Chilean Chronicles, Part XIII: Edmundo Verdugo Carnitas and the Treasures of Quinta Vergara

Quinta Vergara park in Vina del Mar has many treasures.

There are the large stone plaques that greet you when you pass through the black gates and that honor Gabriela Mistral and Pablo Neruda, Chile’s pair of Nobel laureates for literature.

There are the paths that wind up and down the park.

Filled with leafy green spaces that spark memories of the California redwoods, they provide shelter shelter from the sun, a cocoon of cool, clear air and the perfect environment for a lengthy, unhurried stroll to consider and start to discuss one of life’s most fundamental questions: what do we want to do and to have done with our time on the planet?

There are the stones placed artfully around the garden, each with poems or poem fragments by bards through Central and South America that invite you to engage in their words, their images and the images about the single conversation that matters most-life.

There are the leaves sculpted with skill and precision into the shape of dinosaurs and pachyderms, of a brontosaurus and a mother elephant leader a child by her tail.

There is the Vina del Mar Municipal Band that has existed for generations. Composed a dozen or so gentleman who stand in their tan suits and ties, they deliver songs for parkgoers’ consumption and pleasure every weekend.

Yet as wondrous as all of these may be, they all pale when compared to the nimble feet and unquenchable thirst for performance of Edmundo Verdugo Carnitas.

Edmundo is a natty dresser with a red bow tie and sweater, a white scarf that matches the feather in his black bowler cap and a long black jacket. He’s got a Chaplinesque mustache, plenty of white stubble, few, if any, teeth and an unblinking gaze.

He’s also 97 years old.

We met when he was standing near the band during a lull in performance. He rested part of his weight on his cane.

We talked long enough for me to establish his name and age.

I started to ask him another question, but then the music began.

Edmundo stepped forward and started dancing, shedding decades by the second.

His tongue protuding the way basketball legend Michael Jordan’s used to wag as he took flight, he moved forward and back in perfect rhythm, twirled in a circle, put his cane through his legs twice, spun it around and caught it cleanly.

Edmundo’s awareness that I was taking pictures of him only heightened his energy.

Off came the bowler hat in a salute to the crowd of about a dozen people-a move that revealed an impressively full head of hair.

One more spin of the cane.

Edmundo didn’t catch it, but his feet still kept time as he bent to pick it up.

The glitch didn’t dampen the audience’s enthusiasm.

They applauded vigorously after the song ended.

I asked Edmundo to write down his name, which he did in shaky but legible letters.

Dunreith and I started walking toward the paths, but looked as the band struck up their version of “Tequila,” complete with chanting the word at the right moments in the song.

Edmundo was still dancing.

We only stayed in Vina for about half a day, so we know we’ll be back to see the rest of what it has to offer.

I know where I’m going.

RIP, Becky Simpson

Dear friend, activist, inspiration and incessantly loving wife, mother, sister, and Mamaw Becky Simpson died earlier this month at age 77. Here is a letter I wrote to her on the plane to Chile on July 11, the day before she died.

Dearest Becky,

This is a note to thank you for all that you have given to your family, your community, the world and me in your 77 years of life. I can't tell you how much you've meant to me in the nearly quarter century since we first met in the summer of 1989, when I spent a weekend unloading fruit with Bobby, working on the Couch's home near the post office on Route 421 and attending a Saturday night service that Lydia led.

I am so glad that Beverly May had us work and stay with you that weekend.

As you know, I enjoyed the time so much that I called you a year later when I was unable to find a teaching job to see if I could stay with you.

"We can't pay you," you told me. "But we can put you up and feed you."

I'm tremendously grateful I took you up on your offer.

The months I spent living with the rest of your family and you in the fall of 1990 and the visits I made in the years after were some of the most meaningful of my life for many reasons.

I loved being around all of you and being included in the activities.

I loved traveling to pick up food and clothing with Bobby, trying not to get caught by his asking about what had happened to "that box," yelling "Mountain Dew," hearing him call a state trooper who thought we were running moonshine "Honey," and being in a place whose purpose, as you always said, was not to give a handout, but a helping hand.

I also loved spending time with you.

I treasured hearing the stories you told me about your early life in the holler.

About how your first memory was of your brother Buford dying when he took sick during a big rainstorm and your father didn't want to travel over the mountain because it was too dangerous.

About how, the next two winters, you fixed a cup of coffee and stayed up all night with Old Man Joe Hensley for two winters so that you wouldn't let your sister Annie, or as you called her, Booger, die.

