The words of the testimony he gave to the reporter and the lawyer are still here, doing their work, but the man who tortured people, as he once was, is beginning to fade. His mustache, the shape of his face, all of him, grows hazy, leached of color like those seventies snapshots from my childhood. I’m left with scraps, stray features from the photograph on the cover of Cauce magazine, which I pull up again now on my computer screen.
My face is reflected in the glass, my face merges with his.
I see myself behind him or maybe in front of him.
I look like a ghost in the picture.
A shadow lurking, a spy watching him though he doesn’t know it.
That’s what I am in part, I think: a spy watching him though he doesn’t know it.
With some effort I imagine him eating breakfast one morning in his refuge. It’s March 1985 and a few rays of winter sunshine come in through a small window. He butters a croissant at the café and goes through the motions of listening to the radio though he doesn’t understand much, hardly anything at all. A news report is beginning. The man who tortured people knows this because he recognizes the theme music by now. The words are just sounds in the strange voice’s unintelligible singsong. Suddenly he hears news from Chile being announced. He understands this perfectly well. Rapport du Chili. The man turns up the volume, as if by doing so he’ll activate some instantaneous translation. He leans close to the speaker, and amid endless incomprehensible sentences he hears them foolishly repeating the word égorgés. Égorgés, says the announcer. Égorgés. And from listening to it over and over it stops being a sound and acquires character and weight. Égorgés, he thinks to himself and he wonders what it means, just as we wondered when we heard the Spanish word for the first time, spoken in a Chilean announcer’s voice, some hundreds of kilometers away. Égorgés, hears the man who tortured people, in that distant village where he’s taken refuge, while in Chile, at the same time or moments before, the same word is being spoken on countless radios in Spanish: degollados.
The old raven shrieks in that window in France.
The man knows what it means.
It’s March 29, 2016, and my friend Maldonado and I are walking down the street to a commemoration. It’s the anniversary of the kidnapping of José Manuel Parada and Manuel Guerrero from the entrance of the Colegio Latinoamericano. In front of what used to be the school and is now the entrance to a modern apartment building, a memorial has been built in their name. The memorial also honors Santiago Nattino, who was kidnapped a day earlier from a different spot and was murdered along with his comrades.
As we walk, we think about González and the little letters she wrote to Maldonado when we were girls. We also think about the ride we took in González’s red Chevy and about our random secret connection through her to the men we’ll pay tribute to today. We walk on, remembering the intense times we were fated to grow up in, and as we do, a Billy Joel song gets stuck in my head. It’s a song that M put on this afternoon when we were washing the dishes, something we kept singing and translating obsessively out of sheer joy. This happens to me sometimes. There are songs I can’t shake, that stick around for days or even weeks in my unconscious. This is one of them. It’s called “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” and it runs through a list of famous people in history, music, film, sports. Books are mentioned in it, too, and movies, TV series, events, anything that left its mark on the world from the day Joel was born to the moment he wrote the song in the late eighties. He rattles them all off in chronological order without explanation, but following along you get a picture of the world he grew up in.
Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnnie Ray
South Pacific, Walter Winchell, Joe DiMaggio
Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Studebaker, television
North Korea, South Korea, Marilyn Monroe
Rosenbergs, H-bomb, Sugar Ray, Panmunjom
Brando, “The King and I” and “The Catcher in the Rye”
So I go on talking to Maldonado and humming the chorus over and over without meaning to, as if I’m still in the kitchen washing dishes with M.
We didn’t start the fire, no we didn’t light it, but we tried to fight it.
On a different March 29, in a scene I’ve already imagined, the man who tortured people and his team kidnapped José Weibel from the bus he was riding with his family. The family was on its way to the very school that used to stand here, to drop off the children, like they did every morning. From the entrance to that school on another March 29, eleven years later, Guerrero and Parada would be taken to the same detention center where José was interrogated and tortured. Maybe by the very same agents. Maybe not. But they were part of the same group, the group of the man who tortured people.
Lots of people have arrived for the commemoration. The street has been closed off, a stage erected, and chairs set up, though too few for everyone who has come. Maldonado and I find a spot off to one side of the stage and try to catch up with the ceremony, which has already begun. A presenter explains how the memorial was planned, speaks about how some in the neighborhood were opposed to it, and addresses the objections of municipal officials. As we listen, I see one of José Weibel’s children in the distance. I recognize him because he’s a well-known reporter, an investigative journalist. Around this time, he’s just published a book exposing the misappropriation of public funds by the Chilean army under democracy.
