Beyond the Ties of Blood (14 page)

“Did you say that was exactly what you thought?” Manuel asked, laughing.

“I don't think that would've gone over very well,” Eugenia said. “She had a group of her friends over, and they were clearly plotting something. They would go quiet when Teresa or I walked into the room. They'd start talking again when we left. Only yesterday did I finally figure out what that was about.”

Eugenia was referring to the demonstration that had marched on the presidential palace, a crowd of mainly upper-class women who had banged on empty pots to dramatize the shortages.

“Mama was in on it, I'm sure of it,” she said.

Manuel smiled. “If my mother were in Santiago, I'm sure that's exactly what she'd be doing too,” he said. “It's the class struggle. It's supposed to deepen now, you know. It isn't often that the workers have the upper hand.” And people like Eugenia's and Manuel's mothers couldn't stand it.

But they began to wonder if the workers really did have the upper hand. As summer faded into the Chilean fall and winter of 1972, the lines to buy bread, milk, oil, and soap, while everywhere, were still the longest in the working-class neighborhoods. Inflation kept getting worse, and it was clear that supplies of basic goods could not keep up with the new demand caused by workers' increasing incomes.

“It's ridiculous,” Gabriela said one day when they were eating stew at Irene's apartment, the half-chicken they'd begged through Manuel's contacts in the Revolutionary Left cut up into tiny pieces among the four of them. “My mama says she doesn't know how she's gonna make it to the end of the month. Prices keep going up, and even if Papa's getting paid better than ever before, it doesn't go half as far.”

Eugenia and Manuel began to see the wear and tear on people's bodies, the way they walked, the glassy stares in their eyes. There was a tightness, a tension right below the surface. In restaurants, on street corners and buses, the slightest misunderstanding would lead immediately to a shouting match, even to physical confrontation, especially when the people involved were from different social classes.

One afternoon in August, when the rains were hard and cold, Manuel and Eugenia came running up the stairs to the apartment, shaking the water from their umbrellas and laughing. They stopped short at the sight of the landlady, a brawny, square-bodied woman with worn hands and missing teeth.

“
Buenas tardes
,” she said, her stance squared off like a boxer's.

“
Buenas tardes, señora
,” Manuel answered respectfully. “It's really cold and wet today.”

She nodded in agreement, then stiffly in Eugenia's general direction, before passing him a slim envelope. “I'm sorry, but I need the apartment for someone else. You'll have to be out by Monday.”

“But
señora
, according to the law you must give people a month's notice, I can't find something by—”

She cut him off abruptly with a chop of her hand in the air. “This isn't about the law. Some of the people who come up to see you, well … the neighbors are complaining.” She rushed down the stairs and out the door, not seeming to mind the downpour as she hurried across the street.

Manuel stood still for a moment, staring at the envelope in his hand. Shaking his head, he took out the key and opened the door. They started the heater in silence and put a kettle of water on for tea. Manuel put the tea leaves to steep in the pot and walked slowly over to where Eugenia was setting out the bread and jam, her face clouded.

“People are getting scared,” he said.

“What do you mean?” Eugenia asked, although the undertone to her voice hinted that she probably suspected.

“Well, you know the stories coming out in the opposition papers. That the Left is organizing a coup in order to get rid of Congress and the right wing. That we're planning another Cuba.”

They sat down at the kitchen table. Eugenia put some jam on a piece of bread and stirred some sugar into her tea. “That's not what she said. What about the time I came back unexpectedly last month? All those dirty, rowdy guys, smoking black tobacco and drinking cheap wine. It was a mess! You don't think the neighbors could hear you?”

They were quiet for a while, neither of them wanting to remember that moment in too much detail. When Manuel spoke, his voice was low.

“You're right,
mi amor
. But we're part of the world-historical struggle for socialism. We can't just give up because a landlady gets scared. Everyone has to do their part.”

“I know,” Eugenia answered softly. “But I would be willing to wager a lot of money that the world struggle for socialism will not repay your loyalty by finding you a new place to live.”

Classes started late in the fall of Allende's third year in office. A confrontation between right-wing and left-wing students closed down the Catholic University at the beginning of the semester, and the leftist majority at the University of Chile went out on strike in solidarity with their comrades. As a result, both institutions called a delay in the start of classes until the end of April. Manuel had managed to find a new apartment, a third-floor walk-up composed of a single room with a tiny sink and gas-powered hotplate. The bathroom was out in the hall, and there wasn't space for their couch or coffee table. Eugenia had been angry, but they'd made up and she was staying over again most nights.

The first Tuesday in June began normally enough. Eugenia's class didn't start until ten, so they lingered longer in bed, drinking coffee. By the time he got to the new shantytown along the eastern side of the city, the one taking shape from the takeover the week before, it was close to eleven.

“Manolito!” The creases along Sonia's cheeks folded together into pleats as she smiled, opening the door to her shack and inviting him in. She was from Temuco, too, and he'd told her about his grandma's pet name for him. “Sit down! A
mate
tea will help warm you up, then you can go to the construction, help the
compañeros
build the school.” Between the
mates
and the homemade bread Sonia took out of the wood-burning oven in her potbellied stove, he didn't make it to the construction site until noon. He settled into the hard rhythm of the work, and the hours passed quickly. The next thing Manuel knew, it was close to six.

