Rebel Mother

by Peter Andreas

  The next day, my mother and I made our way back to Santiago by train. Whereas the last time we had said good-bye to Rosa and her family everyone was in a festive mood, this time could not have been more different. Unexpectedly, it was Mauricio who cried the most when we said good-bye at the entrance to the farm. I had never seen him shed tears while sober. He suddenly appeared far more frail and vulnerable than he ever had in a drunken stupor. Rosa hugged and kissed us. Octavio thanked me for the pair of socks I left him as a parting gift. Pedro just shook my hand and mumbled something about how he would have a hard time getting up in the morning not having me along to check on the animals. “Pedrito,” he yelled out to me as my mother and I turned to go, “next time you come, we can hunt birds with the new rifle, not just our slingshots.”

  No one came with us into town to the train station, which we had to make sure to get to before the evening curfew began. No one risked violating it—a teenager had been gunned down recently while rushing home from the town plaza only a few minutes late. I sobbed silently for more than an hour after our train left Renaico, clutching my mother’s side with both hands and burying my face in her sweater.

  Back in the capital, some five hundred kilometers to the north, we headed straight to the downtown hotel where we’d stayed when we had first arrived almost a year earlier. There was nowhere better to turn: our old house—the “commune of exiles”—had been abandoned. We ran into an Australian on the street who had lived there and he told us everyone had fled when the landlady denounced them to the authorities right after the coup. Up the block, soldiers had stormed a house in a hail of bullets a few days earlier. On the afternoon of the coup, everyone in our old house began to frantically burn anything the new military government might consider “Marxist literature and propaganda.”

  The burning frenzy taking place across Chile included all of my mother’s notes and research materials for her book, which she had left with friends in a Santiago shantytown. “I lost everything,” she told me when she found out. My mother stood staring out the hotel window as she spoke, looking down at the eerily quiet street below. Although I felt helpless to do anything about her lost book materials, all I really cared about was that I had not lost her. My mother would still end up writing a book about Chile, but one that was more of a personal account.

  Worse still, we found out, was that the landlady had reported to the police the two Uruguayans in our house—Carlos and my mother’s lover, Roberto. They had been given political asylum under Allende and could now be deported. They tried to seek refuge in the Argentine embassy but were intercepted by soldiers right before they reached the entrance gate. They were sent to Santiago’s National Stadium, which was turned into a giant prison for tens of thousands of people. Somehow they managed to get out after being granted political asylum in Europe. Two of the other foreigners in the house also ended up in the National Stadium but were later released into the custody of their governments.

  Many others were not so lucky: thousands of the prisoners in the stadium were tortured, killed, or simply “disappeared.” One American, Frank Teruggi, was detained at the National Stadium and was identified ten days later in the morgue. Earlier that year in Santiago, my mother and I had sat near him and his girlfriend at a public screening of a Czech film about the horrors of German occupation. They stayed for only the first minutes, saying it was more than they could take. Much later we heard that the body of another missing American, Charles Horman, had turned up in the morgue. His story would eventually be featured in the Costa-Gavras film Missing.

  Friends told us that the American embassy had officially listed us as “missing.” When my mother heard this she laughed. “And I’m sure the embassy wouldn’t mind if we permanently disappeared.” I didn’t like the sound of that word. It sounded worse than death. And I wondered if my father thought we had “disappeared” and was looking for me. I wanted to get a message to him, but that would have to wait until we got out.

  Washington had covertly backed the Chilean opposition to the Allende government, including funding an anti-Allende propaganda campaign. As Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said after Allende was elected in 1970, “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people.” The violent overthrow of Allende and its brutal aftermath would become a powerful symbol for the international human rights movement and the struggle for social justice in Latin America for decades. It would also leave my mother with less faith than ever about the possibility of peaceful social change through elections, and more committed than ever to the belief that the capitalist system had to be overthrown by any means necessary. As she saw it, Chile’s workers and peasants had been duped into believing in the electoral process and were robbed of their revolution, and the lesson was that workers and peasants everywhere should now trust in nothing but revolution through armed struggle.

