by John Gibler
And so it begins. You invent meetings that you had scheduled where some of your compañeros—assuming they had not heard of your disappearance—might show up. Neither the meetings nor the people exist. They plan their operations, gathering their guns, spreading out in the streets, stationed in their different cars. They wait. And you sit inside the truck with a gun to your head, but with your eyes making contact with the light and without electricity coursing through your body. On the one hand you half wait, you hold on to a fantasy that someone passing by randomly on the street could recognize you through the tinted windows and tell your compañeros who could then denounce your being held incommunicado and use the media to put pressure on the government to publicly account for you. A fantasy. But on the other hand, it refreshes you to see them invest their resources and move all over the city pursuing ghosts you create for them while at the same time diminishing the pain a little. Such are your small victories. Even though you return, always without prisoners, and they take out their frustration on your body, your being. And like the water drops falling on the bound prisoner’s face: the questions, the quantity of things they repeat. That they could say to you a hundred times, for example, “Tell me your name.” And it’s not a matter of hours, but days, and weeks, and months.
Until one day, some two months after your capture, they come in triumphant to the room where you are handcuffed, tied, and blindfolded.
“At last, asshole: now you’re really fucked.”
You think: What do you mean “now,” it has been quite a while . . .
“Your lies are over, asshole. You’re done. Because now . . . now we know who you are. And we have something here that will interest you.” He pauses and then continues: “We’ve got your wife and also your kids.”
The impact is so overwhelming that really no . . . You tremble and feel like, yes, now you are truly fucked. You think: How did they find out about them? How could they have found out? What happened? But your immediate reaction is to deny everything: “No, I don’t have a wife and kids.”
“Are you going to tell us the truth, yes or no?”
“Well, what are you talking about? I don’t know.”
“Look, I went to a human rights organization and spoke with a woman who is your wife. She’s not in trouble, she’s not mixed up in this. We know that. But since you haven’t been home, she’s looking for you and asking for help there at the human rights organization. She wants to find you. I spoke with her, and she told me she’s looking for you.”
You think: Yes, they could do something like that, but she wouldn’t. What would have led her to do that? Who might have suggested it to her? I don’t know. But knowing how murderous these people are, they wouldn’t wait one second to bring her here in front of me. I don’t think they have her. No, they don’t have her. Perhaps something is happening. They know something, but they don’t know everything. If they did know, they’d have my wife and kids right here, right now, and they’d torture me together with them. There is no doubt about that. If I admit I have a wife and children, I could harm them.
Everything is a fight, war. You insist that you are not married and do not have children.
“So you’re saying I’m a liar?”
“No, I’m not saying you’re lying, but I can’t admit to something that doesn’t exist.”
“Ok. Then, tell me, why is this woman saying you’re her husband?”
“Well, let’s think of the possibilities.”
“Okay. Tell me.”
“One possibility is that the organization is looking for me. They haven’t found me. Let’s say that a woman in the struggle or some volunteer pretends to be my wife to see if that way the government accounts for me. It could be that.”
“Sure, it could be something like that. But what are you if you’re not a man?”
“No. I’m a man, but I’m not married.”
“Well, just in case, so there isn’t any doubt about whether or not you are her husband, I’m going to bring her here. We’re going to bring her and see if she recognizes you.”
“Okay. Sure.”
But she wouldn’t do that. And if she did, it would be stupid. And if someone advised her to do it, then they were stupid. Imagine seeing your child tortured. If it feels awful when they do it to someone else, with your child . . . No, no, I can’t imagine it.
You think: They don’t have her. The organization must have made something public, but they don’t have her. Because, honestly, if they had her, they wouldn’t waste a moment. They’ll use everything they can.
But the impact of the moment when they told you they had your family wrecked you. You think: And to top it all off, I’m still alive.
Someone comes to tell you that you have suffered a lot. That he even thinks the government is behaving badly, that he’s thinking of looking for a contact with the EPR so he can help them. He says he is studying law and this is just a day job in the meantime. He offers to take any note or message you write to someone in the organization or your family, so that they’ll know you’re still alive.
Another tells you that they’ll be taking you somewhere else. He admits that they have tortured you, “but with moderation.” He says that it is his job, his obligation. He’s worried about you. He says, “I’ve been your buddy and haven’t mistreated you too much, but the ones who will take over from me, they are true killers.” You listen to him curled on the floor, handcuffed, tied, blindfolded, wearing the same clothes they abducted you in and accompanied by a choir of incessant pains all over your body, all over your being. He says: “If you go before them you’ll realize that what we did to you amounted to gentle caresses. But if what I’ve just told you matters to you, you can tell me what you’ve been hiding. If you collaborate with me, I’ll take you where no one can touch you.”
