Che Wants to See You

by Ciro Bustos

  Back at the hotel, I found an indignant Roth listening to the radio. The ball had started rolling. The newspaper account of Debray, ‘the free man’, included the side bar story that, from his document, the airport police had identified the other ex-prisoner as a member of the Argentine Federal police. Roth rang them to insist on a correction, explaining that the document was my driver’s licence, issued by the police like everyone else’s. But it was not that easy to correct; whether the radio corrected it or not, it would no longer be news. The AFP interview eventually denounced this stunt and cleared things up, but only belatedly.

  Next morning, the Chilean and international press focused on the manner of our escape, and journalists in Camiri, fooled by the secrecy of the mission, reported what they could. One apparent witness was the parish priest whose church was next to the cage. In an early re-writing of the story, the flabby old Italian told how he had watched the proud departure of the hero whose confidante he had been. Debray had left bright-eyed, head held high, firm step, applauded as he passed, whereas the other prisoner, pale and dishevelled, needed help to walk … Did he bear an eternal grudge because I refused his visits? He had wanted to help me unburden my conscience of its wicked communist thoughts; ideas that harmed the Lord’s children and had brought me here. I replied that of all mankind’s vicious inventions, religion was the most perverse, because it subjected us to the idea that suffering in this life guaranteed joy in another. Perhaps I offended him. Amazingly, no one noticed the contradiction between the secrecy of the operation and the priest’s views, no doubt illuminated by Divine Providence.

  Driven to the airport again by the Chilean intelligence services, we took off for Santiago in a magnificent ten-seater twin-engined police plane. We were the only passengers travelling, as if in a luxury Ferrari or on a flying carpet, down the Pacific coast, with the Andes to our left silhouetted in bluish-violet against the sun. At the police airport in Santiago, a committee was waiting to formally receive the Frenchman on behalf of the president. A car whisked him out of my sight forever, without a backwards look or goodbye on his part. Plainclothes policemen drove me straight to their Central Criminal Investigation Unit where, after a very long softening up period in the corridor, I was subjected to a prolonged interrogation by the unit’s deputy head.

  In the process of setting up the victorious Popular Unity government, power was distributed by quotas to the parties in the coalition. Hence, the balance of power gave the Communist Party second place in a body dominated by the Socialist Party. The other parties made up the cast appropriately. The deputy head of the Investigation Unit was a communist obsessed with Peronism, an evil beast of a neighbour from the not too distant past, and he concentrated his whole interrogation – illegal by the way – on trying to link me to Peronist revolutionary groups he called terrorists. Two or three hours later when he had exhausted the subject, he announced I could go. I still did not have a valid document so I had to have my fingerprints taken again for them to issue me with one. I retrieved my bags, was escorted to the exit, and left on the pavement with not so much as a ‘Good Afternoon!’

  I did not have a cent. I sat on a row of stones round a flowerbed in front of Teatinos Street police station, not knowing what to do or where to go. I finished cleaning the ink off my fingers with the toilet paper kindly provided for me. Naturally, my fond memories of Chile do not include policemen.

  I was forced to reflect on the circumstances that led me from a military cage in Camiri to a socialist pavement in Santiago, a smooth transition which nonetheless left me with no way home, nowhere to sleep, and on the point of collapse from exhaustion. Just then a taxi stopped at the corner, about thirty metres away, and two little girls came skipping towards me, shouting excitedly; they were my daughters, followed by Ana María and our lawyer friend Gustavo Roca, effing and blinding at whoever had given them such misleading information about where and when I would arrive. On arriving from Buenos Aires, they had asked for official confirmation of my whereabouts and were sent to Pudahuel, Santiago’s international airport. No one knew anything. They took taxis to two other airports but found no sign of us until someone gave them an unofficial tip-off. Following the trail, they learned that I was in the hands of the police.

