Cities of Refuge (32 page)

In late July,
El Mercurio
published a call for uprising written by one of the Christian Democratic senators. That night, under the pretense of a celebration of the anniversary of the Cuban
Revolution, thousands of leftists went into the streets and gathered in an arena. I expect you know the night I’m talking about – you will if you’ve read the histories. Trade unionists, students, communists, militant MIRistas. I was among them, with my housemates, and it was Carl who told us that the rally might get ugly. The lines were split between those who wanted armed response to the rightist militias and those who thought violence would tip the country into civil war. As groups tried to out-chant one another, skirmishes broke out and things devolved into denouements and schisms. The illusion of unity – it was my illusion too by then – was lost.

That night one of Allende’s aides was assassinated.

And it was Carl who told us that same night, before we’d even heard of the assassination, that it was all coming apart. We didn’t want to hear it, and Will got angry enough with him that he’d have thrown a punch, I think, if Carl hadn’t been so uninviting of violence, so physically delicate, and devoted to clarity.

Or so he seemed to me then. I wonder how he seems to you. There’s the Carl I knew, the one presented here, and the one you imagine. At some level, they’re all inventions. Of course I believe we can recover a lot from the past, and we need to do so (and our world is ever less interested in doing so), but we’ll never know anything comprehensively. The boundaries around our certainties about people and historical moments are sometimes hard to find - any retelling asks us to admit conjecture – but when we come to those borders, we must respect them.

I could as easily have described Carl as an unattractive young man, proud of his learning, who took private pleasure in deflating ideals, unravelling slogans. More quietly serious than the
rest of us. Unsmiling. I could have mentioned my feeling that his lack of physical presence, a small body folded in on itself, seemed to have fiercened his intelligence. His brain was what he could extend into the world.

And I might have mentioned that one day I saw him by chance on a street bordering the better neighbourhood of Providencia, climbing out of a car with diplomatic plates. And that I heard an American voice and glimpsed a face inside the car that would become familiar to me later, long after I’d left, that of an American “advisor” who showed up again in the margins of a photo I came across in my researches into the horrors in El Salvador eight years later. I’ve never known this man’s name, but even in that first instant I knew all I needed to. What he said to Carl, I thought in that moment as I walked past, was “good work.”

Two English words set into my Spanish afternoon. As I turned them over, it came to me for the first time, I think, just how language betrays us. It can obscure our seeming understanding, and it can reveal us to others through meanings hidden perhaps even to ourselves. When I think of good work, I can think of you, full of goodness and duty, or I can think of Carl. But I no longer assume that common speech has absolute and precise values.

I kept walking, and Carl must have walked the other way. I didn’t tell him I’d seen him. It was as if I failed to process the image, that I thought I might have been mistaken, though there was no mistaking Carl for anyone.

I’ve left out of this account so far the people at the language school. Students came and went. They were from Britain, Brazil, North America, North Africa, the English and French Caribbean.
Some of the teachers were university students, others were older professionals, working the late days or evenings. My instructor was Jaime Prieto, a full-faced man of about thirty, with thick glasses that magnified the delight in his eyes. He designed lessons based on his many enthusiasms. The preterite tense and American jazz, stem-changing verbs and Camus. I think he’d grown up in Santiago. Whatever his origins, he was, like the city itself, full of kinetic revelations, one of those people you can’t imagine in blank spaces, without the concentration of random energies in a metropolis. And neither can I imagine him in a calmer time. In the classroom, we never discussed Allende or what was happening, because we never had to. A politics of hope imbued everything. Everyone was awake and dreaming.

