Although I soon wearied of these questions and comments, I tried to answer as best I could. Eventually I evolved a little set speech, in which my accent and phrasing were far more polished than in more spontaneous conversations. It was enough to satisfy most people. I began to joke that I should record these responses, and then just turn on the tape machine whenever I was introduced to someone. To answer Chileans' questions about my country, and about my presence in and attitudes toward their country, was, I knew, part of my tacit responsibility as an "unofficial" goodwill ambassador of the United States--regardless of whether the Insitute of International Education received funds from the CIA.
       But I was uncomfortable with the way so many Chileans felt compelled to remind me how small and backward their country was in comparison with mine. My reaction to these apologies was always to extol the glacial beauty of the cordillera, the grandeur and bounty of Chile's 3,000 miles of coastline, the wealth of its natural resources and the dignity and warmth of its people--until I sounded like a conciliatory travel brochure writer. I felt I had to counteract this impulse to underscore Chile's inadequacies. What I did not realize then was how deeply the legacy of colonialism was impressed in the national psyche.

       Even after the 1810 independence from 300 years of Spanish rule, Chile had been dominated by foreign interests--British, German, North American--who invested in, developed, and reaped huge profits from the principal export industries of nitrate and copper mining. The national economy was virtually controlled by the demand for, and the prices of, these commodities on the world market; but the foreign companies were the major beneficiaries. Very little of the profit trickled down to the working classes who supplied the labor. Although mining and its subsidiary industries at least provided them with jobs, the wages were low, prices of food, clothing and consumer items in the mining settlements were high, strikes (such as the 1907 nitrate miners' protest of Santa María de Iquique) were often violently suppressed, and there were few other employment options.
       Only the ruling oligarchy, and a small urban mercantile class, grew fabulously wealthy from their middlemen's dealings with the foreign companies. With few exceptions, though, they did not start mining companies, invest in processing plants or build railroads and shipping facilities. They used their wealth to purchase French furniture, cut-glass chandeliers from Belgium, carriages and later motorcars from England and America. They sent their children to school in Paris, bought homes on the Costa del Sol, and put the remainder of their assets into Swiss banks. The capital that flowed into Chile from its principal exports flowed back out again. A potentially wealthy country was far less developed, prosperous or economically independent than it could have been.
       After World War I, when synthetic nitrate had been invented and Chile's natural reserves were nearly exhausted anyway, copper mining emerged as the first-ranking industry and the major source of foreign exchange. With Germany defeated and Britain reduced to a debtor nation, control of the copper mines and other mineral concerns was assumed by U. S. corporations. Chile moved further into the orbit of North American influence, both economic and political. In 1948, Chile joined the Organization of American States, committing herself to support of U. S. anti-communist policies. The United States began to send military "advisors" and armaments, and to admit Chilean officers for training in the American army, under the 1951 Mutual Security and the 1952 Mutual Defense Acts. Professional contacts were established between the two armed forces, and the sympathy of the Chilean military towards U. S. defense policies and priorities was ensured. In the ensuing years, more and more American and multinational companies moved in to Chile--Chrysler, Ford, General Motors, International Telephone and Telegraph, the Bank of America--building industries and businesses that employed some Chileans but produced goods and services for their own wealthy, developed home countries.
       Land reform laws had been adopted in 1962, during the presidency of Jorge Alessandri, due to pressures in the Chilean Congress from the newly formed Christian Democratic party and a coalition of socialist and leftist parties led by Salvador Allende. These laws provided a legal basis for expropriation from large landholders and redistribution to small cultivators, but very few pieces of property had actually changed hands. Agriculture was still dominated by the landowning families of the feudal oligarchy, who had invested little to modernize farming methods and equipment on their huge estates. As a consequence, food production was on the decline.
       Eduardo Frei's administration enacted legislation that permitted several million acres from the largest, most poorly managed haciendas to be expropriated. Allende's government continued and accelerated this process, but it would have taken several years to develop and modernize agricultural production. Despite a large middle class and a tradition of relatively stable (for Latin America) democratic government, Chile still lacked the means, by the time Allende was elected, to provide sufficient food, clothing, housing and consumer goods at affordable prices for all her people. Until Allende moved to nationalize key industries, the controlling interest in Chile's economy was still held by the oligarchy and a consortium of American and multinational companies.

       So in this pleasant park, a little over a year after Allende's election, surrounded by comfortable upper middle-class barrio alto homes, Chileans still felt themselves to be standing in the long shadow of their huge, wealthy, powerful northern neighbor. Even the presence of two norteamericanos at their Dieciocho celebration must have served to remind our hosts of the tenuous nature of their independence, at least in its economic aspects.
