Chasing Che (17 page)

Here was a nation paralyzed: Chile was now a democracy in name, with a free press, elected legislature, and independent judiciary, but there were certain monumental subjects that could not be discussed. Around me, the browsers kept their eyes down as they moved past this booth with its unpleasant silences.

Two booths up I saw a couple of saggy, middle-aged men in berets. They both wore full beards and had cigarettes fuming from their lips. Their hair was disheveled, their eyes were afire, and their shirts were rumpled—the unmistakable plumage of the leftist intellectual. The berets alone drew me in, and I introduced myself. The one in suspenders was Ricardo. The one in a paisley shirt and ill-fitting trousers was Pedro. Respectively, they were editor and subeditor of a little magazine called
Caballo de Proa
, which is the Spanish phrase for the carved figure on the prow of a sailing ship.

When I say little, I mean little: their magazine was so small it almost disappeared among the assorted books of poetry they were also selling. I bought three back issues, which stacked together were the size and shape of a deck of cards without the aces. In Spanish this was called a “purse magazine,” and Pedro and Ricardo crammed as many items into their purse as any grandmother. The problem with this format wasn’t the number of articles—any given issue included three or four pieces of cultural criticism, music and book reviews, an essay on the esthetics of eating, a few cartoons, some appeals for environmental and human rights causes, a dispatch from Chiapas, a history of the cinema in Valdivia, some satire, an odd quote from
Kafka, and even an ad or two taken out by one of Ricardo’s friends or by Pedro himself for one of his other ventures, like his Sunday morning radio show. No, the problem was length—the longest article in the bunch took ninety seconds to read, and most were only two or three paragraphs long. I read all three issues while standing in front of their booth, and we agreed to meet for coffee later. They named a café and a time.

W
e spent Sunday on our backs on the floor, on opposite sides of the bike. Don Don pressed the wires of the volt meter against various bits of Kooky’s anatomy while I pretended to understand what he was doing. Once in a while I would jump up at his instruction and turn on the key or try the headlight and horn or press the starter button. Diagnostic work is slow and boring, requiring a passionless, methodical routine. After an hour we’d learned nothing.

With a pop, Don Don pulled the black spark-plug wire off the cylinder on his side of the engine. He inserted the tip of a screwdriver into the cap at the end of the wire, and then held a finger to the metal of the screwdriver.

“Start it,” he said.

I refused, but he insisted. I gave a gentle kick on the starter.

“Harder,” he said, and I did, and he winced and dropped the screwdriver and then said, “There is a spark.”

We stopped working for a while, and while we stretched our legs Don Don told me the story of the four Americans he had met in his life. He’d learned to repair John Deeres from an American. In one six-month period he’d met two men, both from Livermore, California, who claimed not to know each other. I was the fourth. The mechanic had strong opinions about America, how Ohio was near Iowa, and how Illinois was the most powerful state because it had both Abraham Lincoln’s birthplace and the Caterpillar factory.

“I know I will never go now,” Don Don said without warning. “In this economy, never.” I told him how back home all the papers
said Chile was an economic success. They called it the “Chilean miracle.” He thought I was joking. As people do, he cited his own situation: his pension covered little, and he was scrambling for body work on cars to make ends meet. In the old days, his skills as a tractor mechanic had been good enough for him to work on any car in Chile. But now, with the inrush of new products under the free-market system, everyone was buying complicated foreign cars. The pollution controls were too elaborate; the equipment to test electronic ignitions cost thousands of dollars, which he didn’t have. You needed a college degree to fix those cars, he said.

The statistics robbed General Pinochet’s economic miracle of much of its wonder. Pinochet had applied virtually every item on the checklist of free market reform, cutting subsidies, privatizing industries, liberalizing trade, and opening the country to foreign investment. But it wasn’t until 1988—after fifteen years of shock therapy—that individual income reached the level last seen under Allende. Consumption hardly rose at all; the new wealth flowed to the top of the social pyramid, pushing Chile from a relatively middle-class society into one where the rich got richer (the top tenth of the population went from collecting 36.2 percent of national income in 1978 to 46.8 percent ten years later) but the poor either stayed the same or actually got poorer (the bottom half of the public went from 20.4 to 16.8 percent of income in the same period). And this was in Chile, the “miracle” and best case. Across the hemisphere the same neoliberal reforms were increasing inequality and widening income distribution. People like Don Don were moving out of the middle class, but not upward.

He didn’t speak for a while and then asked me if Gary Hart supported expanding NAFTA to Chile.

Perdón?
He repeated the question: Does Gary Hart support expanding NAFTA to Chile?

“Maybe,” I said.

He turned away from me and fussed with something on the tool bench. “Boot ta tie ’em drugged,” he said.

Perdón?

“Boot ta tie ‘em drugged,” he repeated, and then: “Esmall grope his beggin toe christ are under TV sex.”

I looked over his shoulder. He was reading from an American magazine, rather tattered and dusty. He mouthed the words to show he spoke English, but I had to read over his shoulder to follow what he was saying:

It was a twelve-year-old copy of
Time
magazine. In the garage, I suddenly realized, time had come to a stop. As long as I relied on Don Don I would never leave Valdivia. The bike was not going to be fixed. In his Caterpillar dreams and John Deere reveries he did not want to admit it, but he really had no idea what was wrong with the electrical system. I had to move on. On Monday morning I charged the battery and rode into town to meet the intellectuals.

P
edro published dirty cartoons in his magazine from time to time, not because he thought they were profound but because he imagined that it annoyed the powers that be. The first Great Power in Chile was the Catholic Church—“a shadow over the nation,” Pedro intoned sternly—and the Church owned one of two national television networks and tended to censor the naughty bits of various shows. So in one issue Pedro stuck in a drawing of Marilyn Monroe with her knickers around her ankles and her hands in a suspicious place. It was a blow for freedom disguised as a turn-on.

