Beyond the Ties of Blood (7 page)

“You were there,
compañera
,” he said respectfully, “so I don't have to tell you how much he suffered. But one of our guys who was also in there with him, and got out by some miracle, he said that
compañero
Bronstein became a legend in the torture camp. They tortured him every day in Villa Gardenia,
compañera
, for hours and hours. And he never said a word. Not one. Here in Mexico,
compañera
, well … we consider him a hero.”

As the widow and child of a hero, she and Laura were given a place to live and she was put into contact with several newspapers, where she learned slowly but surely to be a journalist. She had always loved reading and had dreamed of becoming a journalist, and this was a way for her to take her mind off Manuel. And Mama. Even Papa. Loved ones she would never see again. By focusing on the stories of others, she didn't have to think about her own.

Slowly they settled into a life in Mexico City. They moved to a small second-floor apartment in Coyoacán, a southern neighborhood full of artists and cobblestone streets. A bougainvillea grew up the side of the balcony, spreading its luxuriant purple blossoms along the edge of the wrought-iron railing. On her third birthday, Eugenia bought Laura a small stuffed porcupine made of pink velvet. They called him Paco. A Zapotec woman from Oaxaca, not more than eighteen years old, helped in the kitchen, washed and ironed their clothes, and took care of Laura when Eugenia had to go in to the office at the newspaper.

Mostly Eugenia wrote at home, clacking out articles on a small Olivetti portable typewriter. Over time, her byline, which at first had felt like charity from the exile community, developed a prestige of its own. The change came after she landed an exclusive interview with the mother of a young leftist disappeared by Mexican authorities the same year she and Laura arrived in Mexico. Hundreds of letters poured in at her newspaper, lavishing praise. From that moment, her editor always sent her when a story had to do with human rights. Between her arrival in Mexico City in 1974 and the beginning of the 1980s, the horrors of military massacres in Nicaragua, Guatemala, and El Salvador—not even to mention Chile and Argentina—kept her very busy.

As the widow of a revolutionary hero and an expert on human rights, Eugenia could not shake the feeling that she was an impostor. After all, she had never done anything truly revolutionary herself, except be in love with Manuel. And what had made Manuel such a hero, anyway? She pretended to know, but she really had no idea. He hadn't talked under torture, everyone kept repeating. Not a word, they said in awestruck whispers. What she never mentioned was that she, too, had never said a word. But that was because she had nothing to say. And it didn't matter to the soldiers. They tied her down and sent electric currents through her anyway, until welts formed on her burning flesh that would mark her forever.

Whenever these thoughts came into her head, Eugenia locked herself in the bathroom and took off her blouse. In the mirror she looked at the purple marks on her arms, the scars from where the electricity had seared her skin. She ran an index finger over each one, felt the raised edges, the points at each end that were still slightly tender to the touch, even after several years. More than anything else, she thought, these made her an expert on human rights. The nightmares did too, full of nameless and faceless beings who did horrible things to her. Things she still managed to suppress during her waking hours.

The first night that Laura brought her the blanket, then the glass of water after another one of her night terrors in 1984, Eugenia felt happy that her daughter wanted to take care of her. In fact, Laura used the same words to comfort her mother after her nightmare that Eugenia had used a few weeks before when their roles had been reversed and Laura had been sick. If only Eugenia had been able to comfort her mother back when Papa left, but Mama had locked her door during the time she was ill. Then she and Laura had talked about Manuel. For the first time, Eugenia realized, she was able to tell Laura about their daily life together, things she thought about constantly but had never been able to share with her daughter before. Now that Laura was ten, perhaps it was easier for her to understand.

She wondered if Laura had seen the scars on her arms that night. She'd been wearing a sleeveless nightgown. When Laura didn't say anything, Eugenia relaxed. But when it happened again, Eugenia bought a new wardrobe of nightgowns, all with long sleeves. They were especially useful after the earthquake, when she found she could not sleep at all.

One September morning in 1985, Eugenia woke to the worst earthquake she had ever experienced. By the time she became conscious, her bed was on the opposite side of the room from where she'd fallen asleep and the walls were changing shape. She was unable to stand until the first shock passed, and found Laura crying under her bed.

For weeks Eugenia roamed the apartment at night. Laura took to sleeping in Eugenia's bed, Paco the porcupine clutched to her chest. Sometimes, just the regular breathing of her daughter next to her calmed her enough so that she could doze off for a while. But then she would wake up again. In the early mornings, with slivers of almost-sun peeking in through the drawn curtains, she spent hours watching her daughter sleep. The straight jet-black hair, the long raven lashes that fluttered against her cheeks as she dreamed. She did not look like Manuel. She tried to put them side by side in her mind's eye, and found that the minute one of them came into focus, the other disappeared. It was almost as if the presence of one was conditional on the absence of the other. Again and again, in the apologetic light of early dawn, she tried to hold both together in her mind. When she finally gave up, only Manuel stood there, his red hair glowing. She shook her head back and forth to get rid of him and reached out and gently moved a finger across her daughter's right cheekbone, imprinted now with the folds of the pillow.

