Rebel Mother

by Peter Andreas

  Ronald could tell we were both completely captivated by his every word. One of our housemates walked into the room and asked Ronald about his travels, and so he told the story all over again, every detail, and we sat there and listened again, just as intently as the first time.

  As he launched into a lecture on how we all needed to get out of Santiago, which he described as a “pocket of cement” where everyone thinks they’re the center of the world, it was clear that he was still the same old Ronald, with the same sense of superiority. This time, though, it felt earned. My mother seemed proud of him; I was in awe.

  When we tried to tell him about our time in Renaico and the farm, he was dismissive. “Too bad you didn’t stay there longer. You should have stayed, or traveled more, instead of coming back to this concrete hellhole.”

  My mother began addressing him as an equal, asking his opinion of the coastal city of Valparaiso, where she planned to conduct some interviews for her book. Ronald told her he hated the place; that he had only gone there to try to get on a ship. Then, without even glancing at me, he said, “Carol, I’m sure Peter is slowing you down these days, and he can be so demanding. Why don’t you leave him with some neighbors here so you can travel around and get out of Santiago?” Ah, yes, I thought to myself, this is the brother I remember, always treating me like a nuisance and wanting me out of the way. I bit my lip and didn’t say anything.

  Things went downhill from there. A few days after he arrived, my mother walked into the kitchen in her nightgown while Ronald was eating breakfast. He shot her a disgusted look, as if she’d personally insulted him. “Look at you,” he sneered, “you haven’t even washed your face, combed your hair, or brushed your teeth. How American.” She tried to laugh it off but could not hide the pained look on her face.

  Then they started arguing about politics and Chile. “I hate rich bourgeois people, and I hate ignorant, drunkard workers, and Chile is afflicted by both,” Ronald declared between bites. “The only real enemies in Chile are the piggy rich and the lazy poor.”

  My mother countered, “Well, Allende is trying to take from the rich to help the poor, and the poor are mostly hardworking people, not lazy at all. And it’s the men who get drunk—there will be a lot less of that as women become more empowered.”

  “Allende, Allende, I’m tired of hearing about Allende. Mostly he’s just created a lot of bureaucracy. Carol, you’re so naive.”

  I jumped in to defend my mother, hoping it would impress her. “Allende is fighting for the people; those against Allende are living off the people. Don’t you see that?”

  “Peter, you stay out of this,” Ronald barked. “You don’t know anything about Chilean politics anyway.” I left the table.

  “I am holding off with writing about my feelings toward Ronald,” my mother wrote in her diary that week. “Just feel there is a huge mountain between us. He can’t relate to bourgeois existence, but neither could he relate to building a community with working-class people.” She continued: “He is a distant observer of everything around him, amused, critical, looking for something that will be worthy of his support. In the meantime, he won’t do any work in the house or treat other people considerately, or so it seems to me. He holds me personally responsible for all the problems of the revolution—for his disillusionment.”

  My mother also wrote several letters to Joel back in Berkeley late that April, which included confessing her mounting frustrations about Ronald:

  Ronald has a big hurt somewhere, I think, that his travels haven’t cured. He sneers at Chile and has no interest in working except to earn money or gain something for himself. He can’t get inspired by any kind of struggle except an isolated struggle against nature (I’d feel better if he’d settle for that and stay out of politics and judging other people. He has no sense of history or of economics—thinks the government here just plunked a lot of programs on the people three years ago). Ronald doesn’t like to be categorized, but it’s easy for people to categorize him as a typical American hippie. I have serious work to do here and get bogged down when I have to defend him or defend myself against him. I’d hate to see you sucked into the hypercritical aloofness that I see in him.

  Ronald was just passing through, and we were not unhappy to see him go. As he was taking off again, this time for Easter Island—a tiny spot of Chilean territory in the middle of the Pacific, thousands of miles from anywhere, which he would explore before returning to the mainland and hitchhiking all the way back to the States—my mother gave him some money, along with a poem she had written about the two of them:

  One woman, one young man

  United by memories good and bad

  In a family old and new

  How absurd are our conversations

  And how important they are

  We want friendship but can’t create it

  We wait too long

  We are actually enemies

  I hear your voice in the corridor

  Pontificating at my friends

  I cover my head

  I can’t believe what I hear

  You hear my voice in the kitchen

  Telling stories of your childhood

  And you enter the room full of fury and hatred

  We are actually enemies

  We embrace between battles

  But the war continues

  And will continue

  Until death

  Ronald scanned the poem quickly and then handed it back to her, saying only, “I don’t relate to this. It’s not my thing.” And then he turned, threw his backpack over his shoulder, and was gone. We would not see him again for almost two years.

  Back to the Farm

  MY MOTHER KEPT our promise to return to the farm, some six months later. We made it back in July, right after my eighth birthday. It was wintertime in Chile. This time we traveled to Renaico by train, arriving on a Sunday morning after trying to sleep all night piled on the cold floor of the train car. At the farm, Rosa welcomed us back as if we were part of her family. The place was even more picturesque than we had remembered it—beautiful sky, tall eucalyptus and pine trees everywhere, snowcapped peaks in the distance overlooking half-plowed fields, piles of freshly cut firewood, and piglets, chickens, dogs, and cats racing in and out of the house. The winter rains had massaged the dust into the dirt road.

