Part III

DEPARTURES

[Warren:] 'Home,' he mocked gently.

[Mary:] 'Yes, what else but home?
It all depends on what you mean by home ...'

[W:] 'Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
they have to take you in.'

[M:] 'I should have called it
Something you somehow haven't to deserve.'

—Robert Frost, "The Death of the Hired Hand"

THERE IS A carpenter in Chile, a man called Carlos, who can teach us something about fear.

I met him while filming Peter Raymont's documentary in 2006, when I spent a few hours in one of Santiago's poor neighborhoods, distributing books from my library to residents for Libros Libres, an unpretentious do-it-yourself organization created by Raquel Azócar, a woman with whom I'd been collaborating for years to "liberate" books into different communities. I had just finished reading one of my stories for children to some of the neighborhood rascals when I was approached by an old man. He'd heard that I'd worked with Salvador Allende and had something to tell me.

Carlos had been an enthusiastic supporter of Allende, basically because his government had created a program that had helped that carpenter to purchase his one and only house. After the military takeover, when soldiers raided his población, Carlos had been so terror-stricken that he'd hidden a picture of the martyred president behind a wall of his house, where it remained throughout the seventeen years of the dictatorship. He did not retrieve it, Carlos informed me, even when democracy returned to Chile and Pinochet had to relinquish his stranglehold over the government. Nor were a series of free elections enough to release that carpenter from his dread. It was only in 1998, when General Pinochet was arrested in London for crimes against humanity, that Carlos pried back the boards that concealed the portrait—and there it was, after twenty-five years, his Presidente lindo, his beautiful president, he said, just as he recalled the man. And when Pinochet was flown back to Chile after eighteen months of London house arrest, Carlos gathered his courage and kept the picture of Allende hanging defiantly on the wall. Never again, he said, was he going to conceal it.

It's an inspiring story, because Carlos was not a militant, a soldier of the revolution sacrificing himself for the common good. If that portrait from the past could emerge from its hideout and share Chile's air and mountains and grandchildren, it was because Carlos had refused to forget; he had not burned the picture while the security forces rampaged outside but had buried it furtively both inside his mind and behind a wall until it could be recovered.

An inspiring story, yes, but also sobering.

Memory, like courage, does not exist in a vacuum. If there had been no justice, if Pinochet had not been made to face judges and answer for his crimes during that year and a half in London, that portrait would have remained in hiding. For the memory to flow out into the open, the fear also had to flow out, there had to be a societal space where the portrait from the past could be safe. The surfacing of those proscribed images and thoughts had itself been the product of many other, more communal acts. Carlos was eventually able to bring together his private and his public memory because others risked everything so a commons of liberation might exist. The case of Carlos the carpenter is sobering, no matter how fervently admirable his loyalty, because the very isolation and secrecy of his hideaway also reveals how ultimately precarious any merely inner and covert rebellion can be, and what happens to a country like Chile when its citizens decide to let fear, even during a transition to democracy, rule their lives.

In Santiago, we employ a handyman whom I will call Rolando. And though he'd had dozens of conversations with Angélica while he painted, tinkered with the plumbing, and sanded some doors, it was only after Pinochet was indicted publicly in a London court in 1998, the day after prisoner Pinochet had been photographed in the dock, that Maestro Rolando had, for the first time since he began working for us, revealed to my wife the most traumatic experience of his life.

A few years after the coup, he said in a matter-of-fact voice, he'd been arrested and tortured by General Pinochet's police. Rolando had worked back then as a porter in a school, and his tormentors had wanted him to implicate his colleagues, to finger teachers who might be engaged in "terrorism." It had been a brief detention. Two, three days and then they let him go. As a result, he lost his job, suffered bodily pain for a few months, and psychological damage for who knows how long.

For almost twenty years, like Carlos the carpenter and millions of compatriots, Rolando had shut himself inside the closet of his secret emotions, had murmured the tale only to his own inner shadow. What had freed his voice, given him the courage to tell his story to someone like Angélica, was the certainty that Pinochet was not above the law. That's what had done it, the six English policemen who escorted the former dictator into a courtroom in London to face his accusers, the fact that Pinochet's lawyer had asked Magistrate Parkinson to grant his client permission to walk in the garden. There it was, the proof of the General's vulnerability and decline: if he wanted to walk in the garden, he had to ask permission!

"And you're no longer afraid?" Angélica asked Rolando.

"Only a fool would not be afraid."

I know what he meant. I'm not immune from that fear, I have tasted its bile and the far worse bitterness it leaves behind, how it prevails beyond the moment of violence, how hard it is to be rid of the serpents of apprehension once they have snaked their way into your mind.

On that trip to Chile in 2006, I visited the Salvador Allende Foundation, set up to commemorate our dead president's memory. In spite of being a member of the foundation's board, I had not yet inspected the recently acquired house where the archives and museum were located, and wasn't aware of that sprawling mansion's peculiar history. So I welcomed the invitation by Patty Espejo, an old classmate from university days who had gone on to become one of Allende's most trusted secretaries, to tour the residence with her.

"We didn't know it when we bought this house," Patty said as she guided me and our camera crew down to the building's basement, "but it belonged to the DINA—Pinochet's secret police had one of its headquarters here. Take a look at what they forgot to take with them. On purpose."

I had written extensively about the invasion of our private lives during the dictatorship, but even so was not ready for that underground cavern, those lower depths where Pinochet's Gestapo had spied on Chileans, leaving behind a warp of twisted wires splayed in a multitude of bright colors, which made them all the more perverse. The agents—nameless, unscathed, unidentified—had not dismantled that tangled snarl of wires, in order to flaunt a message of impunity, to sicken us with the warning that they had heard us talking to each other, had listened to our secrets, that the power they once had still endured.

I had been one of those captured inside those listening devices.

On my first trip back to Chile in 1983 I had jauntily agreed to write an op-ed for the New York Times, to be published on Sunday, September 11, the tenth anniversary of the coup. Howard Goldberg, my editor at the paper, had instructed me to phone New York and dictate my commentary days in advance so he could contribute editing suggestions.

I started my piece by stating how normal everything seemed, much too normal, that I had somehow expected the birds to sing differently under a dictator. While everyday life, the taste of the food and the way people laughed, remained unperturbed, my ten years away had made me acutely aware of the abysmal distance between rich and poor that had grown malignantly during the General's forced modernization. Nothing I had read about changes in Chile had prepared me for what I felt when, after passing through a virtually unaltered Santiago full of misery, I reached the barrio alto, the hillside neighborhood where the privileged classes traditionally reside. I found myself being guided, like a tourist, along unknown avenues filled with hundreds of glass towers and shopping malls, splendid gardens and efficient freeways. Only a few miles from that sleek and exclusive city-inside-a-city were the slums where millions of impoverished Chileans lived in squalor.

"It is as if Chile," I said into the telephone, "has been struck by a plague."

Since midnight I'd been feverishly scribbling this piece, determined to prove to myself, perhaps more than to others, that I would not let any adjustments or inhibitions worm into my writing just because I was back home. I'd try to be as impudent in perilous Santiago as I had been abroad, where no reprisals could reach me.

Sixteen-year-old Rodrigo wandered into the room and sat himself down, allowing a mixture of admiration and alarm to creep into his eyes, finally whispering, "Hey, man. That's strong stuff."

I threw a pillow at him and he dodged it, then sat there listening to the stronger stuff that was on its way, my accusations of censorship and torture and murder. As I spoke these words, I began to hear my voice through Rodrigo's ears, a reminder that I was spouting this indictment in Santiago, where a secret police agent was probably noting each phrase in a cellar not far from where I was sitting. But I calmed my beating heart in 1983 by telling myself that I was protected by the international press, that CBS had sent a team to film this first return of mine, that Pinochet could not be so stupid as to arrest me for reporting to the United States, for using my English to proclaim that our tyrant was losing the battle for the dreams of Chile. So I spoke my final words into that telephone: "It's good to be home," I said, "and to be able to declare that not only the birds wake me in the morning, so good to be able to tell the world that my country is alive."

That was it. Done. Byline and out.

Except that a few seconds after I finished, a voice with a staunch Brooklyn accent piped up on the other side of the line and the hemisphere, the man in charge of the recording device in that remote Manhattan office: "Would you mind repeating that?"

And Ariel: "Repeat what?"

"The op-ed. From the beginning, please. Doesn't happen often, you know, but the tape got all messed up."

I had to reprise those words one more time, certain that Pinochet's agents would arrive before I got the chance to send them once again to New York. It was egocentric to suppose that the secret police were that interested in me, ridiculous to think they could understand immediately what I was saying in English and decide then and there to arrest me. But my inner voice in Spanish, the language in which they would come for me, was full of apprehension. What if that sound I'm hearing is someone's hot breath, el aliento caliente de alguien? What if the call has already been interrupted and I am speaking to an empty receiver? How can I tell if anyone is still recording this at the Times, while in a Santiago office a faceless man is barking out orders and a car is being boarded by men on their way to get me?

After the voice on the other end of the phone informed me that the tape recorder had worked fine this time, I hung up and sat there, still full of panic, trying to make sense of the lesson I had received, trying to frame this incident as a homecoming, a way of beginning to establish the frontiers of what is permissible, discovering how repression can shape the dusk of our every word. A lesson in the difference between exile and clandestinity, and in the slight distance that, under a tyrant, separates what we say to ourselves in the secluded fortress of our minds and what we say on the hazardous streets.

I had my English to thank for pushing me beyond what was prudent, for giving me a false sense of security, and ultimately for connecting me to the trepidation so many Chileans had been living with during my absence. So this is what people risk when they insist on flaunting their criticism and rebellion in spite of their fear, alone with their conscience and their skills, their cunning and their luck, unsheltered by the New York Times or the CBS cameras. My English was bizarrely telling me that no matter how much I wrote or published in that language, I would never be entirely sheltered, my body would always be exposed. English could not wrench me from Chile or the underprivileged world as long as I continued to speak out. It was not in hiding but on that slippery, unreliable surface of reality that power needed to be disputed; it was in the gray light of the day-to-day that the country had to be wrested away from the authoritarian government, that was where the immense majority of the people lived and where the armies of the night had to be defeated, and if voices like mine had to be heard, in Chile as they had been abroad, I might as well get used to being in danger.

And in the next few years, I somehow found ways to control my unbridled paranoia, to convince myself that fear could be conquered.

Typical of this delusion that fear held no sway over me was an experience in Santiago the day after I arrived there at the end of 1985, supposedly to settle in once and for all. I couldn't know that this intention would be thwarted six months later by the burning of Rodrigo Rojas, that I would have to wait until 1990 to again attempt a "definite" return. At any rate, back in 1985, maybe to prove I would not submit to the dictates of terror, I'd decided to join a group of women who were protesting in the Plaza de Armas. My friend Angela Bachelet—the mother of Michelle, the future president of Chile—had told me not to show up. "They've been very violent with men recently, whereas we ... well, we always hope they'll treat us with more deference." But I didn't listen to her and was encouraged by how peaceful that circle of women looked, holding their hands up in the air. And nearby was none other than my own Rodrigo, living in Chile before starting his freshman year at Berkeley. There he was, wielding a camera for Teleanálisis, a semi-clandestine newsreel project.

I hurried to find my place in the circle and was greeted by grumbles—hadn't I been informed that this was a women-only event? I grabbed two uplifted hands, one on either side of me, muttering that I was an honorary woman, I was a feminist, had a female soul, who knows what other justifications. My psychiatrist friend Fanny Pollarolo was there, and Moy de Tohá, the widow of Allende's vice president, murdered by the military, and also among the group were a few relatives of the Desaparecidos, and they must have realized it made no sense to waste time trying to eject me when soon enough the carabineros would be ministering to the lot of us.

In effect, we had barely launched into the "Canción de la Alegría" when Rodrigo, who'd been panning over each protester with his camera, urgently warned me, Ariel, vienen los pacos. Through his lens he saw a mob of policemen in riot gear trotting in our direction. I hesitated—how could I run away, abandon these ladies? And then a woman to my left shouted, Andate, huevón, que te van a sacar la cresta. Get out of here, you idiot, they're going to beat the shit out of you. I released my hand from her grip and left the members of the fair sex to fend for themselves. From behind the safety of a tree in the plaza, I watched my compañeras being dragged off to police vans, some by the hair, some courteously escorted, some beaten, others allowed to go free—everything, as always, capricious and unpredictable.

We recounted the scene to Angélica a few hours later. Rodrigo had scarcely escaped himself, kept filming as he darted in and out of the melee. "But you, man, if they'd grabbed you, the one male in that group of women..." I responded by laughing it off, assuring him that I could always, with a bit of luck, land on my feet. I was glad that by lapsing into the absurd, dictatorial Chile had once again relieved the stress.

Supported by this false sense of invulnerability, I took ever-increasing risks during that long stay in Chile in 1986, as if I had vanquished the knot in my stomach when the voice in New York had told me that I would have to repeat my accusations against Pinochet all over again.

And then, on April 28, 1986, Halley's comet appeared over the Southern skies.

Approaching in all its magnificence, as close to Earth as it had been since 1910. A once-in-a-lifetime chance to see the cosmic visitor, and a once-in-a-dictatorship's lifetime to ask it to take Pinochet away and dispose of him in el espacio sideral, cast him into empty space, llévatelo, and never bring him back, adiós General, no vuelvas nunca más, see you seventy-six years from now. That gigantic burning body had already snatched Duvalier from Haiti and Marcos from the Philippines that very year, why not Chile next? Wasn't it the Year of the Tiger, when powerful men will fall?

I was one of some three hundred manifestantes in Plaza Italia, enjoying the joke while a phalanx of policemen kept at a discreet distance, confused as to how to react to something as apparently innocuous as a horde of citizens with fake telescopes waving farewell to the fiery nucleus and its dusty curved tail lighting up the Santiago night.

If only Rodrigo had been there by my side, but he was already enjoying his first year of college, so I had no one to tell me what to do, where to go, when two enormous trucks appeared, as if out of nowhere, and dozens of soldiers jumped out. They were led by a lieutenant, hawk-nosed, muscular, lean, his face entirely covered in black grease—one of the carapintadas, a fiend of the night. My group of protesters held their ground. "Qué hacen acá, mierdas? What are you doing here, shitheads?" the lieutenant shouted. "Andando, andando, hijos de puta, conchasdesumadre," a roar that was followed by soldiers advancing on us with a storm of kicks and rifle butts as we were herded up the street. "Al trote, al trote, los hijos de puta."

I stumbled, sprawled, could feel a pain in my knee, my hand went to it and there was a gash in my pants. As I scrambled to get up, another kick left me reeling and then another blow to my torso but I kept hobbling up Avenida Providencia, away from Plaza Italia and the photographers and bystanders. I couldn't be sure if we were going to be arrested or shot or—but the glint-eyed lieutenant wanted to return with his blackened face and his pack to minister to other subversives. Was I safe? Outrun by my fellow protesters, I panted there, dazed and bleeding, until I saw that a lone soldier had been left behind.

Twenty years old, perhaps younger, obviously a recent recruit. He pointed his submachine gun at me, his finger trembling on the trigger. "No se acerque," he barked. "Hands up, stay back, five meters, five meters away. A cinco metros," he said. As I raised my hands, I understood that this young man couldn't really see me, my inept hands, my extreme defenselessness. Incredibly, he was terrified of me.

I saved my life by doing the one thing I'd been perfecting throughout exile: communicating with those who are different from me. Gently, as if this were the most normal exchange in the world, I asked him to look, I didn't have even a candy bar in my hands, I used the name of a sweet I had eaten as a child, ni un Ambrosoli, I said, a candy he must have chewed in his own childhood, as if that might remind him of his innocence and mine, and then I mentioned my two sons, one a bit older than he was, another younger—anything to establish a relationship, to come nearer than those five meters.

"Shut up," he said.

We stayed like that for a few more seconds, and I couldn't help it, my mind started dissecting, classifying, interpreting. Though I was five meters away from death I couldn't stop intellectualizing, during those seconds I allowed myself to become acutely cognizant of the divide between us: he was poor and uneducated and I was well-to-do and deft with Western words; he was of Indian ancestry and my folks noticeably came from somewhere else. Life had not been generous with him, and I wondered if, now that the tables had turned, he would make me pay for those centuries of neglect.

He didn't pull the trigger. He looked down at my bleeding leg, blinked, and I watched something brutal and sad drain out of his eyes. He breathed deeply as if ridding his lungs of a cloud and then veered his weapon away and made a motion with his free hand, I should get the hell out of there.

A few days later, on May 1, there was another protest, marking International Workers' Day. That morning, I'd put an extra pair of socks in my bag in case I got arrested. But then, instead of going downtown, I headed in the other direction, up into the hills with Angélica and Joaquín, and we sat by a river watching the turbulent water go by while Joaquín threw branches into the current and bombarded them with stones—and Angélica quietly held my hand. Gently as well, because it had been injured in the fall in the Plaza Italia. And there were two black-and-blue marks on my back, another near my ribs where a rifle butt had carved its message. And my left knee was crusted over with a scab, covering a cut so deep that I couldn't help but limp—even now, twenty-four years later, that knee still shows the mark. But the bruising of my ego was more painful.

What I felt on that May 1, 1986, was not the fear that hounded me when I was hunted down after the coup, and not the fear I felt when the man recording my voice at the faraway New York Times asked me to repeat my sacrilegious words, and not the fear of my own failings during that crisis of allegiance in Holland. What that lieutenant had hawked into me was unlike anything I had ever lived before, a trepidation encoded in my very body.

By 1990, when I returned to Chile, time and distance had somehow melted away the bone-deep fear. And I would have need of my newfound courage when I ventured into the land of secrets that Chile had become, when I dared to speak out in a land where most of the people were hiding from each other and from themselves, hiding from the truth they did not want to face.

 

Fragment from the Diary of My Return to Chile in 1990

SEPTEMBER 3

I am about to break my vow of silence.

Ever since I heard about the Comisión de Verdad y Reconciliación, while still in the United States, read about its goals, realized that the indisputable importance of its work was tempered by the agony it couldn't address, something began to stir inside me, a fever that has been hastened by our return to Chile six weeks ago.

And now I know what needs to be done: I am going to write a play.

A play that started out as a novel eight years ago in the United States and, as often occurs with my work, had its origins in an everyday, ordinary event, though its remote sources were percolating from way before.

During the first years of exile I had not desired—or needed—an automobile. Then, in 1977, we received an inheritance from Humberto, Angélica's father, who had died in London five years earlier. According to his wife, Lita, mother to Angélica's darling half-sister Nathalie, he would have liked us to have his old car. I drove it in Holland for a few months before it broke down on a snowy day and was abandoned forever to the scrap heap. But in the States, living in suburban Bethesda, a vehicle was of course indispensable.

I contacted Marcelo Montecino, a Chilean interpreter and prize-winning photographer living in exile. His cousin knew a mechanic named Pedro, from El Salvador, recently arrived in Fairfax, Virginia, who, besides selling me an inexpensive model, could repair it if anything happened to go awry. And, in effect, when the car Pedro sold me, a sturdy used Volkswagen squareback painted a discreet green, failed to start one morning, he swiftly came all the way from Virginia to fix the damn carburetor. During a conversation we had over coffee at our house, we were startled to learn that Pedro had been a sergeant in the Salvadoran army, which meant that he'd probably participated in who knows how many atrocities.

I liked Pedro, his calm reserve and unobtrusive sense of humor—and above all I liked having someone who could fix my car if I ran into trouble—so after he left I fantasized that he had abandoned his army post and his land in order to escape from those horrors. But on his next visit a few months later to patch up the brakes, it became clear where he stood in the conflict in his country. Not that he came right out and said it, he was as careful as I was to communicate through indirection and innuendo—he knew we were defenders of that other Salvador, Salvador Allende, and seemed to like us as much as we liked him. He had promised to keep the Volkswagen in shape, and he wasn't going to back down from that promise or our business, so both of us avoided mentioning anything that would transfer the respective conflagrations back home to our distant setting.

