All Men Are Liars (11 page)

I suppose Alejandro must have been like that with every woman. I haven't got a jealous bone in my body, so I can talk about these things without blushing. I don't think he was like that with Loredana, because he was not yet experienced with words, only with the body, which does its own thing. But certainly with his wife, with that Graciela, whom he never saw again. He didn't say as much to me about her, but I know that he yearned for that woman the way a person yearns to breathe. And especially so because someone had taken her from him, someone had deliberately handed her over to the executioners—you knew that? And this was something Alejandro never forgot. I imagine them to have been very similar, he and Graciela, like two consummate actors sharing a stage, with no false moves, not a word out of place, whether they were alone in bed or in the company of some extra, brought out from backstage to be the third leg in their irresistible double act.

He behaved differently with all the women he knew, myself included. I'm sure that those many other lovers, described to me night after night, hung on Alejandro's every word. To them he was like one of those storytellers who sit in the marketplace and mesmerize the crowd into silence. Enraptured, they would finally realize that the night had ended and that light was creeping in between the blinds.

Quita was the one who made me laugh. When I saw her come into the office in the mornings, I could have sworn on my life that she had been with Alejandro the night before. Not because the bastard hadn't come home, for that was a freedom he had demanded on our first day together, and which I had agreed to, or accepted—perhaps even wanted. But because Quita's skin had acquired an iridescent, silken quality, as though the words Alejandro had poured into her were still flowing through her blood, blue, golden, and red. Gorostiza, who never would have admitted that he and Quita were a couple, watched her with a quiet, sad half smile. I think that he voiced no reproach, so long as she allowed him to remain, clinging to her skirts, in the thick of things. Quita, on the other hand, was jealous—or perhaps
maternal
is a more precise term for those women who like to have a little man in their arms, close to the breast, like a Mater Dolorosa.

Alejandro lost his cool only once, that I remember. It was on a night that he came home late. He told me that he had met up with someone, but he didn't want to say who. He began to talk, hour after hour, without stopping. This time the aim was not to seduce anyone except perhaps himself, or to console himself, embolden himself. He began with that eternity spent in prison, about which he had already spoken to me, but this time it was as though he felt it in the flesh, as if he were reliving that hell through smell, touch, everyday objects. I don't know if I'm explaining this well: he was speaking across time.

They had picked him up in the way that had become standard at that time in Buenos Aires: the Ford Falcon drawing up to the pavement, the two men in dark glasses grabbing him by the shoulders, the blindfold across his eyes, the order not to touch the door handles, which were electrified. From beneath the blindfold he thought he recognized a street near the Recoleta Cemetery.
The bus I took to school came this way,
he thought then. And also:
If this had happened then, from my seat I would have seen myself being taken away, because I always looked out on this side.

When they came to some invisible gates, one of the men took down the car radio and uttered what must have been the code to open them. “Uranus.” That was the first word of a new vocabulary that Alejandro had to learn during his confinement, as though his past life had suddenly been erased and he were starting again in some monstrous school where ghostly hands wrote cryptic terms on the blackboard in a tidy hand:
operating theater; the machine; the grill;
the egg cup; the lion's den; the hood; the kennel; the tube; the cabin; the truck; the flights; the fish food; the fish tank
. Take this down, Terradillos, because it's history and evidence. I'm telling you this just as he told me, sparing you only the ins and outs. You see: no secrets.

He spent the first days sitting on the floor, with nothing to lean against, unable to move, as rigid as a bullfighter in the veronica stance, with the blindfold tight across his eyes. He learned to look downward, to recognize the guards' voices, to intuit the presence of others. He thought he knew that the cell was large and that he was not its only occupant. At irregular intervals he heard the door open and close, and felt someone place a bowl of soup in his hands, or a glass of water. In the middle of the room there was a pit for relieving himself. Sometime afterward, he learned that the building was known as the Cesspit.

