Body of Truth (18 page)

“These are very bad things,” Grajeda said. “These deaths.”

Haydon waited.

“Here in Guatemala the cruelty is unimaginable,” Grajeda mused. “They’re trained, you know, these soldiers, to be inhuman. They do whatever they are told. So many of them are only ignorant kids, intimidated and brutalized. Indian kids the army has kidnapped off the streets of the little towns and villages all over this country. And then there are the sadists who get into this business. Every death is a message, a letter to the living. People are not just ‘killed’ by the death squads, by the G-2, by the DIG. Men are not just disemboweled, their genitalia are cut off and stuffed into their mouths. Women are not just raped, their uteruses are ripped out of their bodies and stretched over their faces. Children are not just killed, they are dragged over barbed wire until the flesh falls from their bones while their parents are forced to watch. Death is not ‘just death’ in my sad, unfortunate country.”

For a moment his eyes seemed to lose contact, and Haydon believed that the young doctor’s thoughts were far away from either of them.

“She didn’t die quickly,” Grajeda said finally. “That’s all that really matters.”

Neither of them spoke for a moment, and the sounds and the smells of the shanties and their attendant miseries accompanied them in their silence.

“Did you know that there’s a report at the Gabinete de Identificación that says that you brought her to Guatemala City?” Haydon asked.

Grajeda sat back in his chair again and raised his eyebrows as though he were offering a mystery. “Let me tell you how it is in Guatemala,” he said, “the true importance of the relationship between integrity and vocabulary. Words are nothing here…nothing…less than nothing. Here lying is pervasive; we discount language altogether. Because there are so many lies, because words are so cheap, they are considered little more than static in a system that has lost respect for language. People are judged by what they do, not by what they say. Belief in the integrity of language does not figure into the equation of everyday life. The lie has attacked my people like a disease and is destroying them as surely as if it were a pestilence. Sadly, it means nothing what the police say or what their reports say. The men who are entrusted with keeping the peace in my poor country are murderers and liars. This is horrible for me to say, but it is the truth.”

“Then the last time you saw her was in the autopsy room?”

“The last time I saw her,” Grajeda said kindly, “those four men were putting her into a plastic body bag and hauling her out to one of their vans with black windows, and the ice they had thrown in there with her was already melting and dripping out of the bag in little rosy driblets.”

It was a cruel image, all the more shocking because of the soft voice with which it was spoken. Grajeda seemed surprisingly free of bitterness. It seemed to Haydon that perhaps the only way the young doctor could hold himself together in the squalor of Mezquital, amid the plastic bags of children’s eyes, in the dirty autopsy rooms of the morgues, was to try to make some kind of philosophical peace with the easiness of human cruelty.

“How long have you been here?” Haydon asked, standing.

“The clinic?”

Haydon nodded.

“Three years,” Grajeda smiled. “An eternity.”

“How are you supported?”

At this question, the young doctor seemed to be uncomfortable. He stood too, facing Haydon across the desk. He seemed to be uncertain about his response for only a moment before he replied.

“I come from a very wealthy family, Mr. Haydon.” He tilted his head a little awkwardly; another apologetic smile. “They were proud to have a doctor. My grandfather was a doctor, my father did very well in…business. But…they were not pleased at this kind of practice. Unfortunately, by insisting on this I caused something of a family disturbance. Now I am something of a black sheep, I’m afraid…but they allow me a small stipend. I use it here, and twice a year I go to the United States to raise funds.”

Something caught his eye, and he looked past Haydon toward the door and stood up. “
Pase adelante
,” he said quickly.

Haydon turned and saw two soot-covered women in shabby Indian dress hovering outside the door, looking in with large skittish eyes. Their deeply lined faces had the blasted, greasy look of women who had trudged many kilometers along highways and roadsides and streets, grimacing against the hot, particulate thunder of diesel exhausts. They each had children, one with two, the other with three, each with one infant wrapped in a
rebozo
. Grajeda stepped around his desk and said something in his soft voice in an Indian dialect as he approached the doorway, trying to put the women at ease by seeming to speak of their children, three youngsters clinging to their mothers’ stained
cortes
, their matted hair standing in shocks as if startled by their condition. Flies drank at the corners of their eyes and sought shade around their runny nostrils. The women shied away like wild, harried creatures, and Grajeda squatted down in the thin shadow a few steps away from his doorway and talked to them, smiling in his way, seeming almost as shy as the women themselves, who, despite the heat, were bundled up in the heavy garments of their people.

