Human Matter

by Rodrigo Rey Rosa

  I wake up thirsty. It is still nighttime. I get up to drink some water—I am thinking of a little house on Pasteur boulevard in Tangier, not too far from Paul’s apartment, where perhaps I could stay if I manage to get back—and it is not until I turn on the light in the kitchen that I come to the realization that Paul died more than eight years ago. While the water flows from the faucet into a tin cup from Madras, I suddenly remember the moment when I kissed his already cold forehead in the Tangier morgue.

  Tuesday.

  Long interview with Benedicto Tun—which I have to interrupt (almost three hours into it) to go to the university and give a talk to B+’s students.

  By way of introduction and as an apology for certain delays and postponed interviews in the past, Tun explains to me that his routine work currently consists of analyzing signatures and fingerprints in various kinds of documents, particularly for the Property Registry, Courts of Auditors, and several banks, since cases of fraud have proliferated dramatically in recent years.

  He allows me to examine a copy of the ruling by his father in the case of a young French woman who participated in the kidnapping of Gordon Mein, the ambassador from the United States, in 1968. He shows me pictures of the young woman, who collaborated in the ambassador’s kidnapping by renting in her own name the Avis car they used for the act. Then, when she found herself cornered by the police, she put a gun in her mouth and shot herself before they could arrest her.

  He allows me to browse the copy of an undated letter (probably from the seventies) addressed to the president of the republic by residents of Zones 9 and 10. In it they mention that they have consulted with Tun, recently retired, requesting the improvement and modernization of the Bureau via the installation of an “IBM machine” to analyze the data from the thieves who operate in those residential areas. Neighbors propose that the financing of the machine will be “in the most disinterested way, for the improvement of the police service, as patriotic collaboration for the collective welfare.”

  An old man leaves the office next to Tun’s and, seeing him go by, Benedicto gets up to call him. It is attorney Rodríguez. Benedicto introduces him to me and explains to him that I would like to ask him some questions. The old man says he’s not in very good health but offers to grant me an interview a few days later, after he is done with the medical treatment he is currently receiving and that is causing him some discomfort.

  I then ask Benedicto to tell me about the problem that his father had as a result of the ruling that he issued on the suicide of Mario Méndez Montenegro.

  “It was during the government of Mario Mendez’s brother, Julio César, when they arrested my father,” he begins. “I myself went to get him out. But first I am going to tell you something that happened a few years earlier, because I think I did not do anything other than return a favor. I had friends on the left, which at that time was almost a crime, right? I never joined any subversive organization, although my friends tried to convince me, and I did attend some meetings, which were clandestine, of course.

  “Returning from one of these one night, shortly after the 1963 coup, a friend and I were arrested. They took us in a jeep with official license plates to what was then the First Police Corps, where they had a place that you will remember, known as the Tiger’s Den, where they kept political prisoners.

  “One of the policemen interrogating us in a kind of office hit me in the face with a rubber club, the kind stuffed with steel pellets. The blow caused my nose to bleed. Instinctively, I defended myself; I snatched the club from the policeman’s hand. Then, he asked his colleagues to help him get it back from me. But they didn’t do it: ‘He took it from you, you take it from him.’ They wanted us to fight. I prepared myself, I raised the club, without thinking, of course. The cop, who did not want to risk getting hit, did not insist. He simply took out his gun and led my friend and me to the collective jail, the famous Tiger’s Den. There, someone advised me to return the weapon to the policeman, because this little trick might later cost me. I listened to him, of course. And you know what? I remember that before tossing the club between the iron bars I saw the following inscription on the handle, in English, of course: ‘Property of the United States Government,’” says Benedicto with a smile.

  “There,” he continues, “I met the brother of the famous ‘Pepe’ Lobo Dubón, Roberto, may he rest in peace, with whom I had a conversation for a good while. He died shortly thereafter, as you may know; he was shot by a soldier in a bar called Martita. He was very brave, no doubt about it. Anyway, we could see a young man they had just tortured, his face disfigured and bruises everywhere, lying in a corner, possibly dying.

  “Several hours later, a guard called out my name in a loud voice. Lobo Dubón warned me that if they took me out at that time of night, it was possible that they were thinking of killing me. He told me to be strong. I came out believing that everything ended there, but what happened was that someone had told my father that they had me in prison, and he came to get me out. Of course, I was not going to leave my friend there, so my father and I demanded his release. When they saw that they were letting us go, other prisoners asked us to appeal on their behalf on the grounds of unconstitutionality. They called out their names from the Tiger’s Den, and I started to jot them down in the palm of my hand with a Parker pen that I had at the time and that I valued a lot because it was a gift from my father. But a policeman snatched it from me and snapped it in half.”

  Benedicto has to return a phone call that he received a few minutes ago on his cell phone. He excuses himself, and after talking for a while, he sits back down next to me on the white leatherette armchair. I ask him to tell me about his father’s arrest.

