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“Don’t fret, General. Both left and right-wing radicals are merely staying true to form. We have freedom of speech, after all. You know yourself that I can do nothing, even when they vilify me.”
That was what he told you then, when you were brimming with indignation over some communist pamphlet. You had brought it to him just as a gun dog brings quarry to its master.
“I know. And I should like you to know: I am truly appalled by all these scribblers, Señor Presidente,” you replied, with the utmost sincerity and gravity. Had you not shared this same outrage with your fellow officers before? The newspapers were taking far too many liberties.
If only he had listened to you then…
…On that very day, in the early hours of the eleventh of September, you pay a visit to Augusto’s home to look upon your sleeping grandchildren.
“You are God’s soldier, Augusto” — the words your mother uttered some forty years ago ring in your head like a formidable knell. And a soldier is permitted no sentiment. You must cauterise the Marxist contagion, just as the Archangel Michael cast Lucifer down into the abyss. Your white gloves are not merely a detail of your uniform; they are a symbol of the purity of your intent. Even they will be stained with the blood of the one who fancied himself a new messiah for the destitute.
You stand over the cribs, listening to their peaceful breathing, and feel your resolve turn to stone within you. That they might live, someone must die. It is all for them. For their future, for the salvation of the country from chaos, for the sake of an order that no one but you can establish. You are Abraham, blade poised over the one he loved, for the voice of duty was louder than the voice of the heart. It is far more important than…
“Señor Presidente, you may rest assured that I am prepared to lay down my life in defence of the constitutional government which you represent,” you told him on that August day, when Congress had dared to voice its discontent. His gaze then was filled with such defenceless, almost tender gratitude that for a moment you felt stifled. One does not look at a subordinate in such a way; one looks thus at their sole pillar of support in a crumbling world.
They say his daughter is with child.
Everything is final now. Valparaíso. May your shared cradle be the port that is first to spit forth steel to crush his world.
If only he had listened to you…
***
“Allende was the legitimate president. Her father perished defending his rights and resisting your coup.”
She will never deign to attend your funeral.
A woman president. What could be more preposterous?
“He was a Marxist lunatic.”
He forced you to escort Castro to the monument of Che Guevara.
He was a Marxist lunatic, leading the country into the abyss, and he died in a hopeless attempt to defend his palace.
If only he had listened to you, he might have…
You bombed his palace and took his seat for yourself, usurping the blood-stained presidential sash and elbowing aside your own accomplices. You granted the country seventeen years of stability and prosperity. You lit the eternal flame of liberty before the palace in memory of that magnificent victory. They will extinguish the flame and erect a monument to him.
As it turned out, the refurbished La Moneda held far too many mirrors and far too many shadows. The palace reeked of fresh varnish, expensive leather, and new power, yet it was of no avail. How many times, standing still in the dead of night within your study, had you caught yourself in a thought as shameful as it was mad? You peered into the dark corners as if truly hoping to behold...
Had those gormless left-wing foreign hacks caught wind of this, they would, of course, have nodded knowingly: the conscience of the usurper and dictator is gnawing at him; the ghost of the legitimate martyred president grants him no peace! In truth, you have nothing for which to repent before a dead man. Yet, in all the world, only one man had the right to judge you. Only he knew the true price of your power.
The familiar silhouette in horn-rimmed glasses never once appeared. Your strong, hardened psyche did not falter. You did what he would never have had the stomach for, yet you shall never see even a spark of understanding or acknowledgement in those ghostly eyes.
You purged the Marxist contagion from the economy, just as one cauterises gangrene with a searing iron, restoring the country’s right to a free market and common sense. Yet the copper — the very copper he clung to with the fanaticism of a madman — you surrendered to no one. The ultimate trophy, his sole success, fell to you. This was your silent, supreme triumph: you became a better steward of his achievements than he himself had ever been.
…Your granddaughter meets his grandson on a television broadcast. They shake hands. A mere two or three hundred years ago, they would have been wed for the sake of peace and national unity, without so much as a thought for their consent. Your spirited blood would have mingled with his blue, weak, and suicidal strain, and your shared descendants would have ruled this God-blessed land together. Would a shared great-grandson have possessed his eyes?
His sister wished to return to the country to kill you. Naturally, you denied her entry. She, too, killed herself.
His frail daughter, whom you mercifully allowed to flee the besieged palace with his grandson in her womb, killed herself in Cuba. She did not have his eyes; she was the spitting image of her mother.
It was Marxism that poisoned their aristocratic blood and rendered them weak. Thank God that your own progeny — currently gathered to divide your foreign accounts — are strong.
His other, stronger daughter, also once allowed to leave the palace, is now a senator. Her namesake and cousin insists in her famous books on calling you a dictator or a general, rather than President.
