The End of the World Tin House Magazine

The End of the World
published Summer Issue 2005 Tin House Magazine

by Francisco Letelier



There are thousands of us on the street. Giant red banners unfurl in the balmy afternoon light. Freshly painted murals adorn the long blocks of our march. Chants and slogans run through the crowd; with upraised fists, with the determination only centuries of struggle and desire can ignite. Over loudspeakers come speeches and songs, muted by the incessant activity of the people, guitars and street vendors’ cries. In the stepped entrances to old buildings, candles are lit, shrines spontaneously created.


Venice, California—January 2005

I am having trouble sleeping and my dreams are full of images. I march through the streets of Santiago along with an enormous crowd towards the presidential palace, just as I did when I was fourteen years old. I wrap my poncho around me against the stiff Andean fog as I sing and shout. At my side march people I have known and loved. My grandmother, Toto, strides next to me, cursing; my father waves a flag and hugs me in a crushing embrace. I ask him where he has been. He looks so well, so alive; his red hair seems to shine. My brothers are there also, moving proudly with friends and faces from the past. There are carts and horses adorned with paper flags, the smell of cilantro and red wine. There is my mother, Isabel, in a skirt, holding a guitar. I hear her singing me to sleep. There is snow on the impossibly high mountains.
It is winter in Los Angeles. In Chile, many former generals and colonels are about to be indicted for crimes committed during the military regime of 1973-1989. A colleague, preparing an article, is asking me to help him make contact with people I know. I have urged him many times to travel to Chile, and now I feel that I must return as well, and witness the events.
My mother, now seventy-four, is waiting for me on the coast near the capital. She is in good health, vibrant and happy; she tells me to come and drink wine, eat seafood and empanadas, good Chilean bread. My brother, Juan Pablo, has written to me from Santiago, urging me to come. We can finally make good on a promise we made to each other long ago.
My sons, Matias and Salvador, do not want me to go. I have never been gone long without them. I have always tried to take them with me to Chile, so that they will also know more than Los Angeles. They will miss me. Their mothers don’t know how they will manage without me. My girlfriend reminds me I will miss her birthday. She has recently come to live with me and I am worried about leaving her alone five weeks. How can I go? Things at home are complicated enough without this sudden compulsion to leave. I tell her I do not belong to only one place, but even to me it sounds hollow, as if I am using the past as an excuse. But there is no time for more explanations; the wave of history is breaking.
In the morning she drives me to the airport. The line is long and daunting, security measures observed carefully. After two and a half hours I make it to the front of the queue, only to be told I’m too late to check in for my flight. I negotiate fiercely, and soon I am running towards my gate. As I buckle my seat belt, I remember embracing my girlfriend at the curb, the light of her green eyes as I promised I’d return as soon as I could. The country of my birth felt far away at that moment; it was hard to grasp why I was leaving, what or whom I am struggling for.

