Ironic Tale of Utopian Zeal Lost on the Path to Democracy

An old horseman on the bleak flatland beside the Straits of Magellan gets a letter: “I’m sorry, Hans. They’re coming for you, the same ones as always. See you in hell. Your friend, Ulrich.”

So begins what at one level is a roman noir about the search for a cache of gold plundered by the Nazis, then stolen from them and secreted in the barren extremity of South America. At another level, the author--the Chilean Luis Sepulveda, exiled under the regime of Gen. Augusto Pinochet and living in Germany for many years--has written a bitterly ironic fiction about the end of the Cold War and the collapse of communism.

The suspense part is told tautly though with occasional awkwardness, some of which may be due to a translation that sometimes fails to wrestle Spanish syntax all the way into English. (“A diver after shellfish he had been.”) The political aspects, though, are fascinating.

During World War II, Hans and Ulrich were guards at the Spandau prison. Working-class buddies, they had no use for the Nazis; they spent their time dreaming of Tierra del Fuego, which they pictured as a land of adventure. In a storeroom used by the Gestapo they discovered, among artworks and other plunder, 63 enormous gold coins dating back to the 14th century. They stole them and fled to Hamburg where they hid out among Hans’ dockworker friends, hoping to stow away on a freighter. They were betrayed; Ulrich was caught and Hans got away.

For 40 years Ulrich endured imprisonment and torture--first by the Gestapo and later by the East German stasi, or security police--steadfastly refusing to divulge the whereabouts of his friend. For his part, Hans keeps the gold safe in the remote Patagonian village where he settled, calculating that someday the East German regime would collapse and Ulrich would be free to join him.

The Wall falls, Germany is united and Ulrich is freed--and immediately kidnapped. The major, a high stasi official, has organized his unit into a racketeering operation. The tortures are no different and Ulrich at long last gives way. Galinsky, a murderous ex-stasi agent, is dispatched to the south of Chile. So, at the same time, is the book’s hero, Juan Belmonte.

Belmonte is the bearer of the author’s irony. He is hired by a big German insurance company to block Galinsky and recover the gold. Why me? he demands of Obermaier, the company security chief. He is, after all, a former leftist guerrilla who worked underground in Chile, helped organize the assassination of the Nicaraguan dictator, Maj. Gen. Anastasio Somoza, and fought with international volunteers alongside the Sandinistas. Eventually, when the Cubans insisted on Communist orthodoxy, he and other “romantic” leftists were arrested, interrogated and expelled.

Who better to conduct a violent clandestine mission in South America? Obermaier rejoins. A former Swiss intelligence officer, he is the major’s counterpart. Once, the two were ideological antagonists; now the Cold War has shriveled to brigand rivalry.

The Tierra del Fuego duel between Belmonte and Galinsky is recounted with fair suspense, though roughly. More appealing is the portrait of Hans, stoically resigned to his fate in his bare Patagonian retreat; and of the Argentine neighbors who have come to respect and care for him. Galinsky is effectively murderous; Belmonte, despite or perhaps because of the author’s sympathy, is only partly fleshed out.

It is in the bleak political dialogues and portraits that the book is at its acerbic best. The author invokes a plague on all the houses of recent history. There is, for example, the major reassuring his agent, Galinsky, that the difficulties currently encountered by former stasi operatives will be only temporary. After all, he points out, what did Galinsky’s secret missions consist of: teaching the Sandinistas to deactivate the mines placed by the Contras, and training Bolivian guerrillas to use explosives. Bolivia is a mining country: you could call it “development aid.”

There is Belmonte’s return to Chile after many years in exile. The government is elected, the restrictions have been lifted and there is freedom, though it must be careful not to grow too big. The armed forces and Pinochet himself watch from the background. Important members of the Communist Party, once persecuted, have become prosperous businessmen. There is no room--any more than in Germany--for utopian passion.

At the airport a security officer examines Belmonte’s dossier. “This is a democracy and everyone is happy,” he announces. The phrase is a policeman’s billy club.

“He didn’t even bother to say that they had restored democracy, or that democracy had been restored. No. Chile ‘was’ a democracy, which was the equivalent of saying the country was on the right track and anyone asking awkward questions could dislodge it from the correct path.”