Arturo Fontaine - La Vida Doble

He asked to be put through to C3.1. I knew that number was Flaco. They told him his call would be returned shortly. I explained that the operation was about to start, that I couldn’t be late, that I had no way to justify my absence.

“Are we going after big fish, here?”

“I don’t know.”

“Even if they’re not big fish, it’s good for these operations to happen, you know? It’s important to maintain contact with the enemy. The terrorist network is designed to avoid contact, except when they hit us with a surprise attack and can get away. And, of course, we have to decapitate the movement. We know that. The subversives scatter when their leaders fall. ‘If you want to kill a snake, cut off its head.’ But you shouldn’t have to take part in these things, Cubanita. You’re just looking for adventure, aren’t you? The drug of danger. I know you too well, kiddo. . But no. It’s not wise and it’s not convenient.”

Gato was convinced that my comrades were about to bring me back in completely, that they had been testing me and would be giving me important missions any day now, and he wanted me to be his informant. He was expecting great things, I thought. . And then, out of nowhere, after a short silence, he put one elbow on the table and held his chin in his hand and he started talking.

“It’s like I don’t even exist,” he said, as he picked up some bread-crumbs that had fallen from the paper wrapper onto the metal top of his desk. “Even the agents I work with look down on me. They avoid me in the hallways, they look the other way if they see me crossing the lot. You just saw that asshole Chico Marín, man. . You saw how that little jerk turned away from me.” He didn’t want to make anyone uncomfortable, he told me. That’s why he didn’t go to the cafeteria. He had his Pepsis and sandwiches — steak with tomato, avocado, lettuce, and mayo — sent in from the shop on the corner. He devoured it all here in his office, in the same basement room where we carried out interrogations. So he wouldn’t bother anyone. . “And some of them I’ve known since we were kids. . But it’s not the bullets that’ll decide this filthy war, you know? They know it. It’s these bits of information, these dirty little jobs. This work is like being an executioner.”

He goes back to collecting crumbs with a fingernail that’s a little long and not very clean. His stomach spills in a wave over the metal surface of the desk. No one trusts anyone else around here. Is that why Gato is confiding in an outsider like me?

“Everyone knows it. Without the evil executioner,” he tells me, “society wouldn’t exist, but no one wants to see him in society. Am I wrong? Maybe it’s the little angels who create the social order? Wouldn’t that be nice! Unfortunately, you have to use terror, you have to use evil, you have to use the most vile and fucked-up parts hidden inside a human being. Later, of course, those methods are condemned and the cruelties that made it possible to move beyond cruelty are punished. Or no? They’re left behind, forgotten, not necessary anymore. Like the journalist in that old cowboy movie says, I can’t think of the name, ‘When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.’ What do you think?” He smiled at me, his eyes narrowing with a feline air. “Do you think, Cubanita, that the owners of the planes and ships and banks and copper mines and the pasta and ice cream factories know that someone like me exists? Do you think they know that their power would all go to shit without us, the ones down here in this damp, dark dungeon, like sewer rats? Do you think the housewife who goes out in the morning to do the shopping has any inkling that we’re protecting the long chain that makes it possible for her to find her noodles, her rice, her bottle of oil in the store? Do you think that pretty young girl in the morning light, at the lake in her bikini, sliding along on fiberglass skis in the wake of a boat with a 150hp outboard motor, you think she knows about me? Do you think she has any idea that her daddy’s gold card hangs from a thin and invisible thread that connects it to an ‘abject’ being like me? Not to mention the intellectuals who analyze the ‘political situation,’ as they call it. What do you have to say about those fuckers?”

Has my past been erased, or does he think that by talking to me this way I’ll erase it myself? I feel his breath on my neck, and that obscene closeness revolts me.

“So many intelligent reports for us to read! They know every-thing, they’re ‘political analysts’ and they write about power. Makes sense, since they’re smart and they’ve studied everything at the best universities in Europe and the United States. Sure, they understand everything, except for one thing: the power of fear. The intellectuals don’t know a thing about that. And we do. I’m plenty professional, you know me. The thing that traps a man who is naked, tied up, and blindfolded isn’t what will happen to his body. Although he imagines it, or believes he imagines it, he still has no idea what it means to have a jolt of electricity turn his body into tongues of fire. But with the tough ones, the well-trained ones, that only softens them, it only softens them up.”

A shiver runs down my spine. I can’t get air, I’m starting to gasp. He asks what’s wrong with me. “Nothing,” I say. He goes on:

“Interrogation is an art. I know how to bring anyone, anyone at all, to a place of desperation. There, he gives up, surrenders. Am I offending you?”

He goes quiet. My anxiety recedes. He takes a sandwich from the drawer, calmly unwraps the paper, peers at it, and sinks his teeth into it deliberately. A dribble of mayonnaise slides out of the corner of his mouth. He chews energetically, concentrated. He softens his tone:

“And no one escapes. No one. It’s a fact. It’s normal, human. That’s why they shouldn’t feel guilty.”

“I have to go, they must be looking for me,” I say.

“I have to protect you. It’s my duty.”

“Gato: I know this operation is authorized. Not only that: the order comes from above.”

“That’s the story Macha gave you, right?”

“I heard the conversation on the phone.”

He furrowed his brow.

“What’s that?”

“While I was waiting, I could hear the conversation.”

“Macha does shout on the phone. I’ll give you that.”

“Yes. I heard it loud and clear.”

He calls again on the internal phone. I hear the secretary’s voice on the other end. It’s taking a while, she asks him to be patient, C3.1 is on the phone with someone else and he’ll call back in a minute. He looks at me, lowers his eyes to the sandwich, and plants another precise and determined bite.

“No one escapes, or as Ronco would say, ‘ain’t no one.’ It’s a fact, a fact.” And he goes on as if we had all the time in the world. “I had one, maybe two, who didn’t. I remember a doctor from the FPMR. We’d just gotten started on him when he had an epileptic fit. Two of our doctors checked him and rechecked him. There was nothing wrong with him. A hysterical reaction, they said. Nothing we could do. That one didn’t talk at all. Exception that proves the rule. Every person has his weak point. It’s just a matter of finding it. Macha, for example, has Cristóbal. He lives for that kid. Since he split up with his wife, he’s had women but never a woman, you get me? Cristóbal is his unconditional. That kid Cristóbal’s best friend is his father. Sometimes he brings him here and takes him shooting at the firing range. Real bullets, you can hear them. He loves that damned kid a lot. He takes him out on his Harley, on long trips, you know; he takes him camping, or fishing down south, at Yelcho. Fly fishing. Macha really likes that. He loves to fish, Macha does.”