The Twilight Zone
Page 8
The place is messy. Dust, lots of chairs scattered around the empty space, a sideboard full of old magazines, and a screen covered in colored paper. Displayed on it are photocopies of the faces of other prisoners with their names and nicknames written in black felt-tip marker. El Quila Leo, Comrade Díaz, Comrade Diego. All the sheets are stuck to the display with tape and risk coming unstuck. El Quila Leo looks at me a bit crookedly, listing to the right, about to fall to the floor. Everything is very precarious, handmade, like some kind of school report. Next to the painting of Comrade Yuri is one of Allende, another of Neruda, and finally one of General Bachelet, the president’s father, after whom the memorial is named.
The comrade director comes back in and explains that as a human rights organization they offer services to the community. They act as a nexus between local residents and the mayor, and they also host biomagnetism sessions in the back room, offered by a therapist comrade for a modest fee. Right now the comrade is treating a Peruvian woman who has stomach cancer, he says. The comrade director tells me he’s a taxi driver, which is why his taxi is parked in the house’s front entrance. By night he drives the taxi and by day he runs the memorial. It isn’t easy. There’s no funding, and the Communist comrades aren’t happy that he’s in charge. All the prisoners who came through Nido 20 were Communists, so the party can’t understand why a socialist comrade like him is the director of the memorial. It strikes them as inappropriate. They don’t like him parking his taxi here, either. After apologizing for the mess, the comrade director offers to show me the house.
The man who tortured people says that Don Alonso Gahona, Comrade Yuri, spent long sessions in the room where I am now. It was the designated location for torture. A small space, once a laundry room. The floor is red tiles with white grout, like the ones in my kitchen. There’s a window that faces the street, directly across from another window in the house across the street. Taped to the walls are a couple of posters with drawings of different forms of torture. They’re illustrations by the comrades who survived this room. On one I read sub-marino. Next to the handwritten word I see the drawing of a naked man with his head in a bucket of water or maybe urine. Two men are holding him down. From the drawing I understand that the intent was to cause the detainee to come close to drowning. On the poster next to it I read piscina con hielo. Here the drawing shows another man, naked and bound, in a tub full of ice. In the drawing, there are random letters around the man’s body. They don’t mean anything, they’re just there as a kind of sign, a secret code that I don’t understand and the comrade director can’t explain. On the floor of the room is a little metal bed frame that might be a child’s. The comrade director explains that in fact it is a child’s cot. It was the only thing they could get to represent the frame that the torturers used for strapping down their prisoners and administering electric shocks.
The man who tortured people says this is what they did to Comrade Yuri. They strapped him to the parrilla, as they called those metal frames, and they beat him and shocked him. The man who tortured people says that after a long session they hung him in the shower of the bathroom that the comrade director is showing me now. It’s a small bathroom, barely big enough for the two of us, tiled in blue and green with a quite tasteful sink and mirror, that’s what I think when I walk in. Once upon a time somebody must have chosen them with care. Once upon a time somebody must have considered how nice they would look in their house’s bathroom. Once upon a time somebody bought them and installed them and used them. Someone washed their hands in this sink. Someone brushed their hair and put on makeup in front of this mirror. And yet, the whole sixties-ish ensemble that goes so well with the tiles is the setting for this scene that the man who tortured people is remembering and describing.
Comrade Yuri was incredibly thirsty after the shocks he’d been given in the torture room. The man who tortured people says Comrade Yuri asked for water and one of the guards left the shower running so Comrade Yuri could drink. The man who tortured people says the guard turned the water off, but Comrade Yuri still complained of thirst. Weak as he was, he used the little strength he had to turn the water back on, but he wasn’t able to drink, or to turn it off again. The man who tortured people says the water ran all night over Comrade Yuri’s body. The man who tortured people says that by the next morning Comrade Yuri was dead, felled by a swift and deadly case of pneumonia.
I’m in the room where the prisoners slept on the floor. It’s a small room, which must originally have been the bedroom where somebody laid their head and maybe had happy dreams before embarking on their daily routine. From this bedroom over to the green-tiled bathroom, then on to breakfast in the living room where I heard talk about gypsies, and finally out the door and down those two steps over which Comrade Yuri stumbled a while later. As many as forty men shared this space, including those who were shut in the tiny closet in solitary confinement.
The comrade director shows me the mural they’ve made. It’s a big painting of Comrade Yuri against a backdrop of bright colors that I don’t know how to interpret. The mural is signed by the Red Star Brigade, and it’s a project of Comrade Yuri’s children, who have close ties to the memorial. The comrade director tells me he believes that since the body of Comrade Yuri was never found, the children—who are no longer children, because Yuri and Evelyn Gahona must be about my age or a little older—visit the memorial like a shrine or a tomb to remember their father. They’ve even requested that no work be done on the bathroom where Comrade Yuri died, that it remain untouched, says the comrade director. Green and small, just as it is now on my visit.
