In the Midst of Winter

They had met in 1990. Lucia had returned to Chile after almost seventeen years in exile and found a job as a TV producer with great difficulty, as thousands of young, better--qualified professionals were looking for work. There was little sympathy for those who came back: people on the left accused them of being cowards for leaving; those on the right saw them as communists.

The capital, Santiago, had changed so much that Lucia did not recognize the streets she had grown up in. Their former names, deriving from saints and flowers, had been replaced by those of military men and heroes from past wars. The city gleamed with the cleanliness and order of barracks; the socialist realism murals had disappeared, replaced by white walls and well-tended trees. Parks for children had been created on the banks of the Mapocho River, and no one remembered the garbage or the bodies the river had once carried away. In the center, the gray buildings, the traffic of buses and motorbikes, the drab poverty of office workers, the weary passersby, and the boys juggling at the streetlights to beg a few pesos were in stark contrast to the shopping malls of the rich neighborhoods. These were as brightly lit as circuses and offered to satisfy the most extravagant tastes: Baltic caviar, Viennese chocolate, tea from China, roses from Ecuador, perfumes from Paris, all available for those who could pay. Two nations coexisted in the same space: the small, affluent one with cosmopolitan pretensions, and the large one that included everyone else. The middle-class districts exuded an air of modernity on credit, those of the upper classes one of imported refinement. The store windows there were similar to those on Park Avenue, and the mansions were protected by electric fences and guard dogs. Near the airport, however, and along the highway into the city, there were wretched slums hidden from the tourists’ gaze by walls and huge billboards showing blond girls in underwear.

There seemed to be little left of the modest, industrious Chile that Lucia had known: ostentatious wealth was the fashion. But all one had to do was to leave the city to recover something of the country as it once was: fishermen’s villages; popular markets; inns serving fish soup and freshly baked bread; simple, hospitable people who talked with the same accent as before and laughed hiding their mouth behind their hand. Lucia would have liked to live in the provinces, far from the noise of the capital, but she could only do her research in Santiago.

She realized she was a foreigner in her own land, disconnected from the network of social relationships without which almost nothing was possible, lost in what remained of a past that did not fit into the bustling present-day Chile. She did not understand the keys or codes: even the sense of humor had changed, and the language was peppered with euphemisms and caution, because there was still the aftertaste of the censorship of the tough times. No one asked her about the years she had been away, no one wanted to know where she had been or what her life had been like. That parenthesis in her existence was completely erased.



HAVING SOLD HER HOUSE IN VANCOUVER and saved some money, she was able to install herself in a small but well--situated apartment in Santiago. Her mother was offended that she did not want to live with her, but at thirty-six Lucia needed to be independent. “That might be how they do things in Canada, but here unmarried daughters stay with their parents,” Lena argued. Lucia was just about able to live on her salary as a producer and began work on her first book, on the “disappeared.” She had given herself a year to complete it but quickly understood that the research would be much harder than she had thought. Defeated in a plebiscite, the military government had ended a few months earlier, and a restricted, vigilant democracy was taking its first steps in a country wounded by its recent past. There was a watchful atmosphere, and the kind of information she was looking for was part of the secret history.

Carlos Urzua was a well-known and controversial lawyer who collaborated with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Lucia went to interview him for her book after trying to arrange an appointment for several weeks, because he was away a lot and was extremely busy. His office in a nondescript building in the center of Santiago consisted of three rooms crammed with desks and metal cabinets with files spilling out of drawers, weighty legal tomes, and black-and-white photographs of people, nearly all of them young, tacked on a bulletin board together with dates and times. The only signs of anything more modern were two computers, a fax machine, and a photocopier. In one corner, typing on an electric typewriter at the speed of a pianist, sat Lola, his secretary, a plump, pink-cheeked woman with the innocent look of a nun. Carlos received Lucia from behind his desk in the third room, which differed from the others only because it had a ficus tree in a container that miraculously survived in the dark shadows of the office. Urzua was impatient.

The lawyer was fifty-one but radiated an athlete’s vitality. He was the most attractive man Lucia had ever seen and produced in her an instantaneous, devastating passion, a primeval, wild heat that soon turned into a fascination with his personality and the work he did. For several minutes she was completely lost, trying to focus on her questions, while he waited, tapping his pencil on the desk in exasperation. Afraid he would dismiss her on some pretext or other, Lucia explained as tears welled in her eyes that she had lived outside Chile for many years and that her obsession with investigating the topic of the disappeared was a very personal one, because her own brother was among them. Disconcerted by this turn of events, Urzua pushed a box of tissues in Lucia’s direction and offered her coffee. She blew her nose, ashamed at her lack of control in front of this man who must have come across thousands of cases like hers.