But then there was armed resistance, and there wasn’t. The uprising never took hold. Light the fuse that would enable the poor of the earth to free themselves from fear and rise up — that was the idea. But when it actually happens, the soldiers start killing and nothing is accomplished. And beauty, where was it? Ah Beauty, do you come from the deep heavens or have you sprung from the abyss?
If the ambush on the way to Melocotón had killed the tyrant. . Listen, can you imagine how José Valenzuela Levy must have felt when he had the dictator in the crosshairs of his LAW rocket-launcher, for those tenths of a second when the idling Mercedes was a sure target? There were, I’ve been told, two previous failed attempts. But no one except José Valenzuela Levy had quite that experience. Having him right there, just a few yards away, in the sights of his antitank missile launcher. He was saved by the bulletproofing on the Mercedes-Benz, he was saved by the shouts of “Back! Back!” that the head of the escort repeated over the radio, and by the chauffer’s agility and quick reactions; he was saved by the LAW rocket that didn’t explode: Click. Click. Why didn’t it explode? It was the last chance. And it is what it is: there was no triumphant overthrow, only transition; the epic revolution never came, just a tired and pedestrian reform.
Though maybe I’m being too harsh. Maybe we just didn’t get it. Years and years of pain and hate and terror had sown a longing for brotherhood and reconciliation and democracy and peace and agreement. Because, as the entire world knows, that was what they ended up prioritizing in my country: the search for a new civic accord. Even if it meant swallowing shit. We were excluded from that process, you see?
Listen welclass="underline" don’t be constrained by this historical anecdote I’m telling you, or by Chile’s narrow geography, either. You’re looking at me with intelligent eyes. You know I’m giving you more information, more political and social context than you need in order to understand the situation, right? I’m too long-winded, I’m obsessed with detail. Because ultimately, all of this is happening all the time. I don’t want to seem presumptuous. What would Clementina be saying if she were here with you? This is just raw material that you’ll have to shape into fiction. And, please. . I’m talking to you from a moral place. Do you understand? I’m talking to you about the truth that lives in collective mythologies. When I read about the prisoners in Guantánamo, held for months and months without trial or due process, when I see the photographs on TV of the people they tortured in Abu Ghraib, in Iraq, I think I know what that’s about, I think I recognize patterns and procedures. Déjà vu. What they did to us in that miserable back alley called Chile, the Yankees had done before in Vietnam, and the military did in Brazil, in Uruguay. Later, it would be repeated in Argentina, in Peru. Now it’s the Iraqis’ turn. . The mujahideen know it.
Look, these days no one’s going to buy a pig in a poke. You have to tell your reader: you are reading a novel, these are pure lies. That’s what Clementina would demand. And you keep going from there and you do it in such a way, with such magic, that the reader gives himself over and goes along with you. And then, you destroy his innocence again. The texture gives way, it breaks like a torn sack, you’ve betrayed him. It was just one more ingenious lie built on top of the other one, you tell him. And the reader gets dizzy and nothing seems real or unreal and he’s a prisoner among your amazements and inventions, he has no way out, he can only go on cooperating in this other thing, the new texture of the new sack, the new mantle that masks the combatant. . That’s what you are if you are a writer: a liar who tells the truth in order to lie once more. It’s the power, mon chéri, the thankless power that always shows itself in disguise. Or no?
So, greed won. Exactly what we wanted to prevent with our complicated clockwork of sympathizers, militants, collaborators, and the hundreds of combatants who entered the country with meticulously falsified passports and their corresponding alibis, with their military training in Cuba, Bulgaria, Vietnam, Moscow, or East Germany, and our charges of explosives and coded messages on cigarette paper, and our AK-47s and our martyrs and our stipends paid with the dollars or pesos taken from banks and currency exchanges, like we were doing when they killed Canelo, Samuel, Kid Díaz, and they captured me. You walk upon the dead with scornful glances, Beauty, / Among your gems horror is not least fair.
