“You’ll find we can do whatever we want to sons and daughters of Magera, if they are enemies of the state,” he said. “Or their allies.” He made a half gesture with his pen and peeked his head out the door. “Marcos, Jorge, be so kind as to give this prisoner some asado. But not too spicy, understand? He has information,” Sepúlveda said.
“I don’t—” I began, but the soldier placed his boot on the chair and pushed it over. I flailed backward and ended up on the ground. My vision went white—another dislocation—and I smelled molasses, orange zest, and freshly slaughtered rabbit. My mind made strange connections. When I regained my vision, two more soldiers accompanied the first and they bound my hands and lifted me up.
“La parilla,” the first soldier said to the others. The grill. They took me down stairs, through corridors. I was near insensible from fatigue, from pain. They brought me into a windowless stone room with a bare metal bed frame. The space stank of feces and urine, stale cigarette burns, human sweat—and something worse. My eye and face felt as though a dull knife had worked its way into my ocular cavity.
They moved me to the bed, cut away my underwear, and strapped me down. They prodded my genitals with their guns; they extinguished their cigarettes on them as well. They attached jumper cables to car batteries and the other clamps to me in places. Sepúlveda asked, “Where is Ofelia Llamos?” and “What do you know about the whereabouts of MIR?” but the questioning seemed perfunctory and the lieutenant colonel did not seem to care what I answered. I told him everything I knew, which was nothing. I told him things I did not know, where I thought the MIR guerillas might be located. Sepúlveda assiduously wrote down everything I said. And then instructed them to hurt me more. To insert things into my anus, my penis. To make me less than meat. But this part is not my testament. Now, as I write this, this isn’t what I want to tell. All I can say of my experience on “the grill” was that inside me something stretched and broke and my mind dissociated itself from my body, as if time itself fractured. I was infinitesimal in the face of the pain, and so I became less than human. In this I matched my torturers.
It went on and on. Over hours. Over eons. I became aware of something more. Something there, hanging in the air. A haze, dark and pulsing, like storm clouds over the sea, clouds piling up on the peaks of the Andes. A hallucinatory presence, filtering through the room. And for an instant, I felt like it saw me, recognized me.
But it did nothing to help me.
In the end, they were disappointed. Sepúlveda had them douse me with water—I had soiled myself, more than once—and they carried me back to my earlier cell and dumped me on the floor. It was a long time before I could move. But the body wants to live, even if the mind has given itself over to despair and has vacated its integuments. A crust of bread, an apple core, and a paper milk carton half-full of water sat on a flea-bit woolen blanket. All could have been scavenged from a Santaverde alleyway trash bin. But I ate the bread and drank the water that tasted like sour milk and devoured the apple core to the pips. I wrapped myself in the blanket—a large section of it was sticky, and it stank of dead things I do not like to think about even now—but it provided me with enough warmth that I soon slept.
When I was awoken, Sepúlveda had returned with different soldiers. He asked me two questions. “What are the whereabouts of Ofelia Llamos?” and “What do you know of the location of the resistance guerillas?” with that same disinterested expression on his face. He ignored my protestations of innocence.
“His eye looks very bad, does it not?” Sepúlveda said to his soldiers. They murmured assent. “And the rest of him is not much better.” The cigarette burns on my chest, legs, and genitals had suppurated and were now leaking. “Get him some clothes,” Sepúlveda said. “If only so I don’t have to look on his nakedness.” A soldier left and returned with some semi-clean linen pants and a woolen tunic. My body did not move easily—it was a shamble of pains and seized like a car driven hard with no oil—but I managed to dress myself as Sepúlveda and his men watched me, implacable.
“Today, Rafael Avendaño,” Sepúlveda said, “you bear witness.”
They led me through the building, to a different room than before, but just as desperate and dreary. It began with a young man, a student, who they placed in an oil drum that was set upon a metal grate. Somewhere below chittered the avaricious voices of rats. Dripping water. The man thrashed and fought, but in the end he slipped in the barrel like a snake into a drainage pipe. Black water sloshed over the rim and the man vomited. One of the soldiers tugged on rubber gloves and forced the man’s head beneath the evil liquid. From the smell, I realized it was full of human waste. I retched.
