Rebel Mother

by Peter Andreas

  * * *

  Our ultimate destination was Santiago, the Chilean capital. But first, we stopped in Guayaquil, Ecuador, where we visited Walter Franco, a former student of my mother’s. She planned for the three of us to learn some Spanish in Ecuador and to get our bearings before heading farther south to Chile. But soon after we arrived, Ronald took off traveling on his own. I was relieved. Ronald had been a lot easier to deal with in Berkeley, where he mostly kept to himself in the basement and we had left each other alone. Once we got to Ecuador, though, he turned on me, telling me that our mother should have left me behind. I would angrily defend myself, yelling at him to leave me alone and stop criticizing me all the time. My mother commented in her diary: “Ronald is constantly making snide remarks to or about Peter, and Peter fights back, so we have a ways to go there—a ways to go, but I don’t know where to.” We didn’t go anywhere with Ronald; he went traveling on south without us, telling us he’d meet up with us later in Chile. My mother couldn’t really stop him even if she had wanted to, and part of her may have actually been as glad as I was to see him go. Things would be simpler and easier with just the two of us.

  We spent a month in Ecuador. After a short stay with Walter Franco’s family, my mother decided she wanted to live “with the people,” and so we rented a small home in a Guayaquil slum along the river. Only the main street was paved, with the side streets full of garbage and sewage. The grayness of the neighborhood was only interrupted by the occasional cluster of carefully tended plants or a tree.

  My mother and I slept together in a creaky, lumpy bed, protected from mosquitoes by a carefully repaired tent of netting overhead. Roosters woke us every morning, soon followed by the sounds of street vendors, oversized trucks lumbering by, babies crying, and radios being turned on to music or the morning news. My mother would hurry to the nearby bakery for fresh rolls before it closed at 8:00 a.m., and often brought home fresh fruit for breakfast. A bag of six bananas or tangerines only cost five cents.

  Unlike many other homes in the area, we were lucky to have running water (even if no hot water), including a shower and a toilet. Perhaps my mother decided to pay a little extra rent for these things because she was not quite ready to give them up. There was a place in back to wash laundry by hand. There was not a lot of room, but we had it all to ourselves. All around us, homes of the same size each housed a dozen or more people.

  Many of our neighbors lived in bamboo shacks propped precariously on stilts above the mud and sewage, where thousands of tiny clams grew. The shacks were connected by narrow, single-slat bridges, and I loved running across them, as a challenge and an adventure. Somewhere in my seven-year-old id, I even secretly hoped to fall into the black muck below, purely out of curiosity. After one morning spent digging up clams, I slipped and did fall in, right as we were leaving. I was blackened from head to foot. It took my mother an hour to clean the sludge off me.

  For a little gringo boy accustomed to the comforts of America, Guayaquil was a rude introduction to our new life. As my mother wrote in her diary when we arrived, “I’ll have to bribe Peter with a Pepsi every day or something like that to get him to want to live primitively. I’m excited about it.” It’s not as if my mother was adjusting any more easily than I was, though. A few days later she added to her diary: “It amazes me that anyone survives living like this. Dogs and other animals are not protected from rabies, for instance, and most of them (the dogs) seem half mad to me. The trucks race down the street and people nonchalantly jump aside. We were going to walk into the really poor areas today. I don’t need it.”

  In the tropical heat, everything felt dirty and sticky. Giant flying cockroaches rose up through the sewer system and infiltrated our home, crawling through the drain when I showered, appearing somehow inside the toilet bowl while I was sitting on it. They were utterly fearless and refused to scatter when lights came on. Usually it took at least two stomps to crunch them, forcing me to quickly overcome my squeamishness. I was both impressed and intimidated by their boldness. And then there were the spiders. As my mother pointed out in her diary: “It’s a good thing Peter and I are enamored of Charlotte, the spider who is E. B. White’s heroine. We have enormous spiders living with us.”

