In the days following our meeting at the zoo, Naranjo met us in various places to work out the details, which, as they were added to the list, made the insanity of the project even more evident. Nothing could dissuade him. Victory is for the bold, he replied whenever we pointed out the dangers. I sketched the plan of the uniform factory, and Mimí drew details of the prison; we calculated the movements of the guards; we clocked their routines; we even studied the wind direction, light, and temperature at every hour of the day. In the course of the process Mimí became infected with Huberto’s excitement, and lost sight of the final goal; she forgot they were trying to free prisoners and thought of it as a kind of parlor game. Fascinated, she drew maps, made lists, imagined strategies—totally overlooking the risks—believing in her heart that, like so many other things in the nation’s history, nothing would go beyond the planning stages. The undertaking was so audacious that it deserved to succeed. Comandante Rogelio, along with six companions chosen from among the most experienced and courageous guerrillas, would camp with Indians near Santa María. The tribal chieftain—motivated to cooperate after the Army had swept through his village leaving a swath of burned huts, gutted animals, and raped girls—had agreed to take the men across the river and lead them through the jungle. They would communicate with the prisoners through two Indians who worked in the prison kitchen. The day of the attempt, the detainees would be ready to disarm their guards and slip into the prison yard, where Comandante Rogelio and his men would rescue them. The weakest part of the plan—as Mimí pointed out, although no experience was needed to reach that conclusion—was how the guerrillas were going to get out of their cells. When Comandante Rogelio set Tuesday of the following week as the latest possible date for the attempt, Mimí stared at him through long mink eyelashes, realizing for the first time that he was truly serious. A decision of such magnitude could not be left to chance, so she pulled out her cards, told him to cut the deck with his left hand, laid out the cards according to an order established in an ancient Egyptian civilization, and read the message from the supernatural forces while he observed with a sarcastic smile, muttering that he must be crazy to entrust the success of such a venture to this bizarre creature.
“It can’t be Tuesday, it has to be Saturday,” she determined when she turned over the Magus and his head was upside down.
“It will be when I say,” the Comandante replied, leaving no doubt about his opinion of such madness.
“It says Saturday here, and you’re in no position to defy the tarot cards.”
“Tuesday.”
“Saturday afternoons half the guards go on a spree in the whorehouse in Agua Santa, and the other half watch baseball on television.”
That was the argument that tilted the scales in favor of the stars. It was at precisely that moment, as they were arguing, that I remembered the Universal Matter. Comandante Rogelio and Mimí looked up from the cards and stared at me, perplexed. And that is how, without ever intending it, I ended up in the company of half a dozen guerrillas mixing porcelana in a native hut a short distance from the house of the Turk where I had spent the best years of my adolescence.
* * *
I rode into Agua Santa in a battered car with stolen license plates, driven by El Negro. The place hadn’t changed much. The main street had grown a little: there were new houses, several shops, and an occasional television antenna. Absolutely unchanged were the sound of the crickets, the implacable noonday heat, and the nightmare of jungle that began at the edge of the highway. Tenacious and patient, the townspeople had endured its steamy breath, and the erosion of time, virtually isolated from the rest of the country by that merciless vegetation. In principle, we should not have stopped. Our destination was the Indian village that lay halfway to Santa María, but when I saw the tiled-roof houses, the streets gleaming from the most recent rain, the women sitting in rush chairs in shadowy doorways, memories swept over me with irresistible force and I begged El Negro to drive past The Pearl of the Orient so I could take one look, if only from a distance. So many things had disintegrated during the years since I had left, so many people had died or gone away without a goodbye, that I expected to find an unrecognizable fossil, ravaged by time and tricks of memory. To my amazement, the shop appeared unscathed before my eyes, like a mirage. The front had been rebuilt, the sign newly painted; the shopwindow displayed agricultural tools, foodstuffs, aluminum pots and pans, and two brand-new mannequins with yellow wigs. There was such an air of renewal about it that I could not resist getting out of the car to take a peek inside. The interior had also been rejuvenated with a modern counter, but the grain sacks, bolts of cheap cloth, and jars of candies were as they had been.
