By Night in Chile

“I am responsible in every way. My silences are immaculate. Let me make that clear. Clear to God above all. The rest I can forego. But not God.”

Urrutia’s establishes his moral purity so that his later-confessed crimes appear as uncharacteristic mistakes. Ironically, this self-distancing makes Urrutia look all the more responsible for his crimes: If he can’t blame his crimes on getting swept up in history, as he later tries to do, then he alone is responsible for his actions. His “silences are immaculate,” yet he remains silent through the unraveling of democracy, through his classes for Pinochet, and through the torture of people below his very feet, introducing the theme of The Problem of Complicity in Dictatorships.

“Don’t call me Father, mother, I am your son, or maybe I didn’t say Your son but The son, she began to cry or weep and then I thought, or maybe the thought has only occurred to me now, that life is a succession of misunderstandings, leading us on to the final truth, the only truth.”

Despite becoming a priest, Urrutia finds no consolation in faith. He does not live in the Christian world, a world of divinely-ordered wonder, but in a chaotic existential void in which even a mother and son can misunderstand each other. The one certainty Urrutia has is the certainty of death, “the final truth, the only truth.”

“I can still remember his shadow slipping from room to room in our house, as if it were the shadow of a weasel or an eel. And I remember, I don’t know how, but the fact is that I do remember my smile in the midst of the darkness, the smile of the child I was. And I remember a hunting scene on a tapestry. And a metal dish on which a meal was depicted with all the appropriate decorations. My smile and my trembling.”

The fear and gloom that define Urrutia originate in his childhood. Cold, unloving, and more absence than presence, Urrutia’s father is likened to the shadow of predatory animals. Without the foundation of a warm, structured childhood home, Urrutia’s fear of a cold, meaningless world is doubled when he goes out into the world.