VALPARAÍSO (14)

23.

Lights along the mooring wavered in the black waters, keen salt smell sharp on the warm air. Marimar and I watched a massive pleasure ship reverse away from the Muelle Prat wharf, motors roiling the water. We’d managed, over a meal at the Bar Inglés, to dispel some of what had lately cleaved us. Now drifting back towards the pensión, our hands and lips brushed, stirring desires forsaken since the gruesome discovery that morning on Cerro Alegre. 

Near the Plaza Victoria, Marimar said, “Your brother still says he is innocent?”

After four days of jail visits, I didn’t know what to believe. Alex’s lawyer claimed suicide had been ruled out by a forensic examination, the bullet fired from behind at close range. Fingerprints on the death weapon had tested inconclusive: two sets – Alex’s, another’s. Yet circumstance and motive firmly convicted Alex. “I’m waiting for him to tell me more,” I said.

Feeling Marimar slipping away again, I reached for her hand. 

“When I was young, Alex was my hero,” I said. As if that explained or forgave anything. 

“So was my brother.” She said his name softly: “Gabriel.” 

“Where is he?”

Marimar shook her head, some large darkness crowding her, then jerked her shoulder as if to push it away. 

As we neared the Residenciál Valdivia, she turned back to the sea. “Copper, wine, fruit,” she said, her voice bitter now. “That’s what we send to the world on our big ships.” 

At the pensión, I’d barely shut the door when she reached for me. “In the mirror,” she said fervently. “Como antes.” 

There was little tenderness in our throttled cries this time. Afterwards we lay in the dark, cloaked again in separation, until Marimar arose, draped in a bedsheet, and padded sullenly across the dark room. By the bathroom light I saw the sheet fall as she reached up and turned on the shower. 

A manila envelope lay on the bedstand. I reached over and picked it up. For the past few days I’d suffered a flurry of emails, phone calls and missives from Dad. Harvesting his old files and contacts, riding the rapids of the information stream lifting him, he was certain he was within a hair’s breadth of connecting the head with the feet, as he was fond of saying. His furious conjectures were almost more than I could bear. Visiting Alex daily in prison, feeling Marimar slipping out of my grasp in a haze of suspicion and mistrust, my bank balance draining with each new withdrawal, I couldn’t see how it mattered that Dryden’s father had been in Chile during the Pinochet coup and the reign of terror that had followed. In what Cold War trouble spot hadn’t Russell Poe and his kind kicked up unrepentant dust?

I took from the envelope a murky, black-and-white copy of a photo taken surreptitiously in the Estadio Chile, Chile Stadium, where students, unionists and leftists had been rounded up, tortured, and killed. Dad had dated it - September 12^th, 1973 – and circled the head of a bespectacled man in a suit standing beside a group of military officers, smoking a pipe. Less clear was a second circled head of a tall, fair young man next to him. Dad had scrawled along the bottom: “The Poes, pere et fils, unmistakably.” 

Dad had railed on the phone that morning. “Don’t you see, Garth? This implicates Dryden too. That’s why Mexico City. That’s why Dryden is dead now. Chilean exile groups, the families who suffered, were after the both of them. Russell Poe was funneled into deep cover long ago, out of reach of his avengers. Who did that leave as a target?”

It could have been Dryden in the photo, but no Chilean judge comparing the dead Arturo Wright with that tall, indistinct blur would accept it as exonerating proof.

 “Is that the head with the feet?” I’d asked Dad on the phone. 

“Look, Alex had his reason to want to harm Dryden Poe. Twenty-six thousand imprisoned, tortured Chileans had better ones.” 

Marimar stepped out of the shower and turned, fixing me in the glare of her rage. Watching her dress quickly, her back to me, before the mirror in the half-lit room, I sensed if I let her leave she wouldn’t come back. 

“Marimar, wait,” I called as she finished brushing her hair and picked up her purse. 

“El Estado Chile,” I said.

She stopped at the door and wheeled. 

“Talk to me. Please. I need you to tell me about your brother.”

“You can’t know,” she said. 

“No, I can’t.” 

“The sailors were all with Allende. After the coup, DINA agents, the secret police, boarded the ships and beat them, or shot them in cold blood, or dragged them off to the detention centers. They took my father. Gabriel was a student in Santiago and they took him to Estadio Chile. We never saw him again. Then they came after the families. All of us - my mother, brother, cousins.” 

