The Good Cripple

by Rodrigo Rey Rosa

  Over the course of her life with Juan Luis, father and son and quarreled several times; she knew that an old hostility persisted between them.

  When she learned that Juan Luis had been kidnapped––the doorman witnessed the capture, which took place as he was driving away from the apartment building where they lived––Ana Lucía had called his father’s house immediately.

  “Well,” said the old man, “it had to happen someday. Remember what he told me once, about a year ago, when we were talking about precisely this possibility? That he didn’t expect me to pay any ransom for him.”

  “He was just saying that to say it, Don Carlos, for the love of God.”

  “Everyone says everything just to say it, amiga mía.”

  And the old man said goodbye and hung up. Ana Lucía hadn’t managed to speak to him again. Once the housekeeper answered and said Don Carlos had had an accident and was in the hospital, and a few days later she dialed the number several times but no one answered.

  All that time she had felt powerless to do anything. She often caught herself squeezing her hands together in anguish, immobilizing one of them with the other and exerting a futile force that ultimately exhausted her but gave her some relief from the oppression of her not at all irrational fears. She tried to breathe deeply, but it seemed as if there were never enough air to fill up her lungs.

  He’d been kidnapped a week ago. It was a cold morning; when she got out of bed she put a sweater on underneath her robe and some flannel pajama bottoms that belonged to Juan Luis. She went from the bedroom to the kitchen and put some water on to boil for coffee. While it was heating up, she went into the living room and sat down on a woolen ottoman. Perhaps the hardest thing to bear during those days had been neither the fear nor the anguish, but the loneliness. She wondered if Don Carlos distrusted her. He was an old paranoid, that much was sure; he may even have been suspicious of Juan Luis himself. Resignedly she went back to the kitchen, where the water for the coffee was now boiling. Someone knocked at the door. Ana Lucía poured the last drops of boiling water into the paper filter, mechanically passed her hands over her head, and, as she crossed the living room towards the door, tightened the belt of her bathrobe. The door had no chain, and she opened it only a crack, with some apprehension.

  A young man of good appearance with a friendly smile was standing there, tall, slender and light-skinned, a nervous young man who was none other than Bunny.

  “Forgive me,” he said, “I have an urgent message.”

  Ana Lucía guessed what he was there for and her legs began trembling.

  “Yes?” she managed to choke.

  Bunny stretched out his arm to give her the package, which was surprisingly heavy. For a moment she thought she’d made a mistake, that this had nothing to do with Juan Luis’s kidnapping. But Bunny told her, “This is for Don Carlos. Take it to him immediately. And please forgive me for troubling you.” He turned rapidly on his heel and in two shakes was at the elevator, whose door he had propped open, and had disappeared.

  Nauseated, Ana Lucía felt the bundle. She shut the door, leaned her back against it and slipped down, sinking further and further until she was sitting on the cold tile floor, almost numb. She looked at ceiling’s granular plaster and it made her think of a patch of sand turned upside down. Meanwhile, her fingers felt the shape of a foot, cut off at the ankle, through the black plastic. She doubled over, her forehead almost touching the floor and felt like vomiting. But there was nothing in her stomach. She lost all desire to drink coffee.

  Not long after that she stood up, went to the kitchen and set the envelope on the counter. She drank a glass of tap water. She sat down on one of the stools, exhausted. She surprised herself watching one of the bricklayers at the construction site across the street clean the panes of a window, and she breathed deeply before forcing herself to lower her gaze and look again at the bundle that contained Juan Luis’s foot.

  It was like an electric shock. She leaped to her feet and went to the telephone.

  “Don Carlos?”

  Silence.

  “I think they’ve just brought me one of Juan Luis’s feet. I’m not sure because it’s inside a black plastic bag. They’ve asked me to take it to you. There’s also a letter for you. Don Carlos?”

  “I’m here.” Both his voice and the silence that followed sounded cavernous. “A foot?”

  “I’m bringing it to you right now.”

  Another silence.

