Chilean Chronicles, Part 104: Returning Home to Chicago

We're in the air from Toronto to Chicago.

We've left Santiago, site of fulfilled dreams, 80 degree Christmas Days, our impossibly dusty postage stamp of an apartment, and the consumption of more pisco sours and glasses, well, bottles, of red wine than we could have ever imagined, and are heading back to the Windy City that has been our home since 2002.

With grins that stretched beyond our ears, Dunreith and I deposited the check from the house sale we completed the day before we left on our Chilean adventure.

It far exceeded our greatest expectations.

We had the great privilege of being in Chile as the nation confronted, more directly than ever before, the still raw wounds from the Pinochet coup that happened on September 11, 1973.

We attended vigils and memorials events and plays and conferences and documentary films and panels and book launches, all of which were dedicated to grappling with the enduring impact of the overthrow of democratically-elected Salvador Allende and the brutal aftermath.

I've lived in the United States close to 50 years, but never before had I witnessed the concentrated and unified focusing on a single event in our nation's history the way Chileans from Arica in the north to Punta Arenas at the end of the world turned their attention to the coup.

In October we witnessed the jubilant eruption of emotion issuing forth from Chileans who hugged, kissed, screamed and honked their horns when their beloved soccer team punched its ticket to the world's largest sport event, to be held next June in Brazil.

In November we went to election events and talked to voters of all persuasions and ages and sides of the political spectrum during what turned out to be the first of two rounds in the presidential elections.

And in December we traveled to Torres del Paine, a national park of unsurpassed and staggering beauty that recently was named the eighth wonder of the world, when Michelle Bachelet made history in becoming the first candidate ever to be elected president twice in the post-democracy era.

Beyond these momentous months in Chilean history, we received an enormously generous reception from Chileans with whom we had some connection-we met everyone from dear friend Marjorie Agosin's seemingly inexhaustible supply of cousins and former students to a female anesthetist Dad had helped train nearly 30 years ago to our colleague, friend of a friend, guide/secret weapon Alejandra Matus-and those whom we had the good fortune to meet through our travels.

My Data Journalism students at the University of Diego Portales gradually understood my Spanish, my teaching methods and the concepts and application of this type of journalism in a process that left both sides feeling enriched for the encounter.

My research into the landmark 2009 Transparency Act, after an initial shift in focus, led me to talk with journalists, lawyers, non-profit executives, government representatives and plain folks in a project that gave me a sharper sense of the law's as yet incompletely realized potential.

Dunreith and I traveled to the vineyards of the Central Valley, to the coast cities of Valparaiso and Vina del Mar. With Aidan we flew to the searing desert of San Pedro de Atacama, the world's driest such space, and to Patagonia, a place Dunreith had longed to visit for years.

We also ventured to Rio, where I had the honor of attending, teaching and presenting to colleagues at the Global Investigative Journalism Conference doing investigative work, often at great physical peril, throughout the world.

We flew to Buenos Aires, where we met Dad and Lee before they set off on a two-week tour to Southern Argetina and up through Chile, and strolled together down elegant, inordinately wide, European-style boulevards, ate ice cream at Cafe Tortoni, the continent's oldest cafe that oozes with swagger, listened and learned for three hours at ESMA, the largest of the Argentine dictator's network of detention centers, and feasted on the sights and food of El Ateneo, the former theater that has been converted into one of the world's most spectacular bookstores.

Jon and I had the tremendous fortune to receive a grant from the Pulitzer Center to do a project about the impact of the past on the present in Chile 40 years after the coup. Together we worked long hours over the course of two weeks for a three-part series that ran on The New Yorker's Photo Booth and on Hoy's website.

The family visits over our final six weeks in the country helped confirm to me the possibility of weaving together the people and passions and dreams and values that I hold most dear. Perhaps, greatest of all, it's fortified my increasing conviction that this way of living was not only possible, but could in a very real sense become ordinary.

