One bright sunny morning in 2018, I rounded a corner to find an old woman pissing in front of a family grave.
She was in her late sixties, dressed and coiffed just exactly like my grandmother Lala’s sisters Quela and Elisa. Brown shoes with thick heels, short hair dyed an unpersuasive brown and firmly styled to communicate order. A bright red coat with a faux-fur ruff lent some grandeur to an otherwise staid ensemble: tea-length skirt, cardigan, tan purse with a bakelite handle. The respectable middle-class armor of Chilean women of a certain generation who reach a certain age.
I took none of this in just then because she was, as I said, squatting in the aisle when I found her, her red coat blaring against the gray. Had she fallen? Our eyes met. Her gaze dropped to the camera that sat in my right hand, accidentally aimed at her. My eyes registered the puddle spreading below her. I panicked and fled back around the corner I’d come from. Then I took a second to try to figure out what, exactly, had just happened.
It was my first day in Punta Arenas. I’d never been. It’s a tough, old-fashioned city at the southern edge of Chile and the world, outfitted with handrails along the sidewalks for when the wind gets really bad, which it does as a matter of course: the city is dotted with statues of humans and animals reckoning with its gelid battery. If you wandered its streets on a still day, you might wonder why Chile represents its figures tilted forward with their clothes blown back. I appreciate the approach for how gamely it concedes that circumstances afflicting the beholder might color how we imaginatively invest in those who came before.
I had come to Patagonia for silence and space after Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation broke the pundit I’d accidentally become. I never really set out to write about politics (I’m a lapsed early modernist. Before that, I studied neuroscience and music). But that somehow became my job. Week after week, I wrote columns about Trump. Culture. Trolls. Gender. The internet. It meant trawling the nation’s most toxic waters for content, but an adrenaline-spiked sense of emergency made it feel worthwhile.
The Kavanaugh hearings—and the roar of discourse around them—collapsed that drive. I considered it, basically, the end. Roe was over. So were decades of flawed but real feminist progress. I was in something very like shock. This was it.
The reason I fled to Patagonia, however, was twofold. There was the shock, and there was the fact that most of my fellow pundits didn’t seem to share it.
Here’s how I saw things back in October 2018: Roe v. Wade was dead. Reproductive freedom was next. We were on fire and no one was coming. It was too late. More broadly, the phase of the American experiment built on shared principles or ideas (even if everyone hypocritically violated them) was over. Republicans acting in bad faith certainly wasn’t new, but the hearing, in my view, was the definitive mask-off moment. No more “just trolling.” No more plausible deniability. Confirmed despite disqualifying conduct on the stand (and off it), Kavanaugh’s appointment was less an evaluation of his fitness than a showcase of how little his fitness mattered. It was a display, by Republicans to the opposition, that the new order was immune to standards, reason, argument, and process. Of course they confirmed him anyway; that was part of the pageantry.
Put another way, the GOP openly declared philosophical bankruptcy at the precise moment it secured what it needed to legitimize the indefensible: an impeachment-proof judicial majority. Real, consequential, history-making repression was on the table. For immigrants, minorities, and also for women’s rights (a battle to which Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony drew particular focus). Trump’s revanchism now had legal backing. To make matters worse, women (and Americans who opposed him) had made Brett Kavanaugh really, really mad. And the new Supreme Court Justice had openly threatened reprisals. “What goes around comes around,” he said in a statement in which he characterized Blasey Ford’s accusation as a malicious political hit orchestrated by his enemies.
I found it hard to imagine a bleaker scenario.
What confused me was how out of step I seemed to be with my fellow news junkies. When I finally checked in that morning, I expected to encounter the kind of widespread mourning we’d eventually see on June 24, 2022, when Roe was finally overturned. But I’d misread the moment; most of the folks I knew and saw online didn’t seem to feel nearly as doomed as I did.
I don’t mean that people weren’t horrified and upset by the hearings. The internet was ablaze with fear and fury over Kavanaugh’s confirmation and how Blasey Ford’s allegation was handled.
But behavior (as childhood educators like to say) is communication. And despite their distress, most like-minded people were making arguments, retweeting gotchas, pushing to pack the Supreme Court and debating Roberts’ respect for stare decisis.
You have hope if you’re doing that shit.
I found it eerie, like watching surgeons squabble over which procedure to try next on a corpse.
Was I catastrophizing? Were they complacent? Who knows.