  Beautiful as it was, winter was still harder on the farm. The cold made it difficult to convince yourself out of bed in the morning. My mother wore three pairs of socks to bed to try to keep her feet warm, and often left them on when she got up. I sometimes wore double socks, too. One morning, I was surprised to see Rosa’s son, Octavio, sewing the tops of his shoes to the bottoms—he had no socks at all. I looked away. I felt bad for him—guilty about my own warm feet—but not enough to give him a pair of my socks. I was wearing the only pairs I had brought with me from Santiago. I wondered if Octavio noticed that I had two pairs on and if he resented me for it. The moment was an awkward reminder that I was still a privileged outsider even as I was trying hard to fit in.

  The water pump would freeze up at night, so we had to thaw it out every morning with hot water in order to wash up and get the day started. As soon as I was ready, Pedro and I headed out on horseback to check on the animals.

  Despite the bone-chilling weather, I was elated. We planned only a short visit, but I ended up staying on with Rosa and her family while my mother traveled around Chile doing research for her book. It took no convincing to get me to stay. And they were more than happy to take care of me. I didn’t want my mother to go, but I also didn’t want to leave the farm, and she assured me everything would be okay and that she’d be back soon—though it was not entirely clear what soon meant. Everyone, including me, seemed to think it was a perfectly normal arrangement for her to leave me there.

  As my mother was leaving, I told her, “I want to live here on the farm for years and years.” At that moment, there was nowhere else on earth I wanted to be more, even if that meant
trading in my closeness with my mother.

  “Let’s just see how things go for a few months, okay? And if we want to stay longer after that maybe we could buy an extra bed.”

  My mother seemed pleased that I was so eager to live there. I kissed her good-bye as I headed off for the hills with Pedro to shoot birds with slingshots.

  Although I much preferred farmwork to school, Rosa ignored my protests and convinced the nuns who taught her youngest son, Sebastian, at the local Catholic school to admit me. The school in Renaico was more than a two-mile walk each way, which I didn’t mind. On lucky days, Sebastian and I caught a ride in an oxcart, dangling our feet off the back, as it was on its way to sell produce at the town market. Octavio sometimes came with us on his way to sell beans at the market. Some kids, like Octavio, never went to school because their families needed them to work in the fields. At lunchtime, no one ever complained about the school food, which was mostly rice and beans, since it was one of the only schools around that had a free lunch.

  But even as I dutifully went to school and tried to learn how to read and write, I always wanted to be on the farm. That’s where I felt I belonged, that’s where the fun was, and what I was learning at school didn’t seem all that useful—to me, or to any of the other kids. I had none of the luxuries of my old life in America, no Saturday-morning cartoons, but I didn’t miss them yet. Pedro, Sebastian, and I shared a twin bed, keeping each other warm through the winter nights. The only thing I dreaded, especially in the middle of winter, was taking a shower—which meant Rosa pouring buckets of cold water over my head. But that was only once a week. I fit right in; I was just a grubby little kid playing and working on the farm. I was the happiest I’d ever been, in those months before the coup.

  El Golpe

  JUST AFTER 9:00 A.M. on September 11, 1973, Rosa, Pedro, and I huddled around the radio in the kitchen, listening intently as President Salvador Allende broadcast what were to be his last publicly spoken words. Pedro and I had just gotten back from our first round of tending to the cows, horses, and other animals when Rosa yelled out for us to hurry in to listen to the radio. La Moneda, the presidential palace in Santiago, was being bombed; the military was staging a coup with the support of the country’s disgruntled wealthy elite and the covert encouragement of the United States, which saw Allende as part of a growing communist threat in the region. Allende vowed never to give in to the military. He would be dead within hours; the junta that was taking over would claim he’d committed suicide with an AK-47 assault rifle given to him by Fidel Castro. Allende’s voice on the radio was solemn yet defiant:

  My friends,

  Surely this will be the last opportunity for me to address you. The Air Force has bombed the towers of Radio Portales and Radio Corporacion.

  My words do not have bitterness but disappointment. May they be a moral punishment for those who have betrayed their oath. . . .

  I will pay for loyalty to the people with my life. And I say to them that I am certain that the seed which we have planted in the good conscience of thousands and thousands of Chileans will not be shriveled forever. . . .

  Workers of my country: I want to thank you for the loyalty that you always had, the confidence that you deposited in a man who was only an interpreter of great yearnings for justice. . . . I address, above all, the modest woman of our land, the campesina who believed in us, the worker who labored more, the mother who knew our concern for children. . . . I address the youth, those who sang and gave us their joy and their spirit of struggle. I address the man of Chile, the worker, the farmer, the intellectual, those who will be persecuted. . . .

  Workers of my country, I have faith in Chile and its destiny. Other men will overcome this dark and bitter moment when treason seeks to prevail. Go forward knowing that, sooner rather than later, the great avenues will open again where free men will walk to build a better society.

  Long live Chile! Long live the people! Long live the workers!

