The Two Sides of the Coin, andThe Two Faces of La Moneda1

DIAMELA ELTIT, TRANSLATED BY KELLY AUSTIN

I ask myself: what could be the possible way of referring to theChilean political (hi)story when this (hi)story is at the sametime personal, corporal, without falling into the engrossed tes-timonial vertigo or in the predictable exercise of constructingan "intelligent" or distant point of view about the events thatlie chaotically—without beginning or end—in memory andwhose footprints survive in a transverse atemporality that, often,perceivably accosts the present. I think about how to speakwhen one does not come from the social or political sciences orfrom a particular discipline that conscientiously examinessociopolitical landmarks and their links. I think, from my liter-ary place, that perhaps the word golpe2 might hold a key for meto approach this (hi)story, the (hi)story marked by the eventsof September 11,1973 in Chile.

I say golpe in the multiple meanings that this word achievesin the psyche of every subject, in the diversity of resonancesthat this word has in the interior of every subject, I say golpethinking, for example, in scars or in hematoma or in fractureor in mutilation. I say golpe as cut between one instant andanother, as surprise, as accident, as assault, as pain, as aggress-ive game, as symptom. The golpe, territory privileged andrepeated from infancy, whose frequency occurs under theform of the fall or of the attack, is perhaps the first memory,the first experience in which one internalizes in a carnal waythis word when the body erupts3 materially as body or appears

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in its difference with what is other—the other—that precociousopponent that draws itself as enemy body from the golpe itself.

If that word extends to golpe de Estado, to program, to thepolitical form of resolving a difference of options, it implicatesin one way or another the reissue of this first time, a regressiontoward the first drives, toward the first fears, until retreatingto the moments in which the irrepressible first rage erupts.4

Without a doubt, the 11th of September in Chile did nothave a single effect on all civilians. The golpe was celebrated bythose who symbolically, politically and economically joined theranks of the military, of the army of tin soldiers that, marchingforward5 with their affected war epoch, broke through withthe goal of intercepting a political trajectory that to themseemed inappropriate to their project and applied themselvesto generate a system of violent authoritarianism, that thoughtfrom the present I can't keep from associating, I repeat it,beyond the multiplicity of possible meanings, with tyrannicalchildren, with a power that wished itself absolute and that pro-liferated their desires for the regulation of reality in the wakeof the search for a military tidiness, bordering on insanity,inside the civil strata.

The attack on difference was multiple and incessant. Thesplit between an us and the others, pure and impure, patriotsand extremists gave rise to the monotonous and sustainedbinarism through which the bodies/corps regimented them-selves. The body, in the political spotlight, became a tragic,model territory of disciplinement. A model that became prim-ordial by way of torture, crime and disappearance.6

I want to return to the 11th day of September and to itsoverwhelming scenographic display that emerged inaugurallymarked by the signs that afterwards were going to multiplyover 17 years.

That day, the soldier's uniforms oversaturated with emblems,with their smudged faces, weapons in position of attack, werethe decisive figures for signaling an atmosphere of war thatseemed to come from well-known Hollywood cinematography

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suddenly transposed to the neutral and corralled city of Santi-ago. The image of the soldier armed to the teeth, whose mobileand unstable look searched for an enemy, became symmetricaland functional with the rigid military edicts that listed, in thismaniacal order that was already not going to stop, notified thepublic of one order and another order with which it shouldcomply, since beyond the emphatic voices and the radiatingedicts, outside, in the cities, the soldiers ran through thestreets, vigilantes and in attack mode, riding in tanks andtrucks, posing in ways that were already impossible to distin-guish from the possible (cinematographic) projection of a realdesire to eliminate whatever "enemy" might cross their path.

The voice of President Salvador Allende was heard withsome interference, through two radio stations that had not yetbeen taken over, these radio stations were transmitting whatwas going to be his last presidential speech, a speech transmit-ted from the Casa de Gobierno (House of Government) andthat, beyond its character as dramatic historical document,invoked the workers, the democratic becoming and called formaintaining a cautious resistance and, inside the caution thatthe speech asked of his sympathizers and devotees, thedepressive signs could be inferred of a leader faced with thesituation of agolpe de estado that at that hour, he already knewand we knew—paying attention to the waning signals of histone—had become irreversible.

And beyond the military edicts and the soldiers was theimminent bombing of the Casa de Gobierno—La Moneda—where the war planes were going to drop their bombs on noless than the city center. They were going to drop their bombs,right in the center, to remove President Salvador Allende andwere thus going to remove a piece of democratic history thatwas going to be understood—this they were going to assurelater—as the extirpated part of a "Marxist cancer."

And still beyond the edicts, the soldiers, the imminence ofthe bombing of La Moneda—that they warned would take placeat noon—an indeterminate number of airplanes buzzed over

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the city, the crazed sound of the buzzing planes made it seemthat from one moment to the next they were going to come fall-ing down out of the sky onto the roof of a house (of my house,of one of my neighbors'—how to explain it—of all the houses).

