All of us saw him on the television screen. In some strange way we tuned in to the same image at the same time.
Sometimes I think about that drive I took with Maldonado and González to Parque O’Higgins. I think about the red Chevy. The blue leatherette seat, so soft and shiny. I imagine one of the three men sitting there, living the last minutes of his life on the road to Pudahuel Airport. I’ve tried to find information about which of the three rode in the Chevy, whether they were driven together or separately, whether they were in the back seat where I sat, or whether they were transported in the trunk, hidden and bound as I know they must have been, but as soon as I find it I forget again.
A while after that televised vision, one October morning in 1991, national police lieutenant Félix Sazo Sepúlveda enters the Crowne Plaza Hotel in the center of Santiago. The lieutenant rapidly approaches the Avis Rent-a-Car counter, behind which stands twenty-one-year-old Estrella González Jepsen, mother of his young son. Estrella is attending a customer when Lieutenant Sazo aims his service revolver at her. They’ve been separated for some time. The lieutenant has struggled to accept the fact of their separation. That’s why he’s been following her, harassing her over the phone, threatening her the way you’d threaten an enemy, an alien, a Communist Party member. Estrella, he shouts. Our classmate scarcely has time to look at him before she’s struck by two bullets in the chest, one in the head, and a fourth in the back.
Like a little Martian from Space Invaders she flies apart into colored lights.
Estrella collapses in the fetal position, dying instantly. Police lieutenant Félix Sazo immediately shoots himself twice in the head with his smoking service revolver and falls to the ground.
On the same screen where we once watched Lost in Space, Movie Nights, Sábado gigante, and The Twilight Zone, our classmate turned up in the crime news.
And so this story comes to an end, with no mention of the man who tortured people, and with the image of Estrella González Jepsen dead at the hands of a national police officer. I imagine her in her school uniform, like the last time I saw her, in 1985. That’s not how she looked when she died, of course, but it’s how I want to imagine her. Beside her is the son of one of the degollados, just as I remember him at that wake, in his uniform, standing next to his father’s coffin, not crying. The two of them in the same scene, where my mind wants to put them. Side by side, maybe looking at each other. Maybe not. They’re the children. That’s what they are.
We’re all around them. Lying on the floor, in our uniforms too, but old now, gray-haired, balding, a few pounds heavier, careworn, fallen as in our enactments of the twenty-first of May on the deck of the enemy ship. Veterans of an old war. Little lead soldiers splashing in a fake sea of colored paper. The vast dark sea of the twilight zone.
I imagine him in a small apartment in a French town. Maybe not an apartment, a cabin. A simple place, in a village near the Swiss border. A sparsely populated area where the French police, who guard him, can monitor the comings and goings of any stranger. He’s been here for just a few weeks. He’s alone, he doesn’t know a soul, and the neighbors speak an indecipherable language. He can’t read the newspapers, can’t understand what the news announcers or the bus driver or the grocer are saying. He has just started getting used to the coins, and though the village is small, he still loses his way on its streets. Like Colonel Cook from that old episode of The Twilight Zone, the man who tortured people has survived his voyage through space, but his odyssey through loneliness and fear is just beginning. He’s an earthling lost on a strange planet. After taking the southern route out of Chile, he traveled on to Buenos Aires, and in Buenos Aires he got on a plane to Paris. He was there for a while, until Sécurité transferred him to this place that is now his. An unknown land, ruled by dead and untranslatable time.
It’s hard for me to imagine him there.
Everything goes out of focus after he leaves Chile.
The words of the testimony he gave to the reporter and the lawyer are still here, doing their work, but the man who tortured people, as he once was, is beginning to fade. His mustache, the shape of his face, all of him, grows hazy, leached of color like those seventies snapshots from my childhood. I’m left with scraps, stray features from the photograph on the cover of Cauce magazine, which I pull up again now on my computer screen.
My face is reflected in the glass, my face merges with his.
I see myself behind him or maybe in front of him.
I look like a ghost in the picture.
A shadow lurking, a spy watching him though he doesn’t know it.
That’s what I am in part, I think: a spy watching him though he doesn’t know it.
With some effort I imagine him eating breakfast one morning in his refuge. It’s March 1985 and a few rays of winter sunshine come in through a small window. He butters a croissant at the café and goes through the motions of listening to the radio though he doesn’t understand much, hardly anything at all. A news report is beginning. The man who tortured people knows this because he recognizes the theme music by now. The words are just sounds in the strange voice’s unintelligible singsong. Suddenly he hears news from Chile being announced. He understands this perfectly well. Rapport du Chili. The man turns up the volume, as if by doing so he’ll activate some instantaneous translation. He leans close to the speaker, and amid endless incomprehensible sentences he hears them foolishly repeating the word égorgés. Égorgés, says the announcer. Égorgés. And from listening to it over and over it stops being a sound and acquires character and weight. Égorgés, he thinks to himself and he wonders what it means, just as we wondered when we heard the Spanish word for the first time, spoken in a Chilean announcer’s voice, some hundreds of kilometers away. Égorgés, hears the man who tortured people, in that distant village where he’s taken refuge, while in Chile, at the same time or moments before, the same word is being spoken on countless radios in Spanish: degollados.
