Human Matter

by Rodrigo Rey Rosa

  I went to the hallway, where, all of a sudden, night had fallen and it was very dark. I stretched out my arm—I think I actually did this in bed, while sleeping—to turn on the light.

  A little while ago I told B+ my dream. I told her that when I turned on the light, I woke up. But I withheld the ending, which was truly the terrifying part for me:

  When I turn the light on, I see my father coming in from the balcony. He looks tired and is much thinner than in real life. He has something under his arm that I think is a bottle of beer, dark beer. I think: Then, it isn’t him. (My father, to the best of my recollection, has never drunk dark beer.) Now the laughter is fainter. The man with the beer, who may or may not be my father, is impassive, as if he has not heard anything strange. He goes into a room and closes the door gently. I hear the click. And then, I wake up terrified, sweating, cold from the damp pajamas against my skin. I get up to change. I go back to bed and sleep without interruption until almost noon.

  Thursday.

  From the press: Social cleansing in Lake Atitlán. Armed groups (with names such as “Hitmen Without Borders”) have carried out thirty-six executions in the last six months. Among the victims: thieves, witch doctors, unfaithful couples, drug addicts, and corrupt government employees. These “cleansing” groups (someone should coin a new term for this concept of social cleansing) publish lists with the names of their next victims. Residents accuse the Ministry of Justice of negligence.

  A moment ago, I was looking for the manila envelope with the photocopies of the “elimination list” created by members of the army, which I obtained a few weeks ago from Luis Galíndez. As sometimes happens with a book or a document that I want to revisit or reread, that envelope is hidden, for now, in the usual mess of my papers. Instead, I find a binder, like the ones I used in school. It contains letters written by my maternal grandfather to his wife and children a few hours before his suicide. An airmail envelope has the following written on it: For Doña Emigdia Monroy, Widow of García Salas. In it there is a goodbye letter written by Don Jorge shortly before shooting himself in the chest. The letter ends: Forgive me thus, and taking everything philosophically, looking for the best side of everything, I wish you all happiness. This is the last and most burning desire from someone who loved you with all his heart.

  There is also a forensic letter, explaining that the death of Mr. García Salas “was produced by a gun shot from a revolver, whose projectile entered the thorax on the left, perforating the skin, cellular tissue, muscles, the lung, and the heart.”

  I give up my search for the lost envelope and continue to read documents from my grandfather, who wrote scientific articles on agriculture and agronomy—among them, several defenses of small farms (in opposition to the large plantations that dominated Guatemala)—during the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s for several local newspapers, and the story of an expedition to the Petén jungle—which he led himself—to combat a plague of locusts, and which resulted in a confrontation with the authorities in Chiapas, Mexico, where the plague was successfully diverted from Petén by my grandfather.

  My thoughts go back to the ghostly dream I had last night. Few dreams have left such a strong impression on me in the last few years; this is perhaps due to what I could call the careful cinematic realism of the production.

  Friday.

  I have a dream about my mother dying. She is in my arms, after a brief but intense agony. She has fallen on her back and hit her head. Just before, we were talking about one of my trips. Her skin color changes suddenly: it is bright, shiny, almost electric, and then, suddenly, it turns pale. She is completely nude, and her skin is ashen. Everything in her has darkened. This happens in the kitchen of her own house, next to the small table where Luisa, my parent’s Tzutuhil servant, eats. I bend over to pick her up in my arms. In a few seconds she has lost a horrible amount of weight. I want to take her to the living room. I run into Magalí in the hallway and we get into an absurd argument about where we should lay her to rest. We decide to take her to her room. I keep talking to her, carrying her in my arms. She has closed her eyes. I say to her, “My love, my sweet love,” and I know she is dying. By the time we arrive in her room, she has died. I wake up in sobs.

  Midmorning.