Riad Halabí, dressed in a batiste guayabera, his mouth covered with a white handkerchief, was adding up his accounts beside the cash register. He was exactly as I remembered him, not a minute older—as sometimes the memory of our first love remains. I walked forward timidly, moved by the tenderness I had felt when I was seventeen and I sat on his lap to ask him for the gift of a night of love, and to offer him the virginity my madrina used to measure with a cord of seven knots.
“Good afternoon . . . Do you sell aspirin?” was all I could say.
Riad Halabí did not look up or lift his pencil from his account book, but gestured toward the far end of the counter.
“My wife will help you, señorita,” he said with the lisp caused by his harelip. I turned, expecting to see the schoolteacher Inés converted into the Turk’s wife, as I had so often imagined; instead, I saw a girl who was probably no more than fourteen, a short, plump little brunette with red lips and an obsequious expression. I bought the aspirin, musing that years ago when this man had rejected me because I was too young, his present wife must have been crawling around in diapers. I will never know what my fate would have been had I stayed with him, but of one thing I am sure: I would have been very happy in bed. I smiled at the red-lipped girl with a mixture of complicity and envy, and left without exchanging a word or a glance with Riad Halabí. I was happy for him, for how well he looked. From that moment I have thought of him as the father that in fact he was; the image fitted him much better than that of lover for one night. Outside, El Negro was grumbling with impatience; this stop had not been included in his orders.
“Let’s get out of here. The Comandante said that no one should see us in this crummy town where everyone knows you,” he complained.
“It isn’t a crummy town. Do you know why it’s called Agua Santa? Because it has a holy spring that washes away sins.”
“The hell you say!”
“It’s true—if you bathe in the waters, you will never again feel guilt.”
“Please, Eva, get in the car and let’s go.”
“Not yet, there’s something I have to do, but we’ll have to wait till dark, when it’s safer.”
It was useless for El Negro to threaten to leave me stranded, because when I get an idea in my head I seldom change my mind. Besides, I was indispensable to the rescue. He not only had to wait, I also set him to work digging as soon as the sun went down.
I led him behind the houses to some rough ground covered with heavy undergrowth, and pointed to the spot.
“We’re going to dig something up,” I told him, and he obeyed because he had decided that unless the heat had melted my brains, this must be part of the plan.
He did not have to expend much energy; the clayey soil was wet and soft. A little more than half a meter down we found a plastic-wrapped package covered with mud. I wiped it off on my shirttail and, without opening it, stuck it in my purse.
“What’s inside?” El Negro wanted to know.
“A dowry.”
* * *
The Indians met us in a cleared ellipse, their fire the only source of light in the dense jungle darkness. A large triangular roof of branches and leaves served as a communal shelter, and numbers of hammocks were strung
beneath it at different heights. The adults wore minimal clothing, a habit acquired through contact with nearby towns, but the children were naked, since parasites and a pale, unhealthy mold thrived in fabrics never free of the damp. Girls wore feathers and flowers above their ears; a woman was nursing a child at one breast and a puppy at the other. I studied those faces, searching for my own image in each of them, but I saw only the tranquil expression of those who have encountered and answered all questions. The chief stepped forward two paces and welcomed us with a slight bow. He held himself very straight; his eyes were large and wide-set, his lips fleshy, and his hair cut like a round helmet, clipped at the back of the neck to reveal the proud scars of many cudgeling tourneys. I recognized him immediately; he was the man who every Saturday led the tribe into Agua Santa to ask for charity; the man who one morning found me sitting beside the body of Zulema; the same man who sent news of the calamity to Riad Halabí and, when I was arrested, lingered outside police headquarters to stamp the ground as if a drum of warning. I wanted to know his name, but El Negro had explained beforehand that it would be discourteous to ask. For these Indians, he said, to name is to touch the heart; they consider it offensive to call a stranger by name or to be named by him, and it would be best to avoid questions that might be misinterpreted. The chief looked at me without a hint of expression, but I was sure he recognized me. He pointed to indicate the way, and led us to a windowless cabin smelling of scorched rags and containing two campstools, a hammock, and a kerosene lamp.
