The Assignment

by Per Wahlöö

  He went to the window and looked out over the great deserted square and the white cobblestones on the other side. In some way he found this empty, sizzling, desolate plaza more repugnant than the rank odor of destitution and privation in the native quarter.

  At six o’clock he went in and asked the woman in the green dress to go out and have dinner with him.

  “I’m afraid not,” she said, “not tonight.”

  He borrowed her copy of the sociological report and went back to his room. He switched on the radio and listened for two hours to the local program which consisted almost entirely of screeching records and advertisements for various more or less meaningless goods. A routine-type appeal from General Gami, asking for calm and order, was repeated three times. The General’s voice was supercilious and dry.

  Once a news bulletin was read; indifferent and meaningless reports from distant countries where something had happened and where people at least seemed to know what was happening.

  At nine o’clock he took López with him and ate a wretched meal.

  When he got back he went straight to bed.

  He began to read the sociological report and that kept him occupied until he heard Fernández relieve López in the room outside.

  At that, part of his relative feeling of security vanished too. He ascertained with a certain surprise that he had evidently relied more on the one than the other although he really did not know either of them.

  He got up and took two of Dalgren’s tablets, looked under his bed, put the light out, and went back to bed.

  His last conscious action was to see that the Astra was in its place underneath his pillow.

  Manuel Ortega fell asleep with his hand on the walnut butt.

  The sanitary patrol started out from the plaza at eight o’clock the next morning, two hours after the prescribed time.

  In the first vehicle, a large white Land-Rover with a searchlight and a canvas cover, sat the escort officer and three policemen. Manuel Ortega and Danica Rodríguez went in the army-type medical car, equipped for rough ground with coarse-treaded rubber tires and red crosses on the rear doors. Then came Gómez and Fernández in their gray Citroën, and last an ordinary police jeep with two more policemen in it. Captain Behounek was obviously not a man to leave anything to chance.

  The convoy drove diagonally across the square and continued southward between the dusty palm trees along Avenida de la República. The sidewalks were almost deserted, but outside the great new church at the corner of the Avenida and Calle San Martín there were quite a few people who were evidently on their way home from mass.

  The town looked white and dead and very hot.

  They passed the police barriers and the barracks, which looked almost equally dead. Only a couple of sentries could be seen at the iron gates and a few idle soldiers were scattered about the great dusty barracks square.

  A mile or so farther south, the highway came to an end. A barbed-wire barrier had been erected across the road and behind it they caught a glimpse of great heaps of stones, one or two skeletons of trucks and a bulldozer, solid with rust. The work seemed to have been broken off at very short notice and quite a long time ago, as if those engaged in it had suddenly lost interest in the project and just walked away.

  “I gather the highway was to have gone all the way to the border, but then the government fell and nothing came of it,” said the doctor.

  He was young, scarcely more than twenty-five. He was driving. Manuel Ortega sat farthest to the right with his elbow resting on the open window. Between them, on the car’s wide front seat, sat Danica Rodríguez. She had crossed her legs and was staring straight through the windshield. It was impossible to catch her eye behind the dark glasses.

  There was one more person in the car, a middle-aged orderly in a crumpled gray linen uniform with brass buttons. He was sitting on a pile of blankets behind the driver’s seat and smoking a thick yellowish-brown cigarette.

  “It’ll be pretty uncomfortable from now on,” said the doctor. “The road isn’t much.”

  They swung off the highway onto a narrow stony gravel road which climbed up between the ridges in long snaking bends.

  “That road was built for strategic reasons,” said Danica Rodríguez. “By a military government who thought that the army needed a route southward.”

  “It’s possible,” said the doctor. “Anyhow it was never finished and it doesn’t make any difference. As little as this kind of trip does.”

  “Why not?” asked Manuel Ortega.

  “Everything is meaningless here. You’ll soon notice that.”

  The landscape around them was grayish yellow and dismal. The hilly land looked dry and desolate and there were no trees, just a few scattered scrubby bushes between the crumbling chunks of stone.

  The convoy drove through a little village consisting of about twenty low mud huts. They saw no one, only a thin donkey which ran zigzagging across the village street, frightened and clumsy. Manuel Ortega said: “Is this place uninhabited?”

  “I don’t think so. Probably the people hid when they saw the cars up on the ridge. They’re afraid.”

  “Of us?”

  “The police car,” said the doctor laconically.

  For about a quarter of an hour he concentrated all his efforts on the road. Then he said: “The people here are very hard to reach. South of the provincial capital there are only Indians except for one or two landowners. But they are few and far between. The estates are huge, and for that matter most of the owners prefer to live in the town. They have foremen on the farms and are content to go out to inspect once or twice a month. The foremen are usually half-breeds.”