Patagonia
Since my arrival I have been meeting with human rights activists, journalists, and politicians, helping Tom Hayden shape an article for publication in the Nation. The Socialist National Convention has just ended; they have nominated Michelle Bachelet, a doctor and current Minister of Defense as the next presidential candidate. In the polls she is an overwhelming favorite. Juan Pablo has been appointed as a vice president on the executive board of the party. The previous evening he and Isabel Allende, the daughter of the former president, accompany Bachelet through the crowd of delegates attending the convention. They and others have been key figures in creating the laws and democratic institutions that will help the nation move into the future. In the warm month of February everything closes, it is the month of government recess. I join my brother, his wife Marcela and his three children at the airport in Santiago to catch a plane south.
We will travel to the city of Punta Arenas, and then after a time make our way towards Puerto Natales and a place where he has secured a cabin in the wilderness. We are finally fulfilling our promise to each other, made when we were just small children, before the storms of our adolescence. It began as a promise to visit the penguin colonies outside of Punta Arenas someday. We had played soccer as children in the Washington DC area on a team made up of other Chileans, called “Los Pinguinos Chilenos” (Chilean Penguins). The promise has grown, over the years we have acquired more reasons to travel to these territories.
We are leaving the capital amidst measures of long overdue justice. The aged former dictator, Augusto Pinochet, has been stripped of immunity from prosecution for the crimes of his regime. His right hand man, Manuel Contreras, the former head of the secret police, has once again been arrested for his role in ordering killings.
Contreras has already served soft time for ordering the brutal 1976 car bombing of my father and his American co-worker, Ronnie Karpen Moffitt, in Washington, D.C. I was seventeen; Juan Pablo was sixteen. We were pulled out of our high school in Bethesda, Maryland, and driven to George Washington hospital. On the way, we passed Sheriden Circle on Embassy row, where the blast occurred.
When we were younger, we had played in the circle, around the statue at its center. Now firemen and rescue squad personnel were hosing down the street and statue. A bloody stream of water was running into the gutter. It would flow into the C&O canal, then the Potomac River, mix into Chesapeake Bay, and then flow out into the Atlantic and beyond. To this day, I imagine the blood sinking into the salt and water of the sea and making its way around the southern tip of South America, passing through the Magellan Strait, joining with Pacific waters, and unerringly making its way through fjords, coves, and bays toward a place on the Chilean coast, near the Mapuche Indian territories where my father spent his childhood. I remember him in this way because he passed on geography to us, tutoring us strictly and methodically, hoping we would inherit his love and passion for the New World.
The city of Punta Arenas and the island lying off its coast have shaped us from a distance. Our trip south was long overdue.
I first learned about Dawson Island after the 11th of September in 1973. I was 14, a young adolescent in Santiago, the capital of Chile, more than a thousand miles from Dawson. Military powers with help from CIA advisors and other US agencies had conspired to overthrow the socialist government of Salvador Allende. The coup that ushered in an era of death, torture and exile for Chileans was the culmination of many years of covert action and intervention. Declassified memos from that period chart the many ways in which US officials manipulated our lives. The White House and its agencies had been notified in advance of the coup and had made plans to aid the military if there were difficulties. In a revealing conversation between Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger after the coup, the Secretary of State reports, “We did it, no one knows…”
We had returned to Chile after living in the United States for thirteen years. My father lost his job as an economist just days after I was born because of his support for Allende’s first bid for the presidency. He was told he would not find work in Chile. We entered our first period of exile and returned to Chile in 1970 after Allende was elected, but were immediately sent back to the States so that my father could serve the popular government.
Nearly thirty political leaders from Allende’s overthrown Popular Unity government (UP) were sent to Dawson Island, along with about two hundred prisoners taken locally. Among the prisoners was my father, Orlando Letelier, former cabinet minister and ambassador to the United States for Chile. On the day of the coup my father has received an early morning phone call from Allende, “There are reports of military garrisons on the move, the navy has deployed its ships from Valparaiso.” My father said he would leave immediately to join Allende at the presidential palace. Allende said, “No, I want my Minister of Defense at the Ministry of Defense.” One of my fathers’ bodyguards did not arrive that morning, he was told his wife was giving birth. He left in a rush as he always did and we did not get news from him for days. We watched plumes of black smoke ascend into the sky, heard jets fly by as the presidential palace, a few blocks away, was bombed. In those dark and terrifying days, life as we had known it ended, we were put under house arrest as squads of soldiers searched the house. Curfews were put into place, people went into hiding, others disappeared. We thought my father had died with Allende. Later he told us that he arrived at the Ministry only to find his way blocked by soldiers. He said, “I give the orders here.” A voice came from the inside, “Let the Minister in.” As he walked through the threshold he felt a machine gun hit him in the back making him stumble. The man with the gun was his missing bodyguard. In the days after the coup he was held in several locations, at one point he was taken out and marched out to a wall where executions were being carried out. He had heard the men taken out of cells, the protests, the volley of gunfire and the dragging of bodies. As he was marched towards what he thought would be his death, he prayed that he would not tremble, cry out or stumble. An argument occurred between two officials. He heard a rough voice say, “I am in charge,” and he was led back to his cell.

