Invisible Country

by Annamaria Alfieri

  As it was, none of the women was about that day to see the two men approach the mansion and be let in by Josefina.

  Within, Martita answered their questions politely while Estella remained wide-eyed and silent. After about forty-five minutes, the men left, taking nothing with them.

  * * *

  The fake, ingratiating smile on Menenez’s face put the padre on his guard. The priest had been sitting in the open patio of his small house next to the church. He had dipped the nib of his pen many times into his pot of ink, but had written nothing. Since the war began, paper was impossible to find. He had torn this piece from the flyleaf of an old novel, though it pained him to mutilate any book, even a profane one. By now this tiny scrap should contain the outline for next Sunday’s sermon, but instead of concentrating on the counsel he should give his flock, his mind kept going back to the murder of Ricardo Yotté. Clearly, whoever dragged the body into the belfry wanted the padre to find it. Why? Did the killer intend to implicate the priest? He was fingering his pen and trying to think through the fear that pained his brain, when the man he feared the most came smiling through the archway from the plaza with his military cap still on his head.

  “Your bold announcement last Sunday is causing chaos,” the comandante announced as if he were declaring a new law. “Women are spreading their legs any chance they get. Panchita Robles and Alberta Gamara are talking about posting Saturnino Fermín’s daily schedule in the café, as if he were some sort of prize bull. And that heathen Josefina is holding forth about old Guarani sexual practices. Outrageous.”

  “I am sure they are just joking,” the padre replied. The comandante’s words evoked sexual images and stirred urges the priest had vowed to eschew.

  “Why would you make such an announcement?”

  “To assuage their guilt.”

  “You are supposed to absolve their sins in the confessional. You cannot forgive them before they are committed.”

  “No God of mine would punish these women for wanting babies now that the war is coming to an end.”

  “Are you saying that Paraguay has already lost?”

  “You yourself told me the Brazilians control the rivers and whoever controls the rivers controls the country. Nothing and no one can come and go from our country but that they allow it. How can we win under these circumstances?” As soon as he spoke, the priest knew he had made a potentially deadly error.

  But the comandante did not pounce. Instead he paused, and after a moment said, “Still, you do not decide what is or is not a sin.”

  “I think I do.”

  The oily look of condescension on the comandante’s eyes finally clouded into threat. “I actually came to talk about the death of Ricardo Yotté.”

  The priest indicated the chair opposite him. Clearly, the comandante wanted information, and the priest must at least appear to cooperate, though he had learned his only information in the confessional, secrets he would never reveal. Since the days when the old Dictator Francia cut the country off from the outside world, the clergy of Paraguay had been more beholden to their supreme leader than to those in Rome who spoke for the Supreme Being. Priests had been expected to—and regularly had—revealed secrets from the confessional. But he was not that kind of priest. Still, he smiled as if he regretted his inability to help. “I am sorry, Señor Comandante, but I have no information I can give you.”

  “You will become even sorrier if you do not tell what you know, Padre.”

  The priest’s mouth went dry. “I?”

  “You found the body. You were the only one who passed through the belfry on a regular basis.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “You, Padre Argentino, know more than anyone except me about what happens in this village. You will have to collaborate.”

  The dryness in the padre’s mouth spread to his throat. Not for years had anyone in the village referred to his Argentinean birth. “I cannot. I am a priest, not a constable.”

  “I have a strong feeling you know, or think you know, who murdered Yotté. You had better tell me, or the people of this village will be left without a priest.”

  The padre held his peace to hide his anger. And his fear.

  “You are deciding if you should tell me.” The comandante took off his hat at last and fingered the patent leather brim. He shot the priest an arch, expectant look.

  The padre had to say something. He chose a truth. “The body was dragged into the belfry.”

  Menenez’s dark glance turned even more threatening. “How do you know that?”

  “I am sorry you did not look at the body yourself. I could have shown you how the dust on the belfry floor was disturbed with long lines leading from the back door to the spot where the body lay.” He did not mention Alivia. He pretended it was he who understood Yotté had not been murdered in the church.