Once I saw photographs of Major Gagarin in his spaceship, the Vostok 1. Buckled into a tiny compartment, he traveled the cosmos in utter stillness. Only his eyes moved, and his hands, too, I think, as he gazed at Earth and the universe through a round window.
I imagine Comrade Yuri immobilized in that bathroom. With what little energy he has, he drinks the water falling on his naked body. There are no windows, but if he closes his eyes he can imagine a round window in the ceiling, just above his tired head. I imagine Comrade Yuri looking out that imaginary window. It’s a starry night. The water is still falling on his body, but everything is so beautiful and blue out there that it’s hard to concentrate on anything else. Suddenly, in the middle of the sky that’s keeping him company, he thinks he sees a white blur. At first he supposes it’s a falling star and he even has the old impulse to make a wish. But then he realizes that what he’s seeing isn’t a star, but something even more fascinating.
A chess piece crossing outer space.
A white bishop spaceship signaling to him from up above, attempting a rescue.
The man who tortured people says that the body of Don Alonso Gahona, Comrade Yuri, was wrapped in plastic and stuffed into the trunk of a car. The man who tortured people says he doesn’t know where the body was taken, but he suspects it was dumped in the sea.
I imagine Comrade Yuri’s body sinking somewhere along the Chilean coast. Maybe near the beaches of Papudo. Or maybe not. I imagine him descending into the depths of the blue sea that Major Gagarin saw from space, coloring the whole planet. Earth is blue, he said over the radio, looking out his round window at the sea in which years later Comrade Yuri would sleep forever. Earth is blue and beautiful, he said, and from where I sit let it go down in history, let it never be forgotten: there’s no god to be heard.
In spite of myself I got deeper and deeper in.
Suddenly I wasn’t the person I used to be.
I could blame my bosses.
I could say that they were the ones who changed me.
But you always have a hand in what happens to you.
I know this because I’ve seen people who don’t betray themselves.
People who might be up to their necks in shit and they don’t break.
El Quila Leo, for example.
That was one prisoner I came to admire.
His name was Miguel Rodríguez Gallardo.
He took a beating and he never talked.
They shocked him, they hit him, they hung him up, they locked him away.
And he didn’t talk.
El Quila found ways
to keep his mind clear, to keep it together.
El Quila listened carefully to sounds,
he took note of the smells, temperatures,
shapes, and colors he managed to observe
when he wasn’t blindfolded.
I’m being held at Cerrillos Airport, he said to me one day.
How do you know? It could be Pudahuel
or El Bosque Air Base.
Every day I hear the instructions from the control tower
and they’ve never announced the takeoff of a fighter jet
or a passenger plane,
so it has to be Cerrillos, he said, and he was right.
When they brought him to Nido 20 he guessed where he was.
This is Stop 20 on Gran Avenida, he said.
The siren that goes off on the hour is from the firehouse where I
was a fireman.
El Quila knew when it was daytime.
El Quila knew when it was nighttime.
El Quila smelled flowers
and guessed the change of seasons.
When he was locked in the closet,
he looked for drawings on the wooden planks
and he made up stories about them,
he told them to himself.
He could tell us apart by the sound of our footsteps.
When we walked by, he called us by name
and he was always right.
He had his head on straight, much straighter than mine.
One night they called me.
They told me to put pikes, shovels, a few machine guns
and several liters of gasoline in a truck.
Then they gave us a list of detainees.
We had to bind and blindfold them.
One of them was El Quila.
He had been with us for more than four months.
They’re going to let you go,
I lied as I covered his eyes with a blindfold.
Yes, he said. I’ll be going free, but I’m not going home.
Before I tied him up he shook my hand
and held it for a moment.
I gave him a cigarette and he thanked me for it.
I started to cry as I was tying him up.
I cried silently, trying not to let him see,
but both of us knew what was going to happen.
El Quila went with the other detainees in the truck.
I kept his ID card.
Also his driver’s license,
his watch, his wallet.
I had to make everything disappear.
I burned them and buried them, same as they did to him.
One day, a little while ago, I was with another agent in a car.
Someone had gotten run over.
The body was crushed
under the wheels of a bus.
The other agent drove past very slowly, and I realized that he liked looking.
I couldn’t look. I turned away.
I’m used to dead bodies.
I’ve seen lots of them by now,
but even so I couldn’t look.
We were eating sandwiches.
The other agent kept eating. He finished his entire sandwich.
We had been innocent conscripts. Dumb. Naive.
Now we were able to eat sandwiches while gawking at a dead body.
I thought about El Quila.
I thought about how much I cried when they killed him.
I imagined him there, out in the open, before he was riddled with bullets.
We’re in Peldehue, he must have guessed from under the blindfold.
I cried slowly, secretly, so that no one would notice.
