Of Exiles, Adaptations, Fears, and Windows

 Jorge Etcheverry

(Thanks, Ozimandeus)

The English text is a translation of the original Spanish version

The last idea that occurred to me that morning would not have been considered a serious idea by any philosopher, or at least not by one who believed that men are autonomous, the subjects of their history or actions, in a world essentially harmonious and oriented forward, towards a promising future, where eventually our children or our children's children will live free even from the last drop of ignorance. Once, perhaps in the Middle Ages, a renowned philosopher and theologian, following Aristotle, had proclaimed this doctrine amidst the stench of the pyres where the plague-dead were consumed or witches writhed and screamed. The thing is, in my native country, I used to teach philosophy at the secondary level and was starting to do so at the university level. Before having to leave due to the force of circumstances and after several failed attempts that I will not mention, I came to Canada after and as a result of the sorrowful and well-known alternatives of the military coup of 1973 in Chile, now 50 years ago.

Because the idea that came to my mind while drinking my coffee was at once a marvel of implacable logic and nonsense, born of that same logic—I want to believe—so perfect as it was cold. We can suppose that a jury as benevolent as it is understanding might have acquitted this writer, in reality an ex-subject, or perhaps—not surprisingly I think this way, since I know Marx, of course, and am rather deterministic—someone who has never been a subject, and who, driven by the atrocious and disheartening, but also quite comical, spectacle of the world's march in this third decade of the twenty-first century, if we follow the official quantification of history according to the Christian myth, and who is struggling to find solutions to the state of things, solutions that one implicitly knows will never be so, since they do not emerge from the viscous walls of the head, nor extend beyond the reach of people sitting conversing in a café, on the shores of a lake, in the summer, leaning back in their lounge chairs, or in any room of this city in this ultimately quite peaceful and affluent country that simply seems to exist.

There is a type of person who, in order to be able to perform the aforementioned, that is, to exist, must at least know what to expect. This type of person has a terrible fear of chaos, of disorder. Perhaps due to my delicate, or seemingly delicate, constitution, I lack the proclivity to spend my day organizing papers, washing dirty dishes, sweeping or vacuuming, ironing or washing clothes, etc., answering phone messages, the old-fashioned mail, and why not say it, even the texts on the cell phone, the emails. There are still people who write or send magazines, books, notes, and expect one to reply promptly, using old-fashioned paper or pen, or pencil—this retro thing that is coming back—or through computers or cell phones, email. And this fear of chaos that we mentioned earlier is not at all scarce in this environment, as it afflicts a lot of people, and—quite naturally—often ties in with a fairly rigorous logic on the part of those affected. After all, logic, reason, even in their embryonic and elementary attempts, constitute forms that try to order the chaos that these individuals feel threatens them from all sides, something that often rests on events still present in the memory of the person in question.

Because in my personal case, this fear of chaos, of disorder—which a professional labeled as a symptom of my post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)—is still present, and is ratified by my almost physical scrawniness that implies vulnerability—which, however, as age advances, is becoming a virtue, thin people are back in fashion—this fear is tempered with the subliminal memory, but not so much, that lurks from the edges of the organized picture of everyday life, and provides, so to speak, a backdrop, a precedent, a landscape more or less like what follows and that ended in a trauma still present despite the passage of 50 years:

When I was young and frequented university classrooms in Chile, I was still far from imagining what really lay behind words such as Imperialism, Torture, Repression. Left-wing Parties enjoyed an enviable position. Representatives of political parties almost impossible in other latitudes perfected their oratory in forums such as State Television, universities, Congress. Democracy, like a mother with a vast lap, protected her sometimes unruly children. Like any Middle-Class Son who, dissatisfied with the social and family environment, sought a kind of transcendence, I joined one of the newest and most radical groups of the Sixties Left. The decade opened like a Multifaceted Flower in the Sky of the Country, reflecting as in a mirror the Distant Light of the Guerrilla Movements that, after the Cuban Revolution, sprang up in all Latin American Countries. Handfuls of middle-class youth, professional and brilliant, even sometimes handsome, sometimes achieved almost impossible alliances with working-class, peasant, indigenous elements. The More Established Left, with another origin, looked with hostility and irony at these youthful outbreaks.

