Eva Luna

by Isabel Allende

  “It isn’t that complicated, Rolf. The simple truth is, as long as the General was feared and hated, he had a firm grip on the reins of government, but as soon as he became an object of scorn, his power began to slip through his fingers. He’ll be out of office before a month passes.”

  All the years of tyranny had not abolished opposition to the dictatorship: a few unions still operated in the shadows; political parties, although they were illegal, had survived; and students never let a day go by without showing their discontent. Aravena contended that the masses had never determined the country’s course, but only a handful of bold and powerful men. The fall of the dictatorship, he believed, would come through a consensus of the élite, and the people, accustomed to a system of political bosses, would follow wherever they were led. He considered the role of the Catholic Church to be fundamental, because even though no one respected the Ten Commandments, and men bragged of being atheists as another expression of machismo, the Church continued to exercise enormous power.

  “You should talk with the priests,” Aravena suggested.

  “I already have. There is one group inciting the workers and middle class; according to them, the Bishops are going to accuse the government of corruption and repressive measures. When my Aunt Burgel went to confession after the argument with her husband, the priest reached under his cassock and passed her a handful of pamphlets to distribute in La Colonia.”

  “What else have you heard?”

  “That the opposition parties have signed a pact—they’ve finally banded together.”

  “Then this is the moment to drive the wedge into the armed forces—divide them and stir up a revolt. The time is ripe, I can smell it,” said Aravena, lighting one of his strong Havanas.

  From that day forward, Rolf Carlé was not content simply to register events; he used his contacts to advance the cause of the rebellion and at the same time to measure the moral strength of the opposition, which was spreading discontent among the soldiers. Students occupied schools and colleges, seized hostages, took over a radio station, and urged the people to come out into the streets. The Army was called out with specific orders to leave a harvest of corpses, but within a few days discontent had spread among many officers and contradictory orders were being issued to the troops. The winds of conspiracy had begun to blow among them, too. The Man of the Gardenia reacted by flooding his cellars with new prisoners, whom he dealt with personally without disturbing a hair on his Beau Brummel head; but his brutality failed to slow the erosion of power. The country became ungovernable. Everywhere people were talking openly, liberated finally from the fear that had sealed their lips for so many years. Women smuggled weapons beneath their skirts; schoolboys slipped out at night to paint slogans on walls; and Rolf found himself one morning on the way to the university, carrying a load of dynamite sticks for a beautiful girl. He had fallen for her at first sight, but it was a passion that was never to be: she took the bag without so much as a thank-you, hurried away with the explosives over her shoulder, and he never heard from her again. A general strike was called: stores and schools closed; doctors refused to treat patients; priests bolted the church doors; the dead were left unburied. The streets were empty, and at night no one turned on a light; it was as if civilization had suddenly come to an end. Everyone was holding his breath, waiting, waiting.

  The Man of the Gardenia left in his private plane to live in luxury in Europe, where he is today, very old but elegant still, writing his memoirs to set the record straight. The same day, the Minister of the bishop’s plush chair escaped, carrying with him a large quantity of gold. They were not alone. Within a few hours, many whose consciences were less than clear fled by air, land, and sea. The strike did not last three days, however. Four captains reached an agreement with the political parties of the opposition; they enlisted their junior officers, and soon other regiments joined in, drawn to the conspiracy. The government fell, and the General, his coffers overflowing, fled with his family and his closest collaborators in a military airplane put at his disposal by the Embassy of the United States. A throng of men, women, and children covered with the dust of victory rushed into the dictator’s mansion and, while a black man played jazz on a white grand piano adjoining the terrace, they jumped into the swimming pool, turning the water to a human soup. The barracks of the Security Force was attacked. Guards defended it with machine-gun fire, but the mob broke down the doors and stormed the building, killing everyone in their path. The torturers were nowhere to be found; they must have hidden months before to avoid being lynched. The shops and homes of foreigners accused of having grown rich through the General’s immigration policy were sacked. Liquor-store windows were shattered and bottles flowed into the street, passed from mouth to mouth to celebrate the end of the dictatorship.

