When we were supervising recess, Blanca told me that Azucena Corrales hasn’t come to class, and she’s afraid she’s going to drop out like her older brothers and sisters, none of whom graduated. She never met Juanito’s mother, who’d already left the island when Blanca arrived, but she knows she was a very bright girl, who got pregnant at fifteen, left after giving birth, and never came back. Now she lives in Quellón, in the south of Isla Grande, where most of the salmon farms used to be, before the virus arrived that killed the fish. During the salmon bonanza, Quellón was like the Wild West, a land of adventurers and single men, who tended to take the law into their own hands, and women of easy virtue and enterprising spirit, able to earn more in a week than a worker could in a year. The women in most demand were the Colombians, called itinerant sex workers by the press and black bottoms by their grateful clients.
“Azucena was a good student, like her sister, but she suddenly turned shy and started avoiding people. I don’t know what could have happened to her,” Auntie Blanca said to me.
“She hasn’t come to clean our house either. The last time I saw her was the night of the storm, when she came looking for Manuel, because Carmelo Corrales was very ill.”
“Manuel told me. Carmelo Corrales had an attack of hypoglycemia, quite common among alcoholic diabetics, but giving him honey was a risky decision for Manuel to take; it could have killed him. Imagine what a responsibility!”
“He was already half dead, anyhow, Auntie Blanca. Manuel is a cool dude. Have you noticed that he never gets angry or worried?”
“It’s because of the bubble in his brain,” Blanca informed me.
It turns out that a decade ago Manuel was diagnosed with an aneurysm, which could burst at any moment. And I only just found out! According to Blanca, Manuel came to Chiloé to live out his days to the full in this magnificent landscape, in peace and silence, doing what he loves, writing and researching.
“The aneurysm is like a death sentence, and it’s made him detached, but not indifferent. Manuel uses his time wisely, gringuita. He lives in the present, hour by hour, and he’s much more reconciled to the idea of dying than I am, who also has a time bomb inside. Other people spend years meditating in a monastery without attaining the peace of mind that Manuel has.”
“So you think he’s like Siddhartha too.”
“Who?”
“Nobody.”
It occurs to me that Manuel Arias has never had a great love, like my grandparents did, and that’s why he’s content with his solitary, lone-wolf existence. The bubble in his brain serves as an excuse to avoid love. Does he not have eyes to see Blanca? Juesú! as Eduvigis would say—it seems like I’m trying to hook him up with Blanca. This pernicious romanticism of mine is the result of the slushy novels I’ve been reading lately. The inevitable question is, Why did Manuel agree to take in someone like me, a stranger, someone from another world, with suspicious customs and a fugitive besides? How could it be that his friendship with my grandmother, who he hasn’t seen for several decades, weighed heavier on the scales of life than his indispensable tranquillity?
“Manuel was worried about you coming,” Blanca told me when I asked. “He thought you were going to cause chaos in his life, but he couldn’t deny your grandmother the favor, because when he was banished in 1975, somebody gave him shelter.”
“Your father.”
“Yes. At that time it was risky to help those persecuted by the dictatorship, and my father was warned—he lost friends and relatives, even my brothers were angry about it. Lionel Schnake giving refuge to a Communist! But he said if you can’t help your neighbor in this country, we might as well go somewhere else. My daddy thinks he’s invulnerable—he said the military wouldn’t dare touch him. The arrogance of his class allowed him to do good in this case.”
“And now Manuel pays back Don Lionel by helping me. The rebounding Chilote law of reciprocity.”
“That’s right.”
“Manuel’s fears about me were justified, Auntie Blanca. I arrived like a bull in a china shop—”
“But that did him a lot of good!” she interrupted me. “I can see he’s changed, gringuita. He’s more open.”
“Open? He’s closed up tighter than a sailor’s knot. I think he’s depressed.”
“That’s his nature, gringuita. He was never a clown.”
By her tone of voice and faraway look I guessed how much she loved him. Manuel told me he was thirty-nine years old when he was banished to Chiloé and lived in Don Lionel Schnake’s house. He was traumatized by having spent more than a year in prison, by the banishment, by the loss of his family, his friends, his job, everything, while for Blanca it was a wonderful time: she’d been crowned as beauty queen and was planning her wedding. The contrast between the two of them was very cruel. Blanca knew almost nothing about her father’s guest, but was attracted by his tragic, melancholy air; in comparison, other men, including her fiancé, struck her as insubstantial. The night before Manuel went into exile, the very same evening the Schnake family was celebrating the return of their expropriated land in Osorno, she went to Manuel’s room to give him a little pleasure, something memorable that he could take with him to Australia. Blanca had made love with her fiancé, a successful engineer, son of a rich family, supporter of the military government, Catholic, the opposite of Manuel and suitable for a young woman like her, but what she experienced with Manuel that night was very different. Dawn found them entwined in a sad embrace, like two orphans.
“The gift was his, not mine. Manuel changed me, gave me another perspective on the world. He didn’t tell me what had happened to him when he was in prison—he never talks about that—but I felt his suffering in my own skin. A little while after that I broke off my engagement and went abroad,” Blanca told me.
