Portrait in Sepia (21 page)

"I'm going to die!" I screamed, throwing myself on her.

"This is not a convenient time to do that," my grandmother replied dryly.

For years people had been complaining about the government, and for months now we had heard that President Balmaceda was intending to declare himself dictator, in the process breaking with fifty-seven years of respect for the constitution. That constitution, drawn up by the aristocracy with the idea of governing forever, granted broad powers to the executive. When power fell into the hands of someone with whose ideas they didn't fully agree, the upper class rebelled. Balmaceda, a brilliant man with modern ideas, had not done too badly, actually. He had advanced education more than any previous president, protected Chilean nitrates from foreign companies, and promoted hospitals and numerous public works, especially railroads, although he began more than he succeeded in finishing. Chile had military and naval power; it was a prosperous country, and its currency was the most solid in Latin America. Nevertheless, the aristocracy could not forgive him for having elevated the middle class and for trying to govern with them, and the clergy could not tolerate the separation of church and state, civil marriage, which had replaced the religious, and the law that allowed the dead of any creed to be buried in cemeteries. (It had been a terrible problem to dispose of the bodies of those who had not been Catholic in life, not to mention atheists and suicides, whose corpses often ended up in ravines or the ocean.) Because of those measures, women abandoned the president en masse. Though they had no political power, they ruled in their homes and exercised tremendous influence. The middle class, which Balmaceda had benefited, also turned its back on him, and he responded with the arrogance of one used to commanding and being obeyed, like any other large landowner of the day. His family owned enormous landholdings, an entire province with its railroad stations, towns, and hundreds of campesinos. The men of his clan had the reputation not of kindly
patrones
but of crude tyrants who slept with a gun under the pillow and expected blind respect from their peons. That may have been the reason Balmaceda thought he could rule the country as he did his feudal estate. He was a tall, good-looking, virile man, with a clear brow and noble bearing, the child of a novelesque love affair, raised on horseback with a whip in one hand and pistol in the other. He had been a seminary student, but he had no calling for the cassock: he was passionate and vain. His nickname was "El Chascon," referring to his obsession with his hair, his mustaches, and his sideburns, and everyone talked about the overly elegant clothes he ordered from London. They ridiculed his grandiloquent speech and declarations of jealous love for Chile, saying that he identified so much with the nation that he couldn't conceive of it without him at the head: "Mine or no one's!" was the phrase attributed to him. Years of governing had isolated him, and in the end he showed erratic behavior that ranged from mania to depression, but even among his worst enemies he was acknowledged to be a good statesman and of irreproachable honesty, like nearly all the presidents of Chile, who, unlike caudillos of other countries in Latin America, left government service poorer than when they went in. Balmaceda had a vision for the future; he dreamed of creating a great nation, but he lived to see the end of an epoch and the collapse of a party that had been too long in power. The nation and the world were changing, and the liberal regime had become corrupt. Presidents designated their successors, and both civilian and military authorities cheated in elections. The government party always won, thanks to so-called brute force, a well-turned phrase if ever there was one. Even the dead and absent voted for the official candidate; votes were bought and beatings brought the undecided into line. The president faced the implacable opposition of the conservatives, a few groups of dissident liberals, all the clergy, and most of the press. For the first time, the extremes of the political spectrum had banded together in a single cause: to defeat the government. Every day opposition protesters thronged into the Plaza de Armas and were dispersed by mounted police with clubs, and in the president's last tour through the provinces, soldiers had to defend him at sword point against angry crowds who booed him and threw rotten tomatoes. Those indications of discontent left him unmoved, as if he didn't realize that the nation was slipping into chaos. According to Severo del Valle and Señorita Matilde Pineda, eighty percent of the people detested the government, and the most decent thing would be for the president to resign; the climate of tension had become unbearable and at any moment would erupt like a volcano. Which was what had happened that morning in January 1891, when the marines rebelled and Congress removed the president from office.

"There's going to be terrible repression, Aunt," I heard Severo del Valle say. "I'm going north to fight. I beg you to look after Nívea and the children because I won't be able to do it for who knows how long. "

"You already lost one leg in the war, Severo; if you lose the other, you'll look like a dwarf."

"I don't have any choice, I'd be killed in Santiago, anyway."

"Don't be so melodramatic, this isn't the opera!"

But Severo del Valle was better informed than his aunt, as would be seen a few days later when the terror was unleashed. The reaction of the president was to dissolve Congress, designate himself dictator, and name a man named Joaquin Godoy to organize the repression. Godoy was a sadist who believed that "the rich must pay for being rich, the poor for being poor, and as for the clergy—they should all be shot!" The army remained loyal to the government, and what had begun as a political revolt turned into a frightening civil war as the two branches of the armed forces confronted each other. Godoy, with the clear support of the army chiefs, proceeded to jail any opposition congressman he could lay a hand on. All civil guarantees were terminated and house searches and systematic torture were begun, while the president locked himself in his palace, repelled by his henchman's methods but convinced that there was no other way to subdue his political enemies. "I don't want to know anything about those measures," he was heard to say more than once. On the street where the Siglo de Oro bookstore was located, no one could sleep at night or go outside during the day for the yells of people being beaten at a nearby police station. None of this was discussed in front of the children, of course, but I learned everything because I knew every corner of the house, and since there wasn't much else to do during those months, I entertained myself by spying on the adults' conversations. As the war boiled outside, inside we lived as if we were in a luxurious convent. My grandmother Paulina sent for Nívea and her regiment of children, wet nurses, and nursemaids and locked up the house tight as a drum, convinced that no one would dare attack a lady of her social position who was married to a British citizen. Just in case, Frederick Williams ran up an English flag on the roof, and kept his weapons oiled.

