“Let me have that washcloth over there, Samuel,” Kaija asked softly. “I need to wipe her cheeks.”
“No, no, I’ll do it,” he said as he went to the drawer to get a fresh cloth.
“No, Samuel, give it to me.” She started walking over to the table.
“Don’t be ridiculous, I can do it. Go back upstairs and rest, sweetheart.”
“I don’t need to rest, Samuel!” Kaija said sternly. “I can take care of my child! I don’t need you to patronize me like I’m incapable of doing the littlest thing.”
“Of course I know that, Kaija…” Samuel seemed stunned that his wife could suddenly be this angry with him for something he thought so minuscule. “I’m just trying to be helpful.”
“Well, you’re not!” She went over and snatched the washcloth from his hand and wiped off Sabine’s hands and fingers. “I think I am still capable of doing that, don’t you think?”
“Yes, Kaija. But there is no need for hostility.” Samuel placed his hand on the table. “I was only trying to give you the space I thought you needed.”
“Space? Space?” Her voice was shrill, surprising both the little girl and Samuel.
Sabine began to cry.
At the sound of her daughter’s wails, Kaija suddenly stopped midsentence. “I’m sorry, Samuel,” she said as she went to Sabine and picked her up in her arms. “I don’t know what’s come over me.”
Samuel nodded. He untied the apron that had covered his trousers and folded it over the sink.
“I understand,” he said in his calm, practiced voice. “I understand how you feel, but it will do neither of us any good to yell at me.”
“I’m sorry. It’s just that I’ve been so exhausted…”
“I know,” he said, trying to sound as compassionate as he could. But, clearly, he was losing his patience. “Kaija, I want you to know that, if there is anything—I mean anything—that you’d like to discuss with me, I am always here for you.”
She tried to smile at him, her eyes crinkling at the edges like two paper fans.
“People tell me I’m a great listener,” he said with a slight grin. “Some are even foolish enough to pay me to listen to their problems.”
Kaija managed a small laugh. “I know, Samuel. It’s just a phase I’m going through. It will pass.”
Samuel, indeed, hoped that it would pass, but he remained skeptical. Both his professional and personal instincts told him that something was clearly bothering his wife. But, she remained secretive, refusing to tell him exactly what was wrong.
Looking at his wife now, the fluorescent light of the kitchen intensifying the blue-white of her skin, the image of his mother returned to him once more. All Kaija needed was a housecoat and a kerchief tied around her head, and she would be the mirror image of his mother after the war. This time, he was old enough to help guide the woman in his life. Yet, somehow, he was still helpless to do anything. Once again, he remained on the outside looking in.
Later that evening, as the two of them sat in the living room, Samuel with the newspaper spread over his lap and Kaija with a magazine, the silence between them deafening, Samuel tried once more to broach the subject of his wife’s recent depression.
“Kaija, are you sure there’s nothing wrong?” He paused and placed the paper to the side. His voice, soft and tender, was the same voice he used with all of his patients. “This is becoming increasingly difficult for me. You’re pushing me away and I feel utterly helpless. Perfect strangers open up to me every day, yet my own wife refuses to do so.”
Kaija’s eyes remained fixed on the pages of her magazine. There was nothing for her to focus on except the glossy image of a young woman in a bathing suit holding a platter of artfully arranged watermelon wedges, but she preferred to look at that than the beseeching eyes of her husband. Why, she wondered, couldn’t he just stop it already? She attributed her increasing frustration to Samuel’s constantly pushing her to explain herself. Couldn’t he just leave her alone and let her deal with her problems on her own?
She didn’t want to burden him with all the facts now—all the medical jargon about her condition. She knew that, as soon as she told him, he would jump up from his chair and head for his office. He’d pull down his medical encyclopedia and try to find the reason for her condition; he would want to explore every possible treatment. But the doctor had been clear. There was no cure. She, a young woman of thirty-five, could no longer conceive.
Kaija waited for several seconds before responding to Samuel. She could sense that he was desperate to have an argument, a loud and passionate discussion that would clear the tension between them. Yet, Kaija remained unwilling.
“I am fine,” she replied tersely. “Please, Samuel, enough of this incessant inquiring on my behalf.” She bit the small middle portion of her lower lip. “No more of this. I will tell you when I need you to assist me with my mental health. In the meantime, don’t you have some work to do? Perhaps some files of a patient, someone who really needs your assistance?”
“I suppose I do,” he responded quietly. He stood up and folded the newspaper, returning it to the place on the coffee table where he had found it nearly an hour before.
“Don’t wait up for me,” he whispered to his wife as he made his way upstairs. “I’ll probably be a while.”
Kaija made no indication that she was listening.
He entered his office and took out from his briefcase the folders of the various patients he had seen that afternoon. Salomé’s was on top.
He opened up the manila file, turned on his desk light, and sat down in his heavy, wooden chair. Recently, Samuel had found himself thinking of Salomé more and more frequently. Sometimes, he would be caught by surprise as his mind lingered on a particular memory of her during one of their sessions. He smiled as he recalled the delicate movements of her hands—how they turned ever so slightly to punctuate her sentences.
