Paula (33 page)

“I can't promise that, Tata.” And in fact, I couldn't, it was too late for such promises. Two days after the military coup, almost as soon as the curfew was lifted, I was, I don't know exactly how, swept into the network that immediately formed to help the persecuted. I first heard about a young leftist extremist who had to be hidden; he had escaped from an ambush with a bullet in his leg and his pursuers close upon his heels. He was able to hide in a friend's garage, where at midnight a sympathetic doctor extracted the bullet and bandaged the wound. His fever soared, despite antibiotics; he could not be kept any longer in the garage and it was impossible to think of taking him to a hospital, where he would automatically have been arrested. In his condition, he could not survive the difficult border crossing through the mountain passes to the south, where some were making their escape. His only hope was to find asylum, but only well-connected people, like politicians, journalists, intellectuals, and famous artists, were finding embassy doors opened to them; poor devils like him, and thousands of others, were left out in the cold. I was not at all sure what “asylum” meant, I had only heard it in our national anthem, which now sounded ironic—
“. . . the country either will be free, or an asylum against oppression”
—but the situation seemed like something from a novel, and without really thinking about it, I offered to help him. I didn't stop to calculate the risk, because at that moment no one knew how terror operated, we were still acting under the principles of normality. I decided to take the direct approach, and drove to the Argentine embassy, parked my car as close by as possible, and walked to the gate with a pounding heart but firm stride. Through the iron grille I could see that the windows of the building had clothing hanging in them, and people looking out, shouting. The street was boiling with soldiers; I saw nests of machine guns and a small tank parked before the gate. The moment I approached, two guns were pointed at me. “What do you have to do to be granted asylum here?” I asked. “Your documents!” the soldiers barked in unison. I handed them my identification card and, one on each side of me, they led me to the guardhouse beside the gate, where I repeated my question to an officer, trying to hide the tremor in my voice. He looked at me with such amazement that we both smiled. “I'm here to prevent precisely that,” he replied, studying the family name on my documents. After an eternity, he dismissed the soldiers and we were alone in the tiny gatehouse. “I've seen you on television. Ummm. . . , this must be for your program, of course,” he said. He was pleasant, but categorical. As long as he was in charge, no one would be given asylum in this embassy; it wasn't like the Mexican embassy, where people wandered in any time they pleased, all they had to do was talk to the majordomo. I understood. The officer returned my papers, warned me to stay out of trouble, and we said goodbye with a handshake. I drove directly to the embassy of Mexico where hundreds had already been accepted, but Aztec hospitality stretched to include one more.

Then I learned that some of Santiago's poorer neighborhoods were under siege by the army; in others, the curfew was in force half the day, and many people were going hungry. Soldiers rolled in with tanks, surrounded the houses, and herded everyone outside. All males over fourteen were taken to the schoolyard or the soccer field—usually an empty lot with a few faint chalk lines—where, after the men were methodically beaten in view of the women and children, some were chosen by lot and taken away. A few returned, telling of nightmarish experiences and showing the scars of their torture. The mutilated bodies of others were thrown on garbage dumps at night, so everyone would learn the fate of subversives. In some areas, most of the men had disappeared, leaving family after family with no source of support. My role was to collect food and money for the church kitchens that provided warm meals to the youngest children. The sight of older brothers and sisters waiting outside with empty stomachs in the hope that a few pieces of bread would be left over is something forever engraved in my memory. I became very fastidious about soliciting help; friends learned to refuse me by telephone, and I think they hid when they saw me coming. Quietly, my grandfather gave me what he could, but he didn't want to know what I did with his money. He was frightened, and he barricaded himself in front of his television, tight within his four walls, but bad news seeped in through the windows and sprouted like moss in every corner; there was no way to avoid it. I don't know whether Tata's reason for being frightened was that he knew more than he confessed, or because eighty years of living had taught him the infinite possibilities of human wickedness. For me, it was a total surprise to discover that the world is violent and predatory and ruled by the implacable law of the survival of the fittest. Natural selection has not caused a flowering of intelligence or evolution of the spirit, at the first opportunity, we destroy one another like rats trapped in a too-small box.

