The Tattooed Soldier (18 page)

She decided to like being a wife. She would settle into this role. There was time to read, and as soon as the baby was born she would start to explore San Cristóbal.

This was what it meant to be a woman. You faced the difficulties, accepted them, and then adjusted. She would have new dreams, new plans. Perhaps they could move to Mexico. Save enough money to move to Mexico or the United States. A place where they could be safe and their daughter, or son, could be educated. A place where you could speak your mind and there were no soldiers on the street.

I will wait and see what I do next, little sister, after the child is born. One thing is certain: I will not be one of these women who stays at home all day with the baby. I am determined to enter the world.

*   *   *

Eight months pregnant, she was a slave to the calendar. The event would happen very soon, but not soon enough for Elena. Headaches one day, backaches the next, dizziness in between.

She was sitting in her chair by the open window with the sun at her back. A gentle draft blew through the dark rooms of her house, a cool antidote to the oppressive midday heat. There was nothing to do but wait and follow the signs from her body, the kicking inside her.

With a book in her lap she slipped into sleep. She dreamed that she was reading
El Gráfico
, leafing through it in search of the names of her friends and the poets Antonio knew. But she found only blank pages. Someone had stolen all the photographs and articles from the newspaper. She ran out of the house in her bare feet, stubbing her toes on the cobblestones, looking for Antonio because she was scared and needed to tell someone all the articles were missing.

A woman cried out in the distance. Elena sat up, startled. Was the cry part of her dream? The book that had been in her lap was on the floor, the bookmark still in place. Now, with her eyes open, she heard the cry again. With some difficulty Elena rose from her chair and moved to the window.

There was another funeral procession, this one with just three people. At the front was a man in a straw hat and soiled work pants, a machete tied around his waist. He was carrying a small casket on his shoulder. Behind him came a woman and a little boy. The woman had a tissue to her face and a shawl covering her head. It was her crying that had jolted Elena awake. The man's cheek rubbed against the rough, unpainted surface of the tiny pine box, just big enough to hold a newborn child. The woman and her son held hands, eyes fixed to the cobblestone street, but the father showed the town and its inhabitants a proud Mayan stare. Cold anger holding off grief. Elena caught his glance, dark brown eyes, penetrating and embittered. He looked straight at her as he walked by with the casket on his shoulder.

This man meant to tell her something with his eyes, some truth, some message, words transmitted in silence.

Why is he looking at me with such hatred? He doesn't know me.
The pine box floated past.

And then the message of his eyes seemed painfully clear.
My child has died. Yours will live.

She stepped away from the window and reached for her belly, surprised that this man, the father of the dead child, had seen and sensed her eight-month roundness. She saw herself as she must look to him: a bourgeois housewife, clean and well fed, a woman who would deliver her baby in an antiseptic hospital far from the slum dwellers and their virulent shacks.

“It's not my fault,” she whispered to herself.

In less than a minute the small funeral procession disappeared through the plaza to a side street that led to the old whitewashed church and cemetery on the other side of town. Short of breath, Elena sat down on the edge of her bed.

After her baby was born, she would go to this place where the children were dying, Colonia La Joya. She had been in San Cristóbal for eight months and had yet to see this slum on the outskirts of town. She had been locked up in this house too long, afraid of her own shadow. As soon as her baby was born and she was strong enough, she would visit this place, this
limonada.

She wanted to see its streets and hovels, its killing air, with her own eyes.

 

9.
MICROBES

 

At the point where the cobblestones ended and the dirt streets began, Elena paused. She was headed for the poorest corner of this poor town, a place “decent people” talked about with bated breath, warning her about muggers and rapists and child pickpockets who would free her of her last centavo. People in Guatemala City spoke the same way about the neighborhood where she was born and raised. Elena pressed ahead. She had put off this day for too long. Carlos was six months old now, at home with Marisol while Elena undertook her exploratory expedition to Colonia La Joya, the place where so many babies were dying. La Joya, it was called, absurdly. The Jewel. La Joya would bother her until she finally saw it.

