Short War
“Before the coup, Gabriel was in love; he had plans; he had friends.”
APRIL 9, 2024
Santiago, Chile, April 1973
A girl was walking toward Gabriel Lazris. A girl in a green miniskirt. She was across the packed basement, between the makeshift dance floor and the card table laden with booze, but he knew, with inexplicable, terrifying certainty, that she was coming for him. Faint light seemed to rise from her pale hair, illuminating her path through the human mass of Ítalo Ibáñez’s seventeenth birthday. She held herself upright, like a dancer, but she moved toward Gabriel, who was folding himself into the corner of the tiny, tile-floored kitchenette, with determination rather than grace.
In the years he’d lived in Chile, Gabriel had spent a lot of time asking God to make him invisible. Maybe his prayers had been heard.
Nobody else was looking at her. His friends hadn’t noticed her approach. Gabriel tried not to stare, but how could he not? She was glowing. Also, she seemed to have extremely important business to conduct with him, though realistically, her agenda probably involved not Gabriel but the beer-filled fridge. She probably didn’t even see him. In the years he’d lived in Chile, Gabriel had spent a lot of time asking God to make him invisible. Maybe his prayers had been heard.
In the future, Gabriel would return often to this moment. He would imagine descending from the cloud of memory, elbowing his sixteen-year-old self, telling him how close he was to the true start of his life. He would never shake the belief that without Caro Ravest, he was less than his full self, though their relationship lasted less than six months. That September, the Chilean military, covertly backed by the United States, overthrew Salvador Allende’s socialist government. Before the coup, Gabriel was in love; he had plans; he had friends. After, he was a lonely American kid in a lonely American suburb, writing frantic letters to politicians who couldn’t care less that his girlfriend had disappeared.
Party heat rolled through the basement. A Los Golpes song played, all jangled harmonies and rough, poppy guitars. Boys slouched in corners, sprawled on couches, straddled turned-around chairs. Girls filled the improvised dance floor, wiggling and tugging at their clothes. From his corner of the kitchen, Gabriel could hear Carlos Aldunante, his worst classmate, monologuing on the virtues of neofascism. He saw Ítalo squinting through the viewfinder of a boxy black camera. He smelled joss sticks smoldering on the kitchenette counter. Somebody had abandoned a school tie beside them, which seemed like a hazard. Those ties were 100 percent polyester, and—Gabriel knew from a Hanukkah-candle incident—highly flammable. He moved it to safety, feeling pleased with himself. He’d contributed to the party now.
Nico Echevarría and Andrés Saavedra, Gabriel’s best and only friends, were bickering over their beloved soccer team, Colo-Colo, which had played like shit in Wednesday’s championship qualifier. Andrés thought the problem was bad goalkeeping; Nico thought the problem was God. Gabriel thought the glowing girl was approaching swiftly. She was very pretty, and very much looking at him. He agreed with Nico, but more importantly, he needed his friends to quit play-fighting and help him out.
She walked into the kitchen, smiling. Up close, she went far beyond pretty, into the horrifying terrain of the legitimately beautiful. Maybe that explained the glow. Gabriel glanced away from her, just to confirm that he could, and took a slug of his terrible drink. Nico had decided the correct mix for the night was pisco, red wine, and Coke. A great experimenter, Nico Echevarría.
Andrés finally spotted the girl. “Hey, Caro,” he said, lifting his chin. “How’s it going?” Gabriel hadn’t realized that his friend knew her. Absurdly, he felt a stab of jealousy.
“Fine.” She shrugged and pushed her hair back, showing a hot, irregular birthmark climbing her neck. It was reddish-purple and rough-looking, like a dried pool of spilled paint. She smiled directly at Gabriel, which made a muscle in his jaw seize. Before he could unclench it, she said, “You’re Gabriel, right?”
He would come to both envy her curiosity and love it. He’d dig for it in himself and, someday, teach it to his daughter.
