Navidad & Matanza Read online

  And so it was this morning. Immediately my reflection transformed into Montes, informing me that we had a very important matter to discuss that afternoon. I speculated that it had to do with the chapters of the novel-game Martes and I had recently written. Montes would ask us to end this diversion. He wouldn’t have been pleased with the story about the girl and the father who swim in the sea while their towels are stolen, because he would have recognized, first the appearances of Edgar Lee Masters and Real (coincidences, he might surmise at first) and then of the hadón and the Vivars, as a rabidly explicit protest on our part against the silencing of Sabado, who’d been locked in her bedroom for more than a month. I feared the worst.

  I sat down to wait in one of the meeting room’s translucent chairs. As my eyes followed, on the screen of the table’s central panel, three-dimensional simulations of genetically amnesic mice passively reacting to hadón (before normal mice, also hadonized, devoured them furiously), I entertained myself by planning the disappearance of the journalist, whom I’d succeeded in establishing as the protagonist-narrator confronting the truth of the Vivar case: there was no truth. It was all a farce. Maybe it’d have something to do with some scheme of Boris Real’s to divert suspicion regarding his involvement in the accident at the Vivar’s family pool that took the lives of Juan Carlos Montes’s two children. Maybe it’d simply be related to thoughts Alicia wrote down in the notebook she hid in horror under her bed every time her father tapped softly at her door, coming in to tell her the same story he told every night, Alice in the Underworld; the same notebook that the journalist would find in the glove compartment of his car on his way back to Santiago, the handwriting so similar to his own that it made him doubt his sanity.

  I was lost in these musings when the sliding door blinked open and shut. Juan Carlos Montes, pale and scowling, stood in front of me. He explained that the project had come to an end. He wanted me to know that his father was a great scientist. A specialist, respected equally in the logic and metaphysics of quantum theory, as well as in behavioral predictions given limited variables. So, while we were developing a chemical meant to inhibit all social impulses in mice, Montes’s father was testing how we—seven human beings subjected to a limited routine, limited spatial and temporal freedom, to emotional relations regulated by light, ambient temperature, and the most awful food and music—would respond to his disintegration hypothesis. So he’d let us play at this idiotic email novel, even though we spoke ill of him, believing access to our inboxes to be personal and private. Everyone’s subjectivity would be more compromised in a literary creation than in the work of synthesizing hadón, and it was to their advantage that the course of our aggravation, fear, hate, and inevitable conflict be recorded in the first person. His father was a man of acute perspicacity, he told me. He’d projected a rule of analogous synchrony, predicting that, in the moment Martes, Sabado, and I finally arrived at a form of hadón a human metabolism could tolerate, our relationship would disintegrate, fatally. As an homage to our work, the video of our sojourn in the laboratory would be used by Montes before the OMS commission as proof that, in reality, human beings do not require ad campaigns or drug therapy to feel hate, they possess an instinctive propensity for it. So, the supposed side effects of hadón could only be presumed, never proven.

  Nothing that Juan Carlos Montes said surprised me. I listened to him without confusion or hope, like someone reading a book or watching a movie. He told me that now they were going to shut me in a room with Martes until one of us destroyed the other. Whoever was left alive would be allowed to leave with a bank account containing a considerable sum and no memory of the last ten months. Then I asked about Sabado. Montes took a step back and told me that she was no longer in her bedroom, or in any other area of the laboratory. Although it seemed impossible, she’d managed to escape through the air ducts in the bathroom or the entertainment room. It was likely that no one would ever see her again. She’d spend a few days slithering through the underground sewer system of the industrial complex, looking desperately for a way to the surface. But she wouldn’t find one. Sabado would die of starvation or gangrene in the Underworld, Montes said ironically. I could take no more; I stood up loudly from my chair and jumped on him, spitting. I remember stomping on his head until his face was paler than before. My foot looked like a boot of blood.

