Iowe my first introduction to Chilean life to Alan Jacobs, a former Fulbright grantee of a few years before. He had stayed on in Chile, teaching high-school history and social studies at Nido de Águilas, the English-medium American school where U. S. Embassy personnel and other foreign diplomats sent their children. By the time I knew him, Alan had already achieved the goal which, soon after arriving in Chile, I found to be my own as well. He had entered as fully into Chilean society--on its own terms--as any norteamericano I had ever met. And he had been (as far I could tell) accepted on those terms. For me he became a bridge to the new culture; and like many a bridge, he was destined to be burned.
       I met Alan at one of those parties given by high-level Embassy attachés, at villas in the barrio alto--the middle and upper-class suburbs--parties which began late in the afternoon over pisco sours and hors d'oeuvres, and ended at 4 a.m. amidst incoherent arguments about NFL football scores, Sino-Soviet trade agreements, and the shrinking value of the dollar. The occasional slurred reference to long-haired, drugged and dissident hippy youth gave the only clue that it was 1971, the height of the Vietnam War. But why would anyone think of such things here? Santiago was a full hemisphere away from the theatre of war, a city in which peace prevailed, at least for the moment.
       At all such gatherings, there was the same assortment of florid-faced Embassy officials, graying senior Fulbright professors, mid-thirties Peace Corps management types posted in Santiago. (The actual volunteers were all out in the countryside, living in shacks and eating roast maize and sopa de taillarines with the peasants). There were also spouses of all these, and a few select Chilean businessmen and landowners, golfing buddies of the Ambassador. The conversations were all in English, except among the Chilean wives, who sat together in one corner of the sunken living room in their cocktail dresses and stiletto heels, gossiping in Spanish.
       In a letter home, I commented with unusual vehemence on the "terrible Embassy party. All those drunken Americans and a lot of phony arty pretensions in the wealthy Chileans, and I couldn't leave until Mrs. Korry went out the door." About Mrs. Korry, I and my fellow Fulbrighters Barbara and Marilyn had been coached by our unofficial mentor, an American journalist named Gina who was conducting a study of the Chilean news media through the University of Chile. Gina told us that diplomatic protocol dictated that other American women had to remain at the party until the highest-ranking woman, the Ambassador's wife, departed.
       I never again went to these parties, but it was fortunate that I was held up at this one. As I wandered between chatting groups of dignitaries, I noticed a slight, bespectacled fellow in blue jeans and tweed jacket, lingering by the chip-dip table. He had dark curly hair and olive skin; he looked like a Chilean graduate student. I must have appeared as out of place to him as he did to me, because he caught my eye and said, in American English, "It's not easy to find the real Chile here, is it?"
       He shifted his glass of beer to his other hand to shake mine and introduce himself--Alan Jacobs--before continuing the discourse he had been carrying on in his head. He said he had been reading recent issues of Ercilla, the Chilean version of Time magazine, about the production slowdowns at Chuquicamata, the open-pit copper mine up north, the largest in the world. In one of his first acts as president, Allende had expropriated this and other mines at El Teniente, and elsewhere, from the American-owned Anaconda and Kennecott companies. Alan hadn't been up North for two years, when Eduardo Frei was president and the mines were in full operation, and he wanted to see the difference. "The only problem is," he said, flashing a crooked smile at me, "I don't want to go by myself."
       Alan refilled my wine glass. I asked him what made him decide to stay in Chile.
       "It's just started to get interesting here," he said. Furthermore, he had no desire to go home to Phoenix, where his father, he said, was a prominent lawyer. He didn't want to follow in his father's footsteps to Stanford Law and then some cushy private practice. After finishing a degree in history and political science at Pomona College, Alan had come to Chile to study its party system. He renewed his grant for a second year to stay close to the action during the presidential campaigns of 1969-70. Just before Allende was elected on September 4, 1970, Alan started teaching at Nido de Águilas. He didn't want to leave until he absolutely had to.
       "Besides," he lowered his voice conspiratorially, "something really big is going to happen here in the next few years." He nodded, looking intently at me to observe my reaction, then he removed his glasses to clean them with a cocktail napkin.
       "Like what?" I asked. He looked up--he had rather nice brown eyes behind his thick lenses. "I can't talk about it here." He jerked his head towards the groups of diplomats drinking and chatting across the room. "But we could continue this conversation another day, over lunch." I accepted his invitation with more interest than I thought I would.

