in an album. It’s a slow-growing plant. Daniel and I are suspended in a virtual space, and this separation could destroy our love. He stayed in Chiloé several days more than he’d planned to. He didn’t get as far as Patagonia. He flew to Brazil and from there to Seattle, where he’s now working at his father’s clinic. Meanwhile I should be finishing my exile on this island, and when the time comes, I suppose we’ll decide where we should get together. Seattle is a nice place, and it rains less than in Chiloé, but I’d like us to live here. I don’t want to have to leave Manuel, Blanca, Juanito, and Fahkeen.
I don’t know if there would be work for Daniel in Chiloé. According to Manuel, psychiatrists go hungry in this country, although there are more neurotics than in Hollywood, because happiness seems kitsch to Chileans. They’re very reluctant to spend money to get over their unhappiness. Manuel’s a good example himself, it seems to me; if he wasn’t Chilean, he would have explored his traumas with a professional and could be living a bit more happily. And it’s not that I’m a fan of psychotherapy—how could I be after my experience in Oregon?—but sometimes it helps, as in my Nini’s case, when she was widowed. Maybe Daniel could work at something else. I know an Oxford academic, one of those with leather patches on the elbows of his tweed jacket, who fell in love with a Chilean woman, stayed on Isla Grande, and now runs a tourism company. And what about the Austrian woman with the backside of epic proportions and the apple strudel? She was a dentist in Innsbruck, and now she has a guesthouse. Daniel and I could bake cookies—there’s a future there, as Manuel says—or we could raise vicuñas, as I’d planned to do in Oregon.
On May 29 I said farewell to Daniel with feigned serenity; there were a few busybodies on the dock—our relationship has been gossiped about more than the soap opera—and I didn’t want to give those tongue-wagging Chilotes a spectacle. But alone at home with Manuel I cried and cried till neither of us could stand it anymore. Daniel was traveling without a laptop, but as soon as he got back to Seattle and found fifty messages from me, he wrote back—nothing too romantic, but he must have been exhausted. Since then we’ve been in constant communication, avoiding saying anything that could identify me. We have a code for talking about love, which he uses with too much restraint, as befits his character, and I abuse shamelessly, in accordance with mine.
My past is not long and should be clear in my head, but I don’t trust my capricious memory. I should write it down before I begin to change or censor it. On TV they said that some American scientists have developed a new drug to erase memories that they’re thinking of using in the treatment of psychological traumas, especially for soldiers who come back crazed from war. This drug is still at the experimental stage. They need to refine it to make sure it doesn’t eliminate all memories. If I had access to such a thing, what would I choose to forget? Nothing. The bad things in the past are lessons for the future, and the worst thing that ever happened to me, my Popo’s death, I want to remember forever.
On the hill, near La Pincoya’s cave, I saw my Popo. He was standing on the edge of the cliff looking toward the horizon, wearing his Italian hat and his travel clothes and with his suitcase in his hand, as if he’d come from far away and was wondering whether to stay or leave. He was there for too short a time, while I stood stock-still, not daring to take a breath in case I scared him away, calling him silently; then some screeching seagulls flew by, and he vanished. I haven’t told anybody, to avoid unconvincing explanations, though here they might believe me. If souls in penance howl in Cucao, if a ship with a crew of ghosts sails the Gulf of Ancud, and if brujos are transformed into dogs in Quicaví, the apparition of a dead astronomer at La Pincoya’s cave is perfectly plausible. He might have been not a ghost but my imagination, which materialized him in the atmosphere like a cinematic projection. Chiloé is a good place for the ectoplasm of a grandpa and the imagination of a granddaughter.
I talked to Daniel a lot about my Popo when we were alone and telling each other about our lives. I described my childhood, spent with joy in that architectural monstrosity in Berkeley. The memory of those years and of my grandparents’ fierce love sustained me through the most terrible times. My dad didn’t have a lot of influence over me; his job as a pilot kept him up in the air for longer than he spent on solid ground. Before he got married he lived in the same house with us, in two rooms on the second floor, with an independent entrance up a narrow outside staircase. We didn’t see much of him, because if he wasn’t flying he might be in the arms of one of his girlfriends, who phoned at all hours and whom he never mentioned. His schedule changed every two weeks, and our family got used to not expecting him or asking questions. My grandparents raised me, went to parent-teacher meetings at school, took me to the dentist, helped me with my homework, taught me to tie my shoelaces, ride a bike, and use a computer, dried my tears, laughed with me. I don’t remember a single moment of my first fifteen years when my Nini and my Popo weren’t present, and now, when my Popo is dead, I feel him closer than ever. He’s fulfilled his promise that he’d be with me forever.
