I started spying on Raúl right away. The job was boring and easy, or maybe it was difficult, because I was searching blindly. From my conversations with Claudia I was vaguely expecting to see silent men with dark sunglasses traveling at midnight in foreign cars, but nothing like that went on at Raúl’s house. His routine hadn’t changed: he went out and came back at regular office hours, and he greeted people he met with a stiff and friendly nod that precluded all possibility of conversation. In any case, I didn’t want to talk to him. I was just waiting for him to do something unusual, something that was worth telling his niece.
I arrived on time or early to my meetings with Claudia, but she was always already there, in front of the pastry case. It was as if she spent the entire day looking at those pastries. She seemed worried about our being seen together, and every time we met she pretended it was coincidental. We walked around the supermarket, peering attentively at the products as if we really were out shopping; we left with nothing but a couple of yogurts that we opened at the end of a zigzagging route that began in the plaza and followed side streets to the Maipú Temple. Only when we sat down on the temple’s long steps did she feel safe. The faithful few who appeared at that hour passed by with lowered gazes, as if getting a head start on their prayers or confessions.
More than once I wanted to know why we had to hide, and Claudia would only say that we had to be careful, that everything could be ruined. Of course, I didn’t know what it was that could be ruined, but by that point I’d already gotten used to her vague answers.
However, on a whim one afternoon I told her that I knew the truth: I knew that Raúl’s problems had to do with the fact that he was a Christian Democrat, and she burst out in a long, excessive peal of laughter. She seemed to regret it immediately. She came over, put her hands ceremoniously on my shoulders, and I even thought she was going to kiss me; but that wasn’t it, of course.
“My uncle isn’t a Christian Democrat,” she told me in a calm and slow voice.
Then I asked her if he was a Communist and she fell into a heavy silence.
“I can’t tell you any more,” she answered finally. “It’s not important. You don’t need to know everything in order to do your job.” She decided, suddenly, to follow that train of thought, and she talked quickly and a lot: she said she would understand if I didn’t want to help her, and maybe it would be better for us to stop seeing each other. When I pleaded for our meetings to continue, she asked me to just concentrate on watching Raúl in the future.
To me, a Communist was someone who read the newspaper and silently bore the mockery of others — I thought of my grandfather, my father’s father, who was always reading the newspaper. Once I asked him if he read the whole thing, and the old man answered that yes, when it came to the newspaper you had to read it all.
I also had a memory of a violent scene, a conversation at my grandparents’ house during independence week. They and their five children were sitting around the main table and I was with my cousins at what they called the kids’ table, when my father said to my grandfather at the end of an argument, almost shouting: “Shut up, you old Communist!” At first everyone was quiet, but little by little they started laughing. Even my grandmother and my mother laughed, and even one of my cousins, who certainly didn’t understand the situation. They didn’t just laugh, they also repeated it, openly mocking: you old Communist.
I thought my grandfather would laugh too, that it was one of those liberating moments when everyone gives themselves over to laughter. But the old man stayed very serious, in silence. He didn’t say a word. They treated him badly and back then I wasn’t sure he deserved it.
Years later I learned he hadn’t been a good father. He wasted his life gambling away his laborer’s salary, and he lived off his wife, who sold vegetables and washed clothes and sewed. Growing up, it was my father’s duty to go around to the dive bars looking for him, asking for him, knowing that in the best of cases he would find him hugging the dregs of a bottle.
Classes started up again and they replaced our head teacher, Miss Carmen, which I was grateful for with all my heart. She had been our teacher for three years, and now I think she wasn’t a bad person, but she hated me. She hated me because of the word aguja, which for her didn’t exist. For her, the correct word was ahuja. I don’t know why one day I decided to take the dictionary up to her and show her she had it wrong. She looked at me in panic, swallowing saliva, and she nodded, but from then on she no longer liked me nor I her. We shouldn’t hate the person who teaches us, for better or for worse, to read. But I hated her, or rather I hated the fact that she hated me.
Mr. Morales, on the other hand, liked me from the start, and I trusted him enough to ask him one morning, while we were walking to the gym for P.E. class, if it was very bad to be a Communist.
“Why do you ask that?” he said. “Do you think I’m a Communist?”
“No,” I said. “I’m sure you’re not a Communist.”
“And are you a Communist?”
“I’m a kid,” I told him.
“But if your father was a Communist, you might be one, too.”
“I don’t think so, because my grandfather is a Communist and my father isn’t.”
“And what is your father?”
“My father isn’t anything,” I answered, with certainty.
“It’s not good for you to talk about these things,” he told me, after looking at me for a long time. “The only thing I can tell you is that we live at a time when it isn’t good to talk about these things. But one day we’ll be able to talk about this, and about everything else.”
“When the dictatorship ends,” I told him, as if completing a sentence on a reading test.
He looked at me, laughing, and affectionately patted my hair. “Let’s start with ten laps around the field,” he shouted, and I started trotting slowly as I thought confusedly about Raúl.
Since we had to make up the days we had lost to the earthquake, the school day was extremely long. I got home only half an hour before Raúl, which made my espionage dangerously useless. I decided I had to go deeper, I had to take decisive action, do my job better.
One night, I was walking along the top of the brick wall and I fell into the bushes. I fell hard. Raúl came out right away, very frightened. When he saw me he helped me up and told me I shouldn’t be doing that, but that he understood, it was his own fault. I tensed up, not knowing what he was talking about, but then he came back with a tennis ball. “If I’d known it was yours I would have thrown it over into the yard,” he said, and I thanked him.
A little later I heard, clearly, Raúl’s voice talking to another man. Their voices sounded close by, they had to be in the room contiguous to my bedroom. I’d never heard any sounds coming from that room before, although I was in the habit of putting my ear to a glass against the wall and listening. I couldn’t make out what they were talking about. I did notice that they talked very little. It was not a fluid conversation. It was the kind of conversation that happens between people who know each other well or very little. People who are used to living together, or who don’t know each other at all.
The next morning I got up at five thirty and patiently waited until I could find out if the man was still there. Raúl’s Fiat 500 left at the same time as always. I hung recklessly out the window and saw that he was alone. I faked a stomachache and my parents let me stay home. I listened silently for a couple of hours until I heard the pipes. The man had to be in the shower. I decided to take a risk. I got dressed, threw the ball at Raúl’s house, and rang the bell several times, but the man didn’t come out. I waited without ringing again. I saw him leave the house and walk down Odin, so I ran along Aladdin to circle the block and meet him head-on. I stopped him and told him I was lost, and asked if he could please help me get home again.