Multiple Choice

(3) How does it feel to be the son of one of the biggest criminals in Chilean history? What do you feel when you think about your father, sentenced to more than three hundred years in jail? Can you sense the hate of the families your father destroyed?

(4) I can’t answer these questions, the ones people always ask. With rage, but also with genuine curiosity. I guess it makes people curious.

(5) It makes me curious too. What does it feel like not to be the son of one of the biggest criminals in Chile’s history? What does it feel like to think about how your father never killed anyone, never tortured anyone?

(6) I must say that my father is innocent. I should say it. I have to say it. I’m obliged to say it. My father will kill me if I don’t say he is innocent. The children of murderers cannot kill the father.

(7) I decided not to have children. I had my father to worry about. He’s sick. His declining health is a public matter; it’s been in all the papers.

(8) When my father dies, then I can have a life and a son. He’ll be Manuel Contreras’s son. But I won’t name him Manuel. I’ll tell his mother to pick a different name. I don’t want to be Manuel Contreras’s father.

(9) I’ve had enough just being Manuel Contreras’s son. I don’t want to be Manuel Contreras’s father too. Better yet, let it be a girl.

(10) This is not me talking. Someone is talking for me. Someone who is faking my voice. My father will die soon. The person faking my voice knows this, and doesn’t care.

(11) Maybe by the time the book this fucking voice faker is writing gets published, my father will be dead. And people will think that there is something true in what my fake voice says. Even though it isn’t my voice. Though I would never really say what I’m saying now. Though no one has the right to speak for me. To make a fool of me. How easy it is to laugh at me. To blame me, to feel sorry for me. It has no literary merit.

(12) Clap for the writer, how ingenious. Clapping for him the way you have to clap for that kind of person. But clap him right in the face, with both hands, until you can’t tell anymore where the blood is coming from.

(13) Now he’s saying that I give orders, that I know how to torture. That I’m a chip off the old block. Now he says I’m telling you to stick a pitchfork up his ass.

(14) Now he’s saying I don’t have the right to challenge my destiny. That I’m one of the walking dead. That I’m saying things I’m not saying. That I even thank him for saying them for me. Now he’s searching for words to tattoo on my chest using the biggest drill he has.

A) None

B) 9

C) 10, 11, and 12

D) 13 and 14

E) 14

65.

(1) With the money he won in the lottery, the old man decided to fulfill his lifelong dream, but since his lifelong dream had been to win the lottery, he didn’t know what to do. In the meantime, he bought himself a Peugeot 505 and hired me to drive it.

(2) I went to pick him up one Saturday, and the plan was to hit the racetrack, but he was watching Sábado Gigante on TV and didn’t feel like going out. He handed me a beer, and together we watched the segment “So You Think You Know Chile?” Don Francisco was traveling through Ancud and Castro, interviewing people who lived in some stilt houses, helping to cook a curanto, making a lot of effort to tug a Chilote wool cap over his extra-large head.

(3) “That’s what we’ll do,” he told me, like he’d had a revelation: “We’re going to tour Chile in the new car.” I asked him why not travel the whole world, like Don Francisco himself in “The Spotlight Abroad.” He replied that before seeing the world, one had to really see one’s own country. I asked him where we would start, in the north or the south. “In the north, man, the north. What do you mean where do we start? This shit goes north to south.”

(4) His opinion at the end of the trip: “Chile is a beautiful country. People are always complaining about the lack of freedom and the dictatorship and all that, but they don’t realize that Chile is a beautiful country.”

(5) I liked seeing my country too, but I don’t remember that much. I drove like a zombie, to the beat of the old man’s terrifying snores. Sometimes, out of the corner of my eye, I’d see the glint of drool in his open mouth. When he was awake, he didn’t like to listen to music, just some cassettes with jokes by Coco Legrand. I came to hate Coco Legrand — his jokes, his voice, everything.

(6) I remember the cold near Los Vilos, where I smoked alone on the side of the road while five meters away, in the backseat of the car, the old man fondled two sad, big-titted whores. I remember when I woke him up on the beach at Cavancha and he thought I was a mugger. In Pelluhue a giant wave almost swallowed him, and I had to dive into the water in my underwear to save him. In Pichilemu he started to scold two pot smokers who were pacifists but still wanted to kick his ass. I also had to defend him in Talca, Angol, and Temuco.