Ismael
While Carlos Alberto stands on the bank of the stream looking on, his mouth slack with shock, Ismael smothers his nose in the left sleeve of his jacket, and with his right hand turns the man nearest to him around. It is one of Diego’s twin sons, he cannot tell which. The young man’s lips are blue, his brown eyes staring. Fumbling with one arm, the other still held against his face, Ismael unbuttons the man’s denim jacket and pulls up his shirt. The bullet to the back has traveled through the body and exited from a place just above the sternum. The wound is pale and clean, its blood having emptied into the stream. He can barely bring himself to look at the others. Another youngish man might be the second twin, but his state of decomposition is further along, and Ismael cannot be sure. Only Juanita would be able to make an identification. The remaining two bodies are of the woman without a face, and his beloved friend, Diego. All four have been dead at least two days, he concludes.
Two by two, Ismael and Carlos Alberto drag the bodies to a flat area at the top of the stream’s bank, wrap them in the bedsheets they had brought with them, and drag them through the forest back to the hut.
La Vieja Juanita weeps inconsolably, wailing that they should be buried where they belong, on the other side of the border, alongside her sister Lucrecia. When she is finally and quietly exhausted, Ismael suggests they put the dead to rest near the guava tree, but Efraín begins to scream hysterically, his shrieks growing louder and more piercing by the minute. Only when a whiff of urine from the tree assails his nostrils does Ismael realize the boy must have used that place to relieve himself. “All right. Not near the guava tree,” he says, and the boy stops screaming. He takes off his shirt, rolls up his pants, grabs the only shovel, and begins to dig in an open space behind the hut, away from the guava tree. The grueling rhythm of this labor cuts his grief into manageable segments. Plunge, scoop, dump...plunge, scoop, dump. Diego Garcia had been shot in the stomach. Plunge, scoop, dump...plunge, scoop, dump. It would have been a slow and excruciatingly painful end. Plunge, scoop, dump...plunge, scoop, dump. Diego’s executioners must have wanted atonement for his sin of eluding them for over forty years. Plunge, scoop, dump...plunge, scoop, dump. This would explain why the others had all been shot in the back and through the heart. Plunge, scoop, dump...plunge, scoop, dump. If one is going to die, it is better to die instantly than to watch life’s blood seep slowly into the earth. Plunge, scoop, dump...plunge, scoop, dump. We honor the spirits of the dead by remembering them and making their families our own. Plunge, scoop, dump...plunge, scoop, dump.
The last time Ismael saw Diego Garcia, they had argued furiously, after Ismael had asked what the difference was between Diego and his enemies now that the end had come to justify all means. They had not met again. But he had not forgotten his promise to take care of his family. Of Diego Garcia’s family, only Efraín remains.
Diego and Ismael had first met, when they were both in their thirties, during the pandemonium of a government raid on a peasant uprising against the encroachment of the latifundios on tribal land in Yaracuy. Ismael had been leading the crowd with energetic songs of resistance, accompanied by a shaman musician known as Antonio Lorenzo, when the sound of sirens and bullets filled the air. People screamed and scattered. Ismael covered his face with his jacket, jumped from the podium, slipped, and fell to his knees, cracking one of them sharply on a stone. Staggering hurriedly to his feet, one hand holding the jacket over his face, the other flailing out in front of him, he began a limping, loping blind run, tripped over a man who had fallen, regained his footing and kept going. A couple of meters out of the range of the tear gas, he looked back over his shoulder and saw a policeman with a club heading for the fallen man. But he was closer than the policeman. Pivoting, his knee sending bolts of lightning pain to the center of his brain, he doubled back, and grabbed the man by his arm, yanking him to his feet. “Follow me,” he yelled.
“I can’t see,” said the man.
“Here, hold on to my sleeve and run with me.”
Bound by the single-minded goal to escape police brutality, they had raced neck and neck, zigzagging across the public square of Simón Bolívar in the town of Barquisimeto as bullets whizzed past them, heading for the street. Grabbing the man’s hand, Ismael veered toward a moving bus, yelling “¡Socorro! ¡Policía!” which in those days of rebellion was not a call for assistance from the police, but meant one was being chased by them. The bus screeched to a halt while the men jumped in and took off again just as quickly.
