Read Online Something Fierce by Carmen Aguirre - Free Book Online Page A

both set off early every morning, leaving Ale and me to do our homework. Once that was finished, the two of us went to the market, haggled for food and cooked lunch. We ate together; working hours in Bolivia provided for a long lunch, the most important meal of the day. After that, Ale and I would go to school.
    In the mornings, before breakfast, Lucas greased his hair back, dabbed on English Leather cologne and ironed his white shirt. He owned only two shirts, and he rotated them, washing one every night in the bathroom and hanging it to dry. At breakfast, he and Trinidad listened to the shortwave radio and commented on the news. Lucas, who was as cool and collected as an oyster lying on the bottom of the sea, would shake his head and murmur while Trinidad yelled out obscenities at the right-wing general being interviewed or praised the miners who were denouncing their horrific working conditions and demanding a change in government. Some of the miners in the highlands had started their own radio stations, and everybody listened to these to get local news and reports on Bolivia’s political situation. Sometimes Trinidad would pull Ale or me onto her lap and caress our arms and hair. She found all kinds of things funny, and it was easy to make her laugh. She liked to have things clean, so she spent a lot of time scrubbing our floors. She was a voracious reader who could read a book in a night, and often did, since she was an insomniac. She liked black coffee for breakfast and had a tendency to stare off into space for long periods of time, cigarette held near her face, hand shaking just a touch.
    At night I’d sit quietly at the top of the stairs and listen to the adults talk. Trinidad and Lucas were on the blacklist in Chile, I’d figured out. They had both been in the leadership of the resistance when the coup happened. Lucas had been sent to the notorious Colony of Dignity, a concentration camp run by an ex-Nazi who was one of Pinochet’s right-hand men. The camp received political prisoners of German descent with special glee, torturing them for being traitors to the Aryan cause. Nobody got out of the Colony of Dignity, Bob said, shaking his head in admiration, but somehow Lucas had. Trinidad had been sent from Villa Grimaldi, an underground detention centre near Santiago, to Chacabuco, a concentration camp in the Atacama Desert. Both of them had sought asylum in Mexico, since Mexico City had become the new resistance headquarters.
    Those who joined the resistance believed in a revolution that would topple the existing capitalist structure in Chile, kick out the multinational corporations and create a socialist, democratically run state. They believed in armed struggle because the status quo was defended tooth and nail by the military, armed with the latest gadgets funded by foreign backers. When those weren’t enough to keep people down, the United States sent in its own military to oversee and even carry out the dirty work. The resistance had recruited members from all sectors of Chilean society: students, peasants, priests, workers, miners, artists, anarchists and native leaders. Internationalists who had come to Chile from all over the world to support Allende joined the resistance as well. Allende had believed that socialism could be achieved peacefully, through the existing structures, but on the day of the coup, he himself, along with other members of his government, had taken up arms. The resistance was virtually destroyed by Pinochet, its members murdered, disappeared or exiled. But now people believed it was ready to build itself up again from within Chile. This year, 1979, had been deemed the Year of the Return, I heard the adults saying. An international call had been made for remaining members, along with new recruits from around the globe, to go to Lima. Now I understood what we had been doing there. The Return Plan was very dangerous, I understood. All three countries bordering