by Warren Adler
It was necessary only to survive, to avoid the demise of his brain, his memory. Above all, he must preserve that.
She certainly must have smelled the smoke. In the breezeless day the ash settled over the roof and the trees, while he stood in the heat of the door, seared but content. If he had not been there to confirm their destruction, he might have avoided the horror of the next few months. An escape route had been carefully mapped in advance, a series of safe places where he could hide until he could cross the Peruvian border.
He had, of course, no illusions. Her revenge would come with his betrayal, and it was quick. Hardly out of the house, in the work clothes disguise he had prepared, he had been whisked into an armored car and brought shackled hand and foot to the barracks, to the whitewashed room without windows, stifling because it was deliberately unventilated. He knew this room, of course. Hadn't they used it themselves? Paranoia was no respecter of ideology. They kept him in the room for hours. A single bulb illumined the starkness. He sat on a stool, in front of a heavy table. Naturally, he knew what to expect. It was all a contrivance. Soon Raoul would come, he knew. The Army was in charge now.
Eduardo heard the door open, then Raoul's snapping military footsteps. He had always been well shod. The cement floor emphasized the perfection of his shiny boots.
"Eduardo." Raoul patted him on the back and stepped around the stool to the chair behind the table. "I feel absurd about this."
Only two weeks before they had stood together clinking glasses of champagne, recalling the old days. It was odd, he remembered, thinking to himself, indulging in nostalgia, as if the end were coming. They were plotting even then. It was, of course, a clue. The country was in turmoil. But they had not realized that it would be the Army that would betray them.
"It is finished, Eduardo," Raoul said, lighting a cigar. "We can get this over quickly and avoid any further unpleasantness. Then I can get you out of the country." His good looks had mellowed. There was gray at his temples. The face had retained its craggy beauty, although the eyes seemed flintier, hardened. Eduardo's back ached from sitting on the low stool.
"Allende went too far. We had no choice. You were destroying the structure of the country," Raoul said. It was ridiculous hearing him say this. "I am apolitical," he had always protested. A soldier.
"Burning the lists only complicates things for us," Raoul said.
"Lists?"
"It was known," Raoul said. "We missed it by seconds. It would have made matters so simple. It would have spared this embarrassment. We are friends, Eduardo."
"We were friends."
"Always politics. What is politics? One is as bad as another. You were ruining us all. Even your own family. Were they any better than us?"
"That's all academic now. At least we tried."
"You brought us to the brink of disaster."
"Now it has come."
"A little bloodletting. It is part of our heritage. We must preserve what we have built." Raoul stood up. "All we need now is the names, as many as you can remember. We don't mean to harm them, just to know where they are. We will watch them. Just as you watched your enemies. A simple exchange."
"Do you think that I will simply regurgitate them? That you will charm me out of them? Just as you have always charmed women to give you what you wanted?"
Raoul smiled. "One uses the tools that God has given."
Eduardo could never shake the awesome envy. Had Miranda been one of his conquests? Such a thought had occurred to him before. He had dismissed it then. The bond of friendship was sacred. Considering his present situation, his faith in such an idea was considerably shaken.
"I knew," he said maliciously, wanting to test the assumption.
"Knew?"
But his courage failed. It would be pointless to know. Raoul's mindless passion would, as always, make his own seem trivial. Raoul's mouth was open slightly. The cigar jaunty in his teeth. He paced the room, then turned, blowing smoke into Eduardo's eyes. Eduardo observed him, determined to remain numb.
"I will call in a stenographer and you will give us all the names you can remember." He walked toward the door, his heels snapping again on the hard cement.
"Don't bother."
"You're not serious."
"Have you ever known me to lie?"
"Eduardo. This is no game. You know all the devices. In an hour I can have you wishing you were dead. Spare yourself. It is not worth it. We have no time. We are simply protecting what we have won."
"You will kill them. And those you do not kill, you will use. Believe me, Raoul, you will not get any names from me."
"We shall see." He opened the door and left the room.
Knowing what to expect did not make it easier. First they would try to break his spirit with uncertainty, starvation, psychological mischief. Then would come the devices, the dreaded electrical conductors attached to the genitals. It would all be quite businesslike. There would be no real hate in it. The pain would be merely institutional, a brain opener. If that failed, they would inject him with drugs, destroy his will to resist. In the end, he knew, he would tell them something. Yet, above all, he understood the power of the will. Hadn't he willed himself to resist all feeling? Now he must find the will to resist telling them everything, to be selective, preserving what could be useful in the future. They will think they have gotten all of it, although he knew they would be insatiable. But he would make them work for what they got.
The door opened again and he was seized roughly under both arms and prodded along between two broad shouldered guards with expressionless flat faces, their Indian blood a reminder of some forgotten meeting. It was only after they had brought him down a long flight of stairs and thrust him into another room dominated by a long table that he could remember the face of Uno's father. Features which said nothing always put him at a handicap. They made him sit on the table, left him there. Hours passed. Finally he lay on the hard surface, but the light above him was too bright. His eyelids could not shut it out. But when his eyes were closed, he could remember sunlight, lying face upward, hearing the thunder of the distant sea, the rustle of the high grass that edged upward toward the Cordillera and Isabella's soft breathing beside him.
