We spent Sunday on our backs on the floor, on opposite sides of the bike. Don Don pressed the wires of the volt meter against various bits of Kooky’s anatomy while I pretended to understand what he was doing. Once in a while I would jump up at his instruction and turn on the key or try the headlight and horn or press the starter button. Diagnostic work is slow and boring, requiring a passionless, methodical routine. After an hour we’d learned nothing.
With a pop, Don Don pulled the black spark-plug wire off the cylinder on his side of the engine. He inserted the tip of a screwdriver into the cap at the end of the wire, and then held a finger to the metal of the screwdriver.
“Start it,” he said.
I refused, but he insisted. I gave a gentle kick on the starter.
“Harder,” he said, and I did, and he winced and dropped the screwdriver and then said, “There is a spark.”
We stopped working for a while, and while we stretched our legs Don Don told me the story of the four Americans he had met in his life. He’d learned to repair John Deeres from an American. In one six-month period he’d met two men, both from Livermore, California, who claimed not to know each other. I was the fourth. The mechanic had strong opinions about America, how Ohio was near Iowa, and how Illinois was the most powerful state because it had both Abraham Lincoln’s birthplace and the Caterpillar factory.
“I know I will never go now,” Don Don said without warning. “In this economy, never.” I told him how back home all the papers said Chile was an economic success. They called it the “Chilean miracle.” He thought I was joking. As people do, he cited his own situation: his pension covered little, and he was scrambling for body work on cars to make ends meet. In the old days, his skills as a tractor mechanic had been good enough for him to work on any car in Chile. But now, with the inrush of new products under the free-market system, everyone was buying complicated foreign cars. The pollution controls were too elaborate; the equipment to test electronic ignitions cost thousands of dollars, which he didn’t have. You needed a college degree to fix those cars, he said.
The statistics robbed General Pinochet’s economic miracle of much of its wonder. Pinochet had applied virtually every item on the checklist of free market reform, cutting subsidies, privatizing industries, liberalizing trade, and opening the country to foreign investment. But it wasn’t until 1988—after fifteen years of shock therapy—that individual income reached the level last seen under Allende. Consumption hardly rose at all; the new wealth flowed to the top of the social pyramid, pushing Chile from a relatively middle-class society into one where the rich got richer (the top tenth of the population went from collecting 36.2 percent of national income in 1978 to 46.8 percent ten years later) but the poor either stayed the same or actually got poorer (the bottom half of the public went from 20.4 to 16.8 percent of income in the same period). And this was in Chile, the “miracle” and best case. Across the hemisphere the same neoliberal reforms were increasing inequality and widening income distribution. People like Don Don were moving out of the middle class, but not upward.
He didn’t speak for a while and then asked me if Gary Hart supported expanding NAFTA to Chile.
Perdón? He repeated the question: Does Gary Hart support expanding NAFTA to Chile?
“Maybe,” I said.
He turned away from me and fussed with something on the tool bench. “Boot ta tie ’em drugged,” he said.
Perdón?
“Boot ta tie ‘em drugged,” he repeated, and then: “Esmall grope his beggin toe christ are under TV sex.”
I looked over his shoulder. He was reading from an American magazine, rather tattered and dusty. He mouthed the words to show he spoke English, but I had to read over his shoulder to follow what he was saying:
But the time dragged. Small groups began to cluster around TV sets. Campaign workers whispered anxiously among themselves. Still no candidate, still no statement. Finally, a few minutes after 11 P.M., Walter Mondale waded slowly through the now diminished crowd, family and entourage in tow.
It was a twelve-year-old copy of Time magazine. In the garage, I suddenly realized, time had come to a stop. As long as I relied on Don Don I would never leave Valdivia. The bike was not going to be fixed. In his Caterpillar dreams and John Deere reveries he did not want to admit it, but he really had no idea what was wrong with the electrical system. I had to move on. On Monday morning I charged the battery and rode into town to meet the intellectuals.
Pedro published dirty cartoons in his magazine from time to time, not because he thought they were profound but because he imagined that it annoyed the powers that be. The first Great Power in Chile was the Catholic Church—“a shadow over the nation,” Pedro intoned sternly—and the Church owned one of two national television networks and tended to censor the naughty bits of various shows. So in one issue Pedro stuck in a drawing of Marilyn Monroe with her knickers around her ankles and her hands in a suspicious place. It was a blow for freedom disguised as a turn-on.
The other Big Power in Chile was the military. Ever since 1989, when the general began to yield power in bits and pieces, the military had been furiously working to avoid any prosecutions for crimes committed during and after the 1973 coup. A blanket pardon was thrown over the military; Pinochet appointed himself “Senator-for-life” with his immunity written into the new constitution. But there were small holes in the blanket: a few officers had been prosecuted and convicted for assassinations carried out abroad. The country had just survived a bitter constitutional crisis over refusal of one of these convicted men—General Manuel Contreras—to go to jail. The military had protected him, and Pinochet’s own guards had ushered the balking Contreras to an isolated military hospital. From his sickbed, General Contreras demanded a jail “suitable to his rank” and reflecting his “long service to the nation.” After much negotiation, the jittery civilians agreed and rapidly built a special jail that resembled a penthouse, with a multiroom cell outfitted with a gym and a cellular phone and a view of the ocean.
