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Show The Great Escape • 19 'Done," said the captain. "Tonight I'll come get you." And Arturo gets prepared, working out all afternoon, he puts on his dirtiest, most npped-up T-shirt-his torture uniform-and he waits. And come nightfall the captain does come, he takes him out, he gives him the brandy, but not the machine. "To your health," said Arturo. "And to yours," said the captain It is a testament to Arturo's character, his humility, I think, that he never told me this story himself. 0 Hidden behind the crowd and branches, Eleutrorio Fernandez Huidobro delivered a eulogy, calling Arturo a Quixote-in-reverse, "so physically and morally similar, yet the opposite," and "one of the most tortured men on the planet." He began: "Yesterday morning, without asking our permission, Arturo died. He never left us before, nor could he go. This is the first time... Uruguay, such a small country, has many records. He who we bury today is one of mem. Only known case in which the commanders of an entire Infantry Battalion, torturing, recognized: he beat us. Prisoners ourselves, one day we found him in the overflowing dungeons of the Florida Battalion. His head was destroyed, his face, unrecognizable. His nose had recendy been sewn back together after they had split it open from bridge to nostrils. So he could breathe and recuperate, they had him lying down with his feet elevated. There was a corpulent private from the Interior who gave Arturo mate and fed him hand-to-mouth delicately, like a young girl. "I never saw so many people hit a Christian so much," he said. "And I've never seen such a courageous man." But the worst of it was when, looking for information, they took him back to the torture room, and they offered, so as not to continue massacring such massacred flesh, that once and for all he just tell them what, for them, and compared to what they'd been looking for before, was a trifle. Arturo, almost dead, proposed a deal: that they torture him again, but this time, if he lost, he'd talk; and if they lost because he didn't talk, they'd buy him, from their own pockets, and from the officials' cantina, a double brandy. |