Human Matter

by Rodrigo Rey Rosa

  I imagine the “unhappy people” referred to in the article are wishing that the San Antonio sinkhole would somehow swallow the Archive.

  Fourth Notebook: Red and Blue Stripes on a White Background

  Nighttime.

  Slightly disappointed: Benedicto did not call me, nor did the chief.

  I return to the General Archive of Central America. They give me the thesis: History of the National Police of Guatemala, 1881–1997 (University of San Carlos, 2004), by one José Adolfo C. Cruz. This revives me—before I start reading.

  I browse the thesis: big disappointment. Was this done by the son of a policeman?—that is the question this sleepy reader asks himself.

  The bibliography does not include any of the thirty-plus volumes of Yearly Reports by the National Police, nor any issues of the famous Police Gazette.

  From the “List of directors of the National Police,” I highlight:

  Mario Méndez Montenegro.

  Antonio Estrada Sanabria (horse-riding friend of my father’s).

  Wednesday.

  Today at seven in the evening, at the Center for Hispanic Culture at Cuatro Grados Norte, presentation of my little novel Caballeriza. Even though I do not want to go, I will. This part of the work, a presentation to the press or to the public (“that monster,” as W. H. Auden would say), is for me the most uncomfortable and the least pleasant; and in the case of this “realistic” story told in the first person, the discomfort is magnified.

  Late at night.

  “No one can express themselves entirely in art,” someone said. And I add: nor in reality.

  Regarding my words during the presentation (I think I said that the little novel, written more than two years ago, no longer seemed at all daring, as it seemed to me when I was writing it): the husband of the editor (who is a good friend of mine) ruled: Bad marketing.

  Thursday.

  Neither the chief nor Tun have called. I feel tired, as if empty, after the presentation. Too much drinking as well. Today it does not seem possible to do anything with joy. In the afternoon I’ll go pick up Pía so she can sleep over. By then I hope to be in better spirits.

  Too many upcoming trips are piling up on me, and I feel it: Petén tomorrow afternoon, Oaxaca on the sixteenth, France in early April.

  Sunday. Hotel Villa Maya, Santa Elena, Petén.

  While I shower before embarking on the return trip to Guatemala City, I remember the conversation we had at dinner after the presentation of Cabelleriza at La Casa del Águila. I was at a dinner that included my eldest sister, Magalí, an environmental activist branded an “ecoterrorist” by a number of newspaper columnists; a friend of hers who worked as a driver for a guerrilla organization, who today makes a career as an advisor to political parties, and his wife; and Willy Sprighmul, a former classmate at Liceo Javier high school, who has become a prominent businessman in the frozen food import-export business. Among other things, we talked of my work (suspended) at the Archive. Magalí and her friends were aware of it, but I had to explain to Willy what the Archive was and what I was doing there. Willy’s overall response was one of astonishment.

  “Very well,” he then said, not only to me but to the table in general, “but what’s the point of digging into the past? It is better to let the dead rest in peace, right?”

  His reasoning resembles that of my father, and reminds me of an after-dinner conversation that I recently had with him. I had just explained that my original intention in requesting access to the Archive had been to investigate cases of artists and intellectuals persecuted or recruited by the police, but that given the state of disarray of the documents and the time that would be required to catalog them, this had turned out to be impossible.

  “And so?” my father asked.

  “I have been allowed to see other things,” I explained. “There are a number of documents from something called the Identification Bureau, led for several decades by a certain Benedicto Tun . . .”

  “And that interests you?”

  “Yes, I find it interesting.”

  “So,” my father concluded, “your interest degenerated.”

  I had to laugh and tell him that that was partly right.

  Monday. Stop in Cobán.

  In a way, reviewing history is dealing with the dead. We do not read history; we always reread it, as we reread the classics, according to Borges. Before reading it, we have a general idea of what it will say.

