Eduardo stands there for a minute, holding his elbows. He takes a deep breath, but he’s only taken a few steps in the house’s direction when he stops again.
He’s just spotted the burrows.
They’re dug all over the hillside. The children are coming out of them, one at a time. They push aside the flattened cardboard, the planks of wood, the black plastic bags. Things he thought were garbage, discarded pieces of rubble. They crawl out of the shallow holes and stand before him, staring. Ten of them, a dozen. They don’t speak. They’re still in their school uniforms and they’re all a bit muddy—cakes of dirt on their skirt hems and trousers, shirts faded, cheeks smudged, hands dirty—but otherwise nothing is out of the ordinary. There is no screaming or running around, no pointing. No wiggling or pinching, no high-pitched shrieks of He hit me, it’s not fair, I hate you, when can we play football? If they were at recess, it’d be the most respectful behavior he’s ever seen.
The children just stand there, not speaking. Somehow he finds it within himself to jerk his head in the house’s direction. “Where are your parents?” he says.
None of them answer. One of the girls turns and presses her face up against another girl’s shoulder.
“Wait here,” he says. He heads up the hillside and bangs loudly on the rickety door—it’s a wonder he doesn’t cause the entire house to come tumbling down. “Hello?”
Nobody answers, but he still has the unmistakable feeling that somebody is on the other side, pressing their face against the wood, holding their breath. He glances over his shoulder—the children are all watching him. He knocks again, as hard as he can this time, then turns abruptly away as though seized by the uncontrollable need to stare out into the distance toward—what? The rest of the city spread out before him? The school with its tall brick buildings? His university library with its books and shelves?
By the time he’s walked back down the hill to where they are standing, some of the children are already beginning to turn away. “Julisa,” he says. “Is she here?” He reaches into his jacket and pulls out the items one at a time. Stone, hair tie, stick: the Guardian, the Gatekeeper, the one that was her favorite.
The girl with her face buried in her friend’s shoulder closes her eyes. But one of the boys says, “Julisa’s gone.”
The girl whose shoulder is being leaned on says, “I can keep those for her.”
Eduardo hands them over. The girl takes them from him with an alarming quickness, snatching them from his palm, clutching them to her chest. He opens his mouth to ask: Is Julisa okay? Did she go, or was she taken? Is she safe; is she strong? In the back of his mind, an unspoken question flickers, one for himself: Do I really want to know? He abruptly shuts his mouth, the questions dying on his lips. He instantly knows he has made a terrible mistake.
The children haven’t noticed: They’re already turning away from him, crawling back into the burrows. As he walks away they’re raising the cardboard and pulling it down over their heads.
He never mentions what he’s seen to anybody. He’s careful not to talk about it—not to bring it up in staff meetings, not to think about it while studying his economics textbook in the evenings, or when pitching stories to Sergio about the link between death squadrons and the government, or among the jostling shoulders of the crowded university protests.
And then there’s the night he’s yanked into a deserted alleyway by three men with close-cropped hair, their motorcycles humming in the distance. They pull machetes out of the waistbands of their trousers. You’ve been publishing the wrong kind of articles, they say before bringing a blade down hard on his right hand.
If he tries hard enough, the memory might just start to fade. With enough time, and a little bit of luck, it might be like it never happened at all.
NARIÑO
The Armadillo Man is watching her. She can tell by how quickly he lowers his face when she abruptly turns toward her bedroom window. He’s sitting in his usual spot, on the white plastic chair beneath the grapefruit tree, walking stick leaning against his knee, hands folded in his lap. She raises her arms and jumps up and down, letting the towel drop. The wind sways the grapefruits above his head; his eyes stay resolutely fixed to the ground. She spins around, does jumping jacks, turns and bends over so that her hands lie flat on the floor. She wiggles her rear end and begins writing the alphabet in the air with it, spelling one letter at a time in long, lazy arcs. She gives him a good show—the best she has to offer.