There is no bust of you in the Presidential Palace. Between him and Aylwin, there is a void. A void seventeen years long.
Folly. Ingratitude. It was you who made a martyr of him. It was you who magnanimously offered him a plane, in the faint hope that he would prefer Moscow or Cuba, just as Alessandri, who later returned from exile, had preferred it. But he chose to follow the path of Balmaceda. You wished he had been a coward. You prayed that he would board that plane, so that you might loathe him—so that you could call him a weakling and believe it. The idea of detaining him, of making him a puppet president, of building a bunker beneath La Moneda and keeping him there in solitary confinement, was far too sentimental; you resolutely cast it aside as unworthy.
At what moment did he learn of your treason? Did he speak of it with those abhorrent, depraved amigos personales of his? Later, you would not even restrain yourself from attending the torture of the surviving amigos, simply to find out. To hear with satisfaction that, until the very end, he worried for his poor, faithful Pinochet — as one of those communist brats would testify before croaking. What was in his gaze when he finally understood everything?
“What do you all think of yourselves, you bloody traitors! You can shove that plane up your ass! You are speaking to the President of the Republic! Presidents elected by the people do not run away!”
You know it was not his Marxist delusions that granted him such strength. It was his noble blood surging within him; he remembered that royal purple makes the finest shroud. All of it to take revenge upon you, to punish you, to reach out across the span of many years.
“…when treason surges toward power.”
You are certain his final words were addressed, above all, to you. To the man who promised to ensure his safety. He did not follow the example of Alessandri, and the royal purple now stains your hands, hidden though they are beneath white gloves.
His widow, who returned by your grace, granted him a proper funeral seventeen years later. You catch yourself harbouring a desire to have been there. Later, they will disturb him again, to determine once and for all whether it was you who killed him or if he took his own life. Will he never find peace? If only he had listened to you, perhaps…
You saw his bloodied body being carried out of the palace. You commanded that he be buried in secret, in a place known only to you and your most trusted aides. Had he survived, triumphed, and become a caudillo, he would have been buried many years later, embalmed, and enshrined in a magnificent mausoleum.
You look at the figures, the charts, the clean streets of Santiago, and you feel this cold righteousness, sharp as a blade. They say Cromwell opened the coffin of the beheaded king. At times, you felt an aching desire to dig him up, to wrench open the casket, and force him to see. To see how the country, once rotting under his leadership, prospers beneath your rule. Or perhaps, simply to look upon him once more? Indeed, you certainly understand Queen Juana and King Pedro.
Even he — that eternal dreamer — would have had to admit in the end that you became a better ruler for this country than you had ever been a general to him.
Hortensia may consider herself the ideal widow. Fools like Prats and Bachelet may believe they remained faithful to him and the Constitution to the very end, never betraying their oath. Yet it was you, and only you, who took care of the legacy he left behind. It is you who are the legitimate successor before God and men; it is your name that shall stand beside his in every encyclopaedia and history book. Whenever anyone remembers Allende, they will remember Pinochet. Does that not signify far more than a graceful widowhood or an unbroken oath? Is your bond not tighter? What matter if the blood cries out from the ground. That blood made you who you are.
Your Russian hound, with a smirk on his thin lips, says that posterity will surely appreciate your worth and thank you all. The Russians. It all happened because of the Russians. It was they who poisoned him with the venom of Marxism. And then they lied, claiming you had killed him, and the whole world believed them. Had it not been for them, he would have been a fine president, and you would have been his most faithful general. You both emerged from the same salty mist of Valparaíso; you breathed the same air of the port’s outskirts. Long ago, you exchanged secret signs in the Lodge. Even then, it seemed a mere game to you, a ridiculous pastime of which you soon grew tired, whereas for him, it was sacred.
Who but you defended him? Who insisted on the brutal suppression of the Tanquetazo? In the good old days, you would have brought him Colonel Souper’s head, and he would have crowned you with a laurel wreath. His gaze then — the gaze of a man who had entrusted his life to you without reserve — weighed more than any crown. That gaze still finds you in the darkness. If only he had listened to you…
Amusing, is it not? Instead, it was you who placed the martyr’s crown of thorns upon him. You made him a saint for the fools of the world, while you remained in the shadows to bear a cross upon your shoulders immeasurably heavier than the assault rifle gifted by Castro. Seventeen years against a thousand days.
That cursed Prats preferred negotiations then. Naturally, all the laurels went to him. He deserved to be killed for that alone.
Your Russian hound will rot in prison without you, and it may well be that he dies there. They will condemn your other boys without you.
You will bequeath that your ashes be interred within the grounds of the family estate.