Antigua and My Life Before

Book by Serrano Marcela

1

The day the Berlin Wall fell.

Everything began that November 9, 1989, with the fall of the Wall. Who could have imagined how much more would come down with it?

Which was what I told Violeta Dasinski that day.

I ought to have been a witness; if only I'd paid more attention.

In the photograph there is a forlornness in her expression I hadn't noticed until now. As if her consciousness were dissolving in her eyes.

The date of the beginning of Violeta Dasinski's public life was the day her name appeared on the front page of the Santiago newspapers: November 15, 1991.

I was awakened. Suddenly came the end of dreams and beginning of recall. Abruptly I went back, picking up the memory that preceded the long stroll through my unconscious. Andres was bringing my breakfast, and there on the tray was the morning paper. Then I saw her.

I studied that face in the photograph. But it is a different Violeta who pursues me: fuchsia glitter on her harlequin mask--clown or Pierrot?--and the hands of the makeup artist transforming her into a sad Venetian with gold and red confetti on her neck.

There was something I had to do.

I got the car keys and left.

"Every reporter in town will be there, Josefa. Don't go!" Andres could not hide his concern.

"I have no choice."

"Then I'm coming."

"No, this is something between Violeta and me."

As I came closer to the Nunoa neighborhood a shiver ran down my spine. When I turned into Calle Gerona to park in front of Violeta's house, I saw two policemen guarding the front door. In fact, all the press was there, lying in ambush. Recognizing me seemed to give them new vigor, and they rolled toward me like an avalanche. The policemen came to my defense. One took my arm.

"It is you! What are you doing here?"

"I need to go in, I have to talk to her daughter."

"No one's in the house. They took the girl away."

"Please, let me go in. I'm a friend of the family. I have to get something." The cop looked puzzled. "There are things of mine I left here a couple of days ago, things I don't want to fall into just anyone's hands." As I lowered my voice the confusion in his eyes deepened. "Please . . ."

I had no doubt that he wanted to let me go in, but it wouldn't go well with him if he did. He looked at his partner. He was holding back the journalists, who hadn't given up and were trying--at the top of their lungs--to ask me questions.

"You come with me," I proposed. "That way you can see that I'm not up to anything."

"It isn't that, senora. Well, since it's you . . . I'll come with you."

I went inside, hearing the cop's footsteps behind me and sensing his curiosity: I could almost have touched him. Once in that long, dark--all the shutters were closed--typically Nunoa corridor, I went straight to the back, to the sunroom. Unhampered, the morning light was pouring in through thousands of tiny panes. Beyond them, the deserted, nostalgic patio. I felt a shock, as if Violeta were waiting for me, sitting in the flowered linen armchair. On the air was a hint of her incense, her perfumed candles. Violeta and that sunroom were one and the same, one passed its feelings to the other, absorbing, fusing. But of course she wasn't there.

To the right, sitting against the thick green wall, was the trunk. A rectangle of yellowish-brown varnished wicker facing the thousand little panes of glass, waiting for me. "My grandmother Carlota saved it from the Chillean earthquake," Violeta had told me many times, as if I didn't know. I hurried to open it--the key never worked--and dug into the disorderly order: books, notebooks, stationery, clippings, drawings. My mind raced: where are they? I can't hunt through everything, they're supposed to be mine, I should know . . . I saw them. Several notebooks of assorted sizes tied together with a simple cord. And on top of them, a large notebook bound in dark brown leather. If I hadn't given it to her myself, I would have had a hard time recognizing it. I took it out confidently and the policeman seemed relieved.

"Is that everything?"

I hesitated. And the others, the ones tied together? The single notebook in my hands seemed innocent enough, credible, something I might have forgotten. But the others? I didn't have the heart to leave them there. You owe it to Violeta, my conscience dictated, stiffening my spine. I took them.

"This is everything." I looked at him, radiating assurance, as I tried to stuff the whole bundle in my purse.

"S-S-Se-ora," the poor man stammered, his dark eyes moving from the handbag to my eyes, from my eyes to the handbag. Then I did something out of character: I offered him an autograph. That wavering gaze lighted up.

