Breaking Lorca Read Free Page A

came to find himself cleaning up after the high-pressure interrogation of Labredo. He had asked about the howls of agony issuing from that room shortly after his arrival at the little school. He was informed that there was no torture, only high-pressure interrogation.
    In his brief tenure in the army, Victor had seen his share of gore. Even before the ambush that had killed his men, there had been the mopping-up operations, sudden descents on villages and outposts where he had seen dead bodies and parts of bodies dangling from tree branches, heads still in their helmets gazing at the sky with empty sockets. He had seen mothers weeping over their dead children, the innards hanging out of the little corpses like torn curtains. He had seen soldiers with the tops of their heads blown off, bodies hidden under heaving coverlets of flies and maggots. These sights Victor got used to. He would have gone mad in the first week otherwise.
    And then his sergeant’s brains had blown into his face.
    He entered the former classroom with a mop and bucket and a few rags. He nearly choked on the smell of shit. He set down the bucket of soapy water and stared at the pool of blood congealing on the floor. It flowed out from a chair in the corner, colours fanning outward from bright crimson in the middle to rust brown at the fringes. The edges looked like a map of El Salvador’s coastline.
    He swung his mop in wide, rhythmic circles as if he were a brain-damaged person who had learned to perform this one function and nothing else. He tried to order his brain not to focus on the elements in his field of vision, and not to put diverse elements together to make up a whole. He did not want to see the whole.
    Tools were laid out on a table by the bricked-up window, simple household items: a hammer, a pair of pliers, a roll of tape. He tried not to connect the hammer or the pliers—both darkened with blood—to the screams he had heard that afternoon. And the teeth on the floor. The clumps of hair. He tried to see these bits of human as inanimate objects only, unconnected to each other, unconnected to the hammer and the pliers. I am a janitor, he told himself. At this moment I am a soldier under orders to clean up a mess. That’s all. I am not a philosopher, I am not a hero, I am no one’s saviour.
    Certainly he was not poor Labredo’s saviour. Indeed, Sergeant Tito had ordered him to lead Labredo from the cells to this very room, the old man unresisting as a lamb. Now, Victor found one of Labredo’s eyeballs impaled on a yellow pencil, propped on a corner of the desk like a drumstick.
    He kept trying not to put everything together. But as he mopped under the desk, he found Labredo’s other eyeball staring up at him in astonishment.
    I led him here, Victor said to himself. I opened his cell and I led Labredo trembling, hardly able to walk, to an indescribable death.
    He had brought Labredo, blindfolded—the prisoners were always blindfolded—out of his cell, the old man clinging to him as if he were his son. Victor had seen in his file that Labredo was not really an old man, he was only fifty-seven, but he had been in the little school for two months, and the photograph stapled to his dossier showed that he had looked very different when he had arrived.
    After Victor had delivered Labredo into Sergeant Tito’s hands, there had not been much noise the first half-hour, just the usual shouts and his uncle’s quieter voice. Then his uncle had come out, grim-faced, and disappeared into his office. That was when the screams had started. Like a baby’s cry, the human scream is meant to provoke sympathy and bring help. In the little school it brought laughter.
    Victor hadn’t had the courage to intervene, or even to run. He feared the bullet in the back. He feared being wounded, maimed or paralyzed; he feared capture. He feared what Tito would do to him. He feared his own screams. And so he had sat with his hands folded on the table in front of him