The other Big Power in Chile was the military. Ever since 1989, when the general began to yield power in bits and pieces, the military
had been furiously working to avoid any prosecutions for crimes committed during and after the 1973 coup. A blanket pardon was thrown over the military; Pinochet appointed himself “Senator-for-life” with his immunity written into the new constitution. But there were small holes in the blanket: a few officers had been prosecuted and convicted for assassinations carried out abroad. The country had just survived a bitter constitutional crisis over refusal of one of these convicted men—General Manuel Contreras—to go to jail. The military had protected him, and Pinochet’s own guards had ushered the balking Contreras to an isolated military hospital. From his sickbed, General Contreras demanded a jail “suitable to his rank” and reflecting his “long service to the nation.” After much negotiation, the jittery civilians agreed and rapidly built a special jail that resembled a penthouse, with a multiroom cell outfitted with a gym and a cellular phone and a view of the ocean.

So Pedro published an essay—albeit a short one—demanding equal treatment for intellectuals. The author of the piece, a local painter, declared that he would never submit to jail unless he too had a special cell with an ocean view, a double bed, and the right to receive collect calls from his kids when they were on vacation. This jail for artists also had to be staffed only by women wearing bright colors (“Green is insupportable,” the painter declared). And of course, he would never submit to jail until his rank in the local painters’ club had been recognized.

Pedro expounded on these themes in the Café Paula, an orange linoleum dump whose twin virtues were that it had the local newspapers and that it let impoverished intellectuals loiter all afternoon over a single cup of coffee. The staff, contributors, friends, enemies, and sympathizers of
Caballo de Proa
gathered at the Paula after lunch on most days, and sometimes they even bought food. It was here that Pedro could rage against the fallen state of the world.

When the bill came it wasn’t much, but I was trying to get inside Ernesto Guevara’s head, and if there was one certain lesson of his 1952 journey it was the art of the mooch. With my funds dwindling, I’d been feeling an increasing pressure to do some serious sponging—
as the Cubans say, to “Be Like Che.” A natural coward, I decided to start with Pedro and a cup of coffee. The bill was a couple of bucks, and I figured that the home team should pay.

So I sat there, waiting for him to offer. And I sat there. We finished our coffee. We stared at each other. We ran out of conversation. We cleared our throats. I ordered and slowly drank a glass of water.

Finally, I said, “Well, Pedro, I’ve got to go, but thanks a lot. It was nice of you to show me La Paula.”

We got up, and I tried to move only very slowly in the general direction of the door. But this wasn’t getting anywhere. If Pedro was going to cough up a couple of bucks for the coffee he would have offered by now. I caved in and decided, in an act of generosity, to pay for my half. I wearily shuffled through my pocket, counting out coins to the precise halfway mark. Then I turned to ask for Pedro’s half.

He was gone. I never even heard the door swing. I noted this maneuver for future use.

I paid the bill and found Pedro outside, engaged in minute inspection of some faded For Sale notices in a storefront. He walked me back to the bike, smiling faintly.

T
he new issue of
Caballo de Proa
was being “presented” that night at a concert of folk music in the municipal theater. I wasn’t sure what presenting a magazine actually entailed, but I went—and I went by foot. Despite the recharged battery Kooky’s green light glowed only dimly, and kicking it over and over produced nothing. I had to walk and was a little late getting into the theater, where a crowd of about four hundred was staring at Ricardo and Pedro, who were staring back at them. Basically, presenting the magazine meant giving it some free publicity. The local literary establishment were all thick as La Paula thieves, and the emcee for the concert was up there quizzing the boys about their latest and greatest issue, asking them questions like “What is your opinion of the national culture today?”

Presumably, P. and R. were hitting these softballs over the plate.
I say presumably because like intellectuals everywhere they were standing too far from the microphone. Nobody could hear a word they were saying. The audience didn’t mind: the Chileans just talked among themselves while the emcee boomed out his questions; and P. and R. stood there babbling away inaudibly, so that occasional words like “theme” and “fundamental debate” came across but no larger point was made.

The folksingers came on next, and they were pretty good. They were local heroes who’d been at it since the darkest days of the dictatorship. After a while they let a poet on stage, and he read some verse. That was the funny thing about a dictatorship: it was great for culture. If there was one sure way Pinochet could support poetry, it was by staging a military coup, shooting a bunch of people, and tossing some tear gas around once in a while. Literature became not some pointless abstraction, but a pointed one. The history books were empty but the poets spoke volumes. The dictatorship filled their readings, it put standing room crowds in theaters. Politics was banned, but culture was there, and the people of Chile used it like they used oxygen.

And then they unbanned politics. Democracy was restored in 1990. The good guys won, sort of. And suddenly the poets weren’t needed anymore. Theaters were half full, the folk concerts were like fifteenth-year college reunions where people were going gray and starting to forget who everyone else was. The natural order had been restored: bookstores everywhere were going broke.

This upset Ricardo, and it drove Pedro crazy, but the poet, whose name was Clemente Riedemann, seemed to welcome any escape from those overly heroic times. He recited this free verse into the microphone; it was, he said, from a poem called “Regarding Cuba, the Sunrise”:

People applauded all night, but in a halfhearted way.

T
here was plenty of news that day. A nineteen-year-old actress named Elizabeth Taylor was getting married (her second time). An entire family in Georgia, USA, had been electrocuted. France was backing a pan-European army. Someone had jumped from the seventh floor of a building in Valdivia. The story I wanted was less important than any of these, and was consequently buried on page 9, in the middle of the sports section: