THE JAM-PACKED YELLOW bus wove at top speed along the Alameda in downtown Santiago. The faces on the bus were like my own, and the voices too. I inhaled the smell of diesel as my ears registered the cacophony of a late-winter city night. The bus honked constantly at the thousands of pedestrians who darted through the traffic, a classic Colombian cumbia blaring from its speakers.
Our handing off of the goods had been a success. A letter we’d received in our post office box in Neuquén, addressed to Señor Soto, had gone on and on about the weather and the vineyards in Mendoza. When we’d ironed the back, brown letters had appeared, outlining in detail how we were to make the delivery. Alejandro and I were instructed to enter Chile in jeans and jean jackets as a young couple hitchhiking through the country, a common activity for middle-class South American youth. The operation had to be completed over a weekend, a challenge since Santiago was twenty-four hours away from Neuquén by bus.
We’d arrived at Terminal North, one of three long-distance bus terminals in Santiago, on the Saturday night. The place was always teeming with secret police and informers, and we knew that everyone from the kiosk owners to the bathroom attendants was bribed to report any suspicious activity. We’d grabbed our backpacks and strolled casually to the corner. A car with the right licence plate numbers and two people inside stopped at the light. The back door swung open and we jumped in, trusting that comrades awaited us, not the secret police. Otherwise, torture would begin immediately; the first twenty-four hours were always the worst, since information was freshest then. But within minutes the exchange was over. We handed over the goods, which we’d transferred from inside the lining into the usual compartments of our packs, and were dropped off ten blocks from the terminal.
When we’d alerted our superiors in Lima about the secret policeman in the supermarket, they’d advised us to keep our check and counter-check skills honed and practise them twenty-four hours a day. If we saw a secret policeman again, we should let them know immediately. Otherwise, we were to continue as before. You couldn’t crumble and throw in the towel over something like being followed. Since that time, our apartment in Neuquén had also become a safe house for resistance members passing through.
Operation Condor sowed fear in insidious ways. One was to spread rumours that the resistance was infiltrated: that behind every contact you had, every letter you received, every instruction you were given lay an infiltrator, an informer, an agent, a torturer. Because of this, it was difficult to recruit new members. The belief that the resistance was run entirely by Pinochet’s dictatorship, in order to trap people, was ingrained so deeply that people laughed each time new graffiti appeared in strategic places around Santiago. Commuters passed wall after wall of red-painted slogans proclaiming that 1986 was the decisive year, but most believed the graffiti had been put there by the military to give police an excuse to raid more homes, to arrest more people, to reinstate curfew. I’d had my own doubts after seeing the secret policeman at the supermarket. How could they have got on to us so quickly in Neuquén? At what point had we shown up on their radar: Lima? La Paz? Villa María? All the way back in Vancouver? And who were Lucas and Juan, really? What if Lucas had become an informer, or had always been one? Why were they sending us to the heart of Santiago to drop off the goods? Doubts ran through my mind in an endless loop. I assumed Alejandro had his doubts, too, though neither of us expressed them to the other. We understood that the paranoia bred by the dictatorship was another way they tried to break us.
After a quick walk around La Moneda Palace, which still bore signs of bombing on the day of the coup—“I have to see it, Skinny, I just do,” Alejandro had pleaded—we boarded a midnight bus to Osorno. From there, we’d take a bus to Neuquén, crossing back over the snowy Andes, arriving late Sunday night, just in time for work on Monday. It was hard to watch the country I was dedicating my life to pass by outside the window.
BY MAY 1987, Alejandro and I had moved into an apartment on the top floor of a high-rise on the most coveted corner of downtown Neuquén, where we continued to lodge resistance members on a regular basis. Although I liked our more comfortable central quarters, I’d felt a pang the day we left the wrong side of the tracks. Sometimes when I’d walked the dark roads at night, I’d heard men murmur, “There she is,” in Spanish, not Romanian, so I’d understood they were looking out for me. That neighbourhood had been a safe place for us. The police steered clear of those roads, afraid of a people who leapt to defend themselves if one of their own was hurt. Chilean labourers had no such luck with the police or other authorities, as I saw when I made my weekly pilgrimage to the government building in pursuit of my Argentinian national identity card. While I stood in line for hours with the requested paperwork, some U.S. dollars for bribe money tucked in my hand, I watched the Chileans who were trying to get a work permit—which would end their undocumented status—be publicly humiliated again and again.
