Open Pit

by Marguerite Pigeon

  Carlos looks startled, like the question is off-putting. “I — yes. I have five. All grown now.” Grown. Like her, he means. In this man’s eyes, she is a child playing dress-up. Aida straightens her shirt and without quite meaning to, stands and puts her napkin on the bar. “I have to get back,” she says, feeling rattled and, ridiculously, jealous of these children of a man who’s made so much of his life. She is also ashamed, suddenly, of her suspicions of Carlos, realizing they have more to do with the vacuum of knowledge surrounding the man Danielle mentioned in her letters to Neela: Adrian. Aida is eager to return to Ralph, Sylvie and Benoît, to get back to her old self, to her role as the daughter of a hostage. She says her goodbyes.

  “Sí, sí, sí,” says Carlos, confused. He passes some money to the barista and hurries out after her, insisting on accompanying her back. On the way, he stops to speak to the most senior-looking policeman in sight, pulling him aside and making a show, Aida thinks, of speaking to him. She assumes Carlos is telling him to avoid any problems with the families. It’s a bit much. Maybe the others are right to avoid someone who performs helpfulness so often for others.

  Then, just as they’re parting, Aida changes her mind. She is sorry to leave him and feels herself reach out for a hug. Carlos hugs her back. The moment is exciting, surprisingly emotional. But it’s brief. Looking up, Aida spots Marta on the top of the cathedral steps, glaring at her. In the space of mere seconds, her host’s face switches from panic to relief to anger. Aida sees Marta signal to Ralph, who is also above the crowd, with Sylvie and Benoît. They all look over and, Aida can see, breathe a collective sigh of relief to find her there, but it’s mixed with disapproval. Aida doesn’t wave. She says goodbye to Carlos before winding through the crowd towards them.

  11:45 PM. 75 KM south of the Salvadoran-Honduran border

  They’ve been walking five hours when Danielle hears her new favourite sound in the world: Pepe stopping and turning, the regular pace of his footsteps interrupted, becoming noisier, resounding against the rough ground, bringing his boot heels across some pebbles, the whistle of his breath changing, indicating annoyance and clout, coming closer. And then the crackling of brush. This is the beautiful sequence, the signal that they can rest, and the hostages know it as well as they’ve ever known the sound of a school bell signalling lunchtime, or the scrap of theme song that says the commercials are over and their favourite TV show is back. In her excitement to begin the break — tonight they’ve done their hardest hike yet — Danielle nearly trips over Delmi. “Sorry,” she says.

  Delmi turns and shoves her indignantly anyway. Danielle tells herself to let it go. The smaller injustices are not worth her time. But the shove sours the happiest moment of her night.

  They all gather in a small group until Cristóbal takes the painfully long, suspicious look around that he always takes, while they stand on their sore legs wanting to collapse. When he gets back he motions for them to move again about twenty feet more, under some trees where there’s less moonlight. Even there, Danielle is surprised at how brightly it shines. It reminds her of nights in Algonquin Park, where she lived for a time with an entomologist she thought was the answer to all her problems — he turned out to prefer the company of Ontario’s multiple species of beetle. That was her last summer away from Aida. Before Danielle’s parents died.

  As she locates a spot to lay her tarp, Martin approaches, sighing loudly, but not unhappily. Although he is still a bad smoker and slow walker, mostly taking up the rear on these hikes just ahead of Danielle, he seems stronger and is generally more at ease, while for Danielle, the night walks remain extended tours of misery. Pepe always seems to be taking them uphill. Danielle remembers that back in 1980 it would take four to five days to walk from the south to the north end of this province. This is their seventh nighttime walk. Pepe must be forcing them into some kind of zigzag, or even backtracking, keeping them hidden. But Danielle is also convinced they’re moving progressively north. Every day, she notes that same set of taller mountains, the ones she crossed over into Honduras on foot in 1980, and not even the miserable places Pepe keeps them, with their bad sightlines, can stop her from knowing: those mountains are getting closer. Her creeping sense that Pepe is literally walking them in circles so near an exit from the country, wasting what little energy she has left, makes Danielle want to lie down and weep.

