Breaking Lorca

EIGHTEEN

Viera stood with hands in pockets like a boy who is uncomfortable with his adult errand. “I thought I’d missed you.”

“But you could have telephoned. I gave you the number the other day.”

“A sudden inspiration. I was working late. Yes, very late. And then I was heading toward the bridge and I saw your restaurant and I thought, why not stop and say hello?” For a lawyer, Victor thought, Viera was a poor liar. “Tell me, Ignacio,” he went on, “are you working on Sunday or are you free?”

“I’m free. The chef has a nephew who does my job on weekends.”

“Ah, good. I was wondering, you see, if you would be so kind as to accompany my wife and myself on a picnic in Central Park. We go to the park often on Sundays-it’s almost as good as going to the country. My sister Lorca will be there too. She is enjoying one of her happier periods, it seems.”

Far beneath his feet, deep in the white-hot caverns of the earth, Victor sensed a colossal grinding of gears. It was not over. “Your sister,” he said, and coughed to cover the catch in his voice. “She is expecting me to come?”

“She knows I am asking you,” Viera said, forgetting his tale of sudden inspiration.

“I don’t know …. After the other day ….”

“Don’t worry. She is in a much better mood, I promise you. Almost cheerful! You don’t have to talk about the little school, you can talk about anything you like. It is just a picnic. Just good food and good company. We have every reason to expect a pleasant afternoon.”

Victor looked up Fiftieth Street toward the traffic of Lexington Avenue. A taxi was blaring its horn at a bus stalled in the intersection. An ambulance went by, lights flashing. “All right,” he said finally. “Should I bring anything? Some food? Something to drink?”

Viera beamed. “You will be our guest. Your presence alone will honour us.”

Sunday broke fair-a crisp, clear day with fleets of white clouds chasing each other over the trees, a sharp wind gusting out of the north. Victor was glad of his windbreaker.

“Have more potato salad,” Helen Viera urged him.

“Oh, no, thank you. It was wonderful, but I assure you I am quite stuffed.”

“Nonsense.” She dropped a large dollop onto his paper plate. “We’ll just have to lug it home anyway.”

“You’re very kind. I seem to be eating everything in sight.”

They were sitting on a blanket spread out on the bank of a small pond. Behind them, the newly seeded Great Lawn was an oval of pale emerald. A hill across the pond was guarded by a miniature castle topped with a fairytale turret. A spot for lovers, Victor thought.

“Another ham roll?”

“Oh, no. I couldn’t.”

“Men. You always say no when you mean yes.”

“Don’t force him to eat, Helen.” Lorca was sitting under a tree, peeling bark from a stick. She didn’t look at them when she spoke. She bent over the stick, shoulders hunched, her hair falling over her face.

“I’m hardly forcing him,” Helen said.

“Believe me,” Victor put in, “I don’t have to be forced. This is the best meal I’ve had since I came to New York.”

“See? He likes it.” Mrs. Viera, who looked a tired thirty, spoke in the hyper-dramatic tones of a twelve-year-old.

Lorca stood up, brushing twigs from her jeans. She walked down to the edge of the water. Victor was still afraid that she would recognize him-some catch in his voice, perhaps even his smell-and suddenly know with certainty what he had done to her. She had barely glanced at him for the past hour, but he was still afraid.

“Finishing off the food, I see.” Mike Viera was coming toward them from the washrooms.

“I gave him the last of the potato salad,” his wife said, snapping a Tupperware lid shut. “Lorca didn’t like it.”

Viera was wearing jeans and a green striped polo shirt, and looked ten years younger than he did in his lawyer suit. He snatched up a Frisbee and yelled to his sister, “Lorca! Catch!”

