Life During Wartime (23 page)

‘Keep close,’ Alvina said as they were herded through the gate, and Mingolla caught up her hand. The gate grated shut behind them, stranding them in sultry heat and dimness, and their three guards disappeared into a door set into a side wall. Before them was another gate perforated with slits from which issued the noise and the smell and an orange glow: Mingolla felt as if he had been swallowed by a beast with metal jaws and fire in its guts. With a screech, the interior gate was hoisted, and they walked rapidly into the shadows on the right. They fetched up against a rough stone surface, and Alvina whispered, ‘Leon?’

‘Who’s with you?’ came a raspy voice.

‘My cousin … he’s all right.’

‘Charmed,’ said the voice.

Mingolla acknowledged the greeting, but was mesmerized by the patterns of smoke and flame and shadow within the Barrio, a constant shifting of darks and lights so allied with fluctuations in the noise that it was several seconds before he could assemble a coherent image of the place. A forest of blackened beams supported the roof, lending perspective to what had at first seemed an infinite depth, and among the beams stood all manner of shelters: lean-tos, tents, huts, piles of brick hollowed by caves. The walls were the walls of small stucco houses with shuttered windows; in other parts of the Barrio, according to Mingolla’s plans, were labyrinths of such houses, remnants of the town that had once occupied the land. Fires bloomed everywhere. Along the walls, in grills and oil drums. And the resultant light was a smoky orange gloom through which packs of prisoners shuffled, many with knives in hand.

‘Bitch of a hometown, huh?’ said Leon, emerging from the
shadows. A middle-aged Indian almost as short as Alvina, with a seamed face and sunken cheeks and black bowl-cut hair. Despite the heat, his shoulders were draped in a blanket.

‘This is the friend I told you about,’ Alvina said. ‘You can trust him to help you.’

‘Don’t volunteer me for free.’ Leon grinned, revealing seven or eight rotting teeth tipped at rustic angles like gravestones.

‘You’ll be paid,’ said Mingolla.

Leon’s face hardened in reaction to Mingolla’s curtness. ‘What do you need?’ And when Mingolla gave him de Zedeguí’s photograph, he said, ‘I’ll find him … we’ll talk in the morning.’ He drew a knife from beneath his blanket. ‘You have a weapon, man?’

Mingolla unsheathed his own knife.

‘Then let’s go,’ said Leon.

During that walk across the Barrio, through zones of flame, patches of sticky-looking darkness, and layers of intolerable stench, Mingolla saw many memorable things, many things that beggared explanation; yet he asked no explanation, for though he grew sick at heart from seeing, he realized that the Barrio was its own explanation, a world with its own rules of right action and process of good and evil. The Barrio seemed to be displaying itself for him, offering him a sampling of its treasures. As he turned his head a frayed curtain would be drawn back from a lean-to, or a group of people gathered around an oil drum, silhouetted like ragged crows, would step aside, opening avenues of sight down which his eyes would travel toward some horrible or pitiful or – infrequently – beautiful sight or event. He saw gang rapes and beatings, a spectrum of the crippled and the diseased. He saw a man whose hand had been replaced by a wooden stump in which a fork was embedded, and another man bearing a tray of mouse carcasses like tiny bloody candies. He saw two matronly women painting a design of crescents on an infant, and beyond them, a young woman crucified to a beam, her waxy breasts painted with this same design. Once a section of the roof was lifted, a noose dropped over the head of a sleeping man, and he was hauled up kicking and spasming by a handful of guards; and farther on,
another section was lifted, and a barrel of water was poured onto some children who laughed and licked the droplets from one anothers’ skin. And the windowless one-room house shared by Alvina and her father provided a further instance of the Barrio’s process. Chained to its door was a boy of about twelve armed with a machete; he appeared content to be chained and held out the lock to Leon, who opened it and gave him a mango. Then Leon bade them good night, reminding Mingolla of their meeting the next morning.