  Tina crouches on Danielle’s left. She’s recently caught some kind of bug and has developed diarrhea. Danielle watches Tina’s moonlit outline as she ritually lays out her own tarp. Pierre and Antoine move to occupy a place to Danielle’s right, and Martin gets down on the ground directly behind her head so that when she turns onto her stomach Danielle can see the soles of his boots. Cristóbal takes a place a little further off, adjusts his hat and puts his gun across his knees, while Pepe walks off. It’s Cristóbal’s night to keep watch, Danielle knows, and Pepe will play scout. He won’t be back for at least an hour.

  Martin lifts his head, which appears to float above his feet. He gives Danielle a faint, open-mouthed smile that, while not exactly friendly, meets the minimum requirement of human communion: two captives acknowledging one another’s existence. His teeth pick up the moonlight and shine light blue. Danielle considers how, for the last two days, things have been both more harmonious and also more distant within their tiny group. Pierre has been somewhat less on edge since his punishment ended. Not that he smiles or even looks Danielle’s way. That would be too much to expect. But earlier in the day, as he smoked a cigarette, clearly enjoying the partial freedom of being unbound, she didn’t feel like he was projecting anything particularly negative her way either. Progress.

  Tina, meanwhile, is too sick to keep up much in the way of anger. She and Danielle even talked a little, when Danielle grabbed an opportunity to ask if she could help somehow with the diarrhea, maybe get the kidnappers to add something to her water — sugar or salt — to keep her from dehydrating. Tina agreed and when Cristóbal brought over a half-canteen of sweetened water, she smiled at Danielle. After a while, under her breath, she said, “About my brother. Why he’s in jail? He was part owner of a club in Hamilton. Got into trouble because someone else — not him — was selling at his bar. It’s the bikers. You can’t stop them.” Danielle was amazed to receive such personal information, amazed, too, at the capacity some people have to get over a slight. Tina was offering intimacy. Danielle shook her head, showing she was worthy of it, indicating her strong disappointment at her brother’s unjust treatment. Tina shrugged, reaching the limit of her willingness to share. “We’re not that close,” she said. But Danielle saw that the girl was lying.

  Now Tina is fast asleep, like the others. Danielle watches her back rise and fall sharply with her breath. Danielle wants the same. The first few nights, she managed to fantasize herself to sleep going over benign aspects of her home life that have come to seem supremely luxurious. Grocery shopping. Showers. Outings with friends. But since taking down Pepe’s reports, she’s run into a problem: for some undefined period before fatigue snatches her consciousness away and leads her into a dreamless slumber, she’s wide awake and unable to stop a flood of much more upsettingly real situations from the past from flooding her thoughts.

  She stares at the backs of Tina’s ribs, which show through her dirty shirt, and tries to see herself in her home office, working on a client document. But slowly, onto this peaceful image, an image of herself at Aida’s age is superimposed. The constant sound of insects begins to recede. There she is, young Danielle, waking from a nap near a fire on which a very large comal has been placed. Nearby are a series of wooden stumps topped by big curved stones, the metates. At each of these stations a woman is bent over, pulverizing corn with another stone shaped like a rolling pin. They are the molinderas, an exclusively female rank of guerrillas who make tortillas, the staple food, for everyone in camp. Danielle can hear bits and pieces of these women’s jokes, their gossip and complaints. Some are quite old, with cracked hands and sti
ck-thin arms. It doesn’t matter. They prepare thousands of tortillas a day, their palms producing uniformly perfect, soft spheres to flatten and cook over the fire. Danielle finds the molinderas tedious and resents that she’s been placed with them for an entire month, supposedly in service of her journalistic work. She’s taken to napping because she’s been sick a lot, but also because she’s bored. The women don’t like it. A molindera named Sara starts asking questions, prodding Danielle until she discovers that Danielle has no children. The other women laugh behind their hands. It’s absurd, from their point of view, for a twentysomething-year-old woman to be childless. And absurd things, as well as embarrassing and contentious things, make the molinderas giggle — like Delmi, Danielle realizes, briefly returning to the present and propping herself up on her side. Where is Delmi? Danielle spots her, not far from Rita, on the other side of Pierre. She lies back down and returns to watching Tina’s breathing.

