Authors: Edgard Telles Ribeiro
The three had spent two weeks at the mansion in Santa Teresa, recovering from the hasty move from Montevideo. By pure instinct, the little one had sensed, rather than actually seen, the helplessness on his father’s face, which was offset by the paleness of his mother’s. There was no one waiting for them at the airport.
No one
other than the shifty security guards inspecting the passengers, of course. They kept casting dirty looks at the child who wouldn’t stop wailing … until they were sidetracked by the eight suede suitcases with leather trim arranged in a semicircle, behind which the travelers huddled, as though taking cover in a trench.
Unlike their landing in Montevideo three years earlier, when Marina and Max had been met by beaming colleagues bearing armfuls of flowers, Santiago immediately presented itself as cold, harsh, and hostile — the face it would wear for the next two decades. There wasn’t a single representative of the embassy to receive them in the crowded terminal, which had become something of a stronghold given the impending coup.
Surprised and somewhat incensed, Max went to survey the ground level of the airport. There he was saved by a driver who recognized and greeted him from afar, then came over with his boss, the assistant to the naval attaché. By happy coincidence, the official had just sent his family off to Brazil on vacation. He accommodated the recent arrivals, as well as their considerable baggage, in the van, acting rather ungraciously all the while, and accompanied them to the hotel Max indicated — the traditional Carrera in the Barrio Cívico, just steps from La Moneda Palace.
During the trip into the city, the young official hardly exchanged two words with Max or Marina. Truth be told, Max didn’t recall ever having said a single word to him on any of his previous missions to Santiago. To make amends, he poured on the kindness, twice referring to the man as his family’s guardian angel. The sweet talk met with silence, however.
More of a guardian than an angel
, Max concluded.
Then the driver ventured to make a more personal observation: “Things have gotten very bad here, Mr. Secretary.”
“
Counselor
,” Max corrected, causing the man to bite his lip and keep his mouth shut.
The first two days, Marina felt hurt not to hear from any of the embassy wives, especially since she needed to find a pediatrician for her son. Not one of the women answered the phone or returned her calls. She found it strange, if not disconcerting, as she’d spoken with several of them from Montevideo just two weeks earlier.
What could have happened since then?
she wondered, frustrated at being compelled to have her son treated by the hotel doctor.
Max, in turn, would soon be facing his own share of challenges. The ambassador’s allies, or those who pretended to follow his ideals out of convenience, had struck Max’s name from their agendas on learning that his transfer had been ordered from above against his will. Not even his promotion to counselor had
made up for the blow to his reputation. It was seen as a consolation prize.
This group had been joined by the military attachés, whom Max had always treated with aloofness or condescension during his previous visits. Initially, at least, all had closed their doors and turned their backs on Max, Marina, and Pedro Henrique. Not yet three years old, the child was already subject to the results of his parents’ ostracism.
What of the handful of liberals still at the embassy, slinking around in the shadows while they awaited transfers to other posts? No matter how hard Max tried to approach them, seeking support and practical information (realtors who would help the couple find a house, doctors who might care for their sick child, bank accounts that could be opened right away, a rental car that would make it possible to move around in a city with no cabs or public transportation due to strikes), no matter how much he quoted authors everyone had read with a passion in days gone by, his shady character precluded any casual contact with this group of dissidents.
Spurned by both of these incompatible factions, Max was living in his own personal hell. It was amid this ravaged atmosphere that, one morning, while shaving in the bathroom of his hotel suite, he heard gunfire. At first he mistook it for fireworks. But it wasn’t even ten in the morning.
Firecrackers
,
at this hour?
he wondered.
No
, he soon realized,
those were gunshots
. And they were coming from the rooftops of buildings around the public square.
He cracked open the window and spotted three tanks just below. They were filing out of the deserted square, heading straight for La Moneda Palace. They stopped midway and remained lined up there, like huge beasts ready for a fight. Marina came over to the window, cradling Pedro Henrique in her arms. Max signaled for her to back away.
