The Infirmary

In a Room Somewhere in the North of Nicaragua

46 i n a r o o m s o m e W h e r e i n t h e n o r t h o f n i c a r a G U a Because the woman was of your age and lovely as any of us, and had little notion of the rebel cause or coup, her thoughts mostly with her son, the four-year-old, where he might be, if they would force him to put the revolver to her head, something she’d heard it occasioned them to do, to make a point you see, and because the hand of the soldier that held the iron prod was so much like mine or even yours, and that gentle way he held it, the way you hold a brush to a canvas say, the poker a good deal longer, though, and the tip of the poker unspeakably red, and how he drew it across her breasts, across her nipples, first one, then the other, so the thing might have been the finger of a child or a lover, each nipple for one moment making a little glow of its own, then a circle of smoke, the pulses of smoke steaming from each of her breasts, a cloudy milk rising that was not milk at all, and how her screaming led him on, so that he teased her a bit here and there with the poker thing, something he liked to do, as if it might find a little secret somewhere for his general, as if his life might be better somehow for what he did to her. all i want to say is that i love you terribly because of it; how it pleases him i mean to do this. and when pain takes away the senses of this one, he will ask for the other, a younger girl with long dark hair, her nipples the color of plums, and those little places in her so very, very red he will think she could be burning there already. ...