I met Ambassador Harold Edelstam at an Amnesty International lawn party and fund-raiser in 1973. He had been the Swedish ambassador to Chile at the time of the coup in 1973. And I had heard this story about him.
One night, in the bloody weeks following the assassination of Allende, when the streets were filled with fear, lost hopes, and bodies, someone got word to Mr. Edelstam that the tanks of the junta were rolling toward the Mexican Embassy, threatening to fire on it if the people inside didn’t surrender and come out. Guns poked from the windows of the embassy, and a determined but futile resistance was about to be put up. Ultimatums were being issued from bullhorns on the tanks, and since this was a totally lawless coup, there was no doubt that the people in the embassy were in danger of their lives.
Holding the Swedish flag above his head, the ambassador walked with his staff past the tanks and into the Mexican Embassy, brought everyone outside and escorted them, under the protection of the flag, to the Swedish Embassy. And there they stayed until their passage back to Mexico was arranged.
“Do I have the story right?” I asked him.
“Yes, more or less,” he said in his singsong Scandinavian accent. The ambassador is tall and skinny and aristocratic. His hands are paper-clean.
He laughed, as if enjoying a good joke.
“It’s simple,” he said. “I’ve never been able to tolerate injustice.”
And I’ve never been able to forget that simple statement.
My 1974 concert in Venezuela got off to a ragged but adrenalated start when the governor opened the gates to the stadium early, perhaps to win popularity with the students, or perhaps because he didn’t want to pay for new doors—these were about to be demolished by the enthusiastic crowd. The promoter, a left wing, multiracial, extremely bright and tough young woman named Maria, was enraged because, naturally, she was losing money as a result of the governor’s whim.
The concert rules at the school stadium were: no one on the playing field, everyone in the bleachers. From previous similar experiences I knew that the rules were entirely unrealistic, and they appealed to me as little as they did to the largely student audience of six thousand.
The bleachers filled as a young Venezuelan folksinger opened the show to whoops and yells and foot stamping. Her songs were very political, like most of the audience. Her set was followed by a brief intermission. When I was introduced, I walked across the great expanse of field with a small huddle of people and climbed up onto the platform. With the very first note the audience began flowing out of the bleachers and onto the field, gathering momentum and running toward the tiny stage. The kids’ faces were animated and beautiful. We had a shouted conversation from stage to ground and back. At this rate we would be a family before two songs were up.
I had just launched into the second song when the electricity went dead. A chorus of boos went up and was followed by much confusion and bustling around the sound equipment. I squatted at the edge of the stage chatting with different individuals in the crowd in their grammar-book English and my ersatz Berlitz, rudimentary Spanish. No headway was being made with the electrical problem, nor did anyone seem very upset. The evening was progressing happily on Latin tempo.
Rumors began circulating that the president of the university had ordered the sound off until the kids returned to the bleachers. Manny elbowed his way through the crowd to the side of the platform. After a minute of saying “Huh?” and “S’cuse me?” he finally understood what I wanted and went to negotiate with the president for one minute of electricity. I went on conversing with the kids up front, rising occasionally to tap the mike. Word came back in a flurry of excitement that the president had agreed to the minute of electricity, but only for me to announce that everyone must return to their seats. I felt as though I were trapped in a junior high school pep rally with the dean saying we’d have to return to class unless all the seventh-graders went back to their assigned section in the auditorium. The electricity came on.
“I would like to thank the president of this university,” I blurted out in my broken Spanish, “for giving us back the electricity. As you see, the audience is well behaved and does not present a problem here on the field.” (“Thank you señor president for to give me electricity. The students do not a problem here next to me.”) “I would like to express my gratitude by dedicating a song to you, and if you like the song, you will let me know by leaving the sound on. Thank you very much, we are all grateful to you.” (“I want to say thank you by to dedicate you a song and if you this song like you will for us make electricity. Thank you of us to you.”)
Perhaps he felt I was so illiterate that I could do no harm. The sound stayed on, and a wonderful evening was had by all, the audience and myself enjoying a bizarre victory in the name of the people, and the president of the university ending up something of a hero for the night.