  “You did not tell me this on Sunday.”

  “I saw it after I went back to the church after speaking to you,” the priest lied. “When Josefina, Saturnino, and I lifted the body to prepare it for burial, I noticed the dust. I also saw streaks on the back of his jacket, as if he had been dragged across grass and mud.” These were all Alivia León’s observations.

  “Mmm.” The comandante scratched his neck. “That would mean whoever brought the body to the church was not strong enough to carry it, but had to pull it. That would eliminate you, Padre. You seem to have remained strong, despite the want in our country.”

  The priest could not help releasing a barb. “Are you suggesting the war has been a hardship for our people?” When neighbors reported one another for expressing such thoughts, Luis Menenez dragged them off to be tortured.

  The comandante pointed a finger as if it were the muzzle of a pistol. “Beware, Priest. I have taken note that you based your misguided sermon on the dangerous notion that Paraguay’s cause is hopeless. You have raised that subject to your peril.”

  A charged silence descended. After a moment, Menenez stood and positioned his hat slowly and exactly, so that the brim obscured his eyes. “Someone will pay for Yotté’s death.”

  “Yes,” Padre Gregorio said as evenly as he could. He was reluctant to direct the comandante to the casa Yotté. Those poor girls were still in shock over their brother’s murder, and Ricardo was barely cold in his grave. But his sisters were the ones most likely to know something useful.

  The priest held his peace, but Menenez read his mind. “I will find out what Ricardo’s sisters have to offer.” He turned on his heel and marched off.

  “Vaya con Dios,” the priest called after him, as a prayer for the Yotté sisters, rather than as a blessing for Luis Menenez.

  6

  That afternoon, the comandante approached the sunny patio of the casa Yotté and surprised Martita and Estella by using the warm traditional greeting of Paraguayans nearing the home of friends. Though he and their brother had ostensibly been allies, it had been a chilly and competitive association. Yet here he was, warmly calling out, “Ave Maria,” to Yotté’s sisters out in the garden beyond the veranda.

  “Sin pecado.” Martita gave him the required response. The Virgin was without sin, she thought, but the comandante certainly was not, but neither had her brother been.

  “Por siempre,” he continued with the formulaic entrance exchange. He doffed his military hat as Martita took Estella’s hand and led her toward him.

  “Adelante, señor.” Martita completed the ritual, bidding him enter, though he was already inside, and there was no way to keep him out.

  Estella curtsied and began to weep. “Go to Josefina,” Martita said. “Ask her to bring a maté for our guest.” Estella sped off as if she were running from a fire. Martita indicated a chair at the patio table for the comandante and sat across from him. “My sister has been very distraught since the passing of our brother.”

  The comandante appraised her as if she were a melon in the market, without even a pretense of sympathy for their loss. “It falls to me the sad duty of fi
nding the person who murdered Ricardo. I am sorry to pain you with questions.” His voice made an attempt at sympathy, but his expression remained stern. “Can you tell me why someone committed this atrocity?”

  “You should know,” Martita offered, “that just a few hours ago two men came looking for something.”

  “Oh? What men?” The comandante rose and paced the space between the table and the patio’s central fountain. He bristled with sudden energy.

  Martita stood too. “They did not give their names. Just that they were emissaries of Señora Eliza Lynch. That the señora had entrusted something to Ricardo that she required back.”

  The comandante’s body tensed. “Did you give them what they asked for?”

  “No, señor. We knew of no such items. They insisted on looking everywhere. Estella and I had to let them, as they were Señora Lynch’s men. I watched them search the house. They were very thorough. They found nothing and then left in the wagon they came in.”

  The comandante fingered his moustache. “Items, you said. More than one, then. Did they say exactly what they sought?”

  “No.”

  “And do you know what your brother had that belonged to Señora Lynch?”

  Martita put her hand over her heart. “Señor Comandante, my brother had many secrets. He never told them to me and my sister.”