My point is: I was convinced we’d officially and irreversibly entered a new dark age for women. (And others, of course. But my focus, in this story I’m telling you right now, is women—for reasons I hope will become clear.)
We don’t have great terms for civic grief. But for me, that’s when the mourning began. My neck was an iron ring, my throat narrowed and made my voice tight, as if going on a pointless strike against speech. I was paralyzed and furious and totally out of words.
All the words people poured out—I kept thinking about women tweeting painful stories about abortions and miscarriages—had failed to move the needle. I hated that they told those stories. Pearls before swine. Blood before swine. I seethed at everyone post-gaming the hearing as if the version of the world we knew hadn’t just ended. Had I the means, I’d have put everyone on mute and mandated the minute of silence no one seemed inclined to give.
It is unreasonable, and not a little despotic, to wish to mute the world. A change of scene was called for.
The day it happened, Aaron and I drove to a reservoir in the Sacramento delta he had written about in a piece on water and California.
He chose well. It was exactly the right sort of arid, alien landscape for a catastrophizing pessimist like yours truly to stare at while processing that forced birth was back. The barrenness was almost a comfort, even though I was struggling with barrenness myself.
I did not let a tomato I found growing wild in the cracks interrupt these profitless reflections and ruin my metaphor. In no mood for hope, I ate it.
My point here, again, isn’t that I was right about any of this. I’m not sure I was. (Though I made a case for how it might happen, I was caught totally off-guard by Biden’s victory in 2020). I’m just trying to describe an inflection point that put me out of step with the zeitgeist and made it hard to do my job. My feeling, rightly or wrongly, was that there simply wasn’t anything more to say.
That’s bad, if you’re a pundit.
Politics writers are supposed to say things.
Argue. Synthesize. Pronounce. You’re supposed to pretend you’re not writing basically the same piece, in response to basically the same news, for the fifth or ninth or eighteenth time. You’re supposed to talk about what this means, and how it’s different this time, and how it might sway things in November.
There have been points where I believed writing mattered. This wasn’t one of them. I did not want to read. I did not want to speak.
I especially did not want to write. Because the only thing worse than losing all hope is talking about it.
Despair is a bummer to read, boring to write, and risky. If you’re persuasive, you might demobilize someone with ideas. Or momentum. Or belief. Think of the thousands of terminally online wits who’ve quote-tweeted “and you’re surprised?” at some poster who made the classic normie blunder of straightforwardly lamenting something awful Trump did. I’d sooner cut off my typing hands than drift anywhere near that snotty, self-flattering strain of political anomie.
Mariame Kaba says “hope is a discipline.” I was not disciplined. But why spread paralysis? Better to go somewhere new. Stare at empty space.
Patagonia seemed good for that. Most of my family is in Santiago, but I was sick at heart with this political depression, or whatever it was, in ways my relatives there might find hard to understand or just plain silly (“puf! where’s your sense of proportion?”).
With good reason. Chileans are way, way ahead of Americans on this particular journey down Fascist Lane. They went through their period of extreme political polarization in the sixties and seventies. Salvador Allende, a socialist, was democratically elected president in 1970 and then overthrown by a notorious military coup in 1973. Democracy returned in 1990, but Chileans have spent the last four decades sitting with the reality that slightly less than half the country embraced its bloodiest, most authoritarian chapter. As late as the 1988 plebiscite, 43% were still in favor of keeping Augusto Pinochet in power.
And everyone still has to live with each other.
43% is not a small number, as most Americans now understand (that happened to be the floor of Donald Trump’s base of support throughout most of his first term and some of the second).
And yet, for many, many years, I found that Americans tended to handwave that Chilean 43% stat away whenever I brought it up. Which I did, not to defend the dictatorship, or deny that some corrupt bookkeeping might have slightly inflated that figure, but rather to point out that fascism is rarely as unpopular as we might wish. Nor does it go dormant, or die when the dictator does. (Jose Antonio Kast, the recently elected, pro-Pinochet Chilean president, won the second round of the 2025 election with 58% of the vote.)
People didn’t want to hear it. In hindsight, I think it ran counter to what most of us think we understand about authoritarianism.
Anyway. I couldn’t whine to my relatives about the whole thing. And everything Americans said online seemed to me like part of the problem. Even the frequent comparisons to Chile, which politically-minded people on both sides (myself included) just can’t stop making. Chile’s curse might be that it’s too useful a case study. A combo Rorschach test, case study, utopia, and boogieman, it’s such a funhouse mirror for US (U.S.)—such an interesting testing ground for our pet theories, imperial self-hatred and narcissism—that it’s hard to learn anything else about it.
