Breaking Lorca

“It’s so clean! I’ve never seen such a clean place.”

“Hotels are like that, Ignacio.”

“And they have put soap and shampoo out for us. Isn’t that nice?”

“Real thoughtful. I better check in with security. Told them we’d be here by noon, and it’s nearly three now.” Wyatt was already dialing the phone.

Victor went down the hall and knocked on Lorca’s door.

“Ignacio, look at this place!” Lorca’s corner room was three times the size of the other. “Have you ever seen a bed this big? It’s like something for a giant. Two giants.”

“Truly. That is a big bed.”

Lorca had pulled the covers back, so that the crisp white sheets resembled an acre of snow. She knelt on the white expanse and trailed her fingers over the material as if it were a tapestry.

“Bob and I have two normal beds. Very good quality, though.”

“Come and try it.” She patted the bed, and he sat beside her. The bedspread, he saw, had been draped over a large mirrored vanity. Noticing his glance, she said, “I hate mirrors. I don’t like to see myself.” She lay back, propped against four pillows.

Victor lay on his side. He was about to touch her when she pointed at the windows. “I have a balcony too. Do you have a balcony?”

“Yes. A small one.”

Lorca jumped up and pulled back the balcony door; a damp gust blew in, carrying sounds of traffic and the smell of imminent rain. Victor joined her outside. The hotel faced another hotel across the street-much bigger and grander than the one they were in. “Very nice,” he said. “Bob says the White House is on the other side of those hills. The White House, can you imagine?”

“The White House,” she said softly. “It sounds so pretty.”

“Bob says we can take a tour. They let people visit.”

“The map says there is a zoo just up the street, too. I think I would rather go to the zoo.”

To the east, storm clouds had massed into a dark wall. The wind tugged at Lorca’s hair, flicking strands across Victor’s face. He stood behind her, placing his hands on either side, gripping the guardrail. “Now you’re trapped,” he said, but she didn’t move.

“Are you really going to write about what happened to you at the little school?”

“Yes. Tonight, I will write it all down.”

“Why don’t you just testify, Ignacio? That is much simpler, no?”

“Perhaps I will testify. I have to work myself up to it. Writing things down may help.” The first heavy raindrops hit the balcony. By this time tomorrow, Victor thought, she will hate me. This was the way it should be; it had been stupidity to expect anything else. “I love you,” he said in Spanish. “Te amo.”

Lorca stiffened slightly, saying nothing. She raised an arm and pointed to a black bird that hovered in the air, hanging motionless on an updraft. Victor kissed her hair, so gently she did not feel it.

She said something he did not hear.

“What was that? What did you say?”

“Si muero,” she repeated. If I die.

“Don’t worry, sweet one. You are not going to die.”

“Si muero,” she said again. “Dejad el balcon abierto.” If I die, leave the balcony open.

“You are not going to die. Not while I am here. I promise.” This might even be true, he realized with a kind of wonder. He would rather die than see her harmed again. Was this where bravery had its roots, then, in love?

“It is a poem, Ignacio. A poem by the real Lorca-Feder ico Garcia. ‘Si muero, dejad el balcon abierto’!”

Goosebumps had formed all up her arms.

“You are cold,” Victor said. “We should go inside.”

TWENTY-SIX

That night, the storm finally broke, flinging bucketfuls of rain at the windows. Victor sat at the tiny desk in his hotel room, struggling to put his thoughts on paper. He badly wanted to be with Lorca, but he wanted to write everything out before his natural cowardice took control of him once more.

For an hour, nearly two, he floundered. He wrote things down and crossed them out, wrote them differently, crossed them out again. How did you tell the world that you had helped to break a young boy’s leg? How did you testify in the clear light of day that you had been in the car that drove that boy to his death? What was the proper way to say, I fastened the electrodes to her breasts? Even the least of his actions seemed an enormity when written out: I mopped up the teeth, the blood, the hair.

A drop of sweat splashed onto the paper, blurring the word blood. Victor was sweating profusely, even though the room was cool. Another drop fell, smearing the word screams. He slid open the balcony door a little, letting the rain hit his face. Lightning briefly lit up the street below like a flashbulb. He breathed in the cool night air; smells of concrete and rain and car exhaust filled the room. Somewhere a horn was stuck, and angry voices shouted.

He read over what he had written. I turned the power up past three. Her screams were terrible. He tried to write in point form, in chronological order, but his brain flashed with images, as if illuminated by the storm outside.

A knock at the door.

“Who is it?”

“It’s me.” Strange, how he had come to love her cracked, unattractive voice. “It’s Lorca.”

He opened the door a few inches.

“I was nervous,” she said. “The storm. May I come in?”

“Let me come to your room in a little while. An hour or so. Just now I am writing my testimony. Trying to work up some courage.”

“I won’t disturb you. I will sit quietly.”

Those terrible sentences-he would never be able to write them with Lorca in the room. “Give me one hour,” he said. “Maybe not even so long.”

The brown eyes went hard and cold. She left the doorway, and a moment later her door slammed.

With hesitations and crossings out, honesty took much longer than he had anticipated. He wanted to write simple statements of fact, but the facts were disgusting. We starved her for three days, and then I fed her a meal full of cockroaches.

He rewrote everything in chronological order, from his induction into the special squad to his desertion at Fort Benning. Point by point, he described what had been done to Lorca, to Labredo and to the real Ignacio Perez. By the time he was finished, he had filled eight foolscap pages. He signed the last one with his real name, Victor Pena.

“Victor Pena,” he muttered to himself. “Victor Pena, coward and torturer.” Victor Pena. Victor Pena felt numb. Victor Pena felt like a man whose home has exploded before his eyes. Destruction beyond his comprehension.

He sat in silence for some time.

“Nothing,” he said aloud, he didn’t know why. And a little later, “Zero.”

Through his reflection in the window, he saw that the rain had slowed. He switched off the desk lamp and his face disappeared. Now he could see clearly into the hotel across the street. On the second floor there was some sort of fancy party in progress. Black waiters in white jackets served champagne from silver buckets. No one had told Victor that Washington was such a black city; he had never seen so many black people in his life, not even in New York. Whenever you saw Americans in El Salvador, they were white.

Music drifted over from the party, Brazilian music it sounded like. He could see some of the horn players on a stage at one end of the ballroom, and several couples dancing. The scene was framed in the window like a painting,