Violeta, p.20
Violeta, page 20
“Why get ahead of ourselves? The future always surprises us,” she’d say.
The only thing she’d decided on was the name: The baby would be called Camila if it was a girl, Camilo if it was a boy.
The third Friday in October, Nieves woke up in the middle of the night moaning from a headache. Two hours later, on her third cup of black coffee—which according to her was the universal cure for all ailments—she stood up and a large puddle of amniotic fluid splashed at her feet. Rita called Roy, who happened to be in Los Angeles that week, and soon the four of us were in the waiting room of the maternity ward. Nieves wasn’t having contractions, she only complained of an unbearable headache.
We waited a long while before they finally examined her and discovered that her blood pressure was through the roof. The hours and days that followed melded into a single night of fragmented images, a kaleidoscope of faces, hallways, elevators, blue scrubs and white lab coats, the smell of disinfectant, doctor’s orders, syringes, Roy Cooper’s hand on my arm. Eclampsia, they said. I’d never heard that term before.
“I’m fine, Mom,” Nieves murmured with her eyes closed and a hand on her forehead to block the blinding glare of the overhead lights.
That was the last I saw of her. They wheeled her away, racing toward the double doors and disappearing behind them, leaving us alone in the freezing corridor.
They told us they’d done everything possible to save her, but they weren’t able to stabilize her blood pressure; she had convulsions, lost consciousness, and fell into a coma. They performed a Cesarean section to remove the baby, but Nieves’s heart failed and she died minutes later. I am infinitely sorry, Camilo. I would’ve wanted you to rest for at least a moment on your mother’s breast after being born, to breathe in her smell, absorb her warmth, feel her loving hands and hear her voice saying your name.
How long did we wait? An eternity. At some point a nurse placed the baby in my arms, wrapped in a little white blanket, with a blue cap on its head, tiny, wrinkled, light as a puff of cotton, breathing softly.
“Camilo, Camilo …” I whispered, crying.
“You’re the grandmother, right? Your grandson is fine, but the pediatrician needs to examine him and run some tests,” the woman said.
You had to remain under observation in the newborn nursery, where we could visit you; it would only be a matter of days; you were underweight and jaundiced, nothing serious, conditions that normally resolved on their own, they told us, but … The nurse allowed me to hold you for a few minutes, then took you away.
They brought us apple juice, and Roy gave me a pill that I swallowed without any questions. I suppose it was a tranquilizer. I couldn’t accept what had happened; I didn’t understand their explanations; I asked for Nieves as if I hadn’t heard them say she was dead. Another person, who introduced himself as the hospital chaplain, guided us to a small nondenominational chapel lined with light-colored wood and lit by the sun shining through the stained-glass windows. There, my daughter was laid out so we could say goodbye to her.
Nieves was sleeping. She looked peaceful and more beautiful than ever, her delicate golden skin and her doll-like eyelashes framed by honey-colored hair with white tips. Roy announced that he would fill out the necessary forms and gestured for Rita and the chaplain to follow, so that I could be alone with my daughter. It was in that hospital chapel, my heart broken from sorrow, where I promised Nieves that I would be mother, father, and grandmother to her son—a much better mother than I’d been to her, the selfless and honorable father she’d never had, and the best grandmother in the world. I vowed to live out the years she didn’t get to so that Camilo would never be an orphan, and that I would give him everything and love him so much that he would have enough left over to give to others. All that and much more I told her, sobbing, stumbling over my words, one promise after another, so that she could go in peace.
Telling you all this, Camilo, the stab of pain that sliced through my chest that day comes back in full force; it’s a recurring pain that ambushes me out of nowhere. There can’t be a pain worse than that one, so great it has no name. I know, I know, who am I to complain? My daughter’s death wasn’t a punishment. I’m just a statistic, this is the oldest and most common suffering in human history. Before, no one even expected children to survive, so many died in childhood, and it’s still that way in a large part of the world, but that does nothing to lessen the horror when you’re the mother. I felt like I’d been emptied out from the inside, I was a bloody cavity, I couldn’t breathe, my bones were made of wax, my soul had taken flight. And the world still turned as if nothing had happened: I stand up, take one step then another, find my voice and respond, I haven’t lost my mind, I drink water, my mouth full of sand, my eyes burning, and my little girl stiff, frozen, sculpted in alabaster—my daughter who will never again call me Mom, who left a tremendous imprint in her passage through my life, the memory of her laughter, her grace, her rebelliousness, her suffering.
They let me remain beside Nieves for hours in that naked chapel. The daylight winked out of the windows, someone turned on lights shaped like candles and tried to put a cup of tea into my hands, but I couldn’t hold it. I was with my daughter, the two of us alone, and I was finally able to tell her what I never said when she was alive: how much I loved her, how I’d missed her for years and years. I said goodbye, kissed her, and asked her forgiveness for the sins of withholding and neglect. I thanked her for having existed, promised her that she would live on in my heart and in her son’s, begged her not to leave me, to visit me in dreams, to send me signs and clues, to return incarnated in every beautiful young woman I saw on the street, and to appear to me in spirit during the darkest hours of the night and in the rays of the midday sun. Nieves. Nieves.
