…it was another kind of success that stirred in Juan when he spoke to me about that time: the Chilean revolution had given him a chance to prove his dignity as a full human being, had dared to conceive through him and millions of others the pale possibility of a world where things did not have to be the way they had always been.
That is why the rulers of the world had reacted with such ferocity.
And Juan understood this and explained it to me with chilling simplicity that day as we crossed the city of Santiago on our way to exile.
“We are paying,” he told me, gesturing toward the streets filled with subdued citizens and rampant military patrols, in the general direction of the factory that was at that very moment being returned to the owner, who had come back to exercise his dominion. “We are being punished. We are paying for our joy.”
He understood that General Pinochet’s military coup was meant to return to their previous owners the levers of economic and political power. But it was just as clear to him that the counterrevolution was conceived as an admonitory lesson for those who had surfaced from the depths of anonymity and set themselves squarely in the middle of a history which was not supposed to belong to them.
His body and the body of all our compañeros were, ultimately, being disciplined for an act of the imagination. Pinochet was trying to make him and millions like him admit that they had been mistaken - not so much in their tactics as in their human strategy, the very rebellion itself, the fact that they had dared to dream of an alternative to the life charted out for them since before their birth.
Pinochet was preparing the world as know it now, more than twenty years later, where the word revolution has been relegated to ads for jogging shoes and greed has been proclaimed as good and profits have become the only basis to judge value and cynicism is the prevailing attitude and amnesia is vaunted and justified as the solution to all the pain of the past...
Wasn’t that the ultimate message that the black hole of that balcony was sending me? Wasn’t that the real blindness - not our incapacity to see the signs of death on the wall, not our eyes shut to our own limitations and blunders, but the more virulent blindness to where the sorry planet was going? That Allende’s revolution, rather than being the wave of the future, was the last gasp of a past that was dying, that the coming twenty years would confirm that we had been swimming against the tide of world history, that General Augusto Pinochet’s coup was inevitable, even if we had been immaculately blameless, even if we had not made even one of our innumerable miscalculations, because we were the dinosaurs, we were the ones buried in the past, we were the ones who wanted to resist globalization, we were the ones who wanted to base our lives on something other than neoliberal competition and individualism, we were the ones who did not see what humanity really was and really wanted.
Isn’t that what Juan was being taught?
Never to dream himself as an alternative?
And yet, no matter how many mistakes he had made, we had made, we did not deserve that balcony at La Moneda, the black hole in that balcony which threatened to engulf us all.
I was not willing then, in that van, and I am not willing now, so many years later, to tell Juan that his joy was unreal.
That was the limit of how much I was willing to change.
Don’t get me wrong: I have, of course, been enormously transformed since the day I stood under Allende’s balcony and saw myself as the channel for all the suppressed voices of the universe, and they are changes I celebrate, changes I needed to learn from history.
But I do not repent of having been that person.
Am I deluding myself one more time? Am I defending that past because I do not dare to cut myself loose, because I fear for the continuity of my identity if I let go of that period in my life when I found a home against death? Is this the last stand of my imagination as it tries to fool that death which came to visit me so early in childhood and has never left?
Perhaps.
If so, if this is one more attempt to imagine the future as it does not and cannot ever exist, so be it. This is the bedrock of who I am: a man who cannot live in the world unless he believes there is hope.
www.nytimes.com