  Gustavo worked his network of lefties in the government. The Interior Ministry got a grip on this embarrassing situation through its deputy minister, the communist Daniel Vergara. We were put up in the Conquistador Hotel, a few paces from the Moneda Palace, where we spent a sleepless night. Then the media circus began. In the morning, the whole reception area of the hotel was filled with camera crews and reporters, a bit at random because the star of this particular show, Debray, had disappeared, protected by official silence. It was impossible to evade the harassment by saying I was tired, so I agreed to speak to some of them: a local paper, a Bolivian, an Italian, a Swede and an Argentine. Through the Bolivian, Mario Rueda Peña, I took the opportunity of thanking the Bolivian people for their warmth and protection, saying that it was their generosity of spirit that contributed most to our safety and subsequent departure. I had to stick to a bland performance to avoid any indiscreet questions about my political past – which strictly speaking did not exist – or reveal any ideological commitments or militancy, national or international.

  A Swedish journalist, who said he was from a Stockholm TV channel, showed not only rigorous professionalism but personal respect over and above the current fashionable political story: the guerrillas and the fate of their emblematic leader, Che. Jan Sandqvist began by cordoning off a part of the lounge from other journalists and interested bystanders. He, with a couple of cameramen, Ana María, the girls and I, sat in leather armchairs going through a process of catharsis about the commitments, decisions taken, and moral values blurred by four long years. The crowd fell silent and heard the whole conversation on microphone extensions.

  Debray meanwhile was skating on thin ice with some of the press, having lost the control he exercised from Camiri. Philippe Gustin, who had covered Debray’s prison stay for AFP, was dubbed a ‘capitalist’ for publishing an article under his own by-line, drawing attention to the fact that two prisoners had been released, not just a Frenchman; that both had been judged by the same court in Camiri and given the same thirty-year sentence; and that both had been released after negotiations with the Gaullist government. Joseph Lambroschini, the new French Ambassador in La Paz, had distanced himself from the first declarations Debray made after his release, when he complained of being alone and abandoned in prison. He described him as a spoilt brat who seemed unaware of the care, attention and constant visits provided by the French Embassy and consulate, benefits not extended to other prisoners.

  On the second day in our luxurious residence, 23 December, we managed to shake off the press hounding us and go for a walk round the city. If you ask a prisoner what he yearns for he would almost certainly reply ‘Go for a walk’. What a prisoner misses most is being able to cross the street, look in a shop window, retrace his steps, walk in the sun or the rain whenever he feels like it. In the Plaza de Armas, diagonally across from the cathedral under some arches in the old town, was a restaurant which matched our limited budget. Gustavo Roca had some official business after lunch and we arranged to meet there. We sat down at a round table, and were being served by a pleasant waitress, when suddenly the most beautiful, unexpected thing happened. The people eating at the tables next to us began to clap, and gradually people stood up at each table and applauded. I don’t think they were applauding anyone in particular, just freedom and our reunion. As if reflecting his clients’ wishes, the headwaiter came over and offered us a free meal. The TV was on a loop showing the release of the prisoners in Camiri and I (with my family and friends) was the only one available to congratulate. Gustavo said Daniel Vergara, the deputy interior minister, was expecting us. We went straight to La Moneda, the presidential palace. Vergara, a thin man with a face as sharp as a knife, improvised a welcome speech in his office wit
h real warmth. He apologized for the circumstances of my arrival and promised to make our stay in Chile a truly fraternal homecoming from now on. On Christmas Eve our hotel room was filled with presents and balloons for the girls from the local and international press and from the Office of the President.

  I did my interview with the Argentine journalist Miguel Bonasso, a young reporter on Semana Gráfica, over lunch in an open-air restaurant on the Alameda. He fitted in quite naturally at our family table and made a fuss of the girls. Keeping certain delicate areas from public knowledge, I told him the story, especially the Bolivian part, which was controversial and being re-written as we spoke. I told him about the Jewish friend whose features I had used to draw the non-existent person I denounced as my contact in Buenos Aires. As I was saying ‘Isaquito was a sailor and a socialist, but most of all a wonderful human being,’ Bonasso sat up in his seat and muttered: ‘Isaquito? … You don’t mean Isaac Shusterman by any chance?’ ‘Yes’, I said, ‘that’s him’. He turned out to be a mutual friend, very much liked by both of us. Not long afterwards, Bonasso sent me the published article; he had hardly changed a word of our conversation.