So Pedro published an essay—albeit a short one—demanding equal treatment for intellectuals. The author of the piece, a local painter, declared that he would never submit to jail unless he too had a special cell with an ocean view, a double bed, and the right to receive collect calls from his kids when they were on vacation. This jail for artists also had to be staffed only by women wearing bright colors (“Green is insupportable,” the painter declared). And of course, he would never submit to jail until his rank in the local painters’ club had been recognized.
Pedro expounded on these themes in the Café Paula, an orange linoleum dump whose twin virtues were that it had the local newspapers and that it let impoverished intellectuals loiter all afternoon over a single cup of coffee. The staff, contributors, friends, enemies, and sympathizers of Caballo de Proa gathered at the Paula after lunch on most days, and sometimes they even bought food. It was here that Pedro could rage against the fallen state of the world.
When the bill came it wasn’t much, but I was trying to get inside Ernesto Guevara’s head, and if there was one certain lesson of his 1952 journey it was the art of the mooch. With my funds dwindling, I’d been feeling an increasing pressure to do some serious sponging—as the Cubans say, to “Be Like Che.” A natural coward, I decided to start with Pedro and a cup of coffee. The bill was a couple of bucks, and I figured that the home team should pay.
So I sat there, waiting for him to offer. And I sat there. We finished our coffee. We stared at each other. We ran out of conversation. We cleared our throats. I ordered and slowly drank a glass of water.
Finally, I said, “Well, Pedro, I’ve got to go, but thanks a lot. It was nice of you to show me La Paula.”
We got up, and I tried to move only very slowly in the general direction of the door. But this wasn’t getting anywhere. If Pedro was going to cough up a couple of bucks for the coffee he would have offered by now. I caved in and decided, in an act of generosity, to pay for my half. I wearil
y shuffled through my pocket, counting out coins to the precise halfway mark. Then I turned to ask for Pedro’s half.
He was gone. I never even heard the door swing. I noted this maneuver for future use.
I paid the bill and found Pedro outside, engaged in minute inspection of some faded For Sale notices in a storefront. He walked me back to the bike, smiling faintly.
The new issue of Caballo de Proa was being “presented” that night at a concert of folk music in the municipal theater. I wasn’t sure what presenting a magazine actually entailed, but I went—and I went by foot. Despite the recharged battery Kooky’s green light glowed only dimly, and kicking it over and over produced nothing. I had to walk and was a little late getting into the theater, where a crowd of about four hundred was staring at Ricardo and Pedro, who were staring back at them. Basically, presenting the magazine meant giving it some free publicity. The local literary establishment were all thick as La Paula thieves, and the emcee for the concert was up there quizzing the boys about their latest and greatest issue, asking them questions like “What is your opinion of the national culture today?”
Presumably, P. and R. were hitting these softballs over the plate. I say presumably because like intellectuals everywhere they were standing too far from the microphone. Nobody could hear a word they were saying. The audience didn’t mind: the Chileans just talked among themselves while the emcee boomed out his questions; and P. and R. stood there babbling away inaudibly, so that occasional words like “theme” and “fundamental debate” came across but no larger point was made.
The folksingers came on next, and they were pretty good. They were local heroes who’d been at it since the darkest days of the dictatorship. After a while they let a poet on stage, and he read some verse. That was the funny thing about a dictatorship: it was great for culture. If there was one sure way Pinochet could support poetry, it was by staging a military coup, shooting a bunch of people, and tossing some tear gas around once in a while. Literature became not some pointless abstraction, but a pointed one. The history books were empty but the poets spoke volumes. The dictatorship filled their readings, it put standing room crowds in theaters. Politics was banned, but culture was there, and the people of Chile used it like they used oxygen.
And then they unbanned politics. Democracy was restored in 1990. The good guys won, sort of. And suddenly the poets weren’t needed anymore. Theaters were half full, the folk concerts were like fifteenth-year college reunions where people were going gray and starting to forget who everyone else was. The natural order had been restored: bookstores everywhere were going broke.
This upset Ricardo, and it drove Pedro crazy, but the poet, whose name was Clemente Riedemann, seemed to welcome any escape from those overly heroic times. He recited this free verse into the microphone; it was, he said, from a poem called “Regarding Cuba, the Sunrise”:
When I was young and it was not possible to inhabit this world without a monthly quota of heroism, Cuba was a standard, a fire that took bearings on the future. What did Fidel think when he rested, what did he sing under the shower? I put a poster of Che in the dormitory, to see if he would collaborate in dreams and give a hand with the student protest.… Thanks for the sugar and the folk songs. Even more for the historical material, even less, without doubt, for the dialectics, for living with an honorable dream of the great revolution we owe ourselves. What happiness does Fidel feel at this hour? Who accompanies him in his sadness?
People applauded all night, but in a halfhearted way.
