Arturo Fontaine - La Vida Doble

I remember a man with hairless skin and small, black eyes. His teeth were even and square, he had short, strong arms, and legs that were also short and muscular. He was like a little tank. “Lechón,” they called him, “Piglet.” His hair was sparse. You could see the skin of his head between the thick, separate strands. I remember that hair well, and his arms, so thick and so short, and the enormous Adam’s apple in his throat. Supposedly, he had headed a combat cell that blew up a bridge over the Tinguiririca River. But I knew little about him, and my questions didn’t get anywhere. The guy would hardly answer anything. His Asiatic eyes would narrow and he’d go into a kind of trance; and when the jolts of electricity came he would scream loudly and regularly like he was following a rhythm, and he gave off that repellent smell of shit that gets stuck in your nostrils. Afterward, he would take a breath, filling himself slowly with air from the pit of his stomach upward, and he closed his mouth and his jaw fastened shut. They showed him photos of Rafa, the Spartan, Max. There was no way to get him to talk.

Why is it so hard for me to imagine him today? Didn’t I recognize myself in that determined man’s body lying there, abused and contorting, his skin suddenly pale, his brow wrinkled, eyebrows distorted, his hair on end, eyes spinning wildly and unable to focus on anything, his cries muffled by a rag? Who was I looking at, if not myself? Who did I hate, then, and vilify?

I’m telling you, at a certain point the person lying there starts to seem like he’s no longer a man. His moans are irritating and they enrage you, and the desire to punish him more grows stronger. I found I could extinguish all human hope from my soul. I made the wild beast’s silent leap to strangle every joy. We must break through his legend, we must make him bear fruit, it’s a question of pride now, there’s no going back and he has to surrender, he must vomit out the truth, his resistance insults me, it is spit in my face; then I approach him, I get very close and I spit on him, I spit on him because I hate him and I must get revenge for his insult.

That he still dares to maintain his legend forces us to keep going, he’s an imbecile who leaves us no choice. I tell him precisely this in my Cuban accent, and still he sits there like someone listening to the rain; we’ve got to give him more. He’s so disfigured he looks like an obscene monster, a revolting being whose revolting nature offends me. Why should I put up with that smell of acid sweat? It makes me nauseous. We have to give him more, give him more until he breaks, we can’t let him beat us, he smells, he goes on stinking; it’s the repugnant smell of fear, I’m sure you’ve never smelled that stench, it’s like no other in the world. I’m indignant. Why does he subject us to this repugnance? Of course he is doing it on purpose, he’s provoking us, seeking out our hate, he doesn’t want to give his arm to be twisted though he’s nothing but a human rag, a rag that humiliates me with its resistance, and goes on shuddering and flopping like a fish out of water that never reaches the end of its death throes. If he dies, it doesn’t matter — fuck him! — but it does matter, the fucker would take it all with him, he’s no good to us dead, he has to be broken first. Gato’s calm voice stops me.

I went on feeling a strange vibration. Ronco brought in Rat Osorio to give him a beating, but nothing. Ronco took out his knife, trembling with rage, and he stuck the blade in between the man’s teeth. Ronco’s tightened face, his fury turning his face and neck red, his mouth half-open and panting, the shine of saliva on his gold tooth. But he could do nothing, and he had to put away his knife when Gato, in his calm, nasal voice, warned him to be careful not to cut the man’s tongue. Something happened to me with “Lechón” when I saw the blade shining between his teeth. There was a terrible determination in that closed jaw as it bit down on the knife blade.

Then they tied him up and he was left there hanging like a chicken. The pau de arara, learned in La Rinconada in Maipú from some Uruguayan instructors who had fought against the Tupamaros, Gato explained to me with a medical coldness. They learned it from the Brazilians, who had learned it, according to Gato, from the French paratroopers who fought in Algeria. That’s where all the techniques they used in Vietnam came from, he told me. And he gave me names of French military men — Colonel Roger Trinquier, General Paul Aussaresses — who had taught in the Special Forces schools in Fort Bragg and Fort Benning. One of them had been in Brazil. Gato had spent some time taking a class at Fort Benning, and more time in Panama, where the instructors were gringos who taught them to kill and eat monkeys in the jungle. Flaco Artaza was there, too. And Macha? He tells me: “No, not Macha. Purely a South American product, that one.” And he laughs under his breath.

When they called me in, “Lechón” had his eyes half shut, and his jaw fastened in silence.

Some hours later the guard let me into his cell. The door opened and I smelled that prisoner stench that suffuses the walls of the cells. He looked like he was sleeping. I tiptoed over to him and I lay down beside him on the mattress on the concrete bed. He must have been very thirsty, and it was only now time to give him water. He thanked me with a slight movement. I massaged his arms, his legs, his back. The guy just let me do it and we didn’t say a word. I felt his tight skin and firm muscles. I liked that feeling of a compact, dense body. It was nice to touch him. I imagined the meat under the skin and I thought it must be delicious to eat. In other times, when we were cannibals, I would have devoured that meat by the mouthful. I noticed a flicker of light in his eyes: he was looking at me. All at once I took off my shirt and freed my breasts from my bra. I was squatting down beside him and there was a glitter in his eyes and I heard him swallow. Not moving.

“You’re a brave one,” I told him.

The words slipped out of me. The flicker of a smile went over his lips and vanished without ever taking shape. I caught a glimpse of his square teeth. He didn’t touch me, and I had an urgent need to feel the contact of his skin. I brushed against his face with a nipple. He didn’t move. With one hand I squeezed his shoulder, round and hard. I kissed an impassive mouth and, despairing, I grabbed at his pants. And I knelt down and took hold of his buttocks and pulled him toward me. His heart was pounding. I had my eyes closed. “Your sense of touch is delicate as a blind person’s,” he told me softly.

“Hit me,” I begged him. “Kick me.” And I curled up on the floor and waited. And he did nothing to me. “Spit on me, please, piss on my face.” And he did nothing to me. Now he was breathing slowly and rhythmically, and neither my fingers nor my lips or tongue could break through his willful indifference. Then I cried and I lay down on my back and opened myself. “Fuck me,” I told him. “You’re scared,” I told him. He sat down calmly on the floor. “You’re afraid you’ll like it and your revolutionary zeal will all go to shit,” I told him. “Look at me at least, you faggot.” I was putting on my pants, I was tying my shoes. “You’re scared to be a man and you hide behind the ‘solidarity’ of your gang.” I kicked him in the mouth. It bled a little, but he didn’t move or say anything. I kicked him again and I left. Who was that man and what had he done? Did he finally break? What ever became of him?

I spend hours alone in the apartment, in my room in the dark with the door closed. I don’t want to see anyone. I throw myself onto the bed. I don’t even take my shoes off. I don’t know what I’m thinking about, if I’m thinking about anything. Sometimes I wake up at dawn with my guts twisted in anguish, and I realize I never even put my pajamas on. I didn’t feel like it and I just stayed there, still dressed and stretched out on the bed. Cold. Morning comes and it’s so hard for me to get up.