by Giles Blunt
He got up from his desk and went over to the woman. He took hold of her elbow. “Excuse me,” he said. “You’re right in the doorway here, could you just move over a little bit?”
The woman moved awkwardly a pace or two, her back against the wall. “I would like to speak to a lawyer. I have the right to representation.”
“Could you just move your left foot, please? You know the ‘at ease’ position? I want you to stand at ease.”
The Captain tapped the instep of her left foot with his army boot. She was wearing grubby tennis shoes with red trim. She moved her foot aside so that her feet were about two feet apart.
“Thank you,” said Captain Pena, then kicked her full force between the legs. She fell to her knees and curled up as if she had taken a bullet.
Fear slipped into Victor’s bloodstream like acid.
“The official form of greeting,” his uncle said. “Man, woman, doesn’t matter. You have to let them know right away that here the rules do not apply. This is their welcome to a different universe, where mercy does not exist. You have a problem with that, soldier, you go back and explain to Casarossa.” He shouted for a guard, and Lopez came in. “Put her in a cell, we’ll talk to her later.”
Lopez pulled her roughly to her feet. She was not able to stand upright. She was still gulping for air. Victor suddenly understood another reason for the blindfold: tears would not show.
“Hold it,” the Captain said.
Lopez paused at the door, and Captain Pena reached for the woman’s arm and pulled a watch from her wrist.
“It has a metal band,” he said to Victor. “We don’t want her cutting anything.” When the door had closed, the Captain said, “We’ll give her three days to think about things. We will keep her a little hungry, we will keep her a little cold, and, most important of all, we will keep her a little tired. This will be your responsibility. Three days from now, I want her nerves to be screaming.”
“What has she done? She doesn’t look like a terrorist.”
“You think terrorists look like terrorists? Obviously, the first thing they learn is how to be inconspicuous. Mother of God, if we went by appearances, we’d never catch anybody.”
“Captain, I don’t think I’m ready for this.”
“Not ready? You want to tell Casarossa you’re not ready, I’ll take you over there myself. We are interrogating rebels here-socialist pigs who want to destroy everything we believe in. If you are not ready for that, then as far as I’m concerned you deserve to die.”
“But, Captain …. she’s a woman.”
“She is not a woman, she is a terrorist. If we do our job right and get some information out of her, we will save lives. And if you do your job right, then by the time we interrogate her we won’t have to use that much pressure. You will save her a lot of pain.”
“First day, you don’t feed her nothing,” Lopez told him. The Captain had instructed Lopez to show Victor the ropes, which seemed to boost the big man’s mood. He was friendlier to Victor than anyone had been since his arrival. “You don’t feed her nothing, understand? You don’t take her to the latrine, you don’t give her no bucket. Nothing. If she speaks, you scream at her to shut up. You never talk, never use your normal voice, always scream. And never use their name, always call them some thing bad: pig, cunt, faggot, whore-doesn’t matter. They have to learn exactly what they’re worth. I’ll be back in a second.”
Lopez went out and Victor remained at the little table facing the corridor of cells. There were eight prisoners in the first cell, ten in the second, and the third, a tiny little chamber hardly six feet square, held only the woman. Across from this there was a solitary cell containing a man named Perez. There was not a sound from any of them.
Victor had not yet recovered from the shock of seeing his uncle kick the woman, hard enough to break the pubic bone you would have thought. He could never have imagined his uncle-so upright, so correct-kicking a woman.
He stood up and yelled, “Blindfold!” The guards always did this, so that any prisoner whose blindfold had slipped could readjust it. And prisoners were anxious to keep the blindfolds in place; to see a guard’s face was certain death.
Victor peered into the first cell, where the prisoners were laid out like sardines, head to feet, on the mattresses on the floor. None of them stirred. The second cell was the same, although at the sound of the peephole opening, one of them moaned for the latrine.
She was curled up on the bed, holding her abdomen. At the sound of the grate she moved her head slightly, but did not speak.
“Soldier!” This was Lopez yelling for him. Guards never called each other by name in front of prisoners. Victor shut the peephole and went back to the table. Lopez was there with a water bucket. “What’s she doing?”
“Nothing. Lying down.”
“Good. Go soak her with this.”
Victor took the bucket without a word. Ice cubes clicked against metal.
“I’ll open the door, you toss it and get out.”
They went down the corridor and Lopez opened the door.
The woman sat up at the sound and waited, breathing through her mouth. Victor hurled the water at her and it caught her right in the chest, completely soaking her shirt, her jeans and the mattress she sat on. She jumped up with a cry and stood gasping.
“Come on, soldier. Don’t hang around.”
Lopez locked the door and Victor followed him back to the guardroom.
“Good shot, man.”
His uncle was away for the afternoon, so Victor felt safe reading. He finished the Steinbeck and moved on to a James Bond story. He didn’t like it, but kept reading to keep his mind off what he had done. Soaking the woman with ice water. Well, it wasn’t torture, he supposed, but he had never done anything mean to a woman in his life. His father and mother had taught him to stand up when a woman entered the room, to offer his seat to a woman on the bus. And now he was expected to soak this prisoner again before he went off duty.