Haydon stepped out of the door behind Grajeda, who had completely forgotten him, and walked away. He knew that the Indian women were watching him, wondering if his presence would in some way mean trouble for them. It was best to be gone. He waited until he was about to turn in to one of the paths that went down among the shanties again before he looked back. Grajeda had managed to get one of the women to let him look into her
rebozo
at her infant, his shoulders hunched into a tender approach as he rose slightly from his crouch and looked into the crusty bundle of rags.

CHAPTER 19

H
e made his way back through the shanties, down the slope to the railroad right-of-way, across the tracks, and up the trails that wound through the shanties on the other side. The heat was stifling, and the rancid odors of poverty weighted the air as the cicadas sang in the wilting weeds. By the time he topped the embankment where the wispy
pirul
tree marked the position of his car, the dust had caked his shoes and stuck to his pants legs in dry rivulets where he had sweated through the material.

His car was still there, but the boys he had paid to protect it were gone as were his hubcaps and a long chrome strip that ran down either side of the car. He checked his windshield wipers. They were gone too. And the hood ornament. Considering himself lucky, he dusted off his pants legs, unlocked the car, and got in. Rolling down the windows to let out the pent-up heat, he started the engine, turned the car around, and drove back toward the city.

If Grajeda could be believed about the two men in civilian clothes, Haydon was guessing they were DIC agents. The G-2 probably would not have come in the company of two National Police officers, rather, they would have come in the company of soldiers or soldiers poorly disguised as civilians—an incredibly stupid charade that happened far too often. On the other hand, things had changed so dramatically in the last twenty months, the military and National Police had become so closely intertwined that Haydon doubted if anyone really knew their jurisdictions anymore, or even cared. Each agency and the departments within these agencies were little fiefdoms. Intrigue was their single shared characteristic, and turf wars were constant. It was impossible to guess who was in ascendancy or descendancy until the signs of change were so clear that it was too late to do anything but stand back and watch the slaughters that accompanied each shift of power.

That was all the more reason for Haydon to get in touch with Efran Borrayo. It had been Haydon’s good fortune to have done Borrayo a big favor in return for his having helped in the apprehension of the run-amok Colombian. The favor turned out to have been a larger one than Haydon had in fact intended. He knew a Houston businessman who was opening a manufacturing plant in Guatemala City and recommended Efran Borrayo to him as someone who could set up an effective security operation for the company. Borrayo turned this one-shot assignment into a permanent second income, one that yielded much more than his captaincy in the DIT. This had continued for four years until the Houston businessman became involved in a political squabble with the government and closed his business. But Borrayo was eternally grateful to Haydon, and once when he had passed through Houston on his way to Virginia for a special antiterrorist course paid for by the State Department, he called a local liquor store and sent Haydon a case of Bordeaux. Even if Lena’s story was way too delicate for Borrayo to become involved in, Haydon could at least expect some first-rate advice. And if the security forces had dealt with Fossler, Borrayo was likely to know about it.

The real puzzle of Lena’s death, beyond the question of why she had been killed in the first place, was why she had found her way back to Guatemala City. Foreigners had disappeared before in the hinterlands of Guatemala, really disappeared. Why had the Indian women risked such a perilous journey, carrying a white woman’s body out of their refuge? Or could that account even be believed? Why had the military commissioner of Soloma not buried her in the local cemetery rather than tossing her on a vegetable truck to Huehuetenango? Why had the report that accompanied her body to Guatemala City said that Dr. Grajeda was bringing her? Why had the Gabinete de Identificación in Zona 6 written an addendum pointing out the discrepancy between how the body had arrived at their offices and how the report said it had arrived? And once they (whoever they were) had gotten Lena back to Guatemala City as they wished, why had they left her in obscurity, put away in the morgue as an XX? And who had told Fossler that Grajeda was a personal friend of Lena’s?