  One late September afternoon, I got lost for hours wandering around the streets of our neighborhood, looking for an ice cream cone. Every block looked pretty much the same, and I soon became disoriented. Eventually, a round elderly man, who had been slowly nursing a beer in front of his house, called out to me the third or fourth time I wandered past. It must have been clear that I had no idea where I was. He gave me a warm, knowing look and put me in the back of his rusty old pickup truck. We drove slowly up and down each street, block after block, until I finally spotted our home and pounded on the top of the cabin for him to stop.

  My mother barely glanced up from her reading when I walked in. “Where’ve you been?” she said casually. “I was starting to get a little worried.”

  As much as I had craved her help and comfort while I was lost, I wanted her to be proud of me for finding my way home without tears. I told her the whole story with as much bravado as I could muster—including the ice cream I never found.

  She took it all in stride, not even commenting on my ride from the old man. “Well, next time you wander off, just don’t forget our address again. Now, let’s go find you some ice cream; sounds like you deserve it.”

  * * *

  Soon after we moved into our neighborhood, my mother tried to enroll me in the local school, but I only lasted a couple of days. I hardly knew any Spanish, and I felt intensely uncomfortable among the other students, as if I were some sort of exotic new creature on display at the zoo. I was probably the only gringo they’d ever seen in class. Their constant attention bothered me so much at first that my mother shook me out of a nightmare one night after I had been screaming, “Stop staring at me!”

  I was also upset that the teacher disciplined me by smacking my hands with her ruler when I wasn’t paying attention or sitting up straight. “That’s not how my old teachers treated me,” I complained. “I don’t want to go back there, ever.”

  My mother could have just told me to toughen up, but she took my side, and chose to keep me out of school.

  I was starting to pick up Spanish faster on the street than in the classroom, anyway—talking to neighbors, playing with kids, chatting with vendors, listening to conversations. But even though I was learning Spanish, being out of school I certainly wasn’t becoming literate, in Spanish or English. As my mother noted in her diary, “I wonder if Peter will ever learn to read and write—he really doesn’t want to study, and I guess he has his hands full.”

  Otherwise, the street was better than the classroom in every way. I found a new favorite game, fútbol (soccer). Everywhere and anywhere—streets, alleys, dirt roads—boys of all ages kicked around a beat-up plastic or leather soccer ball, using makeshift goalposts. They let me join their games, and were impressed I could kick equally well with my right and left feet, but that didn’t stop them from teasing me about my long hair.

  My mother refused to let me cut my hair short like theirs. “That’s how they cut hair in the military. You don’t want to look like an American soldier, do you?”

  It was the haircut my brothers had had as little boys. My father would mow their hair down to a few millimeters from their scalps with his big, white electric razor; it was simple and fast and he didn’t have to pay a barber. Regretting her own compromises as a 1950s housewife, my mother was determined to raise me differently, in every possible way.

  Near the end of our month in Guayaquil, the neighbors started to call me Pedrito and my mother Carolina, which pleased her enormously. She liked it so much that she referred to me as Pedrito in her letters to Grandpa Rich, and at the bottom of the letters she signed her name as Carolina.

  * * *

  I spent our last days in Guayaquil in a hospital bed, hooked up to an IV bag. It all started with a bad ca
se of diarrhea, which my mother tried to treat with some pills she picked up at the local drugstore. I had immediately swallowed the pills with a gulp of water as she’d instructed and then felt worse. Much worse.

  It turned out that my mother had misread the Spanish label and accidentally fed me a laxative. Luckily, Walter Franco’s father happened to run a local hospital clinic. The main thing I remember about my three-day hospital stay was how luxuriously clean and neat the place was compared to where we lived. I could order grilled cheese sandwiches anytime, day or night, and the nurses pampered me. Other than the uncomfortable IV needle stuck in my arm, which left me with a lifelong needle phobia, I didn’t want to leave. My mother stayed in the hospital room with me, and we took turns telling each other stories about the animals and insects in our house, including the rat that lived under our bed, as well as a dead spider I found under there attached to her egg sac. I think my mother must have been as struck as I was by the contrast between the hospital and the conditions in which we’d been living. She confessed to her diary what she’d never have said to me: “I feel kind of guilty for exposing him to such hazards, but if he gets through OK he’ll have some understandings that he may be glad for later. We have been living in one of the largest slums in South America.”