  Like Zagajewski in his “Intellectual Krakow,” I saw the Archive as a place where the stories of the dead were in the air like filaments of strange plasma, a place where one could get a glimpse of some “spectacular machines of terror,” like stage machinery that has been hidden from view. I wonder: Might other researchers see something else?

  This is also from Zagajewski:

  To describe new varieties of good and evil—there lies the great task of the writer—and, now he does convince me, in an essay titled “Against Poetry.”

  To describe new varieties . . . And what if the new varieties were to obliterate the old ideas about good and evil, of what one or the other can be or become in each person’s subjectivity?

  Even the best of us—and I am thinking of “us” in the widest possible sense—needs to constantly choose between good and evil. Then, it becomes obvious that the choices are never identical, nor can they be, between two different people, because their circumstances—of time and place at the very least—are necessarily different. Time and place: both concepts are understood in their entirety—that is, in their tendency to infinity.

  Poetry, that little grain of ecstasy that changes the flavor of the Universe, Zagajewski writes.

  Saturday morning.

  On my reading desk—a low table of Kaqchikel craftsmanship—I have a number of the photocopies of the Police Yearly Reports that were made at the General Archive of Central America. I see three photographs of the woman “known as Angela Fuentes when she was alive” and her remains. The caption under the first photo reads: “The macabre torso being examined by the coroner in the anatomical theater.” (The title of the article, which comes from the previous page, is “The Monstrous Crime of Majadas, or the Beheaded Woman.”) The caption for another photo, showing the skull, reads: “The detached head was found 200 meters from the body.” Date: November 20, 1945. The author of the article: Benedicto Tun.

  Tuesday the 13th.

  At about eleven o’clock I call Benedicto, the son, again. He apologizes for not calling a few days ago, as he had agreed to do, and tells me that he has found more documents that could be of use to me. He proposes that we meet further down the line, in order to come to an agreement as to what documents I will use, and how. We agree to talk again tonight at seven o’clock.

  Later, I call the chief. He also apologizes, and “so as not to further delay our meeting,” he gives me an appointment for tomorrow afternoon at two, after lunch, at the cafe next to Taco Bell on Avenida de las Américas.

  Nighttime.

  I definitely want to go back to the Archive. I want to see the place again, with its army of researchers that make me think of Kafka characters, with their outlandish clothes, their piercings and tattoos under their ocher-colored lab coats with optimistic bright green badges that say “Archive Recovery Project”: the older folk, with gray hair and stooped shoulders, and the frustrated revolutionaries who work there for the salary but also diligently, with a kind of dull determination, because they want to make the dead speak. I could almost guarantee that, as in my case, no one (except perhaps the cleaning crew and the accountants) is there completely disinterestedly or innocently. Everyone there, in some way, files and records documents in favor of or against their own interest, with anticipation, and perhaps sometimes with fear as well. Nobody knows, as they say, whom they work for, and even less whom they have worked for.

  Wednesday, March 21, afternoon.

  “When you get back from Oaxaca,” the chief said to me, “you can go back to visiting the Archive.”
I must call him upon my return.

  During our last interview, I made the blunder of not letting him finish telling me about his children’s friend who had died a few days before in a traffic accident in Totonicapán: something about the bonds of friendship that united them, from their childhood in a “beehive”—which was the term used to refer to the shelters for the children of members of the Guerrilla Army of the Poor.

  Here, a comment of mine made the conversation shift toward the business of illegal adoptions. According to the chief, it began in the eighties and was linked to massacres in the countryside, especially in the western highlands. Although at first the normal procedure was to leave no survivors, later the soldiers began to leave the children alive, who were then taken to the so-called newborn shelters.

  I asked if he thought that they stopped killing children due to some humanitarian scruple. He said he did not think so, that they had realized that “it could be very good business, putting them up for sale for adoption.”

  After I updated him on my findings regarding the Identification Bureau, the chief told me that he liked the idea of focusing on a character like Tun instead of on a “psychopath” like Barnabas Linares (alias Linduras), of whom he had spoken—known as one of the biggest thugs serving Ubico and subsequent counterrevolutionary governments.

