The Case of Lisandra P. (10 page)

Eva Maria pours another glass of wine. She looks down at her desk. Her gaze wanders to her tape recorder. What sort of music did Stella like? She'll have to ask Estéban. Her gaze follows the black cable joining the tape recorder to the headphones. It's like an umbilical cord. A Playmobil umbilical cord. It looks like the Rio de la Plata, winding its way into the sea. Eva Maria scribbles on the page of her open notebook. She puts down her pen. She winds the black cable around her fingers. She removes the jack from the tape recorder. Puts it back in. Removes it. Puts it back in. Removes it. How long has it been since she made love? Eva Maria gets up. She goes over to her wardrobe. She opens it. She gets down on her knees. She rummages behind her shoes. She takes out her brown backpack. She hunts among the cassettes. She checks the spine. “Miguel.” Yes, that's it.
Miguel.
She can't remember the names of all the patients, but she remembers that name. Even though she didn't listen right through to the end. The only cassette she has not transcribed. She didn't have the courage; it was more than she could do; she couldn't face it. Eva Maria shakes her head. She has to listen. To all of it. What will remain of the duty of memory if the torturers do not pay, if the victims stay silent, if she doesn't listen to Miguel? She has to build up her courage. One must always build up one's courage. Drinking will help. Eva Maria pours another glass of wine. She puts the headphones on her head. She takes a blank sheet of paper. Feeds it into the typewriter. She rewinds the cassette in the tape recorder. Presses
Play
. And yet this is not a game.

VITTORIO

Miguel? What are you doing here? I'm sorry, Lisandra isn't at home. And I have a patient coming any minute.

MIGUEL

Is it Mr. Bach?

VITTORIO

How did you know?

MIGUEL

Because that's me!

VITTORIO

What do you mean, that's you?

MIGUEL

That's me as well—it was my name back then, and since I've come to talk to you about back then, I gave you my name from back then. Can I come in?

VITTORIO

Into my office?

MIGUEL

Yes. I have an appointment, may I remind you.

VITTORIO

Of course, come in, please. Your name from back then? I don't understand.

MIGUEL

“Number 2137” was my real name back then, but if you replace the figures with letters, you get “B-A-C-H.” Incredible, don't you think? Unless they did it on purpose. But I think it was a wink from Providence, a sign to hang in there, rather than proof of their intelligence; unfortunately, they did not choose to put their intelligence in the service of poetry. It's funny you didn't recognize my voice on the telephone. I was sure you would recognize me.

VITTORIO

You worry me, Miguel, I've never seen you so agitated. What's going on? Why are you coming to see me, pretending to be someone else? You should have told me it was you.

MIGUEL

I thought it would be easier if it was “Mr. Bach” who came to tell you.

VITTORIO

Tell me what?

MIGUEL

About everything that happened there. Tell someone at least once. Tell you. So that I would learn how. I've already told myself—in my head, first, and then out loud—I've already done all that, I've turned the terror into a story, and given it the necessary narrative form;
I've found the right words, at least those that work best to express the images; and I've even found a certain chronology—that was what was hardest, to introduce the order of time into fear, to join elements together, and gestures, and events, which until then had been superimposed in a sort of layer cake of fear; everything had existed outside time, violently, and I had to reintroduce it, time that is, this notion that is peculiar to humanity and which disappears as soon as inhumanity comes on the scene. But I managed, I've done all that already, all on my own. Now I have to tell someone the story, with all its words, shaped by chronology; I have to tell someone and then, at last, it will become more natural, that's what I figure; it's like music in your head, first you need the notes, you have to look for the ones you hear, find them, and then in the end someone else has to hear them, otherwise there's no point, except to lock yourself away and listen over and over. Fear remains, along with the inability to pour the story into another ear, and for a long time I wondered who I could tell, and suddenly I thought of you. You're my friend, and besides it's your job. I'm sure you can help me, Vittorio. I have to tell someone, don't you see? I want to spend my life telling the story. Not to shut myself away, but to free myself. Do you hear me? Answer me. Do you agree that we can act as if I were a patient? For once. Just this once. Do you agree?

VITTORIO

Of course, of course. I'll cancel my next appointments, I'll take the afternoon off; we'll have more peace and quiet that way.

