I found myself wondering how Avendaño had come by the photographs of the prints of A Little Night Work, since he’d been arrested by the Vidalistas on that night so long ago.
One thing leads to another. By resuming A Little Night Work, I was led back to Below, Behind, Beneath, Between, Avendaño’s strange testament. I needed to understand how the two manuscripts were related to each other, and to the man who had introduced them to me. And he had not called when he said he would. A pressure was building inside me, and I could not express it properly without knowing the full story.
I began to read once more.
Avendaño 2
Take down my name, write it with obsidian ink
Like the black waves upon stone shores of Magera
Where the sea meets the land
And the sky teems with terns and gulls
Gliding upon the currents of air.
No man stands tall in such a prison,
And his weakness is on display
For any creature that passes by.
—Guillermo Benedición, Nuestra Guerra Celestial
There are poets who think they are angels, that their words are sent from some divine power greater than themselves. Other poets feel they’re daemons, giving voice to the molten words of the subconscious, spewing the hot stuff of psyche out into the world. As I passed in and out of consciousness, my face swelling, the words of both angels and daemons came to me—Camila Araya, Guillermo Benedicón, Yesenia Pinilla, and, above all, our great father Neruda—whispering to me as I lay in the twilight between lucidity and oblivion. Warm socks, the appearance of the hordes, fixed ideas that make me read with obscene attention to a few psychologists, Our heavenly war, I do not love you, I love the jealousy I have for you, the breaking clouds, the breaking sky. A thousand voices caromed in my head. From such a remove, I can see now it was just the tugging of the flesh, trying to find something to grasp onto to protect itself, the quivers of an organism in distress sorting through experience and conditioning. My life up until then was just a fabric of verse and poems.
Now my life was no longer mine.
The soldiers stripped me to my underwear, bound my hands and feet with duct tape, and placed me on hard wooden planks in the back of a truck. I knew there was unrest in Magera, and a great hatred of Pávez by the rich, elite men who had made their fortunes on the backs of the poor. And our distant northern neighbor, that looming storm front—Estado Unidos, the American vastness—hated socialist and Marxist movements. They had killed Guevara. It might have been Bolivian carabineros, but certainly shadowmen stood by them and their rifles were made of metal cast in America. At that time, I was apolitical, concerned solely with the ways of the flesh and the soul. Yet I was not an ostrich; I was aware of some of the hidden currents of unrest in Magera, thanks to Alejandra. And so, as I rattled in the back of the truck for hours, those periods where I was awake, I was filled with great foreboding and disturbing thoughts, not just for myself, not just for Alejandra, but for my country.
The soldiers smoked American cigarettes and spoke in hushed voices over me. The smell of their smoldering tobacco came as a burnt offering, ash and cinder, falling lightly on me as if I were a bound sacrificial lamb. The stink of the cigarettes—Pall Malls, or Winstons, or Marlboros, shipped south out of Texas on some cursed diesel container-barge to brave the Gulf and then the Atlantic down the coast to Argentina, off-loaded by sun-drenched stevedores in Buenos Aires beneath wheeling seagulls shrieking at the sky and loathsome shore; crates of cartons loaded unceremoniously on truck beds by calloused hands and then driven west over mountains to finally bring their cancerous stench here, to me, in the hands of soldiers; a gift maybe, from an American governmental operative; a bribe, a lagniappe for doing business with the anti-Marxist blond-haired, blue-eyed giant looming so far north, its breath stinking and foul—the smell settled upon me, lying raw and delirious, as the truck rattled north and west, away from the shore. After some interminable time where I floated, insensate, suspended within the cloud of pain, we came to a stop. I was awake then and aching. Of all the pains my body endured, my head was the worst, but the skin of my legs, arms, and chest were bloody and abraded by the planks. Worse, the outrage to my pride and security. What had become of Alejandra? My nostrils were full of caked blood and the salt-sweat smell of men and stale cigarettes. The soldiers made crude jokes about my belly, poking me with the bores of their rifles. The skin on my face, especially near my eye, felt as sausages cooking over a fire, full of juice and ready to spit. They removed me from the truck without binding my face or covering my eyes, and this terrified me—they did not care if I knew where I was. For an instant, I had fresh air filling my nose, the scent of foliage and plant life blooming, sunlight streaming—I caught sight of a building, its roof and courtyard wall, beyond that a tree, even farther than that a sliver of sky and mountain. Magera. Guillermo Benedición called my beloved country a long petal of sea, wine, and snow. I knew the sky. I knew the snow-peaked mountains. If I wasn’t in Santaverde, I was very close. Even if I had been blindfolded, I would have known. I could smell the brown shallow water of the Mapache River, running to the thick Palas, itself running to the sea.
