The guerrilla hideout. West, handcuffed, alone, reading a Portuguese edition of The Godfather. Carlos enters, beaming, carrying two bowls of soup and some bread.
Carlos Good evening.
West Hello. You’re looking very cheerful.
Carlos Yes, I’ve had a good day, very successful operation.
West Really?
Carlos Yes, I rang the police this morning and told them the American Embassy was being attacked by a gang of thugs disguised as an army unit and then I rang army headquarters and told them the American Embassy was being attacked by a gang of thugs in police uniform. Then I went and watched from a safe distance. Most satisfactory.
West You mean it worked?
Carlos Three dead, a dozen or so wounded and a certain amount of damage to property.
Silence.
West Well, how nice for you.
Carlos Yes, it was.
West Why do you people always blame the Americans for everything?
Carlos You know as well as I do the Americans were behind the coup in 1964, and they were behind it because their profits were being threatened, and now they bribe the ruling classes to make sure their profits aren’t threatened again. The American public knows their government gives aid to underdeveloped countries, unless they’re communist of course, in which case they prefer to ship over a few tons of napalm, but what they don’t know is that nearly all the aid has strings attached, and what they also don’t know is that twice as much money comes out in profit as goes in in aid. Why do you think the corporations make two, three, sometimes ten times as much profit in Latin America as they do in their home markets? You may think all’s fair in love and commerce, but some of us take it personally when our children starve to death so that somebody in Detroit or Pittsburgh can buy themselves a third car.
West That’s a ludicrously oversimplified way of putting it.
Carlos Well, as it so happens, it’s a ludicrously oversimplified process, starving. You don’t get enough food to eat and, by an absurdly oversimplified foible of nature, it makes you die. And it can be very aggravating when you think to yourself that the excess profits which ought to have been ploughed back into your country so you might have stood a chance of getting a bite to eat have gone towards installing a telex in the interests of business efficiency. It can be a terrible setback to your notions of international brotherhood.
West Well, these things develop slowly …
Carlos We haven’t got time for slowly. We need fast.
West But a lot of these things just can’t be done fast.
Carlos They can’t be done at all, as long as the Americans have their teeth in our neck. Don’t think I’m so stupid as to be against them just because they’re Americans. If it wasn’t them, it’d be someone else. It’s just that they’re the most powerful at the moment. Before them it was you.
West Me?
Carlos You. England. You bled us empty all through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Or rather Portugal bled us and you bled Portugal.
West I thought Portugal was supposed to be our oldest ally.
Carlos Of course. If I had you round the throat squeezing you dry for hundreds of years, you’d be my oldest ally.
West Well, it’s hardly my fault.
Carlos That’s it. Nothing’s ever anyone’s fault. Millions of dollars flow out of the country, quite spontaneously, to the amazement of all. By some freak statistical whim, 3 per cent of the population of an underdeveloped country find themselves controlling most of the wealth and look on bewildered as it slips from their nerveless fingers and fortuitously lands in a numbered Swiss bank account. How can it be anyone’s fault?
West None of it ever lands in my numbered Swiss bank account.
Carlos Think what you’re missing, you silly man. My father has three.
West That’s very interesting.
Carlos For you, maybe. Not for me. I don’t get on very cordially with my father, he being well to the right of Caligula. Apart from counting his money, he has only two enthusiasms: Vasco da Gama football club and the Death Squad.
West What does he think about you?
Carlos He thinks I see everything exactly the way he does.
Silence.
West Somebody I know was killed by the Death Squad not so long ago.
Carlos Well well.
West So the story goes, anyway. He wasn’t anyone we knew very well, a friend of a friend in England, we met him two or three times. He was a homosexual, so of course when the bank posted him to Rio, he thought it was his birthday. They just broke in one night, took him to some obscure favela and shot him. Because he was homosexual, we were told.
Carlos Oh, yes, the Death Squad disapproves of immorality.
West Well, in my opinion, their puritan zeal was rather undermined by the fact that they sexually assaulted him before they killed him.
Carlos It’s a very tragic tale.
West Yes, I think it is quite.
Carlos Well, after all the things that have been done to friends of mine in the last year or two, you must forgive me if I’m not moved to tears by some garbled story about some foreign faggot.
West Oh.
Carlos Listen, I won’t go into details about it … yes, I will, I will go into details about it, I will, I’ll tell you what happened to a friend of mine, a girl of seventeen called Maria, a philosophy student, who had only the very remotest connection with us. She was a very quiet, thoughtful girl and she lived with her grandmother in Urea. Last September, they arrived in the middle of the night, and since it was a political offence she was suspected of, they naturally started off by raping her, right there in front of the old woman. Then they hauled her off for a few days on the Ilha das Flores and gave her all the usual treatment, more rape, electric shock, hanging her upside-down on the parrot perch and beating her, all that. She hasn’t recovered from it and I don’t think she ever will. She’s still under treatment. She sent a message to us saying she never wanted to see any of us ever again. Mind you, it wouldn’t do us much good if we did go to see her, because they gave her another piece of standard treatment, humorously referred to as the telephone, which consists of punching the ears of the victims as they hang upside-down. They broke her eardrums. She’s completely deaf.
West Horrible.
Carlos You see, countries like ours operate their own version of the Welfare State. Instead of wasting a lot of money trying to reform and rehabilitate psychopaths, sex maniacs, thugs and sadists, we give them a uniform and a good salary and a title like the Death Squad, or the C.C.C., or the Metros, or the C.R.S. and let them use their skills for society’s benefit. (He sees West’s dubious expression.) Don’t think there aren’t hundreds of people in every country who’d jump at the chance to belong to that kind of organization, who’d love to spend an evening throwing beggars in the river or ramming a broken-off bottleneck up any pretty middle-class girl with a few vague ideals about improving the lot of the workers. And don’t think there aren’t thousands of people in every country who’d sleep more comfortably in their beds if they knew that kind of thing was going on. And the unity those people have, the unity of hatred, the wonderfully simple level of their ideas! Whereas we, my God, we poor old nit-picking intellectuals, I sometimes think we spend all our strengths and all our energy bickering over points of doctrine like a gaggle of old nuns discussing the Immaculate Conception in a brothel.
West I don’t see how you can hope to achieve anything.
Carlos We will, in the end.
West You’d need a miracle.
Carlos Anything can happen. Suppose there was a nuclear war between America and Russia. I don’t expect you know this, but by some quirk of the trade winds or whatever, Brazil would suffer less fall-out than any other country in the world. Then we might be able to make some progress, like we did in the First World War when the Imperialists got off our backs, we might even turn into that superpower the generals keep prattling about. You see, we always look on the bright side. We’re not like Lady Britannia, sinking sedately beneath the waves and stolidly replacing one reactionary government with another even more reactionary government; our country is so vast that the most terrible things can happen without anyone even noticing – but it’s also young enough to change in the most radical and unexpected ways.
Silence.
West I remember being in a little town on the Araguaia, sitting by the river, waiting for a boat which was needless to say several hours late. I was watching the children, who were going up and down the river-bank in groups of two or three, very active. I couldn’t see what they were up to at first, but after a time I realized they were hunting out anything that was alive down by the river, small animals, reptiles, insects, anything they could find, and torturing it to death. Naturally I, sitting there like an idiot in my tropical ducks, was something of a centre of attraction for them, and they kept bringing me little offerings, like a worm sliced into six wriggling pieces or quite a large lizard with all its legs pulled off. They went on for hours, dozens of them, that’s all they were doing.
Carlos Well, what else is there for them to do, comrade?
Blackout.