Two months have gone by since Daniel’s departure, two months without seeing him, two months with my heart tied up in knots, two months writing in this notebook when I should have been talking with him. I miss him so much! This is agony, a fatal illness. In May, when Manuel came back from Santiago, he pretended not to notice that the whole house smelled of kisses, and Fahkeen was nervous because I wasn’t paying attention to him and he had to take himself out for walks, like all the other mutts in this country. Not long ago he was a street mongrel, and now he thinks he’s a lap dog. Manuel put down his suitcase and announced that he had to sort out certain matters with Blanca Schnake and since it looked like rain, he’d sleep over at her house. Here you know it’s going to rain when the dolphins dance and when there are “rods of light,” as they call the sunbeams that shine down between the clouds. As far as I know, Manuel had never slept over at Blanca’s house before. Thank you, thank you, thank you, I whispered in his ear during one of those long hugs he hates. He gave me the gift of another night with Daniel, who at that moment was stoking up the fire in the woodstove to cook chicken with mustard and bacon, a recipe invented by his sister Frances, who’s never cooked a thing in her life but collects cookbooks and has turned herself into a theoretical chef. I was trying to keep myself from looking at the ship’s clock on the wall, which was quickly swallowing the time I had left with him.
In our brief honeymoon I told Daniel about the rehab clinic in San Francisco, where I spent almost a month and which must be quite similar to his father’s in Seattle.
During the 570-mile trip from Las Vegas to Berkeley, my grandmother and Mike O’Kelly hatched a plan to make me vanish off the face of the earth before the authorities or the criminals got their paws on me. I hadn’t seen my father for a year, and I hadn’t missed him. I blamed him for my misfortunes, but my resentment evaporated the instant we arrived home in the red van and he was waiting for us at the door. My father, like my Nini, was thinner and shrunken; in those months of my absence he’d aged, and he was no longer the seductive charmer with a movie star’s good looks that I remembered. He hugged me tight, saying my name over and over again with a tenderness I’d never sensed. “I thought we’d lost you, sweetheart.” I’d never seen my father overwhelmed with emotion before. Andy Vidal had been the very image of composure, handsome in his pilot’s uniform, untouched by the bitterness of existence, desired by the most beautiful women, well traveled, cultured, contented, and healthy. “Bless you, bless you, sweetheart,” he kept saying. We arrived at night, but he’d made us breakfast instead of dinner: chocolate milkshakes and French toast with bananas and whipped cream, my favorite meal.
While we were having breakfast, Mike O’Kelly mentioned the rehab program Olympia Pettiford had spoken about and reiterated that it was the best way known to manage addiction. My dad and my Nini shuddered as if they’d received an electric shock every time he pronounced one of those terrifying words, drug addict or alcoholic, but I’d already incorporated them into my reality thanks to the Widows for Jesus, whose vast experience in such matters allowed them to be very frank with me. Mike said that addiction is an astute and patient beast, with infinite resources, always lying in wait, whose strongest argument is persuading you to tell yourself you’re not really an addict. He listed the options available to us, from the rehab center he ran, which was free and very modest, to a clinic in San Francisco, which cost a thousand dollars a day and I ruled out from the start; there was nowhere to get that kind of money. My dad listened with his fists and teeth clenched, pale as a ghost, and finally announced that he’d use his pension savings for my treatment. There was no talking him out of it, even though according to Mike the program was similar to his; the only differences were the facilities and the sea view.
I spent the month of December in the clinic. Its Japanese architecture invited peace and meditation: wood, big windows and terraces, lots of light, gardens with discreet paths, benches to sit on all bundled up and watch the fog, and a heated swimming pool. The panorama of water and woods was worth the thousand dollars a day. I was the youngest resident there; the others were friendly men and women from thirty to sixty years of age, who said hello to me in the hallways or invited me to play Scrabble and Ping-Pong, as if we were on vacation. Apart from their compulsive consumption of cigarettes and coffee, they seemed normal. No one would imagine they were addicts.
