“No!” I shouted.
“No!” Renzo said, “Stop that!” but by then another man—he was dark, with a face ravaged by the deep craters of childhood acne—was already straddled above me, his pants pulled down to his knees.
“Please!” I now begged. “Don’t do that!”
Renzo was cursing in both French and Italian, trying to stand up with the chair still attached to his body. He made it three steps closer to me before falling over onto his side.
The leader, whose men I heard addressing him as Vasa, stared down at Renzo, a stranded turtle, then at me and the kneeling crater-face, who was now reaching to pull down his stained underwear. Meanwhile, the rest of the men lit cigarettes, standing around us like an audience outside the theater, waiting for the second act to begin.
“Please,” Renzo repeated. “I beg you. I am the spy, okay? Not her. No spy.”
“Please . . .” I was crying now. “Please don’t.”
Vasa smiled tentatively: behind his eyes, a new plan. He whispered in the ear of the crater-face, which caused the latter to pull up his pants and step aside. Then Vasa knelt down over Renzo and untied him. That’s when I allowed myself to believe we’d make it out okay, or at least without further incident. The men had our car, our equipment, our clothes, all of our cash. Surely they could now let us go. But just as I was mentally trying to figure out how that would happen—we’d have to walk into town and hitch a ride or, because of the darkening hour, find a nearby house in which to hide for the night—Vasa pulled Renzo to his feet.
“Okay. You do it.”
Renzo stared back at him, confused. “Do what?”
“You . . .” He poked his finger into Renzo’s blood-stained chest. “Do sex . . .” He made two fists and pumped his elbows back, his hips forward. “To her!” He pointed down on the floor at me.
“Are you crazy?”
“No,” I begged. “Please.”
Vasa hit Renzo again with the butt of his rifle. “You do sex. To her! Now! Like American film. XXX.” Then he grabbed him by the hair and dragged him to where I lay, still immobilized. “You!” he shouted again, spit flying. He pushed Renzo to his knees and kicked him in the back. “Do sex!” As Renzo fell over, grabbing his back in pain, Vasa started laughing, which made his minions crack up as well. Then, taking a sudden dislike to the cacophony of voices, he removed a small revolver from his pocket and shot it into the roof right above us. The room became silent. So silent you could hear my syncopated gasps, the floor creaking, the tiny bits of plaster fluttering down from the ceiling.
“Renzo,” I said to him, the tears flowing freely now, “Fai quel che ti dicono di fare. Non preoccuparti per me. Cerchiamo solo di uscire di qui.” Just do what they say. I’ll be okay. Let’s just get through this.
“No!” Renzo snapped. “E’inumano!” It’s inhuman.
Vasa held the revolver to Renzo’s head. “You. Do. Sex! To her!” he said once again. He cocked the trigger to make his point clearer. “Or . . .” he made a show of unbuckling his belt “. . . I do it.”
“Renzo, please!” I said now in English, my voice frantic, pleading. “Just do what he says.” My hands, still held tight by the man behind me, were starting to lose feeling from the wrist up. “We’ll be okay. I promise . . .” I said, trying to convince myself.
Renzo closed his eyes and breathed deeply. Then he turned to face his captor. “If I do this to her, you NOT do it, yes?” His face was emotionless, stone. “We make deal, yes? No one but me, yes? Deal?”
Vasa smirked. “Deal.” He motioned with his eyes for the man holding my arms behind me to release his grip. Then, gun still in hand, he yanked off Renzo’s jeans, revealing a penis that hung down as flaccid as the ear of a basset hound, the sight of which caused Vasa to laugh. With his right hand he pointed the gun at Renzo’s crotch and started to yell, his face growing bright pink with the effort. “Do sex now! Like American film. XXX. Now!”
“Okay, okay!” Renzo said. “Stop yelling. I can’t just do, like that!”
So Vasa grabbed Renzo’s penis in one hand, the back of my head in the other, and shoved the two parts of us together. “Make hard!” he said.