And then the questioning began.
They used his name, and had I been of a better mind, or if that part of me that will never die was stronger, I would have remembered him. I would have etched his name into my memory. But I am a coward. I have forgotten it and everything about him except for his pain.
He was just the first. Another man they took to the grill; a woman, they hung like beef in a restaurant walk-in cooler. Another woman they . . .
No, I cannot think of it. I cannot think of them.
I am not strong enough.
They tortured me again, and again, but in the times between, they made me watch.
I do not know what they did to Alejandra, or if I do know, it is not accessible to me now, in the halls of my memory.
I have locked those doors.
When you are sunless and less than human, time changes—it expands, it contracts. It passes and you understand its passage, but with only an animal understanding, the tug of the moon on the sea of body, the fall of temperature indicating night. You exist outside of time, in near-time. A stilled fermata. The moment when the wave crashes, but frozen. The point the sparrow falls, floating. All moments now singular. Collapsed upon each other. And pain is the door to near-time.
I was delirious, aphasic. Soldiers collected me from my cell, led me to horrors, or led me to moments of pain. It became unclear to me which I found worse. They stopped asking me questions, I think. Or maybe I stopped being able to understand them.
And then he came.
• • •
I do not know how long he was speaking before his words filtered into my consciousness. I was on the floor, wrapped in the tattered, stinking blanket, while he sat in a chair, at the desk. The swelling in my eye had become an overwhelming pressure. Something was wrong, and I only needed my hands and fingertips to comprehend that, without a doctor, I might not live to see again.
I might not.
There were papers in front of him, and he held a single sheet in his hand. The caged bulb burned brightly above, but this man held the paper so that its shadow fell across my face. As I looked up at him, the sheet became a luminous thing, glowing, with the faint intimation of the words inked on the other side. Somehow, I knew they were words I had written.
“‘. . . from their spear tips to sword hafts, from their ill intentions to their cruel thoughts a rich smell rises. Blood calls to blood, bad calls to bad, and through pain and sacrifice, we draw the gaze of hidden eyes of titanic movements beyond the stars. It is a lure, a sweet aroma, the killing and the letting of blood. The pain becomes an offering and sacrifice becomes a beacon.’”
He paused, moving the paper, allowing the light to fall upon my face. A fractal expansion of pain, intricate and myriad. It felt like a physical blow. I winced and closed my eyes.
“Are you with me now, Señor Avendaño?” the man said. His voice was deep, rich. The voice of a man that might be able to sing, if he wished. Become part of a choir. “Please, join me. I have water here for you, and some wine, if you will take it. Aspirin. Food.”
Even if he was lying, I was at least going to see to what extent this man was a liar. And something was wrong with him, sideways.
American.
I do not know if it was because of my deep thrall to the collapsed-time of torture, but he terrifi
ed me. I feared Sepúlveda. But in this man, I could feel my end. I could feel all ends. I could not tell if it was his accent, or the lack of it. He spoke Spanish in a cultured, easy voice. His resonant tones and perfect pronunciation seemed out of sync with the visual information I could glean from him—each was separate from the other—possibly an effect of the torture, perhaps my ears along with my eye had been injured. I was becoming a haphazard collection of sensorial injuries. His voice seemed to be everywhere, behind me, below. Coming from beyond. I could not apprehend it, and for me—where language was everything—that was frightening.
I did not know if I still existed in collapsed-time, but everything moved slow. Pushing myself up, I felt as if I forded the Mapacho, made sluggish by rushing water tearing at me, wanting to drag me to the sea. To the wide salt desert, sky full of sharks.
There was another chair in the cell now, I assumed set in place by Sepúlveda’s men. But Sepúlveda and his cohorts were nowhere to be seen.
“Sit,” he said. And gestured to the chair. I sat.
