The Twilight Zone

sweeping. Whether it was all real or a childish delusion I’ll never know, but because of my imaginings as a girl, I guess, I developed a perverse connection to stories about lost souls. I had such a kindred feeling for the stories, it was as if they had been written for me. As soon as I learned to read I immersed myself in books about ghosts. The books came to me by chance, at random: from the bookcase at home, the shelves of some friend, or a reading list handed out by the teacher at school. I remember the elderly phantom in The Canterville Ghost. Murderer of his wife, lord and master of the house he has inhabited for centuries, he battles the modern ways of the Otis family, who scoff at him, show no fear, and use detergent to wipe away the terrible bloodstains from the killing of Lady Eleanor. And I remember Ichabod Crane, riding at night in the town of Sleepy Hollow, fleeing the headless horseman who seeks to kill him. And the ghost of Catherine in Wuthering Heights, calling through the fog to her beloved Heathcliff. And the young brother and sister haunted by spirits in The Turn of the Screw. And Ana María, in The Shrouded Woman, reflecting back on her life from the coffin at her own wake. I remember dreaming of the sinister House of Usher and its furniture bolted to the floor, and the “nevermore” of the raven that appeared at midnight, evoking the ghost of beloved Lenore.

That’s how I imagine the man who tortured people: as one of the characters in those books I read as a girl. A man beset by ghosts, by the smell of death. Fleeing from the horseman trying to behead him or from the raven perched on his shoulder, whispering daily in his ear: nevermore.

Now he’s on a southbound bus to Bariloche. He’s surrounded by Mapuche peasants, fellow travelers. In the pocket of his jacket he has his new ID and passport, ready to be used for the first time when he crosses the Andes into Argentina. Behind him or in front of him, not especially close by, is another lawyer from the Vicariate. The man who tortured people has never met him, but he knows who he is because they’re the only two passengers on the bus who aren’t Mapuche. They’ve exchanged glances from their seats, but they haven’t spoken to each other. The lawyer is traveling to protect him. If any problem arises during the border crossing, if the international police stop him, if the fake passport is spotted, if somehow the air force or the security services discover his whereabouts and the operation to get him out of the country, the lawyer will have to step in and do what he can to keep things on track. But there isn’t much he can do, and both of them know it. If the intelligence agents get wind of his departure, they’ll almost certainly be in serious trouble.

The man who tortured people tries not to think about that. He’s been inside in hiding for months. Now he lets his mind wander over the bright landscape he sees through the window. The fields and cows have been left behind, as has Lake Puyehue, and now, I imagine, they’re making their way into the mountains. The sky is cloudy. Small white feathers float gently in the air, that’s what he sees. The feathers spin a few times before landing in the treetops, the bushes, the grass, the pastures. It’s snow. The man who tortured people has probably never seen it before, but the truth is I don’t know that. I simply imagine that as he watches the flakes falling more and more thickly, blotting out the landscape, he might feel the childish surprise of someone seeing snow or the sea for the first time.

“Jingle Bells” plays over the bus’s speakers. It’s December, and in just a few days it will be Christmas. That’s probably why all the Mapuche peasants around him are traveling, because the holidays are coming and they’re on their way to visit family. They’ve brought the usual gifts, the chickens for Christmas Eve dinner, the bottles of aguardiente and red wine. Everyone on the bus knows the song and their lips move slightly as they sing to themselves, bobbing their heads in time to the music, while outside it snows, and, in his seat, the man who tortured people thinks about the strange Christmas that awaits him if he succeeds in fleeing the country.

One of the ghost stories I remember most fondly is Dickens’s Christmas Carol. Everybody knows the plot. Bitter old Ebenezer Scrooge is visited for Christmas by three spirits: Christmas Past, Christmas Present, and Christmas Yet to Come. With them he sets off on a strange journey, half dream and half memory, in which he witnesses different Christmas scenes that have been a part of his life. Or are, or will be.

I imagine the man who tortured people sitting on the bus, remembering the ghosts of his own Christmases. A tree strung with lights that blink on and off at his childhood home in Papudo. Twinkling lights that still shine bright in memory. His parents, his siblings, maybe an uncle or aunt and some cousins, all sitting around the table, talking, laughing, eating special dishes of chicken or beef prepared by his mother. Country people like the Mapuche on the bus with him. Happy to share a night in the tinkling glow of those Christmas lights, blinking in time to “Jingle Bells.”

Another memory assails him. Like a blaze of light from that old Christmas tree, picture and sound come to him. It’s the voice of the nation’s first lady, Doña Lucía Hiriart de Pinochet, addressing the whole country on a state radio station. He listens to her over the radio transmitter at Remo Cero, or maybe Nido 20, or the AGA, from the chill of any jail,