Work Text:
1974
There were three times in Gustavo’s life when he was seized by a sense of unimaginable smallness, the way astronauts were said to feel upon seeing the Earth from space. The first time was one of those memories too old for him to place, so old it could just as easily have been dreamt. He was playing in the garden outside his grandmother’s house near Arica, looking first at his crouched shadow, black on the bare rock, and then at the immense sky. It was rimmed by a delicate fringe of mountaintops, which he would later learn were some of the highest and cruellest mountains in the world, yet when he was very young they seemed to him benign. Perhaps a plane purred overhead, its engines straining in the thin air. It was so long ago that he can’t be sure.
Now fully grown, he can’t remember that day without feeling the shadow of his grandmother’s hand at the back of his skull, combing his hair with her small, smooth fingers, or the sensation of standing by his mother’s side, pressed up against her leg, tipping his face shyly into the long flat flank of her skirt. The memory of Abuela came back to him in the last place he would have expected, a roadside shrine some way south of Mexico City, a damp green place set back off a crumbling red-ochre road. There was an icon there, a guttering votive candle, photographs with one colour bleached or washed away leaving faces tinted pure cyan or magenta— there were plastic bottles, dozens of them. Fruit juice and Coca-Cola. “As American as Coca-Cola”, was that how the phrase went? As American as apple pie. They were within a scant few hundred miles of the United States border. What would his grandmother think?
Abuela only ever allowed him to overhear one of her opinions regarding his father, then a lieutenant colonel assigned to a regiment in Santiago.
“They eat their own,” she’d said to his mother, who responded with a faint smile that was stiff as plaster. “Always, always they turn on each other in the end. Remember that.”
She could have meant men, or soldiers, or the Fring family in general. Gustavo was never quite sure.
When he was seventeen and back from his grandmother’s house for the last time, his bones started to ache badly enough to keep him awake at night. Growing pains, his mother always called them, even though he hadn’t grown so much as a centimetre since his fifteenth birthday and they all knew it. Really, the problem was how the city gathered its own atmosphere of pollutants, dirt and heavy metals sinking in the thin mountain air and settling in the hollow of the earth. When Gustavo had coughed for weeks on end, he was sent to a doctor, who recommended fresh air and wrote him a prescription for an inhaler. It was early afternoon when they went to collect it, and the pharmacist was still in the back of the dispensary; there was a boy behind the counter instead. Sixteen, seventeen, perhaps, but taller than he was. He had warm eyes, as if some private joke was hidden behind them. Gustavo tried not to look too hard.
When his mother took him back to refill the prescription, the boy was there again. Gustavo had to pretend he was looking at the rows of old-fashioned glass jars on the shelves, their skins clouded by time, their names printed in truncated Latin— he didn’t want to blush. The boy looked at him across the register with what seemed like a shocking impropriety, as if what they were both thinking was being broadcast to the whole store, to the whole street. Didn’t he understand how dangerous it was to be exposed?
Still, Gustavo tilted his chin down into his collar just a fraction and glanced down at the counter to read his name, scrawled upside-down on the carbon-paper receipt. Max Arciniega. At dinner that night, he thought of Max eyeing him with that latent teasing humour and had to choke back a nervous laugh.
“Something on your mind, Gustavo?”
“No, father.”
Just out of school one day, Gustavo had turned the corner when there he was, Max, lounging astride a courier’s motorcycle, balancing on his heels and waiting for the cars ahead to start moving. He was squinting into the road, his hair full of sun. Gustavo by accident stared so long that some boy behind him whistled lewdly, but Max wasn’t paying attention to either of them. When the traffic flowed forward again, he kicked off and peeled away.
Gustavo watched him until he had vanished.
One night, after his parents had gone to bed, he heard the motorcycle again. Their house was on an avenue, and his bedroom overlooked the street. He listened for a while to make sure it was the same one. It hummed at a constant pitch, waiting.
Gustavo pushed the curtains aside, fumbled with the latch on the shutters, and opened them only a crack. Yes, it was him. He looked very young waiting down there, his face turned upward, bone white in the streetlight.
