La Vida Doble (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

by Fontaine, Arturo

  For the brothers and sisters of Red Ax, Allende’s “legal path” had only been the opening act. You said you wanted historical facts, here’s one, the kind people don’t like to hear anymore: Fidel, Ho Chi Minh, they were also ambivalent in the beginning. Shortly after the military coup, Canelo left Chile and headed for Cuba. One of his teachers was the legendary Benigno, who fought in Bolivia until the end at Quebrada del Yuro, where they captured Che. Benigno escaped into Chile, wounded, with a fever of 104 degrees. The bullet had entered his shoulder and lodged near his spinal column; they extracted it in Santiago.

  Later, Canelo would fight as one more Cuban soldier under the orders of General Ochoa in Ogaden, Africa. His unit, made up of Ethiopians and Cubans, crossed undetected through the mountains and took up a position behind the Somali troops who were defending the Mardas Pass, in order to attack them in a cunning pincer movement. Jijiga fell within two days, and all the other towns fell quickly one after another like dominos. In a month, Siad Barr, who was receiving support from the Yankees—this was, don’t forget, the middle of the Cold War—ordered his troops to retreat to Somalia. Ethiopia won. The eighteen thousand Cuban soldiers with their six hundred Soviet tanks turned out to be decisive in the war. And Canelo was there. Later he joined the FMLN. He fought for three years in the guerrilla war in El Salvador.

  I’m telling you about ancient, epic times, times of war aristocracies that live for death and honor. Nothing that would make any sense to you today, right? Che Guevara was an “international partisan,” a man with a Bolivarian vocation, a knight errant. The stuff of legend. Everywhere you looked in Latin America back then there was another fabulous Amadís of Gaul, a Palmerín, a Tirant lo Blanc or Florismarte, who all wandered the earth in search of adventure with their swords at the ready, to set right every wrong, to succor the needy and destitute, redress iniquity, and amend injustice. But, of course, this time there were also ladies errant, and they did not lag behind the knights in courage or derring-do. We all wanted to recover that happy age to which the ancients gave the name of golden, because they that lived in it knew not the two words “mine” and “thine”! In that blessed age all things were common . . . It wasn’t only happening in Latin America, either. Here in Europe, for example, you had the Brigate Rosse and the Rote Armee Fraktion, or Baader-Meinhof Komplex. Back then we lived confidently, auguring and weaving the future. And all the while at our backs, history, tight-fisted, dirty, vulgar history, was preparing to wash right over us like the giant wave of a tsunami.

  He had short, light-colored hair, small, alert eyes, lips that were too thin. He wore a tie and a light gray suit. No long, sloppy hair or beard; no pipe or Cuban cigar, no poncho or leather jacket. Nothing that would suggest the combatant who had fought so bravely in the Ogaden desert or on Guazapa hill in El Salvador, where he slept in a dugout. He could have been a lawyer or an insurance agent. He told us about our commander, about his story.

  Joel Ulloa was a simple teacher of history and geography at a high school in Valdivia. At that time Che was moving deeper into the jungle in the mountains along the Ñancahuazú River in Bolivia. Joel Ulloa abandoned his routine of blackboards and test correcting. He was disgusted, he said, by the hypocrisy of Chile’s staid, bourgeois democracy. To make the Andes into the Sierra Maestra of the Americas: that was the goal. Canelo showed us a photo: glasses and black hair combed away from his face. Shaved beard, Asiatic eyes, ample nose and mouth. His mission was to lift up the Mapuche people and take back their land. Canelo told us how the Mapuches, who were used to revolutionaries with long hair and a shaggy, bohemian look, were impressed by this schoolteacher who showed such great practical sense when it came to organizing a battle, and later, too, with the work in the fields they occupied by force. They said he had never known lincanquén, fear.