  * * *

  In the early morning, two days after Ricardo Yotté’s funeral, Salvador slipped out of the bed where he could not make love to his wife and dressed silently, choosing a shirt of homespun without decoration. The woman he intended to seek would have more sympathy for a man in plain clothing. He looked up at the red dawn, wondering how much time he had before the threatened storm turned the roads to mud and made walking more torture than it ordinarily was.

  This sky was the same shade of red as the battle flames the morning they invaded the Brazilian camp at Tuyu Cué. Starving as they were, they could not believe the riches they found in the enemy’s stores: salt, flour, even brandy and cigars. They went wild, looting anything they could eat. Then came a sound like thunder—the hoofbeats of the Brazilian cavalry counterattacking. His closest friend, José Cépeda, was shot through the heart while his head was inside a burlap bag of sugar. At least poor José had died with sweetness in his mouth. Salvador wondered if every red sky, for the rest of his life, would bring him back to Tuyu Cué.

  Hurrying to beat the rain, he made his laborious way to the village, thinking what it would be to ride a horse—to move about as easily as he did in his youth. But he knew he would never feel that young again. At the height of his strength, he had felt as if he could tear his way through stone walls. Now he despised his own weakness: drained as he was of bodily strength, of courage, of the will to go on living. Alivia was his only reason for staying alive. He tried to tell himself he had Xandra too, but the girl’s heart was already gone from him. He did not know where she had given it, only that it was not his anymore.

  Passing the forge, he tipped his hat to Manuela Aragon, one of about twenty village women who had been drafted into the ranks and sent to San Fernando, where she trained as a lancer and held the rank of sargenta. The women’s brigades never fought. Their lot was worse: they dug the trenches, risked their lives to carry the dead and wounded off the battlefields and most of all, died of cholera. Manuela had come back to the forge of her dead father—a lady blacksmith, and a good one. Like Salvador, she had survived. That word “survived” at first had made him feel triumphant, even in the midst of devastation. But guilt soon overwhelmed him for he knew that he least of all deserved to go on living.

  When, sweating and sad, he finally came to the open doorway of Josefina’s little house just outside the wall of the Yotté garden, he called out, “Hola, Josefina.”

  Young Pablo appeared suddenly out of the shadows, startling the breath out of Salvador. The boy’s eyes carried the same blank expression as the mad boy in the cabin. Salvador’s chest filled with dread. Alivia had nursed this child with all her skill, tried all her cures. Nothing helped. Pablo had lost one of his arms in a fight with a Brazilian cavalryman. What monster would do such a thing to a skinny, frightened child? Now Pablo’s eyes stared blankly from his dark, square face. He never spoke, and grief-stricken Josefina, who had only him left of all her family, had to force him to eat. The wounds on his legs still festered, no matter how much molle balsam Alivia applied to them. A fever in him continued to flare up from time to time. Alivia said the festering wounds would kill him one day. Salvador reached for the boy, embraced him, and kissed his cool smooth cheeks.

  The end of Josefina’s cigar glowed in the shadows behind her grandson. “May I come in, señora?” Salvador asked with all politeness.

  “Come in, please, Don León.” She offered a chair with a wordless gesture.

  The room was small, with a mud floor, peeling whitewashed walls, and nothing but rafters overhead, up to the roof. Green beetles glinted here and there in the thatch. The house smelled of the sickness of the boy, like the odor of the miserable field hospital where Salvador had lain after he lost his foot—the smell of death and desperation. He forced his mind to the here and now and accepted the gourd of maté Josefina handed him without asking if he wanted it.

  “What is it you have come to discuss? Is it which of the village ladies will benefit from your services? If you are going to make babies, you had better begin. Hector Mompó is already hard at work, so to speak.” She laughed heartily and made herself cough. “That old goat goes about with his harp, serenading the women, and he says he intends to sleep in a different house every night.” This time the coughing came before the laughter, but when she looked him in the eye, her expression turned serious. “You are not here about that, are you? It would not be like you. You want to speak about the murder of Ricardo Yotté; I warn you I cannot tell you who did it. You are not the first to ask.”

