Authors: Giles Blunt
TWENTY-THREE
T
HEY WENT TO A
M
C
D
ONALD’S
, where they shared a Coke and french fries and talked for two hours, nearly three.
They talked about the strange and frightening city they had moved to—though not nearly as frightening as San Salvador. They talked of their experiences in North America: the confusing manner of the gringos—alternately so warm and then so cold—that made trust difficult, friendship impossible. They talked about the native Hispanics who seemed to look down on Latin people not born in the United States. They talked about the angry stares of store clerks when comprehension was not immediate. The sensation of complete mutual understanding was new to Victor, and it thrilled him.
When they stood once more at the top of the subway steps, the rain had stopped and a warm breeze blew out of the south, tossing Lorca’s hair into a tangle. “The air feels so good now,” she said. “So clean and fresh.”
Victor leaned close to kiss her.
“No,” she said, and with a sudden movement pushed him away. “I don’t want to be kissed.” Then she turned and hurried away from him down the subway stairs, her quick, light steps echoing after.
For days, Victor felt the imprint of her hand on his chest with a mixture of shame and anger. A kiss would have felt like forgiveness. I am in love with her, he told himself tentatively, testing the words.
He stood in front of the pay phone for a full half-hour before he managed to put a coin in.
“No, not a movie this time,” she said. “There is somewhere special I would like to take you.”
“Special? Special how? Where do you mean?”
“Don’t panic, Ignacio. It’s not expensive, and you don’t have to get dressed up.”
“But tell me what it is.”
“You will see.” That was all she would tell him, despite his repeated entreaties. “You will see soon enough.”
He asked her yet again when they met up, outside a dough nut shop in Penn Station. Victor had arrived twenty minutes early and had worked himself into a state of high anxiety by the time Lorca got there. She had taken some trouble over her appearance; she was wearing makeup and a light perfume. She smiled upon seeing him, and yet again he was shaken by the black spark of her broken tooth.
“Tell me now. Where is this secret place you are dragging me to?”
“It’s a church.”
“A church? You want to go to church on a Saturday night?”
“A special church. You will see when we get there.”
It certainly didn’t look special. Our Lady of the Assumption was hidden in a shabby block of West Thirtieth Street. The structure had once been white limestone, but a hundred and twenty years of New York soot clung to the facade in a black film. In a niche by the side entrance, a statue of the Blessed Virgin spread her arms in welcome, though one of her hands had been snapped off at the wrist.
Lorca opened the side door and waved him in.
The basement was all curling linoleum and water-stained walls. Alcoholics Anonymous posters hung next to childish drawings illustrating the alphabet. Another poster showed a cute little old lady raising her fist above the words,
Seniors, Rock the Vote!
A battered aluminum urn was set up on a trestle table, and the place stank of burnt coffee.
Seven or eight people slouched uncomfortably in rows of metal folding chairs. They were mostly women, all Hispanic, and Victor suddenly realized with panic where he was. “Lorca, no. I don’t want to be here.”
“I didn’t either, Ignacio. Not at first. But it has helped me a lot.”
“I cannot. It’s too much. I don’t know any of these people.”
Lorca took his hand and towed him toward the chairs, but he pulled away. She shook her head. “Really, Ignacio, there’s nothing to be afraid of. Why should you be so scared?”
Because somebody might recognize me
, he wanted to scream.
“Everyone is afraid the first time. Just sit quietly. No one is going to bother you.” She took his hand in both of hers. “Please stay, Ignacio. Won’t you stay with me?”
There were only eight people in the place, and none of them looked familiar. My hair was shorter then, he told himself. And I wore a uniform—at least, until I joined the special squad I wore a uniform. Civilians see only the rifle, the sunglasses. They don’t see your face. I don’t look like a soldier now.
A voice boomed out across the basement. “Ignacio! You made it! Good going, Lorca!” Bob Wyatt’s massive frame blocked the doorway, and then he was rolling toward them, hand extended. “Glad you could come.”
“He is not happy about being here,” Lorca said. “He wants to run away.”
“Oh, everyone wants to run away the first time.” Wyatt squeezed Victor by the shoulders and eased him down toward a chair. “Sit down, sit down, take a load off! Just relax and you’ll be fine.”
Wyatt’s entrance had caused a stir. The others in the room had turned to look at them. One woman—a Salvadoran by her heavy features—was staring with intensity at Victor. The man beside her whispered something to her, but she kept her eyes fixed on Victor.
