The Twilight Zone

by Nona Fernández

  And at night I dream of rats.

  ESCAPE ZONE

  I remember her at the back of the classroom, sitting at one of those wooden desks in the last row. The science teacher is taking attendance, ready to tell us about Major Yuri Gagarin. Or maybe it isn’t him, maybe it’s the Spanish teacher, who has us reading Charles Dickens. Or the math teacher, or the art teacher, or any of the other teachers, reading our last names from the class roster as we listen and call out in reply. Elgueta, here. Fernández, here. And she always comes after me on the list. González, here. Her roster number was fifteen and her full name could be read embroidered in red thread on the bib of her checkered smock: Estrella González Jepsen.

  Those were days of numbers and last names. That’s essentially what we were, a last name and a number on a long list of children. That long list was added to another long list, which in turn was added to yet another long list, and all those lists together were the classes that lined up early every Monday morning in the courtyard to start the week with a civic ceremony. Somebody stood up front and gave a short speech based on what the week held in store: National Police Day, Naval Victories Day, Battle of Maipú Day, Disaster of Rancagua Day, or any other heroic deed that fit the bill, and then the national anthem played over the speakers as the flag was raised. Everybody sang the anthem, the verse with the line “Your names, brave soldiers, who have been Chile’s mainstay / they are engraved on our breasts” (laughter among the rows of the littlest kids) “and our children will know them too.”

  I suppose that’s who we were: our children.

  My school was a strange one, part public and part private. It started as a private school for young ladies in 1914, where the then-distinguished residents of Barrio Matta, in the heart of Santiago, sent their daughters to study with the nuns. The school had a big yard with a statue of the Virgen del Carmen in a grotto. Behind the Virgen, a long fence ran across the whole yard. On the other side of the fence was a public school attended by the not-so-distinguished residents of the neighborhood. These less well-to-do neighbors around the intersection of Nataniel Cox and Victoria sent growing numbers of children to the public school, and, across the fence, the stuck-up young ladies prayed to the Virgen, who was completely unaware that there were other children behind her back.

  It was a time of fences, and virgins too.

  But in the eighties everything changed. The Ministry of Education came up with the idea of decentralizing oversight of private and public schools, leaving it to the municipalities. On top of issuing business licenses and traffic permits, on top of worrying about garbage trucks, maintenance and decoration of public plazas, repair of potholes, regulation of street markets and a thousand other things, municipalities were charged with a new responsibility: education. A state subsidy was allocated, to be administered by the municipalities. No distinction was made between private and public education, thus creating two types of subsidized institutions: municipal schools, run by the district where each was located, and subsidized private schools, run by private entities. Each school was allotted a certain amount of money per student to aid in their education. So my school took down the fence in the courtyard, the students were mixed, and the school became a subsidized private institution. There was no divide anymore. We were all equal in the eyes of the state, and each of us would bring in a small sum to cover the cost of our education. It had been a while since the neighborhood stopped being distinguished, and there were no wealthy neighbors anymore who could pay the registration fee and tuition, so it made sense to accept this new form of assistance. As a result, classes grew to almost forty-five students and we ourselves didn’t know everyone in the room. A sea of children, all in uniform, we clung to our numbers and our last names in order not to be shipwrecked.

  I don’t know whether González arrived before or after this metamorphosis. Hard to remember all the faces, all the names. There’s a photograph I’ve kept, proof of her presence back then. In it, we must be about ten, and we’re standing side by side, with the whole class. González is dressed as a ship’s mate, same as me. We’re wearing little white sailor hats that say Chilean Navy and we have mustaches that were painted on with burnt cork. We look alike, all forty-five of us, in blue uniforms with sailor hats and charcoal mustaches. We’re on a stage decorated with colored paper to look like a big ship, and in the middle of our group, Muñoz, black cork beard and sword in hand, gives a heroic speech. “Gentlemen, we are outmatched,” says our captain and we gaze at him with patriotic eyes. “But be brave and take heart. Our flag has never fallen in the face of the enemy and I hope that this day will be no different. While I live, the flag will fly, and if I die, my officers know their duty. Long live Chile, damn it,” and Muñoz sets out to board the enemy ship. Every year, on the twenty-first of May, we put on this performance. Like déjà vu, it’s up to us to die yet again on the enemy deck for our nation and our honor. Like last year, and the year before, and the year before that.