I am a Mageran and I did not require sight to know I was home. And the carabineros did not care if I knew. What terrible things had occurred since I had left?
They took me into the building. It was full of the silence that comes from the cessation of loud, painful noise. A hush. Two soldiers hefted me by the armpits and my bare feet, still bound, dragged behind. It was cold here; thick stone walls provided some insulation, but not enough. They carried me through an eerily quiet room full of people, all nude, who stared at me with hollow eyes. Carabineros watched them silently, their weapons unwavering. The abruptness of soldier’s laughter echoed loudly down the stone halls.
The soldiers placed me in what appeared to have been an office, except that where there once was a window, it had been mortared with brick. A metal chair with a plastic seat sat near an administrator’s desk. A single caged lightbulb on the ceiling cast distorted squares of yellow light. The space smelled of urine and fear, though had I been asked then to define the latter, I would not have been able to answer. And afterward . . .
Well, we all would be able to.
I cannot say how long they left me there. I sat in the uncomfortable metal-and-plastic chair. I paced. I pressed my swollen eye to the stone walls, cooling it. I needed to void my bowels and bladder, and was desperately eyeing the corner, when keys clanked in the door and a man entered the office, a carabinero hefting a rifle. He scanned the room and gestured with the bore of his weapon that I was to sit in the chair. I did. Once I was seated, another man entered the office, head down, peering at a clipboard. He read the cover sheet without looking up. He shuffled to the second page and then glanced over his spectacles at me, like an aged professor—except this man wore a Mageran army uniform, not heavily decorated, but with the rank of lieutenant colonel. A stocky man, with a heavy black mustache and deep-set, sleepless eyes. The nameplate on his breast read “Sepúlveda.”
I thought of lunging at the carabinero, gouging his eyes, wresting his gun from him. But I was not young, even then, and near naked. I felt very small.
“Rafael Avendaño?” he said.
“Where is Alejandra?” I managed to say.
Sepúlveda glanced at the soldier. He approached, lifted his rifle, reversed it, and struck me in my already-wounded eye with the weapon’s stock. Such a casual movement. The pain blossomed, so outrageous, the sensation of the blow expanded to suffuse my whole body. It was as if my toe and my palm and my calf and forearm; every pore, every tooth, every hair; my bones and sinew; every bit of me felt the outrage done to my eye, simultaneously. Pain was the sum of my body. I could no longer think of my body in parts. All was one. The air vibrated, electric. I felt all my blood being pushed through the maze of my body’s corridors and passageways, pulsing. And then I felt nothing. I picked myself off the
floor and retook my seat in the chair. It was no longer uncomfortable. A dislocation came with the blow.
“Rafael Avendaño?” he said.
It was easier to speak than to nod. “Yes.”
He made a small mark on his clipboard. “Welcome home,” he said.
“What—” I said. Sepúlveda raised his eyebrows quizzically in response. “What is going on?”
“Ah, yes,” he said. “I imagine you would have some questions. There has been some unrest throughout Magera. The resistance has been very active in recent days.” He removed his spectacles and cleaned the lenses with a white handkerchief. “I’m afraid they managed to kill President Pávez.”
Despite the pain, my first inclination was to laugh at the absurdity of his statement. Pávez was a socialist! Most regarded him as an ally and Pávez’s nephew was an early firebrand in the socialist movement. It was ridiculous.
Yet I kept my expression still and did not laugh or exclaim.
Sepúlveda returned his glasses to his face. “Currently, our generals have reestablished order.”
“Who is in charge?” I asked.
“It is a commission of equals, of course. But General Vidal is the eldest,” Sepúlveda said.
“A junta, then,” I said.
Sepúlveda frowned. “I was hoping that as our guest—a laureled and renowned poet!—you would offer more substantive commentary.” He sighed. “Let us earn a crust, then.” He flipped a page on his clipboard. “Alejandra Llamos has a sister, does she not?”
Alejandra’s sister? Why would they want—
“Answer the question, please,” Sepúlveda said. The soldier stepped closer to me.
“Yes,” I said. “Ofelia.” It is so easy to fall when one is hurt, afraid, and naked. These are things I tell myself now, rather than “Where is she now?” as Sepúlveda asked then.
“I have no idea,” I said.
“Yet she visited you in Santo Isodoro,” he said.
“She visited Alejandra,” I said. “And I am sleeping with Alejandra. Where is she?” I said before I could stop myself. The soldier raised his rifle to strike me again, but Sepúlveda shook his head imperceptibly, stilling the other man. “You will be reunited in time,” he said. “If you are cooperative.”
“I am a son of Magera,” I said. “You cannot hold me.”
“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 book on the chair and pushed it over. I flailed backward and ended 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 is 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 as if a physical blow. I winced and closed my eyes.
The Sea Dreams It Is the Sky Page 5