  “One afternoon,” he begins, “in April of 1967, someone alerted me over the phone that my father was in custody. ‘They have him in the First Corps barracks. They’ve already ordered prison food for him,’ they told me, and I remember it very well because that was when I realized that it was serious. I spoke with several friends and acquaintances of my father and of the minister of the Interior at the time, asking for an explanation, but to no avail. In the upper spheres of politics, police, and the military, it would appear that they were unaware of the case. Then I decided to talk to a moneyed young man, who was influential in government. He owed me a couple of favors, and he agreed to give me a hand. He got me an interview with a high-ranking military official. Three men welcomed me into a ‘dark house’ (it was already nighttime by then) here, downtown. In these situations, you are received with all the lights off, so that you cannot see the faces of those who speak to you. I only managed to find out that it was a low-level matter, or a policy issue that had nothing to do with the government; otherwise the army would have known. I called Rodríguez then, and we decided to go directly to the barracks—not together, however, but one behind the other, so that they would not arrest the two of us at the same time. We synchronized our watches; it was almost eleven o’clock at night. I was able to go through the first door of the barracks without being stopped. I did not give them time to react, I suppose. In the parking lot I saw, in a fancy car, a relative of the president, who was leaving. I went up to the second floor, all the way to the Interpol department, at the end of the corridor, where there was light. They had my father there, under interrogation. He seemed disoriented, as if he had not yet realized that he was in custody. ‘I’m working with these gentlemen,’ he told me.

  “They were reviewing his ruling on the suicide of Mario Méndez, the president’s brother. They wanted my father to report that he had been assassinated. They wanted to make a hero out of him, a martyr.

  “I told my father to get up, that I was there to take him with me. I grabbed him by the arm and pulled him out of there. When I got out to the hallway I heard Rodríguez arguing with one of the guards at the door. He was explaining to them that, in addition to being a lawyer, he was an army officer.

  “When they let him through, he joined us and the three of us went out to the
street without any additional difficulties. On our way home, I told my father how they had alerted me that he was detained and that they had even ordered prison food for him. He did not want to believe it, but that very night we wrote his letter of resignation. The president, as I told you, did not accept it.”

  With some misgivings, I tell him that, in order to paint a clearer picture of his father, I would like to know some personal traits.

  “Ah,” he says, “my father’s personality.”

  “Yes. For example, what books he liked to read. Judging from the way he wrote, I assume that he read quite a bit.”

  “It is true. He read everything.” He smiles. “In addition to criminology, forensic medicine, and other sciences related to his work, he was interested in philosophy, the occult, and the esoteric—and in particular, palmistry.”

  Benedicto stops and studies the palm of his left hand for a while. With his right index finger, he touches, I believe, the wisdom line, which is very pronounced. “He believed . . . ,” he says, and pauses. His mind seems to change course. “He also read history. He read a lot of Toynbee.”

  He shows me a photo from the sixties. In an austere amphitheater, Benedicto Senior is standing, in a formal suit, in front of a podium. He is delivering a talk at a Police Academy conference, his son explains to me. He has a strange grin and seems very tense, even tormented, and he has his arms crossed over his chest in a defensive attitude, the attitude typical of the very shy when facing the public.

  “As you can see,” the son tells me, “he was a very shy man. He was very quiet on the outside, but at home he spoke loudly and had an iron hand.”

  He tells me, not without signs of filial affection, that he was the youngest of seven brothers and that he had only a few years with his father as an adult.

  “He was internally conflicted about his Mayan origins,” he tells me. “You know how things were. Things have changed, although in reality, maybe they have not have changed so much. Racial discrimination persists, right? Only now it is less crude than it was then.”

  He tells me that his father was the only son (he had three sisters) in a Quiché family from San Cristóbal Totonicapán. The father was a merchant and sent his son to high school at the county seat in Quezaltenango. Upon graduation, he traveled to the capital, where he started his law degree. Right after he began his studies, he found employment as a scribe for General José María Letona, a government minister and “right-hand man” for Manuel Estrada Cabrera [immortalized by Asturias as el Señor Presidente]. That job, which allowed him to familiarize himself with state matters (he had excellent handwriting, and the minister had him copy his own books), led to disagreements with his father, who did not want him to be a mere employee. He had made financial sacrifices to send him off to school in the capital with the hopes that he would pursue a college degree.

  “My grandfather, who was mayor of his town for more than one term, had a store near that of the Gutiérrez family—can you imagine?” he continues. “If my father had devoted himself to business, perhaps he would have become a rich man, though perhaps not as rich as Juan Bautista Gutiérrez, from the Gutiérrez family in Totonicapán, one of the wealthiest families, if not the wealthiest, in Central America, right?” Benedicto smiles.