Over the next twenty years she heard news of him, because Manuel never stopped writing to Don Lionel; so she learned about his divorces, his time in Australia, then in Spain, his return to Chile in 1998. She was married then, with two teenage daughters.
“My marriage was in all sorts of difficulty, my husband was one of those chronic philanderers, raised to be waited on by women. You’ll have noticed how sexist this country is, Maya. My husband left me when I got cancer; he couldn’t stand the idea of going to bed with a woman who had no breasts.”
“And what happened between you and Manuel?”
“Nothing. We met again here in Chiloé, both of us rather wounded by life.”
“You love him, don’t you?”
“It’s not that simple—”
“Then you should tell him,” I interrupted. “If you’re going to wait for him to take the initiative, you’d better make yourself comfortable.”
“My cancer could come back at any moment, Maya. No man wants to get tied down to a woman with this.”
“And at any moment Manuel’s fucking bubble could burst, Auntie Blanca. There’s no time to lose.”
“Don’t you even think of sticking your nose in this! The last thing we need around here is a gringa matchmaker,” she warned me, alarmed.
I’m afraid that if I don’t stick my nose in, they’re going to die of old age without resolving this matter. Later, when I got home, I found Manuel sitting in his easy chair in front of the window, editing some loose pages, with a cup of tea on the end table, Dumb-Cat at his feet and Literati-Cat curled up on top of the manuscript. The house smelled of sugar; Eduvigis had been making apricot jam with the last fruit of the season. The jam was cooling in a line of recycled jars of various sizes, ready for winter, when the abundance ends and the earth goes to sleep, as she says. Manuel heard me come in and waved vaguely, but didn’t lift his eyes from his papers. Oh, Popo! I couldn’t stand it if anything happened to Manuel, take care of him for me, don’t let him die on me too. I tiptoed over and hugged him from the back, a sad embrace. I lost my fear of Manuel after that night when I climbed into his bed uninvited; now I hold his hand, give him kisses, take food off his plate—which he hat
es—rest my head on his knees when we read, ask him to scratch my back, which he does in terror. He doesn’t scold me anymore when I wear his clothes or use his computer or correct his book; the truth is, I write better than he does. I nuzzled my nose in his coarse hair, and my tears fell onto him like little pebbles.
“Something up?” he asked me, surprised.
“What’s up is that I love you,” I confessed.
“Don’t harass me, señorita. A bit more respect for this old man,” he mumbled.
After the abundant breakfast with Roy Fedgewick, I traveled in his truck for the rest of the day, hearing country music and evangelical preachers on the radio and his interminable monologue, which I barely listened to, because I was drowsy from the aftereffects of the drug and the fatigue of that terrible night. I had two or three opportunities to escape, and he wouldn’t have tried to stop me—he’d lost interest—but I didn’t have the energy. My body felt slack and my mind confused. We stopped at a gas station, and while he bought cigarettes, I went to the washroom. It hurt to pee, and I was still bleeding a little. I thought of staying inside that washroom until I heard Fedgewick’s truck leaving, but the exhaustion and fear of falling into other cruel hands drove the idea out of my head. I returned to the vehicle with my head hanging, curled up in my corner, and closed my eyes. By the time we arrived in Las Vegas, at dusk, I was feeling a little better.
Fedgewick dropped me off right on the Boulevard—the Strip—in the heart of Las Vegas, and gave me a ten-dollar tip, because I reminded him of his daughter, he said. He showed me a photo of a blond five-year-old on his cell phone to prove it. When he left, he stroked my hair and said good-bye with a “God bless you, dear.” I realized he feared nothing, and his conscience was at peace; that had been just one more of many similar encounters for which he was always prepared with the pistol, handcuffs, alcohol, and drugs; within a few minutes he’d have forgotten me. At some point in his monologue he’d let me know that there were dozens of teenagers, boys and girls, runaways, who offered themselves on the road for truck drivers to use however they wished; it was a whole culture of child prostitution. The only good thing that could be said about him is that he took precautions so that I wouldn’t infect him with a disease. I’d rather not know the details of what happened that night in the motel, but I remember in the morning there were used condoms on the floor. I was lucky—he practiced safe sex while raping me.
At that time of day the air in Las Vegas had cooled off, but the sidewalk still held the dry heat of the daylight hours. I sat on a bench, aching from the recent excesses and overwhelmed by the scandal of lights in this unreal city, risen like an enchantment from the desert dust. The streets are lively, a nonstop festival: traffic, buses, limousines, music; people everywhere—old men in shorts and Hawaiian shirts, grown women wearing cowboy hats, sequin-studded blue jeans and chemical tans, ordinary tourists and poor ones, lots of obese people. My decision to punish my father remained firm—I blamed him for all my misfortunes—but I wanted to call my grandma. In this age of cell phones it’s almost impossible to find a public pay phone anywhere. When I finally found a phone booth in working order, the operator either couldn’t or wouldn’t let me make a collect call.
