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Just then my Dutch friend Luc arrives; he has some books to give me. I introduce him to Camilo. He sits with us for a few minutes, and in his extravagant Spanish he asks Camilo if he’s in exile. “Not anymore,” Camilo answers. “Or, yes. I don’t know anymore.” Luc wants me to leave with him, but I feel like I should stay. I tell him we’ll meet up later.

Big Camilo had told his son that he was never tortured, even though he was held prisoner for several months. “They beat the shit out of me,” he says to me now. “But I don’t want to talk about that. I’m alive. I got to leave, start over again.” We both fall silent, thinking about Camilo. I think of the record shop, the song by the Talking Heads; maybe I hum it a little. “I was born in a house with the television always on / Guess I grew up too fast / And I forgot my name.”

*
   
*
   
*

Now we are walking along Prinsengracht. It’s cold. Without meaning to, I start to count the bicycles that are going by on the street at breakneck speed. Fifty, sixty, a hundred. The silence seems definitive. I sense that we’re about to say good-bye. And, sure enough, just then he says, “Well, I’ll be going now.

“Tell Hernán I’m sorry,” he adds. I assure him that my father forgave him many years ago, that it’s not important. We ask a boy to take our picture with my phone. As we pose, I think about how tomorrow I’m going to call my father, and we’ll talk for a long time about Big Camilo, and we’ll also remember, as we do sometimes, the horrendous night in early ’94 when Auntie July called to tell us that Camilo had been hit by a car, and the wretched week when he almost pulled through but didn’t pull through.

I don’t know why I ask Big Camilo how he learned of his son’s death. “I found out eight days later,” he says. “July knew how to contact me, but she didn’t want to.” We’re standing, staring at the ground, on a corner by a lamp store. I’ve seen this several times in Amsterdam: shopwindows filled with lamps that are all turned on at night. I’m about to tell him this, to change the subject. Then he repeats, “Please tell Hernán I’m sorry about that goal.”

“I’ll tell him,” I reply. When we say good-bye, he hugs me and starts to cry. I think that the story can’t end like that, with Camilo Sr. crying for his dead son, his son who was practically a stranger to him. But that’s how it ends.

LONG DISTANCE

I
worked nights as a phone operator, and it was one of the best jobs I’ve ever had. The money wasn’t good, but it wasn’t awful either, and although the place looked inhospitable—a cramped office on Guardia Vieja whose only window looked out on an immense gray wall—it was a pleasant place to work: not too cold in winter or too hot in summer. Well, maybe I got cold in summer and hot in winter, but that was because I never managed to figure out how the thermostat worked.

This was in 1998: the World Cup in France had ended, and, a little while later, after I’d been working at the job for a couple of months, they arrested Pinochet. My boss, who was Spanish, put a photo of Judge Garzón on a corner of his desk, and we placed
flowers around it in thanks. Portillo was a good boss, a generous guy; I rarely saw him, sometimes only on the twenty-ninth, when I waited, with some stupendous circles under my eyes, to pick up my paycheck. What I remember most about him is his voice, so high-pitched, like a teenager’s—a common enough tone among Chileans but, for me, a disconcerting one to hear from a Spaniard. He would call me very early, at six or seven in the morning, so I could give him a report on what had happened the previous night, which was pretty much pointless, because nothing ever happened, or almost nothing: maybe some call or other from Rome or Paris, simple cases from people who weren’t really sick but who wanted to make the most of the medical insurance they had bought in Santiago. My job was to listen to them, take down their information, make sure the policy was valid, and connect them to my counterparts in Europe.

Portillo let me read or write, or even doze off, on the condition that I always answer the phone in good time. That’s why he called at six or seven—although, when he was out partying, he might call earlier, a little drunk. “The phone should never ring more than three times,” he would tell me if I took too long picking up. But he didn’t usually scold me; on the contrary, he was quite friendly. Sometimes he asked me what I was reading. I would say Paul Celan, or Emily Dickinson, or Emmanuel Bove, or Humberto Díaz Casanueva, and he always burst out laughing, as if he had just heard a very good and unexpected joke.

