The Twilight Zone
Page 16
Vigils, protests, marches.
Meetings of the student movement Pro Feses
in a warehouse on Calle Serrano.
Seventy-seven actors receive death threats.
Superman visits Chile in support of his fellow thespians.
We go to see him at the Matucana Warehouse.
The mother of a classmate is kidnapped.
Days later she turns up with her nipples sliced
by a razor blade.
In France, the man who tortured people keeps speaking out
from his hiding place.
Family members of the disappeared
light more and more candles in front of the cathedral.
The Coalition of Parties for NO is created.
The poet Enrique Lihn dies.
Pinochet is declared candidate for president.
The NO campaign begins.
The YES campaign begins.
Marches, rallies, water cannons, detentions.
Plebiscite in Chile.
Vote YES for the regime to stand.
Vote NO for the regime to end.
NO wins.
Family members of the disappeared
light candles in front of the cathedral.
I enroll
at the Universidad Católica’s Theater School.
Rod Stewart sings at the National Stadium.
Cóndor Rojas cuts his own forehead
at the Maracanã Stadium.
MIR leader Jécar Neghme
is shot and killed on Calle Bulnes.
The Berlin Wall falls.
Back to the Future II is released.
Marty McFly breaks the barriers of time
and space and travels to the year 2015 to save his children.
Family members of the disappeared
light candles in front of the cathedral.
Presidential elections.
Patricio Aylwin Azócar, candidate of the Coalition of Parties for Democracy, wins.
Celebration of democracy at the National Stadium.
A group of us get tickets and go together.
Family members of the disappeared
light candles in front of the cathedral.
They’re sure that now they’ll learn
the whereabouts of their family members.
Congress is back in session.
David Bowie concert at the National Stadium.
I meet the Thin White Duke and want to be like him.
Amnesty International organizes two concerts.
I see Sinéad O’Connor live
and want to be like her too.
Months later I decide to shave my head.
The remains of Salvador Allende
are moved to the General Cemetery
with state honors.
Spectacular rescue
of Marco Ariel Antonioletti of the Lautarista Youth Movement
from Sótero del Río Hospital.
Hours later he is shot in the forehead and killed
by PDI assault troops
at the house of Coalitionist Juan Carvajal.
Army placed on alert in response to investigation
of the pinocheques, illegal checks paid out to Pinochet’s son.
Three thousand five hundred and fifty counts
of human rights violations
are documented in the Rettig Report.
President Patricio Aylwin
asks the forgiveness of victims’ families
for the abuses.
He announces that justice will be done
to the extent possible.
Family members of the disappeared
light candles in front of the cathedral.
They’re still waiting for word
about the whereabouts of their family members.
Back to the Future III is released.
Marty McFly breaks the barriers of time and space
and travels to the past to try to correct the future.
The Patriotic Front assassinates Jaime Guzmán
at the Eastern Campus gate
of the Universidad Católica.
We see it all from the bus stop.
Fiestas Spandex at the Esmeralda Theater.
The Patriotic Front kidnaps Cristián Edwards,
son of the owner of El Mercurio.
Two Patriotic Front members are gunned down
when they leave the house where they’re holding a family hostage.
It all happens on the corner by my school.
Erich Honecker and his wife Margot
arrive requesting asylum.
Sor Teresa de Los Andes is canonized.
Boinazo near La Moneda:
army troops muster in combat uniform
protesting the opening of the pinocheques case again.
Family members of the disappeared
light candles in front of the cathedral.
There are no more water cannons, but still no answers.
Three Lautaristas are killed
on the bus on which they escaped after an attack.
The police kill three passengers and wound twelve.
Eduardo Frei Jr. wins the presidential elections.
Kurt Cobain commits suicide in Seattle.
The Memorial of Disappeared and Executed Persons is inaugurated.
Family members of the disappeared
light candles in front of the cathedral.
Rolling Stones in concert at the National Stadium.
M and I take our backpacks
and set off around the world.
Writer José Donoso dies at seventy-one.
Spectacular escape of four members
of the Patriotic Front
from the high-security prison.
A helicopter carries them away through the skies
dangling in a basket.
Asian financial crisis. Chile survives because we are
the jaguars of South America.
More malls, more billboards,
more credit cards.
More options to buy everything on the installment plan.
Family members of the disappeared
light candles in front of the cathedral.
Pinochet cedes command of the army
and becomes a senator for life in the National Congress.
The world laughs at Chilean democracy.
The Communist Party
files the first lawsuit against Pinochet.
