“A revolution,” Canelo went on to say, “is paid for with gallons and gallons of young blood. Everything else was and will always be mere deception, cajolery. That’s why we asked for weapons, but when the day came that we needed them, what we had in troops, infrastructure, weapons, and ammunition was clearly insufficient. And what happened, happened, and they got us how they got us. . That was the end of unarmed prophets. The cauldron of the class struggle is turning red hot. We can’t wait for the revolution. We have to provoke it. Víctor Jara: Now is the time / for what tomorrow can be. . Our armed missions are symbols. Our writing of fire will incite the common masses to rise up. Then we will be able to dream of a society like none that has ever existed before, a society of equals that will allow us to leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom. This is the vision of the brotherhood of Red Ax. When the people see that we’re defying the established order, detonating bombs here and there — and the police look for us but can’t find us — they will join us. Pyotr Tkachev, one of the greatest of the Russian revolutionaries, said: We cannot allow ourselves any delay. It is now, or perhaps very soon, or never.”
I believed him. He brought us the fierce truth of war and broke through the sweet lie of peace and of law. He didn’t give us time to reflect or reason. It was a forceful jolt of hope in its purest state. My destiny was to seek vengeance. The silence of the dead hummed in my ears. Canelo said our armed actions would set off a repressive overreaction and then the people’s angry rebellion. Rafa and I told him yes, we were ready to start as soon as he gave the word.
Two weeks later I went to my first camp in the mountains of Nahuelbuta. Our story or alibi: hikers. We studied the Mini-Manual of the Urban Guerrilla, by the Brazilian Carlos Marighella: “The urban guerrilla’s reason for existence, the basic condition in which he acts and survives, is to shoot.” And: “To prevent his own extinction, the urban guerrilla has to shoot first, and he cannot err in his shot.” But we didn’t have target practice, not yet. I was left with the desire. There were long walks in the hills, self-defense practice, basic notions of surveillance and countersurveillance. The indoctrination sessions were long. Our forces, the instructor repeated, would always be inferior in number and weapons compared to the enemy’s might, but our advantages were surprise and the moral superiority of our fight. At nightfall, we stood and listened to a cassette recording of Commander Joel’s voice. It was a greeting of no more than four minutes. It was the first of many more that we would hear in the future, sunk into reverential silence. One of those rituals that demonstrates inclusion in a community. His voice was slow, solid, well-pitched, midrange, with a rural southern accent. None of that “is he or isn’t he Caribbean” that was common with our leaders. Above all, it was a voice I felt was trustworthy.
Then a couple guitars appeared and there were songs around the bonfire. The most important thing to forge ties: the song and the fire woven into coiled tongues. War has always been like that, atavistic. ¿Qué culpa tiene el tomate?. . What fault has the tomato / peaceful on its vine / and then along comes the son of a bitch / who puts it in a can / and sends it to Caracas! The song was from the Spanish civil war, but we knew the version by Quilapayún. Cuando querrá el Dios del cielo. . When will God in heaven decide / it’s time for the omelet to flip / the omelet to flip / and the poor will eat bread / and the rich will eat shit, shit. My eyes filled with tears. We were singing again. The time of Advent had returned.
And that’s where I met the Gringo, a tall, very thin guy with long, blond hair and a moustache. He had a pleasant tenor voice. Levántate. Stand up / and look at your hands, / reach out to your brother / so you can grow /. . blow like the wind / on the flower in the valley / cleanse like fire / the barrel of my gun. A German from Puerto Varas, he told me. We talked for a while. I don’t remember what about. We laughed. I don’t remember what about. The last night, he was on the other side of the bonfire and his eyes held mine with a gentle insistence. I was expecting something to happen, but in the morning he was gone. I was sorry.
That was my rite of initiation, and how I began the difficult process of self-elaboration that is necessary in order to embrace a moral asceticism. And understand that in those dark years, belonging to that family, that secret and forbidden family that I had chosen, was to be born again, and to be prepared for the sacrifice, anytime, anywhere.