I dedicated much of the concert to the refugiados and prisioneros of the bloody regime in Chile, as it had been only a year since the coup, and many Chileans had fled to Venezuela for their lives. I didn’t yet know what a golden representative was seated in the bleachers next to the governor.
I had been invited to a private dinner after the concert at the home of a Venezuelan woman writer named Frezia Barria. There were only about ten people attending, including her children, and a man named Orlando Letelier.
I had heard about Orlando the way you inevitably hear about exceptional people, in stories told with love and a touch of awe. The former ambassador from Chile to the United States had been imprisoned during the coup and was a source of strength to everyone who knew him.
When he arrived and we were introduced, I was surprised to see that he had red hair. If Goya had been commissioned to paint a cheerful redhead with freckles, it would have been Orlando Letelier, for he had the slender height and demeanor of Latin aristocracy which Goya had depicted so frequently and so well. Orlando’s hand was still healing from being ripped on the fence as he and his fellow prisoners were herded at a run from one yard to another. He wanted to play the guitar and sing, though playing made his hand hurt, and he wanted to dance the cueca, a Chilean folk dance. He was with friends from years past, and he was happy, filled with stories and laughter and songs and jokes. I was cajoled onto my feet amidst laughing and clapping, and danced the cueca with him, not caring that I could only wave a handkerchief around in the air and imitate Orlando’s footsteps and grin like a happy fool at the joy and fun of it all.
The dancing slowed as energies were spent, and Orlando began to talk more seriously, and much more softly. The children went to bed, and the crickets chorused outside in the humid night. My Spanish being what it was, I contented myself with listening to the syllables, the rolling r’s, and the sibilant s’s, and thinking about the ferocious stupidity and evil of imprisoning a man like Orlando on the freezing islands of his own country. Miraculously, he had not died. He had fought the cold and hunger, the beatings, humiliations, the deprivations, and the terror with his plenitude of spirit, and with his disciplined mind. Just as miraculously, he was not murdered, and was here now, mending, smiling, and whispering stories. Every now and then he would almost weep, and his friends would wipe their eyes, and I would feel my heart bursting with tenderness for this man. Then, in a wave of silence, something in the room shifted, as though we’d all taken in the same breath of air at the same time, and all of us were suddenly and intensely aware of the ghastliness Orlando had so recently left behind. At that moment, as we held our breath in the stillness of early dawn, other murderous crimes were occurring in a long white scream, beyond our power to stop them.
Back home, I decided to try to write a book. I had not written in many years, and, uncertain of what I wanted to say, found myself returning over and over again to the theme of the long white scream.
One morning in 1976 as I alternately wrestled with words on my typewriter and gazed out the window, my secretary came unannounced down the path through the oleanders, her head thrust forward and her brow in a troubled frown. She was an extremely efficient, highly emotional woman with a kind heart, and everything in her posture told me she was bearing bad news. Sitting down in front of me, she spoke in shaky but controlled tones, and her eyes filled up in anticipation of my reaction to her words. The next thing I remember is sitting in the kitchen, staring at the coffee jittering in my mug, and listening to my own teeth chatter uncontrollably. I had just been east to sing at a benefit for Chilean prisoners, and had again spent time with Orlando, finding him as unique and refreshing and special as I had on the first meeting, when, as complete strangers, we’d made and sealed a friendship by dancing the cueca.
I flew to Washington, D.C., for Orlando’s funeral and sang in a park before the march, circulating through the gathering of stunned and profoundly hurt diplomats, academics, poets, bureaucrats, exiles, workers, students, and politicians. The march was stately and heartbreakingly sad. A deep voice called out over the bullhorn through the misty morning sunlight, “Compañero Orlando Letelier!” and the thousands of trudging mourners replied, “Presente!” The voice again: “Ahora!” (Now!); and the crowd, “Y siempre!” (and forever!). Those of us with flowers stepped out of line to lay them on the spot where Orlando had died. His car had been booby-trapped and exploded on Embassy Row, killing him and his young coworker, Ronni Moffitt. The assassin was a professional hit man from Chile’s secret police, D.I.N.A., who plea-bargained his way to star witness for the prosecution. Two officials from D.I.N.A. were indicted but never stood trial, and two Cuban exiles were convicted. The United States government’s position was dubious at best, since the CIA had helped finance the military coup and supported Allende’s overthrow, as well as the installation of Latin America’s most efficient dictator to date, General Augusto Pinochet.
