Dr. Claudio Roberto Sepúlveda Álvarez RIP
One of the best-known opening sentences in French literature that I know is “Aujourd’hui, maman est morte”, in the 1942 novel L’Etranger by 1957 Nobel prize laureate in Literature, Albert Camus.
My father died 7 days ago, between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, ironic as he was a real atheist. Not from the infamous coronavirus COVID-19, but from aortic aneurysm. My mother and brother took him to ER at the Clínica Alemana in Santiago, Chile in the middle of the night for acute chest and back pains, but he preferred to go back home after the scanner exam instead of using the last bed available there among COVID patients.
He died just before noon on Saturday April 11, 2020 and was cremated 24 hours later on Sunday noon with a Roman Catholic ceremony (so weird for me). In modern times, and in a pandemia crisis, only 5 people were allowed there (my father’s eldest sister’s son + wife, and my father’s youngest sister + husband attended), and it was streamed live on YouTube! His obituary should come out tomorrow in El Mercurio, Chile’s national newspaper that he read every day.
I hardly knew my father, and he certainly didn’t know much about me. Life hazards I suppose. So these are my incomplete recollections of my little interactions with him. Potential errors are all mine.
He was born on April 29, 1944 in Concepción, Chile, a student town where his father Dr. Roberto Sepúlveda Jara had settled as an obstetric surgeon in the nearby port town of Talcahuano. His mother, Doña Ana María Álvarez Marchant died when he was 3 years old. In our Chilean tradition the eldest child takes on the name of the parent of the same gender. My father had a 1st-degree cousin born 3 years earlier called Roberto already, so he was named differently, as Claudio Roberto (I don’t know if he was ever baptised). We all knew him by Claudio (like my elder brother later on), but his close family from his youth always called him Tito, short for Robertito, “little” Roberto.
His father had had an elder daughter 10 years earlier, and later remarried when my father was about 7, and had 3 more daughters. He was always busy with his medical work, and with outside activities such as freemasonry so my father would always say he was raised mainly by the 3 single sisters (“las tías”, the aunts) of my grandfather’s. As I remember, Claudio R. finished high school at 15, entered the renowned medical school in Concepción, and graduated as a doctor at 21. He later completed his specialty in Public Health. He met my mother, a nurse working there in Concepción in those years and married in June 1968.
I suppose he got involved in politics young then, looking for a new family to belong to. When I was myself invited to join a freemason lodge years later (and declined), I discussed it with him. He said he had been invited too, but had declined as he had “found a family with the Socialist party. “Maybe I should have joined” he said. Indeed, he became very involved with what must have been the National Federation of Socialists students, rising to become #3 as the national Treasurer, and actively participating in the presidential campaigns of Salvador Allende, whom he revered. When Salvador become the elected president of Chile, my father became head of the Public Health organization of Chile at age 28.
On September 10, 1973 my father was attending a medical congress in Lima, Peru, and my mother had flown to meet him to celebrate her 30th birthday. They woke up the next day to the sounds of aerial bombs, gunshots, and the last radiophonic speech of Salvador Allende during Pinochet’s coup. They couldn’t come back to Chile. Many of his friends, many from Medical school (a big source of recruits for the the Socialist Party, Allende was himself a MD) were murdered. He had grown up also in his neighbourhood, and later at university with two of the founders of far-left guerrilla group MIR (Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria), Bautista van Schouwen and Miguel Enríquez — later tortured and murdered by the DINA, Pinochet’s secret police. One of the MIR’s founders even married my mother’s sister, and is the father of my cousin, and had to flee the country the day after. In those days, when his friends went to the far-left of the political spectrum, my father preferred to stay with the Socialist Party and Allende.
