I thought of Estéban, with his centrist politics, back in Santa Fe, oblivious to my presence at this rally. I was to spend the Christmas holidays with my mother, her partner Bill, my little brother Lalito, my uncle Boris (my mother’s brother), his wife Magdalena, and their daughter, my little cousin Sarita. While Mami had come to pluck me from Santa Fe, they’d all gone to Chile from Canada, like thousands of fellow exiles from around the globe returning for the election. After it was over, she and I would fly into Santiago.
Mami and I were boycotting the election. Although Pinochet would step down as dictator and undoubtedly many human rights abuses would cease, he would continue as commander-in-chief of the armed forces and a lifelong senator, his constitution would remain in place, and there would be no trials for crimes against humanity.
Two young men, roughly my age, were standing next to us. I clocked them through my peripheral vision and whispered, “Chilean.” What with their dark skin, almond eyes, full lips, Mapuche woven bags, and leather handmade sandals, everything about them would scream “Chilean leftist” from a mile away. Keeping her head stock-still, my mother darted her eyes in their direction. Every time a camera pointed their way, they hung their heads, ensuring their faces were not in the shot.
“They’re in deep shit,” I commented in English under my breath.
The Chilean left had several strands, and I knew right away that these two belonged to ours, the MIR—Movement of the Revolutionary Left. Mami and I pricked up our ears so as to hear the young men talking in hushed tones. Their accents were Chilean. Accents I hadn’t heard in so long, a lump formed in my throat. A couple of minutes passed, and my mother began a conversation with them. This would have been unheard of in the recent past, when if you were to detect a fellow MIRista in your vicinity, you would vanish as quickly and effectively as Jeannie the genie when she was in trouble with the Major. A MIR comrade had the high probability of “bringing a tail,” as we called being followed by the secret police. But again, our struggle was over, and none of us had the slightest clue as to what the new rules were, so we made them up as we went along.
“So. You’re Chilean,” she offered.
“Yes. Yes,” the older and darker one nodded.
“We are too,” Mami said in an effort to connect.
Neither of us had ever before spoken these words out loud to absolute strangers in the South. Words that not only pointed to our dangling roots, but grabbed them by the fistful and planted them back in that long, skinny country over the Andes we’d had to leave so many lifetimes ago.
“Oh! Are you from Santiago?” the younger, lighter-skinned one asked.
“Yes,” I answered, swallowing hard.
“But I live in Canada,” Mami clarified.
“Oh. Do you know Nubia Villanueva, also known as La Huasa?” the older one asked.
My mother and I glanced at each other. They had just named one of the leaders of the MIR in Canada, one of the ones who had been in charge of the Return Plan ten years earlier, when many Chilean exiles, including us, had quietly left Canada to join the underground. Not only was La Huasa a leader, she had been one of Mami’s best friends and an aunt to me before she too had slipped out of Vancouver to come back south, leaving no forwarding address.
“Yes,” my mother answered.
It was an electrical shock, witnessing her reply in the affirmative to a question that such a short time ago would have been suicidal to ask or respond to.
“She’s our aunt,” the younger one stated.
My mother, stone-faced, brought her index finger to her mouth. We all stared forward, as the throngs moved on to another chant now, and the cameras continued to shoot and roll.
“Go now. In exactly thirty minutes we will meet at the café on the corner one block east of here,” she ordered.
The young men didn’t miss a beat. They dissolved into the crowd and Mami and I looked at each other, the sweat pouring down our faces as the sun set on that rally. When darkness set in, raucousness would follow. At any moment, we knew, all hell could break loose.
Their names were Miguel and Manuel. Miguel, the darker one, was eighteen, Manuel seventeen. The United Nations was putting them up at a boarding house while they awaited a response from the Canadian government regarding their refugee claims. A few months earlier, they had crossed the Andes on foot, leaving Chile behind for the first time in their lives. They hailed from Estación Central, a Santiago neighbourhood with the city’s train station at its core. When their cell, comprising four teenagers, was discovered and the other two had fallen into the secret police’s hands, Miguel and Manuel had had to escape with only the clothes on their backs. Comrades and helpers had got them through the Andes, including a toothless old man who took them through a treacherous stretch on his mule, and they’d managed to make it to Mendoza, Argentina. From there, they’d taken a bus to Buenos Aires.
“I knew I was in Argentina when I saw them eat half a cow for lunch, speak on humongous orange public telephones instead of regular-sized grey ones, and drive on avenues with nine lanes on each side as if it were the most normal thing in the world!” exclaimed an awed Manuel before taking a long sip of his café au lait, ignoring the accompanying croissant.
Santiago was also scorching in the summer, I thought, but not muggy. People there were mostly dark-skinned, as opposed to Argentinian fair, and drank black tea rather than café au lait, taken with avocado-covered homemade bread, not croissants.
