Beyond the Ties of Blood (15 page)

Carlos's shoulders crumpled, and he stopped fiddling with the bolt. Finally he looked up and met Manuel's eyes. “Look,
compadre
, it wasn't my idea. If it were me … well, you know, we've been together for years. But that new guy, the one the central committee sent in, he said your girlfriend was a
momia
. That we couldn't trust you anymore, and that you were no longer part of the organization.”

“The central committee sent someone in?”

Carlos nodded, then hung his head. “It's over, man. Word came down from the top. There's gonna be a military coup, and we're gonna resist, arms in hand. The armed struggle,
compadre
. Can't afford any weak links.”

Weak links. The full irony of Carlos's words didn't hit him until much later. When Eugenia got back from vacation, a last eviction at the beginning of September forced them into a small, grimy room behind a gas station that didn't even have a kitchen. That was the first time he'd benefited from his infamous
momia
girlfriend, and the account she kept at the national bank. At least she had money in there to pay for their meals.

On September 11, 1973, after the four branches of the armed forces united to bring down Allende's government and formed a military junta, the Revolutionary Left issued the call they all knew was coming. No one had the right to seek political asylum in the embassies. They all had to participate in armed resistance against the dictatorship. Manuel knew that, in the last desperate days before the coup, not even the rest of his own organization would have known that he had been expelled from the Revolutionary Left. That meant that Military Intelligence, no matter how many comrades they arrested and tortured, would not know, either, and even if they had, they probably wouldn't have cared. As a result he couldn't even risk showing himself at the door. Eugenia was the one who went out every morning to get some food and coffee and bring back the newspapers so he could see what new lies were being published that day. He found that in the tabloid, toward the back of the second section, they would list some of the people who had been arrested. Although the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, and the Military Police each had a separate listing, all were full of names he recognized, guys in the second or third tier of the Revolutionary Left.

“Why haven't your buddies gotten in touch?” Eugenia asked one morning, about a week after the coup. “Weren't you guys supposed to have a resistance plan or something?” They were sitting at the rickety table toward the back of the room, far from the danger of the windows. Manuel put down the paper he'd been reading and shook his head.

“I only wish. Most guys I knew have been falling pretty quickly. In fact, this morning I just read the names of a couple of guys in my cell.”

“So you're next?” The question was a choppy uptake of breath. Manuel let out a sarcastic chuckle.

“Don't think so. Remember what I told you when you got back from vacation. These guys were playing cops and robbers, decided I was a security risk, and cut me from the group. Funny how these things work, don't you think? Their stupidity may have saved my life.”

But he had been the stupid one. Two weeks later, the goons had followed Eugenia back to the room. How'd they know? The light bulb went on that first night in the torture camp, when they put him in the same cell with Carlos. By that time there wasn't much anyone could do for Carlos, but Manuel was sure his friend recognized him. A look of horror crossed his face when the guards tossed Manuel in. And through the night, as Manuel heard death slowly seep into his friend's deep, jagged hacks, he also heard something else.

“So-sooo-sorrrr-y … y … y …”

At that point, fresh off the street, Manuel realized they were playing games with him. Making sure he saw Carlos die. Making sure he connected the dots: Carlos, who knew Eugenia … At least he'd had the presence of mind to figure it out before Carlos died. To realize that anyone who is being tortured to death might say anything, to make the pain stop. After all, what had everyone in the Revolutionary Left always said? After an arrest, no one is responsible for what they know for more than twenty-four hours.

How innocent they'd all been, and how short-sighted. Everyone was a weak link once the pain started. And the goons weren't just picking up the revolutionaries. So that first night, before they could begin to wear him down, he resolved he would not say a word. No matter what. He would prove that bureaucratic lightweight from the Central Committee wrong. He would not be a weak link. Sure, in part it was his revenge on the Revolutionary Left, not that they'd ever know. But it was also because he felt responsible for Eugenia's arrest. Not that she'd ever know, either, but there wasn't anything else he could do.

