We talk about potatoes—there are a hundred varieties or “qualities,” as they call them: red potatoes, purple potatoes, black, white, and yellow ones, round potatoes, long ones, potatoes, potatoes, and more potatoes—how you have to plant them when the moon is waning and never on a Sunday, how you have to give thanks to God as you plant and harvest the first one, and how you have to sing to them while they’re sleeping under the earth. Doña Lucinda, who’s 109 years old, as far as anyone can tell, is one of the singers who entices up the crop: “Chilote, take care of your potato / care for your potato, Chilote / don’t let anyone from away come and take it, Chilote.” They complain about the salmon farms, responsible for lots of damage, and the failings of the government, which makes a lot of promises and hardly ever keeps any of them, but they all agree that Michelle Bachelet is the best president they’ve ever had, even if she is a woman. Nobody’s perfect.
Manuel is far from perfect: he’s gruff, austere, lacks a cozy belly or a poetic vision of the universe and the human heart, like my Popo, but I’ve grown fond of him, I can’t deny it. I like him as much as Fahkeen, even though Manuel never makes the slightest effort to win anyone over. His biggest fault is his obsession with order. This house looks like a military barracks; sometimes I leave my stuff lying around on the floor or dirty dishes in the sink on purpose, to teach him to relax a bit. We don’t fight, at least not literally, but we do have our run-ins. Today, for example, I didn’t have anything to wear, because I forgot to do my laundry, and I grabbed a couple of his things that were drying by the stove. I assumed that since other people can take whatever they feel like from this house, I could borrow something he’s not using.
“The next time you want to wear a pair of my underpants, please do me the favor of asking for them,” he said in a tone of voice I didn’t much like.
“You’re so fussy, Manuel! Anyone would think it’s your only pair,” I answered in a tone that he might not have liked too much either.
“I never take your things, Maya.”
“Because I don’t have anything! Here, take your fucking shorts!”—and I started undoing my pants to give them back to him, but he stopped me, in terror.
“No, no! Keep them, Maya, you can have them.”
And I, like an idiot, burst into tears. Of course I wasn’t crying about that—who knows why I was crying, maybe because I’m about to get my period or because last night I was remembering my Popo’s death and I’ve been walking around sad all day. My Popo would have hugged me, and two minutes later we’d be laughing together, but Manuel started walking around in circles and kicking the furniture, as if he’d never seen anybody cry before. Finally he had the brilliant idea of making me a Nescafé with condensed milk, which calmed me down a little so we could talk. He asked me to try to understand, that it had been twenty years since he’d lived with a woman, his habits are very deeply ingrained, order is important in a space as small as this house, and cohabitation would be easier if we respected each other’s underwear. Poor man.
“Hey, Manuel, I know a lot of psychology, because I spent more than a year among lunatics and therapists. I’ve been studying your case, and what you’ve got is fear,” I told him.
“Of what?” He smiled.
“I don’t know, but I can find out. Let me explain, this obsession with order and territory is a manifestation of neurosis. Look at the fuss you’ve made over a lousy pair of shorts, when you don’t even blink if a stranger walks in and borrows your stereo. You try to control everything, especially your emotions, in order to feel secure, but any moron can see there’s no such thing as security in this world, Manuel.”
“Ah, I see. Go on—”
“You seem serene and distant, like Siddhartha, but you don’t fool me: I know inside you’re all screwed up. You know who Siddhartha was, right? Buddha.”
“Yes, the Buddha.”
“Don’t laugh. People think you’re wise, that you’ve attained inner peace or some such nonsense. During the day you’re the height of equilibrium and tranquillity, like Siddhartha, but I hear you at night, Manuel. You shout and moan in your sleep. What terrible secret are you hiding?”
Our therapy session got that far and no further. He pulled on his jacket and hat, whistled for Fahkeen to go with him, and went off for a walk or maybe out in the boat or to complain about me to Blanca Schnake. He got back really late. I hate staying alone at night in this house full of bats!
