The Blue Line (13 page)

LA MÁQUINA

Austral Winter

1976

P
aola had a very bad night, caught in the grip of hallucinations and delusions. Rosa too tossed and turned in her sleep, and Julia could see that she had fallen into a depressive spiral. Julia and Adriana kept an eye on them.

The two girls washed before dawn and were leaning against the wall watching their cell mates struggle to sleep when they heard the sound of boots approaching, and El Cabo Pavor's voice, addressing his superiors.

“They've come from Morón,” Adriana murmured in a weak voice, referring to soldiers from the Argentine air force based at Morón. They were known for their brutal interrogation methods.

The two sick girls already had their hoods over their faces. Julia and Adriana slipped theirs on just in time to hear El Cabo
Pavor bellow, as he turned the key in the lock: “We're going to have some fun today, girls!”

He pushed the door open. “You, blondie. Get a move on,” he shouted.

Adriana began to shake from head to toe. Julia squeezed her hand tightly.

“Hope you've washed properly, kid,” he sniggered.

Because Julia was trying to hold on to Adriana, El Cabo pulled off her hood and struck her across the face. He dragged her out of the cell by her hair, tied her hands behind her back, and blindfolded her, tying the cloth so tight it cut into her skin. Then he started to kick Adriana so she would come out too and locked the door of the cell.

There were more men waiting for them at the end of the corridor. There was a commotion, fresh abuse, more orders. El Cabo Pavor dragged Julia and Adriana up the spiral staircase, kicked the door open, threw them inside, removed their blindfolds, and closed the door behind him. It was pitch-black. Clinging to each other, they groped around them, trying to find a place to sit so they wouldn't fall.

A harsh glare flooded the room and an iron hand pushed them apart. Julia's hands and feet were tied and she was forced into a chair with a bright light shining in her face. A hand yanked her head up by the hair. Half-blinded, she could just about make out the edge of a table pushed up against her knees and a metal bed to her right. She heard Adriana whimper behind her, then a thud, like a sack of rice being dropped.
Now the groans were muffled. From the sound of their footsteps, she could tell that there were two men in the room. One of them seemed to be gagging and tying up Adriana. The other one kept circling Julia, breathing down her neck.

“You're going to talk,” said the voice of the man now gripping her chin and twisting her face.

A blow dislocated her jaw. Julia screamed in pain. The voice said, “You're going to be a good girl and tell us everything, in front of your little friend. She's right here; she can see it all. If you don't want her to get hurt, you'd better tell us everything you know right now.”

A second blow, this time straight to the nose. She felt blood trickling down to the corners of her mouth. She couldn't see the man's face, but it wasn't El Cabo Pavor speaking to her. This voice was nasal, almost childish.

“Do you know who I am?” the man asked. “No, you don't know yet, but you will soon, and you won't ever forget me. They call me El Loco. I love my nickname. Because you see, lying drives me insane. I can smell a lie the way a dog smells fear. Finding out the truth excites me. I'm an expert at digging it out.”

She felt a burst of adrenaline. The man speaking to her was mentally ill, there was no doubt about it. An animal with a human voice. She could sense his arousal. He had already tied her feet to the chair. He prowled around her, sniffing her, pressing his crotch against her arm. She felt him harden. He panted as he spoke.

He moved away briefly and went over to a record player. He lifted the arm and carefully returned the stylus to the beginning of the LP.

“You're in luck—I'm going to make you sing along to the
Nocturnes
. Ever heard of Debussy? No, of course not. I might as well cast pearls before swine.”

He gave a roar of laughter, and the opening bars filled the air. The music coming out of the loudspeakers was fragmented, slow, dissonant. Julia found it sinister. The man approached her again and stroked her hair gently. She had to stop herself from biting him. He hit her again, so hard that she fell to the ground, taking the chair with her.

The man took his time before sitting her up in the chair. Then he began to tie her whole body to it. He went about it meticulously. With each movement he pawed her, as if she were a piece of meat. He tied her up neatly with electric wire, pulling it so tight that it cut into her.

His voice had become almost delicate, his breathing short when he spoke again. “Now you're going to tell me everything. I want your alias, Montonerita. What is your alias?”

El Loco tugged the wire tighter. It felt like a razor was slicing into her skin. He secured the end of the electric wire to something heavy behind Julia, then moved away. Her gaze followed him instinctively. He walked toward a shadowy corner of the room. The music drowned out his voice, but Julia knew he was talking to someone else. Still blinded by the spotlight,
she couldn't make out what he was doing. Out of the corner of her eye she could see shadows moving rhythmically.

“What was your role within the organization? Who is your contact person?”

Julia trembled all over. She managed to turn herself around, the wire digging into her wrists. Then she understood.

“No!” she screamed. “Not Adriana, not Adriana!”

“Where did you meet? I want addresses, telephone numbers. I want all the names,” the clipped voice continued.

“No! No!” Julia struggled to free herself, her wrists bleeding.

“Talk, filthy Trotska. I want the whole truth about the d'Uccello brothers. I want to know their rank in the organization. Who is the head of your unit?”

Each time El Loco asked Julia a question, El Cabo Pavor struck Adriana violently. El Loco jerked Julia's head up with one hand to make sure she was following his every move. With his other he laid into Adriana in the shadows. Suddenly both men loosened their hold, and the teenager flopped over like a puppet.

“Adriana! Adriana! Answer me!” Julia implored.

Then she distinctly heard El Cabo Pavor's voice. He was accusing Adriana of pretending. He began to slap her to make her get up.

