The Death of the Dream: The Dead Dream and the Birth of Betrayal
We have mentioned before the way in which the workers of Ex-Yarur took over their factory and made it into a profitable enterprise directed by the workers. As Peter Winn wrote, these workers, for the first time in their lives, dare to dream of a different Chile. Winn dedicates an entire book to covering the almost two years of existence of Ex-Yarur before it was taken back by the military. He writes,
“Seventeen month after the socialization of their factory, many Ex-Yarur workers were as concerned about values and intellectual limitations as they were about material needs and vocational aspirations. The revolutionary process had proved a powerful transformer of worldviews as well as of structures. It was not just their external conditions that had changed, but their inner lives as well – their self-image, their job satisfaction, their consciousness…Once such change was the increase in self-esteem summed up in the word “dignity,” which reflected their transformation from “Don Amador’s people” into “Ex-Yarur workers,” masters of their own lives” (p.216)They dreamt of a future where Chile’s workers were able to realize themselves while working, develop professionally, and raise their self-image and consciousness above their past condition of being an almost-slave by becoming an integral part of a self-directed force-work. And their dream became true. For workers around the country, the workers of Ex-Yarur were the prove that their dream would become true as well. Of course, once this dream started to become a reality, the upper classes were not willing to let it spread throughout the country. They woke the country up with the brutality of the coup.
Their dream became
for them the reality of the new Chile. As Vicente Poblete, a former
teacher and the second general manager of Ex-Yarur said, the transformation
of consciousness was their greatest achievement,
If one asks the compañeros who are the leaders or rank and file:
‘Did you think the same way or see the same way in October {1971} as now?
They say: ‘No.’ They are aware that now they see the destiny of the country
another way and see the progress here more clearly, that they are more
conscious of where we are heading. Well, that is what is called ‘forming
the New Man,’ because socialism has to be constructed not only in things,
but in people, in our own consciousness.”
These changes of consciousness were reflected, according to Winn,
“…in altered patterns of political participation and partisanship, both inside the factory and beyond its gates. Within the Yarur mill, there was a dramatic increase in the extent of participation, whether measured by voting, meeting attendance, or committee membership. At the same time, there was a transformation in the quality of political life at the Yarur mill, including a marked radicalization of both the language of politics and the issues debated…More visible to the nation than these changes inside the mill walls was the intensified participation of Ex-Yarur workers in political activity beyond the factory gates… In mid-1972, almost all Ex-Yarur workers appeared ready to defend the socialization of ‘their’ industry, most were willing to act in support of ‘their’ president, and many were prepared to participate in active efforts to advance ‘their’ revolution from below. ‘If things go badly, we are the first to be in the streets,’ boasted Omar Guzmán, ‘so one sees that here there is more consciousness,’ a judgment shared by national leaders such as Guillermo Garretón, who placed the Ex-Yarur workers ‘in the vanguard of Chilean society.” (p.220-221)Although a coup of the magnitude of the Chilean one may never kill the experiences of those two years and the new consciousness that emerged from them, it is, indeed, capable to kill the hope, the dream of a new Chile, land of the New Man. The image of the Palacio de la Moneda in flames has become an obsessive and recurrent image for most Chileans. Either as symbol of terror, or as a symbol of victory over the “Marxist virus” the black or while image lives, in its by-polar and dialogical existence, as a movement that constantly alternates between its two excluding opposites.
But this image is not only the visible sign of the fact that there were two Chiles living-dying in the same territory. It is also the painful sign of the destruction of something inside of many Chileans as well as the sign of the fact that those Chileans have been forced to live, for over 17 years, with the a mechanism of auto-censorship that on the one hand repress the image of that destruction replacing it for the image of the “cure against the virus,” and on the other hand they cannot avoid to have the recurrent image visit them constantly as a reminder of the a death that is more alive the more they try to forget about it. The image of the Palace has become over the years also the flag, the background of all those photographs of Chileans who were made to disappear during the dictatorship, but also the finger pointing at all those that chose to submit to the terror of the Pinochet’s terror regime.
Many were the theater productions devoted to those 17 years of terror, once the regime “legally” ended. Among those theater productions there is one that I would like to refer to in order to define more clearly the complicated significance of the image of the Palace in flames. I am refereeing to the play called “El sueño muerto” (“The Dead Dream”). This play was rehearsed and performed for the first time in Valparaiso. The director of a theater group called Los Viajantes proposed the actors of the group to work together in a piece about the 17 years of dictatorship. Each member of the group came from a different background and that provided the challenge with plenty of different nuances and details that had it be worked by a more homogeneous group would have gotten lost. The text of the play was the result of their group effort.
