Breaking Lorca

TEN

The American’s visit was so brief as to seem hallucinatory. One moment he was there, the next he was nothing but a memory of blond hair and a whiff of aftershave. When he was gone, the soldiers had their lunch, and then in the afternoon the woman was brought back to the interrogation room, where they left her alone, tied to the chair. Tito liked to make her wait like this, knowing the torture would come but not knowing when or what form it would take. After half an hour, maybe forty-five minutes, they connected her up to the machine as if she were herself an electronic device without which the little school could not run.

Once again Victor took down a record of the interrogation while Tito worked the dial. All through the woman’s screams and the shouted questions, Victor felt a growing thickness in the back of his throat like an oncoming cold. And at the crown of his head there was a sore spot as if he had been tapped with a small, hard object there. Much of what he wrote was blurred with sweat.

Then Tito shocked the woman too hard and she fainted. When they could not revive her, Lopez and Victor carried her to her cell.

“Too bad the whore is not on our side,” Lopez muttered. “She is one tough bitch.”

Victor was glad to be on guard duty while his colleagues interrogated other prisoners. He could hear the mutter of gunfire from the nearby rifle range, and the odd sergeant’s shout from the garrison. He sat at the little table, his head in his hands, feeling himself sink into a fever as if toward the bottom of the sea. He hardly noticed when they came for Ignacio Perez, the man in the cell across from the woman’s. Perez was the only prisoner there who seemed to Victor as if he might actually be a guerrilla. He was not much older than Victor, short but powerfully built, and he resisted the soldiers like a wild dog, kicking and screaming at them.

Victor’s brow was hot as an iron in his hand. He barely heard the shouts and cries coming from what used to be the little school’s playground. They were playing Submarine with Perez. So far, Victor had not had to participate in that particular game, where one or two soldiers would toss the prisoner into the tank of water that had been fouled with every kind of filth the school could produce. The prisoner was then forced beneath the surface at the end of a restraining pole, and held there until he near drowned in the shit and piss. Who thought these games up, Victor had wondered when it had first been explained to him. But this day he hardly noticed Tito’s laughter or Perez’s terrified, choked cries.

Later, when Lopez came to relieve him, he sat down at the table with a weary sigh. He looked Victor up and down. “What’s wrong with you, Pena?”

“Nothing. Except I just ….” Victor had to lean on the back of the chair to steady himself. His words were slurring like those of a drunk. “I think maybe I’m getting a cold or something.”

“You’re shivering like a-”

Victor didn’t hear what Lopez said next, because a gauzy curtain closed between them. He felt a smile spreading like butter across his face, and then his legs folded beneath him.

For the next three days he lay in bed, clenched in a fever, except for the times when he dragged himself to the barracks toilet. At his lowest point he perched on the toilet while at the same time leaning over a bucket, discharging violently from both ends.

In bed, dreams and memories intermingled. He dreamed of his uncle’s appearing to him like an angel of deliverance at the military prison. He dreamed of Mr. Wheat walking among the bodies of El Playon amid a scent not of death but of aftershave. Spirits rose like steam from the bodies, calling Victor to join them-death wasn’t so bad, it wasn’t so bad once you got used to it. It was better than being afraid all the time. In the dis tance, a woman called a name he couldn’t quite make out.

The doctor visited him. Later, Victor wasn’t sure if it had been real, because the doctor had grown a small moustache and his hair was black again. But it must have been real, because there was a bottle of medicine on a small wooden box that was his bedside table. It tasted like licorice and made the dreams even more vivid.

That night he climbed out of bed, the fever gone, and tiptoed through completely deserted classrooms that glowed pale as marble in the moonlight. After slitting the throat of the night guard, a boy of fifteen, he opened the last door and lay in bed with the Sanchez woman. What they did together was indistinct, but he had a wonderful sensation of warmth and comfort, as if he were curled in a den of warm animals.

When the Captain and the others burst in on them, Victor pulled out his service revolver and fired before they could even draw their pistols. Bodies tumbled at his feet. He pulled the Sanchez woman along the corridor, fighting hand to hand with the soldiers who now leapt out at him from all sides. It was amazing what strength and cunning he had. Bullets swarmed in the air, but he ran through them with supernatural courage. It should have been a terrifying dream, but it was not; the sense of victory was too thrilling.

But the thrill dissolved when he awoke and remembered he was a coward. A coward who, far from saving the Sanchez woman, had done his part to split open her flesh.