His first impulse was to deny. To say, What’s a Gabriel? But she’d crossed the room to talk to him, and he, somehow, had known it. Surely this was his chance. Gabriel had been sixteen for half a year now, and he’d still never kissed a girl. Not for lack of wanting, either. He just had no clue how to act. His inner voices were not helpful. Right now, for instance, they were suggesting very strongly that he pretend not to speak Spanish, or maybe hide in the fridge. Anything to keep Caro from discovering that he was the human idiot: useless, hopeless, and thoroughly unworthy of her time.
She tilted her head. “The American friend?”
Nico reached over to ruffle Gabriel’s curls. “You got it. Our quiet American.”
“Good book,” Caro said, alarming Gabriel still more. He didn’t know what book she meant. “And sorry for ambushing you. My cousin Alejandra is Andrés’s neighbor. She sent me to introduce myself.”
Nico shuffled his feet. He’d dated Alejandra over the summer. She’d dumped him in January for sex reasons, or Catholic reasons, depending on your perspective.
“It wasn’t an ambush,” Gabriel managed. “I mean, not a bad one.”
Nico winked at Caro. “See? He speaks!”
Amusement flickered in her eyes. “I’ve never heard of a good ambush.”
“Surprise parties?” Gabriel offered.
“Ever had one?”
He shook his head.
“Alejandra threw me one last year.” Caro wrapped her hair around her hand. “Not good.”
“Why’d she send you over?” Gabriel asked, belatedly surprised. He and Alejandra weren’t exactly close. In general, he was startled when she remembered he existed. He’d known her for nearly nine years, but he still had an impulse, every time he saw her, to reintroduce himself.
“Some guy we don’t know was telling us about his trip to Miami, and I said I’d never even met an American, or any foreigners except the German nuns at our school. Alejandra thought I was complaining. She said if I was so sick of Chileans, I should come talk to you.”
“Typical,” Andrés said wryly. “I bet Miami Boy is Sebastián Kahl. Caro, did he talk”—he slipped into an imitation of Kahl’s braying voice—“like this?”
Caro giggled. “Maybe.”
“I better rescue your cousin, then. Very difficult to shut Kahl up once he starts bragging.”
“I noticed that.”
“I’ll come,” Nico said. “I should say happy birthday to Ítalo.” His mouth twitched with anticipation. They’d already greeted Ítalo, who’d insisted on photographing them with his new camera, but they hadn’t lingered long enough to see if he had coke. He usually did, and Nico, of the three of them, was by far the best at drugs. Gabriel, though smallest by half a head, was best at drinking. Andrés could chain-smoke a whole pack of cigarettes and not puke.
“Nice seeing you,” Andrés told Caro. Nico reached for the half-empty pisco bottle, poured a stream into Gabriel’s glass and a splash into his own, then led Andrés into the party. Gabriel had to remind himself to stay behind. Talk to Caro. Keep her from wanting to dance. It was not biologically possible for him to be sober enough to converse but drunk enough to dance. It was only narrowly possible for him to dance while still capable of standing up.
He considered his newly disproportionate drink. It smelled like an enemy of self-control. “I think,” he said, “Nico ruined this. And it was terrible to begin with. Would you like a beer?”
“Please.”
Gabriel searched in the fridge, finding two Cristals hiding behind a girl’s shoe. Why was everyone leaving their clothes in the kitchen? Should he ditch his sweater here to join in? He showed Caro the shoe, which made her laugh, then banged the beers on the counter to open them. Neither foamed too much, which was a relief.
He didn’t want to seem American — he’d devoted years of energy to sounding, looking, and thinking like a Chilean — but what if she decided he actually was an impostor?
“Short war,” he said, lifting his bottle to hers. It was the Lazris toast, adopted or created during World War II. Possibly imperialistic now, but Gabriel liked it. In Spanish, which he alone in his family spoke fluently, it felt like an invention of his own.
“Short war,” Caro echoed. She didn’t question the toast, which Gabriel later realized was highly uncharacteristic. She hated not knowing details. He would come to both envy her curiosity and love it. He’d dig for it in himself and, someday, teach it to his daughter.
Somebody put on João Gilberto, whose soft bossa nova made the whole party sigh and slouch. Caro took a step closer to Gabriel. “You seem less American than I thought,” she said. “Not that I know what Americans are like.”
