Arturo Fontaine - La Vida Doble

“Anyone else?”

His eyes looked me up and down. I thought: he’s measuring the chain of denunciations; he’s calculating, like the good chess player he is, which pieces he has to give up for lost.

“No.”

He nodded again in silence and looked at me again with intense curiosity. He was a dark, broad-shouldered man; I’ve already told you that, right?

“And yet you seem fine,” he finally commented. “Thinner though, yes. Tell me, why did they keep you locked up for so long, what did they want from you?”

“They wanted me to sing, at first.”

“Obviously. And then?”

“They wanted to know where Commander Joel was, what he looks like, how he communicates with Bone, what our structure is. They fear and respect us a lot, I’d say. There’s a lot of paranoia about us.”

A burst of cold, absurd laughter escaped me. The Spartan furrowed his brow.

“And then?” he asked after a pause.

“They thought I could still be hiding something,” I said, ashamed of my laughter. And I added: “Those pigs want to get at Bone. That’s it. And they want him alive.”

“Obviously. But they won’t get to him.”

“They want to know about the weapons and the cash. They asked about that over and over.”

He didn’t say anything. It was trivial, and I felt silly.

“They never brought you face to face with any of our people?”

I shook my head.

“I passed Briceño in the hallway, as I told you, and of course, we acted like we’d never seen each other before.”

“Strange,” he muttered. “Very strange. And those shouts you heard that were Chico Escobar, you say, why did you hear them? Did they want you to hear them?”

“Possibly.”

“And you didn’t take the bait?”

“Of course not!”

The Spartan swallowed a spoonful of broth.

“There are some evil guys inside there. They mess with you for a while just to punish you, and you end up like a scalded cat, you know?”

He didn’t smile with me.

“Anything in particular to tell me?”

“Well, it was just like they’d told us it’d be.”

He smiled slightly. It took a lot for the Spartan to laugh. When a smile did escape, his eyes turned sad and defeated.

“Nothing else? Any experience or reflection? You were a teacher, an intellectual, always spouting some quotation or other.”

I let out another peal of strange, out-of-place laughter.

“Only something which never ceases to cause pain remains in the memory, ” I managed to say after a moment, serious again. “Those thugs don’t need to read Nietzsche. They just know that’s how it is. Order, their order, just like the transparent stages they create to show off their fetishes, those public spaces they design in order to usurp — their famous malls —it’s all held together by cruelty. Underneath the banks and the stock exchange, the twenty-story buildings and the factories with huge, smoking chimneys, under the stadiums full of people cheering for goals, beneath the serpent television, there’s the promise of blood. ”

I make air quotation marks with my fingers. I wasn’t lying, not in the slightest; at that moment it was what I felt, what welled up in me; it was the truth.

“Everything — understand me, anything — the most horrible things, chopping off their legs and arms with an ax — it’s all justified.”

And I really felt that to be true, as well.

“As long as it’s effective,” he tells me in a cold, firm voice. “Our hate, sister Irene, is also subordinated to our collective goal. Everything we do or don’t do is justified by the cause. Otherwise, it’s better not to fight. To resign ourselves to peace and endless negotiation. Which means tolerating the world’s abuse and injustice. It means having endless patience and getting used to misery and the disgrace of inequality. It would mean adapting, reconciling ourselves to evil. No! We are at war, but it’s not a conventional one. Any armed mission of ours is always a message. The formal retaining walls of the ‘democratic bourgeois’ have given way and class domination is exposed for what it is. The seed is germinating underground. The hour of the great vengeance is approaching. We’re going to win, sister Irene,” he says with a trace of softness, and immediately he hardens his brow. “And if we can’t win we have no right to live.”

He fell silent, sunk into his thoughts. That’s how the Spartan was. He’d turn somber all of a sudden. He lived completely absorbed, I think now, in his task of revenge. He was disdainful of politicians because they all made concessions, because they were all dirty. He, on the other hand, was going against the current, and he knew himself to be tough and alone and superior.

“Why were they waiting for us at the currency exchange? What went wrong?”

“One must lose, sister, if one wants to someday win. This episode has been investigated. Your version of events will be requested and then you will be given a report.”

I looked at him, but he was stirring sugar into his coffee.

“You know the procedure,” he concluded after a long pause. “You’ll have to write a report about what happened. It will be processed and then you will be called in to clear up any questions. Remember this number.” And he made me repeat it three times from memory. “Call from a public phone, of course, on Tuesday at 12:10. Understood?”

“Understood.”

“Sister Irene ends here, right? As you know, you’ll be disconnected for a while. That means: no stipend. What do you plan to do?”

“Whatever you, my brothers and sisters, assign me to do. I’m at your disposal.”

“I’m asking what you would like to do, compañera.”

“I want revenge, a just revenge. That’s what I want. I want a dangerous mission. This time I won’t fail. I want to show what I’m capable of. I ask you, brother, for that chance. It’s a formal request.”

“I’ll deliver this request at the appropriate time. The question was, what do you plan to do now?” he said, relaxing his tone.

“Go back to teaching French, I guess.”

“And not leave Chile? You’ll stay here and go on giving private French lessons?”

He looked at me approvingly.

“Teruca, as you know, sent her son, Francisco, out of Chile. He’s in a children’s home in Havana. There’s a group of kids, the children of militants, living together there. As you know, it’s an indispensable security measure. To avoid blackmail and to protect the children. You already said no once. You wanted to keep your daughter here, you said she was safe in your mother’s house. We respect your decision, sister, though we don’t agree with it. It’s a very serious matter. Serious for you, as the responsible mother that you are, and serious for all your brothers. The time has come for you to send your daughter to that home on the island. Don’t you think?” I lowered my eyes. “It’s a tremendous sacrifice, I know. But it’s necessary. Your safety is at risk, your daughter’s safety, all of ours.”

I nodded my assent. He took my chin in his hand and met my eyes.

“Everything for the cause, Irene. Everything.”

I nodded again.

The Spartan, when we separated, gave me a Lonsdale Fonseca no. 1 that came wrapped in fine, transparent rice paper. That night, I went out alone in my mother’s yard, and I contemplated its wrapper, as the Spartan called it, like someone staring at the skin of the person they love; I lit it from below, turning it around, slowly, as he had taught me, and I smoked it unhurriedly. Then I went barefoot into Ana’s room. She was asleep. She slept with such trust. The air passed through her half-open lips so serenely. She looked so beautiful to me. With one finger I traced her profile. “Everything for the cause, Irene. Everything.” I didn’t shed a tear.