by Ted Simon
We stood by one of the desks under a fluorescent tube, and as I looked around my 'prison' it became again just a pleasant, clean, well-lit office in which I had spent hardly forty-eight hours.
For a while I could not think what to say. I wanted to describe the fear, the humiliation, the despair that I had suffered in there, and I knew it was impossible. I might as well have launched into an account of a bad dream. To Matthews it would surely be quite incredible and I was afraid of losing his sympathy. So I stuck, as best I could, to the facts, explaining who I was and where I had come from.
'I will see what I can find out’ Matthews said, and left the office. I watched through the hatch as he telephoned the Superintendent at home. He was polite but not obsequious, and I awarded him full marks. When he came back I noticed, for the first time, that his English was heavily accented.
'He says it is something very big. He will explain it to me on Monday.'
My fears, it seemed, were not groundless after all. There was some consolation in that.
'He says you have full rights and privileges . . .' I could not restrain the cynical smile . . . but unfortunately you must wait for the outcome.
'I will come back to visit you tomorrow, but is there anything you need now?'
It was kind of him. He would have liked dearly to put me off until the next day. There were many things I wanted badly; a clean shirt, a towel, a shave, a cover to sleep under, books to read, paper to write on, dry socks, but I could not concentrate my mind sufficiently to remember where they would be. I begged Matthews to go to Sao Raimundo fetch my red bag, hoping that what I wanted would be inside it, because what I craved most of all was news from the priests' house, to know what had happened there and to Father Marcello.
Dutifully Matthews toiled out to Sao Raimundo and back. Of all the things I wanted, the bag contained only my razor. However, the news was as good as it was baffling. No police had been to the house, and Father Marcello had certainly not been deported. Matthews promised to return next day with books and a towel, and I lay down for the third night in the same shirt and trousers.
Next morning the hours passed as slowly as ever. The dampness was getting deeper into me now, and the fever and congestion were worse. Despite that, the Consul's arrival had stimulated my imagination again, and once more I could find no escape from doom-laden speculations.
On reflection the Consul's arrival seemed less of a miracle. I tried to draw up a new balance sheet of my prospects. On the credit side, the police were not after all trying to keep my presence there a secret. But then, why should they? They were the law. If they needed a pretext for holding me, they would have no problem finding one. If they wanted to implicate me in some sort of conspiracy obviously they could do so. My trip to Iguatu gave them plenty of ammunition.
By now I was beginning to wonder whether there was more going on in Iguatu than the after-effects of a flood. Perhaps there really were small centres of resistance to the regime, struggling to survive. And where better than in a disaster area?
And those radio messages? I had not imagined them, with their references to an 'ingles' and Marcello and deportation. They must mean something. Why the concern with 'photographs of the coast'? Were they afraid of foreign intervention? From Cuba, perhaps.
I recalled the agent on the cellar steps and his offhand remark about having seen my visa cancelled. It simply did not sound like a lie. Why on earth should he have invented a lie like that? Did that mean that the best I could hope for was deportation? Yet there had still been no attempt to question me further. And most mysterious of all, they had shown no interest whatever in my belongings. They had my passport, but my address books and papers, carried openly in the same wallet, they had
ignored. Surely if they suspected me of conspiracy with 'subversivos' they would at least go through the motions of examining my address books. None of it made sense.
Several times I had the strange impression of being two quite distinct people; one innocent and the other guilty. As though it were, in a sense, my own choice that would decide the matter. I tried to remember more clearly something I had read or heard about there being people who were 'torturable' and others who were 'untorturable'. Was it Kafka? Or one of the Russians? No matter. I decided to devote myself to being innocent and untorturable. And immediately I stumbled over my own guilty secret, which was the passport under the fridge.
A thousand times I cursed the impulse to put it there. The prospect of the police coming upon it in a search was so disturbing that I even considered confessing its existence voluntarily.
What stopped me was an even more awful prospect. Suppose the maid in the meanwhile had swept the dining room and come across the belt. And handed it to Walsh. And what if he, then, had decided to hide it elsewhere on my behalf. What then would the police think if, after all, it was no longer there? Would not that indicate the very thing I was most afraid of, evidence of a conspiracy involving the priests? I absolutely dared not take the risk of implicating them. During all the time I was held by the police, the one thing which constantly undermined all my resolution was the image of that hidden package being discovered.
Matthews came at lunchtime as he had promised, bringing books and a towel. I racked my brains to think of ways to profit by his presence, as the underprivileged do when given brief access to power. I dared not tell him about the second passport, so at last I recalled the Superintendent's facile promise that I should go to dine in restaurants. It struck me then as a ludicrous idea, as futile to propose as a journey to the moon, and I expected him to laugh when I mentioned it, but he took it up immediately with the agent in the hall and again I watched their faces through the hatch.
The agent, who had never even glanced at me before, turned to me with a smile of electrifying sincerity and said 'of course' and 'why didn't you mention it earlier?'
I was astonished. I walked out into the sunshine and experienced for the second time in twenty-four hours a shock of ecstasy. The sun reached directly into my bones. I felt the moisture boiling off my clothes and skin. The relief was overwhelming, and only then could I measure the effect of the dampness in the building.