“Evening, all! Sorry I’m late!” Wyatt strode up to the makeshift stage, waving a sheaf of papers. “Some preliminary announcements!” he hollered, and launched into a list of scheduled events that meant nothing to Victor, until he got to the matter they had discussed at the Vieras’. “The congressional hearings are just two weeks away. We need more witnesses. Remember: nothing but good can come of testifying—good for you, good for your country, good for my country.”
“Not so good if you end up dead,” a man with a patch over his eye commented wryly.
“True. That would be a negative thing. But you don’t have to worry about that. I’ve checked out the security arrangements myself. You’ll be completely safe. Any more volunteers tonight?” He aimed his beard first at one side of the room then the other, but there were no takers. Lorca stared resolutely at the ceiling. “Well, all right. No one’s going to force you, that’s for sure.”
“I know who you are.” The accusation shot across the room like an arrow. Victor had no doubt who had said it, and to whom. The woman was still staring at him with black, venomous eyes.
She had spoken in Spanish, and Victor answered her in Spanish. “Well, I don’t know you.”
“You were not a prisoner. You were a soldier.”
“Hold on a second, there,” Wyatt said. “Can we just finish with the announcements first?”
“I was not a soldier. I was an administrator in land reform.”
“You were with the Guardia. You came to our village. You killed people.”
“It was not me. I was never a soldier.” A thick sweat had broken out on Victor’s brow. They can
tell
. All of them
know
.
“Please, Yvonne,” the woman’s husband said. “Leave the man alone.”
“I will not. He is Guardia.”
“Why would a soldier come to be among people like us?” he asked her gently. “I am sorry, sir,” he said to Victor. “My wife was mistreated by the Guardia. For this reason, now, she sees them everywhere. Even in the United States.”
“I am not mistaken! I have seen this man in uniform! He came to our village in Chalatenango!”
Victor had never been to Chalatenango. “I was not a soldier. I was a prisoner.”
“You don’t have to defend yourself to this woman,” Lorca said softly.
“They came in the middle of the night,” Victor continued. “They took me to this place, blindfolded—always I was blindfolded. I get there and the Captain kicks me.” He pointed to his crotch. “Kicks me harder than I have ever been kicked in my life.”
“If you were blindfolded,” the woman said, “how do you know he was a captain?”
“I don’t know. Someone called him Captain. I don’t want to talk about this.”
“Of course you don’t,” the woman said. “Because nothing you say is true. If you were a prisoner, tell us what jail you were in. Tell us what they did to you.”
“It used to be a school. A little school. They threw me in a cell by myself. They fed me meals full of salt, meals full of bugs. They stopped me sleeping. Day and night, they threw buckets of cold water on me.”
“It’s true,” Lorca said to the room at large. “This is exactly how it works at the little school. I was treated exactly this way.”
“You know this man? You were at the same place?”
“I was with him in the little school. What he says is true. It is exactly how they treat new prisoners.”
“Oh, yes? What else did they do to you, then?” The woman shook off her husband’s restraining hand. “No, let the poor suffering prisoner tell us himself.”
“I told you, I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Hold on, hold on.” Bob Wyatt put his hand up for order. “Nobody is forced to talk here. Ever. I don’t care who it is. Many of you were forced to talk in the past, and that is the last thing we want going on in this group.”
The woman shrugged. “A convenient arrangement if you happen to be a soldier.”
“Don’t say that again,” Lorca warned the woman.
“Mother of God, I’ll tell you what they did to me.” Victor leapt up. “They played Submarine with me, all right? That’s what they did. Held me underwater in a tank full of shit. Does that make you happy? They beat me on the head. Here, you want to see the scar?” Victor bent forward to show the woman the crooked white scar at his hairline. He found there were tears in his eyes. “They shocked me with wires. Put wires on my fingers, my teeth, my ears—and here.” He pointed again to his crotch.
“You don’t have to talk,” Wyatt put in again. “No one here has to talk against his will.”
But Victor couldn’t stop. It was as if real memories were flooding through him. “Over and over they would shock me. Over and over they would say, ‘You ready to play ball now? You ready to play ball?’ Over and over they would say this, and apply the electricity. It felt like an earthquake in my flesh. It felt as if my flesh split open to the bone.”
