“Small towns are like small Chiles. A scaled-down version that hides what everyone knows and no one dares to say,” one of the people I interviewed in San Carlos told me—a small city in the Eighth Region that I fled as soon as I was old enough for university.

Nine years have passed, and for the umpteenth time, this summer, I broke the promise I made to myself, Cinema Paradiso-style, never to return. García Márquez says that “life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it to tell it.” I remember a tornado that devastated the Plaza de Armas in San Carlos and lifted a car in 1981; I also remember Nicanor Parra when he told the mayor of San Fabián that he could shove the title of illustrious son they wanted to give him; I remember the kids from Osorno who arrived with a Pixies cassette under their arm and who would later call themselves Glup! I also remember my encounter with “el Pescao,” a buddy from pickup soccer games who later became a professional criminal and left several people by the wayside, or the sweltering afternoons with high school girls in an empty apartment for which I had the key from ‘Chico’ Uribe. Or the night I became friends with María Paz, the queen of a brothel with more wisdom than beauties to embrace. Stories without much significance. Of small-town adolescence. The B-side of a period of Authoritarian class, in which other stories were written in blood and which to this day remain in limbo. With a couple of ideas and García Márquez in mind, I got off the train at the old station. I was looking for lives I didn’t live and enough memories to tell them.

ANY TOWN

San Carlos is one of those towns adjacent to Route 5 where few stop. Its characteristic is being a small city, perhaps like yours: a plaza de armas as a meeting point, a long commercial street, a couple of nightclubs and radio stations, young huasos who park their 4x4s or enduro motorcycles in the middle of the street, shouting at the top of their lungs, farmers whose money goes from their hands to the shopkeeper, from the shopkeeper to the supermarket, and from the supermarket to the butcher shop, driving the annual economy.

There is no cinema or theater, but there is a university campus and plenty of transport: 400 collective taxis and cabs for streets that can be walked in less than 30 minutes. In the video stores, porn and Kung-fu films abound, and the hits are by the “Llanero Solitario,” a ranchera singer with ten cassettes and two CDs to his credit.

The chauvinistic pride claims that the local medialuna is “the biggest in Chile” and that the sausages are better than those in Chillán. The family that makes them—the Pincheiras—is known as “The Sausage Empire.” Reminiscences of Star Wars?

Maybe. The average San Carlos resident is proud, and as in all towns, a line—the train tracks in this case—divides the social classes between the old town and the “Once” and “Araucanía” neighborhoods, the two districts where more than half of the 50,000 San Carlos residents live.

Here, the two massive farmers' protests called “Sancarlazos” took place in 1995 and 2001; here, the Virgin of the Álamos appeared in 1962, and the following year, the ‘Canaca,’ Jorge del Carmen Valenzuela Torres, better known as the Jackal of Nahueltoro, was executed by firing squad...

On October 2, 1973, Manuel Humberto Crisóstomo Toro, ‘el Chilenito,’ the only forcibly disappeared person from San Carlos, was detained by carabineros and military personnel. He was 24 years old. As in every small town, the hell and the boredom are big, and for that reason, anonymous and fantastic stories are woven together, of forgotten heroes and executioners, of former subversives and neighborhood poets who see each other's faces every day.

They are fragments and town memories that no one forgets, but that more than a few prefer not to remember.

OUR GREY MILITARY YEARS

On September 11, 1973, businesses and many houses in the center woke up flying flags. From a house on Calle Serrano, a white one emerged with a black spider in the center. The message from Patria y Libertad and the Romero Godoy family was clear.

There were four brothers. Highly linked to the agrarian guild, Opus Dei, and the military world, that family was and is one of the most recognized in San Carlos. In fact, in 1999, the local newspaper El Esfuerzo gave Raúl Romero Godoy its annual award.

With Pete, his son, we were childhood friends. Later, we drifted apart. On the other side of the train tracks, however, in the 8 de Octubre squatter settlement (later renamed 11 de Septiembre), no flag was flying.

At that time, the Romero Godoys owned a supermarket, a hardware store, and agricultural properties. One of them, Mario Romero Godoy, was a lawyer. He was quickly appointed military prosecutor for the province of Ñuble, recalls an interviewee who, for fear, asks for his identity to be kept confidential and adds: “The disappearance of ‘el Chilenito’ and all the repression was in charge of Romero.

He personally tortured friends and people very close to me. They recognize him as one of the torturers, along with the current municipal secretary (Florencio Rodríguez Orellana), who witnessed the tortures, which amounts to the same thing,” he confirms.

As in other cities after the coup, civilians participated in raids, and municipal officials arrived in uniform to work. “Rodríguez Orellana was one of them,” the interviewee recalls. But there were others.

Ramiro Grez is a deacon of a parish. After the coup, he did not arrive at the municipality in uniform, but former officials say that he did so “with a pistol. He kept it in a drawer and put an image of the Virgin of Carmen on the desk.