The gun was now pointing at my skull. I did as I was told, my mouth moving up and down along Renzo’s still-jowly flesh, which caved and folded in on itself each time it reached the back of my throat. “Renzo, please,” I said, coming up for air and crying. “Just fake it. Pretend if you have to.”
“I cannot pretend!” said Renzo. “This is insane . . .” His entire body, except for the one part that needed to be, had turned tense and stiff.
“Of course it’s insane. Let’s just get through this.” I’d been to a live sex show in Bangkok once, the couple stationed on a raised translucent platform above us, the woman’s rear squashed flat into a bifurcated heart, the man’s sweat falling in tiny splats onto the scratched Lucite, like rain against a windshield. From either this sight or from the tom ka gai I’d slurped down earlier—it was impossible to say—I’d spent the rest of the night retching.
I lowered my voice to an intimate whisper. “Imagine we’re actors, on a stage. Or all alone, like we used to be. Remember that? Focus on that. Please . . .” If Renzo were unable to perform his duties, how many members of our watchful audience—laughing, pointing, flicking their ashes onto Renzo’s naked backside—would relieve him of them?
“Okay,” he said, the blood on his face now close enough to drip onto mine. And with his lips held together between his teeth, he climbed on top of me and simulated the act as best he could, moving his hips, squeezing his gluteal muscles, even making soft moans to avert the attention away from the protuberance hanging lifeless between his legs.
“No no no!” Vasa yelled, enraged by the performance. “You fuck her. Like man! Like man. Watch!” He pulled Renzo off of me and literally threw him into the wall, screaming something in Serbo-Croatian before spitting into his face.
“Don’t touch her!” Renzo said, on the verge of tears, his hands held over his groin in shame. “We had a deal!”
“Yes, and you break it,” said Vasa, as if scolding a child, first wagging his forefinger in disapproval, then making the same deflating motion with it as before.
“No. Please!” I screamed. “Please!”
“Elle est pleine!” screeched Renzo, in a last-ditch effort for leniency. “Vous comprenez? Enceinte!” He mimed the orb of a pregnant belly with his hands. As if uttering this fact in the authoritarian tongue of his father could actually sway these men one way or the other.
Afterwards, while Vasa, then the crater-face, took their turns demonstrating, with my newly ripe body, their versions of fucking like a man, while I wailed and kicked and felt myself transmogrifying down the Mohs’ scale first to gypsum, then to quartz, then into a solid slab of industrial-grade diamond, four of the others took Renzo outside, into the cold night air, where they made him lean with his head against the side of the house and began to douse him, continually, with a garden hose.
The next morning, making our way on foot back into town, Renzo and I made a pact: we would keep the incident between us. For him, the humiliation was too great, the memory of his ineptitude too painful. “They would have done it anyway,” I kept assuring him. “Stop beating yourself up.”
For me, as usual, it just felt easier to try to erase it.
CHAPTER 17
“WOW,” I SAID, finishing up the last spoonful of my soup, “that was excellent. Where’d you buy the fish?” Do you ever think about that night? That awful night, when both of us pretended to sleep, you with your teeth chattering, forehead bleeding, me getting up every ten minutes to try to clean myself off?
“Just down Ninth Avenue. Chelsea Market it is called? Simon beam for me this address into my Treo.” Renzo downed the water in his mug and filled it up halfway with wine. Then he did the same to mine.
“Hey!” I said, laughing, “I was still drinking that.” And yet Daisy came out fine in the end. More than
fine: my happy child, the spitting image of her father.
“Drink the wine. It is better for you,” he said.
“Better for me or better for you?” I said. The words reverberated in the air, a gauntlet’s echo. Though I hadn’t meant to throw it down.
“Better for both of us,” he answered, and from his tone and the ensuing silence and the way he’d leaned his body forward and was staring at my face, unblinkingly, I could tell he’d met me there, in no-man’s-land, awaiting further command: the tiniest gesture, the slightest of openings.
“Renzo, listen, actually I shouldn’t, I mean I’ve never . . .” I couldn’t even say the words: I’ve never cheated on my husband.
