Amalfitano's exile from Chile

Amalfitano's exile from Chile was forced by the coup, but he later gives displacement a meaning beyond loss: he sees it as a movement capable of loosening the hold of fate. His history links a personal break in 1974 to the novel's wider landscape of migration, cross-border commerce, and a Santa Teresa whose rapid growth outpaces its infrastructure.

Cause and Retrospective Account

When the European critics ask what he was doing in Argentina in 1974, Amalfitano answers that the coup in Chile had obliged him to choose exile. He speaks as if he has repeated the explanation many times, then apologizes for its grandiloquence. The apology suggests how habitual the account has become, even as the event remains the decisive cause of his departure.

His response is not framed as an uncomplicated tragedy. After Liz Norton calls exile terrible, Amalfitano says that he now sees it as a natural movement, one that can help abolish fate, or what is generally taken to be fate. He asks pardon for that formulation, but the idea gives his displacement a second significance: an imposed break may also unsettle the expectation that life must follow a fixed course.

Exile and Recurrence

Jean-Claude Pelletier counters that exile brings inconveniences, skips, and breaks that keep recurring and interfere with important undertakings. Amalfitano does not deny the disruption; he replies that this recurrence is precisely what he means by abolishing fate. Their exchange holds two consequences of exile together: repeated interruption can obstruct purposeful work, yet the same interruptions can loosen the force of a predetermined path.

The account is retrospective, delivered in conversation in Santa Teresa rather than as a direct scene of departure from Chile. That distance matters. The reader hears both the cause of exile and the interpretation Amalfitano has formed afterward, but the evidence does not specify the route or circumstances of his leaving Chile, or the particular hardships he experienced in Argentina.

A Cross-Border Landscape

The wider setting gives Amalfitano's personal history a material context. Santa Teresa is described as a city expanding unevenly: its industrial horizon is marked by maquiladoras, while slums press around industrial parks and spread across the city's edges. The critics' drive takes them through neglected central streets, poorer western neighborhoods, and more affluent districts to the east; the city seems to be growing by the second.

That movement reaches the national boundary. On the American side, Fate passes through Adobe, a settlement of houses and appliance stores arranged along a main street that ends near the border post. At the Mexican crossing, he presents his passport and press identification, opens his suitcase, shows his car papers, and fills out forms. The fence is at once a visible division and a point of regulated passage.

Chucho Flores describes Santa Teresa as a city of factories, maquiladoras, workers arriving from other cities, Central American immigrants, a cocaine cartel, money, poverty, and an urban infrastructure unable to support demographic growth. He says the city lacks time: it cannot wait for this combination of economic activity and deprivation to become something else. His description makes movement across and within borders part of a pressured urban order, not a guarantee of safety or stability.

Meaning and Limits

Amalfitano's account places exile between coercion and reinterpretation. The coup determines why he leaves; it does not dictate the only meaning he can later give to leaving. In his formulation, recurrent breaks both obstruct important work and weaken the appearance of fate. The novel sets this personal reflection beside Santa Teresa's larger currents of labor, immigration, trade, and uneven urban expansion, without equating Amalfitano's individual exile with those distinct movements.