Footsteps

“He would have been sixty-four years old last July and he was a perfect Leo: tenacious, firm in his decisions, and unpredictable. “What Allende thinks only Allende knows,” one of his cabinet ministers had told me. He loved life, he loved flowers, he loved dogs and he was a gallant with a touch of the old school about him, perfumed notes and furtive rendezvous. His greatest virtue was following through, but fate could grant him only that rare and tragic greatness of dying in armed defense of the anachronistic booby of bourgeois law, defending a Supreme Court of Justice which had repudiated him but would legitimize his murderers, defending a miserable Congress which had declared him illegitimate but which was to bend complacently before the will of usurpers, defending the freedom of opposition parties which had sold their souls to fascism, defending the whole moth-eaten paraphernalia of a shitty system which he had proposed abolishing, but without a shot being fired. The drama took place in Chile, to the greater woe of the Chileans, but it will pass into history as something that has happened to us all, children of this age, and it will remain in our lives forever.”
Gabriel Garcia Márquez, “The Death of Salvador Allende”, translated to English by Gregory Rabassa, published in Sociology of Developing Societies, pp.350-360.