  I call Benedicto Tun again. He tells me he has found several rulings that he thinks might be of interest to me and several cassette tapes with something that his father was preparing for a History of the National Police. He suggests that we come up with a “firm plan”: He gives me an appointment at his office for next Tuesday afternoon. He asks me if I can bring a cassette player, as he does not have one. After hanging up the phone, I go check; I have one in my studio that I could loan him.

  I call the chief’s cell phone. He does not answer, and his mailbox is full.

  Afternoon.

  I go pick up Pía from her catechism session at San Judas Tadeo church. There are a dozen bodyguards in the parking lot, who accompany four or five “anguished mothers” (two of them, stunning), who are also there to pick up their children.

  PAGES ATTACHED TO THE FOURTH NOTEBOOK

  At my parents’, after lunch.

  The press is carrying two news items related to the Archive and another one related to the National Civil Police.

  1) One month after the “cave-in” in Zone 6, no one is taking responsibility for those who lost their homes, nor is there any support whatsoever for the relatives of the deceased. The sinkhole continues to widen and the danger continues to grow, affecting the buildings surrounding the Archive.

  2) A committee has been established to support the National Police Archive Recovery Project. “The Human Rights Ombudsman awaits the files on cases of human rights violations during the internal conflict.” “A. M. de Klein, member of the Anguished Mothers* organization, considered that the investment that must be made in order to catalog the approximately eighty million pages should be made instead in education and health, because the present is more important than scouring the past.” On the other hand, Mrs. Verónica Godoy, a member of the Public Safety Support Group, says that “it is vital to recover our collective memory, so that we can see the modes of operation of the National Police, whose highest-ranking members are currently expected to testify before our courts.”

  3) Yesterday another officer of the National Civil Police was executed (extrajudicially) in connection with the murder

  Note

  * Anguished Mothers (Madres Angustiadas) is an anti-violence group in support of women and families of victims of violent crimes. of the Salvadoran congressmen and their driver. This was done by four young men under twenty years old, according to eyewitnesses, in front of Ríos de Agua Viva elementary school, owned and directed by the same police officer. “In the El Coco community, this man was known to be both a criminal and, at the same time, a police officer.”

  Third Sketchbook: “Scribe”

  Friday morning.

  I call the chief several times; mailbox full.

  Prensa Libre carries more news and commentaries about the National Civil Police, publicly identified by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights, Philip Alston, for carrying out “social cleansing” operations. The Rapporteur adds: “This is a good country in which to commit a crime.”

  I call the chief again; he does not answer.

  Afternoon.

  The afternoon newspaper La Hora says: “Agents from the Division of Criminological Investigations commit extrajudicial executions, asserted the Rapporteur for the United Nations.”

  For almost fifty years Benedicto Tun directed what would perhaps have been the equivalent of this division for the old National Police. Again, I ask myself: Could this have been a “decent” man?—at least in the Orwellian sense? I wonder if I will have a clearer idea about this after my interview with his son.

  Saturday morning.

  Last night, again, a terrifying nightmare. In the dream, I am at my parents’, in the bedroom that we used to call “Grandpa’s room.”
I am awake but lying in bed in the dark. I hear noises and get up to investigate. I walk without turning the lights on, then continue toward the living room and dining room, where the noises are coming from. When I enter, I stop, frightened. A little man, evidently a thief, is leaning on the other side of the table, his back to me; he is searching for something in the cabinet with the glassware. I switch on the lights; the little man turns. He has the face of Mark Rich, a painter (I believe, ultimately, a frustrated one) whom I met in Morocco and who later became a friend in New York but whom I have not heard from in over twenty years. It is him! I think—but a lot thinner, and as if in miniature. He seems to be furious, his nose reminiscent of a bat’s. I look around me, in search of a blunt object with which to attack him or defend myself. He takes a big flower vase that sits on top of the cabinet where he is snooping around and makes as if to hurl it at me. I let out an inarticulate noise, half scream, half moan, that barely comes out of my mouth. I wake up drenched in sweat. I get up to assure myself that I am all alone in the apartment, then check the main door to make sure it is locked.