She turned from the pond just in time for the Frisbee to catch her in the chest. Victor expected an angry outburst, but she just retrieved it from the mud and tossed it back without a word. The Frisbee cruised toward her brother in a perfect arc. Viera threw it back. “We used to play for hours when we were kids,” he said to Victor. “Flying saucers, she used to call it. Never wanted to stop.” The Frisbee sailed over a low-hanging branch into his hand. “Let’s move away from the water. Come on, Ignacio.”

Victor had not played at anything since he was a boy. The game of catch seemed foolish. And he had a faint sense of rudeness that Helen Viera was not invited to join in. She sat alone on the plaid blanket, reading a novel by Danielle Steel.

He was completely uncoordinated at first. He threw the plastic disc too hard; it soared over Lorca’s head and she had to run after it. Then, in a single motion, she swung around and sent it curving toward her brother. Viera was businesslike, dispatching the toy toward Victor’s grasp with the neatness of a fact.

As the game progressed, Victor became more skilful. It even became easy. If only speech were this easy, he thought. If only trust and friendship could be so natural.

“This was a good idea,” he called to Viera. “To bring this thing along.”

“For a picnic, a Frisbee is essential. You didn’t know this?”

Viera whipped it straight and level, chest-high to Victor. Then Victor launched it into a graceful tilting flight to Lorca. She had only to take one step, a short leap, to pluck it out of the air. In that swift, clean motion she looked perfect, Victor thought. Undamaged.

“You two continue,” Viera said. “I am fat and middle-aged and require my rest.”

“Lazy!” Lorca yelled after him. “Lazy old man!” She stamped her foot in a comical way. Then she spoke to Victor for the first time that day. “You’ve had enough too, I suppose. You want to join the little old man? The senior citizen?”

Victor shook his head, holding out his hand for the Frisbee. With a flick of her wrist, Lorca sent the bright plastic disc whizzing into his palm. As they played on, his technique continued to improve. He could now place the Frisbee pretty much where he wanted to. Yes, he thought, I’m like a normal person now. I’m doing a normal thing.

Despite the cool breeze, he worked up a sweat. Several times he thought surely Lorca would have had enough, but they played on and on. How could this leaping, graceful girl be the hunched and bitter woman of an hour ago?

The clouds arranged themselves into high-banked columns of cumulus that now and then hid the sun. Victor and Lorca played in shade then sun, shade then sun. It got windier, it got colder, but they played on, Lorca silent and serious, Victor sometimes shouting “Good throw!” or “Sorry!”

No one would ever know what I did to this woman, he thought. She may even come to like me. Is this what being good feels like? This ease, this freedom, is this how the brave feel every minute, every hour? With me, of course, it is a performance, and all performances have their final curtain.

“It was the same when we were children,” Viera said when they joined him and his wife on the blanket. “Lorca never wanted to stop. She would have played in the pitch-dark.”

“Why not?” Lorca said, accepting a plastic cup of lemonade from Helen. “They make ones that shine in the dark, you know. They are called-I forget the word for it, this shining.”

“Phosphorescent.”

“Phosphorescent.” The word came out with a slight whistle, and she covered her mouth with her hand.

“We should get that tooth fixed,” her brother said. “It makes you look like a street person.”

The tip of her tongue probed at the tooth. She turned away and stared at the water. “I am cold now.”

“Because you’re sweating,” Helen said. “I told you to bring a jacket. Tell her she’s foolish, Ignacio.”

Victor said nothing. At the mention of Lorca’s injury, shame had coiled itself around his chest. He could hardly breathe.

They didn’t stay long after that. The plates and napkins were thrown in the trash, the Thermos and blanket packed away.

“This is the happiest I’ve seen her,” Viera said as they headed back across the park toward Fifth Avenue, “the happiest since she came here. This is how she used to be, Ignacio. So easy and free. Not this anger all the time, this rage.”

Lorca had been walking ahead of them, but she stopped at the edge of the park drive, where cyclists and roller skaters whooshed by. She said, “I think I would like those, the Rollerblades. I would like to try that sometime.”