El Chino Ríos becomes the top-ranked tennis player in the world.
Pinochet is arrested in London.
The Chilean government intervenes on his behalf,
asking for his release.
The world laughs at Chilean democracy.
Family members of the disappeared
light candles in front of the cathedral.
Pinochet appears before a British court.
We follow it all via artists’ sketches
because no media are allowed in the English courts.
My grandmother dies just before her ninetieth birthday.
Cardinal Silva Henríquez, creator of the Vicariate of Solidarity, dies.
Jack Straw decides to release Pinochet
on grounds of ill health.
Pinochet returns to Chile in a Chilean air force plane.
He rises from his wheelchair,
bursting with health,
to salute the head of the army, who is there to greet him.
The world laughs at Chilean democracy.
Family members of the disappeared
light candles in front of the cathedral.
Ricardo Lagos takes office as president of the republic.
A military-civilian forum, Mesa de Diálogo, is established.
The fate of two hundred of the disappeared is reported on national television.
Family members of the disappeared
light candles in front of the cathedral.
Names are missing, they say.
Wh
ereabouts are missing.
They keep asking: Where are they?
Judge Juan Guzmán Tapia
requests the impeachment of Pinochet
in order to strip him of his immunity as senator for life
and make him face some of the eighty-odd lawsuits filed against him.
M and I become the parents of a boy called D.
Attack on the Twin Towers.
D eats his first baby cereal
as we watch the towers fall on TV.
The National Commission on Political Prisoners
and Torture delivers the Valech Report
with the testimony of more than thirty-five thousand
Chileans who were detained and subjected to torture.
Family members of the disappeared
light candles in front of the cathedral.
Still asking.
Still waiting.
D takes his first steps and starts nursery school.
Roberto Bolaño dies in Vall d’Hebrón Hospital in Barcelona.
The Supreme Court upholds Pinochet’s impeachment.
Former DINA director Manuel Contreras is arrested.
His daughter cries and writhes on the ground.
Contreras resists arrest.
Family members
of the disappeared
light candles
in front of the cathedral.
Beginning of the Revolución Pingüina,
a student movement across Chile.
Sit-ins, marches, hunger strikes
demanding improvements
in public education.
Hunger strike by Mapuche activists held at Angol Prison
demanding communal property rights.
Militarization of Mapuche communities.
Application of antiterrorism laws
created by the Pinochet government.
Family
members
of
the
disappeared
light
candles
at
the
cathedral.
Surrounded by family and loved ones,
Augusto Pinochet dies at the army hospital
aged ninety-one.
He never served a sentence in Chile.
I hear the news and get into an accident on the highway.
The next day I visit my insurance company.
It’s next door to the Military School
where Pinochet is lying pompously in state.
Thousands of fanatics weep
and stand in line to bid the tyrant farewell.
The grandson of General Prats
patiently stands in line.
Hours later, he reaches the coffin and spits on it.
We didn’t start the fire, no we didn’t light it, but we tried to fight it.
I smell the candles burning on the corner. I recognize the smoke clinging to my skin, my hair, my faulty memory. Unsettling stink of burned tires, paraffin, barricades, hundreds of lit candles. All these years and it’s still impossible to shake it. Time stands still. Present, future, and past blur together in this ceremony, a parenthesis of smoke governed by the stopwatch from The Twilight Zone. I imagine there must be other children, like the children of José Weibel, Manuel Guerrero, José Manuel Parada, and Santiago Nattino, hidden among the candle flames. Maybe Yuri Gahona is here with his sister, Evelyn. Maybe they’re still playing with their father’s white bishop. Maybe Alexandra is here too: little Smurfette, Lucía Vergara’s daughter. Maybe she’s come with her own daughter and her daughter’s partner, because I know they’re the mothers of a little girl. Maybe Quila Leo’s children are here. Maybe Carol Flores’s children are here. Maybe Arturo Villavela’s children are here. Hugo Ratier’s children. Maybe Mario is here, the boy who lost the house in Janequeo that wasn’t his house and the family that wasn’t his family. The boy who was given asylum in Sweden and started a real family there. Maybe he’s back again with his real wife and children and they’re all here somewhere, joining in the festivities, breathing the sticky smoke from all these candles.