But at that time, from history, the figures of Manuel Rodríguez and José Miguel Carrera created wings and cast halos from the primary school textbooks. They gained ground against the more established, portly figure of O'Higgins, who minted the Republic from the meager drawing of the chauchas—penny coins—and rose again in the dreams of my Generation Companions, men and women, their gaze fixed on the horizon, their hair in the wind.

But ours was a dream of crazy children. As for our livelihood, some still lived under the family roof. The majority, like me, started with teaching hours in a high school—I studied Pedagogy in Philosophy and Spanish—or in private schools or had—like me—some assistantship at the university. Although the possibilities of a stable future were slowly closing the door on us, there was a certain ease to live. Everyone sensed the Era that would follow the one closing with the Christian Democrats. The atmosphere that bathed the country was like the roof of a greenhouse on which a certain historical hail fell. I was starting to embark on a professional future that seemed secure, I knew and was intimate with the one who would become my wife over time. At the same time, this process touched or included, like an oil stain, all my friends, and beyond, our group, even our generation.

The atrocities committed by nationalist or anti-communist organizations abroad came to us filtered, they seemed like something remote and contrary to that general intoxication of a life still and yet beginning to bloom, we now know, under deadlines that were shortening. We talked about our specificity: the country is not a soil for coups or bloody revolutions. The ACHA—Chilean Anti-Communist Action—was a pitiful group of retired military men. The stories of the Spanish Revolution—in which my father, like so many others, had fought under Republican colors—had an ancient and romantic tint for us. I would recline for hours at my girlfriend's house in a town in the NORTE CHICO reading collections from the thirties of the magazine Para Ti, a period that I associated with the Spanish Revolution through an unexperienced nostalgia. Intellectual voracity even led us to the pages of the historian Vicuña Mackenna, to glimpse the horror of the War to the Death, which in 1979 decreed the death of Araucanian children over 8 years old. The Alamedas were then wide and allowed me to mix my incipient teaching duties with avant-garde militancy and frequenting the books of Eliphas Levy, Gurdieff, Ouspensky, Scott Elliot, and Meyrink, along with Debray, El Diario del Ché in Bolivia, the Little Manual of the Urban Guerrilla by Marighella. The atmosphere of the country was like a luxury that allowed the cohabitation of many women with the same man, or vice versa, as different styles of furniture in the same room. The Crowing of Roosters and Birds in the early mornings opened a horizon not limited by the (nearby) mountains. I don't know if that sensation is perhaps something that all young people at that age feel when they awaken to social, romantic, cultural, or political life, or if it was a sign of an evidence that the structure set from time immemorial by history was going to open like a rotten orange.

And by that time, futurologists were beginning to become popular in our environment, mainly disseminated through articles. Some stark interpretations of history were beginning to be known, always marginally. It must be clarified that by then I had access to foreign magazines with restricted circulation, because I was involved in the editorial of a poetry magazine. I always looked for small notes in magazines and newspapers with wide circulation. These speculations remained far from General Thought. But we also had a kind of optimism partly justified by the traditional solidity of our institutions, despite radicalizing ourselves to the point of sporadic shooting practices, we did not really believe that blood was going to reach the river, the pavement of the streets, to splash the walls. Or maybe there was another bloodthirsty animal alongside the emblematic animals, with the condor and the huemul of our national shield, and also in its shadow, the ostrich, which they say buries its head in the ground in unusual or dangerous circumstances. Books related to the Spanish Revolution mysteriously disappeared from the shelves of libraries. If any discussion existed regarding the imminence of the Coup in those days of the Popular Government, it was reduced to the High Spheres, to the Inner Circles of the various parties. The Brazilian case of theThe Brazilian case from the previous decade was also not appreciated for its evident parallel to our situation. A few days after Allende's election, the organization I was part of produced a university-level pamphlet announcing the inevitability (imminence) of a coup. We were a group of doomsayers whose arguments were soon discredited. Those years were rapid and frenetic.

