How the hell do they find animals like those? How do they round them up? The answer I’d give you today: it’s not that they go out looking for them. Once the space of delimited impunity is there — because there are limits, there is a system, it’s not just pure chaos — the monster we carry within us, the beast that grows fat on human flesh, is unleashed within the good father or the daughter of a good family. But for that to happen there has to be an order that you follow and that keeps you innocent. This, belonging to an institution carefully elaborated over time, the discipline, is what allows the transfer of blame to whoever is above you, your superior in the hierarchy. That’s what I think. Sometime later, Macha would tell me: It’s not the man who is evil; it’s what he does that turns him evil.
My head falls and bounces against the metal bed frame. The bed acts like it doesn’t know you. As if your own guard dog is attacking you in your home. The torment makes your body into a foreign object, and at the same time, the one suffering is you — you, incapable of obeying your brain’s instructions. If you could at least control your mouth, if you could stop one jawbone from clattering against the other.
Ronco shouts something about my daughter, “Ana,” he says. Now it’s an unmitigated pain. “Anita, that’s the kid’s name,” shouts Ronco. “I’m going to go grab her when she comes out of the French Alliance, in Calle Louis Pasteur. There, that’s the school your kid goes to, right?” I hear Ronco’s words in my memory, words he surely uttered on his way out. Gato tells me my first duty is to protect my daughter. . When did Gato get here? I am devastated.
“My daughter?” I ask, lifting my head with a wavering, little girl voice. And suddenly: “Nooo, pleeeease. . noooo,” I plead, struggling, or I try to; I’m on the verge of fainting.
Suddenly I lift my head up: How do they know about my daughter? Canelo would have thought about her. He would have fixed things to hide her for a while. I’m terrified: the Spartan was right. I should have sent her to Havana. I knew I had to. It was my duty. I put it off and put it off. . I cry out in rage at myself. I see her coming out of school in all her innocence, playing around with her friends, never imagining that those men coming closer are going to kidnap her. No! How did they get to her? My alibi has fallen, I think. When that happens, it’s as if they’ve killed you. A combatant without an alibi isn’t worth anything. You are no longer the ghost you were, and now you’re consumed by a new fear.
I give a start and I ask Gato to please, run after Ronco, order him to leave my daughter alone, Anita is only five years old. .
“All right,” he says. “I’ll go see if I can catch up with him,” he says. I hear him get up slowly and leave the room with heavy steps. The door shuts with a dry sound.
Ronco’s cold laughter wakes me up. I must have been out for a second. They’re sitting down. “Gato stopped me. Let’s see what you have to say, you stupid dyke. .” Rat frees my hands and feet. I hear him breathing. I ask for water and he says no, it’s not allowed. Holding on to him I manage to sit up on the frame. I sit there, naked.
What’s happened is simple. They photographed me. When I was arrested the first time, they sat me in a chair, handcuffed, and they took my picture. I don’t remember it, but it happened. Later, they gave me the prisoner’s uniform. Investigative Police received that photo. Gray and methodical functionaries searched long and patiently — in those years the system wasn’t computerized — in the Cabinet of Identification’s registry until they found a photograph that looked like me, and with luck on their side, they came upon my real name and ID. And my alibi falls. I’m cooked: they find my parents, their addresses, where I work. In Central they quickly find out I have a daughter and that she goes to school at the French Alliance, located on Calle Louis Pasteur and, obviously, that the identity I had given them was false. I put all this together later, of course.
You see, I was prepared for torture — or I thought I was, more like it — and my duty, I repeat, was to last five hours. After that I could talk and it didn’t matter anymore. My comrades would have vanished. Then one of two things would happen: they would release me or kill me. But now I was inside for the second time, my alibi had fallen, my cover had fallen. When that happens, I don’t know, it’s an awful feeling of helplessness, like nothing else. There’s no possible defense. Because then they have a way to blackmail me, starting with my daughter and moving on to my parents. And I don’t want them to bring Anita; I don’t want her to see me here naked among these clothed animals, naked among them, shaved for my torment. They have no right to make my daughter see me like this, no, they have no right to do that. But what is a right? In the meantime, they ask for names and more names, alibis, descriptions, houses, addresses. . But in the end the questions all lead to Bone.
Moments open only to the future or the past. In that state of anguish you can find no refuge within yourself or in anything you’ve been taught. Nothing makes sense. All that’s left are your cries half muffled by the gag. It gnaws at me like guilt, my daughter.
Ronco stops. The miserable Gato then grows enormous before my blindfolded eyes. His voice calms me. His memory. I’ve already told you, I’ve never met anyone with such an ability to remember every detail of a story, to make someone tell it over and over until he found those raised bridges between two truths, the inconsistency, the lie that accuses and bites you. And as frightening as he is, it becomes more and more tempting to see him as one who is, deep down, good, or at least beautiful and cruel. It’s harder to accept that unlimited power could be in the hands of an abject being. The evil ones are his subordinates, like Ronco, not him. That assumption helps me resign myself. In the depths of that basement there is someone good, the invisible Gato on whom I depend, my deus absconditus. Hidden desires well up, I want to save him so that he can save me. The distressing thing is that he’s gone. Once again I’m at Ronco’s mercy.
I surprise myself by searching for the fault in myself. He’s an implacable but fair god whose anger I myself must have unleashed. And so guilt sets in, and with it comes the will to sacrifice something as expiation. The attraction of collaborating with him will grow. It’s fear, of course, but fear transformed into remorse. The omnipotent father cannot be that evil, it must be possible to redeem my sin.
When I heard, hours later, Gato’s feigned voice again, it was a relief, a happiness, a hope, and I gave myself over to him, sobbing and cursing what I had been. I was the guilty one now, putting my own daughter in danger. That’s what I shouted at him, out of control. And then I talked. I talked as if I were already one of them. The person I’d been was gone. She abandoned me the way someone I once loved and have stopped loving would leave. It was a change of skin, of language. And that is not innocent. One is never the same in another language. There had been pain, but it was before. Not anymore. My confession flowed out as a vomit of hate toward my brothers, toward myself, my previous self. Everything happened faster and at the same time much more slowly than what I’m telling you.
Later, when they removed my blindfold and someone wearing a hood, I think it was Ronco, or maybe Rat, I don’t remember, I don’t really know, showed me the photo of my daughter, they finished breaking me. No one said anything. First it was the photo, and then a video, a couple of minutes of video shown on a small video camera that one of them plugged in and placed on the floor: her, Anita, coming out of school in her little blue skirt. She was talking to a friend and I heard her laugh. That was it. I need for her to go on laughing, I said to myself. And I surrendered. And I became one of them.