Beyond the Ties of Blood (34 page)

Eugenia shook her head. “Let's just walk out to the terrace,” she said.

They stood at the edge of the viewing ledge. Letting go of her hand, Ignacio put an arm around her shoulders as they looked out over the city. It was later in the day, and the clarity of the morning had disappeared. Smog now covered the horizon in all directions.

The skyline had changed so much. The city had expanded both up and out, glass and steel skyscrapers now dominating the area east of downtown. Even further toward the mountains, large housing developments climbed into the foothills, disappearing behind the smoky curtain of pollution that hung down into the valley. She could still see the little cable cars that made their way slowly up and down, connecting the station at the edge of the Bellavista neighborhood below to the beginning of the pedestrian paths to their right. But the people riding them could no longer get that breathtaking view of the snow-capped peaks that had been there every morning as she was growing up. The memory of those mountains framed in the window of her childhood room when she woke up mixed now with the image of the bodies, also framed, arms and legs splayed, in the skylight above the patio of the Investigative Police.

“Can you tell me what happened?” Ignacio asked.

She felt new tears gathering in her eyes. “It was just that this morning … well, I took the metro down to the offices of the investigative Police.”

“Did they give you trouble? They shouldn't have. I made sure all the papers were in order, they should just have—”

“No, there was no problem. In fact the lady took my folder without even asking me any questions.”

“Was it the office in charge of the citizenship applications? Did the guy give you a hard time about Laura? I can find out who he was.”

“No, he was very nice. I just need to take Laura down to Foreign Relations, and then everything will follow its normal course.”

“So what was the problem?” Ignacio was sounding increasingly confused.

“Well, I don't know exactly how to put it,” she began. “Maybe it's just the stress I've been under, you know, coming back, Laura, my mother and everything …”

“Did anything happen at the police offices this morning to set it off?”

“I was just getting to that, it's just that now—well … I feel kind of embarrassed.”

“You know you can tell me anything. And believe me, by this point, with all the stories I've heard from survivors, from the families of the disappeared … nothing you can say will shock me, you can be sure of that.”

“Well. It was when I went back to talk to someone about Laura. You've been there, right? It's in the back of this old-style mansion. All the offices open up from the central patio. It looked so familiar, you know, so many of the old houses the wealthy families used to have in Santiago, that patio with the flowers, the skylight overhead. I don't know. Maybe it was the soldiers standing guard at the doors, with their helmets and guns. There was just a moment when I must have started hallucinating, I don't know, I looked up and—I swear, Ignacio, there were shadows of bodies reflected against the glass of the skylight, dead people, their arms and legs sort of intertwined, almost like a thicket of brambles. And then the screams—” She choked up, unable to continue.

His arm tightened around her, and he ran a hand through her hair. “Do you remember being held there?” he asked. After she shook her head, he continued. “Some people have come into the Commission and told stories like this. They go into a government building, and even though they've never been there before, they break into a cold sweat. Sometimes they hear screams of pain, sometimes through a set of French doors, or a skylight, like in your case, they can see dead bodies, or heads of bodies.

“The first time it happened, I chalked it up to psychological trauma. But after it happened a few more times, I started wondering. There isn't much about it in the mainstream psychology literature, that's for sure. Believe me, I checked. Then I interviewed the sister of a disappeared union leader who turned out to be one of these natural healers. You know, massage therapy, herbs, that kind of thing. And she told me that the body has a different way of storing memory than the brain. We're not conscious of it, she said, but bodies carry the memory of earlier wounds, and when something sets them off, a connection of some sort, suddenly they remember.

“At first it was all too New Age for me, you know? But I started to keep track. And when people told me stories like this, it turned out that they were themselves victims of torture. Their bodies were remembering. Something is still out there, lurking in the corners of this country. And it's you, people like you, who can tell.”

He had brought her even closer as he talked. Now he placed a hand on the side of her face and brought her lips to his for a deep kiss, mouth open. She'd forgotten what it felt like, desire coming up through her belly, not able to get close enough, his young back and shoulders, hard thighs pressing, lifting her off the ground. Then the sound of the car horn.

“
Don
Ignacio!” Custodio's voice rang out. “An urgent call on the car phone!”

“I'm sorry. Still working.” His voice was hoarse as he walked toward the car. She followed him and caught the tail end of his side of the conversation.

“No, I'm—there was an emergency with a witness, I … No, that's tomorrow afternoon. Yes. Probably not. I had to go out east to handle the situation, and now it doesn't make sense to … Oh, I'll be in very early tomorrow, no problem. Yes. There isn't that much more to prepare, I don't think. Okay. See you then.”