  Let me interrupt my own reverie.

  I should make a connection here to the man who tortured people. Follow the rule that I set for myself and uncover the strange, twisted link between him and González, a link close or far in a long, heavy chain like the kind dragged by Dickens’s ghosts or prisoners at a secret jail. But I won’t. I’ll focus on other parts of the screen. I’ll extend the borders of the twilight zone and I’ll go right on with this story of little soldiers and big charcoal mustaches of burnt cork.

  González was quiet. She didn’t talk much, or if she did I don’t remember. She sat at the back of the classroom, half-hidden, writing letters on graph paper from her math notebook, passing them later to my friend Maldonado. They wrote to each other and told each other secret, important things in those letters. Like about González’s father’s accident. Her father was an officer and a gentleman in the service of our nation. No one knew him very well; he never came to school festivals, weekly Mass, or parent meetings, but a few people had gotten a glimpse of him and they said he was a big man with gray hair, quiet like González. The accident was at work. Another officer happened to pick up a grenade, and somehow the pin got pulled. To save the officer’s life, González’s father grabbed the grenade with his left hand, poor little hand, and tried to throw it far away, and before he could, the grenade went off. After that, instead of a poor little left hand, González’s father had a wooden hand in a black glove.

  It was a time of grenades and poor little left hands, too.

  The years went slowly by. Time dragged, with endless evenings of TV watching, of Cine en su casa, Sábado gigante, Lost in Space, The Twilight Zone, and of Atari, gangs of us playing Space Invaders. The green glow-in-the-dark bullets of the earth-lings’ cannons scudded up the screen until they hit an alien. The little Martians descended in blocks, in perfect formation, shooting their projectiles, waving their octopus or squid tentacles, but they always ended up exploding, like González’s father’s left hand. Ten points for each Martian in the first row, twenty for the ones in the second row, and forty for the ones in the back row. And when the last one died, when the screen was blank, another alien army appeared from the sky, ready to keep fighting. They gave up one life to combat, then another, and another, in a cycle of endless slaughter. Projectiles flew back and forth, as if in the kind of heroic act that we celebrated at our school assemblies and flag-raisings.

  It was a time of projectiles and slaughter, too.

  At some point we stopped going to the Monday assemblies. We stayed in the classroom, listening from the distance to what was happening in the yard. When the monitor made us attend, we lined up with everybody else but we didn’t sing along to the verse beginning “Your names, brave soldiers.” Instead we shouted the line “Be either the tomb of the free or a refuge from oppression.” That was how we grew up, yelling the word free and the word oppression at the top of our lungs every Monday morning, as we organized the first meetings of our student union and got up the courage to walk out the front door of the school
, heading into the street in a pack as if charging aboard an enemy ship.

  It was a time of marches and protests. It was a time of Cauce magazine getting passed from one person to another. It was a time of shocking headlines. A time of attacks, kidnappings, strikes, crimes, scams, lawsuits, indictments. A time of ghosts, too. Of mustached monsters giving testimony in powder blue pull-out sections under the title I TORTURED PEOPLE. A time of TV specials on torture. A time of dark rooms, of women locked up with rats. Whole nights spent dreaming of those dark rooms and those rats. A time of spray-painted graffiti on walls, and leaflets we cranked out on a mimeograph machine and distributed in the streets. A time of banners, assemblies, petitions, meetings of the Secondary Students Federation at a warehouse on Calle Serrano. A time of our first militant actions, first sit-ins, first detentions. A time of lists. Long lists that we searched for the whereabouts of friends who’d been arrested. A time of heavy down parkas to protect us from the rifle butts and boots of the national police. A time of lemons, salt, the smell of tear gas, jets of water mixed with gas that not only soaked you and knocked you down, but also left you with a stink of rot that lingered for days. A time of leaders. I remember one of them standing on a fountain in the middle of the Alameda declaiming and giving instructions in case the cops came to scatter us with blows and shots in the air, as if we were little Martians from Space Invaders. We were kids. Not even fifteen. An army of kiddie aliens with painted-on charcoal mustaches, Lilliputians taking over the streets and the schools, shouting in shrill voices, clamoring, demanding the right to an independent student union, calling for school fees to be lowered, for our detained friends to be released, for the tyrant to be removed, for democracy to return, for the world to be more reasonable, for the future to arrive with no dark rooms, no screaming, no rats.

