The Twilight Zone by Nona Fernández (inspirational books .txt) 📗

The lawyer tells how this man was contacted through a magazine that the man had approached, desperate to make his statement. I want to talk, the lawyer says he said. The lawyer tells how, after reading what this man described to the reporter, he agreed to meet with him and interview him. Then came that August afternoon in the Plaza Santa Ana and the beginning of a relationship that I’ve been trying to imagine.

My cell phone screen lights up. There’s a WhatsApp message for me. It’s from my friends, the directors of the movie we’re watching. I’d told them that I was planning to come, and now they’re messaging, curious to know how many people are in the audience. I look around at the legion of red seats, all empty. From the theater above us comes a deafening sound, like an explosion. The walls and the floor vibrate slightly. Ultron must be battling the Avengers, probably in the middle of the climactic scene, the one that makes everybody shrink in their seats, popcorn hopping where it probably lies scattered on the floor by now. Meanwhile, my mother—the only first-time spectator in this theater—cries softly as on screen the lawyer addresses the camera. I keep thinking that there are images missing from the documentary, other shots that would’ve been more powerful, more earth-shaking. Maybe we should have reconstructed some scenes: brutal fights, hand-to-hand combat with evil agents. Maybe we should have hired stars like Robert Downey Jr. or, more realistically, a face familiar from the afternoon soaps. Maybe we should have included some special effects, or at least photoshopped wrinkles and gray hair, patched in a swelling sound track for each segment, and added something as spectacular and hair-raising as the explosion up above us that I can still hear. It’s lunchtime, and the documentary I’m watching is an odd fit for a multiplex like this, so it makes some sense that my mother and I are the only ones here, but even so I can’t bring myself to answer my friends’ question. I’m afraid to confess that the one real audience member came because I brought her and she might only be crying because she’s cut her dose of Sentidol. I write truthfully that I’m here with my mother and she’s very moved. Then I tell them that I’ll be in touch when the show is over and I turn off my phone.

On screen the lawyer is still talking. He says that the first thing he did with the man who tortured people was go in the Renault van to some of the places where the detained and disappeared had been buried. The lawyer says that the man who tortured people paced each spot, trying to remember; he counted his steps, did sums in his head, raked the soil with feet and hands. As I imagine it, at least, it strikes me as a moving scene. A man trying to summon his worst memories, meticulously attempting to mentally declassify their darkest details.

The lawyer says they also went to see some detention facilities. They sat outside peering in, hidden in the car as the man who tortured people described what he’d seen. The lawyer says it was a long afternoon of looking and searching. The lawyer says that after this excursion they arrived at a predetermined location, property of the Catholic Church, where they were expected. Once they got there, they asked expressly not to be disturbed. The lawyer says that they settled in, he took out a tape recorder, and they got to work. The lawyer says—and meanwhile I’m setting the scene and imagining it all, because I know his words so well I could repeat them by heart, even imitating the timbre of his voice:

Look, I’m going to record this, but I care less about the recording than your words. I want you to talk to me, and as you do I’m going to write. To me, writing means getting your words down. To me, writing means hearing and understanding what you’re saying and what I should ask.

The lawyer says that after this explanation he started the tape recorder, that the tape spun in the machine, capturing the voice of the man remembering, in spare, precise sentences, without adjectives.

Thirty years after this encounter, on the screen here in the theater, the lawyer inserts an old cassette into a tape recorder. It’s ancient, the kind that isn’t used anymore. He carefully pushes Play, the tape inside turns, and from the machine’s small, staticky speakers comes a man’s voice.

It’s him. What I hear over the theater speakers is the voice of Andrés Antonio Valenzuela Morales, Soldier First Class, ID #39432, La Ligua. His words, unfiltered by time or faulty memory. Testifying right there, a few hours after his suicidal despair, with the smell of death on him, still trying to get it off his body.

Each time I saw this image in previous cuts, I instinctively leaned toward whatever screen was in front of me to hear better. Now the theater’s Dolby Surround Sound lets me listen without having to move from my red seat. As the lawyer listens to the testimony he gathered decades ago, the voice of the man who tortured people, trapped in the continuous present turning in the cassette tape, makes its way across the theater to me. For the first time, I hear it clearly. His words truly are spare, nouns unadorned by adjectives, sticking to what’s strictly necessary. He mentions some agents, victims, one operative especially whose name I don’t recognize. Little Fanta, Big Fanta, he says. He reels off memories, trying to identify prisoners, pinpointing facts, names, dates.

I didn’t know I’d end up doing this.

If I had known,

I would’ve kept those IDs it was my job to destroy.

Now we’d know who we’re talking about.

I can’t remember their names. I remember nicknames.

We called one guy the Watchmaker. One was the Vicar.

One was Comrade Yuri.

To me, writing means getting