Still, Mario’s wasn’t the tendency that prevailed among us, but rather Claudia’s more peaceful leanings. The truth is I listened to those conversations with very little interest. I was in love, and my love filled my days and nights.
News started to reach us about the demonstrations at Saint Nicholas Church in Leipzig, Mondays at five in the evening, processions of people with candles and banners: Ohne Gewalt, No Violence. Some of them dared to cross over from Germany into Hungary. No one shot at them. Then many more crossed over. Soon afterward, the Berlin Wall crumbled; I watched on TV as they pulled down a statue of Lenin. It collapsed like a big sandcastle — a grand castle that, like Kafka’s, we never managed to reach. The truth is, we knew little about it. The world I’d been born into and grown up in just disappeared, that Cold War that divided Berlin in two and the planet in two, that damned war of empires that reached all the way to the ass of the world, all the way to Chile, and infected us and wounded us to the core. For someone like me, that conflict and that war was the world, not just one among many possible worlds, not one that could eventually disappear and be replaced by another, with other conflicts and other wars. It’s hard to understand what that meant for people like me. It’s incomprehensible. Everything I’m telling you is incomprehensible. I’m telling you about a way of life that is gone. I’m talking to you from a junkyard of broken, illusory, lost ideals.
You know what? All of us, on both sides, lived inside a language that’s been forgotten now. The inscriptions are still there, but now no one knows how to read them. The truth is, those of us who remain from that time don’t know how to recognize ourselves anymore. Though we claim otherwise. . People like me don’t exist anymore. Do I believe that? Am I contradicting myself? There will always be young people like the ones we were. Maybe. There will always be those who fight for equality. Yes. And against the Great Whore. Certainly. There will always be lives that death will transform into symbols of hope for humankind.
But our rhetoric, the language that was home to our utopia, the place of our no-place: it has ended. Because that rhetoric and the liturgy of the mountain — with its walks, its bonfires and guitars — that addictive language, I’m telling you, was the forge for our brotherhood of clandestine strangers who only knew — or should know — each other’s aliases but who were prepared to die together the very next day. That’s what people today don’t believe in: the inner nobility that made our souls quiver as we felt ourselves to be among the vanguard, the chosen ones.
During that period, Claudia invited me to meet a boy, a Chilean college student who was coming from Cuba to study for a few months. (Who today could imagine the dream Cuba embodied for us back then?) “His name is Francisco,” she told me. “His mother belonged to Red Ax, and he was raised in a home with a group of children whose parents had entered Chile clandestinely to join in the struggle.” Claudia didn’t know anything about that practice.
“It was a safety measure,” I explain to her. “It helped to avoid moral extortion.” She opens her eyes wide. And suddenly my hands are trembling and I shout at her: “It was indispensable! How else could they do it?! Don’t you see? What world of little angels did you live in, you nitwit?” Claudia looks at me and falls silent.
“I’m sorry,” she says, “I’m sorry.” I say nothing, of course, about how I should have sent Anita to that home for combatants’ children in Havana and I never did. I say nothing, of course, about the price I paid for it.
“The kid,” says Claudia, hurt, “holds a grudge against his mother. He has these marvelous dark eyes, let me tell you. He understands her, he says, but he still doesn’t want to see her again. He understands perfectly, he says, but at the same time he can’t accept what she did. He’s tried and tried again, but he just can’t, he says. She wasn’t my mother, he says, and now she can never become my mother. That’s what she doesn’t understand; she thinks she can, now. She says she needs me now, that at least she could be a kind of aunt. But that’s impossible, too, he says, because she’s not my aunt, she’s the mother I never had, he says. For me, it’s better not to see her. That’s what he says.”
Claudia asks me, as a Chilean, to talk to the boy, she wants me to tell him about our struggle, try to explain it to him, try to reconcile him with his mother. Could this Francisco be Teruca’s son? I didn’t want to meet that boy, I looked for any excuse not to meet with him. I didn’t want to see his face. I was afraid. I wonder what ever became of him?
Claudia called me to cancel a lunch date. “Something came up last minute,” was her excuse. “Let’s get together next week,” she said. “I’ll call you to set a time.” She never called. I called her, and she never answered. The same happened a few weeks later with Mireya. I went out for coffee with Mario. He was very nice. He said he would call me and he never did. It must have been around then, I think, when the rumors started about me, and people started to edge me out. I could never find out how much they knew or what exactly the rumors were. It didn’t matter much to me. I was, finally, a free and happy woman. Roberto still loved with me and he got along well with Anita. That was enough for me.
FIFTY-THREE
Out of pure nosiness I find an envelope in her desk and my heart skips a beat. Nosiness? No. The truth is that she’s been a different person for some time now. She is distant. I’d like to ask her: Why did you forget how to hug me? At what moment did my body become foreign to you? I want to put my arms around her, but I don’t dare. Not like before, at least. She seems so indifferent.
And I know that handwriting. How could I not! It’s Rodrigo’s. That’s how I find out that, after all these years, he’s found my daughter and now he exchanges letters with her. I don’t like it at all. Anita, under pressure from my questions, admits that she plans to go to Chile and live with her father. Just for a while, she tells me when she sees how my face falls in sorrow. I say a few silly things in an effort to dissuade her: education in Sweden is so much better, she’s better off graduating here. . She says she’s leaving the following week: “My dad sent me the ticket.” She says it so casually, as if her dad had always been her dad. I’m struck by her innocence. I hug her, barely holding back the flood of tears, and I tell her that I will always want the best for her and that she should live wherever she will be happiest. I pull her to me in a long, tight, terrible embrace, which I cut short suddenly to run to my room. I throw myself onto the bed, the feather pillow in my mouth. If only my rough sobs could suffocate me.
I break down. I have to learn how to live all over again. Without Anita. With this sadness. She calls me on the phone the day after she gets to Santiago. She’s delighted. Her father has a house with a giant yard, he works as a real estate agent, his wife is charming, so are her brothers and sisters. “Hello, hello. Hello! Hello, Mom, are you there?” I can’t talk. If I open my mouth I’ll burst into tears.
Nostalgia gnaws at me. In the morning as I make breakfast, I can almost see her sitting at the table, eating her muesli with honey and cold milk, her hair falling forward over her sleepy face. In the afternoon, after work, I find myself going through photo albums, postcards, notebooks, school report cards. When I used to come home from work, she would run to me and hang around my neck before I even got my coat off, and she would press her warm little face against mine, cold from the wind and snow outside. Like before, it’s hard for me to get out of bed. It’s too much. I try to go on sleeping, but I can’t do that either. Only silence awaits me, and in the evenings the same silence when I come home.