The train came to a stop. It wasn’t customs but a tiny station in the middle of nowhere where two people got on and five got off. The Argentinean, seeing that Paulo wasn’t in much of a talking mood, decided to leave him alone with his thoughts, but he was worried—Paulo’s expression had changed entirely. He asked one last time:
“So, everything really is all right with you, right?”
“I’m performing an exorcism.”
The Argentinean got the message and said nothing more.
Paulo knew that there, in Europe, the things he’d been through did not happen. Or, rather, they had happened but in the past. He always asked himself how those walking to the gas chambers in the concentration camps or lined up for death at a mass grave, watching the firing squad execute the front line, never had the slightest reaction, never tried to run, never attacked their executioners.
The answer was simple: their panic was so great that they were no longer present. The brain blocks out everything, there’s neither terror nor fear, just a strange submission to what’s about to occur. Emotions vanish to make way for a sort of limbo, where everything happens in a zone that scientists have been unable to explain to this day. Doctors have a label for this, “temporary stress-induced schizophrenia,” and have never bothered looking into the exact consequences of the flat affect, as they call it.
And, perhaps to expel the ghosts of his past once and for all, Paulo relived the entire ordeal through to the very end.
; The man in the backseat with him seemed a bit more humane than the others who had approached them at the hotel.
“Don’t worry, we’re not going to kill you. Lie down on the floor.”
Paulo wasn’t worried—his head was no longer processing anything. It was like he had entered an alternate reality; his brain refused to accept what was happening to him. The only thing he did was ask:
“Can I hold on to your leg?”
“Of course,” the man responded.
Paulo clutched the man’s leg, perhaps his grip was stronger than he thought, perhaps he was hurting the man, but the other man didn’t move. He allowed Paulo to continue—he knew what Paulo was going through, and he likely took no pleasure in watching such a young man, full of life, endure that experience. But he also followed orders.
* * *
—
Paulo couldn’t say exactly how long the drive lasted, and the longer they drove, the more he became convinced he was about to be executed. He had already managed to make some sense of what was going on—he had been captured by paramilitary officers and was officially disappeared. But what did that matter now?
The car came to a stop. They tore him from the backseat and lugged him down what seemed like a hallway. Suddenly his foot hit something on the floor, a sort of metal strip.
“Please, could we go slower?” he asked.
That’s when he received the first blow across his head.
“Shut your mouth, terrorist!”
He fell to the ground. They ordered him to stand up and remove all his clothing—carefully, to ensure the hood stayed in place. He did what he was told. They immediately began to beat him, and because he didn’t know where each blow was coming from, his body could no longer prepare itself and his muscles were unable to contract, resulting in pain far worse than anything he’d ever experienced in his childhood scuffles. He fell again, and now each punch was replaced by a kick. The beating lasted ten or fifteen minutes, until a voice ordered the men to stop.
He was still conscious, but he wasn’t sure if he had broken something; he couldn’t move he was in so much pain. Despite this, the voice that had ordered an end to that first torture session ordered him back to his feet. The voice began to ask a series of questions about the guerrilla movement, about comrades, about what he’d been doing in Bolivia, whether he was in touch with Che Guevara and his gang, where the weapons were hidden. He threatened to gouge Paulo’s eye out as soon as he could confirm his involvement. Another voice, this one from the “good cop,” took a different tack. It was better to confess to the robbery they’d committed at a nearby bank—that way, everything would be cleared up; Paulo would be put in prison for his crimes but they wouldn’t touch him again.
That was the moment, as he struggled to his feet, that he began to emerge from the lethargic state he found himself in and regained something he had always considered one of man’s greatest attributes: the survival instinct. He needed a way out of that situation. He needed to tell them he was innocent.
They ordered him to tell them everything he’d done in the previous week. Paulo recounted everything in detail, though he knew they’d never heard of Machu Picchu.
“Don’t waste your time trying to fool us,” the “bad cop” said. “We found the map in your hotel room. You and Blondie were spotted at the scene of the crime.”
Map?
The man showed him a piece of paper through the opening in his hood, a drawing someone in Chile had given them showing the way to the tunnel that crossed the Andes.
“The Communists think they’re going to win the next elections. That Allende will use Moscow’s gold to corrupt all of Latin America. But you’d be wrong. What’s your role in the alliance they’re forming? Who are your contacts in Brazil?”
Paulo begged them, he swore none of that was true, he was just some guy who wanted to travel and see the world—at the same time he asked them what they were doing with his girlfriend.