Breaking Lorca

THREE

Only two months previously, Victor had been in a jail rather than guarding one. Being from a military family and having a high school diploma had made him prime officer material when he enlisted. And as Lieutenant Pena, he had several good months under his belt, running supplies along a coastal route considered only medium risk. Then one night, in a stunningly swift and brutal raid, the guerrillas slaughtered more than half the men in his command.

His sergeant had turned to yell something when his head exploded. Blood and brain matter blew into Victor’s face. He fell choking into a pit slick with blood, firing blindly into the trees, and surely would have been killed with all his men had it not been for the purely accidental arrival of a helicopter gunship thrown off course by faulty electronics. The pilot had plucked Victor and his remaining men to safety.

Victor had posted three guards, the right number by the book, but “clearly insufficient for conditions,” his superiors decided. Thus Lieutenant Pena was busted down to corporal. And that was not the end of his humiliation.

That night, that raid, undid him. Terror-at least in the field-became his mode of existence. The mere sound of automatic gunfire made him want to cry. And when, six months later, it came time to overrun a northern village suspected of harbouring rebels, Victor managed to charge smack into a guy wire, and spent the rest of the manoeuvre in a sheltering ditch, bleeding from a scalp wound. The resulting court martial sentenced him to death by firing squad.

His cell in the military jail had been much better than those in the little school, and he had not been abused by anyone. No, his torment had been simply to count down the hours to his certain death. After his sentence was pronounced, he had ten days to appeal, which was a joke, because in wartime there was no court of appeal. Victor wanted desperately to sleep through those ten days, but found he could not manage more than three or four hours a night, and even those were racked by savage dreams. His waking hours were consumed by an endless inner movie, rich with close-ups, of his own execution.

He had heard stories about firing squads. The worst was that all five men, none wanting to be the one to fire a lethal shot, would aim slightly away from the heart. The result, in more than one case, was that they blew off the condemned man’s arms.

Then, one damp, grey afternoon, his uncle, Captain Pena, had appeared before him like an angel of deliverance.

“You remember me, little Victor?”

“I remember you,” Victor said, staring at his uncle, who stood before him with a cowed-looking guard. “But you’re dead, I thought. They said you were killed in San Vicente.”

“So I was, as far as the press is concerned. That was just public relations. They had to lower my profile, so to speak, after all the noise about Sumpul.”

The Sumpul River had been the site of a massacre. Refugees had been driven by the Captain and his men toward the border with Honduras. The Honduran army had swept down with American helicopters and the refugees had been caught between the two forces. The army called it a great victory, announcing the death of six hundred rebels. But the American ambassador had made noises of discomfort when the bodies of women and children continued to wash up on the shores for weeks afterwards.

“Well, it looks like they’re going to kill me, uncle.”

“Lucky for you I came back from the dead. Casarossa said he wouldn’t protest if I removed you from his command and made you disappear. You’re the family shame, Victor. A blot on the name of Pena. But if you’re not ready to die just yet, you can come and work for me. One ghost working for another, eh?”

“You mean they’re not going to shoot me?”

“You’re coming with me-unless, of course, you’d rather die.”

Which was how Victor came to find himself cleaning up after the high-pressure interrogation of Labredo. He had asked about the howls of agony issuing from that room shortly after his arrival at the little school. He was informed that there was no torture, only high-pressure interrogation.

In his brief tenure in the army, Victor had seen his share of gore. Even before the ambush that had killed his men, there had been the mopping-up operations, sudden descents on villages and outposts where he had seen dead bodies and parts of bodies dangling from tree branches, heads still in their helmets gazing at the sky with empty sockets. He had seen mothers weeping over their dead children, the innards hanging out of the little corpses like torn curtains. He had seen soldiers with the tops of their heads blown off, bodies hidden under heaving coverlets of flies and maggots. These sights Victor got used to. He would have gone mad in the first week otherwise.

And then his sergeant’s brains had blown into his face.

He entered the former classroom with a mop and bucket and a few rags. He nearly choked on the smell of shit. He set down the bucket of soapy water and stared at the pool of blood congealing on the floor. It flowed out from a chair in the corner, colours fanning outward from bright crimson in the middle to rust brown at the fringes. The edges looked like a map of El Salvador’s coastline.

He swung his mop in wide, rhythmic circles as if he were a brain-damaged person who had learned to perform this one function and nothing else. He tried to order his brain not to focus on the elements in his field of vision, and not to put diverse elements together to make up a whole. He did not want to see the whole.

Tools were laid out on a table by the bricked-up window, simple household items: a hammer, a pair of pliers, a roll of tape. He tried not to connect the hammer or the pliers-both darkened with blood-to the screams he had heard that afternoon. And the teeth on the floor. The clumps of hair. He tried to see these bits of human as inanimate objects only, unconnected to each other, unconnected to the hammer and the pliers. I am a janitor, he told himself. At this moment I am a soldier under orders to clean up a mess. That’s all. I am not a philosopher, I am not a hero, I am no one’s saviour.