Finally Rita and Roy came to get me. They helped me stand and circled me in an embrace; they held me up until I was able to gather myself, sheltered in the warmth of their friendship. We said goodbye to Nieves with a kiss on the forehead, and they guided me to the exit. It was dark outside.
Two days later, while you were still under observation in the hospital, your mother was cremated. You have to understand, Camilo, that I couldn’t leave her body in Los Angeles, so far from her family and her country. I kept her ashes with me until I was able to place the urn in the crypt reserved for our family in the Nahuel cemetery. I go there to visit her.
Once again it was Roy Cooper who came to my aid in the darkest moment of my life. Naturally, in any normal family, I would’ve been the one to take charge of the baby, but Roy pointed out that, by birth, my grandson was a U.S. citizen and it would be a nightmare to get authorization to take him out of the country. In the absence of a mother or father, a judge would determine his fate, a long process, and in the meantime the baby would have to stay in a foster home assigned by the family court. Roy wasn’t even finished explaining the problem before I lost it; the first idea that popped into my head was to steal my grandson from the hospital and disappear with him. Undoubtedly, Julián Bravo could help me smuggle a baby to the southern end of the world, his means of skirting the law were endless.
“That won’t be necessary. We’ll register Camilo as my son,” Roy interrupted.
“What are you saying?”
“Let’s pretend I had a brief affair with Nieves. I recognize my paternity and accept the economic responsibility. The boy won’t bear my last name, in line with the mother’s express wishes. She wanted him to be named Camilo Del Valle, because she didn’t want to use the last name Bravo. Do you understand?”
“No.”
“I can decide what happens to the baby because I’m supposedly the father. I can grant custody to his grandmother and authorize her to take him back to her country. Forget about Julián Bravo.”
“Tell me the truth, Roy: Are you Camilo’s father?”
“No, woman, good God! How could you think I’d ever sleep with Nieves?”
“But, Roy, then why …”
“Didn’t I tell you I earn my living solving other people’s problems? This is just one more.”
That’s how it happened, Camilo. Roy Cooper was listed as your father on your birth certificate, but of course he isn’t your dad. He took care of your mother in the last months of her life and lent his name to this ruse out of affection for her and for me. His plan worked and I was able to take you out of the United States without any trouble, and then I registered you here, which is why you have dual citizenship.
Seven days after your birth, they finally released you from the hospital and I walked out of there with you in my arms. You’d recovered from the jaundice that had made you as yellow as an egg yolk, and your weight had improved. They told me that you weren’t premature, even though you looked like it. You were very little and ugly—bald, pale, with big ears, and mute—you barely moved and didn’t cry.
“This little mouse needs sunshine and Latin music, to make him want to live a little,” Roy joked, but it was good advice.
I moved into Rita’s house with you, because you weren’t ready for travel, and I started the job of fattening you up. At first you wouldn’t eat and I got hysterical trying to force the bottle on you, but Rita had the idea to give you milk through a medicine dropper. What a saint. She spent hours at it.
And your grandfather Julián? What role did he have in all this? I called him and explained what had happened; it would’ve been impossible to hide it from him. For the first time in the many years I’d known him I heard him sob. He cried over his beloved daughter for a long time, unable to speak, and when he did it wasn’t to ask for details, but to offer help: His grandson would want for nothing as long as he was alive, he promised. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I would be taking custody of the baby and that I didn’t need his help. I simply explained how Nieves had lived after escaping the Utah clinic and the part that Roy Cooper had played.
“Cooper? What does Cooper have to do with my daughter?”
“Nieves called him. He acted like a father to her.”
“I’m Nieves’s father!”
“I don’t know what happened between you and Nieves, but she didn’t want you to know where she was or that she was pregnant.”
“I would have helped her.”
“I can only tell you what happened in the final months of her life. She was at peace, free of drugs, well cared for by our Mexican friend, and the boy is healthy. If you want to see him, you can come to Los Angeles. As soon as I can, I’m taking him home. We’ll raise him there among all of us.”
Your grandfather couldn’t travel to Los Angeles, so he met you a few months later in Sacramento. But he sent Roy Cooper a check and a thank-you note. Roy, livid, tore up the check.
Between the medicine dropper, the sunshine, and the rancheras, joropos, and rumbas on the radio, the little mouse survived, and six weeks later we said goodbye to Roy Cooper and Rita Linares, who had done so much for us, and traveled back home. A baby is a full-time job; it saps your energy, sleep, and mental health. It was a serious inconvenience for a woman of fifty-two, as I was then, but you restored my youth. I fell in love with you, Camilo, which helped me face the challenge of raising a child and transformed my grief over the loss of your mother into a celebration of my grandson’s life.
18
Facunda told me about how the agrarian reforms had expropriated several of the farms surrounding Santa Clara, such as the Moreau lands, though they hadn’t affected the Schmidt-Englers. My former father-in-law decided that he wasn’t going to sell his products at the official price imposed by the government, and he closed down his dairy and cheese factory. The cows vanished overnight; I think they took them across the border, where they could be kept until the country returned to normal.