  Rolf Carlé did not go to bed for three days, filming events in the midst of frenzied mobs, automobile horns, street dances, and widespread drunkenness. He worked as if in a dream, with so little thought of himself that he forgot fear; he was the only person who dared carry his camera into the Security Force building to record firsthand the piles of dead and wounded, the dismembered agents, the prisoners set free from the infamous cellars of the Man of the Gardenia. He was also at the General’s mansion to film the mobs destroying furnishings, slitting paintings, and dragging the First Lady’s chinchilla coats and beaded ball gowns into the streets, and he was also present at the Palace when the new Junta composed of rebel officers and prominent citizens was formed. Aravena congratulated him for his work and gave him one last push by praising him at the television station, where his daring reporting made him the most celebrated figure on the news broadcasts.

  All the political parties joined in a conclave to outline the basis of an agreement; experience had taught them that if they cannibalized each other the only ones to benefit would again be the military. Exiled leaders tarried a few days before returning to establish themselves and begin to untangle the skein of power. In the interim, the economic right and the oligarchy, who had joined the rebellion at the very last moment, quickly moved in on the Palace and in a few hours had taken over the vital posts, apportioning them so astutely among themselves that when the new President took office, he realized that the only way he could govern was through compromise with them.

  Those were confused days, but finally the dust settled, the noise diminished, and the first day of democracy dawned.

  * * *

  In many places people did not learn of the overthrow of the dictatorship because, among other things, they had not known that the General was in power all those years. They lived on the periphery of current events. All ages of history co-exist in this immoderate geography. While in the capital entrepreneurs conduct business affairs by telephone with associates in other cities on the globe, there are regions in the Andes where standards of human behavior are those introduced five centuries earlier by the Spanish conquistadors, and in some jungle villages men roam naked through the jungle, like their ancestors in the Stone Age. It was a decade that had witnessed great upheavals and marvelous discoveries, but for many it was no different from previous times. People are generous and forgive easily; there is no death penalty in the nation, or life imprisonment, so that those who benefited from tyranny—collaborators, informers, secret agents of the Security Force—were soon forgotten.

  The details of the news did not reach Agua Santa, so I did not learn what had happened until many years later when, out of curiosity, I was scanning the newspapers of the period. On that fateful day a fiesta was in progress, organized by Riad Halabí to raise funds to repair the school. It began early in the day with the blessing by the priest, who originally had been opposed to such festivities on the grounds they served as an excuse for betting, drinking, and knife fights, but who had taken a broader view when the school had been damaged in a recent storm. After the blessing came the election of the Queen, who was crowned by the mayor with a diadem of flowers an
d imitation pearls fashioned by the schoolteacher Inés; then later in the afternoon came the cockfights. Visitors came from nearby towns, and when someone with a portable radio interrupted, shouting that the General had fled and mobs were breaking into the prisons and butchering secret agents, people yelled at him to shut up, he was upsetting the gamecocks. The only person to give up his place was the chief of police, who left reluctantly to go to his office to communicate with his superiors in the capital and receive instructions. He returned a couple of hours later, saying that the whole damn thing was a tempest in a teapot; the government had fallen, but nothing had changed. So start up the music and dancing, and give me another beer, let’s drink to democracy. At midnight Riad Halabí counted the money, handed it over to the schoolteacher Inés, and returned home, tired but happy, pleased that his project had not been in vain and a roof on the schoolhouse was assured.

  “The dictatorship has collapsed,” I said the minute he came in. I had spent the day looking after Zulema, who was suffering one of her crises, and I was waiting up for him in the kitchen.

  “I know, child.”

  “That’s what they said on the radio. What does it mean?”

  “Nothing that involves us. It happened a long way from here.”

