Tears. Anger. At Every Station.
From The Twilight Zone, by Nona Fernández (translated by Natasha Wimmer):
We visited all the floors. We went into the September Eleven Zone, the Fight for Freedom Zone, the Absence and Memory Zone, the Demand for Truth and Justice Zone, the Return of Hope Zone, the Never Again Zone, the Children’s Suffering Zone. We saw the parilla, a metal bed frame where electric current was used to shock detainees, and the door of the former public prison. We saw the watchtower of the Calle República detention and torture center, and the cross from Patio 29, a mass grave at the cemetery where many unidentified bodies ended up, and also photographs of various crimes. All of this in no particular order, with little regard for firsts or nexts, because when the subject is horror, the logic of the machinery doesn’t much matter. Dates and time lines and causes and effects and explanations are subtleties you might as well skip. The crimes all merge together. A couple of lines for bombings, a few each for throat slashings, deaths by burning, shootings, firing squads. And causes and effects, as I said, don’t appear in any account. It’s all one big massacre, a fight between good guys and bad guys who are easy to tell apart because the bad guys are in uniform and the good guys are civilians. There is no in between. There are no accomplices, nobody else is implicated. The citizenry is free of responsibility, innocent, blind, all of them victims. And at each station we cried, of course we did. And then at the next one we were angry, of course we were. And then at the next one we cried again, only to move on and make room for those behind us who were enacting the same ritual of tears and anger, tears and anger, on a kind of emotional roller coaster ride terminating in the End of Dictatorship Zone, where a big blowup of ex-president Patricio Aylwin giving his inaugural address makes visitors’ spirits soar, leaving them exultant with joy and hope, more at ease, more at peace, because from now on we’re safe, the good guys won, history is forgiving, we’ll forget that it was Aylwin himself who went to the military to request a coup in 1973, a fact that isn’t part of this chain of memories, and moving on, listening to the happy slogans of democracy’s return which inform us that this is the end, everyone’s free to go now, and enjoy a refreshing Coca-Cola in the café, or stop by the little souvenir shop — as we do, why not? — to buy a couple of Allende buttons and a postcard of La Moneda in flames.
Nona Fernández uses her novel, The Twilight Zone, to shape a fictional view of a real period of history: Life in Chile during the military dictatorship (1973 - 1990) of Augusto Pinochet.
The passage above highlights the felt reality of walking through a real place built to house the regime’s many human rights violations: the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago, Chile.
I had prepared to write here about the way in which Fernández juxtaposes the physical building and a person’s visceral reactions. I wanted to address the ways in which she lets real horror play in full force from one sentence to the next. I wanted to reflect on the waves of emotions I experienced when reading the passage — which only hints at what it must be like for any person, moreover any Chilean, to make this real-life walk through all the floors.
But that all ultimately seemed so dull under the brilliant light of the text above.
While my thoughts and feelings about the situation and the author’s writing might have merit, they cannot and should not replace what already rests underneath Fernández’s words: This happened. These people were dehumanized.
The fiction gives way to reality, blending the two, letting the darkness seep into everything you can feel here.
And Fernández packaged that monumental underpinning into as small a space as perhaps anyone could without losing clarity.
I’m in awe. Analysis would only dilute what Fernández has done and wipe away a history that can speak for itself.
Sit with this one. I hope her words and vision of reality will impact you as it did me.