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Soviet-style communism failed, not because it was intrinsi- cally evil but because it was flawed. It allowed too few people to usurp too much power. Twenty-first-century market-capitalism, American style, will fail for the same reasons. Both are edi- fices constructed by the human intelligence, undone by human nature.

The time has come, the Walrus said. Perhaps things will be- come worse and then better. Perhaps there's a small god up in heaven readying herself for us. Another world is not only possi- ble, she's on her way. Maybe many of us won't be here to greet her, but on a quiet day, if I listen very carefully, I can hear her breathing.

Excerpted from a longer version of this essay in War Talk (South End Press, 2003), based on a Lannan Foundation reading. Arundhati Roy's other books include Power Politics (South End Press, 2001); The God of Small Things (Random House, 2008), which won the Booker Prize; Field Notes on Democracy (Haymarket Books, 2009); Walking with the Comrades (Penguin, 2011); and The Folded Earth (Free Press, 2012).

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

The Black Hole

Ariel Dorfman -------=--'

This is the bedrock of who I am: a man who cannot live in this world unless he believes there is hope.

In front of me as I write is a photograph of the balcony of the palace of La Moneda in Santiago, snapped on November 4, 1970, the day Salvador Allende was inaugurated President of the Re- public. In that photo, he waves a handkerchief from the balcony, greeting an unseen crowd that is gathered in the plaza below him.

Next to that photo I have hung another one, of the same balcony, almost three years later, a few days after the Hawker Hunter planes under the control of General Pinochet attacked the palace on September 11, 1973. Their bombs left a black yawning gap where the balcony stood. Where the president once waved his handkerchief, there is nothing. Allende is dead. And we can sense that outside the frame, below where the balcony jutted out, there is only emptiness, that only the cold, implacable solitary lens of the camera witnesses the scene. Nothing else. All too soon, I will be forced to face the black hole of that photo.

For now, I want to return to the day when that balcony was as intact as our dreams, when these eyes of mine and all the thousands of other eyes in the crowd did not have an inkling of the destruction that awaited us. There was no room for ab- surd premonitions: This was a turning point in history, the first

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peaceful, democratic revolution the world had ever known. Who could stop us? Who would dare to even try?

It was then, in the midst of that multitude of men and women I had never met and did not know, it was then, as I breathed in the air that they were breathing out, that I had an experience which I hesitate to call mystical but which was as near to a religious epiphany as I have had in my life.

Allende was making a brief speech, something about how we were now going to be the masters of our own destiny, the owners of our own land and the metals under the ground and the streets we walked through, how we would have to fight for the pos- session of everything in Chile, from the state to the city to the fields, how this country belonged to the people who had suffered in it, something like that. At some point during that speech I stopped listening and let my eyes wander over the crowd, thou- sands and thousands of hopeful faces as far as I could see.

Since their birth, those men and women had been told the limits they could not cross, the questions they could not ask. They had been told that their failure in life was deserved, that the very fact that they had not found a way out of their desti- tution proved that they deserved it, that they were by nature subhuman, incompetent, inferior, worthless, lazy, all their lives treated like something disposable and defective, all their lives taught to bow their heads and lower their eyes so as to survive, warned to obey or else, the doctrine of submission drilled into every nerve of their bodies, taught that the only road out of their misery was individual and solitary, each person scratching his way to the top, where, if he was lucky or ruthless enough, he could then become the exploiter of his brothers.

Above all, they had been warned that any collective at- tempt to change their lot was doomed to failure and pain. And they had defied that warning, they were about to break out of the script dreamt for them, they were about to start telling their own stories in their own way after having lived endlessly under the shadow of somebody else's story. And if they could do it, so could I, and then it was as if I had stepped out of that space and inhabited some other zone where I could watch myself and the

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multitude as well, suddenly all the voices went silent and in the silence I felt reality begin to crack open under my feet, as if a real, physical crack had opened in the very architecture of the universe, and that was when, peering into the crack that my own life had become, immensely vulnerable and open, I felt life quicken and accelerate, I felt the giddiness of those few great moments in your existence when you know that everything is possible, that anything is possible.

