It was a time of Chevrolets and mustached men and men in dark glasses, too.
One March morning in 1985, we heard a disturbing report on the radio. The announcer described what he called a gruesome discovery. Three bodies had turned up with their throats slashed—degollados—on a bleak stretch of the road to Pudahuel Airport. Police and investigators were on their way to the scene, and so was the press. Reporters, photographers, TV cameras. The announcer spoke of surprise. Shock and surprise, as he put it. Everything was strange and puzzling, apparently, but what caught our attention was the word degollados because we didn’t quite understand what it meant. I remember my mother explaining it to me in detail and the word turning up everywhere. We spotted it in newspaper headlines. We heard it on the radio, on TV, in conversations among parents, neighbors, teachers. The three bodies were identified at the Institute of Legal Medicine as José Manuel Parada, Manuel Guerrero, and Santiago Nattino. All three were Communist Party members, kidnapped a few days before. Parada and Guerrero were talking outside the entrance of a school like ours when they were seized. One was a dean and the other was a parent. Meters away were many students in their classrooms, Lilliputians like us, aliens with cork mustaches, all sitting at their desks, listening to the teacher of the moment, never imagining what was happening outside. A group of national police agents stopped traffic on the street, a helicopter hovered over the rooftops keeping watch, and a couple of cars, maybe Chevrolets with no license plates, parked at the entrance to the school. A group of men with mustaches and dark glasses got out and wrestled Parada and Guerrero into the car, just as they had taken José Weibel, Comrade Yuri, Contreras Maluje, the Flores brothers, and an endless list of other names. Some kids in gym class saw it all happening. That was the last anyone heard of Parada and Guerrero until they turned up with their throats slashed on the road to Pudahuel Airport.
It was a time of maimed, burnt, slashed, and bullet-ridden bodies, too.
The exact moment isn’t clear to me, but I know that coffins and funerals and wreaths were suddenly everywhere, and there was no escaping them. Maybe it had always been that way and we were only just realizing it. Maybe we were distracted by all that history homework, all those assemblies, all those enactments of battles against the Peruvians. I remember attending the wake of one of the men whose throats were slashed. I remember a coffin, some place I’m not sure how I got to. There were several of us, all dressed in our uniforms. There were lots of flowers and candles and people standing in silence. At some point the son of one of the dead men appeared, a kid just like us, in his uniform, with his school crest, and he stood next to the coffin for a long time. Maybe he said something. I can’t remember anymore, but what I know for sure is that he didn’t cry. He didn’t cry the whole time he was standing next to his father in that coffin. Then, another day, I remember a massive march toward the General Cemetery. Many voices shouting and chanting slogans, making demands, praying for the dead. The crowd tossing flower petals at the hearses, thousands of petals covering everything like a shower of flyers scattered in the street. The crowd advancing with flags and banners. We filled avenues, crossed bridges, walked on endlessly. But I don’t know anymore whose funeral I’m remembering. It might be the Vergara brothers from Villa Francia, or the boy burned to death by a military patrol, or the priest shot in the settlement of La Victoria, or the boy riddled with bullets on Calle Bulnes, or the kidnapped reporter, or the group assassinated on the Feast of Corpus Christi, or one of the others, any of the others. Time isn’t straightforward, it mixes everything up, shuffles the dead, merges them, separates them out again, advances backward, retreats in reverse, spins like a merry-go-round, like a tiny wheel in a laboratory cage, and traps us in funerals and marches and detentions, leaving us with no assurance of continuity or escape.
Days after we heard the word degollados, González stopped coming to class. We thought she was sick, but her absence stretched on for too long. Our teachers didn’t tell us anything, and Maldonado had no idea what was happening either. González’s phone didn’t ring, her house was closed up, there was no way to get in touch with her. One day González was there, and the next she was gone, vanished from our lives. Without realizing it, we started getting used to the sight of her empty desk at the back of the classroom.
