Blog 46-The Base

The Base
We left the encampment before sunrise in the rented jeep of the man whose name I couldn't say. Danny. I made myself say it aloud when I greeted him. He negotiated with the guards at the main entrance to the Base and drove a zigzag of straight roads to the Camp, as if all of this had been easy, as if this moment that seemed to never arrive, barely exist even as possibility, was just one more moment, the next moment. I sat in the passenger seat looking out the window at the squat wooden buildings. The access road was almost deserted except for two young men in caqui uniforms sitting outside one of the huts. Machi sat in the back seat tapping his foot. How to get Machi in to see Ori was a question the man, Danny, had not yet answered.
I sat on a plastic chair in a small waiting room with other silent people, mostly women. Machi sat next to me, and the man next to him. I didn't want to count the women. There were more of us than I could see when I looked straight ahead. I sat in the middle of the middle row, the only empty chairs we'd found when we arrived, too early for our supposed appointment, but later than hundreds of others. I was afraid to speak, and the others were also afraid. Was the window to our right as we faced a long brown formica table, one way glass? Were we being watched for some sign? Every now and then, at unpredictable intervals, a deep male voice through a speaker on the wall called out a series of numbers. I wondered if my own number had been called and I had not heard it.
Could I show one face to the Camp authorities and keep my own face, my own mind? Was this yet one more acid bath to corrode me? Had I kept my face while putting on the mask of burocrat in my last job? Most of the time I thought not. But Soli, my colleague, then friend, and finally boss, said I had. "You keep us honest." What did she mean? It was a job I didn't want, to be the conscience of the literacy group. I laughed. I was a beta human. I survived by submission, not by dominance. Or I was not alpha enough to survive, to hold on to my mind. I felt the rabia sorda of the subjected...of the submitted..of the beta.. So in my life, nothing happened.
We didn't sit long in the windowless waiting room stinking of cigarette smoke but empty of ashtrays. Had they only recently they'd forbidden smoking? The smiling officer entered from the far door and approached me with his hand held out. I gripped his hand hard and watched him give Machi a rigid charming smile. They wanted something from me, from us. I was not the only supplicant here.
I had no idea what it must have been like for Ori to have been in the Camp for two years. I was embarrassed that my images came from movies and childhood magazine photographs of tortured men and women. "Por dos años a Ori solo lo vi en sueños." I had said those words to Anacaona last night. We''d sat together until almost three in the morning at the table by our shelters,both of us unable to sleep, both waiting for Machi, both at once hopeful and afraid of finding Ori.
The smiling man brought somebody in. From Machi's sharp intake of breath I understood that this was Ori. For two years I had only seen him in my nightmares. I was never more glad that my son was with me, that the man Danny convinced the camp authorities it would go better if both of us saw Ori. I was almost certain this thin man with cheeks sunken around missing teeth, was the man I'd seen on the surveillance screen, curled up on a cot somewhere in the bowels of the Camp. He stood perfectly motionless by the door for just a moment before he stepped into the room and walked toward me. I saw he had no idea he was unrecognizable and that was good. To himself he was still Ori.
The three of us were alone in the small room although the smiling man and others must be watching through the square window that must surely be one way glass. Machi stepped between us and pulled his father into his arms. Now Ori was the smaller one, frail inside his burly son's embrace. Machi's arms were crossed behind Ori's back and his hands were spread, enormous on both sides of the curved spine. Ori melded into Machi, gave way, collapsed into him and made a sound I couldn't name, between a cry and a growl. He sobbed. I moved toward them and put my arms around both of them. Ori was still Ori if he could cry. I remembered before the separation, how Machi choreographed family kiss ins, getting us all to hug and kiss at once.
On the other side of the glass the watchers must be waiting for me to deliver the message. Another thing I must do I didn't want to do. Had I ever done anything other than comply? Were all humans bound together by terrible twining coils of compliance? Surely the smiling man didn't want to be smiling. What was there to smile about when you worked in a torture camp? Complying. Following the order to use a prisoner's wife's need to see her husband as pressure so that she complied with your request to get her husband to comply, to collaborate with what? They called their tortures interrogations.
"Como estas?" Ori raised his head from Machi's chest and offered me his gaze. His eyes were huge now in the shrunken face, liquid, showing terror and confusion and still the fierceness I recognized as Ori's essence. For a long time I simply looked into his eyes. I felt his mind. They hadn't killed him. They had hurt him but they hadn't killed him. He remembered me and I remembered him. He held my gaze. "They expect me to inform." His voice was unlike his voice coming from that reduced chest. His voice was softer, hoarser but still his voice, the words connected to the thought, the words uttered just a heartbeat more slowly than most people.