The program was similar to the one at the academy in Oregon, with talks, courses, group sessions, the same psychological jargon and advice that I knew too well, plus the Twelve Steps—abstinence, recuperation, and sobriety. It took me a week before I started to mix with the other residents and conquer the constant temptation to leave, since the door was always open and being there was voluntary. “This place isn’t for me,” was my mantra during that first week, but the fact that my father had invested his life savings in those twenty-eight days, paid for in advance, held me back. I couldn’t let him down again.
My roommate was Loretta, an attractive thirty-six-year-old woman, married, mother of three, real estate agent, and alcoholic. “This is my last chance. My husband told me if I don’t stop drinking, he’s going to divorce me and take my children away,” she told me. On visiting days her husband would arrive with the kids, bringing her drawings, flowers, and chocolates. They seemed like a happy family. Loretta showed me her photo albums over and over again: “When my oldest son, Patrick, was born, I was only drinking beer and wine; on vacation in Hawaii, daiquiris and martinis; Christmas 2002, champagne and gin; wedding anniversary 2005, had my stomach pumped and went into rehab; Fourth of July picnic, first whiskey after eleven months sober; my birthday in 2006, beer, tequila, rum, amaretto.” She knew the four weeks of the program weren’t enough. She should stay for two or three months before returning to her family.
As well as the talks to lift our spirits, they educated us about addiction and its consequences, and there were private sessions with the counselors. The thousand dollars a day gave us the right to use the pool and the gym, to go for walks in nearby parks, to have massages, relaxation, and beauty treatments, as well as yoga, Pilates, meditation, gardening, and art classes. But no matter how many activities there were, each of us carried our problem around like a dead horse on our shoulders, impossible to ignore. My dead horse was the pressing desire to flee as far away as possible—flee from that place, from California, from the world, from myself. Life was too much work. It wasn’t worth the effort of getting up in the morning and watching the hours drag by without a purpose. To rest. To die. To be or not to be, like Hamlet. “Don’t think, Maya, try to keep busy. This negative stage is normal and will soon be over,” was Mike O’Kelly’s advice.
To keep myself busy I dyed my hair several times, to Loretta’s astonishment. There were only dark gray traces left at the ends from the black Freddy had applied in September. I entertained myself by applying highlights in tones normally seen on flags. My counselor described it as self-aggression, a way of punishing myself; I thought the same of her matronly bun.
Twice a week there were women’s meetings with a psychologist who resembled Olympia Pettiford in her volume and her compassion. We sat on the floor in a room by candlelight, and each of us contributed something to set up an altar: a cross, a Buddha, photos of children, a teddy bear, an urn containing a loved one’s ashes, a wedding ring.
In the half-light, in that feminine environment, it was easier to talk. The women told how addiction was destroying their lives. They were full of doubts, having been abandoned by friends, family, husbands, or partners. They were tormented by guilt for having hit someone when driving drunk or for leaving a sick child to go in search of drugs. Some also told of the degradation they’d stooped to, the humiliations, thefts, prostitution, and I listened with my soul, because I had gone through the same thing. Many had relapsed and didn’t have a trace of self-confidence, because they knew how elusive and ephemeral sobriety could be. Faith helped for those who could put themselves in the hands of God or a superior power, but we don’t all have that capacity. That circle of addicts, with their sadness, was the opposite to the lovely witches of Chiloé. In the ruca nobody is ashamed; all is abundance and life.
Saturdays and Sundays there were very painful but necessary family sessions. My dad asked logical questions: What is crack and how is it used? How much does heroin cost? What is the effect of magic mushrooms? What’s the success rate of Alcoholics Anonymous? The answers he got were not very reassuring. Some people’s relatives revealed their disappointment and distrust. They’d supported addicts for years, unable to understand their determination to destroy themselves and the good life they once had. In my case there was only affection in the eyes of my dad and my Nini, not a single word of reproach or doubt. “You’re not like them, Maya; you peered over the edge of the abyss, but you didn’t fall all the way down,” my Nini said to me on one occasion. Olympia and Mike had warned me against exactly that, against the temptation to believe I was better than others.