I look around for the little girl whose mother never answered her question. I try to find her, because I want to tell her yes, this is a birthday party, the way she imagined. We’ve been celebrating this strange day and lighting and lighting these damn candles for too long. For an endless, tedious moment of déjà vu, we play the parenthesis game and we’re always here in the fragile light of the little flames, our eyes red from the smoke. I search for the girl amid all these people I know because I want to tell her she’s right, this is a party, but a shitty party. We don’t deserve birthdays like this. We never deserved them. Not her, not me. Not Maldonado, not X and his little girl L, or F and his mother, or N and little S, or M, or D, or Alexandra, or Mario, or Yuri, or Evelyn, or anybody’s children, anybody’s grandchildren.
I want to tell her this, but I can’t find her.
She isn’t here anymore.
Maldonado takes my arm the way she used to when we were kids and we pretended to be old ladies. I lean on her and she leans on me and we inhale deeply, sucking in all the air and smoke that our worn-out lungs can hold, and when we’re about to burst, we whisper our wishes and blow as hard as we can. We blow with the force of someone spitting on a coffin, trying once and for all to extinguish the fire of all the candles on this shitty cake.
There’s one last scene that I want to write. It isn’t part of any imaginative exercise, but pure domestic reality. In this scene, water sloshes in the dishwasher as M and I scrub the day’s grime from the tile floor. M is talking about Frankenstein. He’s been rereading the book and now he remembers that at the end Mary Shelley’s monster goes to hide in the Arctic, far from the world, fleeing himself and the crimes he’s committed. He’s a monster, M says. He alone knows the horror of what he’s done, so he decides to disappear.
As I rinse the forks and spoons, I think it’s true, the monster is a monster. But there is a qualification: He didn’t choose to be what he is. He was part of a gruesome experiment. Doctor Frankenstein stitched a body out of corpses and brought to life a being haunted by its own smell of death.
M, scrubbing the dirty frying pan with steel wool, replies that this explains his actions, but it doesn’t absolve him of having been a monster. According to that logic, all monsters would be exonerated by their pasts.
I imagine the white landscape of the Arctic and a half-beast, half-human creature wandering the emptiness, condemned to loneliness and a smell he’ll never shed because it’s a part of him. The monster repented, I insist. That’s why he hides away in the Arctic. Doesn’t that mean something?
It might, says M. But that only makes him a repentant monster.
Dear Andrés,
in this new life of yours
that I find so hard to imagine,
maybe you don’t hide the way you used to.
Thirty years are enough
to learn how to blend in.
Probably by now you’re part of the landscape.
Probably your Chilean-accented French
doesn’t attract much attention anymore.
Probably this letter from me
written in your native language,
in short, curt sentences like yours,
will strike you as a message
in some indecipherable tongue.
I know your mustache is gray now.
I know you wear glasses.
I know your wife from back then is no longer your wife.
I know you’re in touch with your children and grandchildren.
I know you’ve had different jobs.
I know you drive a truck.
I know you’re sick, or you were.
I know that in the evenings you read and forage for mushrooms.
I know that Chile has faded somewhat in your mind,
but not your beach: Papudo.
Dear Andrés, Papudo is still a pretty beach.
Es
pecially now in winter
when only a few of us are strolling
its black sands.
In this life, which is the only one I have,
I’ve chosen this place to say goodbye.
Ahead of me a dog runs alone,
fleeing the waves.
It barks and startles a flock of gulls.
The sea is tossed by the wind.
It comes and goes, like the scenes I’ve tried to imagine.
I hear voices each time a wave breaks.
Cries for help trapped in glass bottles.
Hundreds of bottles.
Maybe more.
In the distance I think I see you smoking a cigarette.
You’re young, no mustache,
probably not in military service yet.
You must be a few years older than my son.
You’ve stopped for a moment and you’re staring at the horizon
as if you know that over there, across the sea,
a hiding place awaits you and becomes your home.
As you smoke you’re interrupted by someone’s intrusive stare.
It’s me, spying on you from the future.
You wave politely.
You smile, I think, and walk on along the shore.
You don’t know who I am.
You can’t imagine the message I bring
from Christmases future.
The air is cool here in Papudo.
I’ll eat clams and dip my feet in the icy sea.
But that will be tomorrow, it’s getting dark already
and the stars are beginning to come out.
Dear Andrés,
in your new life of foraging for mushrooms
and reading in the evenings,
you’re probably in bed,
awake or asleep, dreaming of rats.
Of dark rooms and rats.
Of women and men screaming,
of letters from the future inquiring about those screams.
When I was a girl I was told that stars
were the bonfires of the dead.
I didn’t understand why the dead
lit bonfires.
I assumed it was to send smoke signals.
How else could they communicate
with no phone, no mail?
My fire has gone out here on the beach.
I’m a hazy shadow in the glow of the embers.
I pick up a piece of charcoal