This essay is part of How to Live With Regret, a series exploring the nature of regret and the role it plays in all our lives. Read more about the project here.
For most of the last 50 years I have been afflicted with a perverse regret: that I did not die in Chile on Sept. 11, 1973, the day that a military junta overthrew Salvador Allende, our country’s democratically elected president.
Entranced by Allende’s project to attain socialism without resorting to violence — perhaps a first in world history — I went to work for him in the presidential palace, La Moneda. Besides advising Allende’s chief of staff on cultural and press issues, my duties included sleeping one night each week on watch duty at La Moneda. If I had kept to the pre-established rotation — I was scheduled for the night of Monday, Sept. 10 — I would have been present on the morning of the 11th and, in all probability, would have perished, along with Allende and most of his advisers.
But I had asked Claudio Jimeno, an old buddy from university, if I could take his shift on Sunday, Sept. 9, so I could show my 6-year-old son, Rodrigo, the place where I worked. Claudio had gladly accepted in order to spend some time with his own sons, Cristobal, 2, and Diego, 1.
So it had been Claudio, and not me, who had been alerted on that Tuesday dawn that the military was seizing power, Claudio who had resisted as the building was being demolished by tanks and bombs, Claudio who had been captured by troops and then tortured and executed, Claudio whose body had been disposed of anonymously, never returned to his family for burial.
Those images haunted me during the interminable years of exile and through my many returns to dictatorial Chile. The one that I kept picturing from that day was of Claudio by Allende’s side, Claudio who had been loyal to the president to the very end.
I had built, during the more than one thousand days that Allende had governed, a certain epic image of myself: someone willing to give his life in defense of a revolutionary government that was liberating the country from centuries of maldevelopment. It was a model for how this could be done peacefully, using ballots rather than bullets.
But when the time came to prove my enduring commitment, I had failed to show up. I had tried to reach La Moneda and had been turned back by armed police officers. And yet over the years I told myself — groundlessly, absurdly — I could have sought another way into the center of the city as the battle raged. I could have summoned the valor to brave that conflagration. That Allende himself, in his last speech, had told his followers not to sacrifice themselves, to live for the day when Chile would again be free, did not help me overcome my feeling of guilt.
Maybe what I regretted was that I was not, after all, the hero I had dreamed of becoming.
Nestled inside that regret was something deeper and perhaps more devastating. We — Allende and his most enthusiastic followers — had promised a socialist paradise without exploitation and instead delivered our people into a reactionary hell. Even though our failure was collective and even though I was a mere 31, I felt responsible for this catastrophe. I regretted that I had not been able to see the abyss into which we were headed, had not been wise enough or mature enough to have found a way to avoid so much death and destruction.
Regret can paralyze you, corrode your worth, grind you into depression. Or it can compel you to help forge a future where nobody will need to spend years searching for redress for their grieving souls, a tomorrow where we are not condemned to mourn those whose only sin was to fight for a more decent and just world. I chose the path of struggle against tyranny, forging myself into a spokesperson for human rights, vowing never to forget what I owed to those who had died that day at La Moneda and in the many years that followed. I could not change the past, but I could try to ensure that its pain would not be repeated.
I allowed my regrets to fuel me and transform me into the creative person I needed to become in an era not of revolution, but of resistance to dictatorship.
The memory of Claudio Jimeno helped me in that task, the constant reminder that because I was alive, his wife was a widow, that I was the reason his children had grown up fatherless, his parents without a son, the country lacking his contributions as an intellectual and a citizen. There were many others whose deaths I lamented, but because Claudio had perished instead of me, he was the one victim I kept going back to obsessively. And because the exact manner of his death was unknown, whenever I heard of yet one more brutal act committed by the Augusto Pinochet regime that replaced Allende, I invariably projected each horror back onto a helpless Claudio.
One experience in particular would recur: I’d find myself in a dentist’s chair and close my eyes and suddenly I would imagine that he was the one getting his teeth extracted, though without anesthesia. He was being drilled into death. Perhaps my focus on Claudio’s mouth was due to his prominently protruding front teeth, which had earned him the nickname Conejo (rabbit), a moniker that he accepted with his usual bonhomie.