  And his triumphs began. At first, there were bank robberies to gather funds. This taciturn people subjected to the huinca, the white man, turned overnight into ferocious aucayes, into rebels. Commander Joel and his Mapuche peasants managed in a couple of years to gain control of almost all the forest ranches and livestock farms in that valley. We must plunder the plunderers. The ministers of that shoddy democracy, as he called it, vacillated between negotiation, turning a deaf ear, and reprimanding them. There were beatings and shootings and some injured Mapuches and police. Sometime later, during Salvador Allende’s presidency, the organization grew stronger and more professional. “The criticisms came from the conventional left then, from inside the house of government, from Allende himself, who looked at us sympathetically but did not agree with our methods.”

  “They called us ‘ultras,”’ said Canelo, “they called us extremists, they called us ‘pistol heads”’ . . . Commander Joel’s answer was: armed conflict is inevitable. His contact in Santiago was Bone. And that was the first time I heard his name, Bone, a nickname he’d been given by the Cubans, I found out later. Sometimes, in the Mapuche nguillatune celebrations, frenetic natives swollen with corn chicha liquor and galvanized by the mournful sound of the trutruca horn, the threatening rhythm of the cultrún drum, devoured their bosses’ Hereford bulls. These things happen in a revolution. Commander Joel’s fame grew quickly.

  And then, one September day in the year of the Devil, at daybreak, the military came for him. It was never learned what went wrong with their defense, because the soldiers should have been fired down on at the entrance to the canyon in Panguicui, which means “Lion’s Bridge,” and which was closed off by a barricade of enormous, centuries-old coihue tree trunks. There were a lot of those military bastards. Commander Joel hid out in the old storehouses on the Pucatrihue ranch. There was a shootout among the piles of sawn planks, and some twenty peasants died. When he realized he was lost, Joel jumped out a window and threw himself into the Pillanleufú River. The military gave him up for dead. No one knows how he managed to float down in the Pillanleufú’s current, escape through the mountains, reach Santiago, find Bone, and reorganize the armed resistance.

  “Ours is a risky bet,” Canelo explained to us, with his particular blend of confidence and serenity that dispelled all doubt and fear. “Allende’s government didn’t have a majority in Parliament to approve the laws that structured his program. Simple arithmetic. A revolution on paper wasn’t possible. Unless,” he said, “unless it was just an initial phase. That’s what his adversaries quickly figured out, with that ruthless realism they have on the right. ‘It would be extremely stupid and absurdly utopian,’ as Vladimir Ilyich Lenin said, ‘to suppose the transition from capitalism to socialism is possible without coercion and without dictatorship.’ A Franciscan illusion is dead,” he said. “Legal revolution—which President Allende put an end to with his heroic death—leaves us in the vanguard.”

  “A revolution,” Canelo went on to say, “is paid for with gallons and gallons of young blood. Everything else was and will always be mere deception, cajolery. That’s why we asked for weapons, but when the day came that we needed them, what we had in troops, infrastructure, weapons, and ammunition was clearly insufficient. And what happened, happened, and they got us how they got us . . . That was the end of unarmed prophets. The cauldron of the class struggle is turning red hot. We can’t wait for the revolution. We have to provoke it. Víctor Jara: Now is the time / for what tomorrow can be . . . Our armed missions are symbols. Our writing of fire will incite the common masses to rise up. Then we will be able to dream of a society like none that has ever existed before, a society of equals that will allow us to leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom. This is the vision of the brotherhood of Red Ax. When the people see that we’re defying the established order, detonating bombs here and there—and the police look for us but can’t find us—they will join us. Pyotr Tkachev, one of the greatest of the Russian revolutionaries, said: We cannot allow ourselves any delay. It is now, or perhaps very soon, or never.”

  I believed him. He brought us the fierce truth of war and broke through the sweet lie of pea
ce and of law. He didn’t give us time to reflect or reason. It was a forceful jolt of hope in its purest state. My destiny was to seek vengeance. The silence of the dead hummed in my ears. Canelo said our armed actions would set off a repressive overreaction and then the people’s angry rebellion. Rafa and I told him yes, we were ready to start as soon as he gave the word.