MIGUEL

Oh, but don't do that! Our conversation mustn't change anything, it mustn't be any more important than your
other patients' conversations; that would just make it worse. Do you understand? I've practiced—it won't take any longer than any of your other sessions, I promise.

VITTORIO

Fine. How do you want us to go about it? Do you want me to start with a question?

MIGUEL

Anything but that. I want to manage on my own. Without gathering momentum. Because if I expect someone to ask me questions, I won't tell the story to anyone. It's incredible, the number of people who never ask questions; it seems that curiosity is a talent that is restricted to childhood. Don't you think? No, it's true; how could you think that with your job—you ask the questions, you spend your life asking questions—but think about it, do people, other people, do you think they ask you questions? I don't. Honestly, this deliberate silence, this way of making everything around us official without any questions asked, astonishes me. Questions can even be a bother! It's like smiles; you say to yourself, What do they want from me? You take it the wrong way, you suspect a smiling person of some evil intention, you sigh at the intrusion. At least where you are concerned, your profession feeds on questions, and that's good. It's a good thing. Do you like your profession, Vittorio?

VITTORIO

Yes.

MIGUEL

And I like my profession, too; it's the thing I love best on earth. It's good when you love your job more than anything on earth, but at the same time it's a bad sign. Now I wish that I could love Melina more than anything on earth.

VITTORIO

I know.

