VALPARAÍSO (15)

25.

The day before his arraignment hearing, Alex sat before me, pale and reduced. 

“It was as if I were communing with a ghost,” he said. “It wasn’t Dryden, it wasn’t Arturo Wright. It wasn’t anybody. This man was already dead. To him my arrival in the jungle was some kind of black, finalizing joke.” 

That evening ,the unrelenting jungle damp had turned to light rain. Dryden and Alex sat beneath a blue plastic tarpaulin on wooden stools drinking Brazilian beer, Dryden’s voice pitched against the beating water. 

“I heard your show once,” he said. “I was bringing my mother to a hospital in Bethesda after her first suicide attempt. My father had arranged a false passport.” Alex recalled the strained woman in the family photo on the den mantle in the LA canyon house, the picture I’d come upon that night. “It was in a taxi coming in from JFK. Cool Earth…” Dryden’s voice was a husk. “That’s when I decided to try and get the tapes to you. I found them in my father’s vaults. I couldn’t get them to New York, so I left you the note telling you to meet me in Mexico City. It was a bad idea. My father had gone there to set up a Cuba listening post. By that time things were becoming difficult for my family. We were all implicated in what had happened in Chile. Exiles hunting him found me instead.” Dryden fixed his vacant blue eyes on Alex. “I survived but the tapes didn’t. It should have been the other way around.”

The drumming rain on the tarp filled the silence between them. Dryden shifted on his stool. 

“Tell me, Alex,” he said. “How good was Maddie?”

Alex looked past Dryden into the blackness. Answers arose he couldn’t possibly voice. He saw Maddie at Jack’s waterfront bar in Santa Monica the first time she sang, and for the first time his world had made sense. 

“So you’re still shooting people up, Dryden,” Alex said. “Why didn’t you just take me out like you did her? We’re far away here. Nobody would know.” 

Dryden looked down at the bottle between his hands. “I admit it crossed my mind. But I’ve seen too much of that. No more killing for me.” 

“What happened to your father?” 

Dryden looked out into the drizzle. “Russell Poe managed events in a geopolitical theater of cruelty, authorized to do things Americans would rather not know about. He died ten years ago in Asunción, eating dinner with General Stroessner. Poisoned, or a stroke, or choking on his food. As you choose. It doesn’t matter. There are always others ready to do what he did.” 

Alex thought of his own father, still zealously pursuing a man who no longer existed. 

“I thought I could get away from all that,” Dryden said, “make myself into somebody else. But of course you can’t. There are families on Cerro Alegre who would kill me if they knew who I was. It’s better you found me first. At least it will be for my own acts, not my father’s. However you cut it, I’ve run out of time. I’d planned to do it myself when I got back to Valparaíso.” 

Alex lay awake that night in the tent on his bed of palm leaves, staring into the moonless dark. Clouds of insects outside the netting buzzed so loud he couldn’t hear his own breath. He remembered liking Dryden that summer long ago, charmed by his assurance, his easy access to things of the world. Thirty years had turned Dryden into a shadow, a specter. His indifference to his own life, his peculiar acts of charity in the forest, confounded Alex’s simple ache for vengeance, and it enraged him. 

“I realized that night,” Alex said to me in prison, “that Dryden had changed and I hadn’t.” 

I thought of what Marimar had said, how vengeance and loss freeze you in time. 

“Dryden dead had allowed me to do what I’d done all those years,” Alex said. “In the broadcast booth, art always trumped death, Maddie’s song reigned forever. Dryden alive changed the equation. It brought her ghost alive again too.”

That night in the jungle tent, Alex arose, gripping the knife. Sweeping back the netting, he turned to Dryden’s bed. He inched forward through the pitch black until his shin bumped Dryden’s cot. Raising the knife, he brought it down. 

The blade tore through the mattress, setting the fronds jumping. 

“Alex?”

He wheeled to the voice outside the tent. He could just see, in the swaying hammock, the outline of Dryden. 

Light bled into the clearing. The women were already lining up before the table, blinking and scratching at their eyes. 

Alex walked stiffly outside. Dryden stood beneath a tree in his wrinkled white suit, smoking. 

“My trachoma nurse left, went back to her village,” he said. “I have five women left to treat.” 

Alex stood beside Dryden in the hut next to a table with an open surgical instrument kit on it. A thin, frightened woman sat on a stool at Dryden’s feet. 

“It’s a simple procedure,” Dryden said. “It takes fifteen minutes. She’s under a local anesthetic. You make an incision running the length of the underside of the eyelid. Then you lift the side of the lid fringed with the lashes outward. Then you stitch the two sides back together.”   

