The Tattooed Soldier (19 page)

“Elena, how are you? Did you have a nice walk? Oh, let me see the baby.”

The secret to dealing with Mrs. Gómez, Elena had learned, was to engage her in gossip about everyone else in town. Thus distracted, Mrs. Gómez began to forget about Elena's mysterious presence in San Cristóbal, instead spinning sordid narratives about a variety of town personalities. Her cast of sullied and tragic characters included old maids, corrupt public officials, unfaithful husbands, and victims of vehicular accidents. Her favorite topic, however, was the town priest, a Belgian named Van der Est.

“Have you ever noticed,” Mrs. Gómez asked in melodramatic tones one lazy afternoon, “how empty the church is? Even on Sunday?”

Elena had, in fact, noticed. “Why, yes. No one seems to go there,” she said, mildly intrigued.

“Well, it's not by accident. After all, this is a Catholic country. We're all God-fearing people, right? It's not natural for the church to be empty. That sadistic priest, he's the reason. Because of what he did to our sacred
Virgen
.”

It seemed that Father Van der Est had tangled with the parish Ladies' Committee, of which Mrs. Gómez was a member. The Ladies' Committee wanted to make improvements to the shrine of the Virgin Mary. The statue of the Virgin was more than a hundred years old, and it was turning black from the smoke of so many votive candles. Could the priest help them raise money to clean the statue? Much to their surprise, the Belgian responded with insults. He said he was sick and tired of all this adoration for the Virgin. He said they put the Virgin before the Holy Father. He said they were a women's cult and called them pagans.

“He threw the Virgin down the front steps!” Mrs. Gómez cried. “That's where we found her, at the foot of the stairs. All scratched but nothing broken, thanks be to God. It was a miracle, of course. She was completely unharmed.” Mrs. Gómez clasped her hands together piously, then crossed herself.

“He's an evil man, this priest. We've written to Guatemala City, to Rome. We've told them all about his transgressions. But nothing. What do they care in the capital about some little town? All they care is that this priest doesn't cause any trouble with politics. Not like the last priest we had, God rest his soul. He was a Communist, frankly. So the church gave us this Belgian. He's quiet. You know that saying: ‘In a closed mouth, no flies enter.' Well, that's all they care about. Keeping out the flies.”

Later that afternoon Elena saw the priest walking past her window, face to the cobblestones, lost in a daydream.

“
Buenos días, padre
,” she called, wishing almost immediately that she hadn't. A Sunday school reflex: you see a priest, you say hello.

He looked up at her with uncertain gray eyes, the corners of his mouth raised in something between a sneer and a smile, and walked on.

Elena brought Carlos's crib into her bedroom, as she sometimes did when she sat by the window passing the midday hours. She looked at her son, his sleep punctuated by jerky movements of his arms and feet. There was something hypnotic about watching him sleep, and she began to feel drowsy herself. Her mind drifted. Did babies dream? Were there enough clean diapers in the dresser? This would be Marisol's first task tomorrow. Suddenly a sound, faint and high-pitched, coming from outside. Elena turned an ear toward the shuttered window. She thought she heard the ringing of tiny bells. People brought instruments to the funeral processions, tambourines, a stick and a can to drum on, whatever they could find.

She opened the shutters but saw nothing.

Good. There were no coffins passing her window today. She hadn't seen one for a long time now. It was not right to think about the funerals of infants, not good for a young mother.
Purge these thoughts.

Carlos was alive and strong, big for his age, his father's double, with Antonio's heavy Spaniard eyebrows. There were folds of skin at his wrists and ankles. Was he overweight? Was she feeding him too much? There was no one around, no one she trusted to advise her on these matters. They bought his crib in Quetzaltenango. Handmade, from pine. A whole section of the market with handmade cribs, chairs and tables too. They bought the crib for a song.

Elena took in the green scent of the wood, a freshness. There were pine forests in the hills here, at the higher elevations. Carlitos's crib filled the room with the scent of a pine forest after a rainstorm. It rained once a day in San Cristóbal, usually for an hour in the afternoon. And then the burst of sunlight that baked the cobblestones and turned the puddles into a fine vapor, water dancing skyward, returning to the clouds for the next rain.

