I did not anticipate anything of this sort while I was researching and writing How to Read Donald Duck. I simply scribbled away and relished being able to put into real literary practice the cannibalization theory of Latin American identity that I had embraced in the sixties: Disney had tried to eat me up as a child in New York, now I was eating him up as an adult in Chile, sending him his duck well roasted and his mice chopped up for good measure.
Listen to me back then in the early revolutionary seventies, listen to the arrogance in my voice. Listen to the delusion in my voice.
We were going to eat up Disney?
In my world of metaphors, in the multiple copies of our Donald Duck critique that circulated in Chile and elsewhere, perhaps. But in the real world, the corporation that bears his name has ended up by gobbling up the globe, has ended up as one of the most powerful entertainment conglomerates on this planet, and I am here alone with my memories, far from my country, remembering my dead, trying to grapple with the dilemma of how to stay loyal to that young man who stood under the balcony that day the revolution started, how to hold on to the vision he had as he looked over the plaza and witnessed the birth of a new nation.
It is a problem that has pursued me since my last day in Chile, since the day in early December when an official of the Argentine Embassy informed me that the Junta, after weeks of denying me the right to leave Chile, had finally approved my safe-conduct; tomorrow I was going to be expelled from the country, I was being allowed to travel to Argentina.
The next morning I found myself speeding down the Alameda in a police van headed for the airport with several other refugees. Outside, just outside my reach, was the bustling traffic of Santiago, people going off to work, clustering onto the micros, oblivious of the fact that so close to them a group of their countrymen was leaving them for who knows how many years, that in a few more hours we would not be able to breathe that air, see that cordillera. “Hold on to this memory,” I said to myself with what I now recognize was excessive melodrama, exaggerated sentimentality. “Llénate de Chile. Fill yourself with Chile.”
It was then that, on impulse, I turned to the Argentine diplomat who had come along for our protection. “Do you think you could ask them to pass by La Moneda? It’s only a short detour.”
It was the sort of suggestion you make to your taxi driver, not the police escort that is about to kick you out of your country, but the diplomat decided, as if it was the last request of a dying man, to do me that favor. He ordered the car to swing by La Moneda.
I had come back to that balcony as if it had been calling me. Three years before, it had represented hope, and two months ago, when I had passed by La Moneda a few days after the coup, the day when I had decided not to kill the sleeping soldier, it had overwhelmed me with a rage I was hardly able to contain.
Now, catching a fleeting glimpse of that ravaged balcony from behind the grilled crisscrossed wire of the police-van window, about to be deported, suspended between a country that was already receding and a foreign world that had not yet materialized, I knew that I was being challenged.
The emptiness of that balcony drilled itself into me as we passed through the plaza and turned the corner, and then it was gone from view, it was behind us, out of sight, but I could feel it growing inside me, its darkness threatening to engulf me in its void, to erase us all forever from the memory of Chile just as it had extirpated the presence of Allende, left nothing of that day when he had stood there defiantly, inaugurating the future. I fought back against the black hole that was sucking me into despair, I told myself that I would keep alive that other balcony, that if we could keep it fiercely alive and warm inside during the years to come, we would be able to return Chile to all its glory, we could ourselves return to the country we would resurrect.
Remaining loyal to the past would prove an almost impossible task, a task that continues to challenge me more than twenty years later, which I am still grappling with here, on the other side of the hemisphere, as I watch the two photographs of that balcony, side by side in my study in North Carolina, as they watch me, the luminous past and the threatening present.
They ask me now, as they began to ask me then, at the moment when I swore that I would not allow one to swallow the other, what is perhaps the most painful political question of my life: If that past was so luminous and promising and participatory, how is it that it became the black hole of the present? How did one balcony turn into the other? That second photo, that second balcony, its absence, interrogates our failure, interrogates our lack of vision, demands to know how we could have been so wrong that day we started our revolution, how we could have been so blind not only to the impending disaster but blind as well to the mistakes we made, which, all that time, were paving the way for that disaster.
It was not a question that would go away, it demanded a collective answer from all Chileans who had supported Allende as well as an individual answer from each of us. That black hole devouring us would not disappear by stubbornly and nostalgically reiterating and validating the past, because that past was responsible for this future we were living, and until we recognized that responsibility, our responsibility in the catastrophe, there would be no change. We could blame the CIA, the United States, the oligarchy, the military, all we wanted, but they would never have prevailed if we had been able to get the majority of Chileans behind our reforms. That had not been the case, however, and unless we now built the vast coalition that we had failed to build during the Allende years we would never rid ourselves of Pinochet; he would stay in power as long as the past continued to divide us.