  González didn’t take part in our new guerrilla activities and intelligence work. I suppose she sat in the classroom writing those graph paper letters to Maldonado and telling her about things, like the trip she took with her father to Germany. González’s father never quite recovered from the accident with the pin and the grenade, so the armed forces sent him to Germany for surgery on his left hand, which wasn’t there anymore, to fix his stump. González went with him and saw the Berlin Wall, which divided the good guys from the bad guys and looked so much like the fence across our school yard behind the Virgen del Carmen. Of course, González stayed on the good guys’ side, because the other side was dangerous and she wasn’t allowed to go there. But after she got back from her trip, it was as if she’d crossed over to that other side, the bad guys’ side, and she started to come to school in a red Chevy Chevette, which was her father’s, but was driven by Uncle Claudio, a kind of driver or bodyguard who looked out for her now. Uncle Claudio waited for her at the entrance to school, sitting in the red Chevy, smoking a cigarette, peering through his dark glasses, his mustache so much like the science teacher’s, so much like the one the man who tortured people wore. When the bell rang at the end of the day, González appeared at the entrance, got in the car, and Uncle Claudio drove her home.

  Some kids sat in the red Chevy and got to know Uncle Claudio. They said he was nice, he liked to kid around, and he’d even share his cigarettes with you. I once went for a drive around Parque O’Higgins with Uncle Claudio. González asked me to come, and Maldonado and I sat in the back seat with her. We got as far as El Pueblito and then we drove around the park for a long time. The Chevy was so nice and comfortable. Its blue leatherette seats were soft and shiny, and it smelled like mint from a little velvet sachet hanging on the turn signal. No one offered me cigarettes, but I have to say that it was a fun ride and Uncle Claudio, who watched us in the rearview mirror, was very polite and attentive, and he even opened the door for us when we got out of the car. González said that Uncle Claudio was a kind of assistant to her dad, they worked together, and since the country was such a mess right now, he kept an eye on her and drove her around, because her poor dad with his wooden left hand worked a lot and her mom had a little baby to nurse. So Uncle Claudio, with his tinted lenses and red Chevy, became part of the landscape of those years.

  It was a time of Chevrolets and mustached men and men in dark glasses, too.

  One March morning in 1985, we heard a disturbing report on the radio. The announcer described what he called a gruesome discovery. Three bodies had turned up with their throats slashed—degollados—on a bleak stretch of the road to Pudahuel Airport. Police and investigators were on their way to the scene, and so was the press. Reporters, photographers, TV cameras. The announcer spoke of surprise. Shock and surprise, as he put it. Everything was strange and puzzling, apparently, but what caught our attention was the word degollados because we didn’t quite understand what it meant. I remember my mother explaining it to me in detail and the word turning up everywhere. We spotted it in newspaper headlines. We heard it on the radio, on TV, in conversations among parents, neighbors, teachers. The three bodies were identified at the Institute of Legal Medicine as José Manuel Parada, Manuel Guerrero, and Santiago Nattino. All three were Communist Party members, kidnapped a few days before. Parada and Guerrero were talking outside the entrance of a school like ours when they were seized. One was a dean and the other was a parent. Meters away were many students in their classrooms, Lilliputians like us, aliens with cork mustaches, all sitting at their desks, listening to the teacher of the moment, never imagining what was happening outside. A group of national police agents stopped traffic on the street, a helicopter hovered over the rooftops keeping watch, and a couple of cars, maybe Chevrolets with no license plates, parked at the entrance to the school. A group of men with mustaches and dark glasses got out and wrestled Parada and Guerrero into the car, just as they had taken José Weibel, Comrade Yuri, Contreras Maluje, the Flores brothers, and an endless list of other names. Some kids in gym class saw it all happening. That was the last anyone heard of Parada and Guerrero until they turned up with their throats slashed on the road to Pudahuel Airport.

