I couldn’t decide where to put this… so this seems like a good place.
There’s an excellent interview with Isabel Allende in the NYTimes today. (Not a gift link, as I’m blowing through my gift link allotment of 10 pretty fast this month.) Allende is a novelist who fled her home country of Chile after the military coup that deposed her father’s cousin, democratically-elected Salvador Allende. In the interview she talks about her life and writing, but here she describes her experience of the coup and knowing it was time to go. I found it chilling, moving, and (sadly) timely:
I have inserted paragraph breaks that were not in the original layout for easier reading.
Interviewer: You had to go to Venezuela, because there was a military coup [in Chile]. What was the moment you knew, “It’s time for me to go”?
Allende: It took months and months. The brutality started in 24 hours — the Congress was dismissed indefinitely, there was censorship for everything, all civil rights were suspended, there was no habeas corpus, which means that a person can be arrested and they don’t have to give you any explanation and there is no hearing, there is no court, there’s no accusation of any kind, you just go to jail or disappear.
Although things happened very quickly in Chile, we got to know the consequences slowly, because they don’t affect you personally immediately. Of course, there were people who were persecuted and affected immediately, but most of the population wasn’t. So you think: Well, I can live with this. Well, it can’t be that bad. So you are in denial for a long time, because you don’t want things to change so much. And then one day it hits you personally.
For me, it was several things. At the beginning, I was hiding people in my house, because we didn’t know the consequences. We had no idea that if that person was arrested and forced to say where they had been, I would be arrested. Maybe my children would be tortured in front of me. But you learn that later.
By the time I was directly threatened, I said, OK, I’m leaving. And my idea was that I was going to leave for a couple of months and then come back. So I went alone to Venezuela. And then a month later, my husband realized that I shouldn’t go back. And so he left. He just closed the door, locked the entrance door of the house with everything it contained and left to reunite with me in Venezuela. We never saw that house again, and everything it contained was lost, which doesn’t matter at all, because I don’t remember what was in there.
But I do remember the moment when I crossed the Andes in the plane. I cried in the plane, because I knew somehow instinctively that this was a threshold, that everything had changed.
A bit close to home? Did that make you shudder? It did me.