Inhaling sharply, Ismael held out his hand and introduced himself.
“Diego Garcia,” said the man, grabbing Ismael’s hand in his own. “Thanks for saving my ass back there.”
They took the bus to the outskirts of town, where they got off and ran across a fallow field and into the woods. They slept without dinner on their jackets on the ground under the trees and awoke ravenous. They considered approaching a farm they had passed while crossing the fields the day before to solicit a few eggs, but they decided it was still too dangerous for them to be seen in the open. Ismael, trained in wilderness survival by his Que family, went deeper into the woods and returned with some berries and edible wild mushrooms. But he had been unable to find a water source and, finally, it was thirst that drove them midafternoon into the open and across the field to the farmer’s door. The farmer was a mestizo who supported the tribal cause, as did all the small farmers of the area who were being eaten up by the caudillos. “I sent my workers away after one of them was severely beaten. They are trying to get rid of all the campesinos. They threaten us and burn our vehicles. If I miss this harvest, I’ll have to sell my farm to them.”
He told them the police were still looking for all resistance organizers and that they should not travel by daylight. He gave them as many water bottles as they could carry, along with some bread, dried fruits, and strips of smoked venison. He also gave them a flask of homemade agua ar-diente. When they thanked him for his generosity, he waved off their gratitude. “It is I who must thank you, who are risking your necks for total strangers.” There was nothing more to say. Silently, they shook the farmer’s hand and returned to the woods under cover of darkness, and on the way Ismael caught and skinned a rabbit with his pocket army knife, which he roasted slowly over a wood fire for their dinner.
“Would you like to hear a funny Guajiro story?” asked Diego, wiping his mouth on his sleeve and smacking his lips in appreciation of a tasty meal.
“Sure,” said Ismael. A sense of complicit camaraderie had grown between them in the hours they had spent together in hiding.
“Around the time of the elections, the white politician, hoping to gain some extra votes from the indigenous tribes, flew his helicopter over the forest where the Guajiros had made their home for generations. Spotting a village in a clearing, he instructed his pilot to land in an open field. The pilot did as instructed, but the people of the village ran into the forest. So the pilot took the helicopter up again, and hovered. The people came out, waving and pointing at the air. Once again, the pilot attempted to land, but the people all ran into the forest. This happened two or three times, and finally the politician said to his pilot, ‘Drop me off in the clearing and take the helicopter away, pick me up again in half an hour.’ The pilot did as he was told, and the politician stood in the clearing, smiling, while the people of the village peered at him curiously from behind the trees. Then the leader of the tribe said to his people, ‘Look, the giant bird has gone, but it has left its shit!’”
They had laughed with belly-shaking abandon, until tears squirted from their eyes. “I swear to you that story is true,” said Diego.
Then Ismael told a story about the time he was working in a camp housing displaced Warao families following a flash flood. Ismael had been interviewed by a journalist, and a photographer had taken his picture. The next day the newspapers had printed the photo with a caption that read, “Warao man surrounded by his extended family.”
When it was
Diego’s turn, he told about the time he accidentally came upon a border posse, whose members had contracted an infection from poison ivy while defecating in the forest and were seeking relief by soaking their enflamed posteriors in the river. They had tried, half-heartedly, to run after him bare-assed, yelling curses as he disappeared into the forest. And so they continued swapping stories, embellishing and exaggerating for effect, and shaking with laughter. Slowly, the stories grew more serious. In the pitch-black of the moonless night they shared their hopes, their dreams, their loves, and, Diego, suddenly serious, said, “If I had a family and anything were to happen to me, you would be the kind of man I would want to look after my children.”
Several years later, after they had brought a group of refugees across the border, including two women and one child, an operation that had involved fighting off soldiers back- to-back with pistols at the river crossing, Diego, who by then did have children, had repeated that sentiment.