Now, as I pause to smoke a cigarette, the first, at this small table on the terrace where smoking is allowed in this other country, I ponder how this universal phenomenon makes the places of origin, countries, neighborhoods, etc., indelibly settle in memory, even though logic tells us, in all these new places where we have chosen or been forced to reside, that things must have changed back there and are probably becoming more similar to what is here, which they call globalization. I remember discussing in the late sixties with a friend and comrade in the Pedagogic Gardens, "Look, Teacher, since the end of last year with the General Strike, it seems things are moving faster. We haven't had a moment of respite." The Teacher removed his glasses and cleaned them with an automatic gesture, which, along with his serious face and conservative way of dressing, made him seem much older, and he said, "It seems we are definitively leaving behind the peaceful days. Dantón and Álvaro were just coming out of the Geography Department with posters they were sticking on the walls, a female companion with abundant curly hair and beautiful legs was applying glue behind them.

And I reminisce and see another young woman, almost with that same hair, here in this other hemisphere, decades later. The sky is dotted with flocks of geese migrating south at this time of year. The Teacher was one of those unblemished and studious young men who seemed very comfortable in the type of clothing their parents wore. They advance the clock a few years and fit into the habits and appearances of maturity. In our (my) country, the weight of the image of the adult male and his attire is something serious. With a brown and grayish complexion, fine features, and hair always combed with plenty of pomade, he had two sensitive and large eyes that shone with a quiet fire on grand occasions, generally coated with an opaque glow. Despite his thinness and (supposed) fragility, he commanded respect and emanated a sense of calm strength. These things one saw and registered in passing, with the corner of the eye. Now I see them again and analyze them, the details a bit blurred in memory. Perhaps I could put a cross to the right above the name, if he did not survive the Coup or the subsequent repression. What is important to point out is that perhaps that concrete and individual person that one knew for years, without becoming intimate, because one becomes intimate with some and not others, depending on the circle, interests, etc., was swept away, and that each of the tortured or dead was real and particular to each of those who knew them. I know he has a cousin in Montreal and maybe he is still alive, getting by somehow, doing who knows what. Perhaps what happens is that we were formed in an environment where the Individual Person mattered, in a more or less modernist sense, of course. Great Natural and Social Cataclysms erase individualities by the thousands. In the neighboring country of Bolivia, around sixty-five, the sons of the landowners went out in helicopters to hunt Indians for sport (this was told to me by Mabel, a Chilean girl who lived in Bolivia, whom I dated a few times, in my now distant youth). Another very objective and rational opinion, but very difficult to assimilate even for someone like me, who once, decades ago, taught philosophy, would be that "after all, we are all going to die someday, whether sooner or later, en masse or individually, the circumstances themselves do not alter the fact in the slightest." But despite our attempts, we have never been able to internalize this type of reasoning.

And returning to the subject of fear, I think such a perception of reality is not strange at all and perhaps denotes a certain adaptation to the state of things—or states of things—and it's not that I'm trying to excuse neurosis or paranoia—the persecution, as we called it in our militant times, in our homeland—but it would be more or less normal given that the finiteness of human life is an ever-present fact but one that is not often thought about. And if we turn to metaphysics and glance at a slender, dark-skinned girl with glorious hair approaching and swaying with a café au lait, which could fall and spill over the terrace tiles, we think of the tendency towards entropy of any order that may be, and from this so-called distant perspective, we don't have much right, not even the most humanistic among us, to deny the existence of a certain unease that afflicts the man (or woman) who, knowing they are mortal, can easily make such an order in their life that somehow compensates for the chaos that surrounds them and that will ultimately, like everyone, end up annihilating them. All musings that will soon disappear from my mind, as the coffee will be followed by an American breakfast of eggs, toast, more coffee, bacon, like the one already being brought to my neighbor at the next table, who receives it without looking up from her miniscreen while I, surreptitiously—here one cannot look directly, it is frowned upon—admire her perfect, bronzed legs, and an incredible tattoo that climbs up one of them like a vine disappearing into her shorts.