During the coup, my brother and I were with my maternal grandparents in the countryside, and stayed there for 3 months, until we could be put on a plane to Lima a bit before Christmas: the start of a long political exile at age not even 3 for me. I believe that the image of a military taking my fingerprints at the airport is my first memory. Maybe I invented it afterwards. In Lima, my parents were immediately unemployed and as a medical doctor, my father eventually joined the WHO (World Health Organization). In April 1974, we flew to Paris, France for a few months, for onboarding, where a french doctor Dr. Michel Péchevis and his family sheltered us outside Paris, lending us one of their children’s room. I always think about that when I see Syrian refugees today on TV. Generosity in times of despair. In August 1974, we left for my father’s new posting, in Thailand, although he had to go to regional HQ in Delhi for a month. I only remember it was very hot and smelly.
By UN Rules, a posting is 4–5 years max in the same country. So that we could do our schooling in only one place, and since we had no other place to go to anyways, we all settled in Bangkok. From 1974–1980, he was with WHO, 1980–84 with ESCAP (UN’s Economical and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific), and from 1984 until he retired with UNICEF. My brother and I went to the French school in Bangkok (1974–1988 for me), as the only other real option was the International (read American) School (ISB) and Dr. Kissinger had not made that an acceptable option. My father spoke fluent French with no accent, having attended primary school at the Lycée Charles-de-Gaulle in Concepción. My grandfather couldn’t afford it afterwards, but the language stayed with him his whole life. Our family’s francophilia started actually earlier. My grandfather Roberto was raised rather poorly when his own father Guillermo left. In those years, an old Frenchman in Chile, M. André Sage (my father had a picture of him, in black and white; an old man with a long white beard) would help pay school tuition to kids from his neighborhood in exchange for work in the summer at his estate. Roberto benefited it from it. 3 generations later, my children are French-born…
Along the way in the 70s, my father’s passport expired, and as there was no embassy yet in Bangkok, he sent his passport for renewal to New Delhi where there was one. It never came back, for many many years, as he was on some political blacklist. So my father travelled on a UN light-blue laissez-passer (a diplomatic passport).
In 1980, we went back to Chile for the first time, and that’s when I met my huge family (my grandfather Roberto had 9 other brothers and sisters). I was carrying a book that night, and asked everyone to sign it. On following trips to Chile every 2 years, I started drawing on a sheet of paper who was who, and many years later, I had built my current family tree of over 21,000 people… My father had booked an international hotel, the Sheraton, next to Cerro San Cristobal, hoping he would not get kidnapped in such a public place. He was really scared. I remember “adult” discussions when his friends mentioned how Bautista and Miguel Enriquez had been tortured to vegetative state, before dying. In the 70s, my father would meet up here and there sometimes with friends who had escaped or who had news of the tortured, disappeared, killed… In the 80s, our family in Chile would listen in secret to dissident Radio Cooperativa. I remember Pinochet on TV talking about “estos communistas de mierda!”, about students being kidnapped by the police and burned to death with gasoline, tear gases in the metro (which is very deep in Santiago) when the Carabineros were trying to break protests at street-level…
In Thailand, as a kid, I remember my father travelling a lot, as he covered a big region, from Korea down to PNG, even going once to the Marshall Islands. I think he was away at least half the year, if not more. In my teenager years, he decided he needed to get to know us, so we were forced to be home by 5pm and sit next to him and talk, while he had his 3 “fingers” of Johnny Walker Black label on the rocks. Actually I think he read the newspaper then, smoked his pipe (I started smoking a box of cigars he had for guests at age 14, and that’s the only thing I’ve ever smoked since), and had us run up to the first floor every 20–25 minutes to turn the LP to the other side. He loved classical music, having attended as a child the Conservatory for 10 years, I think 4 for violin, and 6 years for piano. My room then was just above the piano, and on Sundays he would wake me up practicing endlessly Scarlatti’s sonatinas. I hate classical music since… Although I discovered opera with my mother (he didn’t listen to that then), and took very early on to jazz. My father was never onto sports, so he didn’t pass that on to me 😉 and I had to discover snowboarding on my own around 19-20 years old at university with friends, and later golf, rowing, cycling, but moderately. He preferred his own hobbies, coloring maps he would copy with calc paper, reading art books, listening to music, collecting news clippings that he would methodically organize in folders.