I felt as if I were the first man on Earth and this was the first day in history and the world was about to begin in all its beauty and that all it would take to give birth to that beauty which was just within our reach was to dare to invent it, dare to name it.

It was a magnificent vision and I kept it inside me all during the Chilean revolution; it was so intense that even now, more than forty years later, I am able to commune with it. Every- thing was new and crying out to be written. I shared a glorious language with the people who were writing the text of reality itself and I wanted to put every last word of it down on paper. I wrote essays and screenplays and poems and magazine articles and television programs and pamphlets and newspaper ads and radio jingles and political slogans and propaganda tracts and an experimental novel and cultural policy reports and political di- atribes and songs and plays, all of them juxtaposed, all of them given equal attention in my life.

A typical day might see me rise at dawn and frenetically type a surrealistic short story, take my son Rodrigo to school, teach a class at the university, burst into my office to scribble part of an essay at noon, then lunch with the producer of a quiz show for adolescents I was hosting on TV, rush off to a powdered-milk factory whose workers had called for volunteers to help load and unload trucks, run back all sweaty to the center of town to collaborate with some writers who were issuing a cultural man- ifesto, talk over the phone with a colleague at the university about the possibility of our Spanish Department joining forces with a trade union to launch a poetry festival, and then, as the afternoon began to wane, meet with a Socialist Party committee that was deciding what political slogan we would issue, to be

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painted by the brigades, and then that night, after a quick din- ner with my wife Angelica, who had been through an equally hectic schedule, and after a goodnight story to my son, my wife and I would join our group of comrades to splash the walls of the city with the very message I myself had conjured up a few hours before. And then, if there was time and energy-and there was, there always was-off we'd go to some body's house to dance and drink and celebrate the fact that we were alive.

When General Pinochet stopped the revolution in its tracks, I was lucky enough to be expelled and not executed or held endlessly in jail. Next to me in the police van taking me to the airport was a worker. I will call him Juan.

He was one of the scant handful of workers who, like me, had sought refuge in the Argentine Embassy to save his life. We had struck up a conversation several times. He had worked, he told me, in a factory that produced canned food and when Allende's Unidad Popular coalition had come, he and his fellows had found themselves facing a major crisis. During Allende's first year in of- fice, the president's policies had created an economic boom: In- creased salaries and benefits led to skyrocketing consumption and that led, in turn, to a major increment in production. So, more goods sold and a better life for Juan and his co-workers, right?

Not at all. The owner of the factory, opposed to Allende's government, even if it did not threaten his property, had de- cided to sabotage production: He had stopped reordering ma- chine parts, he had blocked distribution deals that were already in place, he refused to hire new workers and threatened to fire those who complained. He should have been making money in buckets and instead was secretly preparing bankruptcy pro- ceedings, pulling his capital out of the industry, getting ready to flee the country. The workers had watched this class warfare pa- tiently for months and, finally, when the owner had announced he was shutting down the whole operation, they had taken over the premises. It was the only way to save their jobs and keep producing the food that Chile needed.

Allende's government intervened in the conflict, negotiated compensation for the owner, and put the workers in control.

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Juan had been elected to head the council that, for a couple of years, ran that factory, and in spite of inevitable mistakes, it had been an economically successful venture.

But it was another kind of success that stirred in Juan when he spoke to me about that time: The Chilean revolution had given him a chance to prove his dignity as a full human being, had dared to conceive through him and millions of others the pale possibility of a world where things did not have to be the way they had always been. That is why the rulers of the world had reacted with such ferocity. And Juan understood this and explained it to me with chilling simplicity that day as we crossed the city of Santiago on our way to exile.

