Torn from the World

by John Gibler

“Whom did you live with there?”

  “Well, I lived with the young woman who pretended to be my wife, but she wasn’t. That was just a cover.”

  “And this photo?”

  He shows you a photograph of your family. How was this damn photo there?!

  “It’s your wife.”

  “Yes, it’s my wife.”

  “Why didn’t you confess this before?”

  “Because it’s not her fault, she was just accompanying me.”

  “Where can we find her?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you think she’s still with them?”

  “I doubt it. The most likely thing is that she got frightened and went to look for work in another city.”

  “And do you know why I took off your blindfold? Do you know why I’m not wearing a mask?”

  “I don’t know, but I can guess . . . ”

  “What?”

  “Well, it’s the end.”

  “Yes, it is the end. I mean, all the time you had us running around like fools, all that time is over. This is the consequence.”

  “No worries.”

  “Really?”

  “No, no problem.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we’re on different sides and usually when it comes to the end one doesn’t get the chance to talk about it. This is one of those chances, or at least that’s how I see it.”

  He even gives you his hand to shake.

  They flood your room and the chill strikes you. They come back the next day and tell you that they have your wife. The fear hits your bones. You are blindfolded again. You hear the sound of a person approaching. You hear someone walk into the room, perhaps a woman, for this person wears high-heels and walks well in them. You hear them lead her into the room and then back out. Is it your compañera? No, it’s not her. And you think: It is the owner of the house. They must have brought her here from Acapulco to confirm whether or not you are the person who rented her house. She would have told them yes. Or could they have just led a woman in high-heels into the room so that you would think they have your wife?

  This leaves you pensive. You feel a lack of will, of initiative, for not having tried to escape yet. And not some bullshit of throwing yourself at the door, but something where you really have some advantage. But, what advantage? You don’t know where you are, nor in what kind of facility. You don’t want to keep going like this. You think of killing yourself, but that seems cowardly. The other option is to provoke them into killing you. But one thing is clear to you: I am not willing to stay like this any longer. I will not live like this, for this is not life, it’s not right. I too can decide how this ends. In fact, I will be the one who decides. Let’s accelerate this end then. That’s what I will do; I have no other choice; I can’t see any other possibility. I think I’ve lacked will. I’ve been struck by cowardice. It is as if I were waiting for an opportunity, but a comfortable one, like if the door were to open toward a tunnel leading out of here. But, well, that’s not possible. So let’s play the final hand, let’s end this.

  You choose this end. It is not suicide: It is combat.

  You’ve eaten little and today decide not to eat. You haven’t defecated in three days and you want to avoid it now. If they were to take you off to the toilet then they would have to remove and replace your handcuffs and you’d run the risk of them putting them back on tighter. Right now they are being a bit lazy. You’ve been testing them constantly. But you can’t hold back the need to urinate so you grab the bottle they use to bring you water and urinate in it. Someone walks in and sees you.

  “Why are you pissing . . . ?”

  “I didn’t want to bother. It is just piss. I’ll throw it out the next time I have to go.”

  He asks you if you need to go now. You say no. In response he hits you a few times and leaves. You sweat, but not because of the punches. The punches don’t hurt; you’ve grown accustomed to them. You sweat from the fear that they’ll tighten your handcuffs.

  That night you try to sleep in lapses. In the predawn hours you try to listen to the television. It has been a while since anyone has changed the channel. You make a quiet sound. No one shouts at you. You think: I’ll use the most minimal carelessness in my favor. You try to remove your hand from the handcuffs. It gets stuck between the bones of the wrist and thumb. You pull and pull until it comes out all of a sudden, tearing off a piece of skin. You lift up the blindfold and walk toward the bathroom and start to remove the glass panes from the window. And then, again, you see a vehicle approach.

  You throw yourself to the floor and try to put your hand back in the handcuffs, but you can’t. As hard as you try, your hand gets stuck. You put your blindfold back on and lie on the floor, lying over your hand, holding onto the cuffs. One of them comes in and screams at you. You pretend to be asleep. He kicks you and you curl up and wince, exaggerating the pain. He kicks you a few more times and then leaves. You wait a few long minutes. There is no turning back. If he comes back in, what will you do? You could tackle him. You could jump through the window. You could provoke him into killing you. All the options lead to the same ending.

  Your body is hot. You feel, contrary to logic, to the image of your withered body, and to any reasonable expectation, invincible. “Freedom resides in whoever tries to reach it.”11 Freedom resides in whoever is prepared to face the end, to declare oneself dead in order to live.

  You remove the blindfold and stand up again, shaking. You take another two panes out of the Persian window, place them on the floor, and jump out. Neither your legs nor your arms have the strength to break your fall and you hit your head. That hurts. But you don’t make a sound. No glass broke. It is a movement so perfect that you’d never have been able to achieve it even if you’d practiced.

