Giles Blunt: Breaking Lorca

Lorca was rigid, shaking.

“Please,” he said softly. He lay a hand over the bony fingers. A pale circular mark glistened where the electrode had burned her. He touched the mark lightly with a fingertip and felt Lorca stiffen beneath him. He pressed his lips lightly to her fingers.

He tugged gently at the covers.

“Ignacio. I am so ugly.”

Wordlessly, he stroked her fingers until her grip on the covers relaxed. He pulled the cover slowly away, revealing her breasts and the livid marks where the electrodes had been attached. “Oh, Lorca,” he said softly. “I am so sorry.” He bent forward and pressed his lips to a semicircular mark. “So sorry.”

Lorca groaned like a patient coming out of anaesthetic.

Victor laid his head on her chest and stroked her belly. Her skin smelt of soap, warm fabric, and faintly of laundry detergent. Desire flowed into him, but the hard white circles on her stomach, ridged like lunar craters, checked it. He remembered her screaming, begging them to stop. He remembered the white numerals on the dial.

“I am so sorry,” he said again, lightly touching a mark near the ridge of her hip bone. Her flesh shuddered under his hand.

“There’s no reason for you to be sorry,” she said. “You didn’t do anything.”

“I wish that I could take back the pain. I wish I could take it back into my hands. My lips.” He began kissing each white mark, moving down her ribs. The current of desire flowed into him, stronger this time.

“No, please.” Lorca took his head in both her hands and held him back. “Please, Ignacio. I cannot.”

He lay still.

“I am sorry,” she said. “I was wrong to come here. To expect-”

“Shh. It’s okay. We don’t have to.”

“Everything is so ugly to me now. They did things to me, Ignacio. They put things in me.”

She turned away from him again, and Victor stroked her shoulders and gently rubbed her upper back. His hands made wide, inexpert circles over her scapular bones. She gave a little moan of relief, and he was encouraged to continue. This was what the human body was designed for, he thought, to bring comfort to another human body. A stroke here, a caress there-it was so easy for the human hand to give pleasure, so effortless and natural. It began to seem possible that he could make up for what he had done to her. If he gave her physical pleasure every time he saw her, over a period of months, say, or even years, might he not make up for the pain he had caused her? He squeezed the narrow cords of Lorca’s shoulder muscles, rubbing with his thumbs. Suddenly she gave out a loud, strangled cry.

“I’m sorry. Did I hurt you?”

The bony shoulders gave a heave beneath his hands, and there was another loud cry. Then a violent quivering, and she pressed her face into his pillow as the flood of tears, so long suppressed, broke free. Her knees drew up as if in convulsion, and she cried as hard as an infant, in huge coughs and bottomless gasps. It was an orgasm far more powerful than the kind he had anticipated, and it went on for so long that it began even to frighten him.

The tears stopped for a moment.

Victor’s hand had been resting on her shoulder the whole time. He moved it slightly, giving her bicep the gentlest squeeze. “Are you all right?”

This unleashed another spasm of crying, then a respite, then a last brief aftershock, and Lorca lay exhausted on her back as if she were a castaway, thrown up onto this bed after weeks at sea.

Victor put his clothes on and made tea. There was no Kleenex, so he went down the hall and came back with a roll of toilet paper, which he handed to Lorca. The tears, he could see, had done her good. The hard set of her features had softened, and there was more colour in her cheeks than he had ever seen.

He waited until she had taken a few sips of tea before speaking. “You must have needed to do that,” he said. “Feel better?”

She nodded. When finally she spoke, it was about something totally unrelated. “The other day ….” she began. She stopped as if she had forgotten what she was going to say.

“Yes? The other day?”

“The other day. At the church. When you spoke-when you told us what happened to you-it really affected me, Ignacio.”

“I’m sorry. I should not have gone on the way I did. It was very childish of me. That woman upset me with her accusations.”

“Yes, of course she did. Of course. But it hit me hard. It hit me very hard, to hear what they did to you in that place. Even for me-it was hard to believe that anyone could hurt a man as gentle and kind as you. That they could beat you, and do those things to you.”

“No, no,” he said hopelessly. “It wasn’t so bad for me. I was just upset. I was nervous. That woman-”

“It made me so angry-I cannot tell you how angry it made me. I am going to testify, Ignacio. I am going to Washington and I am going to testify at those hearings.”

“Do you think that’s smart? How can you be sure it is safe?”

“Maybe it is not safe. But I cannot live like a rabbit, shaking in fear my whole life.” She turned on her side and smiled at him, flashing the broken tooth. “You see? Seeing you, Ignacio-seeing how brave you are, how cheerful in spite of the pain you have suffered-this has taught me not to be afraid.”

“No, Lorca. You are wrong about me.”

“I am not. Now, will you turn around so I can get dressed?”

It was nearly three o’clock in the morning, but he could not persuade her to stay. She wanted to take the subway home, but he would not hear of it, and pressed a twenty-dollar bill into her hand. He waited with her in the cold, damp wind that blew up Broadway until they managed to flag a cab.

“Please think more about these hearings,” he said, holding the door for her. “You are safe now. I want you to stay safe.”

She smiled up at him, and then he was watching the tail lights of the taxi merge into the other lights of Broadway.

Later, he sat for a long time on the edge of his bed, clutching the pillow Lorca had soaked with her tears. She was not a woman to be talked out of anything; it was pointless to try. “It’s the only way I have left to fight those people,” she had said. “I am going to Washington. I am going to the hearings. And there I will tell them all about our little school.”

The bizarre landscape of New Jersey was behind them. Victor had never travelled on an eight-lane highway before, and he found the intricate turmoil of expressways, parkways, tunnels and bridges frightening-especially at seventy miles per hour. But the vast networks of pipes and vats, the chemical smells and the whoosh and roar of eighteen-wheelers, were over now, and the road that unfurled before them was the most beautiful Victor had ever seen.

Wyatt had borrowed a car for this trip-a cramped, rusted vehicle with a bad rattle in the engine and a powder of cigarette ash and what looked like cat litter covering every surface. Lorca sat in the back, and Victor, feeling it would be rude to leave Wyatt alone up front like a bus driver, sat in the passenger seat besside him.

“It makes sense,” Victor said. “They make the roads to Washington the best possible. You have to give people a sense of importance when they drive to their capital.”

Wyatt glanced over at him. “I don’t get you.”

“We have travelled at least fifty miles, and there has not been a single hole. No patches, no dirt sections. All your highways cannot be so perfect.”

Wyatt had been uncharacteristically subdued ever since they had met at the church. He just shrugged. “Most of the interstates are pretty good.”

“Not like this, I am sure.” The surface was so smooth, the curves and inclines engineered to such perfection, they seemed to waft the car along on a cushion of air.