Did he really put them on the line? I wonder. .
“The director didn’t like what he heard. What we’re sowing here, I told him, is terror, of course, and then hate and more hate. In the end no one will believe us about anything. Not even that there ever were groups of trained terrorists. . Because they kill in cold blood, they kill people who were never terrorists. . I don’t deny that fear brings about a military ‘victory,’ but it’s a pyrrhic victory. It’s achieved at the price of political failure and moral shame.
“I don’t know what the director answered. Chain of Command, Chain of Command. . ‘But what does Command want?’ I asked him. There was nothing concrete in his answer. Our job isn’t to conquer a territory but rather the people in it. In this conflict, the main thing is to win the war of images. You know?” Flaco goes on saying to me. “We live in a world of pure interpretation.” And he opens his long arms, inviting me to understand him. Because that’s what he wants from me, he wants me to think he’s good. In the midst of the filth and disgust, here is a just man who loves me. I take advantage of the situation to ask him why he fights. It’s something that intrigues me in him, in all of them. What really drives them? Are the sacred rites of “order” and “Command” enough?
My question irritates him. I’ve taken him out of his noble deliberations. His answer is rote, fast, machinelike, he launches his entire demonology at me: that they are fighting so our country won’t be taken over by people who defend a system that builds a wall in Berlin so the populace can’t get out; the same people who in ’39 supported the pact between Hitler and Stalin, the same ones who wrote panegyrics for Stalin and later for Brezhnev, who in ’56 supported the Soviet Union’s invasion of Hungary, who in ’68 supported the Soviet Union’s invasion of Prague and — incredibly — here in Santiago came to defend the Soviet embassy against the people who went there to protest the invasion; the ones who trained in Cuba, in Vietnam, in Bulgaria, and who received and were still receiving AK-47 rifles, and M-16s and FALs and RPG 7 rocket launchers. . Didn’t they catch MIR, at the very start, with something like two hundred AKs hidden in gas cylinders? Meanwhile, in Europe, they think these people are social democratic doves. . Idiots! They’ll never understand the double dealing these con artists are capable of. They just sit there sucking their thumbs! Castro fooled them already, but they didn’t learn. Idiots! Because this irregular war is against Fidel Castro’s Cuba. Because it’s Cuba that wants to destabilize Chile and it’s Cuba that sends trained men and the weapons we find in arsenals and hideouts. From Cuba and the USSR. He tells me: “Behind it all, the big Russian bear is always lying in wait. . No, not here,” he boasts, “here they’re not going to do what they did in Nicaragua; in Iran, in Vietnam. No, no. Here, we’re going to tear them a new asshole. . Our freedom is at stake. And democracy?” he asks himself. “It will come, not yet, but it will come.”
I tell him that such an attitude, so reactionary, is lacking in poetry. He smiles with the simplicity of the simple and literal man that he is, a smile that inspires in me a certain disdain and, at the same time, an uncertain tenderness. Then he talks to me again about the purity and freedom of the mountaintop. “If you only knew the beauty of Alto de Los Leones. A true obelisk that’s 18,570 feet high. Huge walls of smooth rock, vertical cliffs of over 3,000 feet. One of them is 7,200 feet! The famous German alpinist Federico Reichert, who explored the Alps, the Caucasus, and the Andes, said in his book in 1929 that the Alto de Los Leones ‘will never lose its virginity, since its inaccessible summit seems beyond the limit of all possibility.’ Can you imagine? Even so, after the Italians Gabriele Boccalatte and Piero Zanetti went up in 1934, there are several of us who have reached the summit. Believe me: that’s what poetry is,” he tells me. “Unadulterated poetry.”
But after that moment of exultation the furrowed brow returns, and the same aggrieved tone as before.
He’s bored with what he does, he tells me. He’s disgusted, he tells me. “My work is ‘intelligence,”’ he tells me. “My work is secret recordings, tracking over the course of months, photos taken from fake ambulances and false taxis, fingerprints, duly verified confessions, microphones hidden behind the plate of a power socket, recordings from a tapped phone, weapons found in secret compartments, documents that I turn into classified information. . But, of course, the evidence is never more than the tip of the iceberg. You have to imagine the reality. But where the imagination creates, reason prunes. That’s what we’re here for, that’s what we train for, to investigate. But here there has been bad intelligence, there’s been shooting into the flock, lack of professionalism, and simple barbarity. The cruelty of wolves in a cage.
“I don’t mean to say they’re all tame doves. No. And I know that Mossad eliminates terrorists and, sometimes, they make mistakes, too. I know it very well. We’ve had instructors from Mossad in Central who spoke perfect Spanish. Smart guys, let me tell you. And the English do the same. You don’t believe me? For example, in 1978, on the way to Gibraltar, I’m telling you, gunmen from SAS and MI5 murdered three terrorists from the IRA. Three. They didn’t even give them a chance to surrender. Well, and then there’s the United States. . Not only in Vietnam. Later, in Libya. . But here, there’s no sense of proportion. Macha’s people fight just to fight, because why not, you understand?”
I answer, quoting Violeta Parra: “Pero no es culpa del chancho. . But it’s not the pig who’s at fault, it’s the one who feeds it the mash.”
He looks at me with a disdainful sneer on his lips.
“I know what you’re thinking. . And yes, you’re right,” he explains, showing the white palms of his hands. I had hurt him. “A lot of missions go straight to Macha from C-1,” he says. “They skip over me because they know what I think, did you know that?” And his tone gets softer to win me over. “And Macha thinks he’s the Macho of all machos, right?” Now his tone is mocking. “The little boss of that mafia only obeys macho orders and he only gives macho orders, right? He goes first into the most dangerous safe house. He wants to take risks. And you know why? To assuage his guilt. It balances things out, he figures. He ignores procedure so he can attack with few people, he’s even gone into a house alone, and then he makes mistakes, like what happened when the ‘Prince of Wales’ got away from him. And then the ones he wants to catch or blow the whistle on get away from him, poor fucker. . It’s so he can avoid leaks, he says, to avoid accidents, because in small houses there’s a big risk of friendly fire, he says, he only trusts his own people, no one else, he says, there’s a mole here, someone warns the enemy; he says he had to investigate Colonel Vergara’s assassination and found it would have been impossible without information from inside. . That’s what he says. I’ve asked him for proof and he doesn’t have any. But of course, you know, they shot at him point-blank and the bullet stayed in him. Too close to the femoral to extract it. So it hurts him. So he limps a little. They could have killed him, but they didn’t kill him. Friendly fire? Betrayal? We’ll never know. That’s it. The truth is that when it comes to Macha, one more death won’t keep him up at night.”
He takes his knees in his hands. He’s dejected. “This shit comes from above,” he tells me in a barely audible voice. “That’s why no one puts a stop to it. My complaint went into a vacuum. The director wants more power, so he needs a bigger budget, so he needs to increase the danger posed by the enemy. And the boss above him, you think he’s not doing exactly the same thing?”