Now, in the woods by the school, knees wobbly from the cigarette, I let her have the last drag. We had entered the familiar Fairview trail, gone over the initial little mound, and stopped at the bottom of it. This afforded us the luxury of still being able to see the parking lot through the trees and spy which cute Chilean boys were getting out of their cars. Chilean slang reached our ears as families arrived with coolers, blankets, and ghetto blasters that would play La Sonora Dinamita cumbias at the game.
“Oh my God, Javier is here—this is gonna be good,” I announced to Macarena.
She was facing me and had her back to the parking lot.
“Just make sure you don’t break out in hives or shit your pants, Carmencita,” she warned, alluding to Javier being a darker-skinned version of Scott Baio, my Happy Days crush. A Tiger Beat magazine centrefold featuring him in an unbuttoned shirt with a gold crucifix around his neck hung on the wall right next to my bed, the mouth disintegrated from all the times I’d kissed it.
Javier, eighteen years old and way out of my league (he dated bottle-blond twenty-year-old rocker chicks who lived in deep East Van like him), was the oldest of four sexy brothers, and they too belonged to the Miguel Enríquez Rebel Youth Brigade. They had just arrived in their van, along with their MIRista janitor parents, whom they helped after school and on weekends. Coming from one of Santiago’s biggest shantytowns, baptized New Havana under Allende, the father had helped build barricades and burn tires to keep the military at bay on the day of the coup. He’d been arrested, along with many others. Once released, the family found refuge in Canada.
On this day, they made their way over to the field amidst foul-mouthed jokes told in slang so specific to Santiago’s poorest quarters that no other Latino stood a chance of deciphering what it meant. The other team was working-class white Canadian, and its supporters also spilled out of their cars, the women in feathered hair, the men with their bushy moustaches, AC/DC T-shirts, and sleeveless jean jackets. Chris and Mark, the two gorgeous cops, climbed out of their cruiser and started walking towards the field, Trident gum in their mouths, Ray-Bans covering their eyes, probably there to monitor who had booze in their coolers.
Out of nowhere, a cold feeling seized my gut. I knew this feeling well: fear. It had gripped me many times in my life, most recently the year before, when I was twelve and living in Bolivia. I had endured two coups there. The first had seen me facing a plainclothes cop who had waved his gun in my face and threatened to shoot me if I didn’t go straight back home. There had also been a spine-chilling underground border crossing into Chile, accompanying one of the MIR’s central committee members on a train across the highlands.
Watch out, my intuitive inner voice told me.
I looked around.
“Everything okay?” Macarena asked, a final stream of smoke escaping her nostrils.
A twig snapped behind her. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up.
This is your instinct, my wise voice asserted. This is your instinct telling you there is danger ahead. Get out. Get out now.
The other voice, the head-voice of reason that made a mockery of my ancient, wise gut-voice, took over.
It’s the cigarette, dummy. It makes you wobbly, tickles your tummy, and gives you goosebumps. That’s all.
A sparrow flew up from where the twig had snapped.
See? It’s just a bird, the pompous voice of reason argued.
The cold, sick feeling in my gut intensified, chills ran up my spine, like a snake slithering its way from my sacrum to the base of my skull, every hair on my body stood on end. The Terror was here, and it wasn’t going away.
Run. Now. While you still can. Run, the knowing gut-voice boomed inside me.
Don’t be silly and paranoid, the voice of reason scoffed.
I let the voice of reason win and made a split-second decision to stay put.
“Yeah. Everything’s fine.”
Macarena dropped the butt on the trail. My adrenalin kicked in full force, a door flung open by a fierce gust of wind. Just as I was about to grab her arm, a male voice spoke calmly from behind a cottonwood tree in front of me and behind her, where the twig had snapped.
“Put your hands on your head, turn around, and don’t look back.”