“Shhh.” Renzo placed his index finger on my lips. “No need to speak about any of this.” And like that the moment was over, both of us safely back behind each of our fences. He pushed his chair away from the table and grabbed the bowls to clear them.
We cleaned up the dishes together, falling back reflexively into our old formations: me at the sink, Renzo clearing and wiping and sweeping. And as we stood there with the water running, the broom swishing, the rhythm and choreography of our two-step ingrained, Renzo rattled on about the plans he’d made: the driver and armed bodyguards he’d hired for us; the amount of cash we would need to pay them daily; the contacts we should call, once we’d arrived; the satellite phones we would need to procure from Bernie’s assistant. “Let’s not talk about a ‘we’ yet,” I said. “I told Bernie I’d decide by this Friday, but I haven’t even had the chance to discuss it yet with Mark. Theoretically, I’d like to go, but . . .”
“Don’t worry,” said Renzo. “The war is not going away anytime soon. You still have time.”
And even when it does go away, I thought, it won’t, really. All that blood, all those bodies: they never lie dormant. What kind of revenge would this one exact? Another building? A whole city? An entire planet, going up in flames? Did you know I still dream about those men who raped me, sometimes snipping off their penises with a pair of garden shears, sometimes simply ripping their heads from their necks with my bare hands? Revenge! It’s built into our RAM just as surely as hunger. “Hey, can I see those photos you were telling me about?”
Renzo dried his hands on a dish towel and planted a kiss on my forehead. “Of course, mon Eliza.”
“Hey.” I crossed my arms over my chest. “I’m not your Eliza anymore. Nor will I be, okay? Let’s get that straight.”
He laughed. “How is—comment il s’appelle — Mark?” Then he walked over to his suitcase to retrieve the photos.
Aside from when he’s unwittingly recreating that very scene of torture? “He’s fine. Everything’s good.” I still haven’t told him, you know. It’s been eight years, and I still don’t have the words for it. “How’s that girlfriend of yours?” I wondered if he’d told her, if he’d been braver than me. Or would that moment stay between us forever, binding us to one another just as surely as the ketubah in my closet. Bernie had told me that Renzo had recently moved in with a woman named Paloma, a young gallery owner who’d exhibited his most recent show in Rome. If true, it would have been the first time, since leaving his parents’ home, he’d ever shared his living quarters with another living creature. Pets included.
“Pregnant,” he said, with no more or less sentiment than if he’d said good. “Due in a month.” He held a large portfolio in his hands which he carried over to the couch. “Come, sit.” He patted the space next to him.
“Pregnant?” I walked over to the couch and sat down. “Bernie didn’t tell me that. Renzo, that’s so . . . so optimistic of you. But wait. If she’s due in a month, what are you doing going to Iraq?”
“What I always do. She know that. The real question is what are you doing going to Iraq?”
“What am I doing?” I could feel the blood rising up the back of my neck, stopping just north of the scalp line. “For Christ’s sake, Renzo, you’re the one who told Bernie to give me the assignment!”
“Yes, this is true.” His face broke into a smile. “But I do not think you will actually take it.”
“Stop smiling. It’s not funny. This is my life we’re talking about. If you didn’t think I would come, then why the hell did you even—”
“Why not? I will not work with Carl. Jonesie’s too old. The young ones, these days, well, you see that gosse at B&H. They are foolish. They take too much risks. At worst, you say no. At best, you come. Nothing to lose by asking, non?” He pulled out a cigarette and lit it.
“We can smoke in here?”
“What do you think?” Again, a smile crept over his face. “This may be the Fascist Republic of America, mi amore, but here we are in the international no-fly zone of chez Simon.” He blew out a puff of smoke, aiming it toward the crack in the window to his right. “So? You still have not answered. Why is it you are thinking of going with me? Last time we speak, after the first baby, you say your career is finish. What makes the change?”
“What makes the change? First of all, I never said my career is finished. I said my career covering war was finished. And second of all, god, your English has really gone down the toilet since we were together. It’s not ‘What makes the change?’ but ‘What made you change your —’” I looked at my watch. 1:05 PM. Irma would be picking up the girls from school that afternoon; I had another four hours before I had to take Daisy to her piano lesson; my editing could wait. “—mind. Pass me one of those.”
