Surviving Santiago (33 page)

“It's, uh, Papá. He's . . . not doing too good.”

“If it's his drinking, you need to come home. You can't change him.”

“It's not.” I listen to the static on the line. “He got hurt. In an accident.”

“What? What kind of accident?”

“He doesn't want to talk about it.” Tía Ileana says he needs to talk about it if he wants the nightmares and panic attacks to stop, and she and his doctors are looking for a psychologist that he'll agree to see. But we can't force him.

“Let me speak to him,” Mamá says.

“He's not here.”

“Where is he?” Her voice breaks.

“At a meeting. He had to give up alcohol. Because of the”—I twist a strand of hair around my finger until the circulation cuts off—“the accident.”

“When's he getting home?”

“No, Mamá,” I say. “Whenever you two talk, he ends up getting drunk and you end up crying. That won't work anymore.”

She doesn't answer—I think she's too shocked to say anything.

“Frankie's father died last week of liver failure. Papá will, too, if he doesn't take care of himself. And what's Evan going to say if you keep crying over the husband you divorced?”

Mamá sniffles. “He was my first love. You never forget your first love.”

“It's over, Mamá. From now on, talk to me only. Papá, too, when he calls. None of this, ‘
Hola
, Tina, how's school? I need to talk to your mother.'”

That gets a little laugh out of her. Good. In our tiny apartment Evan won't be able to eavesdrop and think I'm acting like a jerk to my mother.

“How bad is he?” she asks.

“Some broken ribs. Liver and a kidney messed up. He was pretty sick for a while, and he gets tired.” I shake out my hand, where the circulation still hasn't returned to my index finger. “The doctor thinks he'll be well enough to ride a zip line in two weeks. There's one where Tío Claudio just moved, and I want to ride it, too.”

“Claudio? My brother?”

“We talked about it when I went to Las Condes.” And we've made him swear not to tell her what really happened to Papá.

“How does he get to sleep at night, without . . .?”

“Warm milk. And lots of exercise.”

“That's super.” She sounds genuinely happy. “So are you taking care of him?”

“When he's not working. He still has his show.”

“I'm sure he's a terrible patient.”

I grin, though she can't see me. “I'm up to the job.”

At home I'd be sanding floors and hanging curtains. I have no skill at tiling bathrooms or carpeting stairs.

And I can't solve all of Papá's problems, either. But I can help him climb to the top of the
cerro
without collapsing and bake treats to fatten him up before he gets stuck forever with the nickname
El Esqueleto
, the skeleton. And we can have some more good times together that we'll always remember—good times the way we are now and not the way we used to be.

A
UTHOR'S
N
OTE

Tina's story came to me in the course of revising
Gringolandia
after it had been accepted for publication. I had been reading some of the testimonies in the
Informe Rettig
(the first of two major human rights investigations of General Augusto Pinochet's seventeen-year military dictatorship in Chile) about Rodrigo Rojas, a Chilean-born teenager living in the United States who died after soldiers set him on fire at a demonstration in Santiago in 1986. The investigation revealed the efforts of paramilitary groups—right-wing groups allied with the military but not under its direct leadership—to silence potential witnesses of this and other atrocities through threats, abductions, and beatings. Officials of the regime went to great lengths to cover up their human rights abuses and at times enlisted people who were not formally in the military but associated with it—like Frankie's uncle—to intimidate or wreak revenge.

Surviving Santiago
takes place in June and July of 1989, nine months before the end of the dictatorship. The Pinochet dictatorship came to power following a bloody coup
on September 11, 1973, that toppled the elected socialist government of Salvador Allende. In the days and years after the coup, more than 3,000 Chileans were killed or “disappeared,” and more than 38,000 were imprisoned and tortured. Like Tina's family, nearly a tenth of the country's population emigrated for political or economic reasons between 1973 and 1990.

Economic policies implemented during the 1980s led to the kind of commercial development—including modern high-rise apartment buildings and enclosed shopping malls—that Tía Ileana's company represented. But while the wealthy and well educated prospered, poor and working-class Chileans endured the brunt of the repression and saw little improvement in their standard of living. By the 1990s, Chile had one of the most unequal distributions of wealth in the world.

In 1980 Chile's constitution was revised to give more power to Pinochet and the military. Under its provisions, a plebiscite (an election in which the only options are yes or no) held in October 1988 would determine whether Pinochet would rule for another ten years, or leave office after the election of a new government the following year. Even if he lost, Pinochet would remain a senator for life and the military would retain its funding and privileges. Despite years of repression and press censorship that was only somewhat loosened to allow the electoral campaign to proceed, the Chilean people voted “no” to their dictator's
continued rule. In October 1989, the people voted again, and in a rebuke to the dictatorship, the opposition Concertación soundly defeated the right-wing National Alliance. The Concertación's parties have continued to win a majority of the Presidential elections ever since.

