The Tattooed Soldier (16 page)

“No one will bother us here,” Antonio said. “No one uses this road anymore.”

He turned off the engine, and the air filled with birdsong and the rustling of leaves. Elena looked through the pitted glass of the front windshield. Brush and sweet-gum trees lined the roadway; palm-shaped leaves hung over the car, enveloping them in a shady cocoon.

They were alone.

Teodoro's severed hands lying in the grass by the roadside.

Gonzalo's books tossed to the street like so much trash.

What was Gonzalo reading, what books did he have when the death squad came for him?

Was Teodoro alive when they cut off his hands?

They would kill Gonzalo to silence his poets.

Teodoro would not betray me, ever.

Elena took a deep breath and reached out to touch Antonio's cheek. He sat still, looking straight ahead. She watched him breathing slowly with his eyes closed. Her own fear and tiredness began to slip away.

“We're still alive,” she said.

“That's right. We are.”

Antonio lowered the Volkswagen's back seat to create a small, cozy space, oval-shaped. Lying on her back, Elena gazed out the curving arc of the rear window and saw a patch of sky framed by the verdant arms of trees, two enormous clouds drifting across the narrow blue canvas. Antonio put his arm across her waist. She pulled him on top of her.
My beautiful man. My tall lover.
His head was bent against the Volkswagen's shell. He began kissing her neck, her forehead.
We're still alive.
She kissed him on the mouth, and as their lips lingered she felt her sadness dissolve and float away, rising into the sky to join the migrating clouds.
Squeeze me tighter, swallow me, show me the way.
No killers, no fear, only her lover, only his straight black hair, the olive-tinted skin, the buttons of his pale blue shirt, the last obstacle of his khaki pants and the imitation leather belt that resisted her for a few seconds.

Elena laughed. She had undressed him in record time. She was still fully clothed and he was naked, the pants at his ankles in a crazy knot with his shirt, socks, shoes, and diamond-patterned boxers.

“I'm cold,” he said.

On his knees, straddling her, testicles dangling above her waist, sex stiff and pointing skyward, he took off her blouse, her bra. With a strong tug he pulled off her jeans, tight as a second skin, and she felt the thrill of being naked under the beautiful blue sky, feeling the cool shady air against her bare breasts and legs.

Gradually he became less tentative, but his movements were still jerky and ungraceful. She let her fingers glide across his bare back and wrapped her legs around him. Finally she reached down and guided him into her. And
yes, yes, there you go, that's it, my love. Like that. Así.
And suddenly she is with Teodoro, in the musty bedroom of his apartment, and he is on top of her, looking at her with his green-gray eyes, the smooth lover.

Why have you come back here, Teodoro? I thought you were dead. Go away. Leave me alone.

This was where she wanted to be, in the Volkswagen with Antonio, this caring man who could release her, save her, shelter her from harm. He was pushing against her, moving faster now, and she leaned up to suck on his nipples, to kiss the handful of hairs on his chest.

She reached for Antonio's hands. Then she put his fingers in her mouth, sucking at the living skin, wishing she could swallow the marrow in the bone. She sucked harder, and it was like pulling a trip wire. His muscles gathered tight and then released and he rolled off her.

The Volkswagen filled with silence. Slowly the sounds of the forest returned, gathering resonance, flowing through the car's open windows, the subtle creak of heavy branches swaying in the breeze, the strange calls of tropical birds, the echoing songs.

Elena took Antonio's hands again. It was the first time she had ever made love without a condom or diaphragm. She was almost certain she would get pregnant. It took only a few quick calendar calculations to realize that she was probably becoming pregnant at this very moment, the microscopic union taking place as she lay on her back in a Volkswagen.

“I've never done this before,” Antonio said. “Not with anyone, ever.”

I knew that, my love.
“Neither have I,” she said.

