Navidad & Matanza Read online

  Copyright © 2007 by Carlos Labbé and Editorial Periférica

  Translation copyright © 2014 by Will Vanderhyden

  First edition, 2014

  All rights reserved

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Available upon request.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-934824-93-1

  This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

  Text set in Dante, a mid-20th-century book typeface designed by Giovanni Mardersteig.

  The original type was cut by Charles Malin.

  Design by N. J. Furl

  Open Letter is the University of Rochester’s nonprofit, literary translation press:

  Lattimore Hall 411, Box 270082, Rochester, NY 14627

  www.openletterbooks.org

  To Mónica Ríos and the Labbé Jorqueras. And to the other six participants of this novel-game, especially to the ones who also tried to make it to the final square.

  Contents

  1

  2

  7

  10

  14

  20

  26

  27

  32

  34

  39

  45

  49

  52

  53

  56

  58

  59

  60

  65

  71

  75

  80

  82

  83

  89

  95

  99

  100

  1

  MY NAME IS DOMINGO. Actually, Domingo is my password here in the laboratory. Just by uttering this name—which I chose—I can enter bedrooms and bathrooms, I can make phone calls, obtain food and drink, access the temperature, hygiene, and communication systems, send and receive email, carry out Internet transactions to purchase any supplies we need. Without it, I’d be trapped in my room. If I were to suffer a psycholinguistic disruption, or if the effect of some microorganism rendered me voiceless, I’d just die of starvation. It’s not that my life doesn’t matter to anyone; it has to do with the nature of the project. It’s not even top secret, as we used to joke, rather, to the world, it doesn’t exist. So if for some reason I was to forget my name, I wouldn’t just die of thirst and hunger, I’d die empirically: the possibility of anyone remembering me would die as well. If the project culminates in success, I’ll be able to return to Santiago, get married, have children, maybe make a career as a gastroenterologist. If the project fails, or if I fail, as occurred with Lunes, Miercoles, Jueves, and Viernes—I fear it may be occurring with Sabado—the organization will be sure to eliminate me. You see, my choice of this allegory wasn’t made on a whim. The project really does resemble a board game, with dice and squares and all of that. Because there is only one way to stay alive: make it to the end.

  2

  NO TRACE OF ME will remain. For that reason, I’ve written all of this in code. My password isn’t really Domingo. Also, I’ll probably insert pieces of pure, hard reality into the story I’m going to tell you. Does that sound okay?

  Let this be the beginning: we were seven. Lunes, Martes, Miercoles, Jueves, Viernes, Sabado, and Domingo. We met in 1996, in the Biology Department at Universidad de Chile. We weren’t all taking the same classes, but we got acquainted in a creative writing workshop, which was offered as an elective. In a way, our friendship was based in literature. We were the only students in the department interested in what is beyond science. Juan Carlos Montes—you already know that I won’t be using real names—is my father. Although that wasn’t the only reason he chose us. We were among the best students in the whole School of Sciences. We got the best grades in molecular biology, neuroscience, and genetics. And all of us enjoyed writing stories.

  7

  ALL OF THIS REMINDS me of the case of Navidad and Matanza, in the summer of 1999. At the time I was writing for a journal whose proprietor was a notorious business executive, and because of this we were tacitly forbidden to write about the most popular topic in the office: disappeared-detainees. This was, of course, during Pinochet’s judicial hearing in London. But even more important was the fact that, at the beginning of the year, Judge Guzman had identified the body of our secretary’s father in an excavation in the Atacama Desert. Suddenly what had been a really worn out subject took on an archaic and distant force that came to completely disrupt our work environment. And so, I’m not sure if it was out of blind solidarity, or a desire to get out of the office, but during those two months we journalists felt oddly compelled to investigate, anywhere we could, news of abductions, disappearances, or reports of missing persons in the province. I began looking into the case of a brother and sister who disappeared in Navidad.