“But you would have been a child.”

“I was ten,” she said. “There were eight hundred detention centers. The worst was Villa Grimaldi, where we were taken.” Marimar’s eyes had deepened by the light from the bedlamp, exposing a narrative running far beneath any place our sex had touched. “I can’t speak of things they did, or made us watch.” The cry that broke from her chest carved a tunnel in the night. “My mother was violated by many men. Afterwards she and my father couldn’t look at each other. That’s when he stopped coming home.”

Outside, a drunken sailor raised a tuneless shanty, drowned by insistent gulls. 

“Seventeen years of terror. It never goes away. We awaken at sounds, jump at passing cars, suffer all kinds of disorders. People come to the hospital where I work, still unable to speak of their conditions, what was done to them. Some of those you see along the waterfront, that sailor you hear, they are victims from those years. I became a nurse. It was all I could do, for the others, for myself. For Gabriel.”

Marimar’s sobs were a heaving sea. I held her a long time. 

Then I said, “Did you know Arturo’s father was American, an advisor to DINA?” 

“How do you know that? If so, why would Arturo choose to live here all these years among us?” 

“Maybe those were his demons, the ones you told me about.” 

Marimar pulled away and walked to the window. “One night in the jungle I told Arturo a little of what happened with my family. He just said “I know.’ These aren’t things we speak of here.”

“Arturo’s real name was Dryden Poe. When he was eighteen he killed his cousin, a girl Alex loved, a singer. It was an accident, but an avoidable one. Dryden’s father took him away so he wouldn’t be arrested and prosecuted. It changed all our lives. Alex never played music again and he never loved anyone else.” 

“Venganza ,” Marimar said. “Thirty years is like one day. Your life becomes a dark dream. My father thinks only retribution will awaken you from it. He lives to avenge his son, to redeem his wife’s honor.” 

She turned and looked at me. 

“If what you say about Arturo and his father is true, then I hate your country.” She reached again for her purse. “What’s so terrible, Garth, is that I love you.”

24.

On my prison visit the next day, Alex told me how he’d woken up in the Bolivian jungle, beneath the same tree in the same clearing. It seemed to be dusk, he said, but in the tropical forest it always did. He heard the roar of insect sounds mixed with babies’ cries and women’s sobbing. Someone had shifted him onto his side. He tried to lift his head and couldn’t. 

Lying curled, he watched a procession of small, brown, barefoot women cross the clearing. Some were crying and blinking and rubbing their eyes, others held naked, potbellied infants. One by one they arrived before a wooden table where the bearded man sat in shirtsleeves, an indigenous woman beside him in nurse’s garb. The man examined each woman’s eyes. Some were sent away, others given something to drink from a plastic cup. The tear-stained ones were led inside a makeshift reed hut. 

Alex watched the strange, wavering tableau, unable to move or speak. Thoughts drifted and collapsed. Fear coursed through him. I’ve been drugged, he thought, recalling the one Amazon hallucinogen he knew of: ayahuasca. His disordered reveries wove themselves back into dream. His eyes closed again, erasing the pale man, the weeping women. 

When he awoke again it was night, the jungle shrill. There was the flame of a low fire, the hiss of damp wood. The bearded man had lifted Alex to a sitting position against the tree, propped something behind his head. Now he sat on a stool next to Alex in the flickering firelight, in a rumpled white jacket, drinking from a bottle of Brazilian beer. 

“I didn’t know I’d waited for you all these years,” he said, “until that day on the Plaza Victoria when I saw Harry Winter playing his cello in the rain.” 

He reached to touch Alex’s forehead. Alex feebly pushed the hand away, closed his eyes again. When he opened them, the chair was empty. Dryden was standing by a tree, hands in his jacket pockets, looking into the darkness. 

“I thought you’d find me years ago, Alex. I tried to contact you once in New York.”

Alex struggled to sit up. “I got your note.”

“I wanted to get you the master tapes. I figured you’d know what to do with them.” 

“I came to Mexico City. I saw you in the hotel bathtub.” 

“You did? They’d beaten me, left me for dead.” 

“The tapes.” 

“No. They died in that bathtub too.” 

“But I heard a copy of Rima, in your house in Valparaíso.” 

“It was copied years ago from the master.”

