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

house, overturning the furniture, finding Boris and seizing him and beating him and kicking him on the floor. And his mother screaming and his niece crying. And the neighbors pretending not to notice and hiding, not seeing or not wanting to see.

And then the other two brothers appear. Carol and Lincoyán. They’ve heard the commotion from somewhere and they come running in alarm. As one might imagine, they too are seized and beaten. And nothing does any good: not their mother’s pleas, not their niece’s tears, not the Floreses’ resistance. As one might imagine, the commandos take the three brothers from their mother’s house to some unspecified location.

The man who tortured people played no part in this arrest. Ten years later, he’s at a parish hall. It’s one of those places used for meetings or community events, but now it’s empty, at the disposal of the man who tortured people and the lawyer working with him. They sit under a bare bulb. There are two cups of tea or coffee steaming on the table, poured a moment ago by some discreet nun who asked no questions and saw no more than she needed to see. There’s also an ashtray holding a few cigarette butts, evidence that the two men arrived a while ago.

I imagine them facing each other, eyes meeting. The gaze of the man who tortured people sometimes drifts to the tape spinning and spinning in the lawyer’s cassette recorder. I imagine the table is full of photographs. The man who tortured people examines them and tries to identify faces. He doesn’t remember names; he remembers nicknames. This is the one we called the Vicar, this is the Watchmaker, this is Comrade Yuri, he says. All of these photographs were provided by family members of the disappeared. The lawyer is trying to track them down, that’s his job, that’s why he’s brought the pictures, and that’s why he’s challenging the man who tortured people to remember them.

Each of these photographs is a postcard sent from some other time.

A cry for help begging to be heard.

The man who tortured people studies the photographs, trying to decipher what they’re hiding. Territories inhabited by other people’s lives and other people’s pasts. Countries bounded by personal histories, regulated by laws invented at family dinner tables. The Contreras Maluje world, the Weibel world, the Flores world. Planets from which the only message to be heard is transmitted by smiling faces looking into the camera and begging to be recognized.

Remember who I am, they say.

Remember where I was, remember what was done to me.

Where I was killed, where I was buried.

The man who tortured people holds one of these photographs in his hand. He examines it carefully. It shows a young man with a child in his arms. The man is looking into the camera and smiling shyly, while the child, barely a year old, looks faintly surprised. On the planet they’re from, the child is most likely the son of the man who’s holding him. The boy is wearing little white shoes and socks, maybe bought for him by his mother, who isn’t visible, but who is part of the world that speaks through the photograph.

I imagine the man who tortured people is imagining this world. I imagine that, like me, he’s able to read the moment when the photograph was taken. He can see the house, the family all around, and as he does so, I imagine, a faint shiver runs through him.

Remember who I am, he hears.

Remember where I was, remember what was done to me.

Where I was killed, where I was buried.

The man who tortured people says that his job in the basement of the War Academy was to sit outside the rooms of detainees, rifle in hand, and make sure that no one spoke. The first room he was assigned was number two. In it was Carol Flores, the man in the photograph he’s holding in his hand.

We called him Juanca, but his name was Carol, he says.

The Flores brothers were tortured at the War Academy. As Carol was being interrogated, young Boris heard his screams. In turn, Carol heard Lincoyán’s screams. In turn, Lincoyán heard Boris’s screams.

One day the youngest of the Flores brothers was taken out of the room where he was held and driven away in a truck. Young Boris made the trip on the floor, lying at the feet of his captors, who announced that they were going to kill him. Young Boris imagined a shot in the back of the head or a burst of machine gun fire behind him as he ran through some open field. He thought about his brothers Carol and Lincoyán, heard their screams of pain from the interrogation room again. And maybe he thought about his mother and his niece weeping, which was the last thing he heard before he was arrested. Maybe he thought about his father, or his other brother Fabio, or his girlfriend, because he must have had a girlfriend. But any last thoughts going through his head were interrupted by the sudden braking of the truck.

The doors flew open. He was blindfolded, and couldn’t see as he advanced, but he soon realized that he was back at the Air War Academy. Back in the interrogation room. When they removed the blindfold, he realized that he wasn’t in a field with some conscript’s rifle pointed at the back of his head. They weren’t going to kill him. They had never planned to. The drive he’d returned from was a kind of warning, that’s how he understood it. But before he could reflect more on what he had been through, a man announced that he had to sign a statement and then he would be released. Boris agreed, and hours later, after being given a good beating, as one might imagine, he was dumped in the center of Santiago. Young Boris could hardly fathom what was happening but as soon