Lucia
Chile, 1954–1973
The two pillars of Lucia Maraz’s childhood and youth were her mother, Lena, and her brother, Enrique, before the latter was taken from her by the military coup in 1973. Her father had died in a traffic accident when Lucia was tiny, and it was as if he had never existed, although the idea of a father continued to float like a mist around his two children. Among the few memories Lucia had, so vague that perhaps they were not real ones but scenes her brother invented, was a trip to the zoo. She was on her father’s shoulders, clinging on with both hands to his thick black hair as they strolled between the monkey cages. In another equally hazy memory she was on a carousel astride a unicorn while he stood beside her, an arm around her waist to steady her. Her brother and mother were nowhere to be seen in either of these images.
Lena Maraz had loved her husband from the age of seventeen with unswerving devotion. When she received the news of his death she was only able to weep for him a few hours until she discovered that the person she had just identified covered with a sheet on a metal table in a public hospital was in fact a total stranger and her marriage a monumental fraud. The same highway police officer who had informed her of what had happened later returned with a detective inspector to ask questions that seemed cruel under the circumstances and bore no relation to the accident. They had to repeat their information twice before Lena understood what they were trying to tell her. Her husband was a bigamist. In a provincial city almost a hundred miles from the capital where she lived, there was another woman as much in the dark as she was, who believed she was his legitimate spouse and the mother of his only child. For years, Lena’s husband had lived a double life, shielded by his job as a traveling salesman, which offered a good pretext for his prolonged absences. Since he had married Lena first, his second relationship had no legal standing, but the son had been recognized and bore his father’s surname.
Lena’s mourning was transformed into a storm of resentment and retrospective jealousy. She spent months scouring the past for lies and omissions, piecing things together to explain every suspect act, every false word, every broken promise, doubting even the way they had made love. In her desire to find out about the other wife she went to the province to spy on her, only to discover she was an ordinary-looking young woman who dressed badly and wore glasses: someone very different from the courtesan of her imagination. Lena observed her from a safe distance and followed her in the street but never approached her. Some weeks later, the woman phoned to suggest they meet to talk about the situation as they had both suffered in a similar way and both had children by the same father. Lena told her they had nothing in common, that the man’s sins were his own business and he must surely be paying for them in purgatory. Then she hung up on her. Lena’s life was consumed by rancor until she finally realized that her husband was still harming her from the grave, and it was her anger rather than his betrayal that was destroying her. She adopted a draconian remedy and cut the faithless wretch out of her life at a stroke. She tore up every photo of him she could lay her hands on, got rid of his things, stopped seeing the friends they had in common, and avoided all contact with the Maraz family, although she herself kept his name as it was also her children’s.
Enrique and Lucia were given a simple explanation: their father had died in an accident, but life went on, and it was unhealthy to go on thinking of those no longer there. They had to turn the page. It was enough for them to include him in their prayers so that his soul could rest in peace. Lucia was only able to imagine how he looked thanks to a couple of black-and-white photographs her brother rescued before Lena found them. In them their father was a tall, thin man with intense eyes and brilliantined hair. In one he was very young, wearing the uniform of the Chilean navy, where he had studied and worked as a radio engineer for a while. In the other, taken several years later, he was with Lena and holding a few-months-old Enrique in his arms. He had been born in Dalmatia and emigrated to Chile with his parents as a young child, as was the case with Lena and hundreds of other Croatians who entered Chile as Yugoslavs and settled in the north of the country. He met Lena at a folk festival, and the discovery of how much they had in common created the illusion of love, but they were fundamentally very different. Lena was serious, conservative, and religious, while he was cheerful, bohemian, and irreverent. She stuck to the rules without questioning them, was hardworking and thrifty; he was lazy and a wastrel.
Lucia grew up knowing nothing about her father; the topic was taboo in her house. Lena never expressly forbade it but avoided the subject with pursed lips and knitted brow. Her children learned to control their curiosity. It was not until the final weeks of Lena’s life that she could talk freely about him and answer Lucia’s questions. “You’ve inherited your sense of responsibility and strength from me; you can thank your father for being likable and mentally alert, but you have none of his defects.”