The old raven shrieks in that window in France.
The man knows what it means.
It’s March 29, 2016, and my friend Maldonado and I are walking down the street to a commemoration. It’s the anniversary of the kidnapping of José Manuel Parada and Manuel Guerrero from the entrance of the Colegio Latinoamericano. In front of what used to be the school and is now the entrance to a modern apartment building, a memorial has been built in their name. The memorial also honors Santiago Nattino, who was kidnapped a day earlier from a different spot and was murdered along with his comrades.
As we walk, we think about González and the little letters she wrote to Maldonado when we were girls. We also think about the ride we took in González’s red Chevy and about our random secret connection through her to the men we’ll pay tribute to today. We walk on, remembering the intense times we were fated to grow up in, and as we do, a Billy Joel song gets stuck in my head. It’s a song that M put on this afternoon when we were washing the dishes, something we kept singing and translating obsessively out of sheer joy. This happens to me sometimes. There are songs I can’t shake, that stick around for days or even weeks in my unconscious. This is one of them. It’s called “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” and it runs through a list of famous people in history, music, film, sports. Books are mentioned in it, too, and movies, TV series, events, anything that left its mark on the world from the day Joel was born to the moment he wrote the song in the late eighties. He rattles them all off in chronological order without explanation, but following along you get a picture of the world he grew up in.
Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnnie Ray
South Pacific, Walter Winchell, Joe DiMaggio
Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Studebaker, television
North Korea, South Korea, Marilyn Monroe
Rosenbergs, H-bomb, Sugar Ray, Panmunjom
Brando, “The King and I” and “The Catcher in the Rye”
So I go on talking to Maldonado and humming the chorus over and over without meaning to, as if
I’m still in the kitchen washing dishes with M.
We didn’t start the fire, no we didn’t light it, but we tried to fight it.
On a different March 29, in a scene I’ve already imagined, the man who tortured people and his team kidnapped José Weibel from the bus he was riding with his family. The family was on its way to the very school that used to stand here, to drop off the children, like they did every morning. From the entrance to that school on another March 29, eleven years later, Guerrero and Parada would be taken to the same detention center where José was interrogated and tortured. Maybe by the very same agents. Maybe not. But they were part of the same group, the group of the man who tortured people.
Lots of people have arrived for the commemoration. The street has been closed off, a stage erected, and chairs set up, though too few for everyone who has come. Maldonado and I find a spot off to one side of the stage and try to catch up with the ceremony, which has already begun. A presenter explains how the memorial was planned, speaks about how some in the neighborhood were opposed to it, and addresses the objections of municipal officials. As we listen, I see one of José Weibel’s children in the distance. I recognize him because he’s a well-known reporter, an investigative journalist. Around this time, he’s just published a book exposing the misappropriation of public funds by the Chilean army under democracy. Scandalous sums disappearing as if by magic. Weibel Junior is sitting up front, with his wife and children. He must be about my age, or a little older. He’s speaking animatedly with Manuel Guerrero’s son. They’re laughing in the way that good friends do. A strange thread of coincidences link their lives to this day and this corner.
Guerrero Senior must have recognized the place he was brought to on March 29, 1985. From the school, he and Parada were transported to a facility called La Firma, where Weibel Senior also ended up on a different March 29, in 1976. Guerrero Senior had been there around the same time, and survived. The man who tortured people says that he took part in that earlier detention as well. The man who tortured people says that Manuel Guerrero was picked up in Departamental and then taken to La Firma. With a feeling of déjà vu, Guerrero must have remembered that previous detention and his stay at La Firma in 1976. Having been there before in the hands of the same people, he may have thought he’d be better at surviving it this time. Having gotten out once, maybe he thought he could get out again. But the twilight zone stopwatch is remorseless. No matter the year or the day, its tiny hands keep time locked up inside it, revolving around itself, advancing backward, retreating forward, inevitably ending up in the same spot, that place beyond rescue distance where José Weibel landed, and then Guerrero, Parada, and Nattino, eleven years later. The strange thread of coincidences running through these two stories of kidnappings, children, parents, and death runs through everything from that time, I believe, and it stitches us here, on this street corner where we’re taking part in a commemoration.
A group of children is singing on stage. They’re out of tune, and they start over. In the crowd across the street, I see my friend X and her little girl L. I also spot F and his mother, who got chairs and are now listening in comfort, while at the back I think I see little S on the shoulders of her father, N. Circling the stage with their cameras, my documentarian friends are filming, working on a movie about Guerrero Junior. There are many familiar faces on this corner. I could name H, R, C, E, a whole alphabet, the full roster of a class, meeting here tonight. Several I don’t even known by name, but I recognize them from other ceremonies like this, other vigils, old marches, their faces stuck in my faulty memory just like this dumb song I can’t get out of my head.
We didn’t start the fire, no we didn’t light it, but we tried to fight it.