  Two weeks later I went to my first camp in the mountains of Nahuelbuta. Our story or alibi: hikers. We studied the Mini-Manual of the Urban Guerrilla, by the Brazilian Carlos Marighella: “The urban guerrilla’s reason for existence, the basic condition in which he acts and survives, is to shoot.” And: “To prevent his own extinction, the urban guerrilla has to shoot first, and he cannot err in his shot.” But we didn’t have target practice, not yet. I was left with the desire. There were long walks in the hills, self-defense practice, basic notions of surveillance and countersurveillance. The indoctrination sessions were long. Our forces, the instructor repeated, would always be inferior in number and weapons compared to the enemy’s might, but our advantages were surprise and the moral superiority of our fight. At nightfall, we stood and listened to a cassette recording of Commander Joel’s voice. It was a greeting of no more than four minutes. It was the first of many more that we would hear in the future, sunk into reverential silence. One of those rituals that demonstrates inclusion in a community. His voice was slow, solid, well-pitched, midrange, with a rural southern accent. None of that “is he or isn’t he Caribbean” that was common with our leaders. Above all, it was a voice I felt was trustworthy.

  Then a couple guitars appeared and there were songs around the bonfire. The most important thing to forge ties: the song and the fire woven into coiled tongues. War has always been like that, atavistic. ¿Qué culpa tiene el tomate? . . . What fault has the tomato / peaceful on its vine / and then along comes the son of a bitch / who puts it in a can / and sends it to Caracas! The song was from the Spanish civil war, but we knew the version by Quilapayún. Cuando querrá el Dios del cielo . . . When will God in heaven decide / it’s time for the omelet to flip / the omelet to flip / and the poor will eat bread / and the rich will eat shit, shit. My eyes filled with tears. We were singing again. The time of Advent had returned.

  And that’s where I met the Gringo, a tall, very thin guy with long, blond hair and a moustache. He had a pleasant tenor voice. Levántate. Stand up / and look at your hands, / reach out to your brother / so you can grow / . . . blow like the wind / on the flower in the valley / cleanse like fire / the barrel of my gun. A German from Puerto Varas, he told me. We talked for a while. I don’t remember what about. We laughed. I don’t remember what about. The last night, he was on the other side of the bonfire and his eyes held mine with a gentle insistence. I was expecting something to happen, but in the morning he was gone. I was sorry.

  That was my rite of initiation, and how I began the difficult process of self-elaboration that is necessary in order to embrace a moral asceticism. And understand that in those dark years, belonging to that family, that secret and forbidden family that I had chosen, was to be born again, and to be prepared for the sacrifice, anytime, anywhere.

  1. Members of the National Liberation Army (ELN in Spanish) formed by Che Guevera in Bolivia.

  2. Splinter group of the Socialist Party of Chile that tended toward armed struggle.

  TWELVE

  Someone had opened my curtains, and in among the apricot flowers, I could see the first green buds that were opening to the sun. I closed the curtains and waited in the dark. I called my father at his office. He answered right away. I told him I was calling to apologize and that I hadn’t meant to act the way I had. He choked up, searching for a way to thank me for my gesture, he said, for the generosity of my call, he said, the incommensurable—I remember that word, so unusual for him—happiness of that call . . . Then I told him: “If something happens to me, if I do something selfish, it’s not your fault, Dad. Understand? I’m in bad shape. This anguish is eating me up. There’s nothing you can do, understand? I wanted you to be prepared.” And I hung up.

  My first outing was to go to the metro station Universidad de Chile. Before I left the house I wrote on a greeting card the same thing I had told my father. Only I added: “Mom, I’m sorry, but you’ll have to explain it to Anita. Hopefully someday she’ll be able to forgive me.”

