My Documents

by Megan McDowell Alejandro Zambra

  He’d been there with us, in front of the TV, when Cóndor Rojas faked his injury in Brazil and the Chilean team walked off the field at the Maracaná. My father and I couldn’t believe what we were seeing, and Camilo was distraught too. “Fucking Brazilians!” I shouted, to see if anyone would scold me, but no one did. My father sank into furious silence. Camilo immediately set off downtown, and he was part of the crowd that protested in front of the Brazilian Embassy. I wanted to go with him, but my parents wouldn’t let me, and I had to swallow my rage.

  One evening, while the subject was still being debated and Cóndor Rojas was still giving interviews in which he proclaimed his innocence, Camilo came over to eat with us and said that he no longer believed that Cóndor was innocent. By then the rumors were already circulating, but my father and I considered them defamatory. My father looked at Camilo with contempt, almost with hatred. “You don’t have the right to an opinion. You don’t know anything about soccer,” he told him. “Do you really think that Cóndor would be stupid enough to do something like that?” When Rojas finally admitted he was guilty, that he really had hidden a razor blade in his glove to fake his injury, we had no choice but to accept it. We apologized to Camilo then, but he said he didn’t think it was at all important.

  Eventually we had to stop admiring Cóndor Rojas, and I also stopped going to my father’s games. Soon after that my father broke his right hand for the second time, and the doctor told him that he should never play soccer again.

  Toward the end of 1990, something marvelous happened: after a decade of requesting a telephone line, we finally got one. We were given the number 557-3317. The morning they came to install it, I was home alone with my mother. The first thing she did was call one of her girlfriends, and then she told me that I should call one of my friends too, so I called Camilo. It was during a period when he had, without explanation, stopped coming to visit. He sounded happy, and I asked him to come see us. He appeared a few days later.

  He told me he wanted to teach me how to talk to girls. I was fourteen by then, I had already kissed a few of them, but my relations with girls were still difficult. Camilo said that he’d recently met a girl called Lorena, and they’d gone out on a date and had slept together. He explained how one should treat a woman in bed (“You have to take her clothes off slowly—you can’t rush it”), and he offered to call Lorena, while I listened in from my mother’s room. “That way you can learn how a guy seduces a woman,” he said. He was not showing off—he really did want to teach me.

  “Hi, Lorena, it’s Camilo,” he said, in a deep voice, when she picked up.

  “Oh, how are you?” Her voice was sweet, sweet and a little hoarse.

  “I’m good, but I need to see you.”

  She was quiet for five seconds, and then she pronounced a sentence that I will never forget. “Well, if it’s already a necessity, we’ll just end it here,” she said, and hung up.

  I went to the kitchen, put the kettle on, and made a cup of tea for Camilo. I think it was the first time I ever made tea for someone. I put a lot of sugar in it, which was what I understood you did when making tea for someone who was sad.

  “Thanks,” Camilo said, with a gesture of resignation. “But it doesn’t matter. I’m happy. Next summer something very important is going to happen.”

  “What?”

  “Well, it won’t be summer for me. It’ll be winter.”

  It was a perfect clue, but I still didn’t understand. How stupid.

  “I’m going to France to see my father,” he said, the excitement clear in his face.

  Now I jump ahead many years; more precisely, twenty-two. It’s October of 2012. I’m in Amsterdam, at a gathering of Chileans, most of them exiles, others students. And there is Big Camilo, Camilo Sr. Someone introduces us and when he hears my last name I notice the interest in his eyes. “You look like your father,” he tells me.

  “And you look like Camilo,” I answer. He asks me some vague questions. We talk about the protests, about the shameful official refusal to allow Chileans abroad to vote in elections. We talk about Piñera, and suddenly we are compatriots spelling out the incompetence of their president. And then: “How is Hernán?” he asks me.

  “Good,” I say, thinking that it’s been a while since I’ve talked to my father. I feel a little bullied, I don’t know why. I’m frozen. Then I realize: Camilo suffered so much because of his father. I feel that, in some dark and absurd way, by talking to Big Camilo I am betraying my friend, my brother. At the same time, I want to talk to this man, to understand who he is. I suggest that we meet up the next day.