  I went to the entertainment room and sat down at my computer. I checked my email. There was a laconic but affectionate message from Sabado. She’d sent it in the last five minutes from a coffee house in downtown Salt Lake City. She said she was safe. That she knew that today they’d add doses of hadón, experimentally processed for human beings, to our food. She also attached one of the final episodes of the novel-game, which I’ll send to you later.

  Martes just came in. He’s sweating and looking at me as if he doesn’t trust, as if he doesn’t trust me, or something around me. I should go. The door just locked from the outside, I fear permanently.

  26

  MORE THAN JUST A family, it doesn’t seem presumptuous to state that the Vivars were a group of people bound together by an enduring perplexity, by having in common something more than possessive impulses. The magazine articles that appeared in the months following Bruno and Alicia’s disappearance—the first of which I wrote myself (Revista SEA, n° 327, February 24th, 1999)—had nothing to do with reality.

  Photographs of the family smiling and embracing each other in the warmth of their home were only part of the media campaign orchestrated by Teresa Elena Virditti. It was no coincidence that, following the disappearance of his two children, Juan Francisco Vivar shut himself away in his mansion. I’m talking about pathological individuals; six twisted people taking part in an unpredictable game.

  The article in SEA, contrary to what the date of publication indicates, wasn’t written in response to the events in Navidad and Matanza, nor did the photograph depicting the Vivars necessarily come from the Vivar Family Archive, as the caption states. In the last days of December—less than a month before Bruno and Alicia disappeared—the journal’s photographer and I received instructions to “write a human interest piece” on the family of renowned businessman Jose Francisco Vivar. As usual, with a roll of our eyes, we obeyed; in the end our salaries, like all the funds at the journal, came from these people, and they were committed to maintaining an image of homespun happiness. And really it wasn’t at all surprising since the fastidious Teresa Elena Virditti (with her unforgettable opera goer hairstyle) was, at the time, on SEA’s editorial committee. Only after being in that house and hearing the news of the disappearance of those two children—which didn’t surprise me—can I explain the shudder I experience when I read that the Chilean family is the moral foundation of our country’s ruling class.

  The interview was scheduled for a Friday at seven in the evening so the whole family could be there. We arrived—the photographer and I—a little early to their residence in Los Dominicos; we picked it out by the imposing grey wall that surrounded it. We buzzed the intercom and were received and asked to wait by the butler, a man of refined manners whose nose was so small that at first glance he appeared not to have one. This detail is not trivial. Soon the mistress of the house, señora Teresa Elena, whom we’d met previously, arrived. She gave instructions to the butler; she called him Bonito. The first surprise was the nose-less Bonito’s response to her instructions; he let out a low laugh, murmuring: I don’t believe you, you filthy sow, and off he went, disappearing down the stairs. In that moment, I expected a scene to unfold: the woman firing Bonito, bemoaning the lack of respect, getting all flustered. But nothing happened. The man wasn’t just a butler, as I found out later. Señora Terelenita, as her friends called her, was distracted for a moment. Then she shook our hands again and left us alone.

  We should’ve waited, as they requested, in that hallway adorned with oil paintings of English hunting scenes and illustrations of bad golf jokes. But it just so happened that my coworker needed to use the bat
hroom. His situation was so urgent that, instead of calling the butler for assistance, he decided to go look for it on his own. Meanwhile, I stood looking out at the home’s vast estate through the thick glass that served as a wall in the entrance hallway. The house dropped three stories, completely covering the eastern slope of the hill. I noted the care with which the trees had been planted along the other side of the hill to the north, bordering a grassy brown pathway that, from the height where I was standing, I saw intersect another pathway, defined by a variety of grasses in differing shades of green. In the middle of this lushness, I caught sight of two figures. A beautiful young woman, dressed in a bikini, walked out through the trees that concealed the swimming pool. She was short with long hair falling down her back. She held a striped towel in her right hand. In her other hand, she carried another towel (or a robe). It was very white. So white that the reddish, almost black stain on one corner stood out starkly. Every so often she stopped and rubbed her eyes. I thought she was crying. But I was mistaken: later, in the living room, she would repeat this gesture, and her brother, holding her hand, would give her a light slap, saying: Stop it, to which she would respond, yawning: I’m sleepy. And then she would look at me maliciously so that I would stop staring at her. But there, standing in front of that large window, it looked like she was crying. I saw that the stain extended to her body, to her left leg, her left thigh. It must be blood, I thought. Her first period must have come unexpectedly and because of this she was in pain.