  I call the chief again. He answers his cell phone and tells me he cannot speak much. He is at the Archive with an “archive guru” who is giving a lecture for the researchers of the Project. The chief sounds very excited. The workshop ends next Monday, and Tuesday there will be a general meeting with the directors and consultants for the Project. He proposes that I start visiting the Archive again on Wednesday morning.

  I take a look at elPeriódico. More news from Philip Alston: “Rapporteur’s findings point to social cleansing,” states the headline on the front page. Among other statistics, it mentions that, in the year 2006, a total of 5,533 violent deaths were recorded in Guatemala, with only 5 percent of them, approximately, investigated by the authorities, and that sixty-four human rights advocates have been murdered in Guatemala in the last five years.

  Another interesting news item:

  Jaime Gonzales, the police-doctor, flew from Costa Rica to Venezuela last week on COPA Flight 223, the day after tendering his resignation, and just hours after visiting the police officers detained in connection with the murder of the Salvadoran congressmen at El Boquerón prison—but no record of his arrival at the Simón Bolívar International Airport has been found. In other words: the deputy chief of the National Civil Police has managed to vanish.

  Tuesday.

  Argument over the phone with B+ (on account of my being late for a date). I tell her she is out of it. She tells me that I do not understand anything. We agree that it is not advisable to talk any further for the time being, and I will call her later. Old story, I tell myself.

  I have lunch at my parents’. I read in elPeriódico an open letter from Jaime Gonzales, where he justifies his departure from Guatemala and his “disappearance.” He says: “My death in those circumstances [the scandal surrounding the murder of the Salvadoran congressmen and the execution of their murderers—high-ranking police officers, under Gonzales’s command in a high-security Guatemalan prison] would have personally damaged me in the eyes of public opinion.” Jesuit logic?

  Saturday, Puerto Viejo, Iztapa.

  Visiting the T’s, overlooking the Chiquimulilla canal. Luxury home, Santa Fe–style, five-star service. But the extreme comfort, along with JL’s bonhomie and the company of B+, do not make me completely happy; they don’t even put me slightly at ease. (And what about them, how do I make them feel? I could ask myself this question. Have never done it.) Although it is not exactly about “feeling guilty for still having a bit of pure air to breathe [as Adorno used to say] in hell,” there is an element of that. Perhaps B+ is right, in what I call her prejudice against the use (however discreet or moderate) of possibly left-linked benzoylmethylecgonine, under the effects of which, and with a slightly trembling hand and a bitter taste in the mouth, I write these lines, stretched out under the blazing sun, by the canal, with the rolling, shimmering sea in the distance.

  Sunday afternoon.

  In the press: one of the police officers involved in the murder of the Salvadoran congressmen, who is now a protected witness, states that there are “evangelical death squads” composed of National Civil Police agents who belong to various religious sects.

  “We are waging,” he says, “a battle against Evil. That is how extrajudicial executions are justified.”

  Monday.

  I leaf through my mother’s journal telling about her abduction, which I borrowed from her on Thursday. During the six months that she was held captive, my mother was allowed to keep a diary, but they took it away from her when they set her free. A few days after her return home, she started to write down her memories of the events in a hardbound journal, with a fabric cover decorated with very small roses against a bone-colored background. Tucked between the pages of the journal are three sheets of paper typed by my mother (who was a secretary in her youth and an excellent typist until recently). She left the work half-finished, but the first few pages are not without interest:

  June 28, 1981. Janila K’ay (her ceramics store).