Now, we are returning to Chicago, the city from which we have left, where we raised Aidan from a boy to a man, and where we have spent the vast majority of our married life.

I am, and will always be, a Bostonian at my core.

I had too many seminal events, from the Blizzard of 78 to the 1975 World Series to growing up amidst that inimitable accent for it to ever be otherwise.

But if Boston in my heart, Chicago's in my guts.

The people's straightforward manner and generous spirit, the city's sense of itself as a place of story and legend, the passion that Chicagoans bring to their sports and their politics and their brats and their neighborhoods, its industrial past and tortured history with race and segregation and immigration and labor that make it what the late, great Studs Terkel called "the true American city", have all gotten in deep, and are not going anywhere, either.

I'll miss our life in Santiago and our travels throughout the country and continent, to be sure.

And I'm excited to fly over the leafless trees toward the dirtied snow and land at O'Hare, to walk in the 20 degree weather and see our breath and our circle of friends and family again, and to bring a fresh, broader perspective to my ongoing love for the city.

We don't know our exact next steps, or, frankly, where we're going to live after we stay at my brother Jon's place on the South Side.

But we do know without any shred of a doubt that, as always, the adventure will continue.

Chilean Chronicles, Part 71: Mario Hernandez and Los Patitos

If you work at a restaurant long enough you become part of the menu.

At least that’s what has happened to Mario Hernandez.

He first started working at Los Patitos, a seafood restaurant in sleepy oceanfront Algarrobo whose name means “the ducklings,” as a 16-year-old.

That was in 1969.

He’s worked there ever since.

Don Mario served thousands and thousands of customers as his three boys grew up and became men.

He waited on Don Pablo Neruda and his third wife Matilde Urrutia. (He said the former’s personality was “special”, while the latter was “normal.”)

He took the order of Socialist President Salvador Allende.

Don Mario served military leaders during the Pinochet dictatorship-a group that he divided in two parts.

The smaller portion consisted of “good” generals like General Oscar Bonilla, who Don Mario said tried to restrain Pinochet’s murderous excesses of Pinochet and died in a mysterious plane crash in 1975.

The larger group were “bad,” he explained, shaking his head with disgust at the memory.

The dictatorship hit Don Mario’s home community hard, he said.

People would disappear in the middle of the night and never return.

Many people.

A climate of fear pervaded.

What was it like to serve people who you knew did these terrible things, I asked?

Don Mario stared.

For a minute, rather than an empty patio, it seemed as if he could see the leaders of the junta who had inflicted such massive damage on the country.

It was work, he said, just a touch of sadness entering his voice.

He worked at Los Patitos in 1988, the year he and Chileans across the country overcame their fear, voted with their hearts and aspirations, and voted No to the dictatorship.

Five years from retirement, Mario looks younger than his 60 years. His face is youthful and unlined. His black hair is a little thin in the back and he’s carrying some extra weight, but his movements are energetic and he smiles easily.

We met on Sunday night, when Dunreith and I were the only customers under the awning outside the restaurant.

We had initially checked the menu, gone to survey other options and returned to Los Patitos when we discovered that nearby Peruvian and Italian restaurants were closed.

It was a little cool on the patio.

Mario took a little while to warm up, too.  When he did, though, the information flowed quickly and freely.

He told us about his three boys, all in their 30s now, and living and working in Santiago. He carefully pulled out the business card for the oldest from his wallet and showed it to us with reverence.

Don Mario talked about being good friends with Manuel Araya, Neruda’s chauffeur whose assertions about the great poet being poisoned have contributed to his body being exhumed.

He’s talked about that for years, Don Mario said. He told me about that for the first time in 1978. Araya said that Don Pablo got an injection in his stomach, which turned red, Don Mario said.

So you believe it? I asked.

It’s the truth, he declared.

Don Mario stood to the side of us, his head jerking regularly as he spoke.

Often he didn’t respond to what I was saying, but kept going with his train of thought.