       A few days later, we met at the Fulbright office, just off the Alameda. We walked a few blocks to a popular restaurant on Calle Miraflores, where Chilean office workers and bank clerks ate, and where it wasn't likely we'd be overheard if we spoke in low voices in English. The walls of the long narrow room were decorated with travel-poster prints of Chilean scenes: huasos in short capes, flat-brimmed hats and spurs, mounted on wiry Andalusian ponies; yokes of black and white oxen pulling high-wheeled carts along a rutted track against a snowy mountain backdrop; the perfect snow-covered cone of Volcán Osorno, rising like a New World Mount Fuji from its own reflection in Lake Llanquihue. We took a table under the poster of Osorno.
       Alan studied the menu, a typed sheet in a clear plastic sleeve. "This place has real Chilean cooking," he said. "I recommend the cazuela de pollo." The waiter came with a basket of bread and a bottle of vino tinto, the house wine. Alan gave the order, pointing to items on the menu and questioning the waiter in perfect, unaccented Spanish about the methods of preparation of different dishes. In his dark pullover sweater and black beret, he looked a bit like a revolutionary. When the waiter left, I told him his Spanish was excellent.
       "Thanks. Most Chileans think I'm Costarrican or Colombian when they first meet me. I don't tell them I'm American unless I have to." He then asked me why I'd applied for Chile.
       "To read Neruda in his own country, mainly. And because professors I spoke to said the Spanish here was good. It wasn't because of Allende."
       Before arriving in Chile in July, 1971, I had had only a vague idea of the political situation. The previous year, while I was doing the application, someone had given me a Time magazine article about "Allende's socialist experiment." But the reality to which the article referred was distant and provisional. I had no background information then by which to judge its importance.
       "You realize," Alan was saying, "that the Institute of International Education receives money from the CIA? Ramparts did an exposé of this a few years ago."
       "No," I said. "I didn't realize." But I did know, because the information was buried somewhere in the prose of the application brochure, that the original 1946 Fulbright legislation authorized the use of money owed to the United States, through the sale abroad of surplus war material, to finance educational exchanges. This meant that Chile was paying back some of what it owed for armaments, not directly to the U. S. government in expensive hard currency--dollars--but in its own currency to us, individual scholars, to support our study and living expenses here. It was odd to think of myself implicated, however marginally, in the international arms trade. Although I was philosophically opposed to the Vietnam War, the bombing of Cambodia, and American military intervention anywhere in the world, I figured, on a more practical level, that if Chile had to pay off its weapons debt anyway, a grant giving me the opportunity to spend a year here was not a bad way to do so. But Alan's talk was making me uncomfortable with this rationalization.
       The waiter came with our orders. After we had eaten for a few minutes, Alan held up his glass of wine and said, "Yes, in a certain sense we're all just pawns of the Defense Department. Our government gave arms to this country for years, but that's all stopped now. The Secretary of Defense vowed that not one nut or bolt would get into Chile as long as the socialists were in power."
       "If you knew this, why did you accept the grant? Or request another year after that?" I kept my voice as even as I could. I didn't know Alan well enough to let him see I was annoyed.
       He tipped his glass toward me, flashed one of his crooked smiles and said, "How else could I come down here and find out things? Or meet you?"
       I flushed. He was rather dashing, in a shaggy, near-sighted way. "You're a lot closer," he went on, "to what the selection committees look for when they give out these grants. I think you really believe all the unofficial goodwill ambassador business in the application brochures."

       One evening soon after, Alan took me to his house to teach me the cueca, the national dance of Chile. The following week was the Dieciocho, the 18th of September, Chile's independence day. He was invited to the festivities by his Nido de Águilas colleagues; he planned to take me, and we would be expected, he said, to perform.
       Alan lived on a street just off the Avenida Vitacura, in a big, shabby, Tudor-style house. Most of its rooms were rented out to male foreign students, mainly Argentines and Peruvians, and a group of Brasilians whom I heard laughing and talking all at once in the kitchen as we walked past. Alan led me into a bare, cement-floored common room on the ground level, and disappeared for a moment, returning with an old box-style portable record player and a handful of Chilean records. Putting an album of cueca tunes on the machine and pulling a white handkerchief out of his jacket pocket, he demonstrated the steps for me, tapping his heels and toes to the rhythms of the guitar and bombo--the horse-hide covered Argentine drum--and twirling the handkerchief over his head. Then he made me imitate, taking my left hand in his and putting his right hand on my shoulder to guide me.
       "Just watch my feet," Alan said. When I made a mistake or broke off, laughing at my own clumsiness, he steered me firmly back into position. "No fooling around now," he said. "You have to be able to do this right. I already told my friends you could."
       He was patient with me, but it was clear he was a perfectionist in the art of mastering Chilean culture. After more than three years here, he did not want to look or act like a gringo. I had arrived less than two months before, and I was pleased to have someone to give me the benefit of his experience. So for Alan's sake as well as my own, I made sure I learned the cueca's basic steps that evening.