  He also explained details of the “misunderstanding” that caused the suspension of my visits to the Archive. He spoke of resentments, of “channels”; issues of confidentiality and professional jealousy; security issues. It was not advisable, for example, when referring to what I was doing at the Archive, to use the word “research.” No one, other than the team from the Ombudsman’s Office proper, had the authority to carry out any kind of research there. Among the team members, there were students majoring in history, political science, and law who had requested permission to use documents from the Archive for their theses or fieldwork, and all requests had been denied by the chief. I enjoyed a simple privilege, he said, adding: “I granted it to you based on an intuition, and I may be wrong, since I don’t know you, and we are not friends.”

  An intuition: that the result of my work as a writer could help the nonspecialized public to know about the Archive Recovery Project and allow them to realize the importance of such a find.

  Wednesday the 28th, evening.

  Strange day, empty.

  Thursday.

  An even emptier day, if that’s possible, than yesterday—due to last night’s excess of red wine and Spanish brandy. I took a nap at my parents’ house. While I rested, I thought about my mother, who is almost ninety years old and who spends a good part of her days sleeping in one of the rooms with large windows overlooking a large garden shaded by old trees.

  At seven Magalí called. My mother must be hospitalized right away. She needs a kidney drainage. Apparently one of her kidneys had not been working for several months, perhaps years.

  We accompany her to the hospital. My niece Claudia, Magalí’s eldest, will spend the night with her.

  Saturday. I fly to Oaxaca.

  On the plane I read a news article on state-sponsored terrorism in Guatemala, “Heritage or Fate?,” penned by an influential columnist. I clip the article and mark this passage in red ink:

  Exasperated and exalted by the paradise that common criminals and organized crime enjoy at their leisure, the highest echelons of Security and the Guatemalan State have always opted for efficiency and pragmatism and have proceeded to organize death squads composed of police officers and professional hitmen hired to kill criminals. These extrajudicial practices are popular causes, as the vast majority of Guatemalans are vulnerable and defenseless against crime and are convinced that for ruthless criminals there is no other way than to give them a taste of their own medicine. In other words, despair and fear among the citizenry ends up granting a certain legitimacy to this variation of state-sponsored terrorism.

  I wonder if the columnist counts himself among those who believe that this “variation of state-sponsored terrorism” does, in fact, have any legitimacy.

  No one will ever know with certainty—he continues, and now seems to want to revise the most recent history—who, among the thousands fallen during three decades of war, was guilty or innocent, nor how many were slain by the insurgency or by the counterinsurgency.

  “What about forensic medicine?” I wonder.

  “Why don’t you tell him to look at the work of Clyde Snow or Michael Ondaatje?” said an old Mexican poet when I told him about this in the arid outskirts of Oaxaca.

  From the Internet: “Clyde Snow was appointed by President George Bush (senior) to be part of the Human Rights Commission at the United Nations in 1991. Considered an “international popular hero” in forensic anthropology, Snow has selected paradigmatic cases of Guatemalan massacres to establish precedents in cases of ‘atrocities’ against human rights. According to his reports, more than one hundred thousand people were killed by members of the Guatemalan army between 1960 and 1996, and about ten thousand by the various guerrilla groups in the same period.”

  Sunday, in Oaxaca.

  Yesterday afternoon, reading of my stories in San Agustín Etla in an old textile mill converted into a cultural center, in the middle of a wild landscape of gray mountains and dark blue sky. By late afternoon, incredibly drunk on mezcal. At night, a rush of visions and memories.

