Beyond the Ties of Blood (25 page)

When Mama worked at home, Laura was not allowed to interrupt her, whether she heard the typewriter clacking or not. Only when Inocencia announced that lunch was ready would the door to the study open, releasing the sour smell of cigarettes. Laura would run to the table, mouth watering with the expectation of a delicious chicken or squash soup and some special time with her mother. If Mama was in a good mood, she could sometimes lose track of the time and they would sit and laugh for hours. But when Mama was sad, all conversation stopped. Then Laura felt like a cloud of smog came down and draped the room in shades of grey and brown. There was nothing she could do or say that would make Mama feel better, so she would just sit and look at her mama's face: her eyes as bright as the small turquoise earrings Inocencia wore; the short curly hair that spread out like question marks from her head; and most of all her light skin, with slight wrinkles around the eyes. Sometimes Laura would tiptoe to her mama's side and reach out to touch her hair, each strand so light between her fingers, so different from the thick, black pieces she felt growing from her own head.

As Laura grew older, she began to stand in front of the mirror and compare her face, thick dark eyebrows and eyelashes, olive skin, large round dark eyes, and straight, thick, raven hair, with her mother's light looks. One day, during the early part of third grade, her friend Cecilia was standing near the gate of the playground when her mama dropped her off.

“Who was that?” Cecilia asked minutes later, while they were playing on the swings.

“What do you mean?”

“Who was that who just left you off?”

“My mama.”

“She doesn't look like your mama.”

“How come?”

“Well, she's so light, a
guerita
, not like you. Is your papa dark?”

Laura realized that, even if she knew a lot about her papa—that he had died in Chile before she was born, that he was from the south of the country, that he had been a hero fighting for the poor—she really had no idea what he looked like.

“Was my papa dark, like me?” she asked later that day at home.

“What?”

“Did my papa look like me? Because I don't look like you, Mama.”

That expression came over Mama's face, the one she got when she would think about Papa, a combination of happy and sad that lit up her face and brought a smile to her lips, yet also filled her eyes with tears. For a few minutes she said nothing.

“Well,
hijita
,” she finally said, “he didn't have your coloring. But sometimes these things skip a generation, you know.”

“What was he like, Mamita? Was he tall? Did he laugh a lot? Do you have a photograph? Did he sometimes get very sad, like you?”

Mama took Laura's hand and led her over to the couch in the living room. They sat down, and Mama put her arm around Laura's shoulders and hugged her close.

“Laurita,” she whispered, her voice cracking, “your papa was a wonderful man. He was so kind to everyone, and loved to laugh. He would have been such a good father if he had lived to see you. And you know, I've often thought about not having a photograph. It seems like such a silly thing now, but we were always so busy. And we didn't have a camera. So all I have now is the picture of him in my heart.”

Then her mother softly disengaged herself and, standing up from the sofa, walked slowly to her study and locked the door behind her. She didn't come out again that afternoon.

One night, when Laura was ten years old, she got up to go to the bathroom. As she was heading back to bed, she heard moans coming from her mother's room. Was she sick, or in pain? She rushed over to the bed. Mama was dreaming. She took her hand.

“Mamita, Mamita, wake up. You're having a bad dream. It's okay, it's not real.” This is what her mother always said to her when she had a bad dream.

Her mama woke up shivering. Laura hurried to the hall closet and, standing on tiptoe, managed to pull an extra blanket off the top shelf. She placed it on her mother's quaking shoulders, then brought her a glass of water. In a few minutes her mother began to calm down.

“It must have been awful,” Laura said.

“It wasn't really scary,” her mother answered. “It's just that, sometimes, I dream about your papa and then, in the dream, I know he's gone and that makes me very sad.”

“What was in the dream?”

“We were sitting at a café in downtown Santiago, where we often went, having dinner. We were laughing.”

“What was he eating?”

“His favorite. Steak-and-avocado sandwiches. And we were drinking wine, and after we finished the food he ordered an espresso and lit up one of his black tobacco cigarettes.”

“Did he smoke a lot?”

“In those days everybody smoked. But his brand of black tobacco, it was special. Not expensive, just a distinct smell. It stuck to all his clothes. When I opened the closet in our apartment, the smell was everywhere. And it was in his hair and beard, too.”

“What else did my papa smell like?”

“He smelled of oranges. I remember noticing that the first time we talked. Later I learned that his Grandma Myriam had orange trees in her patio in Temuco, and he used to visit her every day. I used to imagine that, after years and years of daily visits, the smell had stuck to him permanently. But it was probably just because he liked to eat oranges. He peeled at least one a day, and the smell just stayed on his hands.”

