My Name is Emilia del Valle

I traveled to New York in a heated cabin with upholstered seats that reclined for sleeping, personalized attention, delicious foods served on porcelain dinnerware, and wine in crystal glasses. I had never before seen such luxury, and the very first thing I did when I arrived was send a telegram to Mr. Chamberlian thanking him for the first-class ticket.

Since much had already been written about the famous train, I decided to focus my first travel chronicles on the workers who all but abandoned their families to keep the train running: the invisible laborers, almost exclusively Chinese, who laid out the tracks and maintained them; the sweaty, soot-smudged men who fed the steel beast with tons of coal; the waiters who slept sitting upright; the shocking variety of people and landscapes I encountered along the rails.

They told me about the failed strikes, the children who died young, the alcohol that turned the men violent, the feverish rage over their irredeemable poverty. They read newspapers, some clandestine, and political pamphlets that circulated discreetly. They were not ignorant of what went on beyond the confines of the camp and the broader province, country, even the world; they had heard of many modern-day inventions, the ways other people lived, the incalculable fortunes of mining companies. They commented sarcastically on the revolt of the congress, echoing Troncoso’s opinion: a futres war.

“What good does the right to vote do men, miss? Nothing changes for us. We don’t want poverty wages, we don’t want credit and tokens. We want schools for our little ones, medical attention, some trees in the plaza, more latrines, clean water,” they told me.

Egan then quietly explained that, in Chile, political and economic power was held by a handful of families, landed gentry who owned the large haciendas and managed them like feudal lords. Whippings and the stockade were common punishments for tenants, who were often sold along with the lands they worked. This did not constitute slavery, he said, because the campesinos were free to leave, but in reality, they had nowhere else to go. No one else would hire them and they would end up as beggars and vagabonds on the roads and in the cities.

The upper-class families used the surnames of both father and mother to locate a person’s place in the social hierarchy and within the intricate web of relatives. Del Vale was a high-ranking surname, according to Egan, but no one had heard of Claro from Chihuahua.

I was about to leave when I realized that he was silently sobbing. My indifference gave way to compassion, and I saw him as he was in that moment—a sick man—not the villain my mother so detested, that arrogant young buck who had engendered me on a whim. I approached him timidly, without knowing what to do or say to console him. He took my hand and pressed it between his, racked with sobs, and we remained that way for several minutes, united by some strange complicity, until he collected himself.

Rodolfo found it ironic that the navy had revolted to join the rebels, because Balmaceda, aware that Chile’s power lay on the sea, had granted it vast resources. In the pages of his newspaper, Rodolfo lent his unshakeable support to Balmaceda, but in private, he was ashamed by the government repression, especially the retaliations against the working class. Rodolfo believed that workers had the right to unify and protest the deplorable conditions they were forced to endure, and that it was the government’s duty to consider their demands instead of sending troops in to silence them.

My new friend was one of those intransigent men of true honor, rare in this world, who often end up crushed by a cruelty unimaginable to them.

I no longer know what I actually witnessed and how much I only imagined; it is all a jumbled confusion of horror in my memory. I had never seen violence and death up close—nothing in my twenty-five years of existence had prepared me for so much barbarism, so much suffering. As the bullets whistled all around me and men fell broken and disarticulated like marionettes with cut strings, I numbly carried out the duties that Angelita had assigned me. My head echoed with the certainty, like a strident bell, that so much cruelty and death was unjustifiable, absurd, a senseless waste of life, a sinister game played by the men in power. How is it possible that, from the dawn of their presence on earth, men have systematically set out to murder one another? What fatal madness do we carry in our souls? That propensity toward destruction is the original sin.

That night, I longed for a pencil and a piece of paper to put down my memories, since, in a short while, rifle fire would erase my story completely. I knew that my lie would not matter to anyone, it would be pure vanity to try to preserve it for posterity, but the pencil and paper would help me reconstruct the chain of events that had led me to that cell and perhaps accept the injustice of my sentence. I understood that the life of each and every soldier in that war was worth the same as mine, that all our souls were precious and all of us were at the mercy of forces beyond our control. I was going to die for nothing, just like those men, all of us disposable, anonymous, numbers tallied up by generals and politicians on the balance sheet of history.