It was a time of grenades and poor little left hands, too.
The years went slowly by. Time dragged, with endless evenings of TV watching, of Cine en su casa, Sábado gigante, Lost in Space, The Twilight Zone, and of Atari, gangs of us playing Space Invaders. The green glow-in-the-dark bullets of the earth-lings’ cannons scudded up the screen until they hit an alien. The little Martians descended in blocks, in perfect formation, shooting their projectiles, waving their octopus or squid tentacles, but they always ended up exploding, like González’s father’s left hand. Ten points for each Martian in the first row, twenty for the ones in the second row, and forty for the ones in the back row. And when the last one died, when the screen was blank, another alien army appeared from the sky, ready to keep fighting. They gave up one life to combat, then another, and another, in a cycle of endless slaughter. Projectiles flew back and forth, as if in the kind of heroic act that we celebrated at our school assemblies and flag-raisings.
It was a time of projectiles and slaughter, too.
At some point we stopped going to the Monday assemblies. We stayed in the classroom, listening from the distance to what was happening in the yard. When the monitor made us attend, we lined up with everybody else but we didn’t sing along to the verse beginning “Your names, brave soldiers.” Instead we shouted the line “Be either the tomb of the free or a refuge from oppression.” That was how we grew up, yelling the word free and the word oppression at the top of our lungs every Monday morning, as we organized the first meetings of our student union and got up the courage to walk out the front door of the school, heading into the street in a pack as if charging aboard an enemy ship.
It was a time of marches and protests. It was a time of Cauce magazine getting passed from one person to another. It was a time of shocking headlines. A time of attacks, kidnappings, strikes, crimes, scams, lawsuits, indictments. A time of ghosts, too. Of mustached monsters giving testimony in powder blue pull-out sections under the title I TORTURED PEOPLE. A time of TV specials on torture. A time of dark rooms, of women locked up with rats. Whole nights spent dreaming of those dark rooms and those rats. A time of spray-painted graffiti on walls, and leaflets we cranked out on a mimeograph machine and distributed in the streets. A time of banners, assemblies, petitions, meetings of the Secondary Students Federation at a warehouse on Calle Serrano. A time of our first militant actions, first sit-ins, first detentions. A time of lists. Long lists that we searched for the whereabouts of friends who’d been arrested. A time of heavy down parkas to protect us from the rifle butts and boots of the national police. A time of lemons, salt, the smell of tear gas, jets of water mixed with gas that not only soaked you and knocked you down, but also left you with a stink of rot that lingered for days. A time of leaders. I remember one of them standing on a fountain in the middle of the Alameda declaiming and giving instructions in case the cops came to scatter us with blows and shots in the air, as if we were little Martians from Space Invaders. We were kids. Not even fifteen. An army of kiddie aliens with painted-on charcoal mustaches, Lilliputians taking over the streets and the schools, shouting in shrill voices, clamoring, demanding the right to an independent student union, calling for school fees to be lowered, for our detained friends to be released, for the tyrant to be removed, for democracy to return, for the world to be more reasonable, for the future to arrive with no dark rooms, no screaming, no rats.
González didn’t take part in our new guerrilla activities and intelligence work. I suppose she sat in the classroom writing those graph paper letters to Maldonado and telling her about things, like the trip she took with her father to Germany. González’s father never quite recovered from the accident with the pin and the grenade, so the armed forces sent him to Germany for surgery on his left hand, which wasn’t there anymore, to fix his stump. González went with him and saw the Berlin Wall, which divided the good guys from the bad guys and looked so much like the fence across our school yard behind the Virgen del Carmen. Of course, González stayed on the good guys’ side, because the other side was dangerous and she wasn’t allowed to go there. But after she got back from her trip, it was as if she’d crossed over to that other side, the bad guys’ side, and she started to come to school in a red Chevy Chevette, which was her father’s, but was driven by Uncle Claudio, a kind of driver or bodyguard who looked out for her now. Uncle Claudio waited for her at the entrance to school, sitting in the red Chevy, smoking a cigarette, peering through his dark glasses, his mustache so much like the science teacher’s, so much like the one the man who tortured people wore. When the bell rang at the end of the day, González appeared at the entrance, got in the car, and Uncle Claudio drove her home.
Some kids sat in the red Chevy and got to know Uncle Claudio. They said he was nice, he liked to kid around, and he’d even share his cigarettes with you. I once went for a drive around Parque O’Higgins
