The Return, Page 5

  “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “Well, I was perfectly clear.”

  “So you’re saying there are no men in Chile and no women who are men either.”

  “Not exactly, but almost.”

  “I think the women of Chile deserve a bit more respect.”

  “Who’s disrespecting Chilean women?”

  “You are, compadre, for a start.”

  “But how could I disrespect Chilean women? They’re the only women I know.”

  “That’s what you say, but it’s lip-service, isn’t it?”

  “How come you’re so touchy all of a sudden?”

  “I’m not touchy.”

  “You know, I kind of feel like stopping and smashing your face in.”

  “We’ll have to see about that.”

  “Jesus, what a beautiful night.”

  “Don’t beautiful night me. What’s the night got to do with anything?”

  “It must be because of the full moon.”

  “Don’t talk in riddles. I’m Chilean, remember, I don’t believe in beating around the bush.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong. We’re all Chileans here and all we ever do is beat around one great big fucking nightmare of a bush.”

  “You’re a pessimist, that’s what you are.”

  “What do you expect?”

  “Even in the darkest hours there is a light that shines. I think it was Pezoa who said that.”

  “Pezoa Veliz.”

  “Even in the blackest moments a little hope remains.”

  “Hope has gone to shit.”

  “Hope is the only thing that doesn’t go to shit.”

  “Pezoa Veliz. You know what I just remembered?”

  “And how am I supposed to know that, compadre?”

  “When we started in Criminal Investigations.”

  “At the station in Concepción?”

  “At the station in Calle del Temple.”

  “All I remember about that station is the whores.”

  “I never fucked them.”

  “How can you say that, compadre?”

  “I mean at the start, the first months; later on it was different, I started picking up bad habits.”

  “Anyway it was free, and when you fuck a whore and don’t pay, it’s like you’re not fucking a whore.”

  “A whore is always a whore.”

  “Sometimes I think you don’t like women.”

  “What do you mean I don’t like women?”

  “It’s the way you talk about them, with contempt.”

  “That’s because, in my experience, when you get mixed up with whores it always goes sour.”

  “Come on, nothing in the world is sweeter.”

  “Yeah, sure, that’s why we used to rape them.”

  “Are you talking about the station in Calle del Temple?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m talking about.”

  “Come on, we didn’t rape them, that was an exchange of favors. It was a way of killing time. The next morning they went off perfectly happy after giving us a bit of relief. Don’t you remember?”

  “I remember lots of things.”

  “The interrogations were worse. I never volunteered.”

  “But you’d have done it if you’d been asked.”

  “I don’t know what I would have done.”

  “You remember our classmate from high school who was a prisoner?”

  “Of course I do, what was his name?”

  “I was the one who realized he was there, though I still hadn’t seen him myself. You’d seen him, but you didn’t recognize him.”

  “We were twenty years old, compadre, and we hadn’t seen the guy for at least five years. Arturo I think he was called. He didn’t recognize me either.”

  “Yeah, Arturo. He left Chile when he was fifteen and came back when he was twenty.”

  “Bad timing, eh?”

  “Good too, in a way, though, ending up at our station, of all the places he could have been taken . . .”

  “Well, that’s all ancient history now, we’re all living in peace now.”

  “As soon as I saw his name on the list of political prisoners, I knew it was him. It’s not a very common name.”

  “Watch where you’re going; we can swap if you like.”

  “And the first thing I thought was, It’s our old classmate Arturo, crazy Arturo, who went to Mexico when he was fifteen.”

  “Well, I reckon he was happy to find us there too.”

  “Of course he was happy! When you saw him he was incommunicado and the other prisoners had to feed him.”

  “He really was happy.”

  “It’s like I’m seeing it now.”

  “But you weren’t even there.”

  “No, but you told me. You said, You’re Arturo Belano, aren’t you, from Los Angeles, Bio-Bio. And he replied, Yes sir, I am.”

  “That’s funny, I’d forgotten that.”

  “And then you said, Don’t you remember me, Arturo? Don’t you know who I am, asshole? And he looked at you as if he was thinking, Now it’s my turn to get tortured or What does this son of a bitch want with me?”

  “There was fear in his eyes, it’s true.”

  “And he said, No, sir, I’ve got no idea, but he’d already started to look at you differently, peering through the fecal waters of the past, as the poet might say.”

  “There was fear in his eyes, that’s all.”

  “And then you said, It’s me, asshole, your classmate from high school in Los Angeles, five years ago. Don’t you recognize me? Arancibia! And it was like he was making a huge effort, because five years is a long time and a lot of things had

  happened to him since he’d left Chile, plus what was happening now he’d come back, and he just couldn’t place you, he could remember the faces of fifteen-year-olds, not twenty-year-olds, and anyway you were never one of his close friends.”

  “He was friends with everyone, but he used to hang out with the tough kids.”

