Beyond the Ties of Blood (6 page)

He stood up and came over to her, trying to put his arms around her. She pulled away. “Okay,” he said. “I get it. I'm sorry.”

Though she knew Manuel was with the Revolutionary Left, and there were nights when he didn't come home until very late, reeking of cheap wine, Eugenia hadn't wanted to get involved. Though sometimes she wondered what he was doing late at night, why he came home drunk, mainly she'd seen his politics as through a veil, vague outlines and figures with a certain mystery to them that she had never been able to figure out. That changed one night in July, right before winter vacation. She'd been feeling guilty about not going to the country house with her mother over the upcoming break, so she'd gone home to spend the weekend with her. When they got into a fight, she had decided to go back to the apartment and surprise Manuel.

She could hear the noise from the ground floor as soon as she let herself in. She climbed the stairs. When she opened the door the stench of sweat, black tobacco, and cheap wine was like an uppercut to the jaw. She stood there for a moment. The floor of their one-room apartment, newly swept only a few hours before, was now covered with crumpled pieces of paper and overflowing ashtrays. The ashes and cigarette butts that could no longer fit in the containers were being kicked around by muddy hiking boots as scruffy, long-haired young men moved between the kitchen and her coffee table. Whenever they passed over her Andean rug they ground a fresh mixture of mud and cigarette ash deeper into its formerly brick-colored pattern. The batik spread on the couch had been crumpled into a corner.

They didn't notice her at first. Then a shout went up. “Hey! Manuel!” He looked up and came running to the door.

“
Mi amor
. Weren't you going to—”

“We got into a fight, so I thought I'd come back and surprise you. Looks like I was very successful.”

“We needed to get out an emergency leaflet, and since you weren't going to … Just give me about five minutes. I'll clear them out, and then I can clean up and …”

“Don't worry. It'll take a lot longer than that for the stink to clear out. I'll go stay at my sister's.”

She called her mother from Irene's downtown apartment and said her plans had changed. She would go to the country for winter vacation. She returned in time for classes and continued sleeping on the couch in Irene's living room. She was unable to return to the one-room place where they had fallen in love and that she had spent months making comfortable and pleasant. She could not fully explain her sense of betrayal, but she felt as if Manuel himself had caused each ash stain on the carpet for which she had scoured the secondhand stores, each scuff on the coffee table she had refinished by hand. For the first time she could see clearly that what mattered most to her was not as important to him. She felt a stab of pain every time it occurred to her that his politics were more important to him than she was.

On the Friday of the first full week of classes, she got back to Irene's to find Manuel sitting on the front steps of the building. He looked like he hadn't slept in days, and he gave off an odor of stale wine. When he saw her, he stood with difficulty, swaying slightly. He was drunk.

“Please.
Mi amor
. Just listen for a moment. Please.”

She stopped, but kept her distance.

“I'm sorry. I've cleaned the whole place up, kept the windows open, aired it out. I promise they won't come over again. I'm so sorry. Please come back, I …” He took a step toward her, but she stepped back. He stopped. “Eugenia,” he said, the roughness of tears palpable in his voice. “I love you. I don't know what I'd do without you. Please come back.” Then he sat back down on the steps, his head in his hands. And he began to sob.

She wasn't entirely sure why she'd gone back. Had it been that vulnerable streak of his, that from the first time at the Plaza Baquedano had mixed with the hint of danger emanating from the Revolutionary Left? Was it the smell of burnt oranges and black tobacco? What he knew how to do with his fingers, his lips? How every nerve ending in her body stood up, when he simply walked into the room? Until she met Manuel, she hadn't known what real pleasure felt like. But part of it, too, was the allure of the prohibited, her knowledge of how shocked her mother would be if she found out. And she had to admit how good it felt that, out of all the girls, the leader of the Revolutionary Left had chosen her.