  Soon, she sees only her young self again. Sara’s questions about her marital status anger Danielle as much as her own inability to produce a good tortilla. Why should she have to justify herself to a bunch of pre-feminist throwbacks? Danielle decides to provoke them. “I won’t be having any children,” she says. “I will become a writer.” Sara looks at her as Danielle has rarely been looked at by anyone in the guerrilla camps. “That’s okay,” Sara says. “But you cannot be a good writer if you are not a good woman.” She slaps a round of raw tortilla dough hard onto the comal like a gavel.

  The funny thing, Danielle thinks, shaking herself fully awake, is that Sara was right: she didn’t become a writer after all; never really became a mother, either; and in some ways she can’t say what kind of woman she is, good or bad. Danielle flips onto her stomach again, feeling the uneven earth beneath her, and watches Martin’s feet. Slowly, she feels herself sink deeper into her tarp as another memory appears. She is sharing a meal of nothing but tortillas and salt with Adrian. This is early in their acquaintance, before the molinderas, when Danielle can still enjoy a tortilla without thinking about female hands having pounded it out. She takes a big bite. “You’re adjusting, I see. Nearly Salvadoran,” Adrian says. “When you publish your stories about us in Canada, you must provide a caveat: I am biased towards their food. And their men.” Danielle laughs, and they exchange a glance that says whatever has begun between them is not nearly over.

  Danielle rubs her eyes, miserably awake. Everyone else is breathing heavily. The air is quite chilly. She gets on her back and stares at the swirl of stars above. What a selfish bitch she was! She loved the idea of revolution and people like Adrian, who could talk passionately about it, but never the ones making it happen, one tortilla at a time. Danielle experiences a mounting regret over this basic fact. But she’s interrupted as Cristóbal rises from where he’s sitting, a few feet behind Tina, presumably to piss. As he walks away, another noise comes from somewhere to her right.

  “Hey!” someone calls. “Heeeey!”

  Danielle’s skin crawls: Rita.

  “Pi-hair,” Rita says.

  Danielle feels her breath go out of her with relief. She thought Rita was talking to her. But Pierre — why him? And then she remembers: that day in the shed, Rita whispering her secret into Pierre’s ear. Danielle lets her head turn very slowly their way, not letting on that she’s awake.

  “Pierre,” Rita repeats, getting up and hurrying to kneel beside him. Danielle sees Pierre stir.

  “No mucho time,” says Rita, in English. “El teléfono. I use it. You make noise.”

  “Quoi?” Pierre sounds groggy.

  “Pepe! El teléfono! You make noise — distráelo. I take. I calling San Salvador. Talking to embajadora.”

  Danielle sees Pierre trying not to move, afraid of Cristóbal coming back, afraid of those restraints being tied back on, but wanting to find out more. “Quand — cuándo?” he says, searching for his non-existent Spanish.

  “Pronto.” Rita flashes her even teeth. For a moment that’s all there is of her — those teeth and the bluish whites of her eyes. A Cheshire cat. “Dile a él,” she says.

  Pierre shakes his head, unsure. Rita sighs loudly and nudges Antoine. “El!” she repeats, shaking him.

  A twig snaps. Cristóbal is returning.

  Antoine makes a sound, like, “Hunh?” and Pierre says something to him very fast in French. “Quoi?” says Antoine, just the way Pierre did a moment ago, taking in the message as Pierre shakes his head wildly to prevent him from speaking more.

  Cristóbal senses the commotion anyway. He whistles a neutral reprimand as he sits back down. “Hay que dormir.”

  Both young men close their eyes with purpose. Rita, of course, is already back in her lair, playing dead. Danielle remains completely still, but her heart beats so hard she thinks Cristóbal, or even Pepe, however far off he is, will hear.

  Minutes later, however, despite everything, Danielle is aware of herself drifting back in time again.

  These nightly breaks normally last about two hours. At the one-hour mark, when everyone’s asleep, Pepe walks down from the higher ground and comes near enough to flash his LED at Cristóbal. Cristóbal knows the flashes mean two things: all is well above, and it’s time to wake up Delmi.

  Cristóbal goes over to shake her shoulder. She mumbles and tries to turn away. “Delmi!” he says again. His sister-in-law is never easy to rouse. He gives her another firm shake. He has yet to see the resemblance between her and Rita and has actually concluded that they must have different fathers. Delmi makes an ugly face under her mask, rises and walks off.