My father was considered highly intellectual and challenged us all the time : he would never answer a question on a word’s meaning, and again, even at dinner, we had to run up to the first floor to open up the Encyclopedia Britannica and read it to him, before we could continue our meal. That’s maybe why I surf on Wikipedia so much now. He always had a very big collection of books, art books, map books, etc. and if you opened some of them, they were carefully marked, underlined, in pencil, with comments on the margins. He would make me and my mother shut up at the dinner table for talking about mundane things, and revert to some international geopolitical or cultural topic. On Sundays at 11am around those years, my brother and I had to take turns and present for 30–60 min (I don’t remember) to the rest of the family a lecture on a specific topic. I remember having to study all the Impressionists we had seen at the Hermitage in Leningrad in 1985, in the books he had, and then discuss them.
Indeed, we travelled a lot in those years, and I still do a lot. The UN would pay as a perk a trip back to the homeland. Thailand was considered an easy country then, and the trip was approved only every 2 years. But as Thailand was exactly on the other side of the globe than Chile, we would stop in many places and my mother would make sure to optimize trips so that we would not have connecting flights the same day! Back then, airlines covered the cost of the hotel for an overnight connection. We travelled cheap because of that, for example on Pakistan’s PIA, Poland’s LOT and later Denmark’s SAS. It was not uncommon for us to go to 10 countries during the 2–3 months of summer, although my father rarely joined more than 2 weeks (otherwise the trip would be void and not paid by the UN!).
He was also trained as an anthropologist, and loved old stones: we went to Egypt to see the pyramids, Louxor, the Valley of the Kings, Alexandria (I remember he loved the Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durell, and took us to dinner in the same hotel restaurant room described in the book)… ; but also drive from Mexico City to Oaxaca and stop at each Mayan site along the way, Guatemala, Honduras (Copán), drive around Turkey later and see 4 archeological sites a day. When we went to Machu Pichu (and he had been there before with my mother), he took a copy of El Canto General, the big opus of Chile’s 1971 Nobel Prize laureate in Literature, Pablo Neruda. And there he read aloud to us on top of one of the ruins, the passage about how the blood of the native indian slaves built that majestic place.
In 1977, my mother was travelling, and my grandfather Roberto died. He obviously could not go back to Chile but he had considered it. He had sent a tape of his father’s favourite music, Beethoven’s Third Symphony (Eroica), to be played aloud when his coffin would leave the house. I remember sitting next to him with my brother, while he listened crying on the phone to the recording and attended like that his own father’s funeral. I had YouTube…
My brother left to study medicine in Paris, France in 1987 and my mother went with him for a while. I stayed alone in Bangkok with my father for many months, but he was hardly there. I did my year of Terminale (12th grade) riding around Bangkok on an electric blue Vespa scooter, that a new friend of mine of dubious activities, whom I met in a club, had lent me. My father never saw it, as I parked it behind the house whenever he was back. I took my week of exams in Singapore (all French school students in South-East Asia did back then, as there were so few of us) in June 1988. When I got my results (Bac C mention Bien) I talked to my father on the phone. I think he was in Manila, The Philippines, and changed his flight to meet me at Changi airport 2 hours before my own flight home to Bangkok, and got me a graduation present (back then we all bought electronics in Singapore and Hong-Kong); a Sony FH-808 mini-hifi set. I was very happy. But I had also bought with my pocket money a CD player; it was a very new technology and hooked it up to the AUX input of the Sony hifi. My father was upset about that, as he only got his own CD player the following year, and had by then maybe 800 LPs of classical music. When I turned 14, I remember well that I had learned to play by myself the mandoline a bit. My father owned his own father’s mandoline that he kept like a treasure, and played it and his own at dinners to his friends. He bought me then a cheap spanish guitar (I still have it); the mandoline was from now on off-limits.
I left home at 17, and joined my brother in his Paris apartment to go myself to university. That was about 32 years ago and I’ve lived in Paris ever since.
