The Tattooed Soldier (5 page)

The man was William Duarte, owner of El Pulgarcito. Duarte was a fervent Salvadoran nationalist and self-described “militant” in the right-wing
ARENA
party; his claim to fame, back in El Salvador, was that his sister was married to a rather influential government minister. He decorated his offices with
ARENA
campaign posters and the mustachioed portrait of the party's balding presidential candidate, Alfredo Cristiani. In between all the political posters calling for “
ORDER, PEACE, WORK
” were tourist posters of Salvadoran landmarks: snapshots of palm-lined beaches and tidy cities. Judging from the cars and the clothes styles, Longoria guessed that the posters dated from the 1960s. El Salvador before the war.

After hiring Longoria, Duarte disappeared for several weeks. When Longoria inquired about him, his co-workers said
el ingeniero
Duarte was busy.
El ingeniero
Duarte was tending to his many investments and properties scattered across Los Angeles. They always referred to the owner by this formal title,
ingeniero
, because he claimed to have a degree in civil engineering, though few of his employees really believed this.
El ingeniero
Duarte drove a white
BMW
and often called the office on his car phone, yelling at his employees to talk faster because the calls cost a dollar a minute and he worked too hard to waste his money on slow-witted people.

When Duarte returned to branch number two, he pulled his newest employee away from the front counter to say he desperately needed a word in private. He grabbed Longoria's arm and began talking with frantic energy, as if he'd been waiting to have a chat with him for a very long time. They sat in a small office in the back, a bare room with only two chairs and a telephone on the floor. Duarte sipped at a milk shake in a Styrofoam cup.

“I can't tell you how much respect I have for our fighting men. In my country, and in yours too, the army is the glue that holds everything together. If it wasn't for the army, we'd still be in the Dark Ages, we'd be living in complete chaos. Am I right, or am I right? Of course I'm right. That's just the way it is. Right?” He lifted his arms, as if to ask how anyone could object.

Longoria nodded in assent and Duarte continued. “We need the army to bring order. Without the army we'd just be a country of poor peasants, illiterates. That's how it is, and you know it too. I can see it in your face. That's why you came here to work with me at El Pulgarcito, because you could see we thought alike. You could sense it as soon as you stepped in the place. We're alike, me and you. We see things the same way. What sign are you, by the way? I'm a Gemini. You're a Gemini too, aren't you? I knew it! I can spot one every time.”

Duarte was wearing a pale yellow guayabera with crusty bean stains on the bottom. He had soft hands that had been spared the indignities of physical labor, and a round gut that showed despite his loose-fitting shirt. His moussed hair was combed back neatly and he smelled of cologne, a vanity Longoria found especially irritating. Although Duarte was talking to him like an old friend, Longoria felt uncomfortable in his presence. He had not yet said a word, but Duarte just kept talking.

“Personally, I never joined the army because I had another role to play, with my business and organizing for the party here in Los Angeles. This is important work. Maybe it's not as dangerous as what you did in the army, but it's important. There are many insidious influences here among the people in Los Angeles, among the Centroamericanos. We have to fight them. We monitor their activities. Once in a great while we organize a little action to let them know we're here. A little letter, a little phone call, sometimes something more serious. The newspapers get all excited and call us a ‘death squad,' but it's nothing like that. Just little things.
Acciones.
One day maybe you can help us. We could use someone with your training.

“So, tell me about your training. Did you get to work with the Americans, with the Green Berets? You know, we have a battalion like yours in El Salvador. They're called the Atlatacl Battalion. Yes, yes, of course, you've heard of them. I forget, I'm talking to an expert here! The American training is simply the best, isn't it? These gringos know what they're doing. Just look at their soldiers, real warriors. For starters, they give them a lot to eat. For years and years our soldiers were always so skinny and small, and then we learned from the Americans that we shouldn't skimp on the food for the fighting men. Little things like that it took us a long time to learn. You have that same look now, that healthy look. What's the word? Robust. That's it. You're small but robust. You're in fighting shape.”