Our instructions were that we were to wait for the other members of the party, who would join us sometime before Friday night. I asked about Huberto Naranjo, because I was counting on our spending those days together, but no one had news of him. I lay in the hammock without removing my clothes, disturbed by the incessant hum of the jungle, the humidity, the mosquitoes and ants, my fear that snakes and poisonous spiders would crawl down the ropes, or might be nesting in the palm thatch and drop on me during the night. I could not get to sleep. I spent two hours examining my reasons for coming there—without reaching a conclusion; my feelings for Huberto did not seem sufficient pretext. Every day I felt more remote from the times when I had lived only for our furtive meetings, fluttering like a firefly around a guttering flame. I think I had agreed to be a part of that adventure in order to test myself, with the hope that by sharing in that unconventional war I could again be close to the man I had loved but asked nothing of. But now I was alone, huddled in a bedbug-infested hammock reeking of dog and smoke. I was not acting from any compelling political conviction, because even though I had accepted the principles of that utopian revolution, and was moved by the desperate courage of the small band of guerrilla fighters, I sensed they were already defeated. I could not escape the prickle of disaster that had haunted me for some time, a vague uneasiness that flared into certainty when I was near Huberto Naranjo. In spite of the revolutionary passion that still blazed in his eyes, I felt an air of calamity closing in about him. I had espoused his rhetoric to impress Mimí, but in fact I believed that the guerrilla movement would never triumph in this country. I did not like to think about what might finally happen to those men and their dreams. That night in the Indian hut, unable to sleep, I was disconsolate. As the temperature dropped I grew cold; I went outside to spend the night huddled beside the coals of the fire. Pale, barely visible light filtered through the leaves, and I was aware that, as always, I was calmed by the moon.
At dawn I heard the Indians, still numb in their hammocks, stirring beneath the communal roof, talking and laughing. A few women went to fetch water, followed by their children imitating bird cries and animal sounds. In the morning light I could see the village better: a handful of huts wasted by the breath of the jungle, stained to the color of clay, surrounded by a strip of cultivated earth with patches of yucca and maize and small bananas—the tribe’s only wealth, despoiled for generations by the greed of the outside world. Those Indians, as poor as their ancestors at the beginnings of American history, had, even with the intrusion of colonizers, maintained their customs, language, and gods. Of the proud tribe of hunters they once were, there remained only a few sad indigents, but the long record of misery had not erased the memory of their lost paradise, nor their faith in the legends that promised they would regain it. They were a smiling people. They owned a few chickens, two pigs, three dugouts, some fishing spears, and the unproductive patches of land they had wrested from the jungle through extraordinary effort. They spent their days looking for food and firewood, weaving hammocks and baskets, carving arrows to sell to tourists by the roadside. Occasionally one of them hunted and, if he was lucky, returned with a bird or two, or a small jaguar that he shared with the tribe but did not taste himself, in order not to offend the spirit of his prey.
