Breaking Lorca

“You know why else they like those dark windows? They like them because they are cowards.” Cobardes. He spat the word.

“English, please.”

The reply was so faint, the words so unexpected, that Victor was not sure he had heard correctly. “Pardon me?”

“Speak English. I hate the sound of Spanish now. To me, it is an obscenity.”

“You?” he said in English. “Named after a fine Spanish poet, you can disown your language?”

“It is a good word, disown. I disown everything. If I could, I would disown myself.”

Victor knew all about that. He longed to disown Victor Pena body and soul, not just his name. But probably only death could do that.

“I prefer English now.” Lorca’s harsh voice, with its cracks and hoarse texture, emerged from the tree as if from a confessional. “It feels …. it feels so far away.” She said far away as if it were a quality of great and rare beauty.

“Yes. It does feel far away. I am still not used to it.”

A pause. Then, from the tree: “You are a good person, aren’t you.”

“I am not,” he said. “I am not a good person.”

“You are a good person,” she repeated in a factual tone. “It is obvious you are. I, however, am not.”

“No, no,” Victor started to say, but she shushed him.

“Let me say it, Ignacio. I thought at one time that I was a good person. I imagine every person on earth thinks that he or she is good. A little bit good. I thought that I was good and kind. I thought that I was generous. I even thought that I was brave. Now I know otherwise-that I am none of those things. And sometimes this knowledge is hard to bear.”

“It is not knowledge, Lorca. It is anger and disappointment. I feel those things too. I feel them about myself. About things I have done. Things that happened at the little school.”

“People are dead because of me. Because I talked. It would have been better if they had really shot me on that cliff. It was just sheer luck that cliff gave way beneath me.”

“That’s how you survived? The cliff gave way? Where was this?”

“Diablo. The middle of a storm. Hard, hard rain. Suddenly a mudslide, and I nearly drowned. It would have been better if I had.”

The rain and the wind came back to Victor. The distant roar of the sea, and the dead boy. It was me, he imagined saying. That was me, behind you with the gun. But he could not face her hatred. “You blame yourself,” he said. “But no one else blames you. At the little school, you were known as the bravest.”

“Known how? By who? Prisoners were not allowed to speak.”

“We whispered together, as you know. When we spoke of you, it was only in admiration.”

“You are mocking me.”

“I swear, Lorca. Even the guards. I heard two of them talking one day. They said you were the toughest.”

He pulled the fronds aside and stepped into the cool, dark space within. Lorca shrank from him, pressing her knees into her chest. She was trembling all over, though whether from the cold and damp beneath the willow or still with fear, Victor could not be sure.

We are like lovers in here, he thought. Only a lover should be with a woman in such a dark, secluded space. He reached tentatively toward her shoulder, but drew back when she looked up at him.

“I told them where my sister lived, and now she is dead. You understand me?” Her eyes overflowed, but she did not allow herself the relief of real weeping. “She is dead.”

Victor murmured in a low monotone that was almost prayer, “They beat you, and you did not speak. Shocked you, and you did not break. Half drowned you, and you spit in their faces. Even they raped you, and you said nothing.”

“Raped me.” She looked at him with sudden ferocity. “Who told you they raped me?”

Victor stammered. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean-”

“This is a lie. This is the guards’ lies. They did not rape me. Beat me, yes. Everything else, yes. But rape me, no. They did not rape me.”

“But you said they did. The other day.”

“No, I said they did not. You think they would lower themselves to do this? You think they would dirty themselves? Contaminate themselves with a guerrilla bitch? Never. You hear me? Never.”

“I am sorry. I should have thought before I spoke.”

“You imagine I would still be alive if they had raped me? I would hang myself from the nearest tree. I would have shot my brains out.”

“I am so sorry. Please forgive me.” She had turned her back on him, and Victor cursed himself for a fool. Rape, he suddenly realized, was the most lasting torment the little school had inflicted on this woman. The pain of the shocks may have receded, the bruises from the beatings healed, but she would go on and on being a woman who had been raped, and that knowledge was too much for her. “Please forgive me,” he said again.

“I am in no position to forgive anyone,” she said. “Even if I wanted to.”

“Lorca! Ignacio, where are you?” Michael Viera’s voice came from behind and above them.

Lorca hid her face against her knees. Victor stepped out from the willow. Viera looked down at him from halfway up the hill.

“She is here with me,” Victor said. “We are coming now.”

“Let’s hurry, please, Ignacio. It’s starting to rain.”

In the shelter of the willow, they had not noticed the rain. By the time they rejoined Helen, who was waiting for them on a bench near the Obelisk, the sky had turned charcoal.

“Did you have a nice time?” Helen asked Lorca brightly. “Enjoy your little walk? We had a dandy time wondering where you were.”

“Leave her alone,” Viera said. “Let’s get to the subway before we get soaked.”

Lorca was silent. As the others said goodbye, she scuffed at the dirt with her shoe. Victor watched them pick their way through the diehard skaters, Viera carrying the basket in one hand and guiding his wife with the other. Lorca kept her distance from them and moved in a careful, hunched posture, bent as if over a wound.

NINETEEN

VICTOR TOLD HIMSELF he wanted no contact with the Viera family for a while. He stayed away for the next few weeks, working his split shifts at Le Parisien, spending his breaks in the library or sometimes in a cheap coffee shop with a newspaper, trying to distract himself from thoughts of Lorca.

His home, if you could call it that, was a rundown SRO hotel on West Ninety-fourth Street, one of the last of these crumbling hostelries on the upper West Side. It was a shabby, depressing place. Victor had a hot plate in his room, a small sink, a wobbly iron bed and peeling wallpaper. The bathroom was along a dingy hallway. Half the time the light didn’t work, and even though Victor had twice scrubbed the place himself, the tub and sink were always filthy.

The Royal Court Hotel, as it was grandly named, was an hour’s walk from the restaurant. To save money, Victor walked it every day, despite almost constant rain.

One wet day, he stopped beside the Belvedere fountain in the middle of Central Park. The rental boats were stacked up onshore; the lake was empty except for a squadron of ducks paddling toward the iron bridge. Victor stood at the water’s edge and stared across the lake at the willows where he had talked with Lorca. He stood there for quite a while.

That was three weeks after the picnic. A Sunday.

The following week, as he was cutting through the park one night on his way home after work, he strode purposefully past the fountain with its wide-winged angel. He had resolved before entering the park that he would not stop there, he wouldn’t think about Lorca.

One glance, however-what could that hurt? A single glance could not do any harm. And so Victor allowed him