My children and Granny were the first to notice my state of mind. Paula, who was then a wise little girl of eleven, and Nicolás, who was three years younger, understood that all about them fear and poverty were spreading like a river overrunning its banks. They became silent and cautious. They had learned that the husband of one of their schoolteachers, a sculptor who before the coup had made a bust of Salvador Allende, had been arrested by three unidentified men who suddenly burst into his studio and hauled him away. No one knew where he was, and his wife didn’t dare mention her trouble for fear of losing her job—we were still in the period when everyone thought that if someone disappeared, surely he was guilty. I don’t know how my children learned of it, but that night they told me. They had gone to see their teacher, who lived a few blocks from our house, and found her bundled in shawls and sitting in the dark because she couldn’t pay the electric bill or buy paraffin for the stoves. Her salary barely fed her three children, and she had had to take them out of school. “We want to give them our bicycles because they don’t have money to take the bus,” Paula informed me. They did and, from that day, Paula’s mysterious activities increased; now she not only hid her grandmother’s bottles and took gifts to her friends in the old people’s home nearby, she also stowed jars of preserves and packages of rice in her bookbag for her teacher. Months later, when the sculptor returned home after surviving torture and prison, he created a Christ on the Cross in iron and bronze and gave it to our children. Ever since, it has hung beside Nicolás’s bed.
My children never repeated what we talked about in the family, or mentioned the strangers who sometimes passed through the house. Nicolás began to wet his bed at night; he would wake up, humiliated, and come to my room with his head hanging and hug me, shivering. We should have given him more affection than ever, but Michael was depressed by the problems with his workers and I was running from one job to another, visiting the poor neighborhoods, and hiding people, all with my nerves rubbed raw. I don’t think either of us provided the children the security or consolation they needed. In the meantime, Granny was being torn apart by opposing forces; on one side, her husband was boasting about the feats of the dictatorship and, on the other, we were telling her stories of repression. Her uneasiness turned into panic as her small world was threatened by hurricane-force winds. “Be careful,” she would say from time to time, not sure herself what she meant, because her mind refused to accept the dangers her grandmotherly heart could sense. Granny’s entire existence revolved around those two grandchildren. “Lies, it’s all a pack of lies made up by the Soviets to run down Chile,” my father-in-law told her any time she mentioned the terrible rumors contaminating the atmosphere. Just like my children, she learned not to voice her doubts and to avoid comments that might attract misfortune.
One year after the coup, the military junta ordered General Prats assassinated in Buenos Aires, because they believed that from there the former chief of the armed forces might head a rebellion of officers with democratic tendencies. They also feared that Prats was going to publish his memoirs revealing the treachery of the generals; by then, the official version of events of September 11 had been widely disseminated, justifying their actions and exalting the image of Pinochet to the point of heroism. Telephone messages and anonymous notes had warned General Prats that his life was in danger. Tío Ramón was also threatened because it was suspected that he had a copy of the general’s memoirs, although he did not believe he was in actual peril. Prats, on the other hand, knew very well how his colleagues operated, and he was also aware that the death squadrons were beginning to operate in Argentina, maintaining with the Chilean dictatorship a horrendous traffic in bodies, prisoners, and documents of desaparecidos. Prats tried in vain to obtain a passport that would allow him to leave Argentina for Europe; Tío Ramón spoke with the Chilean ambassador, an old-time diplomat who had been his friend for many years, to plead with him to help the exiled general, but all he got were promises that were never fulfilled. Shortly before midnight on September 29, 1974, a bomb exploded in Prats’s automobile as he arrived home after dining with my parents. The force of the explosion threw pieces of burning metal a hundred meters around; it dismembered the general, and his wife died in the blazing inferno. Minutes later, Chilean newspapermen congregated at the site of the tragedy, arriving before the Argentine police, as if they had been waiting just around the corner.