Dryden performed the procedure on the woman, explaining each step. By that afternoon Alex was doing the surgery with the help of a nurse who administered the anesthetic. 

Alex did two women that day. The next day he did the last three while Dryden treated the remaining river blindness cases outside with Ivermectin.

That night Alex slept in the tent, Dryden outside in the hammock. Alex got up before dawn and slipped away, working his way back up the Rio Mamoré, the Rio Beni, to Coroico. The further he got from the jungle the more it felt as if the whole episode hadn’t happened but had been some sort of ayahuasca dream.

“I was appalled that I’d tried to kill Dryden,” he said. “He’d let me live when he’d had the choice. He’d shown me how to heal another person. But in the end nothing had really changed. Maddie was gone, Dryden had killed her. The Poes had been responsible for countless deaths in Chile and elsewhere. By the time I got back to Valparaíso the bitterness and rage still echoed in me. But I no longer wanted to harm him.” 

Alex went back to the house on Cerro Alegre and let himself in. He stayed in Dryden’s room upstairs that night. 

“The next morning I was still half-asleep when I heard the door open. The cat scrambled down the stairs. I heard a shot. Then the door slammed. From the top of the stairs I saw Dryden lying in blood. The pistol I’d found in his bedroom drawer was on the ground beside him. In a panic, I climbed back upstairs. Then Marimar came in. Then you.” 

The bell rang, signaling the end of our jail visit. Alex looked off down the row of prisoners on the other side of the glass. I reached out and put my open palms against the Plexiglass partition. Alex placed his against mine. Our gazes locked. 

“What does your lawyer think you should plead?” 

“Guilty.”

“But you didn’t kill him.”

“I wanted to. I would have. In the jungle I tried.” 

A guard tapped Alex on the shoulder.

Outside on Gunpowder Road, the harbor below seem to spin, the sea crash in my eyes. I stumbled off down the cerro. 

When we were young in Wilkes Barre, I could tell Alex anything. It was the same with our parents. Later, the secrets and griefs came to imprison us all, and truth ceased to be a currency among us. 

Back at the Residenciál Valdivia, I called my father and told him Alex’s story. “Dad,” I said, “Russell Poe is dead. He died ten years ago in Paraguay, having dinner with General Stroessner.”

I could hear my father’s slow breathing through the speaker. I prayed he’d accept this finalizing report, the resolution of his mad quest. 

“You don’t really expect me to believe that, do you, Garth?”

26.

I lay on the pensión bed in a torpor that afternoon, one half-open eye tracking the ascending shadow on the stucco wall. All I’d hoped for had been swept away in the undertow of our histories. The love I’d found in Valparaíso was being drawn back down into the hollows of Pinochet’s death cells where Marimar’s brother had vanished. She’d lost her father to the sea again, Arturo Wright to a bullet, and now she stood to lose me. 

The afternoon passed. The telephone rang but I made no move to answer it. I couldn’t bear to hear Dad’s hoary voice, fomenting another phantom defense. 

At last I picked it up to stop it from ringing.

“Garth, I need to see you.” 

“Where?” 

“Cerro Concepción.” 

I’d never heard her sound so distraught.

I struggled up, fumbling for my shoes.

The painted crate of Ascensor Concepción bore me up the granite scarp, over the weeds and stubble that overgrew the tracks. I stood with my back to the harbor, the lone passenger, indifferent to the spreading twilight spectacle below. The metal cables clanked to a halt inside the wooden shed. Stepping out onto the platform, I thought of those December mornings when I’d met Marimar with coffee and donuts and we’d watch the immense drama of the port unfold, then toss the crumbs to the cats and climb to Arturo Wright’s house to see if he’d returned from the jungle. 

She was sitting on the white metal bench at Mirador Gervasoni, a heavy sweater over her shoulders, though the early evening wasn’t yet cool. The sky above the harbor was ink blue, the lights down along el plan emerging in clusters. 

I kissed her on the cheek and sat. She took my hand and squeezed it. In her other hand she clutched an envelope. It was addressed to her, with a Panamanian postage stamp and no return address. The page she lifted out bore a set of fingerprints in purple ink, a Panamanian notarial seal, and a photocopy of a Chilean passport with photo and signature. 

Mi querida -

Your mother has written that your friend’s brother is to be charged with the murder of Arturo Wright. You must know by now that Arturo Wright was not who he pretended to be. He was the son of an American who advised the dictator Pinochet. He had the audacity to come and live among us for years under a false name, surely to sow ill. Partisans have hunted him for thirty years.

You will never see your brother again. Our family will never be whole. Chile will not know peace until there has been an accounting for each and every crime.

