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Original article: Macul con Grecia: El axis mundi de los corazones púrpura

On Friday, June 5th, at 8 PM, the novel «Amor Fati» by Leo Madariaga will be launched, published by Ediciones Askasis. The event will take place at Neighborhood Association No. 19 in Ñuñoa, located on José Pedro Alessandri Street 1036, and will feature the author alongside Cristián Oyarzo and Adrián Barahona.

Below, we present the prologue to this novel, which proposes a temporal architecture where the 19th century, the memory of the tenements, vampiric bohemia, and the political trauma of the 1990s coexist within a single fractured consciousness: ‘the Anfibio,’ an entity divided between Tito Lastarria and Leo Lechuga.

An Introduction to «Amor Fati» by Leo Madariaga from the Corner Where Time Curves Over Itself.

By Adrián Barahona

Paradoxically, there are certain places that, although they appear on maps, exist only superficially. An inconsequential corner could serve as an articulation point between different planes, like a rewe, but in this case, not carved from wood, but molded from concrete. This corner could also resemble the brasero of a 19th-century tenement, that of Febe Pinilla in «El conventillo de la buganvilla», a point where the living, the dead, and those still unsure of their allegiance converge. Macul with Greece is one such corner, the heart of what was once dubbed the «Macul cordón» and «Amor Fati», Leo Madariaga’s novel, was written—perhaps unknowingly, perhaps with acute awareness—from its magnetic core.

I dare say the novel is not fully comprehensible without understanding that certain places in Santiago are where the 19th and 20th centuries intersect, just as Tito Lastarria and Leo Lechuga are two sides of the same coin, the dual lives of the same «Anfibio». In this location, as if it were a pagan ritual, a chained vampire in Rancagua can be summoned by a group of students smoking cannabis under an ancient oak, while a 90s fanzine like «Crápulas» and the «Lira Popular» establish themselves as links in the same chain of oral production, where culén punch and Escudo beer perform identical sacramental functions.

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Macul with Greece, much like Leo Madariaga’s novel, intertwines its story with a three-act structure, operating at three levels.

The first act, «before the Coup,» dates back to the 1950s when the Pedagogical Institute of the University of Chile relocated from downtown Santiago to Macul 774, almost on the outskirts of the city. During those years, the area served as a large open agora, an intellectual tenement without walls, where utopia was not only a project of collective political construction but also an unbounded imagination.

Gradually, what would later be fragmented by the dictatorship in the 1980s solidified: UMCE, the IPS—which later became UTEM—and several other faculties of the University of Chile that would gradually settle in: Arts, Sciences, Philosophy, and Humanities. Meanwhile, students traversed from one building to another, from one garden to another, akin to moving from room to room in a 19th-century tenement. With each crossing, the nütram occurred—the Mapuche art of conversation that Viejo Crápula claimed as the pillar of the «Crápulas» magazine. Discussions about Marcuse could occur beside an imaginary brasero, singing Violeta Parra in the central courtyards, or debating the future of socialism with the same passion with which Sileno Gatica defended red wine against milk punch.

The liquor store on the corner—which would later be named «Time in the Bottle,» a title that sounds invented by a Borges-like chronicler but is strictly real—or the fountain «Los Cisnes» invigorated the transforming afternoons into nights, just like the chingana of the Buganvilia in the novel. Sharing beer was part of a larger ritual where books, slogans, safe house addresses, and ways to search for classmates who hadn’t made it to class were exchanged. Wine was a sacrament of fraternity, just as Viejo Crápula describes in his notebook when he writes that «Fridays at the Pedagógico are a sociological affair, a paradise of perspectives.»

In this context, the image of Tito Lastarria—the vampire of Rancagua, confused by historians with the moneylender said to collect debts in souls and blood—represents something that students of the 1960s knew well: the popular memory prior to the oligarchic Republic, that solidarity of tenements and chinganas that official historiography had buried beneath layers of «colonial nap» and «progress.» When Zorobabel Magno slams the table and shouts: «They are rascals! Tunantes! The real thieves are right there in Congress, the Government House, the courts!» he delivers a speech that any student from the Pedagógico would have signed without changing a comma.