“Well, I guess it's back to reality,” she said after he hung up and they moved slightly away from the car.

“I'm not so sure about that,” he answered. “What happened here seemed a lot more real to me than this phone call.”

“That's not what I meant,” she said. “It was nice of you to take care of me, to deal with your witness emergency so kindly.”

“What was happening here was not about nice or kind,” he said. “And I never handle my witness emergencies this way.”

“But I
am
a witness. And there are a lot of emotions in your line of work.”

“You're right,” he said. “You are a witness, and a very important one at that. Next week we have your testimony before the Commission, and you'll be meeting
doña S
ara and
don
Samuel for the first time. Plus I know that Laura and her grandparents will need to meet, get to know each other. But once you and I are done with the Commission's work, once we're on the other side of this and things have settled down. We'll see.”

She felt it the minute she closed the gate behind her and approached the front door of her mother's house. Something had happened.
Doña
Isabel was sitting in the dining room drinking a cup of tea. As soon as she saw her daughter in the foyer, she stood up quickly. The heels of her shoes clicked loudly on the marble tiles as she rushed over and took Eugenia's hand.

“What is it, Mamita?” Eugenia's voice took on a concerned tone.

“Ay,
m'hijita
.” Her mother looked down at their joined hands and shook her head. “I don't understand, I really don't.”

“What are you talking about?”

“We were just sitting here, you know. I had just served us some tea. After all, we didn't know when you'd be back, I wasn't even sure when you'd gone out. In any case, we were just sitting here with Laurita, drinking tea. I'd just asked Rosa to bring us out some cake, you know, the special one I'd just made, and then …” She paused, seeming not to know what else to say.

“And then?”

“I honestly don't know what happened next, Chenyita. Suddenly Laura just stood up and ran out of the room. She ran up the stairs and slammed her door. I tried going up, Chenyita, knocking on the door, but she wouldn't answer.”

Eugenia was already halfway up the stairs when her mother finished talking. She stood for a minute at the door to her daughter's room and listened. Silence.

“Laura?” She knocked gently. “Are you there? Are you all right?”

Silence. She tried again, knocking more loudly. “Laura?” She tried the door. It was locked. After standing there for a few minutes, she went back to her own room.

Even over the sound of Neil Young in her earphones, Laura heard her mother's knock. She simply couldn't let her in. What would she tell her? That Grandma Isabel was a bitch? Even though it was true, and her mother kind of knew it, she just couldn't say it to her. So what could she do? She turned up the volume and listened to Neil sing “Crime in the City.” She repeated it several times and thought back to what had happened at the table. After she'd told Grandma that something had come up and Mama had gone out to meet Ignacio, they'd decided to have some tea. At first she'd been really nice, offering her some of the cake from the day before. When she'd said yes, Grandma had tinkled that little bell. Laura couldn't get used to Grandma calling Rosa, or anyone, with a bell.

After Rosa went back into the kitchen, Grandma served them both pieces of cake. Laura took a bite of the luscious combination of crisp meringue and nutty lúcuma paste. Then Grandma started in on how happy she was that her daughter and granddaughter were back with her. At some point, she started harping on Laura's looks again. And all of a sudden she just laughed and said, you know, Laurita? If I hadn't driven to the airport with you and your mother, you a month old and your mama's breasts full of milk, I'd swear you were Rosa's daughter.

Laura stopped her Walkman and took out the Neil Young tape. She rummaged through her collection of tapes stored in the bottom drawer of the bureau and took out Silvio Rodríguez. Placing the new tape in her player, she cued up “I Give you a Song,” the one she'd first heard at the Inti concert. “I give you a song when I open a door / And you appear from the shadows,” Silvio began, accompanied only by his guitar. Laura thought back to Mexico City, to the nights when her mother's nightmares had first opened the door and her father had stepped out of the shadows. “I give you a song at daybreak / when I most need your light,” Silvio continued. Would her father's memory ever give her light? “i give you a song when you appear / The mystery of love.” Mystery, indeed. She wondered how Grandma's comment would have made Rosa feel. The worst part of it was that, in a way, she really did look more like Rosa. Toward the end of the chorus, Silvio added: “And if you don't appear, it doesn't matter.” But it did.

“There they are,” Ignacio whispered as he and Eugenia turned the corner and headed toward the two-story stone building that housed the offices of the Truth Commission. Standing in front of the beveled glass doors at the top of a short staircase, framed against the smog-stained façade, Manuel's parents looked like tiny black bears. Their overcoats and broad-brimmed hats seem to melt into each other as in a watercolor, the edges bleeding into the surrounding background to create a furry splotch of ink.