There were scattered murmurs of recognition among the crowd. Lorca had covered her mouth with her hand.
“You think you will not cry,” Victor went on, weeping openly now, “and you do nothing but cry. You think you will not scream, and you do nothing but scream. I would have told them anything. Anything they wanted. But all they wanted was for me to play a part in this ceremony—a big ceremony in front of the Presidential Palace. ‘See! This is land reform! We are giving all these men a piece of land!’”
“So they tortured you,” Bob Wyatt said, “to make sure you wouldn’t give the game away?”
“And because I had encouraged others to apply for deeds under the law. They said they would bring me my own deed within the next few days. I knew what that meant.”
“What did it mean?”
“They come and kill you,” the man with the patch over his eye said. “I knew of a man who was killed this way. The Guardia showed up in the middle of the night and shot him in front of his wife and children, then they stuffed the deed in his mouth.”
“God,” Wyatt said. “The committee needs to hear about this.” He produced a box of Kleenex from somewhere and held it out to Victor.
The woman who had made the accusation was sulking now, arms folded tightly across her chest. Victor was astonished at the lies he had told, the amount of detail. He had not planned it. It was as if sheer wanting to have been on Lorca’s side had convinced him it was so.
Lorca was looking at him, her mouth open a little and an expression in her scorched-out eyes that Victor had never seen before.
“You think you did something wrong, don’t you,” Wyatt said. “You think by playing along with them, by playing their game, you committed a terrible evil.”
“I did,” Victor said bitterly. “It was a terrible evil. You don’t know.”
“No, Ignacio. You did nothing wrong. Nothing. It’s the people who did these things to you—the Guardia—they are the evil ones. Not you.”
Around the room, pale, shaken faces nodded agreement. As Victor lowered himself to his seat, Lorca put her arms around him. Her breath was hot and moist on his neck.
TWENTY-FOUR
M
ONDAY NIGHTS WERE ALWAYS SLOW
at the restaurant. Victor had already read both the
New York Post
and the
Daily News
, and now he was trapped in his kitchen cubicle with nothing to distract him from his thoughts. He stood with arms folded, reading the labels on his packages of flour and oil and icing sugar over and over again. From time to time curses came from the main part of the kitchen, where Fidel was listening to a baseball game.
In desperation, Victor set about reorganizing the utensils on his wall rack. But this could not distract him from the feeling that he had compounded his evil by provoking Lorca’s sympathy under false pretences. It was one thing to simply not tell her the truth; it was another to get up in front of a crowd and actively pretend to be a victim. He had no right to any sympathy from Lorca. Victor considered fleeing: he could disappear one night and leave no forwarding address. Still a coward, he thought. Still running away.
He could not continue his deception much longer. Lorca’s new look of tenderness was unbearable, almost worse than any anger could have been. Sooner or later he would have to reveal himself, and the outcome would be the same as running away: he would never see her again. He imagined the horror on her face when he told her. She would spit on him.
The owner appeared at the kitchen door. “Someone here for you, Ignacio. A woman.”
Fidel, the chef, let out a whoop. “Ignacio has a girlfriend! Ignacio has a girlfriend! Bring her back here for all of us to see.”
Victor ignored him.
“This woman must be blind or crazy!” Fidel shouted after him. “You give her one for me, eh?”
The dining room looked deserted. The bartender had gone home, and the owner was entering the night’s paltry receipts into a ledger. A last couple lingered in a corner banquette, holding hands and staring into each other’s eyes. Their waiter stood nearby, leaning back against the wall, his eyes closed.
Lorca hung back, just inside the entrance, as if fearing she would be thrown out. “I could not sleep,” she said. “I hope I didn’t get you into trouble by coming here.”
“No, no. It’s okay. It’s fine.”
She raised her eyebrows at the banquettes, the rich tablecloths. “You never told me you worked in such a high-class place.”
“Oh, yes,” said Victor. “Very high-class.” I will tell her everything tonight, he thought. As soon as there is a good moment.
It was midnight, it was Monday, and it was raining. The avenues were busy, but the cross streets were slick and deserted. A faint mist clung in webs to the street lights. Victor and Lorca walked several blocks in silence, Victor trying to work up his courage to speak. But he began to sense that Lorca too was working herself up to something, and he decided to let her speak first.
They were heading west toward Sixth Avenue, without having discussed where they were going. They crossed the avenue, and when they reached the far corner, Lorca suddenly stopped. Somewhere in the shadows a bottle smashed.
