Short War, page 8
“They report on Party policy,” he said. “Different.”
Nico crossed his arms. “How do you know?”
“I don’t.”
Across the field, Caro emerged from the trees, small and ornament-bright in her red windbreaker. She waved at Gabriel, then headed for the lunch shed. He recognized his cue to follow, but Nico was saying, “So, what: you just want them to be independent?”
“I want them to be not like my dad.”
Nico looked startled, which made Gabriel’s stomach lurch. He shouldn’t have said that. Hadn’t meant to. The carrot fronds beside him rustled; a sparrow hopped between them, eager-eyed. Gabriel lowered his knees to the packed red dirt and waited for Nico to ask, but his friend only studied him, chewing his bottom lip.
Eventually, Nico said, “What’s wrong with your dad?”
Gabriel shut his eyes. The light nudged itself through his lids. He wanted to tell Nico that his dad was a CIA propagandist. He was sick of carrying this knowledge around by himself. Sick, too, of protecting his father. He had little will to be a good son.
“He could be a lot worse,” Nico suggested.
“No, he couldn’t,” Gabriel said, quickly and bitterly. “He couldn’t.”
Now Nico looked truly worried. “Why?”
“He works with the CIA.”
Nico’s mouth dropped open. Gabriel waited for relief, which did not arrive. He had overstated the situation. Made his dad sound like a spy.
“You’re not fucking with me,” Nico said.
Gabriel pinched a hard clump of dirt till it burst. “I wish.”
“He’s not a reporter?”
“He is, but a corrupt one. I think he lets them tell him what to write.”
Nico tugged a carrot from the dirt. It swung from his fingers, lank roots dangling like unbrushed hair. “Like Claudio says.”
“Pretty much.”
“Fuck.” Nico tossed the carrot into a waiting crate. “That’s not good.”
“Very bad,” Gabriel agreed.
“I won’t tell anyone.”
“You can’t.”
“I won’t even tell you.”
Gabriel made himself laugh. “Wouldn’t want me to find out.”
“Exactly.” Nico mimed zipping his mouth shut. “It’ll be like I don’t know.”
Gabriel flopped on his back in the dirt. Streaky clouds swirled above him. He felt worse than before. His throat ached. His mind seemed as flat and dull as the winter sky. He wondered vacantly if Andrés had been comforted by telling the secret of Dr. Lucas’s coming flight to Cuba. Gabriel doubted it. Besides, how could he compare the two situations? Andrés had to reckon with the fact that his dad was in danger. Gabriel had to keep his dad out of it.
“Hey,” he said, not sitting up. “Nico.”
“Gabriel.”
“What would you do?”
“What would I do?”
“If it was your dad.”
Nico barely hesitated. “I wouldn’t report him, if that’s what you’re asking.”
Gabriel levered himself from the ground. Nico had four carrots in his right fist. One was forked at the bottom; another appeared to have its legs crossed, like a little kid desperate to pee. “I hate carrots,” Gabriel announced. “I hate Trabajo Voluntario.”
His friend’s mouth twitched. “No shit.”
“You knew?”
“You should see yourself in the van.” Nico slid his jaw out and collapsed his back into an imitation of Gabriel’s slouch.
Despite himself, Gabriel laughed. He spotted Caro tramping back from the shed, hair whipping about her. In the next row, the three antisocial brothers who rounded out their brigade picked while standing, stooping at the waist like hinged telescopes. Gabriel lifted his chin at them. “That can’t be comfortable.”
“No,” Nico agreed. “You’d hate picking vegetables even more if you did it like that.”
Caro was coming closer. Gabriel tipped his head in her direction. “Don’t tell her I hate manual labor.”
“Better do some, then.”
“Fine.” Gabriel reached for his trowel. “Race you to the end of the row.”
* * *
AFTER THE SECOND WEEK OF TRABAJO VOLUNTARIO, Gabriel and Caro subjected themselves to a twin ordeal: lunch with her parents Saturday, lunch with his Sunday. The idea was to gain their trust in order to exploit it, but within fifteen minutes of entering the Ravests’ chilly apartment, Gabriel understood that it would be impossible for him to win Caro’s mom over. She watched him with the measured suspicion of a downtown cop. Even as she refilled his Coke, passed him dishes of salted peanuts and green olives, and ushered him into the dining room, Gabriel felt thoroughly unwelcome.