It wasn’t out of rudeness, but rather as if he didn’t hear me.

He did connect when I mentioned our friend and Chilean guide Alejandra Matus.

Alejandra Matus, he asked, brightening. I know her.

That was a good book, he said, referring to Alejandra’s The Black Book of Chilean Justice, her powerful expose of the Chilean judiciary in the Pinochet era.

The judge’s decision the day after the book’s publication in the spring of 1999 to recall all of the copies and the possibility of her serving 5 years in jail prompted Alejandra to flee the country.

The book was banned, but that didn’t stop Don Mario from getting a copy.

My copy was photocopied in Argentina, he said, smiling. A friend from Santiago got it for him.

I’m not a Communist, but I liked that book, he said, shedding his manner of long-time employee and leaning in close when Dunreith and I stood up to go.

You’re not a Communist, but you like to know the truth, I said.

Don Mario smiled again.

Tell her I sent my greetings, he said.

We shook hands.

His grip wasn’t real firm, but contained genuine enthusiasm.

Dunreith and I exited the patio and started to walk back to Andres’ rustic cottage in the woods.

Mario Hernandez was there, standing vigil over the restaurant where he’s worked so long that his name is a part of its history.

Chilean Chronicles, Part 49: We Have a Community

In one of my favorite scenes of one of my favorite shows, Detective Bunk Moreland confronts Omar Little, about, among other things, how young children have started to glorify the shotgun-toting rippper and runner. His trademark cigar in between his index and middle fingers, his right hand pointing at the seated vigilante, Bunk declares about the area where they both grew up several years apart, “Rough as that neighborhood could, we had us a community.”

Bunk’s words came to me early this afternoon as I sat next to Macarena Rodriguez in the front row of a lecture by Francesca Lessa at the University of Alberto Hurtado about legal impunity in Latin America.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wmgghlEagA&w=420&h=315]

(Start watching around 3:00 to see the build up to Bunk's statement.)

Maca, whom we had met with her husband Miguel in Chicago, picked us up at the airport when we landed in Santiago on July 12.

Our friend and Maca’s colleague Hugo Rojas sat next to Francesca at the table.

Outside of the room was an exhibit of long maps of Chile that showed the concentration camps, the Caravan of Death, and the women, militants and communists who were disappeared during the Pinochet dictatorship.

Hugo had shown me the display on Monday that two Geography professors at the university had created after drawing on data from a national report about torture and a list of disappeared people.

I had brought the students from my data journalism class to see and critique it on Tuesday.

I had given Hugo, a true gourmand, the white chocolate Dunreith had selected for him this morning on our way to the university.

He undid the staple at the top of the brown paper bag.

His eyes lit with reverence as he saw the contents.

“Es sagrado,” he said as he placed the bag in one of his coat pockets.

This is sacred.

Francesca delivered a riveting presentation about the global investigation into amnesty laws and national efforts to negate or undo them. (Some of the most successful were in Latin America.)

After the lecture I saw Dunreith, who introduced me to Ignacio, Hugo’s ayundatia, or teaching assistant. Dunreith’s been tutoring him in English to prepare him for the trip he’s taking at the end of the month to Chicago.

Ignacio, who is lean and bearded and has a hoop-shaped earring in his left ear, told us about the beauty of Uruguay, about the mural in Chicago that he wants to visit and the neighborhood in Santiago he wants to show us.

I hugged him, kissed Dunreith nand walked back to join the journalism department’s celebration of the nation’s impending Independence Day on September 18.

My colleagues were not waiting for the day to arrive to start enjoying themselves.

I grabbed a hot empanada and started talking with Literature Department Chair Rodrigo Rojas about the two years he lived in apartheid-era Pretoria, South Africa as a teenager in the mid-80s.

I thanked Arly and Jorge from Gloo, the online, digitally-oriented publication, for the special September 11 coverage they had sent me that the students had done.