Age, like the clouds, is imprecise and changeable. Sometimes Manuel looks as old as the years he’s lived, and sometimes, depending on the light and his mood, I can see the young man he once was still hidden under his skin. When he leans over the keyboard in the harsh blue glare of his computer he’s pretty old, but when he captains his motorboat he looks about fifty. At first I used to focus on his wrinkles, the bags under his eyes and the red edges to them, the veins on his hands, stains on his teeth, the chiseled bone structure of his face, his morning cough and throat-clearing, the tired gesture of taking off his glasses and rubbing his eyes. But now I don’t notice those details anymore, but rather his quiet virility. He’s attractive. I’m sure Blanca Schnake agrees; I’ve seen how she looks at him. I’ve just said Manuel is attractive! Oh my God, he’s older than the pyramids! The wild life I led in Las Vegas turned my brain into a cauliflower. There’s no other explanation!
According to my Nini, the sexiest parts of women are their hips, because they give an idea of reproductive capacity, and in men it’s their arms, because they indicate their capacity for work. Who knows where she dug up that theory, but I have to admit that Manuel’s arms are sexy. They’re not muscular like a young man’s, but they’re firm, with thick wrists and big hands, unexpected in a writer, a sailor’s or bricklayer’s hands, with cracked skin and nails dirty with motor oil, gasoline, firewood, earth. Those hands chop tomatoes and coriander, or skin a fish with great delicacy. I watch him while pretending not to, because he keeps me at a certain distance—I think he’s scared of me—but I’ve examined him behind his back. I’d like to touch his hair, straight and hard like a brush, and sniff that cleft he has at the nape of his neck, that we all have, I guess. What would he smell like? He doesn’t smoke or use cologne, like my Popo, whose fragrance is the first thing I sense when he comes to visit me. Manuel’s clothes smell like mine and like everything in this house: timber, cats, wool, and smoke from the woodstove.
If I try to find out about Manuel’s past or his feelings, he gets defensive, but Auntie Blanca has told me a few things, and I’ve discovered others by doing his filing. He’s a sociologist as well as an anthropologist, whatever the difference might be, and I suppose that explains his contagious passion for studying the culture of the Chilotes. I like working with him, living in his house, and visiting other islands. I enjoy his company. I’m learning a lot; when I arrived in Chiloé, my head was an empty cavern, and in such a short time it’s beginning to fill up.
Blanca Schnake is also contributing to my education. Her word is law on this island. She’s more in command than the two carabineros posted here. As a child, Blanca was sent away to a boarding school run by nuns; then she lived for some time in Europe, where she went to teacher’s college. She’s divorced and has two daughters, one in Santiago and the other, who’s married and has two children, in Florida. In the photographs she’s shown me, her daughters look like models, and her grandchildren like cherubs. She was the principal of a high school in Santiago and a few years ago requested a transfer to Chiloé, because she wanted to live in Castro, near her father, but she was assigned to the school on this insignificant little island instead. According to Eduvigis, Blanca had breast cancer and recovered thanks to the healing of a machi, but Manuel told me that that was after a double mastectomy and chemotherapy; now she’s in remission. She lives behind the school, in the nicest house in town, renovated and extended, which her father bought for her and paid for outright. On the weekends she goes to see him in Castro.
Don Lionel Schnake is considered an
illustrious person in Chiloé and is much beloved for his generosity, which seems inexhaustible. “The more my dad gives away, the better he does with his investments, so I have no qualms about asking him for more,” Blanca told me. In 1971 the Allende government implemented agrarian reform and expropriated the Schnakes’ estate in Osorno and handed it over to the very same agricultural laborers who’d lived on and worked the land for decades. Schnake didn’t waste his energy cultivating hatred or sabotaging the government, like other landowners in his situation, but simply looked around in search of new horizons and opportunities. He felt young enough to start over again. He moved to Chiloé and set up a business supplying seafood to the best restaurants in Santiago. He survived the political and economic upheavals of the times and later the competition from the Japanese fishing boats and the salmon-farming industry. In 1976 the military government returned his land and he turned it over to his sons, who raised it up from the ruin it had been left in, but he stayed in Chiloé, because he’d suffered the first of several heart attacks and decided his salvation would be in adopting the Chilotes’ calm pace of life. “At eighty-five well-lived years of age, my heart works better than a Swiss watch,” Don Lionel—who I met on Sunday, when I went to visit him with Blanca—told me.
