The next day, she ate a plate of heavily salted beans and asked several times for water, but no water was brought to her. Later, when Victor checked on her through the peephole, he saw her sucking water out of her shirt, the way an infant sucks a beloved blanket.
Sergeant Tito came for her that afternoon. “Bring her out, soldier. Don’t tell her nothing what’s going on. She will learn soon enough.”
“Blindfold!”
Lopez unlocked the cell door and Victor went in for the woman. She was crouched against the wall, her arms curled up in front of her, expecting a soaking.
Victor took hold of her elbow and she yanked it away. He jerked harder.
“Where are you taking me?”
“You’re going to have a chat with the General,” Lopez said. “That’s what you wanted, right?”
Victor led her along the corridor.
“Where is the General?” she demanded as soon as she was brought into the interrogation room.
Tito and the Captain were sitting at a small table. Yunques was not around, and Tito motioned for Victor to stand by the wall.
“Have a seat, please,” said the Captain. “What is your name, please?”
“Maria Sanchez.”
“You don’t want to tell me your name?”
“I just told you my name. Maria Sanchez.”
“That is a lie. But I will tell you my name.” The Captain got up and leaned down beside her ear. Even though his voice was barely above a whisper, she flinched when he spoke. “My name,” he said, “is God.”
FIVE
Once, when Victor was in high school, he had been caught smoking on school property. The vice-principal, a prematurely bald and angry man, had taken him to the office and offered him a choice: Victor could take a two-week suspension or the strap.
“There is the telephone, Pena.” The bald head gleamed for an instant as he nodded at the terrifying instrument. “Call your father and explain to him why you will be missing class for the next two weeks. Tell him why you will miss the term review just as your exams are approaching-because you had to have a cigarette on school property, even though you are well aware of the rules. Go on now, Pena, you call the Major and ask him what to do.”
The prospect of such a conversation with his father was a brick wall. Take a two-week suspension? The Major would beat him about the head. He would make him suffer for a year.
“I will take the strap, sir,” Victor had said. It couldn’t be worse than his father’s fists. Many boys got the strap, and all of them said it didn’t hurt, they didn’t cry.
“Very good, Pena. Bend over the desk and take hold of the far edges.”
Victor bent over, feeling horribly exposed even though his trousers had not been lowered. He caught a glimpse of the strap as the vice-principal took it down from the shelf. It was about fifteen inches long, and much thicker than he expected-a quarter-inch of leather. He gripped the far side of the desk and tried to fix his mind on the bookshelves that faced him. There were no book titles to read, however, just large binders-probably full of dossiers on delinquent students like himself.
He looked back over his shoulder and caught a glimpse of the vice-principal leaning back, his wind-up for the first blow. There was a whistling sound and then the smack of leather on flesh. Victor shrieked. The strap felt like a patch of fire across his skin, and tears sprang into his eyes.
The strap whistled again, and again he shrieked. To his dismay, he now began to cry helplessly; great gasping sobs shook his body. He could not catch his breath, and the hot tears streamed down his cheeks. Deep inside, a voice spat the word, “Coward.”
“Holy Mother, Pena.” There was genuine puzzlement in the vice-principal’s voice. “That’s only two strokes. I don’t know if you’re faking or not.”
Victor’s voice was choked and unrecognizable.
“Nobody’s ever screamed like that. I know you’re a skinny runt, but really-try and control yourself. It can’t hurt that much.”
But Victor could not control himself. The vice-principal threw himself into the remaining eight blows, and rained them down so quickly that Victor scarcely had time to breathe before the next one landed. When the blows were done, he nearly passed out.
“Sit there until you catch your breath. Go on. Sit down and put your head between your knees. You look like you’re about to faint.”
Victor did as he was told, staring at the polished wooden floor. He had to breathe through his mouth, his sinuses were so clogged from crying.
“Really, Pena,” the vice-principal said, not unkindly. “You frightened me.” He opened a file and began to read. He did not speak again until Victor stood up. “Go into the washroom now and wash your face with cold water. I will tell no one what has happened here today.”
Everyone will know anyway, Victor thought; his eyes were bloodshot, his cheeks puffy. When he quietly took his seat in history class, the other pupils glanced over at him, but no one said anything. Nor did anyone mention it to him when class was over, or in the following weeks. He could not tell if his classmates’ silence was born of sympathy or contempt.
He had come that day to his first disillusionment. Until then he had cherished an unsupported conviction that he could be heroic under the right circumstances. In time of peril, he would risk his own life to save a woman or a child, he would brave flames or gunfire to help the helpless. But the vice-principal had shown him that Victor Pena was not the stuff of which heroes are made.
And now he was learning this lesson again-this time from a skinny woman with an unpleasant voice.
“My name is God,” Captain Pena told her that first day. “I am the Lord of Life and Death. Whatever I say will happen, that is what will happen. If you cherish any illusions about this, abandon them now. In this place there are no rules except the rules I make. If I decide you should live, you will live; if I decide you should die, you will die. The sooner you understand this, the easier it will go with you.”
“I want a lawyer,” the woman said. Even green Victor could see this was the wrong tone to take with the Captain.
“There are no lawyers,” he replied. “There are no laws. Now, what is your name?”
“My name is Maria Sanchez. Look at my birth certificate.”
“Your birth certificate is a fake.”
“No, it is not. I want to know why I have been brought here.”
“You have been brought here as a suspected terrorist.”
“For taking food to the church basement.”
“Food for whom?”
“For children orphaned by the war.”
“The children of terrorists, you mean. Sympathy for them is sympathy for terrorism.”
“They are children, and they will starve unless we feed them.”
“What is your name?”
“Maria Sanchez.”
Captain Pena got up and stood beside her. He unzipped his fly, pulled out his penis, and pressed it against her cheek. The woman jerked her head aside.
“Tell us your name right now.”
“Maria Sanchez. My name is Maria Sanchez.”
There was a bed along one wall, a narrow cot with only the metal springs showing. A mattress was brought in. The woman was stripped and secured by wrists and ankles to the bed frame. Captain Pena lowered his trousers and lay down on top of her. She screamed obscenities at the ceiling and tried to bite him.
Yunques yanked her head back by the hair.
The Captain had trouble entering her. The woman screamed and screamed, and Victor tried to look anywhere but at the bed, at the pale buttocks heaving up and down. A series of grunts signalled the end and then the Captain climbed off.
The woman was crying now, cursing him through the tears.
“I hope you are taking the pill,” he said matter-of-factly. “There are three more men here.”
The woman’s abdomen heaved. She let out a scream that tore into Victor like a machete.