Shrieking broke out in the treetops, a scrimmage of howler monkeys. The racket spread to other trees then faded off. Alex felt tears running down his face. 

Dryden turned back to the clearing. “When I first came here, the line stretched all the way down to the river. Now all but a few have been treated.” He nodded. “This will be my last visit.” 

“What do you do here?” 

“Trachoma. It can take decades to render its victims blind. The underside of the eyelid, scarred by past infections, continues to shrink, turning the lashes inward. ‘Hair in the eye,’ they call it. Each blink is an agony. Those crying women you see leak tears ceaselessly, a kind of stigmata of sorrow. The operation is simple, using a local anesthetic. A health worker with little training can do it. The materials cost about $100.”

“Are you a doctor?” 

Dryden went on as if Alex hadn’t spoken. “The other condition is onchocerciasis, river blindness. It spreads by the bite of the blackfly, near streams where the women wash clothes. Dermatitis, eye lesions, nodules beneath the skin. Eighteen million cases worldwide. It can’t be eradicated but it’s treatable with an oral medicine, Ivermectin. If used in time, it prevents the blindness.”

Alex’s head throbbed, his eyes wheeled out of focus. “Where did you learn to do this?” 

“After the coup in Chile, my father was transferred to an AID mission in Ethiopia. A cover, of course. We were on the run.” Dryden’s face twisted by firelight. “My mother killed herself there, in Addis. Seconal. She couldn’t bear what my father had become, what he did. She’d thought she’d married into some kind of national honor.” Dryden stared dully at the ground. “I needed to get away from my father then. I’d seen things I couldn’t forget. And I was still haunted by Maddie’s death. I’d had some medical training in Santiago. I volunteered to go into the Sahel.”

Alex watched Dryden’s face morph into boy, man, boy, shapeshifting in the strobe of flickering firelight: the youth with his surfboard, his puppets and his fixings and his dogs, striding across that lost LA summer; the hollowed figure in the clearing. 

“After Mexico City I came to Valparaíso, to the bottom of the world, to live as Arturo Wright. I knew I’d always be fair game, it could come from anywhere, any time. So I read and I drank, I helped people in the neighborhood a little, waiting for somebody to find me again and kill me.” Dryden didn’t move or break his quiet, sad gaze. “I thought of doing it myself, save them the satisfaction. I bought a gun. Then one day somebody I’d worked with in Ethiopia contacted me and asked if I’d do the work here in Bolivia that I’d done there.” Dryden shrugged. “It was something I knew how to do. It wasn’t evil. It passed time.”

That night Alex lay awake in a tent on a mattress of fronds. Dryden was asleep a few feet from him on his back. Forest sounds raged in the dark outside. Alex watched the silhouette of Dryden’s chest rise and fall. 

Lying helpless in the tent, Alex realized that all these years he’d held out the unreasonable hope that the session tapes still existed. He thought of Cool Earth’s molten river of sublimated grief, his own lost musical vocation, the dementia that had gripped his father. And he thought of Maddie. If she couldn’t live through her music at the least, why should Dryden and Russell Poe endure? They were the ruin of the world. 

He felt in his shoulder bag for the kitchen knife he’d brought from Valparaíso. 

Tomorrow night, he whispered to himself. I’ll be strong enough.

The forest dawn spared no sleepers. A dull light suffused the clearing outside the tent where the line of weeping women was already beginning to form. Dryden was bent over a basin of water, splashing his face. Alex tried moving his limbs and found he could. A woman brought him a bowl of green broth. Sipping it, he watched Dryden step into the clearing. 

A racket of birdsong filled the trees. Through the tent flaps he saw Dryden seated at his wood table examining the women’s eyes, sending one for Ivermectin, another into the hut behind, a third back to her village. 

Alex stood up and walked unsteadily outside. 

“Go look in the hut,” Dryden called, without looking up. 

Alex shuffled over and ducked through the entrance. There were half a dozen women. One helper took the skin biopsy that identifies river blindness, another performed the trachoma operation upon the eyelid of a patient sitting in a wooden chair. 

When he came back outside, the line had diminished. Dryden was sitting beneath a tree, eating. “Two more days and I’m done,” he said. “Then you can kill me. How’s that?”

Alex heard an echo of the young Dryden Poe’s off-key bravado. 

“Why else did you come here with my kitchen knife in your bag?”