I last saw him a few weeks ago. I’d been working on the script for a documentary by some friends. It was about the Vicariate of Solidarity, an agency of the Catholic Church created in the midst of the dictatorship to assist victims. The film was a record of counterintelligence work, carried out mostly by the agency’s lawyers and social workers. From testimonies and material collected for each case of forcible disappearance, detention, abduction, torture, and any other abuses they handled, they were able to put together a kind of panorama of repression. By obsessively studying this landscape, the Vicariate team tried to expose the sinister logic at work in the hope of getting a step ahead of the agents and saving lives.
We’d been working on the film for years and the material was so intense it made us a little queasy. My friends, the creators of the documentary, recorded hours and hours of interviews. Each person described on camera how they joined the Vicariate, their work, and the strange way they gradually became detectives, spies, secret investigators. They all ended up analyzing information, asking questions, planning operations, building a mirror image of the enemy’s security services, but to nobler ends. The interviews were utterly engrossing and thorough, making the editing process very difficult. Which is why I had to make sure to prepare for our meetings first thing in the morning, with a strong cup of coffee so that I was as sharp as possible.
I want to describe one such morning. Shower, coffee, notebook, pencil, and then pushing the Play button to queue up new material to review. As I watched I took notes, paused images, tested cuts in my head, listened over and over to clips in order to decide whether they were necessary or not. That’s where I was, in the middle of testimonies, interviews, and stock images viewed millions of times, when he appeared: the man who tortured people.
There he was in front of me, no longer just a still image printed in a magazine.
His face came to life onscreen, the old spell was revived, and for the first time he was in motion. His eyes blinked on camera, his eyebrows shifted a little. I could even see the slight rise and fall of his chest as he breathed.
My friends explained to me that while he was briefly back in Chile they had managed to secure an interview. He hadn’t been back since he snuck out of the country after giving his testimony in the eighties. Thirty years later he had returned to appear in court and present further evidence, this time to a judge or multiple judges. It was his idea; he hadn’t been summoned. Even the French interior ministry and the agents charged with his safety all these years had tried to dissuade him. What I saw on my screen that morning was the image of a man who had come home after a long time, hoping to bring a chapter to a close. In fact, he said as much in the only interview he gave to the press at the time.
As I write now, I pull up the image on my screen again.
It’s him. There he is, on the other side of the glass.
The man who tortured people looks me in the face as if it’s really me he’s talking to. He has the same bushy mustache, but it’s no longer black; it’s closer to gray, like his hair. Thirty years have gone by since that photograph on the cover of Cauce magazine. Thirty years, betrayed by the wrinkles furrowing his brow, his tinted glasses, the now-gray hair. He’s speaking in a voice I’ve not heard before. It’s a calm voice, very different from what it must have been when he turned up to give testimony in eighty-four. Soft and timid, even; nothing like what I had imagined. It’s as if he’s answering my friends’ questions despite himself, reluctantly, but with the conviction that it’s his duty, as though he’s following orders.
I look at him and consider that: the secret compulsion to be constantly obeying some superior.
Now it’s all just part of an old story, and he keeps repeating the phrase “I remember” as his eyes reveal the workings of memory. Only a few moments from the interview capture my attention. Things I haven’t read elsewhere, spoken calmly, released into the air for me to gather and write down.
I remember the first marches.
People came out with posters of disappeared family members.
Sometimes I walked past them.
I saw those women, those men.
I looked at the photographs they were carrying and I said to myself: they don’t realize that I know where that person is, I know what happened to him.
My face is reflected in the television screen and my face merges with his. I see myself behind him, or maybe in front of him. I look like a ghost in the picture, a shadow lurking, a spy watching him though he doesn’t know it. Which is partly what I am now, as I sit here observing him, I think: a spy watching him though he doesn’t know it. He’s so close I could whisper in his ear. Pass on some message he would mistake for a thought of his own, because he doesn’t see me, doesn’t know I’m here, intent on speaking to him. Or writing to him, actually, which is the only thing I know how to do. It could be a couple of sentences on the screen that he’ll read like a ghostly apparition before his eyes. A sign from beyond the grave, which is something he must be used to. A message in a glass bottle tossed into the black sea where all those who ever lived in that dark
