Breaking Lorca (12 page)

“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

V
ICTOR 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.

TWENTY

V
ICTOR STOPPED BY
Mike Viera’s office unannounced. He was surprised to see Lorca sitting behind the receptionist’s desk. She was busy on the phone, and Viera’s door was closed. Victor sat in the tiny waiting area and watched her over top of a
Sports Illustrated
. She was arranging a meeting between Viera and another attorney, speaking quietly into the phone. Instead of her usual faded jeans and work shirt, she was dressed in a neatly pressed blouse and skirt. Except for the chipped tooth, she looked like any other professional New Yorker. Should I ask her now, he wondered? Or is it too soon?

“The Frisbee champion,” she said when she hung up. “How are you?”

“I am very well, Miss Viera. How are you?”

She shrugged. “My brother has chosen to enslave me.”

“You look like you’ve been doing this all your life. Very professional.”

Before he could say anything more, the office door swung open and a woman came out. She was perhaps thirty, with heavy eyebrows that gave her a sad appearance. Her complexion was pebbled from burnt-out acne. She said to Lorca, “I have to see him again next week. I have to bring my mother.”

Lorca reached for a calendar. Mike Viera waved for Victor to enter.

“Come in! Come in, Ignacio! What a pleasant surprise,” he said, shutting the door behind them. “I wanted to ask you to come to dinner next week. I was afraid after Lorca’s distressing episode in the park we would never see you again.” He gestured for Victor to sit on the couch.

“I enjoyed our picnic,” Victor said. “It was a wonderful afternoon.”

“So you’ll come for dinner on Saturday?”

“I would like to, very much.”

“Good. It’s settled. Eight o’clock.”

“Eight o’clock, Saturday.” Yes, he thought. I should ask her now.

Victor sat down on the vinyl sofa, and a stack of files slid to the floor. He knelt and tried to balance the files into a loose pile against the wall.

“Leave them, Ignacio. It’s nothing. Tell me how you like my new receptionist. The old one called in sick too often.”

“It looks like you have a perfect arrangement now.”

Viera emptied a full ashtray into the wastebasket and lit himself a cigarette. He took a drag and contemplated the stream of smoke as he exhaled. “ To be honest, I am already a little regretting my decision to hire Lorca. She scares the clients, I think.” Viera stared up at the ceiling, as if debating whether he should go on.

“But she looked like she was doing very well to me.”

“Today is a good day. Three days ago it was a different story. At home, maybe nine o’clock, I go to ask her something and I can’t find her anywhere. I look in the basement, I look in the garage, even in the crawl space above the garage. Finally, you know where I found her? Under the bed. She was hiding under her bed, shaking like a leaf. Some boys had been letting off firecrackers on the street.”

“At the little school, the first thing they do is destroy your nerves. Stop you sleeping. Scream at you all the time. It makes the interrogation worse.”

“It makes
life
worse.”

“They frighten me also, firecrackers. It sounds like the war.”

There was a silence. Viera stubbed out his cigarette. “My sister used to call me a coward. You too must think I’m a coward for running away from that war.”

“I am no judge of cowards. Only a madman would run
to
that war.”

“Hah! You are a subversive, Ignacio.”

“No. Nothing like that.”

Viera sighed and swivelled to look at the hideous view of Seventh Avenue behind him. “Lorca has told me very little of what they did to her at the little school, but I am not blind. Did you notice the scars on her arms? And that tooth? You know some stinking guard punched her in the face? That’s how that tooth was broken. Can you imagine, Ignacio? Can you imagine yourself ever, under any circumstances, punching a woman in the face?”

No
, he wanted to scream.
But I was terrified. They would have killed me
.

“I am not a violent man, but if I had before me the man who did this to my sister, I would kill him.”

“I would not blame you.” Suddenly Victor needed to be anywhere but this office.

“School. What an obscenity, to call that place a school.” Viera swivelled back to face him again. “Well, I don’t have to tell you. They must have done terrible things to you also in that place.”

Victor got up and in his nervousness managed to knock another stack of files to the floor. “I had better get back to work before I destroy your entire place. And someone has to make chocolate mousse for the rich, no?”

