The ceramic Aztec mask on my wall is one of my few physical reminders of a Chilean uncle who died in exile in Mexico City almost two decades ago, two weeks after I informed him of the death of his favorite sister, my mother, some two thousand miles away. The other reminders are fading images and verbal exchanges pieced together from the increasingly distant past.
Checho, as Jose Vaccaro de Ponce was nicknamed, had attained mythological status in my childhood imagination, as my mother had told me story after story of a dashing young man and then a rising star in the Santiago labor movement out to narrow the widest gap between rich and poor in the Western Hemisphere. The stories themselves loomed larger for the fact that he was beyond physical reach after she’d emigrated to the U.S. to marry my father. They’d met during the Second World War, when he was attached to the American embassy in the Chilean capital as an Army Air Force instructor to the country’s military pilots, countering the Nazi influence in Argentina. Checho first met me when I was too young to remember, my mother having taken me as a toddler to visit her family. But my uncle and I grew close during the summer that I spent there mostly on my own years later.
“You give me such pain,” Checho said in Spanish when I delivered the news of his sister’s death after his wife handed the phone to him. She had warned me that he was seriously ill with the intestinal disease that he’d long suffered from.
“I’m sorry,” I replied in his language. Those words were the most personal we had ever exchanged and the last.
He had served in the brief administration of Salvador Allende, the medical doctor who had become the first democratically elected Marxist chief executive in the world, and had married an attorney who was his justice minister’s daughter, only to flee with her and her family to asylum in Mexico after the coup mounted by Allende’s chief of staff, Augusto Pinochet, in September 1973. My aunt, Roxanna, his archconservative middle sister, had slammed the door in his face when he arrived at her house in the upper middle-class neighborhood of Brown Norte, where I had spent a North American summer and South American winter four years earlier, to say goodbye the night Checho and his wife and family fled. Instead, the last words he would hear from Roxanna were, “You brought this upon yourselves.” She would die of emphysema a few years later.
I visited him twice in Mexico City during the following years, and he came to New York once after those visits, where in our apartment kitchen he recited by heart and with evident emotion several of Pablo Neruda’s Veinte Poemas de Amor y Una Cancion Desesperada, perhaps reflecting the fact that his wife, some fifteen years younger, had begun to demand a separation. Only later did my mother explain that his wife had grown tired of the fact that he couldn’t find permanent work and lived off her earnings as a civil servant in the Mexican social security administration.
My uncle then traveled by train to Chicago, where he asked my mother if he might come to live with her and my father, only to be refused for reasons that were never quite clear. It was impossible, my mother said to me later. It simply was. I could tell from her tone, and her inability or unwillingness to explain why this was the case, that she felt bad about it. Yet there was a coldness to her decision I’d never seen her exhibit before. Her brother was her closest living relative, someone she said she adored, featuring most prominently in the stories she told me as a child while I pored over maps of South America and the two-thousand-mile-long shoestring of a country along its narrow edge west of the Andes. The Rand McNally World Atlas still gathers dust on one of my bookshelves, so old and out of date it reflects the Cold War divisions of Europe and Asia in primary colors.
“You are Chilean,” she would insist as she told me how her father had sung her to sleep to “Besame Mucho” and taken her to soccer games at the National Stadium, where my uncle took me decades later and where the Pinochet junta rounded up those it considered subversive less than a year and a half after that, storing the bodies of those it killed in its concrete bowels. And I would witness her cry to depths I’d never imagined possible when she received news of her father’s funeral via aerogram. Yet why exactly my mother found it impossible to accommodate Checho—a lack of money or space, or the emotional burden he represented—I never quite understood.
My uncle returned to Mexico City, eventually reconciled with his wife, and then visited Chile after another decade or so, when Pinochet finally fell, democracy was restored, and a general amnesty for political antagonists was declared. But too much about the country had changed for my uncle to return for good. Time had passed him by, and Chile was no longer his.
Unlike the evening during my visit a year and a few months before Allende’s election, when Checho took me to a café in the Bohemian quarter known as the Quinta Normal to hear folk music. I cannot remember who exactly we came to hear, but I often wonder whether it was the renowned singer-songwriter, poet, theater director and political activist Victor Jara who performed on the piano that night.