“Shit. I'm gonna be late again,” he told Hernán, his buddy from the Revolutionary Left who'd been working next to him. “Eugenia's already been on my case about this, but I can't help it, the buses are damn full this time of day and—”

A shout went up from the guard on duty. They always had a guard at the new shantytowns, especially in this part of town where the neighbors were notoriously hostile.

“
Momios
! At two o'clock!”

All the men working on the school stood up in unison, looking around for sticks of wood just in case. It was hard to tell who was coming and how many through the late afternoon light. As they marched through the empty field, dust billowed up around them, forming a curtain that caught the flat undertones of the setting sun. Besides,
momios
was a pretty general term, meaning conservatives, people opposed to the government, anyone who seemed even remotely upper-class.

These
momios
were goons from the New Fatherland, the fascist political party that formed as soon as Allende got elected. As things had heated up over the previous six months, their influence had spread to the more upper-class, right-wing student groups at the Catholic University. Rumor had it that they were behind the recent wave of confrontations there, and responsible for the increasing violence on the streets. This group looked pretty young, probably all university students, and there were lots of them. The yells and blows, the dust. The taste of blood between his lips. His fall to earth was in slow motion, only one thought sharp in his mind: how'd the son of a bitch get ahold of my hammer?

He woke to Sonia's worried face as she placed another cold rag on his cheek. “I think the cheekbone's broken,” she whispered. “It's very swollen.” And then the pain nearly made him pass out again.

By the time he was revived enough to try standing, Hernán at his side to keep him from falling, it was pitch black outside. Fortified by several
mates
laced with cheap pisco, he was able to walk, if a bit wobbly, with Hernán's help. They made it to the bus stop, and the fresh air helped him walk straighter. Hernán stayed with him till his stop, and continued to prop him up as they walked the three blocks to his building. Making it up to his apartment was definitely a stretch. Hernán was staggering under his weight by the last flight of stairs. But Eugenia must have heard them, because the door was open by the time they reached it.

It all came back at him in her gasp—his swollen face caked with blood, the haggard look on Hernán's face. “Oh, God,” was all she said. Then she had him by the waist, taking over from his friend, her sobs stabbing through his temples. Behind her, he just made out Irene and Gabriela, sitting at the table, leaping to their feet as he stumbled in.

It took Manuel's cheekbone a full month to heal. A friend of Irene's at the University of Chile Medical School saw him for free and gave him pain medication that made him useless to his comrades at the land takeovers.

“Don't worry about it,
compadre
,” Hernán told him during a visit in the middle of June. “There's not much we can do there anymore, there aren't enough of us. The party's pulling us from all those resettlement projects anyway. We gotta concentrate on the New Fatherland goons. They're getting bolder all the time, you know, and they're even trying to recruit at the University of Chile now. They're like sharks that smell blood in the water. We have to defend ourselves every day on the streets.” No kidding, Manuel thought to himself.

As his comrades got more and more involved in street fighting, Manuel had trouble seeing the connection to the rights they were supposed to be defending. He was reminded of his high school friends in Temuco, who had seemed more interested in sex than in justice. In this case, they seemed more interested in the confrontation itself. True, the images on television, with most reporters and stations in opposition to the government, were sensationalist and put the Revolutionary Left in the worst possible light. Yet too often his
compañeros
just seemed to enjoy the violent rush of the moment, the thrill for blood. He moved further and further into the background, his injury the excuse and Eugenia his refuge. They talked late into the night about the solidarity that had seemed so palpable even a few short months before. He could still trace its shape between her shoulder blades and along the moonlit curve of her back.

When she left for winter vacation in the second half of July, he tried to contact his old comrades. Two weeks earlier, when on television he'd seen the stray tank make its way toward the presidential palace, it had seemed comical at first. But most of the news reports had not taken it so lightly. For the first time there was open talk of a military coup. It was general knowledge that the Air Force was in favor of military action, but the head of the Army still supported the constitution and the Allende government. It all depended on the Christian Democrats, reporters said. At first they had supported democracy, even though the elected president was a socialist. But when the shortages began to alienate the middle class, they began to waver, and the Christian Democratic party had taken the lead in Congress in opposing government reforms. If they were willing to ally with the right wing, things would come to a head very quickly. But then the commander of the Army, who still wanted to abide by the Chilean constitution, bowed to right-wing pressure and resigned. General Augusto Pinochet, whose political position was not well understood, took his place. Manuel started to worry and wonder what plans his comrades in the Revolutionary Left were making to address all this. He might disagree with how they had been acting, but if push came to shove he would stand up with them and be counted.

Carlos was the only one he could find shortly after Pinochet became head of the Army, because he was still living with his parents. There was surprise in his friend's eyes when he answered the makeshift bell attached to the metal gate outside the small one-story dwelling.

“Manuel! What's up, man? I thought you were long gone by now.”

“What's that supposed to mean? You know I broke my cheekbone in that fight after the takeover,
compadre
. Pain meds turned me into a zombie. Pretty much recovered now, though.”

“No, man, it's just that … well …” Carlos fumbled with the bolt on the gate. He could not meet Manuel's eyes. The silence between them was broken only by the clicks of the metal bolt and the shuffling of Carlos's uneasy feet. Suddenly Manuel understood.

“Did you get instructions about me from the local committee?”