 

8.
THE WINDOW

 

The old bus puttered along a black ribbon that cut through a forest of cornstalks two feet taller than the tallest man. Elena had not been so deep in the countryside for many years and was surprised by the abundance of the land, the dark richness of the soil, the fleshy sheen of the narrow leaves that sprouted from the stalks like spokes on a wheel. There was a tiny golden crown on each plant. The
campesinos
here worked the land with manic industry, as if they feared God would punish them for leaving any spot unplanted. Corn climbed the round bellies of the hillsides, filling narrow, rocky ravines, clinging tenaciously to the steepest slopes, stalks rising even from the edges of cliffs, like stiff green divers poised to jump into the precipice below.

Inside the bus, bodies jostled back and forth in unison. Elena stared at the corn-happy landscape in a trance. She was married, a fact that still seemed impossible twenty-four hours later. There had been a civil ceremony in which she signed her name with Mrs. Bernal and her friend María Teresa looking on as witnesses. She wore a new white sundress with purple and yellow flowers. The whole thing lasted no more than five minutes, not even a chance to linger with her new husband in the registrar's office before Antonio's mother hustled them off to her house.

“It's not safe, son, to be out in public too long.”

Mrs. Bernal had sent them on this road, the Pan-American Highway, a name that sounded much too pretentious for the two-lane potholed strip of asphalt before them. She had convinced them to seek refuge from the terror of the capital in a small town where no one would know who they were. “Any fool can see it's only a matter of time until they come after you. It's too dangerous to be a student in this city. It's a death sentence.” A stern and attractive woman with strands of gray in her hair, Antonio's mother was now the provider of cash and shelter and would not be disputed. Without money and with a baby on the way, they had no place else to turn. Antonio had resigned himself to the plan, his face a white flag of surrender.

Elena looked out the bus window at signs announcing towns with Quiché Indian names, Hispanicized centuries ago: Chimaltenango, Tecpán, Chichicastenango. On this road to safety she had already seen three army trucks rumbling along, each one filled with young soldiers whose alert and frightened faces suggested that battles were being fought nearby.

She looked across at Antonio, sitting with one foot in the aisle, his hand fixed to the bar on the seat in front of him. Here was her husband, a stranger, a man with gestures and habits that were still unknown. Married couples were supposed to share a daily, mundane intimacy. It worried her that she hadn't known Antonio long enough to find out what was annoying about him.

The journey began to feel more like an ending than a beginning.
This is internal exile. They are sending me to this nowhere village to serve my sentence.

With each town they passed Elena felt the person she was before her pregnancy slipping further away. In the capital the revolution continued without her. Some of her friends were organizing clandestine cells now, giving their new creations brave names, the Worker-Student Front and the University Movement for Proletarian Democracy. They were taking the struggle to a more advanced stage. Elena was leaving them behind, betrayed by her well-functioning ovaries, her efficient fallopian tubes.

I am selfish. I would rather be pregnant and safe than face the dangers of the movement and the city. I am spoiled. I lack the convictions of a true revolutionary.

But then she remembered the face of Che Guevara and the slogan on the wall.
A revolutionary is motivated in all her actions by great feelings of love.
There could be nothing wrong in accepting the love of a man and loving the child you conceived together. Beyond the movement there was this other responsibility, to child and husband. Antonio was a year younger than Elena, only twenty, and he would be lost without her. The easy thing would have been to find the secret doctors who helped young women with these problems, but the moment to make that decision had come and gone very quickly, like the kilometer posts that were disappearing behind her, marking the progress of her escape.

It was impossible to shake the feeling that she was running away. Everything in the puzzle of events seemed to point in two directions at once. Maybe it was because she was pregnant, because her body was becoming stranger every day, because everything around her seemed to be moving more slowly, because the light seemed brighter, blinding and white. She looked out the window and saw cornfields and more cornfields. With each kilometer the forest of green stalks seemed to grow thicker.
I will be lost in all this corn.
Three times during the drive to San Cristóbal she broke down. Each time Antonio wrapped his arms around her.

“
Amor
, why are you crying?” Antonio looked distressed, helpless, impotent before the stream of her tears. “What's wrong?”