  Even if it had been safe for us to stay in Chile—the actual level of danger was never entirely clear in the midst of all the uncertainty and chaos right after the coup—the bitter truth was that there was nothing left for my mother to fight for in post-Allende Chile. There was certainly no emerging resistance movement. Allende and his revolution were both dead, and it left my mother feeling politically lost and disoriented.

  To Buenos Aires

  NOT LONG AFTER we returned to Santiago, my mother and I boarded a bus that was crossing the high Andes, headed for Buenos Aires. It was a two-day trip, including a five-hour stop at a remote mountain border checkpoint, where we had to get off the bus to be searched by Chilean soldiers. As we watched them frisk passengers ahead of us, sift through luggage, and check documents, my mother and I grew increasingly nervous.

  We not only wanted to get out of Chile safely but also hoped our duffel bags would not be inspected too carefully. Tucked inside the cover of one of my notebooks, buried under my clothes, was a small black, white, and red poster that said CONSEJOS COMUNALES: UNIDAD Y PARTICIPACION CAMPESINAS. It depicted a crowd of farmworkers demonstrating their militancy with raised pitchforks, sticks, banners, and clenched fists. The consejos (councils) were becoming organs of political power only in the final days of the Allende government. Gambling that the soldiers would focus on the adults and overlook the innocent-looking eight-year-old gringo boy at her side, my mother hid this poster in my belongings. She was determined to smuggle this political memento out of the country, right under the noses of the Chilean soldiers, as a last little act of defiance.

  I did my best not to look nervous. While the soldiers patted my mother down and rifled through her luggage, I held my breath, avoided eye contact, and stared at my feet, hoping they wouldn’t pay attention to me. They seemed bored and simply waved me through. I had no idea what they would have done if they had caught me, maybe just confiscate the material, but I was glad to not find out.

  When we made it across the border into Argentina, my mother smiled approvingly at her little accomplice. “Well done, Peter!”

  Once we arrived in Buenos Aires, more than a 1,500-kilometer drive from Santiago, my mother called Grandpa Rich collect to tell him we were safe. No one had heard from us since the coup. Newton was such a small place that the call made the local paper. “Newtonian’s daughter safe” ran the headline in the Newton Kansan the next day. After Grandpa Rich had been assured we were safely out of Chile, I sat down to write a note to my own father and gave it to my mother to mail:

  Dear Daddy,

  I’m very fyne.

  I wount to stay in soyth America with mammy.

  We will be in Buenos Aires for a little while.

  Bye daddy,

  Peter

  As it turned out, immediately after the coup, my father had been trying to track me down and bring me to Michigan. He had sent me a one-way airplane ticket to the American embassy in Santiago, but the embassy could not locate us. My father had also called his congressman in Washington, William Broomfield, to see if he could help find me in Ch
ile and get me out. In his October 24 response letter to my father, Broomfield wrote, “The State Department has informed me that your son, Peter, is safe with his mother in Buenos Aires, Argentina.” I’m sure my father was relieved to hear I’d gotten out of Chile, but I imagine he didn’t think I was actually “safe” with my mother.

  * * *

  Buenos Aires, spread out on the southern shore of the Río de la Plata, looked like a sparkling, sophisticated first-world city—it made us feel like we had actually left South America, or at least the South America we had known so far. At the time, Argentina was more stable than Chile, though the political situation was still tumultuous. Juan Perón had just returned from exile in Spain—my first memory of Buenos Aires was seeing posters of him plastered on walls all over the city—and was about to start his third term as president.

  Although we didn’t plan to stay long in Argentina—my mother didn’t think it had enough revolutionary potential—we ended up sharing an old downtown apartment with an ever-changing mix of Chilean exiles. The only thing we had in common was that we had all hurriedly left Chile and had no intention of staying in Argentina.