  The other figure moved through the park from the southeast, along the brown grass pathway. It was difficult to tell who it was. At a glance it looked like a woman, judging by the dress, the jewelry, and the fashionable hairdo. But whoever it was walked in a distinct way, legs wide apart, which made me doubt, correctly, that it was señora Terelenita. Then the figure took off the wig and threw it in the bushes, the dress too, stashing it behind a lavish Georgian dollhouse, another station on that pathway of playthings. The figure wasn’t wearing a bra or panties. He laid down on the grass (it was clearly a man), naked, with a visible erection. It looked like he was carrying some sort of list in one hand. I imagined that it enumerated how many steps away the little girl was. After five steps she still hadn’t reached him, no: the garden’s sprinklers came on. All at once. The man’s naked body was soaked; he closed his eyes and pounded his fists on the grass like an impatient child. His erection shrunk. Soon the girl saw him. She wasn’t surprised, nor did she stop, instead she walked over and sat down next to him. The man, dripping wet, sat up and pulled her small body against his. She in a bikini, he naked.

  It was hot and the grass was sopping. The scene struck me as sordid, especially witnessed through sheets and sheets of water shooting from sprinklers, like iridescent specters in front of the light. I shut my eyes and turned around. I didn’t know what to do: I’m not sure how I reacted, but suddenly I felt someone softly blowing on my eyelids. When I opened my eyes, scandalized, I saw that I was one step away from Bonito, the butler or whatever he was. He placed one hand on my shoulder and, with the other, offered me a glass of Coke. Calm down, he whispered. Alarmed, I stammered and pointed out the window, but he’d already disappeared. I brought the glass to my lips. There was no one outside. The girl’s towels had been left in a tangle on the grass and a Great Dane was pushing them with her nose toward an area underneath a birch tree occupied by another dollhouse, this one of Mediterranean style.

  Soon my colleague, the photographer, came back, out of breath. He looked anxiously in all directions. You’re pale, he said to me. So are you, I replied. It wasn’t necessary to ask him anything; immediately he began his confused tale, which he described more than once as “a terrible error.” Looking for the bathroom, he’d come across a room where a hairless boy, lying in bed, was observing a large aquarium, which occupied more than half of one wall. According to the photographer, the “terrible error” had nothing to do with his own impertinence, but with what was inside the aquarium. They weren’t fish, though, in a way, they seemed to be: three little girls with long hair swam about without needing to come up for air. The three small sirens came together for a moment behind the glass, staring with curiosity at the unfamiliar man who’d just walked in. The photographer ran out into the hallway without being seen by the boy. Their faces, if you could’ve seen them. They were horrible. Expressionless, like all beings that live underwater, but they were little girls. Monsters, he’d just said when the butler reappeared in a doorway and said that the family was waiting in the living room. Unsettled as we were, we decided to finish the job as quickly as possible. I should add that I was more intrigued than afraid.

