At 20:37 he begins to see smoke filtering under the door to his room. At 20:40 he goes out into the dark hallway to look for Hugo, alias Uncle José. Uncle, he shouts toward the bedroom, but no one answers. At 20:41 he hears voices. At 20:42 he realizes they’re the voices of agents. At 20:43 he hears another burst of gunfire. At 20:44 he can’t figure out how he’s still alive after the shooting and he runs down the dark, smoke-filled hallway looking for Hugo, alias Uncle José. At 20:45 he realizes his uncle isn’t in his bedroom or the kitchen. He can’t find him anywhere. Uncle, he shouts, uncle, but again there’s no response. At 20:46 he thinks about curling up on the floor and not moving, no matter what, but at 20:47 he decides no, he can’t abandon himself to his fate, he has to escape, no matter where, get out of there before he’s killed by another round of machine gun fire. At 20:48 he’s in the back yard. At 20:49 he’s scaling the side wall; at 20:50, as he’s climbing, he thinks about Alejandro, alias Raúl, his father who isn’t his father, thinking how lucky it was that he didn’t come back. The delay saved him, he thinks, and at 20:51 he lands in the yard of the house next door, still hearing shots and the voices of agents, who are kicking down doors and overturning furniture at 5707, while he, at 20:52, tries to scramble over the next wall to keep fleeing from yard to yard. But at 20:53 he realizes that this new wall is too high, he’s tired, his body is shaking, it isn’t so easy to escape the house, life weighs heavily on him, he’s not going to make it. At 20:54 he decides to knock on the window of the neighbor, who at 20:55 comes out into the back yard when he hears knocking and sees the figure of a boy of fifteen asking for help, scared.
That’s my house, says the boy, at 20:56.
Where it’s happening, that’s my house, he says, at 20:57, and he repeats the same thing at 20:58 and 20:59. My house, my house, my house, and each repetition is uttered with the conviction of someone telling the truth.
Inevitably the fifteen-year-olds get mixed up in my head. I think about Mario on that September night in 1983. Maybe he’d have a good time with my son and his friends here. In a life he never had, we would sit him down at the table to eat a piece of cake and tell him he could stay as long as he wanted. Tell him he didn’t have to keep climbing wall after wall.
Andrés Antonio Valenzuela Morales, alias the man who tortured people, says he was there. After he hauled the body of Lucía Vergara out to the Calle Fuenteovejuna median, he received orders to head with his team to the other side of the city, to the district of Quinta Normal, specifically 5707 Calle Janequeo. He says it before my eyes, on the computer screen, in a video recording made in France, probably at the end of the eighties.
He’s sitting in a dark café. He has long hair, nothing like in the photos I’ve seen of him. Thick, abundant hair. He seems like another person. Next to him is Ricardo Parez, MIRista in exile, comrade of Alejandro Salgado, alias Raúl, and Hugo Ratier, alias José. Ricardo watches him as he drinks from a glass of wine or water. The man who tortured people is smiling and answering Parez’s questions, because this is an interview. Somewhat informal, with a do-it-yourself feel, but it will serve as evidence for a possible lawsuit concerning Fuenteovejuna and Janequeo, in the distant country that Chile has become in this new life they’ve both adopted. That’s why Parez asks him to repeat some things more clearly. That he was ordered to kill everyone living in both houses, for example. That the intent was always to eliminate them, at the Fuenteovejuna house and the Janequeo house both. That it was well known they weren’t directly responsible for the death of General Carol Urzúa. That these killings were a kind of vendetta.
The man who tortured people repeats what he’s said more clearly, as requested, accustomed to following orders. Both men seem somewhat uncomfortable, but they try to break the ice, speaking in a casual way that sounds strained. Parez asks the man who tortured people about his nickname, Papudo, and the man who tortured people explains that in military service all his friends were from the south and he was the only one from the central coast, which is why they called him Papudo. And the two of them laugh and it’s strange when they laugh. I think they feel a little stupid themselves, or that’s how it seems.
French tango music can be heard beneath their words. The man who tortured people says that by the time he and his team got to Janequeo the operation had already begun. Everybody was shooting, he says. The same jeep mounted with a machine gun on Fuenteovejuna was in the middle of the street doing its job against the facade of 5707, which was where the MIRistas Hugo Ratier, alias José, and Alejandro Salgado, alias Raúl, supposedly lived.
The man who tortured people says that a few minutes after he got there he saw a person walking down the street with bags of groceries. The person stopped to see what was going on. It was a man. He could have been any local resident, but he was rapidly identified as Alejandro Salgado. When Alejandro, alias Raúl, the father-not-father of Mario, saw a group of agents shooting at the house that wasn’t his house, he started to run, fleeing in terror, at the same moment Mario
