“Lorca, please,” said her brother. “Mr. Perez only came to say hello. I asked him to come here. I thought you might talk to him. You don’t talk to anyone else.”
“But I did, Michael. I did talk, didn’t I? I talked too much, if you recall. And because I talked, our little sister is dead.” Once more she turned the black, excoriating eyes on Victor. “You some kind of vulture, is that it? You come to feed on what the guards left behind? Well, I’m not dead yet, Mr. Perez. Maybe when I am, my brother here will give you a call and you can come by and fuck the corpse.”
She slammed the door in her brother’s face. He looked down at the floor, shaking his head. “I have no words,” he said. “No words to tell you how ashamed I am.”
“It’s all right,” Victor said softly. “Your sister suffered a lot. She just wants to forget.”
“I am deeply ashamed.”
“Please, Mr. Viera. She just wants to forget.”
Viera said nothing more until they were downstairs. “But that’s the point,” he said. “Lorca does not forget. She cannot forget. She stays in that room all day long and all she can think about is that terrible place you were in. She has to talk to someone about it. It’s the only way she will ever truly forget.”
“Did she even come out to say hello?” Helen Viera stood in the kitchen doorway clutching a salad bowl in one hand, a wooden fork in the other.
“It’s okay,” Viera said. “Lorca is not having a good day, that’s all.”
“Lorca’s been having a bad day for going on two years, Michael. She was rude to you, wasn’t she.” The doughy, expectant face turned to Victor.
“It’s all right. She suffered a lot.”
“Yes. And doesn’t she let us know it. Are you sure you won’t stay for supper?”
“I am sure. Thank you very much, though.”
Viera opened the door. “You understand, my sister didn’t talk like this before the jail. This is anger, a reaction-well, it’s true she was always angry, but not like this, not in this pointless way. Most days she won’t even speak. She eats in her room. If you could have known her as a girl-she was so happy, so lively ….”
“She has a lot of spirit. I am sure she was delightful.”
“Mr. Perez, I don’t know what to do. This is so hard on everyone.” He tilted his head slightly toward the kitchen. “She has her good days, sometimes. Why don’t you give me a phone number, and I will call you when she is feeling a little more-”
“But she doesn’t want to know me. She said so very clearly.”
“Sick people are often not interested in their cures. Please, will you let me call you? In return, I will refund your consultation fee.” He pulled some bills from his pockets.
Victor tried to refuse the money, but the lawyer would not hear of it, pressing the bills into his hand. When Viera asked for his phone number, Victor gave him the number of the restaurant’s pay phone.
SEVENTEEN
A week after they had disposed of Lorca Viera, Captain Pena had taken Victor into the kitchen for what he called a cup of tea, although Victor had never seen his uncle drink tea. The Captain opened a pint of chocolate milk, which he gulped down with audible pleasure. Victor drank a Coke.
“Victor,” Captain Pena had announced sonorously, as if from a pulpit. “Victor. They can say what they want of me when I am dead. They can say that Pena was an ugly bas tard, they can say that Pena was a fool, they can say that Pena was too hard, too soft, too mediocre. I don’t care.”
“I’m sure no one will say those things, sir.”
His uncle raised one hand to forestall contradiction and with the other wiped chocolate milk from his moustache. “The press, the army, the bureaucrats, they can say what they want-and they will, too, I know them. But one thing they cannot deny. What they cannot ever deny is that Captain Eduardo Vargas Pena-no matter what the situation-Captain Eduardo Vargas Pena stood by his family. Always he was loyal to his own.”
A scream like tearing metal came from the interrogation room, where Tito was at work.
The Captain continued. “And as a man who always comes to the assistance of his family, I have-yet again, my underachieving nephew-I have yet again come to your rescue.”
“How, Captain?”
“The United States of America is offering to train five hundred troops at Fort Benning, Georgia. Fort Benning, my boy! The School of the Americas! All of our best warriors have gone there, all of our toughest officers. Believe me, a course at the School of the Americas is a sure ladder to success in this army. And I-by pulling more strings than you can ever hope to count-I have managed to get your miserable carcass into it.”
“You have? But that’s wonderful, sir!”
“Ah, you are excited, I see.”
Excited? Victor could barely suppress tears of joy.
“You have no idea,” his uncle went on, “how difficult it was to secure this opportunity, given your sorry record. I had to call in every possible favour-some of them imaginary. I owe a lot of people now, on your account. You understand me? A lot of people. Well? You have nothing to say?”
“I’m overwhelmed, Captain. Truly. I don’t know what to say.”
“Let me down again, and I will man the firing squad myself.”
“Oh, yes, Captain. Don’t worry. I promise I will live up to the family name.”
Another shriek from the interrogation room. A cheer went up from the tormentors, as if they had scored a goal.
Captain Pena drank the last of his chocolate milk and belched luxuriously. “You leave in two weeks. Make sure your papers are in order.”
“I’ll be ready, Captain. I promise.”
The Captain stared at him in frank assessment. “Forget what I said about the firing squad. Tarnish the name of Pena, soldier, and I will personally hand you over to Sergeant Tito, you understand? I will tell the sergeant to be sure and take his time. I think Sergeant Tito would enjoy that.” Captain Pena stepped out into the hall and, as if on cue, Tito tore from his victim’s throat another scream.
Victor’s transfer came in due time. But before he travelled to the United States, he removed from his uncle’s files the identity papers of Ignacio Perez. The first night the visiting soldiers were allowed off the Fort Benning base, he caught a bus, and then a train, and then another bus, to New York City.
He had not planned to work in a restaurant, but he knew no one, and no other job was available. Le Parisien was located on East Fiftieth Street among a row of much better restaurants. Except for a trio of unpleasant waiters-all with identical moustaches-no one connected with the place was French. The owner was a shy, silent Greek who sat at his corner table sipping anxiously at a chain of espressos while his business sank inexorably into decline.
Victor worked a split shift, arriving at ten-thirty each morning and working through lunch, preparing salads and desserts until three. Then, after a two-hour break that he would spend sitting in a nearby branch of the New York Public Library, he would return to his station, little more than a stall really, and begin the dinner shift.
The French waiters said little to him, except to call him silly names when placing their orders. (Two profiteroles,
The day after his trip to Queens, Victor took off his apron, raised the hinged countertop of his station, and walked out into the bright sunshine of Fiftieth Street. It was a cool spring afternoon.
Despite the chill, there were many people-clerks and secretaries, they looked like-seated on the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. They looked carefree, Victor thought as he ascended toward the great bronze doors. He had seen grand cathedrals in picture books and movies, of course, but St. Patrick’s perfect neo-Gothic arches and beautifully carved saints were in stark contrast to San Salvador’s national cathedral, with its facade of bullet holes. There the Guardia had fired into a crowd of protesters, killing thirty. No one took their ease on those steps.