He bit the bottom of his pen and pondered the majestic length of her neck, the curve of her collarbone, which seemed to be carved out in high relief from her fragile frame. Initially, it was her frankness that he had found so attractive. However, in the weeks that had passed between them, he had noticed a change. It was as if the frightened, vulnerable woman who had first arrived at his office was transforming herself into a stronger, more passionate woman. Undeniably, the combination of her courage and fire had intensified his attraction to her.
Salomé claimed she had initially come to him to recover from her inability to listen to music. But Samuel had realized, almost immediately, that she needed no prescription or intensive psychoanalysis. She only needed to be guided slightly, someone to ask her the right questions. Someone with whom she could discuss her anger and her resentment. Someone to whom she could reveal her story completely. He really was only there to listen.
With all his years of experience, Samuel had learned that the power of listening was entwined with the capacity to heal. And Salomé Herrera would be healed of her terror. He was confident of that. The only person that he was worried about, who might slip further away from him, was his wife.
He heard his wife’s footsteps treading quietly into their bedroom. He saw her going into their daughter’s room once more to make sure that the child slept undisturbed. There was so much goodness in his wife. He had loved her since that first moment she’d asked him if she could draw him in the park. He didn’t want to think of his patient Salomé as he had been recently. It was wrong. It was against his professional and personal ethics. He desperately wanted to have eyes only for Kaija.
But Kaija was not herself. And he was at a loss to help her. Nor did she seem to want his help. Samuel closed Salomé’s folder and tried to shake his new patient from his mind.
He turned off his desk light and sat down in his leather chair, falling asleep at his desk with his manila folders stacked before him. And, as it had been when he’d first entered the room, Salomé Herrera’s file remained neatly on top.
Thirty-seve
n
VILLA GRIMALDI
JANUARY 1974
The first time they applied the electrical wires to Salomé, they did not strip off her clothing. Instead, they applied the nodes only to her hands and mouth, shooting currents of fire through her delicate veins. She shrieked and hollered, writhing in the chair to which she was strapped. Begging them to have mercy on her. Pleading for them to stop.
The second, third, and fourth times, they took her to the interrogation room, ripped her clothes off, tied her to a metal table, and inserted clamps on her breasts and the folds of her genitalia. They turned the electrical currents on and poured water over her body to intensify the pain.
Her skin was burned purple in places that had once been delicate, white, and smooth. The flesh on her wrists, where the shackles had held her, now revealed a sliver of her bone.
Nearly every day, she was dragged from her cell and brought upstairs to one of the rooms where she was raped or tortured.
She had never known how sound itself could be a torture. When she lay in her cell and heard music piping in through the speaker, she knew that not far away another person was being beaten or electrocuted. She knew it because she had been that person. Her bruises and scabs were like a palimpsest where her torturer had marked her. She could trace his journey on her body like a blind man reading braille. For the scars were raised and the welts irregular, and even if she tried, she could not forget the history of how they had first arrived.
They had burned her from the electrocutions. They had played the music over and over as they clamped her with the metal clothespins. They had taunted her with the sound of dripping water, telling her that if she didn’t confess, the water would be thrown on her and the pain of the electricity would only intensify.
She didn’t know what she could confess. She knew she had never done anything against the new regime.
“I am a wife and mother,” she said over and over. “I have never said anything against the general or his army. I am innocent,” she said through tears and cries of pain.
The men who tortured her didn’t know who she was. They didn’t even know why she was there. They only knew that she had to be in the Villa Grimaldi for some grave offense against the government. So they did their job and relished doing it. They tortured an innocent woman into confessing to a crime she had not committed.
They filled a large Coke bottle with water, and one of the men drizzled a little on Salomé’s forehead. She was handcuffed to a large metal surgical table, and as she writhed with great futility to free herself, more water was poured on her chest and her pelvis. Her dress was soaking wet when the younger guard told his superior officer, “The bitch is ready.” Without hesitation, the other soldier flicked the little red switch and turned on the electrical shock machine.
Weeks later, after her limbs were swollen from the beatings and the electric shocks, and her body distended from lack of water and food, she sat crouched on the floor of her cell staring up at the cement ceiling like a wounded, mangled bird.
“What’s the matter with you?” one of the guards asked.
“Are you talking to me?” she whispered. Her voice was hoarse from having screamed and cried for hours at a time.
“Yes, I’m talking to you. Why are you staring at the ceiling?”
Salomé looked at the guard. He was young, carefully shaven. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-two years old. He’s not a career soldier, she thought to herself. She could tell those men right away. They were the most brutal of the guards, the ones who thrived on violence and sought it out like starving wolves, hungry for blood.
The very fact that this soldier had asked her why she was staring at the ceiling differentiated him from the others. His was the first question posed to her as if, indeed, she were a person.
Her eyes scanned his carefully pressed uniform, his fastidiously combed hair, and neatly filed nails. His youth and the lack of badges on his breast pocket indicated that he must be a new recruit. He’s probably from a modest family, Allende’s socialism didn’t serve him well, and now he’s siding with the ruling class in the hope of being a part of them.