“What’s wrong? Was there somewhere special you wanted to go?”
Lorca curled one hand around his neck and kissed him. Her tongue darted between his lips and out again. “I want to go home with you. Will you take me to your apartment?”
“I thought you didn’t want to be kissed,” Victor said, feeling a foolish grin spreading across his face.
“I was mistaken,” she said earnestly. “Will you take me to your famous Royal Court?”
“We can go there, if you want.”
“You don’t want me to come?”
“No, no, of course I do. It is not the most pleasant place, that’s all.”
“I have seen worse places, I am sure.”
Silence claimed them once more for the walk uptown. Victor became more nervous with each block.
“I will make some tea for us,” he said when they were inside. He didn’t want tea, he didn’t even like tea; but it was an excuse to turn his back to her, to hide his nervousness by fiddling with the kettle and the hot plate.
Lorca stood in the middle of his single room, looking around. Victor was acutely aware of the peeling paint, the mildewed rug he had found on the street. “How much you pay for this place?”
“A hundred and fifty a week.”
“Ignacio, you have no kitchen. And where is the bathroom?”
“Down the hall. Believe me, for Manhattan this is not such a bad deal.”
Lorca sat down on the bed. “Anyway, I don’t want to talk about rent.”
“No. And I don’t want any tea.”
Victor switched off the hot plate and stood with hands on hips, facing her. He felt like a trapped chess piece, unable to move without causing loss.
“I don’t blame you for hesitating,” Lorca said. “I know I am ugly.”
“Don’t say that. I think you are beautiful.”
She gave a short, bitter laugh.
Victor sat beside her on the bed. “You are very beautiful. It’s the truth.” He held her hand, stroking her forearm. He felt the ridged scar on her wrist.
“Don’t look,” she said. “It’s ugly.”
He held his hand over the old wound as if he could soothe it. He traced the jagged scar with his thumb.
“It was handcuffs. They were so proud of these handcuffs. Like children with a new toy.”
He remembered the blood coursing down her body, the scarlet pool on the floor.
She stood up. “Ignacio, would you close your eyes, please? I’m going to get undressed. I don’t want you to see me.”
Victor turned over on his side and faced the wall. He took slow, deep breaths, trying to calm himself. She thinks she loves me, he thought. Lorca thinks she loves me, because she believes I suffered. That would be in her character. After all, it had been the suffering of another, and not her own, that had finally broken her at the little school. He pressed up against the wall so she could slip under the covers.
“Does it have to be so bright in here?” she asked. She had pulled the covers up, almost completely hiding her face.
Victor switched off the light and got undressed. Street light poured through the window, bathing the room in a cool metallic glow. Lorca turned on her side, facing the wall, when he got under the covers. He put a hand on her shoulder, feeling the small muscles tense.
After a time he exerted a gentle pressure, pulling on her shoulder. “Lie back.” The command was gently expressed, but it was still a command, and it seemed to hang in the room like a garish sign.
Lorca hesitated, then lay back against the pillow, clutching the covers up to her chin.
“Let go.” His voice was nearly a whisper. He stroked her forehead with one hand as he spoke. “I want to see your body, Lorca. I want to see your beautiful body.”
Lorca was rigid, shaking.
“Please,” he said softly. He lay a hand over the bony fingers. A pale circular mark glistened where the electrode had burned her. He touched the mark lightly with a fingertip and felt Lorca stiffen beneath him. He pressed his lips lightly to her fingers.
He tugged gently at the covers.
“Ignacio. I am so ugly.”
Wordlessly, he stroked her fingers until her grip on the covers relaxed. He pulled the cover slowly away, revealing her breasts and the livid marks where the electrodes had been attached. “Oh, Lorca,” he said softly. “I am so sorry.” He bent forward and pressed his lips to a semicircular mark. “So sorry.”
Lorca groaned like a patient coming out of anaesthetic.
Victor laid his head on her chest and stroked her belly. Her skin smelt of soap, warm fabric, and faintly of laundry detergent. Desire flowed into him, but the hard white circles on her stomach, ridged like lunar craters, checked it. He remembered her screaming, begging them to stop. He remembered the white numerals on the dial.
“I am so sorry,” he said again, lightly touching a mark near the ridge of her hip bone. Her flesh shuddered under his hand.