But the person calling me on the cell phone is not one of my—few—friends, or even the fewer, who might share that conclusion, bear their vital scandal without feeling obscurely offended, and who might even understand and enjoy the humor, patent to anyone who is not a complex-ridden man or woman, although in this other land, touted as a land of opportunities and where they have made other lives, but which are still marked by the original stigmas. It was not the skinny guy from the Spanish circle who wanted to organize a prose or poetry workshop, in a vain attempt to introduce a bit of literary culture into the optional Spanish language literacy plans in secondary and adult education, proposing something like that to an audience that would surely be composed of retired ladies or gentlemen, the rudiments of the different genres; prose, poetry, essay, theatre, and even perhaps screenwriting for cinema or television, the only truly profitable field for writing in these times, and I say this from my only experience, which was for a Chilean filmmaker, quite cheap, but in comparison...

And while one answers the phone, one cannot help but part the curtains by the window to see if the neighbour is getting dressed—at that time of the morning sometimes, when she doesn't go to work, since she must work part-time, as they say here, half a day, and one assumes that she also studies at the university, although one is not very sure of her age, although she looks to be between her twenties and thirties, a bit plump, but very well-made, shapely—when it's not her turn to go to work or to the university—if we assume she is studying—she is usually seen walking, doing one thing or another, passing by the window of her room, or other rooms of the house she shares with other young people, I'm not sure if they are friends, people who share nothing more than the same place, roommates, as they say here, with nothing in common, maybe smoking is not allowed, because I've seen how she sometimes closes the door of her room, lights an incense stick and smokes a cigarette, at night, from time to time, behind her almost completely transparent curtains behind which she moves, perhaps unaware that a few meters away is precisely the window of the little room I call my study, at that very time I lose the desire to examine some of the papers I leave on the desk—I still have the habit of correcting manuscripts by hand, on sheets of paper, one is already a dinosaur—and she gets out of bed in her bedroom and goes to the study, but it is not known if she is aware of that fact, whether she is in other words an exhibitionist who is lucky enough to live in the house next door and with the window almost adjacent to a voyeur, or whether she innocently lives comfortably, turning the furtive act of systematic or occasional, intentional or casual observation into a crime in this society that is a bit harsh on these, let's say, minor things, but which allows drug dealers and bastards to occupy their downtown corners for years, doing their business in plain sight of everyone, and even more so of the police.

But we must also not forget some mitigating elements: a large part of those protagonists, and most of the young women they exploit in prostitution, are minors, and if they are occasionally apprehended, they do not take long to return to circulation. And the same police declare through their spokespeople, in the face of the admonitions and recriminations of anguished parents, that if they decide to tighten the screws on the rats that work on the corners, they will let the big fish that direct them and whom they are actually trying to control escape. No. It is not one's fault. Just as events like the massacre 50 years ago and the subsequent dictatorship that brought us here, to these latitudes, are not. When I moved, the situation was already set up that way, and it would have been the same whether it was me or an armadillo who came to rent that fairly cheap apartment, because working as a freelance translator, that is, independently, one does not know for sure what the income will be at the end of the month. Moreover, there's an almost fanatical consensus on personal privacy: perhaps that curtain that covers nothing, especially at night when the lights are off, is a convention, a symbol, that makes the locals not officially observe and that this possible spectacle does not exist for them, nor in their view, expressing it in a more pedantic way and with the style (borrowed) of some of my academic friends in that Chile of the past, the current one I do not know: horizon of expectations.