  I had to go out to a public phone to make two more calls that were in order. I knew my brothers must have had someone following me to find out if I had a tail, but I never saw who was watching me. Finally, the rendezvous: El Refugio restaurant, on Gran Avenida about a block south of Carlos Valdovinos. I was to wait, reading the newspaper Las Últimas Noticias with the front page facing the door until I was approached. Someone would say to me, “Hi, there, I’ve got a terrible hangover,” and I would answer, “You should have a coffee with milk.” When that person arrived, I was startled. It wasn’t easy for me to keep calm. I didn’t know the young woman, and I was very tense. But everything went according to plan. She ordered a coffee and I ordered another and we drank them quickly. She commented on an interview of a television celebrity that was in the paper. Nothing else. We went out to take a bus that left us on Alameda. We ducked down into the metro and reemerged at the station Unión Latinoamericana, where an old woman appeared out of nowhere—I had the vague feeling I had seen her face before—and the young woman disappeared. The old woman and I climbed the stairs at her slow pace, and outside we took a taxi that dropped us off on Calle Puente, which we followed until we reached the Central Market. The old woman took a couple of turns around it, bought some vegetables, and left me at a fish stall. The next instant there was the Spartan, no less, the Spartan in person, and we went into a restaurant.

  It was hard to control my emotions when I saw him, and I was glad I was wearing sunglasses. How could he not have been captured? At that moment I felt I stood wholeheartedly with my brothers and sisters in the struggle, I was resolved to never fall into temptation again, resolved to give my life. The Spartan seemed shorter and wider than I remembered. He was wearing an ordinary jacket of blue cloth, a white shirt and no tie, and gray pants with pockets at the knees. Common, everyday clothes. The Spartan blended in. An average Chilean. He could be a vendor in the market, or a cabdriver. That was his cover, in fact: taxi driver. I shouldn’t have known that, but as you see, I did. We sat down and ordered two bowls of a mouthwatering conger soup. We drank a Semillon wine from San Pedro. He was, as I’ve said, a truly respected combatant. His military training had begun in Cuba, under Camilo Cienfuegos. Later, already an officer, he was sent to Bulgaria as an instructor in courses of sabotage and intelligence at the Military Academy G. S. Rakovski. At the end of the seventies he was sent as an officer to fight with the nicas. He entered Costa Rica illegally and then crossed over to Nicaragua to join the Sandinistas of the Southern Front, commanded by Edén Pastora. The National Guard was concentrated there, the most elite of Somoza’s army. “I lived through that battle with the artillery stuck in the mud, and grenades that would sometimes explode from the humidity,” he told us. “I lived through it as a practice run for what would someday happen in the south of Chile, in the Araucanía region.” That’s where he learned that “a dictator is only overthrown with bullets.” Many Chileans died in that war. The worst, he told us, was on the hillside of Palos Quemados, close to Lake Nicaragua with its freshwater sharks. But then came the happy march to Managua and the entrance into Somoza’s luxurious palace. The Spartan remembered drinking a Chilean wine there that the tyrant stored in his cellars.

  “Cómo que tú andas, Irene? How’re you doing?”

  I felt pride at hearing my combatant name. I looked at him and shrugged my shoulders, not knowing how to begin. It was so like him to mix in Cuban expressions and turns of phrase when he talked. He did it with a trace of humor, sometimes, and other times out of habit, without realizing.

  “I have an assignment,” he told me with no preliminaries, taking on his curt tone of voice. “To pass
on to you the Directorate’s congratulations. You didn’t give up any names during the required number of hours.”

  “I held out much longer than five hours,” I protested. “Women can be very brave . . .”

  He nodded silently and looked at his plate.

  “And you were inside for twenty-nine days. That’s a long time. You know what? It wasn’t easy for us, either. In cases like this we have to hope the combatant dies in the fight, and if they’re captured, that they’re killed as soon as possible. I caught myself many times hoping you were alive and that they would let you go.”

  I tried to meet his eyes, but he didn’t lift them from his plate.

  “Canelo!” I said and my voice broke. I took a sip of wine.

  He nodded again, in silence and without looking away from the plate.

  “Did your ID hold up?”

  “They never questioned the validity of my identity card.”

  “Strange. Unusual. Very unusual. Did you know your name was never mentioned in the press? The official communication didn’t mention any arrests, it only talked about three dead ‘extremists’ and two more who got away. How was your questioning with the military prosecutor?” And when he saw the surprise on my face: “You know, there should have been a military tribunal. They caught you red-handed, you had the money in your purse . . . All of that falls completely under the ‘Anti-Terrorist Law.’ But according to the official information, the money was found in a bag one of the ‘terrorists’ was carrying. No one ever formally questioned you?”