Santa Julia was born from a land occupation in Los Cerros de Talcahuano, and almost all of its houses had been built by their owners with wooden planks and metal sheeting. The Carrascos’ house was one of the biggest, with a second floor, concrete steps leading up to it, and cement walls enclosing the back patio. My house was very small, because my father had built it on the same plot of land as his mother’s house. He’d decided to live in Santa Julia rather than accept one of the houses in the Naval Village, which he had a right to as a marine. It’s not that he was ashamed of being in the navy—he, more than anyone, possessed the pride typical of military men—but he said he didn’t want his children to get used to that environment. Meaning, I thought, that he didn’t want any of us to end up in the navy like him. In addition to our house itself, my father made many of the things inside it, from the furniture to our toys. He liked to work with wood, but he could manage with any kind of trash he found lying around: bottles, aluminum caps, powdered milk cans, spools of thread. He used to say that if he’d had more options, he would have been an engineer. My mother used to try to convince him to start a workshop so he could earn some extra money. But he had always replied, in a serious voice, that he already had a job, and as long as he could feed his family, it was enough.

He already had a job.

Since I was little, I’d been used to people imagining my father’s job was something great. The neighbors, my mother’s family, my teachers, and my classmates all treated him with the utmost respect. A respect that was born partly of admiration but mostly of fear—I suppose because of the dictatorship—and it imbued his job with an aura of excitement and mystery. Of course, for his family, his work possessed none of that intriguing darkness. We knew exactly what he did.