My mother knew none of this when she told us what she’d seen that morning, a few hours before. It took me years to connect her story to the one I read in the testimony of the man who tortured people. While we were having lunch that day, eating the casserole or stew my grandmother had made, Carlos Contreras Maluje was probably getting beaten in a cell on Calle Dieciocho, a few blocks from my old house. While we were helping ourselves to gelatin and drowning it in condensed milk, a dessert we loved, Carlos Contreras Maluje was probably sending telepathic messages to his family and friends, asking someone to come and rescue him from the small, lonely planet where he had landed. That place where he was stranded, afraid and in pain, with no ship to take him back to his home above the Maluje Pharmacy in Concepción.
Hello? Ground Control? Is anybody out there? Can anybody hear me?
Desperate cries, calls for help that no one could answer. While my mother was drinking lemon verbena tea and while I listened to the end of the story of her disturbing experience, Carlos Contreras Maluje was probably bleeding on the floor of his cell, besieged by gremlins, in a time frozen by the deadly stopwatch marking the bounds of the twilight zone. A reality so different, according to the old voice-over, you can only unlock it with the key of the imagination.
I click and search for Andrés Valenzuela Morales’s name.
I know I won’t find it. This is the Absence and Memory Zone, not the Torturers Who Turn Over a New Leaf Zone, not the Deserters Zone, not the Feelings of Remorse Zone, not the Motherfucking Traitors Zone. The man I’m imagining hasn’t died, and he isn’t catalogued as a victim. A black hole swallowed him up just like everybody else, and if I want to find him, it can only be here, in front of this screen like something in a control tower, a radio whose signal reaches that eerie planet. The only zone that has no place in this museum.
Dear Andrés, Control Tower here. Are you there? Can you hear me?
Dear Andrés Antonio Valenzuela Morales, Soldier First Class, ID #39432 of La Ligua, Control Tower speaking. Are you there? Can you hear me?
I want to believe it’s possible, that my voice can reach that place. That from some still-functioning speaker in your wrecked and broken spaceship you can hear me and maybe even be cheered by my words. I want to believe that your microphone short-circuited and that’s why I can’t hear what you have to say to me. I want to believe that each time I ask whether you can hear me, you answer yes, that although history and memory have abandoned you in that nebulous place, you’re still alive, still standing, still waiting for someone to come and rescue you.
I believe that evil is directly proportional to idiocy. I believe that the territory you roamed in anguish before you disappeared is ruled by idiots. It isn’t true that criminals are masterminds. It takes a vast amount of stupidity to assemble the parts of such grotesque, absurd, and cruel machinery. Pure brutality disguised as a master plan. Small people, with small minds, who don’t understand the abyss of the other. They lack the language or tools for it. Empathy and compassion require a clear mind. Putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, changing your skin, adopting a new face: these are all acts of genuine intelligence.
Dear Andrés, I think you were ultimately an intelligent man.
Each time you vomited after watching an execution. Each time you shut yourself in the bathroom after a torture session. Each time you snuck someone a cigarette or saved an apple from your lunch for a prisoner. Each time you passed on a message to someone’s family. Each time you cried. Each time you wanted to speak up but couldn’t. Each time you spoke up. Each time you repeated your testimony to reporters, lawyers, judges. Each time you hid. Each time you fled out of fear of being found. Each and every time, each and every day, you used and use your lucid intelligence against the stupidity of where you landed.
You imagined being someone else. You chose to be someone else. You chose.
Being stupid is a personal choice and you don’t have to wear a uniform to employ that evil talent. If only you knew, dear Andrés, the number of good guys these days who aren’t good and never were, though they have yet to be memorialized in a museum; the number of heroes who aren’t heroes and never were. I wonder how we’ll tell ourselves the story of our times. Who we’ll leave out of the Nice Zones in the story. Who we’ll entrust with control and curatorship.
Colonel Cook, space traveler, shipwrecked on that mysterious planet, receives a final radio message from home. In it, his superiors inform him that they can’t come to rescue him because a great war has broken out. Good guys and bad guys blowing each other to bits. Everything he knew as his world is beginning to disappear. Any real memory of the past will be preserved solely in Colonel Cook’s mind. From now on it will be his mission to record and bear witness to a past that no longer exists. Stranded in captivity on a small planet in outer space—or the twilight zone, as it seems to Colonel Cook—he sends messages into the void about a world that has disappeared.