I felt, to be blunt, chata. Fed up.
I wanted no people — not-people. The opposite of people.
I tried to think of unpeopled spots. Surely, I thought, the emptiest place on Earth has got to be a cemetery in Patagonia.
The bus ride from Punta Arenas to Puerto Natales has much to offer the female misanthrope in want of silence. The Andes flank miles and miles of gorgeous emptiness punctuated by flamingo-flecked ponds, the odd sheep and clutches of sassy guanacos. Magellan called it Tierra del Fuego because of the Selk’nam bonfires he saw burning on the shore, but there’s a helluva lot more ice than fire, and the hushed ride through all that nothing felt like chugging water in a desert.
That’s the good news.
The bad news is that the graveyard I wanted to mope in was hopping with people loudly preparing for the following week.
Like an idiot, I’d unwittingly timed my visit for the weekend before All Saints’ Day. A.k.a, the second-busiest weekend on the cemetery calendar.
The Cementerio Municipal Sara Braun is a big imposing place with sweeping vistas and gigantic trees shaped hard by the wind and then smoothed by human effort. The plaza across the street was lined with kiosks selling flower arrangements and decorations and food. People were respecting the dead with savage, cheerful pragmatism: whitewashing gravestones, trashing old flowers and faded plastic figurines, pressure-washing the dirt off catacombs.
These visits were loving, of course; no one casual about the past spends their weekend cleaning and scrubbing headstones. But it all seemed, to my mind, heretically festive: The blaring radios and garbage bags clashed in tone with the more solemn pilgrimages families would make later in nice clothes and polished shoes.
I briefly wondered which kind of companionship the dead might like more, but the answer was obvious. Reverence is flattering but the noises of life and garbage are better. (I can say that: I am writing even now in a quiet room, more than a decade into infertility caused by endometriosis.) (And I can say that again now, two years later, with baby twins babbling in the room next door.) (And now again, that they are toddlers, learning this week how to walk.) (They’re expert climbers now. As I update this paragraph, hopefully for the last time, I’m gazing at a koala-like creature named “Real the Ghost” one drew, and a very silly portrait the other made of my grandmother, Lala—whom he has never met, and whom I’ve barely mentioned, but whose framed photograph he stole from my mother’s house and carries companionably from place to place. “Here, Lala,” he says, setting her on the piano stool before he joins her on it to bang the keys.)
The cemetery is—like so much else in Chile—segregated by class. The mausoleums are quiet, buffered by air and space. Poorer Chileans rest bone and ash in the posthumous equivalent of apartment buildings, stacked one on top of the other. Cramped but companionable. Cosmopolitan. (The provinces have more space, but in death, anyone can be a santiaguino.)
Wandering the middle-class corridors of the single-story graves in search of an epic view, I finally found one: the hill of the cemetery swooped down the city and bam into the ocean. You could fantasize about sliding down Punta Arenas into the sea.
I was doing just that, with my camera out in search of another angle, when I rounded the corner and found the old woman crumpled in the aisle, clearly—pretty clearly—peeing.
Had I seen what I thought I’d seen? I wondered, from the corner to which I’d retreated. Floating above the gravestones I saw the torsos of parents, the heads of children. This lady was out in the open. Any one of them could have glanced over the crosses and made her.
Maybe her back hurt as mine sometimes did, I thought. Maybe she just needed to rest it as I have done—inelegantly, while visiting museums, smashing myself awkwardly against a wall and eventually sliding down it until I’m basically squatting just to give the curve of my lower back (and my inflamed, endo-wrapped insides) a break.
If it was urine, and I absolutely planned to check, maybe she just had to go? Old age? Couldn’t wait? But if so (I reasoned), she’d surely have retreated to where I was standing now—a sheltered corner just a few feet away, protected from view. Not the middle of a highly-trafficked aisle.
I peeked round the corner. My grave-pisser was walking away. Primly, with the choosy gait of a window-shopper at the mall.
A young woman with two children headed toward her swathed in harried motherhood—that early middle phase of it. I saw them pass the puddle, which was still steaming. They did not recognize it for what it was.
And indeed, what was it? I thought, a little giddy now, walking up to the scene of the crime. Because it was becoming clear to me that whatever just happened here should not be understood as an accident: It was a gesture intended for some member of (I looked up at the vault) the Vargas-Gualas, who would no doubt be coming with all the rest of Punta Arenas to tend their family grave.
