Allende - A Novel 9780804743655

Citation preview

Allende: A

Novel

Allende: A

Novel

Fernando Alegria Translated by Frank Janney

Stanford University Press Stanford, California

Allende: A Novel was originally published in Spanish in I989 under the title Allende: Mi vecino el presidente, © I 989 by Editorial Planeta Chilena S. A. The present edition has been revised by the author.

Stanford University Press, Stanford, California. © I993 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.

Original printing 1993 Last figure below indicates year of this printing: 03 02 0 I 00 99 98 97 96 9 5 94 CIP data appear at the end of the book. Partial translation of Neruda's "Sad Song to Bore Anyone" courtesy of John Felstiner. Photographs courtesy of Marcelo Montecino and the Fundaci6n Salvador Allende: p. I, Allende in military service; p. I 2 5, Allende; p. I43, Allende and Fernando Alegria at a campaign meeting; p. 200, Allende and Pablo Neruda; p. 213, the Allendcs with their grandchildren; p. 2I9, Allende and Jose Toha.; p. 22I, Allende and his nanny, Mama Rosa; p. 254, Allende at his inauguration, escorted by General Pinochet; p. 27r, Luis Corvalan and leaders, in exile in Bulgaria; p. 2 73, Allende, CorvaLin, and Carlos Altamirano; p. 287, mourners at Allende's funeral. Stanford University Press publications arc distributed exclusively by Stanford University Press within the United States, Canada, and Mexico; they are distributed exclusively by Cambridge University Press throughout the rest of the world.

Foreword

I

n history there is often fiction, and in fiction sometimes much history. Occasionally the two collide, then merge, enriching and refining each other. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Latin America, and Fernando Alegria's Allende: A Novel is a prime example. Salvador Allende's 6 5 years encompassed tumultuous decades of Chile's recent past. Most of what transpired during those years has been written about at length. There are many interpretations of Allende's chapter in history, but never before has a Chilean political leader been the subject of a book such as this one. I see four principal reasons for this. First, Allende was both a product of his times and a man who helped shape them. Second, his truncated presidency and death occurred during an epoch when prose fiction became the primary vehicle by which Latin America's past(s) and present(s) were being critically examined by intellectuals. History, in short, was being written in fictive form, revised in ways appropriate to a region where the frontiers separating fact from fiction shift constantly and are not at all the same as those obtaining in Europe or North America. Third, Allende's life and death were epic in their ingredients, at the very least romantic. And fourth, Allende never had a chance to write and publish his own memoirs. The 1973 putsch that dismantled Allende's via chilena a/ socialismo is still fresh in the minds of Chileans and North Americans. Long after memories of the Brazilian coup of 1964 and allegations of U.S. complicity have begun to fade, North Americans still remember what happened in Chile on that bloody Tuesday, September I 1, r 97 3. This is probably the most compelling reason why Allende's life and times will continue to influence the way foreigners think about Chile. Allende's face, his posture, his per-

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Foreword

sonality, his gestures, his grit, and his foibles are better known to foreigners than those of any other twentieth-century Chilean. What a novel may lack in fidelity to historical detail it can compensate for in insights and impressions. The closer a novelist is to history, or the closer the past is to the present, the easier for history and literature to come together felicitously. Some might think this confluence detracts from historical perspective. I prefer to think of it as a sharpening of overall perspective on writer, subject, and the times of each. Reliance on fictionally historical (as opposed to historically fictional) material in so many works of the past few years is no coincidence. Latin America's "new novel" of the late twentieth century is a phenomenon of historical proportion, a major force of historical revisionism. There is an intense relationship, probably more so than at any other time in the history of Latin America, between the recent period and its literature. Never before have alternative narrative forms-surrealism, stream of consciousness, intertextuality, internal monologue, magic realism-composed so rich a mix. In Latin America pasts do not become presents as they do elsewhere. The passing of time is more an eddy than a flow, more spiral than linear. What strikes the foreigner as bizarre is often commonplace; the outrageous is tolerable, the unreal real. Presents blur with futures, only to become presents and then pasts again. In this book we see history and literature become literally inseparable because of the intensity of political conflict. One of Allende's political confreres is Pablo Neruda. In 1945 they both run for the Senate: Neruda is elected in the north, Allende in the south; the Left closes in on the center. Other collisions and mergings of fiction and history dot these pages. In one place Allende is compared to Garda Marquez's Colonel Aureliano Buendia. Carlos Ibanez's lamentation on the death of Arturo Alessandri is as poignant as though his old nemesis, the Lion, had been a real patriarca. Imagined and remembered political dialogues as intense as some in Carlos Fuentes's Hydra Head or Mario Vargas Llosa's Conversation in the Cathedral both inform and tease. Historical figures are woven into fie-

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Foreword

tive backgrounds much as they are in Alejo Carpentier's Concierto barroco and Tomas Eloy Martinez's Peron Novel. Fictional history is as lyrically and evocatively portrayed as in Vargas Llosa's Real Life of Alejandro Mayta and Fuentes's Old Gringo. Alegria's intimate sketches of rural Chile are as passionate as those by the great names from the country's literary past. They are as representative of the Latin American experience as those offered in Guillermo Cabrera Infante's View of Dawn in the Tropics. Most of the significant themes of the new novel are indeed here: authoritarianism versus libertarianism, military-civilian relations, relationships between men and women, depictions of urban and rural life, history and the search for national identity, the recent politics of oppression, adumbrations of the future. Through the efforts of the new novelists, such themes have become paths to historical revisionism. Important in the life and times of Salvador Allende, they all fuse in Alegria's book, giving Allende: A Novel a place of its own in Chilean and Latin American letters. Allende: A Novel is vintage Alegria, faithfully rendered in Frank Janney's translation. It is a logical extension of Recabarren (1938); Lautaro (1943); Alegria's memoir, Una especie de memoria (1983); and Chilean Spring (1980), the fictional diary of a young Chilean photographer who was killed after the I973 coup. (For a comprehensive discussion of Alegria's works, see Alegrfa and Juan Armando Epple's Nos reconoce el tiempo y silba su tonada [1987], which includes a bibliography of works by and about Alegria. See also Epple's edited Para una fundaci6n imaginaria de Chile: La obra literaria de Fernando Alegria [1987].) From the Chilean literary "Generation of 1938"-a critical year in Chile's political and historical evolution-comes Fernando Alegria, one of a number of writers who constitute the country's richest concentration of political-literary talent between the "Generation of r842" and that since 1973. Chronicler andessayist in the manner of nineteenth-century Portugal's Jose Maria E