So Long. Lucia Berlin

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 legs, dragging them by their little feet. They washed ten faces in a row, all the eyes blind. They fed six mongoloid giants, reaching up with spoons of oatmeal.

      These orphans all had something the matter. Some were insane, others had no legs or were mute, some had been burned over their entire bodies. No noses or ears. Syphilitic babies and mongoloids in their teens. The assorted afflictions spilled together from room to room, out into the courtyard into the lovely unkempt garden.

      “There are many things needed to do,” Miss Dawson said. “I like feeding and changing babies. You might read to the blind children… they all seem particularly intelligent and bored.”

      There were few books. La Fontaine in Spanish. They sat in a circle, staring at me, really blankly. Nervous, I began a game, a clapping and stomping kind of game like musical chairs. They liked that and so did some other children.

      I hated the dump on Saturdays but I liked going to the orphanage. I even liked Miss Dawson when we were there. She spent her time bathing and rocking babies and singing to them, while I made up games for the older children. Some things worked and others didn’t. Relay races didn’t because nobody would let go of the stick. Jump rope was great because two boys with Down’s syndrome would turn the rope for hours on end without stopping, while everybody, especially the blind girls, took turns. Even nuns jumped, jump jump they hovered blue in the air. Farmer in the Dell. Button Button. Hide-and-go-seek didn’t work because nobody came home. The orphans were glad to see me; I loved going there, not because I was good, but because I liked to play.

      Saturday nights we went to revolutionary theatre or poetry readings. We heard the greatest Latin American poets of our century. These were poets whose work I would later love, whom I would study and teach. But then I did not listen. I suffered an agony of self-consciousness and confusion. We were the only Americans there; all I heard were the attacks against the United States. Many people asked questions about American policy that I couldn’t answer; I referred them to Miss Dawson and translated her answers, ashamed and baffled by what I told them, about segregation, Anaconda. She didn’t realize how much the people scorned us, how they mocked her banal communist clichés about their reality. They laughed at me with my Josef haircut and nails, my expensive casual clothes. At one theatre group they put me on stage and the director hollered, “OK Gringa