Unofficial, but self-appointed guide Alejandra Matus, her face glowing with pleasure at the shared company of her colleagues and friends, made sure that I was all set to join the Independence Day party she and her husand Alberto are hosting at their home on Saturday.

I spoke with Rafael, a bearded professor with wild black hair who was exiled in France and teaches courses on interviewing and humor, about wanting to connect with presidential candidate Marco Enríquez-Ominami.

He’s a cousin and a friend, Rafael said. Whenever you want.

I chatted with Andrea Insunza, one of the nation’s top investigative reporters and the co-author of a biography about presumptive presidential candidate Michelle Bachelet. The granddaughter of the former head of Chile’s Communist Party, Insunza has a chapter in a new book in which 17 people who grew up during the dictatorship relate their experiences.

Andrea wrote about traveling in 1986 to the then-Soviet Union to see her grandfather, only to learn shortly after arriving that he had been living in Chile clandestinely since 1983.

The party wound down. I started to help Ingrid, one of the department’s administrative assistants, clean up the plates and utensils and half-eaten empanadas

She told me to stop.

I’m used to it, she said.

I’m used to it, too, I answered, citing my years of marriage and my training in our childhoold home at Griggs Terrace in Brookline.

I explained the system of middle management that Mom and Dad design involved rotating the position of General on a weekly basis.

The General had powers of delegation, but not enforcement, powers for tasks like setting and clearing the table, cleaning the dishes and washing the laundry.

Any work the other two did not do fell to the general.

In theory, we all got experience in leadership.

In practice, it meant that the general ended up doing all the work each week.

That was a good system, Ingrid said.

We laughed.

Dunreith returned from tutoring Ignacio and I went to teach my class.

The students listened via Skype to friend and Tribune colleague Alex Richards and applauded when they saw absent classmate Hernan Araya’s name listed in an email distributed to the listserv for the organization where Alex used to work and where he cut his teeth in data analysis.

I referred repeatedly to Alex’s presentation as the students presented about the projects, the first about data, on which they’ve worked for several weeks.

Before they left for the vacation, I reviewed all of the work we have done and the skills they have begun to acquire since we met in early August.

The last step after finishing a project, I said, is to celebrate.

The students applauded before filing out of the room.

Two months ago today, we landed in Chile, turning a long-held dream into a reality.

In just eight short weeks we’ve not only been the recipient of extraordinary hospitality, we’ve seen and heard and visited people and places that had previously seemed utterly unattainable.

This has been a remarkable gift.

But what is even more meaningful, perhaps, is how the people’s generosity has allowed us weave a web of connection that’s flowed from our relationships in Chicago and Massachusetts and Washington.

As the inimitable Bunk would say, we have a community.

Santiago is not our home.

But, sooner than I had anticipated, it’s starting to feel that way.

Chilean Chronicles, Part XXXIX: Charo Cofre's Many Skills

Charo Cofre’s got skills. Lots of them.

Folk singer.

Activist.

Guardian, along with her husband Hugo Arevalo, of Pablo Neruda’s memory.

This morning, Dunreith and I rented a blue Peugeot four-door this morning and drove with dear friends Lisa Cook and Jim Peters to eat, drink and soak in the pleasure of what amounted to a private concert by Charo at Hosteria La Candela, the hostel and restaurant she’s run for the past 15 years with Hugo.

Thanks to Alejandra Matus’ generosity of including us in a day-long trip with Pulitzer Prize winning-journalist Jack Fuller, Dunreith and I had had the pleasure a week ago Friday of being part of a group of five people who were the only people in the spacious room that has a seated of Dan Pablo in the corner as well as a spectacular view of the Pacific Ocean crashing into rocks and spraying foam onto wind-swept trees.

Charo had played for the five of us at that meal, too, making it clear that she was doing so because she admired and respected Alejandra’s work.