And also the shots. Intermittent bursts of machine-gun firebegan to install themselves as a possible sound in the city. Byair and by land. And in the coastal cities, by air, by land, by sea,the armed forces demonstrated their hallucinatory armedpower that was deploying and deploying in order to vanquishthis enemy that was lurking in every corner, gap, or hide-outthat might be allowed in the territory and that, little by little,by the buzzing planes, by the sounds of the machine guns, bythe warning of the bombing, by the blackened faces, thisenemy initiated his integration into a part of the brain of everyone of us that was horrified by what was happening and in themiddle of the horror and of the pain, we were already convertedsymbolically into this extremist enemy that they were search-ing for, into the extremist enemy that had broken the impeccableand Jegendary Chilean order and that had to be eliminated inorder to restore the contaminated nation to its original purity.

That 1 lth of September, even before noon, before the bomb-ing, the scenery was already determined by the order of themarks extended across the city. The form of the war had beenconsolidated into a montage/mise-en-scene impossible to escape.Fascism, which only circulated as a form of investigation in microsituations, had become concrete, invasive, embedded itself in acity configured by new signs that proclaimed a nationalrefoundation. An obligatory and selective refoundation that,in order to return to execute its messianic venture, looked inan absorbed way at the bodies and put them beneath the micro-scope of military procedure.

At noon, La Moneda already literally burned through andthrough, the bombing had been consummated and the Casa deGobierno blazed with its flames. Out of the spectacle of the fireemerged, superimposing itself, the new regime that continuedand continued emitting its radiating edicts to the population,

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laconic proclamations that did not inform except that theykept notifying the passing of measures and actions with whichthey kept winning a cause won beforehand. The emphatic and,why not say it, shrill military hymns filled the radios underlin-ing a patriotic state suspended on the finality of its resources.

The television seized by the incessant broadcast of cartoons—that in no way can be read innocently in the middle of the con-solidation of an extreme authoritarianism—blocked, in a tra-gicomic sense, the information. Donald Duck and his friendsoccupied the screens. In this way, the official images of the firsthours were the cartoons that, under the pretext of distractingthe infantile public, at the same time shed light on a lesson, onthe ironic will for infantilizing the public, or else on the hier-archized look of the new power that emerged, whose will wasto maintain civility in a state of control and infantile depend-ency, conditioned upon the avatars of the cartoons that, withtheir distorted voices, left at the end of every episode an edify-ing moral.

During these hours, a state of siege reigned. The city thusstayed depopulated of whatever body that wasn't the military.Whichever body that might not correspond to the militarybody7 could be assassinated because the traffic8 through thecity was already prohibited, in this way the city lost its publiccharacter to turn into a minefield. The state of siege opened anew division that, over 17 years, was going to maintain withrigorous distinctions, dividing, reterritorializing the spaces toseparate, in a radical way, the habitation9 of the bodiesbetween the public and the private, between the inside and theoutside, between safety and danger.

One could not go out on the street, but, most importantly,one could not go outside because the outside no longerbelonged, it had been stripped of its communal character.This outside, then, transformed into an outlawed territory,left to the images of an imagination that could not be filled, inthese circumstances, except with the imaginary of blood and ofwar.

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At some time in the afternoon, the cartoons were brieflyreplaced by objective and distanced information that indicatedthat President Salvador Allende had died, had committed sui-cide inside La Moneda—succinct news, broadcast with amarked indifference in order thus to politicize the new hege-mony and to present the military dominion as absolute andimpenetrable.

The television displaced the radio and played host, betweenone and then another cartoon, to the military edicts comingfrom the new Junta Militar. The edicts demanded the surren-der of weapons, called on the political leaders of the UnidadPopular government to surrender themselves to the militaryunits that were being stipulated, called also for the patriotismof the public in order to denounce extremism, because extrem-ism was the word that resonated in a wide, general sense, thissense that was inscribing, at the end of the day, with a negativeforce in what was going to be the new national lexicon.

Toward afternoon, in the middle of a fevered chronologythe solemnity of the national anthem irrupted on the televi-sion screens. The national anthem was the framework to receivethe Junta Militar that for the first time was going to address thecountry that factually speaking it had already governed sincethe first hours of the morning. In the manner of a suspensefilm that tensely administered its leading elements, the uni-formed men from the four branches of the military presentedthemselves in front of the cameras, seated behind a grandiosetable, in order to give the inaugural address of the new gov-ernment.

For the first time, for some of us, the face that was not goingto go away appeared publicly because it was General Pinochetwho headed the new Junta, protected behind dark lenses, con-cealing the direction of his gaze, a gaze impossible to detectbehind these lenses that were another form of armor, ratifyingthe implantation of a rigid atmosphere determined by the newpublic language that pursued a communication identical tothe military edicts, identical for its abysmal scarceness, for its

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domineering tone, for the dry and occlusive word that circu-lated on the no less than impassive face that resembled anarchaic father who, from the convincing theatricality of hisanger, seemed determined to use whatever measure necessaryto demonstrate the plenitude of his patriarchal power.