  He paused before adding: “They’re not particularly popular.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “Almost two years. At first I minded very much. There’s almost nothing one can do. The people are unfathomable, as I said. They seem to stand outside everything, looking on. You can’t get really near them. They are frightened and ignorant, and if you speak to them they answer in monosyllables and always with some meaningless phrase, just to keep you happy. If someone is very ill and in great pain and you ask if it hurts, he usually answers no. He thinks you’ll be angry otherwise. And our resources are very limited. The medical supplies don’t cover five per cent of the need. And neither is there any possibility of teaching them to use the drugs. Usually they’re scared and throw away the medicine as soon as your back is turned.”

  “But there are teachers in the villages?”

  “Yes, of course. You’ll be meeting one soon. Do you see those little fields up there?”

  “Yes.”

  “They’re a good illustration of the problem. There was quite a lot of forest up here before. But the Indians burned it all down in their ignorance and sowed in the ash. After a few years the fields were ruined by erosion. In this way the forest goes to hell and all the cultivable land left is in the hands of the landowners, who know how to look after it. The food situation is already hopeless. Practically everyone who lives here is undernourished and the children die like flies.”

  “What’s the name of the village we’re going to?”

  “Pozo del Tigre—in Spanish. I’ve forgotten the Indian name.”

  The conversation came to an end. The engine roared harshly in low gear. Manuel Ortega stared at the stony landscape shimmering in the heat. Danica sat silently smoking. In front of them the white jeep climbed farther and farther up the steep sharp bends. Once they met a police patrol on its way down and several times they caught a glimpse of low huts below the hillside, but nowhere did they see a single human being.

  An hour or so later the cars drove into Pozo del Tigre and stopped in the marketplace. Children, pigs, and dogs ran in all directions. Several old Indians with sunken cheeks stared resignedly at the men in white uniforms.

  “How big is this village?” asked Manuel Ortega.

  The doctor shrugged his shoulders, but Danica Rodríguez ans
wered the question.

  “There are about sixty households here—four hundred people in all.”

  “Have you been here before?”

  She nodded.

  Manuel Ortega thrust his hand inside his jacket and felt the Astra. Then he got out onto the hard ground and looked around.

  The village consisted of about fifty squat huts with mud walls and dirty gray thatched roofs. Each hut stood in a fenced-in plot and there appeared to be three parallel village streets, all surfaced with uneven, sun-baked clay. By the marketplace stood the village’s chief building, a large white church with an annex which must have been for the priests and their servants.

  On the opposite side of the marketplace stood another white stone building; it was long and low and across its façade was the word ESCUELA in tall brown letters. Above the brown wooden door was a piece of paper on which was written CUARTEL DE LA GENDARMERÍA and on the steps leading up to the school building sat two policemen with no caps on and their uniform jackets unbuttoned.

  In the middle of the marketplace was a well with faucets and rusty iron pipes. A bit beyond stood a little group of people looking timidly at the cars. The men were dressed in straw hats, white shirts, and white trousers with broad red belts, the women had coarse strips of material wound around their waists and were wearing some kind of triangular blouses tied at the nape of the neck. They were all dirty and their clothes hung in rags.

  Danica Rodríguez looked around, thoughtfully chewing her lower lip.

  “They build schools and use them as police stations,” she mumbled. “Nothing changes.”

  She said this very quietly, but Manuel Ortega was sufficiently close to her to catch her words. He asked: “Is this your home village?”

  She shook her head and took a few steps across the marketplace.

  “Come,” she said.

  Manuel Ortega hesitated. He was disturbed by the people and the surroundings, and the feeling of alienation made him reluctant to move far from the policemen and their cars.

  “You needn’t be afraid,” she said. “It’s quite safe here. No one will recognize you and I doubt that they even know that such a person as the Provincial Resident exists.”

  He realized she was right. Besides, he was armed and had both Gómez and Fernández less than ten yards away from him, not to mention the men in the white uniforms.

  They walked across the marketplace and the people drew silently aside.

  Behind the church lay a low, primitive stone barrier below which was a steep slope deeply scored by a ravine. At the bottom of the ravine they could see a slimy green pool of water, still and stinking, and beyond the slope the landscape widened into scorched furrows between gray-white ridges.

  “You see the road down there? If you follow it for about twelve miles to the south, you come to the village where I was born. It’s about a third as big as this. Behind the mountains there.”

  She pointed, and he looked out over the monotonous landscape.

  “As I say, I was born and grew up there. The huts looked the same as these here, and there was a church there too and a Catholic priest who lived by practicing blackmail on illiterates. I remember that he sold candles to people and then omitted to light them. The next day he would maintain that their sacrifice had pleased the Holy Virgin and the saints, and then he sold the same candles again. That way he could keep the price down and still do good business.”

  “And your family?”

  “My father died down here more than ten years ago. He was a doctor, although he had broken off his studies rather early.”

  She lit a cigarette, put one foot up on the stone wall, and adjusted the straps of her sandal.

  “He was crazy, of course. A naïve idealist who was doomed to failure in everything he undertook.”

