A Guitar, Two Hands,
and
Other Weapons of Love and War
AMDG
November 1, 2024
“I give you a song, my homeland.
I give you a song with the hands that kill,
with the hands that give you a guerrilla,
with the hands that work day to day.”
“I give you a song,” Silvio Rodriguez
“Look what they’ve done to his lovely hands.”
“The bastards.”
“I’m surprised they didn’t cut off his tongue as well, since their purpose was to silence him forever. They wanted to prevent him from ever playing his guitar again, not even from beyond the grave.”
“Why would they cut off Victor’s fingers if they intended to kill him anyway?”
“They always saw his hands and his guitar as weapons of war. After all, his songs did more to threaten their regime than a thousand rebels. So when they came to power, it is not surprising they would punish him by mutilating his hands. They wanted to hold him accountable for the fierceness of his message. The best way to do so was to destroy the means he had used to convey it, his long callused fingers defiantly strumming a guitar named Viridiana.”
“I never anticipated such a thing would happen to your husband although it was always in the cards. He sang his songs to support Allende’s Popular Unity Party, he applauded the Marxist government and he celebrated the Communist Youth for years.”
“I never imagined a man could be tortured and killed for playing music on a guitar, not even protest music,” Joan said, referring to her husband. “How I wish he had abandoned Viridiana and worked only directing plays. Then he would never have been in the crosshairs of the oligarchy and its military proxies.”
“Don’t deceive yourself, Joan. One way or another Victor would have made his voice be heard. Don’t forget his musical Viet Rock, not exactly an endorsement of Richard Nixon’s intervention in Vietnam.”
***
Victor had told his wife Joan that his father Manuel Jara had callused hands as well, rough enormous hands which he used from sunup to sundown to work the fields and vineyards and sometimes at night to pummel a wall or a tree with fury. As a child, Victor had learned to fear his father when he came home drunk at night and punched the walls until his hands were bloodied. But with the passage of the years Victor had come to understand him, realizing that his illiterate father’s violence was a response and a symptom of the oppression which he endured on a daily basis at the hands of his hacendado, Mario Garcia Reyes.
“Manuel, take these bales of hay to the stable.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Manuel, dig a trench next to the barn.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Don’t forget to wake up at four for the stomping of the grapes.”
“Yes, sir.”
“We need someone to fix the tractor right away.”
“Yes, sir.”
No matter what the hacendado ordered, Manuel had to fulfill his wishes ipso facto lest the hacendado scream and demean him as he was wont to do. Since Manuel had no power anywhere else, and no prospect of ever improving his condition, he exercised his power in the home by tyrannizing Victor’s mother and his six children although unlike certain other peasants, he never beat them with his hands. His violence was only directed against himself. Manuel didn’t bruise his hands when he was drunk because he hated himself or wanted to be punished. He did so because he couldn’t punch his hacendado in the face and had no other means to vent his anger.
The hands of Victor’s mother Amanda Martinez were scarred by work as well, yet remained soft and delicate. She taught her son to be proud of his Mapuche[1] heritage, instructed him that toiling in the fields and vineyards was an honorable line of work. And his mother’s songs were Victor’s introduction to Chilean folk music, what would become the mainstay of his life. In his mother’s Mapuche songs, accompanied by her sonorous guitar, Victor first heard the peasants’ songs of love and loss, oppression and resistance. They were not exactly songs of protest, but eventually Victor would understand them as such since the Araucanians of Chile had been violently suppressed for centuries, just like indigenous people all over Latin America. Although the peasants’ complaints were subtle, Victor heard in them a call to arms, a strong populist message, a cry of protest against subjugation by their hacendados.[2]
It was Victor’s mother Amanda who first taught him to play certain songs on the guitar, but the lessons would end suddenly, as one night Victor’s father came home in a rage and pulverized the instrument with his two enormous callused hands as the eleven-year-old Victor looked at him, paralyzed by fear. Victor would remember that night to the end of his days, on his last week at the Chile Stadium, where he was riddled by bullets and lost his hands.
“That son-of-a-bitch Reyes treated me like a horse,” Victor’s father had begun, “reminded me that I was only his peon in the worst possible way.”
“He was here at four o’clock in the morning looking for you,” responded Victor’s mother. She had been teaching Victor to play the guitar when Manuel found them and the boy was holding the body of the instrument against his chest.
“He told me that the vendimia[3] of Casablanca was four hours away by car,” said Amanda, “and they needed to arrive before nine in the morning to showcase his vineyard’s wines. I told him you hadn’t been back all night. I didn’t tell him you were engaged in a bout of drunkenness with Macario.”
“I don’t know how I could have forgotten the wine harvest,” Manuel responded. “That hijo de la gran puta[4] Reyes needed me to help him transport his wine bottles to the plaza where the vendimia was being held.”
Appearing at the vendimia would not only allow Reyes to sell thousands of bottles of wine; it would also provide huge propaganda for his winery and its products.
“I can’t believe you missed the vendimia because you had gotten drunk the night before,” said Victor’s mother.
“Yes, and it infuriated Reyes, hijo de la gran puta. That son-of-a-bitch Reyes cares about nothing as much as money. Aagh! When I remember what he did to me, it makes my blood boil.”
“What did he do to you?”
“He found me hiding in the fields and expressed his displeasure in no uncertain terms. He told me that without my help it had been impossible to take his wines to the vendimia. Reyes can’t drive and the two other peasants that do were already at the harvest festival, setting up the stands to sell the product. But of course without the wine the kiosks were useless. And you know what that hijo de puta did? He ordered me to take off my pants and fiercely beat my buttocks with a riding crop, as if I were a mule that belonged to him. And he did so in front of all the other peasants, most of whom just laughed, because he wanted to humiliate me further. I swear that I thought of using my callused hands to strangle him that very moment. But being surrounded by so many campesinos[5] it was impossible to do so.”
“Why didn’t you take him to the fiesta de la vendimia once he found you?”
“Casablanca is four hours away and it was almost three in the afternoon when he found me. By seven o’clock the degustation and sale of the wine would have been over and the dances and the selection of the queen of the vendimia would already have begun. So he proceeded to punish me like a dog.”
“What did you expect him to do?” asked Victor’s mother. “The harvest festival happens once a year. And because of your drunkenness you made Reyes miss the vendimia altogether.”
“Don’t tell me you’re taking his side!” Manuel exploded. “I am not an animal but a man. No man has the right to whip another. While I am breaking my back from sunup to sunset, you spend your time teaching Victor the guitar. Why does a poor boy like him need a guitar anyway? He shall always be a peasant like his father, abused and humiliated throughout his life.”
When Amanda protested, Manuel took the guitar by the neck and smashed it against the ground. The young Victor cowered against a wall. The destruction of the guitar shocked him as much as when his father beat his fists against a tree. It would be years before Victor took up the guitar again, long after his father simply disappeared one day, but Victor would never forget his mother’s songs or her old guitar.
It is true, of course, that Victor may have been thinking of his long-lost father when he wrote about the arduous work of the field hand in many of his songs. In The Plow, for example, he wrote that with the work demanded of the campesino it was impossible not to be “agotao,” slang term for “exhausted,” at the end of every working day. Had Manuel Jara not been perpetually agotao, it is possible that he never would have hurt himself or drunk to excess. Not surprising that many landowners claimed – fairly or not – that alcoholism and wife beating were rampant among their peasants. After all, they were all subject to the master’s whip, all suffered from the same daily injustice, humiliation and misery. What made Manuel a tyrant in the home eventually made his son a rebel with a guitar.
***
“One man’s song of protest is another’s incitement to Communist insurrection,” said Quena as she and Victor’s wife were waiting for the singer to be buried. “Victor’s Right to Live in Peace was an homage to the Viet Cong’s Ho Chi Minh. Don’t forget his paean to Che Guevara, The One Who Appeared.”
“Victor actually met Che Guevara in person when he played a concert in Chile in 1960, thirteen years before Pinochet’s coup d’etat. Of course, Che Guevara and my Victor shared the same fate, though in different countries: death at the hands of the Americans and their proxies. Ho Chi Minh, at least, has survived the onslaught of the United States so far although Victor’s song was premonitory. It is now the people of Chile who are not allowed to live in peace by the Colossus of the North.”
