Turbulence Read online

  At first I only eyed him as a prospective housemate. When a male housemate graduated, we needed to replace him, and wanted another “Best Boy.” I approached Pasje in our club’s discotheque. He flirted, which I ignored. I made a big plea for our house, emphasizing its fantastic location on the Rapenburg canal, at the center of social and academic life. He moved in a month later.

  He had a bit of a southern accent—I had to overcome my own northern prejudice. Then we became great friends. Real buddies. We studied, shopped for food, made dinner, and watched TV together. At night, we went to the society together. That is where we each went our own way. He said I only had eyes for the older boys. It was true. I knew many because they were my brother’s friends, and I had my heart set on one of them. After a night at the society, I would discuss my progress with Pasje the next day. All the ups and downs of the relationship, which ended in a breakup before it had really begun. Pasje’s broad shoulders were always there to cry on.

  We both said it was the other who started our romance. One evening, we ended up alone in his room. We were having a conversation. I said I had no fears, that I dared everything. He looked me in the eyes, and suddenly, the tension was palpable. “I know something you wouldn’t dare,” he said, his dark eyes gleaming with anticipation. So I dared . . .

  He was my first. Few people would have believed that, because I had a big mouth and moved around in a self-possessed way. “Unaware,” I would call it today. I was fully focused on the outside world, rather than how that world perceived me. I was also used to hanging out with boys. Pasje knew all that and more. Looking back, I now realize how wise and insightful he was.

  We had hit the jackpot. Our love was real. At first, we had to keep it a secret because of the coed house rules. To be alone, we would casually stroll across the Rapenburg bridge to the Academy Building and climb over the walls of the Hortus Botanicus botanical garden with a bottle of wine. Weekends, when he would go back home, were endless and full of anticipation. On Sunday night he would show me the poems he had written during our separation.

  Paris, 1981

  Costume party, Leiden, 1983

  For our first joint vacation we went to Paris. He proudly showed me the city he knew very well, thanks to an ex-girlfriend who had lived there. From Paris, we hitchhiked to his parents’ country house in Normandy. Both the area and the house were deserted. It felt like a true honeymoon.

  After we went public with our relationship, Pasje had to move out; romantic liaisons were not permitted in our house. He chose to move to the biggest frat house in Leiden. It was big enough to allow him to go his own way. He had both the character and the time to play house with me and still be one of the guys. He never gave in to peer pressure, whether it concerned me, his taste in music, or his political views—all three radical.

  There was an enormous intimacy and a total lack of shame between us. He called me a dolphin, or sometimes Flipper, “because of that smile with the little teeth.” I called him a seal, because of his eyes—the sweet brown eyes I kissed immediately when we woke up every time we were together, for thirteen years. I would sign every note with a little drawing of a mouth, an arrow, and an eye.

  Yet, I had a longing for the world in the same deep way other girls can long for love, or the idea of love. I liked the idea of seeing the world. Maybe because I already had love, maybe because of my programming or my destiny. Two years after I took Pasje’s dare, when most of our friends were eyeing management jobs at the student club, my focus turned to getting out of there, to Latin America. Preferably with Pasje, but otherwise, for the time being, without.

  DAY ONE

  Everyone is dead. I am sitting here. In a jungle. Alone. I move my eyes. I see the leaves, the broken plane parts, the bodies. I listen to my breath. It sounds as labored as it feels; my chest hurts so much! But I am breathing. Loud and clear!

  Again, I observe: the sounds, the jungle, the leaves, the plane, the bodies. And myself, lying on a bed of twigs. Sharp little twigs. They hurt. I move a bit. It hurts. My hips hurt. Everything hurts. Help me, dear Lord. Help me!

  My forehead feels as if somebody is pounding on it with a hammer. I cannot move my legs. They seem both cramped and lifeless. I stay on my back and look at my arms. They are covered with blood. There are two gaping wounds near my right elbow. They feel tender. When I graze my fingers over them, I nearly scream.

  I go outside myself again. I focus on the leaves. On the broken plane parts. On the bodies. The Vietnamese girl died with her fist clenched. The man next to me looks both peacefully asleep and dead. Like Pasje, with his sweet smile . . . Don’t think of Pasje. Don’t think of Pasje. I look back at the man. He is not scary, just dead. I know what the dead look like. I have seen corpses. I think of the ones I have seen. Mr. Bongaerts. My grandmother. Manuel in Chile. You only have to see one to know that dead is dead. And that they are not scary, that there is nothing to fear. I check the man’s watch: ten o’clock. Ironic how that keeps going.

  I look at the sky through the trees. There are clouds, but they don’t seem to hold rain. Isn’t it rainy season? I wish I had read up on my travels! I have no idea of where I am. I just know the jungles are endless. And I don’t see any planes. Where is the next plane? The next plane will surely see us. We seem high up the mountain. Who knows how far from where. I have not even looked at the map! I have no idea what direction we are flying. Pasje is my compass. Don’t think of Pasje!