"We are paying," he told me, gesturing toward the streets filled with subdued citizens and rampant military patrols, in the general direction of the factory that was at that very moment being returned to the owner, who had come back to exercise his dominion. "We are being punished. We are paying for our joy."

He understood that General Pinochet's military coup was meant to return to their previous owners the levers of economic and political power. But it was just as clear to him that the counterrevolution was conceived as an admonitory lesson for those who had surfaced from the depths of anonymity and set themselves squarely in the middle of a history which was not supposed to belong to them.

His body and the body of all our compafieros were, ulti- mately, being disciplined for an act of the imagination. Pino- chet was trying to make him and millions like him admit that they had been mistaken-not so much in their tactics as in their human strategy, the very rebellion itself, the fact that they had dared to dream of an alternative to the life charted out for them since before their birth.

Pinochet was preparing the world as we know it now, where the word revolution has been relegated to ads for jogging shoes and greed has been proclaimed as good and profits have become the only basis to judge value and cynicism is the prevailing atti- tude and amnesia is vaunted and justified as the solution to all the pain of the past.

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The emptiness of the La Moneda balcony drilled itself into me as we passed through the plaza and turned the corner, and then it was gone from view, it was behind us, out of sight, but I could feel it growing inside me, its darkness threatening to engulf me in its void, to erase us all forever from the memory of Chile just as it had extirpated the presence of Allende, left nothing of that day when he had stood there defiantly, inau- gurating the future. I fought back against the black hole that was sucking me into despair, I told myself that I would keep alive that other balcony, that if we could keep it fiercely alive and warm inside during the years to come, we would be able to return Chile to all its glory, we could ourselves return to the country we would resurrect.

But first I had to face the most painful political question of my life. If the past under Allende was so luminous and prom- ising and participatory, how is it that it became the black hole of the present? How could we have been so wrong that day we started our revolution, how could we have been so blind not only to the impending disaster but also to the mistakes we made which, all that time, were paving the way for that disaster?

It was not a question that would go away; it demanded a collective answer from all Chileans who had supported Al- lende as well as an individual answer from each of us. That black hole devouring us would not disappear by stubbornly and nostalgically reiterating and validating the past, because that past was responsible for this future we were living, and until we recognized that responsibility, our responsibility in the catastro- phe, there would be no change. We could blame the CIA, the United States, the oligarchy, and the military all we wanted, but they would never have prevailed if we had been able to get the majority of Chileans behind our reforms. That had not been the case, however, and unless we now built the vast coalition that we had failed to build during the Allende years we would never rid ourselves of Pinochet; he would stay in power as long as the past continued to divide us.

Let me make this as concrete as possible, this need that inev- itably awaited me to scrutinize the past for mistakes.

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For the very people who should have been our allies then and were indispensable as allies against Pinochet in the years to come, for the people we had to convince to join us against Pi- nochet, the past that I remembered as glorious and enthralling was perceived as painful and traumatic.

No better way to illustrate this dichotomy than to focus on someone who had been unjustly hurt by the Unidad Popular, someone I recalled with regret many times in exile: Don Patri- cio, a friend and neighbor of ours in Santiago and the father of Rodrigo's favorite playmate. A calm, decent, quiet man, a pro- gressive Christian Democrat who had worked as an accountant in the government center for the distribution of flour, he had been more than willing, he told me several times over afternoon tea, to contribute to the change in Chile that Allende had in- augurated, even if he did feel himself to be in the opposition.

But Don Patricio had been shunted aside, humiliated, left at his desk with no work to do for months, discriminated against merely because he was not an Allendista. I remember the day he told me, fighting back tears, that he had resigned, that he couldn't stand so much hatred. I didn't know what to say. I com- miserated with him, pointed out that these were probably tem- porary misunderstandings, suggested that perhaps these small sacrifices were necessary for the country to be liberated.

