Breaking Lorca (11 page)

SEVENTEEN

A
WEEK AFTER THEY HAD DISPOSED
of Lorca Viera, Captain Peña had taken Victor into the kitchen for what he called a cup of tea, although Victor had never seen his uncle drink tea. The Captain opened a pint of chocolate milk, which he gulped down with audible pleasure. Victor drank a Coke.

“Victor,” Captain Peña had announced sonorously, as if from a pulpit. “Victor. They can say what they want of me when I am dead. They can say that Peña was an ugly bas tard, they can say that Peña was a fool, they can say that Peña was too hard, too soft, too mediocre. I don’t care.”

“I’m sure no one will say those things, sir.”

His uncle raised one hand to forestall contradiction and with the other wiped chocolate milk from his moustache. “The press, the army, the bureaucrats, they can say what they want—and they will, too, I know them. But one thing they cannot deny. What they cannot ever deny is that Captain Eduardo Vargas Peña—no matter what the situation—Captain Eduardo Vargas Peña stood by his family. Always he was loyal to his own.”

A scream like tearing metal came from the interrogation room, where Tito was at work.

The Captain continued. “And as a man who always comes to the assistance of his family, I have—yet again, my underachieving nephew—I have yet again come to your rescue.”

“How, Captain?”

“The United States of America is offering to train five hundred troops at Fort Benning, Georgia. Fort Benning, my boy! The School of the Americas! All of our best warriors have gone there, all of our toughest officers. Believe me, a course at the School of the Americas is a sure ladder to success in this army. And I—by pulling more strings than you can ever hope to count—I have managed to get your miserable carcass into it.”

“You have? But that’s wonderful, sir!”

“Ah, you are excited, I see.”

Excited? Victor could barely suppress tears of joy.

“You have no idea,” his uncle went on, “how difficult it was to secure this opportunity, given your sorry record. I had to call in every possible favour—some of them imaginary. I owe a lot of people now, on your account. You understand me? A lot of people. Well? You have nothing to say?”

“I’m overwhelmed, Captain. Truly. I don’t know what to say.”

“Let me down again, and I will man the firing squad myself.”

“Oh, yes, Captain. Don’t worry. I promise I will live up to the family name.”

Another shriek from the interrogation room. A cheer went up from the tormentors, as if they had scored a goal.

Captain Peña drank the last of his chocolate milk and belched luxuriously. “You leave in two weeks. Make sure your papers are in order.”

“I’ll be ready, Captain. I promise.”

The Captain stared at him in frank assessment. “Forget what I said about the firing squad. Tarnish the name of Peña, soldier, and I will personally hand you over to Sergeant Tito, you understand? I will tell the sergeant to be sure and take his time. I think Sergeant Tito would enjoy that.” Captain Peña stepped out into the hall and, as if on cue, Tito tore from his victim’s throat another scream.

Victor’s transfer came in due time. But before he travelled to the United States, he removed from his uncle’s files the identity papers of Ignacio Perez. The first night the visiting soldiers were allowed off the Fort Benning base, he caught a bus, and then a train, and then another bus, to New York City.

He had not planned to work in a restaurant, but he knew no one, and no other job was available. Le Parisien was located on East Fiftieth Street among a row of much better restaurants. Except for a trio of unpleasant waiters—all with identical moustaches—no one connected with the place was French. The owner was a shy, silent Greek who sat at his corner table sipping anxiously at a chain of espressos while his business sank inexorably into decline.

Victor worked a split shift, arriving at ten-thirty each morning and working through lunch, preparing salads and desserts until three. Then, after a two-hour break that he would spend sitting in a nearby branch of the New York Public Library, he would return to his station, little more than a stall really, and begin the dinner shift.

The French waiters said little to him, except to call him silly names when placing their orders. (Two profiteroles,
Potassio
. Three Caesar salads,
Ignoracio
.) They weren’t hostile, exactly, they just assumed he was an idiot because he was Hispanic, and because a chef’s helper compared to a professional waiter was a lowly thing.

The day after his trip to Queens, Victor took off his apron, raised the hinged countertop of his station, and walked out into the bright sunshine of Fiftieth Street. It was a cool spring afternoon.

Despite the chill, there were many people—clerks and secretaries, they looked like—seated on the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. They looked carefree, Victor thought as he ascended toward the great bronze doors. He had seen grand cathedrals in picture books and movies, of course, but St. Patrick’s perfect neo-Gothic arches and beautifully carved saints were in stark contrast to San Salvador’s national cathedral, with its facade of bullet holes. There the Guardia had fired into a crowd of protesters, killing thirty. No one took their ease on those steps.

The vast interior was dark and cool. Smells of candle wax and incense brought back childhood memories.

As a boy, Victor had revered priests as God’s representatives on earth. But then the war came, and the army had taught him that priests were the enemy. The army hated the Church for many reasons. The teaching of history, with its catalogue of revolutions, they saw as subversive. And what need was there to learn of political systems less repressive than El Salvador’s? But the priests ignored all warnings.

Archbishop Romero had written a letter to the President of the United States asking him not to send any more military aid. He told the President that military aid was used to slaughter civilians. Then he had preached a sermon telling soldiers they should disobey orders that were against the law—orders to abduct, orders to torture. The archbishop was shot the next day while saying Mass.

Such courage, Victor reflected, and I haven’t even the courage to go to confession. He looked at the row of confessionals against the wall, where several penitents were lined up. He wanted to ask for forgiveness, he wanted to ask for advice, but he did not know American priests. He feared they might tell him to turn himself in.

He knelt in the back row and prayed for courage. If courage came, he would tell the priest about Labredo, about the boy. He would confess what he had done to Lorca Viera, and how he had intended to kill her, and how she had slipped at the crucial moment. If the courage came, he would tell everything, and maybe the priest would forgive him.

The courage didn’t come. Victor went back to work with a leaden heart.

All through the dinner shift, the waiters called him ridiculous names. Then suddenly there was a panic when a party of eight all ordered Caesar salads at once. Nick, the lugubrious owner, had cheered up considerably and came into the kitchen to help. Later, there was shouting across the stoves as Fidel the chef threatened to kill a waiter who cancelled an order for filet mignon he had already prepared.

Fidel’s Spanish curses echoing among the pots and pans were like an audio replay of the little school, and loathing swelled in Victor’s chest at the sound. English was the language of sanctuary, of rebirth, of anonymity. In English, no one knew who and what he really was.

By ten o’clock, the orders stopped coming. By eleven, the place was empty. Victor put plastic wrap over the mousse and threw out the whipped cream. He washed his chopping block and the half-dozen knives he had used. Nick told him morosely that he could go home.

Fiftieth Street was quiet at this hour. The air smelt fresh after the kitchen smells of frying meat and hot oil. Maybe tonight there would be no nightmares. Victor stood at the top of the restaurant stairs, struggling with the zipper of his jacket. It was a cheaply made thing of fake leather he had found in a Salvation Army store, and the zipper always stuck.

“Just leaving, I see!” Mike Viera was grinning up at him from the sidewalk. “I was just passing through the neighbourhood, Ignacio. I’m so glad I caught you!”

EIGHTEEN

V
IERA 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 Peña 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.”