Not more than a few days had passed after Chile’s historic 1988 plebiscite that my parents quickly made plans to return to their homeland. Not that the dictatorship had ever been any reason for them to keep away.
Arriving in the United States in the late 1970s, they hardly were the leftist political refugees that had made up most of Chile’s emigrés in those post-Allende years. My mother, who had no strong feelings either way about the journey, simply followed my father, who had left his studies in jurisprudence, as well as a stable job in their hometown’s city hall to pursue an American adventure (I hesitate to refer to it as his “American Dream”) of dubious merit; in his mind he had erected a hedonistic mosaic that he now wanted to enact in the flesh; composed of Coca-Cola, Studebaker, John Wayne, Brian Wilson songs, and (I have always suspected) scantily-clad beach bunnies who would presumably be awaiting this rakish, new arrival in his late 20s, perhaps willing to overlook his marriage that was then going on its fifth year. Weren’t American girls supposed to be fun, after all?
Despite the distance, the presence of “Pinocho,” as my father often referred to the then Chilean head of state, was never very far away. My father alternated between lavish praise and demonical denunciation as his mercurial moods saw fit. One day, he was the destroyer of democracy; the next, he was the saviour of the nation. Mother, on the other hand, was more consistent—she was an unabashed and steadfast supporter, no surprise coming from the eldest daughter of a family with a longstanding military tradition.
Chile is an anomaly among Latin American nations in that its authorities are largely free of corruption, and are therefore widely respected. Even to this day, polls in the country regularly demonstrate that the military and carabineros—the national police—are the most trusted branches of the government. For years, Chileans had considered that those guilty of the excesses committed during the Régimen Militar were other people; not our neighbors, not our fathers, not our sons. (Although the skepticism of authority commonplace in Anglo-American countries is starting to gain a foothold in that stretch of land tenaciously clinging onto the edge of the Andes.)
My mother often told me about how she was caught in the crossfire between rebels and military in Valparaíso’s Parque Italia on September 11, 1973; how the army summoned buses to ferry her and other civilians out of harm’s way.
“For your own safety, citizens, please keep your heads ducked under the window,” she recalled one uniformed officer telling her. An irrepressible metíche—a Spanish word whose inexact meaning in English combines implications of “nosy,” “gossip,” and “busybody”—as well as contrarian, she couldn’t resist peering just over the windows.
“That’s when I saw all the bodies,” she recalled.
As the days grew closer to our trip in January 1989, I pleaded with my father to consider alternatives to a journey to Santiago by flight. Wasn’t there a ship, a freeway, a Greyhound that could take us, please? Didn’t he care about his family, about me specifically? My eyes glued to the news even at that young age, Lockerbie, Cerritos, and Korean Air were names that I knew well, names which evoked the deepest terror, far exceeding the usual nighttime disturbances of ghosts and goblins that children ordinarily feel. My father, a loving, but firm man with a streak of Old Testament discipline, quickly shot me down.
A few weeks later, hours after the Bush I inauguration, our LAN Chile flight touched down in Arturo Merino Benítez Airport. As it turned out, the flight, according to the captain on duty, had experienced an unusual degree of turbulence. Even the touchdown was rocky, so much so that the entire cabin spontaneously erupted into applause and cheers, grateful not only that their 14-hour flight was over, but that they had made it in one piece. My father kissed the ground and recited the Lord’s Prayer as soon as we had stepped off the plane. Digging into my seat in silent terror throughout the flight, I gave way to an uncontrollable fit of giddiness as soon as the wheels gripped the tarmac, cackling as if somebody had just cracked the funniest joke of my young life. I had just avoided my much too untimely demise by the skin of my teeth, so I thought.
As I type these words, the heart of my 8-year-old self is practically leaping out of my mouth. My Qatar Airways flight to Doha is approaching Baffin Island, soon to be followed by Greenland. A few hours later, our plane curves south around Finland to begin its descent into the Arabian peninsula. Ever since we began to stride along the Rocky Mountains, our plane has been beset with prolonged periods of strong turbulence. Stronger than this 38-year-old chronically terrified of air flight would prefer, at any rate.
The notification to fasten our seatbelts has lit up once again. Turbulence, strong enough to rouse mild alarm among the passengers, with the woman next to me clutching her daughter with her right arm as her left holds for dear life onto the seat in front of her, smacks our vessel about. “Isn’t it time they build a highway to Armenia?,” a childish voice from within me asks.
We’re about to cross the Davis Strait. Four hours down, eleven to go.