From The Times Literary Supplement September
Arturo Fontaine's remarkable novel of politics, sex and torture in Chile resists the moral high groundDavid Gallagher In a recent article on “Chile: Politics and Fiction”, Carlos Fuentes suggested that Arturo Fontaine was the true heir to José Donoso, the man who is generally regarded as the finest novelist in a country best known, according to Fuentes, for poets such as Pablo Neruda and Gabriela Mistral. It strikes me that one quality Fontaine has inherited from Donoso, apart from a vivid narrative style, is his strong sense of freedom. Like Donoso, he does not seem to be beholden to anybody. Like Donoso, he is not afraid to look into the most embarrassing corners of Chilean society, seeking the ugly truths behind the comfortable masks worn by the elites across the political spectrum.
In his remarkable third novel, La vida doble (Double Life), Fontaine looks into the ugliest corner of all: the squalid world of torture during the Pinochet regime, and he does so with an independence, and freedom of mind, that will irritate many readers on both Left and Right. The novel is about a woman, called Irene or Lorena – let’s call her Lorena. Brought up in a middle-class, if broken, family, and educated by nuns, to whom she is always solicitous, Lorena goes on to study French literature and philosophy at university. Abandoned by her boyfriend when pregnant, she wanders into an opposition march, and little by little becomes absorbed into a left-wing militant group called Hacha Roja (Red Axe).
Soon she is tearing down her posters of Mick Jagger and Robert Redford and replacing them with posters of Marx and Che Guevara. “I felt I suddenly belonged to something big, to a huge collective body. We sang together and I was part of the hope of those who suffered, part of the poor of this earth.” She is given military training. Subsequently arrested in action, she is subjected to extreme torture, but she does not give anything important away. She is then released so that the secret police can follow her and discover who she really is. When they do, they arrest her again and this time they threaten to hurt her daughter. This breaks her, and she becomes a double agent, helping to interrogate and identify torture victims. Because she puts on a Cuban accent so that her blindfolded victims will not recognize her voice, she becomes known as “la Cubanita”. This is the story she recounts to the narrator of La vida doble in Stockholm, where, decades later, she is in a home suffering from terminal cancer.
What happened to Lorena happened to many women during the Pinochet years: Fontaine undertook careful research into those cases before writing his novel. But her fictional attributes are well suited to a narrator who is seeking to expose the world she inhabited, leaving no stone unturned but suspending ultimate judgements. In the five-hour interview she gives the narrator in Stockholm, Lorena does not seem to spare any detail, however crude; at the same time, thanks to her education, she provides a lively moral and epistemological commentary on what she describes. Her malleable nature allowed her to empathize fully, not only with the insurgents but later with the torturers. She can convey the rationale behind the actions of both sides, but her acute analytical mind enables her to distinguish between rationale and rationalization.
Lorena assumes that the narrator will reduce all she says to him in Stockholm to a simple narrative in which the good and the bad will be clearly distinguished in the interests of producing an “edifying moral fable”, because, as she says, otherwise “no one could understand this story. No one would want to . . .”. What he will no doubt write, she predicts,
"is a moral adventure story. That’s what will get you a publisher. People love a story that confirms their prejudices. To recognize what they have already seen on TV: that’s what they like. Truth is too troubling, too edgy, too contradictory and too horrible. Truth is immoral. It shouldn’t be printed."
The strength of La vida doble – what makes it so original and so audacious – is that the narrator contradicts this prediction. He writes down everything that she says, without censorship. He makes no judgement at all. Far from confirming our prejudices, he allows us to travel through the helter-skelter of Lorena’s moral confusion, and that of the torturers too.
Lorena has an affair with El Flaco, the most senior figure among the group of torturers for which she works, and as they indulge in some after-sex philosophizing, he tells her of a meeting he once had with his boss, presumably the head of the secret service, in which he argued that they were capturing too many innocent people, and that as a result their actions were becoming counter-productive. Instead of catching and isolating insurgents, he argues, they are disseminating terror and breeding hatred. The boss disagrees and El Flaco, frustrated, realizes that he has a vested interest in there being more and more insurgents, because that way his power, and budget, will increase. And El Flaco “opens his long arms inviting me to understand him”, says Lorena. “Because that is what he is asking of me, that I see him as a good man. In the middle of the filth and grime, a man who is just and who loves me.”
