I Lived on Butterfly Hill Read online

  Papá pours everyone a cup of coffee. Even me, although mine has more leche—milk—than café. He frowns when he sees his empty plate with a few stray crumbs on it, but Abuela Frida quickly puts another empanada on his plate, telling him, “Andrés, you must be losing your memory in your old age! I warned Esmeralda about marrying an older man!” We laugh, and then there is a rare silence. We always start with the empanadas. We chew and smile at one another, devouring them one by one while they are still warm, and capturing on our sticky fingers any crumbs that have escaped to our plates.

  But a pang of sadness interrupts my enjoyment. I think of Minerva’s babies and the children on Cerro Campana and Cerro Delicia. I’m sure they don’t get empanadas today, even though it’s Sunday.

  I think about how before yesterday I had visited the poor neighborhoods of Valparaíso only in the sunshine. The colors of the flags strung between the houses, the music played by old men on the corners strumming guitars with one string and tapping rhythms on empty paint buckets—that’s what I always remembered when I thought about the outskirts of town. And the children—they were running around, playing in the streets. When I think back, they did wear ragged clothes, and most of them were barefoot—but I hardly noticed since they were laughing like all little kids do. Somehow the sun’s sparkle seemed to land on everything on the hills, making them beautiful. Or maybe it was the people themselves.

  And now a strange idea is forming in my mind, one I will try to make sense of by writing it down in my notebook: I think there may be two kinds of rain in my country. It falls from the same sky, but then the rain changes depending on who it falls on. There is the rain of people like me. As it falls, I watch from the windows of Café Iris while eating sopaipillas with my friends, or listen to its pitter-patter while reading on the sofa next to Abuela Frida knitting blue scarves, enjoying the feeling of everyone safe and snug under our strong roof in our sturdy house on Butterfly Hill.

  The rain of the poor is rain that knocks houses over, makes roofs cave in, and spoils food. It is rain that makes mud and illness rise up from the ground. It is rain that shows the Minervas of Valparaíso all they lack, by taking away the little they had. Sun and rain, city center and city outskirts—I used to think all was beautiful and good. But now I am not so sure.

  Abuela Frida

  On Sundays it is my job to wash the dishes after our big afternoon meal. It was Abuela Frida who insisted on giving me this chore, because Mamá and Papá have always been happy as long as I focus on my studies. “I raised you and Graciela to value hard work, Esmeralda!” Abuela told my mother one day as I sat beneath the kitchen table. “And I don’t want my granddaughter to grow up like all the lazy upper-class children at her school!”

  But I don’t mind washing dishes . . . at least, not much since discovering I can make up stories in my head and scrub Delfina’s stew pot at the same time. My grandmother has given herself one endless chore—she knits, knits, knits—huge scarves that move and stretch like rippling waves from the invincible ocean called the Pacific. Abuela Frida falls asleep when she knits, and I often hear her speak in a low voice, as if something troubling were happening. I wonder if she is dreaming of the long journey she took to Valparaíso Harbor on the Ship Called Hope. Papá says Abuela suffers from an illness called nostalgia, which often is cured with a sprinkle of love, some lemon, a few raisins, and many slices of avocado.

  When I was younger, my grandmother would say things like “Celeste, take your zzzzzzshoes off the zzzzzzsofa,” and I’d wonder why she always sounded like a bumblebee when she spoke.

  I place the last plate in the dish rack and wipe my hands on a dish towel. The window over the kitchen sink looks out at the eucalyptus tree with the pink and purple swings, and by the shadows they make on the grass I can tell there are a few hours of daylight left. I wonder if Abuela Frida will take a walk with me. I want to talk to her, just the two of us, and ask her what she thinks about the ships in the harbor, and tell her about Minerva and her twins shivering with cold, and all the other troubling things I saw on Cerro Campana and Cerro Delicia yesterday.

  I poke my head into the parlor. She is sitting in her rocking chair as always, knitting a blue scarf. “Abuela Frida, I’m done with the dishes. Will you take a walk with me, maybe to get some ice cream?”

  “It’s a bit late, Querida.” Abuela Frida looks up at the cuckoo clock on the wall.