       Already that day, along the route our taxi had taken, Alan and I had seen posters and billboards that joyfully proclaimed "Viva Chile Mierda!" ("Long Live Shitty Chile!"). The naughty-adolescent tone of this phrase perfectly illustrated the mixture of inferiority complex and perverse pride that seemed to pervade the national consciousness. We could hear this slogan being shouted from nearby fondas as friends greeted each other, and as cueca tunes started and people began to clap and stomp their feet. I thought of the Fourth of July in my own affluent super-power nation: just another long holiday weekend, dominated by highway fatality statistics, firework displays, and opportunities for major advertisers to sell their products in patriotic packaging. For Chile, the independence celebrations still had an air of ongoing struggle, especially now that Allende's election had thrown the country's political future into uncertainty.
       Alan's colleague Sergio was putting a record on the portable tocadiscos sitting on a table at one side of the tent. He called to us to come dance. We all stood in a circle outside the fonda, clapping in time to the cueca's opening measures. The first few couples stepped into the ring, tapping their heels and toes as they circled each other, left hands at their hips, right hands waving white handkerchiefs over their heads. As each set of couples finished, we applauded them with shouts of "Bravo! Viva Chile!"
       Then the cry went up: "Let the gringos dance!"
       Before I could hesitate, Alan steered me firmly into the circle. I'd had just enough to drink to be able to relax and follow his lead, twirling my handkerchief over my hand with what I hoped was some finesse, and tapping my feet in the correct patterns. Alan spun loops around me, slapping his calves and thighs, and ducking for the fancy Cossack-style men's kicks. He grasped his handkerchief in both hands above his head, or whirled it dizzyingly about my head like a Chilean gallant. I was just grateful I could maintain the basic steps. When the music ended, our friends cheered and exclaimed that they hadn't believed norteamericanos could do the cueca at all.

       Alan became my teacher and guide in more than dancing the cueca. After the Dieciocho, he started me on exercises to improve my Spanish, with short practice sessions every time we met. He taught me tongue-twisters: "Tío Timoteo, no toques tu trompeta, toca tu trombón," and "Tres tristes tigres trayen trigo al trigal." I had to repeat them over and over, faster and faster, without stumbling, until I had them perfect. As we walked along the street, or rode in taxis, Alan often startled me out of my revery (gazing at the passing scene, and only half-listening to what he was saying) with a nudge and the words "Tío Timoteo." Without hesitation or error, I had to recite whichever tongue-twister he put to me at that moment. The competitive spirit Alan brought to these learning exercises was irksome at times, especially when I was tired or annoyed about something. But it was immensely helpful to be challenged like this all the time, just as I was anyway in day-to-day interactions with Chileans.
       "I'm only making you do what I had to make myself do," Alan said when I complained. "If I can learn this way, by myself, you certainly can."
       He had me read aloud to him from books as well. Once, when we were about to leave for a crafts fair in the Parque Forestal, he went back into his room and came out with a small paperback copy of Juan Ramón Jiménez's Platero y yo.
       "This is what I learned from," he said. "Every morning, and every night before going to sleep, I read a chapter aloud to myself, until I got the pronunciation right."
       I looked at the book's cover, with a whimsical silver-toned illustration of its famous donkey hero. "Read it," Alan said. "You're the poet, you'll like the language."
       I opened to the first page:
       "Platero es pequeño, peludo, suave . . ."
       I read the first short chapter, Alan stopping me to correct my vowel sounds. The prose itself forced my mouth wider to make the consonants clear and precise--like the sea off the coast of Andalucˇa--the vowels bright and sharp like sun reflecting from whitewashed village walls. From such reading, I came to understand the pellucid Mediterranean quality of this language, even as it had been clipped and softened by its transplantation to a precarious narrow shelf of land between the Andes and the Pacific. It was not such a simple language to render correctly, no matter what other students had thought in high school, where common wisdom held that it was an easy "B" course at least.
       "Tien' asero," said the Andalusian peasant of Platero, of the obduracy of his species. The language, too, was of steel--steel and silver, like Platero.

       I read other books Alan recommended, and he had me discuss them with him--in Spanish of course: this was the next phase of my Chilean education. I had to make note of, and look up in my Spanish-English dictionary, any new words I came across in my reading, and then use them in my verbal summaries of the books. "You only know a word when you can use it correctly in conversation," Alan told me. Fortunately he didn't make me write out these exercises. "I have enough papers from my high-school students," he said.
