Space Invaders

by Nona Fernández

  VIII

  A green glow-in-the-dark hand. Riquelme keeps dreaming about it, can’t shake it. This time he sees it on a television screen. The hand advances rapidly, in pursuit of extraterrestrial children. They run back and forth, fleeing in terror, but the hand clutches at the first Martian within reach and at its touch there is an explosion. The body of the little Martian flies apart into colored lights that vanish from the TV screen. On the screen the score goes up by one hundred points, but the amazing record set by González’s brother stands unbroken. The green hand and many other green hands stream out of an earthling cannon, on the hunt for more space invaders.

  Third Life

  I

  Santiago de Chile. 1985. On March 29, brothers Rafael and Eduardo Vergara Toledo, ages eighteen and twenty, respectively, are shot and killed by national police operatives in the working-class neighborhood of Villa Francia. Both had dropped out of school, under suspicion of being agitators and pamphleteers. That same day, at 8:50 a.m., in front of the Colegio Latinoamericano de Integración, Manuel Guerrero, a teacher, and José Manuel Parada, a parent, both communist militants, were kidnapped by the national police. Early the following morning, they would be dead, found with their throats slit on a bleak stretch of the road to Pudahuel Airport, together with another militant, Santiago Nattino. The next week, at the Avenida Matta school, the girl stops coming to class. Her father no longer drops her off in the morning. Neither does her uncle in the red Chevette. The caretaker doesn’t see her crossing herself in front of the statue of the Virgen del Carmen or eating ham and cheese on a roll at recess. The desk at the back of the classroom sits empty now. For some reason, the girl never occupies it again.

  II

  No one is exactly sure when it happened, but we all remember that coffins and funerals and wreaths were suddenly everywhere and there was no escaping them, because it had all become something like a bad dream. Maybe it had always been that way and we were only just realizing it. Maybe Maldonado was right and we were too young. Maybe we were distracted by all that history homework, all those math tests, all those enactments of battles against the Peruvians. Suddenly things sprang to life in a new way. The classroom opened out to the street, and, desperate and naive, we leaped onto the deck of the enemy ship in a first and final attempt doomed to failure.

  Maldonado dreams of the word degollados. She sees it printed in the headlines of every newspaper from back then. Caso Degollados. Throats slashed. In newsstands, on the dining room table at home, in her mother’s hands, in the fat binder on shelf number four in the third aisle of the school library. Maldonado doesn’t know what degollados means, but she senses that it’s something awful and then her dream turns into a nightmare. Fuenzalida dreams of the voice of a newscaster on the radio in her mother’s car. The man is talking about a gruesome discovery, that’s what he calls it, and he uses the same word, which is new to Fuenzalida too. Zúñiga dreams about the funerals. He says that he was there, he went with his parents and his brother. Acosta remembers a coffin, some place he isn’t sure how he got to. There were lots of flowers and candles and people standing in silence, he said. At some point the son of one of the dead men appeared, a kid just like us, in his uniform, with his school crest, and he stood next to the coffin for a long time. Maybe he said something. Acosta can’t remember, because he never remembers voices, but the one thing he’s sure about is that the kid didn’t cry. He didn’t cry the whole time he was standing next to his father in that coffin. Zúñiga says that when he got home from the funeral his family was arrested. Zúñiga and his brother were released the next day, but his parents were transferred to some secret location. Donoso and Bustamante got beat up at a student rally. Donoso suffered permanent loss of mobility in his little finger and Bustamante ended up at the Central Hospital with ten stitches in his head. Fuenzalida hears the clamor of a massive march toward the General Cemetery. There are voices shouting and chanting, making demands, praying for the dead. At Riquelme’s house, anonymous phone calls begin to come in. A strange voice swears at his mother, who has a job no one knows anything about, because it’s secret. The voice tells her that if she keeps fucking around something will happen to her son or her mother. Fuenzalida hears the sound of the crowd tossing flower petals at the hearses, thousands of petals that cover everything like a shower of flyers scattered in the street. Donoso’s house was searched by a group of national police agents. They turned it all upside down and broke some furniture but they didn’t take anything. Donoso couldn’t sleep at night, afraid that a squad would come any minute and take his diaries, his comics, his parents. Fuenzalida hears the footsteps of the crowd advancing with flags and banners. They fill streets, cross bridges, walk on endlessly. We spent a few days looking for Zúñiga’s parents but we couldn’t find them. They were moved from a police station to some undisclosed location and there was no trace of either of them. One night, as she was leaving work, Riquelme’s mother was kidnapped. Twelve hours later she was released. Crosses had been cut into her nipples with a razor blade. Fuenzalida can’t remember what funeral she’s dreaming of. It might be the one for the brothers from Villa Francia or for the teachers from the Latinoamericano, or for the boy burned to death by a military patrol, or for the priest shot in the settlement of La Victoria, or for the boy riddled with bullets on Calle Bulnes, or for the kidnapped reporter, or for the group assassinated on the Feast of Corpus Christi, or for one of the others, any of the others. Time isn’t straightforward, it mixes everything up, shuffles the dead, merges them, separates them out again, advances backward, retreats in reverse, spins like a merry-go-round, like a tiny wheel in a laboratory cage, and traps us in funerals and marches and detentions, leaving us with no assurance of continuity or escape. Whether we were there or not is no longer clear. Whether we took part in it all or not isn’t either. But we’re left with traces of the dream, like the vestiges of a doomed naval battle. We wake up with smudges of cork beard on our pillows and with the unpleasant feeling of having been assailed by green glow-in-the-dark bullets, by a wooden orthopedic hand.

