La Vida Doble (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

by Fontaine, Arturo

  FORTY-TWO

  I got a call from Central. I was summoned to appear in Macha’s office right away. Indio Galdámez greets me, in his sleeveless shirt, sweaty and foul smelling, that shows off his cretin’s muscles with their green boa. I sit on the brown plastic imitation leather sofa in the waiting room. He goes back to his game of foosball with Chico Marín, who, wide as a cube, waits for him scratching his shaved head. Over the chessboard, Iris is motionless. Across from her, Mono Lepe. He’s lost three pawns and a knight. He looks on, alarmed, and leans down until he’s almost touching one of his rooks with his crooked, sunken nose. Pancha is watching TV. She knows very well she’s looking good in that black shirt. An everyday, coarse woman, but with the kind of good tits that make the men like her. There are several chairs scattered about, a table in the middle of the room with two copper ashtrays, the butts twisted inside them, and a vase holding artificial flowers. I hear Macha’s voice. He’s barking into the phone.

  “I repeat: this is fucked. No,” he bellows after a silence. “To blow the operation now doesn’t make sense.” Silence. “No. I don’t want to throw away a tracking operation that’s taken months.” Silence. Angrily: “And what did you want me to do? Sit on my ass and wait for the order? Sure! And now it’s all fine and dandy and you want to come in and take advantage of the situation.” Long silence. “And why did you go in person to abort the arrest?” Silence. “Of course! Are you threatening me? What? I was shitting all over procedure? Oh, please . . .” Silence. “The situation has changed. That’s why. Now it would be premature. We’re getting very valuable intelligence, Flaco. We’re on the verge of . . .” Silence. More calmly: “I repeat: it would really fuck things up. They’re getting to the bottom.” Silence. “Yes. That’s not the point. We’re ready. I’ve just called my people in . . .” Silence. “Then I’m receiving an order. It’s definitive. An order.” Silence. “All right.” Silence. “Yes. I’ll go. Fine. The order will be carried out immediately.” Silence. “Yes. All right. Let me say one thing: you all upstairs, you’re some bloodsucking bastards. But the mission will be carried out immediately.”

  Indio Galdámez ushers me into the office. Behind his desk, Macha greets me indifferently. The room is small, and the grayish linoleum floor smells of wax. A single neon tube lights the room. I sit down. His desk is between us. I look around for any personal object. There’s no photo, no picture or paperweight, nothing that would tell me anything about him. The ink pen I see in the desk is an everyday yellow Bic that rests on a block notebook. To one side, a coat hanger holding no coats and a metal shelf with some file folders. Behind him, the radio and a solid safe built into the wall. Over the corner of the safe are his shoulder holster and his service weapon, his 9mm CZ Parabellum, and a magazine with no clips in it.

  “I need you,” he says in that grave voice of his. “We’re going to blow the tracking operation we’ve been doing on the ‘Prince of Wales’ and ‘Viollier.’ Orders from above. We can’t make any mistakes. I need you there. I repeat: we can’t make any mistakes. I want them alive. Are you willing?”

  “Of course,” I say. “Of course. When?”

  He looks at his Rolex.

  “It’s eleven thirty. We leave within ten minutes. Go have them disguise you. You have your weapon with you, right?”

  “Yes,” I say, pointing to my purse.

  And as I’m about to open the door:

  “Did you tell Flaco or Gato that we had a tail on the ‘Prince of Wales’?”

  I shake my head.

  “I believe you,” he tells me somberly. “But it doesn’t matter now. Don’t talk to anyone. We’ll meet in the parking lot in ten minutes. Clear?”

  In the hallway I ran into Gato. He was walking with his head down as always, moving with slow and heavy steps. I noticed his worn-out gray pants, his old tennis shoes that he wore without socks. Chico Marín passed next to me and tugged my hair, laughing with his jumpy eyes, and walked on as if he didn’t see Gato. When I could smell his garlic stench, he looked at me, grabbed my shoulders, and shoved me up against the wall.

  FORTY-THREE

  “Where you headed, Malinche?”

  “To Makeup.”