  * * *

  The crisp, cool weather in Santiago was a welcome relief after tropical Guayaquil. It was also, apart from the smog, a lot less dirty. We knew no one in the Chilean capital when we arrived there by plane in late October 1972. All my mother had was a little notebook with a scribbled list of contacts whom she hoped might help with her research on women in Allende’s socialist Chile.

  My mother was excited to finally be in Chile, to be part of the Allende revolution. Allende was taking on the rich landowners and the foreign companies that owned Chile’s copper-mining industry. He nationalized the copper mines and many of the country’s other major industries, took over large agricultural estates to distribute land to the campesinos, raised workers’ wages, and established relations with Cuba and China. These radical moves prompted the Nixon administration to retaliate by supporting Allende’s opponents and squeezing the country economically. The CIA had already tried but failed to covertly block Allende from taking power after he won the election.

  We arrived in Santiago in the midst of a major crisis—a strike by all the forces opposed to the Allende government—which meant that most stores were shut down, there were food shortages, some schools were closed, and people were in the streets calling for the return of ex-presidents Frei or Alessandri. The army was everywhere. Clouds of tear gas made Santiago’s already polluted air even harder on the eyes and nostrils.

  In response to the anti-Allende protests, thousands of supporters of Allende and his political party, Unidad Popular, also took to the streets, rolling up newspapers and lighting them to make torches. Allende’s supporters blamed hoarders and the government’s right-wing opponents for the country’s severe shortage of basic necessities, from food to cloth to toilet paper. One pro-Allende demonstrator carried a sign that read NOW THAT THERE ISN’T ANY TOILET PAPER, EL MERCURIO (a right-wing newspaper) IS THE BEST, NO? The marchers chanted, “Ya van a ver, ya van a ver, cuando los obreros se toman el poder” (They’re going to see, they’re going to see, when the workers take power).

  In the first letter from Chile that my mother sent to her father, whom she wrote to often to reassure him that we were fine, she was ecstatic: “One can see clearly that the underdogs have come to power. This is a little preview of what revolution might look like in the USA 20 years from now.” She later wrote in her diary: “Witnessing the complex political and economic processes that go into making (or killing) a revolution in a small relatively underdeveloped country like Chile, my mind boggles to think what is ahead for the USA.”

  We settled into an upper-level room in an old downtown hotel. From our window we watched police forcing grocery stores to open their doors rather than hoarding supplies. When I asked my mother what was going on, she said, “The government is finally getting the right-wingers to start sharing.” I had always been told that “sharing” was a good thing, so I smiled and nodded.

  During those first couple of weeks in Santiago, we ate our meals at the public cafeteria on the ground floor of the newly built cultural center downtown. On the second floor, a conference on Latin American women was getting underway, organized by Chilean communists. Students we had met at the cafeteria took turns entertaining me while my mother attended the weeklong conference. My mother’s aura of optimism inspired people to trust her and open up. It was easy for her to make friends, which came in handy when she needed free impromptu childcare. It also helped that Chilean supporters of Allende tended to welcome foreigners like my mother who came to show solidarity and join the cause. And she was especially intriguing as an older single mother, since this did not match the profile of the typical leftist foreigner visiting Chile.