  It was never clear to me who exactly was or wasn’t living in the apartment. On average, there were maybe seven or eight of us, mostly single men or couples in their twenties or thirties. Someone always ended up crashing in the living room. One day, a young Chilean couple moved in with their infant; my mother and I woke up the next morning to diapers drying in our window. A woman named Carmen, whom we had met on the bus ride to Buenos Aires, had a broken leg in a long plaster cast. She was almost always around, sprawled out in the living room, puffing cigarettes and killing time. She and her lover, Luis, made handicrafts to sell in the park on weekends. Sometimes I would tag along to serve as an interpreter for North American tourists. When Luis got a job on a boat to Australia he made me a small leather pouch before he left. Gaston, a welder from Santiago, had the clearest plans for the next stage of his life: he was waiting for a passport to go to Mexico, where he hoped to meet up with Heather, his American girlfriend with whom he had been living in Chile before the coup, and then move to Los Angeles together. In the meantime, he spent his days borrowing my mother’s little typewriter to write letters to Heather in Mexico City and making a daily batch of crepes for everyone in the house.

  The kitchen and bathroom were always a mess, which no one bothered to clean because the mess would immediately return. Almost as soon as someone brought any food into the kitchen it would disappear. My mother bought three cartons of milk one night, and by morning one of them was left burned on the stove and the other two had vanished. No one did much cooking beyond Gaston’s steady supply of crepes. Without regular jobs, it wasn’t clear where anyone was getting money for anything, but one thing that everyone seemed to have enough money for was cigarettes. My mother and I were the only ones who didn’t smoke.

  My favorite housemate was Freddie, a musician with long dark hair who used to play with a Chilean musical group called Los Jaivas. Freddie slept on and off at all hours of the day, and sang and played his flute or guitar between naps at all hours of the night. He had little money and didn’t help out much around the apartment, but no one seemed to mind. His contribution was to entertain the rest of us. Late one night, Freddie coaxed me into singing spontaneously about Chile, switched on his tape recorder, and then played along, going back and forth between his flute and guitar. I waxed poetic about Allende, the tragic end of his revolution, the beauty of the Chilean countryside, and all the animals I had taken care of on the farm. We stayed up late into the night. My mother was so proud of that tape that she sent a copy to Grandpa Rich in Kansas, and another copy to Joel and Ronald in California. A Bay Area public radio station, KPFA, would end up playing it as part of a story they produced about Chile and the coup. I tearfully begged my mother not to mail it, telling her that “Ronald will think I’m showing off, will make fun of me, and then everybody will hate it.” My mother mailed it anyway.

  Besides us, the only other non-Chilean in the apartment was my mother’s lover Jean-Pierre, a lanky Frenchman with thick, wavy black hair and a bushy beard. My mother first met Jean-Pierre in Chile during one of our weekend stints with the volunteer work brigades in the countryside. Jean-Pierre returned to Paris shortly after that, but he and my mother kept writing long love letters to each other, and he came to join us in Buenos Aires a month or so after we got there.

  With my mother and Jean-Pierre

  Jean-Pierre had discovered he was bisexual while back in Paris, and told my mother about it the first night after he arrived in Buenos Aires. Before Jean-Pierre came, my mother and I had been sharing a single bed on the floor, but I ceded my spot on the mattress, and moved a sleeping bag to the other side of the small room. As I was trying to fall asleep that first night, I overheard Jean-Pierre and my mother talking in hushed voices.

  “I have to tell you something, Carol. I slept with Madeleine in Paris.”

  “Oh. Who’s Madeleine?” My mother didn’t seem all that disturbed by this news.

  “She’s a friend, a good friend.” Jean-Pierre paused for a few seconds. “And then I slept with Jean-Jacques.”

  “Huh? Jean-Jacques? That’s a man?”

  “Yes. He’s another good friend.”

  Silence.

  My mother and Jean-Pierre hanging out with some of our Buenos Aires housemates

  Jean-Pierre continued. “And then Jean-Jacques, Madeleine, and I all slept together.”

  Silence.

