We say goodbye.
Of course (I think, once I am back in my car, as I watch the stocky author agent walk away with long strides, in his navy-blue suit, down Avenida Las Américas), in his current job, he inspires mistrust.
The chief has not called back.
Mechanically, with suppressed fear, thinking I shouldn’t, I dial Lemus’s number. No one answers.
Friday. Seven in the evening.
I meet with Mejía again, this time at a Mexican restaurant. (I wanted to ask him on what he based his reckless judgment of the chief.) I found a pretext for meeting: to give him one of my books, which he had told me he wanted to review. He arrives with a friend, a linguist and literary critic, who studied in Paris. Bref: a fop.
Mejía insists:
“Your chief is, or was, Comandante Paolo,” he tells me, and laughs. “Didn’t you know?”
I did not know, and I feel a little naive, a little dumb. What I did know is that “Comandante Paolo” was part of the court that sentenced the young guerrilla women captured in the eighties in Guatemala and later executed in Nicaragua; they were the ones that Dr. Novales referred to during his lecture series.
We argue about the definition of war crimes. Mejía compares the executions attributed to the chief with the crimes committed by the Guatemalan military. I do not see, I say, the symmetry.
I think Mejia’s anger toward the chief at the Archive Recovery Project is of a personal nature. (As a young man, Mejía was an active member of the Guerrilla Army of the Poor, in which “Comandante Paolo” was a leader.) The amusing part is that Mejía now works for the government and finds it reprehensible that the chief is in charge of the Archive Recovery Project.
When we say goodbye, he surprises me by handing me an article that he is preparing, about the ensemble of all the books I have written. He would like to publish it, he tells me, in a foreign magazine. I read it when I get home. He surprises me again: the tone is slightly complimentary.
Monday, May 14.
I had lunch at my parents’. Long conversation with my father and Magalí. I ask them what they think we should do if we find out now who kidnapped my mother. My father says that he would do the same thing we have done so far: nothing.
“You know,” I tell him, “kidnapping is an imprescriptible crime; it makes no difference if more than twenty years have gone by, there could still be punishment.”
He does not change his mind.
When Magalí leaves, I ask my father if he has saved the tapes we recorded during the phone negotiations at the time of my mother’s kidnapping. He says he has. I ask him for them. He goes to one of his cabinets and finds three cassettes.
“You keep playing with fire,” he tells me as he hands them to me.
Wednesday.
Yesterday morning, another interview with Benedicto Tun. He explains that he does not have much time; he must go to the courthouse to take care of some business. He tells me that his youngest son also wanted to be at this meeting but was not able to come because of work. I suggest that the three of us meet sometime in the future.
Among other criminal events that he remembers at random, he tells me about one known as “the case of house number 38.” It was a robbery committed in the residence of two old women. They were killed by the robbers, among them the grandson of one of the women.
“At that time, you know, when the city was still very small, one investigation method in common use was to send agents to drink at the bars. Everyone knew everyone, and sooner or later you would hear something said by someone who was being careless that could serve as a clue. One more down, said the drunk each time he emptied a little bottle of firewater. That’s why they arrested him and took him to the barracks, and it did not take long for him to talk. He was one of the culprits, and because of him, they found the other two.”
Rodríguez appears. Benedicto introduces us again, and he accompanies us to the office next door before saying goodbye. Although Benedicto had already warned me that his friend suffers severe lapses of memory, I ask Rodríguez to tell me about Benedicto Senior. He says, “He was a brilliant man, honorable, extremely honest, deeply knowledgeable about his work. Our first criminologist. That is why they could not do without him, not even during the Revolutionary Government. He was a close friend of intellectuals like Balsells Rivera, the writer, and Cazali, the father of that girl who writes art reviews in the press. . . . He came from Quiché; his parents were Indian people. And look how far he got.”
I ask him to tell me about the failed uprising against the regime of Ydígoras Fuentes in 1960, in which he played a significant role. His memory, however, is too fuzzy and he cannot string together the events. About Yon Sosa (who also participated in the uprising and was the founder of the Armed Rebel Forces), he tells me: “It’s a pity that he would come to such an end. They killed him last year in Tapachula for smuggling; didn’t you hear about it?”
I know that members of the Guatemalan army killed him in Tapachula, but that was more than forty years ago. I choose to remain silent.
Sunday, May 26.
Pía turns five. Small celebration with my parents and sisters in El Tular. Penguin mini-piñata, that at the moment of truth Pía refuses to break.
Monday.
Silent call last night, around two. Pía was with me, which worries me even more.
Tuesday.
In the afternoon I went to Novex, the hardware store, looking for a nylon rope and harnesses for a possible escape (with Pía) through a window of the apartment. At the end the idea seemed ridiculous to me and instead I bought cables and terminals to record phone conversations.
Monday.
Good times with Pía, who is on vacation. At night I’ll take her to her mother’s.
