And I dribble. I’m always dribbling when I eat. I move the spoon and fork awkwardly. I hate that. My shaking betrays me. Or if I manage not to spill, I choke. Even drinking water, I choke. I’m not having a metaphysical experience here, as you can see. When I saw myself in the mirror for the first time after chemotherapy, without hair, I thought I was looking at my skull. A cliché. Death is the greatest of all clichés. I live in wait for rigor mortis. But I won’t be watching when it comes. One doesn’t live through one’s own death. That of others, yes, from the other side of the threshold, of course. The dead do not live. What I’m living now is the gradual loss of the capacity for being alive. Dying. For me, that’s what life consists of now. And when the time comes they’ll throw me out, they’ll send me to that trash pile they call by another name, before my stench starts to horrify them and my face and hands—too white, and soon stained with violet—begin to disgust them. Above all, before that stench comes that the bouquets of flowers can’t mask. That’s what it’s about, then, to die: to be left shamelessly exposed, meat no one bought from the butcher’s and that eventually rotted. Then they dress you up in wood and cover you up with earth so they never have to see you again; you disgust them, and they weep, those people you disgust, poor things.
No one will go with you, of course. Nothing you’ve done before will be worth anything to you. And from now on there’s no purpose, no task, not even the smallest one stays with you. For this voyage you won’t bring a suitcase. I can feel my fear. To see death a step away, waiting for you like an abyss just a yard and a half away, and to be the one who’s going to fall—it’s atrocious, I tell you, just horrifying. I didn’t want to die when Canelo fell in combat. Now either, you know; I don’t want to die now, either. Even though when I was healthy, I did. And they’re taking my life from me one bite at a time.
Do not go gentle into that good night. / Old age should burn and rave at close of day; / rage, rage against the dying of the light. Dylan Thomas. What do you know, I still have some memory left.
That’s why you’ve come all the way to Ersta, Stockholm, to listen to me. I’m not kidding myself. You’ve come before it’s too late . . . You’re a crow with an ear for a beak. No one can understand this story. And no one would want to. It’s useless. Only the edifying fable with its moral will remain, only the husk of the facts, the pornography of horror. We know that. But what gave it meaning, what made it human—that dies with us. I don’t know how you’ll use what I tell you, though I’m curious. I don’t know if it will help you at all. I don’t think a novel should repeat reality. Perhaps you should just imagine me on your own. You want me to talk to you about fingerprints, lock picks, chases, car bombs, manhunts, shootouts, and torture. But in the end what you’re looking for is a moral adventure tale. That’s what will get you a publisher. People love a story that confirms their prejudices. To recognize what they’ve already seen on TV: that’s what they like. The truth is too disturbing, thorny, too contradictory and horrible. Truth is immoral. It shouldn’t be printed. You won’t write what I tell you. You’re not going to like what you hear at all. I can read it in your eyes. Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère: Hypocritical reader, my double, my brother!
Ha, ha! Why am I laughing? You were saying you wanted my version. Don’t ask me to give you yours, then. You have to listen to my story. That’s why you came to Ersta. No one made you come here. You know what? I can smell your contempt, your virtuous-souled contempt.
Remember, when Dante reaches the bottom of Hell he finds the Devil crying. But he’s still the Devil, and he doesn’t repent. If he did, he would be in Purgatory, and he would have hope. The Devil doesn’t repent and yet he cries, he cries hopelessly. There’s something undignified about repentance and the desire for forgiveness, something Christianoid that bothers me. The Devil, even in defeat, stays faithful to himself and to his own contradiction. He punishes those he inspired and who have followed in his footsteps, he punishes them day and night, as he himself is punished. He is the supreme traitor.
SEVEN
Hate is human. There is nothing I don’t hate. Tomasa hates only the other side. Not our brothers, not the ones who placed the bomb and blew up the bridge, not the ones she hid and who later fled, she tells me, leaving her at the mercy of these rabid dogs. I don’t know what cell she’s in. We try to maintain our compartmentalization. But I do know that they’ve brought her face to face with Chico Escobar and with Vladimir Briceño. There must be microphones in here, because she whispers it in my ear. “They want to know about the cash,” she says.
