The two women shouting at the opening ceremony are Ana Vergara Toledo, sister of Rafael and Eduardo Vergara Toledo, young men killed during the dictatorship, and Catalina Catrileo, sister of deceased Mapuche activist Matías Catrileo. Before the startled members of the audience, Ana pleads for justice for her dead brothers and for political prisoners, and Catalina addresses the president, saying that her brother had been killed a few years before by a national police agent during Bachelet’s own administration.
An uncomfortable moment follows. The guests watch uneasily as the president tries to address the women, who continue to challenge her from the light towers, rejecting the protocol of ceremonies, agreements, consensus, the whole notion of polite discourse that has prevailed for so many years. Ana and Catalina’s shouting begins to rouse the attendees. Memories of past and current abuses mesh, defying for a brief moment the passivity of museum displays. The women’s cries awaken memory, set it in conversation with the present, raise it from the crypt, and breathe life into it, resuscitating a creature fashioned from scraps, from bits of different people, from fragments of yesterday and today. The monster wakes and announces itself with an uncontainable howl, taking everyone by surprise, shaking those who thought they were comfortable, problematizing, conflictualizing, provoking. And this is the dangerous primal state in which it should remain. That’s what I thought when I watched a clip of what happened online, and that’s what I’m thinking today as I visit the museum yet again.
I’ve been here many times. The first time was with my son and mother right after it opened. My son ran around the wide expanse of the central courtyard while my mother looked at everything, surprised by the brightness of the place, the big windows, its resemblance to a contemporary art museum rather than a cemetery or something lugubrious and terrible, as we had imagined. Once inside, we went through the exhibits painstakingly, reading all the texts, putting on the headphones to listen to the recorded testimonies, pushing the buttons on the consoles, playing the videos, watching each screen that appeared before us.
We visited all the floors. We went into the September Eleven Zone, the Fight for Freedom Zone, the Absence and Memory Zone, the Demand for Truth and Justice Zone, the Return of Hope Zone, the Never Again Zone, the Children’s Suffering Zone. We saw the parrilla, a metal bed frame where electric current was used to shock detainees, and the door of the former public prison. We saw the watchtower of the Calle República detention and torture center, and the cross from Patio 29, a mass grave at the cemetery where many unidentified bodies ended up, and also photographs of various crimes. All of this in no particular order, with little regard for firsts or nexts, because when the subject is horror, the logic of the machinery doesn’t much matter. Dates and time lines and causes and effects and explanations are subtleties you might as well skip. The crimes all merge together. A couple of lines for bombings, a few each for throat slashings, death by burning, shootings, firing squads. And causes and effects, as I said, don’t appear in any account. It’s all one big massacre, a fight between good guys and bad guys who are easy to tell apart because the bad guys are in uniform and the good guys are civilians. There is no in between. There are no accomplices, nobody else is implicated. The citizenry is free of responsibility, innocent, blind, all of them victims. And at each station we cried, of course we did. And then at the next one we were angry, of course we were. And then at the next one we cried again, only to move on and make room for those behind us who were enacting the same ritual of tears and anger, tears and anger, on a kind of emotional roller coaster ride terminating in the End of Dictatorship Zone, where a big blowup of ex-president Patricio Aylwin giving his inaugural address makes visitors’ spirits soar, leaving them exultant with joy and hope, more at ease, more at peace, because from now on we’re safe, the good guys won, history is forgiving, we’ll forget that it was Aylwin himself who went to the military to request a coup in 1973, a fact that isn’t part of this chain of memories, and moving on, listening to the happy slogans of democracy’s return which inform us that this is the end, everyone’s free to go now, and enjoy a refreshing Coca-Cola in the café, or stop by the little souvenir shop—as we do, why not?—to buy a couple of Allende buttons and a postcard of La Moneda in flames.
The second and third time I visited, it was to find material for a couple of projects. I went to the research department, a sort of library of videos, recordings, books, articles, magazines, and other sources, where kind people kindly assist you and point you in the direction of what you’re looking for.
Now, on my fourth trip to the museum, I’ve come to find out something about the man I’m trying to imagine. I know I won’t encounter him in the halls of this little outpost of the past. He’s not easily labeled good or evil, black or white. The man I’m imagining inhabits a more mixed-up place, awkward and hard to classify, and maybe that’s why there’s no room for him within these walls. Still, I fantasize that the testimony he gave will turn up here as valuable material for the good guys, in one of the good guy display cases. That photograph on the cover of Cauce magazine and the terrible declaration nobody had made before: I TORTURED PEOPLE.
I wander through the museum’s various zones on freedom, hope, struggle, justice, truth, reconciliation, solidarity, and other nice words until I come upon a collection of magazines under glass, accompanied by a large display label that reads “Government Suppresses Opposition Magazines. Photographs Banned.” This is from a newspaper article that appeared twelve days after the man who tortured people gave his testimony to the Cauce magazine reporter. The article describes a court order that forbade certain magazines from publishing anything but text. Accordingly, the magazines on display in the museum feature white boxes on their covers, ghost images that serve only to draw one’s attention and rouse suspicion.
