Cuantas veces había sido torturado y
cuantas había confesado. Después de los golpes los hombres de blanco
inspeccionaban el cuerpo y procedían de manera profesional y fría. De Nineteen Eighty-Four, de
George Orwell…
… He was lying on something that felt like a camp
bed, except that it was higher off the ground and that he was fixed down in
some way so that he could not move. Light that seemed stronger than usual was
falling on his face. O'Brien was standing at his side, looking down at him
intently. At the other side of him stood a man in a white coat, holding a
hypodermic syringe.
Even after his eyes were open he took in his
surroundings only gradually. He had the impression of swimming up into this
room from some quite different world, a sort of underwater world far beneath
it. How long he had been down there he did not know. Since the moment when they
arrested him he had not seen darkness or daylight. Besides, his memories were
not continuous. There had been times when consciousness, even the sort of consciousness
that one has in sleep, had stopped dead and started again after a blank interval. But whether the intervals
were of days or weeks or only seconds, there was no way of knowing.
With that first blow on the elbow the nightmare had
started. Later he was to realize that all that then happened was merely a
preliminary, a routine interrogation to which nearly all prisoners were
subjected. There was a long range of crimes--espionage, sabotage, and the
like--to which everyone had to confess as a matter of course. The confession
was a formality, though the torture was real. How many times he had been
beaten, how long the beatings had continued, he could not remember. Always
there were five or six men in black uniforms at him simultaneously.
Sometimes
it was fists, sometimes it was truncheons,
sometimes it was steel rods, sometimes it was boots. There were times when he
rolled about the floor, as shameless as an animal, writhing his body this way and that in an endless, hopeless effort
to dodge the kicks, and simply
inviting more and yet more kicks, in his ribs, in his belly, on his elbows, on
his shins, in his groin, in his testicles, on the bone at the base of his
spine. There were times when it went on and on until the cruel, wicked,
unforgivable thing seemed to him not that the guards continued to beat him but
that he could not force himself into losing consciousness. There were times
when his nerve so forsook him that
he began shouting for mercy even before the beating began, when the mere sight
of a fist drawn back for a blow was enough to make him pour forth a confession
of real and imaginary crimes. There were other times when he started out with
the resolve of confessing nothing, when every word had to be forced out of him
between gasps of pain, and there were times when he feebly tried to compromise,
when he said to himself: 'I will confess, but not yet. I must hold out till the pain becomes unbearable. Three more kicks, two more
kicks, and then I will tell them what they want.' Sometimes he was beaten till
he could hardly stand, then flung
like a sack of potatoes on to the stone floor of a cell, left to recuperate for
a few hours, and then taken out and beaten again.
Big Brother is watching you |
There were also longer periods of recovery. He
remembered them dimly, because they were spent chiefly in sleep or stupor. He
remembered a cell with a plank bed, a sort of shelf sticking out from the wall,
and a tin wash-basin, and meals of hot soup and bread and sometimes coffee. He remembered
a surly barber arriving to scrape
his chin and crop his hair, and businesslike, unsympathetic men in white coats
feeling his pulse, tapping his reflexes, turning up his eyelids,
running harsh fingers over him in search for broken bones, and shooting needles
into his arm to make him sleep… (Part
3, chapter 2, Nineteen Eighty-Four, from
George Orwell)
Vocabulario
Truncheons: cachiporras
Writhing:
retorciendo
Dodge:
esquivar
Forsook:
dejó
Flung:
arrojado
Surly:
malhumorado
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