And what if our Good Samaritan were Chilean, what if, once I went back to my own divided land, my car broke down on a solitary road and someone just like Pedro happened by and saved my ass, what if I invited him back home and someone there, my wife maybe, discovered that this man had done, what if that man had ... This mechanic, if he had been Chilean, would have been my mortal enemy, yet here I was partaking of cakes and ale (well, coffee) with him, someone who might well have murdered friends and relatives of my Salvadoran comrades Manlio Argueta and Claribel Alegría and ... what if, what if the man who stopped on the road in Chile when my car broke down was not an uneducated sergeant but someone with the sophistication and sighs of a Jaime Guzmán as he listened to the Beethoven quartet in that theater in Chile, what if that man who stopped to help was hushing up harm done to a member of my family, to one of my friends, what if he had been the one who had approached Claudio Gimeno on the night La Moneda was bombed...

What if, what if, that's how my mind works, hundreds of bifurcations and characters and phrases jostling for attention, waiting for the instantiation when it all comes together, and I'm off, plunging into my next poem, story, article, play, novel, essay, whatever genre happens to feel right for the emotion dogging me, whatever is necessary to get it out of my system and onto the page, into the lives of readers, so I can be cleansed and they can be disturbed.

Sometime in the middle of the steaming summer of 1982, I started a novel tentatively called Memoria, uncoiling the idea that the wife of the stranded motorist had been raped and tortured by a Good Samaritan in love with heavenly music. The woman, recognizing the voice of her tormentor when he steps through her door, ties him up and seeks revenge. Outside that woman's house the thugs of Pinochet would be looking for their colleague. I imagined a Chile full of shadows and murk and menace, I imagined that woman's rage suddenly detonating, as mine had when that horrible Hübner man had dared to touch me in The Hague, as mine had almost burst out when Jaime Guzmán had sat down so close, so close, and sullied my Beethoven, my anger when I had read in that magazine in Paris that General Gustavo Leigh was laying claim to the music of my soul.

I wrote a first page of that 1982 novel, and a second one, and then tore them up and started again and threw those pages away, and continued like this for weeks, and something was wrong, something was most definitely wrong.

I was not ready.

First I had to return to Santiago, return once and for all and drink the bitter, hopeful river of Chile until the riverbed was empty.

It has taken me eight years to discover what was missing from that story, eight additional years of inferno that my country would have to go through before we reconquered our democracy, eight eternal years before I could sink into the ocean of suffering that is Chile.

I've spent these last seventeen years gathering all that anguish, a sponge of sorrows. I defined my role in this long voyage home as someone who dared to plunge into the abyss so I could come up with perhaps one fragile splinter of hope. That's how I built, word by word, my aesthetics of hope. During the dictatorship, all that ache had a dreadful communal meaning, and I assumed, perhaps we all did, that there would be some sort of catharsis when Pinochet was gone, a public reckoning. Well, he's gone now—or at least unable to continue repressing as he did a mere seven months ago—but instead of using that absence to deal with the dictatorship, the subject has almost disappeared. Now that the war is over, writers are supposed to go back to roses and birds and beauty. Turn the page, get on with life.

Except that I can't. I can't turn the page. Everywhere I go, it's enough to scratch the surface of each person, crack open the door to each person with a question or a look—that's enough for the howl of the past to inch out, a quiet howl, a hidden howl, a howl unasked for, neglected, a gasp more than a howl, but waiting for somebody to come and listen, somebody to care enough to listen.

It is out of that howl that Paulina has emerged.

That's what I'm calling her.

The story I interrupted eight years ago in the exile of Washington did not disappear from my landscape. It infected me and has, over the past few days, begun to take over my life. Paulina burrowed into my heart, I see her alone by a roaring sea and frightened out of her wits because her husband is late, he is on the road somewhere nearby with a flat tire, waiting for a stranger to help him. Paulina is alone in that house, damaged as irreparably as the land that spawned her, yet fierce, so fierce that she won't leave me alone, or maybe I am the one who can't leave her alone, there is too much pain there for me to abandon that woman to silence, hers and mine, too many women like her, too much need for her voice to be heard.

Not, as I had thought, under the guise of a novel. The wall I was hitting my head against whenever I tried to resume the narrative has finally crumbled now that I have returned to the turbulence of this Chile without Pinochet's absolute power.

Paulina's deepest tragedy is not that she has been tortured. It is that she has been betrayed. The democracy she yearned for, where she could tell her story and receive justice, has instead slammed the door shut, demanded that she sacrifice herself for the common good. And this transition in Chile has also revealed to me the identity of the person making that demand: it is Paulina's husband, Gerardo, a lawyer on the comisión seeking truth and reconciliation, someone I could not have conjectured until now, during this perverse intermediary period, he is the one who, in order to find the missing bodies, in order to bring order and progress to Chile, must defend the doctor Paulina has captured in her living room. A conflict that needs to be enacted by real people on a stage—it is too critical to our sanity as a nation, too imperative and vital to languish between the covers of a novel that would take a year or more to publish. My words have to invade the physical space where the violations occurred, invade that space with the bodies that are being forbidden or concealed, invade the city where that doctor roams free, that city where a woman like Paulina must be asking herself if she will become like the monster who destroyed her life, a city where the lawyer, the hero and central protagonist of Chile's transition, tries to do the right thing for his wife and also for his country, a husband who wants to save his land and save the love of his life and who may end up losing his soul in the bargain. All three, Paulina and her husband and the doctor, will be onstage and also in the audience that watches, as the lies explode and the story of this fractured realm is stripped for all to see, for all to recognize. The story that everybody is living and nobody is talking about: this Chile where victims and torturers walk side by side, elbow each other on the bus or lick ice creams next to one another in the cafés, everywhere I go, everywhere I go, not knowing whether that taxi driver, or that heavyset man in the gray overcoat and the pinstriped tie, could be the one who approached Carmen Bueno on a street like this one, listened to Carmen's screams, sipped coffee and asked for more sugar and less cream and measured the electricity and the screams, is that the man?

It was necessary that I cohabitate and intersect with those people denied to me in exile, greet in this country someone like Jaime Guzmán, shake hands with someone like Hübner. The real reason I have come back: to tell stories against the flood of amnesia, force my hand to write about the most dramatic situation that history could have handed an author, the multiple scars nobody is interested in.

It is not a task I take upon myself willingly.

Wasn't this return supposed to be a time to learn from my fellow citizens, avoid my reputation for feistiness, refuse to stick a finger into every wound in Chile? And do I really want to get involved in the hectic swirl of rehearsing and producing and promoting a play instead of slowing down after more than twenty years of nonstop activity? Doesn't it make more sense to help the family settle in, now that we've just taken Joaquín out of Nido de Aguilas and need to find a different school for him, something more accommodating. Isn't our house here still falling apart, aren't family and friends awaiting multiple visits? And as for creativity, do I really want to continue on the road of immediate contingency, my work strapped to Pinochet, eternally attached to his fate? Haven't I been trying to escape his influence, declared my independence from Chile as the sole source of my inspiration in my latest fiction?

Am I to break my vow of silence just because the country is also silent? Surely there is somebody else in our land who is ready to tell this tale of treachery and retribution.

Or is there?

…

THERE WAS something missing in my life, in my life and in my story, a photograph, a very specific one, that I hoped to find when I journeyed to Santiago in 2006 to film the documentary.

Many years ago, in the worst moments of expatriation, someone had shown that photograph to me, and then I had lost it or squirreled it away so well that I could no longer find even a trace of its existence. None of the circumstances were clear, all was a blur in my mind except what stood out in the picture itself.

It had been snapped during the glorious times of Allende, and my face was a speck floating within its boundaries, one among a multitude of enthusiastic revolutionaries waving their fists in front of La Moneda Palace. I did not remember much more, not the date or the occasion or who accompanied me that sunny day, which of my friends and comrades. But that photograph was the only extant representational evidence that I had been there in Chile during the revolution, that I was not the ghost I feared exile had turned me into, and now that I was going to revisit my life for Peter Raymont's camera, I was determined to anchor that past in something just as visual, a piece of celluloid that could establish the distance between the Ariel of 2006 who looked at the photograph and the young man he had once been, that would punctuate the distance between the revolutionary who thinks he will never leave and the exile who suspects he will never go back.

The photograph, alas, continued to evade me during that whole 2006 trip. Friend after friend just shook their heads, no, it hadn't been them, though we pored over family albums and tore open old boxes in attics and closets: nothing, nada. Only Antonio Skármeta vaguely recollected a photograph of that sort, but he recalled it as pensive and forlorn rather than triumphant, and in any case he had no idea where it might be, if indeed he had ever possessed it. Ah well, maybe a positive spin could be put on the foiling of my quest, maybe the elusiveness of that photograph illuminated how the past can never be entirely grasped, certainly not in times of oppression.

And then a surprise: on the last day of the shoot, Peter Raymont, Rodrigo, and the rest of the crew ended up ferreting out the photograph from who knows where in Santiago, handing it to me in front of La Moneda, in the very plaza where it had presumably been taken. And my heart leapt for joy: there I was, there, right there, that long silhouette with glasses had to be me, though something inside warned me that nobody recognizable was nearby and the occasion did not correspond to my reminiscences and that man really did not look like me and ... I kept on grinning anyway, posed with the photograph, pointed at the indistinct person I suspected was not me, I couldn't disappoint the camera, after all.

That scene with the fraudulent photograph is not in the film. Because two months later, through the good offices of the archive department of Julio Scherer's magazine, Proceso, the real photograph was found on the cover of a book published in Mexico in 1974, and that was really me, and nearby was Skármeta, and he had been right: we are indeed pensive, both of us, not a single fist in the air, no mouths rejoicing. I had, through the years, misremembered it, perhaps mislaid the photograph so I could misremember its lack of victorious symbolism, polish it clean of hints of defeat. Perhaps I didn't want it to contest a cardinal moment in that same plaza that I had not forgotten, even if not one photograph had been snapped of that event, even if the image of that night persisted only inside my mind and nowhere else.

I had last seen Salvador Allende alive one week before the coup, on September 4, 1973, when I had joined a million marchers who had poured into the streets of Santiago to celebrate the third anniversary of our electoral victory. That night it had taken our group—Manuel and Antonio, Cacho Rubio and Carlos Varas, and Jenny and Miguel Roth—it had taken us seven fervid hours to reach the street below the balcony of La Moneda where Allende was saluting the multitude. We had streamed by him, singing and chanting and unfurling flags, and brandishing sticks with which we swore to defend the revolution, and for one moment of eternal magic we convinced ourselves that we could still change the history of humanity, and then we looked back and saw him standing alone on that balcony waving a distant white handkerchief, and something unspoken and grievous made us immediately, without consulting one another, continue around the block and mingle with the next overflowing column, milkmen and women textile workers and ice cream vendors, so we could pass by one long, last time. Our hoarse voices might roar that el pueblo unido jamás será vencido, and that we would overcome, Venceremos, venceremos, but what we were really doing that night was bidding farewell to our president.

A week later he was dead, his body secretly dumped in a grave by the sea, the first of the Desaparecidos that Pinochet would hide away, the first of many denied a tombstone so they could be erased from memory.

Except that we had not complied.

More than thirty-three years later, on a bright December day in 2006, I fulfilled a dream I had been nursing during all those decades: I stood on that balcony where I had last seen Allende. The making of our documentary gave me access to that iconic space, the chance to stare out onto the empty Plaza de la Constitución, exactly from where our martyred president had saluted us, the same spot from which he had delivered so many speeches until the night he had waved goodbye with a white handkerchief. It was a poignant visitation of ghosts and memories, because down there now only strangers were walking; none of those who had shouted their defiance and hope that history would be on the side of the poor and forsaken were crowded into that plaza. Allende was dead and the revolution something pale and magnificent inside me, and it didn't matter if the photographs shone with victory or were twisted with defeat, it didn't matter if every possible photograph had been misplaced in some elapsed attic, because some solace drifted into me from that visit, all of Pinochet's repression had not stopped me from standing where Allende had stood, nobody has been able to quench these memories.

Or to stop me from believing in the justice of Allende's cause, his dream of a better world, the certainty that another world is indeed possible.

But how to arrive at the perfect society he envisioned—ah, that is another matter. The young man who had left Chile as an intrepid revolutionary, convinced that the end of capitalism was nigh and that any sacrifice was therefore justified on the road to socialism, was not the older man who stood on that balcony thirty-three years later.

When did it change? Was there a moment, a point of rupture, that separated one Ariel from the other, an event that marked the difference between these two versions, maybe avatars, of myself?

If I had to single out one day, it would be a glacial morning in the winter of 1982 when I was summarily expelled from the chancellery of the People's Republic of Poland in Washington, D.C. It had taken me many years to get to the point of walking through the gates of that embassy, to meet that ambassador under an ornate, bourgeois chandelier, it had taken me a whole lifetime to be able to tell that representative of Poland, undoubtedly a member of the Polish United Workers' Party, that, as a socialist and follower of Salvador Allende, I was ashamed and outraged at what his government was doing to the working class of his country in the name of Karl Marx.

It had been the repression of Solidarność a few months earlier, in December of 1981, the martial law declared by General Jaruzelski, the carnage in the Gdańsk shipyards, the outlawing of the free trade unions and the jailing of thousands of supporters of the Solidarity movement, the spectacle of the party supposedly embodying the hopes and desires of the proletariat turning its guns on those very workers—those events had been la gota que colmó el vaso, the straw that broke Ariel's ideological back.

My connection to communism had been, since the adolescent start of my political education, an ambiguous one, probably because I was torn between my mother and my father and their conflicting visions of social change. Like so many of his generation forged in the fight against fascism in the midst of the Great Depression and the debacle of capitalism, my dad had enthusiastically joined the Communist movement. Although, by the time of my birth in 1942, he'd broken with the sclerotic and bureaucratized Argentine party, he remained faithful to Marxismo-Leninismo, slavishly adhering to the Soviet Union and many Stalinist practices. A loving, sensitive father and spouse, he was cold and inflexible in defending measures that would bring about the presumed paradise of a classless society. Indeed, he considered those birth pangs imperative, regretfully obligatory—a position he maintained even after the Twentieth Party Congress denounced the crimes of Uncle Joe Stalin, even after the invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia. For my father, outraged by inequality, misery, and Nazism, those Bolshevik beliefs were the bedrock of his immigrant identity; to abandon them would, I surmise, have meant opening an abyss of introspection for which he was neither ideologically nor psychologically prepared.

Whereas my gentle mother, a staunch opponent of the death penalty and all other forms of brutality, had always been wary of communism's shortcomings. With a vivacious sense of humor that did not sit well with the commissars, she had founded the SRCLCP, the Slightly Reformed Conservation Life Communist Party, of which she was the sole member.

It was not as if there was much political discussion at the dinner table; my father would lay down the doctrine, the interpretation of current and past history, and my mother would merely offer some supple suggestion of her own that undercut the stiff views of the macho of the house without really confronting him. For my part, raised in a Chile with so many impoverished people, a Latin America scarred by arrogant Yankee interventions, I gravitated, indignant and flush with the Red self-righteousness of youth, to my father's positions, though always held in check by my mother's refusal to add one more victim to the century's long list of atrocities. So Salvador Allende was the perfect combination of my two progenitors: an admirer of Cuba and a fervent Marxist, he insisted at the same time that we could build a more just social order without having to repress our adversaries. Allende's democratic vocation fit well into my own personality and desire to avoid bloodshed, my fear of hurting any living being.

The failure of our peaceful Chilean revolution did not turn me into an advocate of armed struggle. On the contrary, it launched, inside me as well as in the left in Chile and across the globe, a multifaceted dialogue about how to achieve socialism in our time and not end up slaughtered by those whose power we were contesting. This debate would lead, in due course, to Eurocommunism, put forward primarily by the Italian and Spanish (and, to a lesser degree, the French) Communist parties, a sort of turn to social democratic ideals and strategies, a tendency I felt increasingly comfortable with.

At the same time, there were two realities of our Chilean struggle that could not be ignored. First, the international fight against the dictatorship was spearheaded by a Soviet Union pouring resources into the antifascist front we were trying to organize. And second, the Chilean Communist Party, because of its organizational skills, popularity, and experience of having outlived ferocious persecution in previous decades, constituted the backbone of the resistance to Pinochet. So even as I drifted away from the more rigid dogmas of Marxism, I bit my tongue whenever the Soviets or the Communists were attacked.

A balancing act that often led to ungainly pratfalls.

The most discomfiting of these occurred in Germany in the early spring of 1975. Our friend Freimuth Duwe, a left-wing member of the Bundestag for the ruling Social Democrats, and soon to be my editor at Rowohlt Verlag, lodged Angélica and me for two nights at his house in Hamburg and also arranged for us to visit Günter Grass's cottage near the city.

The Grass visit went smoothly for a while. The great author (and artist) showed us his latest etchings and then escorted us to the kitchen, where he was preparing a superb fish stew in our honor. Literature and Chile, Chile and food, food and wine and politics. I had devoured all his books, we were having the best of conversations, and he seemed more than willing to sign on to our committee to help artists in the homeland—everything chummy until he told me that he'd recently been in the south of France at a conference of solidarity with the Czech resistance to the Soviet occupation, which the Chilean Socialists had refused to attend. "Don't they realize, Ariel," Grass said, "that the Prague Spring and the Chilean revolution have both been crushed by similar forces, one by the Soviet Empire, the other by the Americans?"

I could glimpse my German host Freimuth trying to head me off, change the subject back to flounders and tin drums, but I wanted to treat Grass like a comrade: as a man of the left he'd understand that the Chilean Socialists couldn't publicly side with the Czechs against the Soviets and our own Communist allies. Günter's eyes narrowed and his bushy mustache bristled even more, if that were possible. What was my position on the Prague Spring?

I'd been in favor of that flowering of liberty and had condemned the Soviet invasion, as Allende had, to which our host replied that my current stance was then more shameful, because I was subjecting my freedom of opinion to petty party politics. Couldn't I see that Dubček and Allende were equivalent?

That's when things got rough. I didn't think we should equate the Soviet Union, for all its many faults, with the United States, and he shot back something about writers and their responsibility, and I was trying to be temperate, I was eyeing that luscious fish stew, but my mouth insisted that it was essential not to create a rift with the compañeros who were fighting in Chile, and Freimuth kept trying to run interference, but it was too late. I think that if Angélica had not been so charming and downright gorgeous, and if Grass's dog had not taken a liking to me, he would have thrown us out right that minute. Instead, he abruptly turned and began to work at his drawing table, on a figure he'd been engraving, and it was clear that our meeting was over, not a drop of stew to be savored, no more to be said.

Except when we timorously rose to say goodbye. He looked up and ... "When something is morally correct," he said, "you must defend that position without concern for political or personal consequences."

What I could not tell Grass, would perhaps not have wanted to admit to myself, was that it was not only out of political pragmatism that I had turned a blind eye to the many glaring excesses of rulers who claimed to be inspired by Marxism. Beyond the loyalty and admiration I felt towards my father, I was held back by all those Communists by whose side I had fought in Chile and the rest of Latin America.

The dead, the dead, we carry so many ghosts to whom we often swear more fealty than to the living. The mythical martyrs of the Paris Commune who had been executed for trying to create a society without exploitation, the many heroes of my youth, as much a part of me as my cheekbones and my lungs, Marx in the British Library, the workers and soldiers storming the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, the Vietnamese dying by the thousands to save their land and tell the world that a small country need not bow to bombs and bullying, Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, lucharemos hasta el fin. I had chanted that in the streets of Santiago next to Pito Enríquez, thin as a toothpick, and he had died, my Communist friend Pito, in some aseptic hospital in Toronto, he had died of heartbreak, and he could not evolve, I could not tell him of my transformation and bring him along with me on this voyage away from the dogmas that he had believed in and that I had tolerated in the name of comradeship. And Enrique París who had been tortured to death, castrated at La Moneda, and Fernando Ortiz who had been picked up one overcast day in the Plaza Egaña and had never returned home, would never again smile at me as we crossed under the álamos of the Universidad de Chile. And the songs of the Spanish Civil War, El Ejército del Ebro, rumba la rumba la rum bam bam, the night when the Republican army had crossed the Ebro and defeated Franco's mercenaries, ay Carmela, ay Carmela, I had heard that song in the womb, in that same womb had listened from near and far to the partisans' Bella ciao in the hills of Tuscany as they fought Mussolini, and the Battle of Stalingrad and Fidel entering Havana, ay Carmela, ay Carmela, and inside me were Neruda and Brecht and Nazim Hikmet and Che Guevara, all dead, rumba la rumba la rum bam bam, so inflexible in their death and yet alive in the vast vocabulary of my "Internationale" heart, arriba los pobres del mundo, a part of the legacy I had inherited.