Violeta Parra would die in 1967, but her spirit would continue to haunt the corner like the Anchimallén that guided Rosalía Bravo during the shipwreck: a blue light floating over the stormy waters of history that told everyone to hide in the cabin because the storm was coming.

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The second act begins on September 11, 1973, when the crosses of Tito Lastarria’s mausoleum began to tremble. Legend has it that the vampire will be unleashed when the four crosses flanking his grave are toppled. Macul with Greece transformed into a permanent war zone. Armored vehicles ascended Greece towards the campus like the cart of the dead that Tito Lastarria saw passing in front of the San Juan de Dios Hospital: a vehicle laden with bodies that jumped with the movement of the car, driven by a small man offering organs like one might offer meat in a market. Not far off, the still-living bodies did not head to the anatomical amphitheater but to the National Stadium, transformed into a concentration camp, another of the obscene investments known by Santiago’s topography.

The corner has remained militarized until today, with the constant presence of the water cannon and the Special Forces bus parked in an alley just a few meters from the main entrance to the campus. At times, traversing those neighborhoods meant being considered suspicious, exposing oneself to identity checks that could end in detention, torture, or disappearance. The establishments sustaining the area’s bohemia closed or reopened under new management. The wine tasted of fear, silence, and words that could not be spoken. The sacrament had been poisoned.

Like a project executed step by step, the University of Chile was dismembered. The Pedagogical Institute, amputated from the university body, became UMCE, a cold acronym like a military barracks. The faculties dispersed. The Macul cordón shattered, fragmenting and isolating each piece, rendering it harmless.

In «Amor Fati», this period is symbolized by the figure of Viejo Crápula, the «eternal freshman». Acario Cotapos—Viejo Crápula’s real name, sounding as if a musician from 1900—is the embodiment of a student robbed of his biography, who attempts to trace it in darkness as petroglyphs so that someone, someday, may decipher it.

And, in the mausoleum of Rancagua, the earthquake of 1985 knocked down two of the four crosses. Curious onlookers went to verify «just in case,» as Viejo Crápula states with that dark humor which is, in some way, the last bastion of the defeated.

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The 1990s arrived at Macul with Greece, much like Leo Lechuga entered the 20th century after being Tito Lastarria, feeling as if he had returned «to the life of Sisyphus, condemned to endlessly lift the same stone, to return time and again to his existential void.» The dissociative amnesia of Tito/Leo takes on its most political dimension here. The «Anfibio» cannot clearly recall which century he truly inhabits, and this confusion is not merely dreamlike, but the collective trauma of a country that lost its sense of time: is it democracy or dictatorship? The 19th century with its epidemics and tenements or the 20th century with its disappeared and curfews? The novel suggests the answer is the same: overlapping layers of violence and resistance, like the levels of the Mapuche cosmos that Lemunküyen describes to his son by the fire.

Democracy arrived, but tutored and incomplete. It is like the box wine that 90s students bought at «Time in the Bottle» to take to the ruins of «Pompeda»: it serves its purpose, but lacks the nobility of the must that Sileno Gatica defends with his staff. It is democracy in tetrabrick.

The corner retained some of its combative vitality, albeit ghostly. The students of Leo Lechuga’s generation—that generation which Madariaga captures with precision—inherit the melancholy of not having experienced utopia. We are orphans of a revolution we did not know, children of trauma that, like Rosalía Bravo with Tito, preferred silence for years. «I had not meant to reveal that Lisandro Lastarria is not your father,» remarks Lemunkuyen. In that sentence resonates the silence of an entire generation that did not know—or could not—speak.

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In this context, the performance gallop of Pedro Lemebel and Francisco Casas towards the Faculty of Arts—that epic gesture of 1988, just before the plebiscite, when stark naked, mounted on horseback, they burst into the campus like an apparition—stands as one of the last great acts of magic of the corner. After that, gradually, resistance fragmented, individualized, and aestheticized. Collectives attempted to articulate new forms of struggle, but neoliberal hegemony had already penetrated even the language.