The year after, my father finally accepted a new posting, and went on to become UNICEF Representative to Turkey, in Ankara. He was there when the 1st Gulf War stroke, and I remember him then at cocktails negotiating with the other ambassadors for help in his relief efforts for the refugee camps: asking for a free helicopter from one country, trucks from another to bring supplies from their warehouse in Denmark. He suffered a heart stroke after 6 months, probably when things settled, and adrenaline came down. I would still visit my parents on the holidays in the summer and in winter in Turkey. They were very often busy, catering to their diplomatic duties, attending 1 to 3 events per night , or entertaining diplomatic guests at dinner at home. We were sometimes invited to sit at dinner too. I remember chatting with the dean then of the Diplomatic Corps, the apostolic nuncio and asking him about his favourite wine. “Chateauneuf-du-Pape, of course” he replied smiling. In Turkey, I would go on long trips with my mother around the country; that’s where I learned how to drive, without a licence ;), so again I hardly saw him.
In 1995, my parents went on a new posting to Bogotá, Colombia, as he became Deputy Director of UNICEF for the region. I went there only a few times in their 6 year postings, as I had started to work as a consultant after engineering school, and didn’t have much holidays. In addition I had wanted to explore the world again and not go back always to my parents. I was in their house, I remember, when I learned about Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination. In my few conversations with my father then, I don’t remember him asking me much about my studies, this new field to him: ‘Computer Science’, and later never about my work in business. His world was of books, Public Health, and politics. Indeed he had started writing books; his memoirs titled “ambar” (collection of stories like an ambre necklace); the preface was written by the famous Chilean poet Gonzalo Rojas, a very good friend of his, who was considered a potential Nobel laureate in Literature. He also wrote a novel about refugees in war that I never read ‘Refugiados de un Irak Milenario”. In his later years in Chile, he got interested in linguistics, and after reading Ferdinand de Saussure and others, developed all these new theories. Our name for example became Sep-Ul-veda, from arabic origin (it actually comes from a medieval town, founded around 780 AD, 100km north of Madrid, Villa de Sepúlveda, that has 7 doors in the city walls — Septem Publicam, the 7 public ways. They are actually part of the coat of arms of the city. Obviously we once went there as a family to visit together, as his own father Roberto had done much earlier.) He also became obsessed with the Atlantis, reading everything about it and said to me once he knew where it was. I think he wrote about them too. I’ve never seen the manuscripts.
After Colombia, in very difficult years for that country then, he went for about 1–2 years to Panama, and decided to retire back to Chile. He probably had wanted to join the political life there, but a new generation was already in place. I suppose he had eventually a good career outside his home country, pursuing both his profession in Public Health (I don’t know what he thought of the COVID crisis) and as a diplomat with the United Nations, meeting many heads of state along the way (Did I ever tell him I’ve met myself Presidents Sarkozy, Hollande, Macron and many Nobel Peace prize laureates ? never got the chance).
My parents first lived in an apartment in the Las Condes area in Santiago for a few years, before they finally moved into the house he always had wanted, far from the center, up in the hills towards Argentina in Lo Barnechea, where smog in the winter wouldn’t affect my mother’s asthma.
I last saw my father in December 2012 when I visited my parents for Christmas, and we stopped talking completely soon after, as he was immersed in his own world, and not much interested in mine.
To be fair, I do understand that it’s a lot to take in when you have been abandoned twice, first by your mother at age 3, and then by your own country at just 29, and have to re-invent a life for yourself on the other side of the globe and try to feed your family.
I did try to establish some rapport for over 40 years, trying to share part of my world. He never congratulated me for my degrees after I left home (that I had to pay for myself…): driving licence, Computer Science engineering at EPITA, MBA at IAE de Paris, MBA at INSEAD & Wharton, WSET Diploma… I brought him a box of great cuban cigars once, asked for his advice about Cuba before I visited (he had been and met Fidel Castro in the 60s, and again much later); brought him single cask single malts (instead of his favourite Johnny Walker), tried to discuss the technology world with him or the business world (he showed no interest whatsoever). He refused I installed Spotify for classical music on his computer (“I already have enough music”). I managed however once to take him to Viña Santa Rita near Santiago to visit a winery. He would just drink his usual wines without showing much interest in the diversity of the wines of the world.
He is survived by my mother, my brother, myself and my 2 children.
