“Pasaporte.” The uniformed customs officer holds out his hand. I can’t tell how old he is because of his military cap and lack of a mustache or beard, but his hand is callused and wrinkled. His other hand rests on the automatic pistol in his holster. I hand him my dark red Chilean passport and the notarized permission forms, which I already showed the soldier at the immigration window. “Cristina Isabel Aguilar Fuentes,” the officer reads. “¿Nombre de padre?”
“Marcelo Leonardo Aguilar Gaetani.”
“Marcelo Leonardo Aguilar Gaetani.” The officer’s lip curls into a sneer as he says, “alias Nino.”
I nod slowly. The name Papá used when he worked underground is no secret to the dictator’s people now. After all, Papá calls his daily radio show Oye, Nino. And my brother said it’s one of the most popular talk shows in the country.
“¿Madre?”
“María Victoria.” I hesitate, because her name changed only two days ago. “Fuentes Rubio . . . de Feldman.” I never liked the de part, which makes it sound like women are the property of their husbands.
He switches to heavily accented English. “What is the purpose of your trip?”
“Visiting my father. My parents are divorced.”
I shift from one foot to the other. People on the lines next to me pass straight through while the guy examines my passport and the letters from my parents that prove I’m not a runaway or a sex slave. Then he uses a two-way radio to call someone else.
Sweat tickles my neck and chest, though my hands are ice-cold. I remind myself to be careful and say as little as possible. He is still in power—Pinochet, the dictator who led a violent military coup that brought down our elected president just three months after I was born. Unlike Daniel, I didn’t know what it was like to live in a democracy until I moved to Wisconsin.
People think a little kid doesn’t notice the difference, but I did. Even if I didn’t know who told the tanks and soldiers to be there, it was hard to miss them. A bunch of times, I saw soldiers—like the one in front of me right now—beat people up in the street. Daniel would try to cover my eyes while Mamá would grab Papá’s arms and beg—think of your kids, Chelo—so he wouldn’t run to help the people. Daniel saw Papá get beaten and arrested in our apartment in Santiago while I was asleep. It’s not something my brother talks about, but before he left for college, his bedroom and mine shared a wall, and whenever he cranked up his music in the middle of the night, I knew he was thinking about it.
And when I think about what they did to Papá in that prison—torturing him so he’d name his sources and associates, beating him into a coma when he refused, sticking him into solitary confinement, even though the left half of his body didn’t work. . . . It’s like our whole family got twisted around this man with his military uniform, his gray mustache, and his pompous smile.
Two more men show up. One looks young and carries a machine gun. The other one has wrinkles around his eyes and a gray mustache clipped the same way as the general’s. He wears a special uniform.
“Open the bag,” the man in the special uniform says. He has almost no accent in English.
I unzip my duffel. The man paws through my stuff and pulls out the plastic bag with the medicine my mother sent for Papá. After exchanging smiles and nods with the customs official that make my insides clench, he takes out the pill bottles one by one. He and the customs official count them out, all twenty-five of them, and examine their labels. He tells the other two to wait while he gets a camera.
Sweat drips down my back. My knees go weak.
I’m screwed. How do I get the next plane home?
The special uniform guy returns with a Polaroid camera. “Why are you bringing all these pills in?” he barks. “Are you planning to sell them?” The man with the machine gun writes something in a small note pad, using the gun’s stock as his surface.
“They’re for my father. The prescription’s there, too.”
The customs officer takes a piece of paper from the bag. “Here it is.” He hands the prescription to the guy with the camera, who I guess is his boss.
“What does he need them for?” the boss asks me in English.
I stare at my sneakers and mumble, “He has seizures.”
Because of what you people did to him. This I cannot say out loud. Rule number one: no discussing politics with anyone besides Papá, Tía Ileana, and their friends. Even though Papá’s side won the plebiscite, the election to decide whether or not Pinochet would rule for another ten years, the general is still around until next March and a lot of his supporters are mad that they lost.
Daniel said I’d be safe if I followed this rule. I’m not so sure. A month ago I overheard Mamá on the phone, arguing with Papá about a musician who got beaten up in the street. The government media called it a drug deal gone bad. Papá thought it was a political attack and wanted to investigate, but Mamá told him to let it go until after my visit.
The customs official steps toward his boss and says in hurried Spanish, “I need a picture of his kid, too.”
I step backward and cover my face. Why?
“Hands at your sides, please,” the boss orders in English. He gives the customs official a quick glance, then takes one photo of me standing alone and one holding the pill bottles and the prescription. Like I’m a mule for a drug cartel. And after sixteen hours on three separate planes and zero sleep, I wonder if I look like those grim-faced, glassy-eyed people in police mug shots. The boss shakes the two photos dry, but I don’t get to see them.