We were renting our new place from our closest friend at the flying club for the same sum we’d been paying in the Gypsy neighbourhood. His father had given him the place for dalliances, he said, but now that he was engaged, he wouldn’t be needing it. Once we had a presentable apartment in an appropriate location, I started giving private English classes in the mornings and on weekends, charging a pretty penny.
I’d become friends with many of the teachers at the English Institute of British Culture, and one in particular seemed perfect for recruitment as a helper. Alejandro and I shared many meals with Ximena and her husband, Agustín, who taught electronics at the technical high school. They were both leftists from Córdoba; her father was a military man who had refused to participate in Jorge Videla’s 1976 coup and so had been kept in jail for the entirety of the dictatorship, tortured almost to death. Now someone in Neuquén would know if we’d fallen and could notify the right people as soon as possible. “To the great avenues opening again,” Agustín said, tears in his eyes, as we raised a toast.
Alejandro was well on his way to becoming a licensed private pilot, learning on Tomahawks and Cessnas. We’d already done a preliminary flight into the Chilean Andes, planning to play dumb if we were intercepted. We couldn’t afford flight training for me yet, so I did two more border runs by land—dropping off goods each time—wearing fashionable clothes paid for in monthly instalments. That was my everyday look now. My hair was permed and streaked with blond highlights, my makeup heavy, my shoulder pads huge. Documents arrived regularly in our post office box, and we’d spend hours poring over them: in-depth analyses of the situation in Chile, instructions about our next move and information on world politics to contextualize it all.
The Terror came in waves, sometimes forcing me to hang on to walls as I walked down the street. Once it hit me as I waited in a bank lineup. The world started to spin, but before I could faint and draw unwanted attention, I’d sat down cross-legged on the marble floor and dropped my head into my hands. When people inquired, I explained I suffered from terrible migraines. I’d made my way home slowly, covered in cold sweat.
The much-anticipated assassination attempt against Pinochet had happened the previous September. His convoy had been ambushed on a quiet country road in the Maipo Valley, an hour out of Santiago, where Pinochet kept a weekend home. The eighteen-strong guerrilla force managed to kill five of the general’s men, but the rocket launcher meant for the dictator had jammed. A grenade tossed under his car had also failed to go off. The window of Pinochet’s bulletproof limousine was riddled with submachine-gun fire, but to no avail. Within minutes the attack was over. The resistance fighters escaped in their fake secret police cars, M-16s pointed out the open windows. Their disguises were so convincing, all the military roadblocks opened up for them as they sped through.
Two hundred people had contributed their skills to the assassination attempt. It had been modelled on similar actions, most notably the assassination of Nicaraguan strongman Anastasio Somoza in Asunción, Paraguay, in 1980, and was so carefully planned it had seemed foolproof. Its failure wasn’t the first major blow for the resistance during the decisive year. In mid-1986, a ship carrying $30 million worth of arms for the resistance had been seized by the Chilean military after people broke under torture and released key information.
The assassination attempt had unleashed a wave of repression that extended to the Chilean shantytowns in Neuquén. Many were arrested in nighttime raids and sent back into the hands of Pinochet. The Cold War was still the excuse for suppressing workers’ movements in the rest of Latin America, but change was in the air. Mikhail Gorbachev’s anti-Stalinist approach as the Soviet Union’s Communist Party general secretary pointed to the end of the Cold War soon. Right-wing dictatorships were falling in every country from the Philippines to Paraguay. It looked as if Nelson Mandela’s release from jail was imminent, making a future African National Congress government in South Africa a real possibility. The first intifada was raging in Palestine; the Sandinistas had prevailed in Nicaragua, despite the Reagan-backed Contra war; and the FMLN was likely to seize power in El Salvador. As for Argentina, we’d just survived the first coup attempt against Alfonsín.
Alejandro and I had awoken on Easter Sunday 1987 to the news that a coup was well under way. While we burned all our documents and flushed the ashes down the toilet, millions took to the streets around the country. In Neuquén, forty thousand people, a third of the city’s population, congregated outside the government building to protest the coup, clasping hands and singing the national anthem. It was a strange sight to behold: the rich mixing with the poor, illegal Chilean construction workers singing the Argentinian anthem alongside wealthy women in Vidal Sassoon haircuts. We watched from our high-rise, longing to be on the street below. Our radio was tuned to the live broadcast from the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, where a million people had gathered and the sound of warplanes flying overhead could be heard. Dozens of secret police agents lay on the tops of the buildings around us, invisible from below, taking pictures of the faces in the crowd with their high-tech zoom lenses.