In Lucia’s childhood the lack of a father was like having a locked room in the house, a hermetically sealed door that might contain who knew what secrets. What would it be like to open that door? Who would she find in that room? However much she studied the man in the photographs, she was unable to relate to him; he was a stranger. Whenever asked about her family, the first thing Lucia said, adopting a doleful expression to avoid any further questions, was that her father had died. That aroused pity—the poor girl was a half orphan—and no one asked anything more. In secret she envied her best friend, Adela, the only daughter of separated parents. She was spoiled like a princess by her father, a surgeon specializing in organ transplants who was constantly traveling to the United States, bringing back dolls that spoke English and had sparkly red shoes like those Dorothy wore in The Wizard of Oz. He was affectionate and great fun, and took Adela and Lucia to the tearoom in the Hotel Crillon to have ice-cream sundaes topped with whipped cream, to the zoo to see the seals, and to the Parque Forestal to ride horses, but the outings and the toys were the least of it. What Lucia most enjoyed was to hold hands with her friend’s father in public, pretending that Adela was her sister and that they shared this fairy-tale father. With the fervor of a novice, she prayed that this perfect man would marry her mother so that she could have him as her stepfather, but the heavens ignored this wish, as they did so many others.
At that time, Lena Maraz was still a young, beautiful woman, with broad shoulders, a long neck, and sparkling, spinach-colored eyes. Adela’s father never dared try to court her. Her severe suits with masculine jackets and chaste blouses could not entirely hide her seductive curves, but her demeanor commanded respect and distance. If she had so wished, she could have had more than enough suitors, but she clung to her widowhood with the haughtiness of an empress. Her husband’s lies had created in her a definitive mistrust for the entire male gender.
THREE YEARS OLDER THAN HIS SISTER, Enrique Maraz did retain a few idealized or invented memories of his father, but over time this nostalgia faded. He was not interested in Adela’s father, with his gifts from America or ice cream at the Hotel Crillon. He wanted a father of his own, someone he could resemble when he was older, someone he could identify with when he looked in the mirror when he was of an age to start shaving, someone to teach him the basic lessons of manhood. His mother kept telling him he was the man of the house, responsible for her and his sister, because it was a man’s role to protect and look after the family. When he once ventured to ask her how he could learn that without a father, she replied curtly that he should improvise, because even if his father were alive, he would be no model. Enrique would have nothing to learn from him.
The brother and sister were as different from one another as their parents had been. Whereas Lucia got lost in the maze of a feverish imagination and boundless curiosity, constantly wearing her heart on her sleeve, weeping for suffering humanity and mistreated animals, Enrique was a cerebral type. From childhood on he demonstrated an ideological fanaticism that at first provoked laughter but soon became irritating. No one could bear this kid who was far too vehement, thought too highly of himself, and was too preachy. In his Boy Scout days he went around for years in short trousers trying to convince anybody who had the misfortune to bump into him of the virtues of discipline and fresh air. Later on he transferred this pathological insistence to the philosophy of Gurdjieff, liberation theology, and the revelations brought on by LSD, until he found his definitive vocation in Karl Marx.
Enrique’s incendiary diatribes as a young man disturbed his mother, who thought the Left did nothing but make a huge racket, and did not impress his sister, a carefree schoolgirl more interested in ephemeral boyfriends and rock singers than anything else. With his wispy beard, long hair, and black beret, Enrique imitated the famous guerrilla fighter Che Guevara, who had been killed in Bolivia a couple of years earlier. He had read Che’s writings and constantly quoted him, even when it was not relevant, to his mother’s explosive annoyance and his sister’s fascinated admiration.
Lucia was finishing high school at the end of the sixties when Enrique joined the groups supporting Salvador Allende, the Socialist Party’s candidate for the presidency, who was the devil incarnate to many in Chile. In Enrique’s view, the only salvation for humanity lay in overthrowing capitalism by a revolution that pulled the whole edifice down. This meant that elections were a circus, but since they provided a unique opportunity to vote for a Marxist, they had to be taken advantage of. The other candidates were promising reforms within a well-known framework, whereas the Left’s program was radical. The Right unleashed a fear campaign prophesying that Chile would end up like Cuba, that the Soviets would snatch Chilean children and brainwash them, destroy churches, rape nuns and execute priests, steal the land from its legitimate owners, and put an end to private property, and that even the most humble peasant was going to lose his hens and end up a slave in a Siberian gulag.