I passed Briceño in the hallway. I’m sure they did that intentionally. His nose was broken, his shirt soaked in blood. We did as we’d been taught: we looked at each other like strangers. It isn’t easy. How do two strangers look at each other in a place like that? Your surprise can betray you—the unexpected pleasure of recognizing a friend, though he’s in the same situation as you—and so can an overly studied indifference . . . They’re very alert to any signs.
“If they would just let me work,” Tomasa says to me. “If they would just let me use my body for something. If only I could be a whore, I could do something and I’d at least be that, a whore. I want to prostitute myself,” she says. You won’t be able to understand that feeling. Even I can’t understand it now, but I did back then. Who could I have been in those days?
If only they would let me shower. That’s all I ask. As the days pass you can’t imagine how important that becomes to me. I can’t stand my own smell. Let me change these stinking clothes. Who knows how many people used them before me. They keep us in this basement in these gray, foul-smelling sweat suits and underneath them, nothing. I just want to wear underpants; I want to put on a bra, that’s what I want. Clothes never used to interest me. But now . . . If they would only let me go out in the yard for a little while to feel the warmth of the sun on my face.
They’ve said to Tomasa: “Show us your tits, fucking cunt!” And she has lifted her shirt and done as they said. “Your nipples are really long,” they told her. “Your nipples are skinny and ugly,” they told her. And that time they didn’t rape her. Me, I have pretty nipples. Tomasa screamed and they made me listen. She started to screech the moment they tied her up. I try to get used to it. It’s impossible. She shouts like a wild boar. According to her, it protected her; according to her, it satisfied them and they weren’t as hard on her. I’ve told her how I feel about underwear, what I would give for a Triumph bra. She doesn’t care at all about that. As long as they don’t rape her again, she doesn’t care about anything. I want a bra. I feel so skinny . . . Who could buy me a bra? It doesn’t matter if they have sex with you, Tomasa tells me, what matters is that they don’t damage your insides. Gato rewards Rat or Ronco, she tells me, he gives them the go-ahead when he feels like it. Tomasa lent me a little mirror the other day. Somehow she gets her hands on those kinds of things. I saw the circles under my eyes, my sunken face, my elongated ears poking out from my greasy hair. My ears never used to stick out like that. But they do now. My breasts are smaller and more flaccid. Or am I imagining that? Surely that’s why I don’t interest them; they don’t even want me to show them. I can feel their nondesire. I’ve heard that some women are forced to dance and they end up naked as showgirls, dancing and crying, naked as effigies of showgirls. In spite of everything, Tomasa and I laugh. I don’t remember about what. But there are things we whisper about that make us burst out laughing.
I concentrate on trying to figure out what time it is, on following the sun between the bars of our cell’s little window and measuring the shadows on the damp walls. The task keeps me busy. Tomasa got her hands on a deck of cards. That keeps us busy. She knows some tricks that amaze me. Tomasa tells me she imagines things, tells herself stories, dreams that she’s free, that she’s at her mother and father’s house, that she’s at a barbecue with high school girlfriends, that she’s climbed up to place a charge on a high-voltage tower, or the column of a bridge; she dr
eams she’s shooting at the enemy. That’s how she kills time. I try to do the same, I try to imagine I’m crawling along on knees and elbows, soaked to the skin, in the Nahuelbuta mountain range, or with my heavy pack over my shoulder hiding out in the mountains and covering my tracks, or conducting a Vietnamese maneuver, or stashing an FAL rifle—one of those that donkey-kicks your shoulder when you fire—well-oiled and loaded in a hidden compartment under the floor of a house, or I imagine myself excavating a dugout to sleep in under the snow. I never manage to hold these images in my mind. And then, when they take Tomasa for another interrogation, her outbursts are truly frightening. She’s already told them everything, surely. Why do they keep working on her? And I have to listen to it. And when my turn comes, they repeat their instructions: Raise your hand if you want to talk.
