I asked her about Raúl: what was he going to do? Raúl is the problem, she said, Raúl is why no one can decide what to do. He is the only one who was tortured, everyone else knew fear and lost everything, had to leave in the night and was lucky to escape, but he is different. He was held for three or four months, first in the stadium in Santiago, the famous stadium, and then in a camp near Valparaíso. He hasn’t changed on the outside, she said, he was always like that. He was friendly and easy, he smiled a lot. Some people used to think that he looked like Bob Dylan and he did a bit, and he played the guitar, although not very well. But he was always there if there was company, he liked smoking dope and drinking, and he liked girls. He thought that he was living in a free country. He was becoming more political as time went on, but he was never a communist, although a lot of his friends were. Anyway, she said, they got him on the night of the coup, he would have been easy to find, and he never thought that he was in any danger.

I know everything that happened to him, she said, or everything that he is prepared to recall, I know it day by day because I did therapy with him in Stockholm—I had almost finished my psychology degree and I was asked to sit in on the sessions so that I could help him. He saw everything. He saw all the murders and the mutilations. He waited for days before they came for him, he lived in the shadows believing that they would let him go, or they would forget about him. But they forgot about nobody. They used electricity on him, all around his genitals, they put an electrode into his penis, and he gave them everybody’s name. This is not a disgrace among us, she said, there is nothing bad about it. This is in the open. He told them the names of his grandparents first, they were dead, and they left him alone for days while they checked this out, and then they came back for him, and he thinks that he was tortured for a whole day and that was when he gave real names. They put him on a bed with no mattress, and then they moved him to a hospital, and then to a camp where he was badly beaten, but no more electricity. And when they released him he took refuge in the Italian consulate in Valparaíso, and they got him out, and he was operated on in Sweden. He still has problems.