“I've died many times, for that matter. The first when Chile was overwhelmed by the coup; the second when they arrested me; the third when they imprisoned my wife Carmen; the fourth when they took away my passport. I could go on." Thus spoke Luis Sepulveda, Chilean writer and activist, naturalized French, in an interview three years ago: today, at the age of 70, he died for the "fifth" and last time, struck down by the coronavirus after almost two months of agony (he contracted it in February, together with his wife who later recovered) in a hospital in Asturias, Spain. Sepulveda had lived in Europe for a very long time, exiled from his country since the days of Augusto Pinochet's regime, which in 1974 forced him to over two years in prison and torture for his political commitment in favor of the socialist president Salvador Allende, of which he was guard personal.
Sepulveda's history was one of resistance: always in favor of the least and of his beloved South America, upset over time by coups d'état and military regimes, and by the oppression of the Western world, especially North America, denounced in those years by another symbol writer of that struggle, the Uruguayan Eduardo Galeano, with his "The open veins of Latin America". “Latin America borders hatred to the north, and has no other cardinal points”, said Sepulveda, who continued his commitment in Europe, discovering over time that he was also an environmentalist (he joined Greenpeace) and above all a top-level writer. Recognizable for the delicacy of his style, he wrote short stories and novels translated all over the world. In Italy, but not only, his most successful work is considered "Story of a seagull and the cat who taught her to fly", published in 1996 and from which a film was also made.
Among the various awards, Sepulveda has obtained the "Gabriela Mistral" Prize for poetry, the "France Culture Award Etrangère" Prize, and in Italy the "International Grinzane Cavour" Prize and the Alessandro Manzoni Literary Prize for Lifetime Achievement. Beyond the awards and publishing success, Sepulveda will also and above all be remembered for his human depth. In a book written together with the former president of Uruguay Pepe Mujica and Carlo Petrini, he had defined happiness as follows: "Everything that is done for a better world has a starting point, which is to win the right to a full existence. A happy existence, in the fullest sense of the word. Knowing, for example, that those close to us are experiencing a situation of social injustice is a wound to our idea of happiness".
In the aforementioned interview with Repubblica, he answered the question of whether or not he felt like a happy man: “If I think about it, I felt special happiness when I got my Chilean passport back. Not so long ago, after all. I have always felt like a free man; but that shred of document, after 31 years of exile, after I had spent my life feeling like a canceled man, had a strange effect on me. Like an unexpected baptism and therefore a rebirth”. And freedom, for a writer who has known persecution, what is it? “It is not easy to define it. Sometimes I think about the responsibility of choosing the right words; sometimes i imagine freedom as a waiting that can be frustrated. Do you remember that line from Cavafis? It's getting dark and the barbarians aren't coming. You never know when the new will break into your life, into your writing”.