  “Yes. Come.”

  Don Carlos Luna was unusually vital and ruddy for a man of almost seventy. He was still a lustful man, and an element of sensuality was evident in each of his acts. On the strength of his money and his affability, he had emerged from a murky past into the most luminous social spheres. But after his wife died and he began giving up on his plans to make a worthy heir out of his son, he was overtaken by the lack of curiosity, the kind of apathy that a belief in immortality engenders.

  He left his bedroom, where he’d been organizing some papers––phone bills, all duly paid but it was a good idea to keep them around for a while; receipts from the veterinarian who had treated one of his mares; newspaper advertisements (land for sale, potter’s wheels, winding frames) which his secretary had clipped––and went to the big living room to wait for Ana Lucía, thinking about two distinct aspects of the word tiempo. He felt a little vertiginous, as if he were on the crest of the wave.

  He would have to negotiate, he told himself. He thought with some aversion that he would have to write a letter asking them to settle for less. He still didn’t know how much they wanted. But wasn’t it only fair that he should pay less when they’d maimed the hostage?

  “Crippled,” he said in a low voice, like a man assuring himself that he’s had the last word and come out ahead. He’d been staring fixedly at a patch of sky beyond the Surinam cherries in the garden, but Ana Lucía rang the doorbell at that moment, and La Caya let her in.

  She was driving the old BMW Juan Luis had inherited from his mother; she parked it under the balcony.

  Ana Lucía hurried up the stairs and entered the living room through the balcony’s glass door holding the black package she’d told him about.

  “Here it is,” she said, extending her arm.

  Without any rush, he placed the package on a small, mosaic table, took the envelope, and opened it.

  “Forgive me,” he said, and began carefully reading the letter. Then he picked up the package and tried to untie it but the knot was impossible and he had to break the string. Inside he found what he’d been told to expect: his son’s amputated foot wrapped in a piece of bloody gauze inside a zip-lock bag. He stared at it fixedly for a moment, then turned to look at her. He threw himself back in his armchair. He felt slightly dizzy.

  Ana Lucía let out moan that was inhuman, almost animal.

  As he watched her, he started to recover a little.

  “Are we sure it’s his?”

  She nodded, her eyes riveted to the foot.

  It had the power to repel all gazes yet as soon as they stopped looking at it, it began acting as a powerful magnet, transforming their eyes into iron needles. Even if they didn’t look directly at it, it weighed on the margin of their field of vision. And even when it was viewed out of the corner of an eye, its shape was apparent beneath the gauze.

  The old man heard himself breathing. He saw a dark vein jumping in the woman’s neck.

  “We have to check to be sure,” he said, but he didn’t move. “But in his letter he asks us to freeze the foot, in case they can reattach it when he gets free.”

  It looked as if she were about to smile, and an instant later she covered her face with her hands and started to cry.

  “Come on,” he said. “Courage, mujer.”

  His blood was going cold. He stretched out his hands, bent over the table in all composure, and took the gauze off
the foot to see if he recognized it. He touched it as if he were a blind man, then leaned back in his chair still looking at it.

  The contact of his gaze with the place where the foot had been severed, where a circle of red flesh, now a little black along the edges, could be seen, with a concentric circle of white bone that was both milky and glassy, could not be compared to the contact of his pupils with other ordinary objects or with any work of art.

  His Italo-Guatemalan businessman’s mind was drawn to the bone marrow. It was crushed, as any object swallowed by a black hole in outer space would be; it was reduced to non-existence and what remained was darkness. A buzzing in his ears seemed so far-off it might have originated in the sun. A dizziness that brought him back to consciousness afforded him the illusion that he had gone on a journey through time. When he came back to himself he was no longer the same man. He was depressed, because he knew he had just regressed. It was as if he’d been presented with an old invoice, benevolently forgotten for a very long time, which now transformed him from a millionaire into a poor man. He had a feeling of having walked down a very long road. He wrapped the foot back up in the gauze and put it back in its bag. He stood up and explained that he was going to put it in the freezer.