How could I simply throw out everything I had subscribed to and learned in my more ardent days just because of terrible things that were being done, mistakes and crimes and cruelty that I told myself did not, could not, nullify the quest for the equality that I was not willing to declare bankrupt? How could I renounce the foundation upon which to build a prophetic humanity, what I imagined could be our shining destiny, the epitome of fairness in that extraordinary phrase "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs"? But above all I was held back by an acknowledgment of what our world would look like without the infinite struggle of so many ordinary men and women for racial equality and the rights of workers to organize, by what a dreadful planet this would be if those militants had not opened a space for women to be free, if they had not stood by the side of the unfortunate colonies of our earth on the road to liberation.

So it took a while, it took a persistent drip and drop and accumulation of errors and invasions and betrayals and mass murders for me to wrest myself away from that confusing allegiance, it took many misdeeds to get me, the personification of the fellow traveler, off the train. The Cultural Revolution in China had not been enough, and the Prague Spring had not been enough, and the killing fields of Cambodia had not been enough, and the appalling Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had not been enough, but every one of those events had chipped away at my armor, until finally, the workers of Poland—the WORKERS, la clase obrera, los trabajadores, los pobres del mundo, the wretched of the earth, no less—were being repressed for demanding the same freedoms being asked for by the people of Chile, and enough, basta, that was the tipping point.

Though exile as well as history had contributed to my transformation.

One morning in Paris—it must have been 1975—I knocked on the door of the apartment of Ugné Karvelis on the Rue de Savoie. Julio Cortázar, who lived with her, answered the door and told me they had a guest, just arrived from Prague, staying over for a few nights. Then Ugné slipped out of the living room and whispered to me that he was an author I would hear much about, a novelist destined for greatness.

It was Milan Kundera.

The saddest man I have ever seen.

That was no routine sadness etched deep into his face. It overwhelmed you with its aura, it extended out from him like a wave of unmitigated grief, a loss as inconsolable as my own but without any of the hope that I kept forcing myself to feel. He was soaking inside that sorrow as if it were his skin, as if he did not want to emerge from it; he wanted to use it, reach down into its depths, let it flow endlessly inside him.

He had fled from a regime that had become one of the cornerstones of the campaign against Pinochet, a regime I had refused to condemn publicly just a few months earlier at Günter Grass's house, a regime that was training our militants at that very moment, offering assistance in many forms and forums. But the arguments I had used in my discussion with the German writer would have been useless, harsh, futile, with Milan. Regardless of what you thought of the government installed by Soviet tanks in Prague (and I had no sympathy for its punitive dictatorship), the only possible reaction to a despair like Kundera's was a burst of compassion as cosmic as his own grief. The practicalities of "the enemy of my friend is my enemy" simply dissolved in the presence of a tragic disappointment that called out to me, that gave to a man persecuted by my allies a face, a real face, an anguish that I could identify with.

Less than a year later, at the International PEN conference in The Hague, when we expelled the Chilean center, I was nursing a mellow Armagnac at the bar of our hotel when I was approached by a tall, harrowed man sporting stubble on his cheeks, as if he had not shaved in several days, that contrasted with a carefully trimmed goatee. He was a Russian, and saved from Kundera's melancholy not by my sort of revolutionary enthusiasm but by a mischievous twinkle in his eyes, which had seen too much not to be amused by human folly. He was glad that Chile had been banished and hoped something similar could happen to the Moscow branch of PEN, though he doubted that the unanimity engendered by my nation would hold when it came to the Russians. He shrugged, as if used to this labyrinth of politics, and then unspooled to me how he had spent years in a psychiatric ward. "They said I had to be off my rocker if I was against communism, no rational person could be against communism, no rational person could ever write the verses that I wrote."

As he talked in his Slavic-inflected English, I wondered if, in fact, he was not a maniac, an insane asylum inmate posing as a poet; but no, he was a gentle soul and quite composed and measured. I had heard, of course, of the tactic being used by the Soviets against dissidents, of medicating and institutionalizing them. I had actually seen it as a positive sign, thinking that at least they weren't executing them, sending them off to gulags in Siberia. Not quite excusing such a deplorable pseudo-psychiatric practice but somehow accommodating to it—as long as I did not have to sit next to the injured party, drink something with him, with her.

As the years went by, I met many similar men and women. The Czech coach of a kids' soccer team in Amsterdam, a Vietnamese tailor, and poets from East Germany and Cuba who wanted only to be free to recite whatever words, obscure or magnificent, leaped from their mouths. As I steered through the crazy, fractious patchwork of expatriates and alliances, something in me began to alter: it became more difficult to pigeonhole each exile according to his or her affiliation alone. I recognized their stories, the wistfulness they felt for the way tea was brewed back home, all those humiliations so parallel to mine, their pride ground into dust just like mine. I did not need to identify with their political choices in order to absorb their pain.

My very slow opening to the victims of Communist experiments was accompanied by a parallel development: the progressive loosening of the bonds securing me to my own party.

Urged on by a combination of guilt and love, I had thrown myself during the first years of exile into an ever more frenzied engagement, the best antidote to the sort of dejection exuded by Milan Kundera, his solitary flight into the murk of exile with nothing but his mind in turmoil to accompany him. Nevertheless, as time sped by and I dashed from one incessant task to the next, a mad, intense pace of work that was sustainable only for those who were fiercely selfless, I realized with mounting relief that I was not made out to be a full-time revolutionary.

My shift towards a more voluntary, less addictive relationship with the organized Resistance became possible, I guess, because literature had rescued me from the remorse of silence. And inasmuch as the collective ceased to be the main buffer zone against loneliness, as the immediate traumas of the coup softened, a space began to open from which to establish a critique, not only of my party and all parties, but of the left in general. These were questions that had been quelled for far too long. Irreplaceable as these organizations might be in a war against a ferocious enemy with an army of its own, did they have to swamp every aspect of life, supply a definitive answer to every misgiving, force a choral answer to each and every problem? How to build a democratic society with parties that were self-perpetuating, as suffocating as the catacombs we were hiding in? Wasn't it time to abandon the Leninist hierarchical structure in order to lay the groundwork today for the sort of state we wanted to construct tomorrow—pluralistic, tolerant, humane, without a supposedly superior group of illuminati deciding the ultimate and totalizing truth?

And here was a question I dared not answer, let alone ask: Wasn't my own distancing a consequence of problems deep in the doctrine itself? I had deposited in a revolutionary party—true, of a new lefty variety—my liberty and conscience, and that Marxist philosophy, still a superb instrument with which to comprehend and critique capitalism, still a fiery vision of the future to which I continued to subscribe, seemed to have increasingly foggy responses to the new dilemmas of our times. What role do indigenous peoples play in guiding us out of our current crisis? How are we to integrate their ancient wisdom into the modern world? How to cope with the monster of industrialization—extolled traditionally by both the left and the right as the panacea to all our troubles—without confronting the environmental degradation corroding our planet? And didn't it make sense to accept the world as full of intractable mysteries, puzzles that could not be reduced to one position? And the challenges of feminism and the sexual revolution and homosexuality and the new technologies and religion, and the more questions I asked, the more I saw myself as a public intellectual at the service of all forms of liberation rather than a militant subservient to the web and requirements of a collective, the more I understood my political work as occurring mainly in the uncertain territory of my writing and advocacy.

Even so, I believe that all the shifts in world history and all the emotional and intellectual alterations in my life would still, given my ideological baggage and the more intimate memories of victory and defeat, have been insufficient to make me ring the bell of the Polish embassy with such public fanfare that blustery day in Washington. One additional factor nudged me in the direction of moral independence from the movement I had served with such commitment. Oddly enough, this act of autonomy could only have happened, for me at least, in the United States, the center of the empire.

Because I was not alone that day at the embassy. That visit had been organized by my friends Doug Ireland and Joanne Landy of the recently formed Campaign for Peace and Democracy, a group of American activists who opposed their own government's bellicosity abroad while at the same time establishing links with, and offering support to, dissidents in the Soviet-bloc countries. Seven years after rejecting Günter Grass's reasoning about the need to concurrently denounce repression originating in both the United States and the Communist countries, I had found a band of sisters and brothers that was impeccably dedicated to that very objective, a troupe (and not a troop) of radicals who understood that one cannot be for freedom in Nicaragua and against it in Hungary, that one could not deplore the U.S. support of Pinochet and applaud Jaruzelski's mentors in Moscow.

I had always been, in some sense, a human rights activist, but it was only through my reconnection to gringo rebels that I began to inch towards the man I am today. It was the American left that gave me space to think creatively, that offered a different sort of community from which to mature, a different sort of homecoming to the country I had loved as a child, that helped me find the freedom to walk into that embassy and shame that ambassador and feel the satisfaction of being ejected. If I had remained a member of the MAPU, I would have consulted with the hierarchy and toed the official line like a good soldier of the revolution. So that day in the Polish embassy I said goodbye to the soldier but not to the revolution, I bid a long goodbye to party politics but not to the politics of liberation, I stated that I would henceforth answer to my own conscience and no longer to the dictates or persuasions of patriarchs in any organization.

Other decisions would follow in the years to come. By declaring that what Polish socialists were doing did not represent me, I was preparing the way for other unsparing evaluations. I was able to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall and deplore the massacre at Tiananmen Square and condemn the execution by Fidel of Comandante Ochoa, one of the stalwarts of the Cuban revolution, the hero of the liberation of Angola, the man who helped defeat the apartheid South Africans. But it all started that day in Washington when I told the Polish ambassador that there can be no socialism without democracy.

Back home that night, I made a telephone call. Not to Günter Grass. Or to Milan Kundera. To my father in Buenos Aires. And told him about the day's events, how that Communist ambassador, who must have sung "Bella Ciao" and "Ay Carmela" in his youth, who must have been trying to be loyal to his own martyrs, his own dead stirring inside, I told my father how that Polish comrade of his had banished me from that building.

There was a pause on the other end of the line.

"Ariel," my dad said, and I couldn't tell if he was smiling or frowning. "You know that I disagree with you. And I'm sure you also know how proud I am that you're my son."

"I disagree with you too, Chebochy," I said, using the endearing term that was his pet name. "And you know that I'm also proud of you."

And we left it at that.

Ay Carmela, ay Carmela.

 

Fragment from the Diary of My Return to Chile in 1990

SEPTEMBER 5

Yesterday, we buried Salvador Allende.

Witnessing the calm, ardent crowds, the photographs that had been secreted inside mattresses all these years and held aloft as the coffin went by, an old man crying into a Chilean flag crumpled in his hands, the youngsters who had not been born when the military had given Allende a first, anonymous funeral close to the Pacific Ocean, those youngsters calling out his name as an incantation against death, the thousands upon thousands of the dirt poor that had lost a day's pay so they'd be able to tell their grandchildren that they had been here on this field of gentle battle, the elderly women in wheelchairs pushing themselves to Allende's new tomb as if it were heaven, the flowers falling from a millennium of hands. I wondered at the miracle of it all, how these compañeros had kept Allende's memory ablaze in the midst of their despair. I wondered at the millions of hours they must have waited for the day when they would be strong enough to resurrect the body we had kept alive in the forbidden darkness of our imagination, how they had been fierce and loyal enough to bring Salvador home.

And now real work lies ahead. While Allende lay in an unmarked tomb, we had to keep his myth intact and uncontested. A myth offers inspiration but also makes it impossible to hold a conversation with the man behind it. That is the dialogue that can begin now that Salvador Allende, so dead and so alive, has been returned to the earth we set aside for him all these years. Now we can start to live with him and without him, now his country can critique him and also seek ways to remain faithful to the vision of social justice and democracy for which he died.

And all of a sudden, lost and found in that forest of clenched fists and chanted slogans, I was visited by an illumination: in this passage from innocence to maturity that I have been obliged to navigate without Allende, I have not always shown the courage of my convictions. I had not been brave enough to die next to him in La Moneda and not brave enough to refuse my party's orders to leave Chile when the junta hunted me down. I had kept myself alive so I could tell the story of our era, that's how I had justified my existence each time I retreated from the utopian dream I still believed in, that's how and where I could redeem myself.

It's time to write that damn play.

I think I will call it Death and the Maiden.

…

WHEN WE had arrived in Baltimore in July of 1980, with our boxes of books and our dreams of migrating to Mexico, the portrait of Jimmy Carter greeted us in every government building, and it was almost inconceivable that he would not be reelected.

Not that I hadn't been primed for the triumph of Ronald Reagan less than five months after our arrival. Hadn't 1979, launched in the coincidental glory of the Sandinista revolution, the defeat of the Shah in Iran, and the earthshattering advent of our Joaquín, ended in global gloom, as Soviet tanks rolled into Afghanistan and Margaret Thatcher ascended to power in Great Britain? Her government, soon to be followed by Reagan's, was wretchedly reminiscent of the malignant Latin American laboratory I had escaped.

A sobering experience, to see the shock therapy executed in Chile being applied on the vaster scale of the United States: the same formulas of the Chicago boys and Milton Friedman and other ideologues who had been Pinochet's neoliberal gurus, the same dismantling of the welfare state and safety nets for the poor, the same tax policies favoring the rich, the same return to a ferocious Victorian Age laissez-faire market, the same smashing of the trade unions, the same visceral anticommunism and militaristic jargon. Although at least the American and British people were spared, as we Chileans were not, the accompanying horrors of dictatorship. But plenty of violence elsewhere: civil war in El Salvador and Angola and Mozambique, and soon the Contras butchering peasants in the land of Sandino, and slaughter in Eritrea, and the end of the socialist mirage in Portugal. And China, waking from the catastrophe of the Cultural Revolution and Mao's tyranny, was experimenting with totalitarian capitalism (Deng Xiaoping: "To be rich is glorious!"). As for Iran, it was persecuting trade unions and curtailing the rights of women. It had been the hostage crisis in Tehran that had undermined Jimmy Carter's presidency and incubated this American nightmare I was returning to, so many years after having fled from its first manifestation.

In effect, the fear that had haunted my childhood during the McCarthy witch-hunts seemed to be catching up with me all over again. With this difference: now I knew more about terror and how it is manufactured, I had seen what dread can do to a democratic land, and therefore recognized its manifestations in Reagan's America, was appalled that his policies could be carried out with the approval of an electoral majority. It was that Teflon popularity that depressed me most: it proved that this ultra-conservative plague was the dominant ethos of our time and that Allende's downfall, rather than the exception, had turned out to be the rule. And it seemed to whisper (or shout, perhaps) that the United States was, as I had trumpeted in my more radical days, beyond redemption or repair.

And yet it was the Gipper who, remarkably, kept baguettes on the table and the mortgage paid. Shipwrecked on the rocks of the Reagan counterrevolution, I had begun to transform what was a disaster for the people of the world into a bizarre source of revenue, publishing articles on the strange intersection of politics and culture in a country that had elected a former actor from Hollywood as its chief executive.

Those articles, and the books in English that started to accompany them, were not merely a desperate means of financial survival. The need to adapt to a new audience also forced me to reexamine my own assumptions and certainties, a process that continues to this day. It was one thing to write scathingly about the United States from the Chile of the revolution, and quite another to meditate and speak from the position of someone who had sought refuge in the very country among whose secrets I was rummaging. It is hard to be offensive when you live and shop and drive among the people you are intellectually dismembering, by no means the same to skewer amnesiac America's belief in its unique goodness and innocence when your own quest for purity has been sorely tested by a decade of revolution and repression, when you awaken each morning reciting the mantra of your own possible contamination. In Chile, the wild words employed in my writing were the ones in which I had chanted our collective future in the streets, the language I had once used to conspire with my comrades in smoke-filled rooms. Other men and women now occupied the place of those compañeros, and I had to ensure that my new foreign readers could follow me into the warren of my every interpretation. At the same time, I was aware of a zone of myself that I wanted to retain, a region of identity, no matter how fluctuating and brittle, that I was not disposed to abandon. I waged a series of skirmishes on behalf of that other recalcitrant Ariel inside, rebuffed the need to make the text so transparent and lucid that it lost a certain mystery and difficulty, and threatened to purge that vision of mine of the original swooping sin that had made it distinctive and interesting to begin with.

A struggle that, of course, cannot be separated from my adulterous love affair with English. It was in those initial years in the United States that I started to experiment with the language in which I write these pages, a language skewed and made slightly alien by the Spanish twin inside, marked by a rhythm and flow and twist, which is not quite how most Anglo authors habitually express themselves. I was joining others from around the world who were changing the language of Joyce and Salman Rushdie and Bob Dylan as they settled into it, made it theirs.

Not an easy voyage of discovery and addiction. I was venturing into the unknown territory of residing in both my tongues, the start of a process of rubbing one against the other, a labor of love that wanted to create one unified Ariel, one more linguistic mongrel on this planet. My gradual gestation of a new authorial self did not come without an inner fight over the pulse of each phrase, over an adjective supposedly misplaced or a verb that was meta-invented, over flow and vocabulary, style and grammar. Yes, my writing had to display how different I was, how secretly alien, yes, it had to stay connected to the source of its transgressive fire, yes, and my heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes—as long as this back-and-forth literary expedition recognized its limits and did not seek to undermine my ability to survive in the foremost nation in the world and the power its English afforded me.

A power that I used, once it had been unleashed in the early eighties, to full effect.

Back in 1965, Angélica and I had celebrated my twenty-third birthday, on May 6, by joining thousands of other Chileans outside the American embassy in Santiago in a protest against Lyndon Johnson's invasion of the Dominican Republic. While others cascaded stones and rotten eggs and vegetables at that building opposite the Parque Forestal, I launched—ever the pacifist—only verbal abuse, but if foul words could have killed...

Eighteen years later, on another May 6, a forty-one-year-old Ariel was again celebrating his birthday, this time by proffering to the holders of American dominion something other than insults: I spent that day walking the halls of Congress in Washington, handing out books that I trundled behind me in Joaquín's red wagon. Five hundred and thirty-five books, to be exact, one for each representative in the House, one for each senator.

The idea for that delirious political-literary project had come to me one insomniac night earlier that year of 1983 as I corrected the proofs for the English text of Widows that Pantheon, thanks to my loyal editor Tom Engelhardt, was bringing out. I can't deny that I was thrilled to be fulfilling my adolescent ambition to publish a novel in the language of my childhood, and doubly thrilled because I knew that having a book in the dominant lingua franca of our times might pry open the door to multiple translations and success in the literary world.

My glee was tempered, however, by the recognition of how far I remained from my original objective, conceived in Amsterdam, of using this very novel to sneak back into Chile, to reach my readers there. My old crone of a protagonist in Widows, that fierce woman who waited by the river for her disappeared men to come home, was about to make an appearance in the bookstores and book reviews of the United States and yet was still prohibited, as I was, from visiting her own country. Then it hit me, and the bouncy, ever optimistic, attention-deficit-disorder Ariel took over: Why not use the novel, newly minted in New York, to reach out to the legislators of this country? Maybe I could get some rich friends of the Institute for Policy Studies to buy the books at cost for my adventure, that's what I'd do. In my mind, I was already rehearsing the conversation:

"Good morning, sir, madam, Senator, Congresswoman, Congressman," and then explain that I couldn't go back to my land, but my plight was insignificant compared to what was happening to the Disappeared and to the relatives of the Disappeared in Chile, as portrayed in this novel I'm now dedicating to you, sir, madam, impossible to do something like this in my own country, because our Congress has been abolished and nobody has the right to vote there, just as I don't have the right to return. Perhaps, sir, madam, you could pressure the Chilean government into allowing me to go back to my country, perhaps you could protest the horrors of disappearance. And let me tell you about how the Reagan government bolsters the Pinochet regime.

And that was it, the spiel I repeated so many times during those eight days in May, rehearsing for what would be a flurry of interviews in the months and years ahead, my English hooked to the cause of Chile and Latin America and every oppressed nation in the world, my English articulated me into many meetings with minor Reagan functionaries and bankers, pundits and luminaries, and it was then that I started to cultivate an array of well-known stars, hitched them to the lone star of Chile.