The customs guy returns the bottles to my bag and hands me my passport. “Have a nice trip . . . Cristina,” he says. His smirk makes me shiver.
After I escape the evil threesome, the only one waiting for me in the airport lobby is my aunt. She wears a dark blue business suit and a pinstriped shirt, as if she’s on her way to the office.
“¿Donde está mi papá?” I ask. My voice trembles.
“He had to go to work early, amorcita. But he promised he’ll come home to eat after his show.” She kisses me on both cheeks, then takes a few steps backward. “I can’t believe how much you’ve grown.”
“You’re still taller,” I say.
“You grew out your hair, too. It looks nice.”
I push my airplane-matted hair back from my face, twist it around my finger, and tuck it under the hood of my sweatshirt.
Tía Ileana lifts my duffel over her shoulder and starts toward the exit. She’s six years older than my father, which makes her forty-seven, but she doesn’t look much different from when I saw her last. She’s cut her hair short, like my brother’s, but added red highlights. She wears gold hoop earrings and a stud at the top of her left ear. Her face is smooth, except for a few wrinkles around her eyes.
She asks me about my flight. I don’t answer, chewing on my disappointment instead. Now I have to wait for la comida, the main meal of the day. That’s not for another four hours.
Tía Ileana keeps looking at me, so I finally say, “They showed two movies. And I saw the sun rise over Lima.” Though I worried that my Spanish would be rusty, I have no problem finding the right words—or understanding everything my aunt says to me.
“That must have been beautiful.” She doesn’t ask me which movies I watched, so I assume she’s not a movie person.
Outside, it’s a clear day, though the sky has a purple tint and my eyes sting after a few minutes.
Tía Ileana puts her free arm around my shoulders. “Smog bothering you?” she asks.
“A little.”
“It’s bad in winter. A lot worse than when you lived here.”
The aromas of my childhood come back to me. Wood smoke. Exhaust fumes. Dirt and vegetation. Palm trees border the parking lot, blue-green fronds spreading out from their smooth trunks like sparklers. Pollution aside, it feels more like a damp early fall at home, with leaves still on trees, sun heating the pavement, and just a bite of cold in each wind gust. By the time we reach her little gray car at the back end of the lot, I’m overheated in my sweatshirt.
We get in the car. I slam the door. “I didn’t want to say anything in the airport, but the customs people treated me like a narcotraficante.”
“They give everyone a hard time.” Tía Ileana pats my knee, like I’m still the little kid who left years ago. Where the palm trees end, two khaki-and-olive-uniformed soldiers with machine guns guard a rusted white metal gate.
“A bunch of people went through on the other lines while they searched my bag. I thought they were going to take the medicine away.”
“They didn’t, did they?” There’s a trace of panic in my aunt’s voice. I shake my head.
The road from the airport takes us through a neighborhood of shanties with tin roofs and walls of scrap wood and metal, each shanty connected to the other in a crooked three-dimensional patchwork. Graffiti covers many of the walls, mostly initials in red and black. Tía Ileana says the graffiti stands for the various political parties that have come together in opposition to Pinochet’s candidates in the upcoming October election.
When we stop at a traffic light, I point to a wall with at least three different party tags, a hammer and sickle, and stenciled portraits of Che Guevara in red, black, blue, and green. They look like the picture of Che that we wear on T-shirts at home. My T-shirt has him in black on an olive green background, but Mamá wouldn’t let me pack it.
“Aren’t these people afraid of getting arrested?” I ask.
“Not anymore.” My aunt turns to face me. “All the parties are legal now, and people can’t be arrested for taking part in the campaign.”
“Really?”
“Yes. I know it’s hard to believe, amorcita. But your father and a lot of other people worked hard to make it happen.”
She smiles. I sure hope she’s right, especially since she’s the one Mamá is counting on to watch out for me.
The light changes, and Tía Ileana drives past more shanties. Some blocks have identical one-story brick houses with sturdier corrugated metal roofs. Most of these look new and don’t have graffiti on the walls, or if they do, it’s a different set of letters. According to my aunt, they’re for the Alliance whose presidential candidate likes the dictator. I guess that’s how the people got the better houses. Ragged children play in ditches beside the road, and packs of scrawny dogs wander through the scrub. The kids and the dogs ignore each other. A military jeep passing in the other direction ignores the kids skipping school.
I remember the poblaciones, shantytowns, and the kids who never went to school or who begged for money in front of the shopping centers and cafés where my mamá and abuelos used to take me. People shouldn’t have to live like that, Papá used to say—words that could get a person beaten up and arrested on the street or in their home in those days.
Smog hides the mountaintops, but I see two large hills in the middle of the city and a lot of modern high-rise buildings near one of them.