Severo del Valle left to fight in the north in the nick of time; the next day they raided his house, and if they had found him he would have ended up in the detention center of the political police, where rich and poor alike were tortured. Nívea had been a partisan of the liberal regime, like Severo del Valle, but she had become a zealous opponent when the president tried to instate his successor through fraud and to crush the Congress at the same time. During the months of the revolution, pregnant with a pair of twins and caring for six children, she found time and spirit to work for the opposition in ways that had she been caught would have cost her life. Though everything Nívea did was with Williams's full knowledge, she acted behind the back of my grandmother Paulina, who had given definitive orders to stay out of sight and not attract the attention of the authorities. Señorita Matilde Pineda was the exact opposite of Frederick Williams, the former as socialist as the latter was monarchist, but their hatred of the government united them. In one of the back rooms my grandmother never went into, they set up a small printing press with the help of Don Pedro Tey, where they turned out lampoons and revolutionary pamphlets that Señorita Pineda then hid beneath her cape and delivered house to house. They made me swear that I wouldn't say a word to anyone about what went on in that room, and I didn't, because the secret seemed like a fascinating game, and I had no idea of the danger threatening our family. At the end of the Civil War, though, I realized that the peril had been real; despite Paulina del Valle's position, no one was safe from the long arm of the political police. My grandmother's house was not the sanctuary we supposed; her money, connections, and name would not have saved her from a raid of the house, perhaps even prison. The confusion of those months worked in our favor, as well as the fact that most of the population had turned against the government, and it was impossible to control that many people. Even in the bosom of the police there were supporters of the revolution who helped the same people escape that they were supposed to arrest. In every house where Señorita Pineda knocked on the door to deliver her lampoons, she was received with welcoming arms.

For once, Severo and his relatives were on the same side; in this conflict the conservatives had joined with one segment of the liberals. The rest of the del Valle family went into seclusion on their estates, as far as possible from Santiago, and the young men went to fight in the north where a contingent of volunteers was forming, augmented by rebellious naval units. The army, loyal to the government, planned to wipe out the handful of dissident civilians in a question of days, never imagining the resistance they would encounter. The navy and the revolutionaries headed north to take over the nitrate mines, the major source of the nation's revenues, where regiments of the regular army were quartered. In the first serious confrontation the government troops triumphed, and after the battle they killed all wounded and prisoners, as they had often done during the War of the Pacific ten years before. The brutality of that slaughter so inflamed the revolutionaries that when the two forces again met in battle, they scored an overwhelming victory. Then it was their turn to massacre the defeated. By March, the Congresistas, as the rebels were called, controlled five provinces in the north and had formed a government junta, while in the south President Balmaceda was losing followers minute by minute. What was left of the loyal troops in the north had to retreat south to join the bulk of the army. Fifteen thousand men crossed the cordillera on foot, entered Bolivia, passed through to Argentina, and then recrossed the mountains to reach Santiago. They arrived in the capital dropping with exhaustion, bearded, and ragged; they had walked thousands of kilometers through inhospitable extremes of valleys and peaks, infernal heat and eternal ice, on their trek gathering llamas and vicunas on the altiplano, gourds and armadillos on the pampas, and birds on the towering peaks. They were welcomed as heroes—that feat had not been equaled since the remote times of the fierce Spanish conquistadors—but not everyone participated in the welcome; the opposition had been growing like an avalanche, impossible to contain. Our house sat there with closed shutters, and my grandmother's orders were that no one should stick his nose outside, but I couldn't contain my curiosity, and I climbed up on the roof to watch the parade.

The arrests, sacking, tortures, and regulations had the opposition on tenterhooks; there was no family that was not divided, no one was free from fear. The troops made surprise roundups to conscript young men, swooping down on funerals, weddings, fields, and factories to arrest men of an age to bear arms and take them away by force. Agriculture and industry were paralyzed for lack of a labor force. The extreme power of the military became intolerable and the president understood that he would have to rein them in, but when finally he tried it was too late; the army had become too arrogant, and it was feared that they would unseat Balmaceda in order to install a military dictatorship a thousand times more frightening than the repression imposed by Godoy's political police. "Nothing's as dangerous as power with impunity," Nívea warned us. I asked Señorita Matilde Pineda what the difference was between the government and the revolutionaries, and her answer was that both were fighting for legitimacy. When I asked my grandmother, she answered, None, they were all scoundrels.

•

Terror knocked at our door when the government arrested Don Pedro Tey and took him to one of Godoy's feared dungeons. It was suspected, rightly, that he was responsible for the antigovernment political lampoons circulating all over the city. One June night, one of those nights of tedious rain and gusting wind when we were eating in the informal dining room, the door flew open, and Señorita Matilde Pineda burst in unannounced, wild-eyed, pale, her cape soaking wet.

"What is it?" my grandmother asked, annoyed by the teacher's lack of courtesy.

Señorita Pineda blurted out that Godoy's ruffians had raided the Siglo de Oro bookshop, beaten anyone who happened to be there, and then taken Don Pedro Tey away in a closed carriage. My grand mother sat with her fork in the air, waiting for something further that would justify the woman's scandalous entrance; she scarcely knew Señor Tey and could not understand why the news was so urgent. She had no idea that the bookseller came almost daily to her house, entering from the street at the rear, and cranked out his revolutionary pamphlets on a printing press hidden beneath her own roof. Nívea, Williams, and Señorita Pineda, on the other hand, could guess what the consequences could be once the poor wretch was forced to confess—and they knew that sooner or later he would do just that because Godoy's methods left no room for doubt. I saw the three of them exchange desperate looks, and although I didn't understand the scope of what was happening, I could imagine the source.