The man who tortured people says he doesn’t regret having talked. The man who tortured people says he doesn’t regret turning up at the reporter’s office that August morning so long ago. Since then, his life hasn’t been easy. Hidden away in his French refuge, he’s been besieged by rats and ravens. I know that in France he’s met with many people. I know Sécurité has transported him to Paris each time anyone requested his testimony. He has arranged meeting times, trips, secret appointments. I know that he has spotted enemies, I know that more than once he’s had to flee, victim of paranoia or real persecution. I know that he has continued to identify photographs. I know he’s met with lawyers, judges, victims’ family members. He even returned to Chile to testify in court not long ago. Which means that for thirty years, his dedication to bearing witness has been unwavering. Despite the fear, the paranoia, and the distance, he’d do the same thing all over again, he says. If time went mad the way it did back then and stopped and turned backward, putting him in the same situation, he’d do it again.
But there is one thing that troubles his conscience about the testimony he gave, he says. Something he’d try to change or handle more carefully to prevent collateral damage. He’d try to keep the thread on which he strung his words from getting tangled up in the names of Parada, Guerrero, and Nattino.
Parada’s daughter and Guerrero’s son take the stage. She looks a lot like her father; he looks like his. Both of them thank the memorial project on behalf of their families. The organizers are a collective of young people who probably weren’t even born when it all happened. Guerrero Junior reads a letter that his own daughter sent from Europe, where she’s in school. It’s a message for everyone, because she doesn’t want to be absent despite the distance. She talks about the legacy that ties her to this corner and about the challenge of keeping memory alive. As Guerrero Junior reads the letter, I think that this memorial and this whole ceremony are for her. Not for her grandfather and his friends, not for her parents, not for us, but for her and for the children in the choir. For Weibel Junior’s children. For L, X’s little girl. For S who is watching it all from N’s shoulders. For my own son, who isn’t with me today, tired of tagging along to memorials like this one.
While the man who tortured people was speaking with the reporter, the reporter knew the information was extremely delicate. Which is why she decided to confirm every tiny detail of his testimony before it was published. So she contacted her friend José Manuel Parada, fellow Communist Party member and manager of the Vicariate of Solidarity’s Department of Documentation and Archives. He was the best person to help her analyze the interview material because he knew more than almost anybody about the apparatus of repression. Every day, José Manuel Parada received accounts of kidnapping, torture, disappearance, and other abuses. He suggested bringing in Manuel Guerrero, whom he trusted implicitly and who could triangulate the interview information with his own experience of being detained by the team of the man who tortured people. Who better to help than someone who had been there and survived?
Sunk in that dark zone, the three analyzed the long hours of recorded testimony. They spent months navigating the weighty, burdened words of the man who tortured people. Each document was strung on a sticky thread that clung to their bodies, entangling them. Everything that this messenger from the far side of the mirror had brought over from the troubling place he inhabited seemed to be entirely true. The reporter, Parada, and Guerrero went about connecting the dots, recognizing beloved names on the list of the dead, linking the crimes described to other crimes, using the material to reconstruct scenes of detention, torture, execution, guessing at the identity of the agents behind each nickname, making the pieces fit, untangling a skein that even now is hard to follow.
Once the information had been checked, the reporter, along with Guerrero and Parada, decided that the interview would be offered to the Washington Post, in the United States, and later delivered in full to the Chilean courts. This had to wait until the man who tortured people had left the country and was safe, that was the agreement. Until then, his words transcribed from the dark zone would keep all of them—their team, the lawyer, the man who tortured people—dangling from a single thread.
We’ve been here for almost an hour and the presenter is beg
inning to draw things to a close. Family members, officials, and a few singers have all had their turn on stage. The inauguration ceremony is coming to an end, but an invitation is extended after the speeches and words of affection, the same invitation that is extended every March 29: the moment has come to light the candles. Now it’s clearer where to do it; instead of a long line of untidy little flames speckling the street with their melted wax, there will be an organized blaze around the memorial. Whether authorized or unauthorized, outside an apartment building or at the entrance to a small school, a small gathering or a huge group like this one: every March 29, this corner is the same again.
One day a priest turned up at the reporter’s office. I imagine him in a long cassock, sitting across the desk, speaking slowly, with the kind of fixed smile on his face often seen on men of the cloth. The priest said that he had come on behalf of the family of the man who tortured people. The priest said that the man’s family members knew he had talked to her, and that he hadn’t been home since. Given the circumstances, he was asking for a little compassion for the wife and children of the man who tortured people. Given the circumstances, our priest was requesting a clue to his whereabouts.
The reporter—I know this, I’m not imagining it—had no idea where the man who tortured people was. For her own safety, she knew nothing about anything that happened to him before he left the country. The meeting in the Plaza Santa Ana, the drive in the Renault van past the detention centers, his hiding place on church property, his attempts to acquire a passport, his southern route out of the country to Argentina, all of the scenes I’ve been trying to imagine: none of it was information to which the reporter had access.
The Twilight Zone Page 14