The Girls Resembled Each Other in the Unfathomable

Seven years later, when the Chilean press could scarcely recall the business conspiracies that served to avoid analysis of the Pinochet recession, there came the regrettable death of Juan Ausencio Martínez Salas. On 5 February, on the seventeenth hole of the Prince of  Wales Golf Club, a heart attack ended the days of the Patricio Aylwin administration’s undersecretary of education. That afternoon, Martínez Salas was walking the links of the capital’s golf club with two friends from his days as an MBA student at the University of Chicago: the board- and video-game executive José Francisco Vivar and Boris Real. A check of the witnesses at the Official Records Office reveals that the given name of the businessman present at the moment of death was Boris Real  Yáñez, forty-eight, and there is no request on file for a name change for the individual in question. Perhaps it was a different Boris Real; perhaps Francisco Virditti had been the real pseudonym. Nevertheless, in another newspaper photograph of Real discussing his dear friend, the face is the same as that of the businessman who declared himself innocent before the Superintendency of Banks in 1984. In a press conference on 16 May 1995, the then congressman Nelson Ávila decried the possibility of a secret murder plot after the release of the findings from the autopsy of Martínez Salas, which seemed to suggest traces of poison in the undersecretary’s system. The public outcry lasted for two days. As so often, there was vague talk of a political crisis. Then everything was forgotten. Boris Real was subpoenaed at his Vitacura residence before returning to anonymity. According to various accounts, he made a statement to Irma Sepúlveda, the judge in charge of the trial investigating the death of Martínez Salas. Today Boris Real is nearly impossible to find. He has no known address, nor does his name appear in any public record. José Francisco Vivar, approached by the press around the time of his children’s disappearance, stated that he was no longer in contact with his friend.

Even more disturbingly, I must report that one July afternoon in 1997, I myself saw all of them: Vivar, Boris Real and the congressman Nelson Ávila strolling along the big beach at Cachagua. They were accompanied by their respective children. Naturally, I urged my companion to edge closer with me. The significance of the situation has only become evident to me since the beginning of the investigation of the incidents of Navidad and Matanza: Boris Real was walking hand in hand with little Alicia Vivar, then a girl of twelve. They were several feet behind the rest of the group. She asked him to come with her to the rocks, to look for shells. She didn’t address him formally or call him uncle, but rather Boris. Then they talked about the reddish colour of the clouds at that hour and she asked how long it was until the end of the world.

What they did that summer was to drive around the beaches of central Chile in a Cadillac. Virditti reclined the passenger seat, closed his eyes and, through closed lips, murmured songs that a woman had taped for him five years before. ‘Memories are made of these’ could be heard. He dragged on a cigarette every so often; that was the only thing to indicate that he wasn’t asleep to anyone looking in from the outside; specifically, from the other end of the beach. There I was on my towel, face down, with a pair of binoculars. Alicia was next to me. Or rather: sometimes she came out of the sea, shivering, and lay down beside me with her arms clutched tight against the yearned-for skin of her body. I set down the binoculars, picked up a fistful of sand and let it fall gently along the path traced by the freckles on her back down to her waist, between the shoulder blades. But she didn’t smile. Fist-fuck, she whispered, her eyes closed, and with nothing but that extremely disturbing expression she reminded me that she wasn’t happy, that she never would be. Those nights that she spoke to me in English across the hotel corridor from her room in a voice hoarse with tears or laughter, the voice of a woman who has wet herself laughing, she told me horrible children’s tales that later turned into the story of her nightmares: a rabbit passing by, her on top of another woman whom I also loved, sucking at her dried-up breast, heedless. Walking over a grave. Boldly she said: the grave I’m staring into now. Do you want to know what I see?