Then the moment was over and we were outside in the bright sun standing with Danny. His name was no longer impossible to think or say. I doubled over about to vomit, my body trembling, my face hot with tears. I pushed my face into Machi's chest and screamed, the wrenched sounds muffled against him. I clung to Machi and he held me hard. Danny stood by, looking down at us from his great height, his long arms hung limp from his oddly square shoulders and then he raised them and put one arm around Machi and one around me. I raised my head and looked up at him. "Is there any fucking way on earth to get him out of here?"
He said nothing. I watched him think. I wanted him to fix this the way I'd wanted Papi to fix things. Papi couldn't. I was still waiting. On the way back to Palenque I sat in the back seat and neither Machi nor Danny said anything. I imagined I looked too sunk, unreachable. We drove away in silence past little wooden houses with little front lawns shrunk and transplanted from a City suburb. Outside one of the houses a thin blonde City Navy wife stood over a pigtailed pale toddler on a tricycle. I wanted to grab the woman and shake her and ask her, "Do you know what your husband is doing? Do you know where his hands have been just before he puts them on you at night? Make him stop." But I said nothing. I wondered if I would ever manage to say anything again.
Machi's voice reached me from the surface. It was Danny he was speaking to. "You know my Mother is Venturan. Is there something you can do with that?"
“It's possible. Every so often El Mandatario wins a mass canje. This is how I see it. We try every legal angle, City law, international law, pardons. Just last year Padre Ezequiel brokered a one for one exchange. One hundred City force prisoners captured in Ventura during incursions exchanged for one hundred renditioned rebels in the Camp. You try every tracker angle, vigils, breaches, rescates, extraofficial canjes. We throw them all. Sooner or later one will stick.”
"Marina. Despierta."
Danny stuck his head in the flap of the lean-to. I bolted awake and stood. In Palenque I wore 24-7 clothes, yoga pants and T-shirts I could live and sleep in.
"Gotta go. Right now." I made a stop at the bank of toilets and we were in his ancient four-wheel drive within minutes. On the way to the Base he explained that after our last visit Ori had resumed his hunger strike, vomiting whatever he was forcefed, tearing out the iv. They want you to try again. There's something they think he knows.
I clenched my fists, brought them to my face and screamed in silence. "Something they want him to know." I watched the lavender sunrise through the of the windshield, grayed by seasalt. We got to the Base before I was ready. I paused at the steps to the shack, noticed the peeling beige paint. A small iguana caught my gaze for a second before it scurried under the small porch. This is where Danny squeezed my arm, sat on the porch railing, and waved me in the direction of a young smooth skinned guardia who had clearly been expecting me. We left Danny on his perch.
I followed the young guardia beyond the compound of small shacks, on a path of packed sand until we reached what looked like oversized dog crates. I proceeded behind him along a passageway between rows of crates, not looking, not wanting to look, but seeing nevertheless from the corners of my eyes the wire mesh pens, and the men inside them who were turned away from me. They wanted to not see me, not be seen by me? Were they too humiliated, broken, and shamed to be seen? I couldn't let myself feel anything, least of all knee buckling horror, in this moment. This was how they were kept! The cells were cages, mesh on all sides and overhead. In some of them three or four men sat on narrow cots or stood, their heads almost touching the overhead grid, or they bent forward. Or they squatted. It was better not to see much. I followed the guard who led me down a maze of passageways, an unending series of pens surrounded by the blue sky and yellow sands of paradise.
Now the young man leading me approached a wooden structure, a house. He climbed up the steps leading to the narrow porch, like the one at my abuela's house in the Venturan campo. I followed him up and through a narrow door. There was a front desk but nobody guarded it. We made our way along a hallway with doors close together on both sides. He pointed to the last door on the right and stepped aside and waited. I understood and pushed the door in and walked inside.
Ori stood with his back to me, facing a window. His shoulders were rounded and his spine was stooped. He turned toward me and I approached him and stood inches away from him. He smelled of laundry soap, the castilla soap from my childhood. His hair was wet. I looked into his eyes and drew him to me. This stranger was my husband and the father of my child. We were face to face. I remembered having to look up at him, before. I took his hand and drew him toward the bed. My knees were giving way. I needed to sit down. I sat and he stood beside me. I drew him toward me and he surrendered onto my lap. I held him like Mary holding Christ, this person, once my husband, was skin and bones and shaking in my arms. I whispered into his ear. "They want me to make you want to do whatever it is they want from you." I felt him sigh. His shoulders rose and fell and I understood that he was crying. He said nothing. I don't know how long I held him before the guardia took me back.