Synopsis

On that cold morning at the end of (the year) 1973 at the airport of Santiago de Chile, Luis never could imagine that it would take him 35 years to reconstitute the 20 sheets on which he had written down, page after page, all what happened at the Argentinian Embassy, 20 sheets that the military grasped and just threw away.

Those sheets of memory were recollected during the years to generate the archives of his mind, his memoirs.

It’s his memory that gives the consistence to the story of the intense actuel experience in an embassy that became smaller and smaller, with the daily arrival of refugees, who risked their live, leaping over the walls, jumping from the neighbouring houses, threw themselves in dangerous situations to try to enter the only door, a door surrounded by military and guns.

Finally there were 750 refugees, and twenty different nationalities.

There are women, some pregnant, and there are children. They are united by the tragedy of the death of democracy in Chile, and by resisting day after day, they constitute a whole, strengthend and disciplined through the human relations that spontaneous grew between them because of the everyday life that they have to face, with all the questions of life and death.

All the refugees have a political education. There are graduated engineers, scientists, labourers, teachers, union leaders, architects, artists, lawyers, judges, military, doctors. The doctors organised advices and they delivered 8 women from the 30 pregnant, on the billiard-table.

They organise their life to avoid any attack. The doctors take care of the refugees who are suffering in their head or in their body, the ideological discussions find place, three teams organise the meals, including Luis.
There is only one bathroom that they keep conscientiously clean. There is no toilet paper so they cut the newspaper in wet pieces, if necessary with a sponge that is always beside the toilet.

This story of the embassy, Luis brings it alive, year after year, on his « Colibri » typewriter, the must in that time.
The characters and the facts became real, they grew and they shrunk, the faces as well as the statures and the lineaments of everybody, with the risk to idealize them.
As time goes by, Luis had to face his own doubts, between what he thought was right, between what he thought that was not, and between what, maybe, was in his imagination. His memories became a run against the time ; sometimes Luis ran after his characters, sometimes they ran after him. He was obsessed by the feeling to be in a labyrinth where everything is whether in front of him or behind, sometimes the images are fuzzy, another time they are sharp, but he always is scared by the deformation created by his imagination, he is scared to make up that what he has forgotten.

Thirty five years are gone and Luis is in the last strait line of the reconstruction of this facts. He will make a manuscript of them, a kind of combination between his memories and the reality such as he found it in the archives of Argentina and Chile.

In the airplane, when he flies to Buenos Aires he has the certainty : this union will give a real live to the characters of his story.