Fiction. Latin American Studies. When Gabriel Canales finds himself locked in a men's room of a Santiago movie house during the Chilean coup, he has nothing better to do than create a movie of his life in his mind. Here he looks in amazement at the string of seemingly trivial events that brought him to that men's room: "Roll at a given speed the film of your own life experiences and see them projected onto the screen of your astonished mind." Delano creates, in a series of flashbacks, both a picture of a single man and a picture of an entire nation over the twenty years that led up to September 11, 1973, a day as important in Chilean history as September 11, 2001 is in the history of the U.S.