Life During Wartime (26 page)

He strolled along the Avenida de la Republica, peering into the bars, feeling distant from the music and laughter, immune to the atmosphere. He bought a lime sno-cone from a vendor and sucked at ice chips as he walked, smiling at everyone, shaking his head at the kids who pushed black coral jewelry into his face. A whore stumbled out of a bar, bumped him, and he caught her around the waist to keep her from falling. She was skinny, with light freckled skin, reminding him of Hettie, and she was very drunk. He helped her back to her hotel, keeping a grip on her waist, and when they reached the door, she asked if he wanted to go upstairs.

‘Wish I could,’ he said. ‘I’ve got an appointment.’

‘Well’ – she patted her hair into shape, smiled foggily – ‘you very nice to gimme a hand.’

‘My pleasure,’ he said, and sauntered off.

At the end of the street was a public square with tall hibiscus bushes at the corners, flowering pink and red. Coconut palms looming along concrete paths that crossed at diagonals, stone benches, a central fountain like a stone lily. Facing the square was a large white stucco church with two tiers of steps leading up to its brightly lit facade. Mingolla chose a bench near the fountain, did some frost for alertness, enough to put an extra shine on the splashing water. Clumped in the shadow of a hibiscus farther down the path was a group of shoeshine boys. Chattering, smoking cigarettes. Their kits were decorated with mosaics of broken glass, and to Mingolla they looked like midgets with diamond-studded satchels. He wished he had a cigarette; he had never smoked, but recalling friends who did, he thought that this seemed the perfect time for a cigarette, the sort of significant lull during which a smoke is helpful in focusing one’s thoughts. He did a tad more frost, instead. The shoeshine boys watched with interest, but showed no sign of going for the police. Not that he cared. He could handle the police. He got a nice drain off the frost and kicked back, crossing his legs, thinking that he had overreacted to de Zedeguí’s death. Still, he realized a certain amount of reaction was inescapable. He would be better prepared in the future. He would go to the Petén, take care of Debora, and after that … well, after that the future would take care of itself.

The faint drift of music from the bars brought back nights on a Florida beach with an old girlfriend, the car door left open so they could hear the radio while they made out on the sand or screwed in the shallows. You could walk out a hundred yards and only be in up to your thighs. Tepid, calm water. Lighted buoys winking like fallen stars. Kids drinking in the other cars, throwing bottles to smash against the sea wall. These thoughts cheered him. He had come through a bad time, but it was behind him now, and he had his memories back. All of them. He did a bladeful of frost to
celebrate, and suddenly felt that he was David Mingolla, David fucking Mingolla, the guy he had nearly lost track of, the guy of whom great things had been predicted, his old self again … only more so.

… According to tradition, the abuse that led to the war between the Madradonas and the Sotomayors was the abduction of Juana Madradona de Lamartine by Abimael Sotomayor in the year 1612, but can one explain away centuries of bloodshed and malfeasance by the emotional reactions to this single act? Can one assign blame for the Slaughter of the Children in Bogota in 1915, or the bombing of the Sotomayor compound in Guatemala City in 1949 to the excesses of a man three centuries dead? No, the feud between the families was – like all great conflicts – nurtured by a lust for power, the power contained within an innocuous-looking weed that grew only in a valley west of Panama City divided by the border of their adjoining estates.

from
The War Between the Madradonas and the Sotomayors
– Juan Pastorín
.

On their last night together in the Petén, Santos Garrido told Mingolla a story. It was an act neither of camaraderie nor of instruction, merely the answer to a casual question; but because of events that followed shortly thereafter, Mingolla came to assign it more than a casual meaning.

