Where the Bird Sings Best (49 page)

In March, the master’s term as deputy was up. He presented himself for reelection but did not make serious efforts. He didn’t get enough votes. In September, a contingent of military men invaded the Senate to express their annoyance, demanding a political and administrative purification. Parliament approved the petitions presented to it. Arturo Alessandri, alleging he’d lost control of power, resigned and left the country. Exactly as Recabarren had predicted! That same month, a military junta met intent on dissolving Congress and convoking an assembly to draft a new constitution. Public opinion applauded enthusiastically, and the conservatives were obsequious and docile as events unfolded. Exactly as Recabarren had predicted!

The master was tired when he came home from the Party meeting. He handed Jaime some money and asked him to buy some pisco. My father returned with three bottles. It was the first time Recabarren expressed a desire to drink. Taciturn, they sat down under the huge white ghost. There was a liter for each of them. Gulping it down, the master began to empty his bottle. My father and Teresa copied him. Little by little they lost equilibrium and began to sweat.

The leader drank the last drops and began to guffaw. Teresa tried to smile, but her face was petrified. She put her head under her arm, imitating a hen, and began to snore, sitting in that odd position.

“The Lion of Tarapacá turned out to be sterile, Lautaro. His reactionary, anti-labor government has been replaced by a junta of generals who are even more reactionary. What a charade! They make promises to the people that go from the human to the divine only so the workers will bend their backs and keep on wearing the yoke. We’re on our way to a criminal dictatorship, here and in Russia. All demagogues. Shut up! There’s no more pisco?”

Jaime passed him the quarter liter he had left. The master finished in one swallow.

“Would you like to know, Quinchahual, how some young comrades responded because I suggested that believing that the proletariat alone, through its own efforts and a great struggle, could establish a Workers Government was an infantile idea? They shouted that I was foolish to think myself owner and master of the Party, that I behaved like an absolute monarch fencing in his servants. I was treated like a rat, and one militant dared to spit in my face! Can you believe it, Lautaro? Within the bosom of the Party there are fights and internecine struggles provoked by those sleeping men. Someday someone has to wake up! Go get the gun.”

“But... ”

“Obey your father!”

Overwhelmed by Recabarren’s will—he seemed to have aged a century—Jaime fetched the pistol.

“Let no one say that what I am going to do is the result of alcohol. Let’s wait until we’re sober.”

The master took a notebook out of a drawer and leafed through it. It was covered with his tiny, tortured handwriting.

“These are the memories of my life. Here is what I really saw in Russia, what I think of Lenin and of the future that awaits us if things don’t change.”

He put the notebook in a metal tray and set fire to it. The rooster began to crow. Teresa awoke and saw the pistol. She dug through the ashes trying to find a legible fragment. The ashes flew around the dining room like a flock of nocturnal butterflies. She said, with infinite dignity, “Good-bye, Luis Emilio. You know what I feel for you. I’ll never forget you.”

Recabarren brought the pistol to his head and squeezed the trigger. He fell over with a red rose on his temple.

The government didn’t dare forbid the funeral procession that would pass on Sunday through the center of the city to the General Cemetery. The coffin, covered with a red flag, was followed by a multitude of workers who filled the streets like a slow, silent, incredibly long river. The union banners paraded with a black ribbon on top of the letters embroidered in the velvet. Delegations of miners, maritime workers, men from the copper and coal mines, peasants, students, railroad men, bricklayers, bakers, and, at the head of the parade, guiding the coffin with a firm step, Teresa. Dressed in workers clothes, she glanced with pride toward the windows of the elegant houses where groups of people gathered to look out.

A barricade of one hundred policemen, armed with rifles and wearing metal helmets, stopped the procession. The human river paused. The master’s companion, standing next to the coffin, sang with such intensity that her voice could be heard blocks away:

Without fear of sanctions
I bid farewell to the subversive man
Who has known a thousand prisons
Without committing any crime.

