We Eat Our Own (8 page)

Matón narrowed his eyes in thought. Beethoven. Beethoven. That's, like, Belgian, right?

Marina shoved her chair back and stormed into the bathroom again.

Andres watched her out of the corner of his eye, tried hard not to flinch. He focused on the little diamond at the tip of the record player needle, sparking as the record turned. He closed his ears against the sound of the shower running, closed his mind against the image of Marina furiously shucking off her jeans. Beethoven was German, he said, but it's not about Germany, exactly. It's about the French Revolution and the conquest after.

The fuck do you know about the French? Fingering the dart in his right hand, Juan Carlos leaned farther back, finding his throwing stance. He was still in his Vicente Mosa costume, the business shirt unbuttoned to the sternum and sweat haloing his underarms.

Their kings were executed by revolutionaries, Andres said. They did exactly what we're trying to do and they won.

Juan Carlos hurled a dart at the wall and laughed. Andres noticed that they'd drawn a target there, in faint pencil so they could erase it later: President Turbay, unmistakable in thin-framed glasses and a bow tie. Juan Carlos threw his dart, said, I don't think that's exactly how shit with the French ended, Puño.

Well, the symphony's about the years before they lost. During Napoleon. The good times.

What do you know about Napoleon?

It's the
Eroica
Symphony. It's one of the most famous pieces of music in the world.

I went to college and I haven't heard of it, Juan Carlos said.

Matón snorted. Two and a half years of college.

It's one of the most famous chord progressions
in the world, Andres said, Listen. He restarted the record and played the opening again.

Matón passed Juan Carlos another dart, said, Aim for the keyhole. I dare you.

Juan Carlos stood. Give me your dinner if I make it.

Yeah, yeah. Matón scooped up his whittling from the table and started hacking.

Napoleon was like Bolívar for Europe.

Juan Carlos narrowed his eyes. No one was like Bolívar.

Matón spat.

Bolívar freed us from the Spanish kings, Andres said, winc
ing at the sound of Matón's knife. Napoleon freed the French from their kings.

You're missing part of the story there, tío, Juan Carlos murmured.

Come on, listen anyway. Andres nudged the voume dial. When the horn comes in, the violins follow. Right there. Napoleon is the horn. The violins are the armies. Do you get it?

Matón glanced up. So we're like Napoleon?

And Turbay is like Louis
XVI
—right here, the timpani, that's him. Andres turned the volume up more, shouted. But Louis
XVI
was worse.

Turbay is a fucking murderer of the proletariat. Juan Carlos did not raise his voice as he aimed. And Borrero was a murderer before him. They have murdered our rights and they have murdered the diginity of the poor and they have murdered our country, a little more every time they let an American through customs to surveil our fields, every time they rig an election—

Andres muttered, I know.

Bolívar was a messiah. Juan Carlos bent his elbow, raised the dart slowly. There's never been a man like Bolívar in the history of the world, before or since.

Andres said it without thinking: Is that why we're losing?

For a moment, Juan Carlos glanced at Andres. The dart followed his gaze; his elbow didn't fall. What did you say?

Because we don't have a Bolívar.

We stole Bolívar's
sword
. If you don't understand the symbolism—

Andres' temples ached but he kept talking. But we're not one movement, not like the one Bolívar led. Not when there are M-19s and the
FARC
and the communists and the
ELN
—

We're not the
ELN
, Juan Carlos said. We don't fucking
burn civilians to death because the city hiked the bus fares. We have strategies.

But how many other groups are out there? Andres said. How is this a people's army if it's split a hundred ways?

Careful, Matón said to them both.

We're all fighting for different things and no one's telling us how to win the fucking war. Andres laughed. If it even is a war.

Straighten your foot, cabrón. Matón yelled, pulled on the rum again. You have to point your foot in the direction you want the dart to go. You're playing like an asshole.

Matón was the only one whose real name Andres didn't know, and he found it hard to look straight at him.

There's no war, Juan Carlos said. Not yet. The war is later. We're still raising funds. We're still making our cause known.

If we're taking war prisoners, it's a war.

Juan Carlos threw.