What happened to the river in the ravine when it rained? Did it flood? Did the people of La Joya move to higher ground? Two girls filling basins by the river, drinking muddy water after the rain. The coffins were made of pine too. Life's equations.

The man in the funeral procession, the man with the straw hat, a resident of the shantytown.
My child lives, his child dies.

*   *   *

There were no libraries or bookstores in San Cristóbal, so she had to go to Quetzaltenango. While Antonio pushed the stroller around the central square during one of their weekend visits, she photocopied articles from books and pamphlets on public health and sanitation. The most recent text she found was a slim ten-year-old manual from the United Nations. Marisol had said the babies were dying of diarrhea, and so had Father Van der Est when she finally succeeded in drawing him into a conversation one afternoon. But why so many in one place? She suspected the answer to the riddle was probably quite simple.

Early the next morning, before the baby was awake, she stacked all the literature on the kitchen table and began to read, taking notes on a yellow pad. It felt good to tackle an intellectual problem again, to search through the indexes and scan the footnotes.

Before Pasteur's discovery, and subsequent reforms, diarrhea was a leading cause of death among infants.… Both bacillary and amoebic dysentery are spread by fecal contamination of food and water.… A disease characterized by the frequent passage of small, watery stools, usually with blood and mucus, prevalent in unhygienic areas of the tropics.…

Carlos woke up just before Antonio left for work. She interrupted her reading to serve them both breakfast. As soon as Antonio was out the door and Carlos finished eating, she would get back to her research.
Eat, my baby, eat. Here, another spoonful from this orange jar. Swallow, swallow. Almost done now.

“Elena.” Antonio's voice was sharp. “He hasn't even swallowed yet and you're giving him more. If you keep feeding him like that he's going to get fat. Slow down.”

Carlitos was in his high chair, bib, chin, cheeks, and nose painted with ocher baby food. Of course Antonio was right, she realized this immediately. She had been distracted, she wasn't thinking. She froze with a spoonful of apricot puree poised in the air. Antonio's presence in the kitchen was making her nervous. He was reading the newspaper while she fed the baby. Always reading. He read instead of talking. He got to read while she fed the baby. There was a lingering tension between them, a smoldering resentment carried over from one day to the next. She shoveled another spoonful of food into her son's mouth.

“Well, at least I feed him,” she found herself saying, the words a reflex, like a boxer raising his arms. “He wouldn't eat at all if it were up to you.”

He rolled his eyes, a familiar response. Why did their arguments always fall into the same pattern? Why did they sound like children?

“Please, not that again,” he said.

“You never help. You never lift a finger. All you do is criticize and complain.”

“I put food on the table. I work. I bring in money.”

“Your mother's money, you mean.”

A second of stunned silence.
I can't believe I said such a thing, but I've wanted to say that for a long time.

Antonio slammed his newspaper on the table and stood up.

“We were too young to get married,” he said, his face contorted. “To have children. You know it's true. This is madness.”

Elena dropped the spoon, and apricot puree splattered violently on the tile floor. All right, he could raise his baby by himself for all she cared. Enough. She wanted to go home.

She pushed past Antonio, ran to the front door, and flung it open. There was San Cristóbal and its cobblestone streets, Mrs. Gómez's store facing her, rows of identical tile-roofed buildings to the right and left, the corn-covered hills beyond.

Love. If revolutionaries were always motivated by feelings of love, then what to make of her feelings for her husband and child? There seemed to be no escaping them, no escaping their demands of her, their desire to be fed, clothed, washed, humored.

Elena looked down the street at a gallery of windows, rows of closed shutters like so many wooden eyelids.

There was no place to run.

*   *   *

They walked carefully down the narrow path that went to the shantytown of La Joya. Three-quarters of the way there, they turned left through a thicket of thorny bushes, toward the river. Elena held Antonio's hand, leading the way. They reached the riverbank and followed it upstream, climbing over smooth rocks and boulders. Elena had a theory about what was killing the babies in La Joya.