I became acquainted with a segment of the Catholic community that in a way reconciled me with the Church from which I had parted company fifteen years before. Until then I had known only dogma, rites, guilt, and sin, the Vatican, which ruled the fate of millions of faithful throughout the world, and the official Church, almost always the advocate of the powerful, despite its social encyclicals. I had vaguely heard of liberation theology and the movement of worker priests, but I knew nothing of the militant Church, the thousands and thousands of Christians dedicated to serving those most in need with humility and anonymity. They formed a part of the only organization with the ability to help the victimized, the Vicaría de la Solidaridad, an entity created for that purpose by the cardinal during the first days of the dictatorship. For seventeen years, a large group of priests and nuns would risk their lives to save others and to report crimes. It was a priest who showed me the safest routes to political asylum. Some of the people I helped leap over a wall ended up in France, Germany, Canada, and the Scandinavian countries, all of which accepted hundreds of Chilean refugees. Once I had started down that road, it was impossible to turn back, because one case led to another and then another . . . and there I was, committed to various underground activities, hiding or transporting people, passing on for publication in Germany information others had obtained about the tortured or disappeared, and taping interviews with victims in order to establish a record of everything that happened in Chile, a task more than one journalist took on in those days. I could not suspect then that eight years later I would use that material to write two novels. At first I had no sense of the danger, and moved about in broad daylight, in the hubbub of the center of Santiago, in the warm summer and golden autumn. It was not until the middle of 1974 that I truly recognized the risks involved. I knew so little about the workings of terror that I was slow to perceive the warning signs: nothing indicated that a parallel world existed in the shadows, a cruel dimension of reality. I felt invulnerable. My motivations were not heroic, not in the least, merely compassion for such desperate people and, I have to admit it, the irresistible attraction of adventure. During moments of greatest danger I remembered the advice Tío Ramón gave me the night of my first party:
Remember that all the others are more afraid than you
.

In those uncertain times, people revealed their true faces. The most contentious political leaders were the first to subside into silence or to flee the country; in contrast, other people who had lived quiet, unassuming lives exhibited extraordinary valor. I had one good friend who was an out-of-work psychologist who earned his living as a photographer on our magazine, a gentle and somewhat naive man with whom we shared family Sundays with the children and whom I had never heard utter a word about politics. I called him Francisco, although that was not his name, and nine years later he served as model for the protagonist of
Of Love and Shadows
. He had contacts with religious groups because his brother was a worker priest and, through him, he learned of the atrocities committed throughout the country; more than once he put himself in danger to help others. During secret walks on San Cristobal Hill, where, we believed, no one could hear us, he used to pass on the news to me. Sometimes I worked with him, and other times I acted alone. I had devised a rather unimaginative system for the first meeting, generally the only meeting, with the person I was to help: we would agree on a time, I would drive very slowly around the Plaza Italia in my unmistakable vehicle until I picked up a quick signal, then slow down just long enough for someone to jump into the car. I never knew the names or stories behind those pale countenances and shaking hands, because our instructions were to exchange a minimum of words. I would be left with a kiss on the cheek and whispered thanks, and never know anything more of that person. It was more difficult when there were children. I know of one baby that to get past the guard at the gate and be reunited with its parents was smuggled into an embassy drugged with a sedative and hidden in the bottom of a basket of lettuce.

