After the Spanish Civil War, refugees came to Chile escaping the defeat. In 1939, the poet Pablo Neruda, at the direction of the Chilean government, chartered a ship, the Winnipeg, which sailed from Marseilles carrying a cargo of intellectuals, writers, artists, physicians, engineers, and fine craftsmen.
I was fifteen when I returned to Santiago, disoriented from having lived several years outside the country and from having lost my ties with my old friends and my cousins.
Foreigners rarely catch on to how this shocking class system operates because social interchange is polite and friendly at every level.
My grandfather was an exception among Chileans because no man from the middle class up knows how to decipher a manual, nor does he dirty his hands with motor oil – that’s what maestros are for; they can improvise ingenious solutions with the most modest resources and a minimum of fuss.
La realidad es que cada uno es responsable de su propia vida. Nacemos con ciertas cartas del naipe, y con ellas jugamos nuestro juego; a algunos les tocan malas cartas y lo pierden todo, pero otros juegan magistralmente con esas mismas cartas y triunfan.
Teresa said that until men gave birth and put up with husbands, as women do, they should not have an opinion – let alone decide on – abortion and divorce. She didn’t believe that men had the right to an opinion, much less to pass laws on the female body, since they’d never know the exhaustion of gestation, the pain of labor, and the eternal bondage of motherhood.
It’s much easier to be generous with a full belly than an empty one,” they said. I’ve never believed that, though, because I’ve seen that both kindness and cruelty exist everywhere.
Uncle Bruno and I celebrated the miracle of life with every chick that hatched from its egg and every tomato that came from the garden to the table; he taught me to observe and listen attentively, to get my bearings in the woods, to swim in freezing lakes and rivers, to start a fire without a match, to enjoy the pleasure of sinking my face into a juicy watermelon, and to accept the inevitable pain of saying goodbye to people and animals, because there is no life without death, as he always said.
Sometimes our fates take turns that we don’t notice in the moment they occur, but if you live as long as I have they become clear in hindsight.
The world is paralyzed, and humanity is in quarantine. It is a strange symmetry that I was born in one pandemic and will die during another.
I said goodbye, kissed her, and asked her forgiveness for the sins of withholding and neglect. I thanked her for having existed, promised her that she would live on in my heart, and in her son’s, begged her not to leave me, to visit me in dreams, to send me signs and clues, to return incarnated in every beautiful young woman I saw on the street, and to appear to me in spirit during the darkest hours of the night and in the days of the midday Sun.
It’s hard to make money working; and the harder the work, the worse the pay. It takes effort not to lose everything and end up on the street. It’s easy, on the other hand, to get rich without producing anything, moving money from one place to another, speculating, taking advantage of stock opportunities, investing in the hard work of others.
That fairy tale that all humans are equal before the law and in the eyes of God is a lie, Camilo. I hope you don’t buy into it. Neither the law nor God treats everyone the same.
If God exists... God would be a Marxist.
The reality is that everyone is responsible for their own life. We’re dealt certain cards at birth, and we play our hand; some of us lose, but others may play skillfully from the same bad hand and triumph. Our cards determine who we are: age, gender, race, family, nationality, etc., and we can’t change them, only play them to the best of our abilities. The game is marked by challenges and chances, strategizing and cheating.
No one gives you anything in life, Teresa would say, you have to take it by force, and as soon as you get careless they’ll take it back.
The path to addiction is straight and well paved;.
There’s a time to live and a time to die. In between there’s time to remember. That is all I’ve done for these past days, silently filling in the missing details to complete this testament – a sentimental legacy, more than a material one.
The rural women taught me that courage is contagious and that there’s strength in numbers; what you can’t do on your own can be achieved together, the more the better.
He said that knowledge was of little use without wisdom, and that there was no wisdom without spirituality, and that true spirituality always included service to others. As.