I’d craved solitude. But this was, undoubtedly, better.
To catch an avatar of female respectability pissing in revenge feels otherworldly because the act is so radically uncivilized. Almost unthinkably feral. Reckless. Primitive.
I don’t know who her message was for: an occupant of the vault, one of its caretakers, or the family writ large. I doubt the family would recognize the liquid in front of their mausoleum—which might, in any case, have dried.
But I do know that, to a woman of experience, whether the message was received in the intended spirit sometimes matters less than the fact that it has been decisively sent.
My political depression wasn’t and isn’t an original problem. Climate activists, for instance, have been mourning the death of hope for decades while most of humanity parties on.
In the years after Kavanaugh’s confirmation, I kept working while wandering through a kind of pundit wilderness, seeking models and mentors for dealing with various strains of political grief. Like Pat Maginnis, the ornery and egoless abortion activist my ex-colleague Josh Levin arranged for me to interview who (at ninety!) endured me grilling her over what it felt like to watch all the progress she worked toward begin to crumble. The last time I saw her, she was wearing a Hard Rock Cafe sweatshirt she’d found on the street and wryly holding a pitchfork.
Or (why not?) John Milton, who channeled his crushed political hope and revolutionary fervor into “Paradise Lost” and “Samson Agonistes.” As a fellow grump, I respect that he infused the curdled misanthropy that plagues many a post-activist with a little sublimity. I’ve come to think of the flood of references in his poetry as not just hopeful but actively medicinal. Maybe he, too, needed to step out of his own time for an antidote to the dull and stupid tyranny of the present.
There’s solace in stepping out of your own time, sheltering in a hurricane of associations, and putting some very weird things next to each other just to see what sparks. What happens (conceptually I mean) if you liken the defeated rebels in your epic poem to the fallen autumnal leaves of Vallombrosa? Vallombrosa, of all places! Or if—in a blog post on democratic collapse—hope dawns at the sight of an old woman pissing?
(Aaron, when I mention that the leaves of Vallombrosa have cropped up here: “and how exactly does that illuminate the question of female agency in failed political states?” I explain, excitedly, that most of the trees in Vallombrosa aren’t actually deciduous. “It’s pines and firs!” There’s a beat. “Don’t you see? Their leaves don’t fall!” I say. “It’s a trick simile!”
Another beat.
“MAYBE SATAN NEVER FELL!”
“Well,” Aaron said, “this is going to save the family.”)
I believe in burrowing into the past for solace and perspective. But there’s value, I suspect, in really stepping into your own time too—without the luxury or the protective mantle of professional obligation. (I have none, since the Washington Post laid me off along with over three hundred colleagues earlier this year.) So I’m doing it. Even though, as of this writing, I’m technically a triple threat of vestigial authority: ex-scholar, ex-pundit, and ex-TV critic.
Here’s the thing about those very good jobs I was lucky to have: They’re subject-specific. You’re not really supposed to talk about Chile or your grandmother’s wedding when discussing seventeenth-century broadsides or the Supreme Court or “The Pitt”.
But … are we not human? Maybe there are very good reasons one should!
So for now, the job is writing without compartments. As a person, not an expert. And it does have to save the family. (Dear god, I have 4-year-old twins and I’m in my forties. Please subscribe!)
So, this is a turn inward? A retreat?
I could be wrong, but I think—and hope—it’s the opposite. Something more akin to (dare I say it) integration? Figuring out what it means to take the news … well, personally. As a full rather than professionalized self.
It’s funny. Years ago, while grimly shopping to improve my life, I realized that none of the self-helpy journaling apps I was dejectedly considering had a “what happened today in the world” slot.
I don’t know if that’s still true. But at the time, users were encouraged to chart what they ate and how long they slept and log what made them happy or sad and what they were grateful for and their creatine and water intake and how long they planked while meditating. But virtually none left room for the possibility that world events might affect your mood. Maybe there was a space for “social media,” which lightly suggests addiction (or “doomscrolling”) in ways that minimize true events by treating them as digital distractions.
The subtext was: you’re not supposed to be personally affected by current events.
I found it odd. Especially with therapists sinking under the volume of patients struggling with “political stress”.
How are we supposed to feel?
Look, I don’t know if I felt the “right” way about Kavanaugh’s confirmation. And I don’t know how much what Trump says and does should affect a person’s mood.