Taking turns, each family went into the center of the circle to share their experiences with the rest of us. The counselors managed this round of confessions skillfully, somehow creating a secure atmosphere where we all felt equal. No one felt as if they’d committed original offenses. No one remained indifferent at those sessions; one by one they broke down. Sometimes someone would stay on the floor, sobbing, and it wasn’t always the addict. Abusive parents, violent husbands, hateful mothers, a legacy of incest or alcoholism, we saw it all there.
When it was my family’s turn, Mike O’Kelly came with us into the center in his wheelchair and asked for another chair, which remained empty, to be placed in the circle. I had told my Nini a lot of what had happened since I ran away from the academy, but I’d omitted what I felt would have killed her. However, when Mike came to visit me on his own, I told him everything; nothing could scandalize him.
My dad talked about his job as a pilot, about how he’d kept his distance from me, about his superficiality and about how he’d selfishly left me with my grandparents, without taking on the duties of fatherhood, until I had the bicycle accident when I was sixteen; only then did he start paying any attention to me. He wasn’t angry and he hadn’t lost faith in me, he said, and he’d do whatever was in his power to help me. My Nini described the healthy and cheerful little girl I used to be, my dreams, my epic poems and soccer games, and repeated how much she loved me.
At that moment my Popo walked in, just as he’d been before his illness: big, smelling of good tobacco, with his gold-rimmed glasses and his Borsalino hat. He sat down in the chair that had been left for him and opened his arms. He’d never showed up before with such aplomb, unusual in a ghost. I sat on his lap and cried and cried, begged for forgiveness, and accepted the absolute truth that no one could save me but me, that I am the only person responsible for my life. “Give me your hand, Popo,” I asked him, and since then he hasn’t let me go. What did the rest of them see? They saw me hugging an empty chair, but Mike was expecting my Popo—that’s why he asked for the chair—and my Nini naturally accepted his invisible presence.
I don’t remember how that session ended. I only remember my visceral exhaustion, my Nini accompanying me to my room and, with Loretta, putting me to bed. For the first time in my life I slept fourteen hours straight. I slept for my innumerable nights of insomnia, for the accumulated indignity and tenacious fear. It was a healing sleep such as I’ve never had since. Insomnia was patiently waiting for me behind the door. From that moment on I devoted myself entirely to the program and dared to explore the dark caverns of the past one by one. I went blindly into those caverns to fight with dragons, and when I thought I’d defeated them, another cavern would open and then another, a never-ending labyrinth. I needed to confront the questions of my soul, which was not absent, as I’d believed in Las Vegas, but numbed, shrunken, and frightened. I never felt safe in those black caves, but I lost my fear of solitude, and that’s why now, in my new solitary life in Chiloé, I’m content. What a stupid thing I just wrote on this page! I’m not alone in Chiloé. The truth is, I’ve never had more companionship than on this island, in this little house, with this neurotic gentleman, Manuel Arias.
While I was completing the rehab program, my Nini renewed my passport, got in touch with Manuel, and prepared my trip to Chile. If she could have afforded it, she would have come with me to personally leave me in the hands of her friend in Chiloé. Two days before my treatment finished, I put my things in my backpack, and as soon as it got dark I left the clinic, without saying good-bye to anyone. My Nini was waiting for me two blocks away in her ailing Volkswagen, just as we’d arranged. “From this moment on, you’ve vanished, Maya,” she said with a mischievous wink of complicity. She gave me another laminated photo of my Popo, the same as the one I’d lost, and drove me to the San Francisco airport.
I am driving Manuel crazy: Do you think men fall in love as hopelessly as women do? Would Daniel be capable of coming to bury himself away in Chiloé for me? Do you think I’m fat, Manuel? Are you sure? Tell me the truth! Manuel says he can’t breathe in this house, that the air is saturated with tears and feminine sighs, burning passions and ridiculous plans. Even the animals are acting strange. Literati-Cat, who used to be very clean, has now started throwing up on the computer keyboard, and Dumb-Cat, who used to be so aloof, now competes with Fahkeen for my affections and wakes up in my bed with all four paws in the air so I’ll rub his tummy.