“You would fall and break your head,” Viera teased her.

“I would not. Helen, you want to learn?”

Viera’s wife looked surprised that she had been addressed. She stammered a little. “Gosh, I don’t know. Skating is for children, isn’t it?”

“It’s not a crime. Grown men and women are still in part children.”

“Oh, that’s a lot of hogwash. I don’t believe that for one second.”

But Lorca did not hear. In a swift change of expression, her mouth opened-the broken tooth a sudden black triangle. She was staring beyond Helen’s shoulder at something on the road.

Victor followed her gaze.

Coming up the hill, lumbering amid the throngs of skaters and bicyclists, was a green Jeep Grand Cherokee. The windows were tinted, the driver and passengers nothing more than dark shapes. A terrible trembling shook Victor in the knees. It’s going to stop, he thought. It’s going to stop and Sergeant Tito will jump out and arrest me.

“What’s wrong?” someone was saying.

It’s just a Jeep, he told himself, a recreational vehicle. They’re everywhere. But his legs trembled all the same.

Lorca ran.

Viera and Helen turned on the path, gaping after her.

“It’s the truck,” Victor managed to say. “The Jeep. It’s what the Guardia drive.”

“Good God,” Helen said. “Where the hell’s she going? Does she expect us to go and pry her out of the bushes?”

“We can’t just leave her,” Viera said. “She doesn’t know the park. She might get lost.”

“Michael, Lorca is a grown woman.”

Lorca had rounded the pond. She vanished among the trees below Belvedere Castle.

“I will go,” Victor said.

“You’d better not,” Helen said. “You don’t know her moods.”

But Victor was already hurrying toward the pond. The trees were not yet in full bloom; dark figures moved among winding paths. As Victor entered the darkness of the Rambles, a ball of fur scuttled out from the bushes trailing a red leash. Victor nearly tripped headlong. “Sorry,” a young woman called to him. “Scampy, you come back here right now.”

He stopped at the crest of a small hill. Below him on one side, cars rushed across the Seventy-ninth Street transverse; above him on the other, laughing children ran around the castle.

“Lorca?” he called. “Lorca, where are you?” A couple walking hand in hand parted to let him pass. “Excuse me,” he said to the man, “did you see a young woman run in here? Dark hair? This tall?” He held his hand, palm down, about five feet off the ground.

The man shook his head and started to walk on, but the woman pointed down the hill they had just climbed. “There was a woman by herself, near the water.”

“Water?”

“By the willow trees. She was wearing blue jeans and a loose blue shirt.”

Victor thanked them and hurried on. He had to clamber down some rocks to reach the waterside path. The willows were visible from the far side of the tiny lake where youngsters and tourists rowed rented boats. Their fronds trailed over the banks and into the water.

As he came around the curve of the hill, he could see a flicker of blue between the emerald branches. “Don’t be afraid,” he said in Spanish, forgetting his fear for the moment. “No one will harm you here.”

There was a shuffling sound from the willow; the blue disappeared.

“Please don’t run,” he said softly. “There is nothing to run from.”

Silence from the willow. Distant laughter from the lake. From farther off, the barking of a dog.

“The truck,” he said. “I know it frightened you. It frightened me too. It’s just like the ones the Guardia drive-the tinted windows, everything. Believe me, I know them well.”

Two men came around the hill holding hands. They glanced at Victor talking to the tree, but were too engrossed in each other to remark on it or laugh.

“The tinted windows,” Victor pressed on. “They like them, the Guardia, because they know it is frightening to be watched by someone you cannot see.”

Not a word from the willow. From the water, the creak and splash of oars.

“You know why else they like those dark windows? They like them because they are cowards.” Cobardes. He spat the word.

“English, please.”

The reply was so faint, the words so unexpected, that Victor was not sure he had heard correctly. “Pardon me?”

“Speak English. I hate the sound of Spanish now. To me, it is an obscenity.”

