mocked her, imitated her nasal Boston whine. She had a tall lift on one shoe because of polio, wore thick wire-rimmed glasses. Splayed gap teeth, a horrible voice. It seemed she deliberately made herself look worse by wearing mannish, mismatched colors, wrinkled, soup-spotted slacks, garish scarves on her badly-cut hair. She got very red-faced when she lectured and she smelled of sweat. It was not simply that she flaunted poverty… Madame Tournier wore the same shabby black skirt and blouse day after day, but the skirt was cut on the bias, the black blouse, green and frayed with age, was of fine silk. Style, cachet were all-important to us then.
She showed us movies and slides about the condition of the Chilean miners and dock workers, all of it the U.S.A.’s fault. The ambassador’s daughter was in the class, a few admirals’ daughters. My father was a mining engineer, worked with the CIA. I knew he truly believed Chile needed the United States. Miss Dawson thought that she was reaching impressionable young minds, whereas she was talking to spoiled American brats. Each one of us had a rich, handsome, powerful American daddy. Girls feel about their fathers at that age like they do about horses. It is a passion. She implied that they were villains.
Because I did most of the talking I was the one she zeroed in on, keeping me after class, and one day even walked with me in the rose garden, complaining about the elitism of the school. I lost patience with her.
“What are you doing here then? Why don’t you go teach the poor if you’re so worried about them? Why have anything to do with us snobs at all?”
She told me that this was where she was given work, because she taught American History. She didn’t speak Spanish yet, but all her spare time was spent working with the poor and volunteering in revolutionary groups. She said it wasn’t a waste of time working with us … if she could change the thinking of one mind it would be worthwhile.
“Perhaps you are that one mind,” she said. We sat on a stone bench. Recess was almost over. Scent of roses and the mildew of her sweater.
“Tell me, what do you do with your weekends?” she asked.
It wasn’t hard to sound utterly frivolous, but I exaggerated it anyway. Hairdresser, manicurist, dressmaker. Lunch at the Charles. Polo, rugby or cricket, thés dansants, dinners, parties until dawn. Mass at El Bosque at seven on Sunday morning, still wearing evening clothes. The country club then for breakfast, golf or swimming, or maybe the day in Algarrobo at the sea, skiing in winter. Movies of course, but mostly we danced all night.
“And this life is satisfying to you?” she asked.
“Yes. It is.”
“What if I asked you to give me your Saturdays, for one month, would you do it? See a part of Santiago that you don’t know.”
“Why do you want me?”
“Because, basically, I think you are a good person. I think you could learn from it.” She clasped both my hands. “Give it a try.”
Good person. But she had caught me earlier, with the word Revolutionary. I did want to meet revolutionaries, because they were bad.
Everyone seemed a lot more upset than necessary about my Saturdays with Miss Dawson, which then made me really want to do it. I told my mother I was going to help the poor. She was disgusted, afraid of disease, toilet seats. I even knew that the poor in Chile had no toilet seats. My friends were shocked that I was going with Miss Dawson at all. They said she was a loony, a fanatic, and a lesbian, was I crazy or what?
The first day I spent with her was ghastly, but I stuck with it out of bravado.
Every Saturday morning we went to the city dump, in a pickup truck filled with huge pots of food. Beans, porridge, biscuits, milk. We set up a big table in a field next to miles of shacks made from flattened tin cans. A bent water faucet about three blocks away served the entire shack community. There were open fires in front of the squalid lean-tos, burning scraps of wood, cardboard, shoes, to cook on.
At first the place seemed to be deserted, miles and miles of dunes. Dunes of stinking, smouldering garbage. After a while, through the dust and smoke, you could see that there were people all over the dunes. But they were the color of the dung, their rags just like the refuse they crawled in. No one stood up, they scurried on all fours like wet rats, tossing things into burlap bags that gave them humped animal backs, circling on, darting, meeting each other, touching noses, slithering away, disappearing like iguanas over the ridges of the dunes. But once the food was set up scores of women and children appeared, sooty and wet, smelling of decay and rotted food. They were glad for the breakfast, squatted, eating with bony elbows out like preying mantis on the garbage hills. After they had eaten, the children crowded around me; still crawling or sprawled in the dirt, they patted my shoes, ran their hands up and down my stockings.
“See, they like you,” Miss Dawson said. “Doesn’t that make you feel good?”
I knew that they liked my shoes and stockings, my red Chanel jacket.
Miss Dawson and her friends were exhilarated as we drove away, chatting happily. I was sickened and depressed.
“What good does it do to feed them once a week. It doesn’t make a dent in their lives. They need more than biscuits once a week, for lord’s sake.”
Right. But until the revolution came and everything was shared you had to do whatever helped at all.
“They need to know somebody realizes they live out here. We tell them that soon things will change. Hope. It’s about hope,” Miss Dawson said.
We had lunch in a tenement in the south of the city, Six flights up. One window that looked on to an airshaft. A hot plate, no running water. Any water they used had to be carried up those stairs. The table was set with four bowls and four spoons, a pile of bread in the center. There were many people, talking in small groups. I spoke Spanish, but they spoke in a heavy caló with almost no consonants, and were hard for me to understand. They ignored us, looked at us with amused tolerance or complete disdain. I didn’t hear revolutionary talk, but talk about work, money, filthy jokes. We all took turns eating lentils, drinking chicha, a raw wine, using the same bowls and glass as the person before.
“Nice you don’t seem to mind about dirt,” beamed Miss Dawson.
“I grew up in mining towns. Lots of dirt.” But the cabins of Finnish and Basque miners were pretty, with flowers and candles, sweet-faced Virgins. This was an ugly, filthy place with misspelled slogans on the walls, communist pamphlets stuck up with chewing gum. There was a newspaper photograph of my father and the minister of mines, splattered with blood.
“Hey!” I said. Miss Dawson took my hand, stroked it. “Sh,” she said in English. “We’re on first name basis here. Don’t for heaven’s sake say who you are. Now, Adele, don’t be uncomfortable. To grow up you need to face all the realities of your father’s personae.”
“Not with blood on them.”
“Precisely that way. It is a strong possibility and you should be aware of it.” She squeezed both my hands then.
After lunch she took me to “El Niño Perdido,” an orphanage in an old stone ivy-covered building in the foothills of the Andes. It was run by French nuns, lovely old nuns, with fleur-de-lis coifs and blue-grey habits. They floated through the dark rooms, above the stone floors, flew down the passages by the flowered courtyard, popped open wooden shutters, calling out in birdlike voices. They brushed away insane children who were biting their