Because he was a constant presence in my days (and I, his longest-serving student in those weeks, in his) I spoke of him to my housemates in slightly reverential tones, I think. They’ve always been so important, these questions of how I spoke of him, what I said exactly, and to whom I said it. It’s not an exaggeration, Kim, to say that the questions did, long ago, send me to my knees in the dark. If you ever could imagine such madness, try to examine every action you take in a day, from morning habits to phone calls, to your words, your decision to cancel a date or eat Chinese. You’ll see that you cannot work back to a cause, a true one, for most of them, even though you know it exists, and beguiling false ones are all around you. How much harder, then, to understand an experience in memory, through memory, struck into you by confusion and fear? How do we measure? What weight do we give conjecture? How do we keep later knowledge from contaminating our judgment? How can
we base an attempt to understand on a recreation of ignorance? On trying to decontextualize? Do you see that, for me, everything I think to be true about those days in Santiago is in question? It all seems based on wrongly invested beliefs, on lies, conscious or otherwise, then and now. On the distortions caused by the sheer need to make sense. On the misinterpretations of the moment, and of the oh so fallible self.

You can’t remember Mexico City, but you were there, bashing me. Of course, you’ll say, but that was a few months in childhood and you remember very well the main events in your adult life, and remember too well the main trauma. I’m telling you that you’re wrong to think this. We don’t purely remember anything, other than maybe a searing moment here and there, and these along with the rest are strung into as much narrative order as we can give them, if we need to, when there may well have been no coherent narrative in the experience. I’m leaving out the defence mechanisms of memory and forgetting, of rationalizing, of dream, all these fully human factors. I’m speaking only of the higher deceptions that work into our efforts at reconstruction – the very moment we think we’ve finally put a few things in order, we’re most likely to miss the little fictions we’ve imposed. Did I really see Carl or was it another? I turned in the other direction and walked away so as not to be seen. Did the man in the car say “good work” or “good word,” as if they’d been discussing euphemisms or Spanish? Did I describe my teacher to Carl as “accepting” of an Algerian student’s anti-Americanism, or as “tolerant” of it, or “encouraging”?

Doubts can take their toll but I value them, even the ones I’d give anything to resolve. Pinochet and his bloody friends were of a type, the type that dismisses doubt, that never qualifies a
statement (this is exactly why I write as I do, in the prose Donald so despises). They believe a world can be made of blunt utterances. Killers think they’re gods.

You already know where this story is going. I’ll try to deliver you in good faith to the ending. The worse things got towards September, the more confusing. Even Carl, who must have known where it was all headed, gave up his commentaries. Will went home at the end of August; Armin moved in with a local girl. New boarders arrived but kept to different hours and I never got to know them. I spent more and more time on my own. One evening Jaime and his wife, Emma, had me over to their apartment, where I met a few of their friends. The discussion then was all politics.

I saw them there in the apartment, with a few others, once more. September 12, 1973. A Wednesday. I arrived in early afternoon. Many of those I’d met at the dinner were staying there, in hiding. As was I. The coup had happened. Allende had made his speech on radio. Then he’d committed suicide (as it seems we know now – for years we thought he’d been murdered). Thousands were being rounded up, including foreigners. Including students at the school, it was rumoured. I tried to make for the embassy but there was no safe route. I was a leftist foreigner. I called the embassy but couldn’t get through. And so I took shelter with the only people I knew.

There were only brief introductions – no one wanted personal stories. I accepted a bottle of beer and sat on the living-room floor with the others. The radio played congratulations for Pinochet from the doctors’ association, the lawyers’ guild, all the business elite of the country, it seemed. And then came the names
of the wanted. I waited to hear my own. Two of those sitting with me heard theirs, I think. I’d already forgotten some of the names of those I’d been thrown together with, but a young, pregnant woman began to cry and some of the others tried to console her and her boyfriend. The boyfriend announced that they would leave and the others insisted they mustn’t. The argument was losing steam when the door flew open.

I won’t describe the soldiers. Everyone in the room was told to produce identification. The ones who didn’t were taken. The ones who did were checked against a list and taken. All except me. I had my passport. It was clear that the passport meant nothing, only the name. It was also clear that my name was on another list. The first list was long, many pages, typed. The physical fact of it, all these pages, was hard to account for. It had to have been compiled over time, and this was only the day after the coup.

