A short story.

Nos hablaron una vez cuando niños, cuando la vida se muestra entera, Que el futuro, que cuando grandes, ahí, murieron ya, los momentos...                 --Eduardo Gatti

Back in the ‘80’s, there started to be traffic in Chile for the first time. Not drugs. Lots of cars on the street. Pinochet promised that everyone would get a car. Dealers started importing a whole bunch of tiny Asian cars with no safety features for not much money. Not that poor people had money for a new car, no matter what size it was, but rich people bought them for their wives and their teenage children. Then, they junked their old cars, and poor people got those.

Up until then, there wasn’t a big turnover in automobiles. People who had cars at all, even rich people, tended to repair and maintain them for decades. Schoolboys had heard that in the United States, there were “cemeteries for cars”. Junkyards. They would scoff in disbelief. In Chile, there were no junkyards. Even trading in an old car was unusual.

The citroneta was the classic economy car. It was French and austere. There were thousands of those. They were slow. Most topped out about 50 mph. Then, there were the renoletas. That was the Renault 4, front wheel drive and gear shift in the dash. I had that one. Fiat made a miniscule egg-shaped contraption with a 600-cc engine. It was nicknamed, huevito, and a common game for students at the university was to have a contest to see how many people could fit inside. Fiat also had the 147. That was a whole car, but they broke down a lot.

Peugeot 404 was a step up. That was a very plain car, but elegant in its own way. Many became taxis. And there were the standard Fords and Chevrolets. They weren’t imported. The parts were imported, and they were assembled in local factories. That was often understood as an indicator that they had a high probability of coming disassembled at a moment’s notice. Armado en Arica was an expression, a way of saying, a piece of junk.

The influx of imported cars in the ‘80’s changed the vehicular landscape. Suzuki had several models, including a tiny van that looked like a toy, and a cool-looking jeep that was very easy to turn over. Daihatsu sold the Charade. Nissan sold boatloads of V-16’s. Those gradually edged out the Peugeot as the taxi-drivers’ favorite. They weren’t as comfortable or as classy, but they were indestructible. That opened the door for Toyota, Kia, Mitsubishi and Brazilian Volkswagens. After that, the assembly plants in Arica all closed down for good.

If it had been just the traffic, well, that would have been one thing. People liked it, in a way, because it made them feel as if Santiago had suddenly become modern. Some even liked the smog. Businessmen would take a deep breath, on a hazy morning and sigh, ah, the smell of money. Banana republic, no longer. Chile had become a sprawling nation with a noisy capital that could boast of forty or more bad air days per year. 

The real problem was that there were lots of new drivers. People bought cars, new and used, and took them out to speed in the traffic. Just like in the movies. And they would crash and kill themselves. Just like in the movies. They killed a lot of other people, too.

There was a stretch of Eliodoro Yáñez, starting at Américo Vespucio and going all the way to about Manuel Montt that was wide and straight and downhill. There were half a dozen red lights to slow you down, but a typical rooky trick was to take your car out there at four in the morning, ignore the red lights and see how fast you could make it go. It was vehicular Russian roulette and, usually, there was alcohol involved. When they crashed, everybody died.

There was some new drug traffic, too. The free market brought in new toxic substances and smoky weeds for everyone. There were first-timers, getting on board, there, too. The most mysterious elixirs were expensive, and reserved for men of wealth, but even poor boys, in the new Chile, could get plenty of weed. I guess that was better than sniffing glue.

That didn’t mean that traditional addictions fell by the wayside. Alcohol would never go away, and orgasm continued to be the preferred drug of ancestral tradition. How many innocent puppies have signed away their souls to Satan for five minutes of sighs and laments? Guys, almost exclusively. Guys are hard-wired to cast caution to the wind if there is ever even the remotest possibility of penetration, licit or illicit. As if the survival of the species depended on it.

Guys experience a momentary suspension of rational function under the influence of hormone overload. And, beyond that, there was a question of honor. El macho earned his honor in the same way that a woman lost hers. It was an impossible situation and quite unfair. Well, some called it was a business opportunity. A Chicago-style market niche.

For a long time, little rich boys were treated like little rich girls. There are pictures from not that long ago. Boys dressed up like china dolls with bows and ribbons. Shameful business, really. They would only receive their first pair of pants when they managed to start growing thick black hairs in manly places. That was a 19th century thing. Rich people believed that, until puberty, little boys were the same as little girls. But they weren’t.

Poor boys, black boys and native American boys were better off. Sometimes, they didn’t have to wear clothes at all until they were twelve. At puberty, boys were encouraged to strike out, to differentiate themselves from their default feminine condition. That made fathers and big brothers happy. Se hizo hombre, they would say. He finally put on the pants.