“Loud and capitalist, I think.”
“And you’re quiet.”
“Quiet and communist.”
She arched an eyebrow. “I thought Americans hated communism.”
Gabriel thought of his father. “Most do.”
“I don’t know.” Caro’s voice dipped, and her eyes took on a teasing shine. “I bet you’re as Chilean as I am. I bet the real American Gabriel is halfway across the room.”
Pride rippled through Gabriel, swiftly followed by fear. He didn’t want to seem American—he’d devoted years of energy to sounding, looking, and thinking like a Chilean—but what if she decided he actually was an impostor? If she set off to seek the real Gabriel, she’d never come back. “I wish I were Chilean,” he said. “But I can prove I’m not.”
“How?”
“You speak English?”
“I take it in school.”
Gabriel took a sip of beer. In middle school, before he got exempted from English classes, he’d often used the speed of his English to annoy teachers and make his friends laugh. Now he got to sit in the library while everyone else did languages. He always told himself he’d use that time to read about socialism, but somehow he never did.
He took a deep breath. In his slowest English, he said, “I was born in McLean, Virginia. I moved to Santiago when I was eight.” João Gilberto plunked and plucked in his ears. Gabriel sped up as he continued: “My dad used to be the Senate correspondent for the Washington Courier. After the Bay of Pigs, he started reporting on Cuba, but we couldn’t move there, I guess. I was little. Anyway, when I was eight, he got made the Courier bureau chief here.” He increased his speed to the pace at which he spoke with his parents. “We moved right before the ’66 World Cup, and—”
“Okay, okay.” Caro flapped a hand at him. “I believe you. I have no idea what you said.”
Gabriel switched back to Spanish, relieved. “Just that I moved here eight years ago.”
“I’m impressed you have no accent.” She pressed a hand to her mouth. “Wait. Shit. Was that a bad compliment?”
“Not at all. I worked hard to get rid of my accent.”
“Does it ever come back?”
“Only if I’m really mad. Or really drunk.”
Caro grinned. She had a dimple in her left cheek. Somebody had switched the record back to Los Golpes, and people were thrashing toward the dance floor. “We better keep drinking, then.”
His first kiss. He had never imagined, in all his years of imagining, that it would come with this soft, cracked-open feeling, this total desire to please.
They swiped a fifth of vodka from the freezer to supplement their beers, then settled on a rolled-up rug at the edge of the room. Andrés, who’d abandoned Alejandra in favor of smoking weed with a pack of soccer players, caught Gabriel’s eye and grinned. Nico was busy flirting with a vaguely familiar-looking girl in bell-bottoms, but turned to do the same. Gabriel ignored them. He couldn’t get distracted. Keeping up with Caro took all his attention. She could move a conversation anywhere: Chilean politics, American politics, Zen Buddhism, Colo-Colo’s Primera División record, her lack of interest in playing team sports, her love of televised Alpine ski races but thwarted dream of learning to ski—lessons and travel would be too expensive—, his recent Communist Youth–sponsored hiking trip to La Campana National Park, their shared desire to visit the glaciers in Patagonia someday. Halfway through a description of her fantasy backpacking trip, Caro paused and touched Gabriel’s arm.
“I think I need a cigarette,” she said.
Half the people in the basement were smoking, but she led him out to Ítalo’s yard. The April air was thin and cold, and fog hung below the Andes, turning the sky a strange purplish-brown. There were no helicopters tonight, no old fighter jets dragging themselves westward to the Air Force base, no headlights crawling past. Just the brown sky, the dark arms of araucaria trees, the faint smell and sound of the Mapocho River five blocks to the north. The Mapocho separated their neighborhood from the slums in the Andean foothills. It smelled, tonight and every night, like fertilizer and dead fish, laundry soap and dumped-out diesel, duck and human shit decomposing together at the river’s edge.