  We agree to meet at a Mexican restaurant on Keizersgracht. It’s a short walk from my hotel. I arrive almost two hours early so I can watch the Barcelona game. Alexis is on the bench. For decades now, soccer has been an individual sport for us Chileans. After what happened with Cóndor Rojas, not only were we out of Italy in ’90, we were also forbidden to participate in the South American qualifiers for the ’94 World Cup. There was nothing for us to do, for years, but focus on the local competition and on the individual triumphs and failures of our few countrymen who played outside Chile. We rooted for Real Madrid when Zamorano was there, and now we root for Barcelona, with Alexis, for as long as that lasts (if it lasts). And we have been and will be for whatever teams Mati Fernández or Arturo Vidal or Gary Medel or the others play for. We’re used to this way of watching: what do the goals that David Villa and Messi score matter to me? The only thing I care about is that they put Alexis in, and even if he doesn’t shine, may he at least not do something dumb.

  Big Camilo also arrives early. I think, I’m going to watch a match with Camilo’s dad.

  Everything I know about Big Camilo, about his exile, is what his son told me: that he was imprisoned in 1974, and that he had the good luck, so to speak, to get out of Chile in ’75. He went to Paris and soon met an Argentine woman, with whom he had two children. He tells me that he has been in Holland for fifteen years, first in Utrecht, then in Rotterdam, and now in a small town close to Amsterdam. Before long, like a policeman who doesn’t want to waste time, I speed up the investigation. I ask why Camilo was changed when he came back to Chile.

  “I don’t know why,” he tells me. “He came to Paris to find me. He wanted us to go back to Chile together. He wasn’t interested in moving here, though I asked him to. He told me he was Chilean. I proposed that he come to study. I talked about our plans to settle in Holland. He told me he didn’t like studying, not in Santiago and not in Europe. It got more and more heated. He said horrible things to me. I said horrible things to him. And it became a contest, a competition of who could say the most horrible things. And I ended up feeling that he had won. He ended up feeling that I had won. All those years we’d been in contact, I’d thought about him, I’d sent him money—not much, but I’d sent it. Later, the first time I went back to Chile, we saw each other, we had lunch several times, but we always fought.”

  “That was in ’92,” I say.

  “Yes,” he replies.

  Fifteen minutes into the second half, Alexis goes in; he’s offside a couple of times, but he plays a small role in Xavi’s 3–0 goal. Then Fàbregas scores, and then Messi again. Alexis misses an easy goal in the final minutes.

  “What do you think of Alexis?” Big Camilo asks me.

  “That he’s not better than Messi,” I say, and he smiles. I add that he was never much for scoring goals—in Chile he missed goals all the time—but that he was an exceptional winger. Suddenly I have that thought again: I’m talking about soccer with Camilo’s father, and I feel a kind of tremor. A very strange feeling. I talk about the 2006 Colo-Colo team. I talk about Claudio Borghi, about Mati Fernández, about Chupete Suazo, Kalule, Arturo Sanhueza. I talk about that terrible finals match against Pachuca, at the National Stadium. I feel awkward talking this way. Naive.

  Later, I tell him that Camilo wanted him to be my godfather. He smiles, as if he doesn’t understand. And I don’t explain.
Then he asks me to use the informal tú with him. I tell him no. He asks me if my father and Camilo used the informal with each other. I say yes. “Use it with me, then,” he responds.

  But I don’t want to. I try to answer politely, but the only thing that comes out is a weak, murmured “No.”

  I ask him why he and my father had fallen out. My dad never wanted to tell me or Camilo when we asked him: he always changed the subject. And no one else knew. I always assumed it was something very serious.

  “It was toward the end of the season,” Big Camilo tells me. “We had it all sewn up, two–nil: I was playing center defense, there were only a few minutes left, and your dad was shouting like crazy: ‘Pass it, pass it back, pass it, Camilo!’ We’d been fighting about that for several games. He never let me make my own decisions. ‘Pass it, pass it back!’ In those days, the goalie was still allowed to pick the ball up with his hands when you passed it back to him.”

  “I remember,” I tell him. “I’m not that young.”

  “You are very young,” he tells me.

  We order more beers.

  He goes on, “He kept saying it over and over. ‘Pass it back, Camilo, come on!’ And I was fed up. Out of pure spite I put the ball in the corner and scored a goal on my own team: ‘There’s your ball, motherfucker!’ I told him. Some people laughed, others yelled at me, your father just looked at me with hate. And then the other team scored, and we tied. If I hadn’t scored that own goal, we could have advanced further, maybe even won the championship.”

  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 oblig
ations, 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.