Humberto Benjamín Clavería

Manuel Urrutia couldn’t get to sleep. Every time he closed his eyes he thought of the damaged skull with a gold tooth that he had hidden away inside his backpack. He seemed to sense the dead thing emerging from the bag, covered in soft tissue, crowned with a mop of fresh flowing hair. His skin stood on end merely imagining that the bodiless head might suddenly come to life, approach him and begin to talk to him, to tell him who he was, to share his past with him. Or perhaps he would weep or laugh. And the gold tooth would shine in the light of his bedside lamp.

The next day, he waited for his mother to leave for work before following the instructions he’d been given to boil the skull in a gentle solution of caustic soda, to clean off any residue of soft tissue. After the gentle acid bath, the golden tooth shone with its past glory and the cleaned bones changed from a yellowish brown to an almost ivory white colour.

Manuel Urrutia was in his first year at medical school and needed bones, perhaps a whole skeleton, to memorize every detail of the human anatomy. One of his fellow students had suggested he go to the cemetery, where an old gravedigger kept bones and teeth from skulls that nobody had claimed and sold them at a good price to medical students.

When Manuel visited the bone seller, the sight of this strange skull captured attracted and bewildered him. The maxilla bones were intact, still with their thirty-two permanent teeth, with the upper right central incisor covered by a gold crown. There was a hole in the left side of the forehead. But in spite of this cavity, which seemed to be the result of a gunshot at close range, the bone seller told him that the skull was expensive because it was almost intact, and because of the gold tooth.

After its acid bath that morning, Manuel placed the skull to dry on the desk, where it now lay motionless and clean, looking rather like a plastic skull.

Manuel Urrutia had never waited as anxiously as he did that day for the return of his mother, to show her the surprise: the skull, ready for his studies.

As usual, Soledad Valdivieso arrived a little after five o’clock, and as soon as she entered the house she went straight to her son to hug him. She was afraid of nothing. She had lived only for Miguel, to see him become a doctor one day. But when she saw the skull, she stopped cold and began to stare at it from where she stood.

She approached it and took it in her hands. With expert fingers, she touched the gold tooth that she knew so well and had never forgotten. She ran her eyes, searching keenly for answers, over every angle of the skull. And finally, she squeezed it against her chest as she broke into tears.

Sobbing, she kissed the crown of the skull, caressed the cheekbones, the chin and the wounded forehead. Manuel believed his mother had lost her mind.

But then, through her tears, she began to tell him the story of her only brother, José Miguel Valdivieso, whom Manuel knew of vaguely from family conversations as his Uncle José Miguel, who more than forty years ago had taken the same decision he had: to become a doctor.

She recounted details to him that he recalled being spoken of long ago by his grandparents, which now seemed to flow freshly from his mother’s memory: student life, the support marches, the coup d’état, the disappearance.

She told him that José Miguel had dedicated his youth to caring for the needy until the fall of the government, when he disappeared without a trace. And anyone who asked questions ran the risk of arrest. So she had to keep quiet, to conceal everything under a thick cloak of silence, an angst-ridden suspense that would never allow her to be happy, with the looming mystery over her brother’s whereabouts, which now, after forty years, seemed to have been revealed with the appearance of this skull, with the gold tooth that was unmistakably his.

“It’s him, my only brother, your Uncle José Miguel. I know it. This gold tooth is one of a kind. I put this crown on myself in my last year of dentistry.”

Manuel responded in disbelief.”Mama,” he said, “have you lost your mind? How can you be so sure?”

His mother, overwhelmed by this discovery, closed her eyes in a deep trance and began to recall José Miguel as he had appeared so many times in her dreams, in a cell, dirty and hungry, dying of cold, weeping in silence, driven mad by anguish.

Soledad Valdivieso cried as she clung to the skull, her only tangible connection to her dead brother. In her mind the parade of images continued; his voice, his contagious laughter, words from long ago, the wildness of youth. Then, gunshots, aerial bombings, the curfew, the thunder of marching boots, the silence of death, the General barking orders. Then, in a wild rage she cried:

“Villains, animals, killers, sons of bitches! Why?”

Manuel listened to her, petrified.

After a moment, he went over to her and hugged her, while Soledad, still clutching the skull, slid down over a couch, muttering meaninglessly.

“It’s alright, mama. If you say you’re sure that this skull belongs to my Uncle José Miguel, we’ll give it a burial, will cover it with flowers, with sandalwood and moss from the ancient oaks of this volcanic valley.”

Sobbing, Soledad Valdivieso looked at the skull and said to it:

“I promise you, nobody will ever again take you away from your rightful place, or trample your dreams with a murderer’s bullet, or sell your bones as if they were junk.”

Then, cradling it to her chest, she added:”Just like Mama taught us, I’ll make sure you sleep well, in peace. I’ll watch over your dreams. Now that you’ve been found, you’ll finally find rest. Your murderers thought they could steal your eternal rest from you. I give it back to you now with your name: José Miguel Valdivieso. You’ll never again be a ‘nameless one’ in your beloved homeland.”

Translated by Martin Boyd

Humberto Benjamín Clavería (b. Santiago, Chile) has lived in Toronto since 1990. He completed his schooling and university studies in Santiago de Chile, graduating from dentistry in 1974 at Universidad de Chile. In the same year he completed a professional qualification in singing. He immigrated to Ecuador in 1976, where he practiced as a dentist, singer and musical composer in the city of Quito until 1990. His artistic work has earned him several awards for his poetry, short stories and his musical compositions. He has won literary prizes in Chile, Italy and the United States, and here in Canada he won third prize (2009) and honourable mentions (2011, 2013 and 2014) in the nuestra palabra short story contest.