Gabriel suspected that he smelled, too. His forehead felt greasy and his shirt clung to his back, but if Caro noticed, she didn’t seem to mind. She’d shown no signs of minding a single thing about him. Gabriel took her free hand while she smoked, and she nestled into his side. The world whirred beneath them. Now, he told himself, not moving. Now, Gabriel. Kiss her now.
He didn’t kiss her outside. Caro finished her cigarette and led him into the house, turning away from the basement stairs and into the Ibáñezes’s guest bathroom. She shut the door and Gabriel’s heart slammed. His first kiss. He had never imagined, in all his years of imagining, that it would come with this soft, cracked-open feeling, this total desire to please.
Expectation flickered on Caro’s face. The mirror behind her showed Gabriel his own desire and fear. To escape his reflection, he guided Caro to the dry bathtub, which, once they were in it, seemed right. The confined space was calming. Gabriel had a brief, inexplicable urge to turn the faucets on, but Nico and Andrés would laugh for a month if he returned to the party soaking wet. Instead, he pictured Caro dripping, water rolling down her high cheekbones, pale hair stuck to the sides of her neck. He scooted closer, braced himself on the tub’s side, and tilted his mouth to meet hers.
At first he felt nothing but clumsy. He didn’t know where to put his free hand. Caro bit his lip, which he liked, but was it an accident? Was he supposed to bite back? Where did his tongue go? Was he drunk? Was he kissing like he was drunk? But he kept going, and slowly, he felt the barrier between them getting thinner. He wondered if it would dissolve.
Experimentally, he moved his mouth to her collarbone, then her neck, her jawline, the warm curl of her ear. Each time his lips touched her skin, a shock moved through him, as if the glow he’d thought he saw earlier were not only real but electric. He felt like he was on the verge of a significant revelation. His new life was in motion.
“Caro,” he said softly.
“Gabriel.”
“Do you like this?” he asked, or meant to, but the question that emerged, though different by only one vowel, was another one entirely. It was his first Spanish error in years. Not a mistake, really, so much as a lapse into helpless truth. He hadn’t asked if she liked this. He’d asked, “Do you like me?”
Gabriel spent all of Saturday trying not to call Caro. On Sunday, they spent so long on the phone he got neck cramps. On Monday, he spent his first three class periods daydreaming about her, then lost three back-to-back Ping-Pong games at break out of distraction.
“What’s your problem?” Nico asked, flipping his paddle. “Still hungover from Friday?”
Andrés glanced up from his book. “Lovesick. Look at him. The boy suffers.”
Gabriel scowled at his friend, who wasn’t wrong. Andrés was never wrong. It was one of his many infuriating traits, along with political perfection, goalkeeping ability, charisma, and height. Gabriel would hate him out of pure jealousy if they hadn’t been friends since he arrived in Chile. Nico and Andrés had adopted him his first day at San Pedro Nolasco, when he was a monolingual eight-year-old terrified to make eye contact with the school priests or anyone else.
Now the three of them were an unbreakable unit. A package deal. Musketeers, or, if you asked certain priests, Stooges. They were unique at San Pedro Nolasco in that all three were white, with the minor caveat of Gabriel’s Jewishness; all three lived in Vitacura, the city’s richest neighborhood, and were rich even by its standards; and all three were ardent Communists. Generally speaking, those traits did not align, but Andrés’s dad had politicized them. Dr. Lucas Saavedra was an ex-pediatrician and famous militant, a commander in the ultra-left Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria, or MIR. He was in the news often, at home almost never. He had been in hiding since 1971, when the Santiago police—not part of Allende’s government or friendly to the left wing—began to issue warrants for his arrest. As far as Gabriel knew, Andrés had last seen his dad in January, three nd a half months ago.
Nico, like Gabriel, did not have revolutionary relatives. His parents, both descendants of Spanish nobility, were archconservative anti-Semites. Nico was neither. He disliked nobody, and radiated kindness the way a cartoon skunk radiated stink. In recent years, he had acquired a laugh like an American mall Santa and a gigantic set of shoulders, which Gabriel envied almost as much as his friend’s fundamental goodness.
“He does look bad,” Nico was telling Andrés. “Weakened by love.”