He felt everything very sharply and finely from that moment on. The irritable tension in the laces as he tried to tie his shoes; the slim weight of his key in his pocket; his hands clamped around the smooth soft-grained leather of Max’s jacket, right where he could feel Max breathe and laugh, the vibrations of the engine, the steady thrumming of his heart.
“Do you like working at the pharmacy?” he asked, when they were lying side by side in the soft darkness of Max’s bedroom. It was too narrow for them both to stand without one crouching or leaning over the bed. The window had only a thin curtain, and an illuminated sign outside flickered on and off, sending slices of neon light into the room.
Max scoffed, still a little breathless.
“The old man’s all right. I pick things up, you know, listening to him. He says he’d trust me to dispense if he could.”
“If it was up to you,” Gustavo asked, “what would you do?”
“How d’you mean?”
“If you could choose anything. I’m just curious.”
Max didn’t quite let his eyes soften, but he bit his lip thoughtfully.
He’d grow out of it, he used to repeat to himself. Maybe he would. He tried to see himself a few years out with a woman on his arm, smiling and laughing, but her face was always blank. And when he thought of her having his children, his stomach would drop, and when he thought of Max back in Santiago, there would come an odd tugging in his chest like homesickness. Soon after he turned eighteen, his parents sent him to the island of Chiloe for a month to stay with his father’s cousin’s family. It rained constantly, and it was never quiet enough for him there. Water drilled against the roof of the house, raced through the gutters and rushed back to earth, endless, endless.
The family’s daughter, Marisol, was one year younger than him. She had long swathes of hair and wore sweaters gone ragged at the elbows. She was loud in the kitchen, scrubbing and sloshing dishes in the sink at her mother’s behest after every meal. His father wouldn’t have approved, but Gustavo supposed he’d only ever seen Marisol on her best behaviour at parties back in the city, demure in chiffon dresses with white gloves on her short, dimpled hands. Out here, they could be more honest with each other.
“I think I know why they sent me here,” he blurted out one afternoon. Marisol was standing in a wash of pebbles, her bare feet shining. The more he thought about the vastness of the ocean before him, the louder it seemed. “I think they want us to—”
“To get engaged,” Marisol finished for him, and threw another pebble into the sea. Her sweater tugged up above her waist, revealing a flash of soft, tender flesh.
It wasn’t that he didn’t like her.
“I don’t want to get married,” she said. “Not now, anyway. I want to go to university. I want to see Europe.”
“Me too,” Gustavo said. “I mean, no, I-I don’t…”
“When I saw how many letters you were writing, I kind of figured it out,” Marisol said. She flung another pebble, but languidly, so that it fell close enough to sprinkle both of them with drops of water.
Figured what out? Gustavo wondered. He took off his glasses and rubbed them clean with the hem of his sweater. He knew Marisol’s older brother Jorge said things about him when he thought he wouldn’t be overheard. Coarse English terms, poorly pronounced. Once Jorge had referred to him using a word that when, much younger, he’d asked his parents what it meant, the room had gone very quiet and his mother’s knife had clinked loudly and awkwardly against her plate.
“I mean, Jorge’s an idiot, but…” she continued. “Don’t worry about it. I like you anyway.”
Back from Chiloe, he told Max about his trust fund, told him that he’d worked it all out, that they would be going to college together, and even if signing the bank manager’s papers was the most frightening thing he’d ever done in his life, he felt restless and reckless enough that he told his father that same night— not about the money, but that he and Max would be living together come the new academic year.
“Do whatever you think is best,” Father said, not even looking up from his papers.
He did.
Later, Max dragged him to an impossibly crowded party in someone’s fourth-floor flat and kissed him at the very top of the stairs, without giving him so much as a chance to put his drink down first. “What are you doing?” Gustavo hissed into the crook of his neck.
“What are you worried about? No one cares,” Max said. He took the glass from Gustavo’s hand, drained it, and kissed him again.
