When we came out of that imaginary house the dawn sky was made of salt. Tomasa and I went back exhausted, and I felt my anguish rising into my esophagus: What would happen today? And we returned to our prison. When we went in we saw Chico Escobar and Vladimir Briceño. They were handcuffed and blindfolded. They had also been picked up again.
Over the gates of Dante’s Inferno is written: Abandon all hope those who enter here. That’s how I lived. I’d lost all hope and I still wasn’t dead. I would see many others in that state of despondency. They were eaten up by desperation in those dungeons. Because they had sworn to fight unto death before giving up and they’d been captured alive; they had sworn not to falter and they’d faltered. The enemy’s cruelty had ensnared them and driven them mad from fear. What did they have before them? If they were released they would never again be what they had been. Their brothers would look at them suspiciously. They would have to give a statement. They could be punished and disgraced. No matter what, for reasons of security and for a long time, as in my case, they would be excluded from any risky missions. Hadn’t they been warned that it was better to die than to fall into enemy hands? The ancient Christians’ baptism of blood washes away all stains and allows direct entrance into Paradise. The mujahideen — didn’t they know it! The miseries of an entire life are erased in an instant, forever. All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born. But they hadn’t been up to it.
So they vegetated, lacking a purpose and sick in their souls. They suffered — we suffered — without relief. Even though the guards and interrogators didn’t do anything to them anymore. They’d finished with them, and one of these nights they’d kill them or throw them out in the street like ownerless dogs. We had trained to be heroes and now we had bodies made of jelly and we longed for a death that we hadn’t be able to consummate.
Along with the first light of day, the pain in my head started to invade my sleep. My mouth was dry and I swallowed saliva and it was still just as dry. When I opened my eyes in the semidarkness of my cell I let out a scream like a wild animal. My heart was in my throat and I went on screaming. I tried to stop but I couldn’t: Tomasa was hanging from one of the bars in the window. Her fixed eyes bulged as if they would come out of her swollen face. She was swinging slowly. A trickle of blood flowed from her ear. When they opened the door and took her down I saw she had hung herself with a thick black belt with a metal buckle shaped like a horseshoe. Mauricio’s. I said nothing.
TWENTY-SIX
I give them the address of a safe house. We met there the night before the mission when I was taken prisoner. Calle Zenteno, between Sargento Aldea and Pedro Lagos, I told them, and when I did it, a tremor passed over my face. A crack was opening up. The vessel had broken.
We parked some fifty yards from the house — Rat in the driver’s seat, Ronco in the back next to me in my ski mask. A Fiat taxi and a blue Toyota four-door pulled up. A man with narrow shoulders and a crooked nose, a woman with a black shirt that hugged her breasts tightly, and another guy who looked Indian climbed up onto the neighboring roofs. A huge, agile, brawny man leaped, his blond bangs flying, and the door flew open under his kick. It was Great Dane, the man I’d seen in Oliver with the girl with Siamese eyes. A woman, skinny as a mouse, went in with her CZ drawn, and behind her went Great Dane, his blond hair grazing his shoulders. From the van, wearing my ski mask, I was just starting to recognize this group. Then, silence. It seemed that a long time went by.
They made me get out and go through the house. Ronco asked me how I could prove that this was a safe house. I hadn’t thought about that. Except for an old woman who was half deaf, no one was there. “You lyin’ to us again, you little bitch? You want us to start all over again? Lemme tell you, Great Dane’s not here to waste his time. . You saw what that guy’s kicks can do. .”
I didn’t answer. I went straight to the closet in a small room at the back, I knelt on the floor, and, trembling, I removed a board. I wanted to say: here. My voice wouldn’t come. “What’s she got?” asked Ronco. The man with narrow shoulders and crooked nose looked at me anxiously with his deep-set eyes. Mono Lepe. The woman with the tight black shirt, Pancha, Pancha Ortiz, came over fearlessly, though she took precautions. Her sure, agile hands, her meaty fingers with their manicured nails and no rings, opened the black plastic bag that was sealed with a zipper: there were two long, black, brand-new 7.62 caliber AKMSs with collapsible stocks, made in Poland.
“I’d like to pet them,” Pancha told me with a deliberately sensual smile. “But I can’t, not before they’re examined for fingerprints. There are some guns that are beautiful, don’t you think? And is it possible to separate their beauty from their function?”
I saw them shove outside the poor old deaf woman who gave the house its cover, as she protested, handcuffed and blindfolded. I watched from behind my ski mask, in that dirty war up to my neck.
I would have liked to be Scheherazade. I should have been. But once my alibi fell I didn’t know how to keep inventing stories.
And that’s how I started collaborating, and collaborating meant informing on my brothers, handing over — contritely — their names to my confessor, Flaco or Gato. Mostly Gato. There’s a vertigo that comes with informing. You turn completely. And you confess and cry and talk and cry names, dates, faded places. And in doing so, the fear of pain disappears, and for a moment, you’re reconciled with that terrible god who demanded that sacrifice. Because that disastrous god, you discover later, asked you to give him an argument for your life and your future. It was a Faustian bargain. And still you have no inkling of what that phrase really means: “to sell your soul to the Devil.” A deus absconditus took for himself all you could ever be, he’s a jealous Mephistopheles whose desire is violent and all-encompassing. There’s something cannily attractive in that death. I have to be born again for Flaco, for Gato; I’m a new woman, I’m “la Cubanita,” Consuelo Frías Zaldívar, native of Matanzas, who is interrogating Chico Escobar and Briceño.
My loss of respect for myself will make my job ever easier. In my betrayed brothers’ faces — though of course they don’t recognize me, they will never see me — you can read the hate mixed with fear. They’re stupefied. Little by little it will spread through Red Ax. A death sentence has been communicated and hangs over an informer — they don’t know who it is, but I do — and there’s no turning back, the cards have been dealt.
And when, a month and a half later, they let me go again — earlier, I’d had to call my mother from “Paris” to justify the unforeseen extension of my trip — an urgent and concrete problem occurred to me, one that “inexplicably” no one seemed to have thought of before: What happened to la Cubanita? How to explain her disappearance, which coincided with my freedom? My situation was extremely dangerous. There was a death sentence hanging over this “Cubanita,” I’m telling you. A spy who is caught in our organization will be punished unto death. The same is true for one who deserts or informs to the police. The solution fell by its own weight: I had to go back to headquarters and interrogate. People had to know that la Cubanita was still in action. As for me, I had already given up. I didn’t need incentives. So the circumstances — did I really say “circumstances”?—obliged me to return, hooded and using a fake Caribbean voice. I now had this job in addition to my private French classes. I started earning exactly 35 percent more each month. I was no longer receiving, as you know, the stipend from Red Ax. I had to educate and support my daughter. I didn’t want her to suffer because of me, I didn’t want her to lack anything because of me. The prose of life is like that, prosaic and hackneyed.