Mariella Gattini

September 11th has a double meaning for me, which can be summarized in two different numbers: 1973 and 2001. Only if life were that simple.

In 1973, I was a little girl living in Chile and in charge of my baby brother, because my mother was far away in Italy, and my father had been working far away for years. My brother and I were left in the hands of a horrible family. The country had been falling apart for years and the coup d’état of 1973 only exacerbated what had been brewing in our society for decades. My mother finally returned, my father also came back to us, but nothing was the same anymore, and things kept deteriorating.

Laura Rodríguez, whose maternal last name was Riccomini, was a schoolmate of mine, ahead of me a few years at Scuola Italiana Vittorio Montiglio, an Italian school in Santiago of Chile. In general, we used to look up to our older schoolmates because they always were doing something interesting; organizing competitions, school plays, dances, and constantly having something to say or discuss. Among them, there was Laura. She was pretty, and most of the time she was surrounded by boys, handsome boys. I was inspired by her when I created Stella, one of the main characters in my book Lost in the Forgotten South, although Stella was the name of one of my daughter’s best friends’ mother. I used it because my daughter, when she was a little girl, told me that from a distance she couldn’t tell the difference between the two of us—between Stella and I, she meant.

Laura Rodríguez went to university and in the 80’s got involved in politics, founding the first humanistic party in the country. A few years later, when Chile was able to go back to the republic it was supposed to be, and Pinochet was partially out of the picture, she became a congresswoman and fought for different rights for women. She especially fought for divorce legislation, which in those days didn’t exist—people had to use a loophole to be able to get legally separated. Finally, in 2004, after years and years of tribulations, a law regulating divorce was passed, but Laura never got to see the results of her struggle, because she passed away of cancer in 1992 at the age of 35. I never forgot her.

In 2001, I was living in Houston, Texas, and studying psychology at Sam Houston State University, when one of the first towers in New York City was struck right in front of me. I was having breakfast watching the news, after my husband had left for work and my daughter; for school. I didn’t go to school that day, I kept calling my husband telling him what I was watching on TV, and whether we had to go pick our daughter up from school because what I was witnessing was unbearable.

I felt helpless all over again. This time I had to be strong for my own family, because I didn’t know where all that was going to take us, and, I was right, things got worse, and worse, with the intervention of the U.S. in Afghanistan, and later in Iraq.

We survived the last decade, we even managed to find a way to be happy again, but I never forgot those events—they will haunt me for the rest of my life.

What happens to us, as individuals, and as a country, follows us wherever we go, and it is a constant reminder of human cruelty, but it also reminds us of the struggle that we were able to overcome. In my case, I could never forget how abandoned I was on September 11th, 1973, but I also remember those wonderful people I had the privilege to meet, like Laura and Stella. Unfortunately, I still associate Chile with the one I was in, living an impossible situation, so for me the only way out is the one ahead.

The U.S. has given me the opportunity to be the one I decide to be—part of an environment where dissent is not only accepted, it’s encouraged. What I learned from all my years of struggle in Chile is that authoritarianism not only threatens our civil liberties, it creates a false sense of security, and it is the source of all kinds of discrimination and violence.

Laura Rodríguez dared to create a humanistic party in 1984, when Pinochet was still in power. Her short life and courage taught me that nothing is impossible, and that you can stand up and say: Enough!