When he finished, he would put the revolver in his belt and kiss the image of the Virgin.” Grez is now the Director of Transit and “is a very respected guy there,” says the source. Between the end of 1973 and all of 1974, there were arrests and torture, for which the prosecutor Romero Godoy, the then-colonel and commander of the Regimiento de Infantería de Montaña Nº 9 de Chillán, Guillermo Toro Dávila; the agricultural businessman Pedro Guzmán Álvarez, and Florencio Rodríguez Orellana—among others—appear indicted for crimes of kidnapping, application of torture, and illicit association, in a lawsuit that will be filed by seven people sponsored by lawyer Eduardo Contreras. Mile Mavrosky Mileva, a Yugoslav immigrant who owned a funeral home and arrived in the town in 1955, had a very bad time. In January 1974, he was accused of being the leader of an armed combat group that used coffins to hide machine guns to carry out—the following Christmas—a counter-coup operation called “Black Christmas.” Mavrosky was forcibly disappeared for more than a year and kept blindfolded. He is certain he was at Colonia Dignidad. Romero Godoy no longer lives in San Carlos, but he is the one most remembered. The same source who accuses him of torture portrays him crudely: “There is a legend that the helicopter that brought General Arellano Stark to Cauquenes did not arrive in San Carlos because Romero was here, who gave full guarantees of repression to the Military Junta.” In 1985, almost simultaneously, the Romero Godoy supermarket, another in Los Angeles, and the Casa Rabié in Chillán were set on fire. The source asserts that at least the Romero case was an attack. “The guy who did it was here for a while and some towers were blown up.” He never heard from him again. The 1988 plebiscite arrived. The YES won, thanks in part to the pressure from the agrarian employers and the legs of Magaly Acevedo at the closing campaign show. The Romero Godoys were protagonists again. The YES had shock troops, commanded by Manuel Antonio Sepúlveda, ‘El Pájaro Loco.’ “When Matthei had not yet recognized the victory of the NO, he left the D-99 school and patrolled in a Romero van, brandishing a rifle in plain sight of the people,” recalls the confidential source. On the previous September 11, ‘El Pájaro Loco’ shot at everything that moved in the plaza de armas. “They were untouchable gentlemen,” says the interviewee. The last September 11 under the dictatorship was surreal. The plaza was full of people celebrating the imminent end of the regime. Around eight o'clock at night, carabineros from San Carlos began firing tear gas. I was 13 years old and watched everything from the balcony of my house. The interviewee recalls: “I approached the major in charge of the carabineros, who was personally bombing the plaza, with a lawyer. The lawyer told him that the action was excessive, and the major, in a derogatory manner, told him: ‘I cannot attend to you, because I am working,’ and he continued throwing bombs.” When I ask him if he knows the problems this interview might bring him, the source says that “these are things that are not said because people are still afraid. These are small towns where our families meet at the same social events or, as Silvio Rodríguez says, ‘Sunday at mass.’ It’s that thing where it’s better to sweep everything under the rug, and the procession goes on inside. I think it’s time to lose the fear,” he says.

WILL YOU EVER TELL MY STORY?

In the provinces, the tradition of the brothel does not die. They are places of lanterns, of damp and frantic sex, where one also goes to drink and talk. In San Carlos, the best-known houses were “Las Malvinas” and “Casablanca.” On weekends, fathers and workers would hide there.

Also 15-year-old kids wanting a piscola or a lay. I was one of the latter when we entered for the first time. I approached the bar to talk to María Paz, the “madam.” A bottle of pisco and four sodas later, the woman had unraveled her life.

Her son was studying at La Sorbonne in France, and this job was the only one that could pay a French education bill. María Paz counted the days until her offspring’s graduation. Then she would retire and join him in Europe.

Years passed, and visits to Casablanca became frequent. I was even at a birthday party for María Paz. If people had half the love and companionship I saw in those butterfly eyes, the world would be different.

But the day came, and I left. One weekend, already in my second year of Journalism, I showed up at the door of my friend’s brothel. She was happy, and we drank and danced until very late. -Will you ever tell my story?- she asked, giving me her cell phone number.

I nodded. Leaving almost at dawn, I took a taxi and promised that next time I would bring a recorder. Just like Humphrey Bogart, I never kept it. Over time, I learned that her son had graduated and that she had hung up her boots.

She was living in Paris. Now, almost out of nostalgia and having graduated in Journalism, I crossed the threshold of the place again. I recognized her immediately and approached. She had returned! Blonde, round, older, but the same.

I don’t remember how many hours we talked, but I do remember the photos: María Paz in front of the Eiffel Tower, María Paz boarding a ship, María Paz with her son, her French daughter-in-law, and her grandson, happy.

• How did you think of coming back?, I asked.
• It’s just that I didn’t feel at home, she said simply.

In France, her family was there, but she didn’t feel at home. In San Carlos, the girls... and she did feel at home. I left her with a smile and walked away. Before sitting down to write this article, I called her.

She was still sleepy and didn’t recognize my voice. The phone cut off. I wanted to tell her that I was finally keeping my word. That her story and others not so beautiful would be published in La Nación Domingo.

That now I understand everything. I wanted to tell her that “the traces in this matter—as Heredia said—must be sought with the eye of the soul.” That, María Paz, now I know that I am not coming back.

Source: La Nación Domingo (March 2, 2003)