As I write this, my son is celebrating his fifteenth birthday with some friends. They’re in the dining room, eating and laughing. I can hear them from here. They’ve known each other since they were five years old. They’ve grown up together, gone to school together, lost their baby teeth, seen each other’s pimples appear, gotten into music, sports, girls, city life, and because of all that, and other things, too, they call themselves friends now. An unbroken thread of history runs through their relationship. I’m sure there are many zones in each of them that are unknown to my son, but I have no doubt that their names are their names, their parents their parents, their houses their houses, and their lives their lives.
Mario moved into 5707 Janequeo early in 1983. The house was located across from a clinic. It was an old terraced house of adobe and brick, with two inner yards where fruit trees grew. Here they shared the game board with new players. Uncle José, whose real name was Hugo, and who wasn’t really Mario’s uncle; and Uncle José’s wife and three children, who weren’t really his cousins, though he had to treat them as if they were. Suddenly they were all living on top of each other. There were so many pieces of the game to coordinate that life in Janequeo was more fun. There were lots of kids and that summer they enjoyed the fruit trees, the plaza across the way, the pickup games in the street, the hose-offs in the yard, the big lunches at the dining room table. The old house was full of life. But despite the high spirits of the children on Janequeo, the times outside were complicated, with protests and pot-banging, and while the gang played, an unlicensed taxi parked on the corner every week to spy. Mario spotted it on his daily rounds and dutifully conveyed the information to his parents. And so, before summer was over, it was decided to attempt a strategic play. The aunt who wasn’t his aunt and her three children who weren’t his cousins would leave the country for Cuba, for their safety. Then, in May, a few months later, yet another new twist was introduced in the game. Mario’s mother, the only real thing he had left, would leave the country. A valuable piece had to be protected and the only way to do it was to take her off the game board. His mother traveled to Cuba and his siblings followed a few months later. Mario watched them leave with their bags and suitcases, and as he did, he felt the hole they left in that big old house, which wasn’t his house but a fake house, the house of a fake family with a fake life. There would be no more big lunches cooked for everyone by Uncle José, no more afternoons in front of the TV, or pickup games in the street, or hose-offs in the back yard. The game board was beginning to empty. For some reason, Mario didn’t leave. He stayed behind at 5707 Janequeo with Hugo, alias Uncle José, and Alejandro, alias his father Raúl, far from his real mother and his real siblings, carrying on the role-playing game, continuing the performance every day, until this very moment, at the table after dinner on September 7, 1983.
At 16:30 the first important move of the afternoon is made: Alejandro, alias Raúl, Mario’s father-not-father, kisses him goodbye on the forehead and leaves the house. He’ll be back later, he says.
At 16:35, Hugo, alias Uncle José, sits down with Mario in the living room and talks to him about his life as a student in Argentina, where he’s from. It’s a nice moment, but at 17:00, Mario goes to his room to try to study, because in this life of performances, trying to be a good student helps a lot.
At 18:00, Mario closes his books and thinks that Alejandro, alias Raúl, his father who isn’t his father, has been gone for an awfully long time.
At 19:50, Mario is hungry and leaves his room.
At 19:55, Mario runs into Hugo, alias Uncle José, in the kitchen, making banana shakes.
At 20:00, Hugo, alias Uncle José, says he’s worried that Alejandro, alias Raúl, has been out too long, as he pours two banana shakes.
At 20:05, Mario and Hugo, alias Uncle José, sit down to watch the TV news.
At 20:10, Mario gets up because the news is boring and goes to his room to listen to music.
At 20:15, Mario puts a Los Jaivas tape on his cassette player and starts to listen to Gato Alquinta singing one of his songs.
At 20:30, Mario hears shots in the neighborhood. He doesn’t turn down the volume or turn off the music. Gunshots, helicopters, and bomb blasts are something he’s heard occasionally in every neighborhood where he’s lived in previous lives, so there’s no reason to worry this time.