  La Caya pulled various cuts of beef and a tray of ice cubes out of the freezer to make room for the foot, and then stood there staring at the freezer door as if she could see through it. Don Carlos left her there, glued to the freezer door as if it were a TV.

  As he went back into the living room, he felt his own existence as he hadn’t felt it in a very long while. There was nothing but color and light, form and shadow.

  He sat down opposite Ana Lucía without saying anything. She was reading Juan Luis’s letter and didn’t raise her eyes, as if she hadn’t realized he was back. A little later, without taking her eyes from the paper, she said, “What do you think you’re going to do?”

  “I don’t know,” he sighed. “Try to get him out of there, of course,” and he stretched out his hand to take the letter.

  “I think I’m going to go and pray,” said Ana Lucía.

  “Good idea.”

  He went with her to the car, and leaned down next to the door to tell her goodbye.

  “You’ll keep me informed, won’t you?”

  He nodded.

  When she was back in the apartment and had closed the door behind her, Ana Lucía collapsed, first to her knees, a step away from the carpet, and then flat on the ground with half her body on the cold tiles. She began to weep, but she felt neither pain nor rage, only a disturbance caused by the father’s lack of compassion and natural coldness, the son’s helplessness, and her own womanly powerlessness.

  With a disillusioned expression on his face and his hands in his pants pockets, one of them holding a ring of keys, Don Carlos went to the damp, dark room that served as his office, where over time he had accumulated all types of objects, from account books dating back a decade and old appointment books to samples of authentic Guatemalan cloth, Turkish carpets, Italian ceramics, several equestrian trophies, and a Virgin of Guadalupe the size of a five-year-old girl that had belonged to his grandmother. From one of the desk’s locked drawers he took a checkbook for an account in a foreign bank. He read the balance: two and a half million dollars. He left the checkbook on the desk and watched as it closed all by itself, little by little, more out of laziness, it seemed, than by some act of magic. He took his current appointment book from another of the drawers and looked for a number under “B” for banco.

  “Hola, Amílcar,” he said. “It’s about Juan Luis.”

  “I’ve been waiting for you to call. What can I do for you.”

  “Half a million.”

  “You’ve got it, of course.”

  “I’ll cut you a check and …”

  Amílcar interrupted him: “Right. When and where are you going to want it?”

  “Ready to go, lowlifes?” asked the Tapir, before getting into the Montero’s front seat next to Bunny, who was driving.

  Bunny was smiling, his straw hat pulled down over his eyebrows and a joint dangling from his lips. He passed it to El Horrible, who was climbing into the back seat.

  “Ready,” said El Horrible. He took a pull on it and offered the joint to the Sephardi, who was already in the jeep and shook his head.

  “Throw that shit away or give it to Carlomagno,” said the Tapir.

  El Horrible lowered his window and gave the joint to Carlomagno, who had just opened the garage’s metal door.

  “Call the old man within half an hour,” the Tapir reminded him. “And if we’re not back by twelve, scram.”

  “Do I waste him, or not?”

  “No, leave him alive,” said the Tapir. “Just get out of here.”

  Bunny pulled out.

  As they were going down the dirt road, he said in an artificial, almost effeminate voice, “Look at this beautiful day! Look at all the flowers and the little birds!”

  “I think this guy’s a queer,” said the Tapir.

  “Strikes me that way, too,” said El Horrible from the back seat. “Are you or aren’t you, Bunny?”

  Bunny glanced at El Horrible in the rear view mirror.

  “Eat shit, cerote.”

  They drove along in silence for a few minutes.

  Once they were on the Panamerican Highway, El Horrible said to the Sephardi, “Feeling good?”

  The Sephardi smiled with just his eyes. He didn’t answer. But he felt very good and remembered a morning he’d fought at Playa Grande. He had once been an officer in the Kaibil division of the Guatemalan army. Then the Israelis had given him a grant to study strategy in El Arish. Later he’d worked in Morocco and Senegal.