  “And? Why? Are they taking you on a mission?”

  I smiled enigmatically.

  “I don’t like it one bit. It’s dangerous. Your place is here, with me. Anyone can do that other thing. Macha’s bringing you, right?”

  I smiled.

  “Are you sure the operation is authorized?”

  I nodded. He made a sudden, unexpectedly quick movement. Now I didn’t have my purse and my arm hurt terribly, twisted behind my back. He manipulated it from my wrist that was bent painfully. He did it all with an agility and skill that were unthinkable in such a fat man.

  “You’re coming with me,” he whispered. “You belong to my department. Let’s go. Let’s see if this order really exists.” And he let out a laugh.

  My wrist doesn’t slacken, but the pain does. We go down to the basement. I can smell the bleach from the floor. They must have mopped recently. He turns on the light and makes me sit down. He puts my purse away in the drawer of his desk, tosses an empty Pepsi can and a sandwich wrapper into the garbage, and lets himself fall puffing onto his chair. Finally, he makes an internal call.

  “We’re just going to make sure,” he says. “And don’t look at me with that put-upon little face of yours . . . I’m protecting you, Cubanita.”

  He asked to be put through to C3.1. I knew that number was Flaco. They told him his call would be returned shortly. I explained that the operation was about to start, that I couldn’t be late, that I had no way to justify my absence.

  “Are we going after big fish, here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Even if they’re not big fish, it’s good for these operations to happen, you know? It’s important to maintain contact with the enemy. The terrorist network is designed to avoid contact, except when they hit us with a surprise attack and can get away. And, of course, we have to decapitate the movement. We know that. The subversives scatter when their leaders fall. ‘If you want to kill a snake, cut off its head.’ But you shouldn’t have to take part in these things, Cubanita. You’re just looking for adventure, aren’t you? The drug of danger. I know you too well, kiddo . . . But no. It’s not wise and it’s not convenient.”

  Gato was convinced that my comrades were about to bring me back in completely, that they had been testing me and would be giving me important missions any day now, and he wanted me to be his informant. He was expecting great things, I thought . . . And then, out of nowhere, after a short silence, he put one elbow on the table and held his chin in his hand and he started talking.

  “It’s like I don’t even exist,” he said, as he picked up some bread-crumbs that had fallen from the paper wrapper onto the metal top of his desk. “Even the agents I work with look down on me. They avoid me in the hallways, they look the other way if they see me crossing the lot. You just saw that asshole Chico Marín, man . . . You saw how that little jerk turned away from me.” He didn’t want to make anyone uncomfortable, he told me. That’s why he didn’t go to the cafeteria. He had his Pepsis and sandwiches—steak with tomato, avocado, lettuce, and mayo—sent in from the shop on the corner. He devoured it all here in his office, in the same basement room where we carried out interrogations. So he wouldn’t bother anyone . . . “And some of them I’ve known since we were kids . . . But it’s not the bullets that’ll decide this filthy war, you know? They know it. It’s these bits of information, these dirty little jobs. This work is like being an executioner.”

  He goes back to collecting crumbs with a fingernail that’s a little long and not very clean. His stomach spills in a wave over the metal surface of the desk. No one trusts anyone else around here. Is that why Gato is confiding in an outsider like me?

  “Everyone knows it. Without the evil executioner,” he tells me, “society wouldn’t exist, but no one wants to see him in
society. Am I wrong? Maybe it’s the little angels who create the social order? Wouldn’t that be nice! Unfortunately, you have to use terror, you have to use evil, you have to use the most vile and fucked-up parts hidden inside a human being. Later, of course, those methods are condemned and the cruelties that made it possible to move beyond cruelty are punished. Or no? They’re left behind, forgotten, not necessary anymore. Like the journalist in that old cowboy movie says, I can’t think of the name, ‘When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.’ What do you think?” He smiled at me, his eyes narrowing with a feline air. “Do you think, Cubanita, that the owners of the planes and ships and banks and copper mines and the pasta and ice cream factories know that someone like me exists? Do you think they know that their power would all go to shit without us, the ones down here in this damp, dark dungeon, like sewer rats? Do you think the housewife who goes out in the morning to do the shopping has any inkling that we’re protecting the long chain that makes it possible for her to find her noodles, her rice, her bottle of oil in the store? Do you think that pretty young girl in the morning light, at the lake in her bikini, sliding along on fiberglass skis in the wake of a boat with a 150hp outboard motor, you think she knows about me? Do you think she has any idea that her daddy’s gold card hangs from a thin and invisible thread that connects it to an ‘abject’ being like me? Not to mention the intellectuals who analyze the ‘political situation,’ as they call it. What do you have to say about those fuckers?”

