bites off the land and the continent of South America strings out into islands. To be more specific, I’m in Chiloé, part of the Lakes Region, between the forty-first and forty-third parallel south, an archipelago of more or less nine thousand square kilometers and two hundred thousand or so inhabitants, all of them shorter than me. In Mapudungun, the language of the region’s indigenous people, chiloé means “land of cáhuiles,” which are these screechy, black-headed seagulls, but it should be called land of wood and potatoes. Aside from the Isla Grande, where the most populous cities are, there are lots of little islands, some of them uninhabited. Some of the islands are in groups of three or four and so close to each other that at low tide you can walk from one to the next, but I didn’t have the good luck to end up on one of those: I live forty-five minutes, by motorboat, when the sea is calm, from the nearest town.
My trip from northern California to Chiloé began in my grandmother’s venerable yellow Volkswagen, which has suffered seventeen crashes since 1999, but runs like a Ferrari. I left in the middle of winter, one of those days of wind and rain when the San Francisco Bay loses its colors and the landscape looks like it was drawn with white, black, and gray brushstrokes. My grandmother was driving the way she usually does, clutching the steering wheel like a life preserver, the car making death rattles, her eyes fixed on me more than on the road, busy giving me my final instructions. She still hadn’t explained where exactly it was she was sending me; Chile, was all she’d said while concocting her plan to make me disappear. In the car she revealed the details and handed me a cheap little guidebook.
“Chiloé? What is this place?” I asked.
“You’ve got all the necessary information right there,” she said, pointing to the book.
“It seems really far away …”
“The farther the better. I have a friend in Chiloé, Manuel Arias, the only person in this world, apart from Mike O’Kelly, I’d dare ask to hide you for a year or two.”
“A year or two! You’re demented, Nini!”
“Look, kiddo, there are moments when a person has no control over their own life—things happen, that’s all. This is one of those moments,” she announced with her nose pressed against the wind-shield, trying to find her way, while we took stabs in the dark at the tangle of highways.
We were late arriving at the airport and separated without any sentimental fuss; the last image I have of her is of the Volkswagen sneezing in the rain as she drove away.
I flew to Dallas, which took several hours, squeezed between the window and a fat woman who smelled of roast peanuts, and then ten hours in another plane to Santiago, awake and hungry, remembering, thinking, and reading the book on Chiloé, which exalted the virtues of the landscape, the wooden churches, and rural living. I was terrified. Dawn broke on January 2 of this year, 2009, with an orange sky over the purple Andes, definitive, eternal, immense, as the pilot’s voice announced our descent. Soon a green valley appeared, rows of trees, pastures, crops, and in the distance Santiago, where my grandmother and my father were born and where there is a mysterious piece of my family history.
I know very little about my grandmother’s past, which she has rarely mentioned, as if her life really began when she met my Popo. In 1974, in Chile, her first husband, Felipe Vidal, died some months after the military coup that overthrew Salvador Allende’s socialist government and installed a dictatorship in the country. Finding herself a widow, she decided that she didn’t want to live under an oppressive regime and emigrated to Canada with her son Andrés, my dad. He hasn’t added much to the tale, because he doesn’t remember very much about his childhood, but he still reveres his father, of whom there are only three photographs in existence. “We’re never going back, are we?” Andrés said in the plane that took them to Canada. It wasn’t a question, it was an accusation. He was nine years old, had grown up all of a sudden over the last months, and wanted explanations, because he realized his mother was trying to protect him with half-truths and lies. He’d bravely accepted the news of his father’s unexpected heart attack and the news that he’d been buried before he could see the body and say good-bye. A short time later he found himself on a plane to Canada. “Of course we’ll come back, Andrés,” his mother assured him, but he didn’t believe her.
In Toronto they were taken in by Refugee Committee volunteers, who gave them suitable clothing and set them up in a furnished apartment, with the beds made and the fridge full. The first three days, while the provisions lasted, mother and son remained shut up indoors, trembling with solitude, but on the fourth they had a visit from a social worker who spoke good Spanish and informed them of the benefits and rights due to all Canadian residents. First of all they received intensive English classes and the boy was enrolled at school; then Nidia got a job as a driver to avoid the humiliation of receiving handouts from the state without working. It was the least appropriate job for my Nini, who is a rotten driver today, and back then was even worse.
The brief Canadian fall gave way to a polar winter, wonderful for Andrés, now called Andy, who discovered the delights of ice-skating and skiing, but unbearable for Nidia, who could never get warm or get over the sadness of having lost her husband and her country. Her mood didn’t improve with the coming of a faltering spring or with the flowers, which sprouted overnight like a mirage where before there had been hard-packed snow. She felt rootless and kept her bags packed, waiting for the chance to return to Chile as soon as the dictatorship fell, never imagining it was going to last for sixteen years.
Nidia Vidal stayed in Toronto for a couple of years, counting the days and the hours, until she met Paul Ditson II, my Popo, a professor at the University of California in Berkeley, who had gone to Toronto to give a series of lectures about an elusive planet, whose existence he was trying to prove by way of poetic calculations and leaps of the imagination. My Popo was one of the few African Americans in the overwhelmingly white profession of astronomy, an eminence in his field and the author of several books. As a young man he’d spent a year at Lake Turkana, in Kenya, studying the ancient megaliths of the region. He developed a theory, based on archaeological discoveries, that those basalt columns were astronomical observatories and had been used three hundred years before the Christian era to determine the Borana lunar calendar, which is still in use among shepherds in Ethiopia and Kenya. In Africa he learned to observe the sky without prejudice, and that’s how he began to suspect the existence of the invisible planet, for which he later searched the sky in vain with the most powerful telescopes.
The University of Toronto put him up in a suite for visiting academics and hired a car for him through an agency, which is how Nidia Vidal ended up escorting him during his stay. When he found out that his driver was Chilean, he told her he’d been at La Silla Observatory, in Chile. He said that in the southern hemisphere you can see constellations and galaxies unknown in the north, like the Small Magellanic Cloud and the Large Magellanic Cloud and that in some parts of the country, the nights are so clear and the climate so very dry that conditions for scrutinizing the firmament are ideal. That’s how they discovered that galaxies cluster together in patterns that resemble spiderwebs.
By one of those coincidences that normally happen only in novels, his visit to Chile ended on the very same day in 1974 that she left with her son for Canada. I often wonder if maybe they were in the airport at the same time waiting for their respective flights, but not meeting. According to them this would have been impossible, because he would have noticed such a beautiful woman and she would have seen him too—a black man stood out in Chile back then, especially one as tall and handsome as my Popo.
A single morning driving her passenger around Toronto was enough for Nidia to realize that he possessed that rare combination of a brilliant mind with the imagination of a dreamer, but entirely lacked any common sense, something she was proud to have in abundance herself. My Nini could never explain to me how she’d reached that conclusion from behind the steering wheel of a car while navigating her way through the traffic, but the fact is, she was absolutely right. The astronomer was living a life