Diary: Pedro Lemebel, Two Scenes of Resistance
Still from the 2019 film Lemebel ©Joanna Reposi Garibaldi
El Coordinador Cultural
If I don’t tell the story here, it might get lost, as memory twists and closes like an oyster around remember when. Because the eighties had barely begun, and those days were so grim and blighted there was almost no light, and only a few of us voiced our outrage in public, through demonstrations that tried to wake the Chilean people from their sleepwalking, their consciences struck dumb by marching boots. Here and there, in disguise or on the down-low, actors, painters, poets, and political groups would meet up after curfew to plan acts of sedition against the regime. And that’s how El Coordinador Cultural was born—a ragtag committee of activists and artists who staged interventions on politically symbolic days. I think it must have been for September 11, as by sunrise the streets were already policed, just like every year, ready for any hint of protest. The organizers had met beforehand, in an unknown location to make sure the details weren’t leaked, which meant the exact time and place where we would intervene were kept secret until the last possible moment, the instructions passing only mouth to mouth to avoid using the phone or writing anything down.
What I’m describing sounds like a movie set in Nazi Germany, but it really was that risky: the cops had shown up at a previous action, arresting people and beating them, and someone had died. The spot on this particular Eleventh was the plaza across from the Municipal Theater—a pretty dangerous choice, being right in the middle of downtown. But the organizers had placed a team of medics and some lawyers about a block away in case anything went wrong. It was never clear how many of us would show up, but many people risked it that day. As we pretended to wait for the bus or passed by each other quickly without saying hello, we realized we were almost a hundred total, each acting as if the others were strangers. Everything would start when the cannon fired at noon, and it needed to be simultaneous and extremely fast. The moment the cannon blasted from the hill, near the theater on Avenida San Antonio, an actress appeared in the crowd, holding a blue balloon (this was the signal). She was carrying an armful of packages, and they tumbled to the ground as she crossed the street, causing a commotion. While other pedestrians helped her pick them up, a vehicle drove into the intersection and a bunch of familiar faces jumped out, forming a chain to cut off traffic. Then the flash action really began: everything had to last no more than three minutes. This was how long it took for the cops to arrive from Paseo Ahumada, a couple blocks away. The painters ran with watches in hand, pasting signs about the dictatorship over the opera’s posters. The poets hurried to the statue of Mekis, the sleazy mayor, on the corner of Bombero Salas, placing money bags in his hands along with a sign that said WATCH ME RUN OFF WITH THE CASH. My job was to dye the water in the plaza’s fountain across the street. I’d hidden the bags of red earth in my floral backpack and pulled them out in a huge cloud of dust that I threw into the basin, but the color clumped at the bottom without the desired bloodying effect. A street sweeper stood beside me, watching the whole scene gobsmacked. Give me that broom, I said, grabbing the handle and quickly stirring the red coloring. Just in time to get the hell out of there—group of dancers were still trying and failing to lift a sign in the air with bunches of balloons, but as soon as we heard a whistle we took our exit.
Oof, what a time, what emergencies we lived through, risking ourselves like that to protest. It’s strange, but there aren’t many who remember anymore. The details have disappeared along with the protagonists, back when no one thought to stage something so public. There weren’t too many of us, after all, maybe fewer than a hundred, who converged that day at noon, with our ass in both hands and a lustrous sigh electrifying our lips.
Pisagua on Pointe
And only today, when the country has leapt into the future, lugging a knapsack of cadavers that drip blood onto the path of truth and reconciliation. When the days of terror have all but evaporated into the past’s menstruated halo. Nights of doors banged open, mornings with olive-green trucks outside the house, waiting for passengers on their way to banishment. Heading south, to an island left off the map. Heading north, to an abandoned saltpeter mine turned into a concentration camp. And right then, in that moment when the soldiers are forcing them to go, holding machine guns and shoving the new detainees who, hysterical, leaving behind their pasts, their homes, their families, have no idea what to throw into exile’s suitcase. Grabbing a sweater, a scarf, and a coat in case it got cold. But, José, don’t forget your pills. But, Carmen, your needles and insulin. Plus socks, undies, and sanitary napkins for the girl-woman arrested at school. In the rush, not knowing what the future would hold, where they were going, it was hard to predict what to pack for exile. Especially if given only a few minutes, troops pushing and shouting at them as they rounded up leftists beneath the dismal green canvas of armored trucks.
