Beyond the Ties of Blood (10 page)

“Well, I guess she must prepare something pretty delicious back there in that tiny, smoke-filled kitchen, something you could never get in this house. Otherwise I might get to see you now and then.” She tossed the book on the coffee table for emphasis. “Besides, you never let us know if you're eating here or not. I keep waiting for you, and you've made it so clear to Francisco that he's not to pick you up. So I never know what you're doing, where you are …”

Manuel felt a familiar wave of anger welling up from his stomach and tried to control the tone of his voice when he answered.

“That's not true. You just don't want me over there. But Grandpa David keeps getting worse, and Grandma insists on keeping the shop open, and
someone
has to help her.”

“Your papa and I hired a nurse a while back, you know. Who else do you think bathes him and keeps him clean?”

“I can't believe that's all you think it is, Mama. Grandma's alone now! You haven't even been over there recently! You haven't even
seen
him! Does it ever occur to you to do anything besides pay the bills?”

His mama pulled herself up taller than her five feet two inches, reached up with both arms, and grabbed him by the collar of his shirt, pulling him down so that they were face to face. He struggled to keep his balance and not fall against her. Her brown eyes, suddenly as dark as charcoal, blazed as she spat out the words.

“How
dare
you,
niñito!
Do you even have a clue about what it was like to grow up in that house, never knowing what he'd do next? One week it was a group of Indians with no land, the next a pile of factory workers on strike. The nights he didn't come home, us not knowing, and he was locked up in a local jail somewhere. Your grandma crying her eyes out, yet every time he came back, he hardly had his coat off before she'd forgive him. Except now he can't come back, and who do you think is left to clean up the mess? At least now somebody can pay the bills, which is more than I could say for them when I was growing up!

“Of course you don't know what that's like. You've always known where your papa is, working himself to the bone for you! Your papa doesn't bring home a flock of dirty peasants and railroad workers, stinking of garlic and wine, to mend their pants and fill their heads full of garbage! You've never opened the door and had a bill collector spit in your face! Believe me, you don't have a clue!”

Manuel slammed his book bag down on the floor of the hall and ran up the stairs to his room. It seemed that every time he saw his mother these days, it ended in a shouting match. He'd become the bullfighter. Manolito. But at least this one was his mother's fault. Grandma Myriam had told him all about their lives, the adventures they'd had before coming to Temuco. Grandpa David wasn't the kind of man his mother said he was. He had been kind to everyone, looked out for everyone. And besides, the old peasants and railroad workers who still brought their dirty pants in for mending didn't smell of garlic or wine. All he could smell in the tailor shop was the cinnamon in the
rugelach
, basil and rosemary in the soup, and oranges in his grandma's hair.

When his grandpa finally died, Manuel was about to enter high school. They took the plain pine coffin to the Jewish cemetery on a gloomy winter day, in a cart drawn by a bony nag of a horse. A crowd of mud-spattered workers and peasants followed them, hats in their callused hands while the rain ran down their faces. Manuel stood in the rain as they lowered the coffin into the ground. Alongside many of the more modestly dressed people present, he took his turn with the shovel and heaved three muddy mounds of dirt into the grave. So did his mama and papa, but when they all said
Kaddish
, it was Grandma Myriam's hand he held, listening to her sobs, holding her up. And he held her all the way back to the tailor shop, where she heated water for tea as they all dried their coats and hats before the fire, the smell of wet wool swirling with the pungent tea leaves as they steeped. After they drank a cup of tea, warmed their hands and feet, and waited for the storm to calm, Mama and Papa hugged Grandma and left. Only then did he ask the question that had been inside his brain all day.

“Why were all those poor people there, Grandma?”

When Grandma answered, her splintered voice came from a bone-tired place inside her he had never heard before.

