by Tom Epperson
“What do you want them to do for you?” asks Roberto.
“Give me a new leg and teach me to walk on it. Teach me to read with my fingers. Help me find a job. My brother is a plasterer, I planned to go into business with him when I got out of the Army, but I don’t guess you can be a blind plasterer. But I’m very strong, I’m full of energy, I know I can do good work at something. And then I’ll take care of my mother instead of her taking care of me.”
Manuel had a girlfriend that ditched him after what was left of him came back from Tulcán. He has hinted to Roberto that his injuries have left him incapable of having children, and he has told him how sad he is that he will probably never have a wife. Roberto’s happy about his good news and yet he feels bad that Manuel now wants so little out of life but will have to struggle mightily to achieve even that.
Manuel reaches for the radio and turns the music down. It’s like a cloud or a shadow has passed across his face.
“What’s wrong?” Roberto asks.
“I need to see a priest.”
“Why?”
“To confess my sins. I did bad things . . . we all did . . . in Tulcán.”
Since the days of the conquistadors, outsiders have not been welcome in Tulcán. The war there has nothing to do with the PRM. The mostly Indian population is resisting the encroachment of the modern world. It does not wish to be globalized. Miners have been massacred and loggers have been captured and then dismembered with their own chainsaws. The conflict there has been exceptionally savage, even by the extreme standards of Roberto’s blood-soaked country. He’s never talked to Manuel about his service in Tulcán, but he’s unsurprised to hear him admit he did bad things. It’s hard to imagine this gentle man sitting in front of him who loves dogs and rabbits committing terrible acts, and yet he’s used to the realities of this country outstripping the capacity of his imagination to deal with them.
“I can take you to a priest now,” he says.
But Manuel acts as if he hasn’t heard him.
“This will be a new beginning for me. So I want to make a clean breast of it. Start over.”
“I understand. So you want to go find a priest? I’ll be glad to take you.”
Manuel puts the heels of his hands into his scarred eyes and rubs them, as if trying to remove the darkness in them.
“The thing I want to tell a priest . . . it’s very difficult . . . because we killed a priest.”
Roberto sits. He waits. The rabbit comes cautiously hopping over to him and sniffs his shoe. Its name is Humberto.
“It was a bad place . . . Tulcán. I know sometimes we did bad things to the people there but they did bad things to us too. I saw many of my friends die. But it wasn’t only the people, it was the trees, the animals, the birds—it was like they all hated us, they wanted to kill us. The day before we killed the priest, my best friend, Gonzalo, he was bitten by a mapaná snake and died. And then that night when we made camp, we could hear an animal walking around. Something big. We heard it growling and breathing and twigs snapping under its feet. We shined our flashlights and couldn’t see anything but we kept hearing it. Someone said it must be a jaguar, but someone else said maybe it’s the Mapinguari.”
“What’s the Mapinguari?”
“The Indians say it’s a ferocious animal that protects the forest and can’t be killed. We’d heard stories about it and we laughed about it, but that night we wondered if maybe the stories were true. The next morning we went into a little village, it was called Las Animas.” The Spirits. “We were looking for a priest who had been causing a lot of trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“They told us he was a Communist. But I sit back here all day and think, all I do is think, Roberto, and I think maybe anybody that tries to help the people they call a Communist. He didn’t try to run away or hide, he walked out of his church and met us. His name was Father Benecio. He didn’t look old enough to be a priest, he didn’t look very much older than me. He said, ‘This is a peaceful village, you are all welcome here, how can we help you?’ Our captain told him he could help us by taking off all his pretty priest clothes. He looked surprised, he asked the captain if he was joking. The captain just laughed, and then he ordered me and another man to take off his clothes for him. We stripped off all his clothes, Father Benecio didn’t resist, it felt wrong to do this to a priest but orders are orders. He was standing naked in the street. He had blue eyes and fair skin, the sun was shining on him and his body looked so white, Roberto, he reminded me of a little baby bird without feathers that had fallen out of its nest.