We’ve had several conversations about love—too many, according to Manuel. “There is nothing more profound than love,” I tell him, among other trivialities, and he, who has an academic’s memory, recites a D. H. Lawrence poem about how there are deeper things than love, the solitude of each of us, and deeper still the unknown fire, heavy and alone, and the ponderous fire of naked life, or something as depressing as that for me, who has just discovered the powerful fire of naked Daniel. Apart from quoting dead poets, Manuel keeps quiet. Our talks are more like monologues, with me pouring my heart out about Daniel. I don’t name Blanca Schnake, because she’s forbidden me to, but her presence also floats in the atmosphere. Manuel thinks he’s too old to fall in love and has nothing to offer a woman, but I have a feeling his problem is cowardice; he’s afraid of sharing, depending, suffering, afraid of Blanca’s cancer coming back and her dying before him, or the opposite, leaving her widowed or getting senile when she’s still youthful, which is quite likely, since he’s much older than her. If it weren’t for that macabre little bubble in his brain, Manuel would surely live hale and hearty into his nineties. What would love be like for old people? I mean the physical part. Would they do . . . that? When I turned twelve and started spying on my grandparents, they put a lock on their bedroom door. I asked my Nini what they did in there when they locked the door, and she told me they were saying the rosary.
Sometimes I give Manuel advice. I can’t help it, and he receives and disarms it with irony, but I know he listens to me and learns. He’s gradually changing his monastic habits, getting less obsessed with that mania he has for order and more receptive to me. He doesn’t freeze when I touch him anymore or run away when I start bouncing around and dancing to the sounds in my headphones. I have to exercise, or I’ll end up looking like one of Rubens’s Sabines, these naked fat chicks I saw in the Pinacotheca in Munich. The bubble in his brain is no longer a secret, because he can’t hide his migraines or his double vision, when he can’t see the letters properly on a page or on the screen. When Daniel found out about the aneurysm, he suggested the Mayo Clinic in Minneapolis, where the top neurosurgeons in the United States practice, and Blanca said her father would pay for the operation, but Manuel didn’t want to hear about it; he already owes Don Lionel too much, he claims. “What difference does it make, man, owing one favor or two? It doesn’t matter,” Blanca countered. I regretted having burned that pile of money in the Mojave Desert; fake or not, it would have come in handy.
I’ve gone back to writing in my notebook, which I’d abandoned for a while in my eagerness to send e-mail messages to Daniel. I’m planning to give it to him when we get back together, so he can get to know me and my family better. I can’t tell him all I want to by e-mail, where only the day’s news fits, and one or two words of love here and there. Manuel advises me to censor my passionate outbursts, because everyone regrets the love letters they’ve written. There’s nothing cornier or more ridiculous, he claims, and in my case they’re not even echoed by the guy receiving them. Daniel’s replies are succinct and infrequent. He must be very busy with his work at the clinic, or maybe he’s adhering very strictly to the security measures imposed by my grandmother.
I keep busy so I won’t spontaneously combust, thinking about Daniel. There have been cases like that, people who for no apparent reason burst into flames. My body is a ripe peach, ready to be savored or to fall from the branch and smash into pulp on the ground among the ants. Most likely the second will happen, because Daniel’s showing no signs of coming to savor me. This cloistered life puts me in a terrible mood. I explode at the slightest problem, but I admit that I’m sleeping well for the first time in memory, and my dreams are interesting, although not all erotic, as I wish they were. Since the unexpected death of Michael Jackson, I’ve dreamed of Freddy several times. Jackson was his idol, and my poor friend must be in mourning. What will have become of him? Freddy risked his life to save mine, and I never got the chance to thank him.
Freddy resembles Daniel in certain ways, with the same coloring, big eyes with long lashes, and curly hair. If Daniel had a son, he might look like Freddy, but if I were the mother of that child, we’d run the risk of him coming out Danish. Marta Otter’s genes are very strong. I don’t look like I have even a drop of Latina blood. In the United States Daniel is considered black, though he’s light-skinned and could be mistaken for Greek or Middle Eastern. “Young black men in America are an endangered species,” Daniel told me when we talked about it. “So many end up in prison or murdered before the age of thirty.” He was raised among whites in a liberal West Coast city, he moves in privileged circles, where his color has not limited him in any way, but his situation would be different in other places. Life is easier for whites. My grandfather knew that too.
My Popo was the very image of a strong and powerful man: six foot three, 265 pounds, his gray hair, gold-rimmed glasses, and the inevitable hat that my dad used to bring him back from Italy. By his side I felt safe from any danger. Nobody would dare to touch that formidable man. That’s what I believed until the incident with the cyclist, when I was about seven.