“Maybe Victor should have left the country before the coup succeeded.”
“How could he have known that Chile would cease being a democracy?” Joan replied. “Sure, there were massive food shortages resulting from a strike of the truckers and marches organized by the reactionaries, but no one could have predicted a coup directed by General Pinochet.”
“Yes, no one saw it as something certain,” responded Quena. “Not until the very end.”
“And even those who thought a coup d’etat was possible,” continued Joan, “did not foresee that all alleged ‘Communists’ would be rounded up in the Chile Stadium in Santiago where a great number of them would be murdered. Never in my worst nightmares did I imagine that I would lose my husband because a military government suddenly took over. He was only a singer-songwriter after all, irrespective of his message. He never took up arms himself although I am sure that by the end he was prepared to do so.”
“Of course,” said Quena, “he would have ended up taking up a rifle against the Pinochet regime if he had lived long enough to do so. Unlike myself – daughter of privilege – he was born a peasant and remained a peasant to his death.”
“I wonder whether his participation in battle would have made a difference, Quena. My husband Victor never even owned a gun. How can we have a civil war when one side has all the bombs, machine guns and tanks provided by the CIA and the other only music and hand-painted banners?”
***
After Victor’s father disappeared, Amanda Jara decided to move the family to the Chilean capital of Santiago. She initially worked as a cook at a restaurant and was eventually able to open a stand at a public marketplace named La Victoria. It was while living on Bernardo O’Higgins Boulevard that Victor was reintroduced to the guitar. As he returned from school in the afternoon he heard music coming from a window, sonorous sounds which immediately caught his attention and mesmerized him. Eventually he would learn that they were compositions from the Brazilian master Heitor Villa-Lobos and Chile’s own Juan Orrega-Salas. Every day he would pause for a long time to delight in the music of the guitar, and the owner of the house, Doña Margarita de Piedrasanta, realized that he spent hours outside her window every day. At the time, Victor was already a strapping seventeen-year-old with the unmistakable look of a campesino – a broad back, callused hands, a swarthy peasant’s face. When Doña Margarita approached him for the first time, she asked him why he stood outside her window every day and he confessed that he loved the sound of her guitar.
“Do you play yourself?” she asked. Doña Margarita was a handsome woman in her mid-forties, already with salt and pepper hair. She earned her living by giving guitar lessons to the sons of the bourgeoisie. She was unmarried because she had spent her life tending to her ailing father.
“I used to play many years ago,” said Victor. “It was my mother who taught me how to do so. She was a cantora[6] and sang with her guitar at weddings, birthdays, even wakes. But that guitar was lost many years ago and guitars are too expensive for me to buy another one. But I still recall the lyrics to her songs and have never ceased to sing them.”
“Here,” responded Doña Margarita as she handed him her instrument. “Let’s see what you remember.”
“She’s a beauty, a real beauty. However, she is useless in my hands.”
“Can you at least sing a song as an example?”
“Sure, there is one song that I still sing, ‘I am a peasant,’ though I can’t remember how to play it on the guitar. I think it begins something like this. ‘I am a peasant. I go to toil in the fields. I go slowly to my death. Little does my master care. I am a peasant. I go slowly to my end. I thresh the grain using my tired hands. Little does my master worry.’ It’s an old indigenous song, a plaintive cry of grievance. I used to play a dozen peasant songs and now can’t play even one. Playing the guitar was one of the few experiences of joy in my young life. How I wish that I could still play my mother’s songs, ‘Dove, I want to tell you,’ ‘What I get when I pray to Heaven,’ ‘You can’t go back’… and on and on. I must have sung about twenty songs, most of which I still remember although I could only play a few on the guitar even when I was a kid. That would be my dream, to rescue my ancestors’ ballads from oblivion and share them with all of Chile.”
“Why don’t you come and take some lessons? I can figure out the notes to your songs.”
“My family is quite poor and I couldn’t afford to pay for classes. And I don’t have a guitar so I couldn’t practice.”
Doña Margarita gently smiled.
“I don’t have to charge you anything,” she said. “You can come once a week for your lessons. And you can come two other times to practice on my guitar. You have a passion for your music and it should be rewarded.”
“That would be fantastic,” Victor exclaimed. “This guitar is lovely like a sevillana. She must come from Spain.”
“My father was a madrileño and brought the guitar to Chile when he emigrated to the country. He called her ‘Blancarosa,’ the white rose, gave her a name just like if she was a woman.”
“There is something of a woman in every guitar,” responded Victor.
Soon Victor’s visits to Doña Margarita’s house became the highlight of his week. He thought about them day and night, sunup to sunset, in the morning when he rose and at night before he fell asleep. He began to think that perhaps he was falling in love with her despite the fact she more than doubled him in age. He did not realize it was not Doña Margarita who drove him to distraction but her trusty Blancarosa. When Doña Margarita played Heitor Villa-Lobos’ Etudes for Classical Guitar, Victor did not recognize that it was the work itself, as interpreted by Blancarosa, that moved him to the heights of ecstasy. Instead he ascribed his feelings to Doña Margarita’ genius as a guitarist and to the artistry of her hands. And so it went for several months. Victor visited Doña Margarita with hat in hand three times a week, thinking that he loved her.
Victor told her that he did not have the skills to be a classical guitarist and preferred to play folk music instead. The compositions of Villa-Lobos, Latin America’s greatest composer, were played on every stage on the planet but those of Chile’s peasants were nowhere to be heard. So Doña Margarita focused on teaching Victor how to play the folk songs he so loved on the guitar. And gradually, slowly, she fell in love with her peasant student, though in her case it was no fantasy. At the age of forty-three, the woman had succumbed to a passion that she feared would lead her to perdition. She dreaded the day when the lessons would end though she knew that eventually they would.
One evening, after they had been working on the music for a song sung by his mother, The Mapocho River, with Doña Margarita carefully writing down the notes on a sheet of paper, Victor gently moved aside her notebook and kissed her fully on the mouth.
At first, Doña Margarita responded in kind, delighting in his kisses, but soon she forcefully pushed him away.
“No,” she exclaimed. “I’m too old for you. At most you’ll love me for a night. I would want you for a lifetime.”
“Can’t a young man love an older woman?”
“You’re in love with Blancarosa, not with me. As soon as you get a new guitar, you’ll forget the two of us. You’re a very gifted guitarist, Victor, and don’t need my lessons anymore. I don’t want to deceive myself. If it weren’t for Blancarosa, you would never even look at me.”
“How can a man be in love with a musical instrument? Why don’t you believe I love you?”
“Let me prove it to you. I can buy you a new guitar tomorrow, the best one that you can find in old Felipe’s store on the corner of Amazonas and Republica de Cuba. Then take her home with you, caress her like a woman and play your songs of Chilean folklore. If, after you play your new guitar, you wish to continue seeing me, then you will know if you truly love me and are not enamored of Blancarosa.”
On the following Monday, Victor and Doña Margarita visited old Felipe’s store. He sold all sorts of musical instruments, including an impressive assortment of guitars and charangos.[7] Victor took his time making up his mind, strummed a few chords on each guitar before choosing the one that satisfied him the most.
“This one,” he said to Doña Margarita. “I hope she’s not too expensive for you.”
“Nothing can be too expensive. I see a bright future for you as a guitarist, especially given your wonderful voice. I wouldn’t be surprised if you become known throughout Chile for your folk songs like Atahualpa Yupanqui and Violeta Parra.”
“Before buying her, let me play Song of the Miner on the strings across her body. She’s a virgin and needs to be brought to jouissance for the first time. I shall baptize her Viridiana.”
“So my rival has a name?”
“She shall be my lover. Together we shall make love and joy, sing of bitterness as well.”
The visits steadily decreased. Victor no longer needed to go to Doña Margarita’s house to play his music. Soon he decided to pursue an unlikely dream. He would collect the peasants’ folk songs from all of Chile and play them in Santiago. On the day he left on his way south, he sent a missive to Doña Margarita bidding her adieu. It did not have a return address and he was never to see her again.
***
“How was it he ended up in the Chile Stadium any way?” Quena asked as the men began to dig Victor’s grave. “Did the soldiers come by your house to arrest him?”
