Paula (28 page)

“They should be more careful about what they ask, they might get it,” the poet sighed.

“There will never be a military coup in Chile, don Pablo. Our armed forces respect democracy,” I said, trying to reassure him with the oft-repeated clichés. After lunch it began to rain; the room darkened and the foreboding woman on the figurehead came alive, stepped from the wood, and greeted us with a shiver of naked breasts. I realized then that the poet was weary, that the wine had gone to my head, and that I must hurry.

“If you like, we can do the interview now,” I suggested.

“Interview?”

“Well, that's why I'm here, isn't it?”

“Interview
me
? I'd never put myself through that,” he laughed. “My dear child, you must be the worst journalist in the country. You are incapable of being objective, you place yourself at the center of everything you do, I suspect you're not beyond fibbing, and when you don't have news, you invent it. Why don't you write novels instead? In literature, those defects are virtues.”

As I am telling you this, Aurelia is preparing to recite a poem she wrote especially for you, Paula. I asked her not to do it, because her poems demoralize me, but she insists. She has no confidence in the doctors, and doesn't think you will get well.

“You think they have all conspired to lie to me, Aurelia?”

“Ah, what an innocent you are. Don't you see that they always protect one another? They will never admit they blew it with your daughter, they're all rascals with the power of life and death in their hands. This is me talking, a woman who has lived from hospital to hospital. If you only knew the things I've seen. . . .”

Her strange poem is about a bird with petrified wings. It says you are already dead, and that you want to leave but can't because I am holding you back, that I am an anchor tied to your feet.

“Don't try so hard, Isabel. Can't you see you're really fighting against her? Paula isn't here anymore; look at her eyes, they're like black water. If she doesn't know her mother, it's because she's already gone. Accept it once and for all.”

“Don't say that, Aurelia. . . .”

“Let her talk, the mad don't lie,” Elvira's husband sighs.

What is there on the other side of life? Only night silence and solitude? What remains when there are no more desires or memories or hope? What is there in death? If I could be still, without speaking or thinking, without begging, crying, remembering, hoping, if I could submerse myself in the most absolute silence, then perhaps I could hear you, my dearest daughter.

A
T THE BEGINNING OF
1973, C
HILE WAS LIKE A NATION AT WAR
,
THE
hatred that had gestated in shadow day after day had been vented in strikes, sabotage, and acts of terrorism for which extremists of the Left and the Right both blamed the other. Peasant groups appropriated private lands to build their own agrarian communities, workers occupied factories and nationalized them, and representatives of the Popular Unity seized control of banks, creating such a climate of insecurity that it took no great effort for the political opposition to sow panic. Allende's enemies perfected to a science their methods for aggravating economic problems: they circulated rumors of bank closings, inciting people to withdraw their money, they burned crops and slaughtered cattle, they pulled essential articles from the market—from truck tires to minuscule pieces of the most sophisticated electronic apparatus. Without needles or cotton, the hospitals were paralyzed, without spare parts for their machines, factories could not operate. An entire industry might be stymied for want of a single part, leaving thousands of workers in the street. In response, workers organized into committees, threw out their bosses, took authority into their own hands and set up camps at the gate, watching day and night to prevent the owners from destroying their own enterprises. Bank employees and public administrators also set up guards to keep colleagues of the opposite stripe from jumbling files in the archives, destroying documents, or placing bombs in the restrooms. They lost precious hours in interminable meetings trying to reach collective decisions but, as everyone fought for the chance to expound his own point of view on every insignificant detail, they rarely reached an accord: what a supervisor normally had decided in five minutes took the employees a week of Byzantine discussions and democratic votes. On a larger scale, the same thing was happening in the government; the parties of the Popular Unity shared power by quotas, and decisions passed through so many filters that when finally something was approved it bore little, if any, resemblance to the original project. Allende had no majority in the congress, and his projects all crashed against the unyielding wall of the opposition. Chaos spread; Chile was living in a climate of insecurity and latent violence, and the heavy machinery of the government was grinding to a halt. At night, Santiago had the look of a city devastated by a cataclysm, the streets were dark and nearly empty because so few people dared go anywhere on foot and public transportation was crippled by strikes and gasoline rationing. The bonfires of the
compañeros,
as government backers were called, blazed in the city center as they mounted an all-night guard over buildings and streets. Brigades of youthful Communists painted propagandistic murals on walls and bands of extreme rightists drove through the streets in automobiles with dark tinted-glass windows, firing blindly. In areas where agrarian reform had been effected, the landowners plotted revenge, equipped with weapons that came as contraband across the long frontier of the Andean cordillera. Thousands of head of cattle were driven to Argentina through passes in the south, and others were slaughtered to prevent their reaching the market. At times the rivers ran red with blood and the current carried swollen cadavers of dairy cows and fattened hogs. The campesinos, who had lived for centuries obeying orders, joined together in cooperatives, but they lacked initiative, knowledge, and credit. They did not know how to use their freedom, and many secretly longed for the return of the
patrón
, that authoritative and frequently despised father who at least gave clear orders and in times of trouble protected them against natural disasters, crop blight, and epidemic disease among their animals. The
patrón
had friends and could get what was needed; in contrast, they did not have the courage to enter a bank and, even if they did, were unable to decipher the small print on the papers put before them for their signature. Neither could they understand what the devil the advisers sent by the government were mumbling about, with their big words and city way of talking, people with clean fingernails who didn't know which end of a plow was up and had never pulled a breech calf from a cow's rear. These country folk, however, did not hold back grain for the next planting, they butchered their breeding bulls, and lost the most crucial months of the summer arguing politics while ripe fruit fell from the trees and vegetables dried and withered in the field rows. As the last straw, the truck drivers went out on strike and there was no way to transport cargo from one end of the country to the other: some cities lacked food while in others produce and seafood lay rotting. Salvador Allende was hoarse from denouncing the sabotage, but no one listened to him, and he did not have enough people or sufficient power to deal with his enemies by force. He accused the North Americans of financing the strike; every truck driver was receiving fifty dollars a day not to work, so that there was no hope of resolving the conflict, and when he ordered out the army to impose order, they found that the engines had missing parts and they could not move the old tires blocking the highways; in addition, the road was strewn with bent nails that blew out the tires of the military vehicles. A TV helicopter showed the ruin of useless iron rusting on asphalt highways. Shortages became a nightmare, but no one went hungry because people who could afford it bought in the black market, and the poor organized by barrios to obtain the essentials. The government pleaded for patience, and the minister of agriculture distributed pamphlets to teach citizens how to cultivate vegetables on their balconies and in their bathtubs. Fearful that we wouldn't eat, I began to hoard food obtained with the cunning of a smuggler. I had previously joked with my mother-in-law, saying that if we can't get chicken we can eat noodles, and we'll be better off without sugar anyway, it will be good for our figures, but in the end I said the hell with scruples. Where once I had stood in line for hours to buy a kilo of meat of dubious origin, now the resellers brought the best cuts right to the house—of course, at ten times the official price. That solution was short-lived because it was too cynical to assail my children with lectures about socialist morality while serving black market pork chops for dinner.