“That’s right,” Gabriel agreed. “I can barely move. I probably have to go home.”
Nico waggled his eyebrows. “Oh, do you?”
Gabriel glanced across the courtyard. No priests in earshot. Ítalo Ibáñez was taking pictures of Mario Amengual tossing a flat basketball through the lone hoop. On the bench beside the court, Raúl Colinao, the class prodigy, smoked a cigarette—strictly forbidden on school grounds, but Colinao was exempt from all punishment, if only because he could talk circles around the priests. Behind him, Carlos Aldunante trailed a pack of assholes toward the rusted outdoor stairs, trampling Father Recabarren’s beloved patch of bright purple lupines en route.
Andrés was looking at Aldunante, too. In a low voice, he said, “I saw him showing Amengual a pair of brass knuckles the other day.”
“You’re joking.”
“I wish.”
Gabriel wanted to talk about Caro, not Aldunante. Ideally, he would have liked to never talk or think about Aldunante again. “Where’d he get them?”
Nico smacked his Ping-Pong paddle into his palm. “He says he’s in Patria y Libertad. Guess he’s not lying.”
Patria y Libertad was a horrifying pack of soft-Nazi creeps who staged marches in jackboots. Gabriel chose to consider them comical, which worked if he looked at them as a Communist, not a Jew. “Did Amengual laugh at him?”
“I wish,” Andrés said. “He seemed impressed. Wanted to try them on.”
It was a worrisome answer. Mario Amengual was apolitical. Medium-rich, medium-dumb, interested mainly in sports and whitehead-popping. If he was drooling over Aldunante’s brass knuckles, that meant either that he was drifting rightward or that he was stupid enough to be attracted to violence for its own sake. Gabriel looked at Amengual again. He was still mugging for Ítalo’s camera. He didn’t seem like a person able or willing to do harm.
“Now I really want to get out of here,” he said.
Nico, who had been glowering, grinned. “You’re not going home.”
“No. I need to go to Santa Úrsula.”
“Is that—”
“Caro’s school.”
Nico and Andrés hooted and clapped. “Gabriel!”
“Look at you!”
“Andrés, we’ve created a monster.”
“A womanizer.”
“A confidence machine.”
“Have you talked to her since Friday night?” Andrés asked.
Gabriel nodded. “Sunday.”
“Good.” Nico reached for him. “Now you just need—” He straightened Gabriel’s school tie, tugged wrinkles from his blazer. Then he licked his palm and went for the cowlicks, but Gabriel squirmed from reach.
“What?” Nico said, mock wounded. “You want to show up looking like Bob Dylan?”
“I always look like Bob Dylan.”
“True.”
Gabriel wondered if Caro had registered that he looked Jewish. He hadn’t mentioned his religion, which was potentially unwise. It was entirely possible that she’d never met a Jew. Santiago’s Jews tended to be insular, which Gabriel couldn’t criticize. Not all Chilean Catholics were fans of his people. Plenty of his classmates thought he’d killed Jesus or was doomed to burn in hell. A few had asked if his family’s wealth came from moneylending. Paco Menjívar had once felt his head for hidden horns. Aldunante made a habit of drawing swastikas in the school bathrooms. Gabriel had caught him twice.
What if she refused to be his girlfriend? What if she laughed at him?
In fairness to the nation of Chile, Gabriel’s own parents were not exactly pro-Semitic. Ray and Vera Lazris did not mix with their fellow Jews. Shamefully, Gabriel was grateful for his parents’ commitment to assimilation. It was half the reason he went to San Pedro Nolasco, which was among Santiago’s fanciest Catholic boys’ schools. The other half was that his mother disliked the American wives she played tennis with. She considered them clubby, snobby, and terminally vapid, and insisted—she had no evidence, but Gabriel thought it seemed perfectly plausible—that all their husbands were CIA. She forbade her husband to send Gabriel to the American school with their kids. Gabriel, privately, thought it was a little hypocritical for his mom to call anyone else a snob, but he appreciated the end result.