Inside, the walls were pale blue, flaking, inscribed with a decade of graffiti; the room was lit by thin candles and dominated by two mattresses, on one of which lay Hermeto Guzman: an ancient white-haired man with skin the reddish dark of raw iron, his bony frame scarcely making an impression on the sheet that was tucked around him. The smell of feces was strong, and Alvina spent the better part of an hour cleaning the old man, while Mingolla sat on the other mattress, leafing through a pile of paperback romance novels. Alvina didn’t bother to perform introductions, and it was unclear whether the old man had seen Mingolla; but as she tipped up his head, helping him drink from a bottle of mineral water, he stared at Mingolla with eyes that were dark yet touched with light, stoic and alive. They seemed to be drinking him in with the same avidity as that with which he gulped down the water. The eyes made Mingolla feel young and unknowing, and he thought the old man’s frail whisper must be commenting upon him.

‘What’s he saying?’ he asked Alvina.

‘He says the water tastes good … reminds him of a time back in the old days.’

‘Right after we killed that bastard Arenas.’ Hermeto struggled up, fell back. ‘Remember, Alvina?’

She soothed him, cautioned him to be quiet.

‘She doesn’t like me talking about the old days,’ Hermeto said.

‘What’s there to talk about?’ she said roughly.

‘The struggle,’ said Hermeto. ‘The struggle was …’

‘The struggle!’ Alvina pretended to spit. ‘All we did was die.’

Mingolla felt sad for the old man. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘You …’

‘No, she’s right. We achieved nothing.’ Hermeto’s voice rose in
pitch at the end, making the sentence sound like a question, as if he couldn’t believe it himself. ‘We thought we were fighting men, and because we killed so many, we thought we were winning. But we weren’t fighting men. We were fighting tides … tides caused by two giants splashing the water thousands of miles away. We didn’t have a chance.’

‘We didn’t have a choice, either.’ Alvina opened a tin box, took out bread and cheese. ‘They were killing us.’

The old man’s voice became inaudible even to Alvina, and she asked him to repeat what he had said.

‘My brother’ – he made the sign of the cross – ‘may God deliver him.’

Alvina stroked his hair.

He asked for more water, gulped it down. ‘But don’t you remember that time, Alvina? Up in the Cuchumatanes?’

‘Yes, I remember,’ she said wearily.

‘They had us trapped in the high passes,’ he said to Mingolla. ‘We didn’t have water, hardly any food. We could see the river down below, but we couldn’t get to it. The sky was filled with the hum of helicopters. We were so thirsty, we ate the flowers of shrub palms, and everybody got cramps. Once we found a place where animals drank, a little pond filled with scum. Finally the helicopters left, and we staggered down to the river. It was such a strange day … thunder and mist. We looked like skeletons, but whenever the sun touched us we glowed like angels, our flesh almost transparent. Like angels throwing themselves into a river.’

‘You make it sound beautiful,’ said Alvina disparagingly.

‘It was beautiful,’ said the old man.

She began feeding him crumbs of bread and cheese. Mingolla was glad for the interruption, because the old man’s description had been hard for him to bear. He settled back against the wall, listening to the noise from outside, thinking about the struggle, the Army of the Poor; to banish thought he opened the packet of frost and snorted a quantity. He loaded a smaller packet with a supply for Leon, then lay down and closed his eyes. Through his lids the candle flames acquired a dim red value, and the bloodiness of the color started him thinking about Hermeto and Alvina. He realized that if he were to relax his guard, he would begin to
sympathize with them, and his sympathy would be as ingenuous and ill-informed as his lack of concern. He had no way of understanding what it would be like to starve in the hills. The hardships he had endured seemed by comparison a privileged form of agony, and just knowing that made him want to pay some penance.

The candles were snuffed out, and Alvina lay down beside him. He edged away, afraid of contact, afraid she might contaminate him with principle and lead him down a risky path. She smelted of earth, of musky heat, and those smells and the action of the drug inflamed his desire. And as if she sensed this, she said, ‘If you want me again, you have to pay.’

He couldn’t frame a reply that would convey his mood, but at last he said, ‘I can get you out of here.’

‘No, you can’t.’