To anyone coming and going my complaints might have seemed hysterical, though the cold and the fever were real enough. It came as a revelation to me that real physical and mental harm could be inflicted on a person, quite subtly, in the 'nicest' circumstance, while civilized observers would see nothing particularly wrong. I was lucky to have had only a taste of it.
The agente, from being a faceless guard, turned into a genial family man recently transferred from Rio. He seemed genuinely anxious to please and asked me where I wanted to eat.
'Fish,' I said, 'somewhere on the beach.'
In his car we drove to the coast south of the city, to a busy restaurant on a terrace. I was crazy with delight at the sound of voices around me, the traffic, the clean linen, the sea rolling in on the sand. The agente impressed me even more by paying for his own meal. The cold beer, 'estupidamente gelada' which we shared, I took on my bill with pleasure. In its way, that lunch of soup, grilled fish, fried potatoes, salad and coffee was the grandest treat I have ever had or hope to have in my life.
It also marked the beginning of a new phase in my prison life. Matthews' real value was that he had broken the ice; the agentes began to take an interest in me and, at the same time, I picked up a few words of Portuguese and learned to sing them so that I would be understood.
The books Matthews had brought me were Agatha Christies published in the twenties, and held together by transparent tape. I devoured them all in a non-stop orgy to give my restless mind a break, and fell back gorged on to the bed with the taste of Hercule Poirot's brilliantine still on my chops. On Monday Matthews returned, and this time he brought clothes, a sheet and some more serious books from Sao Raimundo. I was able at last to change my shirt for a clean one after four days and nights, and to plunge into a history of the Decline of the Spanish Empire.
Pr
edictably, Xavier had nothing very remarkable to tell Matthews after all except that they were determined to hang on to me. I was still unable to get breakfast. At midday, I was brought a small dish of rice and bones, and again I protested loudly, but this time Franziska was there to help me. Finally one of the younger agentes, called Daniel, was persuaded to take me into town, and Franziska came along. From then on, for a while, I had no more difficulty going out. And it was about this time, too, that I knew Franziska was watching me with more than ordinary interest. It was the hardest thing to judge.
During the first days, when I imagined myself to be under sentence of death, or worse, I found her curiosity about me obscene. It offended me that a good-looking girl with a gun in her handbag and almost unlimited power over my fate (as I imagined) could expect me to swagger and crow over her favours. Now that my fears were receding and I felt the blood flowing a bit warmer through my veins I was intrigued but extremely cautious.
It was impossible to know whether she was acting on her own initiative, or someone else's, or both; and the confusion stifled the excitement I might have felt. As the days dragged on she would come in, often at odd hours when the office was almost empty, and question me about England or other places I had seen. I knew that my answers were not what interested her most, that her real interest was more personal, but the game seemed full of danger and I dared not even think about playing it.
Instead, as the novelty of my new privileges wore off and I became increasingly angry and frustrated at the waste of my days, it was she who bore the brunt of my bitterness. She seemed authentically surprised by my complaints.
'Why are you so angry?' she asked. 'It is going well for you. You will be free soon, I think.' 'When will I be free?' I asked harshly. T don't know. I am not involved in your case.'
'Then how can you know I'll be free?' I said with fine contempt, refusing the offer like one who has been fooled too often.
T don't know. We can tell. Daniel, the others, they all think so.' Almost as though I were a medical case showing signs of remission.
She always looked me straight in the eye. She was never demure or evasive. At any other time I would have known she was telling the truth, but my instincts were warped and I saw her as Sarah Bernhardt playing Mata Hari.
I was sick and tired of coping with my fear and resentment. My twice-daily excursions into town no longer appeased me. I was in a rage of impatience.
'It's ridiculous,' I said. 'You know I'll be free. They know it. But how can I believe you? They must know who I am by now. It's disgusting to keep me locked up here, imprisoned, for no reason.'
I had meant my outburst to be intimidating. I would have liked her to burst into tears. But she was simply amused.
'Nobody is free,' she said. 'Everyone has a prison. Wife, parents, children, they all make prisons.'
I was astounded, insulted, to have my ordeal compared with petty domestic trammels, and I ranted on about the principles of justice and liberty, but my speeches had no visible effect. And I was feeling far too self-righteous to accept the simple, shocking truth that she presented to me.
Matthews came again on Tuesday, to be told once more that the police were waiting for a reply to one last cable. He told me he had to leave Fortaleza for four days. The superintendent had promised that my case would be resolved before his return.
That night a customs house clerk joined me in custody. He was twenty-eight years old, frail, timid and very unhappy. He told me he had flown in from a town somewhere up the Amazon and had been discovered without any identity papers. He said he had left them at home by accident, and was worried because his wife would be expecting him back next morning. It was remarkable how much we could tell each other with the little scraps of language we had in common, but after his arrival my grasp of Brazilian improved more rapidly. He was called Ignacio, and he called me Tedge. Like most Brazilians he was incapable of pronouncing the 'd' in Ted'.
