“I told you, I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Hold on, hold on.” Bob Wyatt put his hand up for order. “Nobody is forced to talk here. Ever. I don’t care who it is. Many of you were forced to talk in the past, and that is the last thing we want going on in this group.”
The woman shrugged. “A convenient arrangement if you happen to be a soldier.”
“Don’t say that again,” Lorca warned the woman.
“Mother of God, I’ll tell you what they did to me.” Victor leapt up. “They played Submarine with me, all right? That’s what they did. Held me underwater in a tank full of shit. Does that make you happy? They beat me on the head. Here, you want to see the scar?” Victor bent forward to show the woman the crooked white scar at his hairline. He found there were tears in his eyes. “They shocked me with wires. Put wires on my fingers, my teeth, my ears-and here.” He pointed again to his crotch.
“You don’t have to talk,” Wyatt put in again. “No one here has to talk against his will.”
But Victor couldn’t stop. It was as if real memories were flooding through him. “Over and over they would shock me. Over and over they would say, ‘You ready to play ball now? You ready to play ball?’ Over and over they would say this, and apply the electricity. It felt like an earthquake in my flesh. It felt as if my flesh split open to the bone.”
There were scattered murmurs of recognition among the crowd. Lorca had covered her mouth with her hand.
“You think you will not cry,” Victor went on, weeping openly now, “and you do nothing but cry. You think you will not scream, and you do nothing but scream. I would have told them anything. Anything they wanted. But all they wanted was for me to play a part in this ceremony-a big ceremony in front of the Presidential Palace. ‘See! This is land reform! We are giving all these men a piece of land!’”
“So they tortured you,” Bob Wyatt said, “to make sure you wouldn’t give the game away?”
“And because I had encouraged others to apply for deeds under the law. They said they would bring me my own deed within the next few days. I knew what that meant.”
“What did it mean?”
“They come and kill you,” the man with the patch over his eye said. “I knew of a man who was killed this way. The Guardia showed up in the middle of the night and shot him in front of his wife and children, then they stuffed the deed in his mouth.”
“God,” Wyatt said. “The committee needs to hear about this.” He produced a box of Kleenex from somewhere and held it out to Victor.
The woman who had made the accusation was sulking now, arms folded tightly across her chest. Victor was astonished at the lies he had told, the amount of detail. He had not planned it. It was as if sheer wanting to have been on Lorca’s side had convinced him it was so.
Lorca was looking at him, her mouth open a little and an expression in her scorched-out eyes that Victor had never seen before.
“You think you did something wrong, don’t you,” Wyatt said. “You think by playing along with them, by playing their game, you committed a terrible evil.”
“I did,” Victor said bitterly. “It was a terrible evil. You don’t know.”
“No, Ignacio. You did nothing wrong. Nothing. It’s the people who did these things to you-the Guardia-they are the evil ones. Not you.”
Around the room, pale, shaken faces nodded agreement. As Victor lowered himself to his seat, Lorca put her arms around him. Her breath was hot and moist on his neck.
TWENTY-FOUR
Monday nights were always slow at the restaurant. Victor had already read both the New York Post and the Daily News, and now he was trapped in his kitchen cubicle with nothing to distract him from his thoughts. He stood with arms folded, reading the labels on his packages of flour and oil and icing sugar over and over again. From time to time curses came from the main part of the kitchen, where Fidel was listening to a baseball game.
In desperation, Victor set about reorganizing the utensils on his wall rack. But this could not distract him from the feeling that he had compounded his evil by provoking Lorca’s sympathy under false pretences. It was one thing to simply not tell her the truth; it was another to get up in front of a crowd and actively pretend to be a victim. He had no right to any sympathy from Lorca. Victor considered fleeing: he could disappear one night and leave no forwarding address. Still a coward, he thought. Still running away.
He could not continue his deception much longer. Lorca’s new look of tenderness was unbearable, almost worse than any anger could have been. Sooner or later he would have to reveal himself, and the outcome would be the same as running away: he would never see her again. He imagined the horror on her face when he told her. She would spit on him.
The owner appeared at the kitchen door. “Someone here for you, Ignacio. A woman.”
Fidel, the chef, let out a whoop. “Ignacio has a girlfriend! Ignacio has a girlfriend! Bring her back here for all of us to see.”
Victor ignored him.
“This woman must be blind or crazy!” Fidel shouted after him. “You give her one for me, eh?”
The dining room looked deserted. The bartender had gone home, and the owner was entering the night’s paltry receipts into a ledger. A last couple lingered in a corner banquette, holding hands and staring into each other’s eyes. Their waiter stood nearby, leaning back against the wall, his eyes closed.
Lorca hung back, just inside the entrance, as if fearing she would be thrown out. “I could not sleep,” she said. “I hope I didn’t get you into trouble by coming here.”
“No, no. It’s okay. It’s fine.”
She raised her eyebrows at the banquettes, the rich tablecloths. “You never told me you worked in such a high-class place.”
“Oh, yes,” said Victor. “Very high-class.” I will tell her everything tonight, he thought. As soon as there is a good moment.
It was midnight, it was Monday, and it was raining. The avenues were busy, but the cross streets were slick and deserted. A faint mist clung in webs to the street lights. Victor and Lorca walked several blocks in silence, Victor trying to work up his courage to speak. But he began to sense that Lorca too was working herself up to something, and he decided to let her speak first.
They were heading west toward Sixth Avenue, without having discussed where they were going. They crossed the avenue, and when they reached the far corner, Lorca suddenly stopped. Somewhere in the shadows a bottle smashed.
“What’s wrong? Was there somewhere special you wanted to go?”
Lorca curled one hand around his neck and kissed him. Her tongue darted between his lips and out again. “I want to go home with you. Will you take me to your apartment?”
“I thought you didn’t want to be kissed,” Victor said, feeling a foolish grin spreading across his face.
“I was mistaken,” she said earnestly. “Will you take me to your famous Royal Court?”
“We can go there, if you want.”
“You don’t want me to come?”
“No, no, of course I do. It is not the most pleasant place, that’s all.”
“I have seen worse places, I am sure.”
Silence claimed them once more for the walk uptown. Victor became more nervous with each block.
“I will make some tea for us,” he said when they were inside. He didn’t want tea, he didn’t even like tea; but it was an excuse to turn his back to her, to hide his nervousness by fiddling with the kettle and the hot plate.
Lorca stood in the middle of his single room, looking around. Victor was acutely aware of the peeling paint, the mildewed rug he had found on the street. “How much you pay for this place?”
“A hundred and fifty a week.”
“Ignacio, you have no kitchen. And where is the bathroom?”
“Down the hall. Believe me, for Manhattan this is not such a bad deal.”
Lorca sat down on the bed. “Anyway, I don’t want to talk about rent.”