  My mother was kidnapped in Guatemala City on June 28, 1981, and released on December 23 of that same year. We never got to know who held her during those six months, and, in fact, no one in the family wanted to carry out any kind of investigation. In the beginning we speculated that her kidnappers were criminal members of the government or of the National Police. (Back in those years it was not uncommon for parties or political factions to kidnap in order to finance their electoral campaigns or war strategies, or just to get rich.) One of the signs that supported this hypothesis was something that happened during the delivery of the ransom. My uncle, the doctor Eduardo García-Salas, and I were designated to deliver the money. We had to go the typical route in the style of “a treasure hunt” through Guatemala City, a journey that started at about four in the morning, in complete darkness. At a given moment, we were instructed to leave the car that we were driving in a public parking lot and to get in another vehicle that was already there, a blue Datsun pickup, that year’s model. There was an envelope in the glove compartment with further instructions: “Remove all of your clothing outside the pickup, under the streetlight next to you, and put on the gym clothes that are under the seat . . .” In addition to the instructions, we found the car registration and deed in the glove compartment. To our surprise, they were made out in my name, and carried the seal of the National Police and the signature of the deputy director.

  The delivery took place without any setbacks and that very afternoon my mother was safely at home, although weak. She had lost about fifty pounds in captivity. A priest who was a friend of the family drove her. It was near his parish that the kidnappers set my mother free, and it was through him that my father had first received communication about the kidnapping, six months earlier.

  A few days after her liberation, my mother ordered a mass of thanksgiving, where she made public her desire for her kidnappers to be forgiven by the powers of this world “and the world beyond.” Within the family circle, the criminal aspect of the case was forgotten. Other than the financial fallout resulting from the ransom payment, my father’s premature gray hair, and the breakdown suffered by my youngest sister, Mónica, (no doubt the greatest damage), the family was practically unscathed. And I daresay this experience was in a certain way enriching for my mother, then sixty-four, putting her in touch with unexpected reserves of inner strength. She gained a broader social conscience, and, after the kidnapping, she became a kinder woman.

  For several years, I thought that one of the gangs under the leadership of Donaldo Álvarez Ruiz, who at the time was minister of the Interior and is today a fugitive from justice and wante
d by Interpol, was responsible for the kidnapping. However, about twelve or thirteen years later, we received information that made us change our minds, and we came up with a different hypothesis about the identity of the kidnappers. In 1994 I resettled in Guatemala after almost fifteen years of voluntary exile, and among the new friends I had, there were some ex-guerrilla fighters. One day, during a long conversation over drinks, one of them assured me that my mother’s kidnappers were members of an urban guerrilla group, short-lived and practically unknown, that carried the name “January 18th Movement,” and whose founder and ringleader, Eugenio Camposeco, died in an automobile accident in 1982. I must say that the possibility that my mother’s kidnappers were guerrillas and not policemen was unpleasant for me because, although I never had direct links with any of the revolutionary organizations, I sympathized with them and not with the government—and this fact made it unavoidable to recognize that, ideology aside, there were “natural enemies” among the ranks of the insurgents. And then, the day before my trip, one of my female friends, who was part of the “support team” for a guerrilla organization, told me that there was a rumor, among several archivists, that the reason I was there was that I was searching for the identity of my mother’s kidnappers, who might very well be employees at the Archive Recovery Project.

  My suspension—I now wonder—was it not due to that?

  Wednesday morning.

  An unforgettable nightmare last night, returning from Oaxaca. B+ came to pick me up at the airport. She stayed with me a while and shortly after one o’clock (my flight had arrived close to midnight) she went home, half asleep, to go back to bed. I stayed up a while reading emails, then went to bed, too. A little while later, the phone rang. I got up to answer: nothing. I went back to bed and fell asleep.

  I woke up at four, drenched in sweat and overcome with an intense fear. It was not a violent dream, but what I would call an authentic ghost dream. B+ and I were at my parents’, in my parents’ bedroom, next to the French door that leads to the garden. From the colors—the green reflections of the grass and the almost black-green of the leaves on the trees (trembling in the dream), I knew it was late in the day. There was a strange noise in the back of the house, near the hallway that leads to the living room. As I listened, I heard demented laughter that seemed to come from the kitchen. B+ was very frightened. She asked: “What was that?” “Ghosts,” I said. “That must be the laughter of a ghost, or someone who wants to frighten us.”