Whatever it was, her decision had sealed her fate. After that, their story accelerated along with the political events in Chile. As the economic crisis got worse and the government still refused to send in police against demonstrators taking over farms and factories, the right-wing opposition got more and more militant. At first it was mainly landowners in the countryside whose farms were being taken over by peasants or expropriated by the agrarian reform. Then factory owners and other members of the investing classes got involved. They were encouraged by the women from the upper class who went out into the streets, banging on pots to protest the shortages of goods.

When the neighbors complained about Manuel's radical politics, they were evicted from their apartment. The polarization between the Allende government with its working-class, radical student, and peasant support, and the right-wing opposition with its coalition of urban and rural upper classes, only got worse through 1972 and the first months of 1973. As strikes and street demonstrations spread, the Allende government lost the support of the middle classes and of their political party, the Christian Democrats. By June of 1973, the smell of tear gas was constantly in the air.

Manuel and Eugenia took to skipping classes at their respective universities. The professors weren't there half the time, anyway. Somehow, Eugenia decided, they'd probably known that their days together were numbered. They drank coffee in bed for hours in their new third-floor walk-up, the slanting sun of winter tracing highlights in Manuel's red beard. What she remembered most about those days, what had made her happy, was the feel of Manuel's red locks between her fingers, the smell of freshly ground coffee at the small Italian shop on the corner, the little pot of English ivy on the windowsill that thrived in spite of their neglect.

Even as they lingered longer in bed in the mornings, Manuel still went out in the afternoons to help build the school at the site of a new working-class community at the edge of town. He dismissed her worries about his safety, even though the more conservative upper-class students at the Catholic University, the supposedly apolitical ones who had never joined a political party or student organization before, now began arming themselves to fight the Revolutionary Left. Rumor had it that they were collaborating with the new fascist group known as New Fatherland, the one that had been started by angry landowners from the south of the country. She knew that students like Sergio, who had been in the Socialist Party, were not willing to join in, but there were still a lot of these conservative hotheads at the Catholic University.

Her fears became all too real the night his jaw was broken in the fight with the right-wing thugs. She'd waited up for hours, and when he finally made it home, his friend Hernán almost carrying him up the stairs, she foolishly expected him to say he would give up politics. But he just stayed in bed, groggy on pain medication, and she fed him soup and mashed potatoes.

He was all right by the time of winter vacation. He took to sitting around the apartment, looking thinner and more haggard, and sometimes he opened a bottle of wine at lunch and kept drinking it through the day. The government had taken over her family's farm in the agrarian reform, so her mother had insisted they spend the break together in the north and she couldn't think of a convincing excuse. Besides, after all the time she spent helping him get back on his feet, she felt as if she owed her mama at least this one holiday. And maybe, just maybe, she needed to remind him that she wouldn't always be waiting around, her hands clenching a cold mug of tea, no matter what he did.

She returned at the beginning of August, a little more than a month before the military overthrew the government for good. A week or so after her return, they were evicted once again. The only room they could find was a ragged little dump behind a gas station. Three weeks later, right after the military coup, the Revolutionary Left put out a statement calling for armed resistance. Even she knew what a joke that was, a few cornered guys with pistols facing the tanks and planes of the armed forces. She'd heard the planes bombing the Presidential Palace the day of the coup, and rumor had it that they'd bombed some of the working-class neighborhoods, too. But the statement meant that the military would target all members of his organization, and that made him a marked man.

She was the only one who could walk to the corner store two blocks away to buy bread, coffee, and the two horrible newspapers whose publication the junta still allowed. Every morning, when she returned, she put the coffee and sandwiches on the table and they ate in silence. Then he turned to the last page in each newspaper to check for names he knew on the lists of those arrested. As she sat there, looking at him run his finger down the list, stopping every now and then, closing his eyes or shaking his head, she wanted to ask him what they were going to do, but she found she couldn't ask the question out loud. She hoped she'd be able to at some point, but they ran out of time.