The University of Buffalo had invited my grandpa to give a series of lectures. We were staying in a hotel on Delaware Avenue, one of those millionaire’s mansions from the century before last that are now public or commercial buildings. It was cold, and an icy wind was blowing, but he got the idea in his head that we had to go for a walk in a nearby park. My Nini and I were a couple of steps ahead, jumping over puddles, and didn’t see what happened, only heard the shout and the commotion that immediately ensued. Behind us was a young guy on a bicycle who apparently skidded on a frozen puddle, crashed into my grandpa, and fell on the ground. My Popo staggered at the blow, lost his hat, and dropped the umbrella that he was carrying under his arm, but he didn’t fall down. I ran after his hat, and he bent down to pick up the umbrella, then reached out his hand to help the guy up off the ground.
In an instant the scene turned violent. The shocked cyclist started to shout; a car stopped, then another, and a few minutes later a police car arrived. I don’t know how they concluded that my grandfather had caused the accident and threatened the cyclist with his umbrella. Without any questions, the police threw him violently against the patrol car, ordered him to put his hands up, kicked his legs apart, frisked him, and handcuffed him with his arms behind his back. My Nini leaped in like a lioness, confronting the uniformed officers with a stream of explanations in Spanish, the only language she remembers in moments of crisis, and when they tried to get rid of her, she yanked the biggest one by his clothes so hard she managed to lift him an inch or two off the ground, quite an impressive feat for someone who weighs less than 110 pounds.
We ended up at the station, but we weren’t in Berkeley, and there was no Sergeant Walczak offering cappuccinos. My grandfather, with a bloody nose and a cut on his eyebrow, tried to explain what had happened in a humble tone of voice we’d never heard and asked for a telephone to call the university. The only answer he got was a threat to lock him in a cell if he didn’t shut up. My Nini, also in handcuffs, out of fear she’d attack someone again, was ordered to sit on a bench while they filled out a form. None of them noticed me, and I huddled up, shivering, beside my grandma. “You have to do something, Maya,” she whispered in my ear. In her eyes I understood what she was asking me to do. I filled my lungs with air, released a guttural cry that echoed around the room, and fell to the ground with my back arched, writhing with convulsions, foaming at the mouth, my eyes rolled up into my head. I’d faked epileptic fits so many times during my pampered-little-girl attempts to get out of going to school that I could fool a neurosurgeon, let alone a few Buffalo cops. They let us use the telephone. They took my Nini and me to the hospital by ambulance, where I arrived completely recovered from the attack, to the surprise of the policewoman who was guarding us, while the university sent a lawyer to get their astronomer out of the cell that he was sharing with drunks and petty thieves.
That night we were all reunited at the hotel, exhausted. We just had a bowl of soup for dinner, and all three of us climbed into the same bed. My Popo had bruises from being hit by the bike, and his wrists had been hurt by the handcuffs. In the darkness, tucked between their bodies as if in a cocoon, I asked what had happened. “Nothing serious, Maya, go to sleep,” my Popo answered. They lay still for a while in silence, pretending to be asleep, until finally my Nini spoke. “What happened, Maya, is that your grandpa is black.” And there was so much anger in her voice that I didn’t ask anything more.
That was my first lesson on racial differences, which I’d never noticed before and which, according to Daniel Goodrich, should always be kept in mind.
Manuel and I are rewriting his book. I say we’re both doing it because he supplies the ideas and I do the writing. Even in Spanish I write better than he does. The idea arose when he was telling Daniel the Chiloé myths and, as any good psychiatrist would, Daniel wanted explanations for the inexplicable. He said that gods represent different aspects of the psyche, and myths are generally stories about creation and nature or about fundamental human dramas, and normally connected to reality, but the ones from here give the impression of being held together with chewing gum. They lack coherence. Manuel got to thinking, and two days later announced that he’d written a lot about the myths of Chiloé, and his new book wouldn’t contribute anything new unless he could offer an interpretation of the mythology. He talked to his editors, and they gave him four months to submit a new manuscript. We have to hurry. Daniel is very interested and contributes by long distance, giving me another excuse to be in permanent contact with our Seattle consultant.