  “You were never one of his close friends.”

  “I would’ve liked to be, though, I have to admit.”

  “And then he said, Arancibia, yeah, of course, Arancibia, and this is the funny bit, isn’t it?”

  “It depends. My partner wasn’t amused at all.”

  “He grabbed you by the shoulders and gave you a thump in the chest that sent you flying back at least three yards.”

  “A yard and a half, just like the old days.”

  “And your partner jumped on him, of course, thinking the poor jerk had gone crazy.”

  “Or was trying to escape. We were so cocky back then we didn’t take our guns off to do the roll call.”

  “In other words, your partner thought he was after your gun, so he jumped on him.”

  “And he would have laid into him, but I said he was a friend.”

  “And then you started slapping Belano on the back and said relax and told him what a good time we were having.”

  “I only told him about the whores; Jesus, we were green.”

  “You said, I get to screw a whore in the cells every night.”

  “No, I said we organized raids and then fucked until the sun came up, but only when we were on duty, of course.”

  “And he must have said, Fantastic, Arancibia, fantastic, glad to see you’re keeping up the good work.”

  “Something like that; watch this curve.”

  “And you said to him, What are
you doing here, Belano? Didn’t you go to live in Mexico? And he told you he’d come back, and, of course, he said he was as innocent as the next man in the street.”

  “He asked me to do him a favor and let him make a phone call.”

  “And you let him use the phone.”

  “The same afternoon.”

  “And you told him about me.”

  “I said: Contreras is here, too. And he thought you were a prisoner.”

  “Shut up in a cell, screaming at three in the morning, like Chubby Martinazzo.”

  “Who was Martinazzo? I can’t remember now.”

  “We had him there for a while. Belano would have heard him yelling every night, unless he was a heavy sleeper.”

  “But I said, No, compadre, Contreras is a detective too, and I whispered in his ear: But he’s left-wing, don’t go telling.”

  “That was bad; you shouldn’t have said that.”

  “I wasn’t going to hang you out to dry.”

  “And what did Belano say?”

  “He looked like he didn’t believe me. He looked like he didn’t know who the hell Contreras was. He looked like he thought this fucking cop is going to take me to the slaughterhouse.”

  “Though he was a trusting sort of kid.”

  “Everyone’s trusting at fifteen.”

  “I didn’t even trust my own mother.”

  “What do you mean you didn’t trust your own mother? You can’t fool your mother.”

  “Exactly, that’s why.”

  “And then I said to him: You’ll see Contreras this morning, when they take you to the john, watch out for him, he’ll give you a signal. And Belano said OK, but he wanted me to set up the phone call. That was all he cared about.”

  “So he could get someone to bring him food.”

  “Anyway, he was happy when I left him. Sometimes I think if we’d met in the street he mightn’t even have said hello. It’s a funny world.”

  “He wouldn’t have recognized you. You weren’t one of his friends at high school.”

  “Neither were you.”

  “But he did recognize me. When they took them out around eleven, all the political prisoners in single file, I went over near the corridor that led to the bathroom and gave him a nod. He was the youngest of the prisoners and he wasn’t looking too good.”

  “But did he recognize you or not?”

  “Of course he recognized me. We smiled at each other from a distance and then he believed the stuff you’d told him.”

  “And what had I told him? Come on, let’s hear it.”

  “A whole heap of lies, as I found out when I went to see him.”

  “You went to see him?”

  “That night, after they transferred the other prisoners. Belano was left all on his own, with hours to go before the new lot arrived, and his spirits were about as low as they could get.”

  “Even the toughest guys lose it inside.”

  “Well, he hadn’t broken down, either, if that’s what you mean.”

  “No, but nearly.”

  “Nearly, that’s true. Also, a really weird thing happened to him. I think that’s why I remembered him tonight.”

  “So what was this weird thing?”

  “Well, it happened when he was incommunicado—you know how it was in that station: all it meant was that you starved, because you could send as many messages as you liked to people on the outside. Anyway, Belano was incommunicado, which meant that no one was bringing him any food, and he had no soap, no toothbrush, and no blanket to wrap himself in at night. And after a few days, of course, he was dirty, unshaven, his clothes stank, you know, the usual. The thing is, once a day we used to take all the prisoners to the bathroom, remember?”

  “How could I forget?”

  “And on the way to the bathroom there was a mirror, not in the bathroom itself, but in a corridor that ran between the bathroom and the gym where the political prisoners were kept, a tiny little mirror, near the records office, you remember, don’t you?”

  “I don’t remember that, compadre.”

  “Well, there was this mirror, and all the political prisoners would look at themselves in it. We’d taken down the mirror in the showers, so no one would get any stupid ideas, and this was the only chance they got to see how well they’d shaved or how straight their part was, so they all had a look in it, especially when they’d been allowed to shave or the one day of the week when they got to take a shower.”