—
Later that morning they go for a walk. They take shortcuts by crossing through people’s yards, stepping over the collapsed portions of walls blown apart by grenades. They cut directly through abandoned houses, walking around shattered glass, splintered furniture, and piles of cigarette butts. There are never any lightbulbs or electric cables, no taps in the sinks or handles on the toilets. She leaves the doors cracked open for stray cats.
In Hortensia’s old garden, they find the body of a drowned chicken in the fishpond. He surprises her by handing over his walking stick and getting down on his knees. He fishes the body out with his bare hands and tosses it into a nearby bush. When he stands up again (slowly but still surely), the knees of his blue jeans have transformed into muddy brown eyes staring mournfully back at her.
“What should we do with it?” she says, circling the bush warily. The water drips from its feathers and runs down the leaves of the bush, forming tiny rivers in the dirt below.
“Leave it,” he says. “The other chickens will eat it.”
“What!”
“You haven’t seen them? Even the chicks will join in.” He shakes his wrists up and down, splattering water on her shirt. “Pick the bones clean,” he adds.
“That’s disgusting!”
“Why?”
“Is that what you want to happen to you?” Her voice keeps rising, getting more high-pitched.
“What I want,” he says, “is nobody’s business.”
She keeps looking at the bush. If it wasn’t for the chicken’s swollen claws and cloudy eyes, it could just as easily be sleeping.
“Or if you’d like,” he says, “we could dig a hole.”
“That’s stupid.” She’s already walking away. So he leaves it there, propped up on the shelf of branches, where, she hopes, the beetles and ants will get to it first.
—
She dreams about sitting in church. On the ceiling are dozens of arms and legs, layers deep, sticking out like prickles on a cactus. As she stands and walks down the aisle, they keep brushing lightly against her hair: the wrists and heels, elbows and toes. As she approaches the door she begins to stumble; looking down, she sees fingers growing out of the floor, springing up between the tiles like weeds. The air is filled with smoke and smells like rotten eggs. Something thick and squishy is lolling around in her mouth, but no matter how hard she pushes it against her teeth with her tongue, she can’t spit it out.
When she opens her eyes in the dark bedroom, her pillow is on the floor. For a second she thinks she can still smell rotten eggs, that the dream is a memory that never ended, an event that’s still taking place, but she’s able to take a deep breath and swallow hard before the pounding of her heart gets any worse. The sky outside her window is dark blue, and somewhere inside the room a cricket is singing. She picks up the pillow, flips it over to its cool side, and pulls her knees as close to her chin as possible.
—
When she’s not taking him on walks or completing basic household chores, the main part of Sofía’s job is accompanying the Armadillo Man on daily house calls. Three months ago, a few days after she and her aunt had returned from the morgue, he knocked on their door and said, “You know, now that I’m a retired man, I’ve been thinking I could use some help.” It only took the first few hours for her to realize that he didn’t actually need a caretaker, that he didn’t need any help, period—from her or anyone. But she’s never brought it up, neither to him nor to her aunt, so every evening the same ritual t
akes place: He gives her some crumpled brown bills in the kitchen and she walks next door to press the money into her aunt’s hands.
That morning they go see Pastora. Her mustard-colored house looks bright against the rolling fields stretched behind it, the land brown from the government fumigations. Even the bananas in the front yard hang black and heavy, the large leaves wilted and discolored. In the kitchen Pastora bustles busily about, serving them overcooked rice mashed with white bread and sugar. Sofía manages a few bites before sculpting the mush into a smooth white mountain in the middle of her plate, making it look as though she’s eaten more than she really has. Pastora and the Armadillo Man talk for hours, with Pastora saying things like “the taxes the guerrillas charged were much less” and “dressing dead civilians in rebel uniforms—shameless, utterly shameless.” In his unmistakable Bogotá accent, with its calm, straightforward steadiness, the Armadillo Man mostly responds with things like “Animals, animals,” or “That’s how it goes—they’ll just keep going.”