“The captain ordered us to round up all the people of the village. The priest began praying. The people looked at him and many of them were praying too and weeping and making the sign of the cross, because they knew something terrible was about to happen. The captain ordered the people to run and get sticks, hoes, rakes, shovels, and they just stood there and looked at each other and then we began to shoot our weapons in the air and hit them and kick them and they ran and came back with hoes and sticks. The captain ordered them to form two lines facing each other. They lined up, all the people of Las Animas: men and women, old people and children. The captain told them it was their privilege today to do a good deed; they were going to send Father Benecio to heaven. He told the priest to start walking between the two lines, and he told the people to strike him. The priest began to walk slowly. He was whispering to himself and crossing himself, but nobody struck him, they loved the priest, and the captain walked up behind a young girl and shot her in the head. He yelled at them to strike, and then a man hit the priest on the back with a shovel, and the captain screamed ‘Not hard enough!’ and shot the man in the head. And then all the people began to hit the priest with their sticks and rakes, and he stumbled forward and blood was running down his white skin, and I heard him yell, ‘Strike hard, my children! Please! End it, for the love of Christ!’”
Manuel breaks off. He turns his face toward Roberto, his usually dim eyes bright with tears.
“Roberto, how can I tell a priest about this? How can God forgive me?”
Roberto doubts there is a God but he says, “They say that God forgives everything.”
He leaves Manuel with his dog. He finds his mother in the kitchen, preparing a meal. He gives her some money. She slips the bills into her pocket without looking at them or him and mumbles her thanks. He goes out of the house and walks toward the street past Nydia, who is squatting on the ground and playing like a little boy with a toy truck.
“Good-bye, Nydia,” he says, not expecting a response, but he’s surprised to hear behind him a shy “Good-bye.”
* * *
She is there in front of him. Her blonde hair falling about her shoulders. Her green eyes looking at him. Her mother is English, that’s where she got the eyes and hair. The golden skin she got from her father. Caroline’s mother had a secretarial job at the British embassy. She went to a disco one night, where Caroline’s father asked her to dance. She was nearly a head taller than him, but he was a tremendous dancer and they fell in love fast. He was a young executive at the local Coca-Cola branch. By the time he retired to paradisal Saint Lucia, he was the chief operating officer for Coca Cola in all of South America. Roberto’s father is well off, but his future father-in-law is out-and-out wealthy. Not a bad guy either.
The first time Roberto saw her, as he and his friend Andrés were crossing the lobby of a theater during the intermission of a terrible play, he was so taken aback by her beauty he came to a stop and with his mouth hanging slightly and stupidly open just stared at her. She was standing with some guy, and she happened to glance over at Roberto, and when she looked at him again a few moments later, this time with a certain amount of curiosity, he finally had the presence of mind to close his mouth. He couldn’t even do it the first time he tried to sleep with her, he was so in awe of her. But the second time it was the opposite, the two of them were in a frenzy all night as if trying to set some sort
of record for climaxes and positions.
It’s night. He’s sitting in front of his computer. He has called her on Skype. She’s telling him about something she saw on the news: a polar bear and her cub swimming in the Arctic for nine days because the pack ice had all melted.
“The mother bear made it to safety,” she says, “but her cub drowned. It’s all because of stupid global warming and nobody is doing anything about it. It made me cry for ten minutes!”
“I don’t like to think of you crying,” says Roberto.
“Too bad you weren’t here to comfort me.”
“That was too bad.”
“So what’s new with my Roberto?”
“Well, let’s see. I’m having dinner with my father and Clara on Saturday.”
“Just you and them?”
“Some other people are coming. I don’t know who.”
“Oh, one of Clara’s fancy dinner parties?”
“I guess so.”
“Well, give your father a big kiss for me.”
“What about Clara?” he says, teasing her. She’s crazy about his father but can’t stand Clara. “Should I give her a big kiss for you too?”
“No,” she says firmly. “No kissing Clara.”
“Why don’t you like her? She’s so sweet.”