The gunfire started up again, the bullets seeming to ricochet off the tanks, which remained motionless, as though indifferent
to the shots. Max looked at his watch. It was five after ten. The snipers continued to fire their weapons, only now soldiers armed with machine guns were taking up strategic positions in the square and firing back. The machine-gun bursts soon drowned out the rifle shots.
Max made Marina and Pedro Henrique sit on the floor, in the corner farthest from the window. He put pillows and cushions around the two. Keeping crouched down, he made his way back over to the window. They’d taken two adjoining rooms in the hotel. The second, a corner room, extended his view over the square. That’s where he turned his attention.
Max flipped on the TV, as if needing confirmation of what was unfolding before his very eyes. But all that came up on the screen were old reruns and commercials. He rushed over to the radio and set it on a table near the windows, which he closed one by one. The sound coming across was tinny, as if far away. What made it feel close was the emotion being conveyed. Max recognized the voice. It was Salvador Allende speaking.
He was saying goodbye
. The words sounded as if they were coming from a world already relegated to History: “This may be my last opportunity to address you.…”
Max listened in astonishment. “My words hold no bitterness.…” Sitting on the floor, his body braced against the wall, Max shrank with each line as Allende’s voice grew. “History is ours and is made by the people.… I have faith in Chile and its destiny …” The radio faded out.
Soldiers’ shouts and their commanders’ orders rose from the square. Two blasts followed. Max reopened one of the windows. La Moneda was in flames. The first tank had taken aim at the palace. The second and third fired simultaneously. The shells had torn gaping holes in La Moneda’s façade. Smoke and dust were pouring out.
Max slumped against the wall and stayed hunched over. Later, he couldn’t say how long he’d remained in that position.
He only remembered that Marina and Pedro Henrique had been quiet and still, petrified. But all of them were jolted by an explosion that shook the hotel’s foundation.
Max rushed to the window. Attacked by tanks, the palace was now being bombarded by aircraft. He looked upward. Two jets were flying low over the square. With each dive, they dropped their bombs. Max checked his watch. Almost two hours had passed. The soldiers continued to fire their machine guns at the façade, in a virtually deserted square.
La Moneda in flames! Right before his very eyes …
Hands trembling, Max cracked open the other windows and, crouching low, circled nervously along them, covering his ears with each bomb that fell, each round fired by the tanks. Speechless, he saw soldiers invade the building. He was watching something that went beyond the images. A scene that would remain etched in his mind forever. But one he wasn’t able to relate to — for he had witnessed it as an outsider.
For reasons he couldn’t quite explain, Max watched the fall of La Moneda as if in a trance. What had happened just beyond the hotel walls triggered a conflict in his spirit, launching him in the direction of conquests still to come.
Hunched against the wall, curled up into himself like a snail while an entire country crumbled around him, he’d realized that it was time to start over again. Only no longer from square one. And that would be the distinguishing feature of this challenge, which he’d face with the same doggedness and discipline he’d displayed on previous occasions.
Had he been used and cast aside?
He had indeed. But now that he understood the whole game, and had trump cards to play, he’d patiently bide his time. He would rise from the ashes, the same way Chile would be reborn from the ruins of La Moneda.
Hours later, in an embassy thrown into a tailspin by the events, he was the only one able to keep a level head. Sitting at his desk, with the office door closed and keeping absolutely still, he underwent what the French call a
mise au point
, a succinct reassessment of personal priorities. The fact that the first civilian bodies gunned down by the military were turning up on the sidewalks didn’t distract him from the task. Nor did the despair of the local public servants around him, worried by the lack of news of their loved ones. Later, he circled through the corridors as a robot, concentrating on his world alone. The greater the commotion, the more serene he seemed in the eye of the storm.