Thousands of voices united in the melody and, repeating the refrain, the marchers once again moved forward. The soldiers didn’t dare fire and disappeared as if by magic. In the cemetery plaza, every worker became an orator. Thousands of inflammatory speeches launched in spurts, joined in a chaotic chorus, like the sound of a waterfall, to bid good-bye to Recabarren’s remains. As those who were hungry and tired gave up, others took their place. At 6:00 p.m., the ceremony was finished, and the body was left in the hands of the cemetery staff so that on Monday, the gravediggers could place the coffin in the family crypt.

The next morning, very early, the sun barely giving a yellowish tinge to the cloudy sky, the gravediggers, asleep on their feet, dissimulating with grumbles the ill effects of alcohol, opened the gates to let Teresa, Jaime, and Sofía Lam (who turned up riding a man’s bicycle and wearing a sailor suit) enter. The three marched silently behind the four drunken gravediggers who carried the coffin on their shoulders, zigzagging and tripping amid muttered curses. The iron crypt that belonged to Recabarren’s grandfather was open. A dark-skinned boy, about twenty-five years old, with short, thick legs; a wide, hairy chest; calloused hands; big teeth; and straight black hair, was waiting for them, leaning on the aluminum cross.

“Yesterday I hid here, Doña Teresa. I forced open the doors and spent the night here, trying to join my family. I am Elías Recabarren.”

Surprised, Teresa set aside her painful silence. “You are Elías? Luis Emilio’s son?”

“Yes, ma’am. I came because... ”

“Let’s get on with the ceremony. Later you can tell us everything.”

The gravediggers tossed the coffin into a niche as if it were a sack of potatoes. The jolt produced a bell-like sound in the metal crypt. They screwed the cover back on, whispering obscene jokes, and stretched out their right hands in hopes of a tip. Teresa gave each one money. Grumbling, even though the amount was correct, they demanded more. Jaime kicked them out. They went off to sit on a tomb emblazoned with a winged woman playing a trumpet, where they passed around a bottle of wine as they took turns caressing the statue’s marble hips.

At the coffee shop, The Last Good-bye, across the street from the cemetery, Teresa, Jaime, Sofía, and Recabarren’s son drank their sodas in silence, not knowing how to begin the conversation. Sofía slapped the table, trying to kill a fly. The others emerged from their immobility to keep the glasses from spilling over, and attention focused on the girl.

“I came today to pay intimate homage to the master and to express my repentance. For obscure sexual motives, I betrayed the most sacred thing, the Party. My vagina and clitoris weighed more heavily than the pain of the exploited working class. Shame made me discover my vocation: I am an atheist monk. Count on me for anything. Are we friends, Lautaro?”

“Friends, Sofía!”

“Now it’s time for me to talk, and I’ll be sincere. About Communism I know nothing. I’ve lived far away from politics, no fault of my own but of my father. As you well know, Doña Teresa, he was married to Fresia Godoy, a maid, my mother, an uneducated woman from the south. Recabarren learned to read quickly, developed his intelligence, found the ideal that would guide his life, went north, and never came near us again. His love for the people made him forget his son. He worried about everyone but me. I grew up humiliated, with no education, in the basement of our bosses. My mother died when I was thirteen. I had no money to bury her decently. She disappeared into a potter’s field. I hated politics, the struggles of the workers, that world that had stolen away my father. I also detested him. He should have come to find me, to teach me what he knew, to give me the chance to prepare the Revolution at his side. He shouldn’t have left me cast aside like a contemptible orphan. I was working for a few days here in Santiago, in a furniture factory. I’m a carpenter. I read the news of his death. I shed not a single tear. To the contrary, I smiled and felt avenged. I asked permission to take a day off, saying I wasn’t well, and I walked downtown intent on getting drunk. It was there the demonstration caught me. That human river following the body of the man who engendered me was pressing against my body, clinging to my skin, to my bones, in order to add me to its flow. I dissolved in the mass, and then, without personality, anonymous, one more cell in the gigantic animal of the people, I felt what everyone else felt, the greatest sadness coupled with an immense gratitude. I admired the honor of a solitary and valiant man who gave everything he had trying to get his compatriots out of poverty. I understood that my hatred was egoistic, and I felt proud to be the son of such a father. When the crowd left the cemetery, I hid so I could sleep in the crypt. Last night I felt no cold even though the walls and floor are iron. Recabarren’s arms were around me. Also, those of my grandfather and great-grandfather. This metal place is a grave for men. In our family, hearts detach from women and immerse themselves in the struggle. That’s the tradition I wish to continue.”

