Now, as I listen to her cry, I realize it was a bad idea to ask her to come. A few weeks ago she adjusted her dose of Sentidol. Instead of three pills a day, she now takes two. She also announced, against the psychiatrist’s orders, that she’s done taking lorazepam to help her sleep, because at seventy-six she doesn’t want to become a drug addict—that’s what she said. She doesn’t sleep anymore, or just a few hours here and there, so she’s shaky and on edge, scratching at her head and hands all day until she breaks the skin, but fortunately safe from the threat of drug addiction. Considering her convalescent state, I should have brought her to see a cheerier movie. I’ve worked on these images so much that I’ve grown used to them, lost all sensitivity to their effects, like a vulture. The revelatory shudder I felt when I first encountered them turned into something routine. Here are those pictures of the Lonquén kilns again. I see the skulls lined up neatly after the exhumation. I see the family members praying and crying with photographs of their loved ones pinned to their chests. I see these things, and what I think is that some pictures are missing. My robot brain analyzes, adds, and subtracts, reconstructing the Lonquén file from my computer, selecting and rejecting scenes and photographs that were reworked and deciding that some of the most effective, eloquent shots were omitted from this final cut.
But my mother next to me doesn’t need more eloquence. She isn’t a machine, and what’s on the screen is more than enough for her. Her memory is fragile, so she’s been sheltered. That’s why she can’t help crying as she watches, as if she’s learning about it all for the first time. The hint of the past triggers her emotions and everything becomes present. Lonquén is here, unfolding before her eyes almost forty years later. In these frenetic and fractured times in which memories fall away, my mother can watch the same movie a thousand times and be as moved as if it’s the first time.
In this lonely theater, my mother is part Barbara Jean Trenton, too, I think.
Everything she’s seeing right now belongs to her past. The projected images revive a time that is more hers than mine, but she’s done her healthy best to forget it, whereas I’ve inherited it as an unhealthy obsession.
The man talking about mass graves is a lawyer. I know him well because he’s part of the chorus of voices I’ve been listening to over and over again lately. He’s slightly younger than my mother; probably in his sixties. He speaks clearly, and, unlike the other subjects, he sometimes shows emotion when he recalls events in which he took part. The kilns and the dead at Lonquén are behind us now, and he is explaining on camera what his job at the Vicariate was. He says that he was the head of the Detained-Disappeared Unit. His brief was the dead. His aim: to track them and hunt for their bodies no matter where they might be. His search took him all over Chile. They called him the Hound because he followed the scent of blood.
Now he’s talking about two informers who helped him in his task.
About one in particular.
One who was an active member of the intelligence services when he came forward to give his testimony.
The lawyer tells how this man was contacted through a magazine that the man had approached, desperate to make his statement. I want to talk, the lawyer says he said. The lawyer tells how, after reading what this man described to the reporter, he agreed to meet with him and interview him. Then came that August afternoon in the Plaza Santa Ana and the beginning of a relationship that I’ve been trying to imagine.
My cell phone screen lights up. There’s a WhatsApp message for me. It’s from my friends, the directors of the movie we’re watching. I’d told them that I was planning to come, and now they’re messaging, curious to know how many people are in the audience. I look around at the legion of red seats, all empty. From the theater above us comes a deafening sound, like an explosion. The walls and the floor vibrate slightly. Ultron must be battling the Avengers, probably in the middle of the climactic scene, the one that makes everybody shrink in their seats, popcorn hopping where it probably lies scattered on the floor by now. Meanwhile, my mother—the only first-time spectator in this theater—cries softly as on screen the lawyer addresses the camera. I keep thinking that there are images missing from the documentary, other shots that would’ve been more powerful, more earth-shaking. Maybe we should have reconstructed some scenes: brutal fights, hand-to-hand combat with evil agents. Maybe we should have hired stars like Robert Downey Jr. or, more realistically, a face familiar from the afternoon soaps. Maybe we should have included some special effects, or at least photoshopped wrinkles and gray hair, patched in a swelling sound track for each segment, and added something as spectacular and hair-raising as the explosion up above us that I can still hear. It’s lunchtime, and the documentary I’m watching is an odd fit for a multiplex like this, so it makes some sense that my mother and I are the only ones here, but even so I can’t bring myself to answer my friends’ question. I’m afraid to confess that the one real audience member came because I brought her and she might only be crying because she’s cut her dose of Sentidol. I write truthfully that I’m here with my mother and she’s very moved. Then I tell them that I’ll be in touch when the show is over and I turn off my phone.
On screen the lawyer is still talking. He says that the first thing he did with the man who tortured people was go in the Renault van to some of the places where the detained and disappeared had been buried. The lawyer says that the man who tortured people paced each spot, trying to remember; he counted his steps, did sums in his head, raked the soil with feet and hands. As I imagine it, at least, it strikes me as a moving scene. A man trying to summon his worst memories, meticulously attempting to mentally declassify their darkest details.
