“Cómo que tú andas, Irene? How’re you doing?”
I felt pride at hearing my combatant name. I looked at him and shrugged my shoulders, not knowing how to begin. It was so like him to mix in Cuban expressions and turns of phrase when he talked. He did it with a trace of humor, sometimes, and other times out of habit, without realizing.
“I have an assignment,” he told me with no preliminaries, taking on his curt tone of voice. “To pass on to you the Directorate’s congratulations. You didn’t give up any names during the required number of hours.”
“I held out much longer than five hours,” I protested. “Women can be very brave. .”
He nodded silently and looked at his plate.
“And you were inside for twenty-nine days. That’s a long time. You know what? It wasn’t easy for us, either. In cases like this we have to hope the combatant dies in the fight, and if they’re captured, that they’re killed as soon as possible. I caught myself many times hoping you were alive and that they would let you go.”
I tried to meet his eyes, but he didn’t lift them from his plate.
“Canelo!” I said and my voice broke. I took a sip of wine.
He nodded again, in silence and without looking away from the plate.
“Did your ID hold up?”
“They never questioned the validity of my identity card.”
“Strange. Unusual. Very unusual. Did you know your name was never mentioned in the press? The official communication didn’t mention any arrests, it only talked about three dead ‘extremists’ and two more who got away. How was your questioning with the military prosecutor?” And when he saw the surprise on my face: “You know, there should have been a military tribunal. They caught you red-handed, you had the money in your purse. . All of that falls completely under the ‘Anti-Terrorist Law.’ But according to the official information, the money was found in a bag one of the ‘terrorists’ was carrying. No one ever formally questioned you?”
“No. So I’m not named in the investigation?”
“As far as we’ve been able to find out, no.”
“Then my case doesn’t exist.”
“Exactly.”
“When I left, they made me sign a provisional liberty. .”
“A fake document, obviously. Did you get to see anyone?”
“See, what you could call see, almost no one. But I’m sure they got Chico Escobar, I heard shouts one night and I have no doubt it was him. They also picked up Vladimir Briceño. I passed him in the jail’s corridor, limping along with two guards on him. They’d broken his nose and his shirt was soaked in blood.”
“So you did see something, and in detaiclass="underline" broken nose, limping, bloody shirt. . Why did they fall?”
“I don’t have information about that.”
The Spartan nodded his head again and he stared into his soup.
“They didn’t ask you about them?”
“No.”
“Anyone else?”
“Tomasa. She says she was already a socialist in grade school, that her father was an ‘entrista,’1 that she had a boyfriend who was ‘eleno,’ and that she got to meet Elmo Catalán himself when she was just a kid. Could that be true? I don’t know when she joined the Red Ax movement. She must be thirty-something. They did bring her face to face with Briceño and Escobar. I don’t know what cell she belongs to.”
“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.”