During the dark years of the Pinochet dictatorship, I visited my father in the south of Chile. Punta Arenas, located on the Straits of Magellan, is the only Chilean port on the southern tip of the continent. It is a colorful, lovely town. Walking the streets during spring and summer you’ll see lupine of all colors—blue, violet, yellow, pink—filling the small front yards of the modest, well-groomed houses. Viewed from the hill on the northern end of town, a collage of tin roofs painted green, blue, red, and yellow make the whole town appear like a summer garden.
The climate in this most southern port is for the hardy. Never have I experienced a place with such extreme and changeable weather. Look in one direction and all is calm, bright, and sunny. Turn around: dark, menacing clouds. Turn just a little more and a fierce rain approaches. And the wind. Always the cold wind, especially in summertime. So strong are the winds that waist-high ropes along the sidewalks have been installed to help pedestrians navigate the downtown area.
I arrived in Chile in 1978 in late December, the southern hemisphere’s midsummer. After landing and spending a week in Santiago, I flew to Punta Arenas for an extended stay with my father and his wife. Other than the brief visit I had made ten years previously, I hadn’t been with my father since my mother with my sister, brother and I left Chile twenty years earlier. We left to seek the medical attention available only in the United States that my sister’s weak heart required.
I remember that long walk across the tarmac and up the stairs to the waiting Pan Am flight, all the while feeling my father’s grief, and my own, boring a hole in my ten-year old heart. I didn’t know that I wouldn’t return for as many more years as I had then lived. But walking away from my father, who stood looking out from the airport windows, I foresaw an unspoken loss: my father, my Pisano family, my country. We would never move back to my Chilean home.
During those first ten years away, I idolized my absent father and he, in letters sprinkled here and there with my pet names, wrote of his longing to be reunited with me, and with his family. But he had no money to make the long, expensive journey to the United States. As years passed and his financial situation improved, he paid for my older sister to visit him. He also implored me to visit: “Sweetheart, decide to come. I’m sure you’ll like to study here and, more than this, to live in Chile. Here there are plenty of people who love you enough and would give you a family life like you could never have been able to have.”
On my first return visit, in 1968, I was a young woman of twenty, no longer the child my family remembered. To me, they had grown deeper into their Chilean ways, which had become dissimilar to mine. I realized, then, the extent of my American assimilation. Still, we were family. And in my father’s eyes I saw the sad look of missed time. I was and was not his daughter. My visit was too short. We had only a few weeks to try to re-establish our relationship.
I was thirty years old on this second visit. Earlier that year I’d lost my first professional library job to California’s passage of Proposition 13, which gutted city and county services. Only ten months and then laid off. ‘Enough of that,’ I thought, ‘it’s time to spend time with my father and get to know the town and landscape to which he’s so attached.’ I wanted to get to know his new wife, his new family. Upon learning of my desire to visit him, my father wrote: “I think the passage of Proposition 13 was the most wonderful thing has happened in California, as it has been the motive for your deciding to come.”
As a child I had lived with my family in central Chile. I had no familiarity with the extreme southern reaches of the country, so different in geography, climate and population. But I had roots here. Sometime in the 19th Century the first Pisanos arrived to this remote southern town on the banks of the Magellan Straits. My grandfather owned a mercantile goods store catering to the needs of those passing between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. His brother was the town’s mayor. Another family member ran a hotel on Tierra del Fuego, the big island across the straits. Punta Arenas was my father’s birthplace and after his family moved to the middle of the country, Punta Arenas is where he returned in 1969 to focus his professional botanical investigations in the Patagonian region until his death in 1997. For him, home was Punta Arenas.
I was nervous about this visit. The coup d’état that overthrew the elected socialist president, Salvador Allende, had occurred only five years earlier. The country carried on under a veil of silence. The purge and terrorizing of Allende’s supporters seemed to be nearing an end. But I knew atrocities existed. Nevertheless I was moved to reconnect with my father. With my American passport and an open return ticket, I went to Chile.
The terror the vicious Pinochet regime had instilled in me during and following the coup still lived within me and, while I had experienced fear for my Chilean family from afar during the early days after the coup, arriving in Chile brought my anxiety to the forefront. On the streets of Santiago I saw the oppressed population as if they had settled into fear; resignation and defiance existed side by side. “How much longer could this regime last?” their look seemed to say. Military rule appeared entrenched in political and social life, in spite of ongoing but failed surges of opposition. Yet overt military presence had subsided and the curfews had long since been lifted.
After a week with my Santiago relatives, I flew down to Punta Arenas. There I saw milicos—Chilean military—throughout the town, and more and more as the days wore on. Milicos prepared as if for war with their weaponry, green uniforms, heavy boots, and the swagger of young men ready for battle. Civilians rushed here and there, heads down, with larger bags of groceries than I had remembered seeing them carry before.
Fear unfolded within me as it did those September days in 1973 when I had experienced the coup from a distance, when I was worried about the lives, safety, and livelihoods of family I had already lost once to distance.
But here, I learned, a different tension was building. Argentina was also ruled by a junta. The country was in the midst of its Dirty War, when the military government led a bloody campaign to purge the country of all political dissent and socialism. Perhaps to divert attention from their internal struggles, or to show strength and exert power, the Argentinean junta was stirring up a decades-old border dispute with Chile. In 1971 an international tribunal had awarded to Chile several key islands in the Beagle Channel—one of the three waterways between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. Argentina was loath to concede the maritime jurisdiction to Chile. And so the Argentinean junta talked of war.