  Two years passed and democratic power was consolidated. With time only the taxi-drivers’ union and a few military men felt any nostalgia for the dictatorship. Oil continued to flow with undiminished abundance from the depths of the earth, and no one was overly concerned about investing the profits, because at heart they believed the bonanza would last forever. At the universities, the same students who had risked their lives to topple the General felt betrayed by the new government, and accused the President of bowing to the interests of the United States. The triumph of the Cuban Revolution had sparked a fire storm of hopes across the continent. There men were changing the order of life, and their noble words were borne on the breeze. There was Che, born with a star on his forehead and prepared to fight in any remote area of America. Young men let their beards grow and memorized concepts of Karl Marx and phrases of Fidel Castro. If the conditions for revolution are not ripe, the true revolutionary must create them, is written in indelible letters on the walls of the university. Some, convinced that the people would never obtain power without violence, decided the moment had come to take up arms. That was the beginning of the guerrilla movement.

  “I want to film them,” Rolf Carlé announced to Aravena.

  And that was how he went off to the mountains, following on the heels of a dark, silent, and cautious young man, who led him by night along mountain-goat trails to the place his compañeros were hiding. And that is how he became the only journalist in direct contact with the guerrillas, the only one allowed to film their camps, the only one in whom the comandantes placed their trust. And that was also how he came to meet Huberto Naranjo.

  * * *

  Naranjo had spent his adolescent years raiding the neighborhoods of the middle class, leading a gang of outcasts in a war against the bands of wealthy youths who, dressed in leather jackets and armed with knives and chains in imitation of movie street gangs, cruised the city on chrome-plated motorcycles. As long as the upper-class youths stayed in their own part of town, strangling cats, slashing movie-theater seats, harassing nursemaids in the park, sweeping through the Convento de las Adoratrices terrorizing the nuns, and crashing débutante birthday parties to urinate on the cake, it was practically a family affair. From time to time the police arrested them, took them to the station, called their fathers to talk things over in a friendly way, and immediately released them without booking them. Innocent pranks, everyone said indulgently; they’ll grow up; they’ll change their leather jackets for suits and ties and direct their fathers’ businesses and the nation’s destiny. But when they invaded the downtown streets and smeared beggars’ genitals with mustard and hot chili, marked prostitutes’ faces with their knives, and trapped and raped homosexuals on Calle República, Huberto Naranjo thought things had gone far enough. He rounded up his cohorts and organized a defense. That was the origin of La Peste, the most feared gang in the city, which confronted the motorcyclists in pitched battles, leaving behind a trail of battered, knifed, and unconscious bodies. If the police showed up in armored vans with attack dogs and anti-riot gear and managed to take them by surprise, the youths with white skins and black jackets returned unmolested to their homes. The rest were taken to jail and beaten until blood trickled between the cobblestones of the courtyard. It was not the beatings that finished La Peste, however, but something much more compelling, something that took Naranjo far from the capital.

  One night El Negro, Naranjo’s friend from the bar, invited him to a clandestine meeting. After giving the password at the door, they were led to a locked room where they found a number of students who introduced themselves using obvious aliases. Huberto sat on the floor with the others, feeling out of place; both he and El Negro seemed alien to the group—they had not only not gone to the university, they had not even attended high school. Nonetheless, it became apparent that they were respected: El Negro because of prestige from having been trained in explosives during his military service; Naranjo because of deference due the leader, the notoriously courageous leader, of La Peste. That night Naranjo heard a young man put into words the confusion he had carried in his heart for years. It was a revelation. At first he felt incapable of understanding much of that impassioned rhetoric—even less repeating it—but he knew instinctively that his private war against the Country Club señoritos and his defiance of police authority were child’s play in the light of these ideas he was hearing for the first time. Contact with the guerrillas changed his life. He discovered with amazement that in the minds of those young men injustice was not part of the natural order of things, as he had supposed, but an aberration. They made him see clearly the schisms that determine men’s lives from birth, and he vowed to put all his rage, ineffectual until then, to the service of their cause.

