Aftermath: Dorfman with image of Allende's balcony Luis Navarro

"Yes," says Dorfman. "When he won the Nobel Prize. And Fidel spoke then. And that's when Allende said, 'I will not leave the Moneda except feet first. I will not leave the Moneda alive. Just so you know it.' He said it very carefully."

Joffre nods. "Those were the last days of 1972, I believe...." There's a pause, and then Joffre shifts back to the coup. "We went on to my house. It was about noon, I would say. And we started doing some practical things--like cleaning lentils. Do you remember that?"

"Yes, yes," Dorfman says, smiling. "And we decided we should put the gun in the one place that they're never going to find it. We put it inside the turntable, right? And it turns out everyone put their gun in the turntable! The first thing soldiers did when they raided a house was smash the turntable!"

"And I remember that you wanted to come to Avenida Grecia and fight," says Joffre.

"Yes." Dorfman grins.

"You were the only one who wanted to do that." Joffre shakes his head. "And it was a hard task for us to convince you that this would be... counter-revolutionary! Ha ha ha ha!" They both laugh. It is an old joke between them.

"Yes," he says, "you convinced me that this was not the thing to do."

"And then," says Joffre, "we decided, Well, we have to eat. We had the lentils. But the lentils had small stones. So we cleaned them."

Dorfman stayed that night and the next at Joffre's house, hiding out while he tried to get a clearer read on the situation--denied, he says, that most precious piece of knowledge under a dictatorship: "clarity about how much danger you are really in, an answer to that most vital of questions, what to do?" Dorfman didn't know. But he wasn't going to leave the country, his country, on a whim, he says. Only if it was absolutely necessary, only if it was life or death.

Then came signs that it was. After several days at Joffre's house, he met Angelica at a cafe. She had burned their papers, she told him, the minutes of their Party meetings, their Che Guevara posters, anything that might give them away. She told him about the raids, about the neighbors who'd been hauled off and hadn't come back. She said that his mother had received two phone calls, a male voice on the other end threatening her "Jew-boy traitor," her "Marxist bastard" of a son. But it wasn't until that night, as he watched the evening news, that Dorfman realized he had to go.

Channel 13 was reporting live from the center of the city on a book burning in progress: scenes of soldiers torching texts, a pile of books ablaze in the night. As the cameras panned the fire, they zoomed in on the titles, the words streaming across the screen in front of millions of viewers: How To Read Donald Duck.

Dorfman's first book, it had sold millions of copies worldwide. In Chile, it had been divisive, contentious. The left hailed it; the right hated it. And now it was burning. If this, what then for its readers? Dorfman wondered. And what would they do to the man who wrote it?

Chicho. They would not call him Salvador, but Chicho," Dorfman tells me. We're in Constitucion Square, directly opposite the palace, and Dorfman is gazing up at Allende's statue. Tears fill his eyes, and, for several moments, he goes silent. He seems to be searching for something inside--perhaps some way of reconciling the two: the sight of this statue with the man he knew in the flesh.

And then, gathering himself, he turns to the palace and points to a second-story window. "The last time I saw him, he was there. It was the third anniversary of his victory, September 4, 1973. We went into the streets, a million of us marching. It took us three or four hours to get here. We crossed Augustinas, and then we circled this block. And Allende was waiting there, right there, waving a handkerchief. And our fists were raised, and we were shouting, 'Venceremos! Venceremos! (We will overcome!)' "

Dorfman pauses for a breath. His eyes widen, and his speech quickens. He talks so fast he can barely get the words out. "And we got here, and we dispersed. And then, all of a sudden, the whole group of us decided, 'Let's do it again!' Like in those operettas, you know? Where you have only four characters, and they keep going round and round. So we circled the block. And the second time we were very quiet. Almost silent. It was as if we were saying goodbye to him."

Adams '01, a former Clay Felker Fellow at Duke Magazine, is currently a freelance writer living in Brazil.