Writer José Donoso dies at seventy-one.
Spectacular escape of four members
of the Patriotic Front
from the high-security prison.
A helicopter carries them away through the skies
dangling in a basket.
Asian financial crisis. Chile survives because we are
the jaguars of South America.
More malls, more billboards,
more credit cards.
More options to buy everything on the installment plan.
Family members of the disappeared
light candles in front of the cathedral.
Pinochet cedes command of the army
and becomes a senator for life in the National Congress.
The world laughs at Chilean democracy.
The Communist Party
files the first lawsuit against Pinochet.
El Chino Ríos becomes the top-ranked tennis player in the world.
Pinochet is arrested in London.
The Chilean government intervenes on his behalf,
asking for his release.
The world laughs at Chilean democracy.
Family members of the disappeared
light candles in front of the cathedral.
Pinochet appears before a British court.
We follow it all via artists’ sketches
because no media are allowed in the English courts.
My grandmother dies just before her ninetieth birthday.
Cardinal Silva Henríquez, creator of the Vicariate of Solidarity, dies.
Jack Straw decides to release Pinochet
on grounds of ill health.
Pinochet returns to Chile in a Chilean air force plane.
He rises from his wheelchair,
bursting with health,
to salute the head of the army, who is there to greet him.
The world laughs at Chilean democracy.
Family members of the disappeared
light candles in front of the cathedral.
Ricardo Lagos takes office as president of the republic.
A military-civilian forum, Mesa de Diálogo, is established.
The fate of two hundred of the disappeared is reported on national television.
Family members of the disappeared
light candles in front of the cathedral.
Names are missing, they say.
Whereabouts are missing.
They keep asking: Where are they?
Judge Juan Guzmán Tapia
requests the impeachment of Pinochet
in order to strip him of his immunity as senator for life
and make him face some of the eighty-odd lawsuits filed against him.
M and I become the parents of a boy called D.
Attack on the Twin Towers.
D eats his first baby cereal
as we watch the towers fall on TV.
The National Commission on Political Prisoners
and Torture delivers the Valech Report
with the testimony of more than thirty-five thousand
Chileans who were detained and subjected to torture.
Family members of the disappeared
light candles in front of the cathedral.
Still asking.
Still waiting.
D takes his first steps and starts nursery school.
Roberto Bolaño dies in Vall d’Hebrón Hospital in Barcelona.
The Supreme Court upholds Pinochet’s impeachment.
Former DINA director Manuel Contreras is arrested.
His daughter cries and writhes on the ground.
Contreras resists arrest.
Family members
of the disappeared
light candles
in front of the cathedral.
Beginning of the Revolución Pingüina,
a student movement across Chile.
Sit-ins, marches, hunger strikes
demanding improvements
in public education.
Hunger strike by Mapuche activists held at Angol Prison
demanding communal property rights.
Militarization of Mapuche communities.
Application of antiterrorism laws
created by the Pinochet government.
Family
members
of
the
disappeared
light
candles
at
the
cathedral.
Surrounded by family and loved ones,
Augusto Pinochet dies at the army hospital
aged ninety-one.
He never served a sentence in Chile.
I hear the news and get into an accident on the highway.
The next day I visit my insurance company.
It’s next door to the Military School
where Pinochet is lying pompously in state.
Thousands of fanatics weep
and stand in line to bid the tyrant farewell.
The grandson of General Prats
patiently stands in line.
Hours later, he reaches the coffin and spits on it.
We didn’t start the fire, no we didn’t light it, but we tried to fight it.
I smell the candles burning on the corner. I recognize the smoke clinging to my skin, my hair, my faulty memory. Unsettling stink of burned tires, paraffin, barricades, hundreds of lit candles. All these years and it’s still impossible to shake it. Time stands still. Present, future, and past blur together in this ceremony, a parenthesis of smoke governed by the stopwatch from The Twilight Zone. I imagine there must be other children, like the children of José Weibel, Manuel Guerrero, José Manuel Parada, and Santiago Nattino, hidden among the candle flames. Maybe Yuri Gahona is here with his sister, Evelyn. Maybe they’re still playing with their father’s white bishop. Maybe Alexandra is here too: little Smurfette, Lucía Vergara’s daughter. Maybe she’s come with her own daughter and her daughter’s partner, because I know they’re the mothers of a little girl. Maybe Quila Leo’s children are here. Maybe Carol Flores’s children are here. Maybe Arturo Villavela’s children are here. Hugo Ratier’s children. Maybe Mario is here, the boy who lost the house in Janequeo that wasn’t his house and the family that wasn’t his family. The boy who was given asylum in Sweden and started a real family there. Maybe he’s back again with his real wife and children and they’re all here somewhere, joining in the festivities, breathing the sticky smoke from all these candles.
I look around for the little girl whose mother never answered her question. I try to find her, because I want to tell her yes, this is a birthday party, the way she imagined. We’ve been celebrating this strange day and lighting and lighting these damn candles for too long. For an endless, tedious moment of déjà vu, we play the parenthesis game and we’re always here in the fragile light of the little flames, our eyes red from the smoke. I search for the girl amid all these people I know because I want to tell her she’s right, this is a party, but a shitty party. We don’t deserve birthdays like this. We never deserved them. Not her, not me. Not Maldonado, not X and his little girl L, or F and his mother, or N and little S, or M, or D, or Alexandra, or Mario, or Yuri, or Evelyn, or anybody’s children, anybody’s grandchildren.
I want to tell her this, but I can’t find her.
She isn’t here anymore.
Maldonado takes my arm the way she used to when we were kids and we pretended to be old ladies. I lean on her and she leans on me and we inhale deeply, sucking in all the air and smoke that our worn-out lungs can hold, and when we’re about to burst, we whisper our wishes and blow as hard as we can. We blow with