He had not gone back to his parents' house until his father was dying. It was a slow, lingering death, and although he wished he might see the old man, his father had remained persistently adamant. Pride ran too deep in the man that the son had betrayed. In his father's mind, he had committed fratricide. They had called him only when the old man's mind had slipped into chaos. And they had left him to be alone with him. He was a wizened bit of flesh, shrunken, barely recognizable.
"You must make him forgive you," his mother had said, her painted face grotesque beneath henna hair. He imagined he had seen a note of triumph in her eyes, the unmistakable sign of the conqueror's victory. Over the years, as his political ascendency matured, she had written him long, pleading letters to preserve their properties and wealth. Answering, he had gone into long polemics on the reasons for nationalization, land reform, shared property, the destruction of the oligarchs. "You must not betray your blood," she had written in every letter.
His father could not forgive him even if he wanted to. His mind was too far gone, as was his power of speech. Bending over the hollow skull, Eduardo had kissed his forehead. It felt like ice. Only the faint blink of an eye told him that his father was barely alive.
"I forgive you," Eduardo had whispered. He had wondered if his father heard. Did he see a brief nod? He wondered if he truly loved the old man or hated him.
Then, suddenly, the illusion of sunlight dissipated. A tall officer was blocking the naked light above him. Behind him came a young soldier lugging a large tape recorder. He put it on the cement floor and attached a microphone around Eduardo's neck. The officer seemed a pleasant fellow. He smiled. Eduardo, surprised at his own reaction, smiled back. Why not, he reasoned. We are in this together.
"I have no desire to hurt you,"
the officer said. "I am doing my duty. I have been ordered to get you to provide me with the names of those people who have remained underground and could be a threat against the present regime. A simple request."
"You know I burned the lists."
"Yes. But the assumption is that many of the names have been committed to memory."
"The assumption is incorrect. If I had done that, why would I have needed the lists."
"That is another question." The, officer brushed aside any further inquiry on this point, signaled the young soldier to start the tape recorder, and began his interrogation.
"Let us begin. They need not be alphabetical."
"Alphabetical?" The idea seemed ludicrous. Eduardo laughed. He had not felt such a sense of amusement in years. The officer ignored it. He repeated the question.
"A name. Any name."
"Eduardo Allesandro Palmero."
"That's your name."
Eduardo laughed again. "Now we're getting somewhere."
"A name," the officer repeated. He was no longer smiling. Eduardo remained silent, closed eyes. He could not tell how long repetition continued. He began to feel fatigue. He must have dozed. When he opened his eyes the officer was gone.
His sense of time faded. His beard began to sprout and a thirst began. At first he had been hungry and then that feeling had disappeared. They were letting him construct a private hell.
The door opened again. He saw the sculptured, handsome face of Raoul. He was smoking a long cigar, elegantly poised in his long fingers.
"What does it matter, Eduardo?" he said. "Who cares?"
Eduardo shrugged. In the face of Raoul he saw the younger man he had envied and adored.
"I would not betray you, Raoul."
Raoul shook his head, lowered his eyes. "I am not asking you to betray me." He took a deep drag on the cigar. The sweet smoke filled the unventilated room. As always, Raoul was casual, collected. How Eduardo envied him this attitude.
"You should have been a poet," Raoul said. "Politics was definitely the wrong profession for you. You always took the wrong road. Especially with women. You never could understand women. You should never have loved Miranda."
He was taunting him now. Perhaps, he is jealous of my courage, Eduardo thought. There was a long silence. Eduardo felt Raoul's eyes exploring him.
"They could kill you, Eduardo."
The boots clicked along the cement. The door closed. Later the officer came back with the young soldier and the tape recorder whirred again. Names? No answer. Names? No answer. The game must have gone on for hours. Eduardo concentrated on other thoughts, seeking to remember the landmarks of his pleasure. They were dim memories and he could not summon them.
Strong arms grabbed him now, bending his body, shackling his wrists to the sides of the table. A huge leather strap gripped his body and he felt his legs being spread and a pinching on his testicles.
"I really did not want to go this far," the officer said. Eduardo opened his eyes. Wires stretched from his testicles to a machine on a little table in the corner.
Whose names shall I give them? he asked himself. Who shall live and who shall die? I am about to play God. There was comfort in the thought of a deity, although he did not believe in God.
"Now I will ask you once more," the officer said. His tone was even, quite businesslike. The litany began again. Names? Silence.
"All right," the officer said pleasantly. "I am going to give you a tiny taste of this, just a little bit. It will indicate how painful a longer jolt will be."
Eduardo braced himself, waiting. The jolt did not come. They were torturing him now without pain. Give me pain, he shouted in his head, while I am ready for it.