The bodies of the soldiers that headed the golpe appeared,in the final hours of the afternoon, like the final prop that waslacking to complete the scenery, this mise-en-scene of a politicalwork that was going to be represented for the next 17 years.There they were, seated behind an official table, the four uni-formed men making labored speeches and, not without confu-sion, signaling the end of the political parties, the end ofpractically everything in order to begin a new era—the era oforder—in the closing moments of one of Chile's most decisiveand chaotic days of the century.

The television image of the four chiefs of the militarybranches inserted them into the interior of the houses whenthese same four had already taken control of everything publicby way of the programmatic inoculation of fear in the peoplein order to thus reduce the civilians to a domestic space. Spacedoubly domesticated after the implantation of the State ofsiege had imposed a complete curfew and the suspension ofthe exercise of all civil rights.

During those hours, outside, the diverse spaces becamealready alien and clandestine because the city, radically per-formed, multiplied its gestures of death. Thousands of citizens,women and men, had been detained across the country andwere being driven to military centers and sports stadiums. Aconsiderable number of men were executed during the hoursof the golpe. More than one person died inside their house dueto a reckless bullet shot by the compulsive and perverse ges-ture of a soldier lost in ultimate anonymity. We knew aboutthose deaths because, despite a lack of news, the atmosphere ofthose hours already contained them in its well-defined syntax.

A hurried and violent apprenticeship rapidly changed thecultural signs. Together with the marks of a culture of death

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emerged the parallel culture of survival, the necessity to organ-ize a new reading of the signs in order to survive became evid-ent, in order to go through mere survival and to be able to liveamidst powers that proved adverse and antagonistic for those ofus who were crossed by a political, anti-dictatorial imaginary.

The reading of the new signs involved the clear internaliza-tion of the events that were happening. To read analyticallythat central military power, allied with a considerable sector ofcivilian forces and even of international forces, like an explo-sion of incalculable proportions in the face of which the logicwent haywire, to read in the middle of this vast explosion ofpower, that seemed unjustifiable, as, nevertheless, a (political)discourse emerged that upheld the abuses of power and guar-anteed them by way of a twisted rhetoric.

And afterwards, over 17 years, to live, to read and to re-readthe senses meaning of the central powers, to never again for-get the historic relation between body, power and defenseless-ness. Not ceasing to read that what was behind the subjugationof bodies, what was not said, stemmed from an economic desire,in a savage form of renegotiating capital. It was a question ofrecuperating the goods at the cost of the aggravation of thebody—especially of the public bodies—pushed to the limit oflack, abused in horrific torture sessions, in unending mentalhumiliations.

The stage on September 11th was, above all, an ornate,blackened scenography cross-dressed in patriotic values that,in reality, only looked for the implantation of a radical capitalism,camouflaged behind hackneyed speeches that named withoutend the fatherland, the order and the integrity of the Chileanfamily while it extended, clandestinely, the spaces of imprison-ment and massive dismissal of workers not addicted to thesystem. The national integrity inscribed itself in the televisedproclamations that incited denunciation as a sign of a valuablepatriotic demonstration. The we (this civic-military alliance)was constructing itself against the others, the enemies, thatwere going to victimize them from who-knew-which method.

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The only discursive axes visible rested solely on the binaryequation of that we and those others, that unique equation onlyfor setting in motion what was hidden: the persistent, subtleand complex operation of a progressive dismantling of theState in the face of/vis-a-vis a civil population prevented fromrealizing any gesture of repudiation. Behind the repression,beyond the grave crisis of human rights, the dismantling of theState was dependent on the unrestricted endorsement of a lib-eralism that was going to turn into triumph, truth and essen-tialist dogma.

Today now that Chile persists—joyfully—in this economythat was founded theoretically upon relativism in order to thusmake possible the buying and selling, the buying and sellingand the right (obligation and duty) to the debt as a pseudo-democratizing form, then it doesn't cease to be significantto remember that the 11th day of September produced—historic, hysteric—the bombing of the currency. Of that LaMoneda. (An)other.10

Notes

1. Diamela Eltit's essay was originally published as "Las dos caras de LaMoneda" in Nueva Sociedad. ISO (1997): 40-45.

2. Eltit takes pains to define golpe in the following paragraph and link it togolpe de Estado (coup d'etat). In a very prosaic sense, golpe means hit,blow, or mark.

3. The verb used here is estallar, a verb also used in the sense of war erupting.4. Parallel to estallar, desatarse is similarly employed to describe the erup-

tion of a political revolt.5. The phrase here is poner en marcha and echoes the military command. En

Marcha! or Forward March!6. I have translated desaparición as disappearance to show its echo with the

"disappeared" in Chile, but it should be noted that this word also meanspassing away, death.

7. Here Eltit uses cuerpo, body, in the sense of corps as well.8. Traffic clearly captures the intention here of tránsito. But, in the context,

it is important to be aware that tránsito also connotes passage, passing,and death.

9. Habitación also has the very intimate signification of bedroom as well asthe more general one of habitat.

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10. The text is very rich here and extremely elusive in English. It reads:"el bombardeo a la moneda. A La Moneda esa. Otra." The replace-ment emphasizes the echo and substitution of La Moneda by money,but is likewise a listing.