About how you used the poultice with crushed onions on her chest to nurse her back to health.

About how you had no shoes and didn't go to school after third grade,

And about how, when the wealthy neighbor told you that she wasn't in the habit of borrowing or lending the sugar you had asked for, you looked straight at her and told her to give it to you.

I appreciated your telling me about marrying Bobby and living in very humble circumstances, about what it was like for you when the floods came and Rickey died in the car accident, and about how your mother was a snake handler who got bit and didn't suffer a bit while Preacher Shorty almost died after his bite.

I was honored by your sharing with me about what happened when the flood came, and how, bad back and all, you still managed to pull the children to safety, about how you lost everything, then began to fight at the state and federal level to have the companies take responsibility for the damage the strip mining did to the land, about how you fought for years before getting $1.25 million awarded to dredge the creek, but weren't allowed to participate in the discussions about what happened to the money.

I remember the time you told me about how you were sitting there crying with Mary Beebe on the side of the road most of the way up the mountain when she said, "You can't come to them and they won't come to you, maybe you can find another way."

That was the moment when the vision came for the Survival Center, when you told Bobby that you'd have a mountain of food, a mountain of clothing and a molehill of money.

All three came true.

I will always remember how you stood up to Sindey Fee when he tried to keep you from seeing your family's grave and when you stared down the people who had trapped Sowhali when he was walking down the holler with a white woman.

You showed me how you can start with so little in a material sense, but, powered by love and justice and a desire to do good, can help tens of thousands of people.

I remember how you never, ever said No to helping someone in whatever you could, how you gave and gave and gave, to your children, their spouses, your grandchildren and great-grandchildren, the tens of thousands of people who came from youth and church and family groups from all over the country to learn and help and pray and give.

I'm thankful that I got to see and know and spend time with you in the kitchen, to share a pop and see how, despite pain in your teeth and back and jaw no person should ever endure, you just kept giving.

I'll also remember the lighter moments, like your love of professional wrestling and your relationship with your twin Hiram, who always seemed to have a special place in your heart, and how you'd get dressed up and wear heels and do your nails.

Becky, I'm sorry that I never brought Dunreith and Aidan to you and that we didn't complete the project about your life the way I had hoped.

But I do want you to know that I will continue to tell people about you, about your fearlessness and kindness, your tenderness and exquisite generosity, your knowledge of who you are and where you were from, about the grace and strength and grit with which you lived and the glorious legacy you are leaving behind.

I'm sad that I'll not see you again in person and sorry that you have been suffering with lung cancer. It's a hard way to end what has been such a beautiful life, but at least it gives many of the people who have known and loved and been touched and moved and changed by you a chance to share and reach back out to you.

I am one of them.

I thank you.

I'll miss you.

I love you.

Jeff

Chilean Chronicles, Part XII: Juan in the Civil Registry

We were about halfway through the line at the civil registry when Juan sat on the blue plastic seat next to me and calmly used his small spoon to dish out his vanilla and chocolate-flavored dessert in an unhurried manner. A din of cell phones ringing, babies crying, and names being called surrounded us.

A sea of people from Africa, Asia, Peru, Colombia, Mexico, the United States and Spain, among others, waited, all of us silently willing the bureaucrats behind the desks to go faster so that our turn would come. (We were there to have our visa certified.)

How old are you, I asked him.

Nine, answered Juan, who was short, had thick black hair and wore a dark blue sweatsuit.

You look like you’re 10, I told him, using my standard line with children.

He shook his head. No, I’m nine.

What are you eating?

A little sweet, he said. Do you want some?

No, thank you. I said, touched. When did you move here?

The question required Juan to consult with his mother, a smiling woman with shoulder-length brown hair wearing blue jeans.

Four months, he told me after he secured the information.

How do you like it?

A little, he said.

When our son was nine years old, we moved from a state called Massachusetts to a place called Chicago in Illinois that he liked a little after four months, I said. Have you heard of it?

I saw it in a film.

I don’t know if this will be your experience, but he decided years later that he liked it better where we had moved to than where we used to live.

I started to elaborate on this idea, but Juan’s mother beckoned him to come over to her. He trotted off obediently, and I turned my attention back to writing.

A few minutes Juan stood in front of me.

He extended his hand, a smile crossing his face.

I shook it and wished him luck.

“Ï believe in you,” I called after Juan’s retreating form.

I don’t know if he heard me.

He rejoined his mother and followed her as they waded through the sea of humanity in the impossibly crowded room.

They walked out of the door and into the rest of their lives.