At 20:35, Mario hears shouts.
At 20:36, Mario hears a burst of machine gun fire and he realizes that they’re shooting at the house. Instinctively he drops to the floor.
At 20:37 he begins to see smoke filtering under the door to his room. At 20:40 he goes out into the dark hallway to look for Hugo, alias Uncle José. Uncle, he shouts toward the bedroom, but no one answers. At 20:41 he hears voices. At 20:42 he realizes they’re the voices of agents. At 20:43 he hears another burst of gunfire. At 20:44 he can’t figure out how he’s still alive after the shooting and he runs down the dark, smoke-filled hallway looking for Hugo, alias Uncle José. At 20:45 he realizes his uncle isn’t in his bedroom or the kitchen. He can’t find him anywhere. Uncle, he shouts, uncle, but again there’s no response. At 20:46 he thinks about curling up on the floor and not moving, no matter what, but at 20:47 he decides no, he can’t abandon himself to his fate, he has to escape, no matter where, get out of there before he’s killed by another round of machine gun fire. At 20:48 he’s in the back yard. At 20:49 he’s scaling the side wall; at 20:50, as he’s climbing, he thinks about Alejandro, alias Raúl, his father who isn’t his father, thinking how lucky it was that he didn’t come back. The delay saved him, he thinks, and at 20:51 he lands in the yard of the house next door, still hearing shots and the voices of agents, who are kicking down doors and overturning furniture at 5707, while he, at 20:52, tries to scramble over the next wall to keep fleeing from yard to yard. But at 20:53 he realizes that this new wall is too high, he’s tired, his body is shaking, it isn’t so easy to escape the house, life weighs heavily on him, he’s not going to make it. At 20:54 he decides to knock on the window of the neighbor, who at 20:55 comes out into the back yard when he hears knocking and sees the figure of a boy of fifteen asking for help, scared.
That’s my house, says the boy, at 20:56.
Where it’s happening, that’s my house, he says, at 20:57, and he repeats the same thing at 20:58 and 20:59. My house, my house, my house, and each repetition is uttered with the conviction of someone telling the truth.
Inevitably the fifteen-year-olds get mixed up in my head. I think about Mario on that September night in 1983. Maybe he’d have a good time with my son and his friends here. In a life he never had, we would sit him down at the table to eat a piece of cake and tell him he could stay as long as he wanted. Tell him he didn’t have to keep climbing wall after wall.
Andrés Antonio Valenzuela Morales, alias the man who tortured people, says he was there. After he hauled the body of Lucía Vergara out to the Calle Fuenteovejuna median, he received orders to head with his team to the other side of the city, to the district of Quinta Normal, specifically 5707 Calle Janequeo. He says it before my eyes, on the computer screen, in a video recording made in France, probably at the end of the eighties.
He’s sitting in a dark café. He has long hair, nothing like in the photos I’ve seen of him. Thick, abundant hair. He seems like another person. Next to him is Ricardo Parez, MIRista in exile, comrade of Alejandro Salgado, alias Raúl, and Hugo Ratier, alias José. Ricardo watches him as he drinks from a glass of wine or water. The man who tortured people is smiling and answering Parez’s questions, because this is an interview. Somewhat informal, with a do-it-yourself feel, but it will serve as evidence for a possible lawsuit concerning Fuenteovejuna and Janequeo, in the distant country that Chile has become in this new life they’ve both adopted. That’s why Parez asks him to repeat some things more clearly. That he was ordered to kill everyone living in both houses, for example. That the intent was always to eliminate them, at the Fuenteovejuna house and the Janequeo house both. That it was we
ll known they weren’t directly responsible for the death of General Carol Urzúa. That these killings were a kind of vendetta.