It’s undeniable, however, that livelihoods and nations are affected. The world can’t afford not to pay attention to an unraveling superpower, but many burned-out, formerly engaged Americans have actively changed their news consumption habits, sometimes opting out entirely as psychic self-defense.
That’s perfectly understandable. But it’s not ideal. And it’s not responsible. Tempting though it might be to ride it all out etherised upon a table (and that is extremely tempting), I think, maybe, at some point, we have to find a way to talk about—and process—political pain.
But taking the news personally also means I’m not opining in these pages as any kind of authority. For critics and pundits, part of the job entails acting like your take or your taste matters more than someone else’s. That won’t be happening here. I mean, I know some stuff and I’ll use it when it seems relevant. I expect I’ll be following—and reacting to—my fair share of news and TV shows and stupid controversies. But what I’m offering here isn’t expertise; it’s specificity and, hopefully, pleasure. The content won’t always necessarily be fun, but it should be fun to read.
There might be lists. Threads or stories I’m following. Subreddit fights. Screenshot collections. Internet rabbitholes. Essays (don’t worry; most of ‘em won’t be as long as this one). Weird facts or phenomena worth looking at or asking questions about.
Take takedown
Something was lost, I think, when the TakeTM won the discourse wars. First, the good old Montaigne-style “essai” turned into blog posts, which bifurcated into subject-oriented thinkpieces and confessional ragebait pitched to get everyone fighting over the state of the author’s soul. Longform has since mostly died, leaving, as sole victor, the dumbest genre of them all: the Take. Sure, it’s snappy, supercilious, and definitive. But I think we can all agree that as an approach, it’s pretty played out. So for awhile, at least—in my capacity as a longtime (but now reformed) Discourse Warrior—I’m making a rule: no arguments.
None? That seems a little extra?
Yeah. Maybe it is.
I do love a good argument. I’ve made many. The trouble is, their usefulness is limited, and you can tell when someone’s been making them too long. Take-masters get facile. Confident. Bored. And the stakes stop feeling real. Comedians stop laughing at clubs once they reach a certain level because they spot the machinery early. Arguments are similar, for those who must make them professionally: They’re fun, highly defended, thoroughly artificial constructions fashioned to mask the true course of human thought. Rarely do they honestly reflect the way we process data—or the real reasons why we arrived at the conclusions we did.
Rhetoric isn’t real thinking. It’s epistemological makeup.
That might be why AI is so good at aping it.
If arguments are persuasive and fun at their best, at their worst, they let us coyly reverse-engineer rational paths to conclusions we arrived at through other means. We all know there are secret, private, unflattering reasons we think what we think. People would find us unserious or even contemptible if we ever confessed them.
They’re still the reasons we think what we think, though. That’s the problem.
Human irrationality is literally driving us to the brink at this very moment. Are arguments really supposed to save us?
That was admittedly an argument against arguments. I shall not contradict myself again.
(That is a lie.)
What happens after
Congratulations! You have arrived at the portion of this that is about insane asylums.
To explain why an old lady pissing in a cemetery was the cathartic endpoint of fleeing to the Strait of Magellan to escape the Kavanaugh hearings, I need to show you this photograph of my great-grandmother, Filomena Urriola Salas, as a new mother. She’s holding my grandfather, her firstborn son Fernando. Her eyes are soft with hope.
The other pertinent facts are these:
Filomena was rich—very rich indeed—when she married my great-grandfather, Valentín.
She had two children with him: Fernando and my great-aunt Inés.
Valentín kicked her out of the family home shortly after Inés was born. “He found her unfit for his bed,” Inés told me. “Ya no le servía para la cama.”
He would spend the years that followed squandering the family fortune on sex workers.
“Since he wanted nothing to do with her,” Tía Inés says, “she took me, as a newborn, to live with her in Tía Emilia’s convent in Valparaiso.”
Inés and I are talking over Whatsapp. She’s in her nineties now, and confined to her bed. Her mind is sound but her hearing is poor. Whenever she can’t hear me, her oldest son and devoted caretaker, my Tío Gerald, gamely bellows my questions into her ear. The recording of this is accidentally hilarious.
“Her … her convent?” I yell.
Apparently so. Yes, Filomena’s aunt, Emilia Urriola de Valdés was a major donor for a complex on cerro Placeres that included a church, a schoolhouse and “Reformatorio Femenino,” which was her main interest (and would eventually be named after her as the Instituto Emilia Urriola).
They were that kind of rich.
