Glimpse - Your Stories from Abroad

I opened the front door and realized something was wrong. The swinging door had knocked over two wine bottles, obviously placed in its path on purpose. There in the hallway stood Jorge, my Chilean landlord and housemate, in his pink bathrobe. He shrilly demanded to know why we had left the dining room un desastre before going out for the night. I turned to my roommate, and his expression said the same as mine: This was the last straw.

Three hours earlier, we had meticulously cleaned both the kitchen and dining room after a dinner with my visiting parents. We had, however, neglected to dispose of the two empty wine bottles on the dining room table. The horror! At any rate, my roommate and I were tired of walking on eggshells in Jorge’s house, and a healthy and long-overdue yelling match began. My unreliable Spanish, which I had struggled with during my five months of study in Chile, now poured out with clarity and fury. After half an hour of pointed fingers, name-calling, and circular arguments, I suggested we retreat to our respective rooms before we came to blows.

It hadn’t always been this way. I came to live with Jorge after deciding that my first host family lived too far away from the part of Santiago I loved, the gritty bohemian barrio called Bellavista, right in the heart of the city. While my first family lived in a quiet upper-class suburb filled with banks and cold high rises, Bellavista had color, street vendors, and noise. I scoured the Internet for rooms to rent and eventually found a beautiful little house just around the corner from La Chascona, former home of the Chilean poet and national hero Pablo Neruda. I set up a meeting with Jorge, and rather liked him at first. Small and soft-spoken, he was a chef and committed communist. He sealed the deal when he told me his shaggy black dog’s name was El Comandante.

After I moved in, Jorge and I didn’t see much of each other, but sometimes we would sit on the patio together and discuss politics. I enjoyed hearing his diatribes against American imperialismo and his reasons for believing that Marxism would return to Chile one day. But for the most part, Jorge was reclusive, spending hours or even days holed up in his bedroom at the back of the house. He was often in a bad mood or complaining of illness. He hoarded the only house phone and looked resentful when I or his other tenants asked to use it. He demanded that his tenants keep common parts of the house in perfect order. When we failed to live up to his standards, he would respond in comically passive-aggressive ways, like hiding pots and pans, or leaving notes supposedly penned by Ernesto “Che” Guevara, saying things like, “The revolution demands that we clean and dry our dishes after breakfast.”

My roommates and I occasionally concocted theories on why Jorge was the way he was: depressed, irrational, and mildly alcoholic. I got some answers one day when one of his three ex-wives came for a visit. She emerged from Jorge’s bedroom one afternoon and struck up a conversation with me while lighting a cigarette. She told me that Jorge had been 18 years old in 1973, when General Augusto Pinochet seized control of the country in a coup and immediately started rounding up anyone connected to the deposed leftist government led by Salvador Allende. An important member of the Communist Party of Chile, Jorge was one of the first to be hauled off to a detention center, where, like thousands of others, he was tortured for several months.

In her words, “They broke him.” He was eventually expelled from Chile and fled with other dissidents to Germany, arriving in a country halfway around the globe without knowing a word of German. It would be almost 20 years before democracy returned to Chile and Jorge could safely return home. As I listened, I remembered my self-pity over my fractured Spanish and homesickness during my first weeks abroad, problems which suddenly seemed very trivial.

I had empathy for Jorge, but I could never figure out how to relate to him. If it wasn’t a wine bottle that inspired the next outburst, it would be something else. My semester abroad drew to a close, and Jorge and I parted—not on the best of terms.

Two years later, when I had all but forgotten my landlord, I opened the San Francisco Chronicle and was shocked to see a beaming Jorge inside the back page. An Associated Press photographer had captured his reaction at a courthouse in Santiago, where a judge had stripped General Pinochet of his self-granted immunity, clearing the way to charge him for the horrific crimes committed during his dictatorship. I remember smiling as I read the article, hoping that maybe Jorge would finally find the closure he needed to make him whole again. Maybe then, he’d even let his tenants leave out a wine bottle or two.