La Vida Doble (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

by Fontaine, Arturo

  That’s what the reports that reached us were like. I could tell you about some spectacular missions of unquestionable veracity; the execution of General Urzúa, the mayor of Santiago, for example, or of Colonel Vergara, head of the Military Intelligence School, and the failed guerrilla war in Neltume, all missions that MIR carried out. And, later, the tyrannicide attempted by the Patriotic Front on the road to Melocotón: it failed by a hair. And, already in the phony democracy that came later, they kidnapped the son of the owner of the newspaper El Mercurio (they had previously kidnapped Colonel Carreño and the Cruzat boy, son of another magnate); then there were the executions of “Wally,” the head asesino during the darkest years of the dictatorship, of General Leigh, one of the coup leaders—he lived, miraculously, but lost an eye—and of Senator Guzmán, the right-wing leader who was murdered coming out of the Catholic University. And there are more. Like when several combatants escaped from Chile’s highest security prison, dodging bullets as they were raised up in a basket hanging from a helicopter . . .

  It’s true: we took some hits, even some hard ones that were possibly devastating. The Spartan took it especially hard when Arturo Vilavella, head of MIR’s military apparatus, died in combat. The Spartan really admired him. Also, of course, when the Front’s arsenal was discovered hidden away in the caves at Carrizal Bajo.

  I want, I need to be precise: those seventy tons of weapons could have altered the course of history. You know? The famous general of Special Troops in Cuba, Patricio de la Guardia, personally negotiated their acquisition. They traveled from Vietnam to Cuba, from Cuba to Nicaragua and from Nicaragua to the north of Chile aboard the Cuban ship Río Najasa. I don’t want to bore you with numbers, but a writer like you would have no reason to know this and I, like I said, must be exact. They found, I remember it well, 3,383 M-16 rifles with ammunition, 2,393 TNT explosives, over three hundred LAW and RPG-7 missile launchers, two thousand hand grenades . . . A respectable arsenal for any revolutionary movement anywhere in the world.

  Later, the sinister Operation “Albania” wiped out several leaders of the Front, depriving it of their best and most experienced officers. Canelo would have been furious if he’d seen how, in the news reports, they depicted Juan Waldemar Henríquez and Wilson Henríquez as mere rebellious citizens killed by the dictatorship and not as combatants who fell defending the school of urban warfare on Calle Varas Mena. Those two fought back. It was thanks to them the other ten combatants escaped. You see what I mean? Heroes made into victims; instead of honor, there was regret and compassion; instead of lions, lambs . . . Tyrannicide and rebellion, which even some priests thought warranted based on ancient scholarly theories, lost their moral and political legitimacy. I’m being too literal, I’m being pedestrian. This doesn’t help you, it’s not part of the book you want to write, it’s just documentary context. Fine.

  But then there was armed resistance, and there wasn’t. The uprising never took hold. Light the fuse that would enable the poor of the earth to free themselves from fear and rise up—that was the idea. But when it actually happens, the soldiers start killing and nothing is accomplished. And beauty, where was it? Ah Beauty, do you come from the deep heavens or have you sprung from the abyss?

  If the ambush on the way to Melocotón had killed the tyrant . . . Listen, can you imagine how José Valenzuela Levy must have felt when he had the dictator in the crosshairs of his LAW rocket-launcher, for those tenths of a second when the idling Mercedes was a sure target? There were, I’ve been told, two previous failed attempts. But no one except José Valenzuela Levy had quite that experience. Having him right there, just a few yards away, in the sights of his antitank missile launcher. He was saved by the bulletproofing on the Mercedes-Benz, he was saved by the shouts of “Back! Back!” that the head of the escort repeated over the radio, and by the chauffer’s agility and quick reactions; he was saved by the LAW rocket that didn’t explode: Click. Click. Why didn’t it explode? It was the last chance. And it is what it is: there was no triumphant overthrow, only transition; the epic revolution never came, just a tired and pedestrian reform.

  Though maybe I’m being too harsh. Maybe we just didn’t get it. Years and years of pain and hate and terror had sown a longing for brotherhood and reconciliation and democracy and peace and agreement. Because, as the entire world knows, that was what they ended up prioritizing in my country: the search for a new civic accord. Even if it meant swallowing shit. We were excluded from that process, you see?

  Listen well: don’t be constrained by this historical anecdote I’m telling you, or by Chile’s narrow geography, either. You’re looking at me with intelligent eyes. You know I’m giving you more information, more political and social context than you need in order to understand the situation, right? I’m too long-winded, I’m obsessed with detail. Because ultimately, all of this is happening all the time. I don’t want to seem presumptuous. What would Clementina be saying if she were here with you? This is just raw material that you’ll have to shape into fiction. And, please . . . I’m talking to you from a moral place. Do you understand? I’m talking to you about the truth that lives in collective mythologies. When I read about the prisoners in Guantánamo, held for months and months without trial or due process, when I see the photographs on TV of the people they tortured in Abu Ghraib, in Iraq, I think I know what that’s about, I think I recognize patterns and procedures. Déjà vu. What they did to us in that miserable back alley called Chile, the Yankees had done before in Vietnam, and the military did in Brazil, in Uruguay. Later, it would be repeated in Argentina, in Peru. Now it’s the Iraqis’ turn . . . The mujahideen know it.

