Lunch at the Polo Club

After their second week of volunteer farmwork, Gabriel and Caro subjected themselves to a twin ordeal: lunch with her parents on Saturday, lunch with his on Sunday. The idea was to gain parental trust, but within 15 minutes of entering the Ravests’ chilly apartment, Gabriel understood that it would be impossible for him to win Caro’s mom over. She watched him with the measured suspicion of a downtown cop. Even as she refilled his Coke, passed him dishes of salted peanuts and green olives, and ushered him into the dining room, Gabriel felt thoroughly unwelcome.

He recognized that he could be projecting. Also, he had no clue how to charm adults. It had never occurred to him that he’d need to try. He did achieve some light sparring about the Copa Libertadores with Caro’s father, a man so quiet that he seemed distant even when he was sitting beside Gabriel, but once that fizzled, everyone seemed at a loss. Caro kept twisting her hair. Her mother asked Gabriel a battery of questions, but none that lent itself to an answer longer than a sentence. It was tough to elaborate on not having siblings, or not liking his school, or not knowing what job he wanted someday.

The meal itself was not on his side. Caro’s mom had made trout with lemon. It was delicious, but it was also full of translucent bones. Gabriel kept failing to notice them, which meant he kept having to spit fish ribs into his napkin. He had the strong suspicion that the dish was a table-manners test.

After dessert, Caro went unbidden to the kitchen, returning with a thermal carafe of hot water and a brown jar of Nescafé. Her mother produced four floral china cups from the sideboard, asking, “Gabriel, how many scoops?”

“Two, please,” he said, mindful of instant coffee’s scarcity.

She narrowed her eyes. “Two?”

“Yes, please.”

“So you like watery coffee?”

“Ma,” Caro interceded. “Let him drink it how he wants.”

“I’d like your boyfriend to drink his coffee how he wants it,” her mother said, sinking a spoon into the coffee crystals. Pope Paul VI glared from a framed magazine cover behind her. His cassock fluttered; his crucifix reflected the sun, or the camera’s flash. Señora Ravest went on: “Instead of asking me to make it weak, because he thinks we can’t afford more Nescafé.”

Gabriel couldn’t recover from that. No chance. He gulped his thin coffee, sick with shame, and fled the moment he could. On the riverbank that evening, he informed his friend Nico that the lunch had been an unqualified and possibly unprecedented disaster, and that he’d probably have to go into hiding because there was no imaginable way he could live it down.

Nico thumped his back, then handed him a flask. “What’d you expect? To have fun?”

Gabriel drank, wincing at the alcohol’s burn. The settlement across the Mapocho River shone with lantern light. He picked burs from his socks with his free hand. “How’d it go when you met Alejandra’s parents?” he asked.

Nico shrugged. “I knew them already.”

“So it went well?”

“No.” They both laughed, and Nico, reclaiming his flask, said, “Don’t worry. Doesn’t matter how bad meeting her parents was. Introducing her to yours will be worse.”

Nico was right. Gabriel’s parents insisted on taking Caro to the Polo Club, where she had never been. He spent 10 minutes explaining to his mother that it was not, in fact, astonishing that Caro had lived most of her life in Santiago—right here in Vitacura—without entering the club’s dining room. It was completely normal, and could his mom please just not make a big deal?

Gabriel hoped Caro would enjoy the Polo Club more than he did. She’d get a great meal and great people-watching, and she liked the challenge of easing herself into unfamiliar settings. He had seen her do it on farms, at Communist Youth meetings, at the May Day march downtown. He told himself the Polo Club would be no different. She might even think lunch there was fun.

He released that hope within a minute of walking Caro through the club’s massive wooden doors. She seemed to shrink beneath its vaulted ceiling. She bit her lips and held herself taut as the maître d’ escorted them to a table. Seated, she unfanned her starched maroon napkin and sat on the edge of her gilt chair, glancing at the dining room’s high brown beams and painted faux-heraldic shields. The walls were heavy with framed pictures of members past, a legion of black-and-white white men holding oars and rackets, mallets and clubs.

Gabriel had the brief, terrible thought that if Caro were mestiza—if she were even the slightest bit brown—this meal would be a crisis just by virtue of its location. As it was, the situation didn’t look good. His father had ordered a double scotch before sitting down, which sent his mother into a fit of silent ring-spinning. Caro couldn’t stop staring at the buffet, which meant Gabriel couldn’t either. Never before had he registered what an impossibility it should be for the Polo Club to have a buffet when the average bread line stretched two blocks.