  Navidad, a small town in Region VI, is the gateway to that obscure stretch of coastline between Santo Domingo and Pichilemu. A couple miles farther along is its twin village, the no less bucolic beach town, Matanza. The area enjoyed several months of touristic splendor when the secret VIP club of a famed international resort temporarily occupied the beach during the last summer of the past millennium. There are about ten thousand members in this club who, every five years via unknown channels, receive conceptual instructions and coordinates of latitude and longitude announcing the unfolding of a unique, unprecedented event. That year, the members received at their doors a young Australian man who handed them an invitation and recited a supposedly unpublished poem by Edgar Lee Masters entitled “The Hotel Room,” in whose final lines appeared the password: “Transensorial beyond seasons / the Spanish groom said / matanza y natividad, heaven and hell.”

  The business executive Jose Francisco Vivar recalls that his family received the Australian visitor in September of 1998. Vivar knew it was a representative of the VIP club and he was pleased the event was going to take place in Chile. Since the trip to Navidad wouldn’t be that expensive, he’d be able to bring along his wife and their two children, Bruno (then 19) and Alicia (14). “I have nothing else to add,” he said, in a report in a daily newspaper from that time, “just that after twenty years of enjoying these events of infinite relaxation, alone or with my wife, I thought the experience would be even better with my whole family. But that was not the case.” At that point, according to the report, Jose Francisco Vivar broke down. “We’d been in Navidad for two weeks. One afternoon, a Thursday, Teresa and I left the children, who wanted to stay at the beach a while longer. We went back to the hotel where we showered, changed clothes, and got something to eat. At seven we planned to meet the children in the Room of Shadows, a site the organization had set up to put on a variety of shows, a sort of Matanza bazaar. That night, Patrice Dounn, the Congolese thereminist was performing.” But Jose Francisco and Teresa never saw their two children again. The image of the two youths shouting goodbye and running toward the waves is the last that they have. Alicia and Bruno officially disappeared the afternoon of January 18th, 1999.

  10

  TO THIS DAY, police investigators have continued to add sightings of Bruno Vivar to the case file of the disappeared Navidad siblings. Every summer since the disappearance, a dozen witnesses from different areas of the central coast have reported seeing a young man fitting his description: striped T-shirt in various combinations of primary colors; shorts or bathing trunks; leather sandals; extremely thin, hairless legs; disheveled, raggedly-cut hair, sometimes brown, sometimes dyed red. As if the last image his parents had of him remained burned on the retinas of so many people who never knew him (the press coverage was as intense as it was brief), they always see Bruno Vivar lying on the sand, face down on his towel, staring out to sea, looking disdainfully through some photographs, or swimming in sil
ence. Of course, other accounts add specific and equally disturbing details: drinking in hotel bars, beer from cans or double shots of whiskey which he pays for with a credit card issued in the United States, while with the other hand he caresses a die which he spins like a top on the lacquered surface of the bar; sitting on a terrace at noon, noisily eating French fries; reading, in the dining hall, a letter delivered to the hotel weeks before; rolling the die and then writing another letter never sent by local mail.

  This information comes from diverse sources: guards, waiters, clerks, receptionists, and janitors, who, at the time, also hoped to put together the case’s missing pieces, but who only succeeded in helping the police declare unverifiable the possibilities of homicide or kidnapping. It has been tacitly assumed that Bruno Vivar—a legal adult—simply abandoned his family without warning, which is not a crime in Chile.

  The most perplexing question is why the name of Alicia Vivar, the fourteen-year-old girl, appears only twice in the case file. Especially after reviewing in detail the reports of repeated sightings of her brother, Bruno. Because Bruno has never once reappeared alone. The accounts agree that he arrives at hotel parking lots in a variety of expensive cars always driven by a man whose smile also appears in police archives, although in another section: Boris Real.

