Alameda Bernardo O’Higgins

Alameda Bernardo O’Higgins is a central thoroughfare in Santiago and a recurring threshold between domestic life and public resistance. In the novel, it is heard first through reports of barricades and violent incidents, then seen as part of a city marked by blackouts, protest, and police violence. Its streets become a route through which the Queen of the Corner carries out an errand for Carlos amid escalating danger.

A city under pressure

The avenue enters the narrative through Radio Cooperativa’s reports of violent incidents and erected barricades. Those broadcasts interrupt the Queen’s songs and the late-night gatherings at her house, bringing news of the streets into a home that Carlos’s visitors use for secret meetings. The contrast makes the avenue more than a distant setting: events there press into the Queen’s private world through the radio.

The avenue also belongs to the novel’s wider image of Santiago in 1986. The city’s cordoned streets, smoking tires, banging pots, and sudden blackouts establish a climate of public resistance and military control. Reports of unrest on Alameda Bernardo O’Higgins place the thoroughfare within that unsettled urban landscape.

Protest and police violence

During a later episode, the Queen is caught in downtown unrest as a crowd runs from the police, shouting accusations against Pinochet and the Secret Police and repeating the protest chant, “Now he will fall! Now he will fall!” A wall of shields and helmets advances, while police strike demonstrators, including women, older people, students, and children. The avenue is thus associated not simply with protest but with the state’s violent effort to disperse it.

The Queen does not flee with the crowd. She continues through the confrontation while carrying a heavy package for Carlos, presenting herself to an officer as a respectable woman who is merely trying to go shopping. Her audacity lets her pass through the police formation and disappear into the pedestrian traffic. The scene joins the avenue’s public danger to the precarious, practical resourcefulness with which she moves through it.

Routes of clandestine action

The Queen’s passage through the avenue is part of a larger delivery. After tear gas fills her bus and the package briefly goes missing, a student helps her recover it. She gets off near Paseo Ahumada, crosses the crowd and the police line, and delivers the package to a man waiting outside the store Carlos had identified. The errand connects Alameda Bernardo O’Higgins and the surrounding downtown streets to the clandestine activity that has entered her home through Carlos and his associates.

Elsewhere, after getting off a bus, the Queen remembers that she has a photograph of a disappeared person in her pocket. Soldiers divide passengers by gender, and she uses her quick-witted performance to avoid scrutiny and continue on her way. Her movement through militarized streets is therefore bound to both the immediate task of helping Carlos and the wider atmosphere of surveillance, disappearances, and armed control.

Narrative significance

Alameda Bernardo O’Higgins links the novel’s repeated shifts between radio news, domestic scenes, public demonstrations, and military enforcement. It is both a place named in reports and part of the urban route across which political danger becomes personal. The avenue’s changing role—from a broadcast sign of unrest to a setting for confrontation and clandestine passage—makes Santiago’s political crisis tangible in the Queen’s everyday movements.