Arturo Fontaine - La Vida Doble

Kissing a stranger is a quick and abrupt pleasure, absolute. I had never done it before. I never thought I would, not until Flaco ordered me to, and I overcame myself and vanquished myself and I found myself doing it, and I swear, I liked it.

I spent that night with them, and I writhed and bristled with the pleasure of passing from one man’s smell and skin texture to another’s, with Flaco’s intense gaze always upon us, and to feel that if one of them was worn out then the other was waiting for me, ardent and tenacious and full, it drove me crazy. I liked to see, in that darkness overflowing with the insidious rhythm of the bass, bodies connected like the arms of a starfish or intertwined like giant flowers with many petals. And you know what else? It set me on fire inside to think that they were our enemies, the very same gangsters who had defeated us and captured and debased us, the same killers who tomorrow or the next day could be crouched on a roof shooting to kill us.

I saw combatants go to pieces. Not from the torture itself but because they weren’t able to withstand it. Not because they were afraid of being arrested and tied up again, that the whole ordeal would start over, but because they’d collaborated. All of this pursued me, eating away at my conscience; it stayed with me like a persistent bad odor. For weeks and months and years I felt disgusted at myself. I still do. I’m contradicting myself. I’ll never be able to understand myself. Or forget. No. Never. But I don’t want to remember. Nor do I want to forget.

I know there were many others like me. We only know about some of them; we know because they’ve bravely confessed in writing. They repented and collaborated with the authorities. Good for them. I’m not judging. I speak only for myself. What I want to make very clear to you is that I didn’t inform under duress and only after screams of pain, no. That’s normal, anyone would understand that. Lorena, though, she’s on a mission to annihilate. So that when this is all over and she comes out of it alive, there will be no one left to hold her accountable. I collaborated with the repression and I swear, I kept them buzzing. Collaborating means, for example, going out “fishing.” We would arrive at the specified time to that plaza, or station, the window of that shop, that diner, the usual church, and I would point out the brothers coming into the “meet zone” or the ones who were already there, handing off a package or a single cigarette with a coded message written on its paper, passed surreptitiously from one pair of hands to another, allowing them to be photographed or followed, or else the gorillas fell on top of them and overpowered them right there.

That moment had a terrifying tension. The combatants of Red Ax were courageous and well trained; they were professionals. Sometimes there were shootouts, in which it was difficult to follow what was happening. I would tremble with emotion. I wanted to see one of their faces right at the moment of surrender. Later on it wasn’t the same: pale and blindfolded, dirty, handcuffed and limping, half dead, their faces broken. I remember one night in particular, the long wait in front of a safe house. Some shots rang out and my soul froze. Suddenly, I saw them dragging someone out in handcuffs. My heart started pounding like it wanted to rip itself from my body. They brought him to me in handcuffs, with Mono Lepe and Indio Ramírez holding him up. They pressed his face to the truck window. He was panting, his jacket was torn, and blood flowed from his upper lip. His eyes, his terrible, wide, and imploring eyes searched for mine behind my mask. His jaw was trembling. I told Rat in a whisper: Pelao Cuyano. That night and all the next day, in Central, I heard his screams. Later I found out he’d died on them.

Did I feel real regret for Cuyano? And if I didn’t, why not? Did it affect me, and I just managed to bottle up my emotions? Maybe. Shit! This existence is immoral. . And this life depends on immoral preconditions: and all morality denies life. I was a ruthless agent. I know that. I had a ferocious rage. No one will ever know how many people I fucked over. I was the ultimate traitor, the whore queen sucking those scumbags off. .

Because the interrogation would come and yes, I did know what that was, and they still didn’t. “We got a package,” they’d say, we’d say. I would go in wearing a mask. I sat next to Gato, who from behind his metallic desk observed every movement, every sign of vacillation with his lifeless green eyes. Sometimes there would be breadcrumbs or drops of the Pepsi he’d had delivered left on his mouth. He wore a mask, too. “Sometimes their blindfolds slip,” he told me, and he put on his rubber gloves. No one would recognize his little hands and their dainty fingers. Disciplinary power is exercised in its invisibility. He used plugs in his ears to muffle the screams and keep his calm.

“I’m a professional,” he says to me with the insidious little voice he’s cultivated, “and I have to keep myself lucid and serene. A person in this job develops a certain ability to numb his senses. Well, it’s the same for doctors. . It’s not easy, Cubanita, to control those moral emotions or to keep them in check so the investigation can go forward. Or to hold back the instinct to attack the man once he’s been broken. It’s discipline. A man who loses control is only fattening himself to be slaughtered like a butchered animal. It happens. Many men have had to be relieved of duty. They weren’t useful anymore as investigators. You know, before they created Central, things happened that were so horrible a person defames himself just by talking about them, he blasphemes — what can I call it — the bare minimum of humanity that we all share. Anyway, that’s how I feel, but I wasn’t ever there, I wasn’t around during that time. You know I’ve only been in Central, I’ve never killed anyone, I’ve only worked in Analysis.”

The detainee would be on his back, tied up and stark naked with his eyes blindfolded. In discipline, it is the subjects who have to be seen. They still wanted to be brave. I liked it that way. That was the joy of it, to break them. That glissement. Gato and I worked very well together. It was a roller coaster of terror and seduction, a game in which anything was permitted, except the unnecessary. Supposedly, “la Cubanita” had met these comrades in Punto Cero, and she had worked in Cuban intelligence. I don’t know how many people believed it. In any case my name, as I’ve told you, was Consuelo Frías Zaldívar, native of Matanzas. My “false history,” my “F.H.,” as they called it in Central; my “mantle,” my “legend,” in Red Ax.

I was there. Yes. I was part of the horror. I lived in the heart of evil. I traveled through the belly of the Beast.

You know what it is that breaks a man, a woman, the toughest ones? It’s not pain or fear. Though all of that helps, of course. What will finally break a person in the end, though, is the knowledge that the interrogator possesses information that concerns him and he doesn’t know what it is. Above all, he breaks when the interrogator catches him in a lie. After that nothing will be the same. There’s a before and an after to that moment.

“I like the tough ones,” Gato tells me, “I like the challenge, how you can ride it out to the climax, to the breaking point, and get all the information out of them. It’s better than the whining of the soft, apologetic ones.” There are things that have become blurry for me. It’s better that way. There are things, feelings, that I wouldn’t know how to describe without adulterating them. Let me tell you, there’s a powerful and mysterious bond that forms with the interrogator. There’s a purpose to that pain that gradually passes from the body to the soul, and you perceive it and anticipate the surrender. “You have to grab hold of those two or three seconds of weakness as they pass, because they might not return for hours,” Gato told me. Sometimes it happens as a moment of intense, though brief, spiritual communion. Finally, he gives you the intelligence that you need right now: the next “meet,” the time and place, names, the cell, its leader, the latest mission. And you give him the peace his body craves.