The receptionist operates the switchboard and talks to the principal. She only says one word: “Santos.” With a gesture, she signals me to go in.
I walk into that place that holds only bad memories. I was there twice. Once, I was suspended for misbehaving, and it was the school’s highest authority who informed me, “Come back with your legal guardian.” The second time was for bad grades in chemistry.
“Sulfuric acid. Write the formula, Santos, one hundred times in your notebook.” “Water, Professor! H2O! Give me a break, Professor Guzmán!” “I’m not expelling you only because you’re Professor Santos’s son.”
“Never again.”
“I’ll study. I promise.”
Today, the office seems even darker and colder than on those two occasions. The kerosene heater is off. The curtains look heavier. The oil portraits of the founding fathers who went to our school look older. Cold colors. A lot of black, and brown, and blue, and green.
The principal’s sitting behind his desk and seems to be drawing something on a piece of paper. He may be filling the sheet with circles of different sizes. That’s what I do sometimes. Like when I’m waiting for something.
In the leather armchair, wide, comfortable, worn-out, like scratched by a cat, is Lieutenant Bruna. He has set his kepi very carefully on his knees. With discipline.
Nobody says a word.
Nobody greets me.
I don’t say a word either.
“It’s cold outside,” the principal says.
As if he wanted to confirm it, he walks to the window and lifts the curtain a little bit. The brief light that, for a couple of seconds, filters into the room crosses like a gust in front of the officer’s face, who remains absorbed looking at the tips of his boots. I bear that long silence by rubbing my thighs.
“Yes, it’s cold,” the lieutenant repeats, an eternity later. “Did you bring your coat, Santos?”
They’re going to take me, I think. Tears start to flood my eyes. For me. But even more than for me, for my dad. The tears don’t fall.
“Santos,” the lieutenant says, still looking at his boots, “life is difficult for everyone. For an officer. For a teacher. For a student, too. Do you understand?”
I understand, but I don’t know what he’s trying to tell me. Is he trying to tell me that he’ll arrest me? My leather jacket is hanging on a hook in the classroom. My black leather jacket. Raindrops slide down over it. I like how I look in it. I like it when I’m playing with Patricia Bettini and she hits my back and it sounds like chas.
I hear the tip of the principal’s pen scratching the piece of paper. The three of us are there, dancing to a silence. Just like when someone dies and they call for a moment of silence. A bus with a broken exhaust pipe passes by and goes away. And there’s silence again. Blown up.
“I …,” Lieutenant Bruna begins.
He doesn’t say more.
He comes to me and hugs me. Then he moves away and shows me his face. He looks sad.
Lieutenant Bruna’s very sad. My knees are shaking. I want to ask what’s going on, but no sounds come out of my throat.
My father, I think.
The officer blows his nose and regains his composure. He opens the door and asks the receptionist to go to the classroom and bring my jacket.
“A black one. Leather,” I add.
“Black. Leather,” he says as well.
Outside, there’s a jeep waiting with its engine on. The driver’s a soldier in combat uniform. Camouflage, like in the movies.
I zip up my jacket. I feel the cold on my chin. The jeep is a convertible. I have a history test tomorrow. I won’t be able to study. My high school average is pretty low. I get by in English, philosophy, and Spanish. The art teacher likes me.
At the corner streetlight, the jeep stops. It cannot be true. There they go, Patricia Bettini and Laura Yáñez, crossing the street, arms around each other. They look happy. They know nothing about what’s happening to me. I wonder if Santiago has always been this sad. I don’t call them. There’s no way I’ll call them. They’d die if they saw me in this military jeep.
Lieutenant Bruna rubs his face. The cold hits hard.
We go up Recoleta, then take Salto, and end up in a neighborhood with vacant lots.
The jeep arrives in an area cordoned off by military vans. There are also two photographers with their credentials in plastic holders hanging around their necks. A priest is drinking coffee from a plastic cup. People are leaning against the walls of their houses, or sitting on the doorsteps. In the distance, a helicopter’s propellers are in motion. The privates lift the white-and-red ribbons as they see Lieutenant Bruna coming.
He doesn’t greet them. They point at a lamppost a few yards away. Cold metal. Tall. The light is off. There are many white clouds and a stripe of black turbulence here and there.
We arrive at the lamppost. With a rough gesture, a plainclothes police official with a sort of rosette on his lapel points at the thick mat that lies on the ground covering something. With a gesture of his chin, Lieutenant Bruna signals him to lift it. The officer pulls the mat fully off. It’s the body of a man.
Professor Paredes.
His eyes are closed, and around his neck there’re one or more sheets stained with blood.
“They slit his throat,” the man with the rosette says to Lieutenant Bruna.
I’m unable to say anything. I can’t breathe. I feel a flow running down my legs. I double up with pain and fall on my knees.
Lieutenant Bruna runs his hand over my hair.
“I did everything I could, my boy,” I hear him saying. “You asked me for it, and God knows that I did everything I could.”
32
HE FELT SOMEHOW CLOSE to the group of the “detained”: a drunk man lying on a wooden bench, a student bleeding after being hit with a police club, a street vendor of unlicensed merchandise, a handcuffed union delegate.
Two hours had passed and not a single officer had begun any proceedings. Once in a while, an officer peeked in, took a look at the group, and disappeared into some back room. Jail is always like this. The feeling of an endless, unproductive time. A prelude to uncertainty. An intermission blown up by desperation. The humiliating wait. Time to imagine your loved ones worrying about your absence. The guard in uniform typing on an old Remington some report that a local judge would probably read a few months later.
The last time that he was taken prisoner, the cops wanted to teach him a good lesson. In a street demonstration against the rise of the public transportation fares, he tried to rescue a girl who was being dragged to a police van by some undercover cops.
He wasn’t even participating in the march. He only followed the impulse of his heart. That’s why, when questioned by the police, he couldn’t give names or addresses of the rioters who had organized the protest, simply because he didn’t know them.
Sometimes his damn heart made him act recklessly before his head could stop him.
On another occasion, he let his mouth run off, saying whatever he held true. Even though he knew there would be consequences. All those times it was he, only his own body, that was at stake. But now everything could result in a catastrophe that could affect a lot of people. If the images of the No campaign fell into the hands of the minister of the interior, he would have not only put at risk the people who had lent their faces to sing and fight against the dictator but also reveal the nature of his campaign to his rivals — the people working for the Yes to Pinochet, who would be now able to design an antidote and create a strategy to nullify whatever improbable advertising merits his naïve oeuvre might have.