  III

  Dear friend, hello! How are you? Better than the last time I saw you, I hope. You were sick in bed with a fever, and I had to stand at the door of your room and wave, remember? You’re probably better by now. Things aren’t so good here. I don’t know how to tell you this, but maybe the easiest way is to say I’ve had some problems, which is why I haven’t been answering the phone or coming to school. The truth is I won’t be back. It’s hard for me even to write that. My parents told me yesterday and I’ve been crying ever since. I hate leaving without being able to say good-bye to anyone but I have no choice. My dad had some problems at work and for security reasons we have to move. Believe it or not I can’t even say where. The truth is they haven’t told me either. All I know is that I’ll be going to a German school so I’ve got some teachers to catch me up on German. I don’t know how much I’ll learn. I’m too sad to concentrate on anything. My mother says not to worry, when things calm down I’ll be able to go back to the school and see you all, but I don’t know whether to believe her or not. For now the best I can do is write to you and give you all the news I can because I’m not allowed to tell much more.

  Maldonado, you’re my best friend and I have a big favor to ask you. Inside this envelope that my uncle Claudio is bringing you is a tiny little letter. He doesn’t know it’s there and neither does anyone else. It’s a secret letter for Zúñiga, because I’m definitely not allowed to send him anything, so I thought that if I put it in this envelope you might be able to give it to him. It’s important for him to get it. I heard that his parents were arrested. I don’t know exactly why, but I hope it all works out. Really I do. Please don’t forget to do this for me. Just please don’t read it. I’d die of embarrassment if you did, even though you already know everything there is to know about us.

  Okay, that’s all for now. I have faith in you. I’m going to miss you a lot. All of you. But I promise that when I
can be in touch and tell you more, I will. For now, write me and save the letters until I send you my new address.

  Lots of love. I’m going to miss you so much.

  Please don’t forget me.

  Your friend forever.

  IV

  It all happens on a deserted beach. A place that smells of the sea, where I’ve come with the rest of my class. Let’s go, Zúñiga, I hear them saying. Don’t be a slowpoke, catch up. It’s a class trip. We’re all there, or almost all of us, and we’re walking barefoot through the sand, following the seagulls that will lead us to the sea. I’m tired and thirsty, and from where we are, I realize, you can’t see the water. You can hear the sound of the waves, you can feel the breeze, but no matter how far we walk we never get anywhere. Maybe there’s no sea. Maybe it’s just an idea, a fantasy.

  Acosta and Bustamante sing an annoying song while we walk. Their voices are shrill, like vultures, but nobody complains, we all keep moving under the sun, roasting our backs, an army of little soldiers trying to reach some strategic location. Maybe we’re on a mission and all of this is part of a war, an important battle, but the truth is we don’t know. We just keep walking under the illusion that if we keep going, eventually we’ll be able to get our feet wet.

  After a while, or maybe not so long, Riquelme brings us to an abrupt halt. The march stops and he speaks as if he’s in charge, though he isn’t. He says that this is as far as we’re going, because a big sand pool has suddenly appeared at his feet. We couldn’t see it from a distance, but now here it is. It’s a hole full of seawater. It isn’t the sea, it’s a hole in the middle of the beach and we have to get in before a wave hits it or the sun dries up its walls and the whole thing collapses. Someone has built it for us. There are brightly colored plastic shovels and buckets and rakes scattered on the sand. We don’t question any of this, because in dreams nobody questions things, and suddenly we’re all naked, swimming in the sand pool. Don’t be chicken, Zúñiga, jump in, they call, and I do, I get in and duck under. We splash around happily, dunking each other, diving. Riquelme is like a duck in the water, he’s in and out and splashing us all, and it’s a happy moment, our one happy moment, because the heat has lifted, because we aren’t thinking about the sea or the war anymore, because Acosta and Bustamante have stopped shrieking like vultures, because finally we have this little sandpit where we can swim for a while.

