Beyond the Ties of Blood (24 page)

Two separate times, after they had successfully made over-the-wall deliveries, Irene had to drive like mad when they were sighted by patrols. Her knowledge of Santiago was a godsend, as was her experience driving the back roads and hairpin curves near her family farm. The first time, she escaped the soldiers by driving off the street into a plaza, swerving to avoid the benches, then out on the other end onto a side street. The second time, she crossed the Mapocho River and drove deep into the Bellavista neighborhood, pulling up between two other cars in an alleyway and turning off the lights.

After that, Dr. McKinley said she could not continue. He worried that she had been identified. He and the others also began to suspect that she was enjoying the chase too much. On the last occasion, one of them said, she seemed to wait around a little longer than necessary, as if she wanted to be seen. So they insisted she stop driving the cars. They couldn't afford to have the whole operation broken apart, so they put her on desk duty, keeping track of new requests and trying to persuade the embassies to increase their quotas.

By that point, the lease had come due on her apartment. She moved back in with her mother, where she was a great deal safer and more secure. No one would suspect that she was using her mother's phone to arrange the escape of so-called subversives, and even though she was pretty sure her mother knew about it, they never discussed it.

One day at the beginning of April, when as usual she answered the phone sitting in the study she'd set up on the second floor of her mother's house, the voice on the other end was so soft that she could barely understand what the woman was saying.

“Hello? Is this the Aldunate residence?”

“Yes?” People looking to leave the country usually asked for “
la señora
Irene,” so she was on her guard at this unfamiliar salutation.

“Could I speak with Irene, please?”

“Who's calling?”

“I'm sorry,
señora
, but I would like to identify myself to Irene.”

“And why is that?”

“Let's just say I have news about someone she's been worrying about for a long time.”

Had something happened to Gabriela? “I'm Irene,” she said. There was a sigh of relief on the other end of the phone.

“Good. Irene, all I can say right now is that I have news about your sister. There's a juice place near the Plaza Baquedano, she said you'd know which one. Tomorrow at three
P.M.”

The next afternoon, at a table under the awning of Eugenia and Manuel's favorite place, Irene sat with a short, beige-colored young woman with brown curly hair who could not have been older than nineteen. From her, Irene learned that her sister had been taken to one of Santiago's worst torture camps, Villa Gardenia.

“I was a prisoner there too,” the woman said. She unbuttoned the cuffs of her blouse, rolling up the sleeves to show the purple marks of electricity. “I wasn't an important catch. Not even my boyfriend, who was their target, was really involved in anything. They let me go, finally, into my parents' custody, but only if I left the country. I leave for Sweden this Friday.

“I saw your sister. We were in the same cell for a couple of nights right before I was released. They had moved her into a different part of the camp, because she's pregnant. She's been badly tortured, but she's alive. She said to call and tell you she's alive.”

Boston, 1986

Irene sat in her kitchen in the early-morning sun. She had grown to love this old house, its large, pockmarked eaves hanging, like protective arms, over the flowerbeds on both sides. The first summer, she'd sat out on the small porch and tried to make sense of the growth that appeared, like magic, from the soil. Were these weeds to pull out? Perennials she should nurture? The gardening book she'd bought had insisted that when faced with an old garden, you needed to let a year go by before you could tell what you would want to keep and what you needed to pull out. She had come to believe that it was good advice for her life too.

Irene had been back in Boston for about four years before she'd finally decided to settle down and buy a house. After Eugenia's exile from Chile, she had allowed the frenetic routine of the Chilean human-rights community to take over her life. She continued helping exiles leave the country, but the work became increasingly bureaucratic. Finally, as the dictatorship got ready to legitimate itself and its new constitution at the polls, she decided she'd had enough.

On the spur of the moment, she wrote her old professor at MIT and asked if she might go back to finish her degree. She started again in January of 1981, almost ten years after she'd gone back to Chile. Enough had changed in her field that she needed two and a half years to finish, but her professor was sufficiently impressed with her past work and her story to offer her a full-time assistantship in his lab when she was done.