The winter climate limits activity on the island, but there’s always work: looking after the children and animals, collecting shellfish at low tide, mending nets, making provisional repairs to houses thrashed by the storms, knitting and counting clouds until eight, when the women all get together to watch the soap opera and the men to drink and play truco. It’s been raining all week, the tenacious tears of the southern sky, and the water drips in on us between the roof tiles that got displaced by Tuesday’s storm. We put cans under the leaks and carry rags around with us to dry the floor. When it clears up, I’m going up on the roof; Manuel’s too old to be doing acrobatics; and we’ve given up hope of seeing the maestro chasquilla here before spring. The tapping of the water tends to worry our three bats, hanging head-down from the highest beams, out of reach of Dumb-Cat’s futile swipes. I detest those winged, blind mice because they might suck my blood at night, although Manuel assures me they’re not related to Transylvanian vampires.
We depend more than ever on firewood and the black cast-iron stove, where the kettle is always ready to make maté or tea; there is an ever-present scent of smoke, a fiery fragrance on clothes and skin. Living with Manuel is a delicate dance: I wash the dishes, he brings in the firewood, and we share the cooking. For a time we shared the cleaning too, because Eduvigis stopped coming to our house, though she still sent Juanito to pick up our laundry and bring it back washed, but now she’s come back to work.
After Azucena’s abortion, Eduvigis kept very quiet, going into town only when absolutely necessary and not talking to anybody. She knew there was gossip about her family, circulating behind her back; lots of people blame her for letting Carmelo Corrales rape their daughters, but there are also those who blame the daughters “for tempting their father, who was a drunk and didn’t know what he was doing,” as I heard someone say at the Tavern of the Dead. Blanca explained that Eduvigis’s meekness about the man’s abuse is common in these cases, and it’s unfair to accuse her of complicity because she was a victim too, like the rest of the family. She was afraid of her husband and could never confront him. “It’s easy to judge others if you’ve never suffered an experience like that,” Blanca concluded. She got me thinking, because I was one of the first to judge Eduvigis harshly. Ashamed of myself, I went over to her house for a visit. I found her leaning over her sink, washing our sheets with a scrubbing brush and harsh blue soap. She dried her hands on her apron and invited me in for un tecito, a little cup of tea, without looking at me. We sat down in front of the stove to wait for the kettle to boil, then drank our tea in silence. The conciliatory intention of my visit was obvious, but it would have been uncomfortable if I’d asked her forgiveness and a lack of respect to mention Carmelo Corrales. Both of us knew why I was there.
“How are you, Doña Eduvigis?” I finally asked, when we’d finished our second cup of tea, all from a single tea bag.
“Getting by, that’s all. And you, mijita?”
“Getting by too, thanks. And your cow, is she well?”
“Yes, yes, but she’s getting old.” She sighed. “Not giving much milk. She must be getting feeble, I think.”
“Manuel and I are using condensed milk.”
“Juesú! Tell the gentleman that tomorrow morning Juanito will be bringing you a little milk and cheese.”
“Thank you so much, Doña Eduvigis.”
“And I guess your house isn’t too clean . . .”
“No, no, it’s pretty dirty. Why should I lie to you?” I confessed.
“Jué! Forgive me.”
“No, no, nothing to forgive.”
“Tell the gentleman he can count on me.”
“As usual, then, Doña Eduvigis.”
“Yes, yes, gringuita, as usual.”
Then we talked about sickness and potatoes, as protocol demands.
This is the recent news. Winter in Chiloé is cold and long, but much more bearable than those winters up north in the world. Here we don’t have to shovel snow or wrap up in furs. We have classes in school when the weather allows, but they play truco in the tavern every day, even when the sky is shattered with lightning. There are always enough potatoes for soup, wood for the stove, and maté for friends. Sometimes we have electricity, sometimes just candlelight.
If it doesn’t rain, the Caleuche team practices ferociously for the championship in September. None of the boys’ feet have grown, and their soccer cleats still fit. Juanito is a sub, and Pedro Pelanchugay was elected as the team’s goalkeeper. In this country everything is resolved by democratic voting or by appointing commissions, somewhat complicated processes; Chileans believe that simple solutions are against the law.
Doña Lucinda had her one hundred and tenth birthday and has started looking like a dusty rag doll in the last few weeks. She no longer has the energy to dye wool and she spends her time sitting staring toward the side of death, but she’s got new teeth coming in. We don’t have curantos or any tourists until spring, and meanwhile the women knit and make handicrafts, because it’s a sin to have idle hands; laziness is for men. I’m learning how to knit so I won’t look bad. For the moment I make scarves that can’t really go wrong, with thick wool and a basic garter stitch.
