***Spanish manuscript available***

***Recipient of the 2006 Roberto Bolaño Prize***

Does the anguish that people experience spring from some interior space? From their surroundings and circumstances? Or from the body politic? In Chile in 1980, the source—and the reality—of some horrors were a rich and complex interweaving of all these, and more.

What can a police officer stationed in Huara, a small town in the north of Chile, do to escape the boredom that is seeping into his soul? Carlos Molina writes a diary. Day after day he describes the way he spends his time, and especially expresses his concerns about the mental health of his wife, Rocio. She had been studying medicine but gave up her studies to follow her husband into the seemingly barren landscape of the Tarapacá region. Although they love each other, they share a life of discomfort which Rocio cannot bear.

Rocio now has vivid nightmares. She experiences visual and aural hallucinations of wild dogs wandering the streets, people lurking near her house at night, and voices . . .

The voices are those of children, haunting her with her own past. In the present, the silence, the drought, the loneliness of the desert town add to her desperation. The place is damned. Here is where the corpses of the upright have been hidden: They are the disappeared, people with no identity, wraiths wandering forever.

Becerra Calderón has written an astonishing description of two loving but solitary souls, destroyed by where and who they are, on the side of the torturers, and by the dictatorship of the Pinochet administration. It is a rich novel nested in an understanding of tenderness, horror, and human folly.