He recognized that he could be projecting. Also, he had no idea how to charm adults. It had never occurred to him that he’d need to try. He did achieve some light bickering about Colo-Colo’s Copa Libertadores performance with Caro’s father, a man so quiet he seemed distant even when he was sitting directly beside Gabriel, but once that fizzled, everyone seemed at a loss. Caro kept twisting her hair. Her mother asked Gabriel a battery of questions, but none that lent themselves to answers longer than a sentence. It was tough to elaborate on not having siblings, or not liking his school, or not knowing what job he wanted someday.
The meal itself was not on his side. Caro’s mom had made trout with lemon. It was delicious, but it was also very full of translucent bones. Gabriel kept failing to notice them, which meant he kept having to spit fish ribs into his napkin. He had the strong suspicion that the dish was a table-manners test. If it was, he knew he had failed.
After dessert, Caro went unbidden to the kitchen, returning with a thermal carafe of hot water and a brown jar of Nescafé. Her mother produced four floral china cups from the sideboard, asking, “Gabriel, how many scoops?”
“Two, please,” he said, mindful of instant coffee’s scarcity.
She narrowed her eyes. “Two?”
“Yes, please.”
“So you like watery coffee?”
“Ma,” Caro interceded. “Let him drink it how he wants.”
“I’d like your boyfriend to drink his coffee how he wants it,” her mother said, sinking a spoon into the coffee crystals. Pope Paul VI glared from a framed magazine cover behind her. His cassock fluttered; his crucifix reflected the sun, or the camera’s flash. Señora Ravest went on: “Instead of asking me to make it weak because he thinks we can’t afford more Nescafé.”
Gabriel couldn’t recover from that. No chance. He gulped his thin coffee, sick with shame, and fled the moment he could. On the riverbank that evening, he informed Nico that the lunch had been an unqualified and possibly unprecedented disaster and that he’d probably have to go into hiding, since there was no imaginable way he could live it down.
Nico thumped his back, then handed him a flask. “What’d you expect? To have fun?”
Gabriel drank, wincing at the alcohol’s burn. The settlement across the Mapocho shone with lantern light. He picked burs from his socks with his free hand. “How’d it go when you met Alejandra’s parents?” he asked.
Nico shrugged. “I knew them already.”
“So it went well?”
“No.”
They both laughed. Gabriel knew Alejandra’s parents too. Her mother had a habit of popping her head out the window and asking Andrés, Nico, and Gabriel to play backyard soccer more quietly. Alejandra’s father, Caro’s uncle, captained a merchant marine ship, and, according to Caro, imposed maritime order during the months he spent at home. Knowing this made Gabriel feel sorry for both Alejandra and her mother, which he found disorienting. Alejandra wasn’t a person who invited pity.
“Don’t worry,” Nico said, reclaiming his flask. “Doesn’t matter how bad meeting her parents was. Introducing her to yours will be worse.”
Nico was right. Ray and Vera insisted on taking Caro to the Polo Club, where she had never been. It took Gabriel ten minutes to explain to his mother that it was not, in fact, astonishing that Caro had lived most of her life in Vitacura without entering the club’s dining room. It was completely normal, and could Vera please just not make a big deal?
Gabriel hoped Caro would enjoy the Polo Club more than he did. It seemed possible. She’d get a great meal and great people-watching, and she liked the challenge of easing herself into unfamiliar settings. He had seen her do it on farms, in Claudio’s moldy house, at the May Day march. He told himself the Polo Club would be no different. She might even think it was fun.
He released that hope within a minute of walking Caro through the club’s massive wood doors. She seemed to shrink beneath its vaulted ceiling. She bit her lips and held herself taut as the maître d’ escorted them to a table. Seated, she unfanned her starched maroon napkin and sat on the edge of her gilt chair, glancing at the dining room’s high brown beams and painted faux-heraldic shields. The walls were heavy with framed pictures of members past, a legion of black-and-white white men holding oars and rackets, mallets and clubs.
