Giles Blunt - Breaking Lorca

Captain Pena shrieked, “Leave the boy where he is!” He slapped the woman full force across the face. “You think you make bargains with us? You think maybe you will negotiate with us? You whore. I will show you how we negotiate. I will show you exactly how we negotiate. On your back, faggot. Get down on the floor.”

The boy was handcuffed, but he began to kick out blindly. His foot connected glancingly with Victor’s groin, and he doubled over and groaned, as if the injury were great. Lopez and Tito wrestled the boy to the floor, pinning him down on his back.

“Get his leg up on the bed frame. Just the heel. Get his leg up.”

They dragged him across the floor, the boy begging please, please, please the whole way. Victor had sunk to his knees with eyes closed. He could hear in the knife-edge of his uncle’s voice, in Tito’s silence, in the sharp, near-hysterical cries of Lopez and Yunques, that a threshold had been crossed. Violence had been launched. Violence had been launched and was now as impossible to recall as a missile that has been fired.

“Listen to this,” Captain Pena yelled in the woman’s ear. “You listen close to this sound! If you weren’t such a whore, this would not have happened.”

The boy’s leg was propped up on the bed frame at a forty-five-degree angle to the floor. Captain Pena took one step and jumped onto the leg with his full weight. Victor’s gorge rose at the sound it made and he nearly vomited. The boy was shrieking uncontrollably.

“You hear that, whore? You hear? This boy’s leg is broken. That’s what you’ve done. You’ve broken his leg. You could have stopped it, and you didn’t. Next time you beg for mercy, I want you to think about what you did to this boy.”

Tito kicked the boy in the head and the shrieks turned to moans.

“Put them together in her cell. Keep them both wet. Nobody gets any sleep until this bitch has told us everything she knows: brothers, sisters, grade school teachers, past lives, everything. This bitch is going to sing.”

“Shit, boss,” Tito grumbled, “I was hoping we could set the little faggot on fire.”

“Maybe tomorrow.” Captain Pena shrugged as he went out the door. “It all depends on the Virgin.”

It was not necessary to torture the boy further; the woman was quite broken. The next day she sat across the table from Captain Pena and Victor and she told them everything they wanted to know.

And now it was over. The torture was done, the questions were done, it only remained to kill her.

It was nine o’clock, the night was black and violent. The sky had opened, and rain thundered around the little school in chestnut-sized drops that clattered on the hood and roof of the Jeep. The soldiers wore their plastic ponchos, beneath which their heavy arms bulged as if they were pregnant.

The woman was led-handcuffed, blindfolded, at gunpoint-to the Cherokee. The filthy tank top clung to her breasts, making the nipples stand out. Victor guided her into the back of the truck. The boy, unconscious and feverish, had to be carried. His pants were torn to the knee. A rough end of shin bone poked through the skin.

Even with the wipers flapping back and forth, the rain reduced visibility to a few yards, and Victor had to drive at a snail’s pace. He knew the way to Puerto del Diablo-not because he had been there as a soldier, but because it was on Lake Ilopango, where he had gone swimming many times. Diablo was a high cliff east of the beaches where he had sunned himself as a teenager.

The windows fogged up and he had to slow down even more, wiping them off with the back of his hand. He was afraid that Tito, slouched in the seat beside him, would start to scream about not taking all night to get there. But nobody spoke. The atmosphere in the Jeep took on a thick, damp solemnity. The boy groaned whenever they went over a bump.

Victor could see Lopez in the rear-view. He wore an abstracted air, as if his mind were switched off. If Lopez felt any guilt about the murder he was about to assist in, the heavy features gave no clue.

They came to a sign that pointed to the public beach one way, Puerto del Diablo the other. Victor made a right, and they drove now in a slightly tenser silence.

“Stop here,” Tito said.

“My name is Lorca,” she had told them. Ten days of screams and tears had left her nearly voiceless. “Lorca Viera.”

“Lorca? Lorca is not a first name. You want me to drag that boy in here and snap his arm too?”

“My name is Lorca,” she said again, and Victor wrote it down. He was writing everything down. “My father loved very much the poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca. He named me after this poet. It is a strange name, I agree.”

“And this father of yours, tell us about him. Who is he? What does he do?”

“He’s in his grave. He has been dead eight years. His name was Paul Nunez-Viera.”

“Oh, no. You have to be making this up. You are telling me your father was General Viera?”

“General Viera, yes.”

“My God, I knew him! Isn’t that amazing? I took a night-tactics class under him! General Viera! He was a wonderful soldier. A wonderful warrior! My God, you didn’t mess with that man-he was one of the most intelligent, respected-can you really be related to him?”

The woman shrugged. “He was my father.”

“Until the terrorists killed him. What a loss that was. What a catastrophe.”

“For you, maybe. Not for the country. My father killed hundreds, maybe thousands of people. His death was a victory for El Salvador.”

“You’re disgusting. Your own father.” The Captain asked about her mother then. Her mother was also dead.

“Will you get the boy a doctor?” she asked suddenly, catching the Captain off guard.

“Maybe we will get him a doctor. It depends how things go with you.”

“The bone is through the skin. He will die of infection.”

“Tell us more about your family.”

Her relation to the famous general had changed the Captain’s view of her, Victor saw. Even if she had hated her father, she could not deny the blood in her own veins, and the Captain was a great believer in blood. He spoke to her now as if they had struck up an acquaintance on a long train trip.

“You have a sister, do you not?”

“I have a younger sister. Teresa.”

“Teresa works with you?”

“She works with me, yes. She helps feed the children at the church.”

“Address, please.”

She gave an address. Victor knew as he wrote it down that it would be the correct one. The sister would not be there now; the prisoner had won that battle. But she might be found eventually.

“But you don’t just feed the children at the church, do you, Miss Viera. The food you were carrying was meant for the FMLN, wasn’t it. Tell the truth, now. I really don’t want to hurt that boy any more.”

“Part of the food was for the children. The rest goes to the rebels.”

“Thank you. Now we are making progress. Tell me how the schedules were arranged-we only caught you by accident, you know. It was just a random check.”

She told the Captain what he wanted to know. The thin mouth, the drawn cheeks, her broken tooth-her features were a picture of exhaustion.

The questions went on. Coffee was brought, pads of paper were filled. The three of them took breaks and smoked cigarettes, Victor silent, Captain Pena chatting about inconsequential things. As the afternoon wore on, the Captain addressed the woman as if her own destruction had been a project they had worked on together-a tough job on the verge of completion-and now they could sit back and relax together.

He imagines that he has won, Victor said to himself, but this woman, this Lorca, has defeated us all. Because of her strength, the Captain and his men, all of us, have degraded ourselves. Her tank top is filthy, her face streaked with blood-the boy’s, probably-and her hair is matted, but this woman is cleaner than we will ever be.