“Strip,” she told us. I think she suspected something.
With that total lack of modesty slim people have, my friend wiggled out of her clothes, stepped into some high-heeled gold slippers, and paraded before the woman in the moss-colored overcoat. It was unbelievably cold. “OK, no boobs, but we stuff everything here. Now for Salomé,” and aunty pointed a peremptory finger at me.
This was not a detail I had anticipated, but I didn’t dare refuse. Shivering, I took off my clothes; my teeth were chattering, and I realized with horror that I was wearing woolen knickers Mama Hilda had knitted for me. Still holding the dog, who never stopped growling at the cat, I stuck my feet into the two-sizes-too-large gold shoes and began my promenade, shuffling my feet like a wounded duck. Suddenly the mirror caught my eye: in triplicate, from all angles, I saw myself in nothing but the shoes and Dracula. It was a humiliation I have not recovered from to this day.
“You’re too short, but not bad otherwise. We can stick longer plumes on your head and put you in the front row and it won’t be noticed. The dog and the exotic man we can do without, we have our own acts here. Come tomorrow and start rehearsing. The salary isn’t great, but if you’re nice to the gentlemen the tips are good.”
Euphoric, we rejoined Michael and the children outside, unable to absorb the tremendous honor of having got the job on our first try. What we didn’t know was that there was an ongoing shortage of chorus girls, and that the impresarios were desperate enough to hire a chimpanzee. Only a few days later, I found myself dressed in what chorus girls really wear, that is, a spangled G-string, an emerald in my navel, glittering pasties on my nipples, and an ostrich headdress heavy as a sack of concrete. Behind, nothing. I looked at myself in the mirror and realized the audience would welcome me with a hail of tomatoes; spectators paid to see firm, professional flesh, not a mother of two who lacked the natural attributes of the office. To top everything off, a team from National Television had come to film the spectacle that night; they were installing their cameras while the choreographer was trying to teach me how to walk down a stairway between two rows of gold-painted, rippling-muscled gladiators holding lighted torches.
“Keep your head up, lower your shoulders, and smile, woman!, stop staring at the floor, and as you walk, cross one leg slightly in front of the other. Smile, I tell you! And don’t flap your arms because in all those feathers you look like a broody hen. Watch out for the torches and try not to burn up the plumes, they cost a fortune! Wag the ass, suck in the belly, breathe. If you don’t breathe, you’ll pass out.”
I tried to do everything he said, but he sighed and placed a langorous hand over his eyes, while the torches burned down and the Romans stared at the ceiling with bored expressions. In a thoughtless moment, I peered through the curtain and got a glimpse of the audience, a noisy mass of males impatient at being kept waiting fifteen minutes. I could not face them; I decided that death was preferable and ran for the exit. The television camera that had filmed me from the front during the rehearsal, descending the stairway lighted by the Olympic torches of the gilded athletes, later filmed the image of a real chorus girl descending the same stairway, shot from behind after the curtain was open and the crowd howling with appreciation. They edited the film at the TV station, and I appeared with my own head and shoulders but with the perfect body of the nation’s brightest follies star. The gossip filtered across the Andes to the ears of my parents in Buenos Aires. The honorable ambassador was forced to explain to the tabloid press that the cousin of President Allende had not danced naked in a pornographic extravaganza, it was merely an unfortunate coincidence of names. My father-in-law was waiting to watch his favorite evening program when he saw me in the buff, and the shock literally took his breath away. The other reporters at the women’s magazine celebrated my, shall we say, exposé on the world of the chorus girl, but the head of the firm, a devout Catholic and father of five children, considered it a grave affront. Among other activities, I was the editor of the one magazine for children on the market, and in his view the scandal offered a regrettable example to the young. He called me into his office to ask whether it was true I had been brassy enough to exhibit my bare backside to all the nation, and I had to confess that, unfortunately, it was not my backside he’d seen but an editing trick. He looked me up and down and immediately took my word for it. The affair had no major consequences elsewhere. You and Nicolás went off to school with a chip on your shoulder, telling anyone who wanted to listen that the lady with the plumes was indeed your mother; that short-circuited any teasing and even led to my signing a few autographs. Michael shrugged his shoulders and made no comment to friends who were envious of his wife’s spectacular body. More than one of them looked at me with a puzzled expression, unable to imagine how or why I hid beneath long hippie dresses the amazing physical attributes I had so generously revealed on the TV screen. I was keeping a prudent distance from Tata, until a couple of days later when he called me, choked with laughter, to say that the program had been almost as good as the wrestling matches in the Teatro Caupolicán, and wasn’t it marvelous how everything looked much better on television than it did in real life? Unlike her husband, who refused to leave the