  It was a time of maimed, burnt, slashed, and bullet-ridden bodies, too.

  The exact moment isn’t clear to me, but I know that coffins and funerals and wreaths were suddenly everywhere, and there was no escaping them. Maybe it had always been that way and we were only just realizing it. Maybe we were distracted by all that history homework, all those assemblies, all those enactments of battles against the Peruvians. I remember attending the wake of one of the men whose throats were slashed. I remember a coffin, some place I’m not sure how I got to. There were several of us, all dressed in our uniforms. There were lots of flowers and candles and people standing in silence. At some point the son of one of the dead men appeared, a kid just like us, in his uniform, with his school crest, and he stood next to the coffin for a long time. Maybe he said something. I can’t remember anymore, but what I know for sure is that he didn’t cry. He didn’t cry the whole time he was standing next to his father in that coffin. Then, another day, I remember a massive march toward the General Cemetery. Many voices shouting and chanting slogans, making demands, praying for the dead. The crowd tossing flower petals at the hearses, thousands of petals covering everything like a shower of flyers scattered in the street. The crowd advancing with flags and banners. We filled avenues, crossed bridges, walked on endlessly. But I don’t know anymore whose funeral I’m remembering. It might be the Vergara brothers from Villa Francia, or the boy burned to death by a military patrol, or the priest shot in the settlement of La Victoria, or the boy riddled with bullets on Calle Bulnes, or the kidnapped reporter, or the group assassinated on the Feast of Corpus Christi, or one of the others, any of the others. Time isn’t straightforward, it mixes everything up, shuffles the dead, merges them, separates them out again, advances backward, retreats in reverse, spins like a merry-go-round, like a tiny wheel in a laboratory cage, and traps us in funerals and marches and detentions, leaving us with no assurance of continuity or escape.

  Days after we heard the word degollados, Gon
zález stopped coming to class. We thought she was sick, but her absence stretched on for too long. Our teachers didn’t tell us anything, and Maldonado had no idea what was happening either. González’s phone didn’t ring, her house was closed up, there was no way to get in touch with her. One day González was there, and the next she was gone, vanished from our lives. Without realizing it, we started getting used to the sight of her empty desk at the back of the classroom. When attendance was taken, we repeated her absence like a mantra. Elgueta, here. Fernández, here, González, absent. There were no more graph paper letters, no more Uncle Claudio, no more red Chevy, no more González. Eventually we were told that she had changed schools, she was at a German school, she had moved, her whole family was gone.

  It was a time of disappearances and absences, too.

  Long afterward, in 1994, when we were no longer at the school, when our uniforms no longer fit us and had been put away in some closet, the Chilean justice system delivered its first ruling on the kidnapping and murder of Communist Party members José Manuel Parada, Manuel Guerrero, and Santiago Nattino. The officers who committed the crime were sentenced to life in prison. On the same television screen where we used to play Space Invaders, we now saw the national police agents responsible for the murders. Six officers were involved. They appeared in plain sight. Their faces scrolled across the screen one after the other.

  Though we had hardly known him, it wasn’t hard to recognize him. His face, ten years older, told us nothing, but that poor little wooden hand in a black glove did. Next to him was Uncle Claudio of the red Chevy. El Pegaso, they called him. He said that he was following orders of his superior, Don Guillermo González Betancourt. He stated that he had stabbed one of the three men as his superior watched from the car, a red Chevette.