  I look at the sun coming through the leaves. The palette of light and shade is beautiful. The leaves are radiant. My mother would appreciate it. My mother always says she does not worry about me when I am with Pasje. She thinks I am safe because I am with Pasje. Pasje who is . . . Don’t think. Don’t think of Pasje! Think of mammie. She’d be happy to know I got my shots. How smart of her to make me get those. Even tetanus! All arranged against my will, with Jaime, my business partner, as her accomplice. They made sure I had them administered at Schiphol airport. Before my flight to Tokyo. “What for?” I had asked her. “We’re not going to the jungle.” Right!

  I look at my feet sticking out of the borrowed pants. They are swollen, really swollen. My favorite shoes—gray-blue woven crocodile leather moccasins from El Corte Inglés—are cutting into bluish flesh that does not seem like mine.

  I grab my purse. How strange that I still have it on me. I check the contents: very basic travel supplies. No wallet. Pasje has the money. No watch. Pasje has the watch. Don’t think of Pasje! No cell phone. I always have a cell phone. To call Jaime. I think of Jaime. What would he say if he knew where I am? These are going to be the first two business days since we have been working together that I am unable to call him. Since we began at Banco Santander, I always called him. With those big cell phones. Everyone looked at me in the beginning. Sometimes they would point at me in the street in Madrid. In Holland, they would scream that I am a show-off with my phone. No phone now. Can’t call Jaime now.

  Not until Wednesday. On Wednesday, Pasje and I are scheduled to return to Ho Chi Minh City. Jaime expects me to call immediately when I get back to the hotel. I always call him, from wherever I am. To talk about the markets, to make decisions. If he doesn’t hear from me by Thursday, he will definitely make noise. Lots of noise, knowing him.

  I continue checking my purse. There is a makeup pouch, a camera, three packages of Philip Morris Super Lights cigarettes, and a Bic lighter. The makeup pouch is from Loewe. Beautiful, soft Spanish leather, evidence of my recent “upgrade” at Banco Santander. No use for it now. The camera I bought with Numachi in Tokyo. Patient Numachi. How my dead neighbor reminds me of him: the way he spoke, or rather, the way he didn’t. And the careful way in which he had handed me his trousers. Thank God for those; they protect me somewhat from these horrible insects! I hope he was right, that they might come for him soon. Nobody will miss me until Wednesday. It’s Saturday now. Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday. Four days until Wednesday.

  It does not occur to me to take pictures. Nor d
oes it cross my mind to open the man’s suitcase. And I don’t make my way back to the main part of the plane, where the bodies are, to search for food or drinks. I don’t even dare to look over my shoulder. I just stay there, looking down the mountain, telling myself this is real, this is where I am. I have no water. Dear Lord, help me get through this. My mouth is dry. So dry. I contemplate smoking, but with nothing to eat or drink, I decide this might as well be the moment to finally stop. Pasje would have been proud. He wouldn’t have believed it. Don’t think of Pasje! Look at the sun coming through the leaves. Wow! How pretty! I am normally not really into the woods. I prefer the sun on the water. But this is beautiful!

  The sun is setting. Somewhere. I can’t see through the trees. It gets dark fast. Very fast. I look at the watch: six o’clock. Time to go to bed? I may as well. I am not scared. I wonder why. I have never been so completely alone.

  CHILE, 1983

  While most of my friends were still fully immersed in college life, I had my heart set on an internship in Chile. The South American country seemed to represent everything I wanted to make up my mind about, economically and politically, with a dictatorship to seal the deal. With an iron hand, Augusto Pinochet was dictating free markets to reign. With my combative, socialist older sister in one ear and my conservative friends in the other, I felt it was time to find out where I stood.

  I liked the idea of Latin America. I loved the music and the stories. I was born in Venezuela; my father worked for Shell, a Dutch oil company. My family left when I was a baby, but, as siblings do, my older sister and brothers endlessly reminisced about those days. They wove into their stories that I had been switched as a baby, that the real Annette was still living in Maracaibo. In a slum, my left-wing sister added, “wondering whether she will get anything to eat that day.” I, on the contrary, got a good education, clean water, and went on skiing holidays. I had believed the story for years, so wasn’t it logical that I wanted to go back to my roots?

  My major was international law, with an emphasis on economics. I knew there was one professor who could help me get into the United Nations in Chile. He had made an appeal in an economics magazine for a synthesis of economic theories: from the tightfisted Milton Friedman to the easy-spending Maynard Keynes. I sweated the whole summer, working out his suggestions in a paper. Then I made an appointment to see him. To my relief, he liked the paper, or the fact that I had written about him, and got me my dream internship, at the Santiago offices of the International Labor Organization, an agency of the United Nations. Luckily, Pasje decided to come along and do research for his graduation thesis on the Andean Pact.

  We made a point of getting contacts on “the other side,” those who opposed the government: we got acquainted with a Chilean exile in Amsterdam, Noemi Baeza, who, after the military coup in 1973, had been rounded up with many of her left-wing friends. She had been at the infamous stadium in Santiago, and was later sent to a camp where she was tortured so badly she could never have children. Her husband was exiled to a different country, where he married a woman who could. Despite all this, Noemi was a warm and open person, and we became very close. By the time Pasje and I left, she trusted us with the addresses of her underground friends in Chile.

