Certainly, when the Ariel Dorfman character confesses his haunted previous, insisting he was accountable for Claudio Jimeno’s martyrdom, Adrián assures him that he’s fallacious. It isn’t true that he died as a substitute of you, Adrián says. Your pal would have died even when you hadn’t modified shifts with him. He needed to be at La Moneda, would have gone there anyway, no matter your individual actions. They murdered all of the president’s advisers. You couldn’t have saved him, identical to I, Adrián avers, couldn’t save Allende, although I used to be near him — two meters away — when he died.
As I transcribed the phrases that that character whispered to my fictional alter ego and avatar, as his invented voice invaded my authorial voice, a parallel tranquillity rose inside me, just like the sweetest reduction from an ailment and ache that had lasted for a lot too many many years. He was proper. Or someone inside me (or the ghost of Claudio, of Allende, of the desaparecidos) was transmitting the balm of that apparent reality that I had refused to simply accept or acknowledge although it had been staring me within the face all this time. Now, after journeying painstakingly via the trying glass of literary fabrication and wishful pondering, this reality was having a medicinal impact on me.
I assumed with reduction, as I completed writing the e-book, “Properly, that’s the tip of it,” not realizing there was nonetheless one other startling revelation awaiting me.
Then, in 2022, Claudio’s son, Cristóbal Jimeno, and his spouse, the journalist Daniela Mohor, revealed a memoir, “La Búsqueda,” about their try and retrace Claudio’s ultimate days and execution.
It took me some time to learn their e-book, however after I did I found, to my amazement, that Claudio had not slept at La Moneda the evening of Sept. 10, as I had believed all this time, however left his personal home at daybreak on the eleventh. So he should have, with out telling me, switched locations with another person. Under no circumstances as I had imagined his ultimate evening on earth.
