Mario’s mother worked for a neighborhood association in the district of La Florida. Several times, as she was on her way to a work meeting, she noticed a pair of men with mustaches and dark glasses watching her, hiding out in a taxi or a van. Worried, she gathered her four children and told them they would be moving south, to the city of Valdivia. The children accepted the decision and when the day came for the move, they said goodbye to their schoolmates, friends, and neighbors, and they got in a taxi to the bus station. On the one hand the children were sad to be leaving home, but on the other they were giddy at the prospect of going away and getting to know a faraway place. What would Valdivia be like? What would the Valdivians be like? Would it be very cold? Would it rain as much as people said?
With all these questions in mind, Mario and his siblings rode in the taxi along unfamiliar streets toward the bus that would carry them south. From the window they saw parts of the city they had never seen before. Plazas, parks, stores, video game outlets, different people, different markets, different stands. When the car stopped at last, great was their surprise when they realized they weren’t at the bus station but at a house in what they were told was the district of San Miguel. The children were silent, not understanding what was happening. They unloaded their belongings in bewilderment, and then, once they were inside, their mother explained the rules of a new game they were going to play.
This house was a special house, she said. Everything that happened from now on between these four walls would be a secret: any people who visited, any meetings that were held, any flyers that were printed, any conversations overheard. From now on, there would be things they couldn’t talk about, that were part of a secret and unspoken reality, a hidden dimension that only they and nobody else could inhabit. They wouldn’t go back to their neighborhood or visit their old friends, because everybody thought they were in Valdivia. The old house and the old neighborhood were part of a life that didn’t exist anymore. Now they had this one, the life of the game and of secrets.
In this new life, Alejandro, alias Raúl, Mario’s father-not-father, is the new piece on the game board. Alejandro and Mario’s mother had met at her job and fallen in love. Now they were a family. Who would suspect a family like this, with four children who play outside, go to the school on the corner, buy ice cream at the store across the street? If one of the kids walks around with his ball, no one imagines he’s inspecting the neighborhood. No one imagines that later he’s giving his parents a report, letting them know whether there’s a suspicious car, whether there’s a stranger who might raise an alarm. If one of the kids goes out holding an adult’s hand and they meet up with someone else, no one imagines that what the child is really doing is handing the adult off to a contact. No one imagines that in this house full of children, injured comrades are being cared for, comrades on the run are being sheltered, El Rebelde is being printed on a press set up in the back room.
But in the game of this performance, there are many returns to square one. This wasn’t something their mother told them, but Mario and his siblings begin to figure it out. From the house in San Miguel, they move on to another house, then another, and another. It’s as if they’ve landed on a square that sends them back to the start, and over and over again they find themselves in a new house, with new neighbors, embarking on a new life while keeping the old one secret.
Each new life came with a new school. And each new school required a new story to answer the questions of new friends. This story couldn’t be the real one, of course, or anything like the one concocted for the previous school. Playing the game, Mario made up lives he didn’t live, came up with names that weren’t his, invented fake grandparents, nonexistent family members, phony birthdays, imaginary trips. Each detail of each of the versions of each of their lives had to be precisely coordinated with their siblings’ and their parents’ so that no one would go off script. And this had to happen at every school and every neighborhood they moved to. Each of the new squares where they landed required them to stage a performance on top of a performance. To make things up on top of what they’d already made up. The line between reality and fiction became so perilously thin, so complicated and tangled, that after a while, at each new level of the game, Mario