Certainly he was not poor Labredo’s saviour. Indeed, Sergeant Tito had ordered him to lead Labredo from the cells to this very room, the old man unresisting as a lamb. Now, Victor found one of Labredo’s eyeballs impaled on a yellow pencil, propped on a corner of the desk like a drumstick.

He kept trying not to put everything together. But as he mopped under the desk, he found Labredo’s other eyeball staring up at him in astonishment.

I led him here, Victor said to himself. I opened his cell and I led Labredo trembling, hardly able to walk, to an indescribable death.

He had brought Labredo, blindfolded-the prisoners were always blindfolded-out of his cell, the old man clinging to him as if he were his son. Victor had seen in his file that Labredo was not really an old man, he was only fifty-seven, but he had been in the little school for two months, and the photograph stapled to his dossier showed that he had looked very different when he had arrived.

After Victor had delivered Labredo into Sergeant Tito’s hands, there had not been much noise the first half-hour, just the usual shouts and his uncle’s quieter voice. Then his uncle had come out, grim-faced, and disappeared into his office. That was when the screams had started. Like a baby’s cry, the human scream is meant to provoke sympathy and bring help. In the little school it brought laughter.

Victor hadn’t had the courage to intervene, or even to run. He feared the bullet in the back. He feared being wounded, maimed or paralyzed; he feared capture. He feared what Tito would do to him. He feared his own screams. And so he had sat with his hands folded on the table in front of him and tried to breathe normally. The Captain had forbidden him to read, but he could not have read anyway. Labredo was begging the soldiers to kill him.

Victor had tried to concentrate on his surroundings. The guardroom was elongated, and there were holes along one wall. He had thought they were bullet holes, but that made no sense, not on this inner wall, and now he realized that what he was sitting in had been the cloakroom at the back of a classroom. The holes were where the hooks had been.

He counted the tiles on the floor, twenty-eight long, eight and a half wide. They alternated black and white, and if you looked at them quickly, they flashed in the corners of your eyes. On his left there was a large cork-board where the squad’s schedule for the week was pinned, along with various notices, some of them yellowing with age. “General Emilio Garcia will be speaking Friday night on the relationship of the army to the community in the auditorium at the Central Business Association.” General Garcia was long dead, his helicopter blown out of the sky two years ago by a remote-control bomb. A significant victory for the rebels.

The screams had stopped, but the muffled cries and continuing shouts indicated that Labredo’s mouth had been taped shut. Even the toughest soldiers could bear only so many screams.

Half an hour later the door had banged open and the soldiers’ voices billowed up the hall.

“Man, that son of a bitch was hard to kill.”

“You owe me fifty centivos, Lopez.”

“Bullshit. You taped the fucker’s mouth shut. How do you know what his last words were?”

“He was begging us to kill him.”

“Doesn’t count. You gagged the little faggot.”

“Pena,” Tito shouted, “open up! Labredo’s going back to his cell for a little snooze.”

Victor sprang up and opened the door to the cells, and Tito, Lopez and Yunques carried Labredo past him. He had a glimpse of the pulped, bloody face, the blood-soaked trousers and then the pale bare feet waving in the air.

“Clean up this faggot’s mess,” Tito grunted as they sidled past. “I want to see my face in that floor.”

“Yes, sergeant.”

“Lopez will take the guardroom. I want to see my face, understand?”

That night, they drove the Grand Cherokee through town to El Playon. There was no need for a blackout in San Salvador; it was well defended and the rebels had no planes, no helicopters. At the crosswalks, pedestrians glanced at the tinted windows and looked away, or crossed the street. The Cherokees were unmarked, but everyone knew they belonged to the security services. The vehicles intoxicated the soldiers inside as if they had been drinking.

“Look at that bitch,” Yunques said, breathing garlic across Victor’s face. He was pointing to a woman who backed away from the Jeep. “I think she’s going to shit herself. You think that’s really a baby she’s carrying?”

“Why? You think she’s carrying a bomb?”

“You never know.”

“You just want to fuck her, Yunques. I know you.”

“No, I don’t. I want to fuck that little baby.”

“He wants to fuck the baby up the ass. Fucking Yunques.”

“I don’t want to fuck it up the ass. I’m no pervert.”

Their laughing filled the truck, and Victor had a vision of the laughter as heaps of garbage-bags of sour garbage bursting inside the truck.

“Hey, Labredo!” Tito called. “How you doing back there, baby?”

“Labredo’s pissed off with you, man. He ain’t going to talk to you no more.”

Lopez put on a little voice, “Hey, somebody turn on the lights. I can’t see a thing,” and more laughter filled the truck.

“Man,” Yunques said again, “that son of a bitch was hard to kill.”

“I can’t believe you took his eyes out before you finished him off. You got to show them what you’re doing. That’s the only way they get the fucking point. Eyes you always take last.”

“I tried to put one back. Fucker wouldn’t fit back in his head.”

“Pena,” Tito said when the laughter died down, “you’re pretty quiet back there. You okay?”

“I’m okay, sergeant.”

“You sure? No complaints?”

“No complaints at all, sergeant.”