When the jolt came, it reached into the heart of him, an animal tearing at his innards, exploding his genitals, destroying his sense of manhood. The explosion radiated upward and downward. No perception of pain escaped. The pores of his body opened.
"Miranda!" he screamed. The current was off, but the pain continued.
"Who?" the officer asked.
He could not believe what he had shouted. Pressing his lips together, he hoped they would seal themselves. The interrogation began once more. Names. He longed for the escape of paralysis, the death of feeling.
Again, he felt the jolt, the accelerated radiation of pain. It seemed endless. He was in hell. His body was burning. How long must he endure this? he wondered, before he would tell them.
"I am just doing my duty," the officer said pleasantly, forcibly but gently opening Eduardo's eyelids. "Believe me, I understand your pain."
Eduardo remained silent, letting the jolt come again and again, bracing himself, waiting for the moment. Had he been punished enough? Would they all forgive him now? he wondered.
"All right," he whispered finally. He had decided to avoid the drugs. "I will tell you."
"Thank God," the officer said, crossing himself.
Eduardo talked into the tape recorder, giving them names selectively. When he had given them what might be enough to satisfy them, he lay back on the table and closed his eyes. The officer had unfastened the clippers from his genitals with careful delicacy.
"It is awful," he whispered, but it was not intended for Eduardo to hear. He imagined how the young officer would be tonight. Perhaps he would find a woman to prove that he was all right and it would take away his revulsion.
"We could have avoided this," the young officer said. Eduardo felt the burning continue in the center of him. Yes, his mind repeated, I could have avoided this. How could he know I needed this, he thought, feeling a sense of victory now.
Dobbs closed the file in disgust. His eyes ached. It had taken the CIA nearly a year to persuade them to release Eduardo. Did the world really believe it was an act of mercy? He would be their bird dog. He would find all the little birds hiding in the crannies of the trees, the burrows of the fields. It had been a grandiose plan, with Dobbs as architect. It was to be the crowning glory of his long career.
"Damn!" he shouted, banging a fist into his palm. The sound and action seemed so uncharacteristic that he had to pause and listen. Had they heard?
Only Eduardo had heard. Dobbs was certain of that, once again feeling his spirit pervade the room. Did he detect a faint squeal of laughter on the outer edge of audibility?
He had tracked the women and Eduardo's activities with them. He had known everything. Everything. He had facts. But not wisdom. He looked around the room surreptitiously. Then, reaching downward, he grabbed his own genitals, squeezing them hard. He felt nothing.
XVII
She could be sustained, Marie decided, if she could be with him once a week, perhaps twice. Not that it would satisfy her need for him, that overwhelming addiction to his person. That was the way she could justify the madness to herself, an addiction to his person.
She would endure Claude, endure her children, endure the guilt, endure whatever humiliation to her body, endure anything ... providing she could one day look forward to his possession of her, forever.
"You mustn't flog yourself," Eduardo had said.
"It is unbearable," she had told him, deliberately censoring her mind's picture of it. "I am living a gross lie."
"We cope," he had said, as if the purpose of life was merely to endure. "There is something greater to be considered, beyond our personal desires."
"But my cause is you," she had protested. It was a familiar refrain, and he was expected to understand.
Yet she could not bring herself to tell him how the device was planted in the ambassador's study. She had wiped the ugliness from her mind. Only the objective was important. The means were trivial. There was solace in such reasoning, tempering her disgust. Not that it had been easy. She had lain awake that night, tossing and turning next to Claude, who slept, finally convinced that he had won her affection again. He might even have been thinking that life had slipped back into its accustomed groove. To him she was surely the great success of the evening, having drawn the
attention of the ambassador to the exclusion of others. He could enjoy living in the glow of her success and, of course, the implication that it reflected on him, the husband, for having the power to have won and kept her.
In her hurt body, she carried the reminder of the scene. Was it seduction on her part? Or rape on his? A few months ago, perhaps weeks, it would have been unthinkable. But she had done it. She had done it for Eduardo. She took pride in that. The violation was simply necessary, hardly deserving of more than passing interest. Convincing herself eased her mind, although she slept fitfully.
In mid-morning, Eduardo called. She had dashed to the telephone, hungry for the sound of him.
"It is done," she said.
"Where?"
"In the dust jacket of one of the books in the study."
"Excellent."
"Eduardo.... "Her voice trailed off. She felt her body's sudden need for him. "I need you, darling."
"I will call you."
"Please, Eduardo. Today. Now. I will come to you now."
"You must understand."
"I need you today. Now." She felt the sob take shape, an inflating balloon inside her and soon her body was shaking and she was verging on hysteria. "I can't stand this, Eduardo."
"Please," he said softly. "I feel helpless now. I cannot explain."
She tried to bring herself under control, but her breath would not catch and she could barely talk.
"Please," he said again. She knew she was trying to say something, but could not make herself understood, the anguish real, painful. The idea of losing him became suddenly more painful than the realization of her need for him.
