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The ceramic Aztec mask mounted on my apartment wall is one of the few physical reminders I have of my Chilean uncle, who died in exile in Mexico City almost two decades ago, two weeks after I informed him of the death of his favorite sister, my mother, almost two thousand miles away. The other reminders of him are fading images and half-remembered conversational exchanges I piece together from the increasingly distant past.

What is certain is that Checho, as Jose Vaccaro de Ponce was nicknamed, had attained mythological status in my childhood imagination, as my mother had told me story after story of his exploits as a dashing young man full of wit and charm and then as a rising star in the Santiago labor movement, whose self-evidently noble goal was to narrow the widest gap between rich and poor in the Western Hemisphere. The stories themselves loomed larger for the fact that he was beyond physical reach after she’d emigrated to the U.S. to marry my father. They’d met during the Second World War, when he was attached to the American embassy in the Chilean capital as an Army Air Force instructor to the country’s military pilots, countering the Nazi influence in Argentina. Checho first met me when I was too young to remember, my mother having taken me as a toddler to visit her family in Chile. But my uncle and I grew close during the summer that I spent there mostly on my own fourteen years later.

“You give me such pain,” Tio Checho said in Spanish when I delivered the news of his sister’s death after his wife handed the phone to him. She had warned me that he was seriously ill with the intestinal disease that he’d long suffered from and that was finally about to kill him.

“I’m sorry,” I replied in his language. Those words were the most personal we had ever exchanged, and they would be the last.

He had served in the brief administration of Salvador Allende, the charismatic medical doctor who had become the first democratically elected Marxist chief executive in the world, and had married an attorney who was his justice minister’s daughter, only to flee with her and her family to asylum in Mexico after the coup mounted by Allende’s own chief of staff, Augusto Pinochet, in September 1973. My aunt, Roxanna, his younger, archconservative sister, had slammed the door in his face when he arrived at her house in the upper middle-class neighborhood of Brown Norte, where I had spent that recent North American summer and South American winter, to say goodbye the night Checho and his wife and family fled. Instead, the last words he would hear from Roxanna were, “You brought this upon yourselves.” She would die of emphysema a few years later.

I visited him twice in Mexico City during the years after the coup, and he came to New York once after those visits, where in our apartment kitchen he recited by heart several of Pablo Neruda’s Veinte Poemas de Amor y Una Cancion Desesperada with perhaps a trace of emotion reflecting the fact that his wife, who was some fifteen years younger than my uncle, had begun to demand a separation. I say “perhaps” because he did not let on that this was the case. Only later, from my mother, did I learn that his wife had grown tired of the fact that he couldn’t find permanent work and thus was forced to live off her earnings as a civil servant in the Mexican social security administration.

My uncle then traveled by train to Chicago, where he asked my mother if he might come to live with her and my father, only to be refused for reasons that were never quite clear to me. My mother simply explained to me, plaintively, that she simply could not accommodate his request. It wasn’t possible, she said. It just wasn’t. I could tell from her tone, and her inability or unwillingness to explain herself, that she felt badly about this. Still, there was a coldness to her decision I’d never seen her express before. Her brother was her closest living relative, someone she said she adored, featuring most prominently in the stories she told accompanying my childhood dreams for myself, while I pored over maps of South America and Chile in the Rand McNally World Atlas that still gathers dust on one of my bookshelves, one so old and out of date it reflected the Cold War divisions of Europe and Asia in primary colors. It also contains the red crayon scribbles I’d scrawled in the margins of those maps that of course included the two-thousand-mile-long shoestring of a country that ran half the length of the coast of the continent immediately west of the Andean mountain chain, known locally as La Cordillera. As I did so, I would listen to her speak of life in that country before she left her entire family to marry my father.

“You are Chilean,” she would insist over and over. I would hear how her own father had sung her to sleep to the lyrics of “Besame Mucho” and taken her to soccer games at the National Stadium, where my uncle took me decades later and where the Pinochet junta rounded up those it considered subversive less than a year and a half after that, storing the bodies of those it killed in its concrete bowels. And I would witness her cry and cry to depths I’d never imagined possible when she received news of her father’s funeral via a flimsy aerogram not long before from his widow in Chillan, my grandfather’s second wife, whom, once my parents and sister had joined me late that summer, we had visited along with him and their daughter via a long train ride south of Santiago. But again, the actual reason my mother might have given Tio Checho for refusing him room and board—a lack of money or space, or the emotional burden he represented—she never provided to me.

My uncle then traveled to San Francisco, where he visited his third and youngest sister, who had emigrated with her family a decade or so before Allende’s election. I do not know if he asked her the same question only to be refused again. Perhaps someday I will ask that of a cousin there with whom I remain in sporadic contact. I’ve lost touch with other members of my mother’s side of the family, there and, after the coup, in Chile.

My uncle returned in any case to Mexico City, where he eventually reconciled with his wife, and then visited Chile after another decade or so, when Pinochet finally fell, democracy was restored and a general amnesty for political antagonists was declared. But too much about the country had changed for my uncle to return for good. Time had passed him by, and Chile was no longer his.

When I heard this, I recalled an evening during the visit I’d made to Santiago a year and a few months before Allende’s election. Tio Checho had taken me to a café in the Bohemian quarter known as the Quinta Normal to hear folk music. I cannot remember who exactly we came to hear, but I often wonder whether it was the renowned singer-songwriter, poet, theater director and political activist Victor Jara who performed on the piano that night.