It wasn’t that he loved San Pedro Nolasco. The school was right-wing and stuffy, and the administration seemed not to care that Carlos Aldunante was covering the walls with swastikas. But without San Pedro Nolasco, Gabriel would never have met Nico or Andrés. He might not have had a single Chilean friend. He would be another expat kid lapping up his parents’ tales of life in the United States, convinced a better, realer self awaited him on the far side of the equator.
On the microbus to Santa Úrsula, Gabriel tried to convince himself that he was adequate as he was. Caro seemed to like talking to him. She hadn’t objected to his looks or personality. She’d kissed him in a bathtub. Still, he couldn’t shake the thought that this bus trip was an awful idea. What if she refused to be his girlfriend? What if she laughed at him? If she laughed, he’d eat his own tongue.
The crowded micro was making him nervous. Sweaty, too. He disembarked fifteen minutes from Santa Úrsula and walked with his head down, scanning the sidewalk for dog shit, bird shit, leaf mold, rotten fruit: anything that, if he stepped in it, would make him too smelly to kiss. Maybe he smelled bad already. Who really knew how they smelled? How they looked? Nico had misled him. Confidence was a scam. Confidence told him he looked like Bob Dylan on the cover of Freewheelin’. What if he just looked like he was twelve?
He turned onto Calle Alonso de Sotomayor, which was lined with sleek, glass-balconied new apartments that seemed designed less for Santiago than Miami or Barranquilla—some city with glittering beach views, not a brown, fogged-up river and Andean foothills covered in scrub and slums. Not slums. ‘Slum’ and ‘shanty’ were reactionary words. The proper choice was ‘settlement,’ but their Communist Youth leader, a burly art student named Claudio Aristeguieta, had brought up the vocabulary issue only a few weeks ago, and Gabriel hadn’t quite retrained his mind.
Gabriel worried often that he had inherited reactionary thought patterns from his dad, who was a real live American conservative. He and Gabriel fought constantly. Their eternal argument was, Gabriel knew, torturing his mother and their housekeeper, Luz, but how could he not fight with his father? First of all, it kept his dad from picking on his mom, and second, his dad’s opinions were terrible. Dangerous. As the Santiago bureau chief for the Washington Courier, Ray signed off on every word the paper’s subscribers read about Salvador Allende, the world’s first democratically elected socialist president. In Gabriel’s opinion, that meant it was both bullshit and unethical for his dad to hate Allende, and irresponsible for Gabriel not to challenge that hate.
He wished he had a dad like Andrés’s. A dad he could admire. Dr. Lucas had actual principles. He’d married a socialite and turned her into a socialist. He had abandoned a lucrative pediatric practice to join MIR, which appealed to him on both personal and political fronts: not only was it a vanguard group that wanted to spark revolution, it had also been founded by a doctor, Miguel Enríquez. Dr. Lucas kept practicing medicine in MIR, but instead of prescribing pills to sick little rich kids, he stitched up wounds and delivered babies in Santiago’s poorest settlements—and, according to his son, carried out various other operations so he could pay for supplies and lifesaving drugs.
Dr. Lucas was the reason Gabriel and Nico were real leftists, if not brave enough to want to run away from home and join MIR themselves. For a long time, it had taken all Gabriel’s courage to keep going to Communist Youth meetings against his dad’s wishes. He’d joined, at Dr. Lucas’s invitation, during Allende’s successful 1970 presidential campaign. Dr. Lucas drove Gabriel, Nico, and Andrés to their first meeting, which, now that Dr. Lucas was underground, had become one of Gabriel’s most cherished memories. Andrés’s dad had picked all three of them up from school. He had the radio blasting rock music, a fat bag of snacks on the passenger seat: salted pumpkin seeds, chocolate-filled cuchuflí cookies, a giant popcorn ball that Nico instantly cracked in half, sending shards of hardened caramel corn flying through the back seat. Dr. Lucas didn’t mind. Of the four of them, he was the most excited. To this day, Gabriel had never encountered an adult who showed enthusiasm—or any positive emotion—as freely as Andrés’s dad. He sang to himself while driving, roared and sometimes wept with joy at his soccer team’s victories, never let Andrés walk by him without a hug. Gabriel imagined that Nico would grow up to be like that. He wished he could imagine the same for himself.