They were still finishing up their sandwiches late on a Sunday morning when the crash of the front door startled her so badly that she spilled her coffee. The thought that she must get up had not even formed completely in her head before she felt a fist hit her face and she was down on the floor. Looking up through the red haze of pain, all she could see was an olive-colored form. Then the sharp stab along her side when he kicked her. She closed her eyes, wetness spreading across her cheeks.

They left her alone after that, focusing on Manuel. She was afraid to open her eyes. She heard, again and again, the hard thud of military boots hitting human flesh, his grunts and moans mixing with the curses of his attackers, all of it punctuated by the sound of glass shattering against the floor. When they finally hauled her up, they tied a blindfold over her eyes and half-dragged, half-carried her out into a waiting car. She was thrown into the back, her head hitting the door on the opposite side.

After they were picked up, Eugenia realized her mistake in taking him back. She was in love with him, but he loved politics. That's why she ended up on that metal frame, the electricity crashing through her until all she wanted was to die. To escape the searing pain. She couldn't tell them anything because she really didn't know anything. She just happened to be in love with a political leader. And then that horrible day, when they took her into the room where they had him and she saw how badly they had tortured him. She was sure the only reason they brought them together was to taunt him one last time. She knew that, after that moment, he'd be gone. She wasn't sure what was worse, having lost him, or seeing him again, in the state he was in, right before losing him forever.

But then she became aware she was pregnant. The sickness started coming every morning, and pretty soon it was clear that she wasn't just suffering delayed effects from the beatings and electric shock. Her breasts got large, and her stomach grew round and full. When the young girl with whom she had shared a cell was released from Villa Gardenia and let Irene know where she was, her sister moved heaven and earth to get her out. Eugenia remembered the cold wetness of the winter morning when she was transported to the Mexican embassy in the old VW van that smelled of gasoline. She shivered all the way, nauseous from the fumes, her swelling belly making it hard to get in and out of the back seat where they'd put her. Irene had been waiting at the embassy gate with a large poncho to drape over her shoulders.

Even after they took her to the embassy, she had to wait until the Chilean government accepted the Mexican request for political asylum. She took to strolling back and forth among the tables of exiles waiting to leave the country, watching their endless chess games, their disputes over a hand of bridge. Irene came every day, bringing treats to still her cravings, new clothes as her belly got larger. Yet every day, when she woke up, she wondered how things could just go on as normal. There were people dying, she thought, being tortured, beaten, and killed all around them. She didn't even want to think about how much Mama must have suffered, her daughter disappeared and tortured, and now, pregnant, about to go into exile. And people were arguing over cards? Every time the baby kicked she felt like the ultimate, and most banal, symbol of how life goes on, even in the midst of tragedy and grief. Her baby was a flower growing on earth made spongy with human blood.

The contractions began one evening while she was still waiting for approval from the Chilean government. After all, there weren't that many countries that, like Mexico, were still accepting exiles. The large number of petitions made the wait so much longer. Canada had filled its quota, and the United States accepted no one. She had never really had Manuel, but now she would have his child. Irene was there, too, when Laura was born, the first person to hold her, tears streaming down her cheeks. Because Laura was born in the embassy, she was a Mexican citizen. In any case, Chile wouldn't want her, the child of two subversives, one of them gone and the other damaged beyond repair. Her birth certificate read: “Laura Bronstein Aldunate, born on Mexican soil, Mexican embassy, Santiago, Chile, September 16, 1974.” Only later, after they'd lived in Mexico for several years, did the full irony of that date strike Eugenia. Her daughter had been born on Mexican Independence Day.

Mexico City, 1974

A month later, she and Laura were booked on a flight to Mexico City, where they were picked up at dawn by representatives of the Revolutionary Left exile organization. The young man who drove the tattered station wagon into which they put her two small bags still sported the large, dark moustache and long hair that had been marks of Revolutionary Left militants. His voice took on a hushed, awestruck tone when he spoke about Manuel.