Since their last argument, since he had said those cruel words, Antonio had been on his best behavior. The last few days had been a series of acts of contrition: meals he cooked, a flurry of kisses, a bouquet of roses that appeared one afternoon on the kitchen table. They even made love again, for the first time in months. Coming along with her on this walk was part of his penance.

They continued upstream, holding hands when they could, inspecting the river. It was muddy but seemed clean enough, though Elena wasn't sure what a poisoned river would look like. Would she be able to see the germs, the source of the infection, the microscopic killers? She took off her shoes, rolled up her jeans, and waded in. The water wasn't very cold. A plastic milk container floated by, followed by a cellophane wrapper. When she was knee-deep her toes disappeared, lost in the silt caused by the rains.

Antonio helped her back onto the bank and smiled softly. He was trying very hard to be diplomatic.

“It's nice down here,” he said. “There's a nice breeze. We could have a picnic one day.”

“Let's just walk a little more,” Elena said.

They followed the river around a long bend curving to the west at the northern edge of San Cristóbal. High above the ravine, a hundred yards or so upstream, two vultures circled, a slow, spiraling descent. Standing on a tall river boulder, Elena looked up to the edge of the ravine and saw the tops of houses, little concrete boxes, the fringes of the town. On the opposite bank the scrub-covered slope had given way to cultivated fields of corn. Nothing here suggested illness or disease.

“Let's go home,” she said.

“Are you sure? We can keep walking if you want.”

“No. There's nothing here. I'm sorry I made you come.”

They turned back, Elena unable to hide her disappointment. Her little expedition was nothing but intellectual pride, middle-class arrogance.
I thought I could solve their problems all by myself. I thought I was a biologist, an expert in public health.

A minute or so later Antonio tugged at her arm. “Do you smell that?”

Elena stopped, taking in the ravine air. “No, I don't smell anything?”

Then the wind shifted and the odor hit her, putrid and foul. The smell of rotting milk, a smell like a finger reaching into the back of your throat. Elena coughed.

“It's awful. Like a garbage dump.”

Antonio produced a handkerchief, and Elena held it to her nose. “Let's find out where it's coming from,” she said.

The noxious breeze led away from the river, into the dark tangle of bushes and branches. They found themselves climbing up the slope of the ravine again, wading through the prickly underbrush, until Elena finally pulled back the last branch and they stepped into a wide clearing.

Before them was an entire hillside covered with trash, a panorama of filth. Plastic bags, toilet paper, rotting vegetables, animal bones. A fetid organic brew baking in the midday sun. A few dogs roamed the blighted landscape sniffing at the ground, snouts bouncing from spot to spot.

“Oh my God,” Antonio said. “It
is
the city dump.”

“Let's go to the top. I want to see how big it is.”

They worked their way up the slope, struggling to keep their footing on the slippery ground. The sprawling pile of garbage oozed down the hillside like a sluggish river, boxes and wood scraps floating on the surface. At its center the pile seemed to be many feet thick. The earth was a strange, sickly gray, a color that seemed to match the smell of the air. Everything dissolved into that same lifeless gray. Yellow lemon rinds, green papaya skins, white eggshells, all pressed down by the weight of more and more garbage until they became an ashen slime.

The man who picks up my trash probably brings it here.
The leftovers of a thousand meals filled this place every day. People came here to dump the buckets of excrement-soiled paper they kept next to their toilets to avoid clogging their pipes. All this rotting food and shit was becoming a permanent part of the landscape, altering the topography of the slope, killing off the vegetation.

Halfway to the top, Elena stepped on something soft and sprawled sideways, landing on her shoulder with a wet swack.

“Are you okay?” Antonio asked. “Did you hurt yourself?”

Elena looked up, her nose wrinkled in disgust, and saw that the corners of Antonio's lips were raised in a faint smile.

“Go ahead and laugh. I must look pretty funny here, huh? All covered with God knows what.”