The Tattooed Soldier (36 page)

“No one,” Longoria reported.

“The houses are empty,
teniente
,” Medina told the lieutenant. “There isn't a soul here.”

The lieutenant stepped closer to the pastor. “Where are these people, old man?”

The pastor only trembled.

“You know where they are. Don't lie to me, you animal. They ran away because they're with the guerrillas, didn't they? Tell me where they are, you bastard.”

“Where are the guerrillas?” the sergeant demanded.

“Where are the guerrillas?” the lieutenant repeated.

A corporal seized one of the peasant men by the arm and took up the chant.
“¿Dónde están los guerrilleros?”

Before Longoria realized what was happening, the soldiers were herding the singers into their church, a little wooden building with a hand-painted sign that read “
Iglesia Evangélica Pastores de Jesucristo
.” One of the boys in the group briefly resisted, standing his ground until a soldier grabbed him by his stringy hair and dragged him inside.

“But I'm with the party,” the pastor pleaded. “I have my papers right here.” He pulled a laminated card and a folded document from his pocket and held them in the air.

The lieutenant took the card and examined its plastic skin with his frog eyes, seemingly impressed by the authority of the party seal. Then, without explanation, he threw the card to the ground and pushed the old man violently toward the door.

“The
MLN
gave them to me,” the pastor insisted, trying to retrieve his card. “The papers say I'm with the party.”

“We've seen all the papers we need to see,” the lieutenant said. “Anyone can get papers.”

Longoria was confused. The
MLN
was one of the right-wing parties that supported Guatemala's president. In the complex set of political classifications and acronyms he had just begun to master, the letters
M
,
L
, and
N
, when put together, should have made the old man a sympathizer, a friendly. The Movimiento de Liberación Nacional was on the side of the army, they were not even neutrals. What the lieutenant was doing didn't make any sense. But then again, Longoria had discovered that many things in the army didn't seem to make sense at first, until you thought about them for a long time and found a way to fit all the elements together. Maybe the lieutenant, who after all was a more experienced soldier, had access to some other information that exposed the old man as a fraud.

Suddenly the boy who had resisted bolted from the church, heading for the jungle in a panicked sprint.

“Stop him,” Sergeant Medina shouted. “Longoria, you!”

Longoria gave chase, dropping his pack because it weighed him down. When he saw he wasn't gaining any ground on the boy, he fell to one knee and calmly aimed his machine gun at the rapidly shrinking target. He missed high, three times in a row.

“
¡Cese el fuego!
” he heard the lieutenant order from fifty yards away. “Cease fire!”

Longoria lowered his weapon, and the boy galloped into the safety of the jungle. Bewildered, Longoria walked back to the main group.

“No shooting! No shooting!” Sergeant Medina yelled. “Everybody in the next village will know we're here. Knives only.”

Knives only. Longoria was still registering the words when he saw five soldiers entering the church, machetes drawn.

They better know what they're doing, he thought. Machetes were very sharp. He had cut himself more than once as a child, before he learned how to handle the long blade. You found out how sharp a machete was when you cut yourself.

Seconds later a woman stumbled out the church door, her arms and face covered with deep gashes. Sergeant Medina blocked her with his shoulder, like a wrestler, and sent her sprawling to the ground. She tried to scramble to her feet, but the sergeant put his boot on her back and pushed her into the dirt. Straddling her, he unsheathed a hunting knife from his hip, grabbed her by the hair, and slit her throat.

Such a strange thing, the silent rush of blood, turning black when it seeped into the earth. Legs trembling, arms flapping. And now the rest of them were doing it too, stumbling out of the church, boys with stains on their crotches, girls holding up ripped dresses. They raised their arms in the air and fell, making noises that came from the lungs and stomach, not the mouth or tongue, a secret language of grunts and moans. What were they saying? What was the meaning of the noises and the blood spilling from their throats, the roll and spin of their eyes? They tossed and shook on the ground. What were these signals the body gave off before it finally surrendered to stiff silence? What were the children saying?