The lawyer says they also went to see some detention facilities. They sat outside peering in, hidden in the car as the man who tortured people described what he’d seen. The lawyer says it was a long afternoon of looking and searching. The lawyer says that after this excursion they arrived at a predetermined location, property of the Catholic Church, where they were expected. Once they got there, they asked expressly not to be disturbed. The lawyer says that they settled in, he took out a tape recorder, and they got to work. The lawyer says—and meanwhile I’m setting the scene and imagining it all, because I know his words so well I could repeat them by heart, even imitating the timbre of his voice:
Look, I’m going to record this, but I care less about the recording than your words. I want you to talk to me, and as you do I’m going to write. To me, writing means getting your words down. To me, writing means hearing and understanding what you’re saying and what I should ask.
The lawyer says that after this explanation he started the tape recorder, that the tape spun in the machine, capturing the voice of the man remembering, in spare, precise sentences, without adjectives.
Thirty years after this encounter, on the screen here in the theater, the lawyer inserts an old cassette into a tape recorder. It’s ancient, the kind that isn’t used anymore. He carefully pushes Play, the tape inside turns, and from the machine’s small, staticky speakers comes a man’s voice.
It’s him. What I hear over the theater speakers is the voice of Andrés Antonio Valenzuela Morales, Soldier First Class, ID #39432, La Ligua. His words, unfiltered by time or faulty memory. Testifying right there, a few hours after his suicidal despair, with the smell of death on him, still trying to get it off his body.
Each time I saw this image in previous cuts, I instinctively leaned toward whatever screen was in front of me to hear better. Now the theater’s Dolby Surround Sound lets me listen without having to move from my red seat. As the lawyer listens to the testimony he gathered decades ago, the voice of the man who tortured people, trapped in the continuous present turning in the cassette tape, makes its way across the theater to me. For the first time, I hear it clearly. His words truly are spare, nouns unadorned by adjectives, sticking to what’s strictly necessary. He mentions some agents, victims, one operative especially whose name I don’t recognize. Little Fan
ta, Big Fanta, he says. He reels off memories, trying to identify prisoners, pinpointing facts, names, dates.
I didn’t know I’d end up doing this.
If I had known,
I would’ve kept those IDs it was my job to destroy.
Now we’d know who we’re talking about.
I can’t remember their names. I remember nicknames.
We called one guy the Watchmaker. One was the Vicar.
One was Comrade Yuri.
To me, writing means getting the words down. To me, writing means understanding what you’re telling me, the lawyer said a little while ago, from the movie theater’s screen. And before that, he said it from my computer screen as I watched. And before that, he said it in front of my friends and their camera when they interviewed him. And before that, he actually said it in front of the man who tortured people, years ago, when he took his statement. And he’ll keep saying it each time the film is shown, whenever anybody anywhere—even a single viewer—wants to see it. The camera captures the words of the man who tortured people, like the notes the lawyer took long ago and like the lines you are reading here. Captures them so the message won’t be erased, so that what we don’t yet understand can be deciphered by someone in the future. Captures them in order to anchor them to the earth, adding weight and gravity, so that nothing goes shooting into space and is lost.
This empty theater is a parenthesis in time, a spatiotemporal capsule, a spaceship in which my mother and I travel at a pace set by a clock telling a different time, the same as the one marking the hours at Barbara Jean Trenton’s mansion in The Twilight Zone. One day her faithful agent comes to visit and she isn’t in the living room. The bottle of whiskey is on its side on the floor and the projector is on, spinning one of the old reels she always used to watch. The agent glances at the movie playing on the screen. In it, everything is the same as always—same lines, same actions, same images—though with a single creepy difference. Barbara has crossed the threshold of the known, entering a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. Halfway between light and shadow, between science and superstition. Barbara Jean Trenton no longer inhabits time as we know it. She has immersed herself in the past, and from the screen she smiles at her faithful friend, bidding him farewell. Her smile is captured in celluloid, an indelible trace.
The theater vibrates with another explosion from Avengers 2. Out of the corner of my eye, I see my mother watching the images, moved, not registering the racket from above, probably because she’s deaf in one ear. In the film, the lawyer stops the cassette and the voice of the man who tortured people can no longer be heard. It doesn’t matter, I’ll capture it here. Next come the sequences I know so well, anchoring me to this red seat like a safety belt. Again the bombing of La Moneda. Again the proclamations and the National Stadium and the detainees.
I’m a lonely actress past her prime, drinking whiskey all day long and trying to decipher ancient images that repeat over and over again.
My mind is back at Nido 18.
And Nido 20. And Remo Cero.
Also Colina and the spiral staircase at AGA that led to the lower level.
I had never seen one.
Before we went down they lined us up.
They told us we had to forget everything we were about to see.
