Breaking Lorca by Giles Blunt Read Free Book Online Page A

judge first time with a prisoner. But I think today she will tell us her name.”
    I would have told them everything in the first minute, Victor thought.
    “Take down whatever she says—it’s important to keep a record.”
    Captain Peña stood over the woman. For the hundredth time, he asked her her name. But she was only capable of groaning now. “Mother of God, Mother of God ….”
    “It’s entirely up to you how long it takes. We have all the time in the world, here.”
    The woman said something unintelligible.
    “What’s that? What did you say?”
    “Decree,” she managed. “Decree 107. Ten days only. Ten days, you have to let me go. It’s the law.”
    The Captain looked at Tito, and the two of them laughed. After a moment’s hesitation Lopez and Yunques joined in. Victor smiled as if he saw the joke too.
    The Captain raised his hand for silence. “You really imagine we’re just going to let you go? ‘Oh, thank you very much, Ms. Sanchez , sorry to bother you’? Sorry, bitch. It doesn’t work like that.”
    “You have only ten days. Ten days is the law.” Somehow she had found her voice again.
    “What is your name?”
    “I will never tell you my name.”
    The Captain and Tito exchanged a glance. They’d both heard it. At last the woman had admitted she still had a name to reveal. Victor saw her mouth open after she had spoken, as if to suck the words back in again. It was her first mistake, and she knew she’d made it.

SEVEN
    “I KNOW EXACTLY what it feels like,” his uncle said.
    They were driving up the winding street to his house in the Santa Ana area. It was a good neighbourhood; one could tell by the height of the walls surrounding each property. Some were as high as sixteen feet, composed of different layers of brick and stone, like geological strata. All were topped with razor wire.
    His uncle had moved here only recently, after his convenient “death,” and Victor couldn’t imagine how he could afford it. The area was far too exclusive for most military men. In fact, Victor remembered an occasion as a child walking through this neighbourhood just out of curiosity, staring in wonder at the houses set like jewels at the end of their long driveways. There were no walls then, just the long drives and the palm trees and the houses that looked like palaces out of fairy stories. He could not believe that the little children playing in the yards were of the same flesh and blood as he, they looked so clean and pretty.
    Then a Guardia patrol stopped him and told him to get the hell out—he did not belong there. He didn’t even resent them for it, because he knew they were right.
    “Yes,” his uncle was saying, “I am personally familiar with the General’s handshake.”
    “I’m astounded,” Victor said. “You were actually tortured?”
    “Of course I was not tortured. What we do at the little school is not torture. It’s high-pressure interrogation. Torture is what they did to the martyrs—skinning them alive, cooking them, that kind of thing.”
    Victor did not see how this differed from the sufferings of Pedro Labredo. “Who interrogated you?”
    “Some Guardia asshole. This was two governments ago. Before your time. They thought I was part of a coup conspiracy. I wasn’t, unfortunately—I’d be a lot richer now if I had been. Anyway, this Guardia guy, he introduced me to the General, and let me tell you, it hurt like hell. You know what it feels like, Victor? It feels as if your flesh is splitting open. It feels as if your flesh is splitting open to the bone. You remember that little earthquake we had a few years back? That crack that opened up all along Ilopango Street?”
    “I remember.”
    “That’s how it feels. Like your flesh is splitting open. You stare at yourself afterwards—you look at your arms and legs, you feel your belly—and you’re amazed that your flesh is still together over your bones. You can’t believe you haven’t split in pieces. There’s no