Days that are nights go by, merging into nights that are nights. I’m an animal reduced to basic desires: that they won’t hurl one more blow or insult at me or take away my bowl of soup, the pillow or mattress, or the can that serves as a toilet in our cell. It’s all happened to me. These are light punishments. I was punished for lying: four days with the same can, if I figured the time right. I can hear a bell, and that gives us a way to measure time. I hate to admit it, but it’s the truth. The only thing left of that eviscerated time is the bell of a church that gives opiate to the people. It’s like being locked in a medieval dungeon. Although in my situation now the priests are a help, even so, I repeat, they deal in resignation as consolation. Still and all I wait for those bells without which my dragging time would brush the abyss. It’s an anemic present that evaporates and abandons me. The bells are the only human thing we have left.
Then, suddenly, they led me to a changing room and handed me a zippered plastic bag. There were the clothes I was wearing the day they arrested me. My purse, too, my wallet with the eight thousand seven hundred pesos I had with me that day, and my false ID card — everything except the thirty thousand dollars and the four million plus in Chilean pesos we had taken from the Bash safe in the currency exchange. They gave me a document signed by a military judge I never saw: provisional freedom. They had, they laughed, paid my bail with the money they found in my purse. I got dressed and they set me free at stop number 21 on Gran Avenida. There were no explanations.
EIGHT
They let me go in the afternoon. I did what our manuals taught us to do, to lose any “shadows,” as we called them. “Tails,” as they said in Central. But it’s hard for me to walk in a straight line. The light hurts. The wideness scares me, the open space of the street. My first job is to lose my potential watcher. Useless, I thought. But I had to do it and I did it. I got on and off of two buses in a row, I walked along streets and then retraced my steps, I walked around the Central Station a couple of times, went out, and got on a third bus. I decided they weren’t shadowing me. Finally, about four hours later, I got to my mother’s house. It was a shock. My mother cried, so did the cook — everyone but Anita, who looked at me without understanding. Five years old, she was then.
I took a long, slow, hot shower and got into bed. I said I was tired and I needed to sleep. But I just lay there facing the wall. I couldn’t get up. I wanted to be alone and not think about anything. My mother gave me some pills to help me sleep, and I managed to doze for a few hours. Ever since that day, I’ve never again been able to fall asleep without pills. Nor have I been able to sleep with the light off. I need a little light, otherwise I start tossing in bed and I can’t sleep anymore. I woke up suddenly, startled and sweating. I was still in my childhood room.
When I left home to live on my own I didn’t want to bring anything with me, and my mother kept things exactly as they were. It’s as if I’d left home yesterday. There’s an old Silvio Rodriguez cassette in my stereo. Those must have been the last songs I heard in this room. Everything is the same. Even a few old dolls with faded hair that I never gave away, which watch me from the shelf with staring eyes, open and empty, as if dead. I look at the little-girl curtains my mother never changed: they’re sky blue with red, green, and yellow balloons. Behind them the flowers of the apricot tree press against the window. I look at the clock. Time doesn’t pass.
My mother comes in and it’s as if she’d woken me up in the middle of the night. Seeing her there disconcerts me. She’s gained weight; I’m annoyed that she’s here and interrupting me when I need to be alone. She opens the window so the scent from the apricot tree can waft in, but I sneeze and sneeze, waves of sneezing: I’m allergic to the pollen. If we were at the beginning of spring, with a little luck I could reach out my arm and grab an apricot. That’s if the pigeons didn’t beat me to it, or the damned ants. I stay there lying in bed, not thinking of anything. I used to love the flowers on the apricot tree. I try to smell them the way I used to, but I can’t. I close the curtain. “I’m not hungry,” I tell my mother. I bark at her, more like it: “I’m not hungry! Don’t bother me, please. .” I curl up and shrink from her. I want to be alone in the dark.
“I didn’t mean to bother you,” says my mother. “Quite the opposite. .” She looks at me. I should apologize, but I say nothing. Finally, just when I’m about to utter the words, she makes a half-turn and leaves, gently closing the door. I should call her back and give her a hug. I freeze up.
My mind jumps around: the rough stubble on my father’s chin against my face, Rodrigo’s back as he plays paddleball on the beach, Ronco’s shout, my grandmother’s deeply wrinkled cheeks. And the rancid smell of the nuns in school, Gato’s sibylline voice, the pain in my wrists, the pain on my back from the electrified bed frame, the feeling of Canelo’s short hair in my hand, the dry sound of my leather purse closing with the money inside. . My memories bounce off of hard glass.
I’m empty, I need deliverance, but there is none. Sighs escape my lips. And my sighs are the howls of an animal that has lost its vocal cords. Even stretching out in the bed is an effort. I doze curled up. Nothing will move me from that position. Except the anguish squeezing my guts; then I arch my body as though trying to wrench away from myself. How long will it last? What can calm me? It’s hard to breathe. I’m desperate. The floor sinks down. I’m the one who has to end this. I should do now what I should have done with my Beretta in Calle Moneda. I’m resolved. Yes, now. There’s no hysteria. I’m reasoning coldly. No one can endure this anguish. It’s the only way out. But not now. As soon as I have the strength. I’ll go to my mother’s bathroom and swallow the whole box of sleeping pills. That’s the answer. This is impossible to bear, it’s inhuman. The decision calms me down.
Until Anita comes in and climbs in bed with me. She makes me laugh. I hadn’t remembered her laugh, and when I see it spill from her mouth, it makes me laugh, too. When she leaves my room, I fall back into the abyss that opens up for me and leads to another abyss, which also opens up and drops me into yet another abyss.
My mind wanders to Liv Ullmann’s face in the black-and-white film Persona, by Bergman. The scene goes like this: Liv is in bed in her white nightgown, smoking, motionless while she listens with enormous attention to what Bibi Andersson is telling her from the armchair. Alma! Of course, Bibi Andersson is Alma, the nurse, and Liv is an actress — I forget her name — who is sick, withdrawn deep into herself, barely moving and refusing to talk. Bibi, who is Alma, talks to her and likes that Liv listens.
What Bibi, the nurse, is telling her about is a strange sex scene with some very young boys at the beach. She and a friend were sunbathing naked when these unknown boys came along and started to ogle them. Her friend said to her: “Let them look.” And Bibi, inexplicably, stayed there, naked and lying face down. Her friend stayed on her back. One of the boys, the braver one, came closer, and her friend took his hand, helped him take his clothes off, and they began to make love. Her hands squeezed the muscles of his buttocks while he penetrated her. Then Bibi wanted to have sex with this same boy; she did, and she got very excited and came immediately. Then the other boy came over and her friend started to play with him, and he came in her friend’s mouth; she touched herself then and when she came she cried out. .