It was a potentially perilous journey.

An inevitable distance began to yawn between the bright world whose rich and famous and powerful I was courting for the cause and the anonymous world of those being repressed in the darkness of places like Chile. My years of penurious wandering had joined me to those unknown people I was serving, but my anchorage in the United States and my assiduous cultivation of English opened up the possibilities of my participating, however marginally, however ambivalently, in the glamour of celebrity.

I got a kick out of this, that's the truth. It was a dream to meet Costa-Gavras in Washington when he premiered Missing and Richard Dreyfuss in Los Angeles and Arthur Miller in New York and Bill Styron in Connecticut. I lobbied Martin Sheen and Dan Rather, Jackson Browne and Jane Fonda and Harry Belafonte. I cultivated that craving of mine for vicarious exposure, while never allowing myself to lose sight of the fact that I was doing this work in order to save lives. Not a vague metaphor, as I was to learn when, in early November 1987, I got a call in my Durham home from María Elena Duvauchelle and Nissim Sharim. Along with seventy-five other Chilean theater people, they'd been warned to leave the country before the end of the month or be executed. The threats were signed by a squad calling itself Trizano—from a Chilean vigilante who had massacred Indians over a century ago—a blatant attempt to stop some of Chile's best-known figures from campaigning in the upcoming 1988 plebiscite. They needed a superstar to stand by their side on November 30, the day of reckoning.

I decided to write an op-ed for the New York Times. A few hours after it was published, the telephone rang. It was Margot Kidder. Alerted by Mrs. Solidarity herself, Rose Styron, Bill's wife, Kidder had contacted Christopher Reeve, her costar in the Superman films. "He's read your Times piece," she said, though I couldn't get it out of my head that it was Lois Lane speaking to me, "and he's fearless. I think he'll do it."

Later that day, the telephone rang again, and this time I recognized that deep baritone I had heard in movie theaters, the voice of the Man of Steel and of the evil dissembler of Deathtrap and of the benevolent lawyer in The Bostonians, the voice asking how he could assist the Chilean actors. At the end of our half-hour conversation, Reeve had a question: "How dangerous is Chile for someone like me?"

"Nothing would be worse for the dictatorship than for you to get hurt, but renegades from the secret police might decide to kill you in order to blame the opposition."

"And if I go, would this help my Chilean colleagues?"

"If you go, you'll probably save their lives."

After a pause, maybe four seconds long: "Then I'll go."

Reeve asked me to accompany him. I responded that my being there might cause him trouble, given my recent arrest at the Santiago airport. And my presence would restrict the impact of his mission; it was crucial that he avoid a partisan stand. My wife, however, had volunteered to travel with him, an offer that was greeted by a long silence and then, Thanks, he'd be happy to have somebody guide him in a country that he knew next to nothing about.

It was an act of great bravery. Though many joked that Superman—a man who caught a child falling from a building, held up planes in the air, and stopped a dam from exploding—was flying to the rescue, the truth is that Chris Reeve's body was as vulnerable as that of any mortal, as he was to discover when, years later, he had an accident on his horse and was paralyzed for the rest of his life.

But Chris confronted that desperate tragedy in the same way he confronted the challenge of Chile. If fate had granted him so much renown, it would be a sin not to use it wisely. He could save real lives—not in dark movie halls, but in the darker territory of history. And he did not flinch when, the day after he arrived in Santiago, the government prohibited the planned public act of solidarity with the endangered actors and the site of the protest was moved to a claustrophobic warehouse, the Garage Matucana. Undeterred, he entered that space where thousands had hazardously congregated. I followed these events breathlessly from afar, informed by Angélica, who was at risk herself, as courageous as Chris, my Angélica, as courageous as those actors, all of them joining together in an act of monumental defiance.

Not his last service to Chile.

The campaign for the No vote against Pinochet in the 1988 plebiscite was gearing up, and I enlisted him to appear in one of our publicity spots that the dictatorship had been forced to offer us every night at an ungodly hour, but that all of Chile had tuned in to, and there was Chris again, telling the TV viewers not to be afraid, that they were not alone.

Nor was he alone.

My mission for the plebiscite was to bring in as many celebrities as I could find. And I delivered—they delivered—and I was thrilled to be valuable, included in the campaign, and tried to suffocate the unsettling thought that I had spent so many decades denouncing the way fandom emasculates citizenship and postpones responsibility, the way Hollywood manipulates our emotions and tamps down our rebellion, I had spent a good part of my life calling for ordinary humans to emerge from the shadows and into the light, and yet when the chance had come, I relished being in touch with the luminaries, caught in the web of their enchantment. Yes, it was for a good cause, and yes, I was giving them a chance to use their fame for something meaningful, but the elation I felt was ... well, unseemly. When I contacted those stars personally, voice to voice, face to face, I could sense my ego swelling, puffing up in a puerile delight that crept out of some deep-seated insecurity intensified by years of rejection and exile.

I was to be taught a lesson in humility one crazy midnight in October of 1988, shortly after the people of Chile resoundingly defeated Pinochet in the plebiscite. "He has an eye that can see everything," an old woman confided in a whisper when I went canvassing for votes in a población a few days before the referendum. "He'll follow me into the booth, take away my roof, but I'll vote against the man anyway. This is my one chance."

And what better way to celebrate that she and so many millions like her had chosen the path of democracy, what better place to rejoice than in a stadium, listening to the blur and roar and wave of seventy thousand screaming, heaving rock fans at an Amnesty International concert, one week after our triumph at the polls? True, it wasn't Chile yet, we'd need another two years before we could hold that concert in Santiago. But Sting and the other singers on that World Tour for Freedom had added that show at the Estadio Mundialista in Mendoza, Argentina, as a way of calling attention to the struggle in Chile, where of course Pinochet would not have allowed even one of the troublemaking musicians to disembark. Mendoza, just on the other side of the Andes, was the city from where the ragtag army of San Martín set forth in 1817 to liberate Chile, so why not create a new Ejército Libertador, thousands of Chileans crossing the mountains to Argentina to celebrate human rights?

Sting had asked that before I introduced him to the multitude, I declaim one of my poems—and I willingly agreed, feeling that I somehow deserved that honor. I had helped to organize this wild extravaganza, Sting's "They Dance Alone" had been partly inspired by my poetry and fiction, this seemed like a unique chance to cast my forbidden verses into the ears of all those young Chileans.

The show's producer, Bill Graham, was dubious. "Those kids will have been out in the sun for hours," he said, "and then in the cold of night waiting for Sting," they would probably not be in the mood for poetry. But Graham asked for the poem anyway, and nodded after reading it, and he said yes, if I was willing to risk it, poetry's always good.

I entered the stage under a flood of lights, enough to make me sweat in the chilly Mendoza night, but I sweat even more when I realized that the spectators were expecting Sting, not this unknown Dorfman fellow. The dazed puzzle of silence was speckled with some hoots, and I hesitated. Wouldn't it be better to ditch the whole poem thing and just announce, like a crazed incarnation of Jack Nicholson in The Shining, here's ... Stiiiing! I looked at the real Sting, standing just out of sight of the crowd next to Peter Gabriel, and they gave me a reassuring smile, they'd tamed this sort of monster many a time, and I ludicrously remembered the scene in The Way We Were, one of Angélica's favorite films, when Robert Redford says to Barbra Streisand, "Go get 'em, Katie," and some voice inside me, not Redford's for sure, was saying "Go get 'em, Ariel."

I took a deep breath and went and got them, or tried to get them, because they seemed to be the ones out to get me. As I launched into the first verses something stirred in the loins of the stadium, and it soon became an uproar. I could hear—or at least hoped I was hearing—shouts of encouragement from the sons and daughters of friends out there, Queno's son Matías, and Rodrigo and his mates, and I kept plodding on, the boos and protests now so loud that I couldn't hear my own words, my litany against death and disappearance trying to soar above the clamor from without and the self-questioning from within, what right do I have to come between these fans and their idol? Why did I ever want to be surrogate to a rock star and bathe in his aura, how could I have become so addicted to the fawning of the world and the whirring of the cameras, what insane delusion gripped me, why, why? Even so, I continued. Pinochet couldn't silence me, and this crowd won't silence me either, and then I'm on the home stretch, almost done, I've finished, I can finally gesture to one side and yell with my last lungful of air, Y ahora, Sting! And he came out with his band and hugged me and I staggered out from below the diabolical lights and Bill Graham gave me a friendly punch in the arm. "That was great, man, that was really gutsy."

I was hoarse and chagrined, but there were more pleasurable matters to attend to, the rollercoaster ride of the music itself had started, and hey, I'd never been to a Sting concert, so I circled around, with my all-access backstage pass hanging from my neck, to join friends and family in the section right in front of the stage and Angélica offered me a comforting kiss and Verónica de Negri a hug. The mother of Rodrigo Rojas, burned by the Chilean military, had been on this tour for the past month and a half, demanding justice for her martyred son, and she'd soon be up there onstage with the women of the Desaparecidos, dancing with Sting and Peter Gabriel instead of dancing with the dead and the missing and the invisible ones.

Finally that was all that mattered, this celebration of our victory in the plebiscite, the fleeting solace of the songs. I was able to leave my public disgrace behind and lose myself in "Roxanne," you don't have to put on the red light ... don't have to sell your body to the night, and then there is the finale with everybody up there singing together, Sting and Peter and Tracy Chapman and Youssou N'Dour and the Inti-Illimani, get up, stand up, stand up for your rights, Bob Marley alive in Mendoza telling us, all seventy thousand of us, that heaven is not under the earth, urging the world to remember that the story hasn't been told, get up, stand up, stand up for your rights.

It took me a while to probe—with the help of Angélica, who doesn't care about fame and cares less about famous people—the meaning of that public pillorying, to realize that a slap in the face can become a good slap if you can only come to love it, embrace its pain as a learning experience.

A lesson that was to serve me well when the extraordinary success of Death and the Maiden opened even more doors, put me in touch with innumerable actors and directors and musicians, not just to enlist them in human rights campaigns, but also as collaborators in my artistic work, my plays, my films. A mantra I would need as I was given access that would have made the poet who introduced Sting that night in Mendoza dizzy with envy, a mantra I try never to forget: This is not about you, Ariel. Treat the exaltation of the limelight as ephemeral, approach every figment of fame with modesty and, if possible, with self-effacement.

A refrain I would repeat to myself when Death and the Maiden triumphed on Broadway and was made into a film by Polanski, and I repeated it when Bono dedicated a U2 concert to me as he shouted out my name. I recalled my ultimate insignificance when words I had written were pronounced onstage by Meryl Streep and Sean Penn, Kevin Kline and Julianne Moore, Sigourney Weaver and Alec Baldwin, whispered to myself: This is not happening because you deserve it; you personally don't deserve anything. This is not, it should not be, about you.

Do I feel proud? Do I continue to crave attention? Of course I do, of course I pinch myself when I spend weeks with Viggo Mortensen adjusting phrases and nuances while we rehearse a new play, or when I rise to address the UN General Assembly and read the delegates a poem, or when I deliver the Mandela Lecture in South Africa, and I say how can this be happening to the writer who had to tap out his despair on a toilet seat in Paris and was expelled from a first-class compartment on a train to St. Denis and spent decades begging for help, this can't be happening to the refugee stranded without a home or a visa or a job in a hostile country, this success can't be real, these photographs that capture me with presidents and Nobel laureates and superstars. But as soon as I perceive a hint of cockiness and entitlement creep into my soul, I quickly cut myself down to size with the message of Damocles from the Mendoza debacle, remember that you are mortal, remember that this is not, it cannot be, should not be, about you. I tried not to forget that refrain when Peter Raymont's documentary on my life was shortlisted for the Oscars or I won the Olivier Award, this is not about me, I will be gone soon and all these wonderful actors and directors will be gone soon and what will be left, if anything at all, oh vanity of vanities, is what we created together, what may be left, if we are lucky, is some trace of faint beauty, some slight hope of kindness prevailing, some person somewhere who has tasted freedom and has been inspired to yearn for more freedom, more beauty, more justice, I am only a vehicle for a force that is in the universe and is blowing through me. It's all right, perhaps inexorable given my personality and my damaged past of exclusion, all right to flit in and out of that world of celebrities as long as you don't believe in the flashing bulbs or the hype or the praise, as long as you remember the man who learned a lesson about loyalty and truth in Holland, the man who learned a lesson about terror and truth from the anonymous people of Chile, as long as I never forget the lesson about narcissism and truth that man learned in Mendoza on a night of humiliation that I now recall as a blessing.

 

Fragment from the Diary of My Return to Chile in 1990

OCTOBER 8

This morning, I completed the play.

It's been night and noon and every hour in between, squeezing any extra minutes out of the day in order to have it ready for staging before I leave for Duke three months from now, I've never felt so possessed by a story.

I've ended up writing a thriller.

In that isolated house by the sea, in an atmosphere as claustrophobic as any Agatha Christie setting, Paulina subjects the man she believes to be her tormentor to all manner of indignities, insists that all she wants is the truth from him. Dr. Miranda protests his innocence and is defended by Paulina's husband, Gerardo, for a variety of reasons. What would happen to the country, to the rule of law, if aggrieved citizens engaged in vigilante justice? And what would happen to the transition, to its delicate balance of power that could be so easily upset, to the pact between former enemies that has guaranteed impunity to the followers and accomplices and executioners of the dictatorship? And what if this Roberto Miranda is not guilty, what if Paulina has misidentified the perpetrator, is attacking the wrong person with circumstantial evidence that would not stand up in a courtroom? What if her thirst for revenge ends up destroying the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and its ability to heal the wounds of the land? But behind the legal, philosophical, and political arguments that Paulina's lawyer husband wields are his more personal motives: How will this "trial" affect Gerardo's career, compromise his meteoric rise and possible appointment as minister of justice?

And what about Paulina?

Paulina must decide, during one long day and night, who she really is, if her pain has turned her into somebody like the doctor who played Schubert while he raped her, or if she is able to step outside the cycle of violence she did not initiate but in which she is nevertheless trapped.

Of course, before she can even ask herself the fundamental question about her identity, she needs to outwit both the doctor and her husband, she needs to set a trap for them so she can reclaim her Schubert as a balm to the better part of her soul rather than a reminder of the perversity that men are capable of in the worst circumstances. Only then can Paulina's ordeal, and the play itself, come to an end, only then can those in the audience ask themselves those very questions about their pain, their complicity, their country.

The audience? While writing the play, I had occasion to summarize the plot for some friends, a couple of them quite well placed in the corridors of power. After the hackneyed smiles of encouragement, a sort of hesitation crept into their eyes and curled out of their lips and ... what they said and did not say, merely implied, was that the story I had described might turn out to be, well, inconvenient. Maybe the country's not ready, maybe you should wait, what if it isn't the right time for this sort of provocation?

Not the right time?

When I confided these misgivings to my psychologist friend Elizabeth Lira, she responded that the people now in power fear me. Me? Feared? Yes, because I know them intimately, the elite of this country, the men who led the Resistance, I'm projecting the doubts they themselves harbor about this transition, reminding them of the price they have to pay for stability, the qualms they cannot afford to recognize.

So Chile has no place for Paulina. But she isn't dead. She may be deserted but she isn't dead—and I, for one, with my words am going to bring her out of the darkness.

Not just you, Ariel. Because what better sign that you are back from exile than to have written a play that requires a community to stage it and a community to receive it and a community to support it, a play written and spoken in Spanish and simmered in the same language of rage and hope that is being suffocated in the streets of our city, what better homecoming gift?

And yet I cannot ignore the world beyond the borders of this land either.

My labors are not yet over.

I still have to translate the play into English.

That's the pact my languages have subscribed to, the truce they reached in their war for my throat. These last ten years in the United States have brought me to accept the glorious plurality of my bilingual existence. It may have been in Spanish that La Muerte y la Doncella has been conceived, in Spanish that Paulina was tortured and Miranda swears he's innocent and Gerardo looks for a way out, but English has not been absent from the creative process.

Indeed, perhaps it was only because English was inside me, exile was inside me, whispering hints as the play was being written in Spanish, perhaps because distance has attended this birth, even if I am geographically installed here in our house in La Reina—maybe that is what has helped me to avoid the traps of realism. My play has not, after all, depicted what happened in Chile but in a country of the imagination where Paulina can have some measure of justice, at least in the moonscape of her mind, and this makes the play, perhaps, meaningful to other places around the world that, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, are going through parallel processes of transition.

At the end of November, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London is holding a week against censorship during which, one evening, they'll stage my play Reader. But Death and the Maiden, as it will be called in English, would seem to be more appropriate, maybe they'll perform that, recognizing its relevance. Which would allow me to hedge my bets, let my work spread its wings in the wider world where I have spent most of the last two decades. Just in case Paulina's story really is inconvenient for Chile. Because I can't help but wonder if this expedition into the madness of this country only has a future outside the country itself, what if the success I thirst for will be in English and not in Spanish?

What if nobody wants to stage it in Santiago, what if they are too scared?

…

BEHIND THAT rush to showcase the play abroad, to arrange a reading in London, there were problems I didn't want to admit, a conflict with the cultural elite of the country that had been smoldering under the suface of all those visits before our 1990 return. I had prefered to ignore a residue of resentment, a hint dropped now and then regarding the luxurious lives exiles led, snide comments about my éxito, how unfair, some people kept saying, that so many deserving Chilean authors were unknown abroad. I had brushed these comments aside, chose not to ask myself why such scant appreciation was expressed by those who had most benefited from my solidarity.

I had not done my work in order to be thanked, at least that's what I believed in exile when I'd answer a needy telephone call at dawn, when I sent funds to artists back home or organized trips for them abroad in search of support, when I opened doors and wrote articles and lobbied the powerful. My model had been Dersu Uzala, the hunter in Kurosawa's film who leaves food and water and blankets in a Siberian cave without ever knowing who will be fed and warmed in the future because of his charity—that's how I projected my selflessness. But the moral of the fable comes a lifetime later, when the protagonist, feeble and old and lost in a blizzard on another part of the tundra, stumbles upon a refuge where some nameless person has left succor for distressed travelers. Just as Dersu had in the past. So I guess that, after all, I was expecting some measure of reciprocity, I nursed the subconscious notion while in exile that, back in Chile, I'd be greeted with open arms.

Instead, most of the people who had any cultural or political power, including many of my former comrades in exile, turned their backs on outsiders like me. They had set their sights on ascending in status, becoming insiders, they were clawing their way into society—a desire that would be symbolized, as I saw it, by their inclusion in the sanctified halls of El Mercurio.

El Mercurio has been, since its founding in 1827, the conservative voice of a conservative country, distilling its presumed wisdom with dry superciliousness, the ideological mortar holding the bricks of traditional Chile together, the arbiter of our land's destiny. Rabidly anti-Allendista, it had used CIA money provided by Nixon and Kissinger to spearhead the offensive against our president; it had been more responsible than any other entity in Chile for bringing him down. Then, during the dictatorship, its owners were among the staunchest supporters of Pinochet, deriding the relatives of the Desaparecidos as liars, imparting from arch editorial pages the reactionary direction in which the regime needed to go. It was the opposite of everything I stood for, yet it was indispensable to read because of its importance and, in effect, its journalistic excellence. El Mercurio could ignore you, but you couldn't ignore El Mercurio.

Even abroad I couldn't escape its allure, and as I read through the pages my mother-in-law sent, I remarked upon an intriguing shift over time. El Mercurio had always flaunted a society section, a few pages where Chile's dinerati paid to display baptisms and weddings and corporate milestones. As the prosperity of that opulent class grew with each Pinochet decree privatizing the wealth of Chile, those pages—called Páginas Sociales—also grew disproportionately: dozens of group photographs of cocktail parties, openings of clinics and anniversaries of boutiques, a Who's Who of Chile's haute monde, only the right sort of people, only supporters of the military government.