The play was divided in numerous acts. The one to the last was a projection of the image of the Palacio de la Moneda during the bombing. In front of the black and while image a figure difficult to see in the darkness of the stage looked straight into the audience, just the same as the image of the Palace looked straight into the audience. The voice that talked through a microphone, echoed in the room. It was monotonous, slow, and accusative. The voice asked to a “you” “How much did you lie? How much for your shoes? Do you want to laugh? etc.. It was the voice of an interrogator except that in this case the interrogator was not an outside figure questioning another in order to obtain information. In this case it was an internal voice, a voice that knew already the answers to those questions and that did not end with the end of the sounds of the planes.
The voice lasted as long as the image of the palace and filled the space totally and completely leaving no space for breathing outside the guilt of having betrayed one self, and accepted the unacceptable disappearances and killings of their fellow Chileans. An atmosphere of guilt grew among all in the room. The enchantment of forgetfulness had been broken.
But even more painful than that was the fact that the voice sounded as it if came from the underworld, or from inside the spectator’s head. It sounded like the voice that for years many Chileans had repressed in the depth of their being in order to survive at the everyday level. Who did not know that voice? Who did not recognize the pleasures of the market bringing closer to home the luxuries of the better to do countries. The voice had the power to bring each spectator face to face to the image of who they were during the dictatorship, and to the faces of those tortured and forced by force to betray their “dream” and their “compañeros.” As Pedro Alejandro Matta constantly reminds us, torture is used all over the world because it works. In a torture chamber there are no heroes. The torturers know that it is a matter of time before the tortured person speaks and gives information that would allow them to capture other members of the group. But how now these victims of torture are going to live with the weight of having betrayed their compañeros.
The expression “traicionarse” is one of the most frequently used in Chile even today. In fact, for the director of the play we were just talking about this is the most immediate and painful question facing everyone today in Chile. The dictatorship erased all traces of the Allende’s social program and replaced it with a neoliberal system that provided the upper classes with a good standard of living while easing their consciousness with the constant use of the TV in the lightest and most dogmatic ways. For the lower classes, although many continued to struggle and were persecuted, their infrastructure, their well-knitted ties among individuals was destroyed and left the once strong sense of unity broken into individuals that run to the TV for their appeasement while they try to survive in a country where the economic reality got harsher every day.
The Chilean journalist Sergio
Marras, mocks in his book Carta Apócrifa de Pinochet a un siquiatra
chileno the false pretension of many Chileans who chose to become paralyzed
by fear instead of taking a stand against the dictatorship, and who not
only did not confront the regime but actually benefited from it by getting
involved in the new economical order that the regime introduced in Chile,
the Neoliberalist model. Carta Apócrifa de Pinochet a un siquiatra
chileno was written in response to a book that Marco Antonio de la
Parra published entitled Carta abierta a Pinochet. In his book
de la Parra speaks of the fear that the figure of Pinochet produced in
his life and of how he decided to have a very low profile in order not
to run into problems with the regime. Marras, in a very sarcastic
tone, wrote a reply to that book in the book mentioned above. Marras,
taking the voice of Pinochet, replied the psychiatrist,
“What I want to assure you, and I do so with great decision, is that I did not inculcate in anybody that which you call the national style of living together <<silly, consumerism, of short reach, des-politicized and soft>>. I did not reduce politics to a “yes” or “no.” All of you, by yourselves, did that. And if you, as you say, became a silly because for you it was too important the color TV, the radio clock, to be in the newspapers, and other things, there were also people on my side and in the other that did not become silly for those things… if you have develop a mentality of consumerism, that it is not my fault. I have not told anybody to get in to a Porsche while buying on installments …one things is to consume and another consumerism…(p.89-92)Marras is in the same note than Jocelyn, considers that the coup of the 73 was actually a logical consequence for a country that, since long before the coup, had a Pinochet inside: “I am the continuation, the legacy of the authoritarian vein that the Mapuche Indians and the Spaniards left all of us, as well as that unavoidable madness of pretending to be democratic” (p. 57), writes Marras personifying the voice of Pinochet, and then he questions the psychiatrist,
"Where do you think I got my authoritarian vein if it is not from the old teachings in this country? Who were the ones who asked me to take action? No, doctor. Do not play that way. I have not been, as you say, the Teacher. I have just been the Good Student.” (p.57)And pages later, after pages and pages of ironic words directed to the psychiatrist that, according to the author of the Apócrifa letter, does not want to confront the reality of his coward, and double face behavior, he, the replier, states once more and for all, just before finishing his letter and book,