Michael knew about my activities and never objected, even when it came to hiding someone in the house. Serenely, he warned me of the dangers, somewhat amazed that so many assignments fell into my hands while he rarely knew anything that was going on. I don't know, I suppose my being a journalist had something to do with it; I was out in the streets talking to people, while he was always in the company of executives, the caste that benefited most from the dictatorship. I showed up one day at the restaurant where Michael always lunched with his associates in the construction company, to point out to them that they spent enough money on a single meal to feed twenty children for a month in the kitchen run by the priests, and then suggested that once a week they eat a sandwich in their office and give me the money they saved. My words were met with a stony silence, even the waiter stood frozen with his tray in his hand, and all eyes turned toward Michael; I expect they were wondering what kind of man this was who was unable to control his insolent wife. The president of the company removed his eyeglasses, slowly cleaned them with his napkin, and then wrote me a check for ten times the amount I had asked. Michael did not eat with them again, and with that gesture made his position clear. It was difficult for him, brought up as he was by strict and noble ideals, to believe the horror stories I told him or to conceive that we could all die, including our children, if any of the poor wretches who passed through our lives was arrested and confessed under torture to having been beneath our roof. We heard the most bloodcurdling rumors, but through some mysterious mechanism of the brain, which at times refuses to see the obvious, we dismissed them as exaggerations—until it was no longer possible to deny them. At night we would wake up sweating because a car had stopped outside during curfew, or because the telephone rang and no one was there, but the next morning the sun would rise, the children and the dog would crawl onto our bed, we would get up and make coffee, and life would start all over again, as if everything were normal. Months went by before the evidence was irrefutable and we were paralyzed by fear. How could everything change so suddenly and so completely? How could reality be so distorted? We were all accomplices, the entire society was mad. The devil in the mirror. . . . Sometimes, when I was alone in some secret place on the hill with time to think, I again saw the black waters of the mirrors of my childhood where Satan peered out at night, and as I leaned toward the glass, I realized, with horror, that the Evil One had my face. I was not unsullied, no one was: a monster crouched in each of us, every one of us had a dark and fiendish side. Given the conditions, could
I
torture and kill? Let us say, for example, that someone harmed my children. . . . What cruelty would I be capable of in that situation? The demons had escaped from the mirrors and were running loose through the world.

By the end of the next year, when the country was completely subjugated, a system of pure capitalism was initiated; because it favored only the executive class and workers lost all their rights, it had to be imposed by force. It did not follow the law of supply and demand, as the young ideologues of the Right claimed, because the work force was repressed and at the mercy of their employers. The social benefits people had obtained decades before were terminated, the right to hold meetings or strike was abolished, and labor leaders disappeared or were murdered with impunity. Businesses, caught up in a mad course of inhuman competition, demanded maximum productivity from their workers for minimum compensation. There were so many unemployed lining up at factory doors to find work that labor was available at near slave wages. No one dared protest, because in the best of circumstances a man could lose his job, but worse, he could be accused of being a Communist or a subversive and wind up in a cell tortured by the political police. An apparent economic miracle was created at great social cost; never before had Chile witnessed such a shameless exhibition of wealth, nor so many people living in extreme poverty. As an administrator, Michael had to dismiss hundreds of workers; he called them to his office by list to tell them that beginning the next day they were not to report to work, and to explain to them that in accord with the new rules they had lost their severance pay. He knew that each of those men had a family, and that it would be impossible for them to find another job; this dismissal was tantamount to an irrevocable sentence of misery. He started coming home demoralized and dejected; after a few months his shoulders sagged and his hair turned gray. One day he called a meeting of his associates to tell them that the situation was becoming obscene, that his foremen were earning the equivalent of three liters of milk per day. With laughter, they replied, “What matter? Those people don't drink milk, anyway.” By that time, I had lost my position on both magazines and was taping my program in a studio under the surveillance of a guard with a machine gun. Censorship was not all that affected my work; I became aware that it was to the liking of the dictatorship that a member of the Allende family had a light comedy program on television—what better proof of normality in the nation? I resigned. I felt I was being watched, fear kept me awake nights, and I broke out in hives that I scratched till they bled. Many of my friends were leaving the country; some disappeared and were never mentioned again, as if they had never existed. One afternoon, an artist friend I hadn't seen in months visited me; once we were alone, he took off his shirt to show me scars that were not completely healed: his torturers had carved an “A” for Allende on his back. From Argentina, my mother implored me to be cautious and not do anything to provoke trouble. I could not forget the prophecies of María Teresa Juárez, the seer, and feared that, just as with the bloodbath she had foreseen, her prediction for me of immobility or paralysis might also come true. Didn't that in fact mean years in prison? I began to contemplate the possibility of leaving Chile, but did not dare speak of it aloud because it seemed that putting the thought into words could set in motion the gears of an irreversible mechanism of death and destruction. I went often to walk the paths on San Cristobal where I had played so many years ago on family picnics; I hid among the trees and screamed, with pain like a spear piercing my breast. Sometimes I packed food and a bottle of wine in a basket and went there with Francisco, who, using his knowledge of psychology, tried vainly to help me. Only with him could I talk about my clandestine activities, my fears, my unconfessable desire to escape. “You're crazy,” he would tell me. “Anything is better than exile. How can you leave your home, your friends, your country?”