Their Communist Youth group met, then and now, at Claudio’s squat in Almagro. Even its exterior walls smelled like mold. Dr. Lucas had parked in its driveway, then gotten out of the car and, solemnly, shaken all three boys’ hands. You’re doing a big thing today, he told them. A good thing. Especially you, Gabriel.
Me?
You. So few Americans have the guts to be Communists. You can set a powerful example. Scratch that. You’re setting it right now.
Nearly four years later, Gabriel carried those words like a mantra. No matter how small he felt, no matter how useless, he could at least set an example. He’d been trying to set an example, he thought, when, for his thirteenth birthday, he asked his parents, who had no idea he’d been attending Communist meetings, to pay his Party dues. He’d hoped his dad might be proud of his courage, even if he disagreed with his politics. No dice. Ray was livid. He called the Saavedras’ house to shout at Dr. Lucas. Gabriel still remembered the shame he felt listening to his dad’s guttural, fragmented Spanish, his record-scratch repetitions. Eavesdropping on that phone call, he wished, for the first time, that he wasn’t Ray Lazris’s son.
Why should he have wanted to be American at all? He saw no reason to side with the country he was born in.
Gabriel had left the phone call out when, on Sunday, he told Caro the story of his political conversion. She’d asked whether he thought he would have become a Communist if he hadn’t had Andrés and Dr. Lucas to guide him. He told her the truth: he doubted it. Without the Saavedras, he probably would have accepted the toxic Lazris combination of Nixonian Red-bashing and bootstrap belief in the American Dream.
Granted, the family had experienced the latter. August Lazris, Gabriel’s grandfather, emigrated from Berlin to Chicago in 1929. By 1939, he owned a massive tannery in Chicago’s Loop, a clanking, belching, smoking two-block building that sucked in workers from the city’s Black and Polish neighborhoods and spat out hundreds of hides every day. The tannery—Lazris Leather—had Americanized August fast. In a decade, it got him a native-born wife, a lakefront house in Glencoe, and a salary that more than covered three first-class tickets on the MS St. Louis for his parents and much-younger brother, who still lived in Nazi Berlin.
But the St. Louis never got past Havana. The United States forbade it to go farther. The Roosevelt administration denied the nine hundred Jews on the St. Louis entry. Some managed to find asylum elsewhere, but more than two hundred, Rosa, Abraham, and Sander Lazris included, were murdered in Hitler’s concentration camps. Why should Gabriel have felt pride in his nationality, knowing that story? Why should he have wanted to be American at all? He saw no reason to side with the country he was born in. He sided with his poor dead great-uncle Sander, who, according to the letters Gabriel’s grandfather saved, wanted to live somewhere socialist but knew better than to try Stalin’s USSR. He sided with Luz, whose relatives had often gone hungry in the three years since Nixon slashed aid to Chile. She gave half her wages to her sister, who had three daughters, but, she said, it still wasn’t enough.
Gabriel was nearly at Santa Úrsula. Time to stop fretting about his family. He cut through Plaza Turquía, passing the right-wing newsstand, the soft-porn newsstand, the candied-nut cart streaming sugary smoke. The nuts were tempting, but he didn’t want Caro to catch him with a full mouth.
Her school was walled like a fortress. A Chilean flag snapped from its roof. Gabriel wondered what the gory-saint situation was like in there. San Pedro Nolasco was full of terrifying portraits: Sebastián spiked with arrows, Bartolomé with his skin peeled off, Lorenzo on the grill. After eight years, Gabriel still had nightmares about them—Bartolomé especially—at least once a month.
