LATIN AMERICA	MARCH 16, 1998 VOL. 151 NO. 10
	The Head Of The House For a young writer, Pinochet evokes an era of patriarchy--and boredom By ALBERTO FUGUET just can't avoid him. Pinochet, I mean. He's all over. I'm surprised he's not in all our family snapshots. Sometimes I feel as if he were at the head of the family dinner table, in our freezing old house in Santiago's classy Providencia neighborhood. He was the north of all our compasses, the strict, scary principal of our tiny national high school. This black-and-white flashback to the heart of the dictatorship years is definitely strange. I have many kinds of memories of those years. Good, boring, weird, decadent, scary, normal. I remember phony plebiscites, gaudy imported goods, awful TV shows and just plain, military bad taste. Chile was a cultural wasteland where we, the crew-cut Pinochet boys, grew up breathing the stale stench of unventilated, totalitarian mediocrity. For me, and for all those under 35, the Pinochet years were our years. At times he made us laugh. The man is funny but also wicked, crudely blunt. Every time he got the chance to underline his power, he dove into it as surely as a comedian hits the punch line. "Not even a leaf moves in this country without my knowing about it" is one of his more famous and startling one-liners. This in the middle of his secret, little dirty war. Now he just seems old. A has-been who still gets press. A harsh reminder that history doesn't go away so fast. I was not that much of a victim. Most of my family supported Pinochet (one does not choose one's parents or one's dictator), or, at best, they gave him the benefit of a doubt. Most of my friends thought the curfew he imposed was their dad's idea. For almost 25 years--practically all my life--Pinochet has leered over our shoulders. First we reacted with fear, then with boredom, now with a sort of stale deja vu that's ever present, like the smog over Santiago. He exiled, executed, curfewed, modernized and put us all in line. Wish we could change the subject. When will we ever do that? I studied journalism when the press had no freedom and even comic strips were censored. The country was exiled from the global mainstream. Democracy wasn't just a sort of rule; it was cool, media-addicted heaven. The U.S. colonized our minds and malls: music, movies, sex, drugs and all that were the only safe ways to rebel. Our campus used to be the headquarters of DINA, Pinochet's secret intelligence service. The thug's hangout had dungeons and secret hallways. Five years before I got there, the place was used to torture and gang-rape. We used those same rooms to play Ping-Pong, smoke joints and relish our slackerish, unpolitical depression. We saw ourselves as Third World punks. No future, we thought. Must leave. Fast. We are still here. For good. This is the place to be. At least, that's what they say. So how will I remember Pinochet? I would like to stick with the fascist-pop, Terminator image: the satanic indoor sunglasses, the concentration camps, the theatrical bombing of the presidential palace. But the puffy, cape-wearing, aging-patriarch look also clings. For just like those who made him, our own fathers and grandfathers whom he sometimes closely resembles, the man is too complex to pin down with such reductive images. Pinochet is an essential part of us. He will haunt us for a long time. A gift from our elders who tried to change the country. They didn't change Chile; he did. Go figure. Pinochet tried to eliminate his foes and evict politics from the bloodstream of the country. He succeeded and failed. Many of his enemies are in power. The opposition is made up of his fans. On certain days like today, I feel disgust for all of them. It's a childish angst, I agree, but no less real. The other night, to my amazement, at a U2 concert, the same 70,000 kids who booed Bono's mention of Pinochet ended up at the end of the night profoundly split when some mothers of "the disappeared" came onstage. To boo Pinochet is easy. It's not so much political as a generational thing. To accept what happened, that's something else. Where Pinochet did triumph, it seems, was with us kids. We bought the line that politics was bad. We grew up depoliticized. I understand all those young--and not-so-young--people who don't vote. When things change, one expects a tremble, a shift. But that's not our way. We changed once, and look where it took us. One can never be too cautious. That's the real legacy we inherited from the generations that came before us. Soon Pinochet will take his dark glasses to the grave, and we will finally be able to see one another without him. It won't be a pretty picture. But it will be about time. Chilean Alberto Fuguet is the author of Bad Vibes. His most recent novel is Tinta Roja.
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