  Boris Real became known in Chile in 1984 as the young Chilean executive who, representing a group of Swiss investors wanting to buy Petrohue Bank, ended up in the Capuchinos jail as a result of an antimonopoly suit filed by the Superintendent of Banks, when it was confirmed that the Swiss were linked to an Australian investment group that had acquired the Atacama Bank and, also to a Spanish-Norwegian group that acquired De Los Lagos Bank and Antonio Varas Bank. He was tried as the representative of the inscrutable international consortium that attempted to acquire fifty-one percent of Chilean banks, a move that, it is noted, could have had consequences for our country beyond the strictly financial. The group in question immediately withdrew from the country, leaving no discernible trace. At least until the summer of 1999. Of course, Boris Real was not that man’s actual name. It was the alias of Francisco Virditti (41), who admitted to having headed a group of six shareholders motivated by “nothing more than the legitimate game of the market,” as he stated in the only interview he’s ever given.

  Seven years later, when the Chilean press scarcely recalled the business conspiracies that helped prevent analysis of the Pinochet recession, there came the unfortunate death of Juan Ausencio Martínez Salas. February fifth, on the seventeenth hole of the Prince of Wales Golf Club, a heart attack ended the days of the Undersecretary of Education of Patricio Aylwin’s administration. That afternoon, Martínez Salas was strolling the links of the capital’s golf club in the company of two friends from his time as an MBA student at the University of Chicago: an executive in the board and video game industry Jose Francisco Vivar, and Boris Real. A check of the witnesses in the Civil Register reveals that the given name of the executive who was present at the moment of death is Boris Real Yañez (48), and there is no request for a change of name associated with his identity. Perhaps it was another Boris Real; perhaps Francisco Virditti was the real pseudonym. Nevertheless, another newspaper photograph, which shows Real speaking about his dear friend, reveals the face of the same businessman who declared himself innocent in front of the Superintendent of Banks in 1984. In a press conference on the 16th of May 1995, congressman Nelson Avila denounced the possibility of a secret murder plot when the autopsy results for undersecretary Martínez Salas suggested traces of poison in his system. Public shock lasted two days. As so often happens, there was talk of political crisis, but no particular individual was implicated. Soon everything was forgotten. Boris Real was subpoenaed in his Vitacura residence before returning to anonymity. Various accounts report that he made a statement to Irma Sepulveda, the judge in charge of the trial investigating the death of Martínez Salas. Today it’s almost impossible to find Boris Real; he has no known residence and his name doesn’t appear in any public record. Approached by the press in the days following his children’s disappearance, Jose Francisco Vivar stated that he was no longer in contact with his friend.

  Even more disturbing, one evening in July of 1997, with my own eyes I saw Vivar, Boris Real, and congressman Nelson Avila walking on the beach in Cachagua. They were accompanied by their respective children. Of course I urged my companion to surreptitiously eavesdrop with me. The situation only became relevant for me after I started investigating the incidents in Navidad and Matanza: Boris Real was walking hand in hand with little Alicia Vivar, then a girl of twelve. They were walking a slight distance behind the rest of the group. She asked him to go with her to the rocks to look for seashells. She didn’t address him formally or call him uncle, just Boris. Then they talked about the reddish color of the clouds at that time of day and she asked him how long it would be until the end of the world.

  14

  THAT SUMMER THEY traversed the beaches of Chile’s central coast in a Cadillac. Virditti reclined the passenger seat, shut his eyes, and with closed lips, hummed old songs from a tape made for him by a woman years before. “Memories Are Made of This” could be heard. He took drags on a cigar now and then, that being the only movement indicating to someone watching from outside that he wasn’t asleep. Specifically for someone watching from the other side of the beach; there I was on my towel, lying down, with a pair of binoculars. Alicia was at my side. Or rather: she occasionally came shivering from the sea to lie down beside me, clutching her arms tightly against the longed-for skin of her body. I dropped my binoculars, picked up a handful of sand, and let it fall delicately along the path traced by the freckles on her back between her shoulder blades down to her waist. But she didn’t smile. With closed eyes she murmured, Fist-fuck, and only upon hearing this immensely disturbing expression she reminded me that she wasn’t happy and never would be. Those nights she spoke to me in English, from her room across the hotel hallway, in a voice hoarse with weeping or laughter, the voice of a woman who has pissed herself laughing. She told me terrible stories of children that transformed into the story of her nightmares: a rabbit walking by, her on top of another woman whom I also love, sucking on her dried-up breast, unaware. On top of a grave. Brazenly she said: The grave into which I’m now staring. Would you like to know what I see?