“It's been so long now, since your grandpa took care of us. All those old peasants and workers, he took care of them, too, Manolito. Sure, he mends their pants and shirts, but he also tried to mend their lives. He helped them write letters to the government, asking for land, for jobs. He helped organize unions and traveled to tiny villages to help the Indians fight the big landowners who moved the fences on them and took away their homes. He got in trouble, too, like he did back in Odessa when he and his papa organized the workers. But no matter how much I begged him, he didn't stop. Those old men, they remember the meetings every Sunday night in the sewing room.”

Temuco, 1967

Manuel entered high school a few months after his grandpa died. The times were beginning to change, and he often wondered what Grandpa David would have thought about the Cuban Revolution, the young guerrillas in Peru, Colombia, Guatemala, and Nicaragua, the student demonstrations in Mexico, or even in the United States against the Vietnam War. Would he have remembered Odessa? Or the Sunday night meetings in the sewing room? It seemed there'd always been landless people, poor or homeless families, unemployed or dispossessed like the frayed and mud-spattered old codgers who had stood by his side and shoveled earth into his grandpa's grave. But now, somehow, it seemed different. It was the young who were in the lead, marching, mobilizing, standing up for everyone's rights. And it was happening all over the world. The young Cubans—Fidel, Che, Camilo—they hadn't looked that much older than he was now when they'd marched into Havana less than a decade before. And then there were the wars in Algeria and Vietnam, not even to mention the struggles for independence in other parts of Africa or Asia. He looked carefully at the grainy pictures of the young, bearded Cuban revolutionaries in the radical newspapers and leftist magazines his older classmates were passing around in school. “Young idealists cheered by the masses,” read one caption. “When the young
barbudos
entered Havana, they changed the world,” proclaimed another. And Manuel saw the truth of these statements reflected all around him. Why, even in his school, some of the students in the higher grades were singing new songs on their guitars, sitting in the plazas on weekends and debating the future.

One Sunday, when his mama was out somewhere and he was alone in the house, he took a walk in the warm afternoon sunlight. Without really thinking about it, he ended up at the plaza next to his school. As he drew close to the statue in the garden near the middle of the park, he heard someone calling his name.

“Hey, Manuel!
Compañero
!”

It was one of the guys from the twelfth-grade class, tall and gangly, with a German last name and a long blond mane. He was sitting on a bench next to a bed of petunias, smoking a cigarette, a black beret perched rakishly on the side of his head. Manuel could see he was trying to look like Che Guevara, but the peach fuzz along his chin that was imitating a beard only made him look younger, and vaguely clownish. Still, Manuel knew him as the leader of the most radical student faction, a charismatic speaker who'd earned the admiration of most leftists at the school. The classmates Manuel envied most, the ones who never tripped over chair legs or bumped into desks, spoke admiringly, almost in hushed tones, about this guy. Once, when he'd been walking unnoticed behind a group of popular twelfth-grade girls, he'd heard this guy's name come up in conversation. The girls had giggled, breathless, as if they were talking about a movie star.

Manuel approached the bench and sat down on the other side.

“Hey, Ricardo. How come you're by yourself? Where are the rest of the
compañeros
?”

“They're on their way. We have important plans for this afternoon. Wanna join us?”

“What's up?”

Ricardo leaned back on the bench, letting the cigarette smoke out through his nose.

“We're starting a student group affiliated with the Socialist Party. This guy who's big in the Temuco branch is meeting us at the tea house across the street in an hour. You interested?”

The socialist from the Temuco branch, a university student dressed in blue jeans, hiking boots, and an olive-green shirt that looked like he'd gotten it off a
barbudo
marching into Havana, had treated them all to mugs of tea and black tobacco cigarettes. Though Manuel had coughed a bit at first, he'd actually taken a liking to the sweet, acrid taste of the cigarette and how it mixed with the black, unsweetened tea. For hours the university student had talked about changes in the world, students marching, oppressed people rising up to throw off their chains. It was their moral obligation, he said, to join the others fighting for world justice. Then, as the late-afternoon sun angled through the dusty windows, scattering luminescent patterns along the black tile floor, he pushed his guerrilla cap off his forehead and reached into his olive-colored pack.