What the display fails to explain is that just a few days before this ludicrous measure was adopted, publication of five issues of Cauce magazine had been suspended. Objections were raised and a grievance filed, and after some back and forth, the courts ruled in the magazine’s favor. Then the government made another bumbling attempt at censorship, and that’s what I’m seeing now exhibited on the museum’s walls. A new plea was made for legal protection. Since Cauce magazine had been victorious in court before, it seemed likely that the ruling would be favorable, but in November 1984, nearly two months after the man who tortured people gave his testimony, a state of siege was reported in the Diario Oficial, under which the publication of Cauce magazine was banned completely. The government was resorting to the only unbeatable weapon it had left: the suspension of civil rights.
This long, tortuous road of harassment, bans, censorship, and so forth is obviously directly related to the testimony that the man who tortured people gave to the reporter. And yet that isn’t recorded here in the museum; it’s like one of those blank magazine covers, an invisible, off-script story, something that perhaps exists only inside my head as I seek a central role for the man I’m trying to imagine.
I imagine the reporter listening to the man as he gives a detailed account of the kidnapping, torture, and death of many of her dear friends. I imagine the contradictory feelings that must have rocked her as she listened to his long testimony. Urges to strangle him, scratch him, hit him, yell at him, but with the simultaneous conviction that she could do none of those things. I know—I’m not imagining—that he was prepared to confess everything and then go back to headquarters to let his superiors do whatever they wanted to him. I know—I’m not imagining—that whatever meant death. I know—I’m not imagining—that he didn’t care. Anything would be better than the anguish he felt. Better than getting up and going to bed with the smell of death, as he put it. The reporter convinced him that his suicidal plan made no sense. She told him to think of his children, to give himself a chance. She offered him protection. She would get in touch with people who could help him. I know—I’m not imagining—that he mulled it over, that he smoked many cigarettes, probably thinking about
his children, as the reporter had suggested, or his wife, or some possible future. I know—I’m not imagining—that he accepted the offer of protection and from that moment he put himself in the hands of people who could help him. I know—I’m not imagining—that he didn’t go back to headquarters, that his absence was noticed, and with the passage of time his superiors realized what had happened.
Beyond that, I know nothing. All the rest is the work of the imagination.
Police and military agents scour the country for the disappeared Andrés Valenzuela Morales. Frantic, desperate, frustrated, enraged. Fucking deserter, motherfucking squealer, they must have shouted, waiting to find him and eliminate him, take him to the Cajón del Maipo, cut his fingers off at the first joint, throw him into the river. And as they were hunting for him, they tried to block the publication of his testimony, full of too many secrets. Magazines were banned, photographs censored, and a state of siege declared in order to prevent the circulation of the opposition press, out of fear that the story would open the door to the dark zone, that ultimate portal of evil and stupidity.
There is a section of the museum that I like the best. Well, everybody likes it best because it was designed to seduce visitors, even spoilsports like me. Guides describe it as the heart of the museum. From an observation platform surrounded by candles, which aren’t actually candles but little bulbs, more than a thousand photographs of many of the regime’s victims are visible, hung high up on one wall. The photographs were donated by the victims’ families, so we see them at home, at celebrations, at the beach, smiling at the camera the way we all do when we want to leave a record of ourselves at our best. There are beautiful women who look like movie stars, who must have fixed themselves up flirtatiously, thinking they’d give the photo to a boyfriend, a lover. There’s a young man dressed in a tuxedo and bow tie, ready for some big event or likely in the middle of one. He looks happy, elated. There’s a man on the beach, holding his son’s hand. There’s another man with his arms around people who aren’t fully visible, as if on some outing or picnic in the country. There’s a woman with her mouth open, captured midlaugh. There’s another serious-looking woman, shy in front of the camera. They’re all snapshots, like the pictures I keep of my son, my father, my mother, my friends, the people I love. Protective, luminous images that foster connection despite death and the passage of time. Seen together, they look like a big family. In a way, they are. Uncles and aunts, brothers and sisters, nephews and nieces, cousins, grandparents, people related by extreme circumstances. There is a touch screen in the middle of the observation platform that you can click on to search for people and learn how they were arrested and killed.
I click and search for José Weibel.
His photograph appears onscreen. He wears glasses and has a gentle smile. He’s looking off to one side, probably at someone talking to him, in the middle of a calm, trusting conversation. I try to imagine the scene, but then I stop myself. I’ve gone too far already, I think. There’s no need to imagine more. The text that appears on the screen about his detention and assassination comes mostly from the account of the man who tortured people. The information reproduced here is not attributed to him.
I click and search for Carlos Contreras Maluje.
Carlos stares out at me from the screen. He is also wearing thick glasses. It’s a small picture and all you can see is his face, like in an ID photo. But it’s still possible to extrapolate the big, broad-shouldered frame described in the testimony of the man who tortured people. I read in Carlos’s profile that he was a pharmacist and that he had been city councilman for Concepción. I read in his profile that he was arrested twice. The second time was on Calle Nataniel, just a few blocks from the house where I lived as a girl. Again, the text that appears on the screen about his detention and death comes mostly from the confession of the man who tortured people. Again, it’s unattributed.