None of these questions seemed to issue from a common front. It was almost as if Lena’s death had involved so many different factions that it would be impossible to say that it had resulted from any singular intent. Haydon could not believe that she had—in whatever way—made herself so threatening or bothersome to such a wide variety of factions that her death would have been welcome to all.

He looked at his watch. It had taken him longer to go out to Mezquital and back than he had anticipated. It was almost twelve noon, an awkward time to call on Janet Pittner. He turned off Diagonal 12 and went to the Los Cebollines in Zona 9 not far from the Plazuela España. He ate quickly, washing the food down with a couple of Gallos.

While he ate, he watched an old man on the opposite side of the street carrying an oversized load of new, terra-cotta
parrillas
, huge disk-shaped cooking griddles. The old man had them strapped to his back with a cheap but stout grass rope and a leather strap called a
mecapal
that went around his forehead and was attached to either side of the bundle on his back. His load and his age were so great that he was making torturously slow progress along a bare dirt path under the eucalyptus trees. During the time it took Haydon to eat, the old man managed to travel only a block and a half, even using a staff, his head bent and neck buckled against the
mecapal
, his eyes always on the dust at his feet. Drenched in perspiration, he stopped frequently, once even holding onto the trunk of a eucalyptus and going down on one knee to relieve the strain on his neck. But after a while he rose with a painful force of will and continued on.

His was the story of Guatemala. All over the country Haydon and anyone who bothered to notice saw these small people under enormous burdens, each single effort a metaphor for the history of their people. It was this figure, the solitary Indian struggling under grim burdens, that should have been on every piece of currency in the country, rather than the beautiful, emerald-tailed quetzal. Like the quetzal, which could only live and sing in freedom, the carefree peace that the bird symbolized was almost extinct. But
sufrimiento
was everywhere. Ugliness survived where beauty perished. The fact was that the land of eternal spring had vanished, and the land of eternal suffering had taken its place.

He left the restaurant and drove to Zona 10, pulling into the gates of Janet’s drive shortly after one o’clock. Her gardener, another old man like the one Haydon had just seen, was cutting the grass beside the first courtyard with hand-held clippers, working on hands and knees, under a flamboyana. Haydon spoke to him as he entered, walked through the first courtyard, opened the wrought-iron gate and entered the breeze-way. He rang the doorbell, and one of Janet’s housemaids answered, recognized him from the night before, and let him into the
sala
. The room was cool and comfortable and was made to feel quite spacious by a pair of tall double doors that were thrown open to the well-kept courtyard and the shady veranda of the house that surrounded it. Haydon stepped out the doors where a slight, occasional breeze stirred the plants and wind chimes of brass butterflies. To his left, a little farther down the veranda, was a large jacaranda in which hung a dozen or so small wicker cages, each containing a confetti of tiny pastel parakeets whose reedy voices accompanied the brass chimes in an atmosphere of almost monastic peace.

Haydon walked over to the jacaranda to look at the birds and had not been at the cages a moment before he realized the tree was situated just outside what must have been Janet’s bath. The next window beyond that and at a right angle to it, was the wide arched window of Janet’s bedroom. Through the high open windows of the bath he could hear water splashing. This was not an unusual sound in Guatemala where the temperate weather made for casual living and windows that looked onto protected courtyards were most often screenless and open. Open courtyards, open doorways, open windows. Sounds carried, and odors and fragrances. Often one could see into houses, though not very well, for in Guatemala living in the shadows was an art form.

The water stopped in the shower, the high window of which was closest to him. Facing the cages, he adjusted his eyes to a different depth of focus and saw Janet come into the noontime shadows of her airy room, drying with a towel that she then tossed away. He saw her naked back and hips, the vague highlights of curved surfaces, glimpses made all the more erotic for their dusky inconclusiveness. A tall pedestal dressing mirror threw a glint of light, and he saw her move back and forth once or twice before he turned away from the cages and walked back to the open doors of the
sala
where he sat down on a leather-covered bench on the veranda.