How this (extraordinarily complex political task was accomplished, how we created a vast front that ended up ousting the General from power and bringing back the democracy that we had not been wise and mature enough to protect is certainly not the subject of this book. But its difficulty must be at least addressed; otherwise, the true dilemma of that young man speeding toward exile in a police van cannot be understood.
Let me make this as concrete as possible, this need that inevitably awaited me to scrutinize the past for mistakes.
For the very people who should have been our allies then and were indispensable as allies against Pinochet in the years to come, for the people we had to convince to join us against Pinochet, the past that I remembered as glorious and enthralling was perceived as painful and traumatic.
No better way to illustrate this dichotomy than to focus on someone who had been unjustly hurt by the Unidad Popular, someone I recalled with regret many times in exile: Don Patricio, a friend and neighbor of ours in Santiago and the father of Rodrigo’s favorite playmate. A calm, decent, quiet man, a progressive Christian-Democrat who had worked as an accountant in the government center for the distribution of flour, he had been more than willing, he told me several times over afternoon tea, to contribute to the change in Chile that Allende had inaugurated, even if he did feel himself to be in the opposition. But Don Patricio had been shunted aside, humiliated, left at his desk with no work to do for months, discriminated against merely because he was not an Allendista. I remember the day he told me, fighting back tears, that he had resigned, that he couldn’t stand so much hatred. I didn’t know what to say. I commiserated with him, pointed out that these were probably temporary misunderstandings, suggested that perhaps these small sacrifices were necessary for the country to be liberated. Later, back home, a stone’s throw from where he was staring into space, right there next door to him, I lamely told myself, recalling his anger and frustration, that I had never done anything directly to hurt him. But nor did I denounce the way he was being treated, recognize that it was the very way in which I was treating (and I was one of the most tolerant and empathetic of the militants!) many of my own colleagues who legitimately disagreed with me and whom I publicly excoriated and privately dismissed as traitors. I did not take the opportunity to comprehend that we were being insufficiently democratic, that we were accelerating the revolution beyond what was reasona
ble, that we had swept people like Don Patricio under the carpet of history, as if they didn’t count, as if their dissidence was to be despised instead of valued, as if consensus were a crime. Though the fact that the other side, the Chino Urquidi side, was even more violent and sectarian and power-hungry certainly made a change in our own attitude all the more difficult.
I have written in this memoir how exuberant that experience of liberation was, how nothing could compare to the thrill of watching the poor of the earth take possession of their destiny.
It was difficult, it would take years to understand that what was so exhilarating to us was menacing to those who felt excluded from our vision of paradise. We evaporated them from meaning, we imagined them away in the future, we offered them no alternative but to join us in our pilgrimage or disappear forever, and that vision fueled, I believe, the primal fear of the men and women who opposed us. At the time, full as I was with the wonder of new voices and lives flooding into the future and inseminating it, I barely gave a thought to what they felt, people we called momios, mummies, because they were so conservative, prehistoric, bygone, passe, that they were, as far as we concerned, already dead. We ended up including in that definition millions of Chileans who, like Don Patricio, were on our side, who should have been with us on that journey into the new land and who, instead, came to fear for their safety and their future. We turned the Don Patricios into Chino Urquidis.
As the years of exile and defeat taught me what it means to learn abruptly that you can be entirely accidental, everything you did or believed in reduced to mistaken dust, your body spared by those in power only because they have squeezed the soul out of it, I came to understand the dread our opponents must have lived through as they saw their world collapse. But at the time I was fanatical, deaf to their affliction. I didn’t really care if they were scared. The truth is that we came to enjoy their fear, the thrill that power over them and over destiny gave us. We ended up savoring the fact that for once they were on the receiving end of the shit of history instead of doling it out. We did not realize how that fear would grow until we were bloated into monsters in their minds, monsters who had to be destroyed.
It is the recognition of these mistakes and many more that the balcony at La Moneda is demanding of us, demanding of me. As the years go by, I will reluctantly, painstakingly, corner that young man and those three years he lived, I will slowly turn him into the man who writes these words, I will tell him what I have learned from this defeat, how I was one of those who inadvertently helped to bring the black hole of that balcony into being. I will tell him that he should not have trusted the state to solve all the problems of Chile or the revolution to solve all his problems. I will tell him that it was unfair to burden a whole people with his salvation. I will tell him that the desire for purity may lead to fanaticism and ethnic strife and fundamentalism. I will tell him that the poor do not need to be represented by a paternal voice, no matter how benevolent. I will tell him that if you reduce everything to politics and ideology, you end up totalizing, squeezing the mystery out of life and explaining away too easily what at times has no explanation, you end up not leaving space for your own imperfections. I will tell him he should not have turned a blind eye to human-rights violations in socialist countries out of insensitivity and political expediency. I will tell him how women were postponed in the revolution and how we did not even conceive that our attitude toward nature was one that pillaged and polluted it.