Despite the campaign of fear, Chile opted for the left-wing parties, who got together in a coalition known as Popular Unity, led by Salvador Allende. In 1970, to the horror of those who had traditionally held power and of the United States, which viewed the election in terms of Fidel Castro and his Cuban revolution, the Popular Unity Coalition won. Allende himself was probably the most surprised of all. He had run for president three times before and liked to joke about his epitaph reading Here lies the future president of Chile. The second-most-surprised person was Enrique Maraz, who overnight found he had nothing to fight against. That changed almost as soon as the initial euphoria died down.
The triumph of Salvador Allende, the first Marxist elected by a democratic vote, attracted the interest of the entire world, and in particular the CIA. However, it proved impossible for him to govern with the support of parties of widely differing tendencies and in the teeth of an all-out war declared by his political enemies. This rapidly became obvious, and unleashed a storm that would last three years and shake Chilean society to its very foundations. No one could remain indifferent.
To Enrique Maraz, the only possible revolution was the Cuban one; Allende’s reforms simply served to postpone that indispensable upheaval. His far-left party sabotaged the government with the same fervor as the Right. Shortly after the election, Enrique abandoned his studies and departed from his mother’s home without leaving an address where she could find him. They had sporadic news of him, when he turned up on a visit or phoned, always in a hurry, but his activities remained secret. He still had his beard and long hair but had given up the beret and boots, and seemed more thoughtful. He no longer leapt into damning attacks on the bourgeoisie, religion, and Yankee imperialism. He had learned to listen with feigned politeness to what he saw as his mother’s reactionary opinions and his sister’s nonsense.
Lucia had decorated her room with a poster of Che Guevara her brother had given her, but only because the guerrilla fighter was sexy, and to annoy her mother, who thought he was a delinquent. She also had several records by Victor Jara. She knew his protest songs by heart and also some of the slogans of the “Marxist-Leninist vanguard of the working-class and oppressed sectors,” as Enrique’s party defined itself. She would join in huge marches in defense of the government, shouting until she was hoarse that the people united would never be defeated. Days later, with equal enthusiasm, she would go with her girlfriends to equally large protest demonstrations against the same government she had defended a few days earlier. She was much less interested in any cause than in the fun of shouting at the top of her voice in the street. Enrique reproached her one day when he caught sight of her in the distance at an opposition march, saying her ideological coherence left a lot to be desired. The fashion then was miniskirts, platform boots, and thick black eye makeup, all of which Lucia adopted. Also in vogue were hippies and flower children, whom some young Chileans imitated, dancing in a stoned haze with their tambourines and making love in the parks, just as they did in London or California. Lucia never went that far, because her mother would never have allowed her to mix with those bucolic degenerates, as she called them.
Since the only topic of conversation in the country was politics, which produced violent breakups between families and friends, Lena imposed a law of silence on the matter in her own house, just as she had done regarding her husband. To Lucia, who was at the height of adolescent rebelliousness, the ideal way to anger her mother was mentioning Allende. Lena would get back in the evening exhausted from her day at work, the dreadful public transportation, traffic held up by strikes and demonstrations, not to mention endless lines to buy a scrawny chicken or the cigarettes she could not live without, and yet she would recover sufficiently to bang on saucepans in her backyard with her women neighbors as an anonymous way of protesting about shortages in particular and socialism in general. The noise of these saucepans began with a single clang in one yard, taken up by others until it became a deafening chorus that spread through the middle- and upper-class neighborhoods as if heralding the apocalypse. Lena would come home to find her daughter sprawled in front of the TV or chatting with her friends on the phone with her favorite songs blasting in the background. Although she was worried about her irresponsible daughter, who had a woman’s body but a child’s brain, she was far more concerned about Enrique, fearing that her son was one of those hotheads who sought power through violence.
THE DEEP CRISIS DIVIDING CHILE became unsustainable. Peasant farmers invaded land to set up agricultural cooperatives, banks and industries were expropriated, the copper mines in the north, which were in the hands of American corporations, were nationalized, shortages became endemic. There were no needles or bandages in the hospitals, no spare parts for machinery or milk for babies; everyone lived in a state of paranoia. Business owners sabotaged the economy by withdrawing essential items from the market. In response, the workers formed committees, threw out the bosses, and took over industries. In the city center, pickets could be seen around bonfires guarding offices and stores from right-wing gangs. In the countryside, the peasants kept watch day and night to protect themselves from the former landowners. There were armed gunmen on both sides. Despite the bellicose atmosphere, the Left increased its percentage of the vote in the March 1973 legislative elections. It was then that the opposition, which had been plotting for three years, understood that sabotage was not enough to overthrow the government. They turned to arms.
