TWENTY-THREE
When I came out of there, shivering from cold and shivering from fear, and filthy, thirsty, fetid, and suffering, under the edge of my blindfold I could see where they’d held me: two red trucks, shiny and at the ready, waiting for the alarm. It was a fire station. Where was it? I never found out. At Central they took my clothes, which were disgusting, and they handed me the grimy prison uniform.
Tomasa squeezes me in a hug. “How can you possibly still be here?” I ask. She tells me that no, they had let her go, too, and then picked her up again. I lie down at one end of the cell’s cold cement floor. I wake up: the same cell, the same stinking clothes, the same sweaty grime on my skin, the same greasy hair. The same woman in jeans who brings us the same watery broth.
Tomasa quietly hums “Te recuerdo Amanda” as she lays out the cards for solitaire. She tells me about an official in charge of the department of analysis. She thinks he’s attractive, different from the rest of them. “Flaco Artaza is a real intelligence agent,” she tells me. “Not like the others, who are just full-time gangsters.”
Suddenly she tells me: “They’ve broken my spine and I need to be recognized as someone, at least as the whore with. . It doesn’t matter who.”
“You told me before,” I say. She doesn’t hear me, or she pretends not to hear. .
“As long as I have someone taking care of me,” she says. “Without a pimp you can’t even be a whore. If I could just find some way to get one of these thugs to soften, to warm up. I’d have to get something in return, of course. A hot shower and new underwear, maybe.” We’re back to the same thing.
The noise of the lock turning startled me. I was sleeping. Several nights had passed, I don’t know how many, interrupted only by the arrival of the day’s glass of water and the watered-down broth. The same fat guardian in jeans brought me, in handcuffs and with the end of her baton sticking into my back, up to the second floor. “You’re going to see the famous Flaco,” she told me. Tomasa liked him, I think to myself. I had only seen him pass by once, from far away. He walked down the hallway with long strides, graceful and indifferent, with the elegance of authority.
When he saw me come in like that, he shouted an order for the woman to remove my handcuffs. He took off my blindfold himself, and a sob escaped me. He took a can of Coca-Cola from the small refrigerator that was camouflaged in a cabinet, opened it, and handed it to me. I kept crying. The soda tasted so good to me. But I went on crying, and I felt I was disgusting. My chest hurt so much with every moan, it was as if the sobs were fighting their way out with a knife blade.
Flaco was a man with an aquiline nose and enormous liquid eyes, blue and melancholy. He moved with lethargic ease. He struck me as attractive when I saw him from behind, one hand on his hip, the other writing on the chalkboard. Long legs. Well-shaped, he was. I noticed his wedding ring. A serious man, I thought. He’d gone bald. He couldn’t be over thirty-four, I thought, and already bald as a father — a father with youthful skin and no potbelly. He offered me a cigarette. We talked. I felt his eyes on me. No one inside there had looked at me. He did. You can’t know what that means, it’s the warmth of a nest. He told me he’d been born in Valdivia. He missed the Calle-Calle River. He hated the Mapocho River, he told me. “We can agree there,” I said, and he laughed with me.
On the whiteboard, a flowchart. In the box at the top, our Commander Joel. It was the same image that appeared in our internal newsletters: his glasses, behind which you could see his serene Asiatic eyes; his abundant black hair combed away from his face; his nose and mouth, wide; his beard, trimmed. It was an image that we carried with us burned into our memories. Flaco noticed my un-ease. A vertical line connected Joel to “Bone,” who didn’t have a photo. From there three lines radiated out and opened up into boxes with names and photos — almost all very blurry — from which other lines led to other boxes. Over time I learned that it was copies of these blurry photos that Macha had been given. In one of the boxes I recognized Tomasa.
He asked me in a smooth, respectful, and convincing tone to help him fill in the boxes with our pseudonyms. They had christened my brothers and sisters with the names of the streets where they had been located for the first time. “We put him to bed there and got him up there in the morning.” That’s how, he told me, the agents in charge of surveillance gave their reports. I never found out who it was they called “Antonio Varas” after they saw him stay overnight the first time in a building on that street. The photo was too blurry. The tail sometimes allowed them to see a “meet.” Surveillance was the thing those bastards did best. But there were also brothers and sisters who had turned. And Flaco wanted me to understand that very well. Tomasa? Briceño? Escobar? How many had flipped? Whoever arrived last to a “meet” and sat in the safest place was the most senior in the hierarchy, they did know that. That’s how they recognized the leaders. The intermediaries confused them, I noticed; those sainted women threw them off the trail. And, looking at things from a distance, I must have been the one who gave Flaco a precise explanation of their function. Accordingly, he perfected their system of tailing and location of leaders. Because it was easy to figure out that they came to few group “meets” but had many meetings with intermediaries.
The box at the top of my cell had a name: “Prince of Wales.” I had met once with the Spartan in a restaurant on that avenue to eat Spanish omelets. Next to our cell, a series of new nicknames were waiting for me to sort through them. “Gladiolo” was obviously Rafa, because his mother lived on Calle Los Gladiolos, where — remember? — I had left him a note he never answered. Others were “Redhead Curinanca,” “Plaid Curinanca,” and “Big-Nose Curinanca.”
“What a way of guarding me,” I said. And with tears still in my eyes I started to laugh, disconsolate, understanding that this would be forever.
At Flaco’s instruction I called my mother and explained to her that I had to leave right away for Paris — for Paris, which for me meant Giuseppe’s love — as an interpreter for a delegation of businesspeople. The interpreter who was supposed to go was sick. It was urgent, it was a good opportunity, I was packing as fast as I could. One week, I lied; I would be gone for one week. My voice shook a little. I said good-bye to her and to Anita.
“Relax,” Flaco said to me, “Relax.” He took hold of my jaw and turned it roughly to the left. A vertebra cracked and I cried out. Then he did the same thing toward the right. A vertebra cracked again. I felt better. “Relax,” he repeated, “Relax.” He got behind me, took me by the legs, and launched me toward the ceiling. In the middle of my flight, my spinal column cracked violently. I shrieked. But it was a good pain. He caught me, placing me gently back on the floor. And that’s how my first conversation with Flaco ended. They gave me a bar of soap and let me shower. If you could only know how marvelous it was to feel the hot water and soap suds sliding all over the skin of my poor body.
The next day, Flaco called me into his office again. He had a surprise for me: a Lancôme palette de maquillage. That’s what he called it, and I was delighted with his gesture and the effort he put into his badly pronounced French. It fascinated me: to be able to wear makeup again. We had lunch together. It was a bit late and the cafeteria was almost empty. I looked at him, trying not to. His smile made my knees weak. I was invaded by a sweet languor, and a few yawns escaped me. My mouth was dry. He’d left his cigarettes in his office. We went to get them after lunch, and I kissed him there. It was an impulse. I kissed him with an exquisite calm, and it was as if he knew intuitively that if he rushed, it would ruin everything.