  Obviously, the Alicia of whom I speak is not the same girl of fourteen, at least not the Alicia Vivar for whom the police are still searching. She stood up; she went running toward the sea. She kicked sand in my eyes. For peeking! she shouted. So I ran after her, grabbing her, the waves already over our shoulders, and held her underwater with the weight of my whole body for half a minute. She came up gasping and didn’t want to speak to me. Then I took her face in my hands and said to her: My little girl, my lost one, my indecipherable book. Sure, moron, your little girl my ass, she responded and then leaned in and bit my lip. This is what I had to discover. That we’ll never be allowed to experience a desire we simply cannot handle. I write this for her, wherever she is. For me, this report will not be neutral: hundreds of connotations have imposed themselves between me and her, because I was naïve enough to think that love has something to do with words, with the proper use of them. Now I’m afraid to speak; I’ll just become a professional. But there is one truth. I loved Alicia. Above all: I love her still. Whatever name she has now.

  That’s the reason I write at this late hour. Returning after forty hours of work in the laboratory. Drunk. Alone. Lost. With my head in the grave. I know what’s right, what awaits me, and the splendor. Glimpses. I also know that sometimes in the Cadillac, Francisco Virditti opened his eyes and watched how Bruno headed for the beach wearing nothing but a bathing suit. Virditti knew perfectly well which girl Bruno had chosen that afternoon, all of them different, but resembling each other in the unfathomable. Bruno would get ready to go in the water and dive in next to them, make a disarming joke, laugh, a sidelong glance, and manage to randomly brush up against th
em in the salt and the spray. And, after ten minutes, the girl, moved by Bruno Vivar’s purple lips, would offer to share her towel with him. This was the moment they waited for, when they arrived where her things had been, the girl would pale to find her towels had been stolen. Her face would empty. It reminded me of my sister; or rather, the daughter of my father, Bruno would tell me much later, between two whiskeys, confronting a death threat: one that I made. Arrogant, twisted, motherfucking fool. If I had him in front of me now I wouldn’t let him speak. I’d spit on him and kick the shit out of him. There’s nothing more to say. At that same moment, in the car, Virditti was dying of laughter. He’d managed to cross the beach, take the towels, and return coolly to the passenger seat of the Cadillac, while Bruno plied his charms amid the waves. But the game was interrupted when Alicia decided to wait for Francisco Virditti in the backseat of the Cadillac and greet him: Fool, you’re the one I was looking for. I realize there was nothing I could’ve done to stop her. Then he started the car and flew toward the highway. Out there, where death so often dwells.

  20

  I WANT TO TELL you how we imagine the organization’s facilities outside the walls of the six bedrooms, the entertainment room, meeting room, bathrooms, and laboratory where they’ve locked us. Our idea is based on the few things Juan Carlos Montes has told us, and the din we sometimes hear in the night. There’s a bubbling machine at the center of a four-hundred-and-sixty square foot industrial plant, beneath a remote mountain, desert, or glacier in the United States. Thick tubes surround it, running through lead walls that contain the radioactive chemicals. In the center there’s a glass dome where the intangible, glowing substance we call hadón reacts. Everything painted blue and white. Cold bulbs that do not light or flicker. As in our dormitories, a reflective panel covers the surface of the walls, ceilings, and floor. But it’s not a mirror. Everything it reflects forms part of the surveillance record at the Masters Lab. It’s also the medium they use to communicate: sometimes in the morning you might be getting dressed, brushing your teeth, or simply examining your face or your back in the mirror, and your image disappears, like a stone thrown into a pool. The reflection reforms, but now it’s the face of someone else, in some other location, materializing to tell you something.