“Victor had insisted on joining the students at the Technical University as they congregated in a vigil in anticipation of what would happen next. When Victor first arrived, the tanks were still not on the streets, the Casa de la Moneda had not yet been bombed and President Salvador Allende was still alive. But neither I nor Victor anticipated General Pinochet’s soldiers would round up all the students and take them to the Chile Stadium following the coup. And the ironic thing is that Victor was ultimately killed in the stadium where he had so often sung his music in front of thousands. I loved him so, Quena. And now they’ve silenced him forever.”
“No, they haven’t, Joan. There are thousands of records out there and, more importantly, Victor’s songs are remembered in the minds of all. Who can forget Just Like They Kill Blacks Today or We Shall Prevail, the anthem of the Socialist movement? Won’t people keep singing The Right to Live in Peace and I Remember You, Amanda long after his death? I’m sure that as opposition to the military regime grows, the masses will continue to play and sing his songs of defiance. Singers from throughout Latin America pay homage to his repertoire. With the passage of time, the people of Chile will move to oust Pinochet from power and Chileans will once again scream out ‘We shall prevail!’”
***
Victor was always accompanied by his faithful Viridiana, strapped about his father’s old red poncho as he crisscrossed Chile to collect the folkloric peasant songs he wanted to save for all posterity, songs of love and joy, despair and ruin, hope and betrayal. Soon he realized that many of the campesino ballads sang of suffering and oppression and remembered how his father used to chafe every time he had to say “Yes, sir!” to his hacendado. Victor’s investigation would lead him to mine for Chile’s folklore not only in the most hidden rural hamlets but also in the shantytowns which surrounded Chile’s cities. After all, the barriadas[8] were full of former campesinos who had brought their music with them. And in the process of learning the tonadas[9] of the marginados[10], he gradually became more comfortable composing his own music and playing it on his ever present companion Viridiana. He considered his songs as authentic Chilean folklore, like those of his north star Violeta Parra, founder of La Nueva Cancion Chilena[11], who saw her works as a continuum and not a replacement of the songs passed on from generation to generation by the peasants. Her songs, To Be Seventeen Again and I Thank You, Life, were no less Chilean folklore than the songs once taught to Victor by his mother. He considered Violeta Parra’s eventual suicide in part as a reaction to the collective despair of the campesino which she had sung about for years. After all, she had died lying on her guitar after shooting herself in the head. Not long after Victor began his investigation, one of the peasant songs he collected – A Sigh Has Escaped Me – was included in a record titled The Folklore of Chile. Although Victor didn’t know it at the time, he was on the road to becoming a genuine Chilean folklorista[12], but before he could do so he had to immerse himself in the music of the peasant. He also had to share their misery with them and remember memories of his own childhood which he had long sought to suppress. .
When he first arrived at Ichabamba, he met with the leader of the village and told him he was in town to collect indigenous songs sung by the peasants. The mayor responded that most of the townsfolk preferred the music of contemporary crooners like Lucho Gatica, Raphael and Sandro and that very few remembered the tonadas of the past. With the arrival of the transistor radio, said the mayor, the youth of Ichabamba had lost any interest in the ballads of their forefathers. They were more interested in the music promoted by the capital’s elites. But then the mayor remembered don Nicanor and beamed a smile.
“You know what you should do?” he asked. “Go to the small brick home of don Nicanor next to the river where he lives with his daughter and ask him to help you. Don Nicanor is almost eighty years old and well remembers the songs of old.”
Victor made his way along the river, with the Andes towering overhead, with a local Indian guiding him and Viridiana hanging from his left shoulder as she always did. When the two men arrived, they found a lone woman in her sixties feeding the guinea pigs and tending to the crops in a small lot adjacent to the house. She spoke Spanish with a Mapuche accent but easily understood her visitor’s purpose. She emphasized that her octogenarian father should be paid a propina[13] if he was to agree to an interview. Victor quickly accepted the woman’s offer – she only demanded a few pesos after all – and he was ushered into the home where don Nicanor’s daughter immediately brought him and his guide two glasses of chicha. Victor was astonished by the poverty of the place, so much worse than the house he shared with his parents and six siblings during his childhood. He found don Nicanor lying on a straw mat in the middle of the house’s only room with a bacenica at his side. He had the potty with him because he couldn’t walk to the outhouse in the backyard and didn’t have a wheelchair to help him get there. Victor correctly divined that the old man had only recently used the bacenica as it was full of fecal matter. Although don Nicanor was old and frail, and spent all day lying on the floor, he was in full use of his faculties and still had a stentorian voice.
“How can I help you?” asked don Nicanor. “My daughter said you have some questions for me.”
“Both my parents were peasants but I’m now a musician living in Santiago. I want to preserve the songs of our forefathers and want to collect them so that they can continue to be sung. The mayor advised me you know many such songs.”
“I’m very pleased by your endeavor,” responded don Nicanor. “I was certain that those songs were going to die with me. Where do you want me to begin? I remember more than thirty ballads I can share with you. I’m afraid our young people have no interest in peasant tonadas. They’re more interested in the music of gringos with long hair.”
“Do you have the songs written down somewhere?” asked Victor.
“I’m illiterate,” responded don Nicanor.
“What do you say if we begin with songs of love?”
“Palomita, palomita,” started don Nicanor. “Little bird, little dove, where have you gone? I can’t use the heavens to pursue you as you know that I can’t fly. Little bird, little dove, why do you ignore my plaintive cry? I can’t use my wings as you know that they are clipped. Little bird, little dove, where is your nest located now? I cannot reach the branches of tall trees with feet that cannot climb.”
“That’s marvelous,” said Victor once don Nicanor had finished his tonada. “Now let’s see how it sounds when your voice is accompanied by Viridiana.”
“Viridiana?” echoed don Nicanor.
“That’s the name of my guitar.”
During the rest of the afternoon, don Nicanor sang a number of other love songs of the Mapuche peoples while Victor tried to accompany him on the guitar. They went over Mariquita, Mariquita, The Enamored Guinea Pig, Sleeping I’m Looking at You, Love Beyond the Mines, I Remember You Roxana, and many others. All in all don Nicanor taught Victor a dozen peasant songs of passion and sexual love. But near the end of the music session the octogenarian man complained because he felt that by focusing on songs of love Victor wasn’t collecting a complete collection of the Indians’ repertoire.
“You must teach Viridiana to sing not only songs of love but also songs of war. The ancestors of the modern-day Mapuche peoples were the Araucanians and they resisted the Spanish onslaught for centuries. Unlike the Incas and other indigenous tribes, the Araucanians kept their independence until the nineteenth century and even then weren’t completely defeated.”
“I had no intention of only making a record of the Mapuche songs of love. I’m very interested in the Indians’ songs of war. I just thought we’d leave them for tomorrow.”
“I didn’t realize,” said don Nicanor, “that you intended to be back tomorrow. I know my daughter will ask for another propina but given how important your work is I shall charge you nothing. You must immortalize our people’s poems of defiance. You must let Viridiana play them throughout Chile. The people must not forget.”
“Can you give me an example? Then tomorrow we can go through some more.”
“Sure, there’s one called Araucanian Mother. It is about the Mapuche rebel Lautaro, who defeated the Spaniards in many battles in the sixteenth century before they killed him.”
“Please go ahead.”
Don Nicanor began to sing.
“Araucanian mother,
In your womb was gestated Lautaro
Rugged and hard of mien
At your breast suckled the Mapuche warrior
Who would avenge your death
You did not live long enough
To see his defeat of the Spanish usurper
For you were killed before his fifteenth year
Pedro de Valdivia cut off your hands
Before he put your head on a metal spike
But Lautaro did not forget
Valdivia enslaved your son and
Made him his page
Lautaro pledged retribution
And gathered an army once he escaped
He routed Valdivia at Fort Tucamel
With Lautaro six thousand men
Massacred the peninsulares
And brought Valdivia to his death
Araucanian mother,
Your son was murdered at Malaquito
But he didn’t lose the war
In your womb were gestated
A million warriors
Who continued Lautaro’s quest
To oust the white man from Araucania…”
“That sounds like a modern-day cancion de protesta[14],” opined Victor once don Nicanor finished his song.