“You got any complaints, I want to hear them. Don’t go yapping to your uncle, or I will personally roast your ass.”

“No complaints, sergeant. I’m just fine.”

“How you like the vehicle?”

“What? Oh, very nice. I used to daydream about owning one of these someday.”

“Stick with this unit, baby, one day you’ll own the fleet.”

Even his uncle was besotted with the Cherokees. The day they had driven away from the military jail toward what Victor thought would be freedom, the Captain had slapped the steering wheel and said, “How do you like this machine?”

“It’s beautiful,” Victor had replied, and meant it. You didn’t see a lot of new cars in El Salvador, let alone a fully loaded Cherokee smelling of new carpet and vinyl. And the tinted windows had the glamour-and anonymity-of sunglasses.

“Courtesy of the United States,” his uncle went on. “They gave us a hundred of them. You believe that?”

“It’s very generous.”

“Fuck generous. They give us the money to buy the trucks. It’s like they’re handing it right to the Chrysler Corporation. You and me, little Victor, we’re keeping those North Americans employed in Detroit.”

Now Lopez was craning his neck in the back seat to look at a movie marquee. “Hey, anybody want to see a movie later?”

“Fuck that, Lopez. I’m tired.”

“Fucking Clint Eastwood, man!” The movie was ancient. The picture showed Clint Eastwood with a big gun and Shirley MacLaine in a nun’s habit.

“You think you’re tired? Look at Labredo.”

They had to stop as the few people coming out of the cinema crossed the street. The tinted glass formed grey halos round the street lights.

“Why can’t they show those movies in Spanish?” Lopez wanted to know. “What do they think we are, fucking diplomats?”

“Yeah. Fucking faggot diplomats.”

Tito gunned the motor and nearly ran down an old man who was slow to get out of his way. The man’s cap fell off, but he recognized the Cherokee as a security vehicle and was too frightened to pick it up.

They drove in silence until Tito turned onto the road that curled up the hillside to El Playon.

“Why do we have to come here?” Lopez groaned. “Why can’t we go to Diablo?”

“Diablo’s for the live ones,” Tito said. “Labredo is extremely dead. Anyway, what difference does it make?”

“This place stinks, that’s all. Diablo at least you get some fresh air. This place, man, the smell is disgusting.”

Yunques nudged Victor. “You want to cut off his thing?”

“What?”

“Labredo. You want to cut off his thing?”

“Why do you want to do that? The man is dead.”

“Hey, sarge. Pena wants to know why we would cut off the faggot’s thing.”

“So tell him,” Tito said.

Yunques breathed garlic over Victor again as he spoke. “We shove that little thing in their mouths so people get the message. You understand? People got to get the message. You don’t join no guerrillas, you don’t protest, you don’t strike, you don’t open your mouth against your country. You open your mouth, we shove your dick in it. Got it?”

“Got it.”

“Good,” Yunques said. “Come on, kids. Let’s take out the trash.”

The landscape before them rippled with black volcanic hills. Tito left the Cherokee’s headlights on bright; they rimmed the hills with silver. Before the war, the area had been a tourist attraction. Victor remembered visiting it as a child. The bald black hills were a striking sight against a blue sky, and there was a hot spring somewhere. But tourists didn’t come to El Playon any more. In daytime the circling buzzards could be seen for miles.

“Pull your kerchief up, man. You’ll need it.”

Yunques pulled his own neckerchief up over his face like a bandit. Victor did the same.

Lopez lifted Labredo by the arms, Yunques and Victor each took a leg. Sergeant Tito led the way with a powerful flashlight. Steam rose into the beam in lush plumes.

“Fuck this. I can’t see a thing.”

Victor stepped on something soft, which suddenly gave way beneath his foot with a snap. Someone’s rib cage. “Oh, Jesus.”

“Yeah, man. The smell is something.”

“No, I stepped on somebody.”

“Well, watch where you step. You’ll stink up the car. Over this way.”

They swung east, and the lights of the city were flung out below them.

Lopez let go, and Labredo’s head hit a rock with a thud.

“Oh, man, the smell. Let’s get out of here.”

The other two let go and they turned back toward the truck. The smell finally flipped Victor’s stomach right over, and he had to yank his kerchief out of the way to vomit.

“Thanks a lot, Pena. Nice touch.”

“He can’t help it,” Lopez said. “First time I was out here, I did the same thing.”

They headed back to the car, Victor watching where he stepped the whole time.

As Tito backed it up, the lights caught on a bleached face here, an outflung arm there. Wisps of steam clung to the rocks like hair.

“I’m sorry I got sick,” Victor said hoarsely. “The smell ….”

“You’ll get used to it,” Yunques said. “Doesn’t take long.”

“You get used to everything,” Lopez said. “It’s incredible what you get used to.”

Next morning, his uncle found him in the guard room. “Not reading for once.”

“No, sir.”

“Good. You won’t have any time for books now. They’re bringing someone in. And this one you’re going to work on with the others. You’re one of the team, understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You’re either with us or you’re with them, understand?”

“Yes, sir. I understand.”