Surviving Santiago (9 page)

“Hey, Pablo and Víctor. How are you?” I murmur in English but get no answer. “Don't look, okay. Wish I didn't have to look at him, either.”

When Papá is done, I help him inside. Figuring his crooked and broken teeth won't rot out any further from
one night of not being brushed, I move the papers from the daybed in his office, lay him down, and pull a blanket over him. He shivers, so I bring a second blanket from the living room. “Fine, set an alarm for seven thirty,” is the last thing he says to me. After that, he mumbles to himself, but I can't make out a single word.

While I pick up the cans and bottle from the living room, I think of Frankie, of the way he held me when I was crying at the movie. Then I remember his rage outside the ice-cream shop. Could he have returned to a similar scene at his house?

The thought of seeing Frankie again makes me feel less alone, as if there's someone else in this country who could possibly understand my life here, between the
minusválidos
and the
ratones
that drink and don't work.

C
HAPTER
7

Sunday, June 18: 64 days until I go home

S
omeone's banging on my bedroom door. It pulls me from my dream of Frankie in his leather jacket, but in the dream he's leaning back in his desk chair in my classroom in Madison, snoring. Like Max always does. I burrow under the covers and pull the pillow over my head.

“Tina, wake up.” Papá's hoarse voice slices through pillow, sheets, and blankets.

“In a minute,” I say in Spanish, but I want to shout,
why are you banging on my door and screaming at the crack of dawn?
Then I realize this could be an emergency. Last night I put my father to bed piss drunk. I throw off the covers and stumble to the door.

Outside in the hall Papá leans on his wooden cane. He clutches a gray sweater and his leg brace in his bad hand, his elbow bent at what appears to be a painful angle. His boots are unlaced and he's buttoned his shirt crooked.

“
Chuta
, you're a mess,” I say. “What time is it?”

“Eight fifteen. Can you help me?”

“How did you get upstairs?”

“Slowly, with great difficulty, and the whole time cursing myself for buying a two-story house.” I laugh. At least Papá finds humor in his purchase of a house with grab bars in the bathroom and stairs all over the place. He coughs and clears his throat. His face has a gray-green tint like the smog-filtered daylight.

I rebutton his shirt from the bottom up and the cuff of his right sleeve, too. His aftershave smells like VapoRub. My fingers stumble over each other, and not just because I'm half-asleep. I shouldn't have to get my own father dressed for work. I yank the sweater and brace from his clawlike grip and maneuver the sweater over his head while holding up the dead weight of his bad arm. The sweater's neck is stretched out and fraying. I roll Papá's jeans leg above his knee to reveal a pale, skinny limb with curls of fine hair the color of rust. I snap on his brace and tighten the Velcro straps over his knee, ankle, and foot.

“Okay. I'm going back to bed,” I tell him when I'm done lacing his boots.

“You're coming with me. I told you last night.” He squeezes his eyes shut. Hung over.

“No, you didn't. You passed out.” He has to be kidding. It's at least four hours before my normal wake-up time. I'd planned to spend the day writing my friends
to tell them about the awesomeness of Frankie. And separating the pieces to start the jigsaw puzzle because I won't get to see him again until Tuesday. Besides, I want my dream back, the one Papá interrupted for nothing more than a clothing problem.

“Graciela's off, Ileana's away, and you're not staying here alone.”

“I can take care of myself.”

“I'm not up to arguing today. Be ready and downstairs in half an hour.”

I cross the hall to the bathroom and slam the door. “Not up to arguing. Whose fault is that?” I say, loud enough so he can hear me through the thin wall. He doesn't answer.

I shower, dress, and go downstairs to the kitchen. Papá stands at the counter, sipping a mug of tea. “Where's breakfast?” I ask him. Having Graciela around has already spoiled me.

“Get your own. I'm not hungry.” He sorts different-colored pills from a bottle and swallows them one by one.

“So you're just going to eat pills?”

He turns his back to me. “Don't give me a hard time.”

I carry a bowl of cold cereal to the dining table and flip through the morning newspaper. The front section has stories on the election campaign, along with car crashes, armed robberies, and a single page of international news.
Back home, I won a school essay contest on the protests in Tiananmen Square, but here they don't even get a mention—as if people have enough of their own problems and can't worry about the rest of the world.

I close my eyes and imagine riding on the back of Frankie's motorcycle, my body pressed against his, taking in the smell of oil and leather and pine-scented aftershave.

Ernesto arrives half an hour late in a dinged-up little blue Fiat—the car I saw last night, though it was too dark to notice the color, or the dents. Papá opens the passenger door and slides the seat forward for me to climb in the back. He hands me his backpack. Then he drops into the front seat, kicks his bad leg inside, and slams the door. “Where the hell were you? I've been up for hours,” he says.

Ernesto shakes his head. “It's Sunday morning. Nothing ever happens on Sunday morning, except the Cardinal's sermon.” He merges onto the wide avenue. I unzip the main pouch of Papá's pack and search for liquor bottles while Ernesto keeps talking. “Do you know why the Cardinal gives his sermon on Sunday morning, Nino? So we can sleep late.”

“Well, I have things to do.”

