Surviving Santiago Read Free Page A

skipping school.
    I remember the poblaciones , shantytowns, and the kids who never went to school or who begged for money in front of the shopping centers and cafés where my mamá and abuelos used to take me. People shouldn’t have to live like that , Papá used to say—words that could get a person beaten up and arrested on the street or in their home in those days.
    Smog hides the mountaintops, but I see two large hills in the middle of the city and a lot of modern high-rise buildings near one of them.
    I point to the tallest of the steel-and-glass buildings. “Is this one new?”
    â€œBrand-new. The one under construction will be a condominium.” The booms of a pair of cranes kiss an unfinished building’s steel frame—twelve—fifteen stories high.
    Even the highways are modern, just like the ones in Chicago or Milwaukee, but most of the cars and buses here are a lot older. Their tailpipes spew smoke.
    â€œThis might look more like Madison, from what your father says.” Exiting the highway, my aunt drives along tree-lined streets through a neighborhood of tidyone- and two-story brick and stucco houses, with a few small apartment buildings. The streets are clean, the yards have trees and flowers, and many of the houses are painted in delicious pastels—blue, green, pink, and yellow. It does look like home, except the houses are closer together, and many, even in this nice neighborhood, have bars on the windows or walls and gates around them.
    â€œLove the colors. Is this where you guys live?” I ask. The apartment building where we lived before Papá’s arrest was nowhere near this nice.
    â€œNo, but here’s where I used to live before your father bought his place.” My aunt waves her hand toward a modern four-story building with lots of balconies.
    â€œI was supposed to be fixing up a house.”
    â€œYour mother said something about it.”
    â€œYeah, Evan, my stepfather—”
    â€œDon’t mention him to your father.” Tía Ileana’s voice is hushed.
    â€œI’m not that dumb.” I push my hair from my face. “We’re doing a good deed by saving an old house and making the neighborhood nicer.”
    â€œWe tear down the old houses when we can,” Tía Ileana says. “And build office and apartment towers to take their place.”
    I repeat my stepfather’s words. “There’s history in an old house. Once it’s gone, you never get it back.”
    â€œI like that.” She taps the steering wheel. “But the city’sgrowing, and the new buildings are safer in earthquakes.”
    She turns onto a one-way street so narrow that at home it would be considered an alleyway. She stops in the middle of a block of split-level stucco duplexes with shingle roofs. I’m surprised because most houses here seem to have either corrugated metal or orange terra-cotta roofs.
    â€œThis is it,” she says. She takes a gray transmitter from the glove box and opens the automatic gate and garage door for the house on the left side. Metal numbers on a low cement wall read 52-50, and the wrought-iron fence above the wall matches the design and height of the automatic gate. Both sides of the duplex are painted white.
    â€œBright blue,” I say.
    â€œWhat?” She cuts the engine.
    â€œWe should paint the house bright blue. Like in that other neighborhood.” I think of Petra’s plan to turn our house in Madison into an upside-down eggplant.
    Tía Ileana laughs. “Are you a bright blue person?”
    â€œActually, red’s my favorite color, but I haven’t seen a house painted red so far. Maybe it’s against the law. You know, troublemakers’ color.”
    â€œTroublemaker,” she repeats with a smile. “That was the one thing your father and mother agreed on about you.” The way she says it makes me think she’s cool with the way I am,