Jorge Edwards
SURVIVING IN CHILE
With my forehead pressed against the tiny window of the
airplane and my mouth hanging open, I was puzzled by my awareness
of great space. Without realizing it, I had grown accustomed to the
European anthill,
to
the Catalan coast invaded by the Germans and the
Dutch at the rate of one ruddy, robust body per square yard. Now,
after flying over the Argentine pampas for two hours, I saw the broad
salt £lats and the first wrinkles of the Andes as the exact opposite of the
European coast: as a deserted planet where nature had seemingly
devoured the frame of society and transformed it into a silent, indiffer–
ent, lunar landscape. We £lew over the mountain range, hidden
beneath a roof of clouds resembling a dense sea, and then our plane
immediately dropped toward the valleys of Central Chile, green and
dark in the depths of the Southern Hemisphere's winter.
After the coup of 1973, I had lost all the privileges of a diplomatic
career and, besides, Chilean papers had lost their former good reputa–
tion, so each time I cross a border I do so with a certain uneasiness, as
though I might be found guilty of some infraction that I'm unaware of.
The feeling is, I suppose, what specialists call paranoia and I've come
to
the conclusion that paranoia, or at least something very much like it,
has become a natural state for many Chileans, for the majority of
Chileans. Still, from the plane's ramp, I saw the idlers lined up on the
observation decks of the small building at Pudahuel Airport, and I had
the strange feeling that they were the same ones I'd seen there in July of
1971 when I took my last trip. I have to say, though, that my uneasiness
at crossing this new border didn 't last very long: the police stamped my
passport without asking any questions and a customs inspector waved
me through without opening my baggage. Previously, I'd been told,
there had been many soldiers with machine guns
to
be seen. That
phase now belonged to the past and the Junta was striving to create an
external image of calm, of recovered normalcy. " Normalization," a
term applicable with a curious symmetry
to
both Prague and Santiago,
was not the only perverse relation deducible from the cases of Czecho-
