It wasn’t easy to find out whose bodies they were. After a long investigation, with the help of expert reports and information accumulated in the Vicariate’s archives, it was possible to determine that the exhumed bodies matched a group of people who had been arrested in October 1973. After years spent looking for living loved ones, horrified family members identified the unearthed bodies, putting an end to any hopes of reunion. All the stories they had made up in the face of absence and emptiness began to fall apart, fantasies in which the disappeared parents, siblings, or children were on a desert island, safe, hidden somewhere in the world waiting for the right moment to send word or return. This discovery was the first evidence that prisoners who had yet to appear had likely been killed. From that point on, families and professionals focused their efforts on searching for the bodies.
My mother listens, weeping steadily beside me.
It’s only been a few months since she emerged from a depression that hit her pretty hard. After her mother’s death and her own retirement, she moved slowly but surely into a period of great anxiety. Everything around her changed completely. As if stepping into the lobby of this movie theater, she suddenly found herself confronted by a range of possibilities she had never dealt with before: 2-D dubbed versions, 2-D subtitled versions, 3-D dubbed versions, 3-D original-language versions, 4-DX dubbed and subtitled versions. So many new titles, so many movies, and there she was standing at the ticket booth, vulnerable to the whirlwind of stimuli. Who she was and how she had gotten to this point hardly mattered. The logic of cause and effect had broken down. The previous chapter was closed and everything that constituted her past was obsolete in the sea of perspectives opening before her. Then, without a prior plan to guide her choices, without the kind of solid script that takes years to write, with no gravitational force to make sense of her options, my mother, light and fragile, shot out into space. She was lost the way memories are lost. And there she drifted tethered by a flimsy cord, as we tried to toss her a cable to earth to restore her weight and gravity. My mother checked into that unnerving territory where 80 percent of my fellow citizens live. A brisk, upsetting place, ruled by psychiatrists, antidepressants, anti-anxiety drugs, and sleeping pills.
Now, as I listen to her cry, I realize it was a bad idea to ask her to come. A few weeks ago she adjusted her dose of Sentidol. Instead of three pills a day, she now takes two. She also announced, against the psychiatrist’s orders, that she’s done taking lorazepam to help her sleep, because at seventy-six she doesn’t want to become a drug addict—that’s what she said. She doesn’t sleep anymore, or just a few hours here and there, so she’s shaky and on edge, scratching at her head and hands all day until she breaks the skin, but fortunately safe from the threat of drug addiction. Considering her convalescent state, I should have brought her to see a cheerier movie. I’ve worked on these images so much that I’ve grown used to them, lost all sensitivity to their effects, like a vulture. The revelatory shudder I felt when I first encountered them turned into something routine. Here are those pictures of the Lonquén kilns again. I see the skulls lined up neatly after the exhumation. I see the family members praying and crying with photographs of their loved ones pinned to their chests. I see these things, and what I think is that some pictures are missing. My robot brain analyzes, adds, and subtracts, reconstructing the Lonquén file from my computer, selecting and rejecting scenes and photographs that were reworked and deciding that some of the most effective, eloquent shots were omitted from this final cut.
But my mother next to me doesn’t need more eloquence. She isn’t a machine, and what’s on the screen is more than enough for her. Her memory is fragile, so she’s been sheltered. That’s why she can’t help crying as she watches, as if she’s learning about it all for the first time. The hint of the past triggers her emotions and everything becomes present. Lonquén is here, unfolding before her eyes almost forty years later. In these frenetic and fractured times in which memories fall away, my mother can watch the same movie a thousand times and be as moved as if it’s the first time.
In this lonely theater, my mother is part Barbara Jean Trenton, too, I think.
Everything she’s seeing right now belongs to her past. The projected images revive a time that is more hers than mine, but she’s done her healthy best to forget it, whereas I’ve inherited it as an unhealthy obsession.
The man talking about mass graves is a lawyer. I know him well because he’s part of the chorus of voices I’ve been listening to over and over again lately. He’s slightly younger than my mother; probably in his sixties. He speaks clearly, and, unlike the other subjects, he sometimes shows emotion when he recalls events in which he took part. The kilns and the dead at Lonquén are behind us now, and he is explaining on camera what his job at the Vicariate was. He says that he was the head of the Detained-Disappeared Unit. His brief was the dead. His aim: to track them and hunt for their bodies no matter where they might be. His search took him all over Chile. They called him the Hound because he followed the scent of blood.
Now he’s talking about two informers who helped him in his task.
About one in particular.
One who was an active member of the intelligence services when he came forward to
