Terroir (27 page)

He lifted the glass in the dark and sipped at the tepid water. Jesus! He spat something out in disgust. A moth? He could feel it fluttering and tingling against his lips. It must have dropped into the glass when he was relieving himself. Christ, how he hated the jungle! Hated being this deep in its canopy of trees. He loathed its steaming damp, its greenness, its secrecy. Everything preying upon everything else: jaguars on monkeys, crocodiles on fish, mongoose on snakes, snakes on frogs and beetles, leeches and ticks on everything. Then there was the river, alive with unimaginable horror: a tiny translucent fish, the candiru, that could enter the body through an orifice and eat away at a man's insides, gorging itself on shit and flesh in the dark. Pirhana could strip a horse to a skeleton in minutes. Swarming and tearing, frenzied, the water boiling with blood. He'd seen that on a film. Mindless appetite. Then crocodiles and black caiman, anaconda and coral snakes. Primitive killers that had never evolved. Above all, there was the colossal surge of insect life waiting to invade skin and clothing. He'd read his English novel under the sheets like a child for a just few minutes with the help of a torch and heard the thud of moths against the mosquito netting. He wiped the back of his hand against his mouth and a shudder passed through him, a dark current of apprehension. He needed to retire. Then none of this would not be necessary. He shifted the pillow again, feeling it damp against his nape hair. The inside of his body felt turgid, as if his bowels had filled with clay.

Tomorrow he'd look at the prisoners through the shuttered windows of their cell doors. He'd study reports, photographs if there were any. Sometimes they were in poor condition, the prisoners. After all, army intelligence officers usually lacked intelligence. They made up for it in brutality, though: breaking teeth, collar bones, cheekbones, gouging eyes, ramming in cattle probes, burning skin with lighter fluid. When he met the prisoners, one by one, the first thing he did was offer them medical attention. He spoke to them softly, touched them solicitously. He wasn't a doctor himself. Well, not a doctor of medicine. He had a PhD from an American University in corpus linguistics. He'd made a study of the untruths people told to maintain relationships with their partners. What was said and wasn't said. What interested him was information and communication. Even statistics had their aesthetic. In these situations of enquiry – he'd never liked the word
interrogation
– information and its communication worked both ways. All that started with the body, with eye contact, with the position of the head or hands, with an unspoken dress code. Sometimes he wore casual clothes: slacks and a polo shirt. Sometimes a smart suit with a crisp shirt and cuff links. Sometimes – in the later stages – a white coat or the short jacket a dentist wears.

And he had no name, never gave a name, never allowed a prisoner to address him in that way. They were usually stubborn. They'd had silence instilled, beaten into them, whereas it's the natural inclination of a human being to give utterance, to speak, to communicate, to share their humanity. He could tell very quickly if the prisoners knew anything, if they were hiding anything worth knowing. That often went with rank, education, where they sat in the hierarchy. Generally speaking, he was sent for when someone important turned up. The rest could be tamed with rifle butts, bare wires and a generator. The outcome was always the same, whatever the interim situation or the nature of the enquiry. Once he had done with them, once his records were complete and his report written, they were taken away and given final treatment. That, at least, was merciful. And it was cheap. It cost the country next to nothing.

People didn't understand interrogation. They thought it was merely about getting prisoners to speak, asking them questions, dragging out answers at any cost, even if they were lies. For him – and he was a specialist – it began with solicitude. The medical kind came first – a plaster cast, a sterile dressing, sutures, even pain relief. Because pain drove things from a person's head, it gave them a focus, something to fight. What he liked to work with was an open mind. Once they were more comfortable they could be more amenable. He took fingerprints, DNA samples, mug shots. It made the prisoners feel that they'd left the realm of random brutality, of arbitrary violence – things they'd shared and perpetrated, after all – and entered a rational world of lawful procedure. They didn't know where they were, though they could guess if they lay awake listening to the night in their pitch
-
black cells. The trick was maintaining that darkness, never giving them quite enough to drink, keeping them on the edge of thirst and fever where their thoughts could multiply. It was he who brought them into the light, who'd order a jug of iced water and let them drink from it, though never too much at one time. That increased expectation, the thought that they
might
drink. Sometimes they'd ask him for water and he'd smile, solicitous again.
Soon, soon,
he would say, soothing them, offering them a future.

He spoke Portuguese of course, Spanish, was fluent in English, which he used for the educated cadres, but he also had a smattering of the hill and river dialects. It was amazing how the sound of a few words in their own language could melt a man's tongue. Or a woman's for that matter. He'd seen prisoners who'd been beaten almost beyond recognition and endured, cry at the sound of their own language. The language of their childhood, the language their mothers had first spoken to them.
The procedure is called de-gloving,
he'd say unexpectedly, softly, turning as he was leaving the room.

He lay in the dark now, listening to the forest seethe around him. His lip was swelling. Maybe it wasn't a moth he'd spat out. There were species in the jungle that had never even been identified. Even a venomous moth wasn't beyond imagination. Nothing was beyond that.

