But maybe they are noticed. Maybe José lets his gaze linger for a moment on the dark eyes of the man who tortured people. Maybe he sees something troubling in those eyes, something he doesn’t have time to process, because just then a woman screams, startling everyone. Somebody stole my purse, she says, and as she speaks, three cars cut off the bus.
Then things happen very quickly. Six men get on through the back and front doors. El Álex and El Huaso shout that it’s José who snatched the purse. That’s the bastard, they say, and they point at José, who barely understands what’s happening, though he’s beginning to have an idea. The Weibel Barahona children look at their father in bewilderment. He’s been with them all this time, near, very near, never breaking the threads that keep the family within rescue distance, so he can’t have taken anyone’s purse. And anyway, he’s their father, the man who gets them out of bed every morning, who takes care of them, who brings them to school. He’s no thief. But it doesn’t matter what the children think, because the man who tortured people and his companions approach José, point a gun at him, and say they’re police and he’s under arrest for robbery. It doesn’t matter that José has no allegedly stolen purse, or that María Teresa is crying and pleading for help because she knows exactly what’s happening. It doesn’t matter that the children are scared, that the bus driver doesn’t understand what’s going on, that the passengers are watching in fear. The man who tortured people and his companions shove José out the door and in less than a minute they’ve put him in one of their cars and he’s gone forever.
I wonder whether José took a mental snapshot of his family in that instant. I wonder whether he managed to catch a last glimpse of his wife and children from the car, freezing the protective image. My runaway sentimental imagination wants to believe that he did, and that the image helped him keep terror at bay in the gray realm where he was condemned to spend the last days of his life.
In the privacy of the Cauce magazine offices, the reporter listened to that story. It was one of the first related to her by the man who tortured people. I can imagine the moment perfectly. He: sitting in an office chair, still nervous, ill at ease. She: listening from behind the desk with a tape recorder running. The words of the man who tortured people are being recorded on tape that is turning and turning in the machine, as the reporter’s imagination begins to run away with her, as mine does, staging the scenes that emerge from his testimony. José riding in the car with a group of unidentified agents. The bus with his family in it fading into the distance behind them, getting smaller and smaller until it disappears, severing the threads that keep the family within rescue distance … The reporter can finish the rest of the story herself, because she knew José, they were close friends, and she’s heard María Teresa describe the same scene on the bus from her own perspective. Now, in 1984, eight years later, neither María Teresa nor the children nor the reporter know what’s happened to José.
Envoy from the dark side, guide to that secret dimension, the man who tortured people said José was taken to a command center on Calle Dieciocho called La Firma. The man who tortured people said José was taken straight to an interrogation cell. The man who tortured people said José’s interrogation was one of the harshest of the era. The man who tortured people said that even so they failed to discover that José was the Communist Party’s second in command. The man who tortured people said that later José was taken to the house where he himself and all the unmarried agents slept. José was there for nearly a week, along with other detainees. The man who tortured people said that one night when he was on leave they took José away and disappeared him. The man who tortured people wasn’t there, but being familiar with such procedures, he guessed that José was taken to the Cajón del Maipo in the foothills of the Cordillera Central, handcuffed, blindfolded, and then shot and killed. The man who tortured people guesses that they then cut off his fingers at the first joint to make identification more difficult, and they tied stones to his feet with wire and threw him into the river.
The reporter cried when she heard this story.
Her weeping was captured on the tape turning and turning in the cassette recorder.
Like the man who tortured people, I wasn’t there when José was killed. But unlike him, it’s hard for me to imagine the details of executions at which I wasn’t present. I don’t know how many people took part, or what they said to each other. I don’t know the details of what unfolded. Nor do I want to. I lack the words and images to write the rest of this story. Any attempt I might make to account for the private last moments of someone about to disappear will fall short.
What did José do? What did he hear? What did he think? What was done to him?
Expelled from the realm of that imaginary unknown, powerless to express myself in a language beyond my command, all I know is that there are other easier things for me to imagine. Things outside that dark zone, things I can cradle like a light to better follow this map. Things like that snapshot
