The Twilight Zone

by Nona Fernández

  This is where M enters the story. Surely the sixty agents drove past M’s building in their trucks. Surely, as my mother-in-law was making dinner up on the thirteenth floor, the sixty agents were positioning themselves a few meters from the white brick house at 1330, so close to M’s building. There they set up the .30-caliber machine gun capable of firing a thousand rounds per minute and they evacuated the neighboring houses, staging the scene for the execution. Surely, as M was setting the table and laying out the forks and spoons, the sixty agents were listening over the radio for the official to give the order to start shooting.

  Maybe: what were Sergio Peña, Lucía Vergara, and Arturo Villavela doing inside?

  Maybe they were making dinner too. Maybe Sergio was setting the table. Maybe Arturo was cooking something for the three of them. Maybe Lucía was laying out the spoons and forks when there was a sudden hail of bullets. Maybe it was then, in that first minute of machine gun fire, that M and his family heard what they call the first explosion. Maybe they stopped what they were doing. Maybe M and his mother looked at each other in confusion and possibly even fear. Maybe it was then that my mother-in-law ran to lock the apartment door. Maybe it was then that an officer addressed 1330 Fuenteovejuna through a megaphone. Come out, he said. You’re surrounded by security forces, surrender. Surely M looked out the window, trying to see what was going on, and his mother said no, move away from there, come back into the dining room, come to the table, dinner’s almost ready. Maybe M obeyed, calling his siblings, just as Sergio exited the front door of 1330 Fuenteovejuna with his hands up. Surely, as M and his siblings sat down at the table, the sixty agents obeyed the order to fire again and Sergio fell to the ground, riddled with bullets. Surely it was then that some of the sixty agents threw a flare into the house and that noise plus the burst of machine gun fire sounded like a second explosion from the thirteenth floor of the apartment building where M lived. The man who tortured people says that Lucía shot back from inside and then the sixty agents opened uninterrupted fire for close to four minutes. The man who tortured people says that once the shooting stopped they entered the house and they saw Lucía and Arturo’s bodies on the floor. The man who tortured people says he was ordered to drag the bodies out into the street. The man who tortured people says the bodies were exhibited like trophies before the cameras and floodlights of the press.

  M comes with me to Fuenteovejuna. It’s a Sunday in February and there’s no one on the streets. The neighborhood is a silent, ghostly place in the oppressive 5:00 p.m. sun. A few blocks away is an empty plaza. Swings, slides, and solitary benches wait for better weather to attract someone. In the middle of the street the old trees on the median rustle at the brush of a faint breeze. The silence is filled with the soft sound of branches over our heads. There is something disturbing in the air here. I can feel it. It’s as if the buildings know the story I’m telling and the landscape falls mute at the memory of it, in an attempt to make room for what our eyes can’t see, for what is seemingly no longer here.

  Number 1330 doesn’t look much like the facade we saw burning on television. In its place is a two-story building with a tall gate and a yellow wall that reveals little of the interior. We wonder who could live in a house with such a dramatic past. Do the inhabitants know what happened there thirty-three years ago? Inside, in the middle of a small, neglected front yard, there is a truck piled high with old junk: a fan, a couple of cardboard boxes, some paint cans. I watch to see whether there’s any movement within. I try to detect comings and goings, the movement of a curtain, a face looking out the window, but nothing happens. Everything is disturbingly still in the house and on the street.

  I can imagine M at twelve riding his skateboard. The sound of the wheels on the pavement rattles the silent space. I imagine M at full speed on this street and that simple act brings the still scene back to life. My brain short-circuits, fills in the gray areas, tries to see past the information provided, and my mind seethes with possible ways to explore this slumbering landscape.

  M on his skateboard.

  Or better yet, M walking with his friends, talking and laughing.

  They have a soccer ball. They’re passing it as they walk. The ball shoots from place to place, shuttling into each corner of this mental image. M and his friends pass in front of 1330. They stop for a moment, about to ring the bell and run. But they don’t. For some arbitrary reason, as arbitrary as any of my imaginary scenarios, they choose the house next door. M and his friends ring the bell at 1332 and dash off, fleeing with the ball, while inside 1330, Lucía, Sergio, and Arturo live a strange family life. They remain ignorant of M’s preadolescent escapades. Ignorant of me, who is conjuring them up today, and ignorant, too, of the agents who have been watching them for three months.

  I imagine Sergio on the other side of the wall. Maybe he’s reading a book or smoking a cigarette or having coffee in the kitchen. Maybe he’s talking to Arturo, or they’re watching television, or listening to some song on the radio. Imagining, I make the walls talk. I interrogate the silent houses next door, the mute windows harboring information behind drawn curtains. Imagining, I ask the old trees to speak, I ask the cement under my feet, the lampposts, the telephone wire, the stale air circling this place. Imagining, I bring the bullet holes back to life. My mind short-circuits and in its imaginings it completes unfinished stories, reconstructs half-told tales, visualizes details that go unmentioned, ignores the instructions that I was given and watches all the corners of the screen, keeping track of every ball.