Gabriel had the brief, terrible thought that if Caro were mestiza—if she were even the slightest bit brown—this meal would be a crisis just by virtue of its location. As it was, the situation didn’t look good. His father had ordered a double scotch before sitting down, which sent his mother into a fit of silent ring-spinning. Caro couldn’t stop staring at the buffet, which meant Gabriel couldn’t either. It no longer looked like a treat to him. It looked, now, like an impossibility. How could it be that in Chile, in June 1973, when the average bread line stretched two blocks and a sweet potato cost more than a pack of cigarettes, the Polo Club could have a buffet?
The chafing dishes were full and sparkled with Sterno and silver polish. Their domed hoods winked open, displaying sliced grayish roast beef, herb-crusted chicken breasts, scalloped potatoes, roasted potatoes, shoestring fries, cubed zucchini, and more little golden cups of individual quiche than any club members could eat. The excess was both unconscionable and confusing. How could an aboveboard, tax-paying business get this many eggs? This much beef? Did some club member fly it personally in from his not-yet-expropriated ranch in the south?
If Gabriel had been alone with his parents, he might have voiced his questions. As it was, he filled his plate. How could he not, given the hungry wonder on Caro’s face? She seemed otherwise miserable. He refused to increase her discomfort. Instead, he trailed her down the buffet, taking exactly what she took. At the table’s end, he looked up to see that somehow the afternoon had gotten worse: the maître d’ was leading Carlos Aldunante and his parents into the room.
Gabriel tried closing his eyes. Aldunante was still there when he opened them. He tried praying, but God neglected to prove His existence by airlifting Aldunante from the room. Instead, Aldunante sat and shook out his napkin, looking delighted to be there.
“Can we sit back down?” Caro asked. “People are looking at us.”
He pointed with his chin at Aldunante. “See that kid? The ferret-looking one? He goes to my school.”
“So?”
“So, nobody at San Pedro Nolasco knows about Trabajo Voluntario. I told them I was going to the United States.”
“Will he tell?”
Gabriel nodded. “He’s a fascist. He hates me.”
Caro balanced her plate in one hand and tucked her hair behind her ears with the other. “Aren’t most people here fascists?”
“Yeah, but not like him. He’s an actual Nazi. In Patria y Libertad and everything. A couple weeks ago he announced to our whole class that the Holocaust didn’t happen.”
Her eyes narrowed. “You didn’t tell me that.”
“I didn’t want—” Gabriel sighed. He appreciated the horror in Caro’s expression, but what could he say? I didn’t want you to imagine me getting Jew-baited? It was humiliating enough to have to deal with Aldunante. Now that he’d told her, he knew his instinct had been right: Caro knowing about it made him feel worse.
She stepped closer. For the first time since their arrival, her shoulders dropped to their usual height. Behind her, the Polo Club gleamed the dull gleam of brass and mahogany, feather dusters and floor wax. “Didn’t want what?”
“To make you think about him. He doesn’t deserve it.”
“What’s his name?”
“Carlos Aldunante.”
“Carlos Aldunante,” Caro repeated. A new expression crossed her face, eclipsing the discomfort that had set in when they entered the club. Gabriel couldn’t identify it. Only once she had led him back to his parents’ table, set her plate down, and directed herself briskly across the dining room did Gabriel, trailing in her wake, realize that the look had been malice.
Aldunante was alone at his table; his parents had gone to the bar. His eyes lit up when he saw Gabriel and Caro approaching. “Lazris!” he called. “I didn’t know you were in town. And I didn’t know they let Jews in here.”
Caro raked a hand through her hair. “You must be Carlos.”
“I am.”
“I go to Santa Úrsula. I’ve heard all about you.” She lingered on the “all,” spinning and stretching the word. Gabriel had never heard her use a tone this nakedly flirtatious. It was like listening to a different girl.
“You have?” Aldunante asked.
“Of course! You’re famous.” She paused. “For having the smallest dick in Vitacura.”
Gabriel burst out laughing. His girlfriend was a genius. He wished he had Ítalo’s camera. Aldunante’s horrified face should be preserved in its full glory till the end of time.