He found it wasn't quite as hard as he had feared. One of the worst moments had been in the car on the way to the torture camp, lying on the floor in the back, hooded, dizzy from the beatings to his head, his ribs screaming from where they had kicked him around on the floor of their room. The fear he felt then, of what they might do to him, was even worse than what they did. When they broke his arm, or gouged up his eye, or shot him full of electricity, as long as he split himself from his body, looked down from near the ceiling at that poor bastard with the red hair shaking and moaning, he could keep his mouth shut.

Yesterday, though, when they brought Eugenia in, and he saw the horror in her eyes at what he must look like. It was like a mirror being put up to his own face. And when he saw the shape she was in, he almost lost it then. But with his next breath, and with immense relief, he realized he'd reached the end of the line. Why else would they bring them face to face? What hurt most was not knowing what would happen to her.

Now, back in his cell, he longed for an open window to let in the day's first light, perhaps a warm breeze to halt the shriveling in his bones. He pictured his grandpa running to the port in Odessa, jamming the
Communist Manifesto
into his pocket. His mama, hunched over a mug of tea grown cold from waiting, but was it him or his grandpa she was waiting for? His grandma, crying on his mama's shoulder when Grandpa went missing during a strike. Yet when she turned her head, it was Eugenia. As he heard the boots stop outside the door to his cell, he knew they'd come to get him for the last time. He gathered up the torn pieces of his family's suffering into the agony of his own wounds, sat up straight, and waited.

Sara was always happiest on Friday nights, when they celebrated
shabbat
. The fragrance of brisket and
challah
wafted through the house, and Mama sang songs and told stories from her childhood. Sara's favorite story was about Istanbul, when her papa had heard her mama singing
Oseh Shalom
. They were both from Odessa, but had never met before. Mama was from a merchant family, and their house was made of stone with geranium pots on the stairs and an orange tree in the back. Papa was a tailor's son, and they'd lived in a neighborhood near the port. Tell me again, Sara would beg almost every Friday night. Tell me about how you fell in love. But her parents never mentioned why they had ended up in Istanbul in the first place, or why they'd left Angol, the first place they'd lived in Chile, and moved to Temuco, where she had been born.

When Sara turned six, her parents placed her in the local German school, the only one that did not require a baptismal certificate. Her classmates were the children of German colonists, most of whom had arrived in southern Chile a generation before as the frontier was opening up. She was the only Jew, and the only one whose parents were not wealthy merchants or landowners.

As she learned to read and write, she also began to decipher new tensions in her house. After he closed the shop and sat down to dinner with them, her papa would go out and not come back until very late. She'd awaken in the middle of the night to arguments, even hear her mama crying. Every now and then she'd find pieces of paper lying about in the corners of the shop, and when she picked them up the ink would rub off on her hands. They were hard to understand, but as she got better at reading she began to get a feel for what they contained. It was something about poor people, working people who didn't get paid what they deserved. Somehow, she knew that these papers were a part of what made Mama cry.

When she was ten, Sara woke one morning to find her mama in her bathrobe sitting at the kitchen table. It looked like she had been up all night.

“Mama! What's the matter?”

“Ay, Sarita, your papa.…”

“What? Where is he?”

“I don't know where he is. I knew it would come to this, I just knew it.”

“What are you talking about? Has he left us?”

“What? Oh, no, not that, he'll be back.”

“Then what happened?”

Mama only sighed.

Sara did not go to school that day. She brewed chamomile tea, helped her mother make a soup for their lunch, and walked to the corner to buy bread. They sat at the kitchen table for hours, talking. Sara learned about the troubles in Odessa, back when Mama and Papa were young. She learned how some people just hated the Jews, and blamed them for everything. She learned that a group of these people had run through the Jewish neighborhood, breaking into people's houses and killing them, for no reason except that they were Jews. They had broken into her mama's house and killed her whole family, including her twin baby sister and brother. Mama was the only one who survived because she hid in the attic. Papa, too, had been left alone after his father died in the workers' rebellion near the port.