Salomé’s mind raced.
She would not reveal to the guard who her husband was, as Octavio’s vocal support of Allende and refusal to support the new regime was well-documented in the press. Instead, she decided to curry the favor of this young soldier by convincing him she was a woman of great means who would never have embraced socialism…someone who should be protected and whose imprisonment had been a terrible mistake. And that if he looked out for her, he would be rewarded in the end. Luckily, she remembered the information about the villa that Chon-Vargas had given her that day in the market.
“You know,” she said to him as she dragged herself closer to the bars, “I was just thinking, it’s amazing how much they’ve changed this place. Who would have known this was once one of the most beautiful villas in Santiago?”
“Villa? How would you know what this place used to look like?”
“Oh, I remember,” she said, her eyes shining up at him. “I remember a lot. You know, I used to come here often when I was a little girl.” Salomé knew that if she told him something that he could verify about the villa, something that no other prisoner would have known, it would give her story credibility. So, she created a story from the information that Chon-Vargas had given her that day in the market, reinforcing it with the images she had seen through her blindfold.
“Why would you be here now then? I thought we only had comunistas here.” He raised his eyebrows and leaned against the bars of her cell.
“Oh, me? I’m no communist. I come from a familia gentil.” She attempted to smile through her bruises, pushing back her hair with a slight, sensual gesture of her hand. But, the gesture was futile. Her fingers only became entangled in a web of matted knots.
“Yes,” she continued, “when I was a little girl, we would summer here at the Villa Grimaldi. Just the name of it! To say it when I was small conjured up beautiful images of summer—gardens full of magnolia and bougainvillea. You know, the land here used to be an old vineyard. But, if I remember correctly, the family stopped that about fifty years ago. Can you still see those old terra-cotta jugs lining the outside?” Salomé coaxed, knowing full well what she said was true, as Chon-Vargas had told her that himself.
“Actually,” the guard said, pondering Salomé’s vivid description, “you’re right. I’ve seen some remains of clay pots, but now they’re just a bunch of broken terra-cotta shards in the entranceway.”
“You see!” she piped up eagerly. “And what about the tower! Or the black gate…and the beautiful kitchen with the tiles from Spain?”
She had succeeded in gaining the guard’s attention. From her descriptions, he could tell that she had been here before under far different circumstances.
“You mean the blue ones?”
“Yes, magnificent, cerulean blue tiles…And the windows…do they still overlook the cherimoya tree?”
“Yes, that tree’s still there…” His voice betrayed that Salomé had captured his attention. “You can see it from the window.” He paused. “Except the windows in the kitchen are now black with soot and streaked from the rain.”
“Such a shame.”
“Damn right. They should have used this place as a recreation center for us guards rather than a prison. Why waste a nice place like this on those damn communists? Allende ran this country into the ground! Before the coup, I hadn’t been able to find a job in over a year…”
Salomé shuddered. She knew if Octavio were in her position, he would have defended his sainted Allende to the end. He would have tried to persuade the guard of his naïveté, and to see that the American multinationals had sabotaged all that the former president had tried to do.
Days passed before Salomé discovered the name of the guard whom she had convinced she was wrongfully imprisoned.
“Miguel!” a soldier called out to him one evening when he was pos
ted nearby her cell. “The major wants us to bring him a prisoner, so take the bitch from cell sixty-eight to the interrogation room right away.”
“Cell sixty-eight?” Miguel replied, realizing that cell was Salomé’s. “I think you should lay off her a bit. She’s looking kind of bad…”
“What the hell are you talking about, asshole? Of course she’s looking bad!” the voice in the dark shouted. “She deserves it, the fucking communist!”
“I doubt that,” Miguel retorted, his tone bordering on disrespectful.
“What?” His superior was incredulous.
“Doubtful. That’s what I said. Look, the lady in sixty-eight knows she’s in the Villa Grimaldi. She’s some rich broad who used to come here every summer as a girl. If she dies, it’ll be on our heads, not fucking Pinochet’s, and you can bet your ass that someone’s out there looking for her right now!”
Miguel had apparently managed to arouse his anonymous commander’s concerns of self-preservation. “Fine! Just get some other whore then…I don’t care which one you get. Hopefully, for your sake, the major won’t either.”
“Yes, sir. Just give me a second!”
She heard a cell unlock a few meters ahead of hers and then slam shut. The force of the closing door echoed into Salomé’s cell. She nearly felt guilty for subjecting another prisoner to the terror that was meant for her. But she was too weary now for such a luxurious emotion. She only wanted to sleep. She wanted to hear nothing at all.
She imagined herself in her bedroom at home, serenaded by the sounds of the garden and the stirrings of her children. It was like a distant dream now, one that became increasingly difficult to recall, as the incessant wailing and tireless music never stopped.
Days passed, and her interrogation sessions became less frequent. When Miguel was on duty, he made sure that she received a bowl of poroto beans without worms. He would also bring her water if she asked.
“Tell me,” he asked one evening, “did they have fancy parties here?”