  Look, these days no one’s going to buy a pig in a poke. You have to tell your reader: you are reading a novel, these are pure lies. That’s what Clementina would demand. And you keep going from there and you do it in such a way, with such magic, that the reader gives himself over and goes along with you. And then, you destroy his innocence again. The texture gives way, it breaks like a torn sack, you’ve betrayed him. It was just one more ingenious lie built on top of the other one, you tell him. And the reader gets dizzy and nothing seems real or unreal and he’s a prisoner among your amazements and inventions, he has no way out, he can only go on cooperating in this other thing, the new texture of the new sack, the new mantle that masks the combatant . . . That’s what you are if you are a writer: a liar who tells the truth in order to lie once more. It’s the power, mon chéri, the thankless power that always shows itself in disguise. Or no?

  So, greed won. Exactly what we wanted to prevent with our complicated clockwork of sympathizers, militants, collaborators, and the hundreds of combatants who entered the country with meticulously falsified passports and their corresponding alibis, with their military training in Cuba, Bulgaria, Vietnam, Moscow, or East Germany, and our charges of explosives and coded messages on cigarette paper, and our AK-47s and our martyrs and our stipends paid with the dollars or pesos taken from banks and currency exchanges, like we were doing when they killed Canelo, Samuel, Kid Díaz, and they captured me. You walk upon the dead with scornful glances, Beauty, / Among your gems horror is not least fair.

  It wasn’t enough. The poor were too suspicious or cowardly or wise. A humanity of cowardly monkeys and wet dogs. They were too realistic, a frightening realism just like the one that grabbed hold of me the instant I should have crossed Calle Moneda and instead I threw myself to the ground and waited, in surrender, for my captor. That quick and irreversible decision imposed itself on me as the truth of my very being. It was a betrayal, but a sincere betrayal. I mean to say: my betrayal sprang from the truth. Now I think that, deep down, I didn’t want to go on living the life of a clandestine combatant, I didn’t want to go on living on the run, always on the verge of being caught; I had no hope because I’d lost my faith in the people, in their revolutionary heart. Although I denied it, of course. Notice that phrase, “the people,” I choke on it now. Brassens’s irony, as I looked at Giuseppe and focused on
his long, lively nose in Pauline’s apartment: Mourrons pour des idées, d’accord, mais de mort lent . . . I wanted to live. I wanted to go peacefully to the supermarket and the beauty parlor, to fix my hair and paint my nails, to buy new clothes and go to the movies. I wanted to spend more time with Anita. Of course, that’s what I say now.

  Hearts with a single purpose. That’s why I admired them, and for that same reason I would hate them later, and myself as well. That society of equals we believed in would never exist. The nation of before was dead. They killed it. You can murder a country, too. You only had to look at the workers. Before, happily crowded into trucks, fists raised on the way to the march, waving their red banners. Now, coming out of the mall, fists lowered, carrying shopping bags and frustration back home. What did they want? To recognize themselves when they looked in the store windows overflowing with objects they could never buy? That’s something in itself, a piece of the dream. Ours isn’t the only utopia. But there always is a utopia, you know?

  The master’s gaze is burned into the slave’s forehead. And the slave sees himself in that gaze, he begins to exist within it. How to break away from it, if it’s the very thing that creates him and sustains him? We hang over an abyss, and the thread that holds us and keeps us from falling is the gaze of our masters. But then, the wound that splits your face and gives it shape also gives you the right to the ax, understand? It gives you the right to turn your fire on them, understand? You wanted me to talk to you about politics, right? You wanted to understand how we thought back then, right?

  We paid dearly for our attempt. We paid with our lives. Or, as in my case, with a perversion of life. That day I threw myself to the ground instead of fleeing, I knew more than I would have been able to admit.

  I knew that divisions were growing among our people. The virus had entered. We didn’t know how to believe anymore. The very idea of our communion of equals was being diluted. What was it about now? The solution of the compromisers, who were gaining ground, was to shake hands with the party leaders of the repressive regime—trying all the while, of course, not to be spattered by the fresh blood—and to negotiate in their salons with tails between their legs. That’s what our newsletter said. They became objective allies of Washington money. The victory went to the bigwigs of the big business of “peaceful” negotiation, the scam that the press worldwide was to applaud with hands and feet, and that would allow the tyrant to die in his home, peacefully in his bed. Do they think that without us, without our attacks, bombings, our injuries, torture sessions, and deaths without coffins or funerals or graves, do they think there would have been any room for their filthy negotiation? Don’t those cowards realize that without our sticks of dynamite affixed under cover of night five or six yards up on the high-voltage towers to blow them up, cables snapping; without the sudden, tremendous, and terrifying darkness that covered Santiago, or half of Chile; don’t they realize that without us, there would never have been any massive protests? Don’t they remember that anonymous blackness that brought the people out into the streets and terrified the bourgeois, terrified the soldiers themselves, who couldn’t contain the barricades and the looting? It was then, only then, that the profiteering gentlemen decided they had to change horses, and they and their lackeys started looking for a “democratic exit.” There were overreaches, stampeding lumpen, you say? Of course! The revolution frees people’s instincts. Cruelty blossoms along with free love, song blooms along with the garbage in the streets, hate along with poetry. Revolution is chaos. It’s a torrent that, if it doesn’t swallow you, lifts you up.