I went to change the ten-dollar bill for coins in a hotel-casino, one of the vast citadels of opulence with palm trees transplanted from the Caribbean, volcanic eruptions, fireworks, colored waterfalls, and beaches without any sea. This display of splendor and vulgarity is concentrated in a few blocks, where brothels, gambling dens, bars, massage parlors, and X-rated cinemas are also plentiful. At one end of the Boulevard it’s possible to get married in seven minutes in a chapel with twinkling hearts, and at the other end you can get divorced in the same length of time. That’s how I described it months later to my grandma, although it would be an incomplete truth. In Las Vegas there are rich communities with mansions behind high fences, middle-class suburbs, where mothers walk with their baby buggies, run-down neighborhoods with panhandlers and gangsters; there are schools, churches, museums, and parks that I only glimpsed from afar, for I lived my life by night. I phoned the house that used to be my father’s and Susan’s and where my Nini now lived alone. I didn’t know if Angie had notified her of my absence yet, although two days had passed since I disappeared from the academy. The phone rang four times, and the recording came on to tell me to leave a message; then I remembered that Thursdays my grandma did a volunteer night shift at the hospice, paying back the help we received when my Popo was dying. I hung up; no one would answer until the next morning.
That day I’d had a very early breakfast, and didn’t want to eat anything at lunch with Fedgewick, so by then I felt a huge emptiness in my stomach, but I decided to save my coins for the phone. I started walking in the opposite direction from the casino lights, away from the throng, from the fantastical brightness of the illuminated billboards, the noise of the cascade of traffic. The mind-blowing city disappeared to give way to another, quiet and somber. Wandering aimlessly and disoriented, I came to a sleepy street, sat down on a bench inside a bus shelter, leaning on my knapsack, and settled down to rest. Exhausted, I fell asleep.
A little while later, a stranger woke me up, touching my shoulder. “Can I take you home, sleeping beauty?” he asked me, sounding like a horse whisperer. He was short, very skinny, with a stooped back, a hare’s face, and greasy straw-colored hair. “Home?” I repeated, disconcerted. He held out his hand, smiling with stained teeth, and told me his name: Brandon Leeman.
On that first encounter, Brandon Leeman was dressed entirely in khaki, a shirt and pants with several pockets and rubber-soled shoes. He had the calming air of a park ranger. The long sleeves covered tattoos with martial art themes and needle marks, which I wouldn’t see until later. Leeman had served two terms in prison, and the police in several states were still looking for him, but in Las Vegas he felt safe, and he’d turned it into his temporary hideout. He was a thief, a heroin dealer and user. Nothing distinguished him from others like him in that city. He was armed out of precaution and habit, not because he was prone to violence, and when necessary he could count on two thugs, Joe Martin, from Kansas, and Chino, a guy from the Philippines, covered in smallpox scars, who he’d met in prison. Leeman was thirty-eight years old, but he looked fifty. That Thursday he’d just come out of the sauna, one of the few pleasures he allowed himself, not out of austerity but having arrived at a state of total indifference toward everything except his white lady, his snow, his queen, his brown sugar. He’d just shot up and felt fresh and dynamic as he began his nightly round.
From his vehicle, a gloomy-looking van, Leeman had seen me dozing on the bench. As he told me later, he trusted his instinct to judge people, very useful in his line of work, and I struck him as a diamond in the rough. He went around the block, drove past me again slowly and confirmed his first impression. He thought I was about fifteen, too young for his purposes, but he was in no position to be too demanding, because he’d been looking for someone like me for months. He stopped a short way down the block and got out of the car, ordering his henchmen to make themselves scarce until he called them and approached the bus stop.
“I haven’t eaten yet. There’s a McDonald’s three blocks from here. Would you like to come with me? I’ll buy you dinner,” he offered.
I analyzed the situation quickly. My recent experience with Fedgewick had left me wary, but this loser dressed up as an explorer didn’t seem like anything to be scared of. “Shall we go?” he insisted. I followed him a little doubtfully, but when we turned the corner and the McDonald’s sign appeared in the distance I couldn’t resist the temptation; I was hungry. We chatted along the way, and I ended up telling him I’d just arrived in the city, that I was just passing through and was going to return to California as soon as I could call my grandmother and get her to send me some money.
“I’d lend you my cell to call her, but the battery needs charging,” Leeman said.
“Thanks, but I can’t call
her till tomorrow. My grandma’s not home tonight.”
In the McDonald’s there were a few customers and three employees, a black teenage girl with fake nails and two Latino guys, one of them with a Virgin of Guadalupe T-shirt. The smell of grease revived my appetite, and soon a double hamburger with fries partially restored my self-confidence, the strength to my legs, and my clarity of mind. Calling my Nini no longer seemed so urgent.
“Las Vegas looks pretty fun,” I commented with my mouth full.
“Sin City, they call it. You haven’t told me your name,” said Leeman, without having tasted his food.
“Sarah Laredo,” I improvised, unwilling to tell my name to a stranger.
“What happened to your hand?” he asked me, pointing to my swollen wrist.
“I fell.”
“Tell me about yourself, Sarah. You haven’t run away from home, have you?”
“Of course not!” I said, choking on a french fry. “I’ve just graduated from high school, and before starting college I wanted to check out Las Vegas, but I lost my wallet, that’s why I have to call my grandma.”