  “I hope you don’t have to smash anybody’s teacup,” said Bunny. He turned towards the Tapir, “When the sulfuric acid starts going to his head, he gets a little abnormal.”

  They went in through Ciudad San Cristóbal in order to avoid the traffic at Roosevelt, and continued along Aguilar Batres and Petapa to Aurora airport.

  The itinerary for the handover of the ransom began in a nameless alley between the Museo de Historia Natural and the racecourse. Bunny stopped the jeep near the line of cypresses, and the Sephardi got out and left an envelope containing instructions on the sidewalk under a stone painted green and white. The jeep continued on its way without him and disappeared around a corner. The Sephardi walked towards the zoo on Aurora, then crossed the street to go to a hot-dog stand. He had time to eat two of them and pay before he saw Don Carlos’s Alfa Romeo turning the corner at the racecourse and approaching, to stop next to the stone with the envelope underneath. The old man got out of the car and walked around it to pick up the envelope. He stepped back into the car, locked the door, and glanced from side to side before reading his instructions.

  A minute or so later he started the engine and made a U-turn, as instructed. The Sephardi stood there a little longer, to make sure no one was following the old man.

  On the way to the Montúfar shopping center he imagined the routes of the two cars, the Montero jeep on one side and the Alfa Romeo on the other, going around in absurdly complicated circles and crossing the entire city before finally converging. He went into American Doughnuts, walked up to the second floor and sat down at a table from where he could see the street. The jeep would go by within half an hour.

  He ordered a glazed doughnut and a coca-cola. The waitress brought them to his table and went down to the main floor to joke with her co-workers about a customer. The Sephardi was alone on the upper floor. Underneath his jacket he felt the automatic pistol, the reserve ammunition, the hand grenade. It was all going to work out fine, he assured himself as he downed a bite of his doughnut and a swallow of coca-cola.

  Two horse flies settled less than an inch from the plate with the half-eaten doughnut on it, one in front of the other. They se
emed to be looking at each other and conversing the way deaf people do, with almost microscopic gestures. The Sephardi shooed them away and looked back at the street. On the other side of the shopping center’s parking lot stood the security guard from the Roble company, a young man in a brown uniform, standing with his feet apart and his arms crossed. The Sephardi knew him by sight and kept close tabs on him. He knew what hours he was on duty and could recognize the servant girls he flirted with. The security guard leaned back next to the corner, raising one foot to rest it on the wall behind him. He was a lazy son-of-a-bitch, thought the Sephardi. He took another swallow of coca-cola and looked back at Calle Montúfar along whose four lanes cars were coming and going in ever greater numbers.

  Two men in business suits, one with an Asiatic face, entered the doughnut shop and came up to the second floor. They might be watching him. The Sephardi noticed that the Asian-faced guy had a bulge in his jacket and grew tense. The bulge might be no more than a pager, but it might also be an automatic. On closer scrutiny, they had the faces of bureaucrats. They looked at the Sephardi, stopped short, looked away, and decided they’d rather sit at one of the tables on the ground floor.

  The Sephardi calmed down but put his hand under his jacket again, just in case, and placed his finger on the safety of his pistol. They might come back. The horse flies did come back and settled near the Sephardi’s plate. The waitress was attending to the two clients downstairs. The Sephardi looked at the security guard across the way. He knew that a Cobanera girl would soon pass by on her way to pick up a young charge from the school bus, and would say hello the guard. The Sephardi took his hand out of his jacket and drank the last of his coca-cola. At that moment he saw the jeep going up Montúfar. Bunny honked three times, so everything was fine. The Sephardi stood up and went downstairs to pay.

  “We hope to see you again soon, young man,” the cashier said.

  He left the tip on the counter and went out. He’d probably never see her again, he thought. Walking slowly, he left the shopping center, kept going along Montúfar to the east, and stopped two blocks down at the bus stop in front of Sam Won, the Korean restaurant, to wait for the crucial moment.