My one eye fixed on him. He appeared to be a handsome man, dressed in a very nice blue suit, immaculate white shirt, and blood-orange tie. A pressed handkerchief peeked from the jacket’s pocket, a bit of elegant sartorial geometry. His face was bland, if somewhat angular. He wore spectacles a size too small for his face. His hair was dark, and oiled away from his brow. He was clean-shaven, but the bluish tint to his jaw made me think he might have a heavy beard if he allowed it to grow. When he reached into his jacket pocket to retrieve cigarettes, polished onyx cuff links glinted at his wrists.
“My name is—” he said, lighting a cigarette and then passing it over to me. I took the burning thing in my hand, wondering what it was for a moment. He reached over and drew a tray holding a plate, a carafe of wine, and a small pitcher of water between us. “Wilson Cleave. I am an emissary.”
I looked around me. The room was empty except for myself and this man. I considered standing, going for his throat. Slamming the pitcher against his head, cutting his throat with the shattered glass. Knocking him down and stomping all upon his head and neck until he was dead. I considered if I could even do any of those things.
I thought I might be able to, now.
He leaned back in his chair and watched me as my gaze wandered, my mind conjured phantoms of violence.
“You are understandably disturbed,” he said. He poured some water into a glass. “Start with this.”
I was loath to accept anything from him, but I did anyway. I drank. I took food into my mouth and discovered I had far fewer teeth to chew it with. One was shattered, and my tongue worried at the fragments protruding from my outraged gum line. I drank wine and tried to ignore the pain. Cleave watched implacably.
When I was finished, he offered me another cigarette and this one I smoked, unspeaking. We sat that way for what seemed a long time, but, as I have said, time expands and contracts in places and circumstances like this.
“You will hate yourself now,” Cleave said.
“Who are you and what do you want?” I managed, my throat still raw. Either from screaming or lack of water, I did not know. Large portions of my mind had been scoured clean.
Cleave shrugged. “My role is one of liaison.”
“You said ‘emissary,’” I said. “For the American government?”
He gave a small inclination of his head, as if we played a guessing game and he wanted to indicate a partial correctness. When I was a child, my cousins and I would hide items from each other, and then run around my parents’ house, yelling “Caliente!” when a child got near the object and “Frio!” if they moved away from it. A toy gun, a spinning top, a bit of candy, a magazine. Finding it, we would squeal with laughter.
Cleave’s head tilt was caliente.
“The army?” I asked.
He pursed his lips and gave an imperceptible shake of his head.
“Central Intelligence Agency,” I said in English, thinking of the American branch of government that James Bond’s American counterpart—Felix something?—worked for. “CIA,” I said.
Cleave smiled. He sat forward, placing the papers he’d been reading aloud when I awoke between us.
“Whatever acronym accompanies my role doesn’t matter.” He settled himself. A strange movement, like squaring one’s shoulders. The light overhead winked out and then came back on. A power surge. The electrical grid in Santaverde at that time was unreliable, though I wasn’t sure until later that it was Santaverde. A strange expression crossed Cleave’s face. “Think of me as an envoy from the exterior brigade, if that helps,” he said.
“The exterior brigade? What is that?”
“You should know, Señor Avendaño. You’ve been desperately signaling us for quite some time.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said.
He tapped the paper. “What can you tell me about this? Your A Little Night Work?”
Here was a man versed in misdirection. My attention was suddenly on the papers in front of me. Typed sheets. Familiar to my eye, my hand. I picked one up. He lifted his briefcase from where it sat beside him on the floor and placed it on the desk. He popped the latches. The sound pinged and echoed brightly off the stone walls.
He lightly tossed the sheaf of photos on the desk. Ángel Ilabaca’s photos from Santo Isodoro, and the house Alejandra and I rented there. He’d taken the effort to remove the salacious photographs, leaving only the prints of Opusculus Noctis, but it was no longer clear which were the more troublesome.
“This, Señor Avendaño. Your great work.”
“It’s nonsense. Old, vile nonsense. Expressions of the id before the world knew what to call it,” I said. Old, vile nonsense. As I said it, I realized how much of my life, my career—my poetry—was old, vile nonsense.