  “But”—I clasp my hands together—“is it ever really too late for dulce de leche?”

  My grandmother’s eyes light up at the mention of her favorite flavor. “Mmmmm . . . Okay, okay!” She laughs. “You know my weakness is caramel—besides you, that is. It will be good to get some fresh air after so much rain. Check with your parents first while I touch up my hair. I’m sure I look a sight.”

  I run down the hall to the study, where my parents are reading. Before I say a word, Mamá asks me, “Are the dishes done? And your homework?”

  “Sí, Mamá.”

  “Then you two girls have fun,” she says, laughing. “And bring me back some chocolate chip!” Sometimes Mamá is like that—she somehow just knows exactly what’s on my mind.

  Papá glances up from his medical journal. “Strawberry for me, hija.”

  Abuela and I take a cable car down to the bottom of Barón Hill, and walk the rest of the way to the marketplace near the harbor. We visit our favorite ice cream shop, Luigi’s, the very same spot where Abuela Frida went with my Abuelo José on their first date. We find a bench to sit on and watch the people—old women selling carnations; men with their hands in their pockets, talking to one another with cigarettes hanging from their lips; families heading home from a Sunday in the park, their little children trailing kites behind them. I wait until we’ve both licked the last drops of ice cream from our fingers to tell her about the strange fears I’ve been feeling in my bones.

  I look at Abuela Frida and open my mouth, but no sound comes out. I look down, flustered. I’m always collecting words and writing them down in my notebook, and I can be a real chatterbox, too, especially with my grandmother. But somehow talking about these fears feels different—almost dangerous—though I don’t know why. I just don’t know how to explain how I’m feeling.

  Abuela Frida takes my hand and clears her throat: “Mmmmmmm rrrrrrrrr zzzzzzz.” Her sounds swirl around my hair, all tangly in the salty breeze. “Celeste of my soul,” she urges me gently. “Don’t worry about finding the words to speak your mind—simply tell me what’s in your heart.”

  “Abuela, I’ve been feeling uneasy lately. Mostly because of what I see in the harbor. The ships are different—they’re so much bigger, and there are so many of them. It feels dangerous. Is it just my imagination or is something going on?”

  Then Abuela Frida speaks to me in German, which she does when she has something very serious on her mind. “Celeste, I will speak to you honestly. I have noticed the harbor is more crowded too. I don’t know of anything amiss, but when you speak of big ships gathering together, it makes me afraid . . . but maybe that’s just because I have seen war. When the Nazis arrived in Vienna in 1938, it was not by ship—they arrived on foot. So, I’m not sure . . .” Her voice trails off.

  Maybe I’ve worried Abuela needlessly? Reminded her of all the horrible things she went through when she was young, just because she was Jewish? I search for something to lighten her mood. “But ships can be wonderful, too,” I say. “Remember how you used to love to tell me stories about the Ship Called Hope?”

  “Yes, how you loved those stories. And how I loved telling them.”

  I take her hand. “Tell me again, Abuela.”

  She smiles and her voice hums. “The couple who helped me escape the Nazis drove me all the way from Austria to the city of Hamburg, in Germany. When we got to the port, they gave me a ticket for a third-class passage on the most enormous ship in the Hamburg harbor, bound for Chile. For another port—called Valparaíso. The name sounded so strange but beautiful, too. I went abo
ard, all alone, a young girl only a few years older than you are now. But that night, in steerage—the belly of the ship, where the poorest passengers slept—I met your grandfather José. We became friends, and stayed friends when we arrived in our new city. And a few years later I married him.” My grandmother’s eyes fill with a soft light. “He brought me peace. He helped me make a new life in the new world.”

  I love hearing about the Ship Called Hope, and imagining how white it shone in the moonlight, crossing the dark Atlantic. I decide to leave my other questions for another time. “Thank you for telling me again, Abuela.”

  “De nada, child.” Abuela Frida squeezes my hand. “But now I’m tired. Let’s go home, Celeste.”

