If I believe in heroes, in this life that I now have, it's because of my real-life mother, an ex-Catholic Chilean exile who fled the country with my gringo father shortly ahead of Pinochet's coup d'etat. Her younger brother Hugo, a leftist historian, almost didn't make it out, but holed up in the Mexican embassy and eventually made good his escape. At least one of her relatives, an aunt of hers I think it was, disappeared for good. It galled my mother greatly that she should have been forced to take refuge in the United States, who had conspired in murdering her country's future.
As a young child, however, I didn't know the reasons for why my mother had become so embittered and harsh and, as it seemed, unloving. I also didn't know that I'd been an "accident", conceived (in Japan, of all places) under inauspicious circumstances, and I didn't know that my father quietly thought it was a mistake anyway for my mother to have more children. Anyway, I spent much of my life afraid of my mother and even hating her, and I had my reasons. But now that she's been dead for almost nine years, hatred seems pointless; now I prefer to remember the things she gave me, things I treasure, and one of them is a belief in heroism.
She was never vocal about it. She could be vociferous enough on a multitude of matters but she was tight-lipped about herself; most of what I know about her, or that I think I know, came from her husband, reminiscing about her after she was dead and gone. But she never tired of reminding me that my given name, my deadname, was shared by that of a great revolutionary—she admired Che Guevara, and pushed me to read his Motorcycle Diaries and other things. She had many leftist books in her collection, though her own interest faded as she got older, and she concerned herself with cooking and mystery novels and other diversions and forgot about La Revolución. Suburban tract-home life isn't hospitable to revolutionary dreams, and life had worn her out.
I wore her out. I'm certain that I must have looked like the death of all her hopes, by the end...she'd struggled and suffered through a life in exile, she endured the grim necessity of living in a country she despised, only to see her favorite child die by their own hand, and her mistaken child turn into an erratic wastrel with appalling tastes in trashy pop fiction and a singular incapacity to hold down any job. What was there to live for?
I don't know that I have an answer for that question. At the moment I have only this to offer: she taught me to believe in heroes, and forty years later, I still believe.
~Χαρά