The march ended at St. Matthew’s Cathedral. Before the service I helped seat people, battling obnoxious members of the Communist Party who tried to occupy the first and second rows of pews. I ushered them away firmly, as though it were my designated job, saying that the area was reserved for family. They hated me a little more than usual, and I returned their fury knowing they were trying to claim the spirit of this brilliant, dancing diplomat for themselves. But he was bigger than a political party; his spirit belonged with the poets.
I sang in the high mass. Looking out over the packed congregation I saw Orlando’s wife, Isabel, and his four handsome sons. Isabel’s doe eyes were swollen from weeping. I sang “Gracias a la Vida” and kept my eyes high above the crowd, because many people had begun to weep. I remember Ronni Moffitt’s young husband struggling to speak from the pulpit, eaten up with fury and sorrow, his tears and his words becoming one.
When I came home I thought about Isabel and her four sons and dreamed I couldn’t get out of the archbishop’s way as he moved from place to place during the funeral mass. I saw Orlando laid out in his coffin again, only this time his face was a skull and some shreds of flesh, drenched and glistening crimson with fresh blood. When I tried to kiss him my lips came away soaked and the skull turned slightly toward me, as though to ask for something, but could only moan in despair.
For a few weeks I tried to keep writing my book. Then I put it away and didn’t try to write again for ten years.
The first time I met Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan, winners of the 1977 Nobel Peace Prize, they said “Hellay, Jane!” and I thought, Oh Christ, they have me mixed up with Jane Fonda. But it was only the Belfast accent.
Two remembrances of my visit to Northern Ireland in 1976:
The frost was crystalized on the hedges along the roadside above the city. A mother of twins was telling Ira, his new wife, Molly, and me about the first spontaneous peace march they’d had in August 1976. The mothers came toward each other, she said, Catholics from one direction and Protestants from the other. They had no idea what would happen when they met. She’d been shoved up front, she said, because she had a big pram, with the twins in it. No one would want to harm the twins, they thought. Well, she said, they just kept on coming, mothers, kids, and prams, all in silence and fear and wonderment, past the big oilcan barriers that separated the two territories. It had never been done before. No one had ever crossed the barriers, and here were two thousand people tumbling toward each other on the Falls Road.
And then they met. They cheered, embraced, and wept, unable to believe the extraordinary thing they had just done. Then they went into the park to talk and talk, and invite each other to tea, and to try and make plans beyond that day. But none of them wanted to look beyond the day. Afraid the spell would break, they did not even want to leave the park.
There was a woman, they said, who’d gone mad and sat at her son’s grave and cried day and night, refusing to leave. Her son had gone to visit friends. They had heard the knock at the door, and called out that they were on their way. But the knocking became suddenly frantic. Then they heard a machine gun. When they got to the door and opened it, the boy fell forward into the hallway, dead, with the uneven design of a cross blown into his jacket, pouring blood from every little hole.
With the Irish peace people we marched with our frostbitten toes in the name of unity, peace, freedom, and an end to the ancient divisions that had so devastated Ireland. When we got into a car to go home to Belfast and turned the key in the ignition, there was a little bumping sound, and then nothing. The only other time I can remember being so frightened was on the pontoon bridge which led out of Hanoi. I was positive that the car was booby-trapped and we’d all be blown to hell, but my Irish companions hesitated for only a millisecond, and then picked up the conversation where it had left off. They had already told me they didn’t even bother to check under their cars anymore. If you’re going to go, you’re going to go, they said.
And I remember Mairead. The breath of God ran through her like a fair summer breeze. She was a smile. She was a prayer. She was endlessly brave, going into the streets and homes of “the enemy” unarmed and with cheerful countenance. No evil could envelop her or even touch her. I’m sure she is all those things still. She will hate to read this, because she is also self-effacing, like some other saints. God bless you, Mairead Corrigan. And God bless the brave women of Ireland who, for a brief but exceptional moment in time, waged mass nonviolent warfare in one of the most violent countries in the world.