When he found out I was the gringuita who was working for Manuel Arias, Don Lionel gave me a big hug. “Tell that ungrateful Communist to come and see me! He hasn’t been here since New Year’s, and I’ve got a very fine bottle of gran reserva brandy.” He’s a colorful patriarch, an expansive bon vivant, with a big paunch, a bushy mustache, and four white tufts on top of his head. He roars with laughter at his own jokes, and his table is always set for anyone who might happen to show up. That’s how I imagine the Millalobo, that mythic being who seizes maidens to take them off to his kingdom in the sea. This Millalobo with a German surname declares himself a victim of women in general—“I can’t deny these beauties anything!”—and especially his daughter, who exploits him mercilessly. “Blanca is more of a mooch than any Chilote, always begging for something for her school. Do you know what she asked me for the other day? Condoms! That’s all this country needs: condoms for children!” he told me, laughing his head off.
Don Lionel is not the only one at Blanca’s feet. At her suggestion more than twenty volunteers got together to paint and repair the school; this is called a minga and consists of several people collaborating for free on some chore, knowing they won’t be short of help when they need it themselves. It’s the sacred law of reciprocity: you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. That’s how potatoes are harvested, roofs are fixed, and fences are mended; that’s how Manuel’s refrigerator got here.
Rick Laredo hadn’t finished high school and was roaming the streets with other losers, selling drugs to little kids, stealing crap, and hanging around the Park at lunchtime to see his old classmates from Berkeley High and, if the opportunity arose, dealing. Although he’d never have admitted it, he wanted to get back into the school gang, after being expelled for putting the barrel of his pistol in Mr. Harper’s ear. It has to be said: the teacher behaved too well, he even intervened to prevent the expulsion; but Laredo dug his own grave when he insulted the principal and the members of the board.
Rick Laredo took a lot of care over his appearance, with his spotless brand-name white sneakers, a tank top to show off his muscles and tattoos, hair gelled up like a porcupine, and so many chains and wristbands that he could have been dragged away by a large magnet. His jeans were enormous and fell down lower than his hips, so he walked like a chimpanzee. He was such a nonentity that not even the police or Mike O’Kelly were interested in him.
When I decided to solve the problem of my virginity, I made a date with Laredo, without giving him any explanation, in the empty parking lot of a cinema, at a dead time, before the first showing. From the distance I watched him going around in circles with his provocative swagger, holding up his pants, so baggy it looked like he was wearing diapers, with one hand and a cigarette in his other hand, excited and nervous, but when I approached, he feigned the indifference required by that kind of macho guy. He looked me up and down with a mocking sneer. “Hurry up, I have to catch the bus in ten minutes,” I told him, as I took my pants off. His superior smile vanished; maybe he’d been expecting some preamble. “I’ve always liked you, Maya Vidal,” he said. At least this cretin knows my name, I thought.
Laredo flicked his cigarette away, grabbed me by the arm, and tried to kiss me, but I turned my face away: that wasn’t part of my plan, and Laredo’s breath stank. He waited till I got my pants off, and then he crushed me against the pavement and exerted himself for a minute or two, stabbing me in the chest with his chains and medallions, not even imagining he was doing it with a novice, then collapsed on top of me like a dead animal. I pushed him off me furiously, cleaned myself with my underwear, which I threw on the ground in the parking lot and left there, pulled on my jeans, grabbed my backpack, and ran away. On the bus I noticed the dark stain between my legs and tears soaking into the front of my shirt.
The next day Rick Laredo was standing in the Park with a rap CD and a little bag of marijuana for “his chick.” I felt sorry for the poor guy and couldn’t get rid of him with ridicule, as a proper vampire should. I snuck out of Sarah and Debbie’s sight, invited him for ice cream, and bought us each a three-scoop cone, pistachio, vanilla, and rum’n’raisin. While we licked our ice cream cones, I thanked him for his interest in me and for the favor he’d done me in the parking lot, and tried to explain that there’d be no second opportunity, but the message didn’t get through his primate skull. I couldn’t get rid of Rick Laredo for months, until an unexpected accident swept him out of my life.