“You are far too stubborn to die young. It will be your children who will be looking after you,” said Ismael, smiling.
“I’m serious.” Diego’s mood had been dark.
“Of course, hombre,” said Ismael, patting him on the back, “don’t worry, it goes without saying.” Only then had Diego’s good humor returned, and, raising a jam jar filled with rum, he toasted the revolution with a bawdy tune.
As long as Ismael had known him, Diego Garcia had been a large-hearted man with a fighting spirit, whose fiery love of rebellion against any authority had trumped all other loves. For Diego, resistance was not a means of achieving freedom; it was freedom. Fortunately—or unfortunately, depending on one’s perspective—this was a passion he was able to ignite in the hearts and minds of many, including his sons.
There was only one time that Diego ever fought another Guajiro. The man was a drug and gun runner who had escaped the clutches of the militares so many times that the people called him Aceite; he lived in the village of Ladrones, a village he had himself founded, located on the northwestern border. It was here to the village of Ladrones that illegals came to learn the arts of pickpocketing, grifting, car hot-wiring, and so forth, before moving to the cities. And it was here that Diego himself had recruited his best drivers to move the cars he stole from the cities, on Ismael’s tip-offs, or those prematurely “scrapped” by Alejandro’s company.
The story was that when Aceite’s unmarried daughter, a traveling midwife, came to visit him, he had lost his temper and thrashed her within an inch of her life. It was because of a gift of two gold bracelets she had received from a client in gratitude for the safe delivery of a baby boy, a gift she refused to hand over to her father. Aceite had beaten the girl black and blue with a horsewhip and, as she lay nearly unconscious on the floor, he had shattered both her wrists, on which she wore the bracelets, with blows from a hammer. Aceite claimed that keeping such an extravagant gift was a humiliation and disrespect to her father. And as far as he was concerned, the only humiliating would be performed by him. Of course, Aceite had not reckoned with Diego Garcia, who came to hear the story from the very man who had given the girl the bracelets. After beating Aceite almost to a pulp, Diego had carried the midwife, whose name was Lucrecia, out of her father’s house and taken her to the nearby town of Valera, where a doctor set the bones in her wrists. Then Diego took her home and cared for her until she was well enough to fall in love with him.
Though Diego’s tryst with the midwife Lucrecia had been brief, it had resulted in conception. Lucrecia, possessed of a roving and revolutionary spirit as fiercely independent as that of her lover, was prepared to birth a baby but not to raise one, much less two, for it turned out she was carrying twin boys. She gave them unnamed to her elder sister, Juanita, to bring up as her own. Juanita, widowed and childless, had named them Manolo (after her late husband) and Moriche (after her father). She had mothered the boys and loved them to the best of her ability, but Moriche, the secondborn, had the temperament of his namesake and had fought her from the start, seeming to perceive even as an infant that she was not his real mother and thus without rightful claim to him.
There was no Guajiro community on either side of the border that was immune to the lure of Diego’s call to arms. When Manolo was sixteen, he ran away to join his father in the guerilla struggle for the rights of his people to their land and way of life. Juanita could not prevent a son from joining his father’s call, but she was determined that Moriche not follow suit. In an effort to shield Moriche from the fate of Manolo, Juanita had explicitly forbidden Diego to recruit him. Her effort, however, had ultimately been in vain, for Diego was a hero, and trying to prevent any young Guajiro from revering him would have been like trying to blot out the light of the sun from the sky.
Diego, out of respect for Juanita’s wishes, had assiduously refused to admit Moriche into the revolutionary army. But Moriche, who thought it was merely a matter of proving his mettle, was not to be deterred. He had tried to establish his value and resourcefulness by intrepidly running dangerously large caches of guns and drugs across the border at the age of seventeen. He arrived at one of Diego’s moving camps in the middle of the night, offering a share of his profits as funding for the rebellion, but Diego had refused his money and slapped him, saying it was blood money, that Moriche had brought shame upon his own name and risk to those who fought in the rebellion, that he should stop playing peligroso games and go back to his mother. This had the unfortunate effect of a challenge to Moriche’s young manhood. Embittered, he had become a mercenary, peddling his wares to the highest bidder and keeping the money for himself. His influence grew in the dark underbelly of the drug world that had no borders, and so did his fortune, which he squirreled away in banks under different names in two countries. In the end his father had come to him for help to secure the release of a group of rebels held by the militares near the border town of Arauca. And after that the line between good money and bad money had been blurred for the resistance fighters.