The chafing dishes were full, and sparkled with Sterno and silver polish. Their domed hoods winked open, displaying grayish sliced roast beef, herb-crusted chicken breasts, scalloped potatoes, roasted potatoes, shoestring fries, cubed zucchini, and more little golden cups of individual quiches than any club member could eat. The excess was both unconscionable and confusing. Who knew an aboveboard, tax-paying business could get this many eggs in June 1973? Or this much beef? Did some club member fly it in personally from his not-yet-expropriated ranch in the south?

Gabriel filled his plate. How could he not, given the hungry wonder on Caro’s face? She seemed otherwise miserable. He refused to increase her discomfort. Instead, he trailed her down the buffet, taking exactly what she took. At the table’s end, he looked up to see that somehow the afternoon had gotten worse: The maître d’ was leading Carlos Aldunante and his parents into the room.

Gabriel tried closing his eyes. Aldunante was still there when he opened them. He tried praying, but God neglected to prove his existence by airlifting Aldunante from the room. Instead, Aldunante sat and shook out his napkin, looking delighted to be there.

“Can we sit back down?” Caro asked. “People are looking at us.”

He pointed with his chin at Aldunante. “See that kid? The ferret-looking one? He goes to my school.”

“So?”

“So Nico and I are skipping school to do the farm brigade. I told them I was going to see my grandparents in the United States.”

“Will he tell?”

Gabriel nodded. “He’s a fascist. He hates me.”

Caro balanced her plate in one hand and tucked her hair behind her ears with the other. “Aren’t most people here fascists?”

“Yeah, but not like him. He’s an actual Nazi. In Patria y Libertad and everything. A couple weeks ago, he announced to our whole class that the Holocaust didn’t happen.”

Her eyes narrowed. “You didn’t tell me that.”

“I didn’t want—” Gabriel sighed. He appreciated the horror in Caro’s expression, but what could he say? I didn’t want you to imagine me getting Jew-baited? It was humiliating enough to have to deal with Aldunante. Now that he’d told her, he knew his instinct had been right: Caro knowing about it made him feel worse.

She stepped closer. For the first time since their arrival, her shoulders dropped to their usual height. Behind her, the Polo Club gleamed the dull gleam of brass and mahogany, feather dusters and floor wax. “Didn’t want what?”

“To make you think about him. He doesn’t deserve it.”

“What’s his name?”

“Carlos Aldunante.”

“Carlos Aldunante,” Caro repeated. A new expression crossed her face. Gabriel couldn’t identify it. Only once she had led him back to his parents’ table, set her plate down, and directed herself briskly across the dining room did Gabriel, trailing in her wake, realize that the look had been malice.

Aldunante was alone at his table; his parents had gone to the bar. His eyes lit up when he saw Gabriel and Caro approaching. “Lazris!” he called. “I didn’t know you were in town. And I didn’t know they let Jews in here.”

Caro raked a hand through her hair. “You must be Carlos.”

“I am.”

“I go to school at Santa Úrsula. I’ve heard all about you.” She lingered on the “all,” spinning and stretching the word. Gabriel had never heard her use a tone this nakedly flirtatious. It was like listening to a different girl.

“You have?” Aldunante asked.

“Of course! You’re famous.” She paused. “For having the smallest dick in Vitacura.”

Gabriel burst out laughing. His girlfriend was a genius. He wished he had his friend Ítalo’s camera. Aldunante’s horrified face should be preserved in its full glory ’til the end of time.

“All the girls talk about it,” Caro continued. Her voice was matter-of-fact now. “They say scientists are going to study it after you die. But, you know, better tiny than circumcised. Right?”

Aldunante didn’t respond. Gabriel felt as if he were levitating. Victory glowed in his chest. “Don’t tell anyone you saw me,” he said. He had never sounded so tough in Spanish—or possibly in any language, including the private mix of his own mind. “And I won’t tell anyone at school about this.”

As he and Caro crossed the dining room, he told her, “I was wishing I hadn’t let my parents drag us here. Not anymore.”

She rewarded him with a kiss. “I enjoyed that.”

“So did I.”