On the morning they came looking for Gastón the choreographer, his house was a jumble of clothes and bundles that his twirling dancer hands tied and untied. Photos, makeup, leotards, and ballet slippers were strewn across the floor, while he—a ballerina who’d worn his heart in his toe shoes for Allende—reached for a scarf, threw out a set of silk pajamas, selected a jacket, wondered about taking a polo shirt, packed some high-heeled boots, knocked a hairbrush to the ground, as two exasperated soldiers pointed their guns at him, fingers on the trigger. Do you know where they’re going to take us? asked Gastón, arching a waxed brow. That’s a military secret that can’t be discussed. Hurry up, we’re going to be late, barked the conscript. But I need to know if it’s north or south, if it’s going to be cold or warm, to see what clothes I should bring. I think you’re going north, said the soldier gruffly. But what part of the north? Mountains or beach? They said Pisagua. That’s waves, beach, sand, and sun, thought Gastón, grabbing his bathing suit and a towel on his way out.
And so, on those long afternoons in the concentration camp, facing the sea in Pisagua, while his fellow inmates argued in long political meetings to which he was not invited, while the other prisoners carved handicrafts or penned secret resistance poems if the guards weren’t watching, when the yellow sun glared off the turquoise blue of the waves, the figure of Gastón sunbathing in a Speedo on his orange towel, barbed wire framing him in the distance, was practically an advertisement for tanning lotion amid that landscape of isolation and death. The slumbering dancer’s image must have been a strange contradiction, banished twice over on his square meter of sand, exile, wire fences, and watchtowers where the guards laughed at the summer holiday he was taking in that jail beneath the stars. But really it was Gastón who was laughing at depression and just how serious it was, being in that prison. It was the only way to escape, even if that meant bronzing himself flamboyantly on the same ground that would later become the mass graves in the north.
You can’t be such a fag here, Gastón. We’re in a concentration camp, buddy, not on the beach in Rio, his bunkmates reproached him, an edge to their voice. And what was I supposed to do, if you guys spend the whole day in meetings and more meetings and there was such a pretty sun hanging over the sea?
Minorities sometimes come up with other ways to act in contempt, using what seems like superficiality as a weapon. Gastón, tanning on his beach towel, knew how to break free from that yard of torment, as if a loca’s irreverence could transform a beach towel into a rug for flying, a magic carpet that would hover over the iron bars, float out past the soldiers’ guns, and raise him above that camp of horrors.
Maybe some of the prisoners who got out of there alive still remember the morning when Gastón received his letter of transit, granting him permission to depart immediately for exile in some European country. Gastón, grinning from ear to ear, carefully put away his bathing suit, folded his towel, and breathed deeply, gulping down air as if he wanted, with a single sigh, to erase the morbid atmosphere of that place. Then he wished everyone goodbye and, walking on the tips of his toes, crossed over the spikes at the entrance. And, still glowing tropically, he disappeared from the road in a cloud of dust, never looking back.
Translated by Gwendolyn Harper
Pedro Lemebel (1951–2014) was a Chilean writer, performance artist, and activist, who came to prominence resisting the Pinochet dictatorship and dramatizing the AIDS crisis and conditions of travesti living on Santiago’s margins. He is best known for his crónicas—essays that combine memoir, reportage, fiction, history, and poetry, many of which appeared contemporaneously on activist radio and in national newspapers. These scenes are drawn from the first edition of his crónicas to appear in English, to be published next week by Penguin Classics, A Last Supper of Queer Apostles, translated and edited by Gwendolyn Harper. He his also the author of the novel My Tender Matador.
Gwendolyn Harper is a writer and a translator of Latin American literature. She won a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and a Work in Progress grant from the Robert B. Silvers Foundation for A Last Supper of Queer Apostles.
Read novelist Garth Greenwell on the life and work of Pedro Lemebel. For more crónicas, read Anakana Schofield on the crônicas of Clarice Lispector.
September 11 is the anniversary of the 1973 coup led by Augusto Pinochet against the government of Salvador Allende.
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