He lay in bed trying to persuade himself that he was not evil. He was not doing it by choice. He was here under threat of death. If he tried to help her escape, they would both be shot; that was not good. If he tried to escape himself, he would be shot, and that was not good. Besides, if he disappeared, they would only replace him with someone much worse. Nevertheless, he resolved to escape if the chance-a realistic chance-should ever present itself.

Victor suffered three days of fever before he was pronounced fit to return to duty. He went back to work feeling thin and ethereal, no match for the harshness of his fellow soldiers.

“Hey, Pena junior,” said Yunques. “How was your vacation?”

“Not much fun, thanks.”

“You’re lucky the Captain’s your uncle, Pena.” Tito made a throat-slitting gesture. “Me and the boys here get the feeling you’re a slacker. A malingerer.”

“That isn’t true. I was sick. Lopez, you saw.”

Lopez shrugged and looked out the window. “So you fainted. So you have a weak stomach.”

“Tell me, Pena,” said Tito. “What do you have in mind for a career after you leave the army?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it much.”

“Because, to tell you the truth, I get a very negative feeling from you. You don’t participate here like you should.”

“And if you don’t participate in one way,” Yunques put in, “you will certainly participate in another.”

“Pena and the doctor, I think they are two of a kind. I think we should tie them together and throw them in the tank.” Tito kicked his chair. “Funny how you manage to be out sick just when things get interesting.”

“What do you mean?”

“It reminds me of your battle experience, no? You manage to be unconscious just when things take a turn for the worse? Oh, yes, don’t look so shocked. I happen to have a friend in the Casarossa unit. He’s told me all about you, my friend, and frankly, you are going to have to convince me of your sincerity. If you’re just here because your uncle saved your ass, that makes you a security threat.”

“I don’t understand. What are you talking about?”

“Look. We’re not fools here, just because we don’t read faggot books in English. We know that when this war is over, people will come asking questions about special units like ours. What are you going to tell them, eh? ‘I was helpless’? ‘They made me do it’? ‘I never hurt anybody’?”

“I won’t tell anybody anything. I assume everything we do here is strictly confidential.”

“What we do here is not confidential. It doesn’t even exist. As far as I’m concerned, you are not yet part of this team. You never do anything to anybody.”

“That’s not true. I worked the General on Sanchez.”

“The Captain made you do it. First opportunity you get, you’re going to blab to everybody what went on here.”

“That’s not true either. I’m on your side. I wouldn’t be here otherwise.”

“Oh, yeah? We’ll see about that.”

He and Lopez had guardroom duty that afternoon. Lopez was always more friendly to him when the others weren’t around.

“What did Tito mean about my leaving just when things got interesting? Did she talk, the Sanchez woman?”

“No, she didn’t. She seems determined to die, this bitch. It’s unaccountable.” Lopez could come out with words like that once in a while. Talk like a complete thug and then suddenly he would use a word that sounded like the tattered remains of an education.

“She had more meetings with the General?”

“Not just the General. She’s made the Captain angry now. It’s becoming personal now, and that’s much worse for her. We did the water thing to her-have you seen that yet?”

“No.”

“Put a wet towel over her face, pour water all over it. Basically drowns them without killing them. She choked and cried like a motherfucker but didn’t tell us a thing.”

“Maybe she really knows nothing. Maybe she is innocent.”

“Don’t be an idiot. If she was innocent, she would have told us everything she knows. She would have given up her grade three teacher by now, if she was innocent.” Lopez laughed at some memory. “When the rat trick doesn’t work, you know they’ve got to be FMLN. Let me tell you, I wish I had as much balls as this bitch.”

“Maybe she will never talk. Maybe some people-”

“Don’t be stupid. You think she’s going to continue this way if we take her eye out with a pencil? We’re just going easy on her because she’s a woman. We can afford to take time. Otherwise they turn you into a monster, and that’s no good. Then it’s like the bastards have won-the rebels, I mean. If they turn you into a monster, it’s like all the things they’ve been saying about us are true. But listen, my friend.” Lopez leaned forward and spoke in a quieter voice. “If I were you, I’d worry more about myself. Tito is going to have your nuts in a vise if you don’t participate more. I mean it. He don’t like what he’s heard about you. He don’t trust you. This afternoon you better show some enthusiasm or, you know, there might be an accident one night-a grenade or something.”

They listened for the rest of the morning to the sounds from the interrogation room. There was a tea party with cookies for one of the male prisoners. A tea party was a regular beating; a tea party with cookies was a beating with clubs.

When they dragged him back to the cells, Victor could not see a single mark on his face.