He settled on a bench across the street from Santa Úrsula and squinted upward, as if he could tell the time from the sun. It couldn’t be later than noon, and presumably Caro’s school, like his, didn’t let its students out for lunch until one o’clock. He imagined Caro slipping through the gate in a flood of high-socked, uniformed girls, a few black-habited nuns mixed in. He remembered her feline face, her long hair, her birthmark with its ragged coastline. His heart sped, and some blood began making its way downward. To prevent an erection, he started listing and ranking the best plays Colo-Colo had made that season, replacing Caro’s skirted legs with star striker Carlos Caszely barreling toward the Unión Española goal. Gabriel loved Caszely. He loved how unathletic Caszely seemed, with his bulldog cheeks, ham-hock thighs, top-heavy run like a toddler’s—and a diagonal shot that could rip through a goal net. Gabriel had seen it happen. One perk of familial wealth was always getting good seats at soccer games.
He looked over Santa Úrsula at the mountains. Flat light drained through the pearl-colored clouds. The trees in Plaza Turquía clacked their branches in the breeze. The school’s high door creaked, then swung open to let Caro out.
She was alone. Her unbuttoned coat swung at her knees. She waved, and Gabriel, astonished, waved back. What was she doing? Had he conjured her? Was Carlos Caszely going to walk up to him next?
“I saw you out the window,” she called, crossing the street.
Gabriel croaked. An actual croak, like a toad. Caro seemed not to notice. She sat beside him, then asked, “Why are you here?”
“I came to see you.”
She nodded. “Thought so.”
The trees shook harder. Caro scraped a line with her heel in the dirt. Her socks sagged at her ankles. The breeze picked up, carrying the smell of ozone. Over the Andes, white clouds mingled with gray.
“It’s going to rain,” Gabriel said.
“You came to Santa Úrsula to tell me that?”
He swallowed. Reddish dust blew between them. Why had he wasted time thinking about Carlos Caszely? He should have been scripting his lines. “I came,” he tried, “to tell you it’s going to rain. And”—what would Nico say? Something confident but also ridiculous; something that would make her laugh—“everyone knows the best place to wait out a rainstorm is in a fruit shop with somebody who wants to be your boyfriend.”
She glanced down the street. “There’s not much fruit.”
There was, in fact, almost none. On the sidewalk, the grocer had set out a few cartons of withered citrus. Inside, there were tragically puckered cherimoyas and overripe cactus fruits with fat black pocks where their spines had once been. A crate of downy, bruised lucumas sat on the counter next to a radio tuned to the center-right station. A white fan turned slowly in the corner, moving the smells of mulch and decay through the store. The counter man, who had a sagging, purplish face and a thick, hand-sharpened pencil tucked behind his ear, looked at them sorrowfully as they approached.
“Hey, Tino,” Caro said. “How’re you doing?”
Tino rested his forearms on the counter. “No onions,” he began. Gabriel couldn’t tell if this was an answer or an automatic recitation. “No garlic. No lettuce, no carrots, no turnips, no parsnips, no beans. No potatoes. Sweet potatoes, yes. You want sweet potatoes?”
Caro was already shaking her head. “I would, but I don’t have my ration book.”
Gabriel never had his ration book. He barely ever saw it. Luz did all his family’s food shopping, and she shopped on the black market only. Tino didn’t bother looking at him, but to Caro, he said, “Your boyfriend either?”
Gabriel flushed, and Caro reached for his hand. The dry touch of her palm sent a skittering, sparking feeling up his arm. “My boyfriend either,” she said, and the skittering feeling hit his chest and bloomed into the great heat of joy. My girlfriend, he thought, looking at her. From first kiss to first girlfriend in three days.
He pulled Caro close, wishing he’d found someplace more private. Rain pattered in the dust outside. Not nothing, but not a monsoon. He thought again of his impulse, in Ítalo’s bathroom, to turn the taps on.
“How do you feel about getting rained on?” he said.
“I don’t mind.”
“Then I could walk you home.”
Caro smiled. A new smile, Gabriel thought. Fuller, somehow, than the ones he’d seen. Maybe a little triumphant, which made him feel triumphant, too. Even better: he felt confident. Not like the human idiot or the American friend. Like his own person, and one who had the potential—maybe, God willing—to be a good boyfriend. He couldn’t wait to tell Nico and Andrés.
This story has been excerpted from Short War by Lily Meyer, published by Deep Vellum.
✺ Published in “Issue 15: Pundits” of The Dial
