Word: santiagos
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...central figure of the book, its fantasy-struck narrator, is a failed, elderly intellectual named Humberto. He is the caretaker of a huge, decayed and sparsely tenanted religious retreat house near Santiago. Those few others who live there-a mother superior, a few female orphans and a handful of ancient housemaids-know Humberto only as "Mudito." The name means "Little Mute," and indeed no one knows that Humberto can speak...
Donoso has a lethally accurate ear for the cadences of Chilean people: aging, pious servants, provincials transplanted in the capital, the crumbling aristocracy. The elusive Iné is a perfect portrait of a working-class Santiago teenager. Along with legends and local lore, there is a great deal of fashionable literary rhetoric that unfortunately tends to make the author's truly bizarre creations more commonplace. When the didact in Donoso pushes the storyteller aside, the book comes perilously close to pomposity...
Among those who witnessed the uprising was TIME'S Robert Lindley. "I was banging away at my typewriter when I heard explosions," Lindley cabled. "Since they began at 9 a.m. and followed a regular pattern, I thought they were a result of more blasting for Santiago's new subway system. But then I heard the unmistakable rattle of machine-gun fire. From the twelfth-floor window of my hotel room (which directly overlooks Moneda Palace), I saw a tank parked across Constitution Square. It had crawled up to within a few feet of the palace and trained...
...weeks crowds of pro-and anti-Allende supporters had surged through Santiago's streets. Demands had been made for Allende's impeachment; others called for civil war. Doctors, dentists and nurses went on strike, protesting Chile's uncontrollable inflation, which has soared 235% in the past year. They joined thousands of copper workers, who have shut down Chile's largest copper mines and paralyzed the nation's economy, which gets 80% of its foreign exchange from copper...
Allende, who had hitherto been fairly scrupulous in allowing freedom of the press, angered many Chileans last week when he ordered the opposition Santiago daily El Mercuric closed for six days. Reason: the paper had printed a right-wing ad that the government considered seditious. Allende then overreacted to a bizarre little incident in which Army Chief Carlos Prats fired two shots at a woman motorist who had stuck out her tongue at him. Forcing the woman's car to a halt, the general pressed his revolver against her head and demanded an apology. When angry pedestrians...