At the Lazrises’ table, Gabriel’s father was eating already, which was a major violation of family etiquette. Gabriel had been trained to not even touch his fork until everyone was seated. His mother asked, in her awful Spanish, “Who was that?”

“A classmate of mine,” Gabriel said in English.

His mom showed only marginal relief at switching languages. “Who you absolutely had to go see?”

He grinned; he couldn’t help it. Beside him, Caro cut a careful square of roast beef, looking highly pleased with herself. “I’m sorry,” Gabriel said, doing his best to sound, if not sincere, at least meek. “I promise, we’re all yours now.”

Gabriel’s delight got him comfortably through the first half of the meal. His father, having wolfed down two chicken paillards, paused and began asking Caro questions. He spoke Spanish but couldn’t understand her replies. Caro, in turn, did her best with her school English, but her vocabulary was too limited for her efforts to make much difference. Gabriel still had to relay to his parents that she was an only child; that her mother was a baker, her father a high-school teacher. She wasn’t a fully subscribed Communist but was seriously contemplating joining the party; she was worried about civil war, yes; no, she didn’t—“Mom! Why would you ask that?”—want to move to the United States when she grew up, but she did want to leave Santiago.

“Really?” Gabriel said, as an aside. “I didn’t know that.”

Caro nodded. In Spanish, she said to Gabriel, “Not necessarily for my whole life, but I like the idea of living in different parts of Chile. The mountains, the desert.” She shrugged. “I know a lot of people want to live abroad, but I’d rather figure out what part of my own country I like best.”

His dad cleared his throat. “What was that?”

“Caro was telling me she wants to live in other parts of Chile.”

“Very admirable.” His father reached for his drink, which was his third. He had a green fleck of parsley in his teeth. “Tell her I like to see young people taking an interest in their native country.”

Gabriel looked at his mother, who looked at the chicken bones on her plate. He was tempted to snatch and drain her full wineglass. Also to march his dad across the room to Aldunante, saying, “You wish I were more patriotic? Ask Carlos here about patriotism. Ask him about Patria y Libertad. Maybe you’d like him to be your kid.”

He glanced behind him to see Aldunante hunched over his plate, curled into himself like a snail. His parents visibly paid him no mind. Pity crept into Gabriel’s chest, unpleasant and unwelcome. Aldunante deserved to be mocked and ignored. Deserved worse. He, Gabriel, wasn’t going to wreck Caro’s gift to him by feeling guilty about it.

“Gabriel,” his dad snapped. “I told you to translate.”

“Eat fast,” Gabriel told Caro in Spanish. “My dad’s going to start a fight.”

“What was that?” his dad asked.

“Nothing.”

“Don’t lie.”

Gabriel lifted his hands in fake surrender. “I was translating for you.”

“I don’t think so.” His dad’s face turned the high lilac of anger mixing with alcohol. He reached for his scotch glass, and Gabriel’s mother, as if killing a fly, swatted his hand to his lap.

He twisted to face her. “Vera.”

“Yes?”

“Am I a child?”

She squared her narrow shoulders. “Apparently.”

Gabriel heard his own breath catch. Beside him, Caro set down her fork. He tried and failed to speak. He was so accustomed to inserting himself into his parents’ arguments, or starting new arguments to derail theirs. His mother had never, in his memory, performed the same service for him. Was this her backward way of making Caro feel comfortable? Or was he watching his mother’s marital patience finally run out?

“Only children can’t control their reactions, Ray,” she said. “Children and drunks.”

Nobody moved. The dining room clinked around them. Soft classical music washed among the tables. A tweed-jacketed woman to Gabriel’s right released an absurd, trilling laugh, like a human xylophone.

“Vera,” Ray said again, enunciating hard. “I am under significant stress.”

“I know.”

“Of which you are a leading cause.”

She coiled her shoulders back, rising in her seat like a charmed snake from its basket. Her various diamonds glittered. Alarmingly, so did her teeth. This was not like her. Her truth-telling was helpless and soft, not sharp-edged and frightening. “I refuse,” she said, “to let you blame me for your paranoia.”

“And I refuse to let you be willfully ignorant.”

The back of Gabriel’s throat swelled. His lunch congealed before him: overdone chicken drying white as sawdust, creamed corn solidifying in its pale-gold fat. Though his stomach turned, he kept his gaze on his plate. If he looked at Caro, there would be a non-negligible risk of tears.