Eventually he was transferred to Dawson Island. Prisoners were subject to forced labor and military marches in formation. They were made to install posts and cables, fill trucks with quarry stones, maintain roads, excavate channels, carry loads of debris, and collect decomposing ferns from a marsh to use as landfill. I have learned more about the camp and the life prisoners led in it from survivors who knew my father than from my father himself. He was careful when he spoke about Dawson. Perhaps the experiences were difficult to relive and perhaps he was protecting us. My father was released after a year, and regained his freedom; the time there was etched onto him through the scars of skin cancer, his broken fingers and finally his dedication to restoring the nation he had promised us as children. The only artifacts he left us from those days were a coffee cup made from an old tin can, reeds, and wire, a thick Mapuche men’s poncho, and an old guitar he played while in the camp. The guitar was signed by the prisoners, the majority of whom are now old men or who died while imprisoned.
The island already had a legacy of this kind confinement. In the late 1800s, a missionary from the Salesian order of the Catholic Church interned close to one thousand Selk’nam from the territory on Dawson. Within eight years, the population was reduced to a scarce 270 natives. The majority had fallen to the common illnesses brought from Europe.
The Selk´nam people had lived in these lands for 10,000 years, they called the territory Karukinka. Karukinka was later renamed Tierra del Fuego, “Land of Fire,” by Spanish navigators. The natives would light fires, which at nighttime would be seen by sailors. Selk´nam legends say their ancestors on the island became isolated when waters rose, permanently separating them from their continental brothers. The fires seen by sailors were signals to their lost brethren.

