by Giles Blunt
The windows fogged up and he had to slow down even more, wiping them off with the back of his hand. He was afraid that Tito, slouched in the seat beside him, would start to scream about not taking all night to get there. But nobody spoke. The atmosphere in the Jeep took on a thick, damp solemnity. The boy groaned whenever they went over a bump.
Victor could see Lopez in the rear-view. He wore an abstracted air, as if his mind were switched off. If Lopez felt any guilt about the murder he was about to assist in, the heavy features gave no clue.
They came to a sign that pointed to the public beach one way, Puerto del Diablo the other. Victor made a right, and they drove now in a slightly tenser silence.
“Stop here,” Tito said.
“My name is Lorca,” she had told them. Ten days of screams and tears had left her nearly voiceless. “Lorca Viera.”
“Lorca? Lorca is not a first name. You want me to drag that boy in here and snap his arm too?”
“My name is Lorca,” she said again, and Victor wrote it down. He was writing everything down. “My father loved very much the poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca. He named me after this poet. It is a strange name, I agree.”
“And this father of yours, tell us about him. Who is he? What does he do?”
“He’s in his grave. He has been dead eight years. His name was Paul Nunez-Viera.”
“Oh, no. You have to be making this up. You are telling me your father was General Viera?”
“General Viera, yes.”
“My God, I knew him! Isn’t that amazing? I took a night-tactics class under him! General Viera! He was a wonderful soldier. A wonderful warrior! My God, you didn’t mess with that man-he was one of the most intelligent, respected-can you really be related to him?”
The woman shrugged. “He was my father.”
“Until the terrorists killed him. What a loss that was. What a catastrophe.”
“For you, maybe. Not for the country. My father killed hundreds, maybe thousands of people. His death was a victory for El Salvador.”
“You’re disgusting. Your own father.” The Captain asked about her mother then. Her mother was also dead.
“Will you get the boy a doctor?” she asked suddenly, catching the Captain off guard.
“Maybe we will get him a doctor. It depends how things go with you.”
“The bone is through the skin. He will die of infection.”
“Tell us more about your family.”
Her relation to the famous general had changed the Captain’s view of her, Victor saw. Even if she had hated her father, she could not deny the blood in her own veins, and the Captain was a great believer in blood. He spoke to her now as if they had struck up an acquaintance on a long train trip.
“You have a sister, do you not?”
“I have a younger sister. Teresa.”
“Teresa works with you?”
“She works with me, yes. She helps feed the children at the church.”
“Address, please.”
She gave an address. Victor knew as he wrote it down that it would be the correct one. The sister would not be there now; the prisoner had won that battle. But she might be found eventually.
“But you don’t just feed the children at the church, do you, Miss Viera. The food you were carrying was meant for the FMLN, wasn’t it. Tell the truth, now. I really don’t want to hurt that boy any more.”
“Part of the food was for the children. The rest goes to the rebels.”
“Thank you. Now we are making progress. Tell me how the schedules were arranged-we only caught you by accident, you know. It was just a random check.”
She told the Captain what he wanted to know. The thin mouth, the drawn cheeks, her broken tooth-her features were a picture of exhaustion.
The questions went on. Coffee was brought, pads of paper were filled. The three of them took breaks and smoked cigarettes, Victor silent, Captain Pena chatting about inconsequential things. As the afternoon wore on, the Captain addressed the woman as if her own destruction had been a project they had worked on together-a tough job on the verge of completion-and now they could sit back and relax together.
He imagines that he has won, Victor said to himself, but this woman, this Lorca, has defeated us all. Because of her strength, the Captain and his men, all of us, have degraded ourselves. Her tank top is filthy, her face streaked with blood-the boy’s, probably-and her hair is matted, but this woman is cleaner than we will ever be.
Victor’s forearm cramped from scribbling all the things Lorca Viera told them. She told them how she dropped the food, a large box with a smaller box inside, at the church. She told them who sent her messages; his code name was all she knew, but she told them where she picked them up and the code names of those she relayed them to. More names, more addresses. So many addresses, but she had held out long enough that they would all be empty now.
Sometimes, as she paused to remember something, the tip of her tongue would touch the jagged edge of her front tooth. And then her words would emerge like small metallic objects, colourless and cold. All animation was gone from her, all passion, all hope, leaving just the voice, dry as blowing grass.
Even if we release her, Victor thought, this woman will be a ghost. Who could afford to be seen with her, a known detainee? What man would want her? It would be known she had been raped many times, and men had trouble forgiving the victims of rape. The woman had been extinguished. That was the object of the enterprise, he saw now, and they had achieved it. I have done that, he admitted to himself. I have done that to this woman because, unlike her, I am without courage.
“I believe you said earlier you have a brother,” the Captain said. “Where is he, now? Is he with the rebels also?”
She shook her head.
“What was that? I didn’t hear you.”
“Miguel hid from the war. He went to law school in the United States. My father thought he would come back, but Miguel stayed there. I hated him for it, running from the war like that. He married a North American woman and he stayed. Now, I don’t care. I am happy he is safe.”
“Address, please.”
“His office is on Seventh Avenue, I don’t remember the exact address.”