  My mother at a conference on Latin American women, Santiago, October 1972

  My mother tried again to enroll me in a local public school a few weeks after we arrived in Santiago. One morning she blithely put me on a public bus and sent me off to school on my own, with five escudos in my pocket to bring myself home at the end of the day. As she wrote in her diary that night, “Peter was late getting home and described his trip excitedly—is a bit scared to do it again tomorrow, but I think he will.” I’m not sure how my mother expected me to navigate a foreign city by myself so soon after arriving and barely able to speak the language, but I do know that I didn’t last long at that school. My Spanish was still not good enough to follow along in class, leaving me frustrated and confused.

  My mother then tried another school, this time a small private one close to downtown with partial English instruction. That worked out fine until my mother decided that she didn’t want me surrounded by privileged upper-class kids, many of whose parents probably opposed Allende. I didn’t complain; the schools were shut down a lot anyway due to strikes or political unrest. My mother wasn’t particularly concerned. I was busy learning, even if it wasn’t in the classroom. As she wrote in her diary, “I have resolved my dilemma regarding his education by deciding that he is getting a whole lot of education and working quite hard at it—and will ask me to teach him how to read when he’s ready.”

  Part of my out-of-the-classroom education was picking up all the revolutionary lingo, and I also began drawing colorful pictures with revolutionary slogans like Venceremos. Without any real understanding of what it all meant, I started to mimic my mother, talking constantly about being for “the people,” “the masses,” “the working class,” and being against “the system,” “the ruling class,” “the dominant elite,” “the bourgeoisie,” and the “capitalists” and “imperialists.” We called Chilean conservatives who opposed Allende momios (mummies) for being stuck in the past. I could tell my mother was proud of how politically sophisticated her little boy sounded. I even started to differentiate between socialists and communists. One day my mother asked me to go get her a pen so she could jot something down in her diary. I found the pen, and as I handed it to her I said, “You’re clearly a socialist and not a communist.”

  “Oh, really, why’s that?”

  “Well, everyone knows the communists are the hardest workers and the socialists are the hardest talkers. If you were a communist you would have looked for the pen yourself instead of asking me to do it.”

  She laughed. “Maybe you’re right, Peter. Maybe out of a humble recognition of the fact that I am more of a talker than a worker, I am about to ask for admission to Allende’s socialist party.”

  * * *

  We eventually found an old pension to rent with two young Uruguayan political exiles who had been granted asylum in Chile. Different as they seemed—Roberto was short, round, and flamboyant, and Carlos was tall, bony, and soft-spoken—they shared a passion for radical politics and an ability to laugh at pretty much anything. My mother and I took an immedia
te liking to them, though that did not always mean harmonious living.

  The house had seven bedrooms, a spacious open hallway/living room in the middle with walls covered in political posters, and an expansive backyard with a garden with grapevines and a big fig tree that I liked to climb to peer over the wall into the neighbor’s property. My mother, Roberto, and Carlos decided to rent out the other rooms to the foreigners who, since Allende’s election, had been making a pilgrimage to Chile to witness the transformation and be part of history. More than a dozen people lived in the extra bedrooms at different times—Americans, a Canadian, an Ecuadorian, an Australian, a Frenchman, and a handful of Chileans. We called our new home a “commune of exiles.”

  At night, after dinner, my mother sometimes lit candles and gathered us all in the living room to hold hands and sing “The Internationale”—the anthem of the international communist movement—squeezing and raising our hands together in celebration at the end. It was fun to sing along, though I had only a vague idea what the words meant. Thinking back to those nights of singing about revolution, I can’t remember the verses, but I do remember that it felt like we were part of something, something important, something that was changing the world for the better. That feeling would not last, but none of us knew that then.

  The Santiago commune was not a true commune, not like Berkeley, where most everything was done collectively. A lot of the work fell to my mother, which made her angry. As Roberto put it, “I want no part in the domestic revolution”—by which he meant more egalitarian distribution of work inside the home.

  Roberto and the other men in the house tried to hire a housecleaner, but my mother put her foot down: “Revolutions are never easy.” She wanted the men in the house to learn how to clean up after themselves.