  We left Amsterdam in September, after an elaborate good-bye from our college friends. My housemates went undercover, a flippant reminder that I was going to a police state. Big trips were still special back then. My sorority even composed a song for the occasion, titled “Missing Herf.” In Santiago, Pasje and I began playing house. We learned Spanish, and we made a wide variety of friends. We spent our time both uptown in trendy restaurants and downtown at demonstrations against Pinochet.

  The building that housed the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), where we both worked, was beautiful. A kind of big version of the Guggenheim, with a reflecting pond. It was located in a wealthy uptown neighborhood at the foot of the cordillera, the mountain chain that spans the continent from Venezuela to Chile’s south. In the afternoon, the mountains would turn a rosé pink. It made a wonderful backdrop for the stunning architecture of our workplace.

  Saying goodbye to our parents, Schiphol Airport, September 1983

  Pasje used the library to write his final thesis. I took a course on employment, organized by the regional labor program for Latin America and the Caribbean, which, contrary to Pinochet’s policies, advocated a big role for the public sector in creating jobs. My classmates were about twenty economists from around the continent, all government employees. The course did not convince me. I believed the one thing the government should leave to the private sector was creating employment. But I cherished the opportunity to get to know people from all over Latin America. At night we would visit the peñas, the Chilean music cafés. Everyone from my class would request songs from their home countries, and we would sing them together.

  When the course ended, Pasje and I traveled north, through South America’s longest desert to Peru, intending to walk the Inca Trail. We managed to walk all the way to the top of Machu Picchu. It was beautiful, majestic, and overwhelmingly peaceful; the raw spirituality touched both of us deeply. However, I got so sick after eating an omelette a local acquaintance had offered that we had to cut the hike short.

  Back in Chile, Pasje, who was four years older than I, decided it was time to go home and finish his studies. I was going to stay in Santiago for another six months on my own.

  In the following year, I was given my own office in the United Nations building to write a report as part of my apprenticeship. That report would also serve as my final college thesis. Every morning at ten thirty, the funcionarios would all have coffee around a big table and discuss the state of the world. Most conversations were about the high exchange rate of the dollar. Of course, this greatly impacted Latin American countries because they had to cope with interest payments on large debts owed to the US. The eagerness to check the dollar exchange rate in the newspapers also had to do with the fact that funcionario salaries were denominated in US dollars. A higher dollar gave them more purchasing power in the local peso. It made me realize that in Latin America, like everywhere else, money was everything. A bit of a turnoff, actually: a revolutionary dream in a cesspool of tax-free BMWs.

  Sometimes after work, I would play tennis with my colleagues, and wine and dine in uptown restaurants, but more often, I would take the subway downtown. I had become close with Noemi’s friends, and they regularly took me to protests against Pinochet. I relished the atmosphere.

  Playing house, Santiago, Chile, September 1983

  Cutting hair, Santiago, Chile, 1983

  Peru, December 1983

  Opening St. Nicholas presents from our families, Santiago, Chile, December 5, 1983

  “El pueblo unido jamás será vencido! El pueblo unido jamás será vencido!” Which means “The people united will never be defeated!” Standing in a chanting crowd at a protest downtown, I would look at the heated faces around me in awe. I had never felt that strongly about anything. Their cause seemed so much more immediate to me than the lack of housing in Amsterdam or US nuclear warheads in Europe. Between the rousing speeches, they sang songs that went straight to my heart. After the demonstrations we would go to the taller to eat. (Taller is Spanish for “studio,” and Taller Amistad doubled as the house and studio of Pablo Madero, a warm and round-faced communist painter.)

  His work was Picasso-style with bright blues, reds, and yellows. He had a golden heart, though he had several left-wing Dutch acquaintances whom he knew how to play for subsidies. He seemed to treat me differently, as one of his own. Perhaps he recognized the opportunist in me. He would say that I was more Latino than Dutch. It was true, if it meant that I easily forgot the time, and myself. I loved being part of the demonstrations, the late dining, singing, and talking. I enjoyed discussing politics and economics with Manuel, Pablo’s brother-in-law, who was the most educated of the pack. I often ended up staying over on the litt
le couch in the hall and taking an ice-cold shower before making it back to the office uptown. I cared about my hosts as individuals. And how could I not understand their cause as I listened to their stories about life in the slums?

  I learned how unconditional Chileans could be in their friendship, whether they lived uptown or downtown. They gave and did things for each other without keeping score.

  My thesis was on the Chilean forestry sector. The Pinochet government prided itself on its laissez-faire credentials. Yet, contrary to its principles, it was subsidizing the forestry sector, and the sector was flourishing. I hoped to use this contradiction to make the government look bad, not only on human rights but also on economic policies. So for research purposes, I planned a trip to a work site deep in the forests of the south.

  I knew that in order to make supply meet demand perfectly, workers were hired on short-term contracts. My work would consist of interviewing the workers. Reaching their work site would require a ten-hour drive south, plus two hours on a dirt track into the woods. I was going to carpool and hitchhike. My colleagues wondered why I did not rent a car. The fact was I didn’t know how to drive.