For the first three years of her life, Inés lived in the Reformatorio with her mother and aunt; Filomena saw her little boy, Fernando, whenever she could.
It wasn’t easy. Having miserably wrangled infant twins in public places, I relate deeply to this blurry shot of Filomena trying to settle baby Inés on a public bench while spending some time with the little son she’s been separated from. He sits scowling next to her. Look at the set line of her mouth. And his. Yup.
“Mi mama sufrió mucho,” Tía Inés says.
Unbeknownst to her, Filomena’s time with her daughter was also coming to an end. On a day Valentín knew Filomena would be in Santiago, he kidnapped Inés, who was then three years old. “I never lived with my mama again,” Inés said. She was brought home to live with him and his sister, Beatriz.
Not, it seems, out of any particularly sincere attachment on her dad’s side. “He said I was ugly when I was a year old!” Inés cackles. She is not sentimental.
From that point on, Filomena was allowed to see her children on Wednesdays and Saturdays. “She would take us to lunch at a nice restaurant on our visits with her,” Inés says. “But she’d always invite any kids we passed along the way who happened to be working in the street, so we were usually joined by a couple of lustrabotas (bootblacks).”
I’m having a hard time with the idea of being parted from one’s three-year-old. So here’s a photo from before that happened, of Filomena and Inés in front of a silly painted backdrop.
I was so thrilled when I recently found this. Nice, in a way, to imagine the two of them sailing away.
Then Filomena died.
“When I was twelve, my father and Tía Beatriz told me my mother had passed,” Inés says. “They gave me her Singer sewing machine as a keepsake.”
I don’t want to write this part
I keep trying to find stuff to add to this “before” section because I don’t want to do the next bit.
Filomena wasn’t dead.
She’d been locked up in the Casa de Orates—the insane asylum in Santiago (which was renamed the Hospital Psiquiátrico).
Filomena lived there for two decades.
Inés grew up thinking she had no mother.
And the only family Inés had left—her dad, her aunt, and her older brother—lied to her about it on a daily basis.
Yes: My grandfather Fernando, the bright-eyed baby pictured with Filomena above, knew his mom was at the Casa de Orates. He visited her there. He wasn’t just complicit in helping his father and aunt conceal the truth from his sister. He did something considerably worse. (Stay tuned.)
Inés was thirty and pregnant with her third child when she learned her mother was still alive.
Gerald, her firstborn, sometimes says his mom stayed a little girl all her life. I can see why, and I sometimes wonder whether some aspect of her development stopped at twelve, when her family presented her with that sewing machine and a life-altering lie.
Here’s the last photo she ever took with her mom. It wasn’t a happy time either, of course—they still lived apart—but Inés looks so healthy in this shot, so vibrant and capable of taking whatever life has to throw at her. Matter-of-fact in that great, little-kid way.
Whenever I get too precious about my own political heartbreak, I think about this image, which splits time into a sad “Before” and a genuinely cataclysmic “After.”
The after, of course, is what interests me. What do you do after.
(Those are the sorts of questions Chileans can help Americans think about too, of course: the long aftermath.)
“Tía,” I said. “What did you do? When you heard she was alive? Did you confront them? Did you ask your brother why he did it?”
“What could I do?” Inés replied. “The minute I heard, I went straight there and brought her lunch. Her dress was thin. She looked cold, so I brought her a cardigan.”
“Y como fue ese encuentro?” I asked her. “How was the reunion? How did she react?”
“Estaba feliz, puh,” she told me. “Fernando had told her I’d never come to see her in all those years because I was a whore.”
Filomena died nine months after their reunion, in 1958.
I’m well aware of the horror any feminist-minded reader will likely feel after this story. I know what it looks like. But I’m trying to resist letting it sink into the vast record of crimes against women in black and white photos. I want to drag it into the present and make us all stare at it as if it just happened.
Here’s why: letting it sit in the gray, neatly classified as the typical patriarchal abuse of yore, or whatever, is about as constructive as calling Donald Trump a fascist.
I mean, sure? Yes. Agreed.
But the inquiry surely can’t end there. Given what might be coming, we need some granularity. We need to ask more. The details matter. The agency people exerted—or didn’t, or somehow manufactured out of thin air—matters.
So does making sure the story actually is what it looks like: a monstrous husband incarcerating his wife after stealing her fortune, her children and her freedom. (Columnists love a juicy, representative anecdote that conforms to expectations and proves their side is right. Tidiness is best, as there aren’t always enough column inches to go into all the pesky details.)
