NINE
WHAT A SURPRISE I HAD THAT morning when I found out that the beautiful and mysterious woman I saw infrequently in the corridors of the archbishop’s palace was the same girl whose testimony I was proofing, testimony that had upset me so much that I couldn’t complete the task in one sitting and had decided to go out to the palace courtyard to get some fresh air and a bit of morning sunshine; such a surprise it was when Pilarica, whom I found sitting on the edge of the fountain looking over her notes and also enjoying the sunshine and fresh air, told me that the woman who at that very moment was walking along the half-lit palace corridor was the same girl whose testimony I was telling her about with great trembling, for this girl recounted the infamies she had suffered seventeen years earlier in the hands of the military when she was arrested during the brutal repression of student protests right downtown in the capital city, a girl who at the time had been sixteen years old and was taken to the dungeons of the police station, where she underwent the worst degradations, including being daily and systematically raped by her torturers, a testimony given so strikingly and with so many details that it had impelled me to leave the bishop’s office where I was working to find some fresh air and less disturbing emotions. “Teresa is a lovely girl, do you want me to introduce you?” Pilar asked me under the comforting morning sunshine and with her best smile, which I could reply to only with a look of consternation — not more than five minutes earlier I had been editing the text of Teresa’s testimony about the most abominable rapes she had been subjected to by the soldiers who tortured her — the last thing I felt like doing was looking her in the face, which I had visualized as covered with bandages and full of bruises and bloody cuts, the face of a girl savagely beaten by her torturers in order to get her to admit that she was a member of the guerrillas and to snitch on her comrades, though the truth was that the torturers knew that the girl wasn’t a member of the guerrillas, that her only sin was being the daughter of a labor lawyer who defended the trade unionists and who would be assassinated a few months later, according to what I read in the aforementioned testimony, a girl they had lowered into Hell itself for a whole week with beatings and rapes that tore apart her vagina and anus, a sweet young thing up on whom a half-dozen soldiers led by a lieutenant named Octavio Pérez Mena unleashed the worst possible cruelty, according to her testimony, an officer this woman had recognized from archive photos and who had made himself out to be the good guy, the one she should confess to so that those half-dozen beasts under his command would stop raping her and beating her, according to her testimony, who at that point was Lieutenant Octavio Pérez Mena, though with the passage of time he would become the chief of military intelligence, for torture is the measure of intelligence in the military, and who now, seventeen years later, was a respectable general strutting smugly around this same city where the woman walking down the corridors of the archbishop’s palace would recognize him and feel the same terror she felt then. “Thank you. I’d rather you introduce me to her another day,” I answered the Toledan, having had the thought that the imagination is a bitch in heat, without understanding exactly why precisely at that moment hammering in my head was the thought that the imagination is a bitch in heat, when nothing in that refreshing courtyard under the morning sun had any relationship either to the imagination or to a bitch in heat, though later I understood that this thought’s intromission had to do with me and the sweet thing previously splayed open by torturers and nothing to do with the woman now walking down the corridor. Thereby was revealed to me conclusively the very image that had forced me to flee from the office where I had been working, focused as I was on correcting the report that contained the testimony of the girl raped over and over again, the image that had made my hair and my soul stand on end so intensely that I could not continue reading and the only thing I could think to do was flee to the courtyard to get some sunshine and fresh air to dispel that image, which of course did not happen, because sitting on the edge of the fountain, while Pilarica perorated about her problems with work, I again felt the shudder of that girl who walked with such difficulty through the basement of the police station, dragged along by Lieutenant Octavio Pérez, her vagina and anus torn to shreds, barely able to take a step and still unaware of the gonorrhea infection that was beginning to eat away at her and the putrid semen that was turning into a fetus in her uterus, paralyzed by terror, believing the lieutenant was leading her to the slaughterhouse, where they butchered the political prisoners and that is why she was but one single tremor of battered flesh as she entered the abattoir, where there was nothing but a prisoner hanging from the ceiling, naked, a Salvadoran guerrilla and arms dealer, the lieutenant explained to her, a mass of bloody, rotten, purulent flesh, where the worms had already made their appearance, for they had beaten him to a pulp, and he was barely able to utter a dull moan whereby the girl understood that that was still alive, an imperceptible moan that let the girl perceive a glimmer of consciousness in that dripping offal she stood, also naked, in front of, her hands tied behind her back and sheer terror in her eyes when the lieutenant grabbed her by the hair and forced her to move closer to the hanging body and told her, in the tone of voice of a scolding father, “that’s what they’re going to do to you if you don’t cooperate,” as if he had had nothing to do with the fists that had been beating her, the boots kicking her, the penises ripping through her vagina and anus, and the lieutenant signaled to the henchman in charge of the abattoir, who took out a small sickle and swiftly heated the blade over a burning ember until it was red hot then passed it to the lieutenant, who expertly with one slice cut the penis and testicles off the bloated body in front of the astonished eyes of the girl, the lieutenant made that perfect castrating cut, which produced a howl as if the victim had been fully conscious, the most horrendous howl the girl had ever heard, which would awaken her at night for the rest of her life, as she asserted in her testimony, the same howl that made me stampede out of the bishop’s office to the courtyard where I now found myself with the Toledan, while the woman who had survived such barbarism — thanks to pressure exerted by her uncle, who was a colonel, she was set free, according to what she stated in the report — went through the door of one of the offices, without me daring to let myself be introduced to her because I planned to keep as far away from her as possible throughout my stay at the archbishop’s palace.