A documentary I watched the other evening about Jara did nothing to jog my memory. But the documentary showed recorded images familiar to me from a much older documentary about the coup, entitled “The Battle of Chile” by Patricio Guzman, which included scenes from Allende’s campaign, election and rallies designed to counter the opposition brewing because of the outbreak of worker and trucker strikes and the chaos that ensued, his distinctive, black-framed glasses over a thick mustache, the earlier images of Allende before ecstatic crowds followed by those of the fighter jets strafing and bombing the presidential palace where he would die, by his own hand or the army’s has never been clear. I recall passing the palace, not eighteen months earlier with my aunt and her similarly black-clad friend as we strolled toward the Café do Brasil for afternoon tea, and imagine the long-standing, Anglophilic custom has survived all that subsequently occurred so far away from the miles and miles of corrugated tin-roofed shanties that lined either side of the Pan-American Highway on the outskirts of the city, but not so far away from the high-walled, well-shaded, inner-patioed compounds of the wealthy.
Yet the image from the older documentary I most distinctly recall was that of an army tank in the street outside the palace, a soldier with a rifle pointed directly at the camera, and a puff of smoke emitted from its barrel before the camera moments later turned skyward as the man behind it fell to the street, having filmed his own death.
We had received reports via aerogram or long-distance phone call of the growing chaos that preceded the coup, the strikes, the marches, the public threats issued from the right-wing newspaper, El Mercurio, and the quarters of those my uncle and his wife referred to as “los momios,” Spanish for “the mummies” and slang for those whose political thinking could be characterized as eons out of date and had themselves therefore been metaphorically wrapped for posterity in Egyptian cotton so desiccated it resembled stone. Yet among those reports of what was happening five thousand miles away was one that noted my uncle had taken to carrying a pistol because of the chaos, including squatters in his apartment whom he had to drive off, but mostly for his own personal protection. All of this was blamed on Allende when it would become clear later that it was instigated and supported by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, before the latter would share the the Nobel for helping to arrange a ceasefire in Vietnam.
I also remember how upon our arrival at the café in the Quinta Normal years earlier Checho had been greeted as no less of a celebrity than Victor Jara might have been. Surrounded by young people, Checho received handshakes and abrazos all around as we made our entrance and sat down at a table to drink mulled wine and listen to songs full of hope for the future of Chile. After the coup, when I heard that the junta’s thugs had broken Jara’s hands as they tortured him inside the National Stadium, I wondered how many of the people in that crowd in the café that evening the junta also might have made “disappear.”
A few years later, while I was visiting my uncle in exile for the first time, he took me to the National Autonomous University of Mexico to attend a lecture about the coup. I realized as I sat in the classroom filled by students and non-students like us that my Spanish was and had always been limited. And I decided that the resulting language barrier—my uncle’s English was next to nonexistent—might be why I could get only so close to Checho. But there was more to the issue than that. After all these years, my impressions of him ultimately still seemed more mythological than real. He was still mostly a character in a narrative my mother had told me about herself, and how I figured in the life she had come to live in a world not her own.
After the lecture, Checho explained that what they had heard was a “scientific” explanation of what had occurred in his country, in keeping with what he considered the reasoning of Marxism, that is, strictly logical and empirical in its analysis of historical developments, and what was derived from this explanation could help the left avoid the mistakes the Allende regime had committed the next time it came to power.
But something about that lengthened the distance between us. I found what he said hard to accept, not so much because of my own political inclinations, which were largely in sympathy with his, but because of the lack of personal connection his explanation involved. He did not speak and, it seemed, never would of his resulting pain and anguish, not to mention the evening we spent together in the Quinta Normal. Perhaps his losses had embittered him or simply made him stoical in the face of what had transpired, detached from his own history, even his family, and had come to live as if that approach were unassailable, and if he hadn’t always done so, he did now.
As we spoke, we stood before an enormous, stylized mural by David Siqueiros high up on the façade of a university building in abstract depiction of the native Mexican population and the revolution they had finally achieved after the Spanish had destroyed their ancestors’ civilization. I felt dwarfed by the mural, and those of others around us by Diego de Rivera as well as Siqueiros, diminished, insignificant. And as I recall that moment, I’ve come to understand that my uncle had been and would remain more of a symbol of what had been lost or left behind than a personal relation to me, and perhaps was always as much of one to my mother.
I purchased the Aztec mask now affixed to my wall at a tourist stall at the edge of the Zocalo, the vast square at the center of the Mexican capital. After the university lecture, he took me there to inspect the remains of the empire that lay directly beneath the huge cathedral built upon the ruins of the pyramids leveled by Cortes. Archeologists had only recently begun their work excavating the fragments of the buried past. And it continues to this day more than a half century later, as does my own.
Ronald Fink’s writing has appeared or will soon appear in such publications as Alternate Route, BlazeVox, Calliope, DeComp, Ginosko, Global City Review, North American Literary Review, Taj Mahal, and Tampa Review. Ronald is a journalist as well as creative writer and currently serves as Senior Editor of Harvard Business Review Analytic Services. He resides in Brooklyn, N.Y.
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