The first time I saw him was on the cover of a magazine. It was a copy ofCauce, the kind of thing I read back then with no knowledge of the people featured in all those headlines reporting attacks, kidnappings, strikes, crimes, scams, lawsuits, indictments, and other scandalous occurrences of the day. ‘Accused Bomber Was Localcni Boss’, ‘Degollados Killers Still Doing Time in La Moneda’, ‘The Plot to Assassinate Tucapel Jiménez’, ‘Diddina Order Calama Executions?’ My reading of the world at thirteen was shaped by stories in magazines I didn’t own, that belonged to everybody, passed from hand to hand among my classmates. The pictures in each issue gradually arranged themselves into a confusing landscape that I never managed to map in its entirety, though each dark detail lingered in my dreams.

I remember a scene I came up with in my head after reading some article. On the cover of the magazine was a drawing of a blindfolded man in a chair. An agent was interrogating him in the glare of a lamp. Inside the magazine was a catalogue of torture methods. I read the testimonies of victims and saw diagrams and drawings that looked like something out of a book from the Middle Ages. I can’t remember every detail, but clear in my mind is the story of a sixteen-year-old girl who said that in the detention centre where she was kept they had stripped her, smeared her body with excrement, and put her in a dark room full of rats.

I didn’t want to, but inevitably I imagined that dark room full of rats.

I often dreamt of that place and woke up from the dream over and over.

Even now I can’t shake it and maybe that’s why I’m recording it here, as a way to let it go.

In that same dream, or maybe another like it, I inherited the man I’m imagining. An ordinary man, no different from anyone else, nothing special about him. Except for a bushy moustache, which I, at least, couldn’t stop thinking about. His face was on the cover of one of those magazines, and over the picture was a headline in white letters:i tortured people. Under that, another line:shocking eyewitness account by security services agent. In a pull-out section inside there was a long exclusive interview. The man gave a full account of his time as an intelligence agent, from his service as a young conscript in the air force to the moment he went to the magazine to tell his story. There were pages and pages of details a