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.
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 bathroom. 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;