One night, around four in the morning, I received a call from someone whose voice sounded mock-serious, or disguised, and
I thought it was my boss pretending to be someone else. “I’m calling from Paris,” said the voice. The man was calling direct, which increased my feeling that it was a prank of Portillo’s, because clients usually reversed the charges when they called. Portillo and I had a certain level of trust between us, so I told him not to fuck with me, that I was very busy reading. “I don’t understand, I’m calling from Paris,” the man responded. “Is this the number of the travel insurance?”

I apologized and asked him for his number so I could call him back. When we talked again I’d become the nicest phone operator on the planet, which wasn’t really necessary, because I’ve never been impolite, and because the man with the unrealistic voice was also unrealistically nice, which was not usual in that job: it was more common for clients to show their bad manners, their highhandedness, their habit of treating phone operators badly, and surely also laborers, cooks, salespeople, or any other of the many groups made up of their supposed inferiors.

Juan Emilio’s voice, on the other hand, suggested the possibility of a reasonable conversation, although I don’t know if
reasonable
is the word, because as I was taking down his information (fifty-five years old, home address in Lo Curro, no preexisting conditions) and checking his policy (his insurance had the best coverage available on the market), something in his voice made me think that, more than a doctor, he just needed someone to talk to, someone who would listen.

He told me he’d been in Europe for five months, most of that time in Paris, where his daughter—whom he called la Moño—was
working on her doctorate and living with her husband—el Mati—and the kids. None of this was in response to my questions, but he was talking so enthusiastically that it was impossible for me to break in. He told me how the kids spoke French with charmingly correct accents, and he also threw in a few commonplace observations about Paris. By the time he started talking to me about the difficulties la Moño had been having lately meeting her academic obligations, about the complexity of the doctoral programs, and about what kind of sense parenthood made in a world like this one (“a world that sometimes seems so strange nowadays, so different,” he told me), I realized we’d been talking for almost forty minutes. I had to interrupt him and respectfully ask him to tell me why he was calling. He told me he was a little under the weather, and he’d had a fever. I typed up the fax and sent it to the office in Paris so they could coordinate the case, and then I started the long process of saying good-bye to Juan Emilio, who fell all over himself in apologies and politeness before finally accepting that the conversation had ended.

Back then I’d picked up a few evening hours teaching at the technical training institute. The schedule fit perfectly: the class was from 8:00 to 9:20 p.m., twice a week, so I could maintain my nocturnal rhythm, getting up at noon, reading a lot, and all was well.

My first class was in March of 2000, a few days after Pinochet returned to Chile like he owned the place (I’m sorry for these reference points, but they’re the ones that come to mind). My students were older than me: they were all at least thirty and some were in their fifties. They worked all day, and struggled to pay their tuition
for programs in Business Administration, Accounting, Secretarial Studies, or Tourism. I was to teach them “Techniques of Written Expression,” according to a very rigid and outdated syllabus, which encompassed composition, grammar, and even pronunciation.

In the first classes I tried to comply with what was asked of me, but my students came to class very tired from their jobs, and I think all of us got bored. I remember the desolation at the end of those first workdays. I remember walking along Avenida España after the third or fourth class, stopping at a hot-dog stand, ordering an Italiano, and thinking that I should tackle that feeling of wasted time head-on. After all, I was there to talk about language, and if there had been one constant thing in my life it was a love of certain stories, certain phrases, of a handful of words. But it was clear that, up to that point, I hadn’t been able to communicate anything. “Interesting class, Prof,” one student told me at the entrance to the metro, as if fate were trying to dispel my dark thoughts. I hadn’t recognized her. To combat my shyness, I opted to teach class without my glasses, so that I couldn’t make out my students’ faces, and if I had to ask a question, I’d just look toward some undefined place and say, “What do you think, Daniela?” It was an infallible method, because there were five Danielas in the course.