She called her sister, who now had a job as an associate chemist at a lab at MIT, and said she could no longer stay in Mexico. Irene called back a week later to tell her about the fellowship being advertised at Carmichael College, which was also in Boston. They were looking for someone with experience in cross-cultural reporting who could also teach a class to undergraduate majors. Her ten years of experience as a journalist in Mexico impressed the search committee, and somehow the school administration convinced the Immigration and Naturalization Service that no one else could do the job.

Boston, 1990

As she sat in her darkened office, Eugenia realized how out of place she'd felt in Mexico. Everyone presumed she shared Manuel's political values, his passionate sense of justice. But beyond her own vague belief that the poor should have access to land, a place to live, basic rights, things like that, she had no idea what he really stood for. His romantic revolutionary figure hovered over every conversation she had with Chilean exiles, and she had to pretend she knew his politics. While others went on and on in hushed tones, all she could remember was him crying on the steps of Irene's apartment, or his body doubled over in the torture camp.

Her early journalistic forays had an almost desperate quality to them. Why had the poor been so important to him? Why had he been so passionate about it all? The interview with the human rights leader had been a stroke of luck. She could definitely understand the other woman's loss, that sense of seeing her loved one through a veil, not quite able to make out what he believed in and what it meant.

Through her interviews, she realized, she had tried to make sense of her own loss. What was so important, so powerful, so overwhelmingly just, that he'd had no choice but to abandon her? Perhaps her grief, her desire for Manuel, her sense of being left alone—these were the things people connected to. But how could she say these things to her students? No, she had to forge a different explanation to satisfy the motivated ones like Elena, who came asking uncomfortable questions. Elena had been the first one to really put her on the spot, and she had not been prepared. How ironic that she had played the culture card, the unique experience card, so completely contradictory to everything she had ever taught them. But how ironic, too, that the truth was exactly the opposite. It was her hunger to know something she didn't know, her desperation to explain something that had no explanation, that made her interviews stand out. A hunger, a desire, so intense that it was almost sexual.

Even now, just thinking about it, her body awakened to a desperation she hadn't felt for a long time. She'd spent fifteen years as the widow of a revolutionary hero, tending his flame, but she was an impostor! Aside from sexual pleasure, all they'd really had together was a mutual desire for romantic love. Sure, she raised his daughter to know his sacrifice, but it was all a story she concocted to prevent people from knowing the truth. And that was why she trembled now in her darkened office. It wasn't the air conditioning. It wasn't even the memories, or her inability to answer her student's simple question. She was afraid she would finally be revealed as the liar she really was.

The doorbell rang about nine in the morning, an hour after Laura had left for school, in a greater hurry than usual because it was the first week, still gobbling down her breakfast on her way out the door. The temperature had shot up again on Monday, threatening the hundred-degree mark by ten in the morning and making it hard to remember that school had already started. Ignacio Pérez had called the night before when he got to Boston, and she was expecting him any moment. Eugenia did not have class that day, so she had been taking advantage of the time to continue writing in her journal. In this latest entry she was focusing on the coup itself, on what had happened immediately afterward.

She pictured herself and Manuel in that last one-room apartment. She remembered the morning the soldiers burst in. The crash of the door, pulled halfway off its hinges, mixed with the downstairs buzzer, wrenching her back into the moment. Eugenia jumped. It took her a split second to separate the past from the present. She pressed down the button on the intercom.

“Hello?”

“Eugenia? It's Ignacio Pérez.”

“Oh. Hi, Ignacio. Just push on the door when you hear it buzz.”

Almost immediately she heard his quick steps taking the stairs two at a time, all the way to the third floor. She opened the door before he could knock, and found a young man with black hair and blue eyes. His hair was very straight and he wore it relatively short, except for a single lock that hung over his right eye, almost like a curtain meant to screen out the sorrow in his stare. That deep-rooted suffering was the only thing about Ignacio Pérez that made him look older than twenty-three. Perhaps for that reason he dressed formally, in a full summer suit and, despite the heat, a dark blue tie with wine-colored stripes. He was sweating and his face was flushed. Eugenia felt an almost maternal concern.

“Please come in, Ignacio. It's so hot out there, and I'm sorry that I don't have air conditioning. Sit down, and let me get you a glass of cold water. Or would you prefer iced tea, or mineral water?”

Eugenia busied herself in the kitchen preparing two glasses of mineral water with ice and lemon. She brought them out to the living room, opened a small drawer on the bottom of her coffee table, and took out two coasters. She placed everything on the table and looked up. Suddenly she did not feel ready to proceed.

“I'm sorry,” she said, “but are you hungry?” Her voice sounded as if she'd had to force it around several jagged roadblocks in her throat. “I have some grapes in the kitchen, I …”

She let her sentence trail off, and went back into the kitchen. She took the grapes out of the refrigerator and washed them under running water in the sink, then put them in a large yellow bowl. She brought it out to the living room and placed it on a small mat next to the glasses. She took a seat in the armchair facing the sofa. She felt short of breath. The heat was becoming oppressive. Ignacio cleared his throat.