The Twilight Zone by Nona Fernández (good books for 7th graders .TXT) 📕

When attendance was taken, we repeated her absence like a mantra. Elgueta, here. Fernández, here, González, absent. There were no more graph paper letters, no more Uncle Claudio, no more red Chevy, no more González. Eventually we were told that she had changed schools, she was at a German school, she had moved, her whole family was gone.

It was a time of disappearances and absences, too.

Long afterward, in 1994, when we were no longer at the school, when our uniforms no longer fit us and had been put away in some closet, the Chilean justice system delivered its first ruling on the kidnapping and murder of Communist Party members José Manuel Parada, Manuel Guerrero, and Santiago Nattino. The officers who committed the crime were sentenced to life in prison. On the same television screen where we used to play Space Invaders, we now saw the national police agents responsible for the murders. Six officers were involved. They appeared in plain sight. Their faces scrolled across the screen one after the other.

Though we had hardly known him, it wasn’t hard to recognize him. His face, ten years older, told us nothing, but that poor little wooden hand in a black glove did. Next to him was Uncle Claudio of the red Chevy. El Pegaso, they called him. He said that he was following orders of his superior, Don Guillermo González Betancourt. He stated that he had stabbed one of the three men as his superior watched from the car, a red Chevette.

All of us saw him on the television screen. In some strange way we tuned in to the same image at the same time.

Sometimes I think about that drive I took with Maldonado and González to Parque O’Higgins. I think about the red Chevy. The blue leatherette seat, so soft and shiny. I imagine one of the three men sitting there, living the last minutes of his life on the road to Pudahuel Airport. I’ve tried to find information about which of the three rode in the Chevy, whether they were driven together or separately, whether they were in the back seat where I sat, or whether they were transported in the trunk, hidden and bound as I know they must have been, but as soon as I find it I forget again.

A while after that televised vision, one October morning in 1991, national police lieutenant Félix Sazo Sepúlveda enters the Crowne Plaza Hotel in the center of Santiago. The lieutenant rapidly approaches the Avis Rent-a-Car counter, behind which stands twenty-one-year-old Estrella González Jepsen, mother of his young son. Estrella is attending a customer when Lieutenant Sazo aims his service revolver at her. They’ve been separated for some time. The lieutenant has struggled to accept the fact of their separation. That’s why he’s been following her, harassing her over the phone, threatening her the way you’d threaten an enemy, an alien, a Communist Party member. Estrella, he shouts. Our classmate scarcely has time to look at him before she’s struck by two bullets in the chest, one in the head, and a fourth in the back.

Like a little Martian from Space Invaders she flies apart into colored lights.

Estrella collapses in the fetal position, dying instantly. Police lieutenant Félix Sazo immediately shoots himself twice in the head with his smoking service revolver and falls to the ground.

On the same screen where we once watched Lost in Space, Movie Nights, Sábado gigante, and The Twilight Zone, our classmate turned up in the crime news.

And so this story comes to an end, with no mention of the man who tortured people, and with the image of Estrella González Jepsen dead at the hands of a national police officer. I imagine her in her school uniform, like the last time I saw her, in 1985. That’s not how she looked when she died, of course, but it’s how I want to imagine her. Beside her is the son of one of the degollados, just as I remember him at that wake, in his uniform, standing next to his father’s coffin, not crying. The two of them in the same scene, where my mind wants to put them. Side by side, maybe looking at each other. Maybe not. They’re the children. That’s what they are.

We’re all around them. Lying on the floor, in our uniforms too, but old now, gray-haired, balding, a few pounds heavier, careworn, fallen as in our enactments of the twenty-first of May on the deck of the enemy ship. Veterans of an old war. Little lead soldiers splashing in a fake sea of colored paper. The vast dark sea of the twilight zone.

I imagine him in a small apartment in a French town. Maybe not an apartment, a cabin. A simple place, in a village near the Swiss border. A sparsely populated area where the French police, who guard him, can monitor the comings and goings of any stranger. He’s been here for just a few weeks. He’s alone, he doesn’t know a soul, and the neighbors speak an indecipherable language. He can’t read the newspapers, can’t understand what the news announcers or the bus driver or the grocer are saying. He has just started getting used to the coins, and though the village is small, he still loses his way on its streets. Like Colonel Cook from that old episode of The Twilight Zone, the man who tortured people has survived his voyage through space, but his odyssey through loneliness and fear is just beginning. He’s an earthling lost on a strange planet. After taking the southern route out of Chile, he traveled on to Buenos Aires, and in Buenos Aires he got on a plane to Paris. He was there for a while, until Sécurité transferred him to this place that is now his. An unknown land, ruled by dead and untranslatable time.

It’s hard for me to imagine him there.

Everything goes out of focus