At the end of our time in the hostel, which has a long gallery of black and white images of Pablo Neruda as well as color shots of Charo with Matilde Urrutia, Neruda’s third wife and widow, Dunreith promised her that we would return.

Today, we made good on our promise.

This time, the room was far fuller.

A Chilean couple dined on one side of us, next to a pair of Americans who rented a car from the same Sheraton Hotel in Vina del Mar as we had.

On the other side of us was a group of about two dozen students from the University of California system who were studying at the University of Chile for a month and were taking a day trip to celebrate the midway point of that time.

And a couple of Australians sat across from Don Pablo at the far end of the room.

Hugo, who is lean and compact and whose grey beard matches his full head of hair, came out to prepare the microphone for his wife at around 2:30 p.m.

By that time Dunreith, Lisa, Jim and I had already consumed what has become nearly a daily routine of having a stiff pisco sour, an unofficial Chilean national drink, dolloped some pevre, the Chilean equivalent of salsa, onto a fresh white roll, devoured a fried empanada filled with onions, and made our way through our main courses of shrimp, salmon and my personal favorite, a fish soup that made good on its promise in the menu to leave nothing out.

Charo’s entrance only heightened our warm feeling.

She strode to the front of the room, directly in front of the table where we were sitting-our waiter told us that she had chosen that table for us so that we would be able to see her well when she was singing-and, as classic performers do, instantly won the crowd over with her charm, wit and talent.

Her black hair, as it was last week, was pulled back tightly over her head. Her eyebrows and eyeshadow blended perfectly with her hair color.

Whereas last week she was draped in a green shawl that covered most of her body, this time she was wearing a white embroidered tunic with a purple and pink pattern. A long-sleeved purple shirt poked out from the tunic on each arm.

Charo won her first major prize for playing guitar in 1967, and she shows no signs of slowing. After a brief introduction to a Venezuelan instrument known for its four strings, she reached over, picked up another acoustic guitar and started strumming and singing with abandon.

A smile creases Charo’s lips as she sings, revealing two full rows of straight white teeth. Her eyes are often closed.

Last time, she sang about her country, the sea that Neruda loved so deeply and, in a new song, about her mother’s hands.

This time she performed the first two songs, but added other tunes, too.

Alternately fast and slow, soulful and political, they spoke about Neruda’s winning the Nobel Prize in Literature for Chile, about her commitment to continue singing no matter what happened in her life, and about a young child whose mother is in the fields.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNMTt2QyuFo&w=420&h=315]

The crowd was rapt with attention, erupting in applause each time she finished.

All too soon, she completed her final song, raising a full goblet of white wine to the crowd and wishing us all, “Buen provecho.”

Enjoy your meal.

We had just wrapped up ours and were starting to walk out of the room and toward Isla Negra, Pablo Neruda’s largest and favorite house and where Charo had made a reservation for us.

“I love you, Jeff,” she exclaimed in heavily-accented English from her seat in between Don Pablo and the Australian women.

Apparently she was very grateful for the blog post I had written about our previous visit.

I answered her in Spanish with just enough enthusiasm to elicit a hearty “Hey” from my wife.

“Oh, right, sorry, honey,” I said.

I regained my domestic footing, Dunreith and I hugged Charo and promised to come back again with Aidan after he arrives in late November.

Along with our dear friends, we set off on the short trip on a sandy road to learn yet again from Don Pablo, fresh memories of our multi-talented hostess trailing behind us.

Chilean Chronicles, Part XXXIV: On Sylvia Broder's Courage

Our first six weeks here in Santiago have included a seemingly unending stream of glorious lunches and dinners that start late, end later and last anywhere from four to nine hours. Thanks to dear friend Marjorie Agosin, colleagues at the University of Diego Portales, chief among them the remarkable Alejandra Matus, family connections, folks from Chicago and the Fulbright program, we’ve had the extraordinary good fortune to meet a wide range of fascinating, generous, committed and intelligent people who have opened their homes and hearts to us.