‘But I can.’ He propped himself on an elbow, trying to see her in the dark. ‘I …’

‘The government has my sister and her children. If we were to escape, they’d die.’

‘They could be located, they—’

‘Stop it,’ she said.

They lay in silence, and the screams and gabble of the Barrio seemed to add a pressure to the darkness, squeezing black air from his lungs.

‘I don’t understand,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘You … I don’t know you well, and I don’t like you very much, yet I trust you.’

‘I’m sorry you don’t like me.’

‘Don’t feel put upon,’ she said. ‘I don’t like most people.’

Implicit in her statement, Mingolla thought, was a studied rejection of life, and he pictured how she must have been back in the days when politics was in the hills, when everything seemed possible: an ordinarily pretty Indian girl imbued with extraordinary zeal and passion. He wished he could help her, do something for her, and remembered the stack of romance novels.

‘Do you like making love?’ he asked. ‘I don’t mean do you like … your work, but would you like it with someone you cared about?’

‘Go to hell,’ she said.

‘I’m serious.’

‘So am I.’

‘I could make you like it.’

She laughed. ‘I’ve heard that before.’

‘No, really. Suppose I could hypnotize you, make you feel passion? Would you want me to do that?’

The mattress rustled as she turned to face him, and he could feel her eyes searching him out. ‘Ten lempira,’ she said. ‘And you can make me crow like a rooster.’

‘That’s not what I’m talking about.’

She reached down, fondled his genitals. ‘Come on, man,’ she said bitterly. ‘Ten lempira. You’ll forget all about the other girls.’

Humiliated, he pushed her hand away.

‘No?’ she said. ‘Well, maybe when you’re feeling better.’

He was tempted to coerce her pleasure, but couldn’t bring himself to do it, unable to shake the conviction that she was his superior.

‘I don’t understand,’ said Alvina after a while. ‘I just can’t figure anything out anymore.’

Morning in the Barrio was different from night only in that when sections of the roof were lifted, chutes of gray light spilled in, and people stood beneath the open sky, risking mortal harm for a glimpse of freedom; otherwise the same smoky orange gloom prevailed among the black beams and fires. The center of the Barrio, where Leon and Mingolla sat in a shadowed niche, featured a row of stucco houses strung out across the width of the prison; and in one of them, a house with a white wall and black shutters, and an oil drum fire burning at its corner, lived Opolonio de Zedeguí. ‘See those four guys out front?’ said Leon, inserting the tip of his knife into his packet of frost. ‘They’re always there. His bodyguards. You’ll have to do something to get rid of them. A diversion, maybe.’ He inhaled from the knife blade. His black eyes widened, his cheeks hollowed. ‘
Chingaste!
This is good stuff!’

The four men ranged in front of de Zedeguí’s house were young and well muscled, and Mingolla could tell from their slack
attitudes that they were under psychic control. De Zedeguí was being terribly incautious: these men might well have been the signal that had alerted American agents to his presence.

‘If you’ve got more of this stuff, I know some guys who can help,’ said Leon.

‘We’ll talk about it later.’ Mingolla did a bladeful of frost and looked around. He was beginning to get used to the noise and the smell, and he wondered if the place was growing on him. He chuckled, and Leon asked what was funny. ‘Nothing,’ said Mingolla.

Leon laughed, too, as if ‘nothing’ were a hilarious concept. Sharp lines spread from the comers of his eyes, making his reddish brown skin look papery. ‘So,’ he said after a silence, ‘you’re her cousin, eh? Strange she never mentioned you. She talks about family all the time.’

‘She didn’t know me,’ said Mingolla. ‘Different branch of the family.’

‘Ah,’ said Leon. ‘That explains it.’

Mingolla had more of the drug. It was doing nice things to his head, but was tearing up his nose, and he thought he should start taking it under his tongue. Or stop taking it altogether. But he had become so used to being drugged, the indulgence seemed natural.

‘I thought all her people lived around Coban,’ said Leon.

‘Guess not.’

‘Y’know,’ said Leon, ‘it’s crazy you coming here just to kill this guy. In here, he’s dead already.’