“Wait. Please, Ignacio. I’m trying to find ….” Viera was shuffling through papers on his desk, lifting up files, clipboard, legal pads. “Here it is.” He snatched up a creased yellow brochure and thrust it across the desk. “Have you ever heard of this place?”

Victor read the front of the brochure.
You are not alone
, it said.
If you have been abducted, detained, physically maltreated, or tortured, the Torture Victims Association can help you
.

Viera said, “I finally talked Lorca into going. She practically spit in my face the first time I suggested it. ‘A bunch of crybabies,’ she called it. But you know, even after only a few meetings, it seems to be doing her a lot of good.”

“She talks to these people?”

“They are victims, the same as her. Same as you. People who were jailed and beaten and God knows what. It does them good to talk, I believe. To know they are not alone. And Lorca has decided she likes very much the man who runs the place. Bob, I think his name is. Bob something.”

Victor was surprised by a pang of jealousy.

“I thought maybe you would like to go, Ignacio. To talk to these people. You might benefit from it too.”

“Me? I don’t think so, Michael. It’s very kind of you, but I don’t need such a place.” The chance of being recognized was too great. Someone who knew the real Perez. No, no, he could not consider it, even though it meant passing up a chance to get closer to Lorca.

“Think about it. Lorca is getting better—you noticed the change yourself.”

“Goddamnit!” Someone was shouting in the outer office.

Viera, followed by Victor, got up to see what was going on.

His client was standing in the middle of the reception area, clutching her arm. “Goddamnit!” she said again. “I don’t believe this place!”

“What is it? What’s wrong?”

“She hit me. Your goddamn receptionist hit me, that’s what’s wrong.”

Lorca was gone.

“Are you all right?” Viera said. “Let me see.”

The woman took her coat off and showed him her upper arm.

“There’s no bruise,” Viera said. “Please sit down for a moment and tell me what happened.”

“I will find Lorca,” Victor said.

He took the stairs down to the street. He searched through the crowds, stepped into two coffee shops and a McDonald’s, but she was not there. He stopped into a laundromat, a liquor store, even a psychic’s storefront. Not finding her, he finally gave up and went back to Viera’s office, passing the outraged client as she left the building.

Viera was staring forlornly out at the avenue.

“Did she tell you what happened, your client?”

“She says all she did, she asked to use the phone. To see if she could get off work a certain day. It took her a while to get through, and Lorca asked for the phone back. My client asked her to wait a minute and Lorca lost her temper. Her nerves are so bad, Ignacio. She has no patience at all.”

“I’m sure she’ll get better. It’s a matter of time, that’s all.”

“Delay of any kind—the slightest wait for anything—it makes her crazy. Absolutely crazy.”

“At the little school, they would make the prisoners wait. It was part of the punishment. They would sit a prisoner in that room and just make them wait and wait, knowing what was going to happen. But not when.”

“I don’t know what to do, Ignacio. I am her brother, but there is only so much I can do. Already, it is putting a strain on my marriage. My business too, if this keeps up. This has cost me a client. That woman is not coming back, you know. I don’t blame her, either.”

“It’s hard for you, I know. You are very good to your sister.”

“She hates being so dependent on me. I know she hates it—it hurts her pride, although she doesn’t say so. You’ll still come for dinner on Saturday?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Thank you. She needs a friend, Ignacio. Not a relative, a friend. Someone she can trust, someone she can respect.”

“I would be happy to be that friend, Michael. Except your sister has no reason to respect me.”

“Oh, you are wrong. You know what she said the day we went to the park? She and Helen had a fight on the way home, they’re always fighting. Later, I went up to Lorca’s room. I wanted to tell her about this support place.” He held up the yellow brochure. “I was telling her about it and saying how it might speed her recovery. And you know what she said? She said, ‘I know you want me to be like Ignacio Perez, but I cannot. I could never be strong like he is.’ That’s what she said.”

“I am not strong,” Victor said. It was all he could think of to say, and he repeated it. “I am not strong at all.” He felt an ashen grief that Lorca could be so deceived. It’s as if I go on and on tormenting her, he thought. As if I cannot stop.