  I can see Lucía sitting at the 1330 dining room table. She has pencil and paper and she’s writing a birthday letter to her little girl, Alexandra, who’s in France visiting her grandmother. The letter will be microfilmed and it will reach the child via some strange process that triggers no suspicions and puts no one’s life in danger. In it, Lucía says she wishes she could give her daughter a hug and sing happy birthday to her in person. It’s been months since she returned to Chile and she misses her little girl so much. She also writes about what’s happening in their faraway country, a country no one has ever heard of. She tells her daughter about the first general strike led by copper miners. She tells her that at night people bang on pots as a symbol of their discontent and hunger. She talks about television, too, and about a show she’s seen that she’s sure her daughter would like a lot. It runs on the weekends. When Lucía watches it she imagines her daughter sitting next to her, eyes on the screen, laughing. It’s a children’s show called The Smurfs. It’s about a city inhabited only by Smurfs, who are like little children who live in toadstool houses and play happily together in the woods. Among them is just one girl Smurf, whose name is Smurfette and who has long blond hair, the way Lucía remembers her daughter’s. There is also a Papa Smurf who takes care of them, but they have no mother, she writes, foreseeing a possible future.

  On the same median where M and I stand looking at the front of 1330, the man who tortured people lay Lucía’s body. If we look down and use our imagination we can see her in the middle of the night, here at our feet. Her bullet-riddled body is naked, she’s wearing only underpants. That’s how she was photographed by the press and that’s how she appeared on front pages the next day. That’s how I remember her, because that’s how she was shown to me, that’s the instruction I was given under the headline “Radical Assassins Die in Dramatic Shoot-Out.” That’s how her family must have seen her, her mother over there in France, even her little girl once she wasn’t little anymore. Despite the years and this whole avalanche of imagination I still can’t understand why they had to undress her for that crude display. How did they pull off her dress? Who removed her bra? Who stole her watch? What about her earrings? What about the chain around her neck? What happened to those clothes? Who ended up with her things? What eyes saw those naked breasts? What hands touched the cold skin of her thighs? What words did they speak as they undressed her? What abject fantasy crossed their perverted minds? The man who tortured people never men
tions any of this. In his testimony he doesn’t explain or even describe the moment when Lucía was stripped of her clothes. I imagine that if he carried the body out into the street he must have taken part in the ritual. But he doesn’t say so. He doesn’t accept responsibility for it. He gives an instruction in his testimony, he directs me to turn my gaze elsewhere.

  If this were an episode of Brain Games, anyone who saw M and me standing here in the street would think we’re two residents of this quiet neighborhood enjoying an eccentric summer stroll under the sun’s blistering rays. The viewers’ eyes would see only the stillness, observing the slight rustle of the treetops and the silent facades of these houses in the upper reaches of the capital. Like those Germans on the World War I submarine, they’d view this scene through their periscope and they’d see a pleasure cruise. They wouldn’t see Lucía naked on the ground waiting for a sheet to cover her at last. Based on the information in front of their eyes, they would have to accept the first explanation their brains concocted. If this were an episode of Brain Games the host would end the show by telling us what we already know. That a simple trick is all it takes to make us see just one ball.

  Once I came back from an operation

  with bloodstains on my pants.

  I hadn’t noticed them, but my wife did.

  She asked me if I was at the massacre

  that was on television,

  the one with the shot-up houses

  in Las Condes and Quinta Normal.

  I always lied to her, but that night I couldn’t.

  I saw her face when I said yes.

  Her face scared me.

  Her silence scared me.

  That night I started to dream of rats.

  Of dark rooms and rats.

  Rats watching me with red eyes.

  Rats following me and creeping into the room with me,

  slipping between

  the legs of my bloodstained pants.

  Mario has lunch with his father and his uncle. His father isn’t his father and his uncle isn’t his uncle. The names they use aren’t their real names either, but in their performance of the day-to-day in this clandestine life, Mario is Mario, his father is his father, and his uncle is his uncle. Mario is in his school uniform. He’s fifteen years old and he’s home from school. Now that they’re sitting around the table together, his uncle who isn’t his uncle and his father who isn’t his father ask how his day was. For Mario, this is a complicated question. A few months ago he started school again, but it hasn’t been easy to get back to work, back to his books, back to homework. Also, his school isn’t his school. It’s a new one, different from the one before, which in turn was different from the one before that, and the one before that, and the one before that.

  It was okay, he says, and neither his father nor his uncle presses him further because they know that in this role-playing game, neither fake fathers nor fake uncles should pester him.

  The radio is on while they eat. The announcer reports the news of the day. Every day, Mario comes home from school and the three of them sit down for lunch and listen to the news. They probably discuss the assault on General Carol Urzúa. A week after it happened, it’s still all anyone is talking about on the radio and television.