The man who tortured people repeats what he’s said more clearly, as requested, accustomed to following orders. Both men seem somewhat uncomfortable, but they try to break the ice, speaking in a casual way that sounds strained. Parez asks the man who tortured people about his nickname, Papudo, and the man who tortured people explains that in military service all his friends were from the south and he was the only one from the central coast, which is why they called him Papudo. And the two of them laugh and it’s strange when they laugh. I think they feel a little stupid themselves, or that’s how it seems.
French tango music can be heard beneath their words. The man who tortured people says that by the time he and his team got to Janequeo the operation had already begun. Everybody was shooting, he says. The same jeep mounted with a machine gun on Fuenteovejuna was in the middle of the street doing its job against the facade of 5707, which was where the MIRistas Hugo Ratier, alias José, and Alejandro Salgado, alias Raúl, supposedly lived.
The man who tortured people says that a few minutes after he got there he saw a person walking down the street with bags of groceries. The person stopped to see what was going on. It was a man. He could have been any local resident, but he was rapidly identified as Alejandro Salgado. When Alejandro, alias Raúl, the father-not-father of Mario, saw a group of agents shooting at the house that wasn’t his house, he started to run, fleeing in terror, at the same moment Mario was climbing the wall in the back yard. Alejandro passed the truck where the man who tortured people was stationed. The man who tortured people says he watched him go by, crouching down as the rest of the officers opened fire.
He fell near a plaza.
He wasn’t armed, but an officer went up and put a gun in his hand.
That’s how he appeared in the newspapers the next day.
Lying on the ground with the gun, as if he’d been shooting.
I saw it.
There was a special report that night about a violent clash. Mario might have seen it on the neighbor’s TV. As he heard voices and movement on the other side of the wall, he would’ve seen images of his house on the screen. There were police and armed agents walking the halls. On the dining room table where he’d eaten lunch a few hours ago, with the orange-flowered tablecloth, there were papers, lots of fake IDs, and a serious pile of weapons he’d never seen before. Grenades, ammunition, machine guns, pistols. If there had been a gun in the house, we would have used it to defend ourselves, thought Mario. Reporting live with a microphone in his hand, the announcer gestured at the weapons and documents, announcing that security forces had killed two dangerous terrorists in a deadly face-off.
The man who tortured people says that when they got to the house the neighbors told them there was a boy. The man who tortured people says they found Hugo Ratier’s body on the floor, but the boy wasn’t there.
Mario spent the night hidden at the neighbor’s house, a few meters from the scene of the crime. Early the next morning, he and the neighbor left by the back door and walked to the bus stop. The facade of 5707 was full of bullet holes, the windows smashed, window frames splintered, the door ajar. Mario eyed it all furtively, as if he were just another neighbor, as if it hadn’t been his house, as if he hadn’t lived his last life there. National police officers were still on the street, but no one noticed him. No one was looking for him or asking what had happened to the kid. It was as if he had never existed. As if having vanished into the game and the secret for so long he had become a secret himself.
They took a bus to the neighborhood of Mapocho, and got some breakfast. When they were done, the neighbor brought Mario to the repair shop where he worked. He told Mario that if he needed anything he’d be here. Then he gave him a little money and they parted.
Mario walked aimlessly around the center of Santiago. Without realizing it, he came to the Plaza de Armas, ground zero of the game board. Centerpoint of any game. Here everything was functioning normally, as if nothing had happened. People were going about their business, buses filled the streets, the stores were beginning to open, old people were feeding the pigeons. For a brief moment he wished he was one of these people. Having a life instead of an endless list, so hard to manage and remember. Going to a single school, then maybe getting some kind of degree, finding a job, settling down with a woman who would call him by his name, moving into a house and not budging for at least a decade. Having children he wouldn’t have to wake up in the night to go on the run, children who would celebrate their fifteenth birthdays with friends, with birthday cake.