“Here, little
compañeros
, I have one last present for you.” He took out a bundle of small mimeographed booklets and passed them around. “There's enough for everyone. Just one apiece, though; I need to save the extras for other interested people.”

Manuel picked up his and examined the cover page. An amateurish drawing of a pair of hands breaking the chain between the manacles attached to the wrists covered the majority of the space. Below the drawing were stenciled the words “Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!” Above the picture, in larger block letters, was the title:
The Communist Manifesto
. He looked up as the organizer began talking again.

“This is where it all started, little
compañeros
. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote this more than a hundred years ago. It has inspired the poor and dispossessed across the world. We are all part of this world-historical movement for socialism, justice, and equality. We must all contribute our little grain of sand.

“Even though we support the principles of the
Manifesto
, we have big differences with the Communist Party. You'll soon learn why, but for now, just read this pamphlet over. It will help to read it several times, maybe discuss it in your group. Its principles of equality and solidarity are the principles we socialists live by. They're your principles now, too.”

Why do the Socialists and Communists have differences? Manuel suddenly wanted to ask. Had this world-historical movement been going on the whole time since this document was written over a century before? How come there still wasn't more equality and solidarity? But as he got ready to open his mouth, the college student got up from his chair and, after straightening his cap and picking up his pack, began shaking everyone's hands on his way out the door.

“All right, little
compañeros
. Welcome to the Young Socialists. I'm late for my next meeting, so I gotta run. I'll be in touch with Ricardo in a couple of weeks to see how you're doing.”

The door closed softly behind him. A long silence settled into the glittering dusk of the room. Then the new socialists filed quietly out into the cold of the rising moon.

Manuel was always in a rush after that, and enfolded in a cloud of black tobacco smoke. His mama complained about the smell, and she still nagged him about how he was never home for dinner. But he was too busy to be Manolito the bullfighter anymore. There were leaflets to write and hand out, statements to mimeograph, meetings to attend. They argued late into the night. What position should the Young Socialists take on the Vietnam War? The kidnaping of the American ambassador by urban guerrillas in Brazil? The Mexican student movement? The massacre at Tlatelolco? What about the limitations of the Chilean Agrarian Reform law? And should the police evict the homeless families that were taking over Temuco's municipal land and building shacks on it? Every day there was a new issue, a new statement to make, a new leaflet to explain the historical context for their position.

But he also had to admit, while combing himself just so in the mirror one morning, that even as he tried to look like Che Guevara, in the end he looked most like Grandpa David, red hair and all. He couldn't go to the shop that often anymore. There were too many demonstrations to attend and pamphlets to distribute. He drank his tea unsweetened now. Sometimes, when he dropped by on a Friday, he only had time to give his grandma a quick hug. She stopped baking
rugelach
. Now that he didn't come by that much, she told him, she just wasn't strong enough to haul the wood and start the oven in the back. All she could do was cook soup on the new gas-powered stove his mama had brought in. When he remembered, he took her a tray of good European pastries from his papa's bakery on the other side of town.

One Friday, Grandma asked him to clean out the sewing room in the back. “Since David got ill, I haven't touched it,” she said. “Can't look at it. Full of ghosts.”

Full of dust is more like it, he thought. He took a broom and dustpan and began in the corners farthest from the old sewing machine, working his way toward the center of the back wall. He borrowed a fruit crate from the grocery store next door and gathered up the junk and old clothes lying in mounds along the sides. Once he was done picking up all the junk and had given the whole room an initial sweeping, he began again from the same corners, washing the floor with soap and water. Making his way toward the middle of the room again, he scrubbed and scraped first, then used the cloth he kept wetting in the bucket to finish picking up the grime. After rinsing the brush and cloth out, he moved to a new position. During one of the moves, he happened to look up and his eyes fell upon a small, dusty, forgotten book jammed in between wall and table, right behind the sewing machine.