“
Oye, huevón
, you're way too intense to be News Director. The minute you take over, there's going to be an uprising.” Ernesto turns to me at the next light. I hug the pack to my chest. “You should be proud of your
papá
, Tina. When our News Director retires next year, he's getting the job.”

My father interrupts. “And the news department meeting will start at eight sharp.”

Ernesto winks at me. “That means nine around here.”

“Eight.”

We pull up to the curb in front of a tall Victorian house. It looks more like the house I was supposed to help Evan and Mamá restore than something I'd see in the middle of a Latin American city. They've painted the siding dark purple and the gingerbread trim white. I will have to tell Petra in my next letter and suggest the color combo to Evan.

Papá asks me to bring his backpack inside. It contains no liquor bottles, but an agenda book, five well-stuffed manila folders, and a pad of lined yellow paper with writing. The thermos clipped to the daisy chain is filled with hot water. Unspiked. I tasted it when no one was looking.

My brother was right last year when he said Papá doesn't bring alcohol to work—except what may still be in him from the night before.

Lifting the pack from my hand, Papá turns to Ernesto. “I have a couple of articles to finish for the newspapers. Give her the tour and meet me in the News Director's office.”

Ernesto leads me to the basement control room, where a napping engineer babysits the live feed from the Metropolitan Cathedral. Ernesto taps on the window to the adjacent darkened control room for music programming, where he'll be spinning records after the Mass. On
Saturdays and Sundays, he says, the station mainly plays music, so the weekend News Director's job consists of editing the UPI newswire to five minutes, giving it to the music programmer to read on the hour, and being available to assemble coverage in case of a big story.

I am at home in this tall old house. And I'm starting to like Ernesto, the way I'd like a young, cool teacher. While he shows me the meeting rooms and the kitchen, I notice a wedding band.

“So are you really going on strike when my father becomes News Director?” I ask.

Ernesto laughs. “Not a chance. We worship him. He taught us everything we know about investigative journalism.” He holds out his hand in front of a framed black-and-white photo on the wall next to the refrigerator. I recognize Papá sitting on a stool behind a microphone, wearing headphones and holding a stack of papers. “During the plebiscite, he was on the air for thirty-five hours straight. Said he couldn't sleep until he knew the bastard was going down so he might as well work, but I'm sure it's an on-air record.”

“Cool,” I say.

“Check out these.” On the opposite wall are three more framed photos. In the largest one Papá stands at a microphone on an outdoor stage, facing a tightly packed crowd of people holding posters for the “NO” vote in the plebiscite. I imagine him finally getting to
describe what happened to him in prison to people who cared, people who would then go and vote to make Pinochet leave office in eighteen months rather than ten years. In the photo, my father has a huge smile. He's smiling in the next photo as well, where he leans against a news van with a tape recorder and cables slung across his body. In the third one, he sits on a stack of boxes hand-labeled
TESTIMONIOS
and gives the photographer a thumbs-up sign.

“He looks happy,” I say.

“We've had some great times together. Made history.” Ernesto takes a can of nutritional supplement from the fridge, dumps it into a blender along with two scoops of vanilla ice cream, and hits the button. “Nino's mid-morning snack,” he explains. It looks like the stuff one of my friends had to drink when she came back from rehab for anorexia.
And all Papá ate this morning for breakfast was pills.
After pouring the shake into a tall glass, Ernesto puts his hand on my shoulder and guides me up the stairs.

Papá stands in front of the clacking teletype machine on the landing outside the News Director's office. He smokes a cigarette while he tears off strips of paper.

“Anything good?” Ernesto asks.

Papá takes a pen from the back pocket of his jeans and writes on the top sheet. “Big story,” he says without looking up. “One of the lions in the zoo died last night.”

Ernesto sets the glass on the table next to the machine, a zookeeper dropping off the eleven o'clock feeding. Papá ignores it. Strands of dull gray hair cover half his face. I want to know what it was like to be on the air for thirty-five hours straight as the election results were coming in, but instead, I silently watch him work while the ice cream melts in his neglected shake.

Papá hands the edited pages to Ernesto and tells him to take me with him. I wonder if they'll let me read the news on the air, just like Papá did in the photo. That would be amazing. I ask him as Ernesto and I are leaving.

My father's sharp “no” hits me like a gunshot. Even Ernesto freezes for a moment.
Then why did you bring me here?

“Nino's full of cheer today,” Ernesto remarks on our way downstairs.

“He's super hungover,” I answer. “Why'd you let him get so drunk?” My friends and I do it because we like watching people make complete fools of themselves, but that didn't look like Ernesto's plan last night. Especially since he bailed the minute I got home.

Ernesto grunts and shrugs. I follow him into the music control room. He flips the light switch and describes all the electronic equipment—a soundboard, microphones, two turntables, a bank of cassette players, a reel-to-reel player, and shelves filled with LPs on every wall.

“That's awesome,” I say.

“We had to build this station from scratch, since we were banned for so many years.” Ernesto pulls three records from the shelf and hands them to me. While he goes on about where the collection came from and adds more albums to my stack, I think about Frankie, and maybe requesting a Metallica song for him in case he's listening. Then I notice a razor blade next to the reel-to-reel player. I lean the records against the tape player and pick up the metal blade.

“Where did you get that?” Ernesto's tone is accusing.

“Here.” I point to the counter in front of the tape player. “Why?”