I’m trying to do my due diligence here. Maybe Filomena had some issues? Plenty of people in my family might benefit from a diagnosis or two. Could she have had PPD?
“Tía,” I ask her. “Is it possible she belonged there? Was there anything actually wrong with your mom?”
“NADA,” she says. “It was all manufactured by Tía Beatriz.”
Beatriz?!
Well, fuck.
Beatriz was Valentín’s sister. And, unlike Valentín, whom Inés described as “un cero,” she was highly capable.
Beatriz never married, but when Valentín ran through all his wife’s money (and failed to finish his degree in architecture, or work as an accountant), Beatriz was the one who got a job and supported her brother’s family while also taking care of their mom.
She got a great job running the Preventorio San Luis in Santiago, a sanatorium for children with tuberculosis. She knew doctors. She knew government officials. She was connected. And my grandfather Fernando was the apple of her eye (she didn’t care much, one way or the other, about Inés).
“She could get people locked up,” Inés says. “And she did.”
Tío Gerald tells me Beatriz waited until Filomena’s mother had died, which left her pretty disconnected from any family support. That’s when she made her move. “Era maquiavélica, Lili,” he tells me.
Beatriz succeeded on her merits, alone, in a man’s world. She supported her deadbeat brother. She was generous to my mother. She helped sick and penniless children. Kind of a feminist icon, really.
“You’re sure she was the one, Tía?” I say, watching the narrative I’d been chasing evaporate. “Beatriz stuck Abuela Filomena in the Psiquiatrico?”
Gerald is understandably a little annoyed since he’d just told me that himself. But he’s a good sport, and obligingly shouts my question anyway.
“Oh yes,” Inés says. “What’s more, when Liliana left my brother, she tried to do the same thing to her.”
“WHAT?”
Liliana is my grandmother. My Lala. The center of my young life—the second one I lived in Chile, anyway, which always existed in parallel to the one I live here, in the States.
“Claro,” Inés says. “She wanted the kids.”
I know I’m nosy, but I don’t expect these sorts of conversations to pop out of history and thwack me in the nose. Sure, I knew my grandparents’ split was bad; so bad that my mom and her brother had to be ceremonially handed off to the other parent at the courthouse, in front of a judge.
But this feels like a Psycho-level twist. Lala is woven into every aspect of the first half of my life. She was so soft you sank into her. Her voice was hoarse and low from cigarettes but she radiated ease, which somehow leached into the cozy, misshapen sweaters she knitted. People stopped in to see her every day—just to say hi, joke a bit, sip cola de mono out of a tiny chipped glass. She was always delighted, as if she’d been expecting them. She seemed lazy; her movements were slow. She was a beast at canasta and loved showing me the scariest illustrations from Hell in The Divine Comedy, a book so fancy it had a latch. “Look!” she’d say. “Their heads are floating in a river of poop!” She’d tell me horror films, beat by beat, while we sat together on the beach. She introduced me to Agatha Christie when I was eight. I didn’t know, until I was much older, how weird it was for grandmothers to act like best friends.
If Tía Beatriz had gotten her way, she would have raised my mom. She would have been … my grandmother. Lala would have become something else. I don’t even know who I’d be.
Here’s a photo of Tía Beatriz (left) and the woman she didn’t manage to lock up.
My mom seems shaken but skeptical when I inform her of this bombshell. I can tell she doesn’t quite believe it. She loved Tía Beatriz. Her memories of her are warm. Beatriz bought her lovely clothes, and the Preventorio San Luis was like Disneyland for her and her cousins when they were small: They had the run of the swimming pool for the sick kids. And the giant, gorgeous park.
Lala did not love Beatriz. She called her “un veneno”—poison—once. But she never told me this.
(Why didn’t she tell me this?)
“No le resultó, claro,” Inés croaks, of Tía Beatriz’s effort to get Lala sectioned. It didn’t work.
Inés’ voice is giving out. I know we need to stop. Even though I want to know, very, very badly, why it didn’t work. These aborted stories are, I suspect, the ones with the most to teach us.
I didn’t know, at the time, that this would be the last conversation Inés and I would ever have.
I want to know what happened to Filomena—whose family was fantastically rich and powerful—that made it possible for her to surrender so completely to her own incarceration. As far as I can tell, she never asked to be released.
I also want to know which mechanisms allowed my grandmother Lala (who was middle class) to escape Beatriz’s snare. Sure, power is part of the answer. But it isn’t all of it.