After three or four days, two men came into the cell and removed the blindfold. They took him, blinking in the light, to a room that looked like an office and was immaculately tidy. They made him sit on one side of a desk and, without saying a word, settled themselves on the other, under a portrait of General San Martín. After a while they brought him a chair. Two or three hours passed this way, in silence. Then the pair got up, went to the door, and ushered in two other men, who were almost identical and took over from the first. This game continued, without words or variations, for nearly a week. Sometimes Alejandro fell asleep on top of the desk, or with his head lolling back against the seat, and then one of the men would stand up and slap his face. Every ten or twelve hours, a woman in an apron brought him something to eat and drink. Alejandro ate and drank and tried to sleep with his eyes open. Nobody said a word.

We know the game in which the threat is never voiced but the imagination is left to build its own hell, in which the fear of what can happen lends a face and claws to a monster that always remains inside your mind. A promise of something unspoken. A curtain raised with no one entering the stage. Allowing the squeak of a door to be heard, or the lash of a belt, the scraping of metal in the darkness. You can imagine it all, can't you?

We know about it. Writing, Terradillos, is a kind of silence, of not speaking, of shooting words down midflight, as the poet Vallejo once said, of rooting them on the page. Writing is a way of threatening what is not spoken aloud; the shadow of the letters taunts us from between the lines. I am too much a lover of Latin American fiction not to be accustomed to aphony, to reticence, to silence. Will you allow me a reader's aside? From the start, under the pretext of describing great spaces and narrating vast epics, South America's chroniclers set out to suggest certain key ideas, to leave a few faint traces. They staged some epic dramas, for sure, novel after voluminous novel, but at the end of the day the story's essence boiled down to a few words hidden beneath the load of some impetuous paragraph we almost didn't read, so distracted were we by number of pages. Sometimes they are concealed in the dialogue, in a footnote, perhaps even in the title. The rest would be superfluous, except that it serves to hide what really matters. It is, as those erudite Anglo-Saxons claim, a “literature of violence,” but less political than metaphysical, less in the flesh than intellectual. It concerns itself not so much with obvious violence as with the other, the deliberate, insidious kind. The wound beneath the blow, the offense beneath the insult, the mask behind another mask, the one everyone recognizes. Believe me. Lying: that is the great theme of South American literature.

Alejandro told me that when they finally began to beat him, the pain almost came as a relief. Hour after hour, day upon day, he had allowed himself to dream up the most atrocious tortures, the most unbearable agonies. Steel, fire, water, lack of air—he had conjured up all of it before actually feeling it in the flesh. He who couldn't even bear to step on a caterpillar, to hurt a cat, was made to imagine everything. And later on, the things that he had imagined began to happen, but differently.

One of the men who often came back to visit him had, Alejandro told me, very soft, smooth skin, like a woman's. He knew this not because he could see him (the man never entered his cell except when Alejandro's eyes were bandaged), but because every time he came, he took Alejandro's hand in his own, as though he were a Gypsy about to tell his fortune. Then, when they led him, with shackled feet and tied hands, to the little room where one of the surgeons (that's what they were called) had to do his job, Alejandro had the impression that the man with soft skin was still there, watching him, always quiet, always sad. Alejandro imagined him as one of Loredana's puppets, which, skewered on its stick, could only swivel from left to right, swaying its arms, rigid, with fixed glass eyes and varnished cheeks reflecting the footlights. In his cast of monsters, he gave this ghostly individual the name Muñeco, meaning “doll.” He told me that this character obsessed him to such a degree that a few days after arriving in Madrid, he thought he heard Muñeco's voice in a café, in a shop, even at the Martín Fierro. Apparently many people experience this kind of hallucination, even months after leaving their own individual hells.

Alejandro did not know what they asked him, nor what he answered during the time he spent in this first cell. He had a confused recollection of beatings, shouting, terrible silences, expressionless faces, gobs of spit, the cries of men and women on the other side of the wall, the pain of injuries he could not see, moments of light sleep, almost without nightmares, the lights constantly lit, a craving for darkness, thirst. At some point they told him that Graciela was dead; later they said that she wasn't, that she had shacked up with one of the surgeons; later that she was being tortured in a distant cell. I don't know if he ever discovered the truth.