For three days they had been hiking through the jungle, leaving behind the village of Sayaxché, once a staging area for Cuban infantry, but now – the fight having moved north along the Mexican border – reverted to the sleepy unimportance of a stopover for the peddlers who traveled the Rio de la Pasión, selling tin lanterns and bolts of cheap cloth and striped plastic jugs. Mingolla’s previous experience of jungle had been limited to strolls through the fringe surrounding the Ant Farm, and this, the heart of the rain forest, surprised him by the hardships levied upon those who entered it. They walked along narrow paths of brown clay crossed by tiny grooves, the trails of leaf-cutter ants, and whenever Mingolla stopped to catch his breath, the ants would swarm up his legs and bite; because Garrido – his guide – would not wait for him to pick them off, he would beat at them as he went, creating deep bruises on his thighs. They encountered mattes of dead vines from which clouds of stinging flies and mosquitoes would rise, buzzing in Mingolla’s hair, invading his nose and mouth. They plunged down rocky defiles, crawling beneath toppled tree trunks, home to centipedes and spiders that dropped onto their necks. The heat was overwhelming at first. Mingolla’s mosquito repellent was sweated off in minutes, and he would have to wash with water in which Garrido had dissolved cigar tobacco, his theory being that nicotine was the most
effective of all repellents … a theory that Mingolla to his own satisfaction disproved. But as they moved deeper into the Petén, it became cooler, clammy and dripping. Every leaf he brushed against left a wet print on his clothing, and even the cries of the monkeys sounded liquid. He began to notice the beauty of the jungle. Green light, green shadow. Cathedral pillars of giant figs and ceibas upholding a vaulted canopy, their boles furred with orange club moss, and butterflies with six-inch wingspans dappling their trunks. Prows of limestone bursting from the jungle floor, netted in vines, like petrified schooners saved from sinking into a long-vanished lake. Everywhere was the litter of war, and this added to nature a curious inorganic beauty. A combat helmet with a cracked, cobwebbed faceplate lying in a hollow like a strange egg; the rusted turret of a minitank protruding from a stand of bamboo, draped in flowering epiphytes; an unexploded missile so overgrown with scale and algae that it seemed a vegetable production, as if the jungle had mimicked the creatures of war, giving birth to a creature that could pass among them.

That third night, Mingolla and Garrido set up camp beneath a high limestone shelf, stringing their hammocks between three sapodilla trees, making a meal of cold beans and tortillas. Garrido was a wizened yet hale man in his early sixties, his hair still black and his dark brown skin underlaid with a rosy tint. The only words he had addressed to Mingolla had been by way of caution or direction, and it was clear that he did not think much of Mingolla either as a colleague or as a man. Mingolla was untroubled by this opinion; in his eyes Garrido was merely a tool.

He spent the hour after dinner cleaning his machine pistol; then he took out a packet of frost and got high. Moonlight filtered through the canopy, puddling silver over the limestone and the surrounding foliage, and it looked like they were sitting in a fold of black cloth imprinted with an abstract design. Insects and frogs started an eerie chorus that had the sound of music made by hollowed bamboo and bubbling water. Mingolla paused to listen, balancing a heap of white powder on the tip of his knife.

‘Why do you take that?’ Garrido asked.

Mingolla inhaled, tipped back his head to let the frost drain. ‘It makes things sharper.’ He gave a brittle laugh. ‘And it keeps off the bugs.’

‘Are you an addict?’

‘I have a slight dependency.’

Garrido was silent for a bit. ‘When we set out,’ he said finally, ‘I didn’t think I understood you. I thought you were different from the other Americans I’ve guided. Why, I asked myself, does this young man hunt with such zeal? I sensed something in you that doesn’t accord with this sort of hunt. But I was wrong. You’re the same as the others. You look at things the same way.’

‘And how’s that?’

‘Without emotion.’

Mingolla’s sniff was partly to clear his nose, partly a reaction: to be emotionless seemed to him an ideal.

‘As if,’ Garrido continued, ‘emotion were an impediment to your master plan.’

‘Why are you telling me this?’

‘It’s best to make plain where one stands when going into dangerous territory.’

‘You saying you won’t back me up?’

‘Simply defining the limits of my responsibility.’

The music of the jungle was growing louder, closing in around them, and Mingolla imagined the darkness to be a trillion open throats ringing the camp. ‘Why bother?’ he asked.

Garrido fingered a cigar from his shirt pocket and lit up. The coal illuminated his mouth and the glints of his eyes. ‘Once a friend and I found a jade cup in an unexcavated mound. A Mayan cup. Our fortunes were made. But I wanted it all for myself, and I ran off with it. Later I learned that my friend had died of the fever … without money for medicine. Since then I’ve been honest with my companions. Honesty prevents that sort of misunderstanding.’

