Salvador Allende went against the grain when he was elected president in 1970. He differed from the Latin American left, which had joined the armed struggle with the triumph of the Cuban guerrillas. Fidel Castro gave him an AK47
Dead, Allende is completely obsolete. Not just because he was a Marxist, but because he wanted to reconcile democracy and revolution, socialism and elections. Because Pinochet’s White House, the business community, and the military disagreed with him, they overthrew him. Everyone has forgotten him.
Ariel Dorfman, no. The writer was born in Argentina, spent his childhood in the United States and settled in Chile, where his parents fled after being persecuted by the McCarthy regime. He has published 38 books of essays, poems, novels and memoirs.
The bestseller was “To Read Donald Duck,” written in 1971 with the Belgian sociologist Armand Mattelart. It is a superficial and hilarious analysis of the Walt Disney characters Mickey, Minnie, Scrooge, Goofy and Caterva.
They are seen as ideological embodiments of puritanism, aggressiveness and mercantilism; anthropomorphized animals that trick and value each other without a father, mother or gender. The book has its charm. The United States, home of free speech, censored him.
The most prestigious play was “Death and the Maiden,” a play whose theme is abuse by the Latin American military and a victim’s revenge. It was successfully staged around the world and Polanski made a film of it. It failed in Chile.
On September 11, the 50th anniversary of Allende’s death, Dorfman published The Suicide Museum (no translation into Portuguese). It must be a farewell because he is 81 years old and writes in the afterword: “Soon I will be dead.”
It is a historical novel that takes up the current trend of autofiction. The narrator’s name is Ariel Dorfman, he tells excerpts from the author’s life, he has the same wife, the same children and the same friends but he is a character.
Everything is absurd and real when Pinochet leaves power in the Latin American way, with perks and bourgeois admiration. Grief and melancholy dominate.
The focus is on Allende’s death, whether it was tragic or epic. If he committed suicide when the militia stormed the La Moneda Palace, it was out of fear and anxiety. Pinochet’s gang announced the tragic version on September 11th.
The epic version is confirmed by his last photo, in which he holds a helmet and a rifle, possibly the AR47 he received to defend the revolution. His heroic resistance was made known by Fidel Castro after listening to Allende’s companions and family.
Dorfman was working in La Moneda but didn’t get there on the day of the coup. He had changed shifts with a colleague who was shot in his place. Because I knew a lot of people, I knew that the president asked an aide if he was scared and he said, “I’m screwed.” Everyone laughed.
I knew that Admiral Patricio Carvajal, one of the coup leaders, called Allende and offered him a DC6 so that he and his family could leave Chile. The president replied, “Usted could put that plane up his ass.” When he hung up, he called the traitors “Maricones.”
I knew Carvajal had committed suicide. He knew that Laura and Beatriz, a sister and daughter of Allende, had killed themselves in exile in Havana. One threw herself from the 18th floor and the other fired an Uzi, also a gift from Fidel. But Dorfman didn’t know how the president actually died.
In the novel, a billionaire in the plastics industry comes to a sudden and obvious realization: he got rich by polluting the planet. As penance, he wants to build a suicide museum to convince visitors that humanity is killing itself.
Allende’s end is highlighted in the museum because it will serve as an example or counterexample of the collective suicide of the planet’s inhabitants. The billionaire is paying tons of dollars for Dorfman to uncover the truth about this death.
Rarely have we seen such an unlikely plot. However, “The Suicide Museum” touches on something present and urgent by combining politics and environmental catastrophe. Do Allende’s generosity and radicalism have something to say about today’s problems?
When he was besieged at La Moneda, he gave a final speech. He said: “You should know that the great paths along which free men will travel to build a better society will reopen sooner rather than later.”
It was a beautiful prophecy, but since then the free man has not appeared and the avenues remain blocked. By the time they open, it may be too late.