“We Indians have been singing songs of protest for the last four centuries,” said don Nicanor, “ever since the hooves of the Spaniards’ horses first landed on Chilean soil. It’s just that the white man never listened to them or, having heard them, decided to ignore them. Now I hear the new canciones de protesta on my transistor radio – it’s my only luxury – and I hear the rebellious composers from Santiago. I applaud them for championing the cause of the exploited campesino and decrying the subhuman condition of the peasant, but grow close to despair realizing nothing has changed in four hundred years.”
That was the day Victor made the irrevocable decision to become a Communist with the stalwart Viridiana as his ally. After four hundred years, there had to be another option.
***
“How did you even find him?” Quena asked as four men arrived at the cemetery with a casket where Victor would be interred.
“A young worker at the morgue was a big fan of Victor and he recognized his face. He hurried over to my house and told me they meant to bury him in a common grave, along with hundreds of other victims of the newly established regime. So we made haste and visited the morgue to recover his cadaver. What we found was gruesome beyond belief, hundreds of dead bodies piled up one above the other, all of them visibly tortured, a nightmare from a horror movie or a scene from Dante’s Inferno. That is when I saw Victor and first realized what the military had done to his hands. Seeing their mangled state made me feel like vomiting, the bloodied stubs where his agile fingers had once been.”
***
Soon Victor became part of a musical group dedicated to Chilean folklore named Cuncumen. The group became vastly popular in a country where the average youth was more interested in American rock and roll than in the songs of protest of the campesinos. With Cuncumen, Victor played across the length and breadth of Chile, and engaged in a five-month tour of Europe which included the Soviet Union where he made his first solo appearance and was favorably received with three thousand spectators listening to him play The Prayer of a Peasant and other songs on the strings of Viridiana. But the trip that most inspired him and would determine the course of his life was a foray to Cuba, not long after the revolution, where he met none other than Che Guevara. After Che Guevara’s assassination by the CIA in Bolivia Victor wrote a lovely and furious song in his honor, The One Who Appeared..
Victor was supposed to meet with Fidel Castro, but Victor’s Havana concert lasted longer than originally anticipated, such that by the time of its conclusion El Jefe was busy with other matters. But at the time of the appointment another man appeared, thin and bearded, with a beret decorated by a single star covering his longish hair.
“I’m Che Guevara,” he said. “I’ve heard a lot about you and a few months ago a Chilean visitor brought us two records with some of your songs. I think they’re revolutionary in the best sense of the word. I should tell you we foment revolutionary music in Cuba.”
“I’m glad you liked them. It’s all I can do to bring Communism and freedom to our martyred nation.”
“The committed artist, the committed songwriter,” said Che Guevara, “is as dangerous as a guerrillero.[15]”
“Do you really think so? A man like you risked his life to bring Communism to Cuba and the rumor is that you intend to bring it to the rest of Latin America. By contrast, all I do is strum my trusty guitar and sing. I’m not about to sacrifice my life in the service of the revolution.”
“You’d be surprised at how powerful a song can be. You are raising the awareness of the oppressed classes and that is an inestimable bounty. Before a revolution can succeed, the proletariat must be conscious of the unjust conditions in which they live. You have to rouse the peasant from his slumber, from his fatalism, and your songs do that in a powerful way. Let me tell you something you should not soon forget. In the hands of the Communist artist, the revolutionary song is a weapon of war. Your guitar serves the grand Communist cause.”
“Still, I’d like to have the courage to do more, to take up arms like Father Camilo Torres Restrepo[16] of Colombia and like you.”
“Different people have different roles in a revolution,” responded Che Guevara. “Your songs of protest reach millions and achieve a lot more than you could ever accomplish with a rifle. Your guitar is more potent than a hundred carbines. And don’t be so sure that you’re not risking your life in the process. At some point, one of your songs shall be a song too many for the Chilean oligarchy. And then they will crush you with all their might.”
“I’m afraid you’re giving me more importance than I have.”
“Don’t believe for a moment that the Yankees and their minions in Latin America aren’t aware of the vast power of music. They do everything possible to muzzle American singers who decry the war in Vietnam or celebrate the Cuban Revolution. Don’t forget for a minute that they understand the value of music as propaganda. You must realize that the reason they export so much of their popular music to Latin America is to convey a subtle political message. I call it a process of cultural colonization. They deceive the masses by proclaiming the American Dream with all its unnecessary amenities is an alternative to the Revolution. They offer a dream and deliver a nightmare.”
“I’m afraid my ditties don’t amount to much as revolutionary propaganda,” responded Victor. “They’re mostly peasant tonadas with a very subtle message. Sure, the subtext is insurrection, but I’m afraid much of that goes over the heads of my listeners. As far as the songs I compose myself, I’m afraid they don’t amount to much. I think I’m preaching to the converted so I’m not so sure my Viridiana does anything to help give birth to a revolution.”
“Then push yourself, Victor Jara. Push yourself in a revolutionary direction. Let your lyrics be the bullets that fell the enemy. Let your guitar become a machine gun in your hands. And don’t be afraid to sing your songs to the sons and daughters of the oligarchy. You never know who might be converted to the cause.”
***
“I fell in love with Victor because of his hands, callused like those of a campesino,” Joan confessed to Quena. “But it was not just because they were manly and beautiful. The main reason I was seduced by his two hands was the way he played his trusty instrument, whom he called his compañera and which he likened to a lover. With his brown and elongated fingers, the guitar shaped like a woman came alive and became Viridiana. It seemed that the wooden instrument and his masculine hands were like a single entity, jointly producing songs of love and protest. Like a woman, Victor’s guitar expressed joy, passion, despair and grief. Joined by his voice, Victor’s Viridiana denounced every injustice, made a desperate cry of defiance, proclaimed the status quo was not acceptable in Chile. Near the end, most of his new songs challenged those who opposed Allende’s Communist government. And those in the oligarchy detested him for it.”
“His music made him an enemy in their eyes.”
“At the time, the use of Indian instruments was in vogue among left-leaning Chilean canta-autores[17] – the charango, the quena, and the champolla – but Victor never abandoned his guitar. The fact he was using a Spanish instrument did not mean he eschewed indigenous songs and themes. And in his voice, the Indian ballads always reminded his listeners of the oppression of the peasants. In a way, his peasant tonadas presaged the Communist turn his songs would eventually take.”
***
Over the years, Victor’s songs became increasingly more strident, increasingly political, frankly espousing a left-wing populist message. But it was the massacre at Puerto Montt that proved to be a tipping point not only for himself but also for the oligarchy in power. Never again would Victor shy away from calling out the enemy by name, never again would the oligarchy shy away from fiercely persecuting Victor. The lines were drawn and it was war. Victor’s weapons, as always, were his hands and his ever present companion Viridiana. The oligarchy’s weapons – at first – were their newspapers and radio stations which quite publicly protested that Victor was a subversive and an agent of international Communism, especially of Cuba. The purpose of the ever worsening accusations, thought Victor, was to move a right-wing fanatic to assassinate him.
“Chile is a democracy,” said President Eduardo Frei, “and Victor Jara is acting as if it were a gulag.”
The massacre at Puerto Montt happened after three-hundred peasants occupied a vacant property owned by the Irigoin family, well-placed members of Chile’s upper classes. Edmundo Perez Zujovic, minister of the interior in the government of Eduardo Frei, ordered that the peasants vacate the property. When they declined to do so, he sent two hundred agents of the Grupo Movil de Carabinieros[18] to dislodge them through force of arms. The leader of Zujovic’s Carabinieros screamed out through a bullhorn that if the peasants did not leave, they would be indiscriminately shot. The campesinos did not believe him and refused to move. Pandemonium soon ensued as the soldiers discharged their machine guns against those who had occupied the property and burnt down their modest dwellings made of straw. The people of Chile were incensed by the massacre and protested in massive numbers. A hundred thousand Chileans took to the streets to denounce the killing. At their head was Victor Jara, who had written a special song for the occasion, Questions About Puerto Montt. It was by far his most direct attack against the oligarchy in power and he accused Zujovic of being responsible for the massacre by name. He was quite openly spitting in the faces of those in power. Never before had Victor played his music before such a multitudinous crowd. Never had his message been more transcendent or defiant.
