La Vida Doble (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

by Fontaine, Arturo

  And then, obeying Flaco, who orders me in a whisper that is gentle but also urgent and controlled, I lie down, languid, on the black velvet sofa, and I hear Flaco’s whisper and those two unknown men come closer, obeying Flaco, those two strangers with young, firm bodies, Rabbit and Jerónimo, they take turns and trade places. And he gives me orders and I submit; “Yes, let him do it,” Flaco murmurs, “yes, go on,” and they say yes silently and I want to obey him and please him and them, to please them all until there’s nothing left of me, just a stain, and I submit with a frenzied heart, with fear and desire, and something breaks inside me and I cross an invisible barrier and I do it and I welcome them and embrace them, I’m made of water and I see Flaco’s eyes and I see his tongue on his lips. But I’m always with those firm bodies and I feel them everywhere, and my body is never alone and I wish I had more mouths and arms and legs because I don’t want to miss anything of either of them and I go from one to the other and we try to come together and it’s difficult and Flaco can’t stand it anymore and joins the group and in the end it’s wonderful.

  Kissing a stranger is a quick and abrupt pleasure, absolute. I had never done it before. I never thought I would, not until Flaco ordered me to, and I overcame myself and vanquished myself and I found myself doing it, and I swear, I liked it.

  I spent that night with them, and I writhed and bristled with the pleasure of passing from one man’s smell and skin texture to another’s, with Flaco’s intense gaze always upon us, and to feel that if one of them was worn out then the other was waiting for me, ardent and tenacious and full, it drove me crazy. I liked to see, in that darkness overflowing with the insidious rhythm of the bass, bodies connected like the arms of a starfish or intertwined like giant flowers with many petals. And you know what else? It set me on fire inside to think that they were our enemies, the very same gangsters who had defeated us and captured and debased us, the same killers who tomorrow or the next day could be crouched on a roof shooting to kill us.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  I saw combatants go to pieces. Not from the torture itself but because they weren’t able to withstand it. Not because they were afraid of being arrested and tied up again, that the whole ordeal would start over, but because they’d collaborated. All of this pursued me, eating away at my conscience; it stayed with me like a persistent bad odor. For weeks and months and years I felt disgusted at myself. I still do. I’m contradicting myself. I’ll never be able to understand myself. Or forget. No. Never. But I don’t want to remember. Nor do I want to forget.

  I know there were many others like me. We only know about some of them; we know because they’ve bravely confessed in writing. They repented and collaborated with the authorities. Good for them. I’m not judging. I speak only for myself. What I want to make very clear to you is that I didn’t inform under duress and only after screams of pain, no. That’s normal, anyone would understand that. Lorena, though, she’s on a mission to annihilate. So that when this is all over and she comes out of it alive, there will be no one left to hold her accountable. I collaborated with the repression and I swear, I kept them buzzing. Collaborating means, for example, going out “fishing.” We would arrive at the specified time to that plaza, or station, the window of that shop, that diner, the usual church, and I would point out the brothers coming into the “meet zone” or the ones who were already there, handing off a package or a single cigarette with a coded message written on its paper, passed surreptitiously from one pair of hands to another, allowing them to be photographed or followed, or else the gorillas fell on top of them and overpowered them right there.

  That moment had a terrifying tension. The combatants of Red Ax were courageous and well trained; they were professionals. Sometimes there were shootouts, in which it was difficult to follow what was happening. I would tremble with emotion. I wanted to see one of their faces right at the moment of surrender. Later on it wasn’t the same: pale and blindfolded, dirty, handcuffed and limping, half dead, their faces broken. I remember one night in particular, the long wait in front of a safe house. Some shots rang out and my soul froze. Suddenly, I saw them dragging someone out in handcuffs. My heart started pounding like it wanted to rip itself from my body. They brought him to me in handcuffs, with Mono Lepe and Indio Ramírez holding him up. They pressed his face to the truck window. He was panting, his jacket was torn, and blood flowed from his upper lip. His eyes, his terrible, wide, and imploring eyes searched for mine behind my mask. His jaw was trembling. I told Rat in a whisper: Pelao Cuyano. That night and all the next day, in Central, I heard his screams. Later I found out he’d died on them.