And then, from the plebiscite of 1988 onward, drip by drip, face by face, the democratic opposition that was on its way to power started to filter into those windows of social life, this figure and that one and this other woman, discreet appearances at first by those people soon to be in charge of the country but who had gone unmentioned in the official newspaper for decades. Their gradual presence in high society suddenly became gossip-worthy, this guy, that guy, this wife, that lover, this executive next to this former exile, this colonel sipping a martini close to that other former political prisoner, Hey, I saw that you were at the inauguration of Suzie's art gallery, claro que sí, and I saw you were at that alumni dinner, I didn't know you had graduated from St. Margaret's British School for Girls. The former pariahs lining up to have their pictures snapped and their lives validated by the right-wing media, given a certificate of good manners and buena conducta by the owners of Chile. Such breathless zeal to be ushered into the enemy's jet-set pages, that stampede towards half-baked eminence by what Angélica sardonically called the Red Set, that herd of dissidents clamoring for the limelight, was disconcerting, or maybe nauseating is a better term, given that the price of admission was to refrain from comments that might discomfit the hosts.

These páginas sociales and what was christened la taquilla, the in-crowd, this danza versallesca, came to epitomize for me the new Chile that was rising from the ashes of the dictatorship. It was one where friends and foes could coexist for the good of the patria, an uneasy alliance between those who wanted to forget the past because it was full of their crimes and those who wanted to forget it because it was too painful, because remembering that terror too insistently could lead to its repetition, and so the word dictadura disappeared from our vocabulary and the more neutral régimen took its place, and it became vulgar to refer to los pobres or víctimas, as if not speaking about something could cause it to vanish, the winners and the losers (but who won, who lost?) mingling under the hushed chandeliers, no atrocities under the soft glinting lights, not when the tea is being served, a country where it is obscene to mention sexual organs on TV but not obscene to have applied electricity to them in some nearby dungeon, a country where abortion is outlawed but not those who aborted a country, ay qué mal gusto, where are your manners?

Like my protagonist Paulina, I wanted no part of that world, that compromise, that room where women come and go talking of Michelangelo. Nevertheless, in some sick zone inside me there crouched the Ariel who had stood onstage in Mendoza with Sting and who now wanted to be recognized and feted by El Mercurio, the Ariel who, after so many homes abandoned and friends left behind, only wanted to belong, an Ariel who somehow assumed he was a member of this club and entitled to talk of Michelangelo. Except that I knew, and those who did not invite me must have known, that at some point I might mention torture, rats in a vagina, and crushed genitalia, ay qué mal gusto, how tasteless. No wonder the door was being slammed in my face. I was a nobody, a don nadie easy to ignore with impunity, and I couldn't have cared less and I couldn't have cared more, I craved to be included and was delighted to be excluded. Apareciste en El Mercurio? Did you appear in El Mercurio? No. I disappeared from El Mercurio. In a far more benign way than so many of my unfortunate compatriots, I had also been desaparecido.

And now, twenty years later, I can appreciate how lucky I was to be airbrushed from the ballrooms of the new elite. That omission nourished La Muerte y la Doncella, forced me to stay connected to Paulina's fiery voice. If I had not been cast from the halls of power, it would have been more difficult to hear Paulina's outrage and the seething, hidden story of Chile.

What a favor they did for me, those who forgot that I existed, forgot me so I could remember who I really was. It was an estrangement that Paulina would reveal to me as she grew inside, what that fictional being whispered to me from a pain that was real: there's no place in Chile for someone who speaks his mind when most people want to shroud their emotions, no room for a writer who has spent far too many years contesting silence to yield to its lies now. Now more than ever, when nobody can jail or banish you or kick you out of a job, now when the only thing that can stop you is yourself, your wish to be loved, sneaked into a photograph, paraded with the glitterati; now more than ever democracy needs to be strengthened by dissidence and criticism and ambiguity. I'm a man who would rather say I'm sorry after I've done something than ask permission before I act. I probably would have written the play anyway, anyhow, even if I'd been hailed by the official world of politics and culture, given a role or at least accorded respect by the new government, incorporated into rituals and gatherings and photo ops of the crème de la crème presiding over Chile. But fortunately they never gave me the chance to be tempted.

Why was I hurt by their rejection? Why did I keep banging on the doors of people who had been my friends in exile and before exile and now had power, like Enrique Correa, who was Aylwin's éminence grise, the president's right-hand man? Didn't I realize that by leaving the party I might have gained independence but had lost clout, access, a brotherhood that would take care of my interests? Why did I suppose that in the Chile where Allende was safely dead there would be a welcome mat out for loose cannons and utopians like me? Why did it take me so long to realize that unpleasant truth?

I had been spoiled.

When I went back to Chile in 1990 there was a memory inside me, and it's inside me now that I know I will never go back to live there, it's here in me, that welcome-home dinner hosted by a hundred friends and compañeros on our first return from exile, in September of 1983.

In better times Angélica and I had lunched at La Querencia, a sprawling restaurant nestled in a ravine way up in the hills of Santiago. A place of such quiet in the afternoon that one could hear below, half hidden from view by a copse of lovely weeping willows, a brook with water so clear that it seemed primeval in its purity. At night, though, it was the noisiest spot in Santiago, where clusters of celebrants guzzled mediocre food and danced to an orchestra of blaring horns and outrageous percussionists.

Our ten years of absence had not changed La Querencia. The same orchestra seemed to be performing the same boleros and rumbas for the same hordes of boisterous merrymakers in the large main dining room. Our party had reserved an annex with movable frosted-glass doors that kept prying eyes out, but not the unbearable racket.

We greeted our fellow guests of honor, José Antonio Viera-Gallo and his wife, Te, who had just returned from their Italian exile. In the midst of our hugs, he yelled out—above the din of the music—something about a rowboat.

"What?"

"The rowboat finally brought us home, just as you said it would!"

The last time Angélica and I had visited José Antonio and Te in Rome, back in 1978, ten or twelve of us had ended up, after a raucous dinner, on the wooden floor of the Viera-Gallos' small apartment, where I had insisted that we all start rowing, that if we put enough muscle into it we would arrive in Chile. So the company took up invisible oars and heaved to, chanting our hope into the imaginary wind, crossing the Mediterranean and past the Pillars of Hercules, look, there's Gibraltar, and then into the Atlantic and the Cabo de Hornos and the Straits of Magellan and up Patagonia to Valparaíso, and we kept on rowing on land, like resplendent galley slaves, rowing for our lives, rowing ourselves out of banishment, willing ourselves home. And now we had made it, we had joined our friends, not in any of those remote, alien cities, but here in La Querencia—a word derived from querer, to want and also to love, querencia, which means longing and is close to cariño, affection, this is where we are loved.

I hardly noticed, as the evening progressed, what we were eating, what we were even saying—as long as I could feast my eyes on each face, all those who had struggled for our return, to keep some semblance of a country safe for us. And then Jorge Molina, a lawyer prominent in the defense of human rights, tinkled his half-empty wine glass with a spoon and stood up, informing us wryly that he'd be brief, because the band had awarded him merely a three-minute reprieve to deliver his speech.

He told us how much those who had stayed had needed us all these years. We have grown, he said, and you have grown, and we know that what you have lived out there, in that world, has made you different from us, but we have to believe that not that much has changed. We may not be the same people of ten years ago, too much has happened, we've seen too much, but still you can recognize us. And now, he continued, we've earned the chance, we've fought for this chance, we've paid for this chance, esta oportunidad, to begin a process of integration, for us and for you, it's time to bring together our sameness and our differences.

The simplicity and truth of his words were enhanced by the calm lull of intimacy, the first time that night that our ears weren't being bombarded with the blaring music. As if on cue, as if some hidden maestro had been eavesdropping, a cha-cha from the next room exploded. A roar of approval! The rest of La Querencia's clientele had not appreciated being cut off from their own version of communal joy. A thumping of feet next door indicated their intention to make up for the lost three minutes with an exacerbation of their previous bacchanalian efforts. Abruptly, the glass doors swung open and a snake dance of young women burst into our room.

"La novia," they shouted. "Queremos a la novia!"

The owner, afraid of the repercussions of hosting our troupe of flaming dissidents, must have informed the other guests that we were holding a wedding party, much to the delight of the bachelorette amazons bidding farewell to one of their brood before she tied the knot. They selected Te as our lucky bride. Wisely, she accepted her assigned role and signaled for the rest of us to join in the fun.

Liberated onto the dance floor of the main dining room, our small crowd let loose all the accumulated tension of our dinner, dancing, not in tow or coupled up, but in a manic, delirious jumble, until the band launched into one of the all-time favorites, "Ali Baba y los Cuarenta Ladrones," to which we sang along at the top of our lungs, repeating the main stanza: "Ábrete, ábrete, Sésamo." Those words, an innocent call for a magic door called Sésamo to open up, took on a special resonance for our group, which had spent the last ten years trying to open the country, ten years of doors being slammed in our faces and on our fingers, doors being battered down by the secret police, every door in Chile either being closed or pried open, until we had managed to create a crack through which we had all managed to somehow return. That's what had done it, first the whispers and then defiant speeches, and now shouts, demanding to be rid of the forty thieves, and this was what each of us was thinking, because our one hundred jabbing fingers were emphasizing the ábrete, ábrete, Sésamo, we were screaming our disguised political slogan and our undisguised emotions, gathering energy for the doors still left to unlock, we were celebrating our invincibility now that we were together. Because this was not only the first time those who had remained in Chile were able to dance with exiles like us; it was also the first time they had been able to dance with one another at all in a public place.

The wild young women who had enticed us to this carnival took the lead again, with a different game: at one corner of the dance floor, the friends of the bride-to-be grabbed her and threw their victim into the air, barely catching her on the way down.

Our gang was not going to be outdone.

Viera-Gallo was soon flying up, up into the air. I was laughing my head off at his gasping protests, laughing even though I knew that it would be my turn next—and then I looked up and saw why he was pleading to be set down. Just above us, a fan hung from the ceiling, turning ominously a couple of inches away from the flying body. I watched in fascination as the tossers counted out eight, and nine, and ... ten, and Viera-Gallo was finally safe, limbs intact, and, oh no, it was my turn next!

I tried to warn them, the fan, the fan, be careful, hey, look, look up there. But nobody paid the slightest attention. Up into the air with me!

I see one of my feet flail, approach the fan, then recede as I begin my descent. I point to the fan, gag and sputter, and I am on my way up once more, and this time the fan blades seem even closer. Roars of exultation answer my nervous hoots, what a welcome, eh, Ariel? I can visualize the tabloid headlines: RETURNED EXILE KILLED BY FAN. I'd escaped death at the presidential palace in 1973, I'd survived all the iniquities and mortifications of exile; at least let me die in some epic, solemn way, not like this. Now they've reached seven and that lucky number pacifies me. I attain a plateau of acceptance just as both my feet land squarely on the ground and it's time to go home, but the evening is not quite over.

Back in our frosted-glass-doored room, my pal Manuel Jofré hands me a book of my poems. "A time to live and a time to die," he says with a shake of his red hair, "and a time for poetry."

"Listen, I'm in no condition to—"

"We've bribed the orchestra"—and, in effect, a moment later another hush settled in. "I think they're on our side, just working-class stiffs, and they're giving us three minutes, no matter what the owner says—the Pinochetista bastard."

I began reading "Testamento" to my friends, my most notorious poem: "When they tell you I'm not a prisoner, / don't believe them. / They'll have to admit it / someday. / When they tell you they released me, / don't believe them. / They'll have to admit / it's a lie / someday, algún día."

As I got to those words, algún día, the orchestra started up again, playing a slow, low bolero, a way of bowing to the pressure of the owner while at the same time showing solidarity with us by choosing something mellifluous and relatively quiet. Pasarán más de mil años, muchos más, the crooner sang softly, a thousand years will pass, more, many more than a thousand years.

Suddenly it all made sense, a pattern seemed to be emerging. We had belted out ábrete, ábrete, Sésamo, demanded that the doors be opened and the thieves be judged, and here was the answer, a thousand years would have to pass before ... what? Before there was justice? Before the doors would open? Before we'd see each other again? Before there could be true love? As the volume of the music implacably rose, I began to scream my verses: "When they tell you / I'm in France / don't believe them. / Don't believe them when they show you / my false I.D. / don't believe them. / Don't believe them when they show you / the photo of my body, / don't believe them."

It was as if I were calling from exile, from one thousand years away, determined to be heard. That sonofabitch owner of the restaurant wanted to silence us? Well, my voice would carry over the wafting melody of the bolero, reaching every last patron of La Querencia. "Don't believe them when they tell you / the moon is the moon, / if they tell you the moon is the moon, / that this is my voice on tape, / that this is my signature on a confession, / if they say a tree is a tree / don't believe them, / don't believe / anything they tell you / anything they swear to / anything they show you, / don't believe them."

Reaching out to an audience I had never expected, to the husbands and wives celebrating a silver anniversary, the girls saying farewell to their betrothed buddy, the birthday people, and the revelers simply out for a good time—in the other vast room they were not dancing, only listening, the way you listen to a train by the tremble of the tracks before it emerges from the distance, they were listening and only the music was louder and louder, whipped up by the owner, I could picture him almost like a satanic conductor in a frenzy, and he wouldn't like my ending, these words: "And finally / when / that day / comes / when they ask you / to identify the body / and you see me / and a voice says / we killed him / the poor bastard died / he's dead, / when they tell you / that I am / completely absolutely definitely / dead / don't believe them, / don't believe them, / don't believe them."

no les creas

no les creas

no les creas.

The applause came not only from those in our room, but also from the other side of the doors. While we'd been ostracized and persecuted, those people, unknown to us, had spent these ten infernal years living and partly living, spectators or less than spectators, dancing to trivial tunes, blowing out candles on a cake, giving thanks for small graces. They had been there all the time, beyond our speeches and even our plans to convert them. And now their celebrations and ours had spilled over, invaded one another's spaces, destroyed the immobility reigning over their lives. Everyone there, each of the men and women welcoming us, each of the exiles who had just returned, we had been self-contained ghettos, all of us, monasteries in the midst of barbarians, we had somehow survived, stayed alive long enough to reunite now, on this dance floor, begin to cross-fertilize, sing again.

In all the years before that event, and all the years since, I've never quite experienced the mix of styles, dreams, desires, classes, as at La Querencia that night. It was a glorious anticipation of what the country could become if we managed to rid ourselves of the dictator—and of our own inner dictators, the censors inside, if we managed to open ourselves to what wasn't planned, dared to create a community as rich and plural as the one formed over the last minutes on the dance floor, if we could let ourselves go and risk the fan shredding us to pieces as we kicked down every last door in the universe.

This is what I knew, that is what I swore never to forget, that it is worth trying for that taste of heaven, no matter what the cost, no matter how dangerous it may be, no matter the noise trying to drown you out.

That is what spoiled me and cradled me and nursed me, that vision of a home for us all.

That's what really hurt, then, on my return to Chile in 1990, continues to hurt each time I go back to a country that seems farther and farther from that communal dream of solidarity. That's what grieved me on the trip in 2006, a sense of mourning that simply will not recede. The certainty that it wasn't me who had been betrayed by Chile, but rather that Chile had betrayed itself, its better self, the wondrous Chile I could not forget, I will not forget, not in a thousand years.

 

Fragment from the Diary of My Return to Chile in 1990

NOVEMBER 10

I wish I'd been able to tell my parents what's worrying me, sit down and out and out tell them, but they just left for Argentina after a brief one-week visit and I never broached the subject.

They love coming back to the Chile where they spent so many happy years, where they still have a large group of friends—and they've discovered a delightful little hotel in Providencia, the Hotel Orly. Though Angélica has invited them to stay with us, as they invariably did during our years of exile, my mother—no matter how much she would like to be close to her grandson Joaquín every minute of the day—understands that the house in Zapiola is really not ready to receive guests like my parents, who need many comforts in their old age. Angélica has too much on her hands as it is, Ariel, my mother said to me, you should be concerned about her, this return has really exhausted her.

For a while, as we wandered through Europe and then the United States, my parents toyed with the idea that, when we came back to Chile, they might return here as well, but the truth is that they have settled into their Buenos Aires querido and can't contemplate another exile.

Besides, my dad has so much to do back there. He's eighty-three years old and still going strong. After the Argentine dictatorship fell, he became one of President Alfonsín's economic advisers, though he refused to cooperate with Carlos Menem, Alfonsín's successor, wanted nothing to do with neoliberal policies imposed by Washington, preferred to create, with a group of younger economists and engineers, a think tank that could provide a critical perspective on the Argentine economy.

It's been great having them here, to bathe for a few days in their affection, revel in the fact that we finally inhabit, if not the same city or country, at least the same continent and latitude, only two hours away by plane. Just in case...

For as long as I can remember, there it was, the dread of their death. When I was young, I'd conjure up the day when I would sit by my mother's sweet side and hold her hand as she said goodbye, the night when my father went, quietly or raging, into the dark, and always in that picture I would be next to them, Angélica is there, our children, the whole family, for the passing, in death as in life, always, always close. Exile disturbed this vision, suggested that they might die in an empty room, whispered that I would hear of their ultimate illness when I was far away, that I would not be there to keep each of them company as they crossed whatever river of sorrow and oblivion that awaited them, I prayed that my migrations would cease before that moment came.

And now here we are, back in Santiago, just as we had prophesied, the family together, as it should be, as it has been for the long history of humanity, since the first burial mounds millions of years ago when our ancestors learned how to deal with the impossible uncertainty of death, that mystery explored and affirmed in so many multiple ceremonies, that sacred duty towards the past and the future, that connecting moment, the last hello before the first real goodbye. Now here we are in Santiago, and we ... and I...

I did not tell my Chebochy, my Chúa, that we have been thinking of leaving Chile for good. I did not tell them because I dare not admit it to myself. Even to write this here is to make it intolerably real, plausible, something that may indeed happen. Talking is different, Angélica and I have been talking about this possible new migration, in some sense it has been corroding us since we arrived, as soon as Chile proved to be such a grueling country in far too many ways, we've been tossing around alternatives. What would it mean, what would be the consequences, how would I deal emotionally with a new departure after dreaming of this return for such a long time? What would it mean for Angélica to once again be separated from her mother and her three siblings? We have worried the subject, but no resolution has been reached. I have been too busy with the play, and the play is rooting me to Chile, giving me hope that it will perform some sort of miracle, burrow me into the ground of the country as if I were a wayward tree, help me avoid a new exile.

Several times I was about to tell my parents that we might stay in the United States once we leave Santiago in January, it was on the tip of my tongue, knowing that they would encourage us, support our decisions as they always have, always selflessly willing to sacrifice their happiness for ours.

But I couldn't confide in them, not this time. How can I tell them that there is a lonely dawn in the future that awaits them and me, how can I tell the man and the woman who gave me life that I may not be there when they most need me, that I will not be there to say goodbye?

…

SMACK IN the middle of our 2006 trip to Chile, we were startled by the news that General Pinochet had suffered a serious heart attack.

My first reaction was incredulity. Just as my poem advocated, I didn't believe him, didn't believe anything he said, or anything any of his cronies said about him. He had already faked dementia in order to escape the extradition sought by Spain when he was arrested in London in 1998. He had fooled the British authorities who were quite willing to see their unwanted guest depart even if, as soon as Pinochet arrived at the Santiago airport, he stood up from his wheelchair with both hands in the air like a triumphant pugilist.

So I was more than justified in doubting this new "sickness" of Pinochet's, especially as it happened to coincide with yet another major indictment in Chilean courts—more than a hundred had been filed and accepted by a judiciary shamed into acting by the British arrest. But he was ninety-one years old and his physicians seemed genuinely concerned, so Peter Raymont and I decided to head for the Hospital Militar de Santiago.

I had two encounters there with Pinochet supporters, both of them women. The first was at the back of the medical facility. As I was talking to a group of journalists, a slim, elegantly dressed woman passed by on clacking high heels and spat out an insult, calling me Comunista asqueroso, a dirty, revolting Communist, didn't answer when I asked her receding back, not aggressively, what I had done to merit such an attack. She just swished away around the corner to the front of the building, where other Pinochet zealots were crying out for their dying leader, led by a small, chubby woman, lips smeared with lipstick, fingers clutching a portrait of her hero, a litany of tears streaming from behind incongruous dark glasses. Here was a woman making a pathetic spectacle of herself for all the world to see, defending a man who had been indicted by courts abroad and in Santiago as a torturer and a thief, accusing her adversaries of being ungrateful, of having mala memoria, the wrong sort of memory.