“Maybe,” his mother said, “if you shared what you claim to know—”

“I know you and Gabriel need to leave.”

Gabriel snapped his head up. His mother’s face blazed with fury. His father’s cheeks were now newsprint-colored, his eyes red and bulging. He looked like a street-corner crank. A soapbox preacher. He looked like Nixon on TV.

“Good parents want their children to be happy,” Vera said. “And our son is happy here.”

“He won’t be happy once war breaks out.”

Gabriel couldn’t speak. Caro took his hand beneath the table. He was still frightened to look at her. He tried to concentrate on the tablecloth, which had faint fold lines running across it, a coffee ring half hidden by a saltshaker.

“The Chilean government,” his father continued, “is weeks from collapse. A few months at best. Nobody—and I mean nobody—knows when the end will come. It could be September, or it could be next Sunday. And if it’s next Sunday, Vera, how am I supposed to protect you? How can I keep you and Gabriel safe if you won’t go?”

Gabriel dragged his chair forward, making its legs screech on the polished wood floor. “I live here,” he said. “This is my home.”

“I’m your father. My job is to shield you from danger.”

“I don’t want to be shielded.”

“When the air force bombs Santiago, you will.”

Rage coursed down Gabriel’s spine. The glow he’d felt earlier returned, harder and hotter. He hated his father. “Whose air force?”

“Chile’s.”

“On whose orders? With what money?”

Ray shook his head. For once, he was silent. Gabriel could not bear to meet his eyes. He stood, tugging Caro to her feet. Blood hissed in his ears. His vision fuzzed like it did before orgasm. He leaned over the table and spat, “You should get some new sources. Talk to somebody who tells the truth.”

His father gave no sign of hearing. His mother was as impassive as a doll. Caro let him lead her across the dining room, past Aldunante, through the club’s vaulted hall, and onto the abandoned patio. Stacked wicker furniture loomed at its edges. The winter sun stung his eyes. Icy air washed over him, shrinking his anger to fear.

“How much of that did you understand?” he asked Caro.

“None.”

Gabriel glanced past her. Brown polo fields rippled into the distance. Beyond them, high wooden fences concealed the shanties—settlements—in which the ball boys and stable hands lived. If he were Caro, he would claim not to have understood even if he had.

“Nothing at all?” he asked.

“I heard ‘air force,’” she said. “Nothing else.”

Gabriel dug his elbows into his sides. He had been working so hard not to be afraid. “My dad,” he said, “is full of shit.”

Caro nodded.

“He has no idea what this country is like. He isn’t a real reporter.”

“What is he?”

“A CIA mouthpiece.”

Caro stepped back. “No.”

“He helps them,” Gabriel said, twisting the word “helps” as hard as he could. His fear receded a notch.

“He told you?”

Gabriel shook his head. “I figured it out.”

“How?”

“Looked in his desk.”

Caro opened her mouth but didn’t speak. Gabriel attempted a smile. He doubted that it worked, but effort counted. He imagined his parents watching through the dining-room windows. Aldunante, too. His dad’s handler could be in there right now, wondering what the hell his pet writer’s kid was doing out in the cold.

He took Caro’s hands. She drew close enough that their noses touched. Softly, she said, “I’m happy you trust me.”

“I do.”

“You know,” she said, “I bought a Courier a couple weeks ago. Some of the newsstands downtown sell them. I thought I’d practice my English by reading your dad’s column.”

His whole body warmed. “Did you?”

“I gave up after a paragraph.” She laughed a little. “I would have tried harder if I had known it was propaganda.” She paused. “Is anything he writes real?”

Gabriel hesitated. It was possible that not all of his dad’s columns contained propaganda, but he had read enough to know that every single one was intellectually bankrupt.

“No,” Gabriel said, looking squarely at his girlfriend. “Nothing at all.”

Caro skipped farming the next day. In the morning, she called to tell Gabriel she was sick—“or else,” she added, “my body forgot how to digest red meat.” He made sympathetic sounds, doom already pulsing in his chest. He was prepared to bet she wasn’t sick. She was probably bracing herself to break up with him. Who could blame her? Why would she willingly subject herself to future episodes of The Ray and Vera Show?