Following the water-carved grooves that coiled through the dirt, Elena walked down an unpaved street that was littered with boulders. Goats and starving dogs ambled by, little more than walking rib cages. Burning trash stacked into small pyramids sent a sticky, sweet smoke into the air. The houses here were made of adobe bricks plastered over and painted white, yellow, and sky blue, the earthen flesh underneath showing where the plaster had cracked and flaked away. A woman sat in the doorway of one of the houses, her head snapping back gently as a young girl ran a brush through her hair in long, luxuriant strokes.

At the bottom of the hill, where the street ended, Elena reached a narrow path that led into a thicket of waist-high brush. Following the directions Marisol had reluctantly given her, she took the path and found herself walking into a ravine above a thin, rocky river, not much more than a stream. At a great distance she saw two girls standing knee-deep in the river, filling plastic basins. They raised the containers to their heads to carry them in the Mayan style, water splashing over the edges and soaking their necks and backs.
I must be close.
An Indian woman passed in the opposite direction, carrying an empty basket against her side, not bothering to look up. Branches and prickly leaves brushed against Elena's pants. She congratulated herself for deciding to wear tennis shoes instead of sandals.

The brush grew higher, the path narrower. For a moment she wavered again, thinking she might be lost. She didn't see any houses or shacks. What sort of people could live on the steep slopes of this ravine, among all these thorns and boulders? Then the path turned, climbing around a jutting shoulder in the side of the ravine. Elena stopped. A city of corrugated tin, plastic, and paper appeared before her, a jumble of square shacks attached somehow to a lush, verdant slope, patchwork structures that seemed about to slide down the hill like rickety sleds. Here and there, a wall of cinderblock. Chicken coops, laundry lines, pigs wading in the river. A rooster's cry. She started to count the shacks but lost track at fifty. The settlement rose in layers, terraces carved into the hillside. Perhaps five hundred, one thousand people lived here.

Elena took a deep breath.

*   *   *

He could not understand this sudden voyeuristic impulse that took the mother of an infant son searching for slums in the ravine.

“You're going to get hurt,” Antonio said. “Think about it, a woman alone in the
barranco.
Anything could happen.”

“It's not as dangerous as you think.”

“You're acting very strange, going off alone like that.”

Antonio was slumped in a reupholstered lounge chair, one of three pieces of furniture in what they called their living room. He frowned at her angrily, an expression that had become familiar lately: this was not the Antonio she married, the bookish man of tender smiles.

“I'm tired of being locked up,” Elena said. “I'm tired of being afraid.”

“You're not happy here? You're not happy with me?”

She was surprised by his infantile tone, the smallness of him suddenly.

“No,
amor
, it's not that.”

“Then why do you go wandering? I have to hear about it from the people at work. People talk, Elena. It's a small town, and you're making a spectacle of yourself. The city lady who likes to walk in the ravine.”

They had been going around in circles like this every day, arguing about any subject at hand. Today, her walks to La Joya. Yesterday, the maid, Carlos, the neighbors, the books she was reading. Anything she did might irritate him. Elena told herself that they were both exhausted, drained by too many sleepless nights and the ritual screams of a baby who still demanded to be fed at three in the morning after six months.

Every afternoon Antonio came home from work and sulked about his job, about San Cristóbal and the hopelessness of their situation. “We're stuck here. We're stuck in this backwater for God knows how long. I hate this. I don't deserve this.”

No amount of kisses and hugs could tease back his smile. It was as if he were the one suffering from postpartum depression. “It is not uncommon,” one of her pregnancy books said, “for the new mother to experience an inexplicable sadness. These feelings might make it difficult for the new mother to eat, sleep, make love, or work.” A perfect description of her husband's current condition.

