An Exaltation of Larks Read online

  Copyright © 2016 by Suanne Laqueur

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior written permission.

  Suanne Laqueur/Cathedral Rock Press

  Somers, New York

  www.suannelaqueurwrites.com

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

  Book Design by Write Dream Repeat Book Design LLC

  An Exaltation of Larks/ Suanne Laqueur. — 1st ed.

  The use of historical events and places in this novel are a respectful mix of fact and poetic license. The village of Guelisten does not exist in Dutchess County, and I feel it necessary to point out there is no Calle Isabella, Calle Trinidad or Plaza San Margarita in Santiago, Chile.

  Augusto Pinochet’s military forces took control of Chile on September 11, 1973, ousting Salvador Allende and bombing the presidential palace. Plans for the coup called for the arrest of any man, woman or child on the streets that day. Tens of thousands were detained, hundreds tortured and in some cases, murdered. The Caravan of Death—an army death squad—flew by helicopter from south to north, ordering and carrying out executions.

  In the wake of the coup came Operation Condor, a campaign of political repression, state terror and forced disappearance. The number of deaths attributable to Condor remains disputed. Some estimates are that at least 60,000 Chileans died in the operation. Some estimate more. Victims included dissidents and leftists, union and peasant leaders, priests and nuns, students and teachers and intellectuals.

  Thousands of Chileans remain disappeared to this day. Los Desaparecidos and the victims of America’s 9/11 were never far from my thoughts during the writing of this book.

  —SLQR

  October 2016

  Somers, New York

  To Camille, who watched me strike the first matches;

  Emma, who told me to burn the house down;

  and Brian, who helped me sort the bones.

  EXALTATION

  Noun: ex·al·ta·tionˌeg-ˌzȯl-ˈtā-shən

  The act of raising someone or something in importance;

  The state of being exalted;

  A strong sense of happiness, power, or importance;

  (Astrology) the sign or part of the zodiac in which the influence of a planet is most positive;

  (Zoology) a flight of larks.

  “Second chances are given or made.”

  —Rafael Gil de Soto

  “You should be able to look your income in the face.”

  —Gloria Landes

  “Pinochet shut down parliament, suffocated political life, banned trade unions, and made Chile his sultanate… His name will forever be linked to Los Desaparecidos, the Caravan of Death, and institutionalized torture.”

  —Thor Halvorssen, president of the Human Rights Foundation, National Review

  “Hey, Mr. Pinochet, you sowed a bitter crop.”

  —Sting, “They Dance Alone (Cueca Solo)”

  October 1973

  Santiago, Chile

  The doorbell rang at three in the morning.

  Alejandro Penda was awake immediately, sitting up in the double bed in his parents’ room. Clementina, his mother, was slower to rise, her silhouette big and round in the moonlight.

  The bell rang again. Alejo moved as close as he could to Clementina, his arm creeping across her pregnant belly.

  “Calmate, hijo,” she whispered.

  “It’s a friend.”

  “Shh.”

  “Papí said friends ring the doorbell,” Alejo whispered. “Soldiers and police bang with their fists.”

  “Get up,” Clementina said, throwing the covers aside. “Come.” She pulled on a robe, tied it above her stomach and stretched hands to her son. “Ahora, Alejito.”

  She pulled him toward her closet and pushed him inside.

  “Stay here,” she whispered as the doorbell rang again. “Just to be safe. It’s me they want, anyway.”

  She shut the door. It was pitch dark within, a pillowy, inky blackness Alejo could sink his fingers into. It stopped up his ears, making the sound of his own heartbeat enormous, like an angry fist pounding on a door.

  Friends ring the doorbell.

  The bell rang one last time. Then silence, except for the blood rushing in Alejo’s ears.

  He was not quite eleven years old and didn’t understand what was happening in the world. Only that Chile was heaving and bucking, caught up tight in a fist of change that squeezed harder and harder every passing day. The fist belonged to a man named Pinochet, who was the arm of something called the Right. Alejo tried to fathom his parents’ frantic whispering, but he couldn’t make sense of what was right and left, only what was us and them.

