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

happy birthday to her in person. It’s been months since she returned to Chile and she misses her little girl so much. She also writes about what’s happening in their faraway country, a country no one has ever heard of. She tells her daughter about the first general strike led by copper miners. She tells her that at night people bang on pots as a symbol of their discontent and hunger. She talks about television, too, and about a show she’s seen that she’s sure her daughter would like a lot. It runs on the weekends. When Lucía watches it she imagines her daughter sitting next to her, eyes on the screen, laughing. It’s a children’s show called The Smurfs. It’s about a city inhabited only by Smurfs, who are like little children who live in toadstool houses and play happily together in the woods. Among them is just one girl Smurf, whose name is Smurfette and who has long blond hair, the way Lucía remembers her daughter’s. There is also a Papa Smurf who takes care of them, but they have no mother, she writes, foreseeing a possible future.

On the same median where M and I stand looking at the front of 1330, the man who tortured people lay Lucía’s body. If we look down and use our imagination we can see her in the middle of the night, here at our feet. Her bullet-riddled body is naked, she’s wearing only underpants. That’s how she was photographed by the press and that’s how she appeared on front pages the next day. That’s how I remember her, because that’s how she was shown to me, that’s the instruction I was given under the headline “Radical Assassins Die in Dramatic Shoot-Out.” That’s how her family must have seen her, her mother over there in France, even her little girl once she wasn’t little anymore. Despite the years and this whole avalanche of imagination I still can’t understand why they had to undress her for that crude display. How did they pull off her dress? Who removed her bra? Who stole her watch? What about her earrings? What about the chain around her neck? What happened to those clothes? Who ended up with her things? What eyes saw those naked breasts? What hands touched the cold skin of her thighs? What words did they speak as they undressed her? What abject fantasy crossed their perverted minds? The man who tortured people never mentions any of this. In his testimony he doesn’t explain or even describe the moment when Lucía was stripped of her clothes. I imagine that if he carried the body out into the street he must have taken part in the ritual. But he doesn’t say so. He doesn’t accept responsibility for it. He gives an instruction in his testimony, he directs me to turn my gaze elsewhere.

If this were an episode of Brain Games, anyone who saw M and me standing here in the street would think we’re two residents of this quiet neighborhood enjoying an eccentric summer stroll under the sun’s blistering rays. The viewers’ eyes would see only the stillness, observing the slight rustle of the treetops and the silent facades of these houses in the upper reaches of the capital. Like those Germans on the World War I submarine, they’d view this scene through their periscope and they’d see a pleasure cruise. They wouldn’t see Lucía naked on the ground waiting for a sheet to cover her at last. Based on the information in front of their eyes, they would have to accept the first explanation their brains concocted. If this were an episode of Brain Games the host would end the show by telling us what we already know. That a simple trick is all it takes to make us see just one ball.

Once I came back from an operation

with bloodstains on my pants.

I hadn’t noticed them, but my wife did.

She asked me if I was at the massacre

that was on television,

the one with the shot-up houses

in Las Condes and Quinta Normal.

I always lied to her, but that night I couldn’t.

I saw her face when I said yes.

Her face scared me.

Her silence scared me.

That night I started to dream of rats.

Of dark rooms and rats.

Rats watching me with red eyes.

Rats following me and creeping into the room with me,

slipping between

the legs of my bloodstained pants.

Mario has lunch with his father and his uncle. His father isn’t his father and his uncle isn’t his uncle. The names they use aren’t their real names either, but in their performance of the day-to-day in this clandestine life, Mario is Mario, his father is his father, and his uncle is his uncle. Mario is in his school uniform. He’s fifteen years old and he’s home from school. Now that they’re sitting around the table together, his uncle who isn’t his uncle and his father who isn’t his father ask how his day was. For Mario, this is a complicated question. A few months ago he started school again, but it hasn’t been easy to get back to work, back to his books, back to homework. Also, his school isn’t his school. It’s a new one, different from the one before, which in turn was different from the one before that, and the one before that, and the one before that.

It was okay, he says, and neither his father nor his uncle presses him further because they know that in this role-playing game, neither fake fathers nor fake uncles should pester him.

The radio is on while they eat. The announcer reports the news of the day. Every day, Mario comes home from school and the three of them sit down for lunch and listen to the news. They probably discuss the assault on General Carol Urzúa. A week after it happened, it’s still all anyone is talking about on the radio and television.

When they’re finished eating,