Victor’s song begins with a question directed to those who killed the peasants and caused many to lose their loved ones during the massacre at Puerto Momtt. He asks about those who had died without knowing the reasons for their death, those who were shot in the chest merely for seeking a place to live. Immediately the next stanza denounces the one who ordered the killing, the “despicable politician” who directed the massacre without rhyme or reason or excuse. Then a refrain is repeated several times, Oh Puerto Montt! Oh Puerto Montt! Oh Puerto Montt! before Victor turns to the meat of his message, addressing Zujovic directly. “You must answer for the massacre you ordered, Mister Zujovic,” says the song. Victor demands that Zujovic explain why his soldiers used carbines against a defenseless people. Finally, Victor, echoing Lady Macbeth’s lament[19] and again using Zujovic’s name, tells him his hands will not be cleaned of the peasants’ blood even with all the waters of the Pacific Ocean.
Everything changed after the public rendering of Questions About Puerto Montt. Those on the right decided that Victor was a dangerous subversive, that he wanted to make Chile a Marxist country, and that his songs of protest were thinly veiled Communist messages. Never mind that Questions About Puerto Montt said nothing that could be interpreted as Marxist given that all it did was denounce the horrors of a massacre organized at the direction of Edmundo Perez Zujovic, a member of the supposedly centrist Christian Democratic Party. Nevertheless, the song definitely had a subtext which was not palatable to the ruling elite. Soon Victor began receiving accusatory messages in the mail: go back to Cuba, Communist dog! Chile doesn’t need any Marxist pigs! You should have been killed at Puerto Montt along with all the traitorous peasants whom you so adore! Victor began to worry about walking in public and more than once was physically attacked by those who opposed what they perceived to be his hardcore Communist message. On one occasion, he barely escaped with his life as a group of right-wing marauders managed to encircle him and pummel him with their fists. Victor was filled with terror, afraid of being killed and felt a primal fear that they might destroy Viridiana. In the end, after throwing a few punches himself, Victor managed to escape and held his Viridiana close to his chest. His right-wing assailants had not realized that without Viridiana he would have been unable to sing Questions About Puerto Montt to the multitudinous masses with the same passion he exhibited. Victor recognized that he could have sung accompanied by another guitar, but it would not have been the same without his lover Viridiana.
Somewhat naively, Victor did not understand the full extent to which the oligarchy believed that Questions About Puerto Montt was a Communist anthem. So when he was invited to a conference on music and culture at Saint George’s College, a school run by American religious, he readily agreed to participate. He knew that the school was where the sons of the oligarchy were groomed to become the leaders of the nation – bankers, hacendados, politicians, industrialists – but he remembered Che Guevara’s admonition that he preach not only to the converted but also to those on the other side of the aisle.
After various professors gave their opinions on contemporary Chilean folk music, carefully avoiding any discussion about songs of protest, Victor was led to the stage armed with his guitar and asked to sing a few of his songs. There were eight-hundred students in attendance including Francisco Perez Yoma, the son of the man detested by Victor, Edmundo Perez Zujovic. The sociology professor who had invited him was sure he would sing his most apolitical songs – Let Life Fly, Dove I Want To Tell You, The Little Cigarette – but Victor had other intentions. After singing The Right To Live In Peace, a paean to Ho Chi Minch, and The One Who Appeared, an homage to Che Guevara,some among the students became restive, waiting to hear Victor’s songs of love and peasant tonadas instead of odes to the Communist figures they so detested. A few in the crowd booed and hooted and more than one threw an egg at Victor, protected by his dependable Viridiana. Victor did not desist but doubled down. He sang Movil Oil Special, a song that criticized the soldiers in the Movil units that attacked Puerto Montt while simultaneously inveighing against Mobil Oil Company, the American corporation. The crowds became more vocal and some hollered, “Communist pig!” and sundry insults and obscenities. But that did not lead Victor to avoid singing Questions About Puerto Montt, the last song he was prepared to sing and which he launched at his listeners like a grenade. It was what Victor called a cancion-fusil, a rifle-song, and he knew to whom it was aimed.
The students were not naïve enough to think that the questions about Puerto Montt were directed only at minister Zujovic. In some way, they were accusations leveled against all those in power, including the students’ parents, a complaint against the ruling elite who benefited from the oppression of the peasants and could only live in luxury because of Chile’s rigid hierarchy of class. Suddenly, before letting him finish his song, someone hurled a large stone at him which damaged Viridiana. Victor, furious about the attack on his partner, continued singing to the end. Mister Zujovic, he proclaimed, not all the waters of the Pacific Ocean will clean off the blood on your hands. The angry students heard the subtext and were inflamed. Rich men of Chile, they understood, not all the waters of the Pacific Ocean will clean off the blood on your hands. A volley of rocks ensued and Victor was quickly ushered off the stage by a small group of students who had applauded him while at the same time a group led by Perez Yoma approached him with the intention to assault him for singing his explosive music. After he escaped with his life, Victor was content that at least some in the crowd had responded positively to his message but he worried about repairing his guitar. Little did he know at the time that his penultimate song, Manifesto, would be a love song celebrating Viridiana.
***
“Didn’t Victor suspect something like this might happen?” Quena asked as the gravediggers began to put the casket in the ground. “I mean especially near the end, when it was almost certain the generals were about to oust Allende from power.”
“If he felt any fear about it, he never expressed it to me. Otherwise why would he go to the Technical University and join the students? I don’t think he would have avoided participating in such a vigil because of the danger to his own life. But he loved me and our two daughters dearly and wouldn’t risk abandoning us through his death, especially at such a critical time in the country’s history.”
“Who would have thought this would happen in Chile, with our long progressive traditions? We can never forget that unlike other Latin American countries, Chile was blessed by four decades of democratic stability.”
“Hitler came to power in one of the most cultured countries of the world,” responded Joan.
***
In January of 1970, the Unidad Nacional, a coalition of various left-wing parties, selected Salvador Allende as its standard bearer in the upcoming elections for the Presidency of Chile. The previous President, Eduardo Frei, had run on a platform promising the nationalization of the copper mines operated by the North Americans as well as meaningful agrarian reform, but at the end of the day the leader of the Christian Democratic Party had accomplished neither. Allende was poised to become the first Latin American Marxist rising to power by electoral means. Faced by the massive strength of Allende’s mighty right-wing opposition and their near complete control of all public media – they had once falsely and viciously accused Victor of child molesting – Victor decided to fill in the breach and organized rallies en masse where he played songs of protest on his guitar to enthusiastic throngs.
Victor prepared Allende’s anthem, ¡Venceremos!, which repeated again and again, “We shall prevail! We shall prevail! A thousand prisons we shall demolish.” Sometimes in his vast rallies he sang with the most unlikely allies, like the Clowns of Ho Chi Minh. He also sung before small groups of factory workers, peasants, miners and students, imploring them to support Allende and his unity government, assuring them there is no revolution without song. Gone were the days when he busied himself with ballads of love. Gone were the days when he rescued Indian tonadas. During the campaign for Allende’s election, all of Victor’s songs were political and unabashedly Communist. He was no longer a songwriter who happened to be a Communist. He became a Communist who happened to be a songwriter. And he knew that the people in power in Santiago and Washington, D.C. were watching. In a premonitory statement, Victor warned a group of student militants, even before Allende had won the election, that the Chilean people should be wary of the jackboot of the American Pentagon and the machinations of Nixon’s CIA. But then he added with joy and determination, “¡Venceremos! ¡Venceremos! ¡Venceremos! We shall prevail!”
During the campaign, Victor was in his element, like a fish in the water, mixing art with politics. Not only did he sing his songs of defiance in front of multitudinous masses assembled at La Plaza de la Constitucion, but he also joined the muralist brigades of Ramona Parra, painting lightning murals with a group of artists on every wall representing the right wing that they could find. Victor had been initially approached with the idea of joining the artist-rebels by Oscar Sifuentes, a Chilean man who had worked for years in Mexico under David Alfaro Siqueiros, the country’s most celebrated muralist. Victor was intrigued by the idea of using graffiti as a weapon of war. It was another means to put art at the service of Allende’s Communist campaign. Sifuentes advised him that the muralist brigades would look for places representing the upper classes – private clubs, fancy restaurants, even the individual homes of rich Chileans – and would “attack” them in the middle of the night. If there was a guachiman[20], they would quickly spray paint the names of Salvador Allende, Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh on the wall and immediately depart. Where there was no guard, they spent hours painting a mural depicting their Communist heroes surrounded by beaming children.