Some time later I felt grief, a knot in my throat.
Some time later I was able to control my tears.
Some time later I stopped crying.
Whether I wanted to or not, I had gotten used to it.
In the end I felt nothing.
I had become someone else.
Someone who gets up and goes to bed with the smell of death.
I don’t want my children to know what I was, he says. I’m going back to my job and I’ll pay the price for what I’ve done.
I don’t care whether they kill me.
For three days the lawyer has been taking his testimony in the parish hall. I imagine that both men are weary and overwhelmed by all the probing.
I’m only doing this so there are no more deaths, says the lawyer. You’re helping us with the truth, but not in exchange for your life. We won’t do anything with your testimony until we get you to a safe place.
I imagine that a long time goes by.
I imagine that silence and cigarette smoke fill the room.
I imagine that they sip coffee. That some nun silently comes and goes.
I imagine that for a moment, maybe only a second, the man who tortured people sees himself inserted into one of those photographs still watching him from the table.
Remember who I am, they keep saying.
Remember where I was, remember what was done to me.
Where they killed me, where they buried me.
It’s a vast chorus. Smiling faces, bright eyes, all posing for the camera while on an outing or at some gathering or party, alongside family members, children, brothers or sisters, friends, in the happy past that everyone was once a part of. A distant and now nonexistent place, from which this man looking at the photographs was barred. He imagines himself as just another face among these lost people. He sees himself with his own children, his wife, maybe his parents, whom he hasn’t visited for a while. He pretends they’re on a beach in Papudo, sunning themselves and eating hard-boiled eggs, relaxing after a pickup soccer game and a nice dip in the sea, feet covered in black sand. They seem happy living a life that was never theirs. A life that he was never able to live because unwittingly he entered the dark parallel dimension where any photograph like this is part of an ancient reality or simply nonexistent.
You’re right, he says. I won’t go back to my job. I’m going to desert, with you as witness.
I imagine that the man who tortured people then reaches into his pocket. From an old wallet he removes his armed forces card, Andrés Antonio Valenzuela Morales, Soldier First Class, ID #39432 of La Ligua. In the center is a photograph numbered 66650, which I’m not imagining, which I have here in front of me, on a photocopied sheet that the lawyer himself gave me years later when we talked about this moment. In the photograph, the man who tortured people is posing for the camera in his uniform. His hair is neatly combed and he’s clean-shaven, no mustache. Eyes wide. Three deep furrows in his brow, too deep for someone his age. On the lapel of his impeccable military uniform are two air force eagle pins.
The lawyer takes the card.
In the parish hall, the desertion is registered.
The face of the man who tortured people lies on the table, exposed, looking up from his ID card. There he is just as he imagined himself, among the other faces. The faces of Contreras Maluje, Don Alonso Gahona, El Quila Leo. They and all the others in the surrounding photographs grow restless when they sense his presence. They seem puzzled. They glance at the man who tortured people, eye him curiously, try to creep into his photograph to get a better look at him. In the left-hand corner, I imagine José Weibel taking off his thick glasses and rubbing his eyes, trying to see more clearly and recognize this new man who’s appeared on the table. A vague memory of the day he was detained clouds his mind. Emerging from a corner under other photographs, Carol Flores approaches the man who tortured people and introduces him to the young son he’s carrying in his arms, while Comrade Yuri, bare-chested, appears from the beach where he was photographed to invite him along.
Come on, Pap
udo, he says, let’s go for a swim.
The man who tortured people doesn’t know what to do.
The man who tortured people is wearing his uniform, he can’t go swimming in his clothes.
The man who tortured people remembers his wife, with whom he hardly speaks; his children, with whom he no longer plays; his parents, whom he no longer sees; and he feels an uncontrollable urge to plunge into the sea. He doesn’t know where he is, he can’t say what beach this is, but none of that matters, and he takes off his jacket with the pair of metal eagles, then his shirt, his tie, his pants. His uniform is trodden into the sand. It looks like the sloughed-off skin of a snake, the vestige of a body that’s of no use to him anymore.
We’re at your beach, Papudo, he hears a shout from somewhere.
Look around and see the color of the sand, Papudo, hear the cry of the seagulls, the sound of the waves.
Suddenly everything is familiar.
At last he’s part of that ancient collective celebration that he could only watch from a distance before. The man who tortured people runs naked, feels the heat of the sun on his face, feels the cool air strike his body. His toes sink into the warm black sand of the beach where he was born, and in the distance he thinks he hears one of his children laughing, playing ball. The man who tortured people reaches the edge of the sea and then he sees him. It’s Quila Leo, dear Quila Leo, ducking under and splashing naked in the waves.
We’re on your beach, Papudo, he says again. Your beach. Do you recognize it now?
Without a second thought, the man who tortured people dives into the sea, immersed at last in the waters of that lost planet, its only traces the tokens scattered over the table in the parish hall.