Because tomorrow was a working day, he remembered all the childhoods he'd had. A miner's son marching with his father from the pithead to a strike meeting. A peasant farmer's son staking out a clearing in the jungle, burning and chopping the bush to grow maize, sweet potatoes. Or his father was dead and his mother was a teacher in the village school, keeping things together, observing decency, feeding her large family of which he was the youngest. Or he'd been raised in the city in a steady family, his father working at the fuel plant, his mother a maid. Maybe he'd been rescued from the streets where an uncle had dumped him, where he'd sold himself to businessmen cruising in cars to survive. There was a web of stories, of names, locations, family members. All of them were interchangeable, all of them familiar to him, as if they'd been real. He told them about his childhood so that they would remember theirs, that was all. It was all lies, of course. Though in the wider scheme of things it was all truth. The way fiction is the ultimate truth because it is reality processed and projected by the mind. It is experience – actuality – synthesized. What led them to him was their own imagination: that ultimate instrument of consciousness. The idea of
breaking
them was never part of his method. That was both stupid and barbaric. It was realisation that made them talk, encouraged them to share the burden they carried.

It was rarely necessary to tell the ones who knew something exactly what he wanted to know. Those ones who resisted and stayed silent had been well trained at those camps in the jungle or in the mountains. The ones they were still finding and strafing from helicopter gunships, burning them out like wasps' nests. He and his brother had done that in the story where they'd survived as orphans at a coffee plantation, living on scraps of charity, barefoot and dressed in rags until they were old enough to plant and weed and pick coffee. They'd saved up for paraffin and matches and destroyed the nests that lay below the surface of the ground for a few cents, saving up the money to buy shoes so they could walk to school. Every story was a story of redemption, how he'd gone from that condition to this. Sometimes they asked him what had happened to his brother and he couldn't answer, his eyes wet with the sadness of memory. He'd touch the prisoner's arm then and smile, as if he'd caught himself in a moment of self
-
indulgence, had disclosed too much.

They knew what they knew; that he wanted to know all of it. He was merely interested in everything. The question was how they came to that moment. In many ways, he'd rather they spoke about anything other than that at first. Denials were tiresome and got in the way. They made him look needy, anxious for the truth. That was something to be approached gently, step
-
by
-
step. It was their redemption, their rendition from one state to another, from sin to a state of grace. Because all knowledge lay heavy, all secrets were burdensome. If they could be released from their secrets, they could be free. To stay silent was to betray themselves.

It was not necessary to use violence. He had photographs of the procedure. They were of high resolution and could have come from a lecture he might give to clinicians. The images showed the first incisions, the skin being peeled back, the final result. They showed the faces of the people being operated upon. Without anesthetic, of course. They showed the faces of others watching. And he was careful to match the photograph to the skin tone of the prisoner – no use showing a black man a white subject or vice versa. No use showing a coffee
-
skinned woman the exfoliated breast of a negress. What they had to imagine was themselves. He would bring the photographs in a portfolio and spread them on the table, as if they were choosing a new body shape with a helpful consultant.
This is the procedure that has been recommended,
he'd say,
we would like you to take a close look.
He'd let the prisoners gaze at the photographs so that they could be in no doubt. A man having his penis skinned back. A fat guy flayed to the spine. A woman with her breasts hanging by a thread of flesh. Someone with no face, just a mask of blood with bared teeth and lidless eyes. Then he'd take them away again, because images grow in the imagination. They grow especially at night with the appetites of the forest at work, the sound of rain and the river pouring through your head.

The next day he might not visit at all, breaking his routine. The day after he would appear, all solicitude, asking them if they'd had enough time to think things over, glancing at his watch occasionally, as if late for another appointment.
Shall I bring the tape recorder?
Would you like a glass of water
?
Ice?
It was remarkable how few of them lied under such circumstances. When they spoke it was almost always the truth.
Where, when, who, how and why.
After all, those were the essential elements of a story, the essential components of a narrative. Those elements gave truth the
ring
of truth. He thought of that as a sacred ring, a contract they'd made together. He would stand between them and all hurt if only they would make him believe.

It was amazing how many of them were grateful afterwards, how many of them thanked him, tried to press his hands before they were taken to the forest. He wondered if the soldiers gloated before they killed them. Or if it was sudden: a shot to the head from behind, so their fading consciousness couldn't keep up with the realisation of what had become of them. He always hoped that it was sudden. For his own part, he had no political views. He was only interested in what they had to say, not why they had to say it. Then it was written down. Not in plain view, but there would be a record. Unsigned. Anonymous.

Himself? He'd fade into history, be remembered only for his linguistic work at the Institute, the recording and archiving of native dialects, the extensive fieldwork that had often taken him away for weeks on end. He'd die a natural death of cancer, stroke, or heart failure. After all, the work was stressful. Or he'd die by his own hand, his grip slackening on the pistol. He'd thought of that too, how his thoughts would explode like stars and then fade.

He was still awake when the dawn came up over the forest, tainting the room with light. There were bird calls piercing the jungle canopy, monkey calls like harsh reproaches mixed with laughter. Steam was rising from the river beyond the trees that spread like a green fire. They were holding two men and a woman who'd been swept up in a raid across the border. They believed at least one of them was of high importance. Which one, was the question.

As he dressed, putting on his watch, his spectacles, he thought of his wife seeing the consultant on her own, having to go through all that in the city hospital without him being with her. The taxi, the waiting room, the nurses who'd treat her as if she was stupid, as if she was meat. A nobody. He thought of his oldest son training for the basketball team, of his youngest who was struggling at his new school. He'd make an appointment with the teacher, make it clear he suspected bullying, that she should be vigilant. Moving from primary to secondary school had been traumatic, but the boy wouldn't say why. The teacher's attitude was insensitive and hadn't helped. Not all children were the same. They had to be treated as individuals. He'd speak to her, and he'd be reasonable. He'd be persuasive in that gentle way he had. They were good boys, Raoul and Paul, and everything would be alright in the end. They'd go to university as he had, meet nice girls, have children he could walk to the park and play with in his old age.