The name of the woman who talked to me in the metro wasn’t Daniela, but it rhymed: Pamela. She told me that she still lived with her parents, that she didn’t have a job. I asked her why she went to school at night, then. “Because it’s hot during the day,” she answered, flirtatious and disdainful. I asked her if she went to school at noon during the winter, and she laughed. Then I wanted
to know if she really thought the class had been good. She looked down, as if I’d asked her something very intimate. Then almost a station later she said, “Yes, interesting.” We got out together at Baquedano, and I kept her company while she waited for the bus to Quilicura.

It hadn’t been so unusual when I was at the university, there were tons of examples: male teacher with student (male or female), female teacher with student (same), and there was talk of a few salacious cases (perhaps somewhat exaggerated) of a male teacher with two female students, and a female teacher with three male students and a female librarian (in the library, on top of the returns desk). So I thought it wouldn’t be that serious of an infraction if I tried to make something happen with Pamela. She wasn’t short or tall, not fat or thin: perfect, I thought. (I’ve never known how to answer those kinds of questions: do you prefer dark hair or blond, et cetera.) I knew for certain that there was something in her voice, in her attitude, in her eyes, that I liked.

I was engrossed in these speculations when I reached the office. I poured a coffee and smoked one cigarette after another (Portillo didn’t smoke, but he still allowed us to), thinking about love and also, I don’t know why, about death, and then about the future, which wasn’t my favorite subject. I thought how it was the year 2000, and I remembered the conversations we’d had as children, as teenagers, about that far-off future year: we had imagined a life full of flying cars and happy teleportations, or maybe something less spectacular but still radically different from the soulless and repressive world we lived in. I must have fallen asleep thinking
about that, because the phone woke me up shortly after, at one in the morning. It was my boss calling to remind me that at 3 a.m. they were going to shut off the water. While I was filling up the thermos and the sink, I thought of myself, probably for the first time ever, as a solitary person.

According to procedure, fourteen days after the first call took place, we had to contact the client (the “pax,” as we called them) and ask how their illness had turned out, and what their opinion was of the service they had received. This part of the process was referred to as the social call, and it was the last step before closing a file (oh, what strange pleasure we felt when we finally closed a file). So I picked up the phone and I called Paris: Juan Emilio was still at his daughter’s house, and it was she who answered—la Moño didn’t strike me as quite so friendly as her father. “Call him later,” she said dryly. That’s what I did. Juan Emilio seemed moved by my call, which tended to happen, because some of the clients thought that we were calling out of personal concern, as if some sad night operator would or could care about a compatriot on the other side of the world coming down with a slight cold.

Toward the end of the conversation, Juan Emilio asked me if I liked my job. I replied that there were better ones, but that this one was pretty good. “But what did you study?” he insisted. “Literature,” I replied, and he let out a chuckle. I usually hated it when people asked me that question, but neither his question nor his laughter bothered me. Over time I learned to accept and appreciate Juan Emilio’s crescendos of laughter, minimal at first, and then frank and contagious.

Four or five days later, now back in Chile, he called again. It was seven in the morning, and I was fast asleep in the office. “I want to know if you’re okay,” he told me, and we got caught up in a conversation that would have been normal if we had been two teenagers becoming friends, or two old men trying to combat the inertia of a Monday at their retirement home. I thought Juan Emilio was pretty crazy, and maybe I felt proud to participate in his madness. “Pax very friendly, calls for no reason and thanks me again for the service,” I wrote in his file. But really there was a reason for his call, although I think that it occurred to him only as we were talking: he asked me to be his teacher, his guide in reading. “I need to be more cultured,” he said. It seemed simple: I would recommend books for him to read, and then we would discuss them. I accepted, of course. I proposed a monthly sum and he insisted on doubling it. I offered to go to his house or his office, although I didn’t really see myself taking the metro and a shared taxi to cross the entire city every week. Luckily, he wanted the classes to take place at my apartment, every Monday, at seven in the evening.