  “OK, I get you, and since Belano was incommunicado he couldn’t even shave or take a shower or anything.”

  “Exactly, he didn’t have a razor, or a towel, or soap, or clean clothes, and he never got to take a shower.”

  “But I can’t remember him smelling really bad.”

  “Everyone stank. You could wash every day and still stink. You stank, too.”

  “You leave me out of it, compadre, and watch that embankment.”

  “Well, the thing is, when Belano was in the line with the prisoners, he always avoided looking at himself in the mirror. You see? He turned away. Whether he was going from the gym to the bathroom or from the bathroom back to the gym, when he got to the corridor with the mirror, he looked the other way.”

  “He was afraid to look at himself.”

  “Until one day, after finding out that his old schoolmates were there to get him out of that fix, he felt up to it. He’d been thinking about it all night and all morning. His luck had changed, so he decided to face the mirror and see how he looked.”

  “And what happened?”

  “He didn’t recognize himself.”

  “That’s all?”

  “That’s all; he didn’t recognize himself. He told me so the night I got a chance to talk with him. I really wasn’t expecting him to come out with that. I’d gone to tell him not to get me wrong, I was really left-wing, I had nothing to do with all the shit that was happening, but he came out with this crap about the mirror and I didn’t know what to say.”

  “And what did you say about me?”

  “I didn’t say anything at all. He did all the talking. He said it was a simple thing, it didn’t come as a shock at all, if you see what I mean. He was in the line, on the way to the bathroom, and as he passed the mirror, he turned suddenly, looked at his face and saw someone else, but he wasn’t frightened, he didn’t start shaking or get hysterical. I guess you could say that by then, knowing we were there at the station, he had no reason to get hysterical. Anyway, he did what he needed to do in the bathroom, quietly, thinking about the person he’d seen, thinking it over, but not making a big deal of it. And when they went back to the gym, he looked in the mirror again, and sure enough, he said, it wasn’t him, it was someone else, and I said to him, What are you saying, asshole? What do you mean someone else?”

  “That’s what I would have said, too. What did he mean?”

  “He said, Someone else. And I said, Explain it to me. And he said, A different person, that’s all.”

  “And then you thought he’d gone crazy.”

  “I don’t know what I thought, but to be honest, I was scared.”

  “A Chilean? Scared?”

  “You think that’s so unusual?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t say it’s usual for you.”

  “Whatever you say. I realized straightaway that he wasn’t trying to kid me. I’d taken him to the little room beside the gym, and he started talking about the mirror and the way they had to file past it every morning, and sudde
nly I realized that all of it was true: him, me, our conversation. And since we weren’t in the gym, and since he’d been a student at our grand old alma mater, it occurred to me that I could take him to the corridor where the mirror was and say, Take another look, with me here beside you this time, take a good calm look, and tell me if it isn’t the same old crazy Belano you see.”

  “And did you say that?”

  “Of course I did, but to be honest, the thought came a long time before the words. As if an eternity had passed between the idea popping into my head and coming out in a comprehensible form. A little eternity, to make things worse. Because if it had been a big or just a regular eternity, I wouldn’t have realized, if you follow me, but as it was, I did realize, and that intensified my fear.”

  “But you went ahead anyway.”

  “Of course I did; by then it was too late to turn back. I said, We’re going to do a test; let’s see if the same thing happens with me beside you, and he looked at me warily, but he said, All right, if you insist, like he was doing me a favor, when in fact I was the one doing him a favor, as usual.”

  “So you went to the mirror?”

  “We went to the mirror. I was taking a big risk because you know what would have happened if they’d caught me walking around the station with a political prisoner at midnight. And to help him calm down and be as objective as possible, I offered him a smoke, so we stood there puffing away and it was only when we’d crushed the butts on the ground that we headed off toward the bathroom, and he was relaxed, I guess he was thinking it couldn’t get any worse (which was bullshit, it could have been much, much worse), and I was kind of on edge, listening for the slightest noise, the sound of a door shutting, but I was careful not to let it show, and when we got to the mirror I said, Look at yourself, and he looked at himself, he stood in front of the mirror and looked at his face, he even ran a hand through his hair, which was really long, you know, the way people wore it in ‘73, and then he glanced aside, stepped away from the mirror and looked at the ground for a while.”

  “And?”

  “That’s what I said, And? Is it you or isn’t it? And he looked into my eyes and said: It’s someone else, compadre, that’s all there is to it. I could feel something inside me like a muscle or a nerve, I don’t know what it was, I swear, but it was saying: Smile, asshole, smile, and yet however much the muscle strained, I couldn’t smile, the best I could do was twitch, a spasm jerked my cheek up, anyway, he noticed and stood there looking at me, and I ran a hand over my face and gulped, because I was afraid again.”