One day before Andrei Sakharov and Elena Bonner had been exiled to Gorki, I telephoned them just to say hello and wish them well. I thought reaching them would be terribly complicated. It took three minutes.
“Your party is on the line in Moscow,” the operator said, as though I were talking to Los Angeles.
My God, I thought. How efficient. And then, I thought for the first time, what the hell am I going to say, and in what language?
“Hello?” I started out boldly.
“Da?” came the response from ten thousand miles away.
“Um . . . Do you speak English?”
“Nyet.”
“Parlez-vous Français?”
“Nyet.”
“Sprechen Sie Deutsch?”
“Oh.” I am an idiot, was all I could think. “Joan Baez, here. Umm. Amnesty International?”
“Da.„
“I think I’d better call you back,” I shouted, feeling utterly stupid, and hung up. I imagined a roomful of guests in the Moscow apartment scratching their heads and figuring it must have been the KGB up to some tricks. I called Ginetta.
“Boy, am I an ass,” I said. “I had him right there on the line!”
“Call eem back and sing eem a song!”
Of course. I called back, waited three minutes or less, got Mr. Sakharov on the line and yelled, “JOAN BAEZ. AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL. HELLO, ANDREI SAKHAROV. HELLO, ELENA BONNER!” and proceeded to sing five verses of “We Shall Overcome.” At the end of each verse I would hear from their end, “Da! Please, yes! Good, good, please, yes, my vife!” and I’d sing on as they passed the phone from person to person. At the end I shouted “GOODBYE! DA SVIDANYA!” They were all shouting at once. I hung up, and sat down on the bed and cried.
In the summer of 1978 I went to Russia and met the Sakharovs.
There was supposed to have been a big concert in Leningrad Square featuring Santana, the Beach Boys, and me. I had taken Russian lessons, learned a beautiful Russian song by a much loved poet named Bulat Okudjas, arranged for Gabe to be in camp, packed mountains of chewing gum, candy, cassettes, records, and everything I owned made of denim, and contacted Sakharov’s stepdaughter (Elena’s daughter, Tanya) in case I could arrange to visit him. The trip was announced in a big press conference, at which the Beach Boys displayed a surfboard and Carlos Santana talked about peace and love. I said that I was going with no preconceived notions of what the USSR was like, and made no comments on human rights.
The Russian government called off the concert two weeks before it was to have taken place. No explanation was given. I assumed that they figured out, belatedly, that there would have been a crowd as large as the one at Woodstock, everyone wearing blue jeans and dancing to rock and roll, and behaving like Western degenerates.
I was furious, and decided to apply for a tourist visa and pay Sakharov a visit.
That’s how I met him and Elena. I went with John Wasserman of the San Francisco Chronicle, and Grace Warnecke, a photographer and translator. We had prearranged a time, and simply walked into their apartment building, took the little elevator as planned, turned to the right when we got off, and knocked on a door that looked as if it had been kicked in and broken down a hundred times.
I know the Nobel Peace Prize winner and his wife as a grandmother and grandfather. In silence, and very movingly, they took the letters and tapes we had brought them from their kids, and devoured them slowly, page after page, side by side. I wanted to disappear and come back the next day, to let them indulge privately in the fresh contact with the people they must miss in a way unknown to most of us.
We were given dinner. Andrei said two things which I will never forget. One was just after I’d finished singing a song. “The KGB is listening, you know,” he said.
“Yes, I suppose so,” I answered.
“Oh well,” he said, “Why not? They are human too.”
The other was what he thought I ought to do when I got back to the States. I must encourage the buildup of our arsenal of weapons, nuclear and otherwise. It was the only way to deal with the Russians.
“Aren’t you the guy who won the Nobel Prize for PEACE?” I asked.
He laughed, but not very hard. I’ve always thought there should be one prize for peace, and another one for human rights.
And there should be a third for courage. Mr. and Mrs. Sakharov should have had the last two.