And yet I was inexplicably, uncontrollably moved by her misery. I waited until there were no reporters hovering over her lamentations, so absorbed in my feelings that I forgot I was being filmed by our own crew as I approached the woman and told her, in a soft and courteous voice, how I had mourned Allende and therefore understood that it was now her turn to mourn her leader—but also wanted her to realize how much pain there was on our side. If we could acknowledge the errors of Allende, could she not do so with the terrors of Pinochet?

This sequence of the film, where I speak to that woman as she listens with surprisingly quiet attentiveness, is the one that, particularly in Latin America, calls forth the most criticism. How, people ask, could you do that? How could you validate that woman's grief for Pinochet, honor it as similar to your grief for Allende? How could I extend my sympathy to an enemy who had celebrated our sufferings, caused by her dying hero? What possessed me? That's what people keep asking.

The right word. In effect, I found myself possessed. It was as if some deep turmoil or angel inside had overwhelmed me.

Psychologists have discovered that a baby will cry more forcefully and for a longer time when she hears the distressed cries of other children than if the baby hears a recording of her own sobbing voice. Think about it: a baby is more upset by the voice of someone else's agony than by her own troubles. The baby intensifies her cries in solidarity with the other, shares the pain, signals to the other child that he is not alone. For me, this is proof, if we ever required it, that compassion is ingrained in our species, coded in the circuits of our brain.

This is how we managed to become human, by creating the conditions for a social network where the anguish of others is intolerable, where we need to comfort the afflicted. It is certainly not the only thing that defines us as humans; we are also characterized by cruelty and selfishness, apathy and avarice. But each of us can decide what defines our primordial humanity, and I have come to conclude, come to choose, after a lifetime of confrontations, that our most important trait is the preeminence of empathy with others. That's what constituted the base for our evolution, what lay the groundwork for our search for language, whose very core is the articulation and belief that someone else will accompany us through life. Compassion is at the origin of our species' quest for the imagination with which we can smuggle ourselves into and under alien skin. What possessed me, then, was quite simple: I felt sorry for that woman.

Even so, that act of mine needs to be interrogated. That hysterical woman, after all, was ranting against those who have mala memoria, targeting people like me, this very memoir, the act of remembering Allende, refusing to forget the crimes of the General. It is her memory against ours, and there is nothing I can do in this world—or doubtless in the next one—to change what she recalls, what she has selected to recall in order to defend the identity she has built for herself. Her narrative, her most intimate story, the myth by which she has lived for decades, is that Allende was a socialist who threatened her peace and property, and thus Allende's barbarian followers had to be violently suppressed by substitute father Pinochet.

It's hard to open a dialogue with people like that, as proven by the harridan at the back of the hospital who insulted me and then hissed away, gave me no chance even to approach, as I did when I saw a crack in the barrier erected by her fellow Pinochetista of the lipstick-smeared lips. Of course, in return for telling her that I understood her distress, I asked that she also try to put herself in my shoes, realize that I was not affected by a mala memoria but merely memories that did not coincide with hers, and that this was not, however, a reason to kill or detest each other.

It was an encounter that in some way culminated a search for answers about coexistence that had started when I had sat close to Jaime Guzmán at the concert and had fled from his presence, left him to enjoy the balm of Beethoven by himself, a search that continued after the coup and deep into exile. It could almost be ventured that my reaction to that woman was a response to my own self, the enraged Ariel who had assaulted that fascist librarian Hübner on the steps of the Hotel Des Indes in The Hague, and the disgusted Ariel who had jogged in Chile and did not know who was an enemy and who was a friend, and the puzzled Ariel who had asked in Washington how you cohabit with those who have conspired to destroy your dreams. My encounter with the wailing Pinochetista was a culmination because, from Death and the Maiden onward, I had been meditating extensively, in plays and novels, in poems and essays, on the walls that separate us from those who have done us irreparable harm, I had compelled my characters to deal with their nastiest antagonists and ask themselves how to avoid the sweet trap of victimhood and retribution, I had suggested in my most recent play, Purgatorio, that atonement was essential for any significant dialogue to transpire.

But when it came to real life, I could not wait eternally for that repentance. In real life, I felt the urge, if only for a minute, to break down those walls myself, leap across the divide, imagine a different sort of world. It's possible that my heart may have misguided me, but if that inconsolable woman was blind to reality and I had one eye open, a glimmer of an eye open, wasn't it crucial that I take the first faltering step, in hopes of unearthing some sliver of kindness that must be hidden inside every enemy's heart. Or would it be better to jail my opponents, kill them, exile them, start the violence all over again? Isn't it necessary, then, for each of us to disarm ourselves, conquer the fear of our nakedness, admit that none among us is so perfect or saintly that we are immune from the temptations of dominance?

Which doesn't mean I was offering reconciliation or forgiveness to that Pinochetista fanatic. For a long-term ceasefire to exist, some remorse would have had to bite inside, she would have had to be willing to inhabit my memories, to accept what someone like Carlos the carpenter had been through during twenty-five years of trying to keep alive his own river of memory in the midst of the conflagration. I would want her to recognize his right to show his portrait of Allende publicly, as she does her portrait of Pinochet, without fear, in front of the cameras of the world. I would want her to know what Adelaida had to go through, recognize that it's a tragedy for our country that a daughter should mourn her father in this way and know him only through photos and the memories of others, that she should feel compelled to transmit her sorrow to the faraway grandchild. I would want that fascist mourner of Pinochet to acknowledge Adelaida's right to justice, our right to remember, our right to mourn.

That woman was undeniably very far from that state of grace. But we did create, she and I, some minimal space for a minimal understanding, a gentle interlude—and history has shown us that those truces when ardent foes begin to speak to each other can be the start of something miraculous. You do not arrive at such armistices effortlessly, you often need to drive your opponents to the table through force and cunning, you cannot suppose that such meetings of the mind will simply happen. Each small step is fraught with peril and false enticements and perverse illusions. In fact, on the Monday after I had met up with that sobbing woman and reached some sort of understanding with her, I had a different sort of altercation with Patricio Melero, an ultra-right-wing congressman from Jaime Guzmán's Opus Dei–inspired political party.

We had both been invited to appear on a television program to respond to the question of whether General Pinochet, still agonizing inside the military hospital, should be afforded the honor of a state funeral. When I said that he didn't even deserve a military funeral, because he hadn't been a true warrior, had never given his enemies a chance to bury their dead, as Achilles had in that founding epic of Western civilization The Iliad, Melero called me vindictive, unwilling to get over the past. I fired a question back: When did you first know that people were being tortured in Chile?

He floundered, first claiming that he'd never known about torture during Pinochet's government, had only recently heard about those "excesses," and then went on to flagrantly declare the opposite, that he and his political party had intervened over and over to stop people from being tortured. When the moderator tried to move into less uncomfortable territory—like so many Chileans who prefer to look the other way, he wanted to bury the past so he could go on with his life and his program—I asked my final question: Who served the coffee?

Because el General did not act alone.

Beyond the many who pulled the trigger or plunged the knife or attached the metal clasp are those who bought the materials with which those horrors were perpetrated, those who kept the accounts and balanced the budget for the purchases, those who rented the basements and cleaned them out, those who paid the agents' salaries and typed out the reports and confessions, and indeed, served the coffee and cookies when the heroic combatants wearied of their marathon task, and yes, those who averted their eyes from the pain.

For those less visible accomplices, responsibility is more easily denied, making it even harder to engender those instances when adversaries meet and reach at least some sort of agreement, a pact to resort to dialogue rather than carnage to impose their points of view. Far too frequently those moments close just as abruptly as they open and we find ourselves yanked back to where we began. Even if that wall of denial is splintered for the snap and crack of a minute by someone like me, there will be no further progress unless the other side, people like that woman who insulted me, like the woman who was closeted in her anguish over the impending death of a tyrant, there will be no significant change unless people like them, like that congressman who knew his compatriots were torturing and did nothing to stop it, manage to take a step of their own, realize that to admit their collusion in the crimes is a way of liberating themselves from their own prison of prejudice and hatred.

How can this be done? Or maybe: Can this be done at all?

On a trip to South Africa in 1997 I was given a glimpse of an answer, of how brief truces between enemies can be made to last longer than a minute, become part of a country's major reckoning with itself.

South Africa is a country that, like Chile, like so many other nations around the world, has suffered severe repression and then experimented with a negotiated transition to democracy and a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a country that therefore offered me, on that visit thirteen years ago, a chance to ask, in a different context and history, some of the same questions that had been worrying me over the years.

Eager to see how you commemorate the past so it does not die, I asked to be taken to the District Six Museum in Cape Town, that site of conscience erected in a multiethnic neighborhood torn apart by discrimination, its inhabitants uprooted and rendered homeless, inner exiles scattered to the winds of their own homeland. As I toured the museum with one of its guardians, he told me about a recent hearing of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. A policeman of Afrikaner origin admitted killing the parents of a child and expressed regret for his actions. When the grandmother of the boy asked him what would happen when she was dead, who would care for this orphan, the policeman answered, after a pause, "Then I guess I will have to take the child home with me."

It is a wondrous story that has stayed with me.

That policeman was embodying a model of behavior, was informing the grandmother and the eavesdropping world beyond her that if we cannot undo the damage of the past, we can at least strive to undo the damage to the future, to prove by our actions today and tomorrow that we've learned from the terrors and sins of yesteryear. What other way to pay for the lives of a mother and a father than to bring home the child you orphaned, what other way to pay for a life taken than to give a life back?

And as a metaphor and epic drama, what more could we ask for, what better challenge to a world ripped apart by ethnic strife and war? I can think of no better plea for a multiracial, omnilinguistic home. Is that policeman not speaking across continents and time to the woman who years later cried for Pinochet? Is he not demanding that she take Adelaida and Paulina and Carlos the carpenter home with her, make them—and my pain as well—part of her life? Are we not all being invited to bring into our homes what is concealed behind the walls of our identity, that which most disturbs us, those memories from the thickets of others that we have considered to be alien, hazardous to our integrity? Is it not in that back-and-forth process of offering a refuge to those who are different that we can find intimations of what it means to reconcile or at least glimpse a pale path towards tolerance?

To find this path to peace is not a quest confined to Chile or South Africa or other lands that have suffered tyranny in our times. As we hurtle towards extinction, threatening to take with us our brothers and sisters and fellow creatures on this planet, it has become a task for all of humanity.

Because we are all in this together.

Maybe that is why I am writing this memoir, why it may matter to draw some lessons from a life so full of wanderings and conflicts. So I can send out this plea, teach this incredibly simple conclusion: we must trust one another. Despite all the loss, all the betrayals, we must trust one another or we shall all, all of us, surely die.

 

Fragment from the Diary of My Return to Chile in 1990

DECEMBER 20

It has been close to impossible to put the play on in Chile.

At first it seemed as if we would run into no problems once Julio Jung and María Elena Duvauchelle (coincidentally, two of the actors saved by Chris Reeve when they were threatened by death squads back in 1987) decided to stage it.

They were very enthusiastic, but had a question about the ending. It is what took longest to write, that last scene, where I interrupt the moment when Paulina is about to kill—or not kill—the man who may—or may not—be her torturer, the moment when she asks herself and Chile, What do we lose by not killing one of them, what do we lose? and then I have a mirror come down and we are in a concert hall and the audience is looking at its reflection while Gerardo explains how the commission's report, finally delivered, has given a voice to the dead, and then Paulina appears in evening dress and quietly sits down. Paulina, who has found her own voice during the play, is now silent, perhaps content with the small victory of listening to Schubert after years when his compositions would make her vomit, triumphant inasmuch as she has had her say, even if it was in the confines of her living room.

At this point Dr. Miranda enters and sits in the same row, all three of them now posed in front of us, looking straight into the audience as if in a concert hall, all of us, characters and spectators, part of one dreadful reality, reflected in the mirror of each other and in the mirror behind Paulina and Gerardo and the doctor. And then the Death and the Maiden quartet starts to play, and Paulina and the doctor glance at each other across the chasm that separates and joins them, them and us, they lock eyes—it is not clear if her tormentor is alive or dead, there in the flesh or as a ghost haunting her and us—they lock eyes and then look straight into the audience and into the future for an intolerably long time as the music plays and plays and plays.

María Elena and Julio understood that I wanted to break the illusion that what we've just seen is merely fictional, so the spectators can wonder which of those characters represents them, if Paulina or Gerardo or the doctor, or maybe the spectators are all three of those fragments of one country. María Elena and Julio agreed that this is a way of accusing us all of trying to cover up the tragedy we are living, the uncertainty we are trying to escape since the dictatorship ended.

Still, they were doubtful. A mirror coming down? From where? How to get this device without making the play prohibitively expensive—this is Chile, Ariel, and not Los Angeles, where hundreds of thousands of dollars are going to be exhausted to put on Widows next year. But their main concern was whether this resolution, worked on diligently with Rodrigo's help, would not leave the audience so dissatisfied and frustrated that the play might be a commercial failure, Julio and María Elena suggested that this could be one provocation too many.

I was adamant. If the spectators don't like the ending, then they should stream out of the theater and change the world, give that story a different ending in their own lives!

My passion was inflamed by what seems to me to be the underlying intellectual failure of our transition: a fear of complexity. I don't condemn it entirely. The past was so confrontational and divisive that people are, quite reasonably, wary of inciting more discord. But I abhor that gray unanimity and, above all, its hypocrisy—yesterday on television I saw congressmen from the left frivolously dancing with their right-wing colleagues in Parliament. It was for some noble cause, crippled kids, blind kids, autistic kids, certainly better to mambo alongside each other than to take out a gun and start shooting, but it still riles me, perhaps because they boogie in order to hide their substantial differences, everything swept under the rug. I abhor this sort of "reconciliation," because it plays to applause, feeds into the indifference, the lack of difference, the fear of difference. Indifference: a way of shielding oneself from the pain, of not letting the evil you have witnessed touch you. Pinochet has never had one ailment, bikes several miles every morning, lifts weights, boasts that he has una salud de hierro, is strong as steel. That's the essence of evil: to take the grief inflicted and transform it into muscle, vigor, potency. Whereas many former political prisoners, relatives of the Disappeared, exiles, and torture victims have cancer, terminal illnesses.

So it can break you down to dwell in pain forever, and the question is how to give yourself up to that pain, invite it into your life and give it a path out of that life without letting it destroy you, without savoring its sweet destructiveness, becoming addicted. That's Paulina's struggle, to leave that agony behind and yet not lapse into the narcotic of forgetfulness. My play might provide some preliminary answer to Chile's search for what to do with the grief, that final scene a way of establishing a zone of liberty, an ethical and aesthetic space that does not compromise, as the politicians must, in order to keep the soldiers in their barracks, keep the past from upsetting the future. But not me. I didn't come back to Chile in order to negotiate away Paulina's story.

Defiant words, but each day that passes makes it look less likely that La Muerte y la Doncella will ever get staged, at least in Chile.

The first crisis snaked up the day we had our inaugural reading of the play, in early November. Something was wrong: there was so much tension between Julio and María Elena that I thought she would end up really trussing him up, I felt he wanted to strangle her, and then Julio suddenly stood up and left, said he couldn't take this anymore, and it turned out that he and María Elena were splitting up, seeking a divorce after twenty years of marriage.

And that was that. We had to replace Julio, and then replace his replacement, and then our second male actor also opted out. Meanwhile, I flew to London, to the ICA, for the reading of the play, and Harold Pinter and his wife, Antonia Fraser, were there, and Peggy Ashcroft, and Peter Gabriel and Albie Sachs from South Africa and my beloved John Berger—and I got to watch the play with a first-class cast. So I'm convinced, after that London performance and the audience's passionate reaction, that the play can travel, has real legs.

Making me more determined, when I came back to Chile a few weeks ago, not to accept any more cuts that our committed director, Ana Reeves, was demanding in order not to overly offend the audience. We were rehearsing well with the two new substitute male actors yesterday in the modest theater María Elena rented on Vicuña Mackenna, and it seemed auspicious that it should be located almost directly opposite the Argentine embassy where, seventeen years ago, I sought asylum, one more circle in my life that was closing.

And then, as happened so many other times during his regime, General Pinochet decided to prove that the only circles that close in this country do so with his consent, that he can barge into any circle and any theater and bark out his orders and we have to obey or face the possibility that la muerte will not be merely words in a play, la muerte will stalk us all over again. He was angry that a congressional committee was about to investigate the money stolen by his son-in-law, which could lead to revelations about the millions Pinochet himself was said to have squirreled away. So he placed his troops on high alert, and there was a rumor that a new September 11 coup was in the offing, and both our male actors went pale and told us they were no longer willing to be part of a transgressive experiment where we'd be putting Pinochet on trial, at least symbolically, both of them capitulated to the fear that continues to corrode Chile.

So now the play will not be on before I leave, in three weeks, for my semester at Duke, we have to find two new actors, we have to see if the lease for the theater can be renewed, we have to scrounge for new financing. My dear friend John Friedman back in the States has offered to put some money into the production, bless his soul, but I said no, if we can't get Chile to support us, then why stage the play here? But the truth is that none of my contacts in the democratic government are answering phone calls, several activists at organizations prominent in the struggle against Pinochet have refused us funds to take the play to the shantytowns or on a tour of the country.

I wonder if all these obstacles do not constitute a warning that maybe it is not the time, after all, to force my compatriots to look in the mirror and see what we have become, what we still might avoid becoming if we can all burn with the truth that I have written. What if I am wrong to try to stage the play now, when the wounds are so fresh?

…

EXACTLY ONE WEEK after my encounter with that sobbing woman outside the Hospital Militar, General Augusto Pinochet's heart stopped beating. The doctors gave all sorts of medical reasons, but I was sure those reports only partly explained his demise, did not account for the astounding coincidence that, of all the days on which he might have died, fate decreed that he do so on December 10, 2006.

December 10: the day each year when the world celebrates the adoption by the United Nations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. So I preferred to ignore talk of strokes and clogged arteries in a ninety-one-year-old body and proclaimed instead that the Desaparecidos finally hunted down their nemesis, finally deprived him of the freedom to choose the date of his own death as an answer to his refusing them life and liberty for so long.

I like to think now, four years later, that is what happened, perhaps because he did, after all, escape my ultimate dream of justice for him. Since I don't believe in the death penalty, I had devised another sort of punishment, that those eyes of his would be forced to look into the black and clear eyes of the women whose sons and husbands, fathers and brothers, he kidnapped and disappeared, one woman and then another woman and then one more, each one telling him how their lives were maimed and ravaged by an order he gave or an order he didn't block, I wanted the fierce circle of his crimes penetrated so he could understand what he had done and perhaps, who knows, one day ask for forgiveness.

Though this redemptive plan was not what came to mind as soon as I heard the news that Sunday afternoon. Nothing, in fact, came to mind. I was shocked into speechlessness, could do nothing but stare for three blank hours at the television set. My consternation was possible because Peter Raymont and his crew had left Chile the night before, were not there to demand that I comment on this extraordinary event. Rodrigo, however, about to leave that evening for the United States, captured me with his own camera. You can see me stunned, dazed, so much so that I declined my son's invitation to accompany him downtown where thousands of families were gathering to celebrate.

Rodrigo brought back exceptional footage, and he showed me some of it before he headed for the airport. I tend to be wary of any attempt to turn anyone's death, no matter how despicable the person, into an occasion for joy, so I hoped that what was being welcomed was not one man's death but rather the birth of a new nation. Dancing under the mountains of Santiago, the multitude chanted over and over, "La sombra de Pinochet se fue," the same phrase echoed and repeated. His shadow is gone, we have come out from under Pinochet's shadow. As if a thousand plagues had been washed from this land, never again the helicopter in the night, never again the air polluted by sorrow and violence. For those, most of them young, who were celebrating, it was as if something had been definitely, gloriously shattered when Augusto Pinochet's bleak and unrepentant heart ceased beating. They had spent their lives, as I had spent mine, awaiting this moment, this day when the darkness receded.

