The Tale of Frederico Vargas

I share a house with my friend Jam. Our tastes differ when it comes to films, music and men but we do share a passion for the theatre and we are both enthusiastic members of our university’s drama society, the name of which is FECCLES. Please don’t ask me what that stands for.

This time last year I was working on a poster campaign for our production of Ariel Dorfman’s Widows. This is a play based on the torture and disappearings orchestrated by the Chiliean government in the seventies. The premise of the story is that all the men in this foreign village go missing or are mysteriously arrested. It’s pretty dark stuff and I was unsuccessfully wracking my brain trying to come up with a poster design that said “Hey! Don’t go to the beach this evening! You want to abandon the fleeting balmy summer breezes and many sun-kissed young women Cornwall has to offer, and instead spend your night sitting in a dark room watching a bunch of people in rags getting beaten up and shot by soldiers!”.

Thankfully a more competent FECCLES member called Rob came up with a good idea. We’d print flyers declaring the various male characters 'missing’ and plaster them all over the campus. It would be manipulative, sure, but the posters would be eye-catching, memorable and all include slogans like 'last seen at a performance of Ariel Dorfman’s Widows’. The campaign would stir up interest and accurately represent the political message of the play.

I excitedly e-mailed a plea to the rest of FECCLES. I needed photographs of their male friends and relatives and I wanted as much variety in age and appearence as possible. I also stressed, and this is very important, to get the subject’s permission before sending off their photos. I got on the phone to my mother who promised to make my dad and brother pose for respective mug shots.
“Should they be smiling?” she said uncertainly.
“No!” I cried, “make them look like dissidents!”
In hindsight this wasn’t strictly necessary but the male half of my family are decidedly rumpled looking with long hair and beards, and I wasn’t about to pass up an opportunity to portray them as enemies of the state.

I believe I rather succeeded in this regard.

  Jam very much got into the spirit of the thing during a party at Rob’s house when he, after rather a lot of wine, borrowed my memory stick and uploaded four excellent pictures from his laptop. Two of these depicted some of his young friends from Hampshire, one his very elderly grandfather and the last a man of indeterminate age striding across a muddy beach. I remember being sober enough to remind him how important it was to actually tell these gentlemen that their likenesses were due to be displayed all around the university. He assured me it was fine, that his friends had already been told and that his granddad was miles away and would never find out.

After a lot of formatting, resizing, researching of Spanish names, printing, tweaking, discussing ethics with the student union, reformatting and more printing, the posters were up. Most of them in the lady’s toilets actually, me being a lady and encountering limits on how many adverts can be displayed in the student bar. I diligently ran around sticking my fake 'MISSING’ posters to the insides of cubicle doors. This turned out to be a mistake. I hadn’t considered how disturbing it is to sit on the toilet and stare directly into the frowny eyes of a friend’s photograph.

That was last year and I thought I’d forgotten about most of this. It’s funny how much comes back to you when you start typing. One week ago I was sifting through old pictures on my computer and Jam asked if he could look at the copies of the Widows posters I’d saved. He had never actually had the chance to see them all, what with the vast majority of them wallpapering the girl’s toilets and everything. He giggled at the copies representing his Hampshire friends and we chatted as he scrolled through the rest of them. Then we came to the one he’d sent me of the man on the muddy beach. Then this conversation happened:

“Oh, I didn’t know you did one of Luke.” said Jam
“That was one of the photos you sent me.”
“Was it?”
“Yes, I’m sure it was. Whose Luke?”
“He’s a lab tech here.”
“Here? Jam you- you did get his permission to use this photo, didn’t you? Before I plastered his face all over the campus under the name ‘Frederico Vargas’?”
“Um. No, actually. I don’t think I did. I don’t even think I meant to send it to you.”
An expression of dawning realisation spread across my housemate’s face.
“Oh, that explains it! We were talking the other day just about weird events in our lives and he said a woman once came up to him and said she’d seen his face on some 'missing’ posters.”
Jam started to laugh and I buried my face in my hands. To think I actually remembered looking at the name of the offending file and thinking “Hmm, Luke Labtec. That’s an unusual name.”

So I’d taken some poor, unassuming lab technician, called him 'Frederico’, claimed there was concern for his safety, printed out photos of his face and posted them in great numbers wherever female students could stare at them while peeing. And I’d described him as five years older than he actually is. In my defense the portrait is a bit grainy and the guy looks kind of rugged. Also this all has less to do with me and more to do with wine and my housemate’s inability to use a memory stick. Nevertheless, I was pretty mortified by the whole situation. Jam, meanwhile, thought it was really funny and insisted on taking some of the remaining posters to show Luke. Thankfully Luke is much less concerned about matters like identity theft and image use and I’m assured that he found the posters of himself hilarious.

In closing, then, I dedicate this inconsequential anecdote to Frederico Vargas and all other fictional Chileans.

And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.