  We go back inside to buy ice cream for my parents, then we walk through the streets of Valparaíso hand in hand. As we climb the winding path that leads to our house, Abuela Frida turns to me. Her face is beaming, lit from within by a memory. “Vienna was a beautiful city before the war. It had many lilacs in springtime, and that is why José planted them outside my window on Butterfly Hill.”

  Mornings with Delfina

  My parents wake with the sun and leave for the hospital while I am still in bed. But sometimes my mother’s good-bye kiss on my forehead wakes me up. If not, Delfina barges in and bangs on the bedposts with her purple broom.

  “¡Buenos días, señorita!”

  She always worries I’ll be late for school, but it doesn’t take long to get dressed. I wear the same navy-blue uniform every day. Girls can wear either skirts or pants—I almost always choose pants, although Abuela Frida says I should wear a skirt because it looks more ladylike—and over them we tie white smocks with our names embroidered in red letters.

  “Good morning, pelicans! Good morning, Valparaíso!” I call out the window before turning to my backpack, overflowing with papers from the night before.

  It’s hard to get all my school books and homework to fit. Now that I am in sixth grade, I have so many subjects. But the one thing I always seem to be learning is poetry. “To know Chilean poetry is to know your history,” our teacher Marta Alvarado reminds us over a chorus of groans every time she assigns poems to memorize and recite. I am one of the few students who never complain. Another is Gloria, because she is a perfect student. And Cristóbal, because he has usually fallen asleep. But me? I just love, love poetry. My favorites are the Odes of Pablo Neruda. Poems about ordinary, everyday things that anyone sees, like sprinkles of salt or a chestnut on the ground or a fish in the market. Today is my turn to recite a poem, and I’ve chosen Neruda’s “Ode to the Watermelon.” My mouth waters every time I repeat the words: “the coolest of all the planets . . . the green whale of the summer.”

  “¡Niña, ya! All right, already! You’ll be late for school!”

  Delfina wakes me from my daydream. My fingers fly through my long, unruly hair as I twist it into tight braids. “I’m coming, Delfina!” I call as I scramble down the twisty staircase, then scramble back up again. “I forgot the watermelon!”

  “What on earth . . . ?”

  I wave the poem at Delfina as she gives me a gentle nudge out the door.

  Earthquakes of the Soul

  Since I don’t have a pair of pelican wings, there are only two ways for me to get down Butterfly Hill to school. When I am late, I take the cable cars. It makes me feel grown-up to ride them alone.

  On days when I have a few extra minutes, I walk along a steep, winding path, a series of small ups and downs that remind me of the beating of butterfly wings. And at night these ups and downs, illuminated by the lights of the cable cars, seem to cast the shadows of a thousand dancing fireflies all around me.

  At the bottom is Café Iris, where el mago waves to me as he sets up his little table with tarot cards and crystals on the patio. And then I come to the busy streets of Valparaíso, where there are fruit stands, squares with statues, the harbor full of flags, and women carrying white baskets, selling red carnations and caramels for just one peso.

  My school looks beautiful from a distance—its white dome topped with red that hides a brass bell, which seems to laugh instead of ring—but inside, the building is full of cracks and crevices. The school has stood at the bottom of the hill for more than a hundred years, ever since a woman named Juana Ross decided to use her fortune to build hospitals and schools all over Chile, and it has survived many earthquakes.

  Every day the brave building sways a little in the wind, as if the earth were dancing a very slow waltz with it. But some days the ground moves too fast, like a Brazilian samba, and our desks shake and dust fills the air. But we are all accustomed to tremors like this, and to our ramshackle school, where the desks are nailed to the floors.

  Everyone in Chile has an explanation for earthquakes. I say that the earth has the right to yawn and stretch just as I do in my bed when I don’t want to wake early for school, and also has the right to sneeze as we all do when covered in dust. “Maybe she is shaking off the sands from the Atacama Desert!” I tell my mother that evening as I recite “Ode to the Watermelon” for her, and a tremor breaks a few teacups in the kitchen.

  Mamá puts my handwritten copy of the poem down and smoothes the crinkled paper with her hand.

  “Celeste, I am not worried about earthquakes that come from the ground as much as those that are born in the soul.”

