The Simple life and Consciousness

Those times were different, from another world, maybe. Perhaps were times of less abundance, less material abundance, let’s clarify. Although Evelyn's family enjoyed a better economic status than most Chileans, thanks to her father's business acumen, she wasn’t free from what we would consider "material scarcity". Although, to tell the truth, looking at this story, we could guess that the reality of sixty years ago had many beautiful details that are remote to us today. 

Her father came that day, as he did from time to time, to Quilpué, where she and her siblings spent much of their childhood. He arrived with a pair of new shoes, suede shoes that were very valued in those years. It is important to highlight that her father, like most parents of years ago, was a strict man who was incapable of tolerating mistakes. The shoes had to be treated with absolute prudence, take care of them, make sure they don’t get dirty, he repeated before putting them in her hands. Evelyn, with the common restrictions of the children of the time, was not allowed to visit other people's houses. However, she could get lost in the forest to play with branches in the eaves of the trees or jump from one puddle to the next whenever the rain accumulated. One of those rainy afternoons, the Lang siblings got lost in the thick green forest of Quilpue. The estuary was a common landscape for them, when it was calm, they dared to dip in it for hours. The incredible thing about this image was that this estuary was also the raw sewage destination, even dead animals could be seen on the banks of the river, Evelyn says. That rainy day, the estuary was very grown and Evelyn, curious as she was, approached the shore with her newly opened shoes. The mud was thick, and she was captivated by the strange feeling of walking on it. When she was close enough to the water, her shoes sank in the mud too deep and little by little the stream started to claim them until inevitably, it took them forever. The shoes were swimming down the river while she couldn’t remove a picture of her angry father from her head. The image was clear, she was going to be whipped. The chaos was total when she came back home barefoot. Her father was not there, but Evelyn and her aunt were forced to invent a good story so that he would not hit her legs with the belt for having lost such precious gift. 

Just as those suede shoes were very valuable, so were other artifacts that today almost seem obsolete. Without going any further, Evelyn was very interested in pencil sharpeners, yes, those day-to-day objects that are almost not used anymore. In her eyes, and apparently in the eyes of many others like her, a mere pencil sharpener was a reason for contention and competition. Who brought the best to the classroom, that was the question. There was one sharpener that Evelyn had fallen in love with, the pencil sharpener of her best friend's father, Gloria Bruhn. Gloria's father was a Civil Engineer and as such, he dedicated a large part of his time to draw building plans. This task required carbon pencils (graphite) of different sizes. Some of them had thick tips and others were thinner. This was the engineer’s main tools that helped him draw the details of his construction designs with clarity. His name was Carlos Bruhn, a German man who had brought the solid metal sharpener from Germany. The technology of the device was such that it could be attached to the edge of the table and be removed as needed. When Evelyn passed by his office, she enjoyed beholding the object for long periods of time. It looked so immaculate on Don Carlos's desk.  

The house of that German man became Evelyn’s second home. Gloria, now deceased, was her best friend for life. Gloria’s sister, Amelia, became her mentor who brought wisdom and awareness to her youth. It was Amelia who explained topics such as consciousness of class, and who introduced her into the "rebel" music that over the years would become the true hymns of the Chilean working class. Quilapayun, Joan Báez, Violeta Parra were the beginnings of Evelyn's political awakening. They read chapters of "The Capital" by Karl Marx and with it extended the invitation to take responsibility for what was necessary. In 1967, an event that caused the stupor of the then grown socialist movement was the suicide of Violeta Parra. Evelyn found out before Amelia and ran to tell her. Amelia did not believe it and shouted for her not to invent such terror. Amelia cried two consecutive rivers when she finally verified the unfortunate event on the radio stations. This metamorphosis in the annals of Evelyn’s thoughts led her to crash head-on with her father, he never understood me, he was always on the conservative side of things, Evelyn says as she takes another sip of the glass of whiskey soaking her lips with alcohol.