“Enough!” barked El Loco. “I want her to remain conscious, to tell the others.”

El Cabo Pavor straightened his uniform. He kicked Adriana's inert body several times, then backed into the shadows and vanished again. Julia had the feeling he was staring fixedly at her. El Loco wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve and came back to Julia.

“You, on the other hand, you're dead.”

He hit her with increasing ferocity. The violence of each blow anticipated the pain of the next. She wouldn't survive. Julia wanted to beg him to stop, but her body wasn't responding anymore, and she was incapable of making a sound.

To prolong his enjoyment, El Loco turned methodical. He was instinctively aware of the level of pain he needed to inflict on her to make her lose her mind, give in, and talk. He always got them to talk in the end; that was his specialty. And his passion.

“I'll make you want to open your mouth, you fucking Trotska!”

He kicked her and she fell to her knees, still tied to the chair. El Loco dragged a large tub of water in front of her face. “You think you can make a fool of me. You don't want to talk. We'll see about that.”

Julia struggled with all her might, but by exhausting herself she was only making her torturer's job easier. He shoved her head into the water. She held her breath for as long as she could. She counted in her head to give herself strength. But eventually she gave up and allowed the water to fill her lungs.

When he pulled her head up, she couldn't inhale the air.
She threw up a lot of water before she felt a thin stream of oxygen penetrate her lungs, bringing relief. As she gasped like a fish, her mouth wide open, he pushed her head back under the water. Five, ten, twenty times in a row.

She thought she was already dead, but she came to when she felt a hot object being forced down her throat, suffocating her. Her instinctive reaction was to bite. The man let out a grotesque howl.

There was a long silence. Then El Loco declared: “You're going to die with your eyes wide open, and when you breathe your last breath, I'll be the last thing you see.”

He untied her from the chair and dragged her over to the bed. Julia's mind had gone completely blank. She felt him bind her with the same metal wire that cut into her flesh. He threaded the wire between her toes, splaying them out and attaching them tightly to one end of the bed. Then he passed the wire between her fingers and tied them to the other end. Finally he strapped her to a wire mesh base that served as a mattress and gagged her with a rag that he stuffed into her mouth.

Julia heard Adriana screaming over the music playing in the background. She raised her head and saw the young girl struggling in a nightmare. Then came the electric shock. A black hole, and then her whole being shattered under the pressure of millions of needles speeding through her veins in an endless circuit running from her head to her toes and back again. The electric particles split her skin, exploded inside her limbs, and
pierced every cell in her body. Julia felt liquefied, crushed from the inside, burned alive as if by a stream of acid.

Suddenly the intensity of the voltage increased, as did the deafening volume of opera music that reverberated inside her head, accompanying the infernal pain that shook her. The current plowed a furrow deep into her bowels. Julia had no eyes, no lungs, no stomach. She was torn apart, impaled, jerked like a hooked fish above the wire mesh; she had no existence outside of her suffering.

Julia heard the man's laugh, his shrill voice between each increase in voltage. Names, streets, times, codes, ranks: all the information was going to spill out of her brain and she wouldn't be able to stop it. She knew she was going to tell him everything.

Then there was emptiness, a descent into oblivion.

—

Julia opened her eyes and couldn't recognize anything, not even Adriana, who huddled against her, crying. It took her days to emerge from a state in which the only thing she was aware of was a raging thirst. Adriana refused to give her a drink. She told her that after
la
máquina
, the water could kill her. In her delirium, Julia accused Adriana of being her new torturer.

Sosa had returned to guard duty. He began to smuggle medicines in to them. Julia gradually came out of her coma.
Then it was her turn to look after Adriana, whose wounds were deeper but less visible. The weekend came like a reprieve. Sosa would be supervising the prisoners on his own. He listened to the girls talking without intervening, especially since most of the old prisoners had left Castelar, and the new ones were not talkative.

“We were very lucky,” Adriana murmured.

Julia stared at her in shock.

“Yes. You weren't hooked up to
la
máquina
for long. They had to break off the interrogation because they were called by a superior.”

“That's bad news,” Julia replied in a low voice. “That means it's only postponed.”

“Maybe,” Adriana said.

“We have to get out of here.”

“But that's impossible! We don't stand a chance.”

“We don't if we can't walk. That's why we have to get back on our feet as quickly as possible.”

“But if they see us up and about, they'll take us back upstairs.”

“Don't kid yourself; they'll take us back there anyway. They'll drag us by the hair if they have to.”

—

They hadn't heard Paola and Rosa since they'd gotten back. Neither answered when the girls called out. They were
probably being held in a cell farther away. Adriana and Julia were back in the cell with the toilet. Even Sosa refused to tell them what had happened to their cell mates.

“Maybe they've been transferred elsewhere?” Julia suggested. “Or legalized?”
*

“I don't think so.”

“But all the old ones have left. Maybe they got lucky?”

“The one who got lucky is our neighbor across the corridor. I overheard the guards say he's come back from Mansión Seré.”

“I thought nobody ever came back alive.”

“Exactly. He moans sometimes. I think he's coming to. If he recovers . . .”

“Do you know who he is?”

“I think it's a student from the sciences faculty, or maybe an engineer. Sosa told me he's in very bad shape. El Loco tortured him here before sending him to the pilots. Apparently there's a particularly vicious officer—a captain, I think—whom they call El Diablo.
*
He throws the prisoners out of planes himself. El Loco suspected this prisoner had something to do with the kidnapping of the Born brothers. That's why they handed him over to the air force.”