  Oscar del Barco, Kichi Kiczkowsky, and other members and friends of the Pasado y Presente group from Córdoba, arrived on a lightning visit in a whirlwind of emotions. None of them had had any problems. No search warrants had been issued for anyone in the EGP, and no one had been harassed on my account, even though political developments in Argentina had meant reorganizing cadres and militants. I was still the same old compañero. Gustavo Roca went back to Córdoba with them. My brother Avelino arrived at about the same time and we decided to cut short the show in Santiago and spend time at the coast.

  Philippe Gustin offered us a cabin by the sea, probably belonging to the Foreign Press Club. Even more surprisingly, and something for which I am eternally in his debt, when we came back he invited to stay us for as long as we liked in his house in Las Condes, an extremely posh area of Santiago. And so it was. We lived in the guest wing of his modern house as if we were with relatives. Moreover, Philippe gave me the keys to his Mini Cooper so we could go round looking for a more permanent solution. This came about via the Popular Unity’s Plastic Artists Association, which was controlled by the Communists. They offered me room in a building reserved for sculptors and painters, near the Mapocho, where Balmes, Gracia Barrios and Mesa had their studios.

  Curiously, or maybe not, the Communist Party, notoriously opposed to the Cuban line on the armed struggle, decided to take us under its wing, all in the name of Art. A prominent member of the intellectual Left, Miguel Rojas Mix (now an internationally renowned art critic and academic), invited us to stay in his house, a grand villa in a residential neighbourhood a few blocks from the Plaza Nuñoa. We had a bright room on the upper floor for our own private use in a most welcoming atmosphere, complete with wall to wall books, and absolute respect for our political ideology. We had long informative chats and spent some wonderful days there until in February we moved to his house on Isla Negra, where Pablo Neruda lived and where most of the party’s sculptors, singers and artists had summer houses.

  This solidarity even continued for a few days after we returned to Santiago, until another crypto-communist, an old Argentine friend from Mendoza called Domingo Politti, a photographer for the Communist Party newspaper Puro Chile, lent us an apartment for their reporters’ use in the popular area of Quinta Normal, the opposite end of the scale to Las Condes. Politti ran the photographers’ pool at Quimantú, a publishing project of the Popular Unity government after it acquired the printing works of Zig-Zag, Chile’s most famous publishing house. He also found me work in the future Documentation Department. We soon rented a larger apartment on the twelfth floor of a building in Cienfuegos Street where, before breakfast on the morning Ana María’s mother arrived to visit her grandchildren, we were hit by a two-minute earthquake. We could not get to the children’s bedroom where they were clinging to each other on one of the beds screaming. It brought us down to earth; all resentment and illusions were jettisoned.

  The shining light of the Bolivian adventure, which cost its volunteer heroes and innocent victims so dear, slowly lost its brilliance, but concentric circles kept travelling outwards from it, lighting a powder keg that encompassed the whole continent and eventually unleashed the greatest wave of repression and killing since the Conquista, from Guatemala to Tierra del Fuego. It has affected me, to a greater or lesser degree, ever since.

  On her last visit to Camiri, Ana María had brought me a questionnaire from Punto Final, the weekly publication of the MIR in Chile, which had come to her via a journalist friend, Juan García Elorrio, editor of Cristianismo y Revolución in Buenos Aires. Manuel Cabieses, the editor of Punto Final, had suggested I reply to the questionnaire and he promised to publish it. So there in the cage, I combined my artisanal work with literature and, although it did not come easily to me and was limited by my situation, I was writing my version of what had happened when I was overtaken by events. But the draft travelled with me to Chile among my books and personal belongings. Once on Isla Negra, Ana María typed a clean copy on Rojas Mix’s typewriter and when we returned to Santiago we went to the Punto Final office to deliver it to Cabieses personally.

