Abstract
This second piece by a Latin American about exile explores through that experience many aspects of his people's ‘personality’ and the events leading to exile.
Tito Valenzuela is a 37-year-old Chilean poet and … now … novelist. After studying painting and graphic design at the School of Fine Arts of the University of Chile in Santiago, he worked during the years of Salvador Allende's Popular Unity government in film-making and television. A book of his poetry was published in 1971, and more appeared in an anthology of work by young Chilean poets in 1972. At the time of the military coup of 11 September 1973 he was working on a film on the nitrate mining area of northern Chile. During the coup the military raided his home, removing books and manuscripts. After living clandestinely for several months, Tito left the country for Peru. Unable to remain there he took up an offer by the United Nations to go to Rumania. Finding the atmsophere there restrictive and stifling, he left for Sweden, where he worked in a ham factory, then travelled on to Berlin and finally London in 1975. After a long battle with British immigration authorities he was given permission to stay.
Pasajero en transito (‘Passenger in Transil’) is Tito Valenzuelas's first novel, as yet unpublished. It concerns a young Chilean photographer, Ignacio (García, who is exiled (like the author) first in Bucharest and then in Stockholm. The protagonist's profession is itself an image of his psychological state, where the past freezes in the present, tending to mystification and distortion. By tracing Ignacio's obsessions in exile and the deterioration in the past of his relationship with Soledad … who disappears during the first days of the coup … the novel explores the Chile of both Allende and the months following the coup, as well as exile itself. The extract we publish finds Ignacio in Bucharest, playing chess with another exile, Pedro ‘El Peluca’ Morales, whose situation is also producing crisis and domestic rupture.
Certain references need explanation. Chileans make great use of nicknames, and most of the characters are referred to by these. El Peluca means ‘the wig’. Loco ‘crazy’ and El Caluga ‘the candy’ (as in sweet). Others have been translated - The Philologist, the Marquis. Coco is untranslatable. Huevón is the all-purpose Chilean interpolation, used incessantly, affectionately and in anger. Literally obscene, it means ‘big balls’. El Pedagogico is the Instituto Pedagogico, the Teacher Training Institute in Valparaiso. The Lebu was a ship used by the military as a prison during the military coup. Milico is slang for military. The tanquetazo was the attempted coup carried out by a tank regiment in June 1973.