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

great processing capacity has its limits, the host tells us, and that’s what the first game is about.

On the television we see four little soccer balls, one in each corner of the screen. The host asks us to choose a ball and focus on it. I choose the one in the upper-left-hand corner. Then I follow the instructions and I focus on it. I don’t look at the other three, I just watch my little ball in the upper-left-hand corner. As I’m watching it, I hear the voice of the host describing exactly what is happening before my eyes: the other three balls begin to disappear from the screen. From one moment to the next, I see only my ball. The funny thing is that when I’m told to watch the full screen again, I realize that the other three balls were always there. My eyes saw them, but when I was focusing on a single one, my brain stopped registering the others. It turned them invisible.

During World War I, the Germans deployed one of their most fearsome weapons: the U-boat, a submarine that was difficult to target because it never came up to the surface. According to the show’s host, after countless devastating attacks, the crew of a British navy ship had an unusual idea. In order to make the submarines surface so that they could be attacked, the British navy crew would disguise their vessel as a harmless cruise ship. When the submarines saw through their periscopes that there was no danger, they would rise, never imagining that an attack was imminent. To carry out this piece of trickery, the English needed a key element not present on warships: women. So it was decided that some of the crew would disguise themselves. Arm in arm with their comrades, the cross-dressing sailors strolled on deck, pretending to be half of a happy tourist couple, or two friends chatting while taking a leisurely stroll in the sea air. This wild idea succeeded. Some lens of some periscope of some submarine spotted the scene and immediately the German crew assumed there was no reason not to rise to the surface. According to the show’s host, on March 15, 1917, the British bait ship attacked the first U-boat to be destroyed by this curious method.

The Germans saw men dressed as women on the deck of a warship. And yet what they processed from that image was the presence of a cruise ship. They rapidly manufactured details to fit a preconceived idea, took for granted information they didn’t possess, making inferences, and misreading the facts before their eyes. Thanks to a small trick by the English, the Germans chose to see just one soccer ball.

It’s the trick that makes the magic, says the host.

It doesn’t matter what you see. All that matters is what you believe you see.

A few months ago, on the same screen on which I’ve just been watching Brain Games, M and I watched a special on the staged media of the dictatorship. M is the father of my son. If this were a Brain Games exercise, anyone who saw us going about our daily business at home would infer that he’s my husband. And yet the host’s voice would correct that mistake, because we aren’t married. Readers who’ve been paying serious attention to the objective facts laid out in this book will have assumed the presence of M. Incidental or ghostly, maybe, but ultimately a real presence. He’s even mentioned in one chapter as the father of the narrator’s son: but has anyone spared him a single thought before we reached this point in the story? I doubt it. No one has properly imagined him. The trick has been not to focus attention on M. Until this very moment, when I instruct everyone to stop staring at the upper-left-hand corner, to watch the full screen.

M and I were lying in bed watching television. M isn’t my husband but he isn’t my boyfriend either. I could call him my partner, but that seems too fussy. Bereft of a word to describe our relationship, I’ve decided to call him M. So as I was saying, we were watching a special on staged events under the dictatorship. We’re somewhat obsessed with the topic and when investigative shows like this are announced we make plans to watch them. The program undertook to cover various scenes that were staged for the purpose of shaping the truth. Lots of media outlets were used repeatedly as vehicles for disinformation and lies. In fact, Televisión Nacional de Chile, the state television station, was taken over by the military and used on this important battlefront: the manipulation of the truth, the art of making us see nothing but a single soccer ball.

The first images I remember are of an International Red Cross delegation’s visit to the prison camp in Pisagua, months after the military coup. A team from Televisión Nacional filmed the visit. In the footage, we see a group of skinny, ragged prisoners swimming at the beach and playing soccer. As we watch the scene there is an interview with three detainees who say timidly that they’re being treated marvelously, they feel like they’re at a real vacation camp. Inevitably, M and I burst out laughing. It’s a pathetic scene. Everything is crudely manipulated. It looks like a comedy skit, Monty Python style. A sad sketch, a cruel dark joke, but a joke nonetheless.

Then come the fake press conferences and testimonies. Alleged clashes, alleged guerrilla forces, alleged suicides, alleged discoveries of alleged stashes of weapons and documents. And among these alleged scenarios comes a staged event from 1983.

A week before, the MIR, or Revolutionary Left Movement, had mounted an attack leading to the death of the governor of metropolitan Santiago, General Carol Urzúa. The reprisals were unexpected. Agents from the CNI, the National Information Center, detained those responsible, but days later they also surrounded two MIR safe houses and killed five MIR