Arturo Fontaine - La Vida Doble

Another time, we undertook an operation to assassinate him as he was leaving his lover’s house. But the man who came out of the house that morning at daybreak, the man who died riddled with bullets from our AK-47, wasn’t him but another agent. Failed operation.

When I raised my eyes again, Macha was speaking quickly and sharply to the tall man with the moustache. He checked the time on his Rolex metal-band wristwatch. He put on a pair of Ray-Bans with metal frames. His back was upright, broad and straight as if there were an iron bar going through him from one shoulder to the other. When he put away the lens case, his dark suit jacket fell open and I saw the shoulder holster for his gun. I heard movement, a slight whisper behind me, just before a blindfold covered my eyes. When everything went black I died, though I didn’t know it yet. Not, of course, the way Canelo died, Canelo, who was now firmly fixed in the eternity of heroes. But I knew that sister Irene had also fallen that day on Calle Moneda, and I was the one who had killed her.

Days are no different from nights, and everything unfolds within a gaseous atmosphere shot through with terror. If only there was some way to describe what happens to you while you’re in there. What are you? An animal driven mad by the horror? Where are you? What do you hope for? From the moment they put the blindfold on, you are no longer you, and you enter into a nightmare filled with indefinite shapes, in which the stupor of fear, the sudden blows and startling pain gradually bewilder you and break you down. A cry to summon all this and a tongue to hang myself from it. Then you tell yourself: this was the truth always, the one my professors taught me, and in the university quads no one no talked about anything else. We are this impalpable flux; I never used to believe in intangible substances, in sacrosanct identities or timeless essences. Then I remember and repeat the lessons I learned in university: I am a slave because I chose to keep my life in exchange for my freedom, et cetera, et cetera. There were brothers and sisters who didn’t let themselves get captured, and they sacrificed their lives. Not me. They were unbound, they ascended and stayed free, suspended above life and death. They are our heroes. The others, the agents who martyred them, admire them. If we are respected, it’s because of them. If we are feared, it’s because of them. I was trained to be like them, but I couldn’t do it. Canelo did.

And so the master will rule over sister Irene, and little by little I will be worn away, I will become a thing to him, I will be his slave. Not Canelo, who went free. He put his dignity and freedom above his life. Excessively grand words? Theirs not to make reply, / Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do and die. Not me. The master would slowly bend me to his will as though I were an animal that belonged to him. The face you cannot see becomes all-powerful, my terrifying deus absconditus, my hidden god. That was what was happening to me. But I’m getting ahead of myself. For now that moment of surrender builds in me though I do not know it. No one commits suicide alone. I am growing ever more exhausted, I do know that. We were trained to endure this. But I never imagined how the simple physical exhaustion chips away at you from inside. A person can die in that place from sheer tiredness, sheer discouragement, sheer solitude. It’s a moribund life I’m living. You don’t need them to kill you in order to die. You move steadily away from yourself until you leave yourself behind, and that’s what dying is. There is an imperceptible surrender; it’s this exhaustion that weighs on you and bends you that finally forces you to succumb.

The pain is forging my being although I don’t know it yet. It always does. The flame that softens and shapes the metal. It’s a matter of reaching the right temperature for each person. And they wanted more from me, always more. You have no idea what that is like. You can’t imagine. You become a cockroach that everyone has the right to trample and crush. They tell you this. You know it’s the truth. You can disappear forever at any moment. You live on borrowed time; you live as long as they want you to.

One of the thugs spit on me, just because. “Rat,” they called him, Rat Osorio: an insignificant being, short and vulgar, with red hair full of dandruff and plastered to his skull, and elongated ears. They called him in to work the crank. I started to cry. Rat became furious, called me hysterical, and slapped me with his open palm. He kicked me to the ground. That was all, but it wasn’t all. “Hysterical bitch,” Rat said to me, looking at me with a mocking smile. “Bitch,” he repeated slowly. “Adiós, bitch,” and when he was leaving he turned around, wearing the same mocking smile; he said it again, just because. Do you understand? That was horrible. Worse than many other things.

Death will start to seem benevolent and good. Death is now the only hope. In those days men will seek death and will not find it; they will long to die, and death will flee from them. Because — you know? — there is always hope. We are always waiting for Godot. It’s just that at a given moment, Godot becomes death and death doesn’t scare you anymore. As long as the agonies it brings are not too painful. What frightens you is the physical pain you must endure in order for death’s door to open. Your minimal future as you wait for the void also leaves minimum room for your past. I never knew that before: the past is yours only if there is something ahead of you, memory only exists and makes sense if there is a future. Otherwise, your memory stops working, it seizes up and forsakes you. That is what kills you. Time has run out and you are almost nothing, almost a thing, and in any case, not you. They have emptied you. And still you survive, with the useless tenacity of a crushed insect still waving its legs.

The interrogator’s pleasure diminishes as I am slowly reduced to be merely his object. He builds himself up as my conqueror as he stamps out my freedom little by little. I must be subjugated and enslaved, but I must not become a broken-down machine. And so he likes it when I scream, when I refuse, when I resist.

I repeat to myself the lessons I learned in my university days: he recognizes his dominion over me in my shudders, my uncontrollable howls, my humiliating pleas, my unconditional subjection, my fear; my fear that penetrates my body like a tattoo. But the truth is that none of this is any good to me, these reflections do not save me, and the only thing I want is for the fear to stop.

None of what I learned sounds real, now. Even thinking as I’m doing now, from a distance and after so many years, is a form of running away. I think because I couldn’t break my chains. I think and think about why I let them imprison me. Because when Canelo shouted at me: “Run!” And I heard him and saw him get in position to fire defensively: “Run!” And I ran, I ran zigzagging among the people, just as we’d been taught, I ran some fifty yards to Calle Moneda, I hurled myself into the street to cross it, as we had been taught, but when I saw that parked truck I threw myself to the ground. I want you to picture it clearly. The sky was gray that fall morning in Santiago, but everything was clear. The street was well lit; there were distinct shades and contours. And there was an instant that existed, there was a precise tenth, an exact hundredth of a second when, instead of going on, I threw myself to the ground and slid beneath the truck. And that infinitesimal moment froze my biography.

I chose to survive. Did I choose? Can we choose? Something perhaps chose for me, my fear, my survival instinct, who knows? I didn’t lie to myself: I knew they would find me, I knew I was turning myself over to them. Although I didn’t consciously think of it that way. No. I told myself the trick was smart in its naïveté, it was something that any pedestrian might have done out of pure fear. The sound of bullets, the bursts of rapid fire and the pauses between them, the running footsteps and the shouts, and those long, frightening silences. First came the Smith and Wesson.44, then the agents’ CZs. Because, just as we’d been taught they would, they drew those 9mm CZ 75 Lugers made in socialist Czechoslovakia and sold to a dictatorship that would use them to kill socialists. And more and more shots were fired; and surely the other three brothers were also fighting. The strange thing was that our AK was silent. I knew that weapon well, I could assemble and disassemble it blindfolded. Though even dirty and caked with mud they would still shoot straight, we always had to keep them like new. I was sure I didn’t hear our AK.