Marcos and Andrea were together for a long time. They had their boy in ’81. I was sick with hepatitis when he told me about it. We agreed that, if I didn’t die, I would be the child’s godfather, and it would be official. It was about then that Marcos’ parents requested asylum in France. They had to say they were being persecuted for political reasons. It wasn’t true, but France wasn’t offering economic asylum. They just got tired of being poor. The recession had hit them very hard. They managed to round up some false testimony. The French consul bought their story, and they became pseudo-political refugees in Paris.

They took the two younger boys with them. Marcos was the oldest of six boys. He became the head of a household consisting of the four remaining brothers and all of his friends. It was where everyone went, really. The house was small, but the back patio was spacious, with fruit trees and a few chickens. That was how they got by. Fruit, eggs and rice; then rice, eggs and fruit. If anyone got a hold of some money, the idea was to go to the street market and bring home the earnings in potatoes, beans or onions. There was a campfire every night. There was always a song and a story. Sometimes, there was weed, wine or beer. One afternoon, in early autumn, el Torombolo fell asleep in a big pile of leaves. Torombolo was Jughead, from the Archie comics. Hours later, after dark, he woke up with the cold night air and the strum of the guitar. It was startling, to have a person suddenly jump out of a pile of leaves.

A few weeks later, he died. El Torombolo sniffed glue. It was an awful drug. The boys could buy it at any hardware store. It was neoprene contact cement, and it was very toxic. The usual brand was Agorex, and that was what they usually called it. They would put a spoonful in a plastic bag and inflate it, then, breathe the vapors until the glue dried. It was very cheap, they got very high and they weren’t hungry anymore.

Marihuana had the opposite effect. Smokers got hungrier than they already were. But they didn’t die. The problem was that some guys smoked, and then sniffed glue because they couldn’t find anything to eat. It became a chain reaction.

Neoprene destroyed the liver and the brain. The damage was instantaneous, irreversible and accumulative. Very few ever quit, and they all paid the price. El Torombolo was badly hooked and everyone knew it. They still loved him, but he still died.

They said he died of a hot dog, but that wasn’t true. Well, maybe he did eat a hot dog from the kiosk. Those were pretty dangerous. He got a stomach ache, and they took him to the ER at the Hospital Salvador, where they tried to operate on him. If it had just been food poisoning, they would have pumped his stomach. I think the doctors tried to remove his gall bladder, but when they opened him up, they discovered that all his internal organs were necrotic. His life collapsed right there in the operating room. It wasn’t the hot dog. It was the neoprene. And it was tragic.

El Torombolo will never appear on any list of the victims of the military regime, but everyone knew that this sort of thing was exactly what happened when young men had nothing to do and nowhere to go. When there was no hope, no passion, no desire to live. Life under the military regime was emasculating. Agorex was the answer to a collective death-wish. Part of the plan, comrade.

The wake was at his home. It was a very poor house with a dirt floor. That night, it became a mud floor with the flood of tears. His mother was inconsolable. His druggie friends were all there. They had made a wreath of joints to lay on his coffin.

Neoprene was invented by a Holy Cross priest, professor and research chemist at the University of Notre Dame. It was after the First World War and before the Second. They were trying to create synthetic rubber for tires. You need tires to make wars, and all the rubber in the world, back then, came out of the Amazon. So, the military machine was extremely vulnerable to entangling alliances and maritime blockades. Belgian Father Julius Nieuwland was considered an American patriot, for his illustrious contribution. Neoprene never went into mass production for tires, but it found its niche in contact cement.

Nieuwland was born in Belgium. His parents emigrated to the US and found their way to the icy hinterland of South Bend. He found his way to Notre Dame and joined the Holy Cross Fathers. When he was just a seminarian, a graduate student of chemistry at the Catholic University in Washington, he was tinkering around with acetylene in the lab, and accidentally discovered lewisite, an important compound that would later be used in the production of chemical weapons. Julius spent a few days in the hospital that time. He breathed a face-full of it, but he didn’t die.

Later, as a researcher at Notre Dame, he learned to stabilize his acetylene, and DuPont Chemical Company bought the patent. They used his research to develop and market neoprene. Which became Agorex. It was contact cement for shoe repair. In poor places, where shoes got repaired. Anyway, it was ironic. In Peñalolén, hell and salvation came from the Holy Cross Fathers. A continuation of the colonial tradition, comrade. Hell was more concrete, though. Salvation was more elusive.

In Chile, more Agorex was sold for sniffing than for shoe repair. That was the free market. Supply and demand. That was what killed el Torombolo. Blas read the prayers at the wake. He was still a seminarian for Holy Cross, back then. But it was Marcos who bore the weight of the sadness. He was the cacique. He should have been able to save el Torombolo, but there was nothing he could do. I think that was a turning point for him.