Chilean Military Academy

The Chilean Military Academy appears as both a training institution and an extension of the Dictator’s personal authority, where judgments about gender and sexuality become grounds for expulsion. Its role in the story is defined less through its curriculum than through the power to admit, discipline, and remove cadets—and through the contrast between its official military order and the Dictator’s prejudice.

Institutional Authority and Exclusion

During a visit to the garden, the Dictator notices a cadet walking and talking with a bodyguard. The secretary identifies the young man as Colonel Abarzúa’s nephew, recommended for the Academy by his uncle. The Dictator objects to the cadet’s perceived effeminacy and orders him removed from the property and discharged. He instructs the secretary to say that the cadet was caught in an immoral act, anticipating that this explanation will deter Colonel Abarzúa from asking questions. The order turns a personal prejudice into an institutional decision, with the Academy’s authority invoked to enforce the Dictator’s preferred boundaries of military masculinity.

The episode also shows how little room remains for independent judgment within the chain of command. The secretary relays the colonel’s recommendation, but the Dictator dismisses it and dictates both the cadet’s fate and the explanation to be given. The young man is taken away in a jeep while protesting and asking why; the narrative supplies no hearing or account of any actual misconduct. The stated rationale is therefore presented as the Dictator’s convenient pretext, not as an established finding by the Academy.

A Personal Prejudice Made Policy

The Dictator’s response links perceived sexual nonconformity with political danger. He calls such people a threat to the army and places them rhetorically alongside Communists, treating both as contaminants that could spread through the institution. This conflation reveals a policing logic in which military discipline is made to protect not only political loyalty but also a narrow ideal of masculine conduct. The cadet’s presence in uniform is itself what the Dictator resents: he regards it as an affront to the order he claims to defend.

The Academy’s institutional role is sharpened by the Dictator’s childhood recollection of toy soldiers and armies arranged in formation. That memory presents military order as an early and enduring fascination, while the later expulsion shows the adult ruler using real institutional power to impose the rigid classifications implicit in his imagined army. The passage does not reduce state coercion to temperament alone: it shows how a ruler’s prejudice can be carried out through official command and the machinery of military service.

Return in a Dream

The expelled cadet reappears in a dream at a ceremony where the Dictator presents awards to singers, artists, journalists, writers, and uniformed soldiers. The sequence places the young man within an orderly procession of honored guests, reversing the earlier act of exclusion. He stands before the Dictator to receive a medal, but his appearance and teasing manner revive the very identity the ruler had tried to remove from the military world.

The Dictator wakes in anger and relief that the encounter was only a dream, imagining that otherwise he would have had the young man arrested. The Academy’s decision has not been undone in waking life; instead, the dream exposes the persistence of the expelled cadet in the ruler’s imagination. The institution thus remains a site where authority can exclude, while the dream stages a symbolic return that the Dictator cannot control.