Beyond the Ties of Blood (43 page)

“Ay, Nenita, I don't even know what ‘for good' means anymore. Laura seems so happy with Manuel's parents, and I just don't have the heart to suggest we move again. Yet I don't have a job here, and at some point I'll have to make a decision about Carmichael College. But we do need our own place. At least for now, until we can figure out what to do next.”

Over the next two weeks, Laura and Sara took a bus every morning to the Committee offices to help with filing and paperwork. When Samuel left for the bakery, Eugenia would leave with him and spend the morning looking for apartments. It was a bad time of year to look, since peak rental season was between September and November, for the next calendar year. Only small furnished apartments were still on the market, designed for single travelers, usually businessmen, on short trips to Santiago.

“You wouldn't believe the dives I'm seeing!” Eugenia exclaimed in the afternoons when they were all back at the house. “The kitchens haven't been used in years, maybe never! I think the knobs on the stoves are rusted in place by now!”

“You'll have more luck if you don't need a furnished place,” Samuel suggested. “Perhaps you should buy some used furniture?”

“But
don
Samuel, we don't know yet what will happen in the long run. Laura isn't in school yet, I don't have a job. I'd rather wait before spending money on something like that.”

“But Mamita,” Laura protested, “we're staying, aren't we? You're not planning to take us back to Boston, are you?”

“
M'hijita
, we don't know yet, do we? I don't feel ready to make that kind of decision, things are still so unsettled.”

“I don't want to move again,” Laura said. “I don't feel unsettled. I'm just beginning to feel at home. And before, whenever I started to feel at home, you picked up and took us someplace else. I don't want that again.”

The following week, with Sara's help, Laura and Eugenia got an interview at the local progressive school. They were lucky to get in before the end of January, when the school administration closed everything up for the February holiday. The principal was impressed at how bilingual Laura was, and marveled at what she called the multicultural sensibilities of Laura's family. These were code words for the unusual combination of last names. The Chilean obsession with last names didn't disappear, Eugenia realized, even in this supposedly freer milieu. It just got reinvented as multiculturalism. But then the principal lowered the boom.

“As you know we don't require a baptismal certificate,” she explained, “but because we see ourselves as a service for our own citizens, we do require some proof of Chilean citizenship. There's no problem with that, is there?”

“Actually,” Eugenia said, “Laura was born in the Mexican embassy on our way out of the country. She's always been a Mexican citizen. I put in an application for her Chilean citizenship months ago, but with the inevitable delays, plus the summer vacation, we haven't heard yet.”

“But certainly you,
señora
. You're obviously a Chilean citizen.”

“Yes, of course, but given my status as an exile I don't have a passport. Because I was classified as a political subversive, I was never able to update my old one. And all my papers are presently with the government as part of my petition for recertification.”

After a short silence the principal sat back in her chair, running a hand through her carefully coifed blond mane. “Well,” she said, “Laura can have a spot in our school for this coming March. But I'm afraid we need one of the two petitions to come through before she can formally attend. Perhaps you can see if one of them can be hurried along?” Then she stood up, signaling the end of the interview.

When they got back to the house Laura went straight to their room. She got out her Walkman, put in a tape, and lay down on the bed with her earphones on and Paco clutched to her chest. Though she did not lock the door, there was no use in trying to talk to her. Eugenia sat down with Samuel and Sara.

“You need help down at the Ministry,” Samuel said. “One of the higher-ups, he goes to our temple. We'll talk to him.”

“Thank you so much,
don
Samuel,” Eugenia said. “I'm sure that will help. But I'm beginning to wonder about all this. I can't find an apartment. Laura can't go to school until one of us gets certified as Chilean. And here we are, in your house, imposing on your hospitality. It'll be coming up on a month pretty soon. It's getting toward the end of January, and school starts at the beginning of March. I'm not sure we're going to make it.”

Sometime after midnight, Laura had the dream. It started off the same, on a warm, sunny day on the trail where she and
tía
Irene had gone horseback riding. A fog came down, and the same man loomed up from the shadows. He was dressed in olive green, and he reached out to grab her arm with his hairy paw. She refused to look in his eyes because she knew they had no pupils. But suddenly, from behind a tree, a young man with red hair and a beard jumped out and grabbed the man around his neck. Her papa. They struggled, and the man without pupils finally got loose and ran away. She reached out to her papa, but just as she thought she got hold of his hand, his image began to fade. No! She shouted, wanting him to come back. No!

At first Eugenia didn't know what had awakened her. It took her a heartbeat to realize where she was, still in the guest room in Sara and Samuel's house. It was pitch black, and then she heard Laura breathing, moaning. The small electric clock on the night table said three
A.M.

“No, no … please … no …” she got up, afraid to turn on the light. Groping where she thought her daughter's bed began, she tried to find something, a leg, her head, gently trying to touch her awake. Then Laura's flailing arm scored a direct hit on her jaw.

“NO!” Laura roared.

Eugenia got up, first on her hands and knees, found the end of the floor and slowly stood up, running one hand along the wall searching for the light switch. She had to close her eyes against the first blaze of light. When she was able to open them back up, she saw her daughter sitting up in bed. The sweat had matted her hair down against her scalp. Her eyes were open, but she was not awake. As Eugenia approached, Laura moaned, then whined, then whispered “no, no, no …” She was still asleep. Her eyes, open still, had gone so black they had no pupils.