Foot! Watch the fucking foot!

Is that it? Did the Patient tell you this shit? Juan Carlos said, staring right into Andres. About the war? The music? The
French?

No, Andres half-lied.

We're not losing, Juan Carlos said. We just haven't attacked yet. He threw. What does a Venezuelan bourgeois fuck like him know about the M-19 losing?

Angle your body! Matón yelled.

He's not a member of the bourgeoisie, Andres murmured. He's a cultural attaché. It's an important job.

What did you just say?

Andres bit the side of his tongue and sighed.

Forget it.

I'm starting to question your commitment—

I said forget it.

No, listen, Juan Carlos said. You need to understand this. The M-19 is not losing. There are compañeros everywhere, chico. Juan Carlos threw. I hate to break it to you, but we're just a little piece. They're in every barrio, secret houses. There are a thousand Patients, a thousand operations. He threw. And there are thousands in the jungle, right now, training for the next thing.

The horn rose like a groundswell from the bottom of the melody.

What damage can we do from the jungle? Andres felt furious and bizarre. Whose idea was that?

Don't question your comandantes.

Who are the comandantes? Andres said. Where are they? You?

Puño—

All I see is a bunch of fucking teenagers who don't know what they're doing.

There was a rush of air, a thunk. The dart was wedged exactly in the keyhole of the bathroom.

Juan Carlos looked Andres in the eye and said nothing. Somewhere in the air behind him, Matón clapped his hands and howled. On the record player, the violins began to gallop.

• • •

He couldn't have stopped it, what happened next, what had happened so many times before. There was nothing Andres could do, when Juan Carlos threw one last dart at the keyhole and missed; when he cursed and yanked the record player's cord out of the wall and stomped into the bedroom with the revolver. It was silent, then, for a moment, but Andres could still hear the chord. It was in the terrible rhythm Juan Carlos beat into the Patient's body. It was in the pause between the
two words the Patient said before the blows started: Please and Don't.

Andres heard it in each twang of his quadriceps as he pedaled his bike home, hot wind slapping at his cheeks. Again that night, as he closed his eyes in bed, and heard his sister Luz tapping a message to him through the wall.

Andres' sisters slept in seven single beds in the living room, him in the coat closet, underneath the copper rod. It was only big enough for a camper pallet, but at least he could close the door. Luz was the youngest, and their father's favorite, so she got the bed in the corner, underneath the little window with the yellow-flowering senna in it. Her mattress was pressed against the closet wall. Ever since she was a kid, she'd tapped a message to Andres before she slept, one knock for each syllable: Good and Night.

Luz and his mother and the rest of his sisters and his father all thought Andres worked in a bakery on Avenida Carrera 15, and that he left his apron at the shop for washing. Luz and the rest had yet another name for him, the name they cooed as they ran their fingers through his hair: Dresa. They made fun of his long brown eyelashes, called him Cerrito, sweet baby piglet, our only boy!

Luz, when she was small, used to sleep in tube socks when it was cold, and they went all the way up to her knees. But now Luz was thirteen. Now, when Andres tiptoed into the closet at night, Luz's ankles stuck out from under the blanket, toenails painted silver and sparkling in the light. Andres saw the strange bend in her anklebone where she twisted it in a pothole on their street last summer and it broke. Andres saw her at Club Simón two days ago, her tongue in the ear of a man twice her age.

No: Jhon saw her at Club Simón, turning in a circle to music that was too fast to dance like that.

No, Dresa saw her at Club Simón, her small forehead bright every time she passed under the disco ball.

El Puño saw her, and he went crazy.
El Puño wanted to drag her off the dance floor by her waist and tell her never, ever to come back there, you stupid little girl.

None of his sisters were ever awake when Andres got home. Their clothes were heaped or folded next to each of their beds, worn synthetics, so many colors. Their eyelids were balmy and twitched; they were probably having nightmares. He paused in the breeze from the window and listened to them breathe. He closed the closet door before he could do anything to wake them.

He lay down and waited to adjust to the dark, to how little air there was. He tried not to hear the chord, repeating and repeating in his head. He tried not to think the obvious thought: that his room was just as dark, and not much bigger than the Patient's.