  I’m not sure what she means, and she can tell, because she goes on. “When the earth trembles and you don’t have anything to hold on to, you can’t steady yourself. It seems like even your house, which you thought was so safe, is nothing but a flimsy raft being knocked about by waves.”

  “So—are you saying that our souls can be knocked down like houses?”

  “Yes, my wise girl,” she says. “Our souls can crumble when we don’t care about our neighbors, or when we say hateful things about others, or exclude people for being different.” She begins to pick the shattered pieces of porcelain from the teacups off the floor.

  I bend down to help her, and she continues, “But remember, Celeste, that there are always so many more ways to heal and help a soul than to break one. Human beings are just like the earth. We want to be whole. Remember that. Promise?”

  My mother’s voice sounds urgent, so I nod gravely. Something is wrong, I can tell. So I ask her straight out. “What is it, Mamá?”

  My mother sweeps the last bits of porcelain dust off the floor with her hands before answering me. I feel she is not only gathering the broken bits but her words as well. For then she says, “Celeste, your father will be cross with me if he knows I told you this. But I feel you are old enough to know what is happening around you. I’ve heard you asking about the ships in the harbor, and truthfully I’m not sure what is going on. Hopefully, what I share with you are my fears and nothing more: I feel that Chile soon will suffer many earthquakes of the soul. I’ve heard rumors, in the hospital, that the military wants to end health care for those who cannot pay for it. And some even say that the military would try to take over Alarcón’s government if it ever were strong enough . . . perhaps if it had aid from afar . . .” Her voice trails off, and she throws the sharp pieces of broken porcelain into the trash. Then she turns to me and shakes her head. “But—likely my imagination is carrying me away. Surely nothing can happen as long as Presidente Alarcón has the people on his side!”

  “It’s all right, Mamá,” I tell her. But a shiver runs down my spine as I watch Mamá fill the kettle with water.

  “More tea, Querida?” She smiles at me, maybe a little too brightly.

  “No, Mamá,” I say. “I’m going to the roof to think.”

  Rose Petals on the Pavement

  The next day in school I can’t stop thinking about what Mamá said about earthquakes of the soul. I think also about all the real earthquakes I have known. I still have nightmares sometimes about the big one, the biggest to hit Valparaíso in decades. I was seven years old, and right here at the Juana Ross School, when the earth exploded beneath our feet. We all
started screaming and running, and our teacher almost fainted. I squeezed into a tiny ball beneath my desk, and Lucila crawled across the aisle to hide with me. We clutched each other, too scared to cry, to even breathe. All I wanted was to run home to Butterfly Hill.

  The earthquake lasted only a few minutes, but it felt like forever. Soon after, Nana Delfina came to look for me on foot, and as we made our way home, it looked like someone had clutched the world in his hands and shaken it upside down. Churches, houses, trees, telephone poles had fallen. Bathtubs and beds had crashed through windows, and people in the streets below had hidden under them. And the worst of all was when Delfina told me to hide my face on her shoulder. I knew why, although I didn’t tell her. We were passing by bodies. People also had fallen.

  I look over at Lucila at her desk, remembering how we held on to each other for dear life that day. How small we were, and yet Lucila somehow knew we should cover our heads with our hands. Picturing us huddled under that desk gives me shivers. I look over at Lucila once more, just to make sure . . . I’m so anxious all of a sudden, just like when I look at the ships in the harbor. Lucila feels my gaze and smiles at me. I smile back, relieved. I am so glad that we are big girls now, and Valparaíso hasn’t had an earthquake so awful in a long, long time.

  I put my elbow on the desk and prop my chin in my hand, daydreaming some more. I hear Señorita Alvarado talking about Chilean independence. My head starts to dip and nod . . .

  “Señorita Marconi, there will be nothing on next week’s history exam about napping.”

  I jerk my head up with a start. “Perdone. I’m sorry, Señorita Alvarado.”

  Marisol giggles, and Señorita Alvarado’s attention is diverted away from me.

  “Señorita López, will you please read the next paragraph about Chile’s war for independence?”