1986
Max had explained to his mother several times that he had no intentions of giving up a career in his chosen field. It just made financial sense, with unemployment so high and openings so scarce, to pursue something more concrete for now. A small business, with scope to expand. Joint ownership. The apartment might still be in Gustavo’s name, but here, at least, they could legally establish themselves as partners.
“The fittings are good,” Max said, tapping on the restaurant’s brushed-steel countertops and cold oven doors. “What about power? How’s the electricity around here? Is it reliable?”
“Absolutely,” said the owner. “We get the odd blackout, but nothing like we used to.”
Max turned on a faucet, nodded approvingly at the stiff jet of water. Gustavo imagined prying out the cracked tile next to his left foot and fitting a new one.
“I’ll leave you two gentlemen to look around.”
When he went home, the afternoon seemed suddenly a long distance away. The curtains of his parents’ house were drawn, bathing them in red light, and Gustavo felt horribly weak in the knees, knowing that something dreadful was coming, just about to crest.
“Why have you taken the pictures down?” he asked, as if that could somehow fix things, pointing out that the paintings were missing from the wall. The coffee table was slightly askew, and a stack of papers had slipped to the floor, like there had been a sudden conflict, a storm of some kind that quickly blew over.
“I’ve been sent for,” his father said. There was a blank, pale circle low down on the wall where the television had been plugged in.
“What do you mean?”
“Juliana packed everything left in your bureau. If there’s anything else you want to take…”
“What do you mean? Where are they sending you?”
“Asuncion,” his mother said softly. Her hands were knotted together in her lap.
He couldn’t leave.
“This is about the trial. They’re going to ask you to testify... why's that such a problem? You’re not being charged, only Colonel Gonzales is being charged. What’s it to you?”
“You know better than to ask questions like that,” his father said.
“It’s not what Gonzales has done,” his mother corrected, and her voice had a cruel pained edge to it that he’d never heard before. “It’s what he’s done.”
“What do you mean?” Gustavo repeated, numb.
“Pull yourself together. You want an explanation? You want me to tell you everything?” When he laughed, he sounded sick, pale, and there was a new unfirmness to the flesh around his face that horrified Gustavo somehow.
“Gustavo, all I ask is that you have the sense to put yourself, your life, ahead of that boy.”
Gustavo looked deliberately down at the floor and clenched his fists. Heat, rage, flared up in him and quickly died.
“We’ve tried being lenient. God knows we’ve tried to tolerate it. Time and time again…”
“I understand,” Gustavo said. His mouth felt cold.
“No. No, you don’t. Listen to me: if you don’t come with us tonight, you’ll be arrested by dawn.”
“Don’t threaten him,” came his mother’s voice, quieter again, exhausted now.
“It’s not a threat. It’s a promise.”
You can’t, Gustavo wanted to say, but of course his father could. His father, and men like his father, could do anything.
“All we need is to get to Buenos Aires,” he told Max, though it wasn’t true, and they couldn’t get to Buenos Aires anyway, not overland. “I know a shipping agent.”
The phone call to Peter Schuler in Hanover cost an exorbitant sum, and indeed there was nothing he could do to help them into Argentina, but he agreed to have his fixer in Valparaiso find something for them. A cargo ship travelling north along the coast would take them as far as Panama City and perhaps— Gustavo’s heart thrummed at the thought— even to the United States, if they could get all the necessary paperwork in order.
So he and Max fled by motorcycle from Santiago to Valparaiso. Should they pay the captain extra to carry the bike on board, or wait around in port long enough for someone to buy it? This was discussed on the way, yelled back and forth into the howling wind, but in the end they were made to board in such a hurry it didn’t matter. Max, who had never been to sea before, was forced to ride the bike straight onto the loading deck by way of a kind of gangplank, and that was that.
In the night, Gustavo could hear and feel him muttering a rosary as waves slumped across the ship’s bow with a dreadful plunging sound that seemed synonymous with death. Max gripped his hand so tightly that the bones crowded together, and Gustavo understood for the first time that the ocean, so harmless-looking on a map, could kill them; that it was a vast thrashing body, too deep to comprehend, and surely malevolent. That was the second time he felt, on a macroscopic scale, impossibly small.