Sofía drinks her coffee in silence. She flips her arms over every few minutes, studying the different patterns the scratchy tablecloth has pushed into her skin. Every once in a while she sneaks a glance at the Armadillo Man’s hands—even after three months as his caretaker, it still feels like an act she needs to get away with. Something sneaky, undercover. The skin on his hands morphs into different colors: patches of red in some places, brownish yellow in others. There’s a bloated purple bump near his ring finger, engorged like a mini head. On his face the skin is white and flaky, like a tree trunk covered in lichens, with the patches in the middle parting in opposite directions, as if his face is trying to peel itself open.
“Six months and nothing,” Pastora says loudly. “Not a word about a ransom. Not for the husband, nor for the son.” She thumps her hand against the table, rattling the cups. “Eugenia is going out of her mind.”
“I guess she didn’t have a deal with the cartels after all,” the Armadillo Man says.
“Don’t you mean the guerrillas?”
“Maybe,” he says. “Or I could mean the army. Or the paramilitaries. Does it make a difference?” He places his hands on the table, palms facing upward, as though offering her something invisible.
It still shocks her sometimes, looking at him that directly, in a room like Pastora’s kitchen where plenty of light trickles in through the high windows. She keeps forgetting that he’s not an old man. His eyes are watery but clearly belong to someone her uncle’s age (or how old her uncle would have been), and the morning light as it hits his face makes his gray eyebrows turn white. She slurps the last of her coffee and wonders (not for the first time) if there’s a scar somewhere, a pair of faded red blemishes or a single dark puckered hole, where the jungle parasite first entered his body. How would it have happened? It would have been five years ago: The Armadillo Man, who back then would have just been the Professor, a teacher originally from Bogotá who’d been teaching at the town’s high school for years. Marching through the jungle, men with rifles and camouflage pants walking steadily beside him. Black rubber boots with yellow bottoms. A metal collar around his neck, attached to a chain. Once the Professor, now the Armadillo Man.
At what point did he realize what was happening to him? Did he figure it out for himself, or did the guards point it out? What part of his flesh began to rot away first?
“It was the Necktie cut that they used,” Pastora says, brushing her fingers lightly across her throat. “Heads off. Genitals in mouth.”
“That’s not the Necktie,” the Armadillo Man says. “That’s the Monkey. The Necktie is when they pull the tongue through the jaw. And not all of them had their genitals in their mouths, just one.”
“You can’t pull out a tongue with a chain saw,” Pastora says.
The two of them suddenly look at Sofía, as if only just remembering her presence.
“So nice to see there are still young people left in this town,” Pastora says in a voice that sounds more angry than glad, and Sofía pushes away her coffee cup, hiding it behind the bag of sugar.
—
Next is a winding road up the mountain to Ramiro. His house is the one with a corrugated tin roof and a giant plastic tub sitting on top to capture rainwater. When they reach the front yard there’s a goat tied to a stick bleating menacingly. It has the bushiest white eyebrows she’s ever seen. She stops in her tracks until the Armadillo Man says, “That’s enough, David.” When Ramiro comes out of the house to greet them, she thinks, David?
Ramiro’s back garden is filled with dead cornstalks and yucca plants. The narrow trunks of two papaya trees reach skyward, their leaves hanging limp on top. They walk on the path through the cornstalks, following Ramiro until he leads them to a field of coca bushes, the leaves browning and dry. Beside her, the Armadillo Man’s breath sounds a little ragged, but when she offers him her forearm he shakes his head.
“See this one?” Ramiro says, pausing and kneeling beside a bush. He uses his machete to point at the roots, where there are still some green leaves left. “Still alive and fighting.” His grin is a shelf of fuzzy yellow teeth. “That’s a personal trick of mine—if you cut off the tops just after they’ve been sprayed, the roots don’t die. That way, the bush can regrow. How about that?”
“Amazing,” she says, scratching her arm. She doesn’t have the heart to tell him that Yaison, twenty minutes away, does the same thing. She glances at the Armadillo Man, who’s looking expressionlessly around the field, blinking slowly, sweat glistening in the cracks in his forehead. Ramiro pulls off the greenest leaves and sticks them behind the elastic band of his sweatpants.
