JORGE EDWARDS
243
slovakia and Chile.
In
both countries there had been a political spring,
euphoric and, for many, illusory; in both countries, it had been crushed
with tanks.
The influence of Europe had distorted my view and made me
forget the impossibly squat architecture of downtown Santiago, with
its startling anarchy of styles, its walls the color of soot or smoke,
towers of fake Gothic rubblework, and neoclassical columns sometimes
plastered over with huge posters announcing sales of mattresses or
shoes at unbeatable prices. There, in the same spot as always, stood the
building where the poet Vicente Huidobro had lived, a building
designed along avant-garde lines produced by a remote influence of the
Bauhaus group; and there, too, was Echaurren, the somnambulant
street of a poem from myoid days, evoking the Basque names, which
began dominating Chilean society in the eighteenth century.
There had been a lot of shooting here, they told me, pointing to a
tall, pock-marked telecommunications tower in the center of the city.
No doubt about it: an ideal spot for snipers. Yet from the moment of
my arrival I verified that the military-convinced of at least some
correspondence between the Left's verbal violence during the Allende
years and its actual striking power-had prepared for a brief Civil war
only
to
find itself, at the end of forty-eight hours, fighting a phantom
enemy. This did not stop them from launching ferocious attacks
against that tattered, unarmed phantom. Anticommunism, as well,
had been transformed into paranoia, into a delirium that sometimes
spoke of international crusades against political perversion in the
world. I think my trip coincided with a period when the country was
slowly beginning to recuperate from its illness. Some people rubbed
their eyes and realized that the current reality was different, that they
had been submerged in a nightmare.
Something I was forced to realize, prompted by memory, was that
all the campaign propaganda had disappeared.
In
my time, the posters,
painted slogans, and strings of letters stretching between lampposts
had been piled on top of each other along the walls and streets like
geological strata. Digging through the layers permitted you
to
uncover
recent political history. Often a decaying poster picturing a somewhat
younger Allende from the '64 campaign could be discovered beneath
the posters from the '70 campaign, while under them remained the tar
from the posters of '58. Not only had the military cleared out the
communists and every kind of leftist, they had also proceeded to clear
away all their outer signs as well. "How clean Santiago isl" exclaimed
several women with pleasure and, for a moment, like apparitions from