We sat in the café for hours that boiling Buenos Aires night, the drumming, whistling, and cheering of the rally just outside the window. The crowds, now chanting “Viva Nicaragua Sandinista! No pasaran!” almost drowned out our voices as we huddled and Miguel and Manuel spoke. Shell-shocked, they were coming to terms with the fact that they would probably never be able to go back to Chile, for they’d been accused of ambushing an infamous torturer on the street and shooting him in the head.
Listening to them, I was overcome with emotion. There was empathy for them, for the life of exile that awaited them, with its torturous longing, but there was also grief for all that I had lost. Until recently, they had lived the life I’d always dreamed of, the life of a Santiaguina in a graffiti-covered, working-class neighbourhood, packs of wild dogs roaming its streets, groups of teenagers talking, laughing, and making out on its corners, participating to the fullest in the mass movements to topple the dictatorship and re-establish a socialist Chile. That they had materialized at that rally, physically unscathed, was an act of sheer magic as far as I was concerned. I took a bite of my croissant and leaned in further to hear their delicious Chilean singsong.
For the next few days, we spent every waking hour with them. We were staying in the heart of Buenos Aires, three blocks from the Plaza de Mayo, at the Gran Hotel Hispano, right next to the Café Tortoni, one of the oldest in the city. Some of the country’s most acclaimed writers, such as Jorge Luis Borges and Alfonsina Storni, had gathered around its marble-topped tables. Miguel and Manuel’s boarding house was not far from us. We walked up and down Corrientes, Santa Fe, 9 de Julio, Lavalle, and La Florida together, talking into the wee hours. They told us how sometimes, upon hearing their Chilean accents, bus drivers would order them off the bus or kiosk vendors would refuse to sell them cigarettes. In those days, being Chilean meant one of two things: either you were filthy rich and over for a weekend shopping spree, prompting bowing sales clerks to fall all over you, or, more often than not, you were poor, brown, undocumented, and on the run, despised by some almost as much as the gypsies. I did all the talking when it came to dealing with others. My impeccable Argentinian accent, acquired through my years of living there, and middle-class attire ensured all doors remained wide open.
On December 14, 1989, as millions of Chileans took to the streets in celebration when the Concertación, a coalition of seventeen parties that opposed the dictatorship, won with 55 percent of the vote, Mami and I sat in a Buenos Aires café with Miguel and Manuel. Although the young men also
saw the election as a loss, the fact that they were not on the Alameda jumping for joy with their friends and neighbours caused them physical pain. Doubled over, faces pale and blank, they were speechless with homesickness. Mami and I recognized that yearning, for it was all too familiar for us. The four of us simply took each other in and, after sitting in silence, walked the foreign streets of Buenos Aires in a daze until the sun came up.
On our last night, we took Miguel and Manuel to an intimate concert in the courtyard of a colonial building in Caballito. Everyone sang along as León Gieco, legendary Argentinian folksinger, played his hits, and Miguel and Manuel couldn’t wait to shake his hand afterwards. When he wholeheartedly embraced their Chileanness, they beamed with pride for the first time since I’d met them.
The following morning, we had breakfast together at the Tortoni. Then the four of us stood on the sidewalk, delaying the final goodbye. We finally flagged down a cab. After they helped us put our luggage in the trunk, we hugged Miguel and Manuel for a good long while. When the taxi pulled away, they chased us down Avenida de Mayo. I looked back and waved as they ran and ran, shimmering like a mirage, as if by running they could materialize in their beloved Santiago with us, and not be left behind in a city that did not see them, did not value them, kept them at arm’s length.
We hadn’t exchanged last names or other personal details. They understood we were exiles and comrades, we knew they were comrades on the run, and that was all the recognition needed to establish an unbreakable bond. No coordinates were given. They dissolved in the heat, and for a moment I wondered if they’d been an optical illusion, a beacon of water in the desert, their presence a phenomenon manifested by my parched soul at the end of a year spent in basketball limbo, in disguise. Real or hallucinatory, they had passed through my life to remind me of all that I was, all that I had given, and all that had been lost. Miguel and Manuel, who spent their destitute, empty days rambling around Buenos Aires, waiting to see who would take them in, embodied the thousands who would now retreat into corners, licking their wounds, wondering if the giving of life and limb for a cause much greater than our individual lives had been worth it. Only history could answer that question, and in that moment, it told us our defeat was complete. Mami took my hand, and together we cried.
TWO
Santiago was overcome with post-election euphoria, a frenzy that would continue for months. After a few days in the capital, we returning exiles spent Christmas with my grandma Carmen in her town of Limache, 125 kilometres west of Santiago, before piling into a rented Citroën and driving to coastal Valparaíso to ring in the New Year with old family friends. Just shy of midnight, the barrio of Cerro Bellavista spilled out onto the cobblestone streets to watch the city’s “world-famous” fireworks usher in 1990.
The carnival atmosphere was overwhelming. I stood at a railing overlooking the bay below, surrounded by people who looked and sounded like me, holding my breath, for if I exhaled, I feared I would faint from the emotion. After seventeen years of lockdown, the dictatorship was finally over. In this working-class port and naval base, resistance had been strong. As had repression. And now the streets flooded with revellers: women with babies in their arms, couples, scores of children, old people who in spite of their lousy backs and failing organs had come out to celebrate, mischievous toddlers, necking teenagers.