An unlikely discussion between a couple of torturers, one thinks, and of course the ironic distance is always there: with Lorena's level of education, it could not fail to be. But this is not a novel for anyone looking for clear-cut moral outrage. It is one that posits that the monster is not out there, but within us. As Lorena puts it, once the place of limited impunity has been established – because there are limits, there is a system, it’s not pure chaos – the monster we carry within us, the beast which feasts on human flesh, is unleashed in the best of fathers, the nicest of daughters. But for that to occur, there has to be an order which you obey and which makes you innocent. The well-wrought sense of belonging to an institution that you acquire, and the discipline, allow that transference of guilt to the man above, to the superior in the hierarchy.
The transference of guilt is, of course, a two-way process. El Flaco feels let down not only by his superior, but also by the underlings who, according to him, get carried away, arresting and torturing people on their own initiative. At every level, people manage to keep carrying out their revolting tasks without guilt.
The world of the insurgents, the noble freedom fighters, has its moral ambiguities too. It is a world of reassuring certainties. “The drop that was my minuscule life was transfigured and became part of a river. We were living in the midst of Sacred History”, says Canelo, one of Lorena’s most heroic comrades, who has fought with the Cubans in places as distant as the Ogaden desert, and who thinks about the “collateral damage” they sometimes cause. He worries because in a bomb blast aimed at a bank, a boy of eleven is killed and a girl of nine mutilated. The boy was called José, and the girl, Karina. And is it all worth it in the end? Lorena, as she talks to the narrator, vacillates. Did they as insurgents achieve more than bring on more repression and provide an excuse for the dictatorship to perpetuate itself? In the end she thinks they did. Actually she thinks they accelerated the end of the Pinochet regime. What she objects to is that her former comrades should later have come to see themselves as victims. They wanted to conquer the world. They wanted to establish their own dictatorship of the proletariat. But instead of being remembered as heroes, they become victims, because they lost, and the military, paradoxically, become criminals because they won.
In this moral quagmire, Fontaine discerns a confused line between torture and sex. At first, they seem polar opposites. Lorena's naked body, while it is being humiliated by its torturers, seems to be an abyss away from the body that once aroused men’s desires. But the torturers often rape their victims and some of the victims end up desiring their tormentors. There is a club to which some female prisoners are taken at night by the torturers. In it there is a room for sado- masochists which one of the most brutal torturers frequents, as a victim: he likes to be flogged, tied to a cross. Drugs are plentiful in this club where identities are dissolved, and anything goes. “We are just carnivorous animals”, muses Lorena, “badly disguised and without the innocence of animals.” Not long before, she had confessed to the narrator that she had got particularly excited with one prisoner who never confessed under torture. After a torture session she lies next to him in his cell, and gives him a massage. “It was lovely touching him. I imagined the flesh below the skin and thought it must be good to eat. In other times, when we were anthrophagi, I would have eaten mouthfuls of that flesh.”
Despite the moral quagmire in which she lives, Lorena does have redeeming features. It is not only that she performs one heroic act which redeems her politically. She is a good, concerned mother. She is sensitive. She admires those comrades who are worth admiring. She does have a strong moral sense: the fact that the monster is within rather than without does not mean that we cannot spot it when it appears. Lorena’s problem is that she is too obsequious, too obedient, too malleable, and too intelligent: she is easily swayed and her clever and devious mind is ready with a rationalization every time. And yet she is the incarnation of the most monstrous evil a political regime can muster.
The gap between that terrible fact and the complexity of the woman seen in close-up is at the heart of this gripping novel. What makes one read on with wide-eyed amazement is a sense of humility about one’s prejudices and one’s confidence in commanding the moral high ground. I can think of no novel which makes torture and the abuse of human rights in general seem more repugnant. But it does so in an original manner, far removed from the denunciatory tract the subject usually inspires. Fontaine never allows us as readers to feel good and complacent on reading about the atrocities described, because he does not allow us to position ourselves as removed from them. That is a remarkable achievement in the face of repression on which Latin American dictatorships have no monopoly: witness Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo. It is of course a form of repression which only a novel could deal with in this kind of intimacy. Fontaine’s sources confessed to him, anonymously, what they did and felt during the torture sessions, but they could never have put such confessions in writing, let alone sign them.
To any reader who insisted on knowing for certain whether the kinds of things described fictively by Fontaine really did occur, Lorena the epistemologist would say that absolute certainty on such secret, underground matters is altogether impossible. But those who know that period in Chile well would think they were likely.
Arturo Fontaine
LA VIDA DOBLE
302pp. Tusquets. Paperback, E18.27.
978 84 8383 243 1
David Gallagher is the author of Modern Latin American Literature, 1973, Improvisaciones, 1991, and, most recently, Otras Improvisaciones, 2005.
