Capturing the spirit

Luis Munoz endured a childhood filled with illness and pain which served in some ways as a preparation for the torture he would endure in a Chilean death camp in the 1970s. His fascinating memoirs offer an insight into an era blanked out of history books by 'official amnesia'. By Michael McCaughan

Being Luis: a Chilean life
By Luis Munoz.
Impress Books, released July 1
€11.99

This gripping memoir grabs hold of of the reader when Luis Munoz, a Chilean revolutionary, is captured by torture addicts determined to crush body and soul; "The world so far had been one with values, morals and principles that seemed to have been in place for ever," recalls Luis. Now the world consisted of a dark hood, electrodes on his privates and hammer blows raining down on his body day and night. His captors grew desperate as he refused to give any information, so they threatened to bring his three year old daughter to suffer in front of him. "Bring her," he said, a phrase which would torment him long after the physical scars had healed.

The author was a Chilean revolutionary who came of age in the 1960s, an era in which young people not only demanded the impossible, but set about making it happen within their lifetime.

The rise of Salvador Allende, a democratic Marxist elected to power in 1970, opened the doorway to radical reform. The extreme left criticised Allende for moving too slowly against the ruling class, while the extreme right sought to oust him from power, fearing the erosion of longstanding privileges. The US, kingmaker in the region, organized and funded a coup d'état led by Gen Augusto Pinochet which murdered 3,000 people and silenced a generation.

Munoz was a member of an armed left wing group, MIR, which anticipated the bloody showdown but proved helpless to prevent it.

However, this book is much more than a retelling of the Chilean tragedy which followed the Latin American pattern of mass repression followed by official amnesia. The author, a survivor of Pinochet's death camps, offers an intimate portrait of a human being taken to the limits of sanity and his subsequent efforts to understand the crazed minds who destroyed his life.

Despite the grim nature of this dominant theme, Luis weaves a funny and hectic narrative around his childhood. His father, an ambitious entrepreneur, saw one money-making scheme after another bite the dust, taking the family from financial comfort to total misery. Luis was forced to abandon school and find work, beginning an odyssey of odd jobs which saw him and his brother eat rotting fruit to stave off hunger each day.

Luis hooked up with radical activists and secretly purchased a rucksack and boots on credit to join Che Guevara in Bolivia, a journey which had to be aborted when his family found out about it. The enthusiastic revolutionary dedicated every spare moment to the cause. One of the most entertaining episodes in the book is when young Luis received orders to find weapons for the organisation. He took up residence as a mathematics student in a house adjacent to a gun shop. The plan was to study the habits of the people living in the house and leave as few clues as possible to his identity. But Luis can't tell the difference between a complex variable and a cappuccino, and his efforts to remain incognito are scuppered by the attention of an amorous daughter who plants herself in his bedroom and constantly sketches the phony student.

The research ended with an armed takeover of the house in which Luis' plot was uncoverd just as his comrades burrowed through doors to empty the armoury next door.

At first glance, Luis was an unlikely candidate for the tough path ahead; born with weak lungs, the family doctor sent the infant home to die with his mother. However, his grandmothers, descended from shamans and healers, applied "carrots, red peppers, cow's blood, donkey's milk, lamb's liver" and a dozen more herbs to save the child's life. Fussed over round the clock, Luis still faced TB, mumps, measles and chickenpox in the years ahead, as if the world was grooming him for days of impending infinite pain.

When the coup d'état occurred in September 1973, Luis began a clandestine existence, shuffling from one safehouse to another as the corpses piled high in the streets outside. Luis refused to go into exile and when his wife was arrested, it became a matter of time before the noose tightened round his own neck.

Husbands were tortured in front of wives and wives in front of children – children as young as two years of age and people as old as 80. The Chilean regime carried out a systematic purge of social activists and their relatives, terrifying everyone else into submission.

Munoz survived against desperate odds, and suspected that a part of him belonged to the world of the dead. After months of torture Luis became an official prisoner of the regime and was released into exile, arriving in London where a small room in a damp squat failed to lift his spirits.

Deeply traumatised, haunted by the memory of close friends and lovers tortured to death, he wandered the streets, unable to rebuild his life. He found work cleaning offices until he had a chance meeting with Helen Bamber, director of Medical Aid, a group which works with torture victims. A combination of study and therapy resulted in an MSc in sociology, psychology and counselling, but Luis has yet to shake off the ghosts inside his head.

When it appeared safe to do so, Luis returned to the "new" Chile, widely acclaimed as an "economic miracle", after two decades of iron-fisted military rule. Luis was detained at the airport by secret service agents and quickly discovered that little had changed since the military had stepped down from power. Chile is a country he no longer recognises – where children beg on the streets and the old sense of solidarity has been replaced by an individual battle for survival. The book climaxes with a judicial confrontation with his old tormentors and shortly afterwards, a joyous if melancholy gathering of old comrades.

Luis has the freedom to tell all in this book, no longer bound by the constraints of clandestine life or the fear of damaging comrades who might still be affected by intimate revelations. But there is no happy ending, as Luis remains damaged and fragile; sleep is difficult, cramps and kidney pain reoccur, panic, fear and terror are permanent companions. He cannot plan ahead and at times needs to be on his own. A visit with his daughter to the monkey bars in the playground becomes a chilling return to the rack, where he was left hanging, arms broken, mind cast adrift, close to madness.

"Tomorrow may be different," concludes Luis, "some kind of magic may have happened during the night and tomorrow may be better."

This book stands tall alongside similar tales of survival, notably Gioconda Belli's The country beneath my skin and Tahar Ben Jelloun's This Blinding Absence of Light. If a more powerful book than this one is published this year, I look forward to reading it.