On the walk back, Ramiro uses his machete again to point out several lines of holes in the dirt, several inches deep, surrounded by empty shell casings. “American helicopters!” he says, sounding almost happy, as if flattered that they even bothered. At his house he takes them on a tour of his botanical garden: bromeliads and orchids, ficus and ferns. The pots are lined against every wall space available, so she can’t walk anywhere without a branch brushing against her arm or face. Ten years ago, she thinks, this house would have been perfect for playing Tarzan. Six years old, playing with her uncle: She would crawl around on her hands and knees, the jungle canopy overhead, monkeys whooping and jaguars growling in the distance. Her uncle always played the part of Cheetah the chimp, dragging his knuckles on the living room floor as she leaped from couch to chair, beating her fists against her chest. She swallows and roughly pushes a bougainvillea vine away from her face.
At one point Ramiro takes her aside, pulls the leaf off a nearby plant, and tells her to rub it against the yellowing bruises on her upper arm, faint stains left over from the last time her aunt pinched her. “It’s also a cure for AIDS,” he says, pressing a handful of leaves into her palm.
As soon as he’s out of earshot, she says in a low voice to the Armadillo Man, “I have AIDS?”
He covers his mouth with his hands as though cupping his laughter. A warm feeling spreads through her chest like spilt water, and she takes a deep breath.
Ramiro puts the coca leaves into a brown paper bag. “Five minutes without boiling over,” he says, handing it to the Armadillo Man, who passes him some bills in return. “That’ll take care of any aches and pains!” He winks at Sofía, who smiles stiffly back.
“Bye, David,” she says to the goat.
As they walk down the hill he says, “Oh my, my.”
“Why ‘Oh my, my’?”
“Every human being has to make his own mistakes,” he says. He suddenly sounds impatient, striking his walking stick forcefully against the ground, so she doesn’t speak again until they’re back in town.
Their last visit of the day is to the municipal building in the town center, where they’re greeted at the door by Márquez, the ex-sacristan. Márquez is from a Venezuelan border town. He speaks with a stutter and always stares directly at Sofía’s chest when saying hello. It makes her uncomfortable enough to not fee
l bad about being rude to him and abruptly charging into the building without offering him a cheek to kiss first.
For the past two months the mayor has let people use the first floor of the building as a church space, until the archbishop in Bogotá sends funds to clear away the last of the rubble and rebuild. “It’s going to happen soon,” Márquez says, his voice cracking with a squeaky enthusiasm that Sofía finds profoundly irritating. “I really think he means it this time—I do!” The Armadillo Man nods and flips through important-looking papers while she wanders around the room.
The rickety metal tables are covered with remains salvaged three months ago from the debris: fragments of Jesus and Virgin Mary statues, a dirty silver chalice. Splintered wooden boards are stacked against the walls. She looks at everything closely but doesn’t touch. Three months since they lined everybody up in the church plaza. Three months since she and her aunt visited the morgue. And this is still all that’s left. The longer she looks at everything, the harder her heart pounds, until she has to wrap her arms tightly around herself, as if afraid of losing her balance.
—
The next morning at breakfast her aunt says, “Be careful.”
“What?”
“You know.” Her aunt stirs her coffee rapidly, the spoon clinking against the glass, the liquid transformed into a whirlpool. Sofía watches carefully to see if any liquid sloshes over the side, but it never does. “He’s a man.”
“He’s the Armadillo Man.”
“Still a man,” her aunt says. “And don’t call him that. It’s disrespectful.”
“But he came up with it himself. He says that being called Professor makes him feel old.”
“Shouldn’t you be eating your breakfast instead of talking back?”
Sofía looks down at the rapidly cooling arepa on her plate. She slowly picks it up and stuffs it into her mouth whole, barely chewing, holding her breath to keep the nausea from rising. When she smiles at her aunt, all that shows is a mass of white corn mush.
The Lucky Ones Page 17