  “The truth is that he continued his employment with the office of the president. He liked life in the capital, the European suit and all that this city had to offer to a young college student, except for the little Panama hat that young dandies wore at that time. He never wore one. He did not want to return to San Cristóbal, so he continued as sub-secretary until the fall of Estrada Cabrera. As you know, his own minister, General Letona, testified about the mental incapacity of the dictator before the Legislative Assembly, who removed him from office. Then, my father had to flee to El Salvador. About a year later, he returned to Guatemala. After a brief time in jail, he was acquitted and began to work in what would later become the Identification Bureau.

  “The Bureau,” Benedicto continues, “completely consumed him; it was his sphere of power. He dedicated all his time to it, and conversely he tended to not take care of his family.” He says this without a tone of complaint, stating it as simply another fact. He repeats that, outside the home, his father was very shy and reserved, but at home he could be very harsh.

  “He asked everything of his children,” says the youngest child, smiling, “but he did not give everything. To help support us, my mother had to take work as a seamstress. The salary from the Bureau was very low, as I already told you. But there he could innovate. He was a man with power, and his job was his refuge. As I mentioned, his Quiché Mayan origin was a problem for him. He also had mild speech problems, and that is why he did not like to speak in public.”

  I asked him if his father spoke Quiché.

  “I believe that he did, as a child, but he forgot it. When we visited my grandmother at the village house, she and the other older ladies laughed at him and made jokes because he had forgotten his mother tongue. No one there used chairs or tables, everyone sat on a mat on the floor, but when we arrived they would take out tiny chairs, like toy chairs, where we could barely sit, and they set up a tiny table for us that would make you laugh,” he tells me. “Imagine the things that he must have seen at work and that he had to keep quiet about,” he continues. “Sometimes, at home, in his old age, he cried in silence. There were those who spoke ill of him, of course, because they were affected by his rulings or because they considered him part of the repressive machine, or because of prejudice, right? In any case, he did not cling to his position. He wanted to resign on more than one occasion, but his resignations were not accepted. Ydígoras Fuentes himself tried to remove him from office, and the chief of police opposed him.”

  I tell him that seems incredible.

  “Did I already tell you about the corpse he had to go to identify one night, only there was no corpse?”

  I say no, or that I do not remember.

  “He told me about that when he was already very old, shortly after his retirement. The thing is, one night they took him and the Justice of the Peace, responsible for the removal of corpses, to a place on the outskirts of town, off the western highway. There were some policemen on the shoulder of the road, and they continued on foot to an area of open land. A police officer was there, next to a man lying on the ground among the bushes with a bullet wound in his back. The famous flight law, right? My father told me that he was sure that that he was a construction worker because of his attire. He leaned over to examine him, and he realized that he was not dead. ‘There is no corpse here,’ he said to the cops. ‘This man is alive.’ Then, the officer ordered one of the agents: ‘Well, do your duty.’ And the agent approached the man lying on the grass and shot him in the head,” he tells me.

  Afternoon.

  After a very quick lunch and the talk at the university, I’m at the Hotel San Jorge with Javier Mejía, who called me a few days ago because he wanted to give me a copy of his last book, The Foreign Agent. Mejía was a cultural attaché in Washington and now he works for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

  We talk about books (Ellison’s Invisible Man comes up, as in almost all my conversations with this individual) and then, inevitably, about politics. I get very bored; rather than having a conversation, Mejía boasts or complains. As we are about to finish our coffees, Martín Solera—a criminal lawyer I met a few months earlier, at the workshop on policy and violence with Dr. Novales—appears. Solera asks me if I already received the diploma for attending the lecture series that he sent with Roberto Lemus, whom I suspect was a kidnapper. I say no. I explain that I had to suspend my visits to the Archive. The lawyer seems a little surprised. I assure him that it is nothing definitive; I have to talk to the chief and I hope that I will soon be able to revisit La Isla. It occurs to me to ask him for Lemus’s phone number. I’m going to call him, I tell him, to see if he can give me the diploma, which, after all, I would like to have. I write down the number on a paper n
apkin.

  After Solera leaves, when the coffees are paid for and we are about to say goodbye, Mejía tells me in a low voice that he knows the chief at the Archive Recovery Project very well.

  “A very dark character. If they ever find a file on him, they will see how many ugly deaths have his name on them.”

  I make a face of hostile disbelief, and he continues:

  “It is very ironic,” he says, “that he would be the one who is sniffing around his enemies’ Archives, no? He is himself a murderer.”

  Uncomfortable, wanting to change the subject, I mention Fouché, and the anecdote told by Zweig about his end ‘at peace with men and with God’: with men, because shortly before his death he decided to burn the police files for which many powerful people feared him, and which he had taken with him when he left Paris, and with God, because he had time to confess and receive the lasts rites.

  “I am not a Francophile,” he comments scornfully. “The biography that I want to read is Kissinger’s, but it is a seven-hundred-page tome and I have not had the time.”