Comrade Yuri was incredibly thirsty after the shocks he’d been given in the torture room. The man who tortured people says Comrade Yuri asked for water and one of the guards left the shower running so Comrade Yuri could drink. The man who tortured people says the guard turned the water off, but Comrade Yuri still complained of thirst. Weak as he was, he used the little strength he had to turn the water back on, but he wasn’t able to drink, or to turn it off again. The man who tortured people says the water ran all night over Comrade Yuri’s body. The man who tortured people says that by the next morning Comrade Yuri was dead, felled by a swift and deadly case of pneumonia.
I’m in the room where the prisoners slept on the floor. It’s a small room, which must originally have been the bedroom where somebody laid their head and maybe had happy dreams before embarking on their daily routine. From this bedroom over to the green-tiled bathroom, then on to breakfast in the living room where I heard talk about gypsies, and finally out the door and down those two steps over which Comrade Yuri stumbled a while later. As many as forty men shared this space, including those who were shut in the tiny closet in solitary confinement.
The comrade director shows me the mural they’ve made. It’s a big painting of Comrade Yuri against a backdrop of bright colors that I don’t know how to interpret. The mural is signed by the Red Star Brigade, and it’s a project of Comrade Yuri’s children, who have close ties to the memorial. The comrade director tells me he believes that since the body of Comrade Yuri was never found, the children—who are no longer children, because Yuri and Evelyn Gahona must be about my age or a little older—visit the memorial like a shrine or a tomb to remember their father. They’ve even requested that no work be done on the bathroom where Comrade Yuri died, that it remain untouched, says the comrade director. Green and small, just as it is now on my visit.
Once I saw photographs of Major Gagarin in his spaceship, the Vostok 1. Buckled into a tiny compartment, he traveled the cosmos in utter stillness. Only his eyes moved, and his hands, too, I think, as he gazed at Earth and the universe through a round window.
I imagine Comrade Yuri immobilized in that bathroom. With what little energy he has, he drinks the water falling on his naked body. There are no windows, but if he closes his eyes he can imagine a round window in the ceiling, just above his tired head. I imagine Comrade Yuri looking out that imaginary window. It’s a starry night. The water is still falling on his body, but everything is so beautiful and blue out there that it’s hard to concentrate on anything else. Suddenly, in the middle of the sky that’s keeping him company, he thinks he sees a white blur. At first he supposes it’s a falling star and he even has the old impulse to make a wish. But then he realizes that what he’s seeing isn’t a star, but something even more fascinating.
A chess piece crossing outer space.
A white bishop spaceship signaling to him from up above, attempting a rescue.
The man who tortured people says that the body of Don Alonso Gahona, Comrade Yuri, was wrapped in plastic and stuffed into the trunk of a car. The man who tortured people says he doesn’t know where the body was taken, but he suspects it was dumped in the sea.
I imagine Comrade Yuri’s body sinking somewhere along the Chilean coast. Maybe near the beaches of Papudo. Or maybe not. I imagine him descending into the depths of the blue sea that Major Gagarin saw from space, coloring the whole planet. Earth is blue, he said over the radio, looking out his round window at the sea in which years later Comrade Yuri would sleep forever. Earth is blue and beautiful, he said, and from where I sit let it go down in history, let it never be forgotten: there’s no god to be heard.
In spite of myself I got deeper and deeper in.
Suddenly I wasn’t the person I used to be.
I could blame my bosses.
I could say that they were the ones who changed me.
But you always have a hand in what happens to you.
I know this because I’ve seen people who don’t betray themselves.
People who might be up to their necks in shit and they don’t break.
El Quila Leo, for example.
That was one prisoner I came to admire.
His name was Miguel Rodríguez Gallardo.
He was a lathe operator, he had three little children.
He took a beating and he never talked.
They shocked him, they hit him, they hung him up, they locked him away.
And he didn’t talk.
El Quila found ways
to keep his mind clear, to keep it together.
El Quila listened carefully to sounds,
he took note of the smells, temperatures,
shapes, and colors he managed to observe
when he wasn’t blindfolded.
I’m being held at Cerrillos Airport, he said to me one day.
How do you know? It could be Pudahuel
or El Bosque Air Base.
Every day I hear the instructions from the control tower
and they’ve never announced the takeoff of a fighter jet
or a passenger plane,
so it has to be Cerrillos, he said, and he was right.
When they brought him to Nido 20 he guessed where he was.
This is Stop 20 on Gran Avenida, he said.
The siren that goes off on the hour is from the firehouse where I
was a fireman.
El Quila knew when it was daytime.
El Quila knew when it was nighttime.
El Quila smelled flowers
and guessed the change of seasons.
When he was locked in the closet,
he looked for drawings on the wooden planks
and he