At six, Lopez came from the kitchen with a cart full of the evening meal. The prisoners got beans and tortillas, or beans and bread, always cold. Never anything else, never anything hot.
They passed the food through the slots of cells one and two, and then Lopez said, “Perez don’t get nothing tonight. But we’ll mix up something special for the new bitch.” He went out to the kitchen and came back with a half-pound container of salt. He handed it to Victor. “Go ahead, man. Pour it on.”
Victor poured a few tablespoons into the beans.
“Not like that, man. You got to really pour it on!” Lopez grabbed his wrist and twisted so that salt poured onto the plate in a white heap. “Stir it, man. Mix it in there!”
Victor stirred the mixture until it was thick as plaster. He delivered it to the cell and came back without waiting to see if she ate it.
“We don’t want them to say we don’t feed them.”
“What about Perez?”
“Take him something if you want, he won’t eat it. The sergeant was playing dentist with him this afternoon.”
As if hearing his name, Sergeant Tito arrived for a surprise inspection.
“Blindfold!” He strode right past the guardroom to the cells. He glanced in one after another, not pausing for more than three seconds before any of the doors. “Soldier! Outside!”
Victor followed his sergeant out to the yard. Tito screamed at him. “Your orders are to keep that woman wet at all times. Ice water every two hours. Can you explain why she is dry?” Before Victor could answer, Tito slapped the side of his head. “You going to make up your own rules now? Who do you think you are?” Again the open hand connected with his ear.
Victor’s head was ringing. “No one told me every two hours. I was going to do it again later.”
“You want to take a swim in the tank, Pena?”
“No, sergeant.”
“You want to play a little Submarine?”
“No, sergeant.”
“Then get a b
ucket and soak that bitch right now. You soak her and you keep her soaked. If that bitch gets so much as thirty seconds of sleep, I’ll cut your prick off, you hear me?”
Victor fetched a bucket of water. The woman backed toward the wall. He didn’t hesitate this time. He threw the water at her, and she shrank from him but made no sound.
His nights in the barracks were miserable. The other members of the squad had their own apartments in the city. That was part of the privilege of working for the squad, you didn’t have to live in barracks, you got to have your own place. But Victor was still on probation. For now, he lived in a tiny room at one end of the little school. It had five sets of iron bunk beds-all, except for his, with mattresses rolled up at one end.
He read late that night; books were the only thing that kept him sane. On his last day off he had ventured into the city and bought a stack of ten American novels from a used-book store. The Hemingway disappointed him because it was set in Europe, not North America, and Faulkner was too difficult. Victor finally settled on a detective novel, and it absorbed him completely. He didn’t have to look up too much vocabulary, and it was set in New York. The story took him from the luxurious apartments on Fifth Avenue to the sweatshops of Chinatown.
When he awoke the next morning, he thought there was a red dog lying on his chest. Try as he might to shift it, the dog would not get off. As his mind cleared, he realized the weight on his chest was fear.
He thought of the new woman prisoner. If he felt isolated and fearful, how must she feel? She would not have slept. She would have been too cold, too wet, too hungry. He had soaked her thoroughly before he went off duty, and when Yunques relieved him, he had added his own bucket right away. “Tits are too small,” he said with a grimace. Yunques was always saying tough things, but sometimes Victor wondered if he wasn’t putting on a show of bravado. Perhaps Sergeant Tito could be that carelessly cruel, but Victor wondered about Yunques and Lopez. Maybe under the macho talk they were just as scared as he was.
–
“Please. I want to see a lawyer,” the woman said. Victor had just thrown a full bucket of ice water on her, and rivulets streamed down her face. “I have done nothing wrong. I was simply taking food to the church basement.”
Victor stood in the door of her cell, breathing hard. Prisoners were supposed to be struck whenever they spoke. He locked the cell door and went back to the guard room.
She called after him in her unpleasant voice: “And I would like some food, please.”
“Special treat for the new bitch,” Lopez said. “Take a look at this.” He opened the lid of a small cardboard box, revealing the cockroaches.
“You going to put them in her cell?”
“Her cell?” Lopez looked truly puzzled. “Why would we put them in her cell?”
“For a joke?”
“We are not joking here, soldier. You should’ve figured that out by now.”
“I’m sorry. I’ll get the hang of things, I’m sure.”
“Put these in her food and serve it to her.”
Victor did as he was told.
“Well?” Lopez said when he came back. “How’d the bitch like it?”
“She felt the bugs,” Victor said. “Then she just put the plate on the floor and lay down again.”
“Really? She didn’t cry or nothing?”
“No.”
“You know, I think she may be a real hard-ass terrorist, this one. Most women scream like a motherfucker when we give them the bug dinner.”
“That doesn’t make her a terrorist.”
“I’ll bet you, Pena. She’s too hard for a civilian.”
The woman didn’t touch any food they brought her that day. When Victor threw the bucket of water at her, she did not cry out, even though he aimed it well to make sure she was good and soaked in case Tito should stick his ugly head in again.