“We aren’t about to pay him a visit, you know.”
“I know. I did not write to him much. I don’t remember the address.”
“Home address?”
“I don’t know. Some boulevard in New York City.”
Victor’s impressions of New York were shaped by movies. He imagined tall buildings, flowers, fountains, and beautifully dressed people.
Captain Pena circled back from family matters to her connection-slight though it was-to the rebels. Gradually, the gaps in her knowledge were established as consistent and thorough. After three or four hours it was clear she had nothing else to tell them.
“All right,” the Captain said. “Thank you very much. Your troubles are over now. No more pain for you. Tonight we take you to Puerto del Diablo and shoot you.”
“I see. Even though the President has been denying that Diablo is an execution site.”
“Presidents have to be protected from some things.”
“Why do you have to kill me?”
“You were aiding the rebels. It’s called treason, and the punishment is death. It’s simple justice.”
“Then why are we all blindfolded? Justice does not hide its face.”
“Don’t lecture me, whore. I don’t care who your father was.”
“Will you let the boy go now? He has served his purpose, hasn’t he?”
“I haven’t decided yet about the boy. In any case, it’s none of your business.”
In the end, they took the boy with them. Tito had insisted. The boy had seen faces at the plantation; the sergeant could not risk the security of his men. More important, Victor knew they could not forgive the boy the evil they had done him. When he was safely dead, the wound they had inflicted on their own consciences would heal over.
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br /> “Stop here.”
Victor pulled to the edge of the road and switched off the motor. Rain hammered at the Jeep and slid in sheets down the windshield.
“Please,” the woman said. “I know my life is over. But don’t kill the boy.”
After her final interrogation, she had been no longer kept in solitary. She and the boy had been thrown in a cell shared by half a dozen others. Through the peephole, Victor had seen her comforting the boy, and she had repeatedly requested medical attention for him.
“You can let him live,” she said now. “Surely you remember how young you were at thirteen?”
“Don’t talk,” Tito said-softly for him. Then he turned to Victor. “Listen, baby, you don’t do a lot of the heavy work, do you?”
“Sergeant?”
“I just volunteered you. You take that bitch to the edge of the cliff and you kill her.” Tito was pure force, his black eyes implacable. “Lopez, you do the boy. Well? What are you waiting for?”
Victor forgot to put up the hood of his poncho. Rain poured down his neck and into his shirt as he went around the back of the Jeep and opened the door. The woman stepped out of the Jeep without being pushed or pulled.
“Which way?” she said. “Let’s get it over with.”
He took her arm with absurd gentleness and led her the twenty paces to the edge of the cliff. The lake was hidden by curtains of rain, but he could hear the waves sloshing seventy-five feet below.
Victor took out his service pistol and pulled back the hammer.
“Mother of God,” she said. “What are you waiting for!”
He stood behind her and raised the pistol to the back of her head. Her hair clung like seaweed to her small, round skull.
Ten yards away, Lopez leaned down and fired into the head of the prone boy. Once, twice. The rain absorbed the noise, making the shots sound like the tinny pops of a cap gun.
Victor’s finger tightened on the trigger. The woman shifted her weight, and suddenly the mud gave way beneath her. The gun popped, there was a muzzle flash, and she was gone. Victor was frozen to the spot. He had missed her, he knew he had missed her. Shooting anything that close up, he would have felt the flash on his hand, but the gun had discharged into empty air.
The mud had collapsed beneath her just as he had fired. He did not hear her hit the rocks below. She was probably still alive. Had the others seen? Would they suspect?
Apparently not. They heard the shot, they saw her fall.
All the way back to town, Victor’s hands trembled on the steering wheel. The rain clattered on the Jeep and reflected the headlights, all but blinding him. He nearly missed the turnoff that would take them back along the service road toward the little school.
PART TWO
Forgive me, if you are not living
If you, beloved, my love,
If you have died
— Pablo Neruda
FIFTEEN
The rain that fell in New York City eighteen months later was of an entirely different character. It was March-the weather was gloomy and rainy-but here the drops were tiny, as if they had been squeezed through a sieve, and seemed to hover in the air rather than to actually fall. This was not the driving natural force of Victor’s homeland, but a thin, dirty mist that clung to his skin.
Living in the vast grey metropolis of New York was like taking up residence inside a colossal machine. It pressed, pulled, squashed, and stretched you with out regard for what you might choose or not choose to do. In this one respect, it was not much different from the army. Victor’s feet seemed to carry him auto matically from the Thirty-fourth Street subway station and through the impossible crowds outside Macy’s. He had thought about coming to this intersection with Seventh Avenue-he had thought about nothing else for the past eighteen months-and yet he could not have said at what moment he had made the actual decision to do it.
Perhaps it was the time of year, with the last chill of winter still in the air, but the city planners of Manhattan seemed to have given no thought whatsoever to trees or flowers. Not in midtown, anyway. In every direction the vistas were grey, grey, grey-an endless monotone interrupted only by the hordes of lurid yellow taxicabs.