Collateral damage
In all the tumult, I’d neglected to ask Inés how she found out her mom was alive. “Liliana was the one who finally told me the truth!” she says. There’s no edge, only relief in her voice. She seems nothing but grateful.
My feelings, after we hang up, are more mixed. “Had Lala and Fernando separated when she told you?” I ask before we hang up. Inés confirms. So: Lala knew, and kept Filomena a secret for a good long while before finally looping her daughter in. I’m thinking, privately, that if Lala’s marriage hadn’t ended, Inés might never have seen her mom again.
This seems unjust. And grubby. It bugs me. Lala wasn’t grubby.
I want to know so badly why Lala didn’t tell Inés the truth much sooner. It drives me batty that I can’t ask her.
It hurts my feelings, too, that Lala and I never talked through this shocking chapter about Beatriz’ plot to get her declared insane and usurp her kids. The one thing making me doubt that whole story is that, if Lala knew of it, she’d surely have talked about it all the time. She relished villainy and would, I think, have dined out on the story of how thoroughly she foiled Beatriz’s plans.
There’s an expression in Chile, “hablar a calzón quitado,” that captures the unguarded way people can confide in each other, and try on ideas, when there’s trust. Literally, it means speaking with your underwear off. Figuratively, it means speaking frankly, candidly, without the usual defenses and hypocrisies—a bare-assed communion of the heart. Lala and talked that way a lot. Not about feminism or politics (those were more gladiatorial engagements) but about my love life. Her marriage. People we wanted to understand. What living is for. Our scariest flaws. And (sometimes) ghosts.
I did notice she didn’t like talking about Filomena. I was so curious, but she was uncharacteristically tight-lipped. She did tell me once that Fernando never once brought her to the Psiquiátrico to meet his mother. Inés confirms this. She adds a story Lala would have loved: Fernando did bring his second wife, Hilda, to see her—until Filomena firmly ordered him to stop. “She couldn’t stand her. I only ever wanted you to bring Liliana, she told him.”
It’s the only story I’ve ever heard in which Filomena put up any resistance at all to anything.
I know, too, that everyone had (and has) their reasons: Lala for not telling me, Fernando for keeping her away from his mom, Filomena for giving up. People usually do, and they’re awfully interesting if you can get people to talk about what the real ones were, a calzón quitado.
There’s another statistic about Chile I sometimes bring up because I find it weird; weird enough that the reasons for it deserve careful unpacking. It’s this: Allende won the 1970 election fair and square, but he only received 30.5% of the women’s vote.
I’ve spent decades studying my female ancestors in a baffled effort to understand why they are how most of them are: personally quite formidable, with cultural attitudes that border on female supremacy, despite being (for the most part) politically conservative. I want to know why they worked to uphold standards that formally subordinated them; why they (like the majority of Chilean women) have tended, unusually for Latin America, to be more right-leaning than their male counterparts. Why they strenuously defended marriage even though—in those quieter, calzón-free moments when they were most themselves—several bitterly lamented the path not taken. Divorce wasn’t legal in Chile until 2004, so the battleground of their lives is strewn with broken marriages that couldn’t die. I want to understand their mistakes but also the rational, very calculated compromises they made while navigating patriarchies capable of flattening them—and the ways they defined resilience, and happiness, and defeat, and success.
For one thing, I’m curious. For another, it seems useful to think about what we might do and what to avoid if hope dies. And about how personal—as opposed to structural—power circulates. And where the anger goes.
I haven’t had anything to say for a long time. Now I do.
Here is Filomena as a young woman, before she got married:
Here’s Inés at roughly the same age, a decade or so after “losing” (but indeed losing) her mother. Also before she got married (that union ended too).
Here’s Lala before she married Fernando:
And here, walking primly past the sinful dead, relieved, finally, of her burden, is the woman who peed at the Cementerio Sara Braun.
I was a fool to seek peace in a graveyard. Even if it hadn’t been under siege from an incontinent avenging fury—on the weekend before All Saints Day, no less—silence was always out of the question. Cemeteries aren’t empty. They’re stuffed.
OH MY GOD, LILI. Am I just supposed to go on with my day after reading this???
Deeper responses soon? But I think this is the only way to go in writing online--not to be one of thousands of busy bees poking at the inmates in the Skinner Boxes of consensus opinion but to be diarists, inhabitants, humans writing against the machinations of rhetoric and the rhetoric that has become a machine. We have small mouths but we must screen?