  By the time she’s reached Pepe, following the LED flashes, Delmi is fully awake. She pulls up the mask, takes off her pants and lies down.

  As Pepe gets on top of her, Delmi starts to giggle. “Rita’s going to do something.”

  He stops. “Qué?” Pepe’s breathing has changed. He pulls out of her and grabs the handgun from his pants, which are half off, puts it under her chin. “Qué?” he repeats.

  Suddenly, Delmi isn’t sure she wants to say. “I don’t know.” Rita never tells her anything. But Delmi just overhead her talking to Pierre, so she feigned sleep to listen in. Stupid Cristóbal didn’t even notice. “I think she wants to steal your phone with that one — the thin one.”

  “Pierre,” says Pepe. He eases away the gun.

  Delmi rolls her balaclava down over her face and starts to get up.

  “No.” Pepe puts a hand to her stomach. “If you say a word —”

  “I won’t. But I want fifty more. Every time.” It’s only fair. She holds out her palm for the money. “And you can’t tell Rita.”

  The sex seems to take forever. Pepe is unfocused. When he’s finally done, Delmi goes back to lie down beside her sister, whom she’s hated for a very long time. She has suspected that Rita would find a way to double-cross her, taking both their shares of what Pepe’s paying and leaving for the U.S. without her. Delmi has foreseen waiting for her turn to leave, but no word coming from Rita. She’s imagined herself stuck with some of Rita’s children on top of her own. Delmi has decided she can do a little better than Rita. If this kidnapping succeeds and Rita doesn’t, who knows? Maybe she’ll get Rita’s share. It will be her in Miami, her wearing nice clothes.

  Watching her sister, who’s either asleep or pretending to be, Delmi feels clever. Within minutes she is snoring loudly.

  Tina wakes with a start not long afterwards. She’s missed it, she’s certain. She turns over, her tarp crinkling, and moans. Her stomach is being squeezed by an invisible vice. She presses her nails into her palms, fearing that Cristóbal will hear if she cries out in pain. But when she looks, he’s smoking, turned the other way.

  Here’s Danielle, fast asleep, her breath whistling slowly. Tina feels sorry for her. She knows Danielle suffers from all this walking. If only she were more likeable. She treats them all like dim-witted teens. And she’s obviously Pepe’s darling. At first Tina figured they were sleeping together. So gross. But now that she knows he
’s sleeping with Delmi, she can’t really see him wanting Danielle too, who’s even older and reminds Tina of an unsexy Susan Sarandon. Danielle is doing something else for him, then. Probably letting Pepe know about their daily interactions. Who’s trying to get away with what. Who’s feeling good. Who’s losing it. Danielle might be a rat. Until now, Tina hasn’t seen much worth tattling about, except that whispering thing between Rita and Pierre. What was that? The dearth of gossip only makes Danielle’s arrangement more pathetic. Tina has no time for rats.

  Trying not to disturb her neighbour, she slowly maneuvers her arm up without making too much racket and pulls Martin’s pant leg, which she can just reach. She has to keep at it for some time before he bends his head forward and up so that they see one another. Tina reaches down and yanks the bottom of her shirt, which she purposely tangled on a thorny bush earlier in the night. It’s ripped enough that she can work it now, pulling a whole piece of the shirt clean away. The entire time, she keeps her eye on Cristóbal. He puts out his cigarette and stands, but takes some slow steps away from them, obviously bored and eager for the walk to get going again. As he turns his back, Tina steels herself, reaches up and quickly hands the torn piece of cloth to Martin before resuming her position.

  It took just a few words, exchanged over a game of chess, to conceive their plan. (The kidnappers let Tina take out her travel set when she asks, thank God.) She felt that she had to do something, especially after the whispering between Rita and Pierre, from which she was excluded. Pierre is smart, but he’s no team player. Now that Tina is getting sicker, she has to ally herself with someone. Martin seems game. After all, how many more days before the kidnappers get serious? There has to be a time limit. Isn’t the whole idea of a kidnapping that if you don’t get what you’re asking for, someone dies? Pepe hasn’t even told them what his demand is and shows no sign that anyone’s granting it.