You thank him for his kind offer and then tell him: “Unfortunately, I’m not hiding anything.” But inside you, his proposal and his calm tone of voice, as insidious as it may be, awoke in you the longing for someone to defend you, to help you. Just a longing that signals what is not there, precisely that which is furthest away from you. No, you are not saved. You are his enemy, and about this there is no uncertainty. They can use you for a bit, wring you out, but you’ll never matter to them unless you become one of them. That’s why you’d have to prove your conversion with acts and not just proclaim it in words. That is, only if you started to lead them to people.
And thus, they destroy you.
You think: For us there is no honor in that. That is something for cowards. That is not for me. Maybe it’s not so bad crawling on all fours. But no. That’s not in my language. That is not within the conditions that I can accept. I have a very different concept of life, of how to be, and they aren’t going to change that just because they want to, because they try to impose a change on me. That would make me a puppet, an object to be controlled, a domesticated individual to be programmed. They could demand: “Say this,” and I’d say it; “Do this,” and I’d do it. And thus, what would such an individual become if not one of them, a person without identity, without conscience, without dignity? Such an individual, even when they do not die, would have just met their death, paradoxically, even though they say they are alive. That is the difference. Yes, I want to live. But not like that. I love life, profoundly, but not at that price.
They bring other prisoners and torture them in front of you, or in the next room. This frightens you and rips at you in a different way, even though you’ve been through the same. It feels even worse when they do it to someone else, because you don’t hear yourself. But the act of listening to the other . . . and then they do it to you . . . that is an effective method. It scares you.
Maybe they don’t even know what to do with you. They give you blank pieces of paper and tell you to write your history with the guerrillas, to name the opposition politicians and intellectuals behind the EPR, to confess which military operations you participated in, and to write that you regret it all. They sa
y that they are going to film you and play the recording on television and the radio. We’re going to help you, they say.
“If you already have it written, you can make it public,” you tell one of them.
“No. No, you have to write it and appear in the video.”
“I can’t. That doesn’t suit me; that’s not me. You make a mistake in choosing me. That’s not who I am.”
“Then you’ll be fucked.”
“Well, here I am. I’ve been here for a long time now. That’s nothing new.”
But it is part of the fight. Afterward you tell him yes, you’ll write, and you write about events that already appeared in the news. But you write precisely about the events in which you did not participate. It is all part of the fight: They tear up the sheets of paper, they give you new ones and tell you to do it again.
They come for you one day. They untie you, lead you out of the room, and take you to a large vehicle, a Suburban or some other kind of van. They do not speak to you. After a bit the vehicle starts to travel at high speed. You’re on a highway. Are they taking you on another operation? Are they taking you somewhere to kill you? They exit the highway and come to a stop. They don’t take you out of the vehicle. You do not know where you are. Time moves in slow motion in the darkness of the blindfold. They get back in, start the vehicle and get back on the highway. After a while they repeat the same thing. This time you hear a large gate opening, but they do not drive through the gate. They get back in and start off again, driving for about two hours. They stop again, at a tollbooth it seems. You can hear the constant noise of car engines. You tell them you need to go to the bathroom. They neither answer you nor take you to a bathroom. They keep driving and after a while you can hear city sounds. They stop a lot and you think it must be for traffic lights. Could they be taking you to some jail? You’ve gone through the southern part of Mexico City, but perhaps they are going to North Jail. But no. They leave the city. You think: the maximum-security prison in Almoloya? Well, even that would be an improvement.
Then they come to a cold place. They stop and one of them gets out and speaks to someone. You hear a large gate opening, the vehicle drives through it and seems to go around in circles a few times, going over speed bumps before stopping. They take you out of the car and lead you about twenty meters. You hear the sound of water in a canal. They open a door and put you in an extremely cold room where you can hear the sound of an air-conditioning unit. They sit you down and tie your handcuffs to a metal structure. You think you might be in Almoloya. But that thought does not last long. The door opens and an older man—gauging by the sound of his voice—comes inside.
He tells you, “We brought you here to kill you.” But he offers to save you if you tell him what you’re hiding. He tells you that he’s been doing this for more than twenty years, that he fought against Lucio Cabañas and Genaro Vázquez and now you’re “one more.” He says that he respected Lucio Cabañas because Cabañas showed his face, but those in the EPR do not show theirs.
“You’re in our hands now, so you’ll start to tell us everything.”
“Well, I’ve already said everything.”
“Oh, come on. I can save you. I can help you.”
And you think: If they publicly accounted for me today, even if they freed me, it would be humiliating. Why am I here? Why so many months? What have I missed? Surely another in my shoes would have done things better. Maybe even escaped already. Me . . . since the moment of my abduction they’ve won every battle. They’ve had every advantage. I haven’t talked, but they have won. What I need to do now is something that hurts them. But, how? What do I have? I don’t have shit. I have nothing, no advantage.