At a newsstand he saw the daily papers and read the headlines. On one front page there was a photograph of Alejandro. He was lying on his back, his face bloody, a gun next to his right hand. It was him: his father-not-his-father. The same person who until yesterday had lived with him in the house that wasn’t his house, living a life of lies, though in light of what had happened, it was the only life he had. Mario was tempted to use the little money the neighbor had given him to buy a couple of newspapers. To keep these photographs as memory or proof, but he quickly changed his mind. His only guidelines were the game and the secret, and now that there were no clear rules to follow, no squares to move back to, he was at the start again.
In his head, Mario rolled the dice and lost himself in the city.
Yes, sometimes I dream of rats.
Of dark rooms and rats.
Of men and women screaming
and of letters from the future
asking about the screams.
I don’t remember anymore
what the screams say
or what the letters say
All that’s left are the rats.
I went to a psychiatrist
to get rid of them.
She sent me for an encephalogram.
I saw an X-ray of my head.
I looked for the rats so I could cut them out with scissors,
but they weren’t there, they were hiding in the shadows.
They made me stack cubes,
they made me take tests.
They said the rats were there
because I was worried about money.
They said I was tense, nervous,
that a few pills would help.
I never told them what was happening to me.
I never told them about my job and how it was sickening me.
They were doctors from the intelligence service,
I couldn’t tell them the truth.
Then I couldn’t take it anymore.
I went to the magazine and I did what I did.
You’ve told it better than I could.
Your imagination is clearer than my memory.
As a girl I had a weakness for ghost stories. I lived in a big old house that creaked at night, and in my childhood fantasies, it was overrun by spirits. I saw shadows cross the hallway at midnight and I heard the tap of feet on the parquet floor. I heard nonexistent people laughing and talking in the back bedroom. I heard furniture being moved, vases breaking, brooms sweeping. Whether it was all real or a childish delusion I’ll never know, but because of my imaginings as a girl, I guess, I developed a perverse connection to stories about lost souls. I had such a kindred feeling for the stories, it was as if they had been written for me. As soon as I learned to read I immersed myself in books about ghosts. The books came to me by chance, at random: from the bookcase at home, the shelves of some friend, or a reading list handed out by the teacher at school. I remember the elderly phantom in The Canterville Ghost. Murderer of his wife, lord and master of the house he has inhabited for centuries, he battles the modern ways of the Otis family, who scoff at him, show no fear, and use detergent to wipe away the terrible bloodstains from the killing of Lady Eleanor. And I remember Ichabod Crane, riding at night in the town of Sleepy Hollow, fleeing the headless horseman who seeks to kill him. And the ghost of Catherine in Wuthering Heights,
calling through the fog to her beloved Heathcliff. And the young brother and sister haunted by spirits in The Turn of the Screw. And Ana María, in The Shrouded Woman, reflecting back on her life from the coffin at her own wake. I remember dreaming of the sinister House of Usher and its furniture bolted to the floor, and the “nevermore” of the raven that appeared at midnight, evoking the ghost of beloved Lenore.
That’s how I imagine the man who tortured people: as one of the characters in those books I read as a girl. A man beset by ghosts, by the smell of death. Fleeing from the horseman trying to behead him or from the raven perched on his shoulder, whispering daily in his ear: nevermore.
Now he’s on a southbound bus to Bariloche. He’s surrounded by Mapuche peasants, fellow travelers. In the pocket of his jacket he has his new ID and passport, ready to be used for the first time when he crosses the Andes into Argentina. Behind him or in front of him, not especially close by, is another lawyer from the Vicariate. The man who tortured people has never met him, but he knows who he is because they’re the only two passengers on the bus who aren’t Mapuche. They’ve exchanged glances from their seats, but they haven’t spoken to each other. The lawyer is traveling to protect him. If any problem arises during the border crossing, if the international police stop him, if the fake passport is spotted, if somehow the air force or the security services discover his whereabouts and the operation to get him out of the country, the lawyer will have to step in and do what he can to keep things on track. But there isn’t much he can do, and both of them know it. If the intelligence agents get wind of his departure, they’ll almost certainly be in serious trouble.
The Twilight Zone Page 11