“Elías, what you’re saying is very beautiful, and I’m sure that if there were such a thing as heaven, your father would be happy to hear you. Luis Emilio often asked himself about your fate. We made inquiries, but we never managed to find your whereabouts. Finally, we reached the conclusion that you were dead. From this moment on, our house is your house.”

“Let’s not forget Comrade Lautaro Quinchahual. I too want to continue the work of my master and adoptive father. Give us advice, Teresa.”

“Often, Luis Emilio talked to me about the importance of developing political awareness among the workers. Despite the fact that in the past few months he was crippled by a sadness impossible to explain, he was also very concerned about art. He thought that the best medium to awaken the workers was the theater. He thought about the possibility of forming theater groups of four persons each to travel the country and go to the mines, putting on shows. He wrote several one-act plays. He finished the last one a day before his death. It’s a comic drama for clowns, quite symbolic. If you want to be faithful to the ideal of my companion, I suggest the following: I’ll sell the house, and with that money buy a truck. There are four of us, and we can travel the country putting on his posthumous works!”

A spontaneous and enthusiastic “Agreed!” turned them into traveling actors for several years.

In January of 1925, a movement led by young army officers staged a coup d’état against the junta of conservative generals and brought Arturo Alessandri back to finish his term in office. But it wasn’t really the president who controlled things. All power was concentrated in the minister of war. Carlos Ibáñez del Campo, who on the one hand tried to attract the workers and on the other tried to destroy the workers movement. The new constitution had been approved and left almost all power in the hands of the executive. On June 4, at the La Coruña mine, the police and army massacred more than two thousand miners, women, and children. Discontent grew to such a point that Alessandri had to resign a second time before finishing out his term.

After two years of tug of war with the judiciary, Colonel Ibáñez was elected president, initiating a dictatorial government that brought with it detentions, exiles, disappearances, executions, and the limitation of civil liberties. Luis Emilio Recabarren’s theatrical work began acquiring more and more meaning as these things took place. Teresa, Sofía, Elías, and Jaime slept in the truck, which, chugging and bucking like an angry mule, carried them from one mine to another. The workers to whom the companies gave no entertainment other than the wine from their company stores, filled, with infantile eagerness, the soccer fields transformed into theaters thanks to the stages constructed from tables in the collective dining rooms.

Teresa was no longer the discreet woman who had remained silent for twenty-five years next to her idol. Dressed in trousers and a blue work shirt, she drove the truck through the pampa, overcoming the obstacles along the way by means of her ironclad will. Without her, the truck would have collapsed like an old house. She learned how to change tires and fix flats, to repair the motor, take it apart, put it back together, change parts, and, her face stained with grease, to curse at the mist to make it fade and clear the road. At the end of every performance, it was she who took up the collection. In addition to a bit of money, they were also given some food and a tank of gas. With every change in the government, with every important political event, they reexamined their act. And merely by changing their tones of voice, leaving the text intact, they managed to keep it up to date.

Teresa would announce: “Ladies and gentlemen and children: you are going to witness the grand performance of the International Failure Circus! We shall present on this stage a beast... ”

(And here Elías, dressed as a bureaucrat, would enter and sit on the floor.)

“and an implacable lion tamer... ”

(And here Jaime, dressed as a colonel, would enter dragging a chair and snapping a whip.)