“You?” he said in English. “Named after a fine Spanish poet, you can disown your language?”

“It is a good word, disown. I disown everything. If I could, I would disown myself.”

Victor knew all about that. He longed to disown Victor Pena body and soul, not just his name. But probably only death could do that.

“I prefer English now.” Lorca’s harsh voice, with its cracks and hoarse texture, emerged from the tree as if from a confessional. “It feels …. it feels so far away.” She said far away as if it were a quality of great and rare beauty.

“Yes. It does feel far away. I am still not used to it.”

A pause. Then, from the tree: “You are a good person, aren’t you.”

“I am not,” he said. “I am not a good person.”

“You are a good person,” she repeated in a factual tone. “It is obvious you are. I, however, am not.”

“No, no,” Victor started to say, but she shushed him.

“Let me say it, Ignacio. I thought at one time that I was a good person. I imagine every person on earth thinks that he or she is good. A little bit good. I thought that I was good and kind. I thought that I was generous. I even thought that I was brave. Now I know otherwise-that I am none of those things. And sometimes this knowledge is hard to bear.”

“It is not knowledge, Lorca. It is anger and disappointment. I feel those things too. I feel them about myself. About things I have done. Things that happened at the little school.”

“People are dead because of me. Because I talked. It would have been better if they had really shot me on that cliff. It was just sheer luck that cliff gave way beneath me.”

“That’s how you survived? The cliff gave way? Where was this?”

“Diablo. The middle of a storm. Hard, hard rain. Suddenly a mudslide, and I nearly drowned. It would have been better if I had.”

The rain and the wind came back to Victor. The distant roar of the sea, and the dead boy. It was me, he imagined saying. That was me, behind you with the gun. But he could not face her hatred. “You blame yourself,” he said. “But no one else blames you. At the little school, you were known as the bravest.”

“Known how? By who? Prisoners were not allowed to speak.”

“We whispered together, as you know. When we spoke of you, it was only in admiration.”

“You are mocking me.”

“I swear, Lorca. Even the guards. I heard two of them talking one day. They said you were the toughest.”

He pulled the fronds aside and stepped into the cool, dark space within. Lorca shrank from him, pressing her knees into her chest. She was trembling all over, though whether from the cold and damp beneath the willow or still with fear, Victor could not be sure.

We are like lovers in here, he thought. Only a lover should be with a woman in such a dark, secluded space. He reached tentatively toward her shoulder, but drew back when she looked up at him.

“I told them where my sister lived, and now she is dead. You understand me?” Her eyes overflowed, but she did not allow herself the relief of real weeping. “She is dead.”

Victor murmured in a low monotone that was almost prayer, “They beat you, and you did not speak. Shocked you, and you did not break. Half drowned you, and you spit in their faces. Even they raped you, and you said nothing.”

“Raped me.” She looked at him with sudden ferocity. “Who told you they raped me?”

Victor stammered. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean-”

“This is a lie. This is the guards’ lies. They did not rape me. Beat me, yes. Everything else, yes. But rape me, no. They did not rape me.”

“But you said they did. The other day.”

“No, I said they did not. You think they would lower themselves to do this? You think they would dirty themselves? Contaminate themselves with a guerrilla bitch? Never. You hear me? Never.”

“I am sorry. I should have thought before I spoke.”

“You imagine I would still be alive if they had raped me? I would hang myself from the nearest tree. I would have shot my brains out.”

“I am so sorry. Please forgive me.” She had turned her back on him, and Victor cursed himself for a fool. Rape, he suddenly realized, was the most lasting torment the little school had inflicted on this woman. The pain of the shocks may have receded, the bruises from the beatings healed, but she would go on and on being a woman who had been raped, and that knowledge was too much for her. “Please forgive me,” he said again.

“I am in no position to forgive anyone,” she said. “Even if I wanted to.”

“Lorca! Ignacio, where are you?” Michael Viera’s voice came from behind and above them.