Even with such grave problems, the people continued to celebrate their victory, and when parliamentary elections were held in March, the Popular Unity increased its percentage of the vote. The Right realized then that tons of twisted nails on highways and the absence of poultry in the markets would not be enough to topple the Socialist government, and that realization drove them to the last phase of the conspiracy. From that moment, rumors began to circulate of a military coup. Most people had no idea what that meant; we had heard that in other countries on our continent soldiers seized power with boring regularity, and we boasted that nothing like that would ever happen in Chile: we had a solid democracy and we were not one of those Central American banana republics, or Argentina, where for fifty years every civilian government had been ended by a military takeover. We considered ourselves the Swiss of the continent. The chief of the armed forces, General Prats, advocated respecting the constitution and permitting Allende to serve out his term peacefully, but in June a faction of the army rebelled and rolled out into the streets in tanks. Prats tried to impose discipline, but by then the genie was out of the bottle. The parliament declared the government of the Popular Unity illegal, and the generals demanded the ouster of their commander in chief, although instead of showing their own faces they sent their wives to demonstrate in front of Prats's house in an embarrassing public spectacle. The general was forced to resign, and the president appointed Augusto Pinochet in his place, an obscure career officer whom no one had ever heard of until then but who was a very close friend of Prats, and who swore to remain loyal to the democracy. The country seemed nearly out of control, and Salvador Allende announced a plebiscite that would allow the voters to decide whether he should continue governing or resign and call new elections: the date was set for September 11. The example of the wives of the military acting in their husbands' stead was quickly imitated. My father-in-law, like many other men, sent Granny to the Military Academy to throw corn at the cadets, to see if they could stop behaving like hens and go out and defend their nation as they were sworn to do. He was so enthusiastic about the possibility of overturning socialism once and for all that he himself beat stewpans in his patio to back the neighbor women protesting in the street. Like most Chileans, he thought that the military respected the rule of law and would remove Allende from the presidency, restore order to a calamitous situation, rid the country of leftists and rebels, and immediately call a new election—and then, if everything turned out well, the pendulum would swing in the opposite direction and we would again have a conservative president. “Don't get your hopes up, even in the best of cases, we'll get a Christian Democrat,” I warned him, knowing that his hatred of that party was greater than what he felt for the Communists. The idea that soldiers would not release the reins of power never occurred to my father-in-law, or anyone else—except those in on the secret of the conspiracy.

Celia and Nicolás have asked me to come home to California for the arrival of their baby in May. They want me to take part in the birth of my granddaughter; they say that after so many months of being exposed to death, pain, farewells, and tears, it will be a celebration to welcome this infant as her head thrusts into life. If the visions I have had in dreams come true, as they have at other times, she will be a dark-haired, likable little girl, with a will of her own. You must get better soon, Paula, so you can go home with me and be Andrea's godmother. Oh, Paula, why do I say things like that? You won't be able to do anything for a long time, we have years of patience and hard work and organization ahead. You will have to do the most difficult part, but I will be at your side to help you; you will not want for anything, you will be surrounded by peace and comfort, we will help you get well. I have been told that rehabilitation is very slow, and you may need it for the rest of your life, but it can work miracles. The porphyria specialist maintains that you will recover completely, but the neurologist has ordered a battery of examinations, which were begun yesterday. They have already done a very painful one to test your peripheral nerves. They rolled you through the maze of the hospital to another wing of the building; there they pricked your arms and legs with needles and then used electric stimuli to measure your reactions. We went through it together, you in the clouds of unconsciousness and I thinking of all the men and women and children in Chile who were tortured in a very similar way with electric prods. Each time the charge entered your body, I felt it in mine, exacerbated by terror. I tried to relax and breathe with you, at your rhythm, imitating what Celia and Nicolás do together in the natural childbirth classes; pain is inevitable in this life, but they say that it is almost always bearable if we do not put up resistance or add fear and anguish.