From there I hear him shouting to me.
Remember who I am, he says.
Remember where I was, remember what they did to me.
GHOST ZONE
I imagine him hiding on the floor of a van. I don’t know what he’s wearing. I don’t know whether he’s clean-shaven, either. It may be that he’s gotten rid of that dark bushy mustache, or on the other hand, he’s kept it and he has a heavy beard, too, to throw off anyone who might recognize him. Months have gone by since he gave his testimony to the reporter and the lawyer. Since then he has waited in utter seclusion until conditions were right for him to be escorted from the country. He knows that his superiors are looking for him. He knows that if he is found, he’s a dead man. That’s why he’s being taken in secret to complete some paperwork that will make it possible for him to leave. He’s hidden on the floor of a delivery van from Manantial Books, a familiar store.
There he is, under piles of packages. Schoolbooks, notebooks, boxes of pencils and erasers shifting with each turn of the wheel. He feels the weight of the bundles on his back and legs. He can hardly see out from under all the packages. From the street comes the clamor of the city. He hears car engines, horns, the radio announcer’s voice. His hands are sweating. His scalp, too. The trip has taken longer than he calculated. But all at once he feels the van’s motor slowing, the turn signal ticking, the clutch shifting, and all of this tells him that they’re parking in front of a church. Specifically, Our Lady of Los Ángeles on Avenida El Golf, in the upper reaches of the city.
We’ll wait here, he hears the lawyer say from the front of the van.
He doesn’t answer, acquiescing in silence. He knows what this means, they discussed it in advance. Any moment now a car will pull up and an official will step out to take his fingerprints for his new identity. In a few days he’ll be in possession of the passport that will enable him to travel south and cross the mountains into Argentina. Then he’ll fly to France, where help is waiting to get him started in his new life. But it is not yet time for that. Now he simply has to keep calm and wait for the official. Everything will happen in the van. From inside the church, sympathetic eyes are watching, ready to assist. In case they’re discovered, in a true emergency, the Spanish embassy a few blocks away is ready to offer them asylum. If they aren’t seized on the street and they’re able to reach the embassy, they’ll be driven to the airport in a diplomatic car and put on a flight to Madrid. No suitcases, no goodbyes, no plan, no passport. But nobody wants a real emergency. They’ve taken every precaution and neither the air force nor the security services should know they’re here now.
I imagine the lawyer turning on the radio as they wait. From the speakers comes a song from back then, December 1984. I try to remember what was on the radio in those days and the first thing that comes to mind is the song from the Ghostbusters sound track. For some reason, that’s the background music I imagine for this scene. If there’s something strange / in your neighborhood / who you gonna call? Ghostbusters! goes the chorus, over and over. And on screen I remember a young Bill Murray with a couple of partners carrying machine guns that were actually sophisticated weapons for fighting presences that no one can see, ghostly beings that only the Ghostbusters can find and destroy with powerful rays. I doubt the lawyer would have liked this song especially, he probably never even saw the movie, but at this point taste has nothing to do with it. All that matters is seeming like someone he isn’t: specifically, a driver for Manantial Books humming a pop song as he delivers packages around the city.
A car stops nearby.
In it is a clerk from the Civil Registry office.
The lawyer recognizes his contact. They exchange looks.
The clerk exits the car and climbs surreptitiously into the van. In the back, he gets to work with the man who tortured people. The process is brief, it shouldn’t take them long. Preprepared forms, signatures, fingerprints.
The lawyer keeps a lookout. Everything seems normal out on the street. No one in the neighborhood has any idea what’s happening inside the van. A woman goes by with a child in a stroller. Two grandmothers walk calmly past the church. They smile at him when their gazes meet. If there’s something strange / in your neighborhood / who you gonna call? Ghostbusters!
A police van appears in the area.
It’s moving slowly and it halts to observe the vehicle from Manantial Books.
The lawyer quickly picks up a delivery form and looks away from the national police as they drive past. He hums the song on the radio as he pretends to work, scribbling who knows what with a pencil on an imaginary delivery list.