In the mornings I would leave my house, looking like someone on her way to school, but halfway there I would meet Sarah and Debbie at a Starbucks, where the employees gave us a latte in exchange for indecent favors in the washroom. I would put on my vampire disguise and go off on a bender till it was time to return home in the afternoon, with a clean face and the look of a schoolgirl. My freedom lasted for several months, until my Nini stopped taking antidepressants, came back to the land of the living, and noticed some signs she hadn’t perceived when her gaze was directed inward: money disappeared from her purse, my hours didn’t match any known educational program, I walked around looking and acting like a slut, I’d started lying and scheming. My clothes smelled of marijuana and my breath of suspicious mint lozenges. She hadn’t yet realized that I was skipping most of my classes. Mr. Harper had spoken to my father on one occasion, with no apparent results, but it hadn’t occurred to him to call my grandmother. My Nini’s attempts to communicate with me had to compete with the noise of the thunderous music in my headphones, my computer, my cell phone, and the television.
The most convenient thing for my Nini’s well-being would have been to ignore the danger signs and just try and live in peace with me, but her desire to protect me and her long-standing habit of solving mysteries in detective novels drove her to investigate. She started with my closet and the numbers saved on my phone. She found a bag with packs of condoms and a little plastic bag with two yellow tablets with “Mitsubishi” stamped on them that she couldn’t identify. She distractedly tossed them into her mouth and fifteen minutes later discovered their effects. Her vision clouded over and so did her mind, her teeth chattered, her bones went soft, and she saw her sorrows disappear. She put on a record of music from back in her day and started dancing frenetically. Then she went outside for a breath of fresh air, where she kept dancing, while taking off her clothes. A couple of neighbors, who saw her fall to the ground, rushed over to cover her with a towel. They were just getting ready to call 911 at the moment I showed up, recognized the symptoms, and managed to convince them to help me carry her inside.
We couldn’t lift her—she’d turned to stone—and we had to drag her to the sofa in the living room. I explained to these good Samaritans that it was nothing serious, my grandmother ha
d attacks like this quite regularly and they went away by themselves. I gently pushed them toward the door, then ran to reheat the coffee left over from breakfast and look for a blanket, because my Nini’s teeth sounded like a machine gun. A couple of minutes later she was burning up. For the next three hours I was alternating the blanket with cold compresses until my Nini’s temperature got back under control.
It was a long night. The next day my grandma had the despondency of a defeated boxer, but her mind was clear, and she remembered what had happened. She didn’t believe the story that a friend had given me those pills to look after for her, and I, innocently, had no idea they were ecstasy. The unfortunate trip got her back on her high horse. Her opportunity to put into practice all that she’d learned in the Club of Criminals had arrived. She found another ten Mitsubishi pills among my shoes, and discovered from O’Kelly that each one cost twice my weekly allowance.
My grandma knew a bit about computers, because she used them at the library, but she was far from an expert. That’s why she turned to Norman—a technological genius, hunched over and half blind at the age of twenty-six, having spent so much of his life with his nose glued to the screen—who Mike O’Kelly employed on occasion for illegal purposes. When it came to helping his boys, Snow White had never had any scruples about surreptitiously scrutinizing the electronic files of lawyers, prosecutors, judges, and the police. Norman can access anything that leaves even the slightest trace in cyberspace, from the secret documents of the Vatican to photos of congressmen frolicking with hookers. Without leaving his room in his mother’s house he could have extorted money, stolen from bank accounts, and committed fraud on the stock market, but he lacked any criminal proclivities; his passion was entirely theoretical.
Norman was not eager to waste his precious time on the computer and cell phone of a sixteen-year-old brat, but he put his hacking abilities at my Nini and O’Kelly’s disposal and taught them how to violate passwords, read private messages, and rescue from the ether what I believed I’d deleted. In one weekend this pair of vocational detectives accumulated enough information to confirm my Nini’s worst fears, leaving her stunned: her granddaughter drank whatever she could get her hands on, from gin to cough syrup, smoked marijuana, was dealing ecstasy, acid, and tranquilizers, stole credit cards, and had set up a scam inspired by a television program in which FBI agents pretended to be underage girls to trap depraved men on the Internet.