Arturo Fontaine's remarkable novel of politics, sex and torture in Chile resists the moral high groundDavid Gallagher In a recent article on “Chile: Politics and Fiction”, Carlos Fuentes suggested that Arturo Fontaine was the true heir to José Donoso, the man who is generally regarded as the finest novelist in a country best known, according to Fuentes, for poets such as Pablo Neruda and Gabriela Mistral. It strikes me that one quality Fontaine has inherited from Donoso, apart from a vivid narrative style, is his strong sense of freedom. Like Donoso, he does not seem to be beholden to anybody. Like Donoso, he is not afraid to look into the most embarrassing corners of Chilean society, seeking the ugly truths behind the comfortable masks worn by the elites across the political spectrum.
In his remarkable third novel, La vida doble (Double Life), Fontaine looks into the ugliest corner of all: the squalid world of torture during the Pinochet regime, and he does so with an independence, and freedom of mind, that will irritate many readers on both Left and Right. The novel is about a woman, called Irene or Lorena – let’s call her Lorena. Brought up in a middle-class, if broken, family, and educated by nuns, to whom she is always solicitous, Lorena goes on to study French literature and philosophy at university. Abandoned by her boyfriend when pregnant, she wanders into an opposition march, and little by little becomes absorbed into a left-wing militant group called Hacha Roja (Red Axe).
Soon she is tearing down her posters of Mick Jagger and Robert Redford and replacing them with posters of Marx and Che Guevara. “I felt I suddenly belonged to something big, to a huge collective body. We sang together and I was part of the hope of those who suffered, part of the poor of this earth.” She is given military training. Subsequently arrested in action, she is subjected to extreme torture, but she does not give anything important away. She is then released so that the secret police can follow her and discover who she really is. When they do, they arrest her again and this time they threaten to hurt her daughter. This breaks her, and she becomes a double agent, helping to interrogate and identify torture victims. Because she puts on a Cuban accent so that her blindfolded victims will not recognize her voice, she becomes known as “la Cubanita”. This is the story she recounts to the narrator of La vida doble in Stockholm, where, decades later, she is in a home suffering from terminal cancer.
What happened to Lorena happened to many women during the Pinochet years: Fontaine undertook careful research into those cases before writing his novel. But her fictional attributes are well suited to a narrator who is seeking to expose the world she inhabited, leaving no stone unturned but suspending ultimate judgements. In the five-hour interview she gives the narrator in Stockholm, Lorena does not seem to spare any detail, however crude; at the same time, thanks to her education, she provides a lively moral and epistemological commentary on what she describes. Her malleable nature allowed her to empathize fully, not only with the insurgents but later with the torturers. She can convey the rationale behind the actions of both sides, but her acute analytical mind enables her to distinguish between rationale and rationalization.
Lorena assumes that the narrator will reduce all she says to him in Stockholm to a simple narrative in which the good and the bad will be clearly distinguished in the interests of producing an “edifying moral fable”, because, as she says, otherwise “no one could understand this story. No one would want to . . .”. What he will no doubt write, she predicts,
"is a moral adventure story. That’s what will get you a publisher. People love a story that confirms their prejudices. To recognize what they have already seen on TV: that’s what they like. Truth is too troubling, too edgy, too contradictory and too horrible. Truth is immoral. It shouldn’t be printed."
The strength of La vida doble – what makes it so original and so audacious – is that the narrator contradicts this prediction. He writes down everything that she says, without censorship. He makes no judgement at all. Far from confirming our prejudices, he allows us to travel through the helter-skelter of Lorena’s moral confusion, and that of the torturers too.
Lorena has an affair with El Flaco, the most senior figure among the group of torturers for which she works, and as they indulge in some after-sex philosophizing, he tells her of a meeting he once had with his boss, presumably the head of the secret service, in which he argued that they were capturing too many innocent people, and that as a result their actions were becoming counter-productive. Instead of catching and isolating insurgents, he argues, they are disseminating terror and breeding hatred. The boss disagrees and El Flaco, frustrated, realizes that he has a vested interest in there being more and more insurgents, because that way his power, and budget, will increase. And El Flaco “opens his long arms inviting me to understand him”, says Lorena. “Because that is what he is asking of me, that I see him as a good man. In the middle of the filth and grime, a man who is just and who loves me.”