The cops, he warns under his breath.
In the back, the man who tortured people is sweating in the December heat and from nerves. His fingerprint won’t take. The ink refuses to stick to his damp fingers and when he touches the paper, all he leaves are smears, random blurry lines. They try again. Two, three, four times, but it’s no good. Despair settles over the van. For a brief moment the man who tortured people imagines that his body is dissolving. That his face is no longer his face, that he himself is only a shadow or a reflection of what he was or is. A blot as black as the ones he’s leaving on one form after another. His fingerprints are essential for identification purposes, fake or not. Without them there will be no identity card to travel south to the border with Argentina, no passport to leave the country. But forms are crumpled and discarded with each failed attempt. And the more forms that are wasted, the more they sweat, the more nervous they grow, the longer the process takes, until minutes become hours. The police seem to crawl past, and it’s as if they’re in a parenthesis in time, as if the Twilight Zone stopwatch is at work and time on the street has come to a standstill.
What to do if the police decide to search the van.
What to do if they open the back doors.
What to do if they’ve been tipped off and they’re sniffing around the neighborhood, ready to reel them in.
The lawyer thinks about the Spanish embassy. He imagines hitting the accelerator and driving at top speed until he reaches its gates, then speeding through them. He imagines himself shattering the seeming calm of this neighborhood, startling the grandmothers still walking past the church, startling the woman with the stroller. And as he imagines his abrupt exit from the country and his uncertain future in exile, his hands become sweaty, the tips of his fingers are slippery, just like the man who tortured people’s, his fifth form already crumpled on the floor of the van. Five identities obliterated because of the smearing of those stubborn prints.
If there’s something strange / in your neighborhood / who you gonna call?
What happens next is quick and discreet.
The clerk climbs out of the van. He’s carrying the signed forms, fingerprints inked at last. His breathing is labored, his legs still trembling slightly from nerves. He gets back into the same car in which he came. In a few days they’ll be in touch again, the documents ready. Without a glance at his contact, the lawyer starts the van. He accelerates gently and drives calmly down the street, without rousing suspicions. In the rearview mirror he glimpses the grandmothers and the woman with the stroller. He sees the police heading off, too. All at once, they’ve ceased to be a threat. From the window of their van the police are watching other people, other cars. Or maybe they aren’t watching anything. They’re just singing along to some song on the radio or commenting on the news of the day. They carry on with their daily rounds, never suspecting that the Manantial Books van leaving the neighborhood harbors a man with no identity, traveling hidden under piles of packages. A true ghost.
Yes, sometimes I dream of rats.
Of dark rooms and rats.
Of women and men screaming, and of letters like yours,
arriving from the future asking questions about those screams.
I don’t know what to tell you.
I don’t remember anymore
what the screams say
or what the letters say
.
I’ve just been watching a TV show called Brain Games. The host guides viewers through a series of exercises and situations testing their mental capacity. Meanwhile, magicians, neuroscientists, and philosophers parade across the screen, trying to explain the manifold mysteries of the human brain. The episode I just watched is about blindness and distraction. Or to put it more plainly, about how the brain sees what it wants to see. The host says that normally we assume we’ve seen what’s in front of our eyes, but the real magic lies in what our brain does with the information. Without the meaning the brain imparts to what it arranges and interprets, what we see would be a random collection of shapes and colors. And yet this great processing capacity has its limits, the host tells us, and that’s what the first game is about.
On the television we see four little soccer balls, one in each corner of the screen. The host asks us to choose a ball and focus on it. I choose the one in the upper-left-hand corner. Then I follow the instructions and I focus on it. I don’t look at the other three, I just watch my little ball in the upper-left-hand corner. As I’m watching it, I hear the voice of the host describing exactly what is happening before my eyes: the other three balls begin to disappear from the screen. From one moment to the next, I see only my ball. The funny thing is that when I’m told to watch the full screen again, I realize that the other three balls were always there. My eyes saw them, but when I was focusing on a single one, my brain stopped registering the others. It turned them invisible.