Wipe it from our minds.
Whoever remembered was a dead man.
I liked the sea.
I wanted to be a sailor, so I could go to sea.
But instead I joined the air force.
At first I was at the Colina base. I wasn’t there for long.
Then they sent me to AGA, the Air War Academy, to guard prisoners of war.
That’s what they called them: prisoners of war.
When we got there they made us line up.
We went down that pipe-filled spiral staircase to the lower level.
It was like a submarine, I thought.
Many people were standing there.
They were blindfolded and handcuffed.
Others, the most valuable prisoners, were in the hallway.
There were signs on their backs.
“No food or water.” “48 hours no sitting.”
I had never been without food or water.
Had never stood for so long.
In my few months of military service
I had never experienced anything like that.
On the first night an alarm sounded.
Everything went dark.
Fifty machine guns had been
placed in strategic spots.
From the same direction, floodlights came on.
The light was dazzling. My eyes stung.
In such a situation we’d been instructed
to make all the prisoners lie down on the floor
with their hands behind their heads.
Even the ones with signs that said “48 hours no sitting.”
If the officer gave the order
we were supposed to shoot and kill the detainees.
I had never killed anyone.
The officer on duty walked by with a grenade in his hand.
He was looking at us, not the prisoners.
He released the safety on the grenade and said that if we were thinking about rescuing or helping any of the prisoners we’d better forget it.
That if anybody made a move he would throw the grenade in the hallway.
That if anybody made a move every damn fool in the room would die.
I was stuck there for six months.
Then they took me to the houses.
Nido 18. Nido 20. Remo Cero.
I was nineteen years old.
There were three Flores brothers. Or at least there were three who got arrested. Boris Flores, Lincoyán Flores, and Carol Flores. The story of their detention is so similar to the others I’ve already imagined that at this point they all blur and run together in a montage, predictable and even a little dull.
It’s noon and young Boris is at the door when he sees four cars and a police van turn slowly down his street. A national police officer with a hood pulled over his face leans out of the first car, pointing to the house. Young Boris knows what’s coming, and he’s terrified. He darts nervously inside, hoping to escape, but any attempt to hide is pointless, because from now on what follows is the unspooling of images already witnessed and recorded here before. Men with mustaches getting out of cars, men in civilian garb breaking down the door, moving through the house, overturning the furniture, finding Boris and seizing him and beating him and kicking him on the floor. And his mother screaming and his niece crying. And the neighbors pretending not to notice and hiding, not seeing or not wanting to see.
And then the other two brothers appear. Carol and Lincoyán. They’ve heard the commotion from somewhere and they come running in alarm. As one might imagine, they too are seized and beaten. And nothing does any good: not their mother’s pleas, not their niece’s tears, not the Floreses’ resistance. As one might imagine, the commandos take the three brothers from their mother’s house to some unspecified location.
The man who tortured people played no part in this arrest. Ten years later, he’s at a parish hall. It’s one of those places used for meetings or community events, but now it’s empty, at the disposal of the man who tortured people and the lawyer working with him. They sit under a bare bulb. There are two cups of tea or coffee steaming on the table, poured a moment ago by some discreet nun who asked no questions and saw no more than she needed to see. There’s also an ashtray holding a few cigarette butts, evidence that the two men arrived a while ago.
I imagine them facing each other, eyes meeting. The gaze of the man who tortured people sometimes drifts to the tape spinning and spinning in the lawyer’s cassette recorder. I imagine the table is full of photographs. The man who tortured people examines them and tries to identify faces. He doesn’t remember names; he remembers nicknames. This is the one we called the Vicar, this is the Watchmaker, this is Comrade Yu
ri, he says. All of these photographs were provided by family members of the disappeared. The lawyer is trying to track them down, that’s his job, that’s why he’s brought the pictures, and that’s why he’s challenging the man who tortured people to remember them.
Each of these photographs is a postcard sent from some other time.
A cry for help begging to be heard.
The man who tortured people studies the photographs, trying to decipher what they’re hiding. Territories inhabited by other people’s lives and other people’s pasts. Countries bounded by personal histories, regulated by laws invented at family dinner tables. The Contreras Maluje world, the Weibel world, the Flores world. Planets from which the only message to be heard is transmitted by smiling faces looking into the camera and begging to be recognized.
Remember who I am, they say.
Remember where I was, remember what was done to me.
Where I was killed, where I was buried.
The man who tortured people holds one of these photographs in his hand. He examines it carefully. It shows a young man with a child in his arms. The man is looking into the camera and smiling shyly, while the child, barely a year old, looks faintly surprised. On the planet they’re from, the child is most likely the son of the man who’s holding him. The boy is wearing little white shoes and socks, maybe bought for him by his mother, who isn’t visible, but who is part of the world that speaks through the photograph.
The Twilight Zone Page 5