Shortly after my father’s death, Juan Pablo had left the United States for Germany, while I went west to California. Over the years we exchanged letters and met in several places. In 1984, the military began lifting restrictions on travel. We were allowed back into Chile, and we lived together in a small apartment in Santiago. It was a dangerous time. Both of us were working against the dictatorship. Juan Pablo had become a youth leader in the Socialist Party and was being watched closely. He was imprisoned several times. I was making art about exile and disappearance, and my exhibits received bomb threats. After a year in Santiago, I contracted hepatitis after giving blood for a transfusion aimed at saving the life of my fathers’ father, also named Orlando. It did not help prolong his life, but it affected mine greatly. I lost the physical strength I needed to stay in Chile. I could not stay and become a burden to those who were struggling tremendously just to get along, day by day. After I had recovered enough to travel, I left Chile once again.
Thirty years later I find myself looking across the Strait of Magellan towards Dawson Island with my brother Juan Pablo. We are standing on a tall promontory on the end of a peninsula, at the end of the world.
It seems most of the moments Juan Pablo and I have shared since my father was murdered have been as fugitives--running away from things, running towards others, carefully hiding our identities and our appearances. Now both of us laugh as we let our hair loose, worn long since we were children: hair we hid from bayonets and soldiers, under hats and inside jackets when the military seized the school we attended after the coup, the hair that made immigration officials pick us out of passenger lists. It is a warm summer day and the wind is kind gently moving through tall green grass off the blue waters of the Magellan Strait. Below us, my brother’s family explores old fortifications remaining from the first Chilean settlement in the area. We name the glaciers and islands as our father taught us, take our bearings, mark the sun, note the kelp beds below us and collect small, flat, oval shaped, black stones made smooth by time and ocean.
In 1973, a few months after my father and other officials of the Allende government were imprisoned on Dawson Island, my mother was given an audience at the Ministry of Defense. She was requesting permission to visit my father. A clandestine report from members of the International Red Cross informed us that he was very ill. Red haired and freckled, he had developed skin cancer from the unrelenting sun, and he had lost an alarming amount of weight. He had been transferred across the water to Punta Arenas for treatment. The men in the prison on Dawson were facing death from forced labor, malnutrition, exposure to the elements and psychological and physical torture; like the Selk’nam, many things were at work that might hasten their extinction.
At the Ministry my mother spoke with a commander she had met on occasions before the coup. He received her stiffly, saying, “No, you may not travel to Punta Arenas. Your husband was very arrogant.” She asked him if arrogance was a criminal offense, if there were any charges against my father. He looked at her with disdain and responded, “You are the same as your husband.” She then threw herself to the ground; crying, on her knees, her hands at his feet, she begged him to let her travel.
When my mother finally arrived in Punta Arenas in 1974, she visited another military commander housed in a building along the Central Square. Before entering she was given a gynecological exam by a woman in uniform who claimed, “This is where communists hide razor blades.”
“The commander from Santiago has no jurisdiction,” the southern commander informed her. “I am in charge here and under no circumstances will S-26 be allowed visitors.”
The high-ranking prisoners had been stripped of their identities and were referred to only by numbers. Once again she threw herself to the floor begging for permission, until a glance down a corridor allowed her to spot my thin, ill-clothed father being led by four young soldiers pointing machine guns at his back. She ran down the corridor towards him, as the commander shouted at her to halt. She hugged my father tightly despite the prodding of loaded weapons. According to my father, her embrace was like a shot of vitamins. He realized she had disobeyed the orders of those in charge and survived.
The commander led them into a small cell where they sat on opposing small cots.
“You have fifteen minutes,” he ordered. He remained in the cell, towering over them. “Talk only about domestic issues.”
My father asked her about the press in the United States, about what was being reported in the rest of the world. The commander protested. My mother replied, “We have never spoken only about domestic issues. How can we do it at a moment like this?” She quickly gave my father a response before the commander cut the visit short. “It’s only been five minutes,” she said.
“The clock started when you entered the building,” he replied.
“Try to come tomorrow,” my father whispered.
The next day my mother went to Sunday mass. On that morning she wore a gift my father had sent her through the International Red Cross: a necklace made with a flat black volcanic stone carved with the image of a seagull. On the way up the aisle she received many curious looks and stares. After mass, on the outside steps, she spotted the commander from Punta Arenas. He was in dress uniform, accompanied by his finely clothed wife. He gestured at my mother, which she understood to discourage her from making public contact.
My mother stepped up to him nonetheless, and he was obligated to greet her politely and introduce her to his wife. The commander’s wife asked if Isabel was from Punta Arenas.
“No,” my mother replied. “I live in Santiago. I am here to visit my husband who is imprisoned on Dawson. Yesterday I saw him for only five minutes and I am hoping that your husband will allow me a visit today.”
The wife was clearly ill at ease, looking towards her husband for a way out of the awkward moment. To break the impasse, the commander said, “Of course we will make arrangements for another visit, Mrs. Letelier.”
As my mother passed through the crowd, many churchgoers now reached out to her, patting her arm, whispering to her that they admired her bravery, murmuring encouragement, admiring the carved black stone of her necklace. My mother knew that, while hauling heavy loads on Dawson, the prisoners would pick up stones from the coastline and later carve them using sharpened nails. She did not know that the stones had recently been outlawed in Punta Arenas, the prisoners’ old nails confiscated. The carved stones had become a symbol of cultural resistance and, according to the authorities, of subversion. My mother’s stone was resplendent, set in an intricate gold and bronze setting and hung from an ornate chain. For the people on the street and in the church, this was a bold act of resistance and beauty.