house for a week or two, Granny boasted about my feat. In private, she confessed that when she saw me descending that stairway between two rows of aureate gladiators, she felt fulfilled, because that had always been her most secret fantasy. My mother-in-law had begun to change by then; she seemed agitated, and sometimes hugged her grandchildren with tears in her eyes, as if she had an intuition that a terrible shadow was threatening her precarious happiness. The tensions in the country had reached the stage of violence, and she, with the deep sensitivity of the truly innocent, could sense something momentous in the air. She was drinking cheap pisco, and hiding the bottles in strategic places. You, Paula, who loved her with infinite compassion, discovered the hiding places one by one and without a word carried off the empty bottles and buried them among the dahlias in the garden.
In the meantime, worn down by the pressures and work in the embassy, my mother had gone to a clinic in Romania where the renowned Dr. Aslan was working miracles with her geriatric pills. Mother spent a month in a convent cell, recovering from real and imaginary ills and reviewing in her memory old scars from the past. The room next to hers was occupied by a charming Venezuelan who was moved by her tears and one day worked up the courage to knock at her door. “What’s the matter, my dear?” he asked as he introduced himself. “There is nothing that can’t be cured with a little music and a drop of rum.” For the next weeks, like two elderly, hired mourners, dressed in the regulation bathrobe and slippers, they took up lawn chairs beneath the cloudy skies of Bucharest, and told the stories of their lives to one another, holding back nothing because they expected never to meet again. My mother shared her past, and he in turn confided his secrets; she showed him some of my letters and he offered photographs of his wife and his children, the one true passion of his life. At the end of the treatment, they met at the door of the hospital to say goodbye—my mother in her elegant travel outfit, rejuvenated by the prodigious art of Dr. Aslan, her green eyes washed by tears, and the Venezuelan caballero with his handsome suit and perfect smile—and very nearly did not recognize each other. Touched, he attempted to kiss the hand of that friend who had listened to his confessions, but she forestalled him by stepping closer and puting her arms around him. “I will never forget you,” she told him. “If you ever need me, you have only to call,” he replied. His name was Valentín Hernández; he was a powerful politician in his country, and a few years later when the winds of violence blew us in many directions he was essential to the future of our family.
My magazine and television reporting gave me a certain visibility; I was so often congratulated or insulted by people in the street that I came to think I was some kind of celebrity. During the winter of 1972, Pablo Neruda invited me to visit him at Isla Negra. The poet was not well; he had left his post at the embassy in Paris a
nd returned to Chile and his coastal home to write his memoirs and his last poems facing the sea. I made meticulous preparations for that meeting; I bought a new recorder, wrote out lists of questions, I read two biographies and reread parts of his work—I even had the engine of my old Citroën checked so it would not fail me on such a delicate mission. The wind was whistling among the pines and eucalyptus, the sea was gray, and it was drizzling in that seaside town of closed houses and empty streets. The poet lived in a labyrinth of wood and stone, a capricious organism composed of added-on and revamped rooms. A ship’s bell, sculptures, and timbers from shipwrecks dominated the patio, and a bank of rocks offered a broad vista of the beach and the tireless crashing of the Pacific Ocean. My gaze was lost in a limitless expanse of dark water against a leaden sky. Pure monotone of steel, gray upon gray, the landscape palpitated. Pablo Neruda, with a poncho around his shoulders and a cap crowning his great gargoyle head, welcomed me without formality. He told me he enjoyed my humorous articles and sometimes photocopied them and sent them to friends. He was weak, but he found the strength to lead me through the marvelous twists and turns of that cave crammed with his trove of modest treasures and to show me his collections of seashells, bottles, dolls, books, and paintings. He was an inexhaustible collector: I love all things, not only the grand but the infinitely small: thimble, spurs, plates, flower vases. . . . He also liked his food. For lunch we had baked sea bass, that white, firmfleshed fish that is king of Chile’s seas, and dry white wine. He talked about the memoirs he was trying to write before death bilked him of the opportunity, about my articles—he suggested compiling them in a book—and about how he had discovered his figureheads all over the world, those enormous wood carvings with a siren’s face and breasts that graced the prow of ancient ships. “These maidens were born to live among the waves,” he said, “they are miserable on dry land, that’s why I rescue them and set them facing the sea.” He talked for a long time about the political situation, which caused him great agony, and his voice broke when he spoke of his country’s being divided into violent extremes. Rightist newspapers were publishing six-column headlines: CHILEANS, SAVE YOUR HATRED, YOU’LL NEED IT!, inciting the military to take power and Allende either to renounce the presidency or commit suicide, as President Balmaceda had done in the past century to avoid a civil war.