I point to the tallest of the steel-and-glass buildings. “Is this one new?”
“Brand-new. The one under construction will be a condominium.” The booms of a pair of cranes kiss an unfinished building’s steel frame—twelve—fifteen stories high.
Even the highways are modern, just like the ones in Chicago or Milwaukee, but most of the cars and buses here are a lot older. Their tailpipes spew smoke.
“This might look more like Madison, from what your father says.” Exiting the highway, my aunt drives along tree-lined streets through a neighborhood of tidy one- and two-story brick and stucco houses, with a few small apartment buildings. The streets are clean, the yards have trees and flowers, and many of the houses are painted in delicious pastels—blue, green, pink, and yellow. It does look like home, except the houses are closer together, and many, even in this nice neighborhood, have bars on the windows or walls and gates around them.
“Love the colors. Is this where you guys live?” I ask. The apartment building where we lived before Papá’s arrest was nowhere near this nice.
“No, but here’s where I used to live before your father bought his place.” My aunt waves her hand toward a modern four-story building with lots of balconies.
“I was supposed to be fixing up a house.”
“Your mother said something about it.”
“Yeah, Evan, my stepfather—”
“Don’t mention him to your father.” Tía Ileana’s voice is hushed.
“I’m not that dumb.” I push my hair from my face. “We’re doing a good deed by saving an old house and making the neighborhood nicer.”
“We tear down the old houses when we can,” Tía Ileana says. “And build office and apartment towers to take their place.”
I repeat my stepfather’s words. “There’s history in an old house. Once it’s gone, you never get it back.”
“I like that.” She taps the steering wheel. “But the city’s growing, and the new buildings are safer in earthquakes.”
She turns onto a one-way street so narrow that at home it would be considered an alleyway. She stops in the middle of a block of split-level stucco duplexes with shingle roofs. I’m surprised because most houses here seem to have either corrugated metal or orange terra-cotta roofs.
“This is it,” she says. She takes a gray transmitter from the glove box and opens the automatic gate and garage door for the house on the left side. Metal numbers on a low cement wall read 52-50, and the wrought-iron fence above the wall matches the design and height of the automatic gate. Both sides of the duplex are painted white.
“Bright blue,” I say.
“What?” She cuts the engine.
“We should paint the house bright blue. Like in that other neighborhood.” I think of Petra’s plan to turn our house in Madison into an upside-down eggplant.
Tía Ileana laughs. “Are you a bright blue person?”
“Actually, red’s my favorite color, but I haven’t seen a house painted red so far. Maybe it’s against the law. You know, troublemakers’ color.”
“Troublemaker,” she repeats with a smile. “That was the one thing your father and mother agreed on about you.” The way she says it makes me think she’s cool with the way I am, but then her smile fades. She hits the button to close the garage door. “Your father wanted white.”
Inside, Tía Ileana introduces me to Graciela, who cleans the house and cooks the midday meal. Graciela is short, with a round face and salt-and-pepper hair in a single braid almost to her waist. She gives me a big hug. “Your father is so happy you’re here,” she says in Spanish, but with a different accent, like she’s from another part of the country.
I’m too stunned to answer. We never had a housekeeper or nanny growing up, except for the eight months we lived with Mamá’s family after Papá’s arrest. Almost no one has them in Wisconsin—at least no one over the age of two because all the little kids go to preschool. But I remember my abuelos offering to pay for a nana when Papá drove the taxi, and Mamá telling them we didn’t need one because our apartment was too small and Daniel looked out for me. Years later, Daniel told me our parents didn’t want anyone coming in and finding out that Papá worked for the resistance.
After we carry my stuff upstairs, Tía Ileana lifts the duffel onto a wooden trunk at the foot of my new bed. I stare at the brightly colored three-dimensional tapestries that decorate my walls. Slightly larger than a picture book, each one has tiny dolls and scraps of fabric in the shape of animals sewn into scenes of the countryside and the mountains.
“I thought you guys didn’t believe in servants,” I say to my aunt as soon as Graciela goes downstairs.
“Your father believes in equality. No masters, no servants. So Graciela may cook and keep the house clean, but she and her husband are also people he worked with underground.” Tía Ileana unzips the duffel. “We all agreed it was the best way to go, with both of us working and him not being able to do a lot of things for himself.”
Flooding into my mind is an image of a twisted man with stubble and stringy hair. One of his arms dangles useless, but the other can lash out in an instant.
Then the fog of sixteen hours on an airplane descends upon me. I run the toe of my sneaker along the shiny hardwood floor, thinking that I might fall asleep standing up while Tía Ileana unpacks for me. A couple of open-mouthed yawns, and she gets the message.