  He was not surprised that she guessed what was on his mind. Others in the village called her a sage or a witch because she frequently saw through people’s words to what they were thinking. He believed she observed things others missed and used what she saw to understand people, which made his question all the more dangerous. She was capable of feeling his fear, even if she knew nothing about the hidden boy. Suppose she guessed? Suppose she told others he was hiding something? If anyone decided to observe him closely, his secret would be exposed.

  “Has anyone seen a person in the village they did not recognize?” He forced his voice to be offhand, but he did not think it sounded that way to her. This conversation was a mistake, but it was too late to stop now.

  “Like the messengers for the comandante?”

  He saw her suggestion was disingenuous. “No. Someone who might have been suspicious?”

  “Like an enemy soldier? Or a deserter from the army?”

  His only defense against her peering eyes and knowing smile was to confess some fear that might explain the apprehension in his voice. He could not specifically ask if, on the day of Ricardo’s death, she had seen or heard of a mad boy dressed in rags with murder in his eyes. “I am afraid of who will be accused of Yotté’s murder. The comandante will not let it go unpunished. Yotté was too powerful with Asunción.” He used the name of the abandoned capital rather than even say the names of the powerful people everyone feared to the marrow of their bones.

  “He will choose the wrong person.” She said it the way she said all of her pronouncements, as if it were an unassailable truth that came from the gods.

  Salvador suppressed a sigh. Though Josefina much enjoyed her role as an oracle, he would never find out what she knew if she chose not to reveal it.

  * * *

  That same morning, Xandra León also slipped silently from her parents’ house, hid behind the tall causauria pine outside her bedroom window, and watched her father hobbling along the road into the town. Her father had a secret. He could be making love to the women in the town to produce those babies the padre had called for. The thoug
ht disgusted her.

  Despite the red glow in the morning sky that carried a threat of lightning, which seemed already to be crackling on her skin, Xandra made her way to César. She had not exercised him in more than a week. They both needed to move. With the threat of a storm, foragers would stay out of the forest, making it safe to take the horse for a ride. She could hide in the lean-to if the storm actually broke.

  She took César out of the corral, strapped on his saddle, and mounted him. She leaned forward to pat the white triangle on his forehead. She squeezed her knees against his powerful flanks and hugged his strong neck. “Take me away,” she said into his ear, and the great horse bolted forward, picking up speed, lengthening his strides. As they neared a dense clump of cacti blocking their way, she leaned against his neck and whispered, “Go, go,” and he leapt over the obstacle, flying like a great black eagle with her between his wings. What she really wanted was to soar over Paraguay and find Tomás. It would not be so difficult. Which way? South. The war had been moving toward them from down there. But lightning was flashing to the south. And she had not prepared for a journey. But that was not it. She was a coward.

  The horse sailed like a leaf in the wind before a storm, happy and free, his mane whipping around her. She pulled the band of cloth from her head and tore off the red cords that held her long, thick braids. She loosened her hair and let it fly, black as César’s mane, and free.

  A rumble of thunder sounded in the distance. She turned César round, back toward his hiding place, so he would be safe before the storm hit.

  When they ducked into the picada, the long, low green tunnel through the dense trees that lead to the hiding place, the horse slowed to a walk and snorted. She scissored her hands before her face to push away the dangling vines. Every once in a while she caught a glimpse of the darkening sky through the canopy of leaves and blossoms. To her right, among the creepers and thick ferns in the undergrowth, a wild agouti sat in silence until she approached. Then he ran into the path and barked at her like a puppy. A blue partridge startled her by flying up right in front of César, but the horse kept his footing. If she had Tomás’s pistol she would shoot it and bring it home and roast it for dinner. She never looked at birds anymore just to enjoy their plumage. They always looked like a meal, even the toucans squawking in the trees overhead. When they fell silent, a woodpecker tapped its plaintive, hollow knock-knock-knock.