The memory of Aidan at nine when we moved from the only place he had ever lived trailed behind them.

Chilean Chronicles, Part XI: The Colors of Valparaiso

Valparaiso explodes in brilliant, luminous, and pastel colors everywhere you turn.The buildings. The worker’s clothes. The street art. The garage doors. The skyline as the sun falls in the late afternoon. The murals and graffiti that seem to spring up, like roots through concrete, throughout the seaport city that has been a harbor for centuries. Even the dogs. The city that seems like a cross between the hilly, twisting streets of San Francisco and ocean view of Haifa, Israel was the first place we visited outside of the Santiago area. It’s got a gritty side, to be sure. Scores of abandoned dogs leave their droppings everywhere in the city. We saw two dogs feasting on rotted meat they had ripped open from garbage bags. And when Dunreith and I asked them about where to get an empanada, a pair of adolescent girls told us that an area where we had planned to go was “Super peligro.” Super dangerous. But, still, those colors. We arrived around noon. After an engaging conversation with yet another of Marjorie Agosin’s seemingly unending stream of cousins, it was approaching two o’clock and we hadn’t eaten lunch. We walked up a street that, like many in Valparaiso, wound around, rather than going in a straight line, to Almacen Nacional, a restaurant recommended by the Ibis hotel at which we were staying and a place where we received a 10 percent discount. More colors. From the bright blue painting on the wall of a couple in bed, to the bar, which was a symphony in muted tones, to the green zucchini soup topped with a slice of the vegetable, to the flaming red hair of the woman at the table next to us to the pink lipstick our waitress wore. We had a meal with service that could charitably be called relaxed, then ambled around Avenida Alemania, or Germany, taking in panoramic views of the harbor until we arrived at La Sebastiana, the second of fabled poet Pablo Neruda’s homes we’ve seen since arriving here 15 days ago. The information in the audio guide was sparse compared with the rich descriptions we had received from Alejandra Fritz at La Chascona, Neruda’s home in Santiago’s Bella Vista neighborhood. Nevertheless, the house inspired a similar, if deeper yet slightly emotionally subdued, understanding not just of Neruda’s fantastic life, but his incessant capacity for creativity. This sensibility manifested itself in his inventing names for his houses, in the pieces of furniture like the fireplace he designed for La Sebastiana, in the deliberate placement of the items he collected from every conceivable corner of the world, and in the disguises, sometimes multiple in the same evening, that he would don as he served drinks in the treasured spot behind the bar in which only he could stand. Indeed, the poet’s attitude toward his house, which he considered a toy in which he liked to play all day long, was a reflection of a desire for endless invention. A chronology filled with black and white photos and text stretched across a half dozen poster boards on the first floor and helped flesh out the central passions and key moments in Neruda’s life. These included early pictures when he was young and had a full head of hair, shots of him with the full beard he grew when he was “clandestino,” or hidden, and images of him delivering “Yo acuso,” the memorable speech he gave in 1948 in which he channeled Emile Zola and denounced the state's repressive, anticommunist actions. The audio, the pictures and the home itself all reinforced Neruda’s visceral connection to the Chilean people, both in his description of his daily work-I am not different than the laborer who works with bricks, he said. I just work with words-and in his statement that he was another branch of the great human tree. The sun started to make its inexorable descent. Dunreith suggested that we go back in a more direct way that took us down uneven stairs, through little traveled pathways and past a mother kneeling to tie her son’s sneakers and dusty workers standing wearily on the front steps of their homes. A trio of young men whose picture I had taken on the way down thanked me. One thrust an open beer toward me and asked me if I wanted it. I’m with my woman, I said pointing to Dunreith, who had walked ahead, as she often does when I am using the camera. But if not, then yes. We laughed. Coca Cola? Another asked as I moved past them. We all laughed again. A street lamp and telephone wire framed the streaks of pink that poked over the top of the buildings before the sun disappeared for the evening. We continued walking through a dicey area, drawn through it by the insistent thumping of bass drums. A crowd had gathered in a town square to hear a local youth band perform. Five girls shimmied provocatively in the front row. The yellow-shirted leader in the middle of the group raised his arms as if in victory. Everyone in the band shouted, “Val-pa-ra-i-so!” The crowd burst into applause and started to disperse into the darkness of the night that enveloped the city like a glove.

Dunreith found a supermarket, where we bought fruit and red wine to keep alive our streak of drinking every night in Chile. She stopped on the street near the hotel to buy a colorful assortment of mints and jellied candies. Drink, dessert and rest, if not dinner, awaited, just hundreds of yards away.