Two years later and less than three months after Irene had moved into her house, the earthquake hit Mexico City. Eugenia called in a panic, and it had seemed the most natural thing in the world for Irene to look around the Boston area for anything that might bring her sister and niece closer. At her suggestion Eugenia had applied for a fellowship in multicultural reporting at Carmichael College. When Eugenia got it, Irene invited them to move in with her. But she'd forgotten about the schools, which were important for Laura. So finally she'd found them an apartment just over the line into the Brookline school district.

Toward the end of October, with Eugenia settled into her office and Laura finally placed in school, they had planned a belated party for Laura's twelfth birthday. Irene and Eugenia bought a cake for a family celebration and, after some hesitation, Irene invited her new girlfriend Amanda. They drank cider with the cake and drove out into the countryside for a pumpkin. When Irene had explained to Laura that they must hollow it out and carve a scary face on the front, Amanda offered to help. The result was an intricate design with curlicues for eyebrows and individual teeth in the smile, and Laura had insisted it seemed happy rather than scary. But Irene thought it looked absolutely fantastic with a burning candle inside for Halloween.

Maybe it had been the pumpkin, or perhaps she'd finally been ready to focus on the present. About six months after their excursion into the fall-dappled countryside, Irene asked Amanda to move in with her. They spent several early-spring Saturdays plying the antique sales in the small towns around Boston. Amanda insisted that a Victorian house deserved a few authentic pieces to show it off. And she was willing to pay for these expensive adventures out of her own pocket.

It was not a smoldering, sandalwood-tinged kind of longing. But as time went on, Irene felt anchored and secure, and in a different, perhaps more nostalgic way, deeply in love. They were both on the threshold of their forties, and she found on Amanda's lightly wrinkled skin, in the warm pockets behind her ears, along her neck and in the folds of her arms, a scent of lilac that spoke of home. On Sundays, when they cooked and baked together in the kitchen, the fragrance of warm bread and roast and pie held them together in a soft embrace.

But just as Irene was beginning to feel settled, another embrace, that of her family and her homeland, turned into a vise once again. Demonstrations against the Chilean dictatorship had begun the same month she had finally graduated from MIT, but it took several years for the crisis to become so large that the Boston newspapers, and even the local television stations, began reporting on it regularly. By the time she and Amanda had moved in together, there was talk of a plebiscite to decide whether or not Augusto Pinochet would remain in power.

The phone rang one Saturday morning, just as Irene and Amanda were finishing breakfast. Amanda answered.

“Oh, hi, Eugenia. Yes, she's right here. I'll put her on.” Irene took the phone from Amanda's hand and sat back down at the kitchen table.

“Hi, Chenyita,” she said. “Are you ready for Laura's birthday lunch today?” It was shortly before Laura's fourteenth birthday, and just a couple of weeks shy of the Chilean plebiscite. Eugenia had managed to change her fellowship into a temporary teaching position, renewable on a yearly basis because her courses were so popular and no one else could teach them.

“Hi, Nenita,” Eugenia said. “I am, though that's not what I'm calling about. You'll never guess what just happened. They called me from Eyewitness news. They want to do an in-depth interview with me about Chile.”

“Wow. Do you think it's a good idea?”

“I don't know. Just last week, some of my worst nightmares came back.”

“And?”

“Well, if the nightmares are back anyway, maybe doing something useful, like helping people here understand some of the background … I don't know …”

“So when do they want to interview you?”

“This afternoon, on their weekend program.”

“Oh, my God.”

“Exactly. So could I ask you and Amanda to pick up Laura and Marcie from the movie at the mall?”

“Of course, sweetie. But isn't this kind of short notice? Don't you think that—?”

“I mentioned that. But they're right. It's short notice, but that's how breaking news is. I should know that, as a reporter, don't you think?”

“I'm not worried about you as a reporter, Chenyita.”

“I know. But I think I have to do this.”

So Irene and Amanda picked Laura and her friend Marcie up at the mall in the old blue Saab they'd recently bought. What no one had predicted was that, on the television sets prominently displayed in the windows of the electronics store they'd passed on their way out, Laura and Marcie had seen Eugenia being interviewed. And that was only the beginning.