Juan Pablo is a three-term Socialist congressman from Rengo, a district south of Santiago. His beard and shoulder-length hair make him recognizable. His outspoken and relentless work creating laws to insure human rights, social justice, and environmental sanity have made him an icon and gained him respect throughout our country. Now, as he and I walk the streets of Punta Arenas, in the far Magallanes region of Patagonia, people stop to shake hands and invite us into shops and restaurants.
Present-day Punta Arenas is far more diverse than it once was. On one corner stands a tall teenage girl, dressed in Gothic fashion, her face powdered white and long black gown slashed and safety-pinned. As we pass, her native features flash a look of recognition as she takes in my brother’s children: long-haired Jose Miguel, fifteen; Margarita, thirteen; and fashionable twenty-two-year-old Macarena, with piercings through her eyebrows, tongue, and navel, her skin flashing a tattoo. “Yes, we are real,” I think to myself, “you and us, returning from a silenced past, we are the children, we are the blood, we belong as much as anyone else.”
That night in my hotel room, the wind whistles through the walls. I hear the music from a bar below me, people getting drunk, I hear bottles break and bursts of laughter. Couples emerge into the dark street, and I wonder why my girlfriend has not answered my recent e-mails; in Santiago she had not returned my phone calls. I think about my girlfriend sleeping in our bed. I imagine slipping in with her, blowing into the room like the wind, reassuring her that I’ll be home soon. I conjure up the faces of my boys, hear their voices, and whisper I love you, letting the stars take it to them far away. They are habits from a life of exile. This is what my father said he did when he was on Dawson. He said it was one of the things that kept him alive.

The next day we leave the city and undertake a long drive towards the Torres del Paine National Park. Along the way we stopped at a small house with a zinc roof where a handwritten sign advertised meals and refreshments. Upon entering we’re buffeted with the strong smell of a curanto de olla, shellfish, mutton, and chicken steamed in a large pot. Around small tables men were drinking the local beer. They were shepherds of the pampas, and through the back of the house we see the horses they’ve ridden here.
Smelling of livestock and sweat, the men greet us warmly. They welcome my brother, a person they have only seen in newspapers and on television, to sit with them for a time, asking questions and drinking beer. They seem to have been waiting to tell their stories from the dark years of the dictatorship; they show us scars, talk about the land, and ask about the news from Santiago. My brother is not what they expected--he knows about livestock, he knows the history of the place. They like me when I eat and drink my fill.
I go outside to see their horses, compact and sturdy Chilean horses with long manes and tails, outfitted with comfortable saddles and padded with sheepskins. They offer to let me ride a young stallion. I handle him fairly and canter off into the plains, nothing in my field of view but snow-capped mountains and sheep. (I remember my son Matias, his best memories of Chile are of horses and mountains, just as mine when I was thirteen. I feel guilty he is not there with me.) When I return the men are pleased with themselves and with me. To let a stranger ride your best horse anywhere in Chile is unlikely, but especially out here. The owner, a man who looks older than I am but is probably ten years younger, jokes, “Llevate mi mujer, pero no me toquis el caballo.” (“Take my wife but don’t touch my horse.”) I tell them I bought my first pony for twenty-five dollars at an auction in Virginia, a place in the United States, with earnings from bailing hay for a farmer when I was thirteen. They laugh and shake their heads as if I was from another world, slap me on the back, and then invite me in for el trago del estribo, the stirrup drink, one last beer for the road.
Two hours later we finally reach Torres del Paine. It is an unforgettable place, teeming with wildlife; the landscape punctuated by stone needles and glaciated peaks. Herds of wild guanaco crowd its hills, condors and eagles dot the sky. Ñandu, Patagonian ostriches, are plentiful, as are foxes and pumas.
During the day we explore the park. We visit glaciers and lenga forests. The trees grow close together, their red trunks rising 150 feet, intertwining their moss covered canopies as protection from the wind, some are more than 600 years old. A small military detachment of enlisted men are assigned to patrol the park, and I see them run by our small cabin every day. We watch for huemul, the elusive and threatened Chilean deer that’s part of the national emblem. After days of hikes and searching we finally spot a well-antlered buck.
Under the Southern Cross constellation, in nights lit only by candles and brilliant stars, my brother and I bring up names from the past, reconstruct memories, talk about our children, and what the future may bring. For both of us, this place is far away from home, but we feel as if it belongs to us, that we have always planned to come here, in this way, with the warm southern wind blowing under the stars.
I hike up into thick ravines alone, knowing that perhaps I might be the first person to have done so; the park is new and some of it is virtually unexplored and untouched. But something has been hunting here for a long time: I come across a bevy of guanaco skulls against a cliff.
As I climb further, a shadow crosses my path. An eagle is floating in the wind, just beyond my arms’ reach, looking intently down at me. It rides the current, staying right above me for a minute or so, rotating its neck right and left, looking at me with one eye and then the other. With an almost imperceptible flick of a tail feather, it catches the updraft over the cliffs. When I reach the top of the ravine, I hear a cry as the eagle circles back around for one last look.
That evening we roast mutton over slow coals outside our cabin. Our meal will take some time to be ready. In the lingering and rosy light of the austral summer night I decide to walk to the banks of the nearby lake. In previous days I have spotted tracks, and seen evidence of kills by a large animal.
I break through the trees and begin to cross a small creek. Five yards in front of me, crouching on the path, camouflaged perfectly by the tall golden grass, a female puma twitches her tail. In the distance, I see one of the enlisted men. As he nears us, the cat crouches down and gets ready to pounce. I almost call out to warn him, but by then he has gone.
The cat looks up at me. For one moment I am afraid. She is perhaps the most beautiful animal I have ever seen in the wild, and somehow I know she will do me no harm. She looks at me with great curiosity and I breathe slowly, trying to make the moment last. I think of predators and prey, of prisoners and stones. Later that evening, I find a primitive hand-ax made of stone. It may be Selk’nam, immeasurably old. Its edges are still sharp.

