I have been through this before.
During the past 28 years, Sept. 11 has been a date of mourning, for me and millions of others, since that day in 1973 when Chile lost its democracy in a military coup, that day when death irrevocably entered our lives and changed us forever. And now, almost three decades later, the malignant gods of random history have imposed on another country that dreadful date, again a Tuesday, filled with death.
The differences and distances that separate the Chilean date from the American are considerable. The depraved terrorist attack against the most powerful nation on Earth will have consequences that affect all humanity. It may constitute, as President Bush has suggested, the start of World War III. It is probable that it will be branded in the future as the day when the planet's history shifted forever. Few people today, however, could remember or identify what happened in Chile.
And yet, from the moment when I watched on television here in North Carolina that second plane exploding into the World Trade Center's south tower, I have been haunted by the need to understand the enigmatic coincidence of these two Sept. 11s. For me, this is enigmatic and personal because it conjoins the two foundational cities of my existence: the New York that gave me refuge and joy during 10 years of my infancy and the Santiago that protected my adolescence under its mountains and made me into a man.
I have, therefore, had to make every effort not to contaminate myself by looking again and again at the photo of the man who falls vertically, so straight, so straight, from the heights of that building; had to try to stop thinking about the last seconds of those plane passengers who knew that their imminent doom would kill thousands of their own innocent compatriots. Amid frantic phone calls to see if my friends in Manhattan are well, I yield myself to the gradual realization that there is something horribly familiar, even recognizable, in this experience.
The resemblance goes well beyond the facile and superficial comparison--that both in Chile in 1973 and in the United States today, terror descended from the sky to destroy the symbols of national identity, the Palace of the Presidents in Santiago, the icons of financial and military power in New York and Washington.