Half the population of the island has a cold, bronchitis, or aches in their bones, but if the National Health Service boat is a week or two late, the only one who misses it is Liliana Treviño. Rumor has it she’s got a thing going on with the beardless doctor. People don’t trust physicians who don’t charge them anything. They’d rather treat themselves with natural remedies and if it’s something serious, with the magical resources of a machi. The priest, however, always comes to say mass every Sunday, to keep the Pentecostals and evangelicals from getting the upper hand. According to Manuel, that wouldn’t be easy, because the Catholic Church is more influential in Chile than it is in the Vatican. He told me that this was the last country in the world to legally approve the right to divorce and the law they’ve got is very complicated. It’s actually easier to murder your husband or wife than divorce them, so no one wants to get married and most children are born out of wedlock. They don’t even talk about abortion, which is a rude word, though it’s widely practiced. Chileans venerate the Pope, but they don’t heed him in sexual matters and their consequences, because he’s a well-off, elderly celibate, who hasn’t worked a day in his life, and doesn’t really know much about it.
The soap opera advances very slowly. It’s on its ninety-second episode, and we’re still in the same stories as at the beginning. It’s the most important event on the island. People suffer the characters’ misfortunes more than their own. Manuel doesn’t watch television, and I don’t understand that much of what the actors say and almost none of the plot. It seems that someone called Elisa was abducted by her uncle, who fell in love with her and has her locked up somewhere, while her aunt is looking for her to murder her, instead of killing her husband, which would be more reasonable.
My friend La Pincoya and her sea lion family aren’t at the cave. They emigrated to other waters and other rocks, but they’ll come back when the season changes. The fishermen have assured me that they’re creatures of deeply ingrained habits, and they always come back in the summer.
Livingston, the carabineros’ dog, is full-grown now, and he’s turned out to be a polyglot: he understands instructions in English, Spanish, and Chilote. I taught him four basic tricks that any domestic dog learns, and the rest he picked up on his own. He herds sheep and drunks, fetches prey when they take him hunting, raises the alarm if there’s a fire or a flood, sniffs out drugs—except for marijuana—and pretends to attack if Humilde Garay orders him to in demonstrations, but in real life he’s very gentle. He hasn’t recovered corpses, because we haven’t been fortunate enough to have any, as Garay puts it, but he did find Aurelio Ñancupel’s four-year-old grandson, who got lost up on the hill. Susan, my ex-stepmother, would pay a fortune in gold for a dog like Livingston.
I’ve missed two meetings of the good witches in the ruca, the first when Daniel was here and the second this month, because Blanca and I couldn’t get to Isla Grande; there was a storm in the forecast, and the captain of the port wouldn’t let any boats out to sea. I was very disappointed, because we were going to bless a newborn baby one of them had recently had, and I was looking forward to giving him a sniff; I like children when they don’t talk back yet. I’ve really missed our monthly coven in the womb of Pachamama with those young, sensual women, healthy in their hearts and minds. Among them I feel accepted; I’m not the gringa, I’m Maya, one of the witches, and I belong to this land. When we go to Castro we usually sleep over for a couple of nights with Don Lionel Schnake, with whom I would have fallen in love if Daniel Goodrich hadn’t crossed my astrological chart. He’s irresistible, like the mythical Millalobo, enormous, ruddy complexioned, mustachioed, and lusty. “What a lucky fellow you are, you Communist, to have this lovely gringuita land in your house!” he exclaims every time he sees Manuel Arias.
The investigation into Azucena Corrales’s case came to nothing for lack of proof. There was no evidence that the abortion was induced; that’s the advantage of a concentrated infusion of avocado leaves and borage. We haven’t seen the girl since, because she went to live in Quellón with her older sister, Juanito’s mother, who I’ve never even met. After what happened, Officers Cárcamo and Garay began to look into the paternity of the dead baby on their own and concluded the same as what was already known, that Azucena had been raped by her own father, just as he’d done to his other daughters. That is privativo, as they say here, and nobody feels they have the right to intervene in what goes on behind closed doors. People wash their dirty linen at home.