  Back in September, they bombed La Moneda, the presidential palace, where our president Allende lived. Allende was dead now. They filled the streets with soldiers and crammed the skies over Santiago with low-flying airplanes and helicopters. They showered the streets with leaflets. The daily bomb blasts and dynamite explosions were their doing. But if they were the Right and the Right was right, it meant we were the Left. Which meant the left was…wrong?

  Huddled under dresses and jackets, Alejo pulled his kneecaps tight to his mouth. The fear burned like a hard fire, pressing him from all sides, as if the walls of the closet were moving together. His mind chattered like teeth and silent tears leaked through his squeezed eyes, wetting the thin fabric of his pajamas.

  Calmate, hijo.

  Four days ago, his father didn’t come home from work. A doorbell rang that night too, but at the respectable hour of eight. It was Eduardo’s assistant, Milagros. Her clothes were scorched, her eyes reddened with smoke, burns on her arms and hands and legs. The soldiers had torched the libreria and arrested Eduardo.

  “Alejo, go to your room,” Clementina said. He ducked only halfway down the hall and hid behind a bookcase, listening. Clementina kept the front door half-closed and he could only catch scattered words.

  “Leftist sympathy… Dissident literature… Student uprisings… A threat… Arresting foreign enemies.”

  Alejo’s mind juggled the words around, trying to extract his father from them. Eduardo Penda was a tall, slender man. Handsome, almost pretty, with dark wavy hair and green eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses. He was left-handed, as was Alex—was that what Milagros meant by leftist?

  Dissident. Did that mean absent-minded? Eduardo’s gaze was either fixed down in a book or up at the sky. He was always late, forgot important dates and often walked out of the apartment wearing two different shoes. But he knew everything about books and history and the magic inside stories. He owned a wonderful shop on the Calle Trinidad, filled with the smell of ink and paper and coffee, and the hum of students debating beneath tall, crammed bookshelves.

  The libreria was a threat? Eduardo was an enemy of the people? Eduardo loved people. The students loved him.

  Clementina was crying now, which drew Alejo back toward the door. He was man of the house when Eduardo wasn’t home. He crouched down, peering around the edge of the door, avoiding Clementina’s foot that tried to shoo him. In the hall, other apartment doors were cracking open, tips of noses inching out, sniffing for news. The air was heavy with suspicion and fear.

  Foreign enemies, Alejo thought, remembering the words on the leaflets showered over the city, calling for Santiguans to denounce all foreigners. He knew Eduardo was the son of Italian i
mmigrants. Clementina came to Chile from Spain when she was sixteen. Were Spanish and Italians Right? Or Wrong?

  “My guess is he’s in the Estadio,” Milagros said. “Or the Villa Grimaldi. I heard they’re detaining people there as well.”

  Alejo couldn’t imagine what his father would be doing in the Stadium. Playing soccer? For a moment he pictured Eduardo kicking a ball around with some other men, passing the time with a friendly game while all this nonsense got sorted out.

  Maybe it’s not so bad, he thought.

  “Go home, Mila,” Clementina said, her hand sliding along her curved belly. “It’s not safe here.”

  “You should get out of Santiago,” Milagros said. “Go to the American embassy at least. I know one of the attachés. Tell him your brother-in-law is a U.S. citizen and he can help with VISAs.” Her hand reached for Clementina’s and their fingers laced, knuckles clenched white on Clementina’s stomach. “Tina, get out while you still can.”

  “I can’t. Not without Eduardo. He needs me.”

  The women kissed cheeks. Milagros slipped away and Clementina shut the door. For hours she paced the apartment, her lovely curved brow twisted up with worry. Every so often she looked wild-eyed at Alejo, as if expecting him to make the decision whether to stay for Eduardo or flee without him. He avoided her eyes and went into the kitchen to make them some eggs.