  These are my last words, and I am certain that my sacrifice will not be in vain. I am certain that, at the very least, it will be a moral lesson that will punish felony, cowardice, and treason.

  When the radio went silent, I could think only of my mother. Where was she? Was she safe? Would I ever see her again? Barely eight, I didn’t fully comprehend the political situation, but I was fluent enough in Spanish at this point to understand Allende’s words—and knew enough to recognize that my mother could be in danger. After all, she was an active supporter of the leftist government that had just been violently overthrown. Indeed, her complaint about Allende was that he hadn’t been leftist enough. Her sympathies were actually with the more radical Chilean MIR—Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria, or Revolutionary Left Movement. She thought Allende should have distributed arms to the workers in preparation for a possible military coup. I had not seen or heard from her in more than a month. I also had no idea how to reach my father or anyone else. At that moment I felt more alone, more cut off, than at any other time in my life. I had been happy living on the farm, but now it suddenly seemed as if I was marooned there in the midst of a political hurricane.

  Allende’s voice was gone forever. Rosa and Pedro sat staring at the radio in stunned silence. Rosa glanced over at me, forcing a tepid smile, perhaps trying to comfort me, but I could see the fear in her dark eyes.

  And so, after El Golpe, the right-wing military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet—the man who would rule Chile for the next seventeen years—I anxiously waited for my mother’s return.

  Days and then a week passed. I lay awake in the middle of the night, wondering where my mother was, wondering when she’d return for me, wondering if she was even still alive. Radio broadcasts by the new military government were blaming “foreign extremists” for Chile’s ill-fated turn to the left. Sensing my worry, Rosa and her family did everything they could to reassure me. Finally, Rosa reached across the table for my hand early one morning at breakfast. A worry line bisected her eyebrows and her lips trembled slightly. She said, “Peter, if something has happened to your mother, you can stay here with us and be part of our family.”

  I nodded but said nothing. I hated to think what “something” meant. My mind raced with scary possibilities. Was my mother imprisoned? Tortured? In a morgue? Maybe in an unmarked grave, never to be found? And then I wondered what it would be like if I stayed there with Rosa’s family. Would I end up with no socks like Octavio, sewing the tops and bottoms of my shoes together to keep them from falling apart? Or would my father somehow find me and take me to the safety of Michigan? That thought was comforting but also disturbing—it would mean my mother had never come back.

  Unexpected anger began to build up inside of me, questions ricocheting in my brain. How could my mother have left me there by myself? Why hadn’t she taken me with her, as she always had before? Should I have tried to convince her to stay? How could she have put herself in such danger knowing how much I needed her? How could she care more about her book than about me?

  A couple of weeks after the coup, as Rosa’s family and I sat down at the kitchen table for lunch, my mother suddenly appeared at the door. I jumped up and ran to hug her, consumed by relief. Any angry feelings I’d had instantly vanished. Rosa and the rest of the family greeted her warmly and quickly made space for her next to me at the table. She dropped her duffel bag by the door and sat down. She had hitchhiked from Valparaiso, a day’s drive to the north. “I had no way of getting a message to you,” she explained in a tired voice, putting her left arm around my shoulders while taking bites of food with her right hand. As my mother ate, Rosa kept filling her plate with more rice and beans and potatoes.

  Rosa said, “I told Peter not to worry about you, that you’d return—but if not, he planned to stay here as part of our family.”

  My mother looked at me admiringly, and I nodded. I could tell she was pleased to hear this, for it meant I had chosen Chile over my father. Truth was, I had no idea how to find my father or
how he would find me, so I was simply trying to adjust to the situation as best I could. As much as I loved Rosa’s family and the farm, I had no doubt I would have gone back with my father if he’d come to get me. But I didn’t say that.

  Between bites, my mother told us what she’d gone through since the coup: hurriedly burning letters and papers expressing leftist sympathies that might give cause for detention in the case of a search; witnessing a battle scene between pro-Allende and pro-coup forces in downtown Concepción (an industrial city in the middle of the country); helping a friend burn incriminating papers and hide weapons in her backyard; the ordeal of hitchhiking to Renaico by catching rides with rich sympathizers of the new military regime and telling them elaborate false stories about why she was in Chile (married to a Ford Foundation representative) and where she was going (to meet up with her husband and child). I was barely listening at that point, clinging on to the hand draped across my left shoulder. My mother was safe and we were together again.

  My mother looked exhausted but relieved to have made her way back to the farm. “We need to leave, we need to get out of the country.”

  Reunited with my mother at last, I turned my grief to the thought of leaving Chile, the farm, Pedro, Rosa and her family—a family I feared I would never see again. Suddenly, the last thing in the world I cared about was having enough pairs of socks.

  Twin calves were born to the family cow right before my mother and I left Renaico. I was captivated by the sloppy mess as Pedro reached deep into the birth canal with his bare hands to attach ropes to the calf’s legs. We then all grabbed part of the rope and pulled hard, and out came the slimy calf. We repeated the process for the second one. One of the calves had to have its legs straightened with splints before it could try to walk. Everyone cheered in celebration of the birth—it was the only thing to celebrate. It gave us all a feeling of life amid an overwhelming sense of death.