       The Dieciocho festivities were a family and neighborhood affair, celebrations that looked back with nostalgia to Chile's rural past--and to the days of the latifundos and haciendas, the huge feudal farming estates of the Central Valley that first Frei's and now Allende's government was striving to break up. People of all classes got together to eat, drink, and (for those who could afford it) dress in the traditional huaso garb--short ponchos, flat-brimmed hats, boots and spurs for men; and long skirts, fringed shawls, and lace head-dresses for women. I wondered why this particular costume had come to represent Chile's heritage. It had to do, most likely, with the power the landed oligarchy exerted, and with the power the idea of landed wealth still exerted--even though many of the latifundo families now lived in Santiago, or abroad, as absentee landlords of estates managed by others. It was interesting to observe, though, that the symbols of this holiday celebrated an era, a way of life inimical to the reforms Allende promoted. These symbols had become so identified with the national spirit, though, that the oppressive social and economic realities which oligarchy created for the majority of Chileans were forgotten, even by Allende supporters, in the glow of patriotic fervor and merrymaking.
       As Alan and I rode through the streets on the morning of the Dieciocho, in one of Santiago's battered yellow and black taxis, we could see fondas, big pavilion-like tents, set up in parks and in the yards of barrio alto mansions. The fonda of Nido de Águilas was in one of the barrio alto parks, among a cluster of similar tents of other professional organizations and family groups. As we stepped out of our taxi, we were assailed by the smells of carne asado and parrillado, roast and barbecued meat, wafting from the cooking pits. Alan's colleagues greeted us with "Bienvenidos! Viva Chile!" On a long table inside the fonda, they had set out platters of meat and cheese empanadas, pots of cazuela (stew), dishes of steaming choclos (corn on the cob), baskets of bread, great bowls of sangría, bottles of chicha (corn liquor) and soda pop. Small red, white and blue Chilean flags of stiff paper, glued to dowel sticks and stuck into balsa wood bases, decorated the tables at intervals between the dishes. Larger paper flags were strung pennant-like along the tent walls.
       A heavy-set man with stiff black hair, a math teacher named Sergio, approached us with a big smile. He clapped Alan on the back and motioned for two glasses of vino tinto, red wine, for a toast to the Dieciocho and to us, the two visiting gringos, especially to Alan's new señorita. The other male teachers greeted me with Latin gallantries, shook my hand, and made signals with their eyes to Alan--congratulating him for his female companion. The women teachers admired my improvised "Chilean" outfit: a long-sleeved blouse with one of my grandmother's Tyrolean silk scarves draped over the shoulders, a longish wool skirt too warm for the spring day, patent leather boots bought in a Providencia shop the previous week. In this approximation of the styles I'd been observing in Santiago since my arrival, I felt overdressed and artificial.
       Alan guided me through the afternoon, explaining the various Chilean dishes, refilling my glass with more vino and sangría than I should have had on a warm spring day, and introducing me to all his friends. He had switched to Spanish the minute we emerged from the taxi. "You need to practice, and become equally comfortable in both languages with me," he said. He reverted to English only to translate, or to explain chilenismos, Chilean terms I hadn't heard before.
       I was still at the early phase of my stay, when speaking nothing but Spanish for more than an hour or two left me mentally weary, craving silence and rest. But with Alan at my elbow, I couldn't stroll away and sit by myself for a while under the huge old European shade trees bordering the park, to watch from a distance the activity around the flag-bedecked tents. So I let myself drift while standing there, as the alcohol suffused my thoughts, and the odors of wood smoke, grilled meat, baked bread, and trampled grass passed over me in the tepid breeze that wafted into the tent. There was a smell of horses, too. I'd noticed a water trough at the edge of the park where some vendors and draymen lounged against the sides of their rough carts, smoking and chatting, while their nags drank from the trough, nosed feed bags, drowsed in the pale sun. I wondered if they--or the pair of mounted carabineros riding by on their alert chestnut thoroughbreds, keeping an eye on the movements of people around the tents--would have any holiday time with their families.
       Alan kept steering me from one Chilean colleague to another--none of the other American teachers had attended the fonda. His colleagues greeted him with a great deal of warmth: "Hola, Alan! Cómo te va? Qué bueno verte!" They smiled at me and said "Mucho gusto" or "Encantado," then drew me into one of those opening conversations that would be so often repeated: "What are you doing in Chile? My, isn't your Spanish good! Where did you study it? What do you think of our country? Such a crazy geography, no? Ah, but it's so underdeveloped, not like your Norteamérica!"

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