“They should be more careful about what they ask, they might get it,” the poet sighed.
“There will never be a military coup in Chile, don Pablo. Our armed forces respect democracy,” I said, trying to reassure him with the oft-repeated clichés. After lunch it began to rain; the room darkened and the foreboding woman on the figurehead came alive, stepped from the wood, and greeted us with a shiver of naked breasts. I realized then that the poet was weary, that the wine had gone to my head, and that I must hurry.
“If you like, we can do the interview now,” I suggested.
“Interview?”
“Well, that’s why I’m here, isn’t it?”
“Interview me? I’d never put myself through that,” he laughed. “My dear child, you must be the worst journalist in the country. You are incapable of being objective, you place yourself at the center of everything you do, I suspect you’re not beyond fibbing, and when you don’t have news, you invent it. Why don’t you write novels instead? In literature, those defects are virtues.”
As I am telling you this, Aurelia is preparing to recite a poem she wrote especially for you, Paula. I asked her not to do it, because her poems demoralize me, but she insists. She has no confidence in the doctors, and doesn’t think you will get well.
“You think they have all conspired to lie to me, Aurelia?”
“Ah, what an innocent you are. Don’t you see that they always protect one another? They will never admit they blew it with your daughter, they’re all rascals with the power of life and death in their hands. This is me talking, a woman who has lived from hospital to hospital. If you only knew the things I’ve seen. . . .”
Her strange poem is about a bird with petrified wings. It says you are already dead, and that you want to leave but can’t because I am holding you back, that I am an anchor tied to your feet.
“Don’t try so hard, Isabel. Can’t you see you’re really fighting against her? Paula isn’t here anymore; look at her eyes, they’re like black water. If she doesn’t know her mother, it’s because she’s already gone. Accept it once and for all.”
“Don’t say that, Aurelia. . . .”
“Let her talk, the mad don’t lie,” Elvira’s husband sighs.
What is there on the other side of life? Only night silence and solitude? What remains when there are no more desires or memories or hope? What is there in death? If I could be still, without speaking or thinking, without begging, crying, remembering, hoping, if I could submerse myself in the most absolute silence, then perhaps I could hear you, my dearest daughter.
