The business executive Jose Francisco Vivar recalls that his family received the Australian visitor in September of 1998. Vivar knew it was a representative of the VIP club and he was pleased the event was going to take place in Chile. Since the trip to Navidad wouldn’t be that expensive, he’d be able to bring along his wife and their two children, Bruno (then 19) and Alicia (14). “I have nothing else to add,” he said, in a report in a daily newspaper from that time, “just that after twenty years of enjoying these events of infinite relaxation, alone or with my wife, I thought the experience would be even better with my whole family. But that was not the case.” At that point, according to the report, Jose Francisco Vivar broke down. “We’d been in Navidad for two weeks. One afternoon, a Thursday, Teresa and I left the children, who wanted to stay at the beach a while longer. We went back to the hotel where we showered, changed clothes, and got something to eat. At seven we planned to meet the children in the Room of Shadows, a site the organization had set up to put on a variety of shows, a sort of Matanza bazaar. That night, Patrice Dounn, the Congolese thereminist was performing.” But Jose Francisco and Teresa never saw their two children again. The image of the two youths shouting goodbye and running toward the waves is the last that they have. Alicia and Bruno officially disappeared the afternoon of January 18th, 1999.
TO THIS DAY, police investigators have continued to add sightings of Bruno Vivar to the case file of the disappeared Navidad siblings. Every summer since the disappearance, a dozen witnesses from different areas of the central coast have reported seeing a young man fitting his description: striped T-shirt in various combinations of primary colors; shorts or bathing trunks; leather sandals; extremely thin, hairless legs; disheveled, raggedly-cut hair, sometimes brown, sometimes dyed red. As if the last image his parents had of him remained burned on the retinas of so many people who never knew him (the press coverage was as intense as it was brief), they always see Bruno Vivar lying on the sand, face down on his towel, staring out to sea, looking disdainfully through some photographs, or swimming in silence. Of course, other accounts add specific and equally disturbing details: drinking in hotel bars, beer from cans or double shots of whiskey which he pays for with a credit card issued in the United States, while with the other hand he caresses a die which he spins like a top on the lacquered surface of the bar; sitting on a terrace at noon, noisily eating French fries; reading, in the dining hall, a letter delivered to the hotel weeks before; rolling the die and then writing another letter never sent by local mail.
This information comes from diverse sources: guards, waiters, clerks, receptionists, and janitors, who, at the time, also hoped to put together the case’s missing pieces, but who only succeeded in helping the police declare unverifiable the possibilities of homicide or kidnapping. It has been tacitly assumed that Bruno Vivar—a legal adult—simply abandoned his family without warning, which is not a crime in Chile.
The most perplexing question is why the name of Alicia Vivar, the fourteen-year-old girl, appears only twice in the case file. Especially after reviewing in detail the reports of repeated sightings of her brother, Bruno. Because Bruno has never once reappeared alone. The accounts agree that he arrives at hotel parking lots in a variety of expensive cars always driven by a man whose smile also appears in police archives, although in another section: Boris Real.
Boris Real became known in Chile in 1984 as the young Chilean executive who, representing a group of Swiss investors wanting to buy Petrohue Bank, ended up in the Capuchinos jail as a result of an antimonopoly suit filed by the Superintendent of Banks, when it was confirmed that the Swiss were linked to an Australian investment group that had acquired the Atacama Bank and, also to a Spanish-Norwegian group that acquired De Los Lagos Bank and Antonio Varas Bank. He was tried as the representative of the inscrutable international consortium that attempted to acquire fifty-one percent of Chilean banks, a move that, it is noted, could have had consequences for our country beyond the strictly financial. The group in question immediately withdrew from the country, leaving no discernible trace. At least until the summer of 1999. Of course, Boris Real was not that man’s actual name. It was the alias of Francisco Virditti (41), who admitted to having headed a group of six shareholders motivated by “nothing more than the legitimate game of the market,” as he stated in the only interview he’s ever given.
Seven years later, when the Chilean press scarcely recalled the business conspiracies that helped prevent analysis of the Pinochet recession, there came the unfortunate death of Juan Ausencio Martínez Salas. February fifth, on the seventeenth hole of the Prince of Wales Golf Club, a heart attack ended the days of the Undersecretary of Education of Patricio Aylwin’s administration. That afternoon, Martínez Salas was strolling the links of the capital’s golf club in the company of two friends from his time as an MBA student at the University of Chicago: an executive in the board and video game industry Jose Francisco Vivar, and Boris Real. A check of the witnesses in the Civil Register reveals that the given name of the executive who was present at the moment of death is Boris Real Yañez (48), and there is no request for a change of name associated with his identity. Perhaps it was another Boris Real; perhaps Francisco Virditti was the real pseudonym. Nevertheless, another newspaper photograph, which shows Real speaking about his dear friend, reveals the face of the same businessman who declared himself innocent in front of the Superintendent of Banks in 1984. In a press conference on the 16th of May 1995, congressman Nelson Avila denounced the possibility of a secret murder plot when the autopsy results for undersecretary Martínez Salas suggested traces of poison in his system. Public shock lasted two days. As so often happens, there was talk of political crisis, but no particular individual was implicated. Soon everything was forgotten. Boris Real was subpoenaed in his Vitacura residence before returning to anonymity. Various accounts report that he made a statement to Irma Sepulveda, the judge in charge of the trial investigating the death of Martínez Salas. Today it’s almost impossible to find Boris Real; he has no known residence and his name doesn’t appear in any public record. Approached by the press in the days following his children’s disappearance, Jose Francisco Vivar stated that he was no longer in contact with his friend.
Even more disturbing, one evening in July of 1997, with my own eyes I saw Vivar, Boris Real, and congressman Nelson Avila walking on the beach in Cachagua. They were accompanied by their respective children. Of course I urged my companion to surreptitiously eavesdrop with me. The situation only became relevant for me after I started investigating the incidents in Navidad and Matanza: Boris Real was walking hand in hand with little Alicia Vivar, then a girl of twelve. They were walking a slight distance behind the rest of the group. She asked him to go with her to the rocks to look for seashells. She didn’t address him formally or call him uncle, just Boris. Then they talked about the reddish color of the clouds at that time of day and she asked him how long it would be until the end of the world.
THAT SUMMER THEY traversed the beaches of Chile’s central coast in a Cadillac. Virditti reclined the passenger seat, shut his eyes, and with closed lips, hummed old songs from a tape made for him by a woman years before. “Memories Are Made of This” could be heard. He took drags on a cigar now and then, that being the only movement indicating to someone watching from outside that he wasn’t asleep. Specifically for someone watching from the other side of the beach; there I was on my towel, lying down, with a pair of binoculars. Alicia was at my side. Or rather: she occasionally came shivering from the sea to lie down beside me, clutching her arms tightly against the longed-for skin of her body. I dropped my binoculars, picked up a handful of sand, and let it fall delicately along the path traced by the freckles on her back between her shoulder blades down to her waist. But she didn’t smile. With closed eyes she murmured, Fist-fuck, and only upon hearing this immensely disturbing expression she reminded me that she wasn’t happy and never would be. Those nights she spoke to me in English, from her room across the hotel hallway, in a voice hoarse with weeping or laughter, the voice of a woman who has pissed herself laughing. She told me terrible stories of children that transformed into the story of her nightmares: a rabbit walking by, her on top of another woman whom I also love, sucking on her dried-up breast, unaware. On top of a grave. Brazenly