Maybe she was right, that future mother, seven months pregnant, who jumped for joy in the center of Santiago and the center of Rodrigo's video—was she right when she shouted to the seven winds that from now on everything would be different, that her child would be born in a Chile from which Pinochet had forever vanished? Or, I wondered as I watched her on the screen, had the battle for the soul of our divided country just begun?

After all, how often have I written lines like that one, hoping against hope that he had not eternally contaminated every schizophrenic mirror of our lives?

I was tired, that's the truth, of saying goodbye to Pinochet.

I'd been doing so since my 1983 visit to Chile. On the evening before we were to depart for the United States, my then brother-in-law Nacho Aguero had taken Rodrigo and me to a población to meet a young Chilean street fighter who was resisting Pinochet. On the way back, our car was brought to a halt by a screeching siren and a hive of braking motorcycles. Habitually calm and composed, Nacho this time seemed unhinged with excitement.

"Es Pinochet, es Pinochet," he murmured.

A caravan of black cars raced by, and then, as they passed, a white-gloved hand darted out of one of the windows and waved. It was one more instance of Chilean surrealism, a dignitary acknowledging cheers from a nonexistent throng.

And then Pinochet was gone. An apparition.

My antagonist, of course, had no idea that I was there, watching. Yet I could not shake the sensation that the General was mocking me, that his ghostly hand in the dusk was gesturing defiantly: I am here to stay, this is as near as you and your kind will ever get to me, this is the only farewell you will ever see from me, I am as far from justice as I am from your hungry eyes. As the motorcycles vanished and the siren faded into the gathering darkness, I could hear his voice in my ear as if he were really speaking to me directly, personally, right there, nearby.

It was a voice I carried into exile with me. Haunted by it ever since that afternoon in August of 1973 when I answered the telephone at the presidential palace of La Moneda and heard, on the other end of the line, the rasping growl of "El General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte," as he impatiently identified himself. He wanted to speak to Fernando Flores, Allende's chief of staff, the man who had brought me to work for the president, to see if I could help devise a media and cultural strategy to stop the coup, though the one who would really thwart the military takeover was the commander in chief of the army, there on the other side of the telephone wire. I rapidly passed him on to Flores—deaf to what that voice of Pinochet was hiding, the betrayal he was devising, the coup that had already happened in his mind.

That was the extent of our contact: no more than a fleeting telephone conversation. Maybe that was why, for all the satanic dimensions I attributed to his voice in my exile, he had remained strangely ethereal, almost disembodied. I could not dispel the sense that he was hiding, that he had been hiding perhaps from his own self all his life, learning from an early age not to tell anybody who he really was, the person he could someday become. Slipping away. Only corporeal for me in those three brief innocent seconds when I had registered his voice over the telephone, again remotely real ten years later, in the three brief vicious seconds it had taken him to wave that hand of his, that phantasmagoric glove, everything in my life and at the same time, nothing.

As Nacho accelerated away, I looked back, as if half expecting Pinochet to return, to explain himself, to materialize once and for all. But no, I was left only with his mockery and his shadow, as I was to be on the December Human Rights Day in 2006, when he was gone and I was left with all those fractured visions of him—the disembodied voice, the glove shrouded in white—still hoping that they were intimations of a possible farewell.

At the time of his death I thought, I could not help but think, Is it really goodbye this time?

Now that four years have gone by, I have come to the conclusion that the answer depends on the future, on how Pinochet's stature will be interpreted many years from now, on who will tell that story of his—which is the ultimate test of where anybody's journey ends up.

In a sense, our dictator's legacy depends on the history of the world.

If we believe that democracy and development are incompatible, if we believe that an underdeveloped country cannot attain modernity and progress unless it is ruled with an iron fist, if we believe that it does not matter if a bit of blood is spilled and certain human rights violations are inevitable in order to guarantee peace and security, then Pinochet will persist as both bogeyman and paragon to be imitated far and wide. The phrase that invariably crops up when people in beleaguered lands live in fear and turmoil, "What this country needs is a Pinochet," will be repeated, will endure.

On the other hand ...

During my years in exile, unable to restrain what Pinochet himself was doing to me and my loved ones, I was fascinated by the possibility that perhaps we could, in some way, determine at least how the word Pinochet would be transmitted to generations to come.

So let me, now that he is dead, hazard a prophecy: of all the battles of his interminable life, the one that the General can no longer win is the battle for the way he will be remembered, how the hard syllables that form his name will become solidified in tomorrow's vocabulary.

We have to trust in the memory of our species, it's that simple.

I think of the children of the future, thousands of years hence, I can see them playing in a meadow or a playground.

And then one of them does or says something that warrants a reproach, an insult, a hideous slur, from the other one, who shouts out, "Oh, don't be a Pinochet."

"Pinochet?" answers the other. "Pinochet? Who's that?"

Pinochet?

Who in hell is Pinochet?

 

SO WAS that the last circle that needed to be closed, in my life and in the documentary about my life? What better ending, after all, than the General's demise? No, there was another circle, more resonant with me and with the world than this petty despot's departure from the earth, one more bit of unfinished business that needed attention, one more experience and place to film, this time in the United States rather than Chile.

We were headed for Ground Zero.

That "hallowed ground," which had added a second tragedy of terror to my existence, could not be missing if we were to tell the whole story. We could not omit the country where I had been bred as a child, the country from which I had been exiled at the age of twelve, the country that had contributed to my exile in 1973, the country where I now write these words, ten blocks from where my two American granddaughters breathe their joy into the world and into our lives.

So we set out, with cameras at the ready, for New York, another city of my dreams assaulted on another September 11, again a Tuesday morning when fire fell from the sky. Though by 2001 very few people in the world recalled the existence of that remote Chilean date, I was besieged by the need to extract some hidden meaning behind the juxtaposition and coincidence of those twinned episodes bequeathed to me by the malignant gods of random history. There was something horribly familiar in that experience of disaster, confirmed during my visit to the ruins where the twin towers had once reached for the sky.

What I recognized was a parallel suffering, a disorientation that echoed what we had lived through in Chile. Its most turbulent incarnation was the hundreds of relatives roaming the streets of New York after 9/11, clutching photographs of sons, fathers, lovers, daughters, husbands, begging for information, are they alive, are they dead?, every citizen of the United States forced to look into the chasm of what it means to be Desaparecido, with no certainty or funeral possible for those who are missing. The photographs were still there in 2006, pinned on the wires separating the ogling spectators from the abyss, encouraging me to use the unique perspective of my own life to forge a message to the citizens of America lost in a labyrinth of pain.

Call it a gift from Chile to the nation that did so much to destroy our democracy, the nation that was also mine, the America where I thrive and teach and write, where my Isabella and my Catalina will grow.

We Americans—yes, we—received that day all of a sudden the curse and blessing of being able to look at ourselves in a way habitually denied to most of our citizens, the chance to distressingly imagine ourselves as part of the rest of humanity. Never before had they—yes, they—been ripped apart to this degree by the ravages of guilt and rage, the difficulties of memory and forgiveness, the uses and abuses of power, the true meaning of freedom and responsibility. And consequently never were Americans more tempted to apply amnesia to their yesterdays and innocence to their tomorrows, never was it more perilous and easier to sweetly, vindictively rid themselves of the complexity and contradictions of their newly naked predicament.

Chile, for all its imperfections and failures, found a way of responding to the terror inflicted on us (yes, us, we Chileans), a path of peace rather than war, a path of understanding rather than retribution. A model that the United States, wrestling with the mirage of its imperial ambitions, did not have the immediate wisdom to follow. And yet the complacent invulnerability of this nation where I now abide has been fractured forever, as the gash in that site at Ground Zero reveals. We citizens will have to share, whether we wish to or not, the precariousness and uncertainty that is the daily lot of the majority of this planet's other inhabitants. A crisis of this magnitude is one of those opportunities for regeneration and self-knowledge that are granted, from time to time, to certain nations. It can lead to renewal or destruction, used for aggression or for reconciliation, for vengeance or for justice, for the militarization of a society or its humanization.

One of the ways for Americans to go beyond the insecurity that has been swallowing us since 9/11 is to admit that our suffering is neither unique nor exclusive. If we are willing to look at ourselves in the vast mirror of our common humanity, we may find ourselves connected with many apparently faraway men and women who have trekked through similar situations of injury and fury.

A message to America I was able to deliver with more forcefulness in the documentary because I had recently become a U.S. citizen.

I had resisted taking that step with as much passion as I had put into trying to remain in Chile during our unfortunate six months in 1990. The implacably practical Angélica had decided to seek naturalization soon after we resettled for good in the States, and then hauled our two sons to Charlotte, North Carolina, for the interviews and swearing-in ceremonies.

I was a tougher nut to crack. I had already switched allegiances twice before—from Argentina to the States and from the States to Chile—and damned if I was going to relapse a third time, especially now that physical absence might weaken my ties to Latin America. Though my obstinacy had more intricate reasons.

No matter how much I might proclaim my mission to be a bridge between the Americas, the voice I had created for myself, the persona I projected, was that of a Latino from the South. I derived authority, power, credentials from that outsider status, relished being a sort of unofficial spokesperson for those who could not make themselves heard from our derelict lands. I had grown comfortable with that tone and viewpoint. It served me well on television and radio, in my op-ed columns and interviews, in readings at bookstores and commencement speeches, a deepening of the perspective I had discovered that morning in Bethesda watching the snow that was and was not mine fall silently. It had crusted into a second skin, become a home away from home, struck the right balance by allowing me to intervene in both Chile and the States from a middle point of intersection and detachment. And each time after 9/11 that I faintly contemplated reconsidering Angélica's arguments in favor of nationalization, something would flare up, in Santiago or Mexico or some neglected corner of Latin America and the words would come flying, in English and in Spanish, and I didn't want to squander that—there is nothing more difficult to abandon than a voice.

And then had come the arrest of General Pinochet in London in 1998, and his year and a half of captivity, and all of a sudden my public persona was more valuable than ever, on the BBC and Charlie Rose and Chilean TV. You see, I said to my wife, ya ves, if I were an American citizen, how could I possibly write publicly to Pinochet and tell him that this was the best thing that could have happened to him, that he has been afforded an implausible chance to repent. It is only feasible to write words like those as a Chilean, that's why I could write to an unknown Iraqi dissident in the Washington Post and say that I understood why he wanted to be rid of the tyrant Saddam but not at the price of an intervention from abroad, explain that I would have rejected such a solution for my Chile in the days of our dictatorship, even if it had meant that friends were to die. I felt that my role as a public intellectual depended on keeping my distance from any official association with a United States misruled by George W. Bush, that Chile was more relevant than ever, the glass darkly through which I saw torture and the erosion of civil rights and "extraordinary rendition," again the outrageous familiarity. I had grown accustomed to the idea that the United States, with all its blemishes and shortcomings, was a haven against persecution, at least for someone like me, and now it was threatening to turn into a police state, foreigners were being rounded up, permanent residency was no guarantee against abuses and Guantánamo, my Lord, and Dick Cheney, no longer a congressman receiving my copy of Widows in 1983, was churning out real widows all across the oil homelands of the planet twenty years later.

Angélica would hand me clippings, as if I couldn't read, as if I didn't know: Listen to this provision of the Patriot Act, no, Ariel, I want you to listen. And also: You want to be effective? Then break out of the snug cocoon, say we when you speak to Americans, include yourself in that we.

And she was worrying, my wife, Escúchame, Ariel, if they expel you, I'm not leaving, this time I'm not following you, you want to never see your granddaughters again? Angélica would not give up. It was absurd, there was no chance of anything of the sort happening to me, not with my contacts, not with my profile, not with—it can't happen here? Wait, wait, hadn't I written, just last year, that it can happen anywhere, make people afraid enough and they'll let the government do anything in their name?

So the day came when, for Angélica's birthday in 2005, my present was a card inscribed with a promise: Mi amor: I am ready to become a citizen. Feliz cumpleaños.

And my succinct explanation to all who wondered how the revolutionary Ariel, the voice of the oppressed of the Third World, could commit the sacrilege of embracing the America that had cast me into exile and was torturing prisoners in Abu Ghraib—Pinter asked me, but why, Ariel, why would you do that?—I had a good answer: I would rather go to jail again than into exile one more time, I will never again go into exile.

It's even partly true—or at least the excesses of the Bush years made my exculpation sound reasonable at the time. Just as when I'm asked, Why don't you live in Chile?, I have a pithy response ready: I left my country because I could stand that they didn't like me, but not that they hated my work. So much more complicated, the scattered reasons for my many expatriations, but what am I supposed to do, expound at length what this book has barely been able to stammer, what those six months in 1990 and the seventeen years of incessant migration revealed to me? We all use shortcuts and templates to tell our life story, are constantly refashioning it so our yesterdays accommodate what we are doing today, how we remember ourselves tomorrow. Not a bad sound bite: I decided to become a citizen so I wouldn't be treated the way Bush's America was treating the rest of the world.

And nothing changed, by the way, Angélica had been, as usual, right. At times I still gag when I say we, it does not come to me readily, it is easier to leave a country than to forsake a thought deeply embedded in the neurons of a brain—but this change in status has been an educational experience. I've grown accustomed to this life on the hyphen, a Chilean-American born in Argentina tightroping between loyalties, as divided and united as my libraries. Nothing much has actually changed except that I leave Miami with my U.S. passport and pull out my Chilean passport when I enter Pudahuel airport, now no longer stopped by anyone with an order to deport me though still irritated by the prosperous countrymen so blatantly indifferent to anything but their own pleasure. And then, with my Argentine passport, I travel to Buenos Aires, less, alas, than I did when my dad and my mom were alive, but I often go to visit my sister Eleonora and friends and editors and the boulevards of the city where I was born and where I am always received with more sympathy than in Santiago. Everything will be fine for this wanderer who is at the intersection of all those overlapping communities, as long as there is not a war between these nations laying claim to my body.

And there was something more than convenience and pragmatism when I stood in a courtroom in North Carolina on a summer day in 2006 among all those other men and women from every unlikely corner of the world and took the oath of allegiance to this nation conceived in liberty, that man who didn't believe in oaths or allegiances or nations. Not bogus what I felt, that tremor. Real emotion. Inside me was the boy who had watched the Manhattan skyline slip below the horizon as we headed for Chile, saying goodbye to the Statue of Liberty, which mocked him but also beckoned across oceans and time and nostalgia, Come back to me, not only English had been waiting but America as well.

In the days before I handed Angélica her birthday card, I had been coming to terms with my ambivalence, I was composing a love letter to America, a Whitman-like prayer in the form of an imprecation: Let me tell you, America, of the hopes I had for you. Hopes that had not been met, but still a love letter, asking America to beware of the plague of victimhood, the surge of self-righteousness that comes from being unfairly hurt, beware the plague of fear and rage that had consumed me for so many years.

Those words of love poured forth, above all, I suppose, from a renewal of my adolescent faith in that other America. The America of as I would not be a slave, so would I not be a master, the America of this land is our land, this land was made for you and me, the America of all men and all women, every one of us on this ravaged, glorious earth of ours, all of us, created equal. Created equal: one baby in Afghanistan or Iraq as sacred as one baby in Minneapolis. Where was my America? The America that taught me tolerance of every race and every religion, that filled me with pioneer energy? Was I wrong to believe that there was still enough rebelliousness and generosity in America, enough citizens unspoiled by excessive wealth and false innocence and imperial overreach, to conquer its fear? Wrong to believe that the country that gave the world jazz and Eleanor Roosevelt, Cassavetes and Toni Morrison and Philip Marlowe, would be able to look at itself in the cracked ice of history and join the rest of humanity, not as a separate City on a Hill, but as one more city in the valleys of sorrow and uncertainty and hope where we all dwell?

And that faith in America was vindicated, partly vindicated at least, two years after I became a citizen.

I had danced on the streets of Santiago on November 4, 1970, when Allende had become president, and then danced once more on November 4, 2008. Thirty-eight years to the day after my fellow citizens in Chile celebrated the inauguration as president of a man who believed in social justice and peace, my fellow citizens in the United States voted along with me for a man who would stop his country from torturing in the name of security, chose as their president a man who bore on his skin the marks of a race that had been oppressed as our Chilean poor had been oppressed from time immemorial.

So again I danced in the streets, this time the streets of this mongrel nation about to be governed by a mongrel like me. I danced even if inside me the specter of Chile was murmuring to be wary of too much enthusiasm, that change in the United States would face, as it does everywhere, the rabid opposition of those who will not give up their privileges without a violent struggle. I knew, of course, even as my body bobbed and weaved and jumped up and down, I knew that the country of Barack Obama would have to tackle many of the dilemmas we lived through in the country of Allende and Pinochet, in our own unsuccessful revolution, and during our own constricted transition. If you go too fast, like Allende, you risk a disastrous end, I whispered to the president-elect, almost as if he could hear me, you may not change the world after all, but if, like the inevitable Enrique Correas of our time, you advance too cautiously, friend Obama, you risk losing your soul, you may not make much of a real difference, you will lose the enthusiasm and inspiring vision necessary to fight for any deep and lasting modification. I had seen the Chilean revolution founder in the seventies because of its inability to create enough support among the people, I had seen a regime of avarice and terror defeated in the eighties, only to watch how in the nineties it kept a twisted grip on the multiple levers of power, I remembered in every one of the cells of my dancing body how we had been outmaneuvered by the forces of the past, our desire for true democracy cornered and poisoned by fear.

But that did not take away the wonder of each victory, small and large, nor was saying goodbye to the America of Bush and Reagan and saying hello to the America of Obama and Roosevelt and Lincoln the only reason why I danced. I was dancing also because that was my body's way of saying and swaying that this land could also be my home, one of my many homes, my joy was not only for the world and for the United States but for this citizen who was accepting his life, with all its turmoil, with all its misfortunes and displacements. I was accepting my life as it had been danced.

 

Final Fragment from the Diary of My Return to Chile

JANUARY 6, 1991

Today I am leaving Chile.

This evening I will board a plane and say goodbye to this land I have called my own for most of my adult life.

Over the past six months I have refused to admit that this day would arrive, a day that replicates the journey I took in 1973, as I head north again, but this time without imagining a permanent return to the south. Except in my head, except in my literature, except in the skip of my heart as I look back. Oh, we'll keep this house, I won't put these books away in boxes, not yet, maybe not ever, somewhere inside me the fantasy stirs that this departure may not be definite—what if they love my play, what if it manages to shake Chile up and prove that the country is open to my offerings? But no, this decision needs to be recognized for what it is: a capitulation. I waited for a miracle, fought hour after hour to hold on to my identity and my country, I fought and lost.

I'm succumbing to the curse that tracks the men of the family, even if Angélica sees it differently, feels that by returning to the States we'll end all this wandering, that we should not sacrifice Joaquín's happiness for este país de mierda. Thus far I have stubbornly responded that it might be a país de mierda, but it's my mierda, my damn shit, a glorious mierda that I was destined to drown in or drain and purge. Until gradually, over the last couple of weeks, as the day of departure for the States to start teaching at Duke drew near, my decision has grown easier to bear.

Basically, I forced myself to acknowledge this truth: I don't like who I have become here, what Chile is turning me into, someone feasting on incessant irritation. I can't stand the trickle of daily vitriol being deposited inside me, this is not how I want to live the rest of my life.

This unexpectedly became clear to me when I attended a funeral on December 28, this fateful 1990 ending with yet one more death.

Ana María Sanhueza had been so alive when I had visited her a few weeks ago! That hepatic cancer devouring her body had made my dear classmate from university days even more beautiful, molded her usual radiance into that of a yellowing, magnificent Asian princess. I was grateful for this chance for us to spend time together, after all those births I had missed, first moments and last moments, all those baptisms and farewells. As we chatted quite normally for several hours, thanks to her astonishing lack of fear, I realized how seldom I had thought of her during these seventeen years of absence, and yet, guardian of my memories, she had summoned me to her bedside so that she could take one last one, one last memory with her to the other side of death, and she was kind enough to restore some to me for safekeeping. There was truth, then, to the myth of Penelope, weaving and unweaving her cloth every night, maybe there will always be someone back home who is waiting for us at our own simulacrum of Ithaca. Ana María contained a tapestry of shared experiences that I had forgotten, we laughed so hard and enjoyed each other so much that I finally had to be evicted, promising to come back before the year's end. And then the news came that she had died on Christmas Day.