“But you must cover your face with a handkerchief or a ski mask whenever we go on one of our expeditions,” Sifuentes said to Victor. “At times, the owners of the places we attack immediately call the thugs of Patria y Libertad[21] – the fascist paramilitary group with an image of a black spider on their chests – and they use their truncheons to force us to leave the site. If one of them were to recognize you – not unlikely given your great fame – they would pummel you to death with their bare hands.”
On Victor’s first night with the brigades, Sifuentes announced that they would “attack” the Santiago Golf Club, a members-only venue where only the wealthiest Chileans were admitted. Per Sifuentes’ instructions Victor decided to cover up his face. Of course the golf club had armed guards, but they could not protect the entire perimeter of the golf course and the muralists could not be seen in the darkness of the night. The painter-rebels decided to work on a grand mural on one of the walls surrounding the club, not only depicting their three favorite Communists but also the Araucanian rebels Lautaro and Caupolican. Given Victor’s lack of experience as a visual artist, Sifuentes asked him to limit himself to writing “Venceremos” at the bottom of the mural.
When they were almost finished with the mural, the thugs of Patria y Libertad appeared, apparently summoned by the guards of the golf club who preferred not to confront the muralists themselves. The fascist group came with handguns and billy clubs, but Sifuentes and two other painters had taken the precaution of bringing pistols with them. A volley of gunfire ensued as the two groups both discharged their weapons. Victor rushed to the vehicle that had brought him to the club and managed to avoid the shots fired by Patria y Libertad in the middle of the night. On his way to the car, however, he tripped over the body of Valentin Dominguez, a young painter who was among the best visual artists Chile had to offer. Victor uttered a Heaven-rending cry. He had never seen the cadaver of a man killed by violence. Despite the fact Valentin was already dead, Victor took the twenty-year-old by the arms and tried to take him to the car. On the way, he was struck in the back of the head by the truncheon of one of his sworn enemies. As he fell bloodied to the ground, he lost the handkerchief about his face and was immediately recognized.
“Victor Jara!” cried out one of the members of Patria y Libertad as he pointed his pistol at the celebrated singer-songwriter. “Filthy Communist,” he said, “be prepared to die!”
But when the would-be assassin tried to discharge his gun, he discovered it was jammed, giving Sifuentes the opportunity to shoot him. Thereafter Victor continued to work with the muralist brigades, never again at the peril of his life. In some ways it was a Sysiphean task as the Communist murals and graffiti were painted over almost immediately after they had been completed. With thousands of lightning muralists, however, Chile was full of images of Salvador Allende, Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh which appeared overnight in every corner of the country.
***
“Are you planning to leave the country, Joan?”
“Yes, I must. I’m simply not safe in Chile any more. And even our daughters Manue and Mandy are in danger. Like so many others the choice is stark: exile or death. At least I have a British passport and can find refuge in England.”
“What a macabre world,” said Quena, “where one must even worry about the fate of children.”
“I guess the men I’ve hired have finished with their job. It’s the time to bury Victor. I want to bury him with his inseparable guitar, his lifelong compañera. Perhaps in Heaven he shall sing ‘We Shall Prevail’ again and his hands won’t be mangled and crimson red as they are now.”
“I’m surprised you’re burying the guitar with him. I would think you’d like to save it as a keepsake. It belongs in a museum, not in the Cementerio General[22].”
“You have to understand that Viridiana went everywhere with him, to Mexico and Czechoslovakia, to Cuba and the United States, even to the heights of Machu Picchu. And now that he’s making his final journey, I think his lovely Viridiana should go with him. Woe to me who will not be the one to join him.”
“He always used the same guitar, didn’t he?”
“Ever since he started singing she’s been with him. You should know that his last song was a tribute to Viridiana.”
“What did he say?”
“He said that he sang because his guitar had both passion and logic, that she made manifest the core of the land and the flight of a hummingbird, that Viridiana was like holy water blessing love and happiness and pain. He called her a tireless guitar with the aroma of a wild garden verbena and that she was not made for the wealthy but was a ladder for the destitute to reach the heavens. And he called his ode to Viridiana, his penultimate song, his ‘Manifesto.’”
“Those bastards,” Quena said again. “How could they have killed a man with such feeling?”
“In their mind they considered him a killer too. Do you know that Edmundo Perez Zujovic, the man accused of murder in Questions About Puerto Montt, was eventually assassinated by a young Communist militant? Perhaps it is not entirely delusional to say Victor incited the assassin. After all, in his song Victor demanded that Zujovic be held accountable for the massacre at Puerto Montt. What could that mean if not a justifiable order to kill?”.
***
On September 4, 1970, Salvador Allende was declared the President-elect of Chile after besting the two other candidates for office. For some, including Victor, it was a moment of unbridled euphoria. For others, it was an occasion to rend their garments. From the beginning, the Chilean left celebrated his success while those on the right plotted his demise. The Chilean right predicted that a Marxist in the Moneda Palace could only bring chaos to the country and soon bank accounts were closed, businesses were shuttered, and many wealthy persons immediately moved everything to Miami. Everyone – both those on the right and the left – wondered to what extent Allende would keep his outlandish promises to take the mines from America multinationals and the properties of the landed gamonales[23]. When Allende boldly nationalized the Kennecott, Cerro and Braden copper mines, previously owned by the Americans, all the people’s questions were answered. Allende designated the occasion as the Day of the National Dignity and refused to indemnify the American companies on the grounds that they had been deriving illegal and excessive profits belonging to the people of Chile for decades. Victor accompanied Allende to the mining town of Rancagua, where the Braden copper mine had been located, and delivered a rousing medley of his most transcendent works, including The Miner’s Song.” The miners responded with a round of applause, recognizing that now the mines belonged to them and not the American corporations who sucked them dry. But that was the beginning of Allende’s ruin. The American corporations were not about to see what they considered massive theft at the hands of the Communists go unpunished.
It did not take long for Victor to realize the extent of the power of America’s copper mining companies.
There was no toothpaste in the stores.
One had to stay in line for hours to get a gallon of gasoline.
People were told to eat fish as meat was unavailable.
After going to the bathroom, one had to use newspapers rather than toilet paper.
The Kennecott Mining Company, once owner of vast mines in Antofagasta, had persuaded the Nixon administration to impose an international embargo on Chilean copper. Since copper represented two-thirds of Chile’s total exports, the entire economy was affected by the embargo. There were runs on Chilean banks and hyperinflation as everything was more expensive than it had been before Allende took over. As a response to the situation, the owners of truck fleets ordered their truckers to go on strike, further paralyzing the economy. The most basic products were available only on the black market if they were available at all. A hundred thousand upper and middle-class women took to the streets, banging their cacerolas, their pots and pans, and demanded the ouster of the Marxist government. Victor concluded that there was a conspiracy between Chile’s ruling elites and the American multinationals to destroy Allende’s grand Communist experiment, so he decided to take action. This time his weapons were his arms and back as opposed to his hands and Viridiana. He collaborated with a vast group of members of Allende’s Popular Unity Party to load basic foodstuffs onto trains so they could be distributed throughout the country despite the truckers’ strike. He carried huge loads of flour on his back so they could reach those who most needed them. Using vehicles borrowed from some of his Communist confreres, he personally visited farms where produce was lying uselessly on the ground as there was no means to take it to market. But despite everything he and thousands of others did, it was clearly not enough. Without gasoline, there was very little that could be transported and the rallies on the streets against the Allende regime swelled on the streets of Santiago and throughout the country. The leftists responded in kind and Victor sang his songs to a million people in front of the Moneda Palace who repeatedly chanted, “Allende, Allende, la gente te defiende![24]” But despite their massive numbers there was very little the leftists could do to defend Allende. There was a reason the United States Army had established the Latin American Training Center at Panama, a reason why the generals of Latin America were trained by the American military. Victor knew it was for situations such as these, to crush the Communist usurper whenever and wherever it reared its ugly head.
“There is going to be a golpe de estado[25],” he grimly told his wife. “An American aircraft carrier has appeared off the port of Valparaiso. What purpose could it have other than to support a coup d’etat and enable the Chilean military to use the most modern planes and missiles to bomb the Moneda Palace?”