Focused on crushing the butt with the ball of her foot, Macarena’s head snapped up, jack popping out of his box, eyes wide like a Cabbage Patch doll. I took her forearm so we could make a break for it.
“Don’t try to run. I have a gun and I will shoot you. Do as I say. Put your hands on your head, turn around, and don’t look back. Now.”
The tone was eerily unperturbed, taking its time.
Macarena asked me in a low voice, “Is this a joke?”
The inquiry wasn’t entirely unfounded. Three years earlier, when I was ten and she nine, we’d found ourselves in a similar situation that had turned out to be a prank.
Locked in the bathroom of the Salmo Court house, applying discarded makeup we’d found in the laundromat, we heard a stranger’s voice threaten us from the other side.
“Hey! I have a gun and I’m gonna kill you!”
It had been a young male voice and he’d tormented us for a solid fifteen minutes, pounding on the door, telling us that once we came out, he was going to murder us. We’d wept with terror on the bathroom floor. He told us he’d already assassinated our family and it was only a matter of time before we gave up, came out, and surrendered to him, he of the sinister laugh, he of the infinite patience who could wait for eternity. Recoiling, we balled ourselves into the fetal position in the corner of the bathroom when he finally threatened to kick down the door.
We’d waited and waited for the imminent door destruction, but it never came. Only silence lived on the other side. Holding hands, heads held high, we’d mustered every last bit of courage we possessed and opened the door, surrendering with dignity to whatever awaited us—the man with the gun or the freedom to behold the aftermath of our family’s bloodied bodies strewn about the halls and at the bottom of the stairs of our home. But it was Gia, Arabella’s half-goddess/half-witch sister, who was standing there, hands on her hips, a big smile on her face, mischief in her eyes.
“Just joking, you two.”
That had also been on a Sunday afternoon, and we’d run across the way to tell on her. Our parents were visiting with her mother, Pam, sipping tea from green mugs that asked in gold letters Your pad or mine? We collapsed amidst sobs into their arms.
As Macarena and I stood suspended on that trail, I remembered the history behind her “Is this a joke?”
“No. This is not a joke,” I whispered back, for by that time I had had enough experience with men with guns to know that this was a real live man with an actual working gun.
“Hands on your head. Turn around. Now,” he ordered again, the tightness in his voice now betraying a hint of urgency.
The Terror was beyond any I had experienced, for I was hit with the certainty that this time I would not escape bodily harm, that there were only a limited number of occasions that one could be tyrannized by men with guns and escape intact. I imagined a savage beating and then a shot to the head. Rape did not cross my mind, because rape happened to other people. Or did it?
Swallowing hard, I thought of my wraparound skirt hugging my hips, my fully developed body—the body of a woman, not a girl. I grappled with what the Rape Relief women had said: it doesn’t matter what you wear. But surely it did. Surely my clothes had lured this man into the woods with us. Macarena, deer in the headlights, stood frozen, eyes on mine.
There was nothing we could do. He was placed between the entrance to the trail and us. If we ran in the other direction, towards the bus stop, he would catch us. A quick tally of the situation told me that trying to pound on him would get us killed. Resistance was out of the question. I made note again of why I believed in arming the oppressed. He had all the power precisely because he had a gun and we didn’t. Given our circumstances, obedience was the on
ly option. If we bowed our heads and did everything he asked, we might make it out alive.
So I said to Macarena, “Put your hands on your head,” and pulled her towards me.
I turned around, placed her in front of me with her back to me, and crossed my hands on the top of my head, as I’d seen my best friend Jana’s father and older brother do on the day of the raid. It hit me that Macarena had no idea what lay behind her. She didn’t know that the voice was disembodied, faceless. There was the sound of running and within a moment the barrel of a gun at the base of my skull. He grabbed the back of my blouse, bunching the cloth in his fist.
Kicking my calves, he ordered, “Put your hands on her shoulders and walk. If either of you turn around, I’ll shoot. You!” he growled at Macarena through clenched teeth. “Walk! I have the gun to your sister’s head and I’ll shoot her if you don’t walk. Off the trail, into the bush. Now.”
