The Twilight Zone

by Nona Fernández

  Why should I write about you? Why should I resurrect a story that began more than forty years ago? Why bring up curved knives, electric shock torture, and the rats again? Why bring up the disappearances? Why should I talk about a man who was part of it all and at some point decided he couldn’t be anymore? How do you decide when you’ve had enough? What kind of line do you cross? Is there such a line? Is the line the same for all of us? What would I have done if, like you, I had reported for military service at eighteen, and my superior had sent me to guard a group of political prisoners? Would I have done my job? Would I have run away? Would I have understood that this was the beginning of the end? What would my partner have done? What would my father have done? What would my son do in the same place? Does someone have to take that place? Whose images are these in my head? Whose screams? Did I read about them in the testimony you gave the reporter or did I hear them myself somewhere? Are they part of a scene from your life or mine? Is there some fine line that separates collective dreams? Is there a place where you and I both dream of a dark room full of rats? Do these images creep into your mind, too, and keep you awake? Will we ever escape this dream? Will we ever emerge and give the world the bad news about what we were capable of doing?

  When I was a girl, I was told that if I misbehaved the man with the sack would come for me. All disobedient children disappeared into that wicked old man’s bottomless dark sack. But rather than frighten me, the story piqued my curiosity. I secretly wanted to meet the man, open his sack, climb into it, see the disappeared children, and get to the heart of the terrible mystery. I imagined it many times. I gave him a face, a suit, a pair of shoes. When I did, he became more disturbing, because normally the face I gave him belonged to someone I knew: my father, my uncle, the corner grocer, the mechanic next door, my science teacher. Any of them could be the old man with the sack. Even I could probably play the part, if I looked in the mirror and drew on a mustache.

  Dear Andrés, I’m the woman who wants to look into the sack.

  Dear Andrés, I’m the woman who’s ready to draw on a mustache to play you.

  If you’ve read this far and my request doesn’t seem absurd or inappropriate, I’d be grateful if you’d write to me at this address. I eagerly await your response.

  The alarm goes off at 6:30 every morning. What follows is a long chain of hurried, awkward acts, an attempt to start the day by shooing away sleep, to forge ahead while yawning and wanting to go back to bed. Drawers opening, cups filling with coffee and milk, taps turning. Showers, toothbrushes, deodorant, combs, toast, butter, the morning news, the announcer reporting the latest carjacking or the day’s gridlock. Heating lunch for my son, putting it in a thermos, making a snack for recess. And between each rushed activity, calls of hurry up, it’s late, let’s go. The cat meows, it wants food and water. The garbage truck goes by, taking away the trash we put out last night. The school bus stops in front and honks for my neighbors. The children come out yelling, their mother sees them off. The man with the dog goes by with his dog and waves as I’m opening the gate and my son’s father is starting the car, getting ready to leave. The young man who jogs is jogging. The woman with the cell phone is talking on her cell phone. Everything is just like yesterday or the day before yesterday or tomorrow, and in the spatiotemporal cycle that we move in daily, my son gives me a kiss to complete the ritual, gets in the car with his father, and the two leave at exactly 7:30 so as not to break the protective spell.

  It’s been like this for years.

  We began the routine when my son was little. In those days we didn’t have a car, and each morning I said goodbye to him as he walked out the door to nursery school, holding his father’s hand. I kissed him and hugged him tight because secretly I was panicked that I might never see him again. Terrifying thoughts assailed me each time we parted. I imagined a bus barreling into him, a live wire dropping from electric poles onto his head, a mad dog coming out of a house and lunging for his neck, some pervert picking him up from nursery school, the man with the sack kidnapping him and never bringing him back. The possibilities were dramatic and infinite. My fearful new-mother’s brain fabricated horrors, and in that unhinged exercise, each time he came home was a gift.

  With time, the madness came to an end. I no longer dream up calamities, but during that morning departure ritual I always focus on the image of my son and his father as they’re leaving. It’s a snapshot suspended in my mind until I see them again. An uncontrollable impulse that I inherited from those days as a frightened new mother, the distillation of an archaic fear that I suppose we all have and try to keep under control, the fear of unexpectedly losing the people we love.

  I don’t know what the morning routine must have been like at the Weibel Barahona household in 1976. I was just four years old and I can’t even remember what my own mornings were like back then, but with a little imagination I can see that house in La Florida and the family beginning their day. I doubt their routine was much different from the one I follow daily with my family, or the one that all families with children in this country have been following daily for years. I imagine the Weibels’ clock marking the launch time, maybe 6:30, the same as ours here. I imagine José and María Teresa, the parents, jumping out of bed and delegating the morning tasks. One makes breakfast, the other gets the children out of bed; one helps them get dressed, the other ushers them into the bathroom; one heats up the lunches, the other prepares the snacks; one is in charge of calling hurry up, it’s late, let’s go. A perfect, well-oiled machine, probably better oiled than ours, because there were two children in the Weibel Barahona household in 1976, not one, like in ours, so their morning maneuvers must sometimes have acquired heroic proportions.

