The Dogs are Curling Up Again

Margaret H. Townley

Description

A love story set against the politically turbulent background of Chile in the 1990s. Refugee Isabel is in search of her identity and discovering her beautiful country of extremes.
Political exile Isabel returns to her native Chile when the country is in transition to democracy, following the cruel dictatorship that killed her father and her boyfriend. She is searching for the old Chile she once knew and for her own identity after years in Britain as a refugee, an outsider.
Finding Chile deeply divided and democracy impossible with the legacy of the dictator, she embarks on the political activity she sees as vital. Her activism and film-making ambitions carry her across this diverse country of extremes. She visits the native peoples’ homeland with its lush forests and learns of their struggles. With her new Chilean lover, she sees the world’s driest desert in flower and the oldest mummies in the world. Isabel learns much else about her country and herself, whilst risking arrest for her political militancy.
Her English partner takes up voluntary work in Chile hoping to find her, fearing for her safety but uncertain if she has left him. His search becomes an enlightening exploration of the culture and politics of Chile in tumultuous times. Isabel is still finding herself and trying to decide her future between two realities.

Sujets

• Historical
• Chile
• Fiction
• Chili

Informations

• Publié par: Balboa Press UK
• Date de parution: 03 octobre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781982286392
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Dogs Are Curling Up Again
 
 
 
Margaret H. Townley
 
 
 

 
Copyright © 2022 Margaret H. Townley.
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
 
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The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.
 
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.
 
ISBN: 978-1-9822-8638-5 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-9822-8639-2 (e)
 
Balboa Press rev. date:  10/03/2022
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
PART 2
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
PART 3
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Epilogue
Glossary
 
 
 
 
 
 
To my sons Tim and An drew
and to Archi and all my Chilean fri ends

Chapter 1

H er mother had begged her not to join the funeral march. She’d said it was too dangerous, a foolish risk, the military coup being less than two weeks old. Everyone, she had insisted would be picked up or photographed for future action on ‘subversives’. Isabel had weighed all this up beforehand and had made her decision. Her mother had always called her stubborn – now she would show her. “Anyone who doesn’t go,” she remembered replying to her mama , “was either a coward or didn’t love their country and its people . ” She’d known that day would be more than a funeral procession for the second Nobel Prize-Winning Poet of her own little country – the land of poets, it would be a protest against the military Junta, the destruction of Chile’s freely elected government, the death of its president, the rounding up of so many loved ones, and the fear and terror injected into all its people.
Now it was an unbelievable twenty years on and so much had happened that she had never anticipated would ever occur in her life. Isabel had lived for fourteen of those years in England. She was now back in Santiago again for her first visit after going into exile , years after the coup d’état. There must be a million of us here today, she remembered she had thought when she followed the massive procession through the streets of Santiago de Chile in September 1973. Like everyone else marching at the funeral of their most acclaimed poet, Isabel had nervously watched the soldiers lining the route and anxiously thrown sideways glances at the tanks and armoured cars waiting in every side street. How could it all have come about , she remembered pondering and how she had agonised.
Isabel could answer that question better now than she had been able to then but it seemed in some sense as unbelievable now as then. Now she knew the evidence of the North American involvement and the traitorous upper echelons of Chilean society that had together instigated the coup and its preconditions. All Isabel had known at that time was that what was happening had to be opposed. She remembered the slow processing along the packed streets - that crowd must have astonished and frightened even the military Junta. They’d not had time to consolidate their power and here were hundreds of thousands of people on the streets in protest. For a day the golpistas must have felt helpless, obliged to accept the march, even though they had declared there would be no public funeral. The whole world was watching but they would bide their time.
“Let the fools have their day” – the generals must have thought, mused Isabel as she trod the same streets again. They had the guns, the power and the CIA backing. She wondered too if the sheer immensity and sadness of the military coup must have killed Pablo Neruda, despite his great courage in the past. He must have felt he could no longer live with such a broken heart. His close friend President Allende, on whom so many hopes had been placed, was dead. Many colleagues and friends had been killed, thousands of ordinary people had been arrested and all the hopes and longings of a people smashed under those ugly jackboots. Neruda had been ill and getting old, too old to face again a popular movement being destroyed in what he had called the “permanent war” – the repetition of bloody actions of an elite against their own people, “which the powerful call ‘order’, and which was paid for with a journey to Washington.”
“I want to just weep and hide,” Isabel remembered she had told her mother back then, “but I can’t. What about Raúl, Jorge, Pedro and Luis and Marta?” Their families hadn’t known where they were. Raúl had been her boyfriend and the others were friends of the family from Isabel’s own neighbourhood. “What about my friends in Manuel Rodriguez?” Her mother hadn’t liked her going to that población to do voluntary work. She had insisted that nothing good would come of it and that Isabel had best stay away from those people.
“Are you going to stop being friends with Pedro’s mum or Luis’s now? Aren’t they respectable enough for you now?” Isabel remembered she had retorted. And so the arguments had raged, heightened by the fear and dread of what might happen next. They had been arguing since Isabel had joined the campaign to help Popular Unity to power in 1970. She had only been fourteen then but was swept up with excitement at all that was going on politically in her country. It had felt like everyone was participating in creating a brave new world. It was to have been an example to the world! Milk and free schooling for all children, literacy campaigns, she’d been helping with those - caring for the children whilst mothers went to classes - the end of poor housing and encampments like Manuel Rodriguez . Changes had been underway, the whole world was interested in its first freely elected Marxist government, and it was in her own beloved country - Chile.
Now Isabel found herself still arguing with her mother. She hadn’t wanted to spoil her first visit back from exile and the first time she’d seen her mother in 14 years, by arguing with her. But did her mother do it deliberately to provoke her? Did she have to caress that photograph of General Pinochet in the newspaper? How could she after all that has occurred? How could she still believe the propaganda and the lies? After what happened to my own father? Isabel’s parents had not been together for 10 years before the coup. Her Papa had understood what Allende and Popular Unity were trying to achieve. He’d been a teacher and active in the teachers’ union. He’d been at Neruda’s funeral march and was arrested a few days later. It had been dangerous to go to the march but her father had courage because we had to show our opposition to the Junta. But she had lost her father. Was it worth it? Wouldn’t they have caught up with him anyway? How she still grieved for him. He was such a good man.
Perhaps her mother was still angry with her for choosing to go into exile with her stepmother. Isabel had felt she had to go because for her the situation had become unbearable. Her father had been one of the detained who was never heard of again. Six years she had spent searching for news of him. Thousands had disappeared and rumours were rife of mass burials in the desert or bodies thrown in the sea. Neighbours had talked of bodies seen in the Mapocho River, but still, her mother didn’t get it. Her mother seemed even more now to believe all that propaganda of the dictator’s government or she had forgotten and blanked through fear, what had happened to people around her.
The country has only partially emerged from that dictatorship, and it is as if a blanket of silence has fallen over the land, thought Isabel. How am I going to find out what is really going on? No one seems willing to talk. No one can celebrate the end of the dictatorship because Pinochet is still Head of the Armed Forces and he still has power and influence, tied up in the Constitution he imposed. But why are the people I’ve talked to so far, so frightened still to speak? Isabel hadn’t expected to find the people so fearful and so divided. Some claimed it had all been necessary but they would not debate why or how the dictatorship could be justified and they were in denial about the cruelty and killings it had perpetrated. Still others, equally mistaken, said it was best not to stir up the past, not to talk of painful memories and that this was the only