EIGHT
“You don’t have what it takes to be an actor. We’re letting you go.”
I had lived in angst about hearing those words, and now here they were. I was twenty-five years old, and my lifelong dream was flattened. Having already failed my third term at theatre school, I had taken two terms off to work on myself, and then returned to repeat it. It was December 1992, the end of my second time around, and in my final talks the dreaded axe came down. Hit by a truck, I could barely take in my teachers’ assessment: you are out of your body onstage, you are not on your voice, you are not taking risks, you are freezing up, you are so uncomfortable onstage that you are painful to watch.
Although I had spent time away from school going to the therapist, evidently it still hadn’t “done the trick.” Once a week I saw her, delving into my family history without mentioning my involvement in the Chilean resistance and barely touching on the rape, even though that’s what I was supposed to be working on with her. Fear kept me from exploring the experiences that were holding me hostage: the rape and the Terror of my MIR times. I did body work, lying on a massage table for my weekly polarity therapy appointments, my healer a cross between Cat Stevens and Jesus Christ, with his long dark hair, beard, and tie-dyed attire. I attended a group therapy session at theatre school for rape and sexual abuse survivors, and read self-help books. I visualized myself onstage as an embodied, whole human being, accessing the endless pool of emotions that lay in my gut, hip sockets, and cells, and giving them all away with a fully centred voice, my resonators giving it the shape it needed. I envisaged doing all of this while interpreting other people’s texts. I imagined myself being a professional stage actor.
In my four terms of class work at theatre school, I’d played Lady Macbeth, Juliet, and Gertrude. I’d done Chekhov, Shepard, Beckett, and Williams. All to no avail. As the axe continued to come down, I heard them say through my numb face that there were times when I was definitely on, and when I was, the work was fine. But there was very little repeatability. I did not have a handle on my creative process, and that’s what they were there to teach: how to graduate with a tried-and-true process that could get you through a three-week rehearsal period and take you to opening night with an honest, dependable performance. Having no repeatability meant I was not ready for a rehearsal process, much less for a paying audience or the critics, some of whom revelled in slamming actors. In the second half of theatre school one acted in plays that were attended by Vancouver’s reviewers as well as artistic directors, producers, and agents scouting new talent. Did I really want to suffer that level of public humiliation?
I emerged from the office as a newly kicked-out acting student, went home, and lay down and sobbed for two days straight. There was nothing else I could do with my life besides acting. This was my calling. Nothing could or would replace it.
And then the phone rang. The director of the school wished to see me. Once again I found myself in the office, facing the three faculty members, who wanted to know how I was taking the news. I broke down and wept, and they offered a compromise.
“You will not act in our plays because we do not believe that you are an actor. But we do believe that you are a theatre artist. So we would like to offer you the opportunity to stay and learn the art of playwriting and directing. You will be our only student doing that, so you will have access to one-on-one instruction with us for the next eighteen months.”
I had mixed feelings about their offer. On the one hand I was grateful and relieved, on the other I saw it as an affront and felt reluctant to continue. Years would pass before I understood the magnitude of the gift that it was.
It was the first day of rehearsals for a piece of musical theatre entitled The Kat Who Would Be Kool. I swallowed my pride and, instead of joining my peers onstage, script in hand, pencil behind ear, I took a seat in the house next to the director flown in from Stratford, pulled out a fresh notebook, and said:
“Hi. I’m Carmen. I’ll be your assistant.”
For the rest of my time at theatre school, I coached my peers on acting, did research for the directors I assisted, filled countless notebooks during rehearsals with ideas on the art of moving bodies around onstage, finding the arc of a scene and communicating that to the actors, working with designers on a common vision; I constructed a thesis on how I would direct Chekhov’s Three Sisters, and wrote my first play under the tutelage of the award-winning playwriting teacher. Although playwriting, considered an essential part of acting training, was taught to all students for the first three terms, I continued one-on-one with him until I graduated.