Our trip ends and we return to Santiago.
A U.S. congressional committee, working under Homeland Security measures, has found secret bank accounts held by Pinochet at Riggs Bank in Washington, D.C. Juan Pablo is appointed to the Chilean congressional committee overseeing the Chilean government investigation into the accounts. The bank is only a few blocks from where our father was murdered. Both Juan Pablo and I opened our first savings accounts there. Later that week Gladys Marin, the head of the communist party, dies from a brain tumor. On my last day in Santiago, I walk the streets with my mother and thousands of others, celebrating the life and legacy of a woman who is an icon of the left and a hero for Chileans across political divisions. There has not been an outpouring of people on the streets like this since the days before the coup. On September 4th, 1973, I marched through these same streets in support of the Popular Unity government, a week later Salvador Allende was dead and the world had changed. Although we have marched through the streets many times protesting the dictatorship and later celebrating the end of the regime, today is different. We have taken this long to recover, to awaken from the effects of repression. There are people of many ages, but the crowd is mostly young. They have revived the music that was outlawed three decades ago and is retro now. The youth wear red and are adorned with tattoos and body jewelry. There are hundreds of different t-shirts with the image of Che. My mother and I lose ourselves in the procession as it makes its way to the cemetery, singing the old songs of Victor Jara, Quilapayun, and Violeta Parra.
“El pueblo unido jamas sera vencido.” The people united will never be defeated.
“Gracias a la vida que me ha dado tanto.” Thanks to life, which has given me so much.
We chant until are we hoarse. Compañera, Gladys Marin. Presente! Compañero, Salvador Allende. Presente! Compañero, Orlando Letelier. Presente! Ahora y siempre! We know all the words.

In Los Angeles it has been raining hard. My studio in Venice is flooded. My girlfriend has moved out; I don’t know where she is. I will find her and again explain the thirty-year wind that brings me back to the center of the nation I still live in, a place that knows nothing about territorial boundaries and scoffs at distances. When I travel to Chile, a type of amnesia comes over me. I partially forget where I have come from. I submit myself to it so that I might reach parts of myself, which are distant, but still full of power.
Back in Venice, I undergo a cultural disassociation with the place I inhabit physically. From past experience, I know that the shock of returning to my life in Los Angeles will gradually pass. In the south, I have reclaimed traces left by ancestors in rock scree, barren islands, and on city streets. I have touched old-growth lenga trees and left footprints in remote places for my children and others to discover in the future. In my dreams, I am a puma on the hunt; I recognize something in a man, who, hungry and unafraid, breaks through an opening in the brush at the end of the world.

Francisco Letelier