  Entering the guerrilla force was a test of Huberto’s manhood: it had been one thing to battle the black-jackets with chains; it was very different to fight with guns against the Army. He had lived all his life in the street, and believed he was immune to fear. He had not retreated in battles with other gangs or begged for mercy in the courtyard of the jail. Violence was routine for him, but he had never imagined the reserves he would be called upon to test in the years ahead.

  In the beginning he was assigned missions in the city: painting walls, printing flyers, pasting up posters, procuring blankets, obtaining arms, stealing medicine, recruiting sympathizers, looking for safe hiding, subjecting himself to military training. With his compañeros he learned the many uses of plastic explosives, how to make bombs, to sabotage high-voltage cables, to blow up railways and roads, in order to give the impression that they were many and well organized; that attracted the indecisive, built the morale of the men fighting, and unnerved the enemy. The newspapers at first publicized these criminal acts, as they were called, but later a ban was enforced prohibiting mention of the guerrilla strikes and the country learned of them only by rumor, through broadsides printed on home printing presses, or in clandestine radio broadcasts. The young revolutionaries used every means possible to mobilize the masses, but their zeal was met with impassivity and ridicule. The illusion of petroleum wealth cloaked everything in a mantle of indifference. Huberto Naranjo grew impatient. At the meetings, he heard what was happening in the mountains: the best men were there, the weapons, the seed of revolution. Long live the people, death to imperialism, they shouted, said, whispered: words, words, thousands of words, good and bad words; the guerrillas had more words than bullets. Naranjo was not an orator; he did not know how to use those passionate words, but he soon developed political insight, and although he did not have the rhetoric of an ideologue, he moved people by the force of his courage. He had tough fists and a reputation for bravery; for those reasons he was finally s
ent to the mountains.

  He left one evening without explanations or goodbyes to his friends in La Peste, with whom he had had little contact since the beginning of his new restlessness. The one person who knew his whereabouts was El Negro, and he would not have told it under threat of death. After only a few days in the mountains, Huberto Naranjo learned that everything he had experienced until then was a foolish game; the hour had come for a serious test of his character. The guerrillas were not a shadow army, as was believed, but groups of fifteen or twenty youths scattered throughout the mountains, few in number, barely enough to keep hope alive. What have I got myself into, these are crazy men, was Naranjo’s first thought, which he immediately discarded, because the goal was very clear: they had to win. The fact that they were so few forced them to greater sacrifices. The first was pain. Forced marches with thirty kilos of supplies on your back and your weapon in your hand—the sacred weapon that could not get wet or be struck, that could not be set down for an instant; walking, crouching, up, down, single file, not speaking, no food, no water, until all the muscles in your body were one long-drawn-out wail, until the skin of your hands puffed up like a balloon distended with dark liquid, until insect bites sealed your eyes and your feet bled raw inside your boots. Climbing and more climbing, pain and more pain. And the silence. In the impenetrable green of that landscape, he learned the meaning of silence: he learned to move like a breath of air; there a sigh, a scrape of backpack or rifle resounded like a bell, and could cost you your life. The enemy was very near. Patience; waiting motionless for hours. Hide your fear, Naranjo, don’t infect the others; bear your hunger, we’re all hungry; bear your thirst, we’re all thirsty. Always soaking wet, miserable, filthy, in pain, tortured by the cold of night and steaming heat of midday, by mud, rain, mosquitoes and chiggers, by infected wounds, coughs, and chills. At first he felt lost; he could not see where he was going or what he was hacking at with the machete: high grass, weeds, branches, rocks, underbrush beneath treetops so thick they blocked out the sunlight. But gradually his eyes grew as sharp as a mountain lion’s, and he learned to orient himself wherever he was. He stopped smiling; his face became hard, his skin the color of dirt, his expression cold. The loneliness was worse than the hunger. He was plagued by a pressing need for contact with another human being, to feel someone’s touch, to be with a woman; but they were all men in that place. They never touched; each was sealed in his own body, in his past, in his fears and hopes. Occasionally they saw a compañera, and each of them longed to put his head in her lap, but that also was impossible.