“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 of a liar this man was. 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 terrified 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 resonate 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 Mapache, 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 that 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 any more. 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 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 familiarity 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 held these once. Her molecules were here, an infinitesimal piece of her. Her perfumed breath—exhaled water vapor as she laughed—condensed in the air and settled on the glossy surface, maybe. We 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.
I inhaled . . . but could perceive nothing of her. Cleave had asked me “Do you not remember?” and I hated him for that. More than the burns, the shocks, the torture they put my body through, that question was worse.
It pained me even when Cleave was absent.
• • •
Sobre el excremento y sus usos. On Excrement and Its Uses . . .
One-eyed, peering through a monocled glass, hunched over photographs.
La madre venenosa se convierte en regente. The Poisonous Mother Assumes Power.
I finished translating a photo, tore the handwritten sheets from the legal pad, and slipped the paper under the door. Minutes later, the bolt rattled and slid back with a wooden thwock, and two soldiers entered and placed on the desk a tray bearing two boiled eggs and a bottle of wine. I drank the wine, stuffed the eggs in my mouth, and stumbled around my cell, screaming at the walls until I could stand no more.
Los Grados Variantes de Sacrificio. The Varying Degrees of Sacrifice . . .
Apprehension of the divine through subtraction. I begged walls for cigarettes, for more wine, but neither Cleave, nor Sepúlveda, nor the soldiers answered. I sat at the desk, poring over a particularly hideous Latin passage. On my bloody knees, I placed my mouth at the gap at the bottom of the door and whispered hoarse pleas for a Latin to Spanish dictionary. It did not open.
Racking my withered brain for declensions, definitions of words, I managed to get through the photograph. In this picture, there was a shadow, half falling upon the cramped page of the Opusculus Noctis, and I assumed it was that of the photographer. I found myself at odd times wondering what he might have been wearing. What he had in his pockets. Bali cigarettes? A flask full of Glenlivet? A wallet with American dollars? Or Belgian francs? Were there pictures in the wallet? He was a photographer, after all. Was there an aproned, smiling wife, beaming from a stamp-size picture? An apple-cheeked, fat and roly-poly child? Or did he know what it was he photographed?
A hand was more than a finger. An arm, greater than a hand. A testicle was less than the phallus itself but greater than an ear. Both testes would yield much power. Lips, nose—the concentration of senses—those were weighty. An eye was close to titanic. A heart or head or full sex—berry, twig, root and stem—trumped them all. But that was just if you had no . . . subjects. Pretium. The author was very sad at this recipe. How to make bread when you have no flour—cut off a finger. When I was finished, I didn’t bother recopying the verses, cleaning up the marked-out failed starts, or multiple guesses at words I wasn’t certain about. I ripped the pages from the pad and stuffed them under the door and waited.
This time, a carafe of water and a small bottle of vodka. A pack of American Pall Mall cigarettes and five strike-anywhere matches. A tin of sardines. A sleeve of crackers. A withered orange. Paper napkins. A Latin to Spanish dictionary. I consumed all of the food quickly, and began a furious session of chain-smoking and sipping the vodka.
La voz de los muertos. The Voice of the Dead . . .
The dead lie inert, like rocks, waiting to be picked up. Whatever passage they might have after life takes a long time and they can answer questions with the right pretium. The speaking with the dead, all in all, is a bargain, really. A finger, a toe. A pint of blood. The right phrase said with the correct intention. Though there’s a footnote—a sentence boxed in blood—that intention outweighs iteration and recitation.
Before I finished, the door opened, and soldiers entered; Sepúlveda, and another man, one I’d never seen before. He had a black leather bag. The soldiers took my arms, held me to the floor. The placid man, the new man, he withdrew a long needle and filled it from a phial and injected it into my arm. You would think that with all I’d been through, I wouldn’t wince. They forced open my mouth, shoved in acrid tasting pills, and held my mouth shut until I had to swallow. As I struggled against the soldiers, the doctor probed my eye with cold fingers.
“Puede que nunca vuelva a ver fuera de él, pero no lo perderá,” he said. He might not ever be able to see out of it again, but he won’t lose it. “Sin sangrado en el cerebro.”
He patted my head as if I were a good dog, or an obedient and genial child. The soldiers allowed me to rise. I had run out of matches, but had cigarettes left. They ignored my begging for fire; Olympians denying humanity before Prometheus stole the flame.
La dulce bruma del dolor. The Sweet Miasma of Pain . . .
We are bits of meat in a watery broth. Sweet-tallow candles waiting to be lit. Pleasure makes us numb, stupid, inert. Pain sparks our wicks. The light and scent of pain—the greater the better—draws the attention of the mighty. The prodigious. The vast and numberless. And that frisson, between the pain, the effluent release of it, and the intention of the deliverers and emissaries, brings forth the miasma.
I shit in the bucket, used the paper napkins to clean myself. The stink of it made me gag, retch. I wondered, amazed, at how unused I was to discomfort, despite my situation. The tooth they shattered on la parilla, it caused my whole body to writhe and shudder with pain. Cleave’s doctor missed that, or more likely, didn’t care. Like a deranged homeless man, desposeído, I shouted at the walls for a dentist, a masseuse, a podiatrist. Laughing, I begged for my ophthalmologist.
They did not come.
Las manos de los fantasmas. The Hands of the Fallen . . .
They did not come.
El señuelo de la inocencia. The Lure of Innocence . . .
At the door, nothing but silence.
Sobre el poder del incesto. The Power of Incest . . .
I stopped translating. Wadded up the photos and tossed them aside. I bellowed my refusal to translate any more. Curling into a ball, I nested under the desk, aware of my cowardice—I did not tear the photographs into tiny pieces. I sobbed until unconsciousness took me. When I returned, absolute darkness. Careening questions rattled in what was left of my brain. Was I asleep? Had time utterly collapsed? When I could reason once more, I stood, and blackness hung all around. I touched my face, to see if my other eye was swollen shut as well, but found my injured eye had improved, the swelling had subsided and I could make out the ridges and contours of my ocular cavity. I took a step, barking my toe on something.
In the dark, there is no time, just one moment, stalled out, breathless, that goes on forever. I counted the rising and falling of my chest until I reached a thousand. I held my breath, in hopes of hearing a footfall in the outer passage. A scream from some poor soul on the “grill.” Something to let me know I was still alive, and on the earth.
Nothing.
I don’t know how long I was like that. Five minutes. A month? All was dislocated. I tested the limits of the room blindly. I felt corners, the door. I gathered crumpled photos from the floor. I returned to the desk.
Sitting down, my hands found the legal pad, the pencil, and a photograph. I said into the empty darkness, “I will return to work now.”
The light flicked back on.
Un pasaje a los sueños. A Passage to Dreams . . .
Other places than these, shining with light from other suns. Flesh-filled worlds are a palace, a villa with many chambers, and with the right pretium, the most valuable pretium, one can extend oneself into the far halls and galleries by giving part of oneself up. An act of self-negation, closing oneself away from the living world purposely. Sacrifice of the seat of a sense.
The Sea Dreams It Is the Sky Page 6