Yet even our lengthy initial meetings have allowed us to forge connections of a surprising depth, I’ve also felt an almost inevitable reserve of distance from the folks we’ve met. It’s as if, to draw from the Czech writer Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, we don’t yet know if the words we are speaking mean the same thing on each side, or rather if we simply are speaking from a Dictionary of Misunderstood Words.

Now, though, we’re starting to see people for a second time, and are finding that the connections are getting deeper.

This was the case yesterday with Sylvia Broder, Marjorie Agosin’s cousin who had hosted us and two other couples for a lovely at her apartment in the Vitacura neighborhood the first Thursday after we arrived. She and the couples had previously lived in a property with five houses in Las Condes.

Sylvia and her family were in the middle, flanked on the right and left by each of the friends. The difference was more than geographic, as the friends on the left were politically left of center, while, Jorge Reizin, the husband on the couple of those who lived on the right was a self-described extreme right.

During an evening of free-flowing, jazzy conversation, among other topics, we talked about children, and, in Sylvia’s case, grandchildren and the vagaries of home repair.

We covered the upcoming presidential election that features Michelle Bachelet and Evelyn Mattei as the two of the nine candidates considered to have the best chance of winning and the complete failure of the Census to arrive at an accurate count. (Jorge advanced the theory that it was a deliberate effort by left-wing bureaucrats to enhance their power in the next government.)

Sylvia also told us about her personal history.

Her mother was a Polish concentration camp survivor, while her father was a Polish partisan who survived the war fighting in the woods like Tuvia Bielski of Defiance fame. Born in post-War Prague, she moved with her family to Chile with her sister at age 10. She did not know that she was Jewish, nor had she yet considered why, as opposed to her classmates, she had no grandparents.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdVMT44nWzk&w=560&h=315]

But she did not tell us about the people she hid during the earliest week of the Pinochet dictatorship that took place nearly exactly 40 years.

There were two of them.

One she knew.

The other she did not.

She hid the one she had not met before in the first week after the coup.

Sylvia had gone to work at the Australian Embassy the morning of September 11, but instantly could tell something serious was happening.

She went to a friend’s house nearby, but wasn’t able to leave for two or three full days.

When she came out, she learned that the man needed help, and took him in without hesitation.

She did so, even though her action meant that she could have been detained, tortured or killed.

Even more, Sylvia advocated to help the man get out of the country.

The Australian government had not committed itself to an agreement that would have obligated it to take action to assist the man and other victims of the dictatorship, so Sylvia worked with officials of the Canadian government to provide him sanctuary.

Which they did.

Sylvia said she did not consciously think of her family’s background, her parents’ survival and her murdered relatives whom strangers had not helped, when deciding to take the man who did not speak into her home.

But she’s sure it played a role in her decision.

Several weeks later, a friend also needed a refuge.

Sylvia let him stay for closer to a month.

Her neighbor sheltered someone, too.

The fugitives hid during the day, and they all enjoyed themselves at night.

Sylvia said there were other neighbors who supported Pinochet and knew what she was doing.

But they didn’t turn her in.

The friend later escaped to Cuba, lived in other countries and eventually returned to his homeland. Another one of Sylvia’s friends, a woman, called to take her to a family event.

After picking us all up downstairs, she took us on a knuckle-grabbing ride that evoked Woody Allen’s ride Diane Keaton in Annie Hall, and that ended for us at the bike store run by a couple who’s worked on bicycles in Santiago for 44 years.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mem9Hby9oRk&w=560&h=315]

We survived and started our walk down Providencia Avenue and past sites like the Fulbright office and Santa Isabel supermarket that have become increasingly familiar during the past six weeks.

As we walked, we were filled with a sense of quiet wonder at Sylvia’s unreflecting courage and at our great privilege of learning about the many layers she and others are already starting to reveal as we start to shed our initial interaction of host and guest and begin to relate to each other as fellow journeyers on the road of life.