The address on Seventh Avenue was not at all what he had expected. The term “New York lawyer” had conjured in Victor’s mind something far grander than this grubby building on this grubby corner. The plate glass of the front door was cracked, and the tiny vestibule smelt of urine. As Victor examined the roster of names peeling from the directory, his heart began to pound. One was a coward at all times and in all places, not just in wartime.
He remained poised before the directory with a sense of foreboding, the sense that he had been carried to this intersection, this building, as part of some cosmic plan, the sense that all his actions were now and always had been out of his control. The same feeling had engulfed him when he had faced the court martial. He had known from the first moment he had faced the tribunal-known with absolute certainty-that he would be found guilty, that he would be sentenced to death.
As Victor stood in the vestibule of this dirty building a world away from the little school, cowardice took hold of him once more. He turned from the roster of names and was pushing at the handle of the cracked front door when the elevator door rattled open behind him and a short, square man-a Mexican, Victor thought at first glance-came bustling out. He was wearing a rumpled shirt and tie and, seeing Victor, he clutched the tie nervously. “Are you by any chance Mr. Perez?”
Victor nodded. Perez was his name now; he had Ignacio Perez’s birth certificate to prove it, and they had been close in age. That was why Victor had stolen his papers from the Captain’s office. The actual Perez, he reasoned, was dead and buried and beyond caring.
“Mike Viera,” the man said, giving him a handshake that was damp but firm. The resemblance was obvious; he had his sister’s hollowed-out face, the same deep lines from nose to chin. “A thousand apologies. I hadn’t forgotten about you, I was just dashing out for cigarettes. My receptionist called in sick today.”
“I will come another time. When your receptionist is here.”
“No, no, please. I’ll be back instantly.”
Viera spoke English so rapidly that Victor hadn’t quite sorted out this last assurance until the lawyer was out the door. But he had no desire to converse in Spanish. Speaking English was part of being a new person; he had committed no crimes while speaking English. A new language was his best disguise.
Waiting for Viera to return, Victor stared at the chipped, discoloured tiles on the vestibule wall, the streaks on the elevator door where someone had tried to clean it with a dirty rag. He reread the names on the directory.
Viera came back, still apologizing. “I know I should quit, but I can’t seem to get up the motivation. You smoke?” he asked hopefully, peeling Cellophane wrap from a pack of Player’s.
Victor shook his head. I am Perez, he insisted to himself. Someday I will be Victor Pena again, when it is safe or when I have courage.
The sour smell of old cigarette smoke clung to everything in Viera’s office. Along one wall, a row of dented green filing cabinets looked near to collapse. Some of the drawers hung open, others were missing entirely. An armless sofa sagged against another wall, its fake leather surface strewn with dog-eared file folders in several colours. Viera’s metal desk was near the window but facing away from it. He sat behind it now and gestured at the couch. “Please, Mr. Perez. Have a seat.”
Victor sat and stared at the lights of a peep show that flashed on and off beyond Viera’s shoulder. New York lawyer. Where were the pinstripes and the wood-panelled office? Where was the wisecracking secretary? The alcoholic investigator? Next to the diplomas above the sofa hung a picture of Viera shaking hands with a slick-looking dignitary. Perhaps Seventh Avenue was a fall from earlier success.
“You wanted to talk about an immigration matter, I believe.” Viera lit his cigarette and took a deep drag. “Is it for yourself?”
“Yes. I want to become a citizen. Or to get at least a green card.” Even though the authenticity of the Perez documents was never questioned, Victor had suffered all the usual hardships of the illegal immigrant: the close calls with police or other officials who suddenly demanded identification, the search for affordable housing that turned into a search for an affordable slum, the long hunt for a job ever lower on the social scale. “If I can’t become a citizen, a green card will do.”
“It’s twenty-five dollars for the initial consultation. Cash or money order is fine.”
New York lawyer. Where was the expensive stationery? The discreet invoice? Mike Viera did not seem even a little embarrassed to state his fee, or that it was so low. Nor was he slow to accept the two crumpled tens and the five that Victor handed across the desk. He put them into his drawer, tore off a receipt, then resumed.
“Do you have any friends or family here? In the States, I mean, not just New York. Any relatives at all?”
“Relatives? No. Nobody. Well, I may know some people, but I haven’t looked for them. No relatives.”
“Is there anyone who can guarantee you won’t become a burden to the state? Someone who will pay your way if you fail to get a job or become sick?”
“No. No one like that. But I already have a job, Mr. Viera, I can look after myself.”
“We’ll get to that. For now, the state doesn’t care about facts, it cares about contingencies.” Viera smiled, as if this were a very clever way of putting it. Perhaps he did not resemble his sister so much after all. He lacked her directness; he almost certainly lacked her strength.
“Well, there is no one to support me, no.”
“That’s bad. Now, tell me: you’re not a doctor by any chance, are you?”
“A doctor?” Victor laughed. “No, I’m not a doctor.”
“A physicist or a software designer?”
“No, no. Nothing like that.” Victor had given his newly acquired background much thought. As an educated person of the middle class, he could never pass himself off to another Salvadoran as a peasant. But he stayed as close to the circumstances of the real Perez as possible. “I worked in the Department of Agriculture. It was my job to inform the campesinos of their rights under Land to the Tiller.”