A documentary I watched the other evening about Jara was inconclusive on that point, simply because the images of his countenance did nothing to jog my memory. But the documentary showed recorded images familiar to me from a much older documentary about the coup, The Battle of Chile, by Patricio Guzmán, which included scenes from Allende’s campaign, election and rallies designed to counter the opposition brewing because of the outbreak of worker and trucker strikes and the chaos that ensued, his distinctive, black-framed glasses over the neat mustache so similar to my uncle’s own, which he had never shaved after his mother told him she found it handsome when first encountering it decades earlier, the earlier images of Allende before ecstatic crowds followed by those of the fighter jets strafing and bombing the presidential palace where he would die, by his own hand or the army’s has never been clear. I recalled passing the palace, called La Moneda (roughly, “The Mint”), not eighteen months earlier with my aunt and her similarly black-clad friend as we strolled toward the Café do Brasil or a similarly Latin-named but Viennese-styled restaurant for Once. This custom, like so many in Chile, was actually Anglophilic and quaintly but erroneously called by that word though it took place at or around five pm instead of at eleven am, as Once means in Spanish. It amounted to afternoon “tea,” including sandwiches and pastries that would tide one over until the family would take a simple supper at nine.

I imagine the long-standing custom has survived all that subsequently occurred after our peaceful, aristocratic stroll so far away from the miles and miles of corrugated tin-roofed shanties that lined either side of the Pan-American Highway on the outskirts of the city, but not so far away from the high-walled, well-shaded, inner-patioed compounds of the wealthy.

Yet the image from the older documentary I most distinctly recall was that of an army tank in the street outside the palace, a soldier with a rifle pointed directly at the camera, and a puff of smoke emitted from its barrel before the camera moments later turned skyward as the man behind it fell to the street, having filmed his own death.

 We had received reports via aerogram or long-distance phone call, from Chile or San Francisco, of the growing chaos that preceded the coup, the strikes, the marches, the public threats issued from the right-wing newspaper, El Mercurio, and the quarters that my uncle and his wife referred to as “los momios,” Spanish for “the mummies” and slang for those whose political thinking could be characterized as eons out of date and had themselves therefore been metaphorically wrapped for posterity in Egyptian cotton so desiccated it resembled stone. Yet among those reports of what was happening five thousand miles away was one that noted my uncle had taken to carrying a pistol because of the chaos, including squatters in his apartment whom he had had to drive off, but mostly for his own personal protection. All of this, of course, was blamed on Allende when it would become clear later that it was instigated and supported all along by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, before, of course, the latter would share the Nobel for helping to arrange a ceasefire in Vietnam. 

“Quite the magician,” my uncle would later comment in his familiar ironic tone about the U.S. president’s closest adviser on news of the award, which happened to coincide with a visit Checho made to Chicago not long after he escaped to Mexico.  

I also distinctly remember how upon our arrival at the café in the Quinta Normal years earlier he had been greeted like no less of a celebrity than Victor Jara might have been. Surrounded by the crowd of young people gathered there, Tio Checho received warm handshakes and firm abrazos amid admiring smiles all around as we made our entrance and sat down at a table to drink mulled red wine and listen to stirring songs full of hope for the future of Chile. After the coup, when I heard that the junta’s thugs had broken Jara’s hands as they tortured him inside the stadium where I’d sat with my uncle and watched the national team beat Bolivia in a World Cup preliminary while the streets of the capital were completely deserted for a much happier occasion, everyone not at the stadium glued to radios or TVs to watch the game, I wondered how many of the people in that crowd in the café that evening the junta also might have made “disappear.”  

A few years later, while I was visiting my uncle in exile for the first time, he took me to the National Autonomous University of Mexico to attend a lecture about the coup. I realized as I sat in the classroom filled by students and non-students like us that my Spanish was and had always been limited. And I decided that the resulting language barrier—my uncle’s English was next to nonexistent—might be one reason I felt as if I could get only so close to Checho. But there was more to the issue than that. After all these years, my impressions of him ultimately still seemed more mythological than real, not to mention intimate. He was still mostly a character in a narrative my mother had told me about herself, and how I figured in the life she had come to live in a world not her own.

After the lecture, Tio Checho explained that what they had heard was a “scientific” explanation of what had occurred in his country, in keeping with what he considered the reasoning of Marxism, that is, strictly logical and empirical in its analysis of historical developments, and what was derived from this explanation could help the left avoid the mistakes the Allende regime had committed the next time it came to power.

But something about all that lengthened the distance I felt between us. I found what he said hard to accept, not so much because of my own political inclinations, which were largely in sympathy with his, but because of the lack of personal connection his explanation of the lessons of the coup involved. He did not speak and, it seemed to me, never would of the pain and anguish involved, not to mention the evening we spent together in the Quinta Normal. Perhaps his losses had embittered him or simply made him stoical in the face of all that had transpired. The fact was my uncle seemed personally detached from his own history, even his family, and lived as if that approach were unassailable, and if he hadn’t always done so, he did now, as might any true Marxist.

As he went on explaining the substance of the lecture to me, we stood before an enormous, stylized mural painted by David Siqueiros high up on the façade of a university building in abstract depiction of the native Mexican population and the revolution they had finally succeeded in pursuing after the Spanish had destroyed their ancestors’ civilization. I felt dwarfed by the mural’s expanse, and those of others around us by Diego de Rivera as well as Siqueiros. At last I understood that my uncle would remain more of a symbol for me than a personal relation, which of course could not help but sadden me and likely always will as my memories of him fade.

I purchased the Aztec mask now affixed to my wall at a tourist stall at the edge of the Zocalo, the vast square at the center of the Mexican capital. After the university lecture, he took me there to inspect the remains of the empire that lay directly beneath the huge Spanish cathedral built upon the ruins of the pyramids leveled by conquistador Hernan Cortes. Archeologists had only recently begun their work excavating the fragments of the buried past. And it continues to this day more than a half century later, as does my own.