The dream came every night after that. It was always after midnight and went on for what seemed like hours. Eugenia did not try to wake Laura, but lay in bed listening to the moaning and roaring, then the descent into whines and finally whispers. All Laura ever said was no. In the mornings, when her increasingly sleep-deprived mother would ask her if she remembered anything, Laura said no. Their conversations fell into a pattern that repeated itself, like the dream, over and over.

“Are you sure?” Eugenia asked. “Maybe if you try to remember, if you tell someone, you'll begin to get to the other side.”

“I never wake up,” Laura answered, avoiding her mother's eyes. “How should I know what it is I'm dreaming?”

“I know what it's like,
m'hijita
. Remember? In Mexico, and again in Boston?”

“That was different.”

“And why is that?”

“Because you were arrested and tortured, my papa disappeared. This is just a dream.”

“But you don't know, do you, because you can't remember. And given how many nights it's come back, it's not just a dream. In Boston, when all the memories started flooding back, it helped to write in my journal. Do you want us to get you one? Or maybe a good therapist will help you sort it out. I could ask
Bobe
Sara—”

At that point Laura ended the conversation. As the February winds blew through the city, pushing the smog out over the surrounding mountains, an increasingly desperate Eugenia moved her bedding to the living room couch. “I have to get some sleep,” she mumbled when Sara asked her if she was comfortable on that old thing.

As the smudges under her eyes got darker, Laura still insisted on going to the Committee every day. The only person who understood her was Joaquín. At one o'clock every afternoon, through the rest of Joaquín's summer vacation, they took a break and went to a small park a block from the Committee's offices. They entered the café on the corner of the little plaza and asked for chicken-and-avocado sandwiches and fresh fruit juice. The owner, an older man with a large salt-and-pepper moustache, began to recognize them and even to have the bread toasting and the fruit in the blender when they arrived.

“Well, if it isn't the two young lovebirds,” he chuckled when they appeared. “Your usual will be ready in a minute. The juice today is kiwi. Is that all right?” Every day it was a different fruit, and every day it was delicious, but he always asked just in case. He wrapped their sandwiches in wax paper, poured their juices into large paper cups, and always gave them a bit of extra change, shaking his head and smiling when Joaquín pointed his error out. “The difference is on the house,” he always said. “See you tomorrow.”

They sat on the same bench every day and talked music. After talking with Joaquín, Laura found she could listen to Inti-Illimani again. They both loved Inti, and he was almost as addicted to Silvio as she was. He also introduced her to other groups from the eighties, like Los Prisioneros. When their first album came out, he and his friends had really related to their name, Joaquín explained. People his age had always felt like they were in jail. Their parents had messed up the country with politics, and it was the kids who had to pay for Pinochet, with no money, no jobs, and the schools worse every year. Then they were the ones who had to put their lives on the line in the streets to bring the dictator down.

Even though she'd grown up in exile, Laura could see now she was part of this generation. She, too, felt like a prisoner: of her mother's past, her mother's desires, her mother's fears. And now a prisoner of her own dream. She liked their song “The Dance of the Surplus Ones,” and the words of the chorus: “Join the dance of the surplus ones / No one is going to add to us / No one ever wanted to help us.” She too felt like a surplus one. She often thought her mother would have been better off without her.

At the end of February, Joaquín was unusually silent as they sat on their bench and ate their lunch. They both knew that once he had to go back to school, they would only see each other on weekends. It hung in the air between them, thick as soup.

“You know,” he finally said, “we'll still have Saturdays to ourselves.” Laura didn't answer. “But maybe you should tell me now, while we still have a few days together,” he continued. “At some point you're gonna have to tell somebody. And it might as well be me. You know I won't tell anybody else.”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” she mumbled, pulling at a stringy piece of chicken that peeked out from the side of her sandwich.

He took the sandwich out of her hand, wrapped it back up in its waxed paper covering, and placed it on the bench on her other side. He took both of her hands in his and pulled her close. He kissed her full on the mouth, more strongly than he ever had before, and one of his hands sought out her skin under her shirt, moving up and under her bra along her left side. When he let go she couldn't catch her breath.

“You know exactly what I'm talking about,” he said, his own breath coming in short spurts. “There's no one else in this world I want to take care of except you. So you need to tell me why the bags under your eyes are getting bigger every day.”

Joaquín stood up from the bench and, tugging on her hand, led them back into a part of the park that was protected from the street by a grove of mature oaks. There, among the trees, they found a patch of soft grass and lay down together. She told him about her dream, and how at first she couldn't escape from the man with the muddy eyes. When her papa came to save her, he always faded just as she reached for him. Every night, no matter how hard she tried, she couldn't hold on to her papa. She woke every morning exhausted from trying. He told her about his recurring dream, too, the headless man who was his papa and who stumbled around running into things because he did not have eyes to see. Neither had ever thought of telling their mothers, who lived trapped in their own grief and loss, about these dreams. In the tenderness of their joined lips they found they could escape together. With their fingers they learned to give each other pleasure.