He tried not to think of Marina: fucking Juan Carlos in the parlor last night, when they both thought Andres had gone.

The couch in the safe house was so white: her teeth were white, and she clenched them to stay quiet. The streetlight through the window was dark blue and cast a rhomboid shape over their bodies. He heard the faint wet slap of him on her, and over it, Juan Carlos' whispering about the jungle.

There were whole villages of guerillas, he told her, shacks on stilts.

She moaned.

They read Marx to the children and teach them to clean weapons.

Andres could hear her breathing change. He saw her shift on top of him.

Juan Carlos kept talking about the weapons. God, there were thousands of them, anything they needed, in boxes shipped up
the river from Brazil, under packs of white T-shirts and sacks of sugar.

Andres wanted to leave then, but he was hypnotized, too. There is no such thing as customs on the Amazon, Juan Carlos said, no such thing as government, no danger. They could train on grenade launchers and Uzis, never worry about being heard.

I could be as loud as I want? Marina laughed.

Let me take you, Juan Carlos said. Please. It's paradise.

Andres stood behind the door. He watched Marina's hands as she grazed her fingernails along Juan Carlos' chest, scratching a white oval into the dry skin. She growled into his ear: I'd love to smell the trees.

The memory was like a splinter. He tried to push it out, and it worked itself in deeper.

Andres lay in his bed, in his closet dark as a cell, and tried to think.

He could put the grenades in the upstairs oven and turn the gas dial and run.

He could call the police and secure his amnesty, try to explain. I am a compañero in the M-19 clandestine unit, stationed in the capital. I and three other guerilleros are safeguarding a kidnapped Venezuelan attaché, Julio Barriqua Caldez, for five hundred million pesetas to fund our paramilitary operations. We are planning an attack. We will strike within the year. Get me a plan of the house, and I will give them all up.

He could say what was true: I don't know why I'm doing this anymore, and I'm too scared to go on.

Or: he could take the banana peels from the freezer to the compost pile, like he did every day. Andres could watch the peels thaw. Marina could not go as far as the garden, but Andres, he could stand there all day if he wanted, in the sun and the air. He could watch them soften into the dirt.

By the next morning, Andres had made a decision.

He biked slowly to the safe house, put on his mask, and fed the Patient breakfast.

He took the mask off in the bathroom and stared into the mirror for a long, still minute.

He said his alias three times out loud: Jhon, Jhon, Jhon.

Jhon went downstairs.

It was a defensive tactic, Juan Carlos said: a luncheon with the landlady. Two hours, three courses. He made the meal himself. Before they ate, they'd show her the completed renovation on the upstairs apartment, let her see just how far her trust in them had gone. If they showed her every corner of the house, how could they be hiding something?

It was Juan Carlos' idea, but Matón was the one who volunteered to stand guard inside the Patient's room. I think he's getting restless, Matón said, scraping his knife against his whittling block. Over the last few months, the wood had turned from a rectangle to an ovoid to something vaguely animal, or at least something with teeth. Let's see if spending some quality time with me helps him with that, he said.

Andres helped Matón lower himself into the chamber. Juan Carlos jogged downstairs and slid out the secret panel in the pantry that hid the part of the room that didn't fit between the floors. Marina hid there, directly underneath the Patient's room, stooped and uncomfortable, probably hugging her rifle like a teddy bear. Andres closed the trapdoor and tapped it once with the flat of his palm to signal they were ready. He became Jhon. Juan Carlos became Vicente. The Patient and Matón and Marina became no one, a part of the walls themselves.

The landlady arrived. She let Jhon guide her by the elbow up the dark and narrow stairs. She oohed over the four-poster bed they'd bought for the spare room, the gleaming stovetop, the
new paint on the walls. She ran her hand over the card table where they played Toruro every night, breathed deeply and asked if she smelled lavender.
We had to cover the cigarettes somehow
,
Andres thought, but Vicente thumped the doorframe, smiled proudly. It's almost ready to sublease. A few more picture holes to fill, and then we'll advertise.