       After his school let out, and my classes were finished at the university, we would meet at one of the caf‚s along the Avenida Providencia, to continue my informal studies. Once, Alan invited me to Nido de Águilas, to have lunch, see the library, and, if I were interested, to enquire about teaching there myself if I decided to stay on in Chile. He didn't invite me to sit in on any of his classes. I remember the single-storey, American-style building, set back on a large plot at the outermost edge of the barrio alto, where the foothills began to rise toward the snowy ridge of the cordillera. Inside the school were broad hallways lined with lockers, lots of windows looking out on the tree-lined lawn and on the playgrounds full of swingsets and tether-ball poles. Classrooms and the library were well-stocked with new books and brightly-colored bulletin board displays.
       The students, from grades K-12, were all loud, confident, and (except for a few foreign diplomats' children) blond. They were modishly dressed, boys and girls alike in the bellbottom jeans and brilliant polyester shirts and blouses that were fashionable then. There were no uniforms. In its Third World setting, the school had been well-named, by someone with a cruel sense of irony--Eagle's Nest, breeding place of the powerful and predatory. A lair for raptors in a country full of crows.
       I couldn't help but compare this well-funded institution with the Chilean public schools I had seen: gloomy three-storey buildings with a narrow ring of concrete for schoolyard between the soot-blackened brick walls and the street, scores of dark-haired children pouring out of the overcrowded classrooms in their ill-fitting hand-me-down uniforms, each clutching a handful of battered textbooks or a grimy satchel. They all walked home or ran to the city bus stop to catch the regular micros (already jammed with homebound factory and office workers) back to their houses in distant lower-middle class neighborhoods. At the end of the school day, the Nido de Águilas students were met by a fleet of vans and minibusses to transport them home. Some of them had shiny new cars, with uniformed drivers and diplomatic license plates, waiting for them in the parking lot.
       That afternoon, Alan and I got a ride from the school from an American, Bob, a burly, sunburned man with thinning blond hair who had come to pick up his teenaged sons. He drove a Land Rover bearing the logo of the agricultural development organization for which he worked. We stopped at a pizza place on Providencia, and sat under a Cinzano umbrella-shaded table on the terrace in the late afternoon sun. Bob's wife and a few other development agency colleagues of theirs joined us; the teenaged sons lurked at another table, smirking at each other and watching Chilean girls strolling by on the street. The talk was all of crop yields and irrigation patterns, average rainfall and rural credit schemes. I sat listening, growing restless and sleepy as the sun sank too low for the umbrella and threw a blinding shaft across our table. Finally I asked about land reform.
       There was a silence, as everyone at the table turned and looked at me. (Alan, for a change, looked away, not saying anything.) It was as if I had uttered a dirty word.
       Bob cleared his throat. "We're naturally very concerned with increasing the agricultural output of this country," he said. "With more food available, prices will drop, and the nutritional levels of the poor will improve. Chile won't have to import foodstuffs she can grow herself. With a higher standard of living, the small farmer will be a better worker, and productivity will increase that much more. . ."
       I wanted to interrupt and ask him how he could be sure that the fruits of increased production would automatically be made available domestically, and at lower prices. What if it was all earmarked for export, to bring in foreign exchange? And what about the landless cultivator, the inquilino who worked as a feudal sharecropper on the latifundo? How could he benefit from increased production of some cash crop on his landlord's estate, when he had no land of his own on which to grow food for his family? But Alan was looking at me strangely, and suddenly he muttered something in Spanish.
       "What?" I said.
       "Déjalo," he repeated. "Drop it."
       Bob was going on about how his organization could not meddle in the internal affairs of the country, or interfere with the private property of Chilean citizens. "Even if we personally believe the system is unfair," he said, "we have to work with it. Otherwise we won't accomplish anything at all."
       I never did find out what Bob's own views on land reform were, or why the topic was so sensitive. I never again spoke to any Americans involved with agricultural development in Chile. As the months passed, I would speak to fewer and fewer Americans anyway. But I continued to see Alan, because his main interest was in finding out what was really going on in Chile.