  Did I feel real regret for Cuyano? And if I didn’t, why not? Did it affect me, and I just managed to bottle up my emotions? Maybe. Shit! This existence is immoral . . . And this life depends on immoral preconditions: and all morality denies life. I was a ruthless agent. I know that. I had a ferocious rage. No one will ever know how many people I fucked over. I was the ultimate traitor, the whore queen sucking those scumbags off . . .

  Because the interrogation would come and yes, I did know what that was, and they still didn’t. “We got a package,” they’d say, we’d say. I would go in wearing a mask. I sat next to Gato, who from behind his metallic desk observed every movement, every sign of vacillation with his lifeless green eyes. Sometimes there would be breadcrumbs or drops of the Pepsi he’d had delivered left on his mouth. He wore a mask, too. “Sometimes their blindfolds slip,” he told me, and he put on his rubber gloves. No one would recognize his little hands and their dainty fingers. Disciplinary power is exercised in its invisibility. He used plugs in his ears to muffle the screams and keep his calm.

  “I’m a professional,” he says to me with the insidious little voice he’s cultivated, “and I have to keep myself lucid and serene. A person in this job develops a certain ability to numb his senses. Well, it’s the same for doctors . . . It’s not easy, Cubanita, to control those moral emotions or to keep them in check so the investigation can go forward. Or to hold back the instinct to attack the man once he’s been broken. It’s discipline. A man who loses control is only fattening himself to be slaughtered like a butchered animal. It happens. Many men have had to be relieved of duty. They weren’t useful anymore as investigators. You know, before they created Central, things happened that were so horrible a person defames himself just by talking about them, he blasphemes—what can I call it—the bare minimum of humanity that we all share. Anyway, that’s how I feel, but I wasn’t ever there, I wasn’t around during that time. You know I’ve only been in Central, I’ve never killed anyone, I’ve only worked in Analysis.”

  The detainee would be on his back, tied up and stark naked with his eyes blindfolded. In discipline, it is the subjects who have to be seen. They still wanted to be brave. I liked it that way. That was the joy of it, to break them. That glissement. Gato and I worked very well together. It was a roller coaster of terror and seduction, a game in which anything was permitted, except the unnecessary. Supposedly, “la Cubanita” had met these comrades in Punto Cero, and she had worked in Cuban intelligence. I don’t know how many people believed it. In any case my name, as I’ve told you, was Consuelo Frías Zaldívar, native of Matanzas. My “false history,” my “F.H.,” as they called it in Central; my “mantle,” my “legend,” in Red Ax.

  I was there. Yes. I was part of the horror. I lived in the heart of evil. I traveled through the belly of the Beast.

  You know what it is that breaks a man, a woman, the toughest ones? It’s not pain or fear. Though all of that helps, of course. What will finally break a person in the end, though, is the knowledge that the interrogator possesses information that concerns him and he doesn’t know what it is. Above all, he breaks when the interrogator catches him in a lie. After that nothing will be the same. There’s a before and an after to that moment.

  “I like the tough ones,” Gato tells me, “I like the challenge, how you can ride it out to the climax, to the breaking point, and get all
the information out of them. It’s better than the whining of the soft, apologetic ones.” There are things that have become blurry for me. It’s better that way. There are things, feelings, that I wouldn’t know how to describe without adulterating them. Let me tell you, there’s a powerful and mysterious bond that forms with the interrogator. There’s a purpose to that pain that gradually passes from the body to the soul, and you perceive it and anticipate the surrender. “You have to grab hold of those two or three seconds of weakness as they pass, because they might not return for hours,” Gato told me. Sometimes it happens as a moment of intense, though brief, spiritual communion. Finally, he gives you the intelligence that you need right now: the next “meet,” the time and place, names, the cell, its leader, the latest mission. And you give him the peace his body craves.