  Has my past been erased, or does he think that by talking to me this way I’ll erase it myself? I feel his breath on my neck, and that obscene closeness revolts me.

  “So many intelligent reports for us to read! They know every-thing, they’re ‘political analysts’ and they write about power. Makes sense, since they’re smart and they’ve studied everything at the best universities in Europe and the United States. Sure, they understand everything, except for one thing: the power of fear. The intellectuals don’t know a thing about that. And we do. I’m plenty professional, you know me. The thing that traps a man who is naked, tied up, and blindfolded isn’t what will happen to his body. Although he imagines it, or believes he imagines it, he still has no idea what it means to have a jolt of electricity turn his body into tongues of fire. But with the tough ones, the well-trained ones, that only softens them, it only softens them up.”

  A shiver runs down my spine. I can’t get air, I’m starting to gasp. He asks what’s wrong with me. “Nothing,” I say. He goes on:

  “Interrogation is an art. I know how to bring anyone, anyone at all, to a place of desperation. There, he gives up, surrenders. Am I offending you?”

  He goes quiet. My anxiety recedes. He takes a sandwich from the drawer, calmly unwraps the paper, peers at it, and sinks his teeth into it deliberately. A dribble of mayonnaise slides out of the corner of his mouth. He chews energetically, concentrated. He softens his tone:

  “And no one escapes. No one. It’s a fact. It’s normal, human. That’s why they shouldn’t feel guilty.”

  “I have to go, they must be looking for me,” I say.

  “I have to protect you. It’s my duty.”

  “Gato: I know this operation is authorized. Not only that: the order comes from above.”

  “That’s the story Macha gave you, right?”

  “I heard the conversation on the phone.”

  He furrowed his brow.

  “What’s that?”

  “While I was waiting, I could hear the conversation.”

  “Macha does shout on the phone. I’ll give you that.”

  “Yes. I heard it loud and clear.”

  He calls again on the internal phone. I hear the secretary’s voice on the other end. It’s taking a while, she asks him to be patient, C3.1 is on the phone with someone else and he’ll call back in a minute. He looks at me, lowers his eyes to the sandwich, and plants another precise and determined bite.

  “No one escapes, or as Ronco would say, ‘ain’t no one.’ It’s a fact, a fact.” And he goes on as if we had all the time in the world. “I had one, maybe two, who didn’t. I remember a doctor from the FPMR. We’d just gotten started on him when he had an epileptic fit. Two of our doctors checked him and rechecked him. There was nothing wrong with him. A hysterical reaction, they said. Nothing we could do. That one didn’t talk at all. Exception that proves the rule. Every person has his weak point. It’s just a matter of finding it. Macha, for example, has Cristóbal. He lives for that kid. Since he split up with his wife, he’s had women but never a woman, you get me? Cristóbal is his unconditional. That kid Cristóbal’s best friend is his father. Sometimes he brings him here and takes him shooting at the firing range. Real bullets, you can hear them. He loves that damned kid a lot. He takes him out on his Harley, on long trips, you know; he takes him camping, or fishing down south, at Yelcho. Fly fishing. Macha really likes that. He loves to fish, Macha does.”

  He delves into his left ear with his pinky finger and then observes the extracted wax with great attention. He goes on chewing zealously.