The next day, she ate a plate of heavily salted beans and asked several times for water, but no water was brought to her. Later, when Victor checked on her through the peephole, he saw her sucking water out of her shirt, the way an infant sucks a beloved blanket.
Sergeant Tito came for her that afternoon. “Bring her out, soldier. Don’t tell her nothing what’s going on. She will learn soon enough.”
“Blindfold!”
Lopez unlocked the cell door and Victor went in for the woman. She was crouched against the wall, her arms curled up in front of her, expecting a soaking.
Victor took hold of her elbow and she yanked it away. He jerked harder.
“Where are you taking me?”
“You’re going to have a chat with the General,” Lopez said. “That’s what you wanted, right?”
Victor led her along the corridor.
“Where is the General?” she demanded as soon as she was brought into the interrogation room.
Tito and the Captain were sitting at a small table. Yunques was not around, and Tito motioned for Victor to stand by the wall.
“Have a seat, please,” said the Captain. “What is your name, please?”
“Maria Sanchez.”
“You don’t want to tell me your name?”
“I just told you my name. Maria Sanchez.”
“That is a lie. But I will tell you my name.” The Captain got up and leaned down beside her ear. Even though his voice was barely above a whisper, she flinched when he spoke. “My name,” he said, “is God.”
FIVE
Once, when Victor was in high school, he had been caught smoking on school property. The vice-principal, a prematurely bald and angry man, had taken him to the office and offered him a choice: Victor could take a two-week suspension or the strap.
“There is the telephone, Pena.” The bald head gleamed for an instant as he nodded at the terrifying instrument. “Call your father and explain to him why you will be missing class for the next two weeks. Tell him why you will miss the term review just as your exams are approaching-because you had to have a cigarette on school property, even though you are well aware of the rules. Go on now, Pena, you call the Major and ask him what to do.”
The prospect of such a conversation with his father was a brick wall. Take a two-week suspension? The Major would beat him about the head. He would make him suffer for a year.
“I will take the strap, sir,” Victor had said. It couldn’t be worse than his father’s fists. Many boys got the strap, and all of them said it didn’t hurt, they didn’t cry.
“Very good, Pena. Bend over the desk and take hold of the far edges.”
Victor bent over, feeling horribly exposed even though his trousers had not been lowered. He caught a glimpse of the strap as the vice-principal took it down from the shelf. It was about fifteen inches long, and much thicker than he expected-a quarter-inch of leather. He gripped the far side of the desk and tried to fix his mind on the bookshelves that faced him. There were no book titles to read, however, just large binders-probably full of dossiers on delinquent students like himself.
He looked back over his shoulder and caught a glimpse of the vice-principal leaning back, his wind-up for the first blow. There was a whistling sound and then the smack of leather on flesh. Victor shrieked. The strap felt like a patch of fire across his skin, and tears sprang into his eyes.
The strap whistled again, and again he shrieked. To his dismay, he now began to cry helplessly; great gasping sobs shook his body. He could not catch his breath, and the hot tears streamed down his cheeks. Deep inside, a voice spat the word, “Coward.”
“Holy Mother, Pena.” There was genuine puzzlement in the vice-principal’s voice. “That’s only two strokes. I don’t know if you’re faking or not.”
Victor’s voice was choked and unrecognizable.
“Nobody’s ever screamed like that. I know you’re a skinny runt, but really-try and control yourself. It can’t hurt that much.”
But Victor could not control himself. The vice-principal threw himself into the remaining eight blows, and rained them down so quickl
y that Victor scarcely had time to breathe before the next one landed. When the blows were done, he nearly passed out.
“Sit there until you catch your breath. Go on. Sit down and put your head between your knees. You look like you’re about to faint.”
Victor did as he was told, staring at the polished wooden floor. He had to breathe through his mouth, his sinuses were so clogged from crying.
“Really, Pena,” the vice-principal said, not unkindly. “You frightened me.” He opened a file and began to read. He did not speak again until Victor stood up. “Go into the washroom now and wash your face with cold water. I will tell no one what has happened here today.”
Everyone will know anyway, Victor thought; his eyes were bloodshot, his cheeks puffy. When he quietly took his seat in history class, the other pupils glanced over at him, but no one said anything. Nor did anyone mention it to him when class was over, or in the following weeks. He could not tell if his classmates’ silence was born of sympathy or contempt.
He had come that day to his first disillusionment. Until then he had cherished an unsupported conviction that he could be heroic under the right circumstances. In time of peril, he would risk his own life to save a woman or a child, he would brave flames or gunfire to help the helpless. But the vice-principal had shown him that Victor Pena was not the stuff of which heroes are made.
And now he was learning this lesson again-this time from a skinny woman with an unpleasant voice.
“My name is God,” Captain Pena told her that first day. “I am the Lord of Life and Death. Whatever I say will happen, that is what will happen. If you cherish any illusions about this, abandon them now. In this place there are no rules except the rules I make. If I decide you should live, you will live; if I decide you should die, you will die. The sooner you understand this, the easier it will go with you.”
“I want a lawyer,” the woman said. Even green Victor could see this was the wrong tone to take with the Captain.