The military apparatus and the secret police were still intact in Argentina, and Alfonsín’s transgression was to allow trials for crimes against humanity, which had been ongoing for two years. February had been the deadline for survivors to charge their torturers, causing a mad scramble of filings in which another 450 current military officers had been named. The Easter coup was quashed, but the cost of that victory was still to be revealed.
“HURRY! GO MILK the cow!” my grandmother ordered.
She stood in the doorway of her yellow wooden house, hands on her hips, mischief in her eyes. I waded through two feet of water that covered the sidewalk, resigned to the fact that I’d just ruined a pair of shoes it would take me a year to pay off. The delivery boy from the general store had ridden his bike through the flooded streets, carrying my suitcase in his basket. It was early winter, and a third of Chile was under water because of torrential storms. Every year it was the same story: floods, mass evacuations, people in the shantytowns left to stand shivering on the side of the road with their babies in their arms. The bus that had brought me to Limache from Santiago had passed countless families on the shoulders of the highway, an expanse of water behind them, bundles at their feet. They stood on the side of the road because there was nowhere else for them to go. They weren’t waiting for a bus, because they couldn’t have afforded the fare. They simply stood and waited for something—anything—as their lips turned purple from the cold and their babies trembled in their wet woollen clothes.
My grandmother handed a bunch of coins to the grocery boy and winked. I wrapped my arms around her, kissing her cheeks and the top of her head.
“Abuelita! What are you talking about? You have a cow now?”
“Shhh! Don’t yell! You might spook it. The cow is not mine. It belongs to someone from up the road. All the orchards are flooded, and the fences came down, and the cow’s confused. It’s been standing in the middle of my orchard for a day now, mooing away. I tried to milk it, but the water reaches up to my hips. The bucket’s in the back. You go do it.”
“Abuelita, I’ve never milked a cow, and it’s not like I’m going to start now.”
“Not so loud. We’re taking its milk, so it shouldn’t be advertised.”
I waded around to the back of the house. Sure enough, there was a lone cow mooing softly in the middle of the water. My grandmother appeared at the back door, gesturing for me to get going.
“Abuelita, that cow will knock me over with a good swift kick, and then lean on me till I drown. Forget it. Besides, I’ve been travelling for forty-eight hours to get here. My travel money ran out way back in the south, and I haven’t eaten for twenty-four hours. I need a hot cup of tea with condensed milk.”
“All right, come in. The witches will keep us company,” my grandmother said.
Her dining room table had become her work area, with my grandfather gone. Sure enough, we drank our tea among witches. There were dozens of them. Witches on brooms, witches on chairs, witches on bicycles, witches wearing black hats and red lace stockings.
“Why witches, Abuelita?”
“Because witches are illegal. That’s a good enough reason for me.”
Each time I’d come to Chile to make a delivery, after that first time with Alejandro, I’d stayed on for a few days with my grandmother. This was my fourth venture inside. Once I was over the border, I’d press myself against the window of the bus and devour that long, skinny country with my eyes. But standing in line as a lifesized portrait of Pinochet stared down at me, waiting in the loaded silence punctuated by the stomping of military boots, a bark here, an order there, sent me into a free fall of fear. I’d heard that the life expectancy of a person who starts doing border crossings was only two years. That knowledge could eat me alive, I realized, causing me to break and do something stupid, or it could spur me to refine my skills. So even though I was twenty pounds underweight, completely frigid (Alejandro had given up reaching for me at night) and suffering from dizzy spells, I’d worked hard to master the skill of killing my heart whenever I crossed the border. First I conjured Juan’s voice, ordering me to remember why I was doing this, reminding me that all experience was good, precious, unforgettable. Then I’d invoke the machete-wielding man in Coroico slicing the bull’s throat and yanking out its heart. Sometimes I also conjured up my three great-aunts, who’d made their fortune smuggling goods across this very line. By the time I reached the wicket to present my passport, my pupils were shrunken and my heart left behind, a squashed tomato on the floor. I’d answer the border guard’s questions with a steady hand and a steadier gaze. Then I’d be let through, with whatever goods I’d wrapped and sewn into the lining of my new suitcase. As I rode through the Andes, I’d will my heart to enter my body again, and with it would come the release of the breath I’d been holding for the last two hours. If my great-aunts had known they were an inspiration for their militant niece, they’d have had to increase their dosage of the tranquilizers they loved to pop.
My grandmother was looking at me sternly. “I want to tell you that whatever it is you’re doing, it’s not going to work.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Abuelita.” I took a sip of my tea and tried to get warm, a project that usually took all winter.
