The Twilight Zone

came up with in my head after reading some article. On the cover of the magazine was a drawing of a blindfolded man in a chair. An agent was interrogating him in the glare of a lamp. Inside the magazine was a catalog of torture methods. I read the testimonies of victims and saw diagrams and drawings that looked like something out of a book from the Middle Ages. I can’t remember every detail, but clear in my mind is the story of a sixteen-year-old girl who said that in the detention center where she was kept they had stripped her, smeared her body with excrement, and put her in a dark room full of rats.

I didn’t want to, but inevitably I imagined that dark room full of rats.

I often dreamed of that place and woke up from the dream over and over.

Even now I can’t shake it and maybe that’s why I’m recording it here, as a way to let it go.

In that same dream, or maybe another like it, I inherited the man I’m imagining. An ordinary man, no different from anyone else, nothing special about him. Except for a bushy mustache, which I, at least, couldn’t stop thinking about. His face was on the cover of one of those magazines, and over the picture was a headline in white letters: I TORTURED PEOPLE. Under that, another line: SHOCKING EYEWITNESS ACCOUNT BY SECURITY SERVICES AGENT. In a pull-out section inside there was a long exclusive interview. The man gave a full account of his time as an intelligence agent, from his service as a young conscript in the air force to the moment he went to the magazine to tell his story. There were pages and pages of details about what he had done: the names of agents, prisoners, informers; detention center addresses, burial sites, descriptions of torture methods; accounts of many missions. Powder blue pages—I remember them well—transporting me for a moment into some parallel reality, infinite and dark as the room I dreamed of. A disturbing universe that we sensed lay hidden somewhere out there, beyond the bounds of school and home, where everything obeyed a logic governed by captivity and rats. A horror story told by the ordinary person at its center, who looked like our science teacher, or so it seemed to us, with the same bushy mustache. The man who tortured people didn’t mention any rats in the interview, but he could have been the tamer of them all. I guess that’s what I imagined. A pied piper playing a tune that made it impossible not to follow him, not to march one by one into the disturbing place he inhabited. He didn’t seem like a monster or an evil giant, or some psychopath you had to run away from. He didn’t even look like the national police in boots, helmet, and shield who charged at us with batons during street protests. The man who tortured people could have been anybody. Even our teacher.

The second time I saw him was twenty-five years later. I was working as a writer for a television series, and one of the main characters was based on him. It was a fictional series with lots of romance, of course, which is a requirement on TV, plus plenty of persecution and death, in keeping with the subject matter and the period.

The character we constructed was an intelligence agent who took part in detention and torture operations and then went home and listened to a mix tape of love songs and read Spiderman comics with his son at bedtime. For twelve episodes we followed his double life up close, the absolute divide between the personal and the professional that was secretly crushing him. He wasn’t comfortable in his job anymore, he was starting to lose his nerve, the tranquilizers had stopped working, he couldn’t eat or sleep, he had stopped talking to his wife, stopped being affectionate with his son, stopped spending time with his friends. He felt sick, despairing, feared his superiors, was trapped in a reality he didn’t know how to escape. At the climax of the series he put himself in front of his own enemies, presenting them with the brutal testimony of what he’d done as an intelligence agent in a desperate gesture of catharsis and unburdening.

To write the series I had to confront the interview I’d last read as an adolescent.

There he was again, on the cover.

His bushy mustache, his dark eyes staring at me from the page, and that line printed over his photograph: I TORTURED PEOPLE.

The spell remained intact. His face loomed again, and like a rat I was ready to follow wherever his testimony led. I pored over every word. Twenty-five years later my hazy map was gradually coming into focus. Now I had a clear sense of the identity and roles of the people whose names and nicknames he mentioned. Air Force Colonel Edgar Ceballos Jones; Air Force Intelligence Director General Enrique Ruiz Bunger; Communist Party leader José Weibel Navarrete; Communist Party member Quila Rodríguez Gallardo, known for his bravery; El Wally, civilian officer of the Joint Command; El Fanta, ex–Communist Party member turned informer and persecutor; El Fifo Palma, Carlos Contreras Maluje, Yuri Gahona, Carol Flores, Guillermo Bratti, René Basoa, El Coño Molina, Mr. Velasco, El Patán, El Yerko, El Lutti, La Firma, Peldehue, Remo Cero, Nido 18, Nido 20, Nido 22, the Juan Antonio Ríos Intelligence Center. The list is endless. I reentered that dark zone, but this time with a lamp that I had been fueling for years, which made it easier for me to find my way once I was inside. The lamp lit my path, and I became convinced that every bit of information delivered by the man who tortured people had been put out there not just to shock readers and open their eyes to the nightmare, but also to halt the machinery of evil. It was clear and concrete