Entitled In a Land Called I Don’t Remember, my play, produced by the theatre school, took place on a bus crossing the Andes mountains from Argentina into Chile. In it, I explored my dual identities, personified by two female characters who were exactly the same age and sat next to each other. One lived in Chile, the other was the daughter of exiles returning from Canada for the first time. The young Chilean woman was carrying documents into Chile for the resistance, and the bus was intercepted by the secret police. The remaining characters represented a cross-section of Chilean working-class society.
I found that taking a risk on the page was not difficult for me. When the instrument was written text, I was able to overcome my fears with exceptional ease. It was only when I myself was the vessel that the Berlin Wall came up. The page as conduit brought out the warrior in me, as I smashed through whatever barriers dared to stand in the story’s way.
During my last year at theatre school, thanks to Puente Theatre, a Victoria company that hired me to participate in workshops during summer vacation, I discovered Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed. Plays were created based on the experiences of marginalized communities, whose non-actor members also performed in them.
I had been introduced to popular theatre when I was four years old and living in Huacho Copihue, Valdivia. The socialist government’s literacy campaign and agrarian reform were under way, and my parents participated by going to rural areas and teaching illiterate adults how to read and write. Chile was also experiencing a cultural boom, thanks to Allende’s generous funding of the arts. Musicians travelled with him, theatre groups moved into shantytowns and created plays based on the dwellers’ experiences, and visual artists painted colourful murals on hundreds of walls across the country with the participation of community members. When the coup happened, Víctor Jara would be murdered, many of the theatre troupes arrested—only to re-form in the concentration camps, most notably Chacabuco—and every last mural covered with black paint.
One afternoon in 1972, a VW van had pulled up to our house. The side door had slid open, revealing half a dozen people in their early twenties, my mother’s age. Wearing ponchos, the men sported beards and long hair, while lapis lazuli–encrusted handmade copper jewellery hung from the women’s ears and necks. They strummed guitars and sang Violeta Parra’s “To Be Seventeen Again,” joking and laughing between verses. Some of the women sat on the men’s laps, the men’s hands caressing their thighs. I had been skipping rope in front of our house an
d stood in awe at the scene, the van’s open door a proscenium. The singing continued as the driver beeped the horn in rhythm.
“Oh my God! Are you Carmencita? Are you?” the people asked.
One of the women jumped out and kissed me all over.
“Oh my God! You’re so cute! And you look just like your Mami!”
They all smiled at me and continued singing.
My mother came running out of the house wearing her Mapuche poncho, guitar slung over her shoulder, Chilote woven bag in her hand.
“Oh my God, Carmen, you never told us Carmencita looks just like you!” they all yelled.
Their hands pulled my mother into the idling van.
“Carmencita,” my mother said, “these are the people I’m going away with for a week. Remember I told you I was going to work for Chile?”
I nodded, mouth down-turned.
“What will you be doing?” I managed to ask.
It was as if the vehicle was vibrating, as if these people had their own personal spotlights, and there was no way I wasn’t going to find out exactly who they were and what they did, for future reference.
“Theatre, Carmencita. Theatre. We’re going to put on a play around the countryside that explains to people what the agrarian reform is, and what comrade Allende is up to. Theatre!”
The door slid closed and the van took off with a series of minor explosions, leaving me behind in the dust, tears of rage and impotence running down my face for not having been invited to join them, the only evidence that they’d been there the tire marks on the dirt road. Years later, I realized they were doing agitprop theatre. Those who didn’t get away were arrested after the coup, one for the simple crime of wearing long hair and a beard when Pinochet had outlawed these on men (he said they symbolized an allegiance to Fidel Castro) and trousers on women (“From now on, men will wear the pants in this country”).
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