“Is that so?” Cleave said. He stood. “I did not know you had such a keen interest in psychological fads.” He pursed his lips once more. He looked down at his manicured hands, which he held out, fanned, nails facing him. He picked at a cuticle. Shifting his attention, he picked a piece of lint from his suit. It was a very nice suit. There was a time I would have asked him about it. “Finish your translation and you’ll not have to bear witness to torture anymore. Not in eye, not in body.”
He walked to the door, knocked on it. A soldier opened it and Cleave gestured to the man. He brought in a single pencil sitting atop two legal pads. “When the pencil needs sharpening, slip it under the door and it will be replaced. With every photograph translated, you’ll be rewarded, as long as you’re good. Food. Wine. Vodka, if you wish. Even a girl, if you so desire.”
“Alejandra,” I said.
“Alejandra?” Cleave said. He laughed. It was absolutely mirthless, the sound. For a moment, Cleave seemed a marionette whose puppeteer was very far away and a poor emulator of human emotion. “I’m afraid we cannot do the impossible. Do you not remember?”
“Remember?” I said.
He tsked and shook his head. “We have been unkind.” He buttoned his jacket and smoothed its front, hand touching each button lightly. A man taking inventory, checking his appearance for performance’s sake. He moved his arms in such a manner that his white cuffs shot out. “Alejandra is gone. But surely another woman would suffice. No?” He waited just a moment while I stared at my hands, trying to remember. “Translate, Señor Avendaño. And you will be fed. Maybe we will even find a doctor to tend to your face. You are quite a mess, after all.”
“My glasses, I can’t—”
He snapped his fingers. He said a few words to the soldier, who disappeared and then returned. He had a tin bucket—a makeshift latrine, it seemed—and a magnifying glass. He placed the glass on the table and the bucket in the corner. “You might break the glass and consider using that to attack a guard. Or me. You are, of course, welcome to try. It would be a fruitless endeavor.” He put his hands in his pockets. The gesture was such a casual insolence, it almost passed unnoticed. He could assume a fa
miliarity with this prisoner, because he did not fear me. He did not pity me. We simply occupied the same instant of collapsed-time.
He stood there, framed in the door. Behind him, darkness. I thought I saw figures moving in the gloom. But I was tired and very weak, and lacking use of an eye. The mind conjures phantoms when the senses fail. Yet . . . these strange figures, wet and glistening. Myopia conjured the illusion of distance beyond, a mountain wreathed in smoke, obscured by streamers of effluvium. It moved, massive and intricate and cold.
I rubbed my face as best I could without aggravating my swollen eye and picked up the magnifying glass.
“If you use it on yourself, Señor Avendaño,” Cleave said, “try to bleed on the paper. Much more effective that way.”
He stepped back, into the darkness, and shut the door. A moment later I heard the bolt being slid home.
• • •
Collapsed-time expanded. The pulsating haze of pain and terror receded some. My heart was not always blood-spiked and panicked. It seems the human body cannot maintain a level of fear indefinitely. Becoming familiar with terror, the flesh and mind breeds if not contempt then a weary, wrung-out simulacrum of it.
I spent the rest of that waking time with the photographs, finding where I’d stopped my translation of A Little Night Work. Un pequeño trabajo nocturno. I could not discern if it was day or night, still. I had no recollection of how long I had been there, in the confines of the building. I could not recall once going to sleep—only ever waking, fevered and disoriented.
The photographs were life, then. A tether to the world I once knew. I smelled the prints, bringing them to my nose to inhale their scent. Alejandra had held these once. Her molecules were here, an infinitesimal piece of her. Her perfumed breath—exhaled water vapor as she laughed—had condensed in the air and settled on the glossy surface, maybe. We’d had sex in the office one afternoon, on the rug in the shadow of the bookcase, and the photos were nearby. The window was open and my breathing and her coos mixed with the cries of seagulls over the surf. The essence of her steamed off, like smoke, to fall as microscopic rain in her vicinity.
A Lush and Seething Hell Page 6