  You stand up and begin walking. It is still dark, but they have just played reveille. You see a wire fence, possibly electrified. You see a number of buildings and realize that you are not in a little house, nor a neighborhood, nor an apartment building, nor a police base. You are in a military base. That’s why they were so confident. You walk and see a soldier approaching. You raise up your hands in pure reflex, but the soldier does not raise his weapon; he does not seem to pay any attention to you. You keep you arms up, as if you had been stretching, out for morning exercise. The soldier passes and greets you, good morning. You look around. There are a number of residential buildings and playing fields. You see two civilian-dressed people walking across one of the fields, toward the fence. They arrive at a place where it is easy to jump over the fence, and they jump over it. You follow them.

  * The narrative in the chapters They Tear You from the World and A Piece of Being is built upon more than thirty hours of recorded interviews I conducted with Andrés Tzompaxtle Tecpile and a written testimony dated “Spring 1999” that Tzompaxtle gave me. All the italicized words are direct quotes from the interviews with Tzompaxtle: They are his words. All non-italicized dialogue and quoted text without footnotes are taken from Tzompaxtle’s written testimony: They are also his words. The sources for all other quotations may be found in the endnotes. All non-cited text is my writing.

  THE SILENCES

  “THIS ISN’T A DEAD MAN’S book,” Andrés Tzompaxtle Tecpile told me one day. “This book is about someone alive. The book won’t tell the whole story.” When he said that, I understood that the book could not tell the whole story, and also that Tzompaxtle would not tell me his whole story. At one point he told me: “It is indescribable. I can’t understand nor remember everything that happened to me.” And at another point he told me that he always tells the story differently: “I think that every time I tell the story some things from the hidden damage will come out, things that represent the permanence of that hidden damage, or perhaps the healing of it . . .”

  Before beginning, a writer here faces two fields of inaccessible information: one blocked by an act of will, the other blocked by trauma and the inevitable and unpredictable fractures of m
emory. At least there was no doubt about this: Many things would remain unknown. Thus uncertainty was accompanied by honesty from the beginning.

  During a journalism conference at the 2012 Guadalajara International Book Fair, Francisco Goldman, author of The Art of Political Murder, said: “Impunity is the freedom of expression of the killers. If you aren’t afraid that someone will grab and punish you, then you can plan and carry out a murder like a theater production.”1 The work of one who seeks to solve a case, one who seeks justice—especially concerning acts of murder or injury perpetrated by the State—is, by definition, that of clarifying all uncertainties, of dismantling the killers’ staging. Who, where, when, how, and why? These questions must be asked and answered as clearly and precisely as possible. One must do this in spite of the disinformation traps, the destruction of evidence, the physical threats, and the lies told by the architects and perpetrators of the violence. In such an endeavor, uncertainty is an enemy to be defeated.

  But what about investigating in the other direction and interviewing a person who has survived State violence? One supposes that such a person’s testimony would be the fundamental element for clarifying the uncertainty, that such testimony would be precisely what the “freedom of expression of the killers” seeks to erase, destroy, ridicule, or annihilate. So, when facing such a testimony, should all uncertainty be seen as an enemy to defeat? Should one allow, out of respect for the testifying person’s pain, the omission of certain information? How does that which goes unsaid affect the trust one places in the testimony?

  A person’s decision to not tell everything presents the writer with a dilemma. This dilemma, for me, is not one of whether or not to continue with the writing, nor much less to try to convince the person who survived the violence to tell it all. The dilemma is something other. It is a methodological, and hence, philosophical dilemma. It is not a matter of responding yes or no, but of asking how.

  The British poet John Keats mentioned, just once in a letter, a concept he called “negative capability.” He defined it this way: “When a [person] is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” This quality, according to the poet, is necessary for literary work: to be amidst uncertainties. To be able to live within and navigate through mysteries. Amongst other things, this is a quality that promotes humility: From the beginning, one must recognize that one does not know and will not know everything. In our present case, the situation is a bit different. Here it is not an issue of deciding between mystery and reason, nor of thinking that they are incompatible. The challenge is how to write within the uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts while seeking out all the information one can find. How to respect and include the silences of the person who lived through the acts of State violence and injury?

  Let’s consider for a moment the two fields of uncertainty present here: that of the will and that of trauma and memory. The parameters of the uncertainty of the will present here are themselves clear. Tzompaxtle told me directly: “This isn’t a dead man’s book. This book is about someone alive. The book won’t tell the whole story.” And by “the whole story” he is speaking of his life after returning to clandestinity and to any and all information that could be used to locate and identify him now. The other field contains two overlapping dimensions: that of trauma and that of memory. The fragility of memory, like that of the body, is something most people experience on a daily basis. Most people have had the experience of remembering in absolute clarity something that never happened. It is quite common. Memory fails; memory leaves traps. That is why we seek verification: we consult other people, check our notebooks, look in the dictionary, or—with increasing frequency and often vexing results—look on the internet. And this is in cases where one’s memory is in perfect health. What happens when someone tries to recall events related to profoundly traumatic experiences?

