They must have been asked about the man who tortured people.
They must have been ordered to reveal his whereabouts.
On March 30, 1985, as everyone is looking for them, as the press is talking about the kidnapping, in a caravan headed by the old red Chevy that I once rode in with Maldonado, a commando unit takes the three detainees down the airport road. The comrades of the man who tortured people are there. González, the officer with the wooden hand who was my classmate’s father, is there. The cars stop and the comrades of the man who tortured people make the three detainees get out. With a knife they cut their throats and leave them to bleed to death. The country wakes up to this “gruesome discovery,” that’s how I heard the news on my mother’s car radio on the way to school. That’s what I remember the voice of the announcer saying, the same person who is the presenter at today’s ceremony, which will never end.
There was a video of the Billy Joel song. In it, Joel is drumming on the kitchen table when suddenly a couple comes in. It’s a bride and groom straight out of the 1950s, who are about to begin their life together. They don’t see Joel. He’s like a ghost from the future watching them unseen, witness to everything that happens in the kitchen. Soon a child appears, the couple’s son. And then the boy grows up, becomes an adolescent and then a young man as styles change, the kitchen appliances grow more modern, and the parents’ clothing evolves. A whole life unfolds in that kitchen. Birthdays, graduations, parties, lunches, Christmases, funerals. Sometimes we see newspaper headlines. Sometimes Life magazine is read. Elvis appears in a photograph. Calendar pages fly off, one month after another, and clocks spin madly. And sometimes the family is a different family. Because families are all alike and each era leaves its mark on families and kitchens, whether they know it or not. And sometimes, in the chorus, Joel keeps drumming on the table, but behind him the kitchen is gone, and instead there’s a kind of window though which we see images from his times, from the world in which he was fated to grow up. A man hanging from chains in a tree, which makes me think of Korea. An Asian man shooting another man, which makes me think of Vietnam. Arrests, policemen, soldiers, bodies from some war. And then flames start to come in through the window to the place where Joel is. Flames that burn everything up, because there has never been a kitchen anywhere in the world that is safe from the blaze of history.
Coup in Chile.
President Allende dies at La Moneda.
Mass arrests,
secret executions,
war tribunals.
The Caravan of Death travels south and north.
Víctor Jara is tortured
and killed at the National Stadium.
The man who tortured people starts at AGA.
Our neighbors, the Quevedos,
hide flyers at our house.
My grandmother, alarmed, makes a fuss.
Creation of DINA, the National Intelligence Directorate.
Creation of SIFA, the Air Force Intelligence Service.
Selective detentions, abductions,
people disappeared.
The man who tortured people
joins an antisubversive group.
I start school, wearing a uniform for the first time
and carrying a metal lunch box.
Assassination of General Carlos Prats,
ex-minister of the interior under Salvador Allende.
His car explodes in Buenos Aires.
On Calle Santa Fe, MIR leader Miguel Enríquez is killed.
Pinochet flies to Franco’s funeral.
The Vicariate of Solidarity is created.
Bodies in the Cajón del Maipo, fingers missing the first joints,
no fingerprints.
Assassination of Orlando Letelier in Washington.
Ceremony on Cerro Chacarillas,
seventy-six young men climbing the hill with torches,
receiving medals from Pinochet.
The man who tortured people
becomes a guard at clandestine detention centers.
El Chapulín Colorado
makes an appearance at the National Stadium,
I go to see him, bringing my plastic squeaky hammer, the chipote chillón.
Contreras Maluje is kidnapped blocks from my house,
My mother watches it happen and then
tells us the story at lunchtime.
El Quila Leo is assassinated.
The man who tortured people
cries secretly in his barracks.
DINA is dissolved and CNI, the National Information Center, is created.
The first bodies of the disappeared
are discovered in the Lonquén mines.
Don Francisco hosts the first Telethon,
I have a sleepover with a group of friends
and we stay up all night to watch it.
Family members of the disappeared chain themselves
to the gates of the National Congress.
Six-year-old Rodrigo Anfruns is kidnapped,
and we’re all afraid of being kidnapped
whether we’re blond like Rodrigo or not.
A national plebiscite is held.
The new constitution is approved,
the one that governs us to this day.
Pinochet moves to La Moneda.
Fire at the Torre Santa María.
The Apumanque mall opens.
Ex-president Eduardo Frei is assassinated
at the Clínica Santa María.
Union leader Tucapel Jiménez is assassinated.
Opposition magazines begin to circulate
among my classmates.
I read the special issue on torture and dream about rats.
Economic crisis in Chile.
My Uncle R and Aunt M leave for Miami, fleeing their debts.
The Parque Arauco mall opens.
Family members of the