  A few weeks later I was ‘summoned’ to the editor’s office and he returned the ‘manuscript’. Cabieses said I should correct the underlined paragraphs for unexplained reasons to do with impartiality and historical coherence. The text was censured and covered by notes in the margin in the tiny handwriting I knew to be Régis Debray’s. I had not lived beside him for over four years without recognizing his handwriting. I had even read the original of the work he wrote for General Ovando in his small, even and interfering hand which seemed to write more in the margins and over original lines than in the main text itself, like a second inquisitorial, critical mind. Publication of the questionnaire was apparently subject to the approval of the Savonarola of the Revolution, the only witness, indicating with his hidden finger the true orthodoxy. I made changes, in any case: not because they were right; but because it was important my version of events was known, even though important things had to be hidden. I kept the original censured version but unfortunately it was burned in San Rafael, Mendoza, when the local inquisition condemned my modest belongings to a pre-emptive bonfire, but I still have photocopies of what was published in Punto Final.

  Then a Bolivian journalist appeared who, although I did not know him personally, was an important piece of the jigsaw. Antonio Peredo Leigue, elder brother of the guerrillas Inti and Coco Peredo, arrived from Bolivia. To my amazement, he had interviewed my compañero and friend León in the Beni, where they were both from. When León learned Antonio was going to Santiago and would try to see me, he asked him to take a letter. Antonio brought the letter, which also perished in the aforementioned fire, but what I remember most about it was León’s euphoria, his real joy, at my release – and his own when Lieutenant Ortiz returned to open the padlock and take him to the Fourth Division commander’s office. There his friend Camba and the other Bolivian prisoners, Eusebio, Paco, Chingolo and Salustio were all waiting to be released together.

  León went back to his plot of land, eager to see his wife again, only to find her hitched to a man who had helped her when she found herself alone with her children, abandoned by the hand of God, or rather the Communist Party. In the letter, he said that in the early morning after we left, he stood outside in the patio, looking up at the stars, until he heard the rumbling of the plane’s engines. Then he took the sheet off his bed and began waving it in the air, in the hope I might see it and know he was saying goodbye.

  Part Six

  Exile

  41

  Chile in the Time of Allende: 1970–1973

  Exile means leaving your native land. What you lose are not your possessions, or external trappings. You lose what is under your feet: the land, the landscape that nourishes you. That is why the drama of exile affects ever
ybody, no matter what your social conditions. These days, forced migration driven by poverty and hunger – caused by the developed centre to the detriment of the periphery – might seem beneficial for those who manage to reach the shores of the first world. And for their children it is true, relatively speaking. But when you see an African walking along frozen Scandinavian streets, you understand that they have really lost everything.

  When you leave your country voluntarily, driven by a sense of adventure, you carry your land with you, on the soles of your shoes, and you can retrace your steps whenever you wish. The idea of exile used to mean fleeing for political reasons, not emigrating, which was a supposedly temporary measure until you could return with the means to support your family. Political asylum was always a respected institution in Latin America because continual social upheavals made it essential: today my turn, tomorrow yours. But whether imposed by political activity or driven by hunger, the streets of exile have never been paved with gold. That idea is reserved for the beneficiaries of diplomatic accords, corrupt politicians deposed from power, emptying the public coffers, the top dogs, those who can; because in reality, the poor could never go into exile.

  I’m not really sure when my exile began. Maybe when I left Argentina? When I left Cuba? Algeria? Bolivia? or Chile? Argentina for the last time, I think, although each time I left a country I loved, parts of me were wrenched away and I was never entirely whole afterwards. I live with the remains, grafted onto a biological structure that resists. But like a graft on a pear tree, the result is neither one fruit nor another.

  My political exile, though, began in Chile. The Quimantú publishing house, which organized my documents, accepted me as a fully fledged member, and I found friends there. One great revolutionary fallacy is that you have compañeros, not friends. Yet without friends, you can do nothing, not revolution, not art, not even love; because a friend is the piece of wood floating on the storm of passion that you cling on to, to lift your head and breathe. You can have compañeros whom you respect, but not someone you go beyond the limits of the mission with, or confide your dreams in. Friendship is something else.