It was time to get rid of the car. El Negro and I drove to a place where the undergrowth was particularly heavy, and pushed the car into a bottomless barranca; we watched it plunge downward noiselessly, past chattering parrots and unimpressed monkeys, silenced by gigantic leaves and curling lianas, disappearing into a jungle that closed over its trail without a trace. The guerrillas arrived throughout the day, one by one—all on foot and by different routes—with the composure of men who have lived long in the outdoors. They were young, resolute, serene, and solitary; their jaws were firm, their eyes sharp, their skins roughened by weather, their bodies scarred. They had little to say to me; their movements were measured, avoiding any waste of energy. They had cached part of their weapons and would not recover them until the moment for the attack on Santa María. One of them, with an Indian guide, left to take up a position on the riverbank where he could observe the prison through binoculars; three others went off toward the airport to lay explosives, under the direction of El Negro; the remaining two set about organizing the retreat. Each carried out his task without fuss or comment, as if it were routine. At dusk I heard a jeep and ran to meet it, hoping that at last it was Huberto Naranjo. I had been thinking about him constantly, hoping that with luck, after a couple of days, the love that now seemed so cool might be rekindled. The last thing I expected was to see Rolf Carlé descending from the vehicle with knapsack and camera. We stared at each other in amazement; neither had anticipated finding the other in this place and under these circumstances.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“I’ve come to cover the story,” he smiled.
“What story?”
“The story that’s going to happen Saturday.”
“Really. How did you know that?”
“Comandante Rogelio asked me to film what happens. The authorities will try to suppress the truth, and I came to see whether it can be told. And what are you here for?”
“To make dough.”
Rolf Carlé hid the jeep and left with some of the guerrillas who, to avoid later identification, covered their faces when they saw the camera. Meanwhile I was responsible for the Universal Matter. In the darkness of the hut, on a piece of plastic unrolled on the hard dirt floor, I mixed the ingredients as I had learned from my Yugoslavian patrona. To shredded wet newspaper I added equal portions of flour and dental cement; I bound it with water, and kneaded it to obtain a firm paste more or less the color of wet ashes; then I rolled it out with a bottle—all under the observant eye of the tribal chief and some children chattering among themselves in their musical language, gesturing and making faces. I now had a thick, pliable dough, which I wrapped around stones chosen for their oval shape. My model was a dark metal Army hand grenade, three hundred grams in weight, ten meters killing range, twenty-five meters bursting radius. It looked like a small ripe guanábana. The false grenade was simple in comparison to the Indian elephant, the musketeers, the pharaonic-tomb bas-reliefs, and other works fabricated by my patrona. Even so, I needed several trial runs; it had been a long time since I had practiced, and anxiety made my wits slow and my hands clumsy. Once I obtained the exact proportions, it seemed clear that ther
e would not be enough time to shape the grenades, let them harden, paint them, and wait for the varnish to dry. It occurred to me that I might dye the dough to save painting it after it dried, but when I mixed dough with paint it lost its malleability. I began to mutter curses, and impatiently scratched my mosquito bites till I drew blood.
The chief, who had followed every step of the process with obvious curiosity, left the hut and soon returned with a handful of leaves and a clay ladle. He squatted beside me and began methodically chewing the leaves. As he reduced them to a kind of cud that he spit into the receptacle, his mouth and teeth became blackened. He pressed the wad in a rag, squeezed out a dark oily liquid—a vegetal blood—and handed the wad to me. I added the spittle to a portion of the dough. The experiment worked: when it dried, it was the color of the original grenade and had not altered the admirable versatility of Universal Matter.
The guerrillas returned at nightfall, and after sharing a few slices of cassava bread and grilled fish with the Indians, they lay down to sleep in the hut that had been assigned to them. The jungle turned heavy and black, like a temple; we lowered our voices, and even the Indians talked in whispers. Rolf Carlé returned shortly afterward and found me sitting before the still-burning fire hugging my legs, my face buried between my knees. He knelt beside me.
“What’s the matter?”
“I’m afraid?”
“Of what?”
“Of the sounds, of this darkness, of evil spirits, of snakes and bugs, of the soldiers, of what we’re going to do Saturday—that we’ll all be killed . . .”
“I’m afraid, too, but I wouldn’t miss this for anything.”
I took his hand and held it firmly for a moment; his skin felt warm to the touch, and again I had the impression I had known him for thousands of years.
“What a pair of fools we are!” I tried to laugh.
“Tell me a story, to get our minds off things,” Rolf Carlé requested.
Eva Luna Page 29