By GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ
New York Review Books, 2012, 116 pages, $19.95 (pb)
‘The most hated man in my life’, declared the
casual-dressed, bearded, non-conformist Chilean film director, Miguel Littin,
was the balding, near-sighted, clean-shaven, Uruguayan business tycoon who
accompanied Littin’s every step on his secret return to the Chile of military
dictator, Augusto Pinochet, in 1985.
Littin’s true story, told to, and retold by, the Chilean novelist, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, recounts how a false passport, voice coaching, weight loss, plucked eyebrows, new hair-do and ‘fake wife’ transformed Littin into ‘what I wanted least in the world to be: a smug bourgeois’, in order to disguise his re-entry to Chile to direct an underground documentary about the dictatorship. Littin, a socialist who headed the pre-coup nationalised film industry, had only escaped execution during Pinochet’s coup through the help of a neutral military officer ‘who happened to be a film buff’.
Twelve years after the 1973 US-orchestrated coup, which
assassinated the democratically-elected Socialist President, Salvador Allende,
and installed Pinochet’s torture regime and a radical free market economic
orthodoxy, Littin, one of five thousand permanently banned Chilean exiles,
spent six risky weeks filming in Chile, protected by the Chilean underground,
narrowly surviving exposure, his own carelessness with passwords, his
impetuousness and being tailed by undercover police.
Littin’s first impression on his return to Chile was one of
‘material splendour’ but the ‘ragged miners’, the poor of the slums, and the
child beggars and unemployed peddlers in the shadows of the gay lights of Santiago
revealed economic squalor.
So too, the apparent civilian calm – ‘armed policemen were
more in evidence on the streets of Paris or New York’ – was deceptive. Just out of visitors’ sights were the junta’s
shock squads in the subway stations, water-cannon trucks on side streets and
‘secret’ police conspicuously present with their short-cropped hair.
This apparatus of repression, and a night curfew, kept many
Chileans passive as individuals but collective protest and armed resistance
were a daily occurrence. From the
general strike which preceded Littin’s arrival, to the protest hunger march he
filmed. From the poor woman who kept a
photo of Allende hidden behind one of the Carmelite Virgin, to the Catholic nun
who ran secret missions to and from Chile, including couriering the last reels
of Littin’s film to Europe. From the young rebels who carried out
innumerable ‘anonymous deeds’, to aristocratic Chileans in regime-fooling BMWs
who saved Littin from sub-machine guns at roadblocks.
Littin found a supportive writer in Marquez, the novelist
himself a friend of Allende, who had announced he would desist from writing as
a protest against the coup until the Pinochet dictatorship had fallen. This impractical gesture was rescinded in
1981 with Marquez’s novel, Chronicle of a
Death Foretold, which also marked a turn from the political to the personal
in his writing, but, as Francisco Goldman notes in his introduction, Clandestine in Chile offered a chance
for Marquez to stick one to the General.
Pinochet felt the blow and seized and burnt 15,000 copies of the book
imported into the country.
The rest of Goldman’s introduction, however, is best
avoided. The professor of literature, a
“post-revolutionary pessimist” embarrassed about his own radical political past
of “idealism and naïve revolutionary dreams”, distorts the book as an illusory
attempt by two ageing socialist has-beens to recapture the “political vigour,
conviction and ardour” of their immature youth, an “absurdist” farce in which
Littin and his film crews “never seem to be in any real danger” with Marquez
pontificating as deluded propagandist for left-wing political “fanatics” such
as Allende. A different book entirely to
the actual one about the genuine spirit of opposition to capitalist tyranny
displayed by the quietly heroic Littin and Marquez.
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