MIGUEL

They started following me more and more often, in groups of four or five, young men no older than twenty-two, twenty-four; sometimes I would turn around in the street to show them they couldn't fool me; I would ask them the time or even come straight out and say didn't they have anything better to do. I wasn't afraid, I thought the fact that I was a public person would prevent them from acting, the political consequences would have been too serious to risk. But that evening, I noticed some people in civilian clothing up on my neighbor's roof busy doing something and I understood that something serious was about to happen. I called some friends to tell them that if the next morning at seven a.m. I gave no sign of life, they should be worried, and then my line was cut. I had to make all my other calls from the house of another neighbor who wanted to help me, so I urgently contacted the embassies—French, German, Canadian, American, and Brazilian. Not one of them would take the risk of getting involved. They all told me the only embassy that could intervene was the Argentine embassy. Might as well call my torturers directly. While I was making all these phone calls, two Fiats had parked outside my house with armed people. Finally there came the assault. I didn't put up any resistance; they dragged me into an army truck that was waiting down the street. Already during the transport they started torturing me. When we got there they took me into a room and on the door it said
Servicio de Informaciones del Estado
, the only words I would read all through those long months. They stripped and gagged me. They tied me to the table, sprayed me with water, then they used the
picana
to apply electricity,
concentrating on my hands in particular; they kept on saying, “No more piano playing for you; you'll be a wreck by the time you get out of here. You're worse than a guerrillero because with your smile and your piano you have made the
negrada
*
think they have the right to listen to Beethoven. You're a traitor to your class. Beethoven is ours. And so we're going to make you pay a heavy price. We're going to destroy you, completely.” When they'd finished, they untied me and left me on the floor; they wouldn't give me any water. I'd bitten myself so hard that the blood from my mouth was running down my throat, but blood doesn't quench your thirst. They left me in the basement in a cell without light or food. There were two of us to a bed. It was cold and damp. There were no blankets. There was a concrete bench. We had to urinate and do the other business on the floor. They tortured me every day. It was as if they made it a point of honor always to torture me differently, but they always used the same words: “No more piano playing for you, ever.” They went on focusing on my hands and arms. When they hung others by their feet, they would hang me by my wrists. “You like listening to music, huh? You like music? So listen to this one.” And they beat my ears so hard—they'd go about it a few of them at a time—I thought my ears would tear; I could hear the cartilage cracking; they threatened to pierce my eardrums. There was nothing I could do to make them stop. They weren't trying to get any information out of me—I had none to give them, I had nothing they wanted—they just wanted to hurt me as a punishment, they wanted to annihilate me. I never saw anyone. I had cotton over my eyes, a blindfold, and a hood. I never saw anything. I heard, I listened, and I counted roughly twenty-four different voices. By ear. I recognized their
voices—the timbre of the tenors, baritones, sopranos . . . There was quite a mixture, even girls. French accents, and German. They told the torturers what questions to ask; apparently they were experts in psychology, specialized in the interrogation of political prisoners. There were constant references to the Nazis. One day, two young officers forced me to repeat maybe five hundred times: “National Socialism is the most beautiful doctrine ever invented by human beings.” “Louder. Louder. Sing the words. Go on! Put them to music.” Sometimes they tortured me as if I were a textbook case, to teach others, the new recruits, how to torture, because everyone was torturing, it was part of their training. So in that case, it was cigarette burns, the hairs on the genitals ripped out by the handful, and I heard them say, “Go on, take the cigarette, press down on it, for fuck's sake, press; you're not supposed to make him come, you wet dishrag, look, go on, on his back.” And down came the cigarette on my cheek. They tore the skin from my hands with tweezers. Every day the wound got bigger, purulent; I would lick it like a dog, hoping to disinfect it. “You're nothing but a pile of shit in our country!” They wanted to destroy me, but I had figured out that if I concentrated really hard, I didn't feel the pain so bad, so I tried to think about technical problems related to the piano, or to reconstruct a work, or listen to Melina's voice singing that work—if you only knew how thinking about my wife helped me to resist—and I resisted throughout the torture sessions thanks to these tricks you learn in this hell: when it didn't hurt so bad I screamed like a crazy man, and when it really hurt, I kept silent, so that they'd concentrate harder on those places where I'd screamed louder when it came time to beat me or electrocute me. But before long I lost all sensitivity in both my hands and my arms. As a musician I was afraid that I had lost it all forever. Day and night, I did
exercises. I couldn't feel my fingers, but I didn't want to lose my digital memory, the distance between notes, so I drew piano keys on the floor, in the dirt, and I looked at my hands, even though I couldn't feel them, I watched as they moved heavily, and I would erase my makeshift keyboard the moment I heard the door open. I had huge gaps in my memory. When I tried mentally to recover a score, I might recall, say, twenty-four bars really well and then suddenly there would be a gap, an ocean, and I could remember the score in a fragmentary way, but I couldn't remember all the development, for example. Digital memory helped me to fill those gaps. The worst thing was that it was my most developed sense that was subjected to all that torture, and I was filled with sounds, voices, those voices . . . I can't get rid of them, the cries of pain, the cries of hatred, the cries pleading for mercy, the cries of insults, the cries as they urged each other on. I have no images. The sensations are fading. But the voices, those voices won't leave me. Noise was the worst torture for me. Every night they would bang on the pipes and the sounds would echo inside me: I could hear notes, dissonant notes, always the same ones, brutal and soulless, notes made of metal; I'm sure it was something they'd planned, to stun me with noise, to kill me with noise, with this unbearable, appalling racket. It was calculated, with a shrink's logic. You have no idea, but there were shrinks everywhere. Embedded with the army. Our guards were shrinks, our censors were shrinks. Forgive me, I don't mean you, Vittorio, but your profession is not always spotless. But shrinks are human beings, after all, they don't always want to do good, either. They knew how to destroy us; they crammed us with medication. I learned how to pretend to take them; I even asked for some, to allay their suspicions. And then I gave them to my companions who wanted them—everyone had their own way of putting up with this