When elections were held in Chile in December of the following year, the opposition candidate won. Irene and Eugenia stayed up all night, watching the television coverage at Eugenia's apartment. Amanda had stayed with them until midnight, then driven the Saab back to the house. When it became clear that the candidate of the democratic coalition was going to beat the right-wing candidate supported by Pinochet, they broke open the bottle of champagne. They hugged and wept for hours, still unable to believe that Chile's seventeen-year dictatorship was really coming to an end.

The following May, her sister received the phone call from that Truth Commission lawyer. The nightmares came back, the sleeplessness. The more her sister wrote in the notebook Ignacio Pérez had suggested, the worse things seem to get. Those early-morning phone calls, always at the moment when Irene was settling into her day, also turned her world upside down. But nothing had prepared her for the call she got the morning after Ignacio interviewed Eugenia. The minute she heard her sister's voice, Irene knew she was crying.

“Chenyita! Are you all right? What happened? Is there anything I can do?”

“Not at the moment.” A short pause and a deep intake of breath as Eugenia composed herself. Then she continued, her voice less ragged. “It looks like the Commission wants to fly me and Laura back, sometime in the next few months. Laura's not happy about it, and she made a bit of a scene with Ignacio last night. But depending on what happens, I might need a lot of help.”

“And why is that?”

“Well, Nenita … I've been wondering, you know? And it kept me up all night. It might be time to go back for good.”

Even before the door closed on Ignacio Pérez's elegant figure, Laura knew they were going back to Chile. She felt that same burning sensation deep in her chest she had felt years before when her mother had moved them to Boston, and that sense of resigning yourself to the inevitable that had been a part of her life for as long as she could remember. What made it even worse was that her mother had no idea what she had done. This had always been the case, Laura knew. And she didn't know what was worse: that her mother kept doing the same thing to her, or that her mother had no idea she was doing it. So she locked herself in her room, took out Paco the pink porcupine, lay down on her bed, and closed her eyes.

Mexico City, 1977

Laura's first memory was of standing on the balcony of their apartment in Coyoacán, the edge of the wrought iron railing barely below eye level. She moved down into the corner, straining her hand between the bars to reach the bougainvillea's lush purple blossoms that seemed slightly out of her reach. Ah, success. And all at once, the vague disappointment at how quickly the flower fell apart between her probing fingers, leaving only a small reddish stain along her palm; and then the whoosh of Inocencia, her sandals flapping against her brown heels, tongue clacking disapprovingly as she swooped Laura up in her arms.

“Ay,
niñita!
What if you fell and your mama came back from the newspaper and found you in broken pieces on the sidewalk! Ay,
Dios
, I can't get anything done around here when you go off like this.”

When Laura behaved and played quietly with her toys, Inocencia would bustle around between the kitchen and the backstairs laundry, cooking fragrant soups and breads, beating clothes against the large stone that served as a washboard before rinsing and hanging them on the line. There, pinned between two wooden clothespins that stood up like horns, the blouses and skirts and slacks would swing gently in rhythm with Mexico City's light breezes. Sometimes, when she ironed in the early afternoon sun, Inocencia would sing songs in her native language, and the round, soft tones of her voice enveloped Laura like a warm blanket.

On days when Mama stayed home, Laura would hear the clack-clack of her typewriter in the small room at the back of their second-floor apartment. Rather than live in that room, in a more traditional arrangement, Inocencia insisted that she preferred to make the one-hour commute daily in each direction to the southern edge of the city, because on the land her brother-in-law had inherited from his family, she could keep chickens and grow herbs in a small plot they gave her by the side of the house. It worked out well for all of them, because it gave Mama a study and Inocencia could live with her family. Besides, the dishes made with the eggs and the fragrant rosemary and basil Inocencia brought from home were delicious. And since Mama never set foot in the kitchen except to warm up the soup Inocencia left for them to eat on her day off, Laura was especially happy that Inocencia's cooking was so tasty.