138
PARTISAN REVIEW
His name echoed off the walls, voices ordering him to attack: a
woman's scream. Which of the five women was it, while, naked and
hooded in her cell, she waited for the torturer who never came?
Czar'!
urged the voices, and the well-trained dog jumped on one of them,
Judit explained to Maiiungo as she stared at the pavement distorted
by her tears, but no one knew on which of the five: they never talked
about it. It's as if they wanted to share the pain and dilute it by not
resolving that mystery. The barking mixes with the laughter and
masculine bravado cheering Czar's triumph, pure brutality, words
of terror echoing empty because of the absence of eroticism, sexual–
ity supplanted by the fear that finally they are coming for her
by
order of the man with the nasal voice who exempted her. Hours im–
mobile in the cold. Naked. Blind inside the hood. The wet, cold,
greasy wall stuck to her back . The gag suffocates her. She's waiting
for Czar. On the other side of the walls, the men treat the dog as an
equal, congratulating him for his prowess as a don Juan.
Czar!
First
faint, then gone completely, Czar's barking remains fenced off, part
of the block they leave behind.
Translated from the Spanish
by
Alfred MacAdam