Though it was thought by many that Diego Garcia, like all pure revolutionaries, was incapable of romantic love, Ismael had heard that his reaction to Lucrecia’s accidental death by a stray bullet during a skirmish with the militares had been that of a madman. From all accounts, he had begun taking ever crazier and exaggerated risks in his cross-border activities, taunting and provoking his foes as though he actually wanted his life to be given a punto final, dragging his sons and even his daughter-in-law down with him.
When Ismael’s arms begin to strain and ache beyond endurance, Carlos Alberto quietly removes his shirt, takes the shovel from his father-in-law’s hands, and continues to dig. Ismael, sitting exhausted on the ground, watches his boxer muscles ripple, the sweat pour down his torso, and he is overcome by affection for this strong, gentle man who has married his daughter. It takes two hours to make four shallow graves. They lay the bodies to rest in the graves without coffins. When the dead are covered with dirt it begins to rain lightly. Efraín’s face contorts violently before becoming flaccid again. It is all right to cry, says Luz. But Efraín mutters that the drops on his cheeks are from the rain and brushes them aside roughly with his fists. He will plant flowers, he says defiantly. Then his eyes glaze over, his body goes limp, and he does not speak again.
“I’m taking the boy, Vieja,” says Ismael.
Juanita emerges momentarily from her veil of sorrow to say, “You cannot have him.”
“It is Diego’s wish, as I told you the day I arrived.”
“To hell with Diego, his wishes, and his endless revolution. The boy is my grandson.”
“He is Lucrecia’s grandson. And you have allowed him to draw too much attention to himself.”
“He has a gift. Why should it be hidden?”
“Such a gift untrammeled and exposed to the public will surely destroy him.”
“And who will teach him and raise him to manhood? Not you, surely; you’re as old as I.” Juanita’s voice is tired and Ismael knows her defiance is half-hearte
d, hollow, unsustainable.
“I will raise him,” says Luz. Ismael hadn’t realized she was listening from the doorway. He looks into her eyes and wonders whether a motherless child and a childless mother might not be the right combination under the circumstances.
Juanita lies down in her hammock, turns her face to the wall. “The little bastard is cursed. Only bad things happen around him. Take him then, and leave me to mourn my sons in peace.”
And so they begin the drive home to Tamanaco, Luz in back with the unresponsive boy’s head in her lap, Carlos Alberto at the wheel, and Ismael in the passenger seat, staring out the window and humming a song called “Consuelo,” which he had composed for his wife on the day they were married.
They arrive in Tamanaco in the cool of the summer afternoon. And when they turn into the driveway Consuelo is already standing in the middle of the garden waiting for them, surrounded by roses, her hair blowing in the breeze. After the initial reunion jumble of hugs and kisses, Luz collects Efraín from the backseat of the Lancer and carries him to her own bed, while Carlos Alberto, his arms around Lily, quickly recounts their adventures in telegraphic hushed tones to an astounded audience.
This excitement, it seems, is all that is required for Lily to go into labor. Amparo and Alegra fly into action, joyfully barking out orders and assigning roles to everyone. Lily’s labor progresses into its fourth hour, but the business of birthing is not enough to dissuade Marta from commencing the eighth Novena to Maria Lionza promptly at eight p.m. Afterward, Ismael is enjoined by Lily to tell a story. In increments, between his daughter’s contractions, pulling and tugging at the memories, forgetting in the heat of the moment to edit the happy from the unhappy, jumbling everything together, Ismael sings his story to his daughter.
The Disappearance of Irene Dos Santos Page 23