In the morning, a call (that I let the answering machine take) from Uli Stelzner—“the German documentarian,” as he describes himself in the message he leaves. He is the director of the film Testament, about the life of Alfonso Bauer Paiz, a political activist and survivor of more than one murder attempt, and still active at almost ninety—a splendid and rare example of a good Guatemalan leftist from the twentieth century. Someone told Uli that I have been working at the Archive. He wants us to talk; he invites me to have coffee with him one of these days. I call him back in the afternoon. I ask who told him that I had been visiting the Archive. “Some people,” he responds. I tell him that this week I will be very busy; we agree to talk next week.
“Some people.” Why not a straight answer? I wonder.
At night.
“To love someone who does not love you,” says B+, who has just read One Hundred More Poems from the Japanese by Kenneth Rexroth, which I lent her a few days ago, “is like entering a temple and worshipping the wooden butt of a hungry idol.”
“I think I understand. Whose is that?” I ask her.
“My own.”
“I do not believe you.”
“It doesn’t surprise me. I don’t care,” she responds with some bitterness.
Wednesday.
I pick Pía up at school. I speak with her teacher. On Friday I will read an adaptation of a Quiché myth about the origin of corn to her class, a story about a crow and a woodpecker that show mankind the way to Paxil Hill, where the plant grew naturally.
The teacher continues to tell me about something that she started to share with me a few days ago. Yesterday, she says, she witnessed a homicide in front of her house. It was not her, after all, that those two men were watching! She is very frightened.
She also tells me that a few years ago she lived in Mexico, where she met a former Guatemalan guerrilla woman, who had been tortured by the police. She survived, and now leads a “normal life” in London. This woman told her that, over time, she came to forgive her torturers, but not her former bosses. One day, the war already over, she went to see Gaspar Ilom, the comandante (Rodrigo Asturias, Miguel Ángel’s son), to tell him what she thought of him: that he was a pig. “He, Gaspar Ilom,” the teacher says
, “turned green, but he did not say anything.”
Friday.
Last night I went with Magalí to the old post office to watch a documentary about the children of the guerrilla fighters, titled The Hive, which focuses on children of high-and middle-level teams in the Guerrilla Army of the Poor. Uli, the German documentarian, was there. He approached me to ask me what I thought of the film. The documentary is monotonous, but it is not without interesting moments. I said: “It’s a family portrait, right? What can you expect?”
Uli made a slightly more severe criticism. “He [the director of the documentary is the son of an ex-comandante and was raised in a ‘hive’] should not have done it, that boy was one of those children. Impossible to be objective.”
We talked about one of the cases that the film presents: a woman, about twenty-five years old, who at the age of about ten got the news that her father had died in combat. A few years later someone told her that, in reality, her father had been accused of treason, tried by a guerrilla tribunal, and executed by his own comrades-in-arms. (When narrating this, the woman starts sobbing.) Somewhat later, she revealed that she heard another version: friends told her that her father had been a hero, that he did not commit treason, that that had been a mistake, a confusion. “I’ve always remembered my father,” the interviewee says at the end, “as someone who fought for his homeland.”
Uli, I believe rightly, complained that they did not probe deeper into this case. Who judged the supposed traitor? What was he accused of? What was the mistake, if there was one? “The fighters knew,” I told him, “that if they were captured, death awaited them, or, if they were very lucky, exile—right?” (Death by their captors, or by their former comrades, because the danger of denunciations under torture or the monitoring of prisoners upon their release was widespread.)
“Of course,” Uli agreed, and continued in a confidential tone, with his marked German accent: “I want to make a documentary about La Isla, but about the people who work there, at the Archive. That is why I wanted to talk to you. I know many of them. They are mostly former guerrillas or sons of former guerrillas. It’s strange that someone like you was allowed to go in.”
“You see,” I said, “they can make exceptions. Anyway, it is good that those who took up arms to fight the system that has been left partly reflected there, at the Archive, continue to oppose it, let’s say, legally, in a way that is retrospective and nonviolent—right?”
Luis Galíndez, from the Archive, came up to greet us. As always, he was very kind. He asked me why I have not returned to La Isla. I mentioned the complaints from other archivists over the privilege that I had been granted. He asked me (to my surprise) who gave me that news. I told him it was the chief.
“I see,” he replied, “they sugarcoated it for you.”
“And what would it be without the sugar?” I asked him in a joking tone.
“A tad more bitter,” he said.
Uli, who seems to be aware of my case, commented:
“Of course, those decisions are made at the very top.”
“I suppose that is the same top where they decided to give me the privilege to enter,” I told him. “They decided to give me the privilege, and then to take it away from me. Seems right to me.”
“Oh, well, how democratic,” Galíndez said. “But it’s true, they did you a favor by letting you in. And perhaps also when they did not let you come back,” he laughed. Uli and I laughed with him.
“Anyway,” Uli continued, “everybody should have access to these documents.”
“Actually,” I said, “I think there’s nothing that we do not already know. A lot of details, nothing else.” (But, I ask myself, isn’t that how the old saying goes: that it is precisely in the details where God is—lurking?)
Midmorning, I dial Lemus’s number. I think I recognize his voice from the answering machine. It sounds like it does on the cassettes. I hang up, quite scared. I redial and this time I record the voice. Then I call Benedicto Tun. He does not answer.
Shortly before noon, I go to Pía’s school to read the adaptation of the Quiché myth about corn. In the afternoon, exhausted.
