He fell near a plaza.
He wasn’t armed, but an officer went up and put a gun in his hand.
That’s how he appeared in the newspapers the next day.
Lying on the ground with the gun, as if he’d been shooting.
I saw it.
There was a special report that night about a violent clash. Mario might have seen it on the neighbor’s TV. As he heard voices and movement on the other side of the wall, he would’ve seen images of his house on the screen. There were police and armed agents walking the halls. On the dining room table where he’d eaten lunch a few hours ago, with the orange-flowered tablecloth, there were papers, lots of fake IDs, and a serious pile of weapons he’d never seen before. Grenades, ammunition, machine guns, pistols. If there had been a gun in the house, we would have used it to defend ourselves, thought Mario. Reporting live with a microphone in his hand, the announcer gestured at the weapons and documents, announcing that security forces had killed two dangerous terrorists in a deadly face-off.
The man who tortured people says that when they got to the house the neighbors told them there was a boy. The man who tortured people says they found Hugo Ratier’s body on the floor, but the boy wasn’t there.
Mario spent the night hidden at the neighbor’s house, a few meters from the scene of the crime. Early the next morning, he and the neighbor left by the back door and walked to the bus stop. The facade of 5707 was full of bullet holes, the windows smashed, window frames splintered, the door ajar. Mario eyed it all furtively, as if he were just another neighbor, as if it hadn’t been his house, as if he hadn’t lived his last life there. National police officers were still on the street, but no one noticed him. No one was looking for him or asking what had happened to the kid. It was as if he had never existed. As if having vanished into the game and the secret for so long he had become a secret himself.
They took a bus to the neighborhood of Mapocho, and got some breakfast. When they were done, the neighbor brought Mario to the repair shop where he worked. He told Mario that if he needed anything he’d be here. Then he gave him a little money and they parted.
Mario walked aimlessly around the center of Santiago. Without realizing it, he came to the Plaza de Armas, ground zero of the game board. Centerpoint of any game. Here everything was functioning normally, as if nothing had happened. People were going about their business, buses filled the streets, the stores were beginning to open, old people were feeding the pigeons. For a brief moment he wished he was one of these people. Having a life instead of an endless list, so hard to manage and remember. Going to a single school, then maybe getting some kind of degree, finding a job, settling down with a woman who would call him by his name, moving into a house and not budging for at least a decade. Having children he wouldn’t have to wake up in the night to go on the run, children who would celebrate their fifteenth birthdays with friends, with birthday cake.
At a newsstand he saw the daily papers and read the headlines. On one front page there was a photograph of Alejandro. He was lying on his back, his face bloody, a gun next to his right hand. It was him: his father-not-his-father. The same person who until yesterday had lived with him in the house that wasn’t his house, living a life of lies, though in light of what had happened, it was the only life he had. Mario was tempted to use the little money the neighbor had given him to buy a couple of newspapers. To keep these photographs as memory or proof, but he quickly changed his mind. His only guidelines were the game and the secret, and now that there were no clear rules to follow, no squares to move back to, he was at the start again.
In his head, Mario rolled the dice and lost himself in the city.
Yes, sometimes I dream of rats.
Of dark rooms and rats.
Of men and women screaming
and of letters from the future
asking about the screams.
I don’t remember anymore
what the screams say
or what the letters say
All that’s left are the rats.
I went to a psychiatrist
to get rid of them.
She sent me for an encephalogram.
I saw an X-ray of my head.
I looked for the rats so I could cut them out with scissors,
but they weren’t there, they were hiding in the shadows.
They made me stack cubes,
they made me take tests.
They said the rats were there
because I was worried about money.
They said I was tense, nervous,
that a few pills would help.
I never told them what was happening to me.
I never told them about my job and how it was sickening me.
They were doctors from the intelligence service,
I couldn’t tell them the truth.
Then I couldn’t take it anymore.
I went to the magazine and I did what I did.
You’ve told it better than I could.
Your imagination is clearer than my memory.
As a girl I had a weakness for ghost stories. I lived in a big old house that creaked at night, and in my childhood fantasies, it was overrun by spirits. I saw shadows cross the hallway at midnight and I heard the tap of feet on the parquet floor. I heard nonexistent people laughing and talking in the back bedroom. I heard furniture being moved, vases breaking, brooms