“Stop feeling pity for yourself. It does not help anybody. A whole country suffered for me. The other half was happy with me. Your problem is not I. If you were against me and you did not do anything, do not feel sorry for yourself. You, being a doctor, can do much to eradicate the dictator and braggart full of complexes that each Chilean carries inside and who took us to what happened in the year 73, and who any day now, if we do not change, will happen again. There is where is what caused all of these…what is important now is that you do not lie to yourself about what happened then, and to give once and for all a meaning to this country that would make it a great nation, beyond its grapes and salmon… to forget and to forgive are impossible, I assure you. But we do not besad because that. You just have to take it. I am delighted that now you feel brave to tell me everything that you think. As I keep loosing power more and more, there will be more and more people who will speak. By the time I die, even the flower jars will be talking. (p.124-126)Basically, Marras accuses de la Parra, the same as Jocelyn in his book and “El sueño muerto” accused Chileans in general, of his double face, and of taking advantage of the economical situation during the Pinochet regime in order to establish his name and his courier. But Marras goes even further and does not let the target of his criticism go without first giving him a farewell worth the strongest and most shuttle of all criticisms and accusations,
“As you can see I have reply to you without taking resort to legal, or other, actions. It is true that this is an apocrypha piece of writing. But what else can one do in an apocrypha country… In the same way that you got tired to write to me, I have gotten tired to write to you, doctor. But let us be friends. Do you still want to have tea? Do you call me or should I could you?” (p.126-127)By Marras writing and signing an apocrypha letter to the psychiatrist as his only recourse in a apocrypha country, he is accusing him of never confronting reality directly but hiding behind a mask. Moreover, the invitation to have tea, and the “common agreement” to remain friends, makes explicit the fact that between the psychiatrist and Pinochet there was a friendship and in no case antagonism. De la Parra wrote in his book La mala memoria, “that mental state of living in the middle of the blade between the lie of the everyday life and the real history being a secret.”(121)
De la Parra is one
of the better-known play writers of Chile. He has published numerous
plays and essays during and after the dictatorship and his plays have been
produced all over Latin America. De la Parra, like all the writers
of his generation, faced the same challenge. Could they oppose the
dictatorial regime frontally or should they “go along” and not attract
attention to themselves. It was, indeed, a difficult call, and many
preferred to do what de la Parra claimed he did,
“We were in a cattlepen, made into infants, prohibited, and watched. Some, moreover, were persecuted….I remember looking at the Chilean flag and feeling estrange and a foreigner in what one day had been my own country. To not know my language as a survivor that was, no matter what, the lowest form of betrayal. I did not serve clandestinely like many others did. I position myself outside the groups that were discussing against Pinochet. I was passive, and fearful. (p.111, translation is mine)For a writer and psychiatrist to lose his belief in language is, no doubt, the greatest of all loses at the creative level. Considering that creativity is, indeed, the most precious of all of human’s gifts together with the capacity to love, de la Parra’s loss has no price. In fact, he even gets to the point of believing that he is, “deluded, words get rusted more all the time. Their power is minimum” (p.97). Of course, his feeling about language is also a reflection of his perception that “language an the history of the country would had gotten hurt for ever. We were to become a country of numbers instead of a country of words” (p.104).
Marras’ reply on this point is that “metaphors may take us very far. It is not true that words cannot kill people. What do you think is an order of execution, or a word of lack of love or a word of hopelessness? You surprise me doctor. Words do kill. It all depends of how one uses them, the same as with armaments or love” (p.32-33). And then he continues, “You are wrong when you affirm that I do not respect intellectuals. Who, if not intellectuals have been at the springboard of my economical model that they so much praise, even my enemies? You say that the merchants, adventurers, the audacious won. That is true, but from both sides, doctor. How many compañero of back then, today are working in private businesses and getting wealthy. I do not have enough fingers in my hand to count them all. And most of them justify it with many words, and even with books. What can you respond to that doctor. One to cero. Things are neither black nor white” (p. 33-34).
Marras' criticism of de la
Parra’s position is at the crux of Eltit’s position as the writer of her
first novel, since she chose to write from an independent position.
She did not situate herself neither as part of the writers who wrote against
Pinochet, nor as part of those who wrote pro-him. However, her position
was not a-political because of her lack of alignment with either side.
On the contrary, her position is perhaps the most honest and brave a writer
may take in such circumstances. To define the place from where Eltit
wrote Lumpérica is the subject of the next section in this dissertation.
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