  In the dream I think about the Battle of Concepción. At some point we studied it in history class. In the dream I remember parts of the class, the parts I want to remember. The teacher with a piece of chalk in her hand writing names and dates on the board. The end of a war, I think. The War of the Pacific, Chile’s endless struggle with Peru and Bolivia. Skirmishes under the sun, in the middle of the desert. The idea of an ambush, a trap, and the certainty that there were dead children in this battle. Probably they weren’t so little. Probably they were like us, an army of adolescents, cheap cannon fodder with crap names, from a shitty school, with no hallowed traditions or view of the mountains, with no foreign languages for protection, dark-skinned kids jumping into the pool without life vests, bare-assed, preparing the terrain for others, always others. Little tin soldiers splashing in this fake sea, no clue what battle they’re fighting.

  The plug, shouts Donoso. The plug. Somebody pulled the plug.

  The sand is swirling. Everything is draining. There’s a hole in the bottom of the pool and it’s beginning to swallow up my classmates. It swallows Bustamante. It swallows Fuenzalida. It swallows Maldonado. And I hear screams and the dream turns dangerous and I’m scared. I knew I shouldn’t have jumped into the water. Who pulled the plug? shouts Riquelme, and before his shout drowns in my ears I watch the hole swallow him up too. Riquelme is gone. I can’t hear his voice or anybody else’s. I can’t see their naked bodies splashing in the water. No one is left. Everybody has gone down the dark drain, who knows where. And then I struggle, I try not to fall, I flail and cling to the walls of sand, but the current is stronger than I am and it sucks me down and the walls collapse and there I go. My feet are in the hole, my legs, my thighs, my chest, my body, and before I disappear I see her high up on the edge with the plug in her hands.

  She’s naked.

  She looks pretty. She always looks pretty.

  Her black hair soaked with seawater, that faint scent of gum.

  Forgive me, Zúñiga, she says. Please, forgive me.

  V

  Santiago de Chile. 1994. Nine years after the fact, the Chilean justice system delivers its first ruling on the kidnapping and murder of communist militants José Manuel Parada, Manuel Guerrero, and Santiago Nattino, in what up until now has been known as the Caso Degollados. The officers who committed the crime are sentenced to life in prison. On the same television screen where we used to play Space Invaders, we see the national police agents guilty of the murders. Six officers were involved. They appear in plain sight. Their faces scroll across the screen one after the other.

  Riquelme is the first of us to recognize him. His face, ten years older, tells Riquelme nothing, but the wooden hand in a black glove does. It’s a real hand, not the glow-in-the-dark green fantasy that chases Riquelme in his dreams. Next to him is Uncle Claudio of the red Chevy. El Pegaso, they call him. He says that he was following the orders of his superior, Don Guillermo González Betancourt. He states that he stabbed one of the three men as his superior watched from the car, a red Chevette. All of us see him on the television screen. In some strange way we tune in to the same image at the same time.

  VI

  Our paper ship begins to take on water.

  We tumble onto the white sheet and go under.

  We lie there submerged.

  Not knowing how to wake up.

  Game Over

  I

  Santiago de Chile. 1991. One October morning, national police lieutenant Félix Sazo Sepúlveda enters the Crowne Plaza hotel in the center of Santiago. The lieutenant rapidly approaches the Avis rent-a-car counter, behind which stands twenty-one-year-old Estrella González Jepssen, mother of his young son. Estrella is attending to a customer when Lieutenant Sazo aims his service revolver at her. They’ve been separated for some time. The lieutenant has struggled to accept the fact of their separation. That’s why he’s been following her, harassing her over the phone, threatening her the way you’d threaten an enemy, an alien, a communist teacher. Estrella, he shouts. Our classmate scarcely has time to look at him before she’s struck by two bullets in the chest, one in the head, and a fourth in the back.

  Like a little Martian she flies apart into colored lights.

  On-screen the score on the board goes up one hundred points.

  And still the record stands.

  Estrella collapses in the fetal position, dying instantly. Police lieutenant Félix Sazo immediately shoots himself twice in the head with his smoking service revolver and falls to the ground.

  We didn’t dream any of this.

  We read it in the crime pages of a newspaper found on the fourth shelf of the third aisle in the school library.

  II

  I wake up.

  She’s sitting on my bed.

  I feel the weight of her body next to mine.

  Zúñiga, she says, you survived. I hear her over the white noise of the television, which is still on. It’s late. I know I’m dreaming, but her voice in my ear is as real as the weight of her body. It’s her. I can see her by the light of the television screen. She’s naked and wet. Her black hair tangled from the sand and salt. Her pubic hair too. Your parents? she asks me. Did they ever let them go? I’m afraid to talk, because I don’t want her to disappear. They’re fine, I manage to say. Old and deaf, but fine. She smiles and hands me the letter that never reached me. It’s written on graph paper from a math notebook. I smell the scent of gum in her hair when she comes close. The television screen announces a new day’s programming. It begins with the national anthem and pictures of the whole country from Arica to Punta Arenas.