By Night in Chile

face, but being so drunk, he got lost. Instead of taking the passage on the right, he took the one on the left, then he went along another passage, down some stairs, and before he knew it, he was in the basement, it was a huge house with a floor plan like a crossword puzzle. Anyhow, he went along various
    passages and opened various doors into rooms that were empty or had just a few packing cases in them, and spider webs the Mapuche maid never bothered to clear away. Finally he came to a passage that was narrower than the others and he opened one last door. He saw a kind of metal bed. He put on the light. On the bed was a naked man, his wrists and ankles tied. The man seemed to be asleep, but it was difficult to verify that impression, since he was blindfolded. The stray guest shut the door, feeling suddenly stone cold sober, and stealthily retraced his steps. When he got back to the sitting room he asked for a whiskey and then another and didn’t say a word. Later, how much later I don’t quite know, he told a friend, who then told my friend, who, much later on, told me. It was weighing heavily on my friend’s conscience. Go in peace, I told him. Then I found out, from another friend, that the guest who had gotten lost was a
    playwright or maybe an actor, and that he had been down every one of the
    labyrinthine passages in María Canales and Jimmy Thompson’s house, over and over until he arrived at that door at the end of a dimly lit corridor, and opened it and came across that body tied to a metal bed, abandoned in that basement, but alive, and the playwright or the actor shut the door stealthily, trying not to wake the poor man who was recuperating from his ordeal, and retraced his steps and returned to the party or the literary gathering, María Canales’s soirée, without saying a word. And I also found out, years later, while watching clouds crumble, break apart and scatter in the Chilean sky, as Baudelaire’s clouds would never do, that the guest who had gone astray in the deceptive corridors of that house on the outskirts of Santiago was a theorist of avant-garde theater, a theorist with a great sense of humor, who didn’t panic when he lost his way, since as well as having a great sense of humor he was naturally curious, and when he realized he was lost in María Canales’s basement, he wasn’t afraid, in fact it appealed to the busybody in him, and he opened doors and even started whistling, and finally he came to the very last room at the end of the
    basement’s narrowest corridor, lit by a single, feeble light bulb, and he opened the door and saw the man tied to the metal bed, blindfolded, and he knew the man was alive because he could hear him breathing, although he wasn’t in good shape, for in spite of the dim light he saw the wounds, the raw patches, like eczema, but it wasn’t eczema, the battered parts of his anatomy, the swollen parts, as if more than one bone had been broken, but he was breathing, he certainly didn’t look like he was about to die, and then the theorist of avant-garde theater shut the door delicately, without making a noise, and started to make his way back to the sitting room, carefully switching off as he went each of the lights he had previously switched on. And months later, or maybe years later, another regular guest at those gatherings told me the same story. And then I heard it from another and another and another. And then democracy returned, the moment came for national reconciliation, and it was revealed that Jimmy Thompson had been one of the key agents of the DINA , and that he had used his house as a center for the interrogation of prisoners. The subversives were taken to the basement, where Jimmy interrogated them, extracting all the information he could, and then he sent them on to other detention centers. As a general rule, prisoners were not killed in Jimmy’s house. It was meant to be just for interrogation, although there was the occasional death. It was also revealed that Jimmy had traveled to Washington and killed one of Allende’s ex-ministers and a North American woman who happened to get in the way. And that he had organized the assassinations of exiled Chileans in Argentina, and even in Europe, that civilized continent, to which Jimmy had paid a brief visit with the diffidence befitting those born in the New World. All this came out. María Canales had known about it for a long time, of course. But she wanted to be a writer, and writers