Punta Arenas has a unique geographical presence as the southern entry point into Chile, yet it is isolated from the rest of the country. The city is accessible only by air or ship. There is no land access except for a road that goes through Argentina. This makes for a most vulnerable position: Cut off access to its port and airport and Punta Arenas is defenseless.
I had dropped into a rapidly-escalating situation.
My father did not believe Punta Arenas was in imminent danger. Threats of Argentinean aggression were not new to Chileans. Border disputes between the two countries are common and the Beagle conflict had been going on since 1904. I wondered, though: Was my father, as a Chilean, inured to threats of violence because of his own country’s brutal dictatorship? Were there more serious threats within Chile itself, never mind this ongoing spat with its wayward neighbor? Neither an optimist nor given to denial nor an alarmist was my father. He was a realist, a scientist who believed in the rational mind, who thought through a problem before coming to a conclusion.
But I was scared.
“Don’t worry, Vivian, nothing’s going to happen. Those Argentinos, they like to give a good fright, but it’s all talk, nothing more.” But he could not explain the obvious anxiousness of the citizens of Punta Arenas. Was my father’s message meant just for me? Did he really believe the Argentineans were making an empty threat? Or was he just trying to protect his Americanized daughter?
Thoughts of leaving skimmed across my awareness, yet I felt unable to resist a subtle message I imagined—no, hoped—I was receiving from my father: “Vivian, don’t leave, stay with your papo who loves you and will take care of you.”
Several days into that tension-filled time my father entered the room where I had been playing the solitaire game he taught me so well. My father had recently added this one room as a second-story to his house. The small, octagonal space had windows all around. It was his room, his sanctuary, where he spent his evenings in quiet seclusion, reading or playing solitaire.
“Vivian, the mayor has called a meeting this evening,” he said. “We are asked to be at the town hall at 7:00 p.m. for some important information.” I felt a cloud coming to obscure this sanctuary room.
That evening, the hall was crowded, people were tense, excitable; they spoke in low whispers. Some in sheepskin jackets and knit hats. Others, the more hardy, wearing just a light sweater. But nearly all in a monochrome of brown, tan, black and gray. There were seats for everyone, yet the hall felt too crowded, stuffy, confining. As the mayor approached the podium, the whispering and shuffling subsided. He spoke for nearly an hour.
My Spanish was too rusty to decipher the words filtering through my fog of fear. But the presentation—complete with slides and drawings showing us how to dig ditches in our back yards—came through sharp and clear: This is what we must all do. Argentinean military planes will be flying soon, headed for our town. Everyone must be prepared for an invasion. The targets, we all knew, were the port and airport, leaving Punta Arenas besieged.
Our walk home was slow and steady. I felt in a stupor, and anxiety trembled inside me in anticipation of the worst. I looked about me—people scurrying home, the air thick with tension, even birds flying low and fast, a shrill screeching as they passed overhead. My father, Carmen and I walked together, at our own pace. I felt, through the spaces between us, the worry that they, ever so much the protective parents, would not show me. The houses we walked by did not betray their ordinariness. They were still the tidy, colorful structures I’d passed every day. Each house had its wire basket on a pedestal out in front for garbage pickup. Some households had embellished theirs, twisting the wires in interesting patterns. The baskets were all empty; the garbage must have been collected recently. Why such normality?
The wind had died down. Flowering scents filled the air; hope and fear clashed inside me.
Was it the next evening or that same one—its date, I know, was December 22—when my father, with a grave face, admitted the threat was real. “We will need to prepare,” he told me. He had received news that Argentinean planes were getting ready to come our way. Never mind that we had dug no ditches. Our house would be our shelter, and we had food and water.
I wasn’t even sure how a ditch could protect us. Ditch-digging would take us days and, in my father’s tiny backyard, a ditch would hardly hold the three of us. How could such a foxhole protect us? ‘He was right,’ I thought, ‘better to seek fortification in the house than be buried in mud and cold. What was that mayor thinking? Would my uncle have given us such impractical advice when he was mayor?’
Late into the evening I climbed up to the second story while my father and Carmen listened to the news downstairs in the sitting room. Just before midnight, I looked out the windows facing the Straits of Magellan, the water so calm on that extended summer evening. Elongated clouds reflected the sun’s waning. An endless-looking sky curved above, dome-like, as if a protective shield. Would calmness persist until morning? Or would military planes and tanks break the night’s stillness, turning our world into a barrage of metal, machines, and explosions? With fear shaking my body, I descended the stairs to my little bedroom off the kitchen.
Each of us slept or didn’t sleep that night, huddled in our anticipation of what was to come. I shivered, from the cool night, or the fear building inside me. I listened intently for the planes, but my own beating heart throbbed wildly in my chest, masking all outside noise.
Morning came. I woke to stillness and bright light. Had I slept? Or was I in a dream of waking? My little room felt cold, as it had every morning and, as every morning, I lingered a while under the comforter. But this was not like every other morning. I was afraid to open the curtains, to see what I feared to see. Not until I heard my father and Carmen preparing their breakfast did I dare to move.
As I approached the kitchen, I tuned my ear toward the news coming from the radio. My father and Carmen, listening carefully, did not see me as I entered. Then they turned toward me, with looks of relief and welcome on their faces. The threat had passed.
Operation Soberanía, Argentina’s intent to invade the disputed islands and continental Chile, via Punta Arenas, had been suddenly halted. While we slept, Pope John Paul II had sent personal messages to the presidents of Chile and Argentina urging a peaceful resolution. As good Catholics, the two countries agreed to papal mediation and the Argentinean planes flew back home. In my father’s house, it was a sweet day to spend upstairs basking in the sunlight and looking out toward the still calm waters. And better yet, a receptive time to get to know Carmen, to feel our way into our expanded family nest.