He had the sensation of separating himself from himself, or splitting into two and feeling that it was his double who was there, lying or sitting, expectant or expecting nothing. He said that it was during those endless months that he began to have the impression of living at the edge of real time, a feeling that never left him completely. When I first met him, sometimes he would wake up saying that he had seen himself stretched out by my side, as though he were dead.

One day, without explanation, they moved him to a cell with only two camp beds. In one corner there was a lavatory with no seat and a washstand. To be accorded such luxuries astonished him. Alejandro recalled how he had not felt water run over his skin for a long time. They left him alone, but it was ages before he allowed himself to go to the basin and turn on a tap. The freezing water made him weep with joy.

They say that intense cold slows the rhythm of the body, reducing the heart rate and pressure of blood in the veins. During those weeks, Alejandro's senses had grown less acute, his perception dimmer. It was hours before he registered the presence of someone in the second camp bed. Only when a booming voice asked him his name did he realize that there was somebody of flesh and blood there. Quite a lot of flesh: El Chancho, “The Pig,” as Alejandro called him (he never told me his real name), was a man of such low stature, or rather of such short arms and legs, that in spite of his enormous torso and bulging belly, he resembled a dwarf. His one charm (if you can talk of charm in such a graceless creature) was his voice. El Chancho was loquacious. Alejandro, on the other hand, feared that he might have forgotten how to talk altogether.

It wasn't long before Alejandro discovered that El Chancho seemed to have some curious links with the authorities. He was a prisoner, certainly, but a prisoner with benefits, you might say. With the exception of one almighty beating he had received on first entering the Cesspit (about which he gave Alejandro all the gory details), the guards had not so much as touched a hair on his head, and even conceded him countless small favors. Sometimes they brought him magazines and books, which El Chancho discreetly shared with Alejandro, sometimes special food, which he kept to himself. They also allowed him paper and a pen, and El Chancho spent hours filling the sheets with writing in an even, clerical hand, very similar to Alejandro's. He had a wife, as tall as he was short and as skinny as he was fat, who was known as La Pájara and whom El Chancho adored with the fervor of a man possessed. Every so often, El Chancho was let out of the shared cell and taken to another one where La Pájara had been brought, and there they spent the night together.

In that world, La Pájara was simply one in a cast of peculiar beings. In a miniskirt that drew attention to her rather full behind bouncing along on top of long legs, with her hair gathered up in the style of a turban and crowned with some outlandish hat, with her lips painted a communist red, La Pájara would arrive in the evenings with a little packet of sweets, as though she were visiting a convalescent. The only visits Alejandro was permitted, meanwhile, were from an older woman, dressed as a nurse, who took his pulse, and a young, melancholic priest who spoke to him of the Good Shepherd. These people came to see him as he lay in a state of confusion, after the really heavy sessions, when, having been dragged down corridors with signs that proclaimed H
APPINESS
A
VENUE
or
SILENCE IS HEALTHY
, he would be left on the camp bed, bound hand and foot. Compared to them, the obese dwarf and the tall woman seemed unreal, or at least as unlikely as the other strange inhabitants of that world in which he did not wish to believe.

After he was transferred to El Chancho's cell, Alejandro's sessions with the surgeons gradually became less frequent and finally stopped altogether. He never knew why. A diabolical law governs places like the Cesspit, with its own rules and geometry. Now the days and nights became long periods of pointless waiting in which he did not know whether to fear the morning or long for it. In the meantime, El Chancho seemed increasingly eager to show him a kind of affection or complicity. He spoke to Alejandro of the sweet perfume of Havana, the milk-coffee color of the Caribbean coastline, of long evening readings on the terrace of some famous novelist's home and of long nights partying on a still, warm beach. He recalled books for Alejandro (because it seems that El Chancho was a great reader); he told him about writers he had known in his youth; he invented stories with details which he developed and embroidered day after day. Of their own situation, he said very little. “Let us invent the world, brother,” El Chancho would say. “This one doesn't really exist.” And, after a moment, he added, laughing: “Or ought not to exist, at any rate!”