  On the wall by the phone hung the calendar, still showing September’s page. Alejo had been crossing out the days in anticipation of their upcoming trip to Portillo—their last ski trip of the season. But the Xs stopped on September 11, 1973. The day Pinochet came to town, froze the calendar and put the country’s plans on hold.

  Clementina and Alejo ate their eggs in silence, an unspoken decision to stay.

  They should have gone.

  Alejo, now man of the house, shook in the dark of the closet, reaching up to hold the sleeves and hems of his parents’ clothing. Worn out by fear, his young nerves shredded, the ball of his body tipped sideways until his head came to rest against the closet wall, cushioned by his mother’s winter coat.

  He began to play the game his father made up: Alejo named an animal, Eduardo gave the group term.

  Lions.

  “Pride.”

  Bears.

  “Sleuth.”

  Zebras.

  “Dazzle.”

  Giraffes.

  “Tower.”

  Pandas.

  “Embarrassment.”

  Alejo went on quizzing himself, his eyes dipping and drooping. When he woke with a start, dawn was evident in the thin crack of light beneath the closet door.

  He snuck out once—to use the toilet and load his arms with things from the kitchen. He returned to his hiding place and waited.

  The doorbell didn’t ring. Nor the phone. The outside din of helicopters, guns, explosions and screams slipped into the open bedroom window and through the crack of the closet door.

  Toads.

  “Knot.”

  Camels.

  “Caravan.”

  Rhinoceros.

  “Crash.”

  Crows.

  Murder, Alejo thought.

  His mother never returned.

  Bullfinch.

  Bellowing.

  Moles.

  Labor.

  Swans.

  Bevy.

  Hedgehogs.

  Array.

  Crows.

  “Murder,” Alejo said.

  He hid in the apartment closet for five days, venturing out only to the bathroom or the kitchen for food. Every hour on the hour, he thought about yelling for help from the window. Once or twice he pressed his ear to the front door, but heard nothing in the hallway. The building was eerily and sickly silent. The normal cacophony of music, voices, water in pipes and footsteps on ceilings seemed to be hiding as well. Or it had been silenced.

  On the sixth day, the childish fear was replaced by a resigned acceptance. The helpless parts of his brain were spent. Other parts wired for survival began to wake up. Alejo opened the closet door and inched on hands and knees to the bedroom window, which looked out over Calle Isabella. Leaflets had drifted inside like large snowflakes. Alejo collected them in a neat pile. His mother liked things to be neat.

  Outside, the rhythmic hum of helicopter rotors chopped across the sky. The rattling burst of a machine gun echoed off building walls. Boots marched on the pavement. Around corners and in alleys, Alejo heard voices raised in anger and despair. Scuffles with the soldiers. Scuffles among the starving people of the campamentos who were scavenging the streets for food. And layered over all, incessant barking and howling.

  Carefully, Alejo peered over the windowsill. Santiago’s streets were home to over a million stray dogs. Like the cats of Rome, this secondary canine population was taken for daily granted, neither culled nor coddled. But now the soldiers, bored and itching for action, were taking pot shots at the dogs. Alejo flinched as bullets ricocheted off brick and stone. His stomach sank in a sickening dread. He loved the street dogs. They were his personal pets.

  I should go.

  The thought tugged at his shirt tails. He’d been ignoring it for days now but the plight of the dogs galvanized him into action. He found the rucksack Eduardo wore when they went skiing in Portillo. He began to pack.

  Papers first. Until this spring, it wouldn’t have occurred to him he had papers. Then La Moneda went up in flames and Eduardo made a call to his brother, Felipe, in the United States. They began to discuss getting out.

  Alejo found the stiff little folder containing birth certificates and passports and separated his own. The Hispanic custom of giving children both parents’ surnames made filling out forms a challenge. He read his full name, crammed in tiny type across the allotted space: Alejandro Gabriel Eduardo Penda Vilaró.

