Исабель Альенде - A Long Petal of the Sea

“Don’t attract attention. Stay still and silent—they can use any excuse to beat you to death with their rifles. They’re wild animals.”

“So much hatred, so much cruelty…I don’t understand,” Victor mumbled. His mouth was dry, and the words stuck in his throat.

“We can all turn into savages if we’re given a rifle and an order,” said another prisoner who had come over to them.

“Not me, comrade,” the metalworker responded. “I saw how these thugs destroyed Victor Jara’s hands. ‘Sing now, you jerk,’ they shouted at him. They beat him and then riddled him with bullets.”

“The most important thing is for someone outside here to know where you are,” the other man said. “That way they can follow your trail, if you disappear. A lot of people disappear and are never heard of again. Are you married?”

“Yes,” replied Victor.

“Give me your wife’s address or telephone number. My daughter can get word to her. She spends all day outside the stadium with members of other prisoners’ families waiting for news.”

Victor, though, didn’t give him either, fearing he might be an informer planted to get information.

One of the nurses from the San Juan de Dios hospital who had seen Victor being arrested finally managed to reach Roser by telephone in Venezuela and tell her what had happened. As soon as she heard this, Roser called Marcel to give him the bad news and order him to stay where he was, because he could be more useful outside the country than in Chile. She, however, was going to return immediately. She bought a plane ticket, and before boarding went to see Valentin Sanchez. “Once we know what they’ve done with your husband, we’ll rescue him,” her friend promised her. He gave her a letter for the current Venezuelan ambassador in Chile, a colleague from his days as a diplomat. There were already hundreds of people seeking asylum in his Santiago residence, waiting for safe-conducts to go into exile. His was one of the few embassies willing to offer refuge to fugitives. Hundreds of Chileans began to arrive in Caracas; soon there would be thousands.

Roser landed in Chile at the end of October, but it wasn’t until November that she learned her husband had been taken to the National Stadium. When the Venezuelan ambassador went there to ask after him, he was assured Dalmau had never been there. By this time they were evacuating the prisoners and distributing them in concentration camps throughout Chile. Roser spent months searching for him, using her friends and international contacts, knocking on the doors of different organizations, consulting lists of the disappeared put up in churches. His name was nowhere to be found. He had vanished into thin air.

Together with other political prisoners, Victor Dalmau had been taken in a caravan of trucks that traveled a whole day and night. They ended up at a camp for saltpeter miners in the north that had been abandoned for decades and was now converted into a prison. These were the first two hundred men to occupy the makeshift installations in huts that had once accommodated the saltpeter workers. The camp was surrounded by electrified barbed-wire fences and tall watchtowers, with soldiers carrying submachine guns, a tank patrolling the perimeter, and every so often air force planes. The commander was a police officer who barked orders and sweated in a uniform that was too tight for him. He was a stone-hearted bully who announced over the loudspeaker that he intended to keep the prisoners in a fist for the crimes they had committed and those they were thinking of committing. As soon as the prisoners climbed down from the trucks they were forced to strip and left in the hot desert sun for hours without food or water, while he walked along insulting and kicking them one by one. From the outset he doled out arbitrary punishments to break his victims’ morale, and his men imitated him.

Because of the months spent in Argeles-sur-Mer, Victor thought he was better prepared than the other prisoners to resist, but that had been years ago, when he was young. Now he was about to turn sixty, but until the moment of his arrest he had never had time to think about his age. There in the north, with burning hot days and icy nights on the saltpeter flats, he longed to die of weariness. It was impossible to escape: the camp was surrounded by the immense desert, hundreds of kilometers of dry earth, sand, rocks, and wind. He felt like an old man.

CHAPTER 11

1974–1983

Now I’ll tell you:

my land will be yours,

I’m going to conquer it,

not just to give it to you,

but to everyone,

to all my people.

—PABLO NERUDA

“Letter on the Way”

THE CAPTAIN’S VERSES

DURING THE ELEVEN MONTHS VICTOR Dalmau spent in the concentration camp, he didn’t die of weariness as he had expected. Instead, his body and mind were strengthened. He had always been thin, but there he was reduced to nothing but skin and bones. His skin was burned by the unrelenting sun, salt, and sand, his features sharpened: he was a Giacometti sculpture in cast iron. He wasn’t defeated by the absurd military exercises, pushups, races in the scorching heat, the hours lying still in the freezing night, the blows and beatings, being forced to work at pointless tasks, humiliated, ravenous. He yielded to his condition as a prisoner, abandoning all pretense that he could control anything in his existence. He was in his captors’ hands: they had absolute power and impunity, he was master only of his emotions. He repeated to himself the metaphor of the birch tree, which bends in a storm but doesn’t break. He had already endured this in other circumstances. He protected himself from the sadism and stupidity of his jailers by withdrawing into silent memories, certain only that Roser was searching for him and would one day find him. He spoke so little that the other prisoners nicknamed him “the mute.” He thought of Marcel, who had spent the first thirty years of his life saying next to nothing because he didn’t want to talk. Victor didn’t want to either, because there was nothing to say. His companions in misfortune kept their spirits up whispering out of earshot of the guards, while he thought of Roser with great nostalgia, of all they had lived through together, how much he loved her.

To keep his mind sharp he obsessively went over the most famous games in the history of chess, as well as some of those he had played with the president. He once dreamed of carving chess pieces from the camp’s porous stones so that he could play with some of the others, but that was impossible due to the guards’ despotic surveillance. These soldiers came from the working class. Their families were poor, and perhaps most of them had been sympathetic to the socialist revolution, but they obeyed orders with great cruelty, as though the prisoners’ past actions were personal insults.

Each week, inmates were taken to other concentration camps or were shot, their bodies blown up with dynamite in the desert, and yet many more arrived than left. Victor calculated there were more than fifteen hundred altogether. They came from across the country, were of different ages and occupations; the only thing they had in common was the fact that they were being persecuted. They were enemies of the fatherland. Like Victor, some of them had not belonged to a party or held any political position; they were there due to a vengeful denunciation or a bureaucratic mistake.

—

IT WAS THE START of spring, and the prisoners were already fearing the arrival of summer, which turned the camp into a hell during the daylight hours, when an abrupt change came in Victor Dalmau’s fortunes. The camp commander suffered a heart attack just as he was giving his morning harangue to the prisoners, who were lined up in the yard barefoot and in their underwear. The commandant fell to his knees, managed to gasp for breath, then slumped to the ground before the nearest soldiers could catch him. Not a single prisoner moved; no one made a sound. To Victor it was as if everything was happening in slow motion, in silence and in another dimension, as if it were part of a nightmare. He saw two soldiers trying to lift the commandant, while others ran to call the nurse.