At first the voices are indistinguishable. Gradually, however, each begins to acquire a personality, a unique character, though they all bear the common stamp of Chileanness, that is, the common stamp of a childhood wreathed in mist and in something that for lack of a better word we can call happiness. The voices that reach us from outer space aren’t just redesigning the childhood island called Chile: they’re teaching us our reality with the teacher’s rod, they’re asking us to open our eyes and also our ears. They’re the voices of real men. Some — to judge by the way they talk, by their moments of hesitation — are scared, nervous. Others control their emotions and maintain their composure with impressive coldbloodedness. The tape rolls and little by little the voices become familiar, as if they’d always been there, talking to us, threatening us. The image is redundant. In fact, they were always there. They’re the men who ordered a father to sodomize his own son if he didn’t want them both to be killed, the bosses who put live rats into the vagina of a twenty-two-year-old Mirista they called a whore.
And yet it all seems like a game. The voices creep in from our childhood like prankster guardian spirits: anything is possible if God doesn’t exist, anything can be done if it’s in the name of Chile. Some voices raise doubts. Most comply, hesitant. Sometimes their ignorance is staggering. A top commander, in direct communication with another commander, says that from now on, given the importance of the information he has to transmit, he’ll speak in English. As if English were a dead language, or as if no one on the other side spoke English.
There’s no getting around it: these are the voices of our childhood. Chilean voices, as if smuggled into a movie too big for them, voices that relay a message that the speakers themselves don’t quite understand. A conversation on the far side of reality, where conversation is impossible. And yet no matter how many extraordinary deeds are accumulated, the picture we’re left with is tinged with a familiar vulgarity, taken to a sickening degree. At some point in our lives we knew the people who’re talking. The voices are performing for us, as if in a radio serial, but mostly they’re performing for themselves. Pornography, snuff movies. At last they’ve found the roles of their lives. Finally, the soldiers have their war, their great war: before them we stand, unarmed but watching and listening.
A Modest Proposal
Everything would suggest that we’re entering the new millennium under the glowering word abject, which comes from the Latin abjectus, which means lowly or humble, according to Joan Corominas, the sage who spent his last years on the Mediterranean coast, in a town just a few miles from mine.
September 11, 1973, glides over us like the penultimate Chilean condor or even like a winged huemul, a beast from the Book of Imaginary Beings, written by Borges in collaboration with María Guerrero in 1967, in which there is a chapter, “An Animal Dreamed by Kafka,” that literally transcribes the words of the Prague writer. It goes like this: “It is the animal with the big tail, a tail many yards long and like a fox’s brush. How I should like to get my hands on this tail some time, but it is impossible, the animal is constantly moving about, the tail is constantly being flung this way and that. The animal resembles a kangaroo, but not as to the face, which is flat almost like a human face, and small and oval; only its teeth have any power of expression, whether they are concealed or bared. Sometimes I have the feeling that the animal is trying to tame me. What other purpose could it have in withdrawing its tail when I snatch at it, and then again, waiting calmly until I am tempted again, and then leaping away once more?”
Sometimes I get the feeling that September 11 wants to break us. Sometimes I get the feeling that September 11 has already irrevocably broken us.
What would have happened if September 11 had never existed? It’s a silly question, but sometimes it’s necessary to ask silly questions, or it’s inevitable, or it suits our natural laziness. What would have happened? Many things, of course. The history of Latin America would be different. But on a basic level, I think everything would be the same, in Chile and in Latin America. It can be argued: there would be no disappeared. True. And there would be no caravan of death. Or firing squads. In Mexico, I met a Mirista who was tortured by having rats put into her vagina. She was a young girl, just a little older than me, which means she must have been twenty-two or twenty-three, and later I was told that she died of sadness, like in a nineteenth-century novel. Without September 11, that wouldn’t have happened. What would we have seen? A different kind of repression, maybe. Instead of meeting that Mirista in Mexico, maybe I would’ve met her at a concentration camp in the south of Chile, where she was sent for her leftist views, that “childhood malady” (for childhood, read childish), and I was sent for being a writer with no class consciousness or sense of history. Would that have been better? I think so. Such a bath of horror, you might say, would be less sticky than the real historic bath of horror into which we were plunged.
A little while ago I was in Chile, where I happened to watch two or three televised conversations among politicians of different views. The conversations, if they can be called that (they were more like mini-debates, though more because of the atmosphere of conflict and strife than because of any controversy aired), consisted of a public exhibition of patience by the politicians of the center and the left, and a display of rudeness — when not of jingoistic hysteria — by the politicians on the right. I was left with the impression (possibly illusory) that some (precisely those supported by the majority of the electorate) took the position of recently liberated offenders still subject to the will (more imaginary than real) of their ex-jailers, and the others (those supported by a much smaller portion of the electorate) took a proud stance, the stance of gentlemen wounded to the quick, but also of badly behaved children, of bullies who don’t intend to concede a single point to their adversaries, completely forgetting that politics is above all the art of dialogue and tolerance.
And it’s here that the word abject turns up again. A difficult and cumbersome abjection that at times seems unshakable. It’s true that the left committed an infinity of crimes, by commission or omission. To require of the Chilean politicians on the left (who I suspect have committed very few crimes of commission) that they intone a permanent mea culpa for the Stalinist concentration camps is from any point of view an excessive demand. It’s toward this, however, that political discourse seems to tend. Toward an incessant penitence that takes the place of the exchange or expression of ideas. But this penitence isn’t even penitence. Its real purpose is to cover up one of the nation’s essential qualities: its ridiculousness and tweeness, the horrific seriousness of Chileans dressed up in the trappings of the twee, of that precious, pretentious vulgarity.
Sometimes, when I’m in the mood to think pointless thoughts, I ask myself whether we were always like this. I don’t know. The left committed verbal crimes in Chile (a specialty of the Latin American left), it committed moral crimes, and it probably killed people. But it didn’t put live rats in any girl’s vagina. It didn’t have the time to create its own evil, it didn’t have the time to create its own forced labor camps. Is it possible that it would have, if given the time? Of course it’s possible. Nothing in our country’s history allows us to imagine a more optimistic alternate history. But the truth is that in Chile the concentration camps weren’t the work of the left, and neither were the firing squads, torture, the disappeared, repression. All of this was accomplished by the right. All of this was the work of the government that took power after the coup. Nevertheless, as we enter the third millennium the politicians of the left are still asking to be forgiven, which after all isn’t so bad, and, upon reflection, is even advisable, on the condition that all politicians — those on the left and those on the right and those in the center — ask for forgiveness for all the real crimes that their fathers and grandfathers committed here and in other countries (especially in other countries!), and that they also ask forgiveness for the string of lies that their fathers and grandfathers told and that they themselves are prepared to keep telling, and for the secrets and the back-stabbing, and then wouldn’t that be a pretty picture, as Hart Crane says, all the country’s politicians asking to be forgiven, and even competing to see who can ask most convincingly or most loudly.