The Twilight Zone

I believe that evil is directly proportional to idiocy. I believe that the territory you roamed in anguish before you disappeared is ruled by idiots. It isn’t true that criminals are masterminds. It takes a vast amount of stupidity to assemble the parts of such grotesque, absurd, and cruel machinery. Pure brutality disguised as a masterplan. Small people, with small minds, who don’t understand the abyss of the other. They lack the language or tools for it. Empathy and compassion require a clear mind. Putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, changing your skin, adopting a new face: these are all acts of genuine intelligence.

In spite of myself I got deeper and deeper in. Suddenly I wasn't the person I used to be. I could blame my bosses. I could say that they were the ones who changed me. But you always have a hand in what happens to you. I know this because I've seen people who don't betray themselves. People who might be up to their necks in shit and they don't break.

When I was a girl, I was told that if I misbehaved the man with the sack would come for me. All disobedient children disappeared into that wicked old man's bottomless dark sack. But rather than frighten me, the story piqued my curiosity. I secretly wanted to meet the man, open his sack, climb into it, see the disappeared children, and get to the heart of the terrible mystery. I imagined it many times. I gave him a face, a suit, a pair of shoes. When I did, he became more disturbing, because normally the face I gave him belonged to someone I knew: my father, my uncle, the corner grocer, the mechanic next door, my science teacher. Any of them could be the old man with the sack. Even I could probably play the part, if I looked in the mirror and drew on a mustache.

There was a special report that night about a violent clash. Mario might have seen it on the neighbor's TV. As he heard voices and movement on the other side of the wall, he would've seen images of his house on the screen. There were police an armed agents walking the halls. On the dining room table where he'd eaten lunch a few hours ago, with the orange-flowered tablecloth, there were papers, lots of fake IDs, and a serious pile of weapons he'd never seen before. Grenades, ammunition, machine guns, pistols. If there had been a gun in the house, we would have used it to defend ourselves, thought Mario. Reporting live with a microphone in his hand, the announcer gestured at the weapons and documents, announcing that security forces had killed two dangerous terrorists in a deadly face-off.

I'm a lonely actress past her prime, drinking whiskey all day long and trying to decipher ancient images that repeat over and over again.

There is a section of the museum (of memory and human rights) that I like the best...Guides describe it as the heart of the museum. From an observation platform surrounded by candles, which aren't actually candles but little bulbs, more than a thousand photographs of many of the regime's victims are visible, hung high op on one wall. The photographs were donated by the victims' families, so we see them at home, at celebrations, at the beach, smiling at teh camera the way we all do when we want to leave a record of ourselves at our best. There are beautiful women who look like movie stars, who must have fixed themselves up flirtatiously, thinking they'll give the photo to a boyfriend, a lover.

Expelled from the realm of that imaginary unknown, powerless to express myself in a language beyond my command, all I know is that there are other easier things for me to imagine. Things outside that dark zone, things I can cradle like a light to better follow this map. Things like that snapshot I want to believe José kept in his memory.

Boris Flores was three years older than my son and he crossed the city by bus, probably at night, hurting and broken after a month of being locked up. I can’t imagine what his mother felt when she saw the men come for him. I can’t even approach what went through her mind when she had to watch him being beaten and taken away. I don’t know how she was able to bear that entire month with no news, searching for him and imagining him. I don’t know how she must have reacted when she heard that he was back, when she saw him walk through the door and she was able to hug that seventeen-year-old body, battered by electric shocks and torture.

Imagining, I make the walls talk. I interrogate the silent houses next door, the mute windows harboring information behind drawn curtains. Imagining, I ask the old trees to speak, I ask the cement under my feet, the lampposts, the telephone wire, the stale air circling this place. Imagining, I bring the bullet holes back to life. My mind short-circuits and in its imaginings it completes unfinished stories, reconstructs half-told tales, visualises details that go unmentioned, ignores the instructions that I was given and watches all the corners of the screen, keeping track of every ball.

I believe that evil is directly proportional to idocy. I believe that the territory you roamed in anguish before you disappeared is ruled by idiots. It isn't true that criminals are masterminds. It takes a vast amount of stupidity to assemble the parts of such a grotesque, absurd, and cruel machinery. Pure brutality disguised as a master plan. Small people, with small minds, who don't understand the abyss of the other. They lack the language or tools for it. Empathy and compassion require a clear mind. Putting yourself in someone else's shoes, changing your skin, adopting a new face: these are all acts of genuine intelligence.

Quiero hablarle de cosas que yo he hecho, le dice el hombre mirándola a los ojos e imagino un leve temblor en su voz en el momento de pronunciar estas palabras que no son imaginadas. Quiero hablarle de desaparecimiento de personas.