Later, back home, a stone's throw from where he was staring into space, right there next door to him, I lamely told myself, re- calling his anger and frustration, that I had never done anything directly to hurt him. But neither did I denounce the way he was being treated, nor recognize that it was the very way in which I was treating (and I was one of the most tolerant and empathetic of the militants!) many of my own colleagues who legitimately disagreed with me and whom I publicly excoriated and privately dismissed as traitors. I did not take the opportunity to compre- hend that we were being insufficiently democratic, that we were accelerating the revolution beyond what was reasonable, that we had swept people like Don Patricio under the carpet of his- tory, as if they didn't count, as if their dissidence was to be de- spised instead of valued, as if consensus were a crime.

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And yet, no matter how many mistakes we had made, I had made, we did not deserve that balcony at La Moneda, the black hole in that balcony which threatened to engulf us all. I was not willing then, in that van, and I am not willing now, so many years later, to say that our joy was unreal.

It is the recognition of these mistakes and many more that the balcony at La Moneda is demanding of us, demanding of me. As the years go by, I will reluctantly, painstakingly, corner that young man and those three years he lived, I will slowly turn him into the man who writes these words, I will tell him what I have learned from this defeat, how I was one of those who inadvertently helped to bring the black hole of that bal- cony into being.

I will tell him that he should not have trusted the state to solve all the problems of Chile or the revolution to solve all his problems. I will tell him that it was unfair to burden a whole people with his salvation. I will tell him that the desire for pu- rity may lead to fanaticism and ethnic strife and fundamental- ism. I will tell him that the poor do not need to be represented by a paternal voice, no matter how benevolent. I will tell him that if you reduce everything to politics and ideology, you end up totalizing, squeezing the mystery out of life and explaining away too easily what at times has no explanation; you end up not leaving space for your own imperfections. I will tell him he should not have turned a blind eye to human rights violations in socialist countries out of insensitivity and political expediency. I will tell him how women's rights were postponed in the revolu- tion and how we did not even conceive that our attitude toward nature was one that pillaged and polluted it.

I will tell him this and much more from the retrospect of the future, everything that I think he did wrong. But there is one thing I will not tell him, that young man I used to be. I will not tell him, I have never told that alter ego of mine in the past, that he was wrong to rebel.

One more story. In the voyages that were to come, that still awaited me, I

met a woman who had been tortured in Chile.

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What saved her at the worst moments, she told me, was her unending repetition of some lines by Neruda or Machado- strange, she couldn't remember the author or the lines them- selves anymore-verses that contained water in them, trees, she thought, something about the wind. What matters is that she concentrated on them ferociously so she could make clear to her- self over and over how different she was from the men who were making her suffer. She discovered that, inside her, beyond those hands and what they were doing to her, there was a space all her own which could remain intact. One small zone in the world that she could keep from them. Some dead poet was providing her with this shield, with this guardian angel of language. As she si- lently repeated those words to herself, she expected to be extin- guished forever.

Who can doubt that at this very moment, in this abomina- ble world where General Pinochet is alive and Allende is dead, there are many others just like her, anonymous, unknown peo- ple, enduring other attempts to obliterate them, suck them into the black hole of history? Perhaps they will not survive, as she did, to tell the tale. But perhaps they are also sending us mes- sages. We cannot be sure. We can only answer those words as if they are being transmitted.

We do know that the woman, even if there was nobody there, was hoping to be heard. Not only by herself. And what she was saying was simple. She was not willing, even if nobody was listening, even if her fate was to disappear from the face of the Earth, to be treated like an object. She was not willing to let others narrate her life and her death.

As for me, while there is one person like her in this world, I will find myself defending both her right to struggle and our obligation to remember.

Adapted from Heading South, Looking North (Penguin, 1999). Ariel Dorfman's other books include Death and the Maiden (Penguin, 1994), Blake's Therapy (Seven Stories Press, 2001), Widows (Seven Stories Press, 2002), and Feeding on Dreams: Confessions of an Unrepentant Exile (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011). Augusto Pinochet died in 2006.