He wasn’t afraid of the CIA. He’d upheld his end of the bargain, training the Uruguayan police force, and he believed that was the extent of what he owed the Americans. He had no fears where MI6 was concerned, either, because despite having delusions of grandeur with respect to Her Majesty’s Secret Service, he’d passed nothing but innocuous information to Raymond Thurston and never received payment of any kind.
He had few or no worries about the SNI, having always kept up proper relations with the organization’s operatives — including Major Vaz, who would visit him in Santiago more than once (Max even held an impromptu poker game in his honor). In Montevideo, he’d reconnected with former colleagues from the War College, all of whom were doing well in their careers. And he could only be grateful for the two swift promotions his own ministry had granted him.
What he had yet to contend with was the ostracism plaguing him
in Santiago
, the causes of which he preferred to downplay. Without dwelling on it too much, he presumed that Carlos Câmara’s plots might have negatively influenced his new boss. That would explain the ambassador’s contempt for him. He seemed to consider Max a flunky of the former ambassador in Montevideo, whom he didn’t hold in high regard.
When he got back to the hotel, Max found Marina still holding Pedro Henrique in her arms. The doctor hadn’t been able to come since the area was surrounded. Max had managed to get through the barricades only because he was a foreign diplomat and a guest at the hotel. A curfew had been imposed across the land. La Moneda was still smoldering next door. Hotel management had received orders to evacuate all guests within twenty-four hours. The lobby was swarming with soldiers.
“You and Pedro Henrique will leave for Brazil tomorrow,” Max told his wife with the calm of someone making a decision long since mulled over. “I won’t set foot in the embassy until you’ve taken off. You can start packing your bags while I talk to
the airline. I’ll have you fly in the cockpit if that’s what it takes. There’s no question that you’re getting out of here first thing in the morning.”
“I saw the Man from the Train in front of me again,” Marina would confide years later. “The one who would rescue me from the boring and predictable life of a poor little rich girl, the one who would make me a happy woman. That man had long since left the scene of my life … if he’d ever really entered it. But he’d come back. By saving my son, he was saving me. And in doing so, he settled all the debts he owed me. The others, which he’d racked up with creditors of every kind both inside and outside the ministry, he’d pay for the rest of his life.
Or not
… But he was paid up with me.
“We left for Rio the next day just as he’d promised. With Chile on the brink of war, we would never have found doctors or a hospital able to care for Pedro Henrique. They were all busy with disasters of another scale. Our poor little son was transported by an ambulance my father sent when we got to Rio. It met us on the runway at Galeão, with two doctors and a nurse on board. Within a couple of weeks, the listless little boy who could barely move and spent all his time between my lap and the bed was racing around the grounds of Santa Teresa. A month later, he was an altogether different child.”
What had been a moment of profound relief for Marina was for Max an even headier feeling — brought about when a man has the rare opportunity to restore his lost dignity, no longer dragged along by events but facing them head-on. He’d never experienced such clarity of vision. But snatching his son from the jaws of death — that’s the dimension Pedro Henrique’s medical condition had assumed in his eyes — was only the first spark in a series that would lead him to completely overturn his status at the embassy in a matter of weeks. In order to do so, however, he had to sell his soul to the devil for the second time since 1964 — now at a dirt-cheap price: he traded it for uranium.
The bottom line is that, while gazing at the burning ruins of La Moneda Palace, Max had resolved to give in to the appeals of his old friend Newton Cordeiro. He would negotiate a deal with the colonel. In Chile, he would give Cordeiro what he hadn’t been able to provide in Montevideo: the contacts needed to open particular doors. In this case, businessmen connected to the Chilean military, who might be interested in certain valuable raw materials Brazil had at its disposal — and to which Cordeiro had access, thanks to one of the countless shady deals made under the dictatorship.
Max asked for little in exchange: full pressure on Itamaraty, at the highest level, so that he could oversee the embassy’s commercial sector. Carte blanche. Not having to run his projects or cables past the ambassador. There was already at least one such precedent at the ministry: the commercial sector in New York operated independently. This might be considered in Santiago too, by orders from above.