  “We gave you lots of names,” Eduardo once said. “So you can be anyone you want.”

  Alejo put the envelope back where he found it on his father’s desk, pausing, as he always did, to pick up the knife his father used as a paperweight.

  It was an Albacete dagger, given as a gift to Eduardo from a student he tutored through university. Twenty-four centimeters long with a handsome bone-and-brass handle. The sheath was covered in buff velour with a pointed brass end, and the dagger slid from it with barely a sound. The double-edged blade had a ridge from the guard to the tip and if Alejo looked close, he could see faint floral designs etched in the metal. It felt light yet solid in his hand. And now, alone in the apartment, it felt like a needed friend.

  He collected clothes, remembering it was the start of spring in Chile, but in New York, where Tío Felipe lived, it was autumn. He’d need long-sleeved shirts and a sweater. And the socks he wore for skiing would be a good idea. From a top dresser drawer he collected six handkerchiefs. His mother was always after him to remember a handkerchief. When he went to bed at night, she tucked one under his pillow. After these practicalities, he packed some books, a toothbrush, a few possessions he couldn’t bear to part with. Last, he picked up the dagger.

  “Albacete,” he said, hefting it a few times in his hand. He put it in the pack.

  Just in case.

  He set the small sack outside the closet door. Then decided it would be better off inside with him. He was about to shut himself in for the night when he heard a volley of gunshots in the Calle Isabella.

  Then a dog screamed.

  Alejo almost pissed himself. His blood solidified in his heart and stomach in a stupefied horror. He’d never heard a dog make that kind of noise. It sounded like a woman keening for a murdered husband.

  “Murder of crows,” he whispered.

  He crept to the window. Plastering himself flat to the wall, he craned his head around and looked. He saw a group of soldiers, one of them with his rifle raised. The dog let out three high-pitched yelps, followed by another terrible moan. Alejo’s hands clamped to his ears and pressed hard. Sandwiched between the ocean roar of his palms, he saw the soldiers am
ble away, guns slung on backs and arms around shoulders.

  He let go his ears. From under the window, the dog cried and cried. Alejo slid down the wall, gathered himself into a ball once more and rocked furiously, willing the animal to die.

  He watched the little clock on the bedside table lose twenty minutes.

  The dog was still alive and crying. Alejo’s face was covered in a fine mist of sweat. The tenderest part of his heart and the survival parts of his brain knew what he had to do.

  He got his father’s dagger out of the backpack.

  Albacete, he thought. He didn’t know it was a region in Spain. He thought it was the knife’s name.

  Albacete, help me.

  He unlocked the front door, checked carefully up and down the hall, then went down the three flights of stairs, his back pressed to the wall.

  He surveyed the block carefully, then stepped into the Calle Isabella.

  It was dark. Only a single streetlight at the corner was lit, making a weak cone of light.

  The dog cried, huddled against the building in a pool of blood. It was female. Her stomach was shot open and her dead pups scattered. She foamed at the mouth and panted between cries. Her glazed eyes looked up as Alejo approached.

  Albacete, you’re here. Help me.

  The smell of the gutshot dog was appalling. The sound was worse. Alejo looked anywhere but the bloody sidewalk.

  “Calmate, hija,” Alejo whispered, crouching down as his awareness floated up and out of his head. It watched as his bodily self lovingly took the dog’s muzzle and pulled the head tenderly against his chest. Albacete made a firm, swift and merciful slice.

  The street sighed into silence.

  It’s done. It’s quiet now. Don’t think about it anymore.

  Alejo wiped the blade on his jeans and slipped back inside. He washed his hands, cleaned off the dagger and sheathed it. He went into the bathroom and threw up with an odd detachment. Then he went into the closet.

  You mustn’t think about this.

  He ran a hand over the thick line of hangers, finding a thin cardigan belonging to Clementina, and a heavier one belonging to Eduardo. He thrust his mother’s sleeves inside the sleeves of his father, then put on the doubled garment.

  Do not think about it. Forget it.