Ever more concerning rumors were circulating about Colonia Esperanza. A journalist had begun to investigate, calling it an enclave of foreigners who lived beyond the law and were a threat to national security, but no one seemed to pay much attention. The settlers had not committed any proven crime, and they earned the respect of their neighbors by opening a small clinic to treat the locals for free and regularly donating crates of produce to the church to be distributed among the poorest families.
“They’re untouchable; they’re protected by the military. The special forces are trained there,” Julián told me on one of his visits.
I discovered that he was piloting unregistered private flights to Colonia. The army was planning to build a runway there, but in the meantime Julián’s seaplane could land on the lake. I asked him what he was transporting for those strange people, but he didn’t answer.
Juan Martín was close to graduating from college and had been elected president of the students’ association. He walked around wearing a poncho, with long hair and a shaggy beard, as was the style among the progressive youths. He often appeared on television as student representative, and although his ideas were revolutionary, his tone was conciliatory. He warned of the dangers of the opposition’s Fascist activities, but he also denounced the tactics employed by far left groups, which did as much damage as the right. That earned him enemies within his own ranks. Everyone lived on the extreme ends of political passion; they didn’t want to hear reasonable calls for dialogue or negotiation.
Eleven months after your birth, a military coup overthrew the government; it was a bloodbath, just as Julián Bravo had predicted. His trips to our country became so frequent it was as if he’d moved here. He was very busy with government business, as he informed me, without clarifying what that business was. We didn’t see each other often, because I was settled with you in Sacramento and he spent most of his time in the capital. When he came to the south he rarely even let me know.
The coup was carried out like a meticulous military operation. The armed forces and the police rebelled at dawn one Tuesday in spring, and by noon they’d bombarded the presidential palace, the president was dead, and the country was under military command. Repression began immediately. There was no resistance in Sacramento, quite the opposite: The people I knew applauded from their balconies because they’d spent three years waiting for those heroic soldiers to save the nation from the hypothetical Communist dictatorship. Martial law went into effect anyway. The soldiers were dressed for war in camouflage, their faces painted like Apaches from the movies so they couldn’t be identified, and the security forces patrolled the city in black cars. Helicopters buzzed overhead like botflies, heavy tanks and trucks filed past, scarring the asphalt and scattering the stray dogs that roamed the streets. We heard police sirens, gunshots, and explosions. No one was allowed out; all travel by air, train, and bus was suspended; and checkpoints were set up along the highways to catch the fleeing subversives, terrorists, and guerrillas. It wasn’t the first time that we’d heard mention of those enemies of the state: The right-wing media had warned they were Soviet agents, preparing for an armed revolution with long lists of people to execute.
Communication was difficult. I couldn’t get in touch with Juan Martín, who was in the capital, or even with José Antonio, who lived a few blocks away. Julián, on the other hand, showed up out of nowhere, when I thought he was in Miami, and announced that he had no trouble getting around; he had permission to circulate because he provided essential services to the military junta in power.
“Follow the instructions they give you on television, Violeta. Stay home; don’t go to the office until things calm down. If you need me, leave a message at the hotel.”
The first three days the country was in total lockdown, no one could leave their home without a special permit or, in the case of a serious emergency, waving a white handkerchief. The soldiers, inflamed, pushed people through the streets and herded them onto military trucks using the butts of their rifles, taking them to some unknown destination. They lit bonfires in the plazas and burned books, documents, and voter registrations, because democracy had been suspended until further notice. All political parties and Congress recessed indefinitely, and the press was censured. Gatherings of more than six people were prohibited, but in many clubs and hotels, even the Hotel Bavaria, people got together to drink champagne and sing the national anthem. I’m referring to the people of means who had been eagerly awaiting the military coup, especially the large landholders in the region, who hoped to recover their property, which was confiscated by the agrarian reform. The supporters of the Socialist government, laborers and farmworkers, students and poor people in general, were holed up in silence, according to Julián Bravo. The television showed the four generals standing between the flag and the national shield, giving orders to the citizens, followed by Disney cartoons. Rumors circulated with a hurricane force, but they were contradictory and impossible to confirm. I locked myself inside my home, as Julián had ordered me to do. I was very busy with you, my grandson, already crawling around every corner of the house, sticking your fingers in the power outlets, eating dirt and worms. I assumed that things would soon be back to normal.
Three days later, when lockdown was lifted for a few hours, Miss Taylor came to see me with the pretext of bringing powdered milk for the baby, which we hadn’t been able to get for several months. Suddenly the store shelves were fully stocked with items that had been scarce before. We sat in the living room to drink my former governess’s favorite Darjeeling tea, and she explained the real reason for her visit.
“They raided the university in the capital, Violeta. They arrested professors and students, especially from the journalism and sociology departments. They say the walls of the college are splattered with blood.”
“Juan Martín!” I shouted, my teacup crashing to the floor.
“Your son is on the blacklist. He’s been ordered to turn himself in at any police station and they’re looking for him. As president of the students’ association, he’s at the top of their list.”