Duarte insisted on hearing about his military career, so Longoria told him about Fort Bragg and the Panama Canal Zone, about the John F. Kennedy Center for Special Warfare and the School of the Americas and how he had diplomas from both. Longoria said he had been impressed by North Carolina, by the antiseptic army base, the nicely stocked PX, everything so orderly and well thought out. He expected the rest of the United States to be like Fort Bragg, but then he came to Los Angeles and was badly disillusioned. What he remembered most about Panama was the unrelenting heat and the American officers who seemed to be two or three feet taller than all the Guatemalans and Salvadorans around them. There was the training in jungle warfare and no time to see the canal itself, which was something of a disappointment. When he wasn't training, all he did was sleep.

Longoria spoke quietly, looking down at the carpet as he talked. He thought he should remain humble before his boss. When he looked up he saw that Duarte's eyes were wide open, the face of a child listening to a fantastic bedtime story.

*   *   *

“This room is so sad, Guillermo. You should decorate it. Put something on the walls, a poster at least. It's like a cave in here. It makes me sad to visit you. My bathroom has more personality than this.”

Reginalda Peralta was the only woman Longoria had ever granted the privilege of staying overnight in his room. A twenty-three-year-old native of the port city of La Unión in El Salvador, she had long, curly black hair and full lips the color of red wine. She was frank and outspoken, a common trait among Salvadoran woman, Longoria believed, especially the ones from the big cities. They had a date every Saturday afternoon.

On this particular Saturday, Reginalda was sitting next to him on the edge of his bed in a tight polyester black skirt and a frilly yellow rayon blouse. It was the awkward, obligatory intermission between the time they entered his apartment and the moment they started having sex. As usual, Longoria didn't say much, though Reginalda felt compelled to fill these minutes with something resembling conversation. As she talked, her small feet tapped against the green linoleum.

“Do you like my new shoes?” she asked, raising her black pumps into the air. “I bought them on Broadway. Just fifteen dollars. The shine never goes away, it's permanent. Nice, huh?”

When Longoria first met her, she had been wearing tennis shoes and a silly Taco Bell uniform covered with bean and avocado smudges. It was last summer, on a day when the hot, dry air had left Longoria feeling especially weary and spent. He was eating alone, as he always did, his face buried in the bland but inexpensive Mexican food before him. He looked up and saw a woman wearing an aquamarine shirt and a small rectangular name tag. Her curly hair was tucked under a purple baseball-style cap that had a yellow bell on the front, and she was wiping the tables in the outdoor dining area, stacking discarded cups and paper wrappers on a bright orange tray. It was late afternoon, a few hours past lunchtime, and Longoria was the only customer left.

It was not his habit to talk to women he didn't know, to begin a conversation out of thin air, but Reginalda intrigued him. She frowned as she scrubbed a rust-colored salsa stain from a plastic tabletop. Longoria looked at her lonely eyes, the hurried, resentful way she wiped the tables clean, and decided that she was as angry and disillusioned as he was. Life has not been fair to me, she seemed to be saying. I deserve better than this, I wasn't meant to wash salsa off tables. He felt he instantly understood everything there was to know about her. His natural inhibitions were overwhelmed by the desire to talk to her, to reach out to her with words, and he said the first thing that came to his mind.

“People should learn to throw away their own trash, don't you think? It's a bad habit people have, to leave their trash for someone else.
Son unos maleducados.
If people were more polite, if they were more considerate, you wouldn't have to pick up after them.”

Reginalda's forlorn mouth broke into a wide smile. She dumped the trash in a plastic receptacle and looked briefly into his eyes.

“You're right,” she said. “People
are
inconsiderate.”

Longoria had the feeling that he had stumbled upon a great, unspoken truth. They talked for a few minutes, mostly about the sad state of a world filled with so many ill-mannered people, until Reginalda's supervisor emerged from the kitchen and told her to stop goofing off and get back to work.