Although the 1988 plebiscite represented the victory of nonviolence and democracy, the events leading up to it were far from peaceful. On September 7, 1986, urban guerrilla fighters from the Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front ambushed the general's caravan. While Pinochet and his ten-year-old grandson escaped uninjured, five of his guards were killed. Over the next few days, four well-known leftist activists were kidnapped and murdered in retaliation, including an editor of the magazine
Análisis
, José Carrasco.

The extreme left engaged in revenge killings as well. In April 1991, a little more than a year after the elected government took power, a splinter group of the Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front assassinated right-wing senator Jaime Guzmán, a former Pinochet speechwriter and co-author of the 1980 constitution.

These kinds of deadly attacks were spectacular and designed to instill fear, but they were also rare in comparison to other countries in Latin American and to Chile itself a decade earlier. By 1989, politically active Chileans normally did not travel with an entourage or take other security measures, such as varying their route to
work. However, many former political prisoners who had endured torture like Marcelo continued to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder and physical ailments related to their brutal treatment in prison; the danger of suicide far exceeded that of homicide. According to the
Informe Valech
(the most recent human rights investigation), the life expectancy of former political prisoners is 60 to 65 years; the average life expectancy in Chile nears 80 years.

Pinochet and military officials demanded silence and freedom from prosecution as a condition for handing over power to an elected civilian government. However, the courageous efforts of Catholic Church officials, journalists like Marcelo, and lawyers and judges to reveal the truth and, ultimately, to prosecute the perpetrators and compensate the victims played a major role in reducing violence motivated by revenge. Beginning in the late 1980s, those on both sides who perpetrated acts of violence and terrorism found themselves increasingly on the margins. Chileans across the political spectrum worked together to rebuild strong democratic institutions and a prosperous economy.

I was in Chile at the beginning of 1990 and witnessed personally the transition from dictatorship to democracy. I consider it the most inspiring experience of my
life, and I am grateful to the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators, which funded my trip through a Work-in-Progress grant, and to the many Chileans who showed me their country and told me their stories. Franca Monteverde and her late husband, Nelson Schwenke, opened their home to my husband and me for the three and a half weeks we spent there. Nelson and I took a roll of photos of Valparaíso at night, competing to see who could hold the camera with a steadier hand. Eduardo Peralta gave me a tour of the Vicaría de la Solidaridad, the Catholic Church's human rights organization. (I also saw the McDonald's in the Plaza de Armas, but being a vegetarian, I didn't eat there.) Marcelo Nilo, Manuela Bunster, and Jaime Barría guided me through their neighborhoods and introduced me to their families and their lives. Dozens of Chileans shared their often painful experiences with me in the hope that I would tell people in the United States what happened to them, and to prevent the same thing from happening again, anywhere in the world.

A note on names: In Spanish-speaking countries, people usually have two surnames (last names). The first of those is the father's name, and the second comes from the mother. The principal surname is that of the father, which is the one used for alphabetical order and carried through to the next generation. Thus, Tina's father is
Marcelo Aguilar Gaetani, and he is generally referred to as Marcelo Aguilar. His print byline sometimes reads “Marcelo Aguilar G.” Tina's name, Cristina Aguilar Fuentes, comes from her father's principal surname, and then her mother's. (A woman keeps her maiden name but traditionally adds the
de
after marriage.) In both the United States and Chile, Tina uses the surname Aguilar rather than Fuentes. The strictness of these naming conventions varies from country to country, but in Chile during this era people tended to observe them seriously.

Surviving Santiago
is a work of fiction, and, as such, it features invented characters. The radio station Radio Colectiva, La Pizza Pellegrino, and Speedy Couriers are fictional as well, and any resemblance to real enterprises by the same or similar names is purely coincidental.

For further reading:

     
Ackerman, Peter and DuVall, Jack.
A Force More Powerful: A Century of Nonviolent Conflict
. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000.

     
Agosín, Marjorie.
I Lived on Butterfly Hill
. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014.

     
Allende, Isabel.
My Invented Country
. New York: HarperCollins, 2003.

     
Bolaño, Roberto.
Distant Star
. New York: New Directions, 2005.

     
Constable, Pamela and Valenzuela, Arturo.
A Nation of Enemies: Chile under Pinochet
. New York: W.W. Norton, 1991.

     
Muñoz, Heraldo.
The Dictator's Shadow: Life Under Augusto Pinochet
. New York: Basic Books, 2008.

     
No
. New York: Sony Pictures, 2013. (feature film)

A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS

Surviving Santiago
traveled a long and circuitous road to publication and received much help along the way. My editor at Curbstone Press, the late Alexander “Sandy” Taylor, suggested I write Tina's story when he accepted my manuscript of
Gringolandia
in 2007. My daughter, Madeleine, who was sixteen at the time, was my first reader and contributed to several chapters that, sadly, did not make the final version. Still, we had a lot of fun discussing the story and writing the first draft as we traveled through Spain in the summer of 2007, and I hope these memories are as wonderful for her as they are for me.