Saddened as I was, I thanked her for this one last gift, that I could say goodbye to her dead body just a few weeks after having said goodbye to her living smile, and at the Cementerio General I was able to reconnect with former classmates, some of whom I hadn't seen in decades. Among them was Raquel Olea, a feminist literary critic who had married and then divorced one of our colleagues. I knew she had not been dealt too many lucky cards in life, so when she asked how things had been going, I simply opened up, didn't hide a thing, perhaps because we had never been that close I confessed how rough this return had been. Five years, she said, echoing the exact number Antonio Skármeta mentioned to me, it will take five years before you'll be accepted here. And meanwhile, you have to use your elbows, Raquel said, open space for yourself with sharp elbows, Ariel.

I didn't tell her I was planning to leave, that the halfhearted decision had already been made, but answered instead that I didn't have five years and didn't want to use my elbows, I haven't got elbows left, sharp or soft or long or short, that's what I vehemently poured out to her as the year ended.

Elbows. Such an unromantic, overlooked piece of our anatomy, and standing in that camposanto where I had imagined my own last rites would someday take place—how often had I beseeched the gods of exile to save me from the fate of dying far from home—standing there I looked at Raquel's elbows and looked at Ana María's coffin about to be turned into dust, and the reluctance that had been holding me back was completely swept away. I was suddenly as weary as Angélica and Joaquín and Rodrigo, and as convinced, with my whole heart and every ventricle and valve and river of blood running through my arms and into my elbows, that I could no longer employ the empanadas and the mountains and the anonymous pueblo that thrilled me and the parking attendant who called me his amigo, I couldn't use any of that to counter the unhappiness of my family, my own unhappiness, nothing was enough to keep me here, not La Muerte y la Doncella and not all the hopes I had projected onto the land and not my Spanish vernacular in all its colloquial glory and not my parents nearby in Argentina, it was just not enough, not lunch with Queno or dinner with Pepe or an excursion to the Cajón del Maipo with Antonio or a visit from Elizabeth Lira, not a sweet conversation with Isabel Letelier or a chess match with Santiago Larraín, just not enough, Angélica's incredible family and the future children whose birthing I would miss, it just wasn't enough, I couldn't grow the elbows I needed in order to open that space to breathe. No, it wasn't enough that Allende was buried just a few lanes away, so close to where I had wanted to be carried and taken and tumbled along these tombs, not enough that I would give up resting with the dead who had kept me alive in exile, it just wasn't enough anymore, the many tiny triumphs of our pueblo, just not enough, I didn't have one millimeter of an elbow left, I didn't want to jab anybody in the ribs, that's not how it was supposed to be.

It's time to get the fuck out of this country.

So is that it? Has the Chile I fell in love with really died?

Yes and no, I say, and also: It's not your fault, no es tu culpa. I'm the one, I expected too much from you, mi país, too many ways in which I wanted you to save me yet again from the demons of my loneliness.

I chose to disregard the warning signals over the years.

On the last afternoon of our first tumultuous return to Chile in 1983, I had stopped by my brother-in-law's house to say goodbye and found myself alone for a few minutes with Patricio's wife, Marisa. She had asked me, So when are you returning? And my answer was tentative, as always, when the question had come up: as soon as we could.

All of a sudden, Marisa began to cry. Taking one of my hands, tears pouring down her face, she said, "No vuelvas, huevón." Don't come back, you idiot. And added, more intensely, "No vuelvas nunca a este país de mierda." Don't ever come back to this fucking country.

Barely fifteen minutes had elapsed since she had been devising all sorts of schemes for our return. The most recent of other flare-ups. In the middle of something else, our closest friends would inexplicably start berating the country as if they hated it. Not Pinochet, not the military, not Nixon, not the corporations. Chile itself. Declaring that if they could leave, they'd pack their bags tomorrow. Stay in Bethesda, Ariel, Angelita. And then, a short time later, as if they were amnesiac, casually suggesting the safest sort of houses to live in when we got back.

These moments were a crack in the smooth glass of our welcome, fleeting but alarming enough to allow us a glimpse of what my loved ones had been through, what they were trying to hide from me or from themselves, a reminder that our family of four would be returning not only to the Resistance but also to the dread and the betrayals, the lassitude and the shallowness, the confusion of past mistakes and the repetition of old vices.

It is a crack that has widened on every return and now has ruthlessly installed itself inside me, the realization that deep within some of the very angels and comrades in Chile who have resisted the worst were the same slouching fiends I had brought back inside myself from exile, the perdition I had hoped to leave behind when I returned to my fabled land. If I fear that monsters have corroded the soul of the country, it is because exile has created in me monsters of my own, or revealed that they had always been there, agazapados inside the sad, crouching truth of what I had done in order to survive, just like the country, just like everybody in the country. And now I will have to carry those imperfections back with me when I leave Chile, I will have to concede that Chile did not have all the solutions.

Concede that I may be able to better find that spiritual evolution far from here. If I were to come back, give it one more try, it would again be day after day of a dig here and a poke there, day after elbowing day, I'd never be at peace in a place like Chile unless I ignored the overwhelming tide of what exasperates me, unless I turned into somebody who was either silent or overbearing, exasperated precisely because everything here was so mine, so recognizable.

No te metas. Don't get involved. Take a step back. That's what Angélica has kept advising me during our many returns here when Pinochet ruled, she would frequently rein me in, remind me what one mistake can cost, how fragile is the thread of life. But she couldn't ask me to hold back entirely. During those years in exile, I had prayed for Pinochet to fall and prayed as well that it would not happen before I had a chance to plunge into the whirlwind of the Resistance, discover firsthand the experience received only by hearsay, derivatively, from reports and articles that always arrived late, and from phone calls with bad news in the middle of the night that always arrived much too early, I begged that I would not be forever chained to the memories and audacity of someone else.

So how could I not meterme, intervene, when I saw something unfair, an outrage, how to become a bystander? One incident, just one: One morning in the center of town I had come upon an eight-year-old girl performing in front of a crowd. She dipped a rag in paraffin, lit it with a match, then snuffed out the fire by cramming the rag in her mouth, repeated the operation again and again, ceasing only when a nearby man signaled her to collect the few pesos dropped in a hat on the ground. As for me, I lost my cool, began to berate the throng, how could they just stand there and watch and not lift up a voice in protest, hasta cuándo, till when, till when, what does it take to move you, make you care?

They dribbled off, none of them responding, not even the pimp and his waif, everyone making believe I hadn't said a word. No te metas. Don't get involved, what Pinochet hammered into us all day long, each man for himself, the same suggestion replicated by the democratic government for sundry, unrelated reasons. But at least in dictatorial times fear could justify inaction. We now have no such pretext, unless we grant that apathy has made us all into accomplices.

So ... Así que me he metido. I plunged in. To the hilt. Under the dictatorship a host of issues not patently political, social issues that galvanized me, had been postponed because of their possible divisiveness, but democracy was supposed to be different, we should know better, we had fought precisely for a society that was more just and equal and tolerant. That's why, upon this 1990 return to Chile, I propelled myself into a permanent campaign for all sorts of rights, almost a crusade to change how people feel and think and act in their everyday lives. With abortion outlawed, no divorce laws, prim and proper manners stiffly enforced, Chile continues to be a mummified, hierarchical land, maids mistreated and children shunted aside and the handicapped hidden from view and indigenous people derided. Pinochet's seventeen years have inflamed the habitual Catholic fear of sex, encouraged and increased our chronic homophobia—and not only among supporters of the dictatorship, so every social gathering is speckled with moments of potential discord. "Just don't take the bait," I tell myself afterwards or beforehand, don't ask the maid to sit at the table, don't offer to clear the plates, don't take every joke against maricones as a personal affront, don't remind the hosts who have just said there are no indios in Chile that there are at least a million of them, that they are the real custodians of the earth, don't comment on how my compatriots degrade the environment and leave trash everywhere, no te metas, Ariel, don't be so prickly, don't say that you want to greet the autistic adolescent isolated in the back of the house, don't, don't, don't, me and my big mouth.

I've often asked myself if one of the reasons I fought so hard to stay behind in Chile after the coup was because I saw it as an opportunity to change my demonstrative personality that gets me into so much trouble. In our house in Durham, Angélica has pasted next to my desk a phrase from the Prisse Papyrus, the oldest book in the world, words attributed to the vizier Ptahhotep of Memphis in the year 2350 B.C.: "Let your ideas fly freely but keep your lips sealed." If I had remained in Chile after the coup, I would have been forced to obey that Egyptian overlord from the fifth dynasty of the Middle Kingdom, become like the men and women who stood up to the enemy with implausible valor but paradoxically bit their tongue in everyday life. My compatriots have learned to bide their time, to develop a subtle spider web of jokes, slight allegories and innuendoes, a language that has survived the dictator, that continues to molder our daily routine. They have spent a near lifetime eluding the direct confrontations that I feel are essential for a true democracy to flourish and that marked my life in exile. That's what I thought would make me valuable here, that I'd find a way to reconcile what I'd learned during my banishment with what citizens in Chile had learned while under the boot.

As if the two halves of my life could so easily be harmonized.

Just as I carried into exile the voices of liberation that had sung the Allende revolution, it was inevitable, I guess, that I regenerate in Chile itself the voices and lives accumulated while I wandered. I can no more repudiate them than betray the voices of the Desaparecidos.

It would take more time than I have now, as the hour of my departure draws closer, to spell out how I have changed, the many new visions swirling inside as I escape the snare of Chile, but one example should suffice: Deena Metzger.

As close to a sister as I have in this world.

Deena had come to Allende's revolutionary Chile from California with her then lover, David Kunzle, seeking out the author of the Donald Duck book that he wanted to translate into English, and we had sat in a café. When it started to rain, I remarked that the rain made me sad, because the independence day festivities were coming up and our people needed to dance, and Deena stood up and danced in the rain, and when the coup came and interrupted our dance of multitudes, she implored the gods to care for us, for each of the compañeros she had met during her visit here. And every one of them survived.

The day after the coup, Deena sent me a telegram from Los Angeles, cannily reminding me that I had an invitation (that she had invented out of thin air, of course) from a California university, when should she send tickets for me and the family? Throughout the years of exile, Deena has educated me about the earth and the feminine soul of the universe and our lasting connection to animals and how to greet the rain in the midst of the rubble, how to begin again.

The United States I will be returning to is not only the land of Nixon and Reagan and Bush. It is also the land of Deena the healer—and I don't need to add to her name all the other names and bodies, the mesh of voices in English and in Spanish that will give us a homecoming, smooth our return to wonderful Duke and the land that I know as well, perhaps even better, than this country I am now abandoning.

Maybe that's why I even entertained the possibility of going back permanently to the States once the idea began to surface, maybe that was what gave Joaquín hope that our decision to remain here was not as final as we had proclaimed, maybe it was the attraction of what that outside world had to offer.

Let's set aside the day-by-day chronicle of these six months, not debate whether the streets needed to be repaired or were secretly resisting modernization, whether Chile was best represented by the unresponsiveness of the government or by the dignity of the workers expelled from their jobs, not hold up the exaltations of my library in Santiago against the sorrows of Joaquín and the frustration of Angélica and the departure of Rodrigo. That's how I have written this return up to now, as a choice between two Chiles, one pulling me towards it and the other pushing me away, exclusion or inclusion. But underneath that tug of war a different confrontation was taking place, two versions of my persona were contending for supremacy.

Like every exile in history, I was consumed with one desire when I left Chile in 1973: to return home intact, unaltered, indomitable. All too soon, also like every other exile who has wandered this earth, I discovered that in order to survive in a foreign land I would need to bow my head and adjust to the world outside. That impediment to my plan for purity was intensified in my case by the circumstance that I was living my third major deracination. After having lost Argentina and then the United States, I was now facing severance from the land I had chosen for my adult destiny. The fact that I was already multicultural and bilingual when I set out on my journey, and did not have, as did Angélica or the great majority of my fellow refugees, childhood roots in Chile, increased the temptation to accommodate to an outside orbit. That is why, I think, I stayed away for so many years from the lure of the United States, ended up there only by accident. Because I was afraid that once I was in America, I would never go back home.

It was in order to contest that fear that I forged, when I departed from Chile after the coup, a narrative about myself, a story that came to dominate the way I understood my role as an intellectual and a revolutionary.

It was a tale emanating from the depths of Chilean history. In the same year, 1541, that Santiago was founded by the Spanish conquistador Pedro de Valdivia, an Araucanian youth called Lautaro was captured and, like so many other males of his tribe, made to serve. The boy must have been exceptionally bright and handsome, because Valdivia took him on as his personal page. Lautaro stayed with that new master for seven years, long enough to appropriate the techniques and language of the foreigners, before escaping back to his people. Five years later, he led an insurrection, which ended with Pedro de Valdivia ambushed and killed. It was the knowledge of those foreign weapons and vocabulary that gave the Mapuches their victory. Indeed, for more than three centuries, until Western industry and science broke the technological balance in Chile with the Remington rifle (as it did all over the globe, from India and Africa to the American West), that race of warriors was able to fight the invaders to a standstill.

Born at the beginning of the modern age, when Chile itself was being fashioned out of the clash of the local and the international, Lautaro became the first of my compatriots to tackle the dilemma of how you live in a colonized land, and also the first to reject the dazzling path of assimilation that so many others took, proclaiming that resistance for the powerless is a better path to identity than becoming a servant or an administrator or a concubine to the intruders occupying your soil. That resistance, Lautaro said, could be bolstered and not weakened by what those usurpers possessed. The trick was to be cunning, return to the tribe from your forced exile loaded with new knowledge; the trick was to remain loyal. Surging out of the mountains of our communal past, Lautaro told me that it was possible to be double, indeed, that to be split was essential, given the planet we inhabit, as long as we remain true to our genesis and to the deeper heart that is hiding back home. This Third World, insurrectionary Odysseus told the young man heading for alien territory that to be cosmopolitan and to speak more than one language should be recognized as weapons that would help, rather than hinder, his return, that it was possible to become a rooted cosmopolitan.

That's how I narrated my own exile as it was happening, that's the persona I defended myself with, clasped through each of my tribulations and returns. In a world where Allende was dead and someone like Reagan could twice be elected president of the United States, for a writer who had skewered Donald Duck only to discover that Disney was more globally triumphant than ever, for someone who had rejected the dominant American model and now saw the Yankee Go Home graffiti on Third World walls modified by the droll And Take Me with You!, Lautaro afforded me the hope that nothing had been substantially modified, not in me, not in my country, not on the planet, not the long view of where history had to be heading. So when I descended from the plane six months ago, in July of 1990, I returned to Chile with the conviction that life back home was more worthy, meaningful, and hopeful—in a word, more real—than life anywhere else, Chile as the one place in the world where I could best defy death.

But that is not the only way to defy death, the only way to heal the world, the only story I smuggled back with me from exile. In the seventeen years that had passed, a different, parallel paradigm settled, almost unawares, almost unstated, into my life. It is not embodied in a character as dramatic as the Chilean warrior, but in a yet unnamed model of existence that I will have to explore in the decades ahead.

Looking back on my life, a pattern emerges. Each of the dislocations that determined my fate and the fate of my family have corresponded, I realize, to a tectonic shift in the battles of the twentieth century. My grandparents were part of the gigantic migratory wave in search of freedom in the decades before the First World War, all those millions deserting a continent whose nations would soon be savaging each other. And then my father had to leave Argentina because of the struggle between fascism and democracy, that crucial conflict that greeted me when I was born, smack in the middle of a second world war. And then another war, just as decisive and planetary, the Cold War, leading to yet another exile, fleeing McCarthy and intolerance and the Red Scare, off to Chile where a young doctor called Salvador Allende was already planning his first run for the presidency, anticipating other wars, world wars as well except they were fought out mostly by proxy, in the neglected and blighted backlands of our planet, in Africa and Asia and Latin America, the wars of liberation of the sixties and early seventies, our revolution in Chile being one of those, though ours was peaceful, even if it ended in blood.

And again into exile I went, again the larger forces were deciding for me, men in faraway rooms were shadowing me, moving their chess pieces oblivious to my existence, but still I had to play on their game board. And now I am about to start living and writing out the consequences of one last exile, expatriation, displacement, withdrawal, whatever you want to call it, the long hybrid aftermath that will pursue me once I depart from Chile on this Day of the Magi. I will be compelled to reluctantly embrace that final upheaval in my twentieth-century life, which was also fleshed out in world history, this last exile of mine that came to pass at a time of deeper transitions, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the defeat of Pinochet and the arrival of a system that had always been global but never this instantaneous, never this interdependent, never this pervasive, this moment that will be looked back upon in the future, if there is a future, if there is anybody to look back, this era that will be deemed the age when humanity finally became one, whether because what is made in China is bought in Kansas or because who eats in California will determine who hurts in Valparaíso. This is the time I am to become globalized along with the world, this is the time of misery and promise when fate has chosen me to journey forth from my salvation in Santiago into a world from which I will not retreat except through death.

Not alone, I will not set forth on this new journey alone. This Lautaro who now knows he will never really go back home must again carry with him the voices and images of a past that has not died. I will be free from the bracing limitations of nationality, but that freedom will not, I hope, block me from my own responsibility towards those who continue to represent the suffering of all humanity. I may be leaving Chile, but Chile, the country of Allende, will not ever leave me. My idea of it, my incessant hope for it, will not leave me alone, will keep challenging my solitude, stalk me, hold me accountable, remind me of the need to dream. Something inside me will always remember the homeless of Amsterdam and the turnstiles jumped in Paris and the lack of health care in Washington, I have to remember, as the temptation of detachment and pride intensifies, as the allure of prestige and the spotlight call again, I need to always remember the lessons of struggle and estrangement. The intellectual and emotional adventure of becoming a world citizen has to be coupled with my commitment to a literature for the pain of that world. If the best of what the world offered me has followed me here to Chile and troubled my integration into this society plagued by terror, how can I not, on the reverse journey away from the South, smuggle out something just as valuable?

The Desaparecidos have ghosted and saved me in exile, and I pray that their raw, savage unreality will keep me centered—or maybe it is de-centered—in the midst of the enticements of expatriation.

Soon I will be far away. I can feel the remoteness and abstraction growing inside again, once more facing the black hole of myself in a faraway country that has no simple answer to my litany of questions, this man who can no longer be consoled, this time, with the certainty that I have something to come back to.

Maybe this is as much as I can hope for, almost more than I can ask for: that I will keep inside my heart some fire with which to survive.

Heart and hearth. In English, somewhere in the collective reminiscence of the language, somewhere in its unspeakable psyche of our ancestors, the heart and the fire, home and fire, are deeply parented, like hogar and hoguera in Spanish, foyer and feu in French. When fire was extracted or nursed or stolen from the gods of lightning, it gave rise to the sedentary in humans, gave our species a center around which to converge, gave to the wheel that would eventually be invented, a place where its wanderings and turns could find repose. Outside the shadows cast by the flames, far from the meat being cooked and the pottery being shaped and the metal being forged, unseen by those whose pounding hearts shared that shelter, there were outer rims of darkness, intimations of what was unknown and predatory and called foreign because it could not be celebrated together through community and storytelling by the light of that fire. And maybe that is my final lesson, what I have come back to learn, take back to warm myself in those nights ahead—perhaps that heart of hearts that is hogar and home in Spanish and comes from the same root as fuego and fire, cannot now, maybe never can, absolve my doubts.

I may have to drag those doubts with me forever.

But also this. My exile has taught me that this heart is everywhere, that it does not belong to one country or one person or one community, it has been beating in all the friends abroad who have cared for us, literally giving us heart, their heart, when we had felt most abandoned. I believe I came back to Chile to find it again, to confirm that it had not been soiled beyond repair, was still inside the people who had struggled and inside a country to which it was worth returning.

I may have been disenchanted, but I also found that heartbeat, I am also carrying away the immense heartbeat of Paulina and her brothers and sisters inside me.

When a catastrophe that I cannot foretell strikes again in the years ahead, as it will, as it must, as it has over and over in my life and the larger life of our species, all that matters, ultimately, is that I may be found worthy of that hearth, that humanity burning in the night.

And to think that all I ever wanted was to come home.