I click and search for Quila Leo, known for his bravery.
I click and search for Don Alonso Gahona.
I click and search for René Basoa.
I click and search for Carol Flores.
Many of the names I’ve read in the testimony of the man who tortured people come into focus on this screen, acquire a face, an expression, the spark of life. Even if it’s a virtual life, an extension of the photographs hanging on this transparent, celestial wall like a piece of the sky. Or better yet, a piece of outer space where all the faces swallowed up by some twilight zone swim, lost, like untethered astronauts.
This door we unlock with the key of the imagination. Behind it we find another dimension. Ladies and gentlemen, you’re about to enter a secret world of dreams and ideas. You’re about to enter the twilight zone.
In the seventies, sitting in front of a black and white television set in the kitchen of my old house, I watched episode after episode of The Twilight Zone. I’d be lying if I said that I remember the series in detail, but I’m forever marked by that seductive feeling of disquiet and the narrator’s voice inviting viewers into a secret world, a universe unfolding outside the ordinary, beyond the bounds of what we were used to seeing. The short episodes told fantastical, bizarre stories. A man with a stopwatch that can stop time. A man who sees gremlins that hound him and try to bring down the plane he’s in. A man who is reunited with his ten-year-old son, while in a parallel world that is considerably more real, the boy is a soldier who dies in battle. A man who talks to his stepdaughter’s killer doll. A man who crosses over to the other side of the mirror. In every episode a door or a tiny crack opened, offering a glimpse through the TV screen of an alternate reality that I was eager to visit.
At night my mother got home from work and we ate together. According to her, often I would tell her the story of some episode that had made an impression on me. Apparently she was rarely sure which stories were part of the series and which I had made up. After dinner we went straight to bed, only to leave for school first thing the next day. I can’t remember much of our morning routine, or those early years of school, but I know that at noon my mother would come for me once class was finished and bring me home for lunch. We talked during the meal, and after dessert and hot tea with lemon verbena from the patio, she returned to work while I was left in the middle of those long seventies afternoons, The Twilight Zone marking the moment when the sun began to set.
A space traveler has to make an emergency landing on an unknown planet a million miles from home. His spaceship is out of commission. His right arm is broken, his forehead cut and bleeding. Colonel Cook, voyager across the ocean of space, will never fly the smoldering wreck of his ship again. He survived the crash, but his lonely journey has just begun. Hurting and afraid, he sends messages home pleading for someone to rescue him, though that appears to be impossible. His people can’t come for him and he’ll be left all alone, on a small planet in space, his very own twilight zone.
And so a new episode brings the day to a close.
Once, while we were eating lunch, my mother told my grandmother and me about something very strange she had just seen. At noon, right there on Calle Nataniel, a few blocks from our house, a man had thrown himself under the wheels of a bus. It hadn’t been an accident. The man was walking along the sidewalk when suddenly he flung himself on purpose, fully aware of what he was doing. The bus screeched to a halt. The passersby who witnessed it froze in confusion, silent and still, as if the stopwatch man on The Twilight Zone had scheduled a few minutes of paralysis. A national police jeep pulled up. My mother described how an officer got out and tried to take charge of the situation. She and a group of people had gathered to see what condition the injured man was in. He was big, maybe thirty years old, bleeding heavily from a head wound. He was half-conscious, his eyes barely open, looking around in confusion, as the bus driver tried to explain to the national police officer what had happened.
I can’t remember my mother’s story very well. She herself sees a blur of images when she tries to reconstruct the scene. She says that as
the passersby and the driver and the national police officer were shouting, a group of people moved decisively toward the injured man, who was still on the ground. As soon as he saw them, he yelled as if he’d seen the devil or a pack of gremlins hounding him. He said they were intelligence agents, and they were going to take him away to torture him again, and could he please be left to die in peace, and could a message please be taken to the Maluje pharmacy in Concepción. My mother says that then everyone froze again. The magic stopwatch did its work, and the fear that someone else would land in the hands of the gremlins halted all possibility of reacting. A car drove up, and amid shouts and pleas and kicks and shoves they maneuvered the man into it, who then vanished forever outside the bounds of reality.
My mother doesn’t know it, but that morning she was very close to the man who tortured people.
Part of the garbled story that she told and keeps telling at my request is a part of what he relayed to the reporter in his testimony.
The man who tortured people said that Carlos Contreras Maluje had been caught the day before, betrayed by one of his comrades. The man who tortured people said that Maluje was being held at the command center on Calle Dieciocho known as La Firma, and that he was interrogated and tortured late into the night. The man who tortured people said that Carlos Contreras Maluje had declared that the next day he had a point of contact on Calle Nataniel. That if they let him go and he kept the appointment they could arrest one more Communist. The man who tortured people said that they did exactly that. The next day they dropped him off on Calle Nataniel, and Carlos Contreras Maluje walked toward Avenida Matta, shadowed by agents deployed through the neighborhood. The man who tortured people said that he himself was seven blocks away when suddenly, over the radio, he heard another agent say: The subject threw himself under a bus.
The Twilight Zone Page 3