Tío Ramón called me at two in the morning to ask me to notify Prats’s daughters and to tell me that he and my mother had left their house and were in hiding. The next day I flew to Buenos Aires on a strange mission, feeling as if I were blindfolded because I had no idea how I would find them. At the airport, a very tall man stepped forward to meet me and practically dragged me to a black car waiting at the gate. “Don’t be afraid, I’m a friend,” he said in a heavily German-accented Spanish, and there was such goodness in his blue eyes that I believed him. He was a Czechoslovakian representative to the United Nations who was plotting a way to get my parents to safer ground, somewhere where the long arm of terror could not reach them. He took me to an apartment in the center of the city, where I found them very calm, making plans for their escape. “You see now what those murderers are capable of, Isabel, please, you must leave Chile,” my mother begged once more. We didn’t have much time together, barely enough for them to tell me what happened and what to do with their things. That same day, their Czech friend managed to get them out of the country. We said goodbye with a desperate embrace, not knowing whether we would see each other again. “Keep writing me every day, and keep the letters until I have a place you can send them,” my mother said at the last minute. Protected by the tall man with the compassionate eyes, I stayed in Buenos Aires to pack furniture, pay bills, release the apartment my parents had rented, and get the necessary papers to take back with me the Swiss dog that had been half crazed when the bomb exploded in the embassy. That pet became Granny’s only companion when all the rest of us had to abandon her.
A few days later in Santiago, in the residence of the commander-in-chief where Prats and his family had lived until he was forced to resign, Pinochet’s wife saw General Prats in broad daylight, sitting at the dining room table, his back to the window, illuminated by a timid spring sun. After her first shock, she realized that the vision was a result of a bad conscience, and gave it no further importance, but in the following weeks the ghost of the betrayed friend returned many times: it appeared, standing, in the salons, it walked loudly down the stairway, it peered through doorways, until its obstinate presence became intolerable. Pinochet had a gigantic bunker constructed, surrounded by a fortresslike wall capable of protecting him from enemies living and dead, but his security experts discovered that from the air it offered a perfect target for bombs. Then Pinochet had the walls of his bewitched house reinforced and the windows covered with armorplate; he doubled his armed guard, installed machine guns around the perimeter, and blocked off the street so no one could approach. I don’t know how General Prats managed to filter through such fortifications.
By midyear of 1975, repression had been refined to perfection, and I fell victim to my own terror. I was afraid to use the telephone, I censored letters to my mother in case they were opened at the post office, and was careful about what I said even in the bosom of the family. Friends who had contact with the military had warned me that my name was on the blacklists, and soon after we received two death threats by telephone. I was aware that there were people who took pleasure from spreading panic, and perhaps I should not have listened to those anonymous voices, but after what had happened to General Prats and his wife, and my parents’ miraculous escape, I didn’t feel safe. One April afternoon, Michael and the children and I went to the airport to say goodbye to friends who, like so many others, had opted to leave. They had learned that Australia was offering land to new immigrants and had decided to test their luck as farmers. We were watching the departing plane when a woman who was a total stranger to me came up and
asked, wasn’t I the person on television? She insisted I go with her because she had something to tell me in private. Without giving me time to react, she pulled me into the restroom and once we were alone removed an envelope from her purse and handed it to me.
“Deliver this, it’s a matter of life and death. I have to leave on the next plane; my contact didn’t appear and I can’t wait any longer,” she said. She made me repeat the address twice, to be sure I had memorized it, and then ran away.
“Who was that?” Michael asked when he saw me come out of the restroom.
“I don’t have any idea. She asked me to deliver this, she said it’s very important.”
“What is it? Why did you take it? It could be a trap. . . .”
All those questions, and others that occurred to us later, resulted in very little sleep that night. We didn’t want to open the envelope because it was better not to know its contents, we were afraid to take it to the address the woman had given me, and neither could we bring ourselves to destroy it. During that long night I think that Michael realized that I didn’t seek out problems, they found me. We could see finally how twisted reality had become when a request as simple as delivering a letter could cost us our lives, and when the subject of torture and death was now a part of our everyday conversation, something fully accepted. At dawn the next morning, we spread a map of the world on the dining room table to look for somewhere we might go. By then, half the population of Latin America was living under military dictatorships; using the pretext of combating Communism, the armed forces of several countries had been transformed into mercenaries for the privileged class and instruments of repression for the poor. In the next decade, military governments waged all-out war against their own peoples; millions of persons died, disappeared, and were exiled; never before on our continent had such a vast movement of human masses poured across borders. That morning, we discovered that there were very few democracies left in which to seek refuge, and that several of those—like Mexico, Costa Rica, and Colombia—were no longer issuing visas for Chileans because too many had emigrated there in the last year and a half. As soon as the curfew was lifted, we left the children with Granny, gave instructions in case we did not return, and went to deliver the envelope to the indicated address. We rang the bell of an old house in the middle of town; a man dressed in blue jeans came to the door and, with great relief, we saw that he was wearing a clerical collar. We recognized his Belgian accent because we had lived in that country.