During World War I, the Germans deployed one of their most fearsome weapons: the U-boat, a submarine that was difficult to target because it never came up to the surface. According to the show’s host, after countless devastating attacks, the crew of a British navy ship had an unusual idea. In order to make the submarines surface so that they could be attacked, the British navy crew would disguise their vessel as a harmless cruise ship. When the submarines saw through their periscopes that there was no danger, they would rise, never imagining that an attack was imminent. To carry out this piece of trickery, the English needed a key element not present on warships: women. So it was decided that some of the crew would disguise themselves. Arm in arm with their comrades, the cross-dressing sailors strolled on deck, pretending to be half of a happy tourist couple, or two friends chatting while taking a leisurely stroll in the sea air. This wild idea succeeded. Some lens of some periscope of some submarine spotted the scene and immediately the German crew assumed there was no reason not to rise to the surface. According to the show’s host, on March 15, 1917, the British bait ship attacked the first U-boat to be destroyed by this curious method.
The Germans saw men dressed as women on the deck of a warship. And yet what they processed from that image was the presence of a cruise ship. They rapidly manufactured details to fit a preconceived idea, took for granted information they didn’t possess, making inferences, and misreading the facts before their eyes. Thanks to a small trick by the English, the Germans chose to see just one soccer ball.
It’s the trick that makes the magic, says the host.
It doesn’t matter what you see. All that matters is what you believe you see.
A few months ago, on the same screen on which I’ve just been watching Brain Games, M and I watched a special on the staged media of the dictatorship. M is the father of my son. If this were a Brain Games exercise, anyone who saw us going about our daily business at home would infer that he’s my husband. And yet the host’s voice would correct that mistake, because we aren’t married. Readers who’ve been paying serious attention to the objective facts laid out in this book will have assumed the presence of M. Incidental or ghostly, maybe, but ultimately a real presence. He’s even mentioned in one chapter as the father of the narrator’s son: but has anyone spared him a single thought before we reached this point in the story? I doubt it. No one has properly imagined him. The trick has been not to focus attention on M. Until this very moment, when I instruct everyone to stop staring at the upper-left-hand corner, to watch the full screen.
M and I were lying in bed watching television. M isn’t my husband but he isn’t my boyfriend either. I could call him my partner, but that seems too fussy. Bereft of a word to describe our relationship, I’ve decided to call him M. So as I was saying, we were watching a special on staged events under the dictatorship. We’re somewhat obsessed with the topic and when investigative shows like this are announced we make plans to watch them. The program undertook to cover various scenes that were staged for the purpose of shaping the truth. Lots of media outlets were used repeatedly as vehicles for disinformation and lies. In fact, Televisión Nacional de Chile, the state television station, was taken over by the military and used on this important battlefront: the manipulation of the truth, the art of making us see nothing but a single soccer ball.
The first images I remember are of an International Red Cross delegation’s visit to the prison camp in Pisagua, months after the military coup. A team from Televisión Nacional filmed the visit. In the footage, we see a group of skinny, ragged prisoners swimming at the beach and playing soccer. As we watch the scene there is an interview with three detainees who say timidly that they’re being treated marvelously, they feel like they’re at a real vacation camp. Inevitably, M and I burst out laughing. It’s a pathetic scene. Everything is crudely manipulated. It looks like a comedy skit, Monty Python style. A sad sketch, a cruel dark joke, but a joke nonetheless.
Then come the fake press conferences and testimonies. Alleged clashes, alleged guerrilla forces, alleged suicides, alleged discoveries of alleged stashes of weapons and documents. And among these alleged scenarios comes a staged event from 1983.
A week before, the MIR, or Revolutionary Left Movement, had mounted an attack leading to the death of the governor of metropolitan Santiago, General Carol Urzúa. The reprisals were unexpected. Agents from the CNI, the National Information Center, detained those responsible, but days later they also surrounded two MIR safe houses and killed five MIR members, presenting the occurrence to the press as a violent face-off.