  TWENTY-NINE

  I remember a man with hairless skin and small, black eyes. His teeth were even and square, he had short, strong arms, and legs that were also short and muscular. He was like a little tank. “Lechón,” they called him, “Piglet.” His hair was sparse. You could see the skin of his head between the thick, separate strands. I remember that hair well, and his arms, so thick and so short, and the enormous Adam’s apple in his throat. Supposedly, he had headed a combat cell that blew up a bridge over the Tinguiririca River. But I knew little about him, and my questions didn’t get anywhere. The guy would hardly answer anything. His Asiatic eyes would narrow and he’d go into a kind of trance; and when the jolts of electricity came he would scream loudly and regularly like he was following a rhythm, and he gave off that repellent smell of shit that gets stuck in your nostrils. Afterward, he would take a breath, filling himself slowly with air from the pit of his stomach upward, and he closed his mouth and his jaw fastened shut. They showed him photos of Rafa, the Spartan, Max. There was no way to get him to talk.

  Why is it so hard for me to imagine him today? Didn’t I recognize myself in that determined man’s body lying there, abused and contorting, his skin suddenly pale, his brow wrinkled, eyebrows distorted, his hair on end, eyes spinning wildly and unable to focus on anything, his cries muffled by a rag? Who was I looking at, if not myself? Who did I hate, then, and vilify?

  I’m telling you, at a certain point the person lying there starts to seem like he’s no longer a man. His moans are irritating and they enrage you, and the desire to punish him more grows stronger. I found I could extinguish all human hope from my soul. I made the wild beast’s silent leap to strangle every joy. We must break through his legend, we must make him bear fruit, it’s a question of pride now, there’s no going back and he has to surrender, he must vomit out the truth, his resistance insults me, it is spit in my face; then I approach him, I get very close and I spit on him, I spit on him because I hate him and I must get revenge for his insult.

  That he still dares to maintain his legend forces us to keep going, he’s an imbecile who leaves us no choice. I tell him precisely this in my Cuban accent, and still he sits there like someone listening to the rain; we’ve got to give him more. He’s so disfigured he looks like an obscene monster, a revolting being whose revolting nature offends me. Why should I put up with that smell of acid sweat? It makes me nauseous. We have to give him more, give him more until he breaks, we can’t let him beat us, he smells, he goes on stinking; it’s the repugnant smell of fear, I’m sure you’ve never smelled that stench, it’s like no other in the world. I’m indignant. Why does he subject us to this repugnance? Of course he is doing it on purpose, he’s provoking us, seeking out our hate, he doesn’t want to give his arm to be twisted though he’s nothing but a human rag, a rag that humiliates me with its resistance, and goes on shuddering and flopping like a fish out of water that never reaches the end of its death throes. If he dies, it doesn’t matter—fuck him!—but it does matter, the fucker would take it all with him, he’s no good to us dead, he has to be broken first. Gato’s calm voice stops me.

  I went on feeling a strange vibration. Ronco brought in Rat Osorio to give him a beating, but nothing. Ronco took out his knife, trembling with rage, and he stuck the blade in between the man’s teeth. Ronco’s tightened face, his fury turning his face and neck red, his mouth half-open and panting, the shine of saliva on his gold tooth. But he could do nothing, and he had to put away his knife when Gato, in his calm, nasal voice, warned him to be careful not to cut the man’s tongue. Something happened to me with “Lechón” when I saw the blade shining between his teeth. There was a terrible determination in that closed jaw as it bit down on the knife blade.

  Then they tied him up and he was left there hanging like a chicken. The pau de arara, learned in La Rinconada in Maipú from some Uruguayan instructors who had fought against the Tupamaros, Gato explained to me with a medical coldness. They learned it from the Brazilians, who had learned it, according to Gato, from the French paratroopers who fought in Algeria. That’s where all the techniques they used in Vietnam came from, he told me. And he gave me names of French military men—Colonel Roger Trinquier, General Paul Aussaresses—who had taught in the Special Forces schools in Fort Bragg and Fort Benning. One of them had been in Brazil. Gato had spent some time taking a class at Fort Benning, and more time in Panama, where the instructors were gringos who taught them to kill and eat monkeys in the jungle. Flaco Artaza was there, too. And Macha? He tells me: “No, not Macha. Purely a South American product, that one.” And he laughs under his breath.

  When they called me in, “Lechón” had his eyes half shut, and his jaw fastened in silence.

