The Feast of the Goat - Mario Vargas Llosa [186]
Between sessions in the electric chair, they dragged him, naked, to a damp cell, where buckets of pestilential water made him respond. To keep him from sleeping they taped his lids to his eyebrows with adhesive tape. When, in spite of having his eyes open, he fell into semiconsciousness, they woke him by beating him with baseball bats. At various times they stuffed inedible substances into his mouth; at times he detected excrement, and vomited. Then, in a rapid descent into sub-humanity, he could keep down what they gave him. In the early sessions with electricity, Ramfis interrogated him. He repeated the same question over and over again, to see if he would contradict himself. (“Is President Balaguer implicated?”) He responded, making superhuman efforts to have his tongue obey him. Until he heard laughter, and then the colorless, rather feminine voice of Ramfis: “Shut up, Pupo. You have nothing to tell me. I know everything. Now you’re only paying for your betrayal of Papa.” It was the same voice, with its discordant changes in pitch, that Ramfis had at the orgy of blood following June 14, when he lost his mind and the Chief had to send him to a psychiatric hospital in Belgium.
At the time of this last conversation with Ramfis, he could no longer see him. They had removed the tape, ripping off his eyebrows in the process, and a drunken, joyful voice announced: “Now you’ll have some dark, so you’ll sleep real good.” He felt the needle piercing his eyelids. He did not move while they sewed them shut. It surprised him that sealing his eyes with thread caused him less suffering than the shocks on the Throne. By then, he had failed in his two attempts to kill himself. The first time, he banged his head with all the strength he had left against the wall in his cell. He passed out, and barely bloodied his hair. The second time, he almost succeeded. Climbing up the bars—they had removed his handcuffs in preparation for another session on the Throne—he broke the bulb that lit the cell. On all fours, he swallowed every bit of glass, hoping that an internal hemorrhage would end his life. But the SIM had two doctors on permanent call and a small first-aid station supplied with what was necessary to prevent tortured prisoners from dying by their own hand. They took him to the infirmary, made him swallow a liquid that induced vomiting, and flushed out his intestines. They saved him, so that Ramfis and his friends could go on killing him in stages.
When they castrated him, the end was near. They did not cut off his testicles with a knife but used a scissors, while he was on the Throne. He heard excited snickers and obscene remarks from individuals who were only voices and sharp odors of armpits and cheap tobacco. He did not give them the satisfaction of screaming. They stuffed his testicles into his mouth, and he swallowed them, hoping with all his might that this would hasten his death, something he never dreamed he could desire so much.
At one point he recognized the voice of Modesto Díaz, the brother of General Juan Tomás Díaz, who, people said, was as intelligent as Egghead Cabral or the Constitutional Sot. Had they put him in the same cell? Were they torturing him too? Modesto’s voice was bitter and accusatory:
“We’re here because of you, Pupo. Why did you betray us? Didn’t you know this would happen to you? Repent for having betrayed your friends and your country.”
He did not have the strength to articulate a sound or even open his mouth. Some time later—it could have been hours, days, or weeks—he heard a conversation between a SIM doctor and Ramfis Trujillo:
“Impossible to keep him alive any longer, General.”
“How much time does he have?