Curfew under the Chilean dictatorship

Curfew under the Chilean dictatorship is more than a restriction on when people may travel: it makes streets, transport, and even a journey home subject to military control. In the novel, its force appears both in the state’s armed repression and in the improvised ways people survive it. For the Queen of the Corner, curfew is at once a threat, an opportunity for work, and a setting in which her performance of respectability can sometimes get her past a checkpoint.

Curfew as state control

The rule belongs to a city already marked by demonstrations, blackouts, and police violence. In the spring of 1986, Santiago’s cordoned streets and news bulletins make public life feel precarious; curfew extends that pressure into the night, when people outside may face patrols and arrest. The Queen is frightened by the news, but the neighborhood’s political talk—about protests, the opposition, and the hope that the dictatorship will not last beyond 1986—shows how curfew sits within a wider climate of mobilization and repression.

The narrative makes the rule concrete through what it permits the authorities to do. During a later military lockdown, the army cuts off roads into and out of Santiago. Soldiers search cars, houses, and whole neighborhoods; residents may be made to stand all night in football fields, while people are beaten and loaded into trucks on little or no pretext. Curfew thus operates alongside a broader siege: ordinary movement becomes a reason for scrutiny, and hesitation itself can expose someone to state violence.

Unequal risks and uses

The Queen’s friends describe a different, compromised dimension of curfew. Lupe jokes that men hiding from patrols can become sexual partners, and that fear, unemployment, and the difficulty of getting home make them easier to approach. The passage does not present this as safety: it shows how poverty and state control alter the terms of street survival, while the friends’ banter exposes their sharply different political readings of the regime. Lupe calls herself a supporter of law and order; the Queen rejects that position and increasingly understands the government as a source of cruelty.

The Queen’s own livelihood and history connect her to the same vulnerable streets. She recalls hustling in alleys and finding temporary company and shelter, while Rana had once given her a place to stay and urged her to avoid alcohol and drugs. The curfew does not erase that precariousness; it changes the circumstances in which people move, seek shelter, or try to earn money. For the Queen, the state’s restrictions are inseparable from the social marginality that leaves her with few reliable protections.

Passing through checkpoints

Curfew becomes an immediate test of judgment when the Queen travels with a package for Carlos. At a military checkpoint, a soldier orders men to one side and women to another. She answers that she would have to split herself in two to obey, then redirects the soldier’s attention by mentioning the embroidery she does for military families. He lets her go without searching her. Her quick, improvised performance of gender and deference gives her a momentary passage through a system that is sorting and inspecting civilians.

The episode also shows the limits of that maneuver. She carries a picture of a disappeared person in her pocket, hears gunfire, and worries that soldiers may be following her or that Carlos has nowhere safe to hide. The city’s silence and the possibility of informers make the route home feel dangerous even after she leaves the checkpoint. Her wit buys passage, not security; the military presence continues to shape what she fears and what she can do.

A rule that reaches the home

After the September 1986 attack on Pinochet’s motorcade, the curfew atmosphere expands into a citywide siege and house-to-house searches. The Queen stays awake with a kettle ready in case Carlos or his friends arrive and the radio turned low for news. The home that had served as refuge is no longer outside the state’s reach: the prospect of a knock, search, or arrest enters its rooms, and she must weigh her attachment to Carlos against the danger of being found connected to him.

By dawn she is clearing traces from the house, burning papers with addresses and telephone numbers, cleaning surfaces, and packing her possessions into two bags. She leaves the home rather than wait for the pressure of the searches to reach her. Curfew and lockdown therefore alter not only who can travel but whether a person can remain in the place she has made her own. Through the Queen’s experiences, the rule links authoritarian force to intimate loss, while revealing how a marginalized person’s resourcefulness can create brief openings without defeating the system that constrains her.