  6:45 p.m. Mario calls to let me know that he will be late for dinner because he has a special meeting at the bank. I take advantage of this to write a note to “Guayito” to order a few items from the factory. At 7:15 Lelo Ungaretti comes by with a message (I do not remember what about) for Mario. I load into the car the defective lamp base to be returned to the factory, along with a wooden fish from Birmania that Rodrigo sent from New York as a gift for Magalí (whose birthday was yesterday), and which I brought to the store to have wrapped. When I get into the car, I see a young man staring at me from across the street, pacing in front of the store. I exit on Seventh Avenue and, as is my habit, I use the access lane on Plazuela España to avoid the red light. I am in a hurry, because I want to have dinner before the 8:00 movie they are going to show on Channel 3. When I turn on to 12th Street, a white van cuts me off. I think it’s backing up to park. I see another vehicle in my rearview mirror. Four or five men get out of the van. There is a woman with them. A man I had not seen, and who I imagine got out of the car behind me, breaks the window on the passenger side of my car (I always keep that door locked) with the butt of his gun. I hear gunshots. I scream.

  Tuesday.

  Long, instructive interview with Benedicto Tun.

  The Pasaje Suiza building, which connects 9th and 10th Streets, is today a somber place that still has some of the glamour of the fifties. Tun’s office is on the third floor, at the end of the hallway, a hallway that has high wood panels and several waiting benches built into the walls between one office and the next. A Kaqchikel family with two small children and a baby sits on a bench under high windows, with the sunlight filtering in through a film of dust and dirt, eating a snack of black bean soup, avocados, and tortillas. When I walk by them, they offer me lottery tickets. A handwritten note with Tun’s cell phone number is stuck to the door of his office. I call him. He tells me he is almost there. I sit on a bench and take notes.

  Tun arrives a few minutes late. He has big slanted eyes, a peaceful countenance, and straight salt-and-pepper hair, abundant and well groomed. He makes me think of a slightly overweight, Guatemalan Humphrey Bogart. Through the door that leads to the hallway, there is another door with iron grating. As he gestures to me to go first, he explains that he is remodeling. The office is divided in half with a plywood partition that is missing several panels. He invites me into his office, on the other side of the partition. I sit on a white divan in front of a desk cluttered with papers. I tell him that I assume he has a lot of work and that I do not want to impose on him. He nods with a slight smile of resignation. He goes to his desk and picks up a few old, damaged audiocassettes (which he assumes his father recorded during the last few months of his life), then hands them to me and sits down in an armchair next to the divan. I tell him that before giving them to me, he should listen to the recordings. I remember that I left the tape player in the car. I offer to get it at the end of our interview
and loan it to him.

  He explains that he found his father’s papers to be in a big mess, for which—he confesses—he feels a bit guilty. It seems to me that he is pleased by the interest that I show in the work of his father, of whom he speaks with obvious affection. He shows me a certificate of his father’s appointment as chief of the Identification Bureau.

  “My father started earning the salary of a simple street agent, but he was serious and ambitious in his scientific pursuit. He was also not dogmatic. He was a practical man, and a scholar who was constantly studying. He created the Identification Bureau practically single-handedly.”

  I ask him to tell me about the ruling on the death of Castillo Armas, former president of Guatemala, which he had mentioned during our early phone conversations.

  Benedicto seems to relax a bit. He starts to tell me in a confidential tone, as if I know the story well, about the case of the soldier Romeo Vásquez, accused of the assassination of President Armas—involving Trujillo, president of the Dominican Republic. He tells me that—as everyone knew from press coverage at the time—this soldier kept a diary. He lets me see photocopies of the diary, with its good, albeit very cramped, handwriting. The notes repeatedly mention the arrival of a “great day” and a “new revolution.” Although many have questioned the authenticity of the dairy (including Norman Lewis in his article “Guatemala: The Mystery of the Murdered Dictator”), Tun believes that these circumstances determined Vázquez’s fate: to be chosen as the scapegoat by the plotters, likely extreme right-wing people, and not left-wing, as it was claimed at the time. They had masterminded a plot, supposedly an escape plan for the assassin. The soldier was betrayed (the door for his escape from the Presidential Palace was locked from the outside). When he found himself cornered, he shot himself under his chin, with the same rifle he had used to kill the president, according to ballistic tests done by Benedicto Senior. The son shows me photos of the soldier lying on the floor, his head blown apart, with the rifle between his legs.