  On March 29, 1976, at 7:30 a.m., the same time my son and his father leave the house each day, José and María Teresa left to take their children to school. They waited at the bus stop nearby with one of their neighbors, who in my mind’s eye has the face of the man who walks his dog each morning in my neighborhood. In all likelihood they greeted each other, as they probably did each morning, just as the man with the dog and I nod at each other when he passes by each day, the two of us planting the flag of everyday normality, tracing the fine line of our protective routine. At 7:40, as part of their own daily ritual, the Weibel Barahonas got on a bus on the Circunvalación Américo Vespucio line, which would take them to their destination. The bus was probably full. I can’t know that with certainty, but I assume it was, because at that time of day buses all across the country are full, no matter the decade. María Teresa sat in the front seat with one of her children on her lap. Maybe José sat next to her holding their other child. Or maybe he didn’t. Maybe he remained standing, moving as close to his family as possible so as not to be separated from them, not to break the threads that keep them safe within rescue distance.

  José and María Teresa don’t talk about it in front of the children, but this apparently normal morning isn’t exactly that. José’s brother disappeared a few months ago and he himself, a high-ranking member of the Communist Party, knows he is being watched. Yesterday a young man they didn’t recognize rang the doorbell to ask about a washing machine that was supposedly for sale. José and María Teresa know the significance of this strange and disturbing visit, so they’ve decided to leave their beloved house on Calle Teniente Merino in La Florida this very day. The children don’t know it, but they’re about to be dropped off at school and at the end of the day home may be somewhere else.

  I imagine José and María Teresa ride in silence. They are both tense, and probably don’t feel like talking. I imagine they answer their children’s questions, stay engaged in the conversation, but inside they’re wondering what the future holds for them. They’re probably watching the faces of the people around them. Surreptitiously they look out for suspicious glances, threatening gestures. They’re on the alert, but it’s hard to keep track of everything going on. There are lots of people on the bus at this hour, lots of people getting on
and paying the fare. Lots of people walking past and sitting down and falling asleep. Lots of people standing. Lots of people looking out the window. So even though they do their best, they don’t spot him in the crowd. Even when their gazes meet, they don’t see him.

  It’s him, the man who tortured people.

  Armed forces intelligence agent Andrés Antonio Valenzuela Morales, registration number 66650, Soldier First Class, ID #39432 of the district of La Ligua. Tall, thin, black-haired, with a dark, bushy mustache.

  He sits at the back of the bus. He wears a hidden radio transmitter to communicate with the vehicles following them unseen. Nearby is El Huaso, with El Álex a few seats away, then El Rodrigo. Each agent has gotten on separately, mingling with the passengers, and now they’re watching the Weibel Barahonas unnoticed.

  But maybe they are noticed. Maybe José lets his gaze linger for a moment on the dark eyes of the man who tortured people. Maybe he sees something troubling in those eyes, something he doesn’t have time to process, because just then a woman screams, startling everyone. Somebody stole my purse, she says, and as she speaks, three cars cut off the bus.

  Then things happen very quickly. Six men get on through the back and front doors. El Álex and El Huaso shout that it’s José who snatched the purse. That’s the bastard, they say, and they point at José, who barely understands what’s happening, though he’s beginning to have an idea. The Weibel Barahona children look at their father in bewilderment. He’s been with them all this time, near, very near, never breaking the threads that keep the family within rescue distance, so he can’t have taken anyone’s purse. And anyway, he’s their father, the man who gets them out of bed every morning, who takes care of them, who brings them to school. He’s no thief. But it doesn’t matter what the children think, because the man who tortured people and his companions approach José, point a gun at him, and say they’re police and he’s under arrest for robbery. It doesn’t matter that José has no allegedly stolen purse, or that María Teresa is crying and pleading for help because she knows exactly what’s happening. It doesn’t matter that the children are scared, that the bus driver doesn’t understand what’s going on, that the passengers are watching in fear. The man who tortured people and his companions shove José out the door and in less than a minute they’ve put him in one of their cars and he’s gone forever.

  I wonder whether José took a mental snapshot of his family in that instant. I wonder whether he managed to catch a last glimpse of his wife and children from the car, freezing the protective image. My runaway sentimental imagination wants to believe that he did, and that the image helped him keep terror at bay in the gray realm where he was condemned to spend the last days of his life.