“All the girls talk about it,” Caro continued. Her voice was matter-of-fact now. “They say scientists are going to study it after you die. But, you know, better tiny than circumcised. Right?”
Aldunante didn’t respond. Gabriel felt as if he were levitating. Victory glowed in his chest. “Don’t tell anyone you saw me,” he said. It was the toughest he had ever sounded in Spanish—or possibly in any language, including the private mix of his own mind. “And I won’t tell anyone at school about this.”
As he and Caro crossed the dining room, he told her, “I was wishing I hadn’t let my parents drag us here. Not anymore.”
She rewarded him with a kiss. “I enjoyed that.”
“So did I.”
At the Lazrises’ table, Gabriel’s father was eating already, which was a major violation of family etiquette. Gabriel had been trained to not even touch his fork until everyone was seated. His mother asked, in her awful Spanish, “Who was that?”
“A classmate of mine,” Gabriel said in English.
His mom showed only marginal relief at switching languages. “Who you absolutely had to go see?”
He grinned; he couldn’t help it. Beside him, Caro cut a careful square of roast beef, looking highly pleased with herself. “I’m sorry,” Gabriel said, doing his best to sound, if not sincere, at least meek. “I promise, we’re all yours now.”
Gabriel’s delight got him comfortably through the first half of the meal. His father, having wolfed two chicken paillards, slowed down and began asking Caro questions. He spoke Spanish but couldn’t understand her replies. Caro, in turn, did her best with her Santa Úrsula English, but her vocabulary was too limited for her efforts to make much difference. Gabriel still had to relay to his parents that she was an only child; her mother was a baker, her father a high school teacher; she wasn’t a fully subscribed Communist but was seriously contemplating joining the Party; she was worried about civil war, yes; no, she didn’t—“Mom! Why would you ask that?”—want to move to the United States when she grew up, but she did want to leave Santiago.
“Really?” Gabriel said, aside. “I didn’t know that.”
Caro nodded. In her regular Spanish, she said, “Not necessarily for my whole life, but I like the idea of living in different parts of Chile. The mountains, the desert.” She shrugged. “I know a lot of people want to live abroad, but I’d rather figure out what part of my own country I like best.”
Ray cleared his throat. “What was that?”
“Caro was telling me she wants to live in other parts of Chile.”
“Very admirable.” Ray reached for his drink, which was his third. He had a green fleck of parsley in his teeth. “Tell her I like to see young people taking an interest in their native country.”
Gabriel looked at his mother, who looked at the chicken bones on her plate. He was tempted to snatch and drain her full wineglass. Also to march his dad across the room to Aldunante, saying, You wish I were more patriotic? Ask Carlos here about patriotism. Ask him about Patria y Libertad. Maybe you’d like him to be your kid.
He glanced behind him to see Aldunante hunched over his plate, curled into himself like a snail. His parents visibly paid him no mind. Pity crept into Gabriel’s chest, unpleasant and unwelcome. Aldunante deserved to be mocked and ignored. Deserved worse. He, Gabriel, wasn’t going to wreck Caro’s gift to him by feeling guilty about it.
“Gabriel,” his dad snapped. “I told you to translate.”
“Eat fast,” Gabriel told Caro in Spanish. “My dad’s going to start a fight.”
“What was that?” Ray asked.
“Nothing.”
“Don’t lie.”
Gabriel lifted his hands in fake surrender. “I was translating for you.”
“I don’t think so.” His dad’s face turned the high lilac of anger mixing with alcohol. He reached for his scotch glass, and Gabriel’s mother, as if killing a fly, swatted his hand to his lap.
Ray twisted to face her. “Vera.”
“Yes?”
“Am I a child?”
She squared her narrow shoulders. “Apparently.”
Gabriel heard his own breath catch. Beside him, Caro set down her fork. He tried and failed to speak. What could he say? He was so accustomed to inserting himself into his parents’ arguments, or starting new arguments to derail theirs. His mother had never, in his memory, performed the same service for him. Was this her backward way of making Caro feel comfortable? Or was he watching his mother’s marital patience finally run out?