“There’s no reason for you to be sorry,” she said. “You didn’t do anything.”
“I wish that I could take back the pain. I wish I could take it back into my hands. My lips.” He began kissing each white mark, moving down her ribs. The current of desire flowed into him, stronger this time.
“No, please.” Lorca took his head in both her hands and held him back. “Please, Ignacio. I cannot.”
He lay still.
“I am sorry,” she said. “I was wrong to come here. To expect—”
“Shh. It’s okay. We don’t have to.”
“Everything is so ugly to me now. They did things to me, Ignacio. They
put
things in me.”
She turned away from him again, and Victor stroked her shoulders and gently rubbed her upper back. His hands made wide, inexpert circles over her scapular bones. She gave a little moan of relief, and he was encouraged to continue. This was what the human body was designed for, he thought, to bring comfort to another human body. A stroke here, a caress there—it was so easy for the human hand to give pleasure, so effortless and natural. It began to seem possible that he could make up for what he had done to her. If he gave her physical pleasure every time he saw her, over a period of months, say, or even years, might he not make up for the pain he had caused her? He squeezed the narrow cords of Lorca’s shoulder muscles, rubbing with his thumbs. Suddenly she gave out a loud, strangled cry.
“I’m sorry. Did I hurt you?”
The bony shoulders gave a heave beneath his hands, and there was another loud cry. Then a violent quivering, and she pressed her face into his pillow as the flood of tears, so long suppressed, broke free. Her knees drew up as if in convulsion, and she cried as hard as an infant, in huge coughs and bottomless gasps. It was an orgasm far more powerful than the kind he had anticipated, and it went on for so long that it began even to frighten him.
The tears stopped for a moment.
Victor’s hand had been resting on her shoulder the whole time. He moved it slightly, giving her bicep the gentlest squeeze. “Are you all right?”
This unleashed another spasm of crying, then a respite, then a last brief aftershock, and Lorca lay exhausted on her back as if she were a castaway, thrown up onto this bed after weeks at sea.
Victor put his clothes on and made tea. There was no Kleenex, so he went down the hall and came back with a roll of toilet paper, which he handed to Lorca. The tears, he could see, had done her good. The hard set of her features had softened, and there was more colour in her cheeks than he had ever seen.
He waited until she had taken a few sips of tea before speaking. “You must have needed to do that,” he said. “Feel better?”
She nodded. When finally she spoke, it was about something totally unrelated. “The other day ….” she began. She stopped as if she had forgotten what she was going to say.
“Yes? The other day?”
“The other day. At the church. When you spoke—when you told us what happened to you—it really affected me, Ignacio.”
“I’m sorry. I should not have gone on the way I did. It was very childish of me. That woman upset me with her accusations.”
“Yes, of course she did. Of course. But it hit me hard. It hit me very hard, to hear what they did to you in that place. Even for me—it was hard to believe that anyone could hurt a man as gentle and kind as you. That they could beat you, and do those things to you.”
“No, no,” he said hopelessly. “It wasn’t so bad for me. I was just upset. I was nervous. That woman—”
“It made me so angry—I cannot tell you how angry it made me. I am going to testify, Ignacio. I am going to Washington and I am going to testify at those hearings.”
“Do you think that’s smart? How can you be sure it is safe?”
“Maybe it is not safe. But I cannot live like a rabbit, shaking in fear my whole life.” She turned on her side and smiled at him, flashing the broken tooth. “You see? Seeing you, Ignacio—seeing how brave you are, how cheerful in spite of the pain you have suffered—this has taught me not to be afraid.”
“No, Lorca. You are wrong about me.”
“I am not. Now, will you turn around so I can get dressed?”
It was nearly three o’clock in the morning, but he could not persuade her to stay. She wanted to take the subway home, but he would not hear of it, and pressed a twenty-dollar bill into her hand. He waited with her in the cold, damp wind that blew up Broadway until they managed to flag a cab.
“Please think more about these hearings,” he said, holding the door for her. “You are safe now. I want you to stay safe.”
She smiled up at him, and then he was watching the tail lights of the taxi merge into the other lights of Broadway.
Later, he sat for a long time on the edge of his bed, clutching the pillow Lorca had soaked with her tears. She was not a woman to be talked out of anything; it was pointless to try. “It’s the only way I have left to fight those people,” she had said. “I am going to Washington. I am going to the hearings. And there I will tell them all about our little school.”