You start listening to everything. The different sounds of animals: roosters, burros, dogs. You are outside of any city limits. You hear explosions sometimes in the afternoons, perhaps dynamite or something like that. You think there may be gravel mines nearby. Sometimes you can hear the shouts of children playing: Could there be some kind of apartment building near? But above all you listen to them. The ones who sleep in the room next to yours, the ones who guard you day and night. One of them snores. Another always flips through the television channels. Another leaves the television on when, it seems, he has fallen asleep. Another screams at you anytime you make a sound. Another either doesn’t realize it when you make sounds, or doesn’t say anything.
When you are alone in the room you lift up the blindfold just a little bit with your finger. You don’t know if there is a video camera in the room, so you do it little by little. You let in just a bit of light and start to see the room in pieces: there is one small window and another window with Persian glass panes. You begin to toy with the handcuffs, all the time. Night and day. Here they have you handcuffed one hand to a metal grid. You become obsessed with being able to pull your hand out of the handcuffs. Pulling and twisting against the handcuffs becomes the physical reflex corresponding to the word that haunts you now: escape, escape, escape. That word.
They’ve isolated you here. The sessions are no longer every two hours, but sporadic. You go days without speaking. You exercise your jaw, but even so when they interrogate you your mouth feels clumsy and painful. You exercise your body by contracting and releasing your muscles, one by one. You exercise by pushing against the wall with the fantasy that one day it will fall down, but that is just a fantasy. But when they see you, you exaggerate your physical degradation. They give you water and you grab the bottle with trembling hands. They take you blindfolded to the bathroom and you bump into the walls on purpose and they berate you for not learning how to walk. They speak to you and you pretend to be asleep until they hit you. Now they only give you bread and water, even though they leave plates of food nearby, perhaps to see if you try to reach the food, or just to make you suffer with the smells of cooked meals.
You fight with the handcuffs until one night you’re able to pull your hand out. You stand up. You approach the window and in that instant a car pulls up. You throw yourself back on the floor and stick your hand back through the handcuffs. It is hard to get your hand back through. One of them comes in and asks you what you’re doing. You pretend to be asleep. He jerks the chain of your handcuffs, walks around the room and then leaves.
One night you are listening to the seven o’clock news with Lolita Ayala. They are talking about the case of General Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo, Mexico’s first federal “drug czar,” who was himself accused of and sentenced for drug trafficking. Then they announce that, after “exhaustive investigations” the police found an EPR safe house in Acapulco. A strange chill hits your bones. Ayala says that the police did not arrest any members of the EPR but confiscated military uniforms, boots, “subversive instructional films,” and other things. And you think: That is the house I was responsible for. Moreover: the house where you lived with your wife and small children. The chill clenches down on your bones. That house, you think, was the symbol of my life, I made it into the symbol of my life. I traded that house for my life. Because if I had given them that house, then I think they would have publicly presented me; that would have been a serious blow against us, against the EPR. They would have paraded me before the media if I had given them that house. But I didn’t, and I never would have. And so, what was all this time, all this suffering for if the compañeros left the goddamned house with everything in it? It is only a matter of hours before I’m subjected, again, to all the interrogation.
With the chill comes your anger against your own compañeros. What happened? Why didn’t they clear out the house? Why didn’t they remove everything? How did the police find the house?
And you think: The police didn’t find it. I didn’t give them any indication of that house. The only possibility is that the compañeros did abandon the house. They went and then left it. I had three months of rent paid in advance. The owner must have gone to ask for the rent for the fourth month. After the three months had passed, she must have gone inside and seen everything that was the
re. And then the most logical thing is that she’d call the police. She has witnesses who can testify that she rented the house to others. The owner—it was her; she turned in the house. The police didn’t find it.
The next day they come and take the blindfold off your eyes. They are not wearing masks.
“Do you have anything to tell me?”
“Um, okay. Yes, I’ll tell you something.”
“What?”
“Well, the house that they just found in Acapulco, I did know about that house. I didn’t want to give it to you because I thought it would be empty. As you know, when someone is taken prisoner, the least the compañeros can do is take everything out of the house. I didn’t turn it over because I thought if you all were to find it empty, you’d think I was mocking you. And, well, that wouldn’t bode well for me. If I’d known that they weren’t going to clear it out, I would have turned it over, and maybe that would have saved me. But, well, it’s too late now.”
“How do you know that we have the house?”
“Well, you do have it.”
“Let’s suppose we have it. What was in that house?”
You tell them that the house had uniforms, a television set, a video camera, a typewriter, boots, and two 9mm pistols.
“Who used the house?”
“I don’t know. They had protocols so that I wouldn’t see them.”
“And why didn’t you ever take a look?”
“Because it was against the rules, no? I didn’t have any reason to break the rules.”
“You obey the rules?”
“Fuck. Okay, well, like you’ve just said, we didn’t even get that right. I know that there is no . . . but, I want you all to know that . . . maybe that was what I was hiding. And it’s okay; I know I’m done.”