It is likely that such an involuntary, albeit vile and degrading, commemoration of Claudio was compounded by the horror that I didn’t know what actually happened to him — he was a “desaparecido.” Disappearance is one of the more malicious punishments: to arrest people, then kill them and then deny them burial, as if they had never breathed and loved and laughed on this earth.
As my survivor’s guilt was so intricately entangled with the absence of Claudio’s body, I gradually conceived the hope that, if his remains were found and interred, I might achieve a certain surcease from my self-reproach. And if not even a bone could be retrieved, then perhaps the restoration of democracy to Chile would offer some consolation.
And so, when we did oust Pinochet from power in 1990, I had a hesitant expectation that my regret and guilt would subside, and I was not entirely wrong. My remorse began to ebb away as the years went by.
Even so, the old regrets — that I had not died at Allende’s side, that a friend had been killed because he switched places with me, that our peaceful revolution had ended up in blood and misery — must have kept gnawing at me over the ensuing decades. As the 50th anniversary of the coup approached, that lethal Sep. 11, 1973, called out to me, demanding that I revisit it.
I decided to write a novel, “The Suicide Museum,” which allowed me to send a character named Ariel Dorfman on a mission to investigate Allende’s death and determine if he had been assassinated the day of the coup or if he had committed suicide. If I had not been present at the end of our leader’s life, I could at least conjecture what had happened that day. I only gradually realized as the narration warmed up that this would also inevitably entail exploring those other mysteries — my own survival and Claudio’s death.
I was aware that I was perhaps opening a door for the demons with whom I had established an uneasy truce to come back into my life. But my wager paid off. In a surprise development toward the end of the novel, a character I had invented — Adrián Balmaceda, who, as one of Allende’s bodyguards, had witnessed the president’s final moments — came to my rescue and drained the shame and regret that had been plaguing me for almost half a century.
Indeed, when the Ariel Dorfman character confesses his haunted past, insisting he was responsible for Claudio Jimeno’s martyrdom, Adrián assures him that he is wrong. It isn’t true that he died instead of you, Adrián says. Your friend would have died even if you hadn’t changed shifts with him. He wanted to be at La Moneda, would have gone there anyway, regardless of your own actions. They murdered all the president’s advisers. You couldn’t have saved him, just like I, Adrián avers, couldn’t save Allende, even though I was close to him — two meters away — when he died.
As I transcribed the words that that character whispered to my fictional alter ego and avatar, as his invented voice invaded my authorial voice, a parallel tranquillity rose within me, like the sweetest relief from an ailment and ache that had lasted for far too many decades. He was right. Or somebody inside me (or the ghost of Claudio, of Allende, of the desaparecidos) was transmitting the balm of that obvious truth that I had refused to accept or acknowledge even though it had been staring me in the face all this time. Now, after journeying painstakingly through the looking glass of literary fabrication and wishful thinking, this fact was having a medicinal effect on me.
I thought with relief, as I finished writing the book, “Well, that’s the end of it,” not knowing there was still another startling revelation awaiting me.
Then, in 2022, Claudio’s son, Cristóbal Jimeno, and his wife, the journalist Daniela Mohor, published a memoir, “La Búsqueda,” about their attempt to retrace Claudio’s final days and execution.
It took me a while to read their book, but when I did I discovered, to my amazement, that Claudio had not slept at La Moneda the night of Sept. 10, as I had believed all this time, but left his own house at dawn on the 11th. So he must have, without telling me, switched places with someone else. Not at all as I had imagined his final night on earth.
Could it be that the story I had told myself and told the world, the guilt and the disarray, had no basis in reality?
That memoir decentered me, undermining the identity I had built for myself for much of my adult existence. But it also added to the therapy my invented character Adrián had bestowed upon me.
There is a moment in Cristóbal’s book when the son touches tiny particles of bones that may have been his dad’s. A communion with the dead that was followed by a private burial of remains that DNA testing linked to his father. A communion with the dead that was followed by a private burial of those remains. So, to the relief of his family and also of this friend, Claudio was finally placed in a grave that perhaps someday I will visit and thank him for saving my life.
And that is how at last, owing to the intervention of a fictitious character and the all too real son of a man who generously switched places with me so long ago, I have achieved a semblance of closure, the hope that I have proved worthy of the life that was gifted to me.
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