AT THE BEGINNING OF 1973, CHILE WAS LIKE A NATION AT WAR, THE hatred that had gestated in shadow day after day had been vented in strikes, sabotage, and acts of terrorism for which extremists of the Left and the Right both blamed the other. Peasant groups appropriated private lands to build their own agrarian communities, workers occupied factories and nationalized them, and representatives of the Popular Unity seized control of banks, creating such a climate of insecurity that it took no great effort for the political opposition to sow panic. Allende’s enemies perfected to a science their methods for aggravating economic problems: they circulated rumors of bank closings, inciting people to withdraw their money, they burned crops and slaughtered cattle, they pulled essential articles from the market—from truck tires to minuscule pieces of the most sophisticated electronic apparatus. Without needles or cotton, the hospitals were paralyzed, without spare parts for their machines, factories could not operate. An entire industry might be stymied for want of a single part, leaving thousands of workers in the street. In response, workers organized into committees, threw out their bosses, took authority into their own hands and set up camps at the gate, watching day and night to prevent the owners from destroying their own enterprises. Bank employees and public administrators also set up guards to keep colleagues of the opposite stripe from jumbling files in the archives, destroying documents, or placing bombs in the restrooms. They lost precious hours in interminable meetings trying to reach collective decisions but, as everyone fought for the chance to expound his own point of view on every insignificant detail, they rarely reached an accord: what a supervisor normally had decided in five minutes took the employees a week of Byzantine discussions and democratic votes. On a larger scale, the same thing was happening in the government; the parties of the Popular Unity shared power by quotas, and decisions passed through so many filters that when finally something was approved it bore little, if any, resemblance to the original project. Allende had no majority in the congress, and his projects all crashed against the unyielding wall of the opposition. Chaos spread; Chile was living in a climate of insecurity and latent violence, and the heavy machinery of the government was grinding to a halt. At night, Santiago had the look of a city devastated by a cataclysm, the streets were dark and nearly empty because so few people dared go anywhere on foot and public transportation was crippled by strikes and gasoline rationing. The bonfires of the compañeros, as government backers were called, blazed in the city center as they mounted an all-night guard over buildings and streets. Brigades of youthful Communists painted propagandistic murals on walls and bands of extreme rightists drove through the streets in automobiles with dark tinted-glass windows, firing blindly. In areas where agrarian reform had been effected, the landowners plotted revenge, equipped with weapons that came as contraband across the long frontier of the Andean cordillera. Thousands of head of cattle were driven to Argentina through passes in the south, and others were slaughtered to prevent their reaching the market. At times the rivers ran red with blood and the current carried swollen cadavers of dairy cows and fattened hogs. The campesinos, wh
o had lived for centuries obeying orders, joined together in cooperatives, but they lacked initiative, knowledge, and credit. They did not know how to use their freedom, and many secretly longed for the return of the patrón, that authoritative and frequently despised father who at least gave clear orders and in times of trouble protected them against natural disasters, crop blight, and epidemic disease among their animals. The patrón had friends and could get what was needed; in contrast, they did not have the courage to enter a bank and, even if they did, were unable to decipher the small print on the papers put before them for their signature. Neither could they understand what the devil the advisers sent by the government were mumbling about, with their big words and city way of talking, people with clean fingernails who didn’t know which end of a plow was up and had never pulled a breech calf from a cow’s rear. These country folk, however, did not hold back grain for the next planting, they butchered their breeding bulls, and lost the most crucial months of the summer arguing politics while ripe fruit fell from the trees and vegetables dried and withered in the field rows. As the last straw, the truck drivers went out on strike and there was no way to transport cargo from one end of the country to the other: some cities lacked food while in others produce and seafood lay rotting. Salvador Allende was hoarse from denouncing the sabotage, but no one listened to him, and he did not have enough people or sufficient power to deal with his enemies by force. He accused the North Americans of financing the strike; every truck driver was receiving fifty dollars a day not to work, so that there was no hope of resolving the conflict, and when he ordered out the army to impose order, they found that the engines had missing parts and they could not move the old tires blocking the highways; in addition, the road was strewn with bent nails that blew out the tires of the military vehicles. A TV helicopter showed the ruin of useless iron rusting on asphalt highways. Shortages became a nightmare, but no one went hungry because people who could afford it bought in the black market, and the poor organized by barrios to obtain the essentials. The government pleaded for patience, and the minister of agriculture distributed pamphlets to teach citizens how to cultivate vegetables on their balconies and in their bathtubs. Fearful that we wouldn’t eat, I began to hoard food obtained with the cunning of a smuggler. I had previously joked with my mother-in-law, saying that if we can’t get chicken we can eat noodles, and we’ll be better off without sugar anyway, it will be good for our figures, but in the end I said the hell with scruples. Where once I had stood in line for hours to buy a kilo of meat of dubious origin, now the resellers brought the best cuts right to the house—of course, at ten times the official price. That solution was short-lived because it was too cynical to assail my children with lectures about socialist morality while serving black market pork chops for dinner.