It wasn’t enough. The poor were too suspicious or cowardly or wise. A humanity of cowardly monkeys and wet dogs. They were too realistic, a frightening realism just like the one that grabbed hold of me the instant I should have crossed Calle Moneda and instead I threw myself to the ground and waited, in surrender, for my captor. That quick and irreversible decision imposed itself on me as the truth of my very being. It was a betrayal, but a sincere betrayal. I mean to say: my betrayal sprang from the truth. Now I think that, deep down, I didn’t want to go on living the life of a clandestine combatant, I didn’t want to go on living on the run, always on the verge of being caught; I had no hope because I’d lost my faith in the people, in their revolutionary heart. Although I denied it, of course. Notice that phrase, “the people,” I choke on it now. Brassens’s irony, as I looked at Giuseppe and focused on his long, lively nose in Pauline’s apartment: Mourrons pour des idées, d’accord, mais de mort lent. . I wanted to live. I wanted to go peacefully to the supermarket and the beauty parlor, to fix my hair and paint my nails, to buy new clothes and go to the movies. I wanted to spend more time with Anita. Of course, that’s what I say now.
Hearts with a single purpose. That’s why I admired them, and for that same reason I would hate them later, and myself as well. That society of equals we believed in would never exist. The nation of before was dead. They killed it. You can murder a country, too. You only had to look at the workers. Before, happily crowded into trucks, fists raised on the way to the march, waving their red banners. Now, coming out of the mall, fists lowered, carrying shopping bags and frustration back home. What did they want? To recognize themselves when they looked in the store windows overflowing with objects they could never buy? That’s something in itself, a piece of the dream. Ours isn’t the only utopia. But there always is a utopia, you know?
The master’s gaze is burned into the slave’s forehead. And the slave sees himself in that gaze, he begins to exist within it. How to break away from it, if it’s the very thing that creates him and sustains him? We hang over an abyss, and the thread that holds us and keeps us from falling is the gaze of our masters. But then, the wound that splits your face and gives it shape also gives you the right to the ax, understand? It gives you the right to turn your fire on them, understand? You wanted me to talk to you about politics, right? You wanted to understand how we thought back then, right?
We paid dearly for our attempt. We paid with our lives. Or, as in my case, with a perversion of life. That day I threw myself to the ground instead of fleeing, I knew more than I would have been able to admit.
I knew that divisions were growing among our people. The virus had entered. We didn’t know how to believe anymore. The very idea of our communion of equals was being diluted. What was it about now? The solution of the compromisers, who were gaining ground, was to shake hands with the party leaders of the repressive regime — trying all the while, of course, not to be spattered by the fresh blood — and to negotiate in their salons with tails between their legs. That’s what our newsletter said. They became objective allies of Washington money. The victory went to the bigwigs of the big business of “peaceful” negotiation, the scam that the press worldwide was to applaud with hands and feet, and that would allow the tyrant to die in his home, peacefully in his bed. Do they think that without us, without our attacks, bombings, our injuries, torture sessions, and deaths without coffins or funerals or graves, do they think there would have been any room for their filthy negotiation? Don’t those cowards realize that without our sticks of dynamite affixed under cover of night five or six yards up on the high-voltage towers to blow them up, cables snapping; without the sudden, tremendous, and terrifying darkness that covered Santiago, or half of Chile; don’t they realize that without us, there would never have been any massive protests? Don’t they remember that anonymous blackness that brought the people out into the streets and terrified the bourgeois, terrified the soldiers themselves, who couldn’t contain the barricades and the looting? It was then, only then, that the profiteering gentlemen decided they had to change horses, and they and their lackeys started looking for a “democratic exit.” There were overreaches, stampeding lumpen, you say? Of course! The revolution frees people’s instincts. Cruelty blossoms along with free love, song blooms along with the garbage in the streets, hate along with poetry. Revolution is chaos. It’s a torrent that, if it doesn’t swallow you, lifts you up.