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insult to the Chilean character, the way we are, our
collective dreams. It’s like being told that all we’re good for is suffering. I
don’t know if you follow me, but I feel like I just saw the light.”
    “I follow you, but that’s not it.”
    “What do you mean, that’s not it?”
    “That’s not what I was talking about. I just don’t like knives,
period. It’s not some big philosophical question.”
    “But you’d like guns to be more popular in Chile. Which doesn’t mean
you’d like there to be more of them.”
    “I don’t care one way or the other.”
    “Anyway, who doesn’t like guns?”
    “That’s true, everyone likes guns.”
    “Do you want me to explain what I meant about the silence?”
    “Sure, as long as you don’t put me to sleep.”
    “I won’t, and if you start feeling sleepy, we can stop and I’ll
drive.”
    “So tell me about the silence then.”
    “I read it in an article in
El Mercurio
.”
    “When did you start reading
El Mercurio
?”
    “Sometimes there’s a copy lying round at headquarters, and the shifts
are long. Anyway, the article said we’re a Latin people, and Latin people are
fixated on knives. Anglo-Saxons, on the other hand, live and die by the
gun.”
    “It all depends.”
    “Exactly what I thought.”
    “Until the moment of truth, you never know.”
    “Exactly what I thought.”
    “We’re slower, you have to admit.”
    “How do you mean, slower?”
    “Slower in every respect. Old-fashioned in a way.”
    “You call that being slow?”
    “We’re still using knives, it’s like we’re stuck in the Bronze Age,
while the gringos have moved on to the Iron Age.”
    “I never liked history.”
    “Remember when we arrested Chubby Loayza?”
    “How could I forget?”
    “There, you see—the guy just gave himself up.”
    “Yeah, and he had an arsenal in that house.”
    “There, you see.”
    “So he should have put up a fight.”
    “There were only four of us, and five of them. We just had standard
issue weapons and Chubby had an arsenal, including a bazooka.”
    “It wasn’t a bazooka, compadre.”
    “It was a Franchi SPAS-15! And he had a pair of sawn-off shotguns. But
Loayza gave himself up without firing a shot.”
    “So you were disappointed, were you?”
    “Or course not. But if he’d been called McCurly instead of Loayza,
Chubby would have greeted us with a hail of bullets, and maybe he wouldn’t be in
jail now.”
    “Maybe he’d be dead.”
    “Or free, if you get my drift.”
    “McCurly? . . . the name rings a bell; wasn’t he in a cowboy
movie?”
    “I think he was, I think we even saw it together.”
    “We haven’t been to the movies together for ages.”
    “Well, this would have been ages ago.”
    “The arsenal he had, Chubby Loayza; remember how he greeted us?”
    “Laughing his head off.”
    “I think it was nerves. One of his gang started crying. I don’t think
that kid was even seventeen.”
    “But Chubby Loayza was over forty and he made himself out to be a
tough guy. Though if we’re going to be brutally honest, there aren’t any tough
guys in this country.”
    “What do you mean there aren’t any tough guys, I’ve seen really tough
guys.”
    “Crazies, for sure, you’ve seen plenty of them, but tough guys? Very
few, or none.”
    “And what about Raulito Sánchez? Remember Raulito Sánchez, with his
Manurhin?”
    “How could I forget him?”
    “What about him then?”
    “Well, he should have got rid of the revolver straightaway. That was
his downfall. Nothing’s easier to trace than a Magnum.”
    “The Manurhin is a Magnum?”
    “Of course it’s a Magnum.”
    “I thought it was a French gun.”
    “It’s a .357 French Magnum. That’s why he didn’t get rid of it. It’s
an expensive piece and he’d gotten fond of it; there aren’t many in Chile.”
    “You learn something new every day.”
    “Poor Raulito Sánchez.”
    “They say he died in jail.”
    “No, he died just after getting out, in