  Some hours later the guard let me into his cell. The door opened and I smelled that prisoner stench that suffuses the walls of the cells. He looked like he was sleeping. I tiptoed over to him and I lay down beside him on the mattress on the concrete bed. He must have been very thirsty, and it was only now time to give him water. He thanked me with a slight movement. I massaged his arms, his legs, his back. The guy just let me do it and we didn’t say a word. I felt his tight skin and firm muscles. I liked that feeling of a compact, dense body. It was nice to touch him. I imagined the meat under the skin and I thought it must be delicious to eat. In other times, when we were cannibals, I would have devoured that meat by the mouthful. I noticed a flicker of light in his eyes: he was looking at me. All at once I took off my shirt and freed my breasts from my bra. I was squatting down beside him and there was a glitter in his eyes and I heard him swallow. Not moving.

  “You’re a brave one,” I told him.

  The words slipped out of me. The flicker of a smile went over his lips and vanished without ever taking shape. I caught a glimpse of his square teeth. He didn’t touch me, and I had an urgent need to feel the contact of his skin. I brushed against his face with a nipple. He didn’t move. With one hand I squeezed his shoulder, round and hard. I kissed an impassive mouth and, despairing, I grabbed at his pants. And I knelt down and took hold of his buttocks and pulled him toward me. His heart was pounding. I had my eyes closed. “Your sense of touch is delicate as a blind person’s,” he told me softly.

  “Hit me,” I begged him. “Kick me.” And I curled up on the floor and waited. And he did nothing to me. “Spit on me, please, piss on my face.” And he did nothing to me. Now he was breathing slowly and rhythmically, and neither my fingers nor my lips or tongue could break through his willful indifference. Then I cried and I lay down on my back and opened myself. “Fuck me,” I told him. “You’re scared,” I told him. He sat down calmly on the floor. “You’re afraid you’ll like it and your revolutionary zeal will all go to shit,” I told him. “Look at me at least, you faggot.” I was putting on my pants, I was tying my shoes. “You’re scared to be a man and you hide behind the ‘solidarity’ of your gang.” I kicked him in the mouth. It bled a little, but he didn’t move or say anything. I kicked him again and I left. Who was that man and what had he done? Did he finally break? What ever became of him?

  THIRTY

  I spend hours alone in the apartment, in my room in the dark with the door closed. I
don’t want to see anyone. I throw myself onto the bed. I don’t even take my shoes off. I don’t know what I’m thinking about, if I’m thinking about anything. Sometimes I wake up at dawn with my guts twisted in anguish, and I realize I never even put my pajamas on. I didn’t feel like it and I just stayed there, still dressed and stretched out on the bed. Cold. Morning comes and it’s so hard for me to get up.

  I’m writhing. The earth opens up beneath my feet. I sink into the same bottomless swamp as always. This thing is stronger than I am. The handcuffs return, squeezing my wrists, the slave of memory returns. The mental torment takes my breath away. If only I knew how to howl like a wolf. If I just had more air. My stomach wrenches.

  If I could only rest. I’m not complaining about the world. I’m the one who doesn’t belong here. I’m not interested in the question of the meaning of life. It’s obvious that life has meaning. How could it not? This isn’t just about a theory. I do not want to go on living. Period.

  Keep in mind that Dante puts traitors in the last circle of the Inferno. Their tears freeze like a visor over their eyes and it keeps them from crying, and their anguish grows and accumulates without end. Their souls go to Hell even when their bodies are still alive in the world. A demon guards them on earth for as long as they live. But for them, hell begins not the day they die but the day they commit their betrayal.

  THIRTY-ONE

  I would lose it suddenly, I would seek it out and yearn for it, for his gaze close by me, covering me, and later I would find it again, contemplating me. Because what attracted me were those masculine backs and arms and legs and chins, and of course the mocking and tender smiles of some and the staring, intense eyes of others, but I enjoyed them most of all if I felt Flaco’s great, shining eyes on me. His peremptory orders in that cavernous voice, the release, the sweetness of fulfilling them, humiliating myself; and his forehead in concentration, his dilated pupils, and the trembling of his lips, it all made me throb. I didn’t know who the others were, nor would I ever know.