Each time she stopped crying only because she could see Antonio was about to break into tears himself. He was the picture of distress, a man on the brink of collapse. She imagined him bolting from the bus and disappearing into the corn.

Antonio had not been the same since they found Gonzalo's body. “I've never had a friend murdered before,” he said to her, almost apologetically. “I've never known anybody who died.” Rumor had it that Gonzalo had withstood the tortures inflicted upon him without naming any of the insolent poets who filled his magazine with calls to insurrection. More than one writer had been saved from certain death, including the author of a brilliant satirical poem about the army chief of staff and his mistresses. After the initial shock, Antonio had slipped into a deep depression, a side of him she did not know, a near total gloom colored with long silences. In between these moods he had begun to show the first flashes of irritability. Three days ago she had caught him looking at her with an odd, resentful stare, as if she were to blame for this mess they were in. As if she were to blame, somehow, for Gonzalo's death.

Each time the bus stopped she got out to go to the bathroom. When the driver stopped for twenty-five minutes to visit a relative in a town in San Marcos, she went twice. They passed through two military checkpoints and three operated by the local civil defense patrol, peasants armed with sticks and machetes. At each checkpoint all the passengers lined up to have their documents examined. At one stop she handed her passport to a peasant and watched as he held it upside down and pretended to read it.

The highway that had wound so steadily through the hills and cornfields came to an end when the bus reached a river crossing. A series of boulders blocking the road and sticks bearing red flags announced that the bridge was gone. Once more the passengers disembarked and lined up to have their documents inspected. After showing his identity card to a
campesino
, Antonio wandered away from the line to the edge of the demolished roadway, now just two sandwiches of asphalt and concrete jutting into the air. In his round glasses, standing above the riverbank with his hands on his hips, he looked like an engineer. Maybe he should have studied engineering instead of literature, Elena thought.

“The war,” Antonio whispered in her ear. “The guerrillas blew up this bridge.”

Elena wanted to see for herself. She stepped to the edge of the roadway. Forty feet below her, blocks of asphalt swam in the river, muddy water swirling around them. The bridge supports, pillars of thick steel blackened by dynamite, had taken up a gnarled, snakelike dance. The perpetrators had left their signature cheerfully spray-painted on the concrete base: “One More Victory in the People's Struggle!”

Here was a rumor come to life: the revolutionary war in the countryside.
The guerrillas are real, they exist. Now I know they are not just a romantic fantasy.
Men and women had come to this spot secretly, at night perhaps, to plant dynamite and close down the roadway. No army column or air force jet had been able to stop them. And yet Elena was puzzled. They were in Totonicapán province, not far from San Cristóbal Acatapán, a place supposedly untouched by the war, which was being fought much farther north and west of here, according to the newspapers. She had only to look at the ruins of the bridge swimming in the water for the authority of the newspapers to dissolve, triumphant “dispatches” from the provinces revealed for what they really were: army propaganda.

I always knew those hacks were lying to me. I knew it.

Elena was at once excited and frightened. There were truths out here in the countryside, secrets hidden by curtains of corn. She imagined guerrilla fighters losing themselves in the fleshy leaves, building impenetrable fortresses in the hills and mountains that rose above the highway. For the first time she began to embrace the idea that living in the provinces might not be so bad.

They returned to the bus, which followed a path cut in the riverbank and crossed over on a rickety Bailey bridge under the watchful eye of the civil defense patrol, machetes and clubs in hand. After all the stops and checkpoints, it was sunset by the time they arrived in San Cristóbal.

The town sat high on a bluff. From a distance the white facade of the church could be seen first, pale orange in the fading sunlight. The bus climbed up the steep grade with a labored grunt and grind. Elena wondered if it would gain strength now that it was near its destination, like horses do when they know they're almost home. The last turn before entering town took them past the municipal cemetery, a tiny metropolis of crosses and marble funeral vaults overlooking the valley of cornfields below.