Until that night, no matter how often Laura asked her mother questions and no matter what the question was, she had not been able to get a direct answer or a clear picture of her father. Laura had begun to think of her father as a luminous yet foggy presence, almost as if she were seeing him through a window that had steamed up from the outside. It did no good to try to wipe the glass. But that night, talking to her mother right after she woke up from a dream, cuddled up against her side as they both fell back asleep on the bed, her mama's sweet tobacco scent in her nostrils, she learned more about her papa than she had ever known before. After that, Laura learned to sleep with her door open. There were nights when she lay awake for hours, hoping to hear her mother's voice. Her sleeplessness was rewarded often enough that she slowly filled in the details of her father's form. She grew to love the middle of the night.

When the horrible earthquake came, just two days after her eleventh birthday, Laura was still asleep. She'd had a bad night, coughing and wheezing; so her mother had decided to keep her home from school. By the time she awoke, she was under the bed. The drills from school, about always getting under something, seemed to have worked even in her dreams. The only thing was that the bed was on the opposite side of the room.

Her bedroom had a crack so large in one of the walls that you could see through to the street. It was three days before Inocencia came back. Although her brother-in-law's house had collapsed, everyone had gotten out safely.

Laura's mother was badly shaken. It didn't help that there was such a strong aftershock barely two days later. Mama began getting into bed with a pair of slip-on shoes right next to the night table, just in case another earthquake came. When the crack in the wall of Laura's bedroom made it unsafe to sleep there, she moved into Mama's room, and Laura could tell she was glad for the company. They shared Paco, the pink velvet porcupine that had slept with Laura since she was three years old.

Because Laura's school had been destroyed, she had nowhere to go after the quake. She accompanied her mother when, like other journalists, she roamed the city with a notebook, taking down people's stories. But there was something special about her mama, the way she interviewed people, especially women. Laura didn't quite understand how it happened, but at first a woman would be talking in that singsong voice, the one you heard on all the reports on television once the broadcasts had been restored. I have told this story a hundred times already, the voice seemed to say, and it has always been exactly the same. And then, all of a sudden, her mama would make eye contact, or she would ask a question or put her hand on the other woman's arm just so. Laura wasn't exactly sure how, but the woman's voice would change. Looking straight into her mother's turquoise eyes, the woman would talk from a deeper place, crackling at first like the stones of a falling building. Then her story would take flight into the smog-filled air.

No matter how many wonderful stories her mother gathered and then published in her newspaper, Laura could tell that the earthquake had broken something inside her. Mama began to lose weight, and big pools of soot gathered under her eyes. Finally, one morning when they had decided not to go out, Laura heard her mother on the phone from her room. She was talking to her sister Irene. She was using her sister's nickname.

“Ay, Nenita, I can't take it anymore. Every night I'm sure we're going to have another quake. I don't know why, somehow it's like the bottom of the boat turned to glass and all I can see is the dangerous ocean underneath. I need to get out of here, preferably somewhere with no history of quakes, I … okay. Call me if you have any news. It's just that … yeah, I really don't understand it, but it just feels like it was the last straw. Yes. Thanks,
mi amor
. I love you too.”

Laura knew then that it was only a matter of time before they left their apartment in Coyoacán, with Inocencia's songs and flapping sandals, the sun coming in through the windows in the afternoon, and the clothes waving merrily under their clothespin horns. She could tell that the earthquake had torn up more than the big buildings downtown and the walls of their apartment and her school. Even the bougainvillea had begun to droop, no matter how much water she took down to it. For the first time in her life, Laura understood that you couldn't be sure of anything, not the ground under your feet, or even your own mother.

After
tía
Irene called back a month later, her mother bustled around the apartment, typing things and placing them on the dining room table, stapling piles of sheets together, then putting it all in a large orange-colored envelope. When Mama noticed her observing everything from the doorway, she sat down on the couch in the living room and motioned for Laura to sit next to her.

“
M'hijita
, your
tía
called to tell me that there's a fellowship at a school near where she lives. It's in a journalism school, for people who write for newspapers, so it would be perfect for me. The applications are due next week, so I'm putting together my credentials.”

“What are cred … en …” Laura's tongue seemed to stick on the word.

“That's the papers you have that show the kind of work you've done. In my case it's copies of the stories I've published, letters from my editor congratulating me on the good ones, things like that. I have everything pretty much ready now, and will send it up to the school in Boston. I'm sure there will be a lot of people applying for the fellowship, so I won't hold my breath, but it would be worse if I didn't try. And maybe my experience here writing for newspapers will make my file stand out.”

“What happens if your file stands out?”

“I don't know, Laurita. Probably they'll want to talk to me, find out what I'm like. I'm sure they'll have a lot of interesting applicants.”

“If they like you, does that mean we're moving?”

“It's much too early to tell,
m'hijita
. But even if this job doesn't work out, there could very well be other ones. We'd be a lot closer to
tía
Irene, wouldn't that be great? I think you should begin to think about practicing your English.”