Giles Blunt: Breaking Lorca

“I’m so glad you could come, Victor,” his aunt said to him with her heartbreaking smile. “In wartime, it’s even more important to stay in touch with relatives, don’t you think?”

“Oh, yes,” Victor said, and smiled in return. “And such wonderful food.”

The Captain had reached out and touched his wife’s arm without looking at her. A gesture of complete confidence and affection.

This is why he has brought me here, Victor said to himself. This is what he wants me to see. My uncle wants to reassure me that it is possible to perform the work of the little school and yet be a good husband, a kind father, a delightful host in a house filled with love.

After lunch the following day, Victor led the Sanchez woman to the interrogation room. She no longer put up any struggle, trailing meekly along behind him. He wondered if this was the first sign of defeat. Then again, perhaps it was just a tactic, perhaps she was simply conserving her energy, the better to withstand the General.

Victor sat her down on the chair. When he turned around, he was surprised to see a white-haired gentleman in a white jacket standing beside the table where his uncle was seated.

His uncle nodded at the gentleman, and he lifted a black bag from the floor. It was the doctor. Victor had not recognized him, because the last time he had seen him, the doctor’s hair had been black, slicked back. Now it was quite white, and he had shaved off his moustache. Perhaps these changes of appearance were to convince himself that he was a different man each time, that he had no history of working at the little school.

The woman took off her clothes when ordered. The doctor opened his leather bag and wrapped a blood-pressure cuff around her small bicep.

“You are a doctor?” she said in disbelief as she felt the cuff. “What can a doctor be doing in this place?”

“Relax, please. I am just here to examine you.” He pumped up the cuff and looked at the meter. “Your blood pressure is slightly high. Nothing to worry about.”

“Doctor, I request that you do a thorough examination. You will find that I have been repeatedly raped.”

“Just relax, please.” He adjusted her slightly forward and placed his stethoscope on her back. “Take a deep breath?” He moved the stethoscope slightly. “And another? That’s it. Very good.”

She obeyed him like a child, lifting her chin slightly when he placed the metal disc on her chest. His eyes focused somewhere beyond the wall of the interrogation room, as if her heartbeat were a radio signal from a distant town.

“Did you hear what I said, Doctor? I said I’ve been raped by these men. Over and over again they have raped me. And they put things inside me.”

“We’ll shove a pitchfork in your guts if you don’t shut up.” Tito smacked her hard across the back of the head.

“Please,” the doctor said. “I am trying to examine this woman.”

“I have been deprived of sleep. I have been deprived of water. I have been fed poisoned food.”

The doctor took her wrist and held it lightly to take her pulse. He stared at his watch and the woman fell into a silence. Despite the blindfold, Victor could see that she was weeping, undone by the touch of a hand that was not brutal.

The doctor stood up and nodded at Captain Pena. He dropped his stethoscope into his leather bag, snapped it shut, and started for the door. The Captain touched his arm. “Not just yet, Doctor. I want to know how she holds up to the General.”

“I don’t like to do that. I told you, it is against my oath.”

“Sit down, please.”

The doctor sat down beside the Captain and stared at the floor.

“Soldier.” The Captain pointed at Victor. “You work the dial.” When Victor hesitated, his uncle screamed at him. “Do as I say. Do it now.”

Victor sat down before the little black box while Tito attached the electrodes, one to a nipple, one between her legs. “Little bitch,” he said. “Now you will feel something worth talking about.”

“Why?” she asked in a small voice. “Why do you want to hurt me so much?”

“Because you’re a terrorist slut and we hate your guts, that’s why.”

The Captain nodded at Victor. Victor stared at the white numerals. He turned the dial to one and a half.

“Turn it up,” his uncle yelled over her screams.

Victor turned it to two, then switched it off.

“I didn’t say to stop, you fool. Put it back on.”

The woman’s screams sank like pencils into Victor’s ears.

Afterwards, she sagged in the chair.

Once more the doctor took out his stethoscope and listened to her heart, felt her pulse. The white hair gave him a kindly look-like a doctor in an ad for children’s cough syrup. “Her heart is strong,” he informed the Captain. “You may continue.”

“A little higher this time, soldier.”

Victor turned the dial to two and a half and kept it there for a minute. His guts turned to liquid at the sounds she made. Like your flesh is splitting open, the Captain had said. This woman has done nothing to me, and I am splitting her flesh wide open.

The ritual of the stethoscope was repeated. The signal to begin was repeated.

Victor kept his eyes on the white arc of numerals, the pointed dial. He remembered where he had seen such an instrument before. It was in a shop window-the transformer of a toy train set that circled over and over again around the window.

The doctor took the woman’s pulse once more before he snapped his black bag shut for the last time and left. Captain Pena went with him, leaving Tito in charge.

“Fucking asshole doctor,” Lopez said. “Changing his appearance every time he comes. What’s he think they invented blindfolds for?”

“Stop yapping,” Tito said. “We got a new toy today.” He pulled a pair of handcuffs from his pocket and dangled them in the light like a necklace. These were not the simple loops of thong they were used to; these were shiny steel handcuffs.

Lopez whistled. He took the cuffs from Tito and looked them over. “Smith amp; Wesson. Nothing but the best for little Miss Sanchez.”

“We’ll hang the bitch up there.” Tito pointed to a heating pipe that ran along the ceiling near the blacked-out windows. They had to stand her on a table, which was not easy since she could barely stand at all. They unclasped one of the handcuffs and slipped it over the pipe, then closed the cuff once more around her wrist. Then they took the table away and she was hanging from both wrists.

“Now let me show you how an expert does it,” Tito said. He shoved Victor aside and sat self-importantly at the controls, as if he were about to pilot a jet. “Write down everything she says. Everything I say and everything she says.”

Victor opened the pad and took a pencil from the jar. It needed sharpening, but he didn’t sharpen it because he remembered what Labredo had suffered at the point of a pencil. Yunques attached the electrodes to her feet.

Tito had apparently decided the way to get an answer out of the woman was not with long shocks but with lots of short, hard bursts. Every time he turned the dial, her feet jerked in a froglike spasm, causing her to swing from the overhead pipe.

Between the sounds of her screams and the shouted questions, Victor’s pencil rasped on the paper. What he took down was repetitive.

What is your name?

No. Please .

Tell us your name .

No. Please. I beg you .

Tell us your name .

Please, stop. I beg you, I beg you, I beg you .

What is your name?

Victor took it upon himself to remove Tito’s expletives from the questions. And nothing he wrote conveyed the woman’s screams, her choking, her tears. The agony of Miss Sanchez would not be part of the official record, he realized, because he did not know how to spell the sound of a scream.