***
“I wish the coup had happened on the tenth of September 1973 rather than the eleventh,” Joan said to Quena. “That way Victor would have been with me and we could all have gone into clandestinity. We could have hidden somewhere and then escaped the country.”
“I thought you said Victor would have stayed and fought.”
“Well, maybe he would have, but he would have done it in on his own terms. He wouldn’t have been slaughtered like a hog in the Chile Stadium. Perhaps he would finally have fought with a rifle instead of a guitar. And I’m sure he would have given his rifle the name of a beautiful woman.”
“You saw it all, didn’t you? You saw what was happening.”
“That’s when I realized my Victor was in mortal danger. I actually heard the military planes flying to bomb the Moneda Palace, looked out the window and saw the fighter jets as they zoomed very close to the ground. And within minutes I heard the insistent booms caused by the exploding bombs as they pulverized the Presidential Palace, followed by a dense smoke that could be seen for many kilometers. Then I saw the helicopters flying toward Allende’s private residence on Tomas Moro Avenue with the obvious intention of bombing it too. I frantically turned on the radio to try to figure out what was happening and heard President Allende giving his valedictory address. He sounded calm despite the situation and said he would never surrender to the traitorous military even as the walls of the Casa de la Moneda fell all about him and the constant explosions could be heard loudly through the airwaves. ‘We may be defeated today,’ he said, ‘but the dream of a socialist Chile remains. I speak of the dream of ending malnutrition among the children, the dream that our natural resources shall belong to the people of Chile and not their American taskmasters, the dream that our peasants will be given a fair wage and our miners will work in safety. The dream is not forgotten although it may be deferred. Venceremos!”
Although I suppose he wasn’t done with his speech, it was suddenly cut off and replaced by martial music, the music of those who vanquish as opposed to those who number among the vanquished. A few hours later, General Pinochet came on the radio to announce ‘the traitor’ was dead and that Communism in Chile would be eradicated forever. They said Allende committed suicide although I’m not sure that I believe it. My suspicion is that he died fighting, like any guerrillero. I wish that he had left behind a written testimonio like my Victor did.”
“What did Victor leave behind?”
“During the four horrendous days he spent at the Chile Stadium, he actually had the presence of mind to write one final song. I found it in the pockets of his pants, titled simply Chile Stadium. I’m not sure if he deemed it finished in his mind, but if my daughters and I ever leave this martyred country, I shall have it set to music, perhaps by Inti-Illimani’s quenas, charangos and champollas. Not surprisingly, he refers to the ten thousand hands that had been trapped, for he always saw the people’s hands as an instrument of battle, either to play a song, paint a mural or wield a rifle. He wrote of ten thousand hands that plant the seeds and work the factories, ten thousand hands that would never again be allowed to produce anything. The ten-thousand hands represented the five thousand people who had been rounded up at the Estadio Chile expecting to be killed. At the time he wrote the song, he could not have imagined that his own two hands would be destroyed completely – peasant hands, musician hands, rebel hands, lover’s hands. But somehow he understood that one way or another he would be killed by Pinochet’s military regime, for he declares that to the soldiers blood is the equivalent of honors, massacres are an act of courage.”
“The bastards!” exclaimed Quena as she and Joan prepared to leave the cemetery.
***
On the day after the coup, the Technical University where Victor and others were taking refuge was surrounded by General Pinochet’s tanks. Forty black buses also appeared as well as more than a hundred soldiers. Rather than going in through a door, the soldiers bombed a wall and entered brandishing their truncheons and machine guns. All of those in the Technical University – more than six-hundred men, women and children – were ordered to put their hands behind their heads and to march onto the buses intended to take them to the Chile Stadium. The soldiers screamed their orders, laced with obscenities and denunciations of Communism, and did not hesitate to use their billy clubs whenever they felt someone was too slow in following their directions. Most of the rank and file were men of peasant stock like Victor, brothers to the Indians who were crushed by the oligarchy. Victor knew that they were men like his father, accustomed to say “Yes, sir!,” and that for the first time in their lives they had a measure of power from which they derived a macabre satisfaction. Now it was the students and the leftist militants who had to say “Yes, sir!” if they did not want to be killed. During that first day after the coup d’etat, thousands were murdered by the military throughout Chile.
The Chile Stadium was only a few blocks away from the university. Once the detainees arrived, they were ordered to stand in line so that they could be processed. Victor thought of providing a false name as he correctly deduced that the soldiers would have a special rancor for him. However, as soon as he appeared in front of Colonel Gunther Grossmann, he was immediately recognized.
“Mister Jara,” said Grossman with a malignant grin, “what a delight to find you here. Have you perchance brought your guitar? This is the place where you’ve sung your songs of insurrection many times.”
“This is no longer a place for music,” responded Victor dryly, “nor soccer matches for that matter. Now that you know who I am, please let me join the others.”
“For now, you will,” said Grossmann derisively. “Eventually you shall be sent to an underground vault where we keep all the dangerous subversives. Had you had your way, Chile would have been transformed into another East Germany.”
“All the countries of Eastern Europe are better off under Communist rule.”
“East Germany is a hellhole. I know what that means because I’ve lived there. My family escaped from East Berlin on a refrigerated truck under the carcasses of slaughtered and stuffed pigs.”
“I’ve been to East Berlin,” said Victor. “I sang to thousands of people. My impression was that the people were happy, that everyone was in solidarity with one another.”
Hoffmann became suddenly incensed. He immediately struck Victor’s face with his billy club. Victor fell to the ground with a bloodied head.
“Don’t tell me how great East Germany is,” Hoffman said angrily, “because you spent a week there feted by those in power. I spent years there, saw the people tyrannized and oppressed. And that is what you wanted for Chile. Now sing your songs, Victor Jara, let me hear you sing Venceremos now. You and your fellow Communists aren’t the ones who prevailed, were they?.”
“We shall prevail,” Victor began as he stood up. “We shall prevail against all odds.” Before he could continue, Hoffmann struck him in the head once again.
“You piece of shit, garbage, less than an animal! I’m going to get you a guitar so that you can sing a complete song for me. I leave it to your discretion as to which song to sing. But it will be your last, no matter what you choose. I dare you to sing Questions About Puerto Montt.We’ll see who dies without knowing the reason why his chest has been riddled with bullets.”
“You really hate the Communists,” muttered Victor as his head and face were eovered in crimson. “You delight in following the orders you have been given.”
“More than you can imagine,” responded Hoffmann. Soon Victor learned that the man was called the ‘prince’ by everyone in the stadium. Blonde-haired, blue-eyed and over six feet tall, the German colonel looked nothing like the brown men who made up the lower echelons of Chile’s army.
“What do you intend to do to me?”
“Nothing for now,” spat out Hoffmann. “At some point my men will take you to a room in the basement of the Stadium where you’ll be joined by all the other dangerous subversives, including Allende’s personal doctor Avellaneda. And you can be guaranteed my soldiers will work you over.”
“Dangerous?” echoed Victor. “All I did was sing some songs.”
“You know better than that, Mister Jara. Do you take me for a fool? If we let you go, you’ll be free to continue to convert the ignorant masses to Communism through your music. It has become commonplace to say your voice and your guitar are more powerful than the shouts of a thousand rebellious peasants. Know that we have already decided to destroy all recordings of your songs. And it shall be a crime to own them, as well as those of Violeta Parra, Inti-Illimani and all those who fall under the umbrella of the Nueva Cancion Chilena, all those Communists masquerading as singers.”
“Can I leave for now? Can I join the others?”
“Go ahead, mix it up with the Communist throngs. Even in the midst of five-thousand people, you can’t hide. I’ll alert you when we bring a guitar so that you can play it for me. I heard your instrument has a name. Will you have a name for the guitar that will be a witness to your punishment at the hands of the patriotic Chilean military?”
“I suppose we shall call her ‘Verdugo.’”
“Why ‘Verdugo’?
“For she along with you shall be my executioner.”
Victor was free to roam the Stadium, surrounded by thousands of others, and briefly thought he could hide among them. But he soon realized it was an empty hope, for all the rank and file soldiers recognized him as well. At one point, one of the soldiers aimed his rifle at Victor and told him to be prepared to die by firing squad. Soon Victor and two others were made to stand against a wall as half a dozen soldiers pointed their guns against them. One of the two captives started wailing while the other defecated in his pants. Victor, for his part, was stoic. He had expected a much worse death than murder by firing squad.