An unlikely discussion between a couple of torturers, one thinks, and of course the ironic distance is always there: with Lorena's level of education, it could not fail to be. But this is not a novel for anyone looking for clear-cut moral outrage. It is one that posits that the monster is not out there, but within us. As Lorena puts it, once the place of limited impunity has been established – because there are limits, there is a system, it’s not pure chaos – the monster we carry within us, the beast which feasts on human flesh, is unleashed in the best of fathers, the nicest of daughters. But for that to occur, there has to be an order which you obey and which makes you innocent. The well-wrought sense of belonging to an institution that you acquire, and the discipline, allow that transference of guilt to the man above, to the superior in the hierarchy.
The transference of guilt is, of course, a two-way process. El Flaco feels let down not only by his superior, but also by the underlings who, according to him, get carried away, arresting and torturing people on their own initiative. At every level, people manage to keep carrying out their revolting tasks without guilt.
The world of the insurgents, the noble freedom fighters, has its moral ambiguities too. It is a world of reassuring certainties. “The drop that was my minuscule life was transfigured and became part of a river. We were living in the midst of Sacred History”, says Canelo, one of Lorena’s most heroic comrades, who has fought with the Cubans in places as distant as the Ogaden desert, and who thinks about the “collateral damage” they sometimes cause. He worries because in a bomb blast aimed at a bank, a boy of eleven is killed and a girl of nine mutilated. The boy was called José, and the girl, Karina. And is it all worth it in the end? Lorena, as she talks to the narrator, vacillates. Did they as insurgents achieve more than bring on more repression and provide an excuse for the dictatorship to perpetuate itself? In the end she thinks they did. Actually she thinks they accelerated the end of the Pinochet regime. What she objects to is that her former comrades should later have come to see themselves as victims. They wanted to conquer the world. They wanted to establish their own dictatorship of the proletariat. But instead of being remembered as heroes, they become victims, because they lost, and the military, paradoxically, become criminals because they won.
In this moral quagmire, Fontaine discerns a confused line between torture and sex. At first, they seem polar opposites. Lorena's naked body, while it is being humiliated by its torturers, seems to be an abyss away from the body that once aroused men’s desires. But the torturers often rape their victims and some of the victims end up desiring their tormentors. There is a club to which some female prisoners are taken at night by the torturers. In it there is a room for sado- masochists which one of the most brutal torturers frequents, as a victim: he likes to be flogged, tied to a cross. Drugs are plentiful in this club where identities are dissolved, and anything goes. “We are just carnivorous animals”, muses Lorena, “badly disguised and without the innocence of animals.” Not long before, she had confessed to the narrator that she had got particularly excited with one prisoner who never confessed under torture. After a torture session she lies next to him in his cell, and gives him a massage. “It was lovely touching him. I imagined the flesh below the skin and thought it must be good to eat. In other times, when we were anthrophagi, I would have eaten mouthfuls of that flesh.”
Despite the moral quagmire in which she lives, Lorena does have redeeming features. It is not only that she performs one heroic act which redeems her politically. She is a good, concerned mother. She is sensitive. She admires those comrades who are worth admiring. She does have a strong moral sense: the fact that the monster is within rather than without does not mean that we cannot spot it when it appears. Lorena’s problem is that she is too obsequious, too obedient, too malleable, and too intelligent: she is easily swayed and her clever and devious mind is ready with a rationalization every time. And yet she is the incarnation of the most monstrous evil a political regime can muster.
The gap between that terrible fact and the complexity of the woman seen in close-up is at the heart of this gripping novel. What makes one read on with wide-eyed amazement is a sense of humility about one’s prejudices and one’s confidence in commanding the moral high ground. I can think of no novel which makes torture and the abuse of human rights in general seem more repugnant. But it does so in an original manner, far removed from the denunciatory tract the subject usually inspires. Fontaine never allows us as readers to feel good and complacent on reading about the atrocities described, because he does not allow us to position ourselves as removed from them. That is a remarkable achievement in the face of repression on which Latin American dictatorships have no monopoly: witness Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo. It is of course a form of repression which only a novel could deal with in this kind of intimacy. Fontaine’s sources confessed to him, anonymously, what they did and felt during the torture sessions, but they could never have put such confessions in writing, let alone sign them.
To any reader who insisted on knowing for certain whether the kinds of things described fictively by Fontaine really did occur, Lorena the epistemologist would say that absolute certainty on such secret, underground matters is altogether impossible. But those who know that period in Chile well would think they were likely.
Arturo Fontaine
LA VIDA DOBLE
302pp. Tusquets. Paperback, E18.27.
978 84 8383 243 1
David Gallagher is the author of Modern Latin American Literature, 1973, Improvisaciones, 1991, and, most recently, Otras Improvisaciones, 2005.
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