Bibliomancy—that game practiced by Leo Lechuga and his friends, opening books at random in search of answers—could be understood as the oracle of a generation that no longer believes in grand narratives, but also cannot endure silence. They open a book by Nietzsche and find death; they open a book by Enrique Lihn and find despair; they open «Crápulas» and find the beggary of poets. «Being passed to gladiolus,» they say, and the funeral joke is also a confession, as they smell of death because they inhabit a country that has yet to fully bury them.

By the 1990s, Tito Lastarria is no longer the vampire of legend. He is now a neighborhood animita, a popular saint to whom teenagers light candles to pass exams. His mausoleum has become what the Central Market morphed into after the dictatorship: a package of folklore, domesticated memory, terror turned into quaintness. The possible relocation of La Piojera, the emblematic bar of the area, from its historic location to Las Condes or Providencia resonates in popular humor: it will change its name to «pediculosis.» The crosses continue to fall, and no one wants to ask, «What will happen when the last one falls?»

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What Leo Madariaga has constructed in «Amor Fati» is, at its core, what the corner of Macul with Greece has always been: a space where times overlap and converse.

The 19th-century tenement of the buganvilla is the red house on Alberdi Street in the 90s. Sileno Gatica strikes the ground with his staff, just as Viejo Crápula pounds the table with his fist. Rosa Aurora sings in the chingana, akin to Luna Barquero reciting in the ruins of «Pompeda». Diógenes Pinilla’s culén punch is the beer Natalia Rodríguez buys after climbing over the campus fence. And fire—the Kütral protected by four ancestral machis, the energy of Pyrós that obsesses Diógenes, the flames of Febe’s brasero, the bonfire on Fridays at the Pedagógico, or the barricade that blocks the street—is always the same fire: «the one that sometimes ignites and sometimes extinguishes, but never goes out,» as Heraclitus writes in the epigraph that opens the second half of the novel.

In this reading, the corner of Macul with Greece functions as the mundi axis of the tribe of purple hearts. It is the point where the vertical axis of the Mapuche worldview—the Wenu Mapu of the utopia prior to the coup, the Minche Mapu of dictatorial terror, and the Nag Mapu of the transition, as an intermediate territory where wekufes and hopes coexist—meets the horizontal axis of the novel—the 19th century of Tito Lastarria and the 20th century of Leo Lechuga—joined by dreams, fire, and disease, which kills slowly as forgetfulness does; and with the diagonal axis of popular culture—from the velorio zamacuecas to the tangos of Viejo Crápula, from the Lira Popular of Rosa Araneda to the photocopies of the fanzine Crápulas, from the guitarrón of the Profeta de Puente Alto to the electric guitar of punk gigs in Pompeda. On each of these axes, the corner serves the same function as Tito Lastarria’s mausoleum: to contain something that longs to emerge.

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«Amor Fati»—»love of fate»—is not a novel about resignation. It is a novel about the radical acceptance of existence in all its facets: beauty and horror, chingana and lazareto, a kiss on Santa Lucía hill and Angelita’s death from smallpox. Nietzsche posed a thought experiment: «What would you do if you knew that this life, exactly as you have lived it, you would have to live it once more, countless times?» Leo Madariaga’s answer is the novel itself: to live it by writing it, singing it, and sharing it around a bonfire.

When the last cross of Tito Lastarria’s mausoleum falls, the legend says, the vampire will awaken and come to collect the promised souls, but perhaps—and this is the secret wager of the novel—Lastarria has already awakened and failed again in his attempt to allow life to surpass death. Even if the vampire from Rancagua does not collect souls but rather awakens them; and even if the corner of Macul with Greece is not a crossroads of streets but the place where, if one pays enough attention, one can hear the thump of Sileno’s staff against the ground, the strumming of Rosa Aurora’s vihuela, Diógenes urging Ahrimán and Ahura Mazda, Viejo Crápula’s voice singing a tango with lips stained purple from wine, and Natalia Rodríguez’s whisper in one’s ear: «Support it; it’s money from imperialism!»

Just as the fire never goes out, the corner never closes its portal, and the «Anfibio»—that violet salamander spanning two centuries, two lives, two shores of existence—will continue to cross from side to side, waiting for someone else to dare to cross with him.

Valparaíso, March 2026

La entrada Macul and Greece: The Mundi Axis of Purple Hearts se publicó primero en El Ciudadano.