Now Jaguars were spilling from the church too, and for a moment it was like a game on a playground. Children running in circles around the huts, soldiers chasing after them with clumsy strides because they were so big and the boys and girls were so little. The children were crying, but it sounded like laughter to Longoria, the excited laughter of the schoolyard.
You can't get me, you can't get me.

And then the soldiers looked like
campesinos
again. Because this was hard work, raising the machete to cut and hack. They chopped and grunted like men trying to clear a sugarcane field, strings of perspiration running down their necks. Steel against bone. Hack, hack. This was work you couldn't do without spattering pink and red and brown all over you. The Jaguars looked like camouflage
campesinos
, dirty and sweaty, muscles working in
machetazos.

*   *   *

Setting fire to the church was Longoria's responsibility, the first important one they had given him since he joined the Jaguars. He could feel Sergeant Medina's eyes on his back as he snapped nervously at the little silver box he had just been given, trying to put a flame to the adobe bricks. He turned the small wheel with his thumb but produced only a few sparks.

“What are you waiting for?” the sergeant yelled behind him. “Do it! Burn it now!”

If Longoria didn't set the fire, if he didn't get the box to work, the sergeant would laugh at him, he would think that the jaguar on Longoria's arm was a fraud. Already this sergeant had made sarcastic remarks about Longoria's trip to Fort Bragg, asking who this peasant was to receive such an honor. Sergeant Medina said Longoria went to Carolina only because he was the
preferido
of Captain Elías, and he said it in a way that suggested something truly disgusting. Finally the box did its job. First a wisp of smoke snaking skyward, then a little cone of fire, the dance of saffron tongues, and the whoosh of a hot wind.

All the bodies had been dragged inside the church. If the people in the church miraculously came to life again, they wouldn't hear the sound of the flames. They wouldn't hear anything, not even their own screams, because one of the Jaguars had cut off their ears to fill a little burlap bag with souvenirs.

Screams were the last sounds the people in the church made when they still had ears and could hear themselves. The pastor and the children screamed before they died because they were afraid of passing over to the other side. Who could blame them? No one wanted to pass over, because on the other side there wasn't anything, just darkness and silence. Longoria might be on the brink of passing over to the other side himself. He could easily wind up like one of those corpses in the church, and that would be the end of him, of all his thoughts and desires. He wouldn't be able to march anymore, to clean his gun or admire his tattoo. Even the jaguar on his arm would wither and die. That's how it was in a war. One moment you could be clapping and singing, full of life and the Lord, your arms reaching for the sky, and the next you could be a corpse, no more alive than a chair or a spoon or a wall.

Longoria made the walls of the church come alive with his cigarette lighter.

*   *   *

There were those who hadn't unsheathed their machetes, those who stood by and watched while their comrades-in-arms exhausted themselves in the labor of cutting and chopping. The other soldiers did not look at them with disdain, they simply ignored them. There seemed to be some kind of understanding among the men. Not everyone was strong enough to carry out such orders.

As he marched from the hamlet of the singing children to the village of Nueva Concepción, Longoria began to see how the Jaguars could be divided. He could sense that each man felt repelled by the others. It did not seem right that they could all be marching together with such different expressions on their faces. Some still wore their warrior masks, jaws locked and ready for more combat, as if they expected the rest of the unit to turn on them like a column of guerrillas. Others had surrendered to a stunned contemplation, and one man wept, a Kanjobal Indian who kept repeating words in his language that no one else in the company understood.

The only thing they seemed to have in common was the jaguar on their berets and on their sleeves. That jaguar was always snarling an identical snarl. The faces of the men in the uniforms might change, but the animal on the patch was always fierce. The jaguar was a hunter; that was why the Mayans worshiped him for generations, that was why the Jaguar Battalion wore his image.

Like Longoria, the lieutenant must have sensed the disunion. He ordered the men to halt and looked down at the muddy soil at his feet, his frog eyes shifting as he searched for words.