ordeal; some of them needed medication just to survive in the hell we were in. For me to survive I had to stay in contact with reality more than anything—it was unbearable to feel I was losing the notion of time. They would deprive us of food for several days in a row; we would hear the cart go by in the corridor but it wouldn't stop for us, then one day it did stop—we didn't know why that day and not the day before or the following day. It was always the same moldy, half-cooked rice, with “meat” they told us was from the scalp of executed victims. From time to time they came to see me, they would remove the blindfold and give me cigarettes; but there were other times when they took out their guns and fired just next to me to frighten me. Another one of their shrinks' ideas. You couldn't make friends—divide and rule, they were really good at that game; we never really knew who was hiding behind a prisoner. A friend or an enemy. Certain prisoners they bought, tempting them with food, perks, or promises if they would denounce others. Sometimes you were denounced for things you hadn't done. Their prison methods were very sophisticated. It was a real laboratory; the procedures were incredible. There were individual or group policies for each floor. I still don't know how the system held together. That was the shrinks' job. Their aim was to destroy me via my passion, my profession. My hands, my hands, always my hands. I know they meted out roughly the same punishment to surgeons. To kill a man by killing the potential for his passion. There was a shrink behind each torture session. I counted five in all, in addition to the French and the Germans; their voices had become familiar—even beyond their voices, their breathing. If you listen carefully, Vittorio, there is a particular sound to every breath, you know. I can recognize a ton of people by their breathing alone. What about you, do you hear breathing? Block your ears, there,
you can hear your breathing, can't you? Well, when I concentrate, I can hear every breath the way you hear yours when you block your ears. When they told me they had arrested Melina, that was worse than any torture. I tried to tell myself it was the ultimate bluff. To destroy me for good. They were threatening to torture her in front of me. Throughout that entire period I stopped practicing in secret—I was afraid they might carry out their threat—I even took the medication. I did everything to be an exemplary victim. And I tried to imagine Melina safe at home. But there was nothing I could have done to prevent them from going through with their sadistic fantasies. Nothing I could have done. “Two one three seven! On your feet!” They took me into the room.
Servicio de Informaciones del Estado
. They made me sit on a chair and they removed my blindfold. Suddenly I heard music. Playing very loudly. It was Ravel's Concerto for the Left Hand. They left me there the time of the entire concerto, and during that time I felt an immense happiness come over me, and then the concerto came to an end. They gave me a cigarette; they asked me if I had enjoyed it, Concerto for the Left Hand; they asked me if I smoked with my left hand or my right—they were all wearing hoods; and in any case they wanted to hear it again. They put the concerto on again even louder this time. They tied my right arm to the table, my body to the chair; they put up a black cloth between my arms and me—I could no longer see my hands—and then they turned on an electric saw—do you hear me, Vittorio, an electric saw. “We're going to cut your hand off, just like we did with Victor Jara,
*
and after that we will kill you.” You cannot imagine the horror of that noise when it comes near your hands. I felt death go
through me. One of the shrinks began to shout: “You will no longer be the pianist you once were, you will no longer be your children's father, or your wife's lover; you will be nothing but a wreck.” I managed to contain myself a bit longer, but when I heard the sound of the electric saw coming closer I let out a scream the likes of which I have never heard: “No, dear Lord! Dear God, have mercy!” That's when everything stopped. Silence. Miraculous. They untied me; they were laughing. They asked me if I had enjoyed their joke. Okay, it wasn't exactly a joke, because they were right, never again will I be my wife's lover, but it was a lesser evil. They were laughing. They told me they were cool guys, decent, they could have cut my hand off, they'd decided it was better to kill my wife. A lesser evil, don't you think? You can always find another wife, but another hand, that's more complicated. And besides, it was her last wish, after all, “for him to stay alive, a pianist, for him to be able to go on playing,” and they had respected it; they wouldn't go and burn in hell: they had asked her which she preferred, “either we kill you, or we cut your husband's hand off,” and she's the one who wanted them to kill her—she even begged them—they couldn't go and refuse her now, could they? They were gallant around here; I was really lucky to have a wife like her. They were laughing. And they let me go. Back to my house. I thought Melina would still be there. I hoped with all my soul that they had been lying, that it was some nasty infantile prank their filthy shrinks had come up with. I was praying; I swore I would never complain about anything ever again, I would never again feel weary or tired, I would never ever forget to tell Melina how much I loved her. But when I got to the house, I could tell that no one had been living there for weeks. It's something you can feel, an immediate sensation, space telling you that Love has disappeared. It's searing. The food on the kitchen table, they must
have come upon her while she was having supper. I looked at that layer of mold on the tomatoes and I knew Melina was dead. And then I collapsed, the way I had not collapsed all that time in prison. Everything had been thought out, scripted by their shrinks. They knew that this would be the worst thing for me. To lose my wife. There we are, Vittorio, as I promised, less than one hour, incredible, isn't it? The sum total of those eleven months fits into less than an hour. No matter what we say, words reduce everything; no matter how precise your words try to be, they can never express the real length of time. The only good thing about words is that they set the voice free; for the rest, they're not reliable. You cannot imagine what it's like to lose your wife, Vittorio, if you only knew how much I miss Melina. By the way, how is Lisandra? I found her distant, the last time we met.