As the unimaginable reality of the military coup unfolded I wrote incessantly in my diary.
My parents asked me to tear the pages from my journal and throw them into the fire, along with my books, magazines, and records. The fire of my memories rose in the air, leaving no trace but a black ashen place within me.
A FIRE OF MEMORIES BY AURORA LOPEZ CANCINO 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 17
The beams of light from our battered car cut the fog that enveloped the road to Valparaíso, our home town in Chile. Smoke rose from houses we passed along the way.
We were to have stayed a few days more in the town of Copiapó, in the north with our relatives, but my father arrived like a tempest that afternoon and without explanation told us to pack and say goodbye. In minutes we were on the way home along the straight road through the pale desert.
In the early hours of September 11, 1973, we arrived in Valparaíso. My brothers and I were still dozing, our chins on our chests, heads bumping occasionally against the windows. My little brothers did not see what I saw when a ghostly feeling made me look up and try to identify the shapes on the road. They were tanks. A procession of tanks and army trucks rumbled along the road leading down the hills to the port. I remember looking at the lights in the streets of our small coastal town, Valparaíso, looking so helpless, isolated in its own beauty of poverty and sacrifice. I was only a child, but I have kept the image of how my town looked from Los Placeres Hill as it was that night, at the beginning of our new life. I was afraid, a cold nameless chill crept up my spine.
My father drove straight home through the poorly lighted streets, and when we arrived my brothers and I fell onto our beds and slept with our clothes on. We slept soundly. No dreams. No certainties. Only the ignorance of the innocent, the omen of the military caravan already hanging over our sleeping heads.
My parents woke me up early the following morning. I did not have school until the afternoon, so there was no hurry. Nor reasons for my father to kiss me goodbye, since he always left for work before I woke up. But my parents came to my room that morning and my father told me he was leaving for work and that he had asked my mother to stay home from work to be with us. My mother was wearing black shoes, my father a dark suit. I was sleepy and could hardly open my eyes. Although puzzled, I fell back to sleep, still numb from the long journey the day before. Later, I was startled by the agitated voices on their way upstairs from the street. My father was home again. He told us he had been informed that he must return to his house and remain there for the rest of the day.
I did not understand the extent of the order on that cool morning that seemed to prolong the winter in our bones. From the instant I heard my parents discussing the situation I was struck with disbelief. Without realizing it, I entered an altered world where my bounded, familiar reality fell apart. An involuntary moan escaped my lips and my body felt as though it has become an amoeba with numb limbs and dissolved muscles. I failed to understand what was happening and deep fear flooded my veins.
From that moment on I could not record or connect facts that I could later access as coordinated memories.
My parents ceased to see or talk to us. We crossed paths in rooms and corridors but it was as if my brothers and I were not there. I wondered what they felt during those first hours. What did they foresee and how did they quell their terror? Which form did dread take in them? For 33 years, the questions and answers would remain sealed, waiting, shrouded in secrecy by anxious denial or determined amnesia.
Only last year my brother Mario told me that José Antonio, one of my mother’s students at the university, was with us that morning, muttering something about “a new Djakarta”, the Indonesian killings of 1965–1966 of about half a million people where an anti-communist purge followed a failed coup. I do not recall his being there. My focus turned to my mother and myself, fearing torture and especially rape. Yet, there is so much I cannot remember. Fear does that to you; it erases the present as reality and replaces it with tremors and dark corners that you are not even sure exist.
I do not remember my brothers that day. I saw no one but my mother. I remember hurried phone calls, repeating the same worries over and over. Whispers, large eyes mirroring the unknown, looking through me. “Are you alright?” “When did you last hear from him?” “I think they were at the campus hall and everyone there was arrested.”
Around noon, I was glued to one of the big speakers in the lounge—a crackling transmission from Radio Magallanes, the only radio station still resisting the coup, though the words were difficult to understand. I crouched on the parquet floor, alone and limited in my quest to comprehend. I listened to what would become Salvador Allende’s last words as president and as a living man, his monumental speech about hope for the future and concern for the present.
“…the only thing left for me is to say to workers: I am not going to resign! Placed in a historic transition, I will pay for loyalty to the people with my life. And I say to them that I am certain that the seeds which we have planted in the good conscience of thousands and thousands of Chileans will not be shriveled forever. They have force and will be able to dominate us, but social processes can be arrested by neither crime nor force. History is ours, and people make history.”
His body was found after the government palace La Moneda was bombarded by air force planes.
The transmission ended with his calm voice promising moral sanction to punish the felony, the cowardliness and the treason. I did not understand his speech; I was 13. Yet, I sensed that what he was saying was crucial for our situation, for what we would become and for the history of our thin isolated country. I looked at my mother, who stood on the terrace in front of my father. Suddenly, it was as if her body broke in two. She crumbled forward, her face in her hands, a mute sob rising from her airless lungs. She would have fallen and split her head open had my father not held her.