But there were aunties, schoolmarms and grandmothers who would reproach a boy for the visible traces of fine dark hair on his upper lip heralding other changes they were not allowed to see. They considered becoming a man act of betrayal, a challenge to the sacred authority of motherhood, and a latent threat to family, morality and tradition. Maybe so.

When children’s songs, stuffed bears and sweet things failed to make it go away, the bulwarks of feminine authority would turn to religion. For their masculine audacity, young men were assured they would face the eternal fires of hell. They prayed to all their castrated saints and pre-adolescent virgins. To stop the revolution. But it happened anyway. It always happened.

The whole ordeal was pretty primitive, in any case. The hungry legion, dusted up and sweaty from la pichanga—that’s pick-up soccer—gave the impression of a herd of colts, not completely wild, but not yet fully domesticated. Sometimes, they looked more like refugees than schoolboys. Returned from foreign wars, persecuted by their own indomitable passions, rejected by women, exiled from the innocent world of childhood and yet, still not included in the confident circles of virile manhood.

They were nobody. Not mama’s little baby, and no knight’s squire. That was how we prepared the next generation for military service, comrade, for long hours in the mines without complaining, for prison and torture, for infinite commitments to revolutionary process. Society demanded a price they could never afford. Y, o la tumba será de los libres, o el asilo contra la opresión. Sing it with devotion, guys, and become a real patriot. Chile would become a grave for the free, or an asylum against oppression. Yeah, sure.

I hope I am not revealing anyone’s secrets, here. Everyone already knew, right? The obligatory sowing of wild oats has already changed the course of history, and it will probably continue to do so, per secula seculorum. That was just how it rolled. Every generation made arrangements. In old-town Santiago, there was la casa celeste.

In Spanish, sky-blue (celeste) was not the same color as blue (azul). They were totally different. Sky-blue was the color of the heavens. Of purity, innocence and devotion. Deep blue had other connotations. From time immemorial, on Cautín street, half a block from the parochial elementary school, la casa celeste had been an institution. There were some things that not even Augusto Pinochet could change. Assuming that he wanted to. The house was painted ironically sky-blue, the only one on the block, so that newcomers could find it. But it was also reputed to be heavenly. Inside.

Everyone knew it was a whorehouse. Old style, the kind you would expect to find in novels about the turn of the century, back when men braved the dark rooms in the back without the protection of latex or the saving potions of Alejandro Fleming, for whom an important thoroughfare was named in Las Condes. Fleming was not Chilean, but he was made an honorary patriot for his achievement. Chronic gonorrhea would no longer be the price of honor, the scourge of conscripts or the worst nightmare of horny schoolboys. After Fleming, gonorrhea became funny. A rite of passage. 

The nineteenth century whorehouse was already a literary cliché. The latest iterations had come from the pen of Hernán Rivera Letelier, renowned novelist laureate of the Chilean pampa and my next-door neighbor in Antofagasta.

He wasn’t a nice guy. Well, friendly was not a thing in Antofa. We would see him every day when he went to the corner to buy hot bread for the afternoon tea. He looked like any dusty old retired guy with gallstones, all wrinkled up and about to blow away. You would never guess that he was an international literary figure. Hard to explain. A guy from the pampa that knew how to use nouns and verbs. A unique phenomenon, to say the least. 

But the pampa itself was the secret of his success. It was the most exotic place on the planet. Exotic things were intriguing, and intrigue sold books. Like many writers, he had three excellent books, and a whole lot more that weren’t worth the paper they were printed on, but successful and translated into ten languages anyway. If you thought one was bad, you had to just assume that you didn’t get it. Like the emperor’s new clothes, if you couldn’t see them, then you were the fool.

Rivera Letelier did have some legendary whorehouses, though. Classic caricatures of the cliché. Her Royal Majesty Queen Elizabeth never in her life sang a ranchera, strumming on her guitar. His Reina Isabel did, though. She was one of his girls.

Modern sex workers don’t sing, comrade. They pole dance to sleazy saxophone sounds. But up high in the desert, there was no electricity. Singing was part of the show. At any rate, caricature or no, I think the big house full of happy hookers was a myth. Invented to smooth over the paradox of honor earned and honor lost. Regular clients insisted that, for certain women, prostitution was a calling. God made them for that. It was even in the Bible.

That was the third kind of traffic, comrade. Human.

Hernán Rivera Letelier was raised in an evangelical Christian family. Then, he became a freemason. He was pretty superstitious, as freemasons go. He even believed in elves. But his whorehouses were gothic burlesque. It was hard to know if he was messing with you, or if he was compensating for his primitive Pentecostal nausea.