Days that are nights go by, merging into nights that are nights. I’m an animal reduced to basic desires: that they won’t hurl one more blow or insult at me or take away my bowl of soup, the pillow or mattress, or the can that serves as a toilet in our cell. It’s all happened to me. These are light punishments. I was punished for lying: four days with the same can, if I figured the time right. I can hear a bell, and that gives us a way to measure time. I hate to admit it, but it’s the truth. The only thing left of that eviscerated time is the bell of a church that gives opiate to the people. It’s like being locked in a medieval dungeon. Although in my situation now the priests are a help, even so, I repeat, they deal in resignation as consolation. Still and all I wait for those bells without which my dragging time would brush the abyss. It’s an anemic present that evaporates and abandons me. The bells are the only human thing we have left.
Then, suddenly, they led me to a changing room and handed me a zippered plastic bag. There were the clothes I was wearing the day they arrested me. My purse, too, my wallet with the eight thousand seven hundred pesos I had with me that day, and my false ID card—everything except the thirty thousand dollars and the four million plus in Chilean pesos we had taken from the Bash safe in the currency exchange. They gave me a document signed by a military judge I never saw: provisional freedom. They had, they laughed, paid my bail with the money they found in my purse. I got dressed and they set me free at stop number 21 on Gran Avenida. There were no explanations.
EIGHT
They let me go in the afternoon. I did what our manuals taught us to do, to lose any “shadows,” as we called them. “Tails,” as they said in Central. But it’s hard for me to walk in a straight line. The light hurts. The wideness scares me, the open space of the street. My first job is to lose my potential watcher. Useless, I thought. But I had to do it and I did it. I got on and off of two buses in a row, I walked along streets and then retraced my steps, I walked around the Central Station a couple of times, went out, and got on a third bus. I decided they weren’t shadowing me. Finally, about four hours later, I got to my mother’s house. It was a shock. My mother cried, so did the cook—everyone but Anita, who looked at me without understanding. Five years old, she was then.
I took a long, slow, hot shower and got into bed. I said I was tired and I needed to sleep. But I just lay there facing the wall. I couldn’t get up. I wanted to be alone and not think about anything. My mother gave me some pills to help me sleep, and I managed to doze for a few hours. Ever since that day, I’ve never again been able to fall asleep without pills. Nor have I been able to sleep with the light off. I need a little light, otherwise I start tossing in bed and I can’t sleep anymore. I woke up suddenly, startled and sweating. I was still in my childhood room.
When I left home to live on my own I didn’t want to bring anything with me, and my mother kept things exactly as they were. It’s as if I’d left home yesterday. There’s an old Silvio Rodriguez cassette in my stereo. Those must have been the last songs I heard in this room. Everything is the same. Even a few old dolls with faded hair that I never gave away, which watch me from the shelf with staring eyes, open and empty, as if dead. I look at the little-girl curtains my mother never changed: they’re sky blue with red, green, and yellow balloons. Behind them the flowers of the apricot tree press against the window. I look at the clock. Time doesn’t pass.
My mother comes in and it’s as if she’d woken me up in the middle of the night. Seeing her there disconcerts me. She’s gained weight; I’m annoyed that she’s here and interrupting me when I need to be alone. She opens the window so the scent from the apricot tree can waft in, but I sneeze and sneeze, waves of sneezing: I’m allergic to the pollen. If we were at the beginning of spring, with a little luck I could reach out my arm and grab an apricot. That’s if the pigeons didn’t beat me to it, or the damned ants. I stay there lying in bed, not thinking of anything. I used to love the flowers on the apricot tree. I try to smell them the way I used to, but I can’t. I close the curtain. “I’m not hungry,” I tell my mother. I bark at her, more like it: “I’m not hungry! Don’t bother me, please . . .” I curl up and shrink from her. I want to be alone in the dark.
“I didn’t mean to bother you,” says my mother. “Quite the opposite . . .” She looks at me. I should apologize, but I say nothing. Finally, just when I’m about to utter the words, she makes a half-turn and leaves, gently closing the door. I should call her back and give her a hug. I freeze up.
My mind jumps around: the rough stubble on my father’s chin against my face, Rodrigo’s back as he plays paddleball on the beach, Ronco’s shout, my grandmother’s deeply wrinkled cheeks. And the rancid smell of the nuns in school, Gato’s sibylline voice, the pain in my wrists, the pain on my back from the electrified bed frame, the feeling of Canelo’s short hair in my hand, the dry sound of my leather purse closing with the money inside . . . My memories bounce off of hard glass.