  “And now Jean-Jacques and Madeleine are sleeping together.”

  My mother sighed. “Well, I guess everyone is happy, then. You’re here with me. They’re together in Paris.”

  “Exactly!” Jean-Pierre’s relief was palpable. “So you’re okay with me being bisexual?”

  “Sure.” My mother laughed. “Well, just as long as you like women as much as men.”

  But my mother wasn’t as carefree about the confession as she’d sounded that night. As she noted in her diary, “I know that his capacity to live this way is part of what I like in him, part of what makes it possible for us to relate together so well. Yet it is clear that I am insecure enough at this point in my life to want all of him to myself.” Beneath my mother’s stated ideological opposition to monogamy, her instincts were more conservative than she let on.

  Over breakfast the next morning I casually asked my mother, “What’s a bisexual?”

  My mother put her coffee cup down and looked at me intently. “Well, it’s when a woman is attracted to both women and men, or when a man is attracted to both men and women. There’s nothing wrong with that, it liberates people from the confines of traditionally defined sex roles.”

  “Like Jean-Pierre?”

  She sighed. “Yes, Peter, it seems so.”

  “So, are you bisexual?”

  “No, unfortunately not.” My mother chuckled.

  “And my father?”

  “Oh, definitely not. But it would probably be good for him if he was.” And then she added, with a wink, “Now, Peter, you’re going to need to catch up on your sleep tonight.”

  * * *

  Meanwhile, safely out of Chile, we were finally able to get back in contact with Joel and Ronald in Berkeley. Sounding disappointed that we had left Chile after the coup, Joel wrote to my mother, “Did you ever think about resisting, fighting? I guess it would be pretty hard for Peter to fight a guerrilla war.” He also reported that he was as energized as ever about liberating kids: “Sunday’s Young People’s Liberation meeting was beautiful. We’re united as communists and revolutionaries and young people and everybody feels really good about everyone else and the group. Revolutionary feeling is vibrating the marrow of my bones again.” Joel enthusiastically predicted, “The revolution is building, soon it seems like an earthquake is due—really—the apoliticalness that started to set in 2 years ago has been blown away by all the heavy political things that are happening now. Watergate, gasoline rationing
, Chile coup, Mideast war, oil company lies, Nixon finances, dirty deals . . . I swear the country is rising and fascism-modernity is falling.”

  Ronald also sent a couple of short letters—one of them mailed on my mother’s birthday without mentioning her birthday—in which he proudly confessed that he had used fake documents to get a year of high school credit for the time he’d been traveling around South America. Ronald’s follow-up letter a month or so later reported that he had been kicked out of high school for making fun of his biology teacher by writing a sarcastic make-believe love note to her that was copied and passed around to the students in the class. As he explained it, “I think it must have really humiliated her (she’s the power-tripper teacher type).” Perhaps feeling like a protective older brother, Joel sent the principal an angry letter protesting Ronald’s expulsion, accusing the principal of running the school in a very “ageist” and “anti-student” way, and warning that “kids liberation is coming.” After he was kicked out of school, Ronald wrote us that he had lined up several part-time jobs, one cleaning buses and the other working at Steve’s Sandwich Cart: “The afternoon work is pretty bad but being stoned helps.” My teenage brothers were clearly managing their Berkeley lives in my mother’s absence, each in their own way.

  I didn’t hear from my father—he had no way of contacting me—but I heard about him through Joel’s letters to my mother. Joel complained that “Carl sent a really nasty letter, about how he didn’t want Peter to follow in my footsteps (unsaid: you’re fucking up).” Our father had been pestering him to see his report card, which Joel found offensive: “I wrote Carl an angry letter when he told me to send my report card—I think that’s amazingly ageist using school evaluations of my progress.” Joel complained, “Carl just don’t understand where my life is at. I hope he sends money. I have $90 now, and my expenses here are $110 a month. I just realized how poor I am—no shoes! I never wear shoes, but now I’ve been suspended from school for not wearing them and I have no money to buy them.”