But she had noticed this about him before, detecting the truth even as she denied it to herself. When situations became tense, when events turned difficult, he tended to slip into this
melancolía.
It had happened when she first told him, fifteen months ago, that she was pregnant, and when they had to break the news to his mother. A fog descended over him. She had entered into this marriage imagining her husband would be a fortress of intelligence, stone walls of compassion and courage. But it turned out there were flaws in his construction; he was rigged together, like those temporary bridges on the bombed-out roads.

That night Elena lay awake beside Antonio and listened to the clock, waiting for the baby's screams to begin in the next room. Tossing and turning. Tick. Tick. Tick. Five hours of this. Time was stillness, a moonless night, the bedroom walls disappearing into infinite darkness.

“
Amor
, are you awake?” Elena asked.

Antonio moaned in assent, rolling over and setting off a chorus of creaking bed springs.

“I have an idea.” It was something she had been nurturing for weeks, waiting for the appropriate moment to share it with him. “Maybe we could go to Los Angeles. I have a cousin who lives there. We could stay with her until we got settled. We could go to California.”

Antonio did not answer. The ticking of the clock filled the room. It was past three and the baby hadn't started crying yet.

“With what?” he said finally. “It takes a lot of money to get that far.”

“I think we've saved enough. Enough to get there, at least, and then you could get a job.”

“A job doing what?”

“Anything. I could work too.”

Another pause. He was mulling it over.

“I won't cross like an illegal and then go to work washing dishes,” he said sourly. “And I won't have my wife clean houses. That's what our people do when they go over there. Even educated people. They wash dishes. They take care of other people's babies. It's not dignified.”

Elena said nothing more. It was clear they would not be leaving San Cristóbal anytime soon. She had to resign herself to that. Her husband wasn't up to it, not now, maybe not for a while. There was no use arguing with a stone. She drifted off to sleep. For once the baby was quiet all night.

When Antonio came home the next day, he raised little Carlos in the air, his torments dissolving in the light of his infant son's smile. These first moments with Carlos were always his best, before the bitterness settled in. He smiled in imitation of the baby, whose toothless mouth opened in a happy circle while he beat the air with his fists like a tiny drummer.

Antonio was a very good father. A better father than she was a mother, Elena thought. He tickled his son and spun him around and played airplane, producing a buzzing sound with his lips that made the baby cackle. On weekends he spent hours on a blanket spread out in the courtyard, trying to interest Carlitos in blocks, balls, plastic baby books.

When Antonio put the baby down, Elena reached up to kiss her husband. A peace offering, like a hand stretched out across the table. He wrapped his arms around her, and they held each other in a long embrace, warm and forgiving. He needed her. She would not go back to La Joya. What was she looking for anyway? What could she hope to accomplish? Elena had removed herself from political concerns for more than a year now. Unopened newspapers from the capital no longer filled her living room because she no longer bothered to buy them. In the stillness of her home she could only imagine the hum and tumult of dissent, the masses on the streets, the screaming letters of their banners and signs. She was the mother of a small baby now, wedded to this house and its window and the rocking chair where she sat for hours to read and sleep.

*   *   *

For months it was her daily recreation, putting the baby in his stroller for the three-block walk to the Parque Central, where she sat on one of the cast-iron benches by the old kiosk and read a few pages from her current book while Carlitos slept in his blue jumpsuit pajamas, sheltered from the sun by the little awning on the stroller. Later he began to crawl on the patches of grass and then on the steps of the kiosk, a brick octagon with a high, pitched roof of red tile, built, she imagined, for brass bands and marimbas. Once Carlitos had mastered the art of walking, she stopped bringing her book along.

Elena sat on the bench and endured the unfailing lascivious stares of the shoeshine men and newspaper vendors who made the park their home. Then she walked back. Sometimes she did this twice a day, but rarely more, since each trip meant risking an encounter with Mrs. Gómez, who ran across the street to greet her whenever she passed by.