  When they’re finished eating, the uncle clears the table and starts to wash the dishes. Mario and his father talk for a while longer. Maybe they talk about Mario’s mother, who really is his mother, and who is the wife of his father who isn’t his father. Maybe they talk about his siblings, who really are his siblings, but who in the game that is this performance have had to split up and live separate lives. They’ve moved to another house in another country, while he is staying in this house, which isn’t his house either, though to a certain degree it is, because at the age of fifteen he’s lived in so many houses that none has really been his. Or maybe they all have been, in part. The house in La Florida, the house in San Miguel, the house in La Cisterna, the house in Conchalí, the house in the parish of El Salto, where he lived with the priest. And now this house in Quinta Normal, specifically at 5707 Calle Janequeo.

  Mario’s mother worked for a neighborhood association in the district of La Florida. Several times, as she was on her way to a work meeting, she noticed a pair of men with mustaches and dark glasses watching her, hiding out in a taxi or a van. Worried, she gathered her four children and told them they would be moving south, to the city of Valdivia. The children accepted the decision and when the day came for the move, they said goodbye to their schoolmates, friends, and neighbors, and they got in a taxi to the bus station. On the one hand the children were sad to be leaving home, but on the other they were giddy at the prospect of going away and getting to know a faraway place. What would Valdivia be like? What would the Valdivians be like? Would it be very cold? Would it rain as much as people said?

  With all these questions in mind, Mario and his siblings rode in the taxi along unfamiliar streets toward the bus that would carry them south. From the window they saw parts of the city they had never seen before. Plazas, parks, stores, video game outlets, different people, different markets, different stands. When the car stopped at last, great was their surprise when they realized they weren’t at the bus station but at a house in what they were told was the district of San Miguel. The children were silent, not understanding what was happening. They unloaded their belongings in bewilderment, and then, once they were inside, their mother explained the rules of a new game they were going to play.

  This house was a special house, she said. Everything that happened from now on between these four walls would be a secret: any people who visited, any meetings that were held, any flyers that were printed, any conversations overheard. From now on, there would be things they couldn’t talk about, that were part of a secret and unspoken reality, a hidden dimension that only they and nobody else could inhabit. They wouldn’t go back to their neighborhood or visit their old friends, because everybody thought they were in Valdivia. The old house and the old neighborhood were part of a life that didn’t exist anymore. Now they had this one, the life of the game and of secrets.

  In this new life, Alejandro, alias Raúl, Mario’s father-not-father, is the new piece on the game board. Alejandro and Mario’s mother had met at her job and fallen in love. Now they were a family. Who would suspect a family like this, with four children who play outside, go to the school on the corner, buy ice cream at the store across the street? If one of the kids walks around with his ball, no one imagines he’s inspecting the neighborhood. No one imagines that later he’s giving his parents a report, letting them know whether there’s a suspicious car, whether there’s a stranger who might raise an alarm. If one of the kids goes out holding an adult’s hand and they meet up with someone else, no one imagines that what the child is really doing is handing the adult off to a contact. No one imagines that in this house full of children, injured comrades are being cared for, comrades on the run are being sheltered, El Rebelde is being printed on a press set up in the back room.

  But in the game of this performance, there are many returns to square one. This wasn’t something their mother told them, but Mario and his siblings begin to figure it out. From the house in San Miguel, they move on to another house, then another, and another. It’s as if they’ve landed on a square that sends them back to the start, and over and over again they find themselves in a new house, with new neighbors, embarking on a new life while keeping the old one secret.

  Each new life came with a new school. And each new school required a new story to answer the questions of new friends. This story couldn’t be the real one, of course, or anything like the one concocted for the previous school. Playing the game, Mario made up lives he didn’t live, came up with names that weren’t his, invented fake grandparents, nonexistent family members, phony birthdays, imaginary trips. Each detail of each of the versions of each of their lives had to be precisely coordinated with their siblings’ and their parents’ so that no one would go off script. And
this had to happen at every school and every neighborhood they moved to. Each of the new squares where they landed required them to stage a performance on top of a performance. To make things up on top of what they’d already made up. The line between reality and fiction became so perilously thin, so complicated and tangled, that after a while, at each new level of the game, Mario and his siblings had to take a break from school for the sake of their own safety and mental health.

  At the age of thirteen, Mario got a job in a store in the neighborhood of Patronato. He traveled there every day, conquering a new territory. Little by little the game board got bigger, and, as in Monopoly, the city was traversed and colonized by the siblings and by the game of secrets. One of Mario’s brothers worked as a parking lot attendant at the National Stadium, so they were able to move their playing pieces to Ñuñoa. Then they worked as vendors in open-air markets in different districts. Then they moved to La Cisterna. Then they left La Cisterna. Then they moved to Conchalí. Then they went their separate ways and Mario ended up at a parish house in El Salto where he was taken in by a Spanish priest. Then other houses. Other neighborhoods. Other neighbors. Other friends. And so on from square to square, level to level, life to life.