Now, six months later, Longoria's meetings with Reginalda followed a strict schedule, just like everything else in his life. He saw her once a week, sometimes twice, rarely more than that. But he never missed a date either. He didn't think he should see the same woman for too long, but he was becoming attached to her anyway. He liked her because she talked endlessly, even when he wasn't listening. She didn't care if he was quiet, and she seemed to know the texture of his past, even though he had never spoken of the things he had seen and done.

Their date today had been like many others over the past six months. He met her at her apartment in Pico-Union, near Olympic Boulevard. They rode the bus downtown to Broadway to see a matinee at the Million-Dollar Theater—Pedro Infante, the Mexican cowboy crooner, in
Soy de Mi Pueblo.
Then another bus ride back to MacArthur Park, where they took a quick walk around the lake without exchanging more than a half-dozen words. He bought her some
churros con chocolate
from a street vendor and they made a beeline for his apartment.

Next to him on the bed, Reginalda tapped her new black shoes on the green linoleum and rambled on about her cousin's upcoming wedding.

“They're going to have the reception on the patio behind the house. She lives down on Century Boulevard, near Watts.”

Longoria reached down and took off her shoes while she was still talking, tossing them on the floor. It was the signal to begin. She looked at the fallen shoes for a few seconds, laughed quietly, and began tugging at the buttons of his shirt. She took a wet bite at his bare chest and soon they were undressed, reaching for each other in a desperate meeting of skin and tongues, the tangle of their bodies on the narrow bed. His desire for her, for her thin arms and wide face, was growing stronger with each passing week. It confused him deeply, his weakness before the pull of this small woman, but he surrendered to it anyway. Ten minutes of groping, and then she put a square packet into his hand, a condom. She was underneath him now, curves of coffee-colored skin, their naked bodies pressed together in an extended caress, a flowing language of kisses and thrusts and scratches.

When their lovemaking was over, the silence between them returned, broken only by the sounds of the building, children and their mothers speaking through the walls, toys falling to the unseen floor above them. Longoria wondered if his neighbors could hear him making love to Reginalda. It bothered him to think that his intimate sounds, his moaning and Reginalda's muffled shouts, might serve as entertainment for people in the surrounding apartments. Maybe they didn't hear him. He tried to be quiet, putting his hand over Reginalda's mouth and keeping it there even when she bit it. He mulled this over. Of course they could hear him: after all, he heard everybody else.

At night, from about ten until one or two in the morning, an orgiastic chorus of Spanish lovemaking radiated from the ceiling, the floor, the walls and windows around him:
“¡Ay amor!” “¡Así! ¡Así!” “¡Qué rico!”
It was enough to drive a single man who was alone in his room to touch himself, a moral weakness Longoria occasionally succumbed to, even though he always remembered the admonition of Lieutenant Colonel Villagrán, who once told him it was a “faggot's habit.”

“Don't play with yourselves, soldiers. It weakens the spirit. Think like warriors, not like faggots. That's why we take you to the brothels, to attend to these needs. Do it the right way, the natural way. The army will see to everything. There will be no ‘self-service' in the barracks.”

Longoria left Reginalda on the bed and went into the bathroom, where he pulled a three-foot stretch of toilet paper from the dispenser and wrapped it around the condom. He carefully placed the neat bundle at the bottom of his waste basket. Then he turned on the shower and waited for the hot water to wash the sex and perspiration from his body. In a few minutes he was completely clean.

*   *   *

Guillermo Longoria had not joined the army by choice. He might have avoided being a soldier altogether if he hadn't gone to the movies on a Sunday afternoon to see
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
at the Lux Theater in Huehuetenango. He was seventeen years old and still filled with youthful innocence, the son of a peasant woman who grew corn on two acres of hillside. His life revolved around the soil, the cycles of rain and harvest. He did not yet know the world.

He was supposed to be in town to buy soap. “Get the soap and come right back,” his mother had said. She was a stern and very short woman, with deep creases in her dark orange-brown skin and a slight Indian lilt in her Spanish voice. “I know what you're like, Guillermo. Don't wander around the market and don't get into any trouble.”