He said this with a degree of feeling, and Mingolla tried to see his expression, but could not. ‘What ’bout the cup?’

‘It was stolen … by an American.’

‘Which explains why you don’t like us.’ Mingolla dug into the packet of frost again.

‘That’s not it. I understand Americans, and it’s hard to care about anything you understand.’

‘It must really be a chore for you,’ Mingolla said, ‘walking around so fulla crap all the time. I know it is for me. I know when I look inside myself and see all the ridiculous crud and opinion I think are wise, it makes me fucking sick to realize I ever bought any of it. But then the next minute, there I go spouting it all over again.’ He inhaled from the knife, spat mucus. ‘Excuse me. It’s just that when I hear major bullshit like “I understand Americans,” I tend to get amused. ’Specially when it’s followed up with, “It’s hard to care ’bout anything you understand.” I mean that’s very deep. That’s, y’know, like philosophy.’

‘Perhaps you’re right,’ said Garrido. ‘But what I’ve said tonight is true enough for you and me.’

‘Whatever.’

Maybe, Mingolla thought, inhaling again, he would stay up all night and grow full of jungle profundity like Garrido. ‘So why you work for us if you don’t like us?’

Garrido blew smoke and coughed. ‘I’ll tell you a story.’

‘Oh, boy!’ said Mingolla. ‘Lemme grab the popcorn! What’s it called?’

‘I’ve never given it a title,’ said Garrido, an edge to his voice. ‘But I suppose you could call it “The Conquistador’s Ghost.” ’

‘Sounds spooky!’ Mingolla leaned forward, making a dumb show of attentiveness. ‘I’m all fucking ears.’

‘This is my only answer,’ said Garrido stiffly. ‘Do you want to hear it or not?’

‘Sure do … I mean there’s nothin’ on TV, right?’

Garrido sighed, exasperated. Insects swarmed in haywire orbits around the coal of his cigar, flashing whitely across the glow.

‘Once not long ago,’ he began, ‘there was a hunter, a Mayan like myself, who lived in a village not far from the ruins of Yaxchilán. Every morning he would rise before dawn, breakfast with his wife and son, and head out into the jungle with his rifle. He would hunt all morning, tracking tapir and deer, avoiding the trails of the jaguar, and when the sun was high he would find a place to rest and eat his lunch. Then he would have a siesta. One afternoon he fell asleep in the shade of a buried temple, and he
was waked by the ghost of a Mayan king, his ancestor, a man wearing a red cloth about his waist and a necklace of gold and turquoise.

‘ “Help me!” cried the king. “My enemy pursues me!”

‘“How can I help?” asked the hunter; he had no idea what manner of assistance he could render against an enemy immune to bullets and blows … so he concluded the enemy to be, for no one can harm a creature of the spirit world except another similar creature.

‘“You must let me lay my hand on your brow,” said the king. ‒When I have done this, you will fall into a dream, and I will enter it and hide therein.”

‘The hunter was pleased to be of service to his ancestor, for he was a man who honored tradition, who had great regard for the old Mayans. He let the king lay a hand on his brow and immediately fell into a dream of a palace with labyrinthine corridors and rooms with secret doors. The king passed down one of the corridors and vanished from sight. The dream faded, and other, more ordinary dreams took its place.

‘Not long thereafter the hunter was waked by a white man dressed in a suit of armor with gold filigree, riding a black horse with fiery eyes and steam spouting from its nostrils. The ghost of a conquistador. “I know you have hidden the king,” he said in a voice like an iron bell. “Open your mind to me, and I will follow him.”

‘“No,” said the hunter. “I will not.”

‘The conquistador’s ghost drew his sword and swung it in a mighty arc that shivered the trees and left a trail of smoke in the air. But the Indian was not afraid, willing to die for the security of his traditions. When the conquistador’s ghost saw his lack of fear, he sheathed his sword, leaned down, smiled, and said in a voice like honey, “I will give you a golden coin if you but let me enter.”