Sunday.
Last night the doorbell rang around midnight, while I was sleeping. This is it. They’re coming for me. Another ring finished the job of waking me up. With a leap, I got up, confused, thinking about the rope and the harnesses that I had not bought to go out the window and lower myself down into the ravine. I said to myself: Pía isn’t here, it doesn’t matter. I left my room, filled with fear, and went through the darkness to the front door. “Who is it?” I asked. “Me,” said B+ (early in the evening we had quarreled—as usual, absurdly). I turned on the light, I opened the door.
“Are you drunk?” I asked her. “What’s wrong? You scared me.”
She explained with a smile, half naughty, half guilty, that she wanted to be with me. I think that she does not imagine, cannot imagine, how much she frightened me.
“How many times did you ring the bell? I asked.
“Twice.”
“I thought so.”
I returned to bed with her, my heart still pounding.
Monday.
I ask myself if, after all, I really love B+. I answer my own question: yes.
After lunch at my parents’.
While we were eating, my father told me that this weekend he saw a television report about the Archive. Then we talked about the movie Capote. My father attacked the writer. “A real self-absorbed son of a bitch,” he said. María Marta and I defended him, with the argument that Capote’s friendly behavior (although self-serving) toward the unfortunate and terrible Perry Smith must have provided the latter, after all, some consolation.
“Let’s see if the same thing that happened to Capote doesn’t happen to you, and on account of researching criminals you never finish another book,” said my father toward the end of the conversation.
Earlier this morning, the urologist definitively forbade my mother coffee and salt. A sad day, no doubt. At night, the sound of the rain, the quiet company of books.
Tuesday.
Pía has been sleeping peacefully for two hours. I wonder if I have actually played with fire by wanting to write about the Archive. It would have been much better if a former fighter, or a group of ex-fighters, and not a mere dilettante (with a very marginal perspective) were to be the first to expose to light what can still be exposed to light and remains hidden in that magnificent labyrinth of papers. As a discovery, as a Document or Testimony, the importance of the Archive is undeniable (although unbelievable, and unfortunately there are those who would like to deny it), and if I have not been able to make it a novel, as I thought I could, it’s because I have lacked luck and fortitude.
Wednesday morning.
I call Tun’s office several times; nothing. I wonder if he can see my number when I call him, and he has decided not to answer. Or if he is sick, or on vacation. I’ll call him again tomorrow.
I read an opinion by Voltaire about the grandson of Henry IV, Duke of Vendôme, which I would like to see applied to me: “Intrepid like his grandfather, a kind, giving character, who knew no hate, no envy, and no revenge. By dint of hating pomp, he came to a cynical carelessness that is unprecedented.”
Friday.
Yesterday I called Tun again. He told me that he was in Mazatenango for several days, working, that he wanted to call me but had not had time. We agreed on lunch next Tuesday at La Casa de Cervantes, which is close to his office. I told him I had a favor to ask. Could he do a voice analysis? I need to compare, I told him, voices in some recordings. He said yes.
Saturday, June 8.
Day practically lost, with family.
Sunday.
In El Tular. Rain.
What can be thought must surely be fiction—Savater?
Monday.
Clara could not come to clean the apartment. She called me on the phone to explain that yesterday they killed another driver on the Boca del Monte bus
line, where she lives, and today his fellow drivers are on strike.
Afternoon.
I call the chief at noon. To my surprise, he answers. The tone is very friendly. He apologizes to me for the string of missed appointments. He tells me that now he is more relaxed. The Human Rights Ombudsman has been reelected and the Project is not in danger, at least not for the duration of the next term, which lasts four years. And the San Antonio sinkhole is no longer a serious threat; they have everything ready in case an emergency evacuation is necessary. He asks me how “the book project” is going. I tell him I’m not sure, that I’ve been keeping a journal, and I don’t know what I will do with it. “A journal?” he asks. I explain to him that it is a personal journal, where I use my visits to the Archive as a theme, and since the day of my suspension it has a leitmotif: my multiple calls to him that are never returned. He laughs and apologizes again. I have a confidential conflict, I say to him, and there is something I need to discuss with him. It is a rumor I have heard, a story that concerns him. I have recorded it as such in my journals, but I do not know if I should publish it, should the opportunity arise. On the other end of the line, I hear him cough. He suggests that we see each other immediately. We agree to meet for lunch at La Estancia.
He arrives ten minutes late. From one end of the long main room of the steak house, I watch him approach; he has a slight swagger as he walks, the way tall men often do. There is something of a Jesse James about him, with his faded jeans and checkered shirt. He has a poker player’s gaze, underscored by large, dark, permanent circles under his eyes. I rise to greet him.
While we eat I tell him what Mejía has told me about the execution of people from his own ranks, attributed to him.
“That’s true,” he tells me, “and it’s no secret.”
He himself made statements before the Commission for Historical Clarification immediately after the signing of the Peace Agreements, and he relates that episode, which he characterizes as an error. When he testified, he adds, he asked that his civil name appear on the testimonial, but it was a guiding principle of the Commission not to use real names under any circumstances.
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