  We called those nights of barricades aucaye nights, rebel nights. Because in that darkness that we created, equality existed for a few hours, and the city once again belonged to everyone. The bonfires transformed the impersonal, estranged city of Santiago into our quitrahue, our hearth, our home. From the dark depths of the race awoke the primordial fascination with fire, and we recognized each other’s faces and genotypes in the light of the flames; in the shrill whistles we could hear the fateful wail of the pifilca flutes made from the tibias of dead Spanish conquistadors, calling out for an ancestral, murderous war. That’s what people forget now. The military bastards didn’t dare stop us. On those nights, carnival and combat intermingled. The blackout created a situation of objective risk. And over our heads flew the rattling helicopters shredding the air with their sharp blades, shaking the windows, deafening us with the unbearable, dirty roar of their rotors; they filmed us with their infrared lenses, but didn’t dare to get out or to use their machine guns for fear of a massacre, for fear of the aucayes, fear of the rebels. Our instructions were not to look at the helicopters so we wouldn’t be photographed and identified. The same went for the press photographers’ cameras that multiplied on those blackout nights. We were careful. We disguised ourselves, we used hoods. Aucaye nights, those were really our nights. The lords of the commerce of concession have forgotten all that now.

  So then the attack from our cowardly and pragmatic branch came at us. Many of our own went over to their side, the majority. For them, we now represented the “maximalist temptation.” Our acts of “sabotage and recovery of funds legitimized the repression.” We only wanted to bear witness. We were prophets, we were nostalgic, we were not politicians with a future. And, of course, our armed approach was “unviable.” We’d heard it all before. Their knees didn’t bend out of fear, oh, no; it was because they were “realists.” As if it were human to renounce hope, as if reality were not precisely that which waits to be shaped by human beings. What they proposed meant: now there is no place for the beauty of the hero. But as it happens, history always leaves room for heroes. We know their dream; enough / to know they dreamed and are dead. Heroes are the ones who carve out that space. Allende’s death is proof. At the last second, he, alone, transformed a political and military defeat into a moral victory. He made himself into a hero when it seemed that there was no time or place left for it. Because he had to die before seeing the tyrant’s face.

  When Canelo fought back, covering my escape as he had been ordered to do, he went toward death instead of letting it catch him. And what if excess of love / bewildered them till they died? He fell with a Smith and Wesson .44 Magnum in hand. That revolver, shot from a few yards away, will lift a man off the ground. It has a tremendous stopping power. They got Canelo, but he was already an inert mass, not a living combatant. Angels of fire and ice. He was equal to our oath and to what was repeated in the monthly communications that each cell had to decode and read out loud. One who allows himself to be taken prisoner puts the entire apparatus at risk; one who lets himself be captured will face torture and will merely postpone his death, which will come as the enemy wishes, without dignity or historical significance; one who lets himself be captured breaks our vow and concedes a moral victory to the enemy. Conversely, one who dies in combat will claim a moral victory that can never be taken from him; his blood will be the fount of history.

  Did Canelo believe that? He fulfilled it, there’s no doubt about that. But hadn’t he been, for a long time, courting death as if it were the solution? Sometimes, when I looked at his face, I sensed that he wouldn’t last long; a dullness in his eyes, I don’t know.

  Then, as Canelo said we would, as he warned us sometimes in our meetings, we ended up with the odious outcome, the one we would get if we came up short, if our revolutionary violence wasn’t enough to incite the masses beyond the level of protest, nocturnal barricades, and vandalism. Canelo intuited that, and in fact, he mentioned it sadly to me just a few days before he was killed. In the end we were useless idiots, we were involuntary accessories of exploitation. The meanness of the petite bourgeoisie won. Their miserliness won, the hard and cold selfishness that petrifies the hearts of the rich and makes them feel themselves to be good. It’s unfair to judge us only by the outcome. We lost, no doubt about it, but we came so close to winning. You have to understand ex ante the ambiguity of the situation. There was a moment when history open
ed a door to us. The invisible, our dream, for a while was there, pulsating in the visible. Now is the time / for what tomorrow can be . . . It wasn’t an illusion. Though it seems like one now. We thought: we are what we haven’t yet become. The low drum of Quilapayún marked time for our invincible march . . . La luz, de un rojo amanecer, / The light of a red dawn / announces now the life to come. The omelet was about to flip . . . the rich would, finally, eat shit. But just like that, dawn turned into twilight. And when I think about it, the rage still rises up like foam within me. We paved the way for the treacherous and filthy pact of the hogs with their slaughterers. The Great Whore of capitalism won, we were fucked by the Great Slut. And I wonder: Did Canelo let himself be killed the same as I let myself be caught? And wasn’t it because of that?