Lorca hid her face against her knees. Victor stepped out from the willow. Viera looked down at him from halfway up the hill.

“She is here with me,” Victor said. “We are coming now.”

“Let’s hurry, please, Ignacio. It’s starting to rain.”

In the shelter of the willow, they had not noticed the rain. By the time they rejoined Helen, who was waiting for them on a bench near the Obelisk, the sky had turned charcoal.

“Did you have a nice time?” Helen asked Lorca brightly. “Enjoy your little walk? We had a dandy time wondering where you were.”

“Leave her alone,” Viera said. “Let’s get to the subway before we get soaked.”

Lorca was silent. As the others said goodbye, she scuffed at the dirt with her shoe. Victor watched them pick their way through the diehard skaters, Viera carrying the basket in one hand and guiding his wife with the other. Lorca kept her distance from them and moved in a careful, hunched posture, bent as if over a wound.

NINETEEN

VICTOR TOLD HIMSELF he wanted no contact with the Viera family for a while. He stayed away for the next few weeks, working his split shifts at Le Parisien, spending his breaks in the library or sometimes in a cheap coffee shop with a newspaper, trying to distract himself from thoughts of Lorca.

His home, if you could call it that, was a rundown SRO hotel on West Ninety-fourth Street, one of the last of these crumbling hostelries on the upper West Side. It was a shabby, depressing place. Victor had a hot plate in his room, a small sink, a wobbly iron bed and peeling wallpaper. The bathroom was along a dingy hallway. Half the time the light didn’t work, and even though Victor had twice scrubbed the place himself, the tub and sink were always filthy.

The Royal Court Hotel, as it was grandly named, was an hour’s walk from the restaurant. To save money, Victor walked it every day, despite almost constant rain.

One wet day, he stopped beside the Belvedere fountain in the middle of Central Park. The rental boats were stacked up onshore; the lake was empty except for a squadron of ducks paddling toward the iron bridge. Victor stood at the water’s edge and stared across the lake at the willows where he had talked with Lorca. He stood there for quite a while.

That was three weeks after the picnic. A Sunday.

The following week, as he was cutting through the park one night on his way home after work, he strode purposefully past the fountain with its wide-winged angel. He had resolved before entering the park that he would not stop there, he wouldn’t think about Lorca.

One glance, however-what could that hurt? A single glance could not do any harm. And so Victor allowed him self this single glance across the lake and kept moving. But then he rounded the bottom of the lake and noticed a waterside gazebo. A moment later he was sitting on a bench inside the gazebo, and telling himself he would stay just five minutes. Five minutes to enjoy the moonlight rippling on the water, the satin glow of the lamps among the trees.

He stayed for over an hour.

When he rose to leave, his legs were damp and stiff. I’m like a man who haunts the scene of his crime, he thought. But that was not quite accurate, because his crimes against Lorca had been committed in another country.

Later, as he lay in his narrow, tumorous bed at the Royal Court, he could not remember what he had been thinking for that hour. What had passed through his mind as he stared across the water? What were his thoughts as he gazed at the moonlight on the willows? He could not remember. He remembered Lorca’s trembling shoulders and her broken tooth. He remembered her harsh voice and her unshed tears.

Victor switched on his ceiling light, tugging on a length of string he had rigged above his bed for the purpose. He reached under his mattress and extracted from among the bedsprings a wristwatch. It was a Bulova heavy with features he did not understand, dials within dials. He read the inscription on the back: To M. from J.

He switched off the light.

The watch dial glowed in the dark.

“I am sorry.”

The loudness of his own voice startled him.

“I am sorry,” he repeated more softly.

The dial glowed as if he held a part of Lorca’s life throbbing in his hand. Maybe it would be all right to call the Vieras, an inner voice suggested. Nothing wrong with that. Just to see what they’re up to, he told himself.

Just to see how she’s doing.