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happy or sad? I never worked it out. What was significant was that he had been murdered a few blocks from our house, in the middle of Flores, on a corner near to where I lived. If I hadn’t taken my normal route to school that day, I might easily have walked past it, heard the shots and seen the blood.
    The murder of Rucci hadn’t happened in the big wide world beyond my universe, the world I only got to see when we went on holiday, when I went to the cinema downtown or when I watched television: he had been gunned down in ‘my’ world, the area that stretched from my house to my school. One way or another, I must have realized that evil is no respecter of borders and makes no exceptions for individuals.
    This is politics.
    When the
coup d’état
came, in 1976, a few days before school term started, I knew straight off that things were going to get ugly. The new president had a peaked cap and a huge moustache; you could tell from his face that he was a bad guy.

16
ENTER DAVID VINCENT
    We got to mamá’s friend’s house just in time to watch
The Invaders
. Her friend sat us in front of the TV and mamá went off to buy milk and Nesquik to appease the Midget.
    The Invaders
was our favourite TV show. The hero, an architect named David Vincent, is the only person who knows that aliens have secretly invaded the planet and taken on human form. Obviously no one believes him. How could anyone believe that that fat man over there, or that blonde girl, are aliens when they seem so nice, so ordinary, and when they speak such perfect Spanish? (Like Señorita Barbeito’s documentary,
The Invaders
was dubbed.) But David Vincent has an ace up his sleeve: he knows that as a result of some design flaw or something, when the aliens take on human form they can’t bend their little fingers, they’re completely rigid. And when you kill one of them, they fall to pieces and disintegrate, leaving nothing but a dark stain on the ground.
    In the 1950s, in the context of the Cold War, paranoid fantasies like
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
made some sort of sense. Behind the face of every ordinary American, a communist might be lurking, plotting to destroy the very fabric of democracy and replace it with a multitude of automata. But by the 1970s,
The Invaders
was just a mediocre genre piece with terrible production values and a castled by the sort of po-faced actor Hollywood usually hired to play Nazis. And yet the theme of
The Invaders
resonated with the younger section of its audience. Any kid stepping out into the world for the first time could identify with the story of David Vincent, this man who had to study every stranger’s face to work out whether he was friend or foe, his ally or his nemesis.
    Like all the best TV series,
The Invaders
had implications far beyond the small screen and it leached into our games. The Midget and I were constantly staring at every stranger’s little finger, on the lookout for aliens in disguise. Restaurants proved particularly rewarding hunting grounds, since back then holding your glass or your cup with your little finger sticking out was still considered to be good manners.
    We never imagined that our game might one day turn serious, that one day we really would have to study every face, every little finger on every hand, looking for some sign that might tell us whether we were in the presence of the enemy.

17
NIGHT FALLS
    Mamá’s friend was a woman who didn’t much like kids, at least that was how it seemed to me. From the moment she opened the door and peered at us over the security chain, her face bore an expression I interpreted as irritation at our presence. The fact that she was a friend of mamá’s clearly did not mean she had to extend the same courtesy to us; after all, it’s possible to love someone and hate their relatives, like I hated my friend Román’s cousin even though he had the same name as me