After fleeing Argentina, Tío Ramón and my mother found themselves with nowhere to go, and for months had to accept the hospitality of friends in foreign countries, unable to unpack their suitcases once and for all in a place of their own. About this time, my mother recalled the Venezuelan she had met in the geriatric clinic in Romania; following a hunch, she looked for the card she had kept all those years and called her friend in Caracas to tell him briefly what had happened. “Come on here, my dear, there’s room for everyone,” was Valentín Hernández’s immediate response. That gave Michael and me the idea that we might move to Venezuela; from what we knew, it was a green and generous country where we could count on one friend and stay a while until the situation in Chile improved. We began to make plans: we would have to rent the house, sell the furniture, and find new jobs, but we rushed everything through in less than a week. That Wednesday, the children came home from school in abject terror; two strangers had cornered them in the street and then, after threatening them, gave them a message for me: “Tell that bitch of your mother that her days are numbered.”
The next day I went to see my grandfather for the last time. I remember him always in the armchair I had bought him many years before at an auction, his mane like silver and his rustic cane in his hand. He must have been tall when he was young, because sitting down he still looked as if he were; with age, however, the pillars of his body had bowed and he had settled like a building with faulty foundations. I couldn’t tell him goodbye; I didn’t have the courage to say I was leaving, but I suppose he sensed it.
“Something has been worrying me for a long time, Tata. Did you ever kill a man?”
“Why are you asking me such a harebrained question?”
“Because you have a bad temper?” I hinted, thinking of the body of the fisherman lying face up on the sand, in those remote days when I was eight years old.
“You’ve never seen me with a weapon in my hands, have you? I have good reason not to trust them,” he said. “When I was young I woke up one morning early when something hit the window of my room. I leaped out of bed, grabbed my revolver and, still half-asleep, pointed it out the window and fired. I came fully awake with the sound of the shot, and was horrified to realize I had tried to shoot some students coming home from a party. It was just one of them raking my shutter with his umbrella. Thank God, I didn’t kill him, but I came within a hair of murdering an innocent man. Since then, my hunting rifles have been in the garage. I haven’t used them for years.”
It was true. Hanging from a bedpost was the sling Argentine gauchos use, two stone balls affixed to either end of a long strip of leather, which was what he kept at hand should anyone break into the house.
“And you never used those bolas or a club to kill anyone? Someone who insulted or harmed a member of your family?”
“I don’t know what the devil you’re talking about, Isabel. This country is filled with murderers, but I’m not one of them.”
It was the first time he had referred to the situation we were living through in Chile; until then, he had limited himself to listening, tight-lipped and silent, to the stories I told him. He got to his feet with a small explosion of bones and curses; he could barely walk, but no one dared mention the possibility of a wheelchair. He motioned for me to follow him. Nothing had changed in his room since my grandmother died: black furniture arranged in the same positions, grandfather clock, the scent of the English soap he stored in his armoire. He opened his desk with the key he always carried in his jacket, looked through one of the drawers, and pulled out an antique biscuit tin and handed it to me.
“This was your grandmother’s, now it’s yours,” he said, his voice breaking.
“I have to confess something, Tata. . . .”
“You’re going to tell me you took Memé’s silver mirror.”
“How did you know it was me?”
“Because I saw you. I sleep very lightly. Now that you have the mirror you may as well have the rest. It’s all that’s left of Memé, but I don’t need these things to remember her and I’d like for them to be in your hands, because when I die I don’t want them thrown away.”
“Don’t think about dying, Tata.”
“At my age, there’s nothing else to think about. I know I will die alone, like a dog.”
“I’ll be with you.”
“I hope you don’t forget that you made me a promise. If you’re thinking about going anywhere, remember that when the moment comes, you have to help me die with dignity.”
“I haven’t forgotten, Tata, don’t worry.”
The next day I flew to Venezuela, alone. I did not know I would never see my grandfather again. I went through the formalities at the airport with Memé’s relics clutched to my chest. The biscuit tin contained the remnants of a crown of wax orange blossoms, a pair of child-size kid gloves the color of time, and a well-thumbed prayer book with mother-of-pearl covers. I also took with me a plastic bag with a handful of dirt from our garden, with the idea of planting forget-me-nots in another land. The official who checked my passport saw the frequent Argentine entrance and exit stamps and my newspaper pass and, as I assume he did not find my name on his list, let me leave. The plane climbed through a featherbed of clouds, and minutes later we crossed the snow-covered heights of the Andes. Those white peaks thrusting through winter clouds were the last image I had of my country. “I’ll be back, I’ll be back,” I repeated like a prayer.