“I thought you quit.”
“I did.” And as I sucked on the cigarette, filling my throat, then my lungs with the ammonium-tinged heat, I told him about producing segments on nail polish to cover the rent, about the feelings of shame at pouring so much time and effort into fluff. I missed the excitement of my old job, I said, but not the physical danger; I just hadn’t been able to figure out a way to have one without the other. On a more positive note, I said, there was April’s story, the documentary I was working on, but A) I hadn’t been able to secure funding aside from that one day of shooting, and B) I realized that what I really wanted to know about the story was unknowable. Then I turned to the broken fragments of my inner life: the bouts of depression; the fainting episodes; my crumbling marriage.
“But before, just ten minutes ago, you say everything is fine.” He stubbed out his cigarette and pulled the half-used cigar out of his breast pocket.
“Well what was I supposed to say? My work sucks, my husband’s into S&M, and I can’t seem to stay vertical? No one wants to hear that. So I say I’m fine, he’s fine, we’re all fucking fine!”
“I see,” said Renzo, looking suddenly deflated. “I understand now. You want to go to Iraq to escape all this problems.”
“No!” I said. I was now smoking my second cigarette and contemplating a third. “I want to go . . .” I sucked in the smoke, let it burn my throat. “. . . because it’s a great assignment. Because I should get back out there. Because it’s important.”
“And this mother who kill herself and your little friend, she is not so important?”
“Of course she is. It’s just that . . . I don’t know.”
“Yes you do. Elizabeth, be honest with yourself. You are thinking about going back to war because war, unlike the rest of your life, you understand. Everything is simple there, on the surface: I hate you, you hate me, if I don’t kill you, you will kill me. Basta. End of story. In civilian life all this gets hidden, pushed down under the earth, but it has to come out somewhere, right? So you have the maniacs in their Mercedes. The teacher who gives the bad marks even to the good student. The functionnaire who tells you with big smile you forgot this form or that, and you must return to the back of the queue. You even have the old woman in my building who secretly presses all the buttons on the lift before getting off. I see her do it one day, I know. Or more extreme, you have these boys who come to school with AK-47s to shoot the students; the teenager outside his shitty HLM, throwing Molotov cocktails at the gendarme; or, as you have discovered,
you have the mother who hate her husband and take the children into the woods and never to come home again.”
“What the . . . what are you talking about?”
“I am talking about motivation. Your motivation. Me, at least I am honest with myself. I am attracted to war, like a lover. Before to see for myself this ‘banality of evil’ and stand at the doorstep of history and all that other blah blah blah. Now, to make of it art. You? I think it has become too hard for you to try to figure out the rules of regular life, so you want to go back to something you understand.”
“You’re so wrong.”
“Oh, yes? Do not get me wrong. I am happy you want to go. I would like this very much, your presence there. But I do think you are lying to yourself.”
“Well, you’re wrong. I’m not lying to myself. I want to go because the story is important. Because truth matters.”
“What do you mean, this truth?” Renzo looked as if he were about to laugh again.
“I mean the opposite of a lie. What’s so funny?”
“You are hoping to find truth in Iraq?” Now he was, in fact, laughing. “You . . . want to find truth . . .” He wiped his eyes and tried to keep a straight face. “. . . in Iraq?”
“No!” It was hard making myself heard over his convulsions. “I want to report the truth in Iraq. To write about something that matters. For Christ’s sake, Renzo, just what is so funny?”
Renzo waited until he composed himself before speaking. “Elizabeth, please. You think that reporting on a war is reporting the truth? You know as well as I that the only truth you will find over there in the desert is that man is beast. So what? You already know that. The truth? I am surprised you are so naive after all this time. We do not report the truth. We report only what we see. Who was that philosopher? I think he was one of yours. I read him only in French. ‘Il n’y a pas d’histoire, que de biography.’ Or something like that.”
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