       We began to take long walks on sunny weekend afternoons in the Parque Forestal and up the Costanera, the tree-shaded parks along the banks of the Río Mapocho. On the bridges we stopped to look up at the massive snow-covered ridge of the cordillera, usually visible on weekends above the pall of smoggy haze that hung over the city. Below us was the dark roil of spring runoff, and on the banks, ragged children fishing or playing. Women came out from the jumble of squatters' shacks propped against the concrete retaining walls, carrying baskets of clothes to wash in the shallows. A few tramps slept on flat rocks in the sun, between laundry spread out to dry on the larger boulders.
       "Allende's reforms haven't reached these people yet, have they?" Alan said, with a bitter little laugh. "I don't know if they will, either. Not if some of our boys can stop him."
       He talked to me on the bridges, and in the parks fronting the river, where no one could overhear us--not the few strolling couples, or the small groups of hippies playing guitars and smoking pitos under the trees. He was trying to find out, he said, what strings were being pulled behind the scenes at the U. S. Embassy. "There's some real dirt there," he liked to say, almost gleefully. "And I'm going to dig it up." "How are you going to do that?" I asked.
       "I have my spies," he would nod, mysteriously. He talked about deals the U. S. military top brass were making with leading industrialists and with disaffected officers in the Chilean Armed Forces, to destabilize Allende's government. "Most of those officers are right-wing," he said. "Even if they do believe that the Armed Forces are supposed to uphold and defend the Chilean Constitution, no matter who's elected to the presidency."
       "How long do you think they'll let Allende continue?" I asked, not because I believed what he was saying, but because I wanted to draw him out.
       "A year, two years maybe," he shrugged. "It depends how long it takes to make the economy collapse, and the whole country fall apart."
       One afternoon, as we rode the quaint, red-painted wooden funicular car up to the top of the Cerro San Cristóbal, Santiago's highest hill, I asked him (in English, even though the car was almost empty) why he wanted to know these things. "Aren't you treading on dangerous ground? And what can you do with this information?"
       He shrugged and looked out at the funicular's metal track curving downward between cypress and palm trees. The grey plateau of the city broadened and appeared to tilt toward us as we rode higher. "It'll be useful later on," he said, "when the truth comes out."
       The car reached the top of the hill. Alan took hold of my elbow as we stepped onto the terrace beneath the huge, glaring white statue of the Virgin Mary which overlooked the city with outstretched stone arms. He steered me to the concrete parapet, and stood behind me, his hands touching the ledge on either side, so that I was closed in between him and the parapet. Thus trapped--or protected--I looked down with him on the somber cluster of Baroque-style public buildings in the city center, so much like those of Eastern European capitols I had seen in photographs. Alan's breath was in my hair; he pushed at my shoulder with his face and then propped his chin in the hollow above my collarbone.
       "Tonto," I pushed back at him, laughing. "Silly." But I didn't push him away.
       I suppose my real question to him, which I didn't want to formulate, was: what would they do to you if you did get hold of any sensitive information? This was two years before the Charles Horman case, later chronicled in Thomas Hauser's book, The Execution of Charles Horman, and then in the film Missing. Both book and film would document and dramatize the dangers of knowing too much about the CIA and the U. S. military's involvement in the destablization and overthrow of Allende's government. I was only dimly aware of the troubling events beneath the surface of Chilean political life in 1971, but common sense told me that Alan's life could have been in jeopardy if he had found out anything of substance.
       One thing was certain, though: Alan was an amateur at this game. He talked too openly and recounted his tidbits of information too gleefully to be in anyone's hire. He may have invented most of it to impress me. Even I, politically naive as I was, knew enough to keep my mouth shut if I didn't want anyone to learn what I was doing or what I had found out, if I didn't want my sources to evaporate. Many Chileans I met were so full of knee-jerk paranoia about the CIA that I didn't know whether to give them credence or not. But Alan's speculations and insinuations were the first I had heard from another U. S. citizen about American interference in Chile's affairs. Superficial though they were, Alan's declarations to me came three years before the 1974 Congressional hearings on Chile--hearings that would demonstrate the falseness of previously maintained State Department claims of a hands-off policy during the Allende years.
       At the time, though, I made little effort to follow up on Alan's statements. I only remember how he moved around me that afternoon, and seated himself on the parapet with his back to the city. "Not to worry, my dear," he grinned. "I haven't found out anything that isn't common knowledge. What's going on here is an open secret. You'll see."
       He rested his hands on my shoulders and looked at me, serious now, his curly hair riffling in the stiff breeze. Beyond the city, deepening to blue-gray shadow as the first scattered lights came on, the cordillera dissolved in a mauve-colored haze of dust and smog. We took the funicular car back down the hill, to make our way to Alan's house through the darkening streets below.

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