In the end, it had all been a macabre joke. The soldiers had no intention of killing the three captives. They just wanted them to shit in their pants – to do so quite literally. Victor heard the soldiers’ uproarious laughter and wondered why some ordinary men are suddenly transformed into monsters when certain opportunities arise.
While he was waiting for his punishment to be ordered by the “prince,” Victor wrote a song to tell posterity what was happening in the Estadio Chile. He wrote about a man who had been beaten in a way that he would never expect a man to be beaten. He wrote about a man who had plunged to his death to avoid the torture of the soldiers. He wrote about the thousands, nay millions, who would be eliminated by the military regime of General Pinochet. And the song did not end on a note of hope. It ended with a cry of despair.
“Why have all of the songs of love been silenced?”
On his third day at the Stadium, the ‘prince’ finally ordered that Victor be brought to him and his soldiers quickly found the doomed canta-autor among the crowds. The ‘prince’ was waiting for Victor with a guitar in hands and immediately ordered that Victor play one of his songs.
“I have no interest in singing. My Viridiana isn’t with me and never will be with me again. Do with me what you will.”
Hoffmann punched Victor in the eye as two soldiers held the singer by the arms.
“It is not for you to say what you are to do. You are the servant and I the master. What will you sing for us today?”
Victor responded with a bottomless rancor.
“I suppose I’ll sing Questions About Puerto Montt. If you listen carefully, it is not merely an indictment of Perez Zujovic, but also of all those who have led to the ruin of the working class in this country, all those like you who are now destroying Chile.”
“You insolent Red!” cried out the ‘prince.’ “Don’t you realize I now have your life in my hands?”
“I realize that no matter what I say, you’ve already decided to destroy me. But since you asked me to sing, I shall gladly oblige. It is much easier to sing a song of protest than to receive your macanazos[26]. Now give me the guitar that will contribute to my torture.”
Hoffman turned over the guitar to Victor and he began to strum its chords as he sang.
“‘He died without knowing why while seeking a land to live in…”
Victor burst into muffled tears. Then he continued, reading stanzas that could be read as a direct attack on Hoffman.
“Oh what a despicable soldier,” sang Victor, “a man who ordered a massacre when he could have avoided a single shot…”
That is when Hoffmann, furious, suddenly brandished a meat cleaver and mutilated one of Victor’s fingers.
“Keep playing,” he commanded as Victor once again began to weep, but this time loudly as if he was coughing convulsively.
“How can I play without my index finger? It’s impossible. Leave me alone!”
“Let me hear it, Mister Jara.”
With his mutilated hand, Victor continued to play the other stanzas until Hoffmann told him to stop and cut off another one of his fingers. Then he proceeded to cut another one.
“What are you going to do?” asked Victor in a weeping voice full of a bottomless despair. “Do you intend to destroy both my hands?”
“That way you will never again use your guitar as a weapon in the war between the demented Communists and the committed Christians.”
“There is nothing Christian about what you are doing,” responded Victor before the ‘prince’ proceeded to cut off all his fingers with a slow and methodical cruelty.
“Now you must realize that you weren’t playing games when you sang your Communist music to incite the masses,” said the ‘prince.’
“If you want to kill me, do it quickly. It is not only a songwriter you are killing but also music everywhere.”
“I don’t intend to eliminate you now that your hands are useless. Salvador Allende’s own doctor is in the adjoining room and can tend to the wounds on both your hands. But be prepared to return tomorrow. We’re not done with you. We must ensure that you will never record a song again.”
“You’ve already done that. How can I play my Viridiana with the stubs you’ve left where my fingers were?”
“You still have a weapon left,” the ‘prince’ responded coolly . “It is your voice, Mister Jara.”
“What do you have in mind?”
“Do you know the history of your native peoples, Mister Jara? You’re of Mapuche peasant stock and I’m sure you know about it. Have you heard about Hipolito, about Micaela Bastidas, about Tupac Amaru?”
“I know their history,” Victor responded grimly. “You intend to cut my tongue off as happened to those three Indian rebels.”
“And why were the tongues of those three Indians cut?”
“Their mouths were destroyed because they had the audacity to use their voice to resist the Spaniards.”
“You, too, have used your voice to attack those who are rightfully in power. To a man who well understands, few words suffice. Sing your songs tonight among your compañeros for you will never sing again after what I intend to do to you tomorrow.”
Victor went out into the stadium, his hands mangled, his face and body covered with bruises, his left eye so swollen that he could not see through it. Doctor Avellaneda had somehow found the bandages to cover his mutilated hands, the hands he had used so many times to strum on Viridiana, the hands he had used to caress his wife before engaging in the act of love. He walked among the multitudinous crowds massed at the Stadium like an automaton, not knowing what to do or where to go. He knew Hoffmann was sadistic enough to let him live, that life without a voice and hands was worse than death for someone with his talent and vocation. While he was walking aimlessly, some of his Communist confreres addressed him. “What have they done to your face?” they asked. “What have they done to your hands?” Victor kept walking among the throngs as if he could hear nothing, responding to no one. He knew his life as a singer would soon be ending in the most brutal fashion possible, knew also that he couldn’t even continue to compose songs without his hands or tongue. He thought of marching up to the nosebleed seating areas and jumping off to his death as he had seen a man do on the first of his days at the Chile Stadium. But he didn’t do it since he thought suicide was the last refuge of the cowardly. He kept walking without sense or purpose, remembering his wife Joan, his guitar Viridiana, his daughters Manuela and Amanda, recognizing that he could not even raise his daughters in a proper fashion as an invalid. Suddenly he saw one of the entries to the stadium guarded by about a dozen soldiers and decided to make a run for it. It was a madman’s gamble but he wasn’t in the full possession of his senses at the time. All he knew is he needed to escape. He couldn’t bear another session with the ‘prince.’ He couldn’t bear a life without a voice. So he ran through the guards ignoring their repeated shouts to halt.
He made it to the parking lot of the Chile Stadium without being shot. But soon he was crucified with bullets, thirty-three in all. Eventually Inti-Illimani would compose a song titled “Victor is in Heaven” in his honor. After the end of the Pinochet regime, the stadium’s name would be changed to Estadio Victor Jara.
[1] The indigenous people of Chile were called “Mapuches” in the twentieth century. Earlier in history they had been known as the “Araucanians.”
[2] The “hacendados” were the white men who owned and ran the haciendas where the Indians worked.
[3] “A vendimia” is an event where a region’s wines are made available for all to taste, followed by a grand festival and the crowning of a beauty queen.
[4] “Hijo de la gran puta” means whore’s son.
[5] “Campesinos” are peasants.
[6] A “cantora” is a singer who performs at various events.
[7] A “charango” is a small stringed instrument similar to a small guitar.
[8] “Barriadas” are shantytowns.
[9] “Tonadas” are a type of song popular among the peasants of Chile.
[10] The “marginados” are the marginalized.
[11] “La Nueva Cancion Chilena” literally means the New Chilean Song. It is an umbrella term for the folkloric songs of several leftist singers.
[12] A ”folklorista” is a singer of the folk music of the peasants.
[13] A “propina” is a tip.
[14] A “cancion de protesta” is a song of protest. In Latin America, many singers protest against the subjugation of the poor.
[15] A “guerrillero” is a guerrilla.
[16] Camilo Torres Restrepo was a priest who gave up his cassock to become a guerrillero seeking to establish Communism in Colombia.
[17] A “canta-autor’ is a singer-songwriter. Many of the singer-songwriters of the Nueva Cancion Chilena were leftists and Communists.
[18] The “Grupo Movil de Carabinieros” was part of the Chilean military.
[19] “Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from my hand?”
Macbeth, Act II, Scene II
[20] “Guachiman” is a term derived from the English word ”watchman” and means a guard.
[21] “Patria y Libertad” means “Homeland and Liberty.”
[22] The Cementerio General is Santiago’s largest cemetery.
[23] “Gamonales” are owners of haciendas.
[24] “Allende, Allende, the people defend you!”
[25] A “golpe de estado” is a coup d’etat.
[26] “Macanazos” are blows from a truncheon.