I am going to tell you something now so another innocent life will not be lost.

I returned to Valparaíso on a mission sponsored by comrades from the torture cells of Villa Grimaldi. The day before I left, I went to Arturo Wright’s house with a knife. Instead I shot him with a pistol I found there.

The document accompanying this letter bears my fingerprints. They will match those on the weapon.

I cannot return to Chile now. My one hope is that you will find it in your heart one day to forgive me and come visit me wherever I may be.

Until then, I send you, and your mother, my love.

Viva Chile. Viva Salvador Allende. Viva Eduardo Prieto Nieto, my lost son.

Your father,

Guillermo Nuñez Prieto

The page that followed bore his thumbprint in purple ink, a notarial seal authenticating it, and his signature.

Marimar walked to the railing, the letter in her hand. I stood and followed.

We stared down into the darkness below where one morning we’d watched a man in a wide-brimmed straw hat, a canvas knapsack on his shoulder, mount the steep cerro path.

“I don’t know who to hate anymore, Garth,” she said.

“Maybe the question is who you should love.”

27.

Sube a nacer conmigo. Rise to be born with me, the poet wrote. 

On a bright Sunday morning I stood across the street from the Complejo Penitenciário, watching Alex emerge in the street clothes he must have worn to Chile. We shared a long embrace, there on the empty cerro street. Then Alex said, “Let’s walk.” 

Out on the sparkling harbor, sailboats clustered for a regatta, fluttering like little bleached handkerchiefs. At the foot of Gunpowder Road Alex turned and took a last look up at the prison bulwarks. “Does Dad know I’m out?” 

“He’s ecstatic. Sounds like his old self.” 

We let the winding path guide us down the hill I’d hiked so many times, in worry or in thought, picking our way, step by step, back into the living world. By the time we reached the city floor, a street market was lining the blocks between Avenida Brasil and the harbor. We wandered among the stalls and tables piled with used clothing and antiques, old furniture and appliances, cassettes and CDs. Music bins brimmed with pirated world pop - Sade, Lenny Kravitz, Bjork, Doors compilations - alongside Chilean nueva canción, Andean flutes, Argentinian tango and Brazilian samba. I glanced over to see what Alex might be gathering. He was standing by a stack of books. 

There were the dogeared LeCarres and Forsythes, the Borges and the Mistral, the collected Chekhov and Shakespeare, the outdated Merck Medical Manual. 

Someone had already liquidated the modest library of Arturo Wright. 

“Look,” Alex said, pointing up.

Harry Winter’s rain-warped cello body twirled slowly overhead on a coat hanger. 

“Should we?” Alex said.

“As a souvenir?”

“Do you think Harry would want it?”

“No. And how would we get in on the plane?”

Alex said, “I’m hungry. And I need a shower.” 

As we walked on towards the Residenciál Valdivia in the spreading light, I could see that the shadow Alex had lived his life under had lifted. In tracing Dryden’s path and facing him, he’d plucked the thorn of vengeance from his flesh. If the angels of fate seldom announce their coming, it doesn’t mean they don’t arrive. It’s just that sometimes you end up with the bootleg version.

That night I met Marimar on the Plaza Wheelwright, at the foot of the Artillería funicular. It was an evening of bright stars, sharp smells coming off the sea, and as we weren’t hungry, we walked the length of el plan arm in arm, watching a waxing moon dodge the buildings, talking little as there were few words left to us. On a dim side street off the Plaza Victoria, we stood outside a tango bar smoking, and when a couple came out still entwined to the music’s woozy surge, we joined them in the dance. By the time we headed for my pensión, the moon had set, the stars were fading, and we could just make out the silhouettes of the giant metal cranes in the harbor dowsing over their ships’ holds. 

“Let’s go somewhere, Garth,” she said. 

“Where?”

“Tierra del Fuego. I’ll show you Tierra del Fuego.”

To the ends of the earth, mi amor. “When?”

“I have my vacation from the hospital in April.”

April, then, we decided. Her fall, my spring. 

That afternoon Alex and I boarded the bus for Santiago and the long flight back. 

Some nights when I’m too tired to write any more, I walk out to the end of the Santa Monica Pier, where the cooling currents slap against the pilings, and I hunker there among the night fisherman with their bait, blankets and buckets. I scan the horizon’s dim edge, out where the starlight stops, and Neruda’s words always come: “The menacing sea locked inside each person: an incommunicable sound, an isolated movement that turns into the flour and the foam of dreams.” Then as the mist becomes drizzle, and the fishermen reel in their lines and begin their trudge back to land, I join them, forgetting sometimes that the city I’m walking back into isn’t Valparaíso.

****