There was plenty of news that day. A nineteen-year-old actress named Elizabeth Taylor was getting married (her second time). An entire family in Georgia, USA, had been electrocuted. France was backing a pan-European army. Someone had jumped from the seventh floor of a building in Valdivia. The story I wanted was less important than any of these, and was consequently buried on page 9, in the middle of the sports section:
TWO VALIANT ARGENTINE RAIDERS ON
MOTORCYCLE PASS THROUGH VALDIVIA
One Is Doctor and the Other Studies Medicine;
Specialists in Leprosy
Currently found in our city are two Argentine raiders, making a journey of great courage through the principal countries of South America. They are the doctor of biochemistry, Mr. Alberto Granados, and the seventh year student of medicine, Mr. Ernesto Guevara Serna, who are making the raid on motorcycle. They left Córdoba the 29 of December of last year and after traveling over the north and south of that province and the principal cities and provinces of the Atlantic of their homeland, they arrived in Chile by Puella, Petrohué, heading for Osorno, but having passed through Junín, San Martín, and Bariloche.
This was the “very nice” article the Correo de Valdivia had published on Monday, February 18, 1952. On a Monday morning forty-four years later the archivist at the municipal building, a mousy man with thick glasses and a sweater vest, had quickly located the volume, and after much turning to and fro I’d found the clip. The paper had stylized their trip as a “raid,” a glamorous term for long-distance racing that ill fit the supposed medical agenda of the two Argentines but that pleased Guevara (upon his return home he insisted on describing the trip as a “raid” to unimpressed friends).
When I showed the article to the archivist—pointing to the name Ernesto Guevara—he looked slightly ill and backpedaled toward his desk, where he buried his nose again in another book. The novelist Isabel Allende—a niece of the deposed president—noted acerbically that any discussion of the past here was “in really bad taste.”
I sought out one of the small number of people in Valdivia with that kind of bad taste. Roberto Arroyo was the painter who had written the little satire about jail that I’d liked so much in Caballo de Proa. Despite claiming in the piece that he could not abide green, Roberto, a dapper, thick-haired young man who slept on the floor of his studio in a sleeping bag, had filled the small space with big canvases of swirling green scenes that evoked the local forests. The paintings were built around traditional Mapuche imagery, particularly birds, but updated with twists of barbed wire and swirls of pure primary colors.
“People have forgotten Che,” he said when I showed him a photocopy of the 1952 article. Guevara’s death in 1967 had made him a martyr to Chileans on the left, and at age fourteen Roberto had joined what he called a “Guevarist youth group.” This was a bunch of students and left-wing activists who studied the life and teachings of their hero. At that point, before the coup, there had been pictures of Che everywhere. “Che had an immense influence in the country,” Roberto said. But after September 1973 his image was suppressed and his teachings largely surpassed or forgotten. Twenty-five free-market years later, the country was “surging in another direction. We’ve moved from social solidarity to commercial solidarity,” Roberto said. Instead of government programs, “Now we have telethons.”
Roberto kept a copy of the multivolume report by a Truth and Reconciliation Commission set up after the return to civilian government, and he began flipping through the pages of one binder, reading me details of the military repression in Valdivia. Statistically speaking, this southern region was the fourth worst site of repression in the country. This was a kind of perverse tribute to the local people, many of whom believed they had been forging a new era of electoral revolutions, of democratic “people’s power.” Scores of farms in the area had been occupied by peasants, who set up local parliaments and named their communes after Che Guevara. One of the local leaders put on a beret, styled himself as “Comandante Pepe,” and gave suitably fevered statements about seizing power and establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat to any journalists who visited his “guerrilla base” (an idle farm decorated with slogans). Inevitably, the fantasies of the left and right began to meet, and Pepe was labeled the Che of Chile. On the day of the coup itself, September 11, 1973, battalion-sized units of soldiers and police instantly closed the mountain passes to Argentina and began rounding up all these left-wing activists. In Panguipulli, j
ust across the flat valley, the military and police detained these peasants and anyone associated even vaguely with the left. Even the leaders of high school student councils were taken, as was the educational director of the region. In Puerto Montt, some people had been summarily executed simply because they were suspected thieves or were involved in personal disputes with military men.
The leftists had misread history, and badly. From the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report:
The 7th day of October, 1973, Andrés SILVA SILVA, 33 years old, logger, was executed by army personnel in the Panguipulli Forestry Complex. He was arrested in his parents’ home on October 6, 1973, by a military contingent which took him to a farm in the Nilahue Sector. The next day, the same soldiers took him to his home which they searched. Later he was executed in the area called Sichahue and his lifeless body abandoned in a small wood in that place.… Andrés Silva was executed by state agents …
It went on and on. Two days after Silva was arrested, the military took seventeen loggers and unionists to a private farm a little higher in the hills and killed them all. The next day, using a list provided by civilian supporters, a combined unit of police and air force men in the same zone detained sixteen people. They were unionists or members of different peasant organizations. The sixteen were taken at night to a bridge over the Toltén River, which is about half an hour from Valdivia. They were shot in the head and dumped, one by one, into the water.
Chasing Che Page 13