I went to Violeta's desk. She always had paper on hand. Beside the clean stack was a book opened to page ninety. I asked the policeman's first name and wrote a long and affectionate inscription.

My exit was triumphal. (Poor Andres, how could I explain to him that he couldn't have pulled it off?) I'd been so focused on my task that I had forgotten the press. I was furious when as soon as I stepped out the door I felt the heat of their spotlights in my face: the TV crew had arrived. Without missing a beat, I asked the policeman--who had his autograph in his pocket--to escort me to the car: I had nothing to say.

Three blocks away my facade of assurance collapsed. When I had gone to Violeta's desk I had seen page ninety of the open book. I couldn't help it. I suppose it was the last thing Violeta read. Those two verses, falteringly underlined in brown ink, swept over me.

The page was Adrienne Rich's "Poem of Women." Oh, Violeta, I wasn't eager for us to go our separate ways. No, believe me, I didn't mean to be a heedless witness to what you were going through.

I can reproduce the underlined words, I know them by heart:

And all the limbs of a woman plead for the ache of birth.

And women come down to lie like sick sheep

by the wells--to heal their bodies,

their faces blackened with year-long thirst for a child's cry . . .

and pregnant women approach the white tables of the hospital

with quiet steps

and smile at the unborn child

and perhaps at death.

Violeta, tell me that your smile was for the unborn child, but don't tell me if it was for death.

A forgotten image had come back to me during the night. That image, in the difficult moment of waking, established a relationship between the present and the previous evening. Andres brought in the newspaper. I began to be aware of this new reality only after I felt the stab of pain in my temple, not before.

An image from childhood.

Violeta coming to my house with a cardboard box in her hands. It was fairly large and her slight trembling betrayed the effort it had cost her to carry it so carefully on the bus from her house to mine.

"Can you keep this for me?"--her little girl's eyes, at once questioning and distrustful.

With the same disinclination you feel handing over booty in your care, she held out her hands to deposit the box in mine.

"Where is the most secret place in your house, the place no one comes but you?"

Her words sounded so serious that I tried to answer at the same pitch of intensity.

"My bed."

"All right. Let's go."

Silently we went up to my room. She took the box from me and pushed it under the bed herself.

"That's it."

She was turning to leave when I asked her to explain.

"Tomorrow is the famous move, and I know no one will look after my things. The grown-ups think my stuff is junk. That's why I want you to keep all my treasures until the danger is over and they have things set up in the new house. That way, no one will throw them out."

As she left she looked hard into my eyes.

"You will look after them, won't you, Josefa?"

The next day she came to me during the first recess.

"Did you sleep over my papers? No one touched them?"

"Papers?" I asked, amazed. She hadn't forbidden me to open the box, but she might as well have, because even though I was curious I hadn't dared. "Didn't you say they were treasures?"

She looked at me, half arrogant, half surprised.

"Yes, they are treasures."

At the end of a week, I reminded her of the box.

"No, I don't want it back now. I'll tell you when."

After a period of time she thought reasonable, she came to get the box. I walked with her to the bus stop. She was deep in thought. As we said good-bye, she said, "You really trusted me. You will be my friend as long as we live."

Violeta always wrote. Diaries? She never called them that. Notes. "To keep my head straight," she said. It was easy to please her. I brought her some pretty notebooks from every trip. Notebooks, but not golden. I remember one with a photograph of Virginia Woolf on the cover. Another with Paul Klee's Senecio on the glossy binding. And the ones bound in bright cloth, those were her favorites. These smooth, virgin pages, Violeta would say as she ran her hands over them, are as inciting as a young girl's body to an aging man.

Pistachios and notebooks; Violeta was easy to get gifts for. I never had to think about it.

They piled up. She had a large, pretty, undisciplined, generous hand. She filled the books quickly, especially if she got them at some moment of crisis. I would venture that during her marriage to Eduardo she filled more notebooks than in all the rest of her life. I had been able to rescue them. I couldn't bear the idea of seeing her private thoughts in the hands of the press or the police--whichever might be the least charitable.

Sh...