  Manuel Ortega said nothing, but he looked at her legs and feet. Again he felt a vague disturbance, as if he were a little afraid of her, but yet not afraid.

  “It’s silly,” she said, “but true. He met a girl in the provincial capital and married her. Had a child by her and then another and then moved down and built a hospital there. After a year or so she tired of it and left him, but he stayed. With us.”

  “For how long?”

  “He stayed till the end. During his last years he drank quite a lot and then he died. By then his hospital had already fallen to pieces. He lived with some Indian woman and I believe they had a child.”

  “And you?”

  “I went off when I was fourteen.”

  “Why?”

  She did not reply at once but remained standing for a moment, her eyes fixed far away. Then she said:

  “I realized even then that it was meaningless to stay here if one wanted to do any good.”

  Manuel Ortega said nothing and he wasn’t in fact thinking about anything in particular. She must have misunderstood his silence, for a moment later she drew in a deep breath and said violently: “Don’t you see? What had happened? At thirteen the boys began to sleep with you. In that respect they were no different from any of the others. Then you would have become pregnant and acquired a handicap which you could not overcome and so … yes, then you would have been stuck here.”

  “Yes,” said Manuel Ortega.

  When they got back to the marketplace, the police had organized a line outside the school. Most of those standing there were women, and nearly all of them had their children with them. They were standing, relaxed and apathetic, without moving or speaking. The children did not even cry or whimper, although many of them were encrusted with dirt and had large running sores on their faces.

  As Manuel Ortega made his way past the waiting line, he smelled once again the rank odor of dirt and poverty.

  In one of the rooms the doctor had set up a temporary surgery. He had laid out his instruments and hypodermic syringes on a wooden box. Behind him stood the orderly in the gray linen uniform sorting ampules in a box. There was also a woman there; she was quite young with dark eyes and brown skin. She was the schoolteacher in Pozo del Tigre. Now she was helping with the injections, clumsily wiping the children’s arms with a pad soaked in antiseptic and then putting a patch of lint and strips of adhesive on afterward.

  The doctor looked tired and irritable. He searched around with his stethoscope in the rags which hung on the little girl standing in front of him, glanced at Manuel Ortega and said: “They’ve an epidemic here. Measles.”

  Then he turned his attention to the child again. The girl was perhaps seven or eight years old. As he examined her, the mother stood to one side, calm and resigned with her arms hanging loosely down.

  “This child has pneumonia,” said the doctor, as if to himself.

  Then he turned to the mother and went on: “She must have an injection from the schoolteacher here every day for a month. That is, thirty days. Do you understand.”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “Every day for a whole month then.”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “Once or twice isn’t enough. You must bring her every day.”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “When will you bring her next?”

  The woman thought.

  “Tomorrow,” she said.

  “And then?”

  “Next time you come with the cars.”

  “No! The day after tomorrow. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “And you must give her this medicine every morning and every evening. Do you understand that too?”

  “Yes, yes.”

  He waved her away and turned to the next patient.

  “We’re short of medicine,” he said in passing. “And they throw it away. It’s all hopeless.”

  Manuel Ortega walked across the room and leaned against the wall. After a while the schoolteacher came over to him.

  “The doctor is wrong. The child had another sickness. Not what he says. A dead person is lying in the house next to hers and the chill has spread to the child. Of course that’s what it is, is
n’t it?”

  Manuel Ortega stared at her.

  “What kind of training have you had?” he said.

  “I know Spanish,” she said. “I believe in the one true God. I’ve learned to read. I went for a hundred and three days on a training course in the provincial capital. In the big building, with the soldiers.”

  She went back to her antiseptic pads.

  Manuel Ortega looked at his secretary. She pushed her sunglasses up on to her forehead and met his eyes.

  In the background he heard the next Indian woman say: “Yes, yes … yes, yes … yes, yes.”

  On the way home, five hours later, the doctor said: “Measles isn’t a very serious disease. It’s just that they die of it. Tonight ten children will die out there. One mustn’t mind. If one minded one would go mad.”

  “But it shouldn’t be all that difficult to do something about it,” said Manuel Ortega.

  “No, of course not. Give us more money, more medicine, and more people. Give us people who will teach them to eat their eggs instead of giving them to the priest; who will teach them not to take water from the pool because someone has persuaded them that there are evil spirits in the well; who will teach them to use the latrines, to use soap, to get rid of lice. Give us more instruments. There’s a shortage of money, to put it briefly.”

  “And the will to do it,” said Danica Rodríguez.

  “Yes,” said the doctor. “Exactly. What does it matter that their kids die. I want to live.”

  It was the morning of the fifth day and Ortega did not wake like a child. He was awakened by someone leaning over him and shaking his shoulder. At first it was a nightmare and then misinterpreted reality. Desperately he thrust his hand under the pillow and tried to throw himself onto the floor. And then a voice: “Calm down, calm down, for Christ’s sake. It’s only me.”

  Eventually he sat up again and stared at the man who had awakened him. It was Fernández.