Sara began to understand that her mama and papa came from very different families. Mama's family had money, but Papa's did not. Papa's family was socialist, Mama explained, and this meant that he was always defending the poor. Which was not a bad thing, she said, but sometimes they seemed more important to him than his own family. In fact, Mama said, when they had traveled from Europe to Chile on a ship, stuck in the third-class cargo hold filled with dirty, smelly people, Papa had criticized her for complaining about them. It wasn't their fault that they were smelly, he'd said. They were poor and had never known anything different.

Mama also told Sara about the farm near Angol where they had lived when they first got to Chile. It was in the south of the country, too, but further north than Temuco. They had been hired as managers, but when the landowner built a fence to keep squatters off his property the surrounding farmers got angry because he blocked the road they used to get their goods to market. One night, when the farmers burned down the gate in protest, her papa had helped them. Then the landowner had fired her papa, and they had been evicted. That's when Mama finally stood up to him, telling him he had to stop getting involved in politics if they were going to have a family.

“So, are you going to say something to him again?” Sara asked when her mama was done. It was the middle of the afternoon and they were drinking yet another mug of tea. Mama placed her mug on the table, then looked down at her hands.

“Ay, Sarita,” she sighed, “what is there to say? Will I leave him if he doesn't stop? Where would we go? What would we do? And it isn't like I haven't tried before.”

At that moment Sara decided that she would talk to her papa, stand up for her mama. But by the time her papa came home late that night, giving off a strange scent that, over the years, she learned to recognize as jail smell, she didn't know what to say to him. So she didn't say anything. And her mama just melted into his arms. All it took was one “my little peach,” and everything was forgiven. Over the years, Sara would grow to hate that phrase.

1940

Papa was always involved in workers' politics, and Sara finally lost count of the nights he didn't come home. But the worst was the time he went into the countryside to help landless Mapuche peasants. There was an electricity in the air then, and people were marching through the streets of Temuco, gathering in the main plaza every afternoon. In the two years since he'd been elected, the new president had been changing things, and people were expecting more. You could just see it in the headlines of the newspapers the boys hawked on street corners.

Times like these, when people got their hopes up, they were always the worst, Mama said. When that had happened before in Angol town, where they'd opened the dry-goods store after they were thrown off the big farm, the police got it into their heads that Papa was to blame. Mama still remembered coming into their store to find everything turned upside down, bags of flour, rice, and sugar torn open, their contents spread across the floor and ruined, because the police had raided them during the night looking for who knew what. But even Mama had to admit that, in the end, the worst of the worst was the time when Papa helped the poor Mapuche peasants invade the land the big farmer had taken from them so many years before.

It was November, and the days were getting longer. The sun still came up timidly, covered in fog, and the fragrance of burning wood still lingered over the shivering city in the early hours of the day. But in the countryside the wheat nursed its spiky golden crown, turning eagerly toward the light, while potato plants hugged the sides of the rolling hills and sent out blue and white flowers that trumpeted the approaching harvest. In the countryside during this time of plenty, it was only natural for peasants to think about what they had lost, how the big landowners had moved in with their thugs and torched their parents' houses, the smell of their burned belongings lingering in the air for days.

At least that was what her papa told Sara before he left for the countryside. There was a small community of Mapuche Indians, he said, near a big river that fed the Pacific Ocean. The Mapuche were an indigenous people, he explained, which meant they had been there first, before anyone else. All the land had been theirs, and when the Spanish first arrived, they'd fought to defend it. But fifty years ago, the Chilean army had finally defeated them. Like most Mapuche, this community got a small land grant from the government. It hadn't been much, but at first it was enough to raise their families, plant crops, and keep a few sheep. Then a big landowner appeared one day and said that half their land was his. His gunmen moved the fence, then burned the houses inside his new claim.