On Tuesday, September 11, 1973, the military rose against Allende’s government. That morning, Lena and Lucia heard helicopters and squadrons of planes roaring low above the rooftops. When they looked out, they saw tanks and army trucks in the nearly deserted streets. None of the television channels was functioning: all they showed was a geometric pattern. On the radio people heard the military pronouncement, but only understood what that meant several hours later when the state TV channel resumed broadcasting and four generals in combat uniforms appeared on the screen in front of a flag of Chile to announce the end of communism in the beloved homeland and issue edicts that the population was called on to respect. Martial law was declared; Congress was indefinitely suspended, as were civil rights, until the honorable Armed Forces restored law, order, and the values of Western, Christian civilization. They explained that Salvador Allende had hatched a plan to execute thousands upon thousands of opponents in an unprecedented genocide, but that they had stepped in first and succeeded in preventing this.
“What’s going to happen now?” Lucia asked her mother nervously, because Lena’s joyous outburst and the way she opened a bottle of champagne to celebrate the occasion seemed to her daughter misplaced: the news meant that somewhere her brother, Enrique, could be in desperate straits. “Don’t worry, daughter, soldiers in Chile respect the constitution; they’ll call elections soon,” Lena replied, little imagining that more than sixteen years were to go by before this happened.
Mother and daughter remained shut up in their apartment until the curfew was lifted a couple of days later and they could emerge briefly to buy provisions. There were no lines in the stores anymore, and they saw mountains of chickens, although Lena did not buy any, because they seemed to her too expensive. She did though stock up on cartons of cigarettes. “Where were the chickens yesterday?” Lucia asked. “Allende was keeping them in his private warehouse,” her mother said.
They learned that the president had died when the government palace was bombarded, an event they saw repeated on television until they were tired of it. They heard rumors of bodies floating through the city in the Mapocho River, big bonfires where banned books were burned, and thousands of suspects being thrown into army trucks and taken to hastily prepared detention centers like the National Stadium, where only days before, soccer matches had been played. Lena’s neighbors were as euphoric as she was, but Lucia was scared. A chance comment she overheard reverberated inside her like a direct threat to her brother: “They’re going to put those damned communists into concentration camps, and anyone who protests will be shot, just like those bastards were planning to do to us.”
When word got around that the body of Victor Jara, his hands mutilated, had been tossed into a poor district of Santiago as a lesson, Lucia cried disconsolately for hours. “It’s just gossip, sweetheart, it’s all exaggerated. They go out of their way to invent things to dishonor the armed forces, who have saved our country from the clutches of communism. How can you think something like that could happen in Chile?” Lena told her. On television there were cartoons and military edicts; the country was calm. The first seed of doubt was sown in Lena’s mind when she saw her son’s name on one of the blacklists instructing people to hand themselves in at the police barracks.
THREE WEEKS LATER, several armed men in civilian clothes raided Lena’s apartment. They had no need to identify themselves. They were looking for her two children: Enrique was accused of being a guerrilla fighter, and Lucia a sympathizer. It had been months since Lena had received news of her son, and even if she had, she would not have told these men. Because of the curfew, Lucia had spent the night at a friend’s place, and her mother was smart enough not to allow herself to be cowed by the threats and slaps she received during the raid on her home. With astounding calm she informed the intruders that her son had distanced himself from the family and they knew nothing about him, and that her daughter was with a tour in Buenos Aires. The men left with a warning; they would come back for her unless her children appeared.
Lena guessed that her phone was being tapped and so waited until five in the morning, when the curfew was lifted, to go and warn Lucia at her friend’s house. Immediately after that she went to see the cardinal, who had been a close family friend before he ascended the celestial stairs of the Vatican. Although she had never before asked any favors, she no longer felt any sense of pride. The cardinal, overwhelmed by the situation and the long lines of petitioners, was good enough to see her and to obtain asylum for Lucia in the Venezuelan embassy. He advised Lena to leave the country as well, before the secret police carried out their threat. “I’m staying here, Your Eminence. I’m not going anywhere until I know what’s happened to my son, Enrique,” she said. He replied, “If you find him, come and see me, Lena, because the boy is going to need help.”