“We both know what I’m talking about, and I’m telling you it’s not going to work. Why? Because we live in a country of cowards.”
“Abuelita—”
“Don’t interrupt me. In what world is it okay for people to watch two youngsters being beaten, doused with gasoline and set on fire? First the soldiers beat them, and people watch. Then the soldiers take their half-conscious bodies to a side road and beat them some more, while people pull their curtains and cower in their houses. Then the soldiers set them on fire, and people dive onto their bathroom floors. It makes me sick to be a part of this.”
“Abuelita, people are terrified.”
“I don’t care. If every one of those households had gone outside and defended those children with whatever they had, any weapon, even if it was just a chair, and if every household did that every time something like this happened, then I’d say to you: go ahead, granddaughter, continue doing what you’re doing, because we stand a chance. But here, here in this cursed country, there’s no chance of anything. You tell me people are scared? Well, let me tell you something: there’s nothing more dangerous than the poison of fear. I’ve seen fear turn people into informers, monsters, turning in their own friends and neighbours. You’re dealing with a country sick with fear, Nieta, and I wish I could say that what you’re doing is going to work, but it isn’t, it isn’t.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
She pulled out her hanky and wiped her eyes. I stared straight ahead. She grabbed one of her half-made witches, took up a toothpick and started to do some fine work on the face.
“Having said that, God knows if I was young I’d be doing what you’re doing. Being old and tired, all I can do is go outside during the blackouts and bang my pots and pans. Did you know I’m the only one on this street who does it? Because of Pinochet’s fortress on the corner, and the secret police agents who live next door. When a fat old woman is the only one who’s not afraid to make some noise, when the youth of this country have been broken down to that point, then there’s nothing to be done. After the blackout I’ll be trimming the flowers out front and the neighbours will pass, saying, ‘I heard your pots and pans last night, Señora Carmen.’ I look them right in the eye and say, ‘Yes, and where were your pots and pans, you coward? Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?’ Then I get back to my camellias. They just drop their heads and walk a little faster.”
The assassination attempt on Pinochet might have failed, but now, six months into 1987, the lid seemed to be coming off the country. The fact that it was possible to get that close to the strongman himself gave people courage and hope. I’d been a witness to this on the buses I’d taken to get to Limache. Shockingly, many of the passengers had spoken loudly against the dictatorship. I’d kept my arms crossed and my mouth shut. The last thing I wanted was for our bus to be intercepted.
“But, Abuelita, people are starting to speak up.”
“They can speak all they want, Nieta, but it’s a long way from speaking to doing. To think that unspeakable son of a bitch is claiming our patron saint as his saviour.”
My grandmother took her new witch on a little spin through the air.
“What do you mean?”
“Haven’t you heard what he’s saying about the Virgin Carmen, the patron saint of Chile? The one you and your mother and I are all named after? The one who protects our borders? According to Pinocchio, the Virgin Carmen protected him from being killed. He’s shown the bulletproof glass on TV countless times. He claims that the gunfire created the shape of the Virgin on his window, that she came to him in the form of bullets that were never meant to penetrate his flesh. He loves to go on about his devout Catholicism, but even the Pope agreed to come to Chile only on the condition that Pinocchio get rid of the exile blacklist. I check that list in the newspaper. It’s down to five hundred now, and both your mother and your uncle are still on it. Their names are published for all to see, so everyone can know that they’re considered terrorists, that they’re not allowed into their own country. But you’ll see, you’ll see. As soon as their names are off, any day now, my children will come back, and I’ll throw a party for them right here in this house, and I’ll show the neighbours that my children are good. My children are good.”
I stayed with her for a week. She fed me, massaged my back with cologne, prepared hot water bottles, washed and ironed my clothes and let me lie in bed all day reading my parents’ old books. I devoured Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast and Galeano’s Days and Nights of Love and War. My grandmother’s house was a capsule, a place where my mind roamed and I laughed in my sleep. I fantasized about the day I’d live there again, when Chile was free.
The day I left, my grandmother waved to me from her front door. I stood up straight, locked my jaw and headed down the street to catch a bus back to Santiago. When I looked back, she mouthed the words “Be careful.”
Her yellow house framed her round body. The camellia bush shone in the winter sun, and my grandmother’s face collapsed.
Go back there, I thought. Go back there and live with her forever. Just turn around. Go back to the house where the Terror doesn’t exist. But that wasn’t what I’d signed on for. And my grandmother had said if she were my age, she’d be doing what I was. I certainly couldn’t let her down.