He was so miserable, he didn’t even tell Nico about Caro leveling Aldunante’s pride. Why bother? Caro would never come to his defense again. He spent the day harvesting greens in grim silence, imagining his bleak, girlfriendless future. How had he lived nearly 17 years without Caro’s questions? Without her awful singing voice, or the mischief in her eyes before sex? He’d been like a prisoner in Plato’s cave—a concept his religion teacher loved, though in the priest’s telling, the allegory was about discovering God, not girls.

Fucking priests. Plato had no Jesus. Plato was centuries before Jesus. Gabriel was sick of Catholic school. He was sick of teachers and parents and being underage. He wished he could dig a hole in the dirt and curl up inside it. He wished he could start university tomorrow and never again talk to anyone from his present world—barring Nico and Caro, if by some miracle she didn’t dump him.

On Tuesday, she returned. She seemed a bit pale, and didn’t lead Gabriel to the lunch shed for afternoon sex, but that could mean either romantic disenchantment or lingering sickness. She skipped again on Wednesday, and one of the antisocial brothers in their brigade approached Gabriel, asking if Caro would be back.

“I have a friend who wants to join,” he said.

Gabriel scowled. He was tempted to say, “You have friends?” Instead, he snapped, “She’s coming. Tell your friend to sign up faster next time.”

He hoped he wasn’t lying. What if Caro vanished? What if she decided she never wanted to see him again? On Thursday, Caro boarded the old van as usual, but Gabriel was not reassured. His mind swarmed like an anthill. He knew better than to ask Caro if she wanted to break up with him, but he couldn’t help it. He needed to know.

That day’s farm grew potatoes, yams, and sunchokes, which they were digging and collecting in crates. Gabriel tried to distract himself with the tactile sensations of farming: wet dirt stiffening his hands and massing under his nails; cold creeping through his jeans and long underwear; humidity swelling through his sinuses. Not helpful. He wondered if the intellectual side of farmwork was learning to catch and release these feelings, or to enjoy the muddy chill instead of resenting it.

It didn’t matter. He appreciated nothing. He would appreciate knowing if he was going to get dumped. Caro wasn’t behaving unusually, but what did that mean? She was, in general, a highly controlled person. She could hide her emotions. She could be suppressing the relief of knowing she was nearly free of him.

Gabriel couldn’t stand it. He managed to wait only the amount of time it took Nico to fill one crate of tubers. As soon as his friend trundled away with his box, Gabriel turned to Caro and asked, “Were you actually sick yesterday?”

Caro narrowed her eyes. Wisps of hair danced at her forehead. “Puking ’til noon. Why?”

Embarrassment needled at Gabriel. Also doubt. “I just want to know.”

“I’d like a reason.” She sat back on her heels. Her face was taut with annoyance. “Do you think I’m a faker?”

Wind raced between them, smelling vaguely of laundry starch. Gabriel stuck his finger into the sugar-brown dirt. “No.”

“So?”

“So I was scared—” He swallowed. “I got scared that you wanted to break up with me. I’m still scared.”

“Why would I do that?”

“My parents.”

Her face softened, and she reached for him. Her gloveless hands were chapped and striated with earth. Clouds moved behind her, thin as pencil marks. “I don’t want to break up with you.”

Gabriel laced his fingers through hers. Pressure began to gather behind his eyes. “I would be sad if you did,” he said. “Worse than sad. But I wouldn’t blame you or get angry or anything. I would understand.”

To his astonishment, Caro laughed. “You don’t have to understand. I’m not dumping you.” Then, for the first time, she added: “I love you.”

Gabriel heard himself squeak. Completely involuntary. A mouse’s sound. Caro smiled at him. She looked pleased with herself, not regretful. She wasn’t blowing away like dandelion seed, or sprouting a second head, or otherwise revealing herself to be a dream or hallucination. She was his real girlfriend; he was sitting in a real, cold potato field, with real wind wailing around him, real tears about to freeze on his lashes, real mucus threatening to drip from his nose.

She leaned forward to kiss him. Her lips were chapped, her tongue mildly salty. He had never felt so fully as if someone else was in charge of his life. He could have been Caro’s pet, or her puppet. It was a perfect sensation. He hoped it would continue ’til he died.

He wiped his face on his sleeve. “I love you,” he tried. “Too. I love you too.”

Caro’s mouth curled up. “You better.”

“I promise.” His heart was racing. “I do.”

This story has been excerpted from Lily Meyer’s forthcoming novel, Short War.