He thought he wouldn’t get seasick— he never did on the ferry to Chiloe— but did anyway, incomprehensibly. For a whole day he didn’t dare leave his bunk, and the corridor outside their cabin was narrow enough that he overheard a few things he wasn’t meant to. Nothing truly incriminating, just enough to allow him to put the pieces together. There was more cargo travelling on this route than was printed on the bill of lading, that much was clear.
There were empty containers that would get offloaded separately at Callao and Buenaventura, where new cargo would be taken on. It did make financial sense. Cocaine was worth dozens of times its weight in copper ore, after all. The supply chain just looked so messy to him. There were so many pairs of hands involved. Harvesting, processing, transport, distribution. Attrition at every stage.
His next phone call to Schuler was full of heavy, expensive silences. He was in on it; of course he was in on it, probably trusting that he’d be able to jump ship and find a place at another company before anyone too important discovered what he was doing. Still, when Gustavo began to tease out the details, he got flustered and crude.
“Don’t fuck around with me, Fring. You don’t have any idea how this business works.”
“Perhaps,” Gustavo said, evenly. He had had plenty of time to rehearse this exchange. “I don’t have your experience, it’s true… but I believe there is a place for me and my partner in this business.”
“And where would that be?”
“We can supply you a product of different specifications. Different to what you are currently handling, but in no way inferior. Higher margins and streamlined production.”
Schuler sighed, a long, impatient, rasping sound.
“Get yourselves to Mexico first. Then perhaps we’ll talk.”
1989
“‘Los Pollos Hermanos’?” Max repeated, eyebrow quirked, leaning over his shoulder.
“I’m thinking of the American market,” Gustavo explained. “To English speakers, it sounds more natural. It flows better.”
“Yes, and what about the local market? People will think we’re illiterate.”
“Now you’re just finding fault because you can.”
“Oh. Oh, that’s rich.”
Gustavo reached over to put his notes aside and switch off the lamp, and settled back on the mattress. It had sunk and sagged over time so that as much as he tried to lie on the firm edge, gravity inevitably pulled him down into the hollow of broken springs, toward Max, who would reciprocate by slipping an arm around his waist and breathing hot into his shoulder.
Once, when he must have been only four or five, his parents took him to the family mausoleum to, he supposes, pay his respects, but he was too young to understand the dead, the long dead, as anything more than a series of old-fashioned names carved into marble. His father stood there, tight-lipped, while his mother stared at the ground.
He understood it differently late in 1989, when his lawyer summoned him and told him that Marisol was trying to track him down. She had been accepted to study at Oxford long ago, and while living in England she had fallen in with a group of left-wing activists campaigning for workers’ rights and international solidarity. Her last letter, mailed from Santiago about three years previously, had included a photograph of the family: Marisol, her husband Pablo, and their baby daughter Claudia, taken in an automated booth in London, all three of them crammed into the frame and smiling; and when the call connected, Marisol’s voice was worn bare. She was back in London, in exile, and Pablo was gone.
“They came to our house one night,” she began, “and…”
Marisol was silent for a long time.
“They told me if I didn’t tell them everything I knew, I’d never see him again,” she continued. “And, my God, I believed them.”
Gustavo stared into the middle distance and breathed low in his chest, in the steadiest, most unmovable part of him. As a boy, he could have wept with her.
“I was so stupid,” Marisol said, and the strain and distance turned her voice, near tears, into something cold and unfamiliar. “I was so desperate to get out. Now we don’t know if we’ll ever be able to go back.”
“You mustn’t blame yourself,” Gustavo told her. He kept himself taut and still and spoke very carefully, because it seemed crucial that she understood. He closed his eyes against a hot wave of pain. “Marisol, you did your best. You only ever did your best. You loved him.”
“I loved him,” Marisol repeated, and in the silence between them the delay in the line made a useless, helpless echo of her words. I loved him.