The cheering reached a dull roar at the stroke of midnight, when the first explosion lit up the bay, the Southern Cross sky, the beaming faces of those around me. There was no more need to chant “And he will fall!” because Pinochet had fallen, the year in which he would step down now palpably here. As people dove into each other’s embrace, “1990” fell from every mouth. On some lips it was a whisper, barely audible, as if the speaker didn’t want to jinx what the new year represented by saying it too loud. The younger, adolescent voices yelled it full blast at the firmament, a challenge to the gods. New calendars could now be pinned on walls, this tiny act momentous in its denoting of a “before” and “after.” From this year on, almost two decades of darkness would enter the past, remembered or forgotten, distorted, downplayed, or denied, but no longer an omnipresent, irrefutable reality.
The “before” was an entire existence for the young people and children who surrounded me that night. A whole life lived in exile for me, half a life for my mother and her brother, Uncle Boris. His gaze was fixed on that horizon imprinted on his retina. He’d spun tops and played soccer with his band of boys on this very street in the 1940s and ’50s, running home for tea in the late afternoons, when the orange sun danced on the ocean below and hundreds of fishermen made their way out in their yellow wooden boats, the barrio of bright-coloured houses, murals, graffiti, monuments, statues, and unexpected nooks and crannies at every turn of its labyrinthine streets a glowing jewel in the dusk. My mother stood next to him, siblings back on their childhood turf. As for the matriarch, my abuelita Carmen, she stood straight and tall, eyes shining like the candles on the altars that lined the streets of this city, the shrines for the disappeared, always accompanied by the placard that demanded to know:
Donde estan? (Where are they?)
My uncle Boris had been fired from his banking job and arrested here after the coup. My abuelita Carmen and abuelito Armando had spent seven sleepless days and nights besieging every police station in town, demanding to know their son’s whereabouts, while his first wife, my aunt Tita, and children, my cousins Macarena and Gonzalo, stayed put in case he turned up at the door of the house they all shared. When he was released, it was with strict orders to “leave the country or else.” It struck me now that I knew nothing about his time in jail. Although he was a boisterous storyteller, the week in which he’d disappeared from all our lives was only mentioned in passing to state that his conscience had been born in prison, and that he would be forever thankful to the comrades there who had steered him onto the correct political path.
After he’d been freed, he suffered from insomnia and spent his nights chain-smoking and studying the bay with binoculars from the front windows of the house. He noticed that several navy ships would make trips out into the ocean and come back at the crack of dawn. Years later, it would come to light that prisoners were held and tortured on these ships. Some had their feet placed in wet cement; once it was dry, they were pushed overboard. Uncle Boris liked to say that he proved to himself and to others that he was willing to risk it all for his new-found politics on the night his binocular vigil was interrupted by the military chasing a group of people during curfew. Shots rang out amidst the shouts. The household rose from its slumber and everyone except my abuelito Armando and Uncle Boris took shelter lying prostrate on the bathroom floor. My abuelito, shotgun in hand, said: “If anybody comes pounding on our windows or doors, we shoot.” My uncle responded, “No. If the military comes, we shoot. If anyone else does, we let them in.” No one was more surprised than he at this declaration, because until then he had always identified as apolitical. Once he arrived in Canada, he joined the MIR in exile.
I looked back, taking in the crowds behind me, and saw that at the top of the next hill—for Valparaíso is made up of hills—a modest house suddenly caught fire. A gasp escaped my mouth. Jaw slack, I looked around and saw that others from Cerro Bellavista were also beholding the blaze. Time stood still in our newborn 1990, and for an eternal collection of moments the centre of our altered universe was not that great big ball of fire around which our planet spun, but the flames that devoured that humble dwelling. Although we were impotent to stop it, there was nothing passive in our bearing witness. Spellbound, we observed those ruthless flames licking the ebony sky, consuming the little wooden house until only a mound of ashes remained. Suspended in the aftermath, we swallowed down our sorrow as we contemplated the cold, swift, and brutal destruction that seemed like a message from the many ghosts that inhabited this old port city.
Someone on our street had put their speakers on a windowsill. The classic cumbia “Colegiala” served as a po
rtal, transporting us back from our hypnotic state. The sound waves tickled our ears and seduced our hips before travelling to our feet. In spite of—or because of—the big, smoking black hole, which to the innocent eye might look as if a meteorite had landed in the neighbouring barrio, the dancing got under way. Down at the port, a twenty-four-piece cumbia band in gold-sequined blazers played to a crowd of thousands.
A few days later, my mother, her partner Bill, my little brother Lalito, my uncle Boris, his wife Magdalena, my cousin Sarita, and I piled into the Citroën and began the long drive to Puerto Montt, in the south of Chile. My uncle Carlos, Mami and Boris’s older brother, waited there with his family.
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