M remembers this news story well. He was a boy, twelve years old, and he lived very close to Calle Fuenteovejuna, where one of the MIR safe houses was located. M says that it was early, around 8:00 p.m., when explosions were heard in the neighborhood. Truth be told, in those days explosions were not infrequent. His mother’s policy was to lock the apartment door whenever there was a blackout or a helicopter flew overhead or the sound of an explosion was heard, whether near or far from the building where they lived. So the door to M’s apartment was swiftly locked, as an airtight security measure, and they carried on with the evening routine. Setting the table, serving dinner, laying out clothes and school things for the next day.
M says that he expected to hear something about it on the news, but as far as he remembers, there was nothing. Later that night, a news flash interrupted the scheduled programming. This must have been when he saw the same news segment we watched in the special. A reporter states that at 1330 Calle Fuenteovejuna in the district of Las Condes, three radicals, two men and a woman, were killed after a dramatic confrontation ending in a big blaze. When the radicals realized they were trapped by the police, they decided to burn all the compromising documents they kept at the safe house, starting a fire that had yet to be extinguished at the time of reporting.
M must have seen that house when he was a boy riding around the neighborhood on his skateboard. A single-story white brick house with a small front yard and a barred gate. But he never noticed it. His eyes saw it but his brain didn’t process the information. It wasn’t until that night, sitting in front of his eighties television set, that he followed instructions and concentrated on the house, on it alone, and on what the reporter’s voice was saying, like everybody else watching the news.
Lying in bed, we watched the news report just as the whole country must have watched it in 1983. We observed the flurry of activity outside the house in flames. The reporter says that the radicals were
intercepted by national police agents at a roadblock a few blocks from the house. The reporter says that when they were surprised they drew their guns and fled into hiding, shooting as they went. The reporter says that from inside the house, the radicals shot to kill, initiating a dramatic gun battle that fortunately hadn’t injured a single man in uniform. The reporter is flanked by flares as he talks, his voice scrambled by the sound of radio transmitters, the voices of firemen, other reporters, police officers and agents walking past.
I sat up in bed, moving closer to the screen to get a better look. Everything was faded and gray, like my memories of that time. I scrutinized every inch of the picture, aware that I shouldn’t overlook any corner of it, any bit of scenery. I examined every face passing before me, following each with obsessive interest, intent as a spy, because in the middle of all that activity, camouflaged in the shadows and smoke, perhaps caught for a second by the camera or hidden in the wings, I knew he was there. The man who tortured people.
Let’s open that door again. Behind it we’ll find another dimension. A world forever hidden by the old trick that makes us look the other way. A vast, dark territory that seems distant but is as close as the reflection we see each day in the mirror. You’re crossing to the other side of the glass, is what the intense narrator of my favorite series would have said. You’re entering the twilight zone.
The man who tortured people says that on September 7, 1983, they were summoned to a major operation. Around 8:00 p.m., he and a group of sixty agents arrived at the parking lot of a supermarket. As the Santiaguinos of the upper city did their shopping and loaded their cars with groceries, the sixty agents awaited instructions. The man who tortured people says that a CNI jeep drove up, mounted with a .30-caliber machine gun. A reineta, he calls it. A national police officer explained that the night’s objective was three radicals at a safe house on Calle Fuenteovejuna. Their names were Sergio Peña, Lucía Vergara, and Arturo Villavela, also known as El Coño Aguilar, a key figure in the MIR organization. Those responsible for the death of General Carol Urzúa had already been arrested, but this action was deliberately aimed at eliminating the leadership of the movement and sending a clear message about who was in charge. The man who tortured people says that the national police officer made it clear that he didn’t want a single bastard to come out of that house alive. That’s what he said: no bastard is coming out of that house alive, I want everybody dead. Those were his instructions. The man who tortured people says the sixty agents left the supermarket and moved on to Calle Fuenteovejuna.
The Twilight Zone Page 9