1. Members of the National Liberation Army (ELN in Spanish) formed by Che Guevera in Bolivia.
2. Splinter group of the Socialist Party of Chile that tended toward armed struggle.
TWELVE
Someone had opened my curtains, and in among the apricot flowers, I could see the first green buds that were opening to the sun. I closed the curtains and waited in the dark. I called my father at his office. He answered right away. I told him I was calling to apologize and that I hadn’t meant to act the way I had. He choked up, searching for a way to thank me for my gesture, he said, for the generosity of my call, he said, the incommensurable — I remember that word, so unusual for him — happiness of that call. . Then I told him: “If something happens to me, if I do something selfish, it’s not your fault, Dad. Understand? I’m in bad shape. This anguish is eating me up. There’s nothing you can do, understand? I wanted you to be prepared.” And I hung up.
My first outing was to go to the metro station Universidad de Chile. Before I left the house I wrote on a greeting card the same thing I had told my father. Only I added: “Mom, I’m sorry, but you’ll have to explain it to Anita. Hopefully someday she’ll be able to forgive me.”
I had to go out to a public phone to make two more calls that were in order. I knew my brothers must have had someone following me to find out if I had a tail, but I never saw who was watching me. Finally, the rendezvous: El Refugio restaurant, on Gran Avenida about a block south of Carlos Valdovinos. I was to wait, reading the newspaper Las Últimas Noticias with the front page facing the door until I was approached. Someone would say to me, “Hi, there, I’ve got a terrible hangover,” and I would answer, “You should have a coffee with milk.” When that person arrived, I was startled. It wasn’t easy for me to keep calm. I didn’t know the young woman, and I was very tense. But everything went according to plan. She ordered a coffee and I ordered another and we drank them quickly. She commented on an interview of a television celebrity that was in the paper. Nothing else. We went out to take a bus that left us on Alameda. We ducked down into the metro and reemerged at the station Unión Latinoamericana, where an old woman appeared out of nowhere — I had the vague feeling I had seen her face before — and the young woman disappeared. The old woman and I climbed the stairs at her slow pace, and outside we took a taxi that dropped us off on Calle Puente, which we followed until we reached the Central Market. The old woman took a couple of turns around it, bought some vegetables, and left me at a fish stall. The next instant there was the Spartan, no less, the Spartan in person, and we went into a restaurant.
It was hard to control my emotions when I saw him, and I was glad I was wearing sunglasses. How could he not have been captured? At that moment I felt I stood wholeheartedly with my brothers and sisters in the struggle, I was resolved to never fall into temptation again, resolved to give my life. The Spartan seemed shorter and wider than I remembered. He was wearing an ordinary jacket of blue cloth, a white shirt and no tie, and gray pants with pockets at the knees. Common, everyday clothes. The Spartan blended in. An average Chilean. He could be a vendor in the market, or a cabdriver. That was his cover, in fact: taxi driver. I shouldn’t have known that, but as you see, I did. We sat down and ordered two bowls of a mouthwatering conger soup. We drank a Semillon wine from San Pedro. He was, as I’ve said, a truly respected combatant. His military training had begun in Cuba, under Camilo Cienfuegos. Later, already an officer, he was sent to Bulgaria as an instructor in courses of sabotage and intelligence at the Military Academy G. S. Rakovski. At the end of the seventies he was sent as an officer to fight with the nicas. He entered Costa Rica illegally and then crossed over to Nicaragua to join the Sandinistas of the Southern Front, commanded by Edén Pastora. The National Guard was concentrated there, the most elite of Somoza’s army. “I lived through that battle with the artillery stuck in the mud, and grenades that would sometimes explode from the humidity,” he told us. “I lived through it as a practice run for what would someday happen in the south of Chile, in the Araucanía region.” That’s where he learned that “a dictator is only overthrown with bullets.” Many Chileans died in that war. The worst, he told us, was on the hillside of Palos Quemados, close to Lake Nicaragua with its freshwater sharks. But then came the happy march to Managua and the entrance into Somoza’s luxurious palace. The Spartan remembered drinking a Chilean wine there that the tyrant stored in his cellars.