On Wednesday Ignacio developed toothache and a big swelling, and I made a fuss about getting him treated, but with no effect other than to occupy my mind. While I was obviously now in favour, the clerk was despised as a petty criminal. Franziska knew nothing against him specifically, but just felt sure that he was up to no good.
At lunchtime there was an unusually vigorous burst of activity in the office. Everybody, including the girls, went out on some operation, all with guns. The guns were neat brown things with tiny barrels. The men tucked them in their waistbands beneath their loose shirts. The girls put theirs in their shoulder bags and teetered off on high heels in the best traditions of television crime series. Franziska later told me it had to do with smuggling, and in the afternoon three flashily-dressed men joined us in the office, followed soon afterwards by a negro with eerie pale eyes. They seemed very boisterous and confident. With six detainees in the office, plus a full staff, the game of musical chairs became hilarious. Even with two of us to a chair there were not sufficient. As the oldest inhabitant I felt entitled to a chair of my own, but in the end it was too much trouble to hang on to it, and by evening the intruders had swaggered off, leaving Ignacio and I to ourselves.
I made a chess set from scraps of paper and we played an elementary game. When Franziska saw us, she rushed off to fetch a set of dominoes from her office. She told us that there was going to be an eclipse of the moon that night just after dark. We saw it clearly through the gap between the roof and the walls, and Franziska and I stood and wondered at it. I could not remember whether I had ever seen one before, and it struck me as odd that I should see it in these circumstances. The rainstorm on my first night there had also seemed significant to me, and I realized that on this journey, for the first time in my life, I was tempted to connect unusual natural phenomena with my personal fate, though I had no idea how or in which direction the influence might flow.
Then there was another flurry in the office, a big briefing session, and they were all off again into the night.
By Thursday morning, things had progressed to the point where, when I wanted to go to the bathroom I simply walked out of the office without a word or an escort and was unchallenged. In principle I could have let myself out of the back door of the kitchen and walked away, though it
would have been supremely silly to do so. Then the barometer swung back suddenly from Fair to Horrible. It happened at 4.30 p.m. after exactly a week in captivity. The fair blue-eyed operations chief who usually sat at the DOPS desk had moved to a seat near the door. I was standing not far away, having again been tricked out of a chair. Then an agente came in who was only rarely seen in the office. He was one of the two agents I had noticed who looked really vicious, the other one being the lumpy-faced fellow who had met me on the ship and whom I had never seen since.
This man was an Arab whose face was ravaged by pockmarks, which did nothing to soften the meanness of his mouth or the shifty glitter in his eye. He and the jefe spoke in whispers, which caught my attention straight away, for it was quite unusual. Worse still, the blue eyes kept flicking towards me, and I was allowed distinctly to hear the word 'ingles' several times. I had already begun to believe that I was watching some kind of charade, when to my amazement the other horror with the lumpy face walked in, complete with dark glasses and his weasel-faced assistant.
They all made a great show of conniving together. Until that afternoon I did not know it was possible to be amused and terrified at the same time. The jefe said 'Ingles' and 'Passaporte' and 'Sao Raimundo' and 'Espiao' which means 'spy', and 'ask the woman' and 'if it is there . . .' and then he made one of the most eloquent gestures in the human repertoire, he scooped up an imaginary fly and crushed it in his fist. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry, but a deep-down sense of the absurdity of it all saved me from doing either. It was a hilarious melodrama with a chillingly serious message. For whose passport could they possibly be after at Sao Raimundo if it were not mine, and who was the spy if not me?
The three villains slunk away in their theatrically a
ppointed mission, and I watched myself carefully to see how I would take the new threat. After all, I told myself, this was where you came in. To my relief I found that I simply lacked the energy to be terrified again. It was too exhausting. If it happens, let it happen, I thought, and went back to reading history. From then on, although I was expecting painful news from Sao Raimundo at any moment, I was able to push the thought from the forefront of my mind. It was encouraging to discover that in coping with terror, as with any other human skill, one improves with practice.
The jefe came back into the office later, like a hound on the scent, asking his staff whether anyone had heard of orshfam, which had to be Oxfam pronounced in Portuguese. Nobody had. I found the spectacle utterly comical and began to wonder whether they were all just incompetent, but that thought was too uncomfortable and I dropped it. Then the fuss was over for the day and they all went home.
There was a simple policeman with a merry disposition who sometimes took me out to eat when there were no agentes to spare. In the office he appeared to have adopted me as a pet, and whenever he saw me he shouted 'ta boa'? at me several times in the exaggerated way that one calls 'good boy' to a dog. I humoured him, as he humoured me, with a laugh or a smile, since I couldn't bark. It never occurred to him, I'm sure, that I might one day learn to speak to him and in consequence his company was quite undemanding and peaceful.
It was a glorious evening, dry and bright. As we walked towards the cathedral I smelled night-scented flowers on the breeze. The cathedral stood two blocks from the police station, a monstrous thing more like a fortress than a church, built long ago out of millions of dark wafer-like bricks. It was far from beautiful, but its size and squatness gave it a power which impressed me more every time I passed. It overlooked a broad cobbled area where several roads met and many small bars and restaurants traded, and it was here also that prostitutes gathered towards evening.