I will tell him this and much more from the retrospect of the future, everything that I think he did wrong.
But there is one thing I will not tell him, that young man I used to be. I will not tell him, I have never told that alter ego of mine in the past, that he was wrong to rebel.
Young man: you were right to rebel.
I will reach that certainty in that very police van on the way to the airport.
Next to me, being expelled along with me, is a worker whose real name I do not remember and whom I shall call Juan.
He was one of the scant handful of workers who had sought refuge in the Argentine Embassy to save his life. We had struck up a conversation several times. He had worked, he told me, in a factory that produced canned food (I think it was canned food) and when the Unidad Popular revolution had come, he and his fellows had found themselves facing a major crisis. During Allende’s first year in office, the President’s policies had created an economic boom: increased salaries and benefits led to skyrocketing consumption and that led, in turn, to a major increment in production. So, more goods sold and a better life for Juan and his co-workers, right? Not at all. The owner of the factory, opposed to the revolution, even if it did not threaten his property, had decided to sabotage production: he had stopped reordering machine parts, he had blocked distribution deals that were already in place, he refused to hire new workers and threatened to fire those who complained. He should have been making money in buckets and instead was secretly preparing bankruptcy proceedings, pulling his capital out of the industry, getting ready to flee the country. The workers had watched this class warfare patiently for months and, finally, when the owner had announced he was shutting down the whole operation, they had taken over the premises. It was the only way to save their jobs and keep producing the food that Chile needed. Allende’s government intervened in the conflict, negotiated compensation for the owner, and put the workers in control. Juan had been elected to head the council that, for a couple of years, ran that factory, and in spite of inevitable mistakes, it had been an economically successful venture.
But it was another kind of success that stirred in Juan when he spoke to me about that time: the Chilean revolution had given him a chance to prove his dignity as a full human being, had dared to conceive through him and millions of others the pale possibility of a world where things did not have to be the way they had always been.
That is why the rulers of the world had reacted with such ferocity.
And Juan understood this and explained it to me with chilling simplicity that day as we crossed the city of Santiago on our way to exile.
“We are paying,” he told me, gesturing toward the streets filled with subdued citizens and rampant military patrols, in the general direction of the factory that was at that very moment being returned to the owner, who had come back to exercise his dominion. “We are being punished. We are paying for our joy.”
He understood that General Pinochet’s military coup was meant to return to their previous owners the levers of economic and political power. But it was just as clear to him that the counterrevolution was conceived as an admonitory lesson for those who had surfaced from the depths of anonymity and set themselves squarely in the middle of a history which was not supposed to belong to them.
His body and the body of all our compañeros were, ultimately, being disciplined for an act of the imagination. Pinochet was trying to make him and millions like him admit that they had been mistaken—not so much in their tactics as in their human strategy, the very rebellion itself, the fact that they had dared to dream of an alternative to the life charted out for them since before their birth.
Pinochet was preparing the world as we know it now, more than twenty years later, where the word revolution has been relegated to ads for jogging shoes and greed has been proclaimed as good and profits have become the only basis to judge value and cynicism is the prevailing attitude and amnesia is vaunted and justified as the solution to all the pain of the past.
Wasn’t that the ultimate message that the black hole of that balcony was sending me? Wasn’t that the real blindness—not our incapacity to see the signs of death on the wall, not our eyes shut to our own limitations and blunders, but the more virulent blindness to where the sorry planet was going? That Allende’s revolution, rather than being the wave of the future, was the last gasp of a past that was dying, that the coming twenty years would confirm that we had been swimming against the tide of world history, that General Augusto Pinochet’s coup was inevitable, even if
we had been immaculately blameless, even if we had not made even one of our innumerable miscalculations, because we were the dinosaurs, we were the ones buried in the past, we were the ones who wanted to resist globalization, we were the ones who wanted to base our lives on something other than neo-liberal competition and individualism, we were the ones who did not see what humanity really was and really wanted.
Isn’t that what Juan was being taught?
Never to dream himself as an alternative?
And yet, no matter how many mistakes he had made, we had made, I had made, we did not deserve that balcony at La Moneda, the black hole in that balcony which threatened to engulf us all.
I was not willing then, in that van, and I am not willing now, so many years later, to tell Juan that his joy was unreal.