  If some wicked being were to develop a procedure to dismantle one’s memory, soon they would arrive at the most common practices of torture: blows to the head, provoking the overproduction of stress-related hormones, malnutrition, lack of sleep, depression, physical pain in general. All of these experiences affect memory.2 How then can one reliably document torture? Torturers usually do not give interviews or publish evidence of their torture sessions. The survivor’s testimony is the essential evidence. And here it is necessary and urgent to note that the uncertainty that arises from the failures of memory does not block or damage the truth of the testimony. Survivors tend to make mistakes recalling details regarding date, time, number of people present in certain moments, some specific characteristics (were they police or soldiers?), and details related to the most traumatic experiences, such as torture and rape. But the survivor does not make a mistake about having been tortured or not, having been raped or not. If we needed them, even the studies agree that mistakes do not justify mistrust: “Current research on memory shows that stories can change for many reasons and the changes do not necessarily indicate that the narrator is lying.”3

  Dori Laub writes about the story of a genocide survivor and witness to an uprising in Auschwitz. The witness told, in the midst of a long testimony, how she saw four chimneys explode in flames and people running. Laub describes a conference with historians, psychoanalysts, and artists in which the historians tried to discredit the woman’s entire testimony because she had the number of chimneys wrong. Laub responded: “She had come, indeed, to testify, not to the empirical number of the chimneys, but to resistance, to the affirmation of survival, to the breakage of the frame of death.”4

  Nora Strejilevich, a survivor of torture during the military dictatorship in Argentina, proposes that one must understand that the survivor’s testimony will always have absences, silences, and contradictions. She writes: “Memories of horror are not accurate, and witnesses who testify in front of a jury have to reshape their traumatic recollections to fit the requirements of the law, which demands precision. A truthful way of giving testimony should allow for disruptive memories, discontinuities, blanks, silences and ambiguities; it should become literary.”5

  The essence of knowledge about torture is different from other forms of knowledge. Its roots lie in the memory of an experience, a trauma that breaks and evades linguistic expression.6 Torture is an extreme act of rupture and isolation. The impossibility of communicating such pain, and the disconnection from language within the experience of pain—both imposed through the studied and refined cruelty of torture—cut off and isolate the person being tortured. The interrogation, a return to language, is the effort to reunite the tortured person with the torturers through language, but in a position of absolute subordination. The interrogation is an essential element of torture and amplifies the psychological dimension of the horror: They destroy your language, they isolate you from the world only to bring you back to language bound to them in a relation of domination and humiliation. Over and over again.

  One of the things that Tzompaxtle most emphasized in his memory of torture was the bludgeoning, incessant repetition of the same questions, and how the only terrain in which he could combat them was precisely that of language.

  We are responsible for what we say precisely because our speech represents our will. Torture seeks to violate this representation: It seeks to force a person to say what he or she profoundly does not want to say, and it does this by subjecting the person to excruciating pain. The torturer inflicts and administers such pain while demanding that the person being tortured say what the torturer wants. What is more, the torturer insists that the tortured person is responsible for their own suffering, that the person chooses pain by choosing not to speak. This is the logic of torture, always a brutal mystification of the torture acts and the responsibility for them.

  Telling the story of what one suffered under torture, denouncing the torture and the torturers may be, for some, a part of the process of healing, of reclaiming the language brutalized by one’s torturers.

  How to un
derstand what it means to resist such horror? I don’t know. But I think it is important to try to do so, to approach the possibility, to listen to Tzompaxtle and other survivors like him, to listen to their stories, to acknowledge what they suffered, what they achieved, and through such acknowledgment to participate in some way in the collective resistance to the persistence of that pain.

  THE INTERVIEW

  ON APRIL 5, 1997, LA Jornada published on the lower right-hand corner of the back page the headline: “EPR fighter was tortured to make him implicate the PRD and two journalists.” The article by Rosa Rojas begins:

  EPR guerrilla fighter Andrés Tzompaxtle Tecpile, alias Rafael, was “disappeared” from October 25, 1996, until last February 22. He declares that he was detained by military intelligence agents and tortured physically and psychologically during his capture, which was carried out in secret jails located at the Llano Largo base in Acapulco and then the Teotihuacán Military Camp, in Mexico State, from which he escaped.

  The reporter mentions a written testimony “dated April 25” and sent to the newspaper. The article continues on the lower left-hand portion of page 22 and appears next to a black-and-white passport-size photograph of Andrés Tzompaxtle Tecpile. Tzompaxtle is looking ahead. He has a mustache and wears a checkered shirt. He does not smile. The article occupies three columns, contains twenty-four paragraphs and cites Tzompaxtle’s written testimony at length. It continues:

  During the torture sessions, “they told me that if I didn’t want to make declarations against my organization that they’d give me another opportunity to save myself: I would have to appear publicly saying that Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas supplies us with weapons, that Manuel López Obrador, Ranferi Hernández, and Félix Salgado Macedonio advise us and are behind the EPR. They promised that upon saving my life they’d let me go, give me money, send me to study abroad, and protect my family.