“All the people in this area support the enemy. That's how they know we're coming, and that's why they run away. That's why they lie to us when we ask them where the guerrillas are. They all know where the guerrillas are, but they lie. I lost six men right here, right at this village, because the guerrillas surprised us. They surprised us even though these snakes knew they were coming.”

“That's right,
teniente
,” Sergeant Medina shouted. “They're all snakes. They betrayed us.”

“When all these people are gone we won't have any more problems,” the lieutenant continued, “because there won't be anyone left to give the guerrillas anything to eat. We're going to go through this place and level it, do you understand? The guerrillas will go away and we won't have to fight them anymore.”

Longoria recognized in the lieutenant's speech what the instructors at Fort Bragg called “leadership.” The men were beginning to fall apart, so the lieutenant gathered them together with words. Longoria was glad that the lieutenant had done this, because he was afraid of what might happen if the guerrillas found the Jaguars divided.

*   *   *

When the Jaguars had taken Nueva Concepción, they sat down to eat. Two women tended to beef sizzling on a grill and slapped masa between their palms to make tortillas, weeping and working, wiping tears from their faces with their sleeves. They were the last living representatives of the hundred or so people who had filled the town market until a few hours ago. Clap, clap, they took yellow balls of masa and squeezed them into flat discs. Three dozen so far. They worked over the fire, surrounded by the contents of the market stalls: baskets of tomatoes upended, mangoes squashed into a slippery pulp, new tin buckets dented, candles broken, handmade brooms splintered. The lieutenant wanted enough tortillas for the company's two-day march back to headquarters. The older of the two, a stooped woman with knots of muscle in her back and a few strands of gray in a black mane, seemed to understand what would happen when she finished. Sergeant Medina pointed his Galil at her, and she clapped the masa faster.

The Jaguars had entered the market firing a steady barrage from their Galils, peasants sprinting and falling across the square in a futile attempt to outrun the racing bullets. When we finish this work, Longoria thought, the guerrillas will go away. He aimed at the moving targets, and this time he got a few, hitting a man in the small of the back and a woman in the neck. He watched, fascinated, as they fell like canvas tents collapsing when you took away the frame, the life of their bodies instantly transformed into dead weight, their muscles no longer able to keep them upright.

Now there were only these two women left, vendors of tamales, spared the executions that followed the taking of the market, sweeping bursts of machine-gun fire in a ditch by the road. They were making tortillas because the Jaguars had eaten all the tamales. The women must have known some of the bodies in the ditch, because they had not stopped crying. Overwhelmed by grief and fear, they worked clumsily, slowing down or falling to their knees until the sergeant stuck the barrel of his gun in their ribs.

When the men had devoured all the steak, chicken, and vegetables they could stomach, when the last of the tortillas was made, Sergeant Medina pulled Longoria and the Kanjobal soldier aside and gave them the order to execute the cooks.

“Take them over there,” he said in a whisper, pointing to a corner of the market strewn with smashed chicken coops. “And be quick.”

Longoria grabbed the older woman by the collar of her blouse and led her away. She flung her arms at him without much conviction. To look at her was to remember the market women he had known as a boy, the outstretched arms that gave him sweet tamales, mouths opening to silver-toothed grins. Market days were special days then, the happiest he could remember, filled with the wonder of so many new sights and different people.

She slipped from his grip and tried to run away but lost her footing in the slush of trampled vegetables on the market's cement floor. Longoria heard a chorus of derisive whistles from the other soldiers. Sergeant Medina was looking at him as if to say, This Indian is not worthy of the beautiful jaguar tattoo on his arm. His tattoo is a joke. Longoria caught up with her in two long strides and slammed her against the cement.
This woman has humiliated me.
If he didn't kill her now, he would be a laughingstock like the Kanjobal, who was crying like a baby over the kneeling figure of his prisoner, unable to carry out a simple order.