I’m empty, I need deliverance, but there is none. Sighs escape my lips. And my sighs are the howls of an animal that has lost its vocal cords. Even stretching out in the bed is an effort. I doze curled up. Nothing will move me from that position. Except the anguish squeezing my guts; then I arch my body as though trying to wrench away from myself. How long will it last? What can calm me? It’s hard to breathe. I’m desperate. The floor sinks down. I’m the one who has to end this. I should do now what I should have done with my Beretta in Calle Moneda. I’m resolved. Yes, now. There’s no hysteria. I’m reasoning coldly. No one can endure this anguish. It’s the only way out. But not now. As soon as I have the strength. I’ll go to my mother’s bathroom and swallow the whole box of sleeping pills. That’s the answer. This is impossible to bear, it’s inhuman. The decision calms me down.
Until Anita comes in and climbs in bed with me. She makes me laugh. I hadn’t remembered her laugh, and when I see it spill from her mouth, it makes me laugh, too. When she leaves my room, I fall back into the abyss that opens up for me and leads to another abyss, which also opens up and drops me into yet another abyss.
My mind wanders to Liv Ullmann’s face in the black-and-white film Persona, by Bergman. The scene goes like this: Liv is in bed in her white nightgown, smoking, motionless while she listens with enormous attention to what Bibi Andersson is telling her from the armchair. Alma! Of course, Bibi Andersson is Alma, the nurse, and Liv is an actress—I forget her name—who is sick, withdrawn deep into herself, barely moving and refusing to talk. Bibi, who is Alma, talks to her and likes that Liv listens.
What Bibi, the nurse, is telling her about is a strange sex scene with some very young boys at the beach. She and a friend were sunbathing naked when these unknown boys came along and started to ogle them. Her friend said to her: “Let them look.” And Bibi, inexplicably, stayed there, naked and lying face down. Her friend stayed on her back. One of the boys, the braver one, came closer, and her friend took his hand, helped him take his clothes off, and they began to make love. Her hands squeezed the muscles of his buttocks while he penetrated her. Then Bibi wanted to have sex with this same boy; she did, and she got very excited and came immediately. Then the other boy came over and her friend started to
play with him, and he came in her friend’s mouth; she touched herself then and when she came she cried out . . .
As Bibi’s story goes on, Liv’s face, listening, becomes larger. The hand with her cigarette covers her thirsty mouth. It’s a kind of modesty that gives us pause. Later that night, Bibi goes on saying, she made love with her fiancé and it was better than it had ever been before or would be again. She can’t understand how the whole thing happened.
The silent profile of Liv’s face continues filling the screen. The light seems to sculpt that face in stone. The forehead, the eye, the outline of the nose, the contour of the lips, all chiseled by light. It’s an inhibited and emotional face. Moved by what she hears. Her full lips, made for kissing, are hesitating, about to open. Something is transforming her from inside, but she holds it back.
It’s extraordinary! Liv just listens. And that’s what Bergman filmed: a woman listening.
Time is beginning to stick to the curtains. Beyond them, hidden, are the flowers of the apricot tree. A black claw reaches into my stomach and squeezes me from inside. If this doesn’t stop, I know what I have to do, I tell myself. It doesn’t make me sad. It’s not revenge. I think that I should prepare my mother, my father, Anita. But how?
So, how did it come to this? I tell myself: I have to go back to my mother. I must. My mother: smart, ugly, but well shaped, good breasts, good legs. I’ve told myself this story before. A woman who works in Radiology at the Salvador Hospital feels that her face doesn’t belong to her, she’s insecure about her looks—but not about her intelligence. She wins the love of a tall, muscular, beautiful man. He’s a talented tennis player but not, of course, a professional. He’s a businessman. He works with his father in a small workshop in the neighborhood of Carrascal. He buys tree trunks in the south, brings them by train to Santiago, and makes them into boards, planks, and panels. For doors and windows, for floors. That’s what my father makes and sells: doors and windows.
La Vida Doble (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) Page 4