  In the privacy of the Cauce magazine offices, the reporter listened to that story. It was one of the first related to her by the man who tortured people. I can imagine the moment perfectly. He: sitting in an office chair, still nervous, ill at ease. She: listening from behind the desk with a tape recorder running. The words of the man who tortured people are being recorded on tape that is turning and turning in the machine, as the reporter’s imagination begins to run away with her, as mine does, staging the scenes that emerge from his testimony. José riding in the car with a group of unidentified agents. The bus with his family in it fading into the distance behind them, getting smaller and smaller until it disappears, severing the threads that keep the family within rescue distance … The reporter can finish the rest of the story herself, because she knew José, they were close friends, and she’s heard María Teresa describe the same scene on the bus from her own perspective. Now, in 1984, eight years later, neither María Teresa nor the children nor the reporter know what’s happened to José.

  Envoy from the dark side, guide to that secret dimension, the man who tortured people said José was taken to a command center on Calle Dieciocho called La Firma. The man who tortured people said José was taken straight to an interrogation cell. The man who tortured people said José’s interrogation was one of the harshest of the era. The man who tortured people said that even so they failed to discover that José was the Communist Party’s second in command. The man who tortured people said that later José was taken to the house where he himself and all the unmarried agents slept. José was there for nearly a week, along with other detainees. The man who tortured people said that one night when he was on leave they took José away and disappeared him. The man who tortured people wasn’t there, but being familiar with such procedures, he guessed that José was taken to the Cajón del Maipo in the foothills of the Cordillera Central, handcuffed, blindfolded, and then shot and killed. The man who tortured people guesses that they then cut off his fingers at the first joint to make identification more difficult, and they tied stones to his feet with wire and threw him into the river.

  The reporter cried when she heard this story.

  Her weeping was captured on the tape turning and turning in the cassette recorder.

  Like the man who tortured people, I wasn’t there when José was killed. But unlike him, it’s hard for me to imagine the details of executions at which I wasn’t present. I don’t know how many people took part, or what they said to each other. I don’t know the details of what unfolded. Nor do I want to. I lack the words and images to write the rest of this story. Any attempt I might make to account for the private last moments of someone about to disappear will fall short.

  What did José do? What did he hear? What did he think? What was done to him?

  Expelled from the realm of that imaginary unknown, powerless to express myself in a language beyond my command, all I know is that there are other easier things for me to imagine. Things outside that dark zone, things I can cradle like a light to better follow this map. Things like that snapshot I want to believe José kept in his memory. In it, María Teresa and his two children are sitting on the bus carrying them to school. The children are in their uniforms with their book bags and their lunch boxes holding the snacks recently prepared. In the photograph they’re all smiling. Nothing bad has happened yet, the rescue distance threads are intact, and they’re all safe, talking about some random thing, enjoying their last moment together without knowing that’s what it was.

  I imagine José sees this snapshot in his mind’s eye and focuses on it that night at the Cajón del Maipo. As the man who tortured people imagined, José must be blindfolded, his hands bound, and he must be lying on the ground or perhaps standing, facing his executioners. In this last scene in the dark of the mountain night, I imagine the snapshot of the Weibel Barahonas and the sound of machine gun fire aimed at José’s back or chest.

  The protective spell is broken, his body is tossed into the river, and he disappears forever.

  No rescue from any distance is possible in this exercise.

  Not even my runaway imagination can do a thing about that.

  The opening ceremony for the Museum of Memory and Human Rights was held in January 2010. Attending were the four presidents of the Concertación, the coalition of political parties leading what analysts call the Transition, the period in which reconciliation and justice within the realm of the possible was the official stance. In those years, the decibel level of memories of violence was lowered so that a politics of consensus could be forged to keep the peace. Democracy was still in the custody of the military, with General Pinochet himself as commander in chief of the army and then a senator in Congress, so it was unwise to use the immediate past as a weapon of debate.

  When I had to explain the Transition process to my son—on our first visit to the Museum of Memory, as it happens—this was how I explained it, concisely, simply, so that his young mind could understand. When I told him that the person responsible for everything he had just seen in the museum was one of the men who made the laws that governed the country, he looked at me in puzzlement and started to laugh, assuming I was kidding. At ten, my son was already wise to the bad jokes of Chilean history.

  Many people were there, twenty
years after democracy had been restored. Government officials, the museum’s board of directors, family members of victims, journalists, international guests, the general public, and, as I said, those four presidents of the Concertación: Patricio Aylwin (1990-1994), Eduardo Frei (1994-2000), Ricardo Lagos (2000-2006), and the sitting president, Michelle Bachelet (2006-2010). Bachelet stepped forward and took the microphone to give a heartfelt inaugural speech, opening the doors of this legitimized version of our recent memory to the audience and all of Chile. She spoke of a united country, of the hate that had once divided us, and of the need to live together in peace. And there she was, delivering an emotional speech to an equally emotional audience, when two women unexpectedly scaled one of the light towers in the courtyard where the ceremony was being held and shouted that the Concertación administrations, including all of the public figures present, had systematically violated human rights.

  How is a museum of memory curated?

  Who chooses what to show? Who chooses what to leave out?