The Girls Resembled Each Other in the Unfathomable

To this day, investigators are still adding sightings of Bruno Vivar to the case file of the disappeared Navidad siblings. Every summer since the incident, a dozen witnesses from different parts of central Chile claim to have seen a young man fitting his description: striped T-shirt in various combinations of primary colours; shorts or bathing trunks; leather sandals; extremely thin hairless legs; dishevelled hair in a ragged cut, sometimes brown and other times dyed red. Over and over again, as if his parents’ last memory of him had been burned on the retinas of so many who never knew him (the press coverage was as intense as it was brief), they see Bruno Vivar lying in the sand, face down on a towel, staring out to sea, looking disdainfully through some photographs, or swimming in silence. Other testimonies, of course, add specific and equally disturbing details: Bruno drinking at hotel bars, beer in cans or double shots of whiskey that he pays for with a card issued in the United States, while with the other hand he fondles a die that 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; tossing the die and then writing another letter never sent by the local mail.

These bits of information come from different sources: guards; waiters; store clerks; receptionists; cleaning people who at the time also yearned to assemble the missing pieces of the case but who only succeeded in helping the police to declare impossible a verdict of either homicide or kidnapping. It has been tacitly assumed that Bruno Vivar – a legal adult – simply abandoned his family all of a sudden, which isn’t a crime in Chile.

The unasked question is why the name of Alicia Vivar, the fourteen-year-old girl, appears only twice in the file. Especially after a detailed review of reports on the reappearances of her brother, Bruno. Because Bruno never once turns up alone. The various accounts agree that he arrives at hotel parking garages in different expensive cars always driven by a man whose smile also appears in police files, though in another section: Boris Real.

Boris Real became known in Chile in 1984 as the young local businessman who, representing a group of Swiss investors who wanted to buy Petrohué Bank, landed in the Capuchinos jail as the result of an anti-monopoly suit brought by the Superintendency of Banks when it was discovered that the Swiss were linked to an Australian investment group acquired by Atacama Bank and, at the same time, to the Norwegian-Spanish group that was acquiring the De Los Lagos Bank and Antonio Varas Bank. Boris Real was tried as the representative of the inscrutable international consortium that attempted to acquire 51 per cent of the Chilean bank, an operation which, it is noted, might have had consequences for the country beyond the strictly financial. The group in question immediately left the country, leaving no trace. At least until the summer of 1999. Of course, Boris Real wasn’t the businessman’s actual name but rather the alias of Francisco Virditti, forty-one, who acknowledged having headed a group of six shareholders motivated by nothing more than ‘legitimate market play’, as he states in the only interview he’s given.