In the meantime, in Santiago, la casa celeste (no caps, we don’t want to attract attention) was real. It continued in full operation, a hundred yards from a Catholic school, Our Lady of the Holy Blessed Virgin Mother of Andacollo. Until ’75, the school was all male, all innocent boys who drank their milk and loved their mom. Boys who had to walk right by there every morning to go to class and learn to read and write. And, mostly, play soccer all morning. But there were other lessons to be learned, comrade, and some of those were invisible, but unavoidable.

Old-World Virgins always wore sky-blue. In Europe, that was the color of cool-headed, immaculate reason, the kind that doesn’t exist. The images were quiet, scornful and alienating. In New Spain, it wasn’t that way. Something about the aroma of tar, tobacco and sugar cane. The Guadalupan Mother wore lively green with seductive pink floral designs. High in the Andes, Our Lady of Andacollo wore dazzling white and gold. She looked like quite the dancer, actually, but no pole. She tapped the floor lightly with her hard-soled shoes, sacred erotica in the Spanish baroque style. No sky-blue on her anywhere.

At la casa celeste, though, it was necessary. Sky-blue was a contrary projection, a way to hide the obvious in plain sight. It was classic dissimulation, the Chilean strategy for survival in all things. The boys would say, la casa celeste, barely a whisper. They knew how to cover a public secret. Officially, it wasn’t there. But it was. A mandatory visit, by fifteen or so, was the local protocol. There had to be witnesses for virile honor to be earned.

La casa celeste was a public secret. Silence was key. If the authorities had ever been every officially informed, they would have been officially required to intervene. They knew, of course. But they knew secretly, so they could proceed as if they didn’t know. La casa celeste was the Villa Grimaldi of orgasm. Everybody knew it was there. And, everybody knew they had to keep quiet about it. A clandestine tradition.

MIR was clandestine in a different way. If a mirista got caught, he would be tortured, (at Villa Grimaldi), his abdominal cavity would be ripped open and he would be thrown from a plane into the sea. The disemboweling was to make sure the cadaver never floated back up to the surface. The technology of disappearance. If a boy got caught coming out of la casa celeste, he would receive, at most, a knowing pat on the back.

After that, it was believed a boy could keep doing his homework, as if sex had never existed. Fathers believed that their sons had to get it out of their system. Tradition maintained that a boy’s grades would improve after he had been duly initiated. But it didn’t always work out that way. Jaime was in the eighth grade at Colegio Andacollo. He was chubby with light brown hair and big green eyes. His mother didn’t know what to do. Their house backed up to la casa celeste from the other block. Jaimito would hop the back wall, and there he was, inside. The professionals thought it was funny. They treated him as their little mascot. He would move from room to room all afternoon, before the real clients arrived.

Jaime was their warm-up. Their private joke. That didn’t happen in the movies. It didn’t even happen in our neighbor’s novels. Jaimito showed up at school after about two weeks, eyes wild and hair messed up, like Wiley Coyote from the cartoon after the firecracker blew up in his hand. He could hardly tell what planet he was on. He had become an addict to orgasm.

He couldn’t concentrate. He couldn’t do social studies or mathematics. His frontal lobe was blocked with hormonal cocaine. Today, that would be sexual abuse of a minor, but it happened in a place that didn’t exist, at a time that never was. Like the pampa back in the nitrate mining days, the surreal world of Rivera Letelier.

I don’t know if Jaime was able to get his life together after that. Maybe his eyes are still spinning in his head. It would not be unusual if he had spent the last thirty-five years trying to get back to that place where he had been the sexual plaything of fifteen prostitutes.

Is that something you would tell your wife and kids? Hard to say….

Across the way from Inelia’s apartment in Ñuñoa there was another casa celeste. It was a third-floor apartment, just like all the rest, but painted sky-blue on the outside. So that rich drug users could always find it. They sold the good stuff. Inelia could see them from her third-floor window. That meant they would have been able to see when Tito was taken. They kept quiet, though. Disappearance was a public secret, too.

Clients came in expensive cars, nothing like anything you would normally see in the  Ñuñoa neighborhood. They drove late model Peugeot, Mercedes Benz y BMW. They stayed five minutes, did their business and then, they left.

Why was it so easy to find illegal drugs, and impossible to find a boy who had disappeared? I mean, there were witnesses and everything.  How was it that Investigaciones never figured it out? I didn’t do drugs, and I knew. Or, perhaps they had figured it out, just not officially. So, they ignored it. Same as the other casa celeste on Cautín Street. Same as the disappeared. They knew what was going on. But not in an official way.

Drug addiction was convenient for the dictatorship. If your brain was asleep, you didn’t notice what was happening around you. And you didn’t care. People who used recreational drugs could say there was no torture in Chile, and that, everyone who got tortured deserved it. With a straight face but, maybe, a murky conscience.

Welcome to the factory outlet of hell.

Nobody gets out alive.