Chilean Chronicles, Part X: Senora Carmen and Chileans' View of the Nation's Past

If there was one idea I had firmly committed in my mind before arriving in Chile, it was this: the people in the country agreed that the Pinochet dictatorship was bad. Based on wrenching accounts of disappeared, tortured and murdered people, buttressed by a diet of books, poems, films and new programs, I had a picture of an unspeakably repressive military regime that controlled its people by sheer force. The United States government saw in Gen. Augusto Pinochet, as it did with the Somoza family in Nicaragua and Shah Reza Pahlavi in Iran, an anticommunist bulwark and ally, however unsavory.

A couple of weeks into my stay here, the picture is becoming more complex.

The loosening of my viewpoint first came through watching The Judge and the General, Elizabeth Farnsworth and Patricio Lanfranco’s award-winning documentary film about how Judge Juan Guzman, after leaving the insular right-wing world in which he had allowed himself to live, immerses himself in the gruesome details of the Pinochet regime, and ultimately indicted the man who had been largely responsible for his professional ascent.

The film opens and closes with footage of Pinochet’s coffin being carried onto the street after the dictator died without having been prosecuted or convicted of the crimes that impacted so many Chilean families.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPnJu1PNTD8&w=420&h=315]

Then-President Michelle Bachelet, herself a torture survivor, exile and the first female president in the nation’s history, refused to make Pincohet’s death cause for a national day of mourning.

Her decision prompted an outpouring of venomous yelling and epithet throwing from hundreds, if not thousands, of Pinochet supporters who cursed their newly elected leader and changed, “They never got him!” (This footage starts at 10:39 of the movie clip.)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhLwpt3LT5E&w=420&h=315]

A dismayed Guzman speaks while watching footage of the protests about the division that clearly existed within the country.

It’s still there.

That is the conclusion I drew after talking Tuesday with Senora Carmen, an energetic and friendly retired elementary school teacher who taught for 17 years in one of Santiago’s most impoverished neighborhoods . Dunreith and I met her Wednesday on the way to registering our visas within the required 30-day period.

Dressed smartly in a black jacket and orange scarf, Senora Carmen was manning the city’s Biblioplaza right near the National Fine Arts Museum. Established about 10 years, the facility has books and newspapers available for residents to take out and return.

We talked for a bit about her teaching career, which included 17 years at one school and two additional years at another one. Carmen, who is energetic and friendly, explained that she would teach the same students for four consecutive years from first to fourth grades. That continuity was important, she said, because many of the students grew up in a drug-filled environment in a poor neighborhood in Santiago.

You must have been like a mother to many of those students, I said.

She agreed.

I told her about Dunreith having been an educator for many years as well as about my late mother-in-law Helen, who taught and was an elementary school principal during her 34 years in education.

I also told her about my experience of working as an apprentice for two years in former fourth grade teacher Paul Tamburello’s class, the same classroom I had been a student a dozen years earlier. He felt that was the ultimate example of impact, I said, adding that last year I published a book called On My Teacher’s Shoulders about learning from Paul at three different points in my life.

Que buena, Senora Carmen answered, a smile filling her face as her eyes danced with delight.

I imagine that you hear from former students, I said.

She said that she did.

How are they doing? I asked.

Some are doing well; others are not doing well, she replied, a shadow of sadness crossing her face.

It’s gotten worse in the past 10 years, she said.

Worse? I asked.

She repeated her answer.

It was better during the dictatorship.

Things were more controlled, she added. There was respect.

I explained that we had always heard in the United States that things were worse during the Pinochet era.

Senora Carmen’s face started to harden in resistance.

But you are telling me that you think it was better then.

It was better, she said again with conviction.

You have taught me something, I said. Thank you.

We started to leave, but Senora Carmen asked me to write down my name.

Dunreith asked if I had a business card. I started to open my backpack and look for one. But Senora Carmen said she only wanted my name to remember the conversation, which she had enjoyed.

I took one of the book receipts and wrote my name is capital letters as neatly as I could.

I told her that, as opposed to Chile, where people carry both their mother and father’s name, but go by their paternal lineage, our last name was Kelly Lowenstein.

I had been Lowenstein.

She had been Kelly.

Together we were Kelly Lowenstein.

We also have two names, Senora Carmen said.

We thanked her again, shook hands and took one more picture before heading on our way to the police department where we were required to register our visas, my understanding of Chilean people's attitude toward their country's past slightly muddier than before Senora Carmen and I began to talk.