  “What do you have to say? I feel like our adversaries are respectable. That’s what I think, and I’ve seen them at their worst, human garbage, the mother giving up her son or the son giving up his mother, all dignity lost. But even so, I consider them respectable. But the feeling is not reciprocated, you know? That hurts. I don’t like to walk around this neighborhood. I come here by bus every day. I don’t have a car. If there’s an emergency they send someone to pick me up. But normally, I come in and leave through these filthy streets that are a boiling cauldron of foul-smelling cars all squeezing in together and thousands of pedestrians who look like beggars. What my mother would say if she saw me go by on my way home from work! This godforsaken lot, the pigeon shit on the ground and on the bodywork of the cars, fucking up the paint on the undercover cars and taxis they use when they follow people . . .” The mayonnaise slides down his chin. “And outside, in the honking horns and squealing breaks,” he goes on. “The litter, the leftover food in wet and stinking cardboard containers, the scraps of fruits and vegetables that fall from crates and rot in the streets, the vulgarity, you know? The crushed beer cans that no one picks up, the oil spots on the pavement with its tar patches, the walls with curse words scrawled on them and shredded posters stuck on top of other shredded posters, the kiosk where they sell cigarettes, peanuts, sweets, and chocolates in the middle of the machine racket, the evil whine of the pigeons and the piss left by skinny, sleepy cats, those skin-and-bone cats that are always stretching, and the dirty roofs, the black smoke from the bus engines, their breaks that screech and squeal and hurt your ears, the same tired little shop on the corner, with its television always on full volume, where they sell mote con huesillo and where for safety reasons I never set foot, though that’s where these sandwiches and my Pepsi come from, the worn-out noise of the old trucks, the air heavy and stinging from the nitrogen oxide and carbon monoxide and the ozone and the cancerous soot from the diesel engines . . .”

  “Gato! I have to go. They’re waiting for me. It’s urgent . . .”

  He falls silent. He takes another bite of the sandwich. I can’t avoid seeing in his open mouth the results of his back molars’ indefatigable chewing. As for him, he seems to be squinting at something far away.

  “What would my mother say if she saw me in the middle of the muck of this neighborhood!” And he looks at the ceiling. He wants me to feel sorry for him. At the same time, he’s being sincere. “She, who was such a lady; she made such delicate embroideries that my aunts, who were both older than her, were jealous, and they competed with her but were never able to match the lace on her immaculate tablecloths. If she were alive, could I stand this job? What could I tell her? Listen, Central owes so much to me. I wasn’t here before, you know that, I’ve already told you that; I wasn’t here when the worst things, the most gruesome, were happening, the things that were so horrible that lots of people can’t even believe they happened. And that’s
what they expected back then, that no one or almost no one would believe the victims. And the ones closest to them, the ones who actually would believe, well, even better, because they were exactly the ones who had to be taught a lesson. That was before they created Central. I started this shitty job here. And they owe me a lot, hear? Even though I just follow orders same as everyone else on the chain of command, same as Flaco Artaza, who gives orders to me and to Macha, who started working here after I did. He hasn’t been in this for very long, when it comes down to it. And here, no one answers to himself. If they did it would be pure chaos, we’d all be fucked, tearing at each other’s throats. Get it? Chain of command. Sure. The Chain of Command gives us orders that we’d rather not get, right? I wasn’t made for this. I mean: I am not what I do. Because, what the fuck, these are our fellow countrymen, it’s really hard, see?” He drags his little voice, inviting my commiseration; he thinks it’s possible, he wants to be thought of as a victim. “But,” he says with a dignified gesture, “I’ve done my duty, I’ve obeyed. That’s my honor. I’m right where they’ve ordered me to be, down here in this sewer, no judgment. Responsibility lies with the ones who give us orders. I just have to carry them out. Verticality of command. Compartmenting. As it should be. As I was taught. Though of course, I still manage to find out what goes on around here. But I haven’t invented anything new, no new techniques or procedures. It’s not like I enjoy what I do, and I go around thinking up new shit, you get me? You’ve seen it. You have to hold back the nausea sometimes . . . But this is what I have to do, and if it wasn’t me it would be someone else. The order is there, it has to be carried out. Even so, when it comes to me, no one wants to see me. No one here inside, I mean.