Giles Blunt's fifth novel begins with its protagonist, a young frightened man named Victor Pena, reading Of Mice and Men with an English-Spanish dictionary and worrying that he will be killed by the soldiers he is working with, even though the captain in charge is his uncle.
The place is a little school, abandoned now and in use for other things. The time is some time during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, and the country is El Salvador. The war with the communists is in full swing – and it is anything but a cold war. The soldiers stationed in the little school are engaged in questioning suspected guerrilla sympathizers. What they do is systematically torture and then murder them. No prisoner gets out of the little school alive. Even those who confess their supposed crimes are dispensed with. The other soldiers have begun to sense that Victor is different from them, that he lacks enthusiasm for the work. They do not attribute this to anything but cowardice.
Victor “had wanted to be a teacher, but the war had come and the schools were closed. Many teachers were killed, many disappeared. Both of Victor's parents were dead; he had joined the army out of necessity. Now all he wanted was to stay alive.”
Into this darkness a woman is brought, blindfolded, like all the prisoners, and her questioning begins with a brutal kick to her groin. Victor is witness to this, and very soon he is ordered to take part in torturing her. The torment proceeds step by brutal step, over many days, hours each day, and it includes beatings, repeated rapes, dousing in cold water, sleep deprivation, starvation, electric shocks to parts of her body and more beatings.
Through it all she insists that she is innocent; she repeats over and over that her name is Sanchez, that she was carrying food to children in the basement of a church. Victor, fearing that his reluctance will cause him to be placed at the mercy of the soldiers, is ordered by his uncle to strike her. He does so, and knocks her teeth out. During the rapes he lies on top of her and can't bring himself to complete the act. And he is the one who is put in charge of the “general,” which is a generator box made by General Electric, with which the shocks are administered. Eventually, when the soldiers finally use the threat of killing an innocent boy in her presence, and after they break boy's leg in the most brutal way, she relents, and tells them her name: Lorca.
The soldiers, with Victor along, take her and the boy out to the place where prisoners are shot. They let Victor know that he is the one who will shoot her. He must obey, and he stands with a pistol aimed at her head, where she waits, beaten and bloody and half-starved, at the edge of a precipice. He fires the pistol at her as the edge collapses and she disappears over it.
In all this horror, we are with Victor. And we see him at the home of the Captain, the murderer and torturer, who is transformed when with his wife and children – nothing more than a humble family man home from work, relishing dinner and being playful and affectionate with his children. The pages showing these tender moments may just be the most terrifying in the book; they confront us with the ordinary face of evil. And they are necessary, because the confrontation runs in the opposite direction with Victor. We see in him the ordinary face of human fright, of the desperate need to survive.
The question then arises: In such a world, where, short of falling upon a sword, does one find the moral line? We all know that bravery is not possible unless there is fear. Giles Blunt's protagonist is in a terrible trap, and we recognize as we read on that in the cruel circumstance, we find difficulty imagining ourselves doing anything differently. For indeed, what does one do if the penalty for any kind of protest, any sign of less than complete enthusiasm for the horrors at hand, is torture and death?
This novel does not answer that question. It presents us with it as experience. Brilliantly. Exactly as a good novel about these horrors should.
And midway through, after all of that, we find Victor in New York City, having deserted from his army during a training mission at Ft. Benning, Georgia, working in a restaurant and finding out that Lorca has survived the ordeal, and is living with her brother nearby.
Victor comes to know her. He tells her he was a victim of the soldiers, that he had a stint in the little school, being tortured. Believing that he is lying, he tells her that he is a fellow victim. And of course, he is. We feel that he is, even as we watch him seek some a way to make up to her what he was a part of, and to find some sense of forgiveness for himself.
I won't say more than that the outcome of this development in the novel is credible, and moving, and oddly reassuring, without a single breath of sentimentality. Giles Blunt, author of the John Cardinal mysteries, has given us a tour de force, sorrowing and direct, sharp as a knife blade, beautifully written – an unforgettable window into the human capacity for cruelty and courage.
Richard Bausch's most recent book is the novel Peace.