The second list, the one I was on, was one hand-printed page.

I was told to leave. The others were lined up in the hallway. I walked past them, and in some the terror in their faces gave way to looks of betrayal, contempt. I understood that two things counted against me, from their point of view. That I’d arrived only minutes before the soldiers, so it might have seemed that I’d led them there. And that my name was on the second list (even from their perspective they might have seen that these two pieces of evidence were unlikely to both be true, but there was no time to offer a defence). I stopped in front of Jaime and asked for his lawyer’s name. I said I’d get help to them. But it was as if he didn’t hear me. I said it in English and Spanish. He wouldn’t look at me. His wife did look. I can’t describe it.

You remember as a teenager overhearing me say that some people exist inside a single ambiguity, and I pretended at the
cabin not to know what I meant. Now you see I do know. I walked to the embassy, fully expecting to be detained by troops without the saving list at hand. I saw a man carrying a child of three or four, walking the opposite way. His face was bleeding badly and the child was crying. By this point I couldn’t stand to be seen. He slowed and I felt him looking, maybe in warning, or pain, and I couldn’t meet his eyes and so I walked on and he said nothing. Around us, soldiers in trucks, and the usual traffic, the hackled city continuing amid the incontrovertible facts of bullets and (real) batons and bodies. In those first hours, with the horror going down right before me, I found it impossible to make sense of these facts, even to connect them to the coup. The unfolding history of it made no impression on me against the fear and blood. The past, mine and the country’s, had fallen away, and we were physically trapped in an unending moment of hell.

A car pulled over and the driver waved me inside. It was a few seconds before I registered that it was a cab. I got in. He asked where I needed to go and I told him – an exchange from another world. He said I didn’t look like I should be in the streets. He dropped me off half a block from the embassy, and refused payment. He asked that I remember to pray for his country.

The embassy was in chaos, all of them were in those first days and weeks. I lived inside for seventeen days as reports came in about the murder campaign, the horrors at the National Stadium. These still stand as the worst days of my life. I could do nothing to help, and nothing to escape them. And after I finally did escape – our embassy got me out through another, to Argentina and eventually home – I more or less covered up and did nothing then either. In January a single Canadian Forces plane was allowed
to leave with embassy staff and refugees, 128 people in all, some of whom I knew well, and I used the news of their arrival as the first real block to shore myself against what had happened.

As far as I’ve been able to determine, Carl Michael Oakes of Berkeley, California, never existed. And yet he’s close by me every day. The ones I’ve been able to keep from my mind until recently, strangely, have been my friend Jaime, and the others. It’s possible to skew a profound memory so that you recall the clover and the mountains, the traffic, even the texture of discontinuous moments, but not the faces and names. Over the years, the decades, I found a place to put them away.

Did someone in that apartment other than me survive? How many? Why aren’t they among the dead? Was it the couple who’d heard their names on the radio? Or their unborn child, and did the child ever learn the story?

I imagine scenarios in which this child grows up and moves to Toronto and comes across my name and confronts me, and explains what he thinks he knows, how I betrayed them all, and how he’s come to be here, and I then tell him my side of things, uncoloured, leaving the gaps I can’t fill, presenting myself as I was, as well as I can. As if I could.

But that wouldn’t happen. If I’m ever so accosted, the words exchanged won’t be slow or shaded. I’ll be asked to answer accusations, not allowed to put things in the order that seems truest to me, who claims not to trust fully in remembered narratives.

And anyway, my story isn’t for the disappeared or their children, whomever they are. It’s for you. And there’ll be no account but this.

Having opened with her own name she could not now sign another, and so she dropped her hands from the keyboard and sat there feeling like some lesser angel’s heart had just shot into her body.

She went out to the front porch and at that moment a breeze stopped dead so that it seemed the day met her with a halted expression. On the step in the high afternoon she felt the sun on her bare arms and closed her eyes and tilted her face skyward and here came the breeze again. Someone upwind was cooking cumin seeds.