  The interview lasted forty-five minutes. My companion took half a roll of photographs before excusing himself, saying he felt ill. He left the house and waited for me in the car. The Vivars were arranged on the couch so that a chimney and chandelier were also in the shot. They were a very affectionate family: Juan Francisco Vivar sat with his wife on his lap; Bruno—his head shaved—placed his right arm on his father’s back while holding his mother’s hand; Alicia rested her head on Bruno’s chest and he patted her lightly on the cheek. To my surprise, Bonito stayed, seated on the arm of the couch, twirling the girl’s long locks between his fingers. He even spoke occasionally. Discounting the excessive displays of mutual affection that I’d witnessed, the interview answered many of my questions. Juan Francisco Vivar’s hair was gelled, his hands well manicured. At one point, I noticed the sheen of moisture behind his ears: sprinkler water from the garden, I suspected. Although clearly Alicia seemed to be in another world (as adolescents generally are, I should add), she didn’t seem particularly unhappy. They even laughed together recounting an anecdote about sledding near the hot springs in Chillán. There was a kind of excessive sincerity in that family: it provoked feelings of anxiety. The mistress of the house gave me a strange look, something like a smile, when she walked me to the door, and recited the names of everyone living in the house: besides her children and husband there was the foreign cook and Violeta, the Great Dane. Bonito, pardon, Boris was also staying with them. The man with the strange nose was her brother.

  27

  (Revista SEA, n° 327, February 24th, 1999)

  VIVAR VIRDITTI FAMILY: SEQUESTERED HAPPINESS

  The kidnapping of Bruno and Alicia, the children of renowned businessman Juan Francisco Vivar and distinguished journalist Teresa Elena Virditti, has shaken the nation. Days before the heartbreaking event, SEA had the opportunity to sit down with the entire happy family.

  He greeted us with his characteristic smile and courtesy in the living room of his Los Domincos residence. He stroked the back of his sweet Great Dane Violeta. Four years ago, when Alicia, his little girl, started maturing, Juan Francisco Vivar realized they were going to need a bigger house. “When they were young the kids couldn’t sit still. They ran and jumped around all day long, and it dawned on us that what we really needed was a park. The change of scenery has made life more enjoyable. The children have rediscovered nature, and I’ve always enjoyed golfing, open spaces, horseback riding, and afternoon walks.”

  Teresa Elena Virditti sat on the couch listening attentively to her husband. Earlier she had shown us the studio and library where she does her work for the journal without neglecting the needs of the family. “For Juan Francisco, the park is the most important thing, but for me there is nothing like my desk,” she comments with a smile. That’s how the Vivar Virditti’s are: an active family. “They were restless when they came out of me,” jokes the owner of the board and video game company. Bruno, the eldest son, who is very close to his mother, wanted to major in journalism, but discovered that it was not for him. Now he has taken an interest in biology. “Since I was very young, my father has brought home chemistry sets for my entertainment,” he says. Alicia, her parents say, “will be able to do whatever she wants because everything makes her happy.” The little girl nods her head and pets the dog. “In this family, everyone has their own space,”
says Juan Francisco Vivar.

  SEA: It must have been fun for your children to grow up surrounded by all the games your company produces.

  Juan Francisco Vivar: In truth, yes. At one point I realized that the best way to test a product was to try it out at home. If Bruno and Alicia liked it, the game would be a success among the children of the nation. Although each one was tested in its own way (Vivar and his daughter laugh). Bruno, for example, performed strength tests on the materials. I’ll never forget when I brought home the first videogame, already quite some time ago. And he, accustomed to me bringing him stilts and skateboards, jumped on top of the machine (more laughter from the girl), hoping it would carry him away or something like that. Honestly I think my children are a great indicator of the tastes of Chilean children. They’re as healthy and sharp as anyone, I’m glad they’re like this. They’re happy, they want for nothing, especially affection.

  SEA: Your garden demonstrates that you are a family that enjoys outdoor activities.

  JFV: Yes, it’s odd, but at the same time it makes sense; I’ve filled the house with board games, but they’d rather go outside.

  Teresa Elena Virditti: We have a great love for trees and all things green. My mother planted that oak when she was just a girl. This was part of my great-grandparents estate. The park wasn’t so well maintained then; it was a fairly dry garden with lots of wild grass, de rulo, as they say in the country. I remember clearly that there was a small forest, and there are still a few of those birch trees left. My sisters and I played hide and seek in that forest and pretended we were camping. I’ve always said that the children enjoy nature because on my side of the family there have been many great naturalists and botanists.