“Sweet! Roberto, have you lost your mind? You know she married your father for his money.”
“Who knows why people do things?”
“Everything about her is phony. Including her teeth and her tits.”
“Her teeth, maybe. But I think her tits are real. They certainly seem real.”
“Oh, and so you’ve spent a lot of time studying them?”
“No, not a lot. Only when I’m with her.”
Caroline has three big fat cats, one of which is stretched out on her desk. Now she picks it up under its front legs and addresses it. “Roberto is so awful, Hombre. Why do I love him so much?”
“It’s simple,” Roberto says. “It’s because I’m so handsome.”
“It’s true, Hombre,” she sighs, and puts the cat down.
Roberto takes his glasses off, and cleans them with a tissue.
“What are you thinking?” she says.
“Hm?”
“You’re always thinking something when you clean your glasses.”
He smiles a little and puts his glasses back on.
“Something else is new.”
“What?”
“I got a phone call this morning. Very early.”
“From who?”
“I don’t know. But it wasn’t a pleasant call.”
“Not pleasant in what way?”
“It was a death threat.”
“Oh Roberto.”
She looks at him with both dismay and reproach, as if he’s at fault somehow. He shrugs.
“You should change your number,” she says.
“What good would that do? And besides, how can I do my job if no one can get in touch with me?”
“What did they say exactly?”
“They made reference to some of the stories I’ve written. I don’t think they liked them very much. And they said if I didn’t leave the country in ten days, I’d be killed.”
“Then leave. Come, Roberto!” she says, holding her arms out to him. “Come to me!”
He doesn’t say anything. Her arms disconsolately drop.
“You’re so stubborn. All you think about is your next story. I need you here. It’s hard for me, with Mother so sick, and Daddy so sad and lost, and—”
“All right.”
“All right what?”
“All right. I’m coming.”
“You’re coming here? To Saint Lucia?”
He nods.
“When?”
“Now. I mean, in a few days. I’ve got a lot to do first. I have to quit my job, and do something about the apartment, and my car, and—”
“Roberto,” she says, suddenly leaning forward as Hombre leaps out of the way, her face filling the computer screen as if she’s about to jump right through it, “you’re really coming? I can’t believe it.”
He can hardly believe it either, he feels as exhilarated as she. It’s such a relief to have the decision made. It’s like he has just emerged from a dark tangled forest, and he sees now openness and sunlight and the pleasant path he will soon be walking on.
* * *
He falls asleep quickly when he goes to bed, and he has a dream. He’s making love to Caroline, but then she becomes Ana María, the woman whose leg he found in the rubble of the newspaper office after the bombing. She worked in the advertising department, she hadn’t been there long, he never really got to know her but she always had a nice smile and a hello for him whenever he encountered her in the hallways or the elevator. And now as in his dream he makes love to her, she begins to weep.
“Ana María,” he says. “What’s wrong? Don’t you like it? Am I hurting you?”
“I do like it, Roberto,” says Ana María. “You’re not hurting me.”
“Then why are you crying?”
“Because I’m afraid.”
“What are you afraid of?”
“Of being alone.”
“But you’re not alone. I’m here.”
“Don’t leave me, Roberto.”
“I won’t.”
“Promise me!”
“I promise,” he says, but he is saying it to nobody. Ana María has faded away. All that is left of her is the sound of her weeping.
Nine days until the day Roberto is to die
It rained during the night but it’s not raining now. The TV is on to the city’s most popular morning show, Good Morning, Everyone! They’re doing a story about a bakery that is making pastries in the shape of iPhones. The reporter’s name is Cristina Ocampo. She’s a knockout, like all the girls that work on local TV; they all seem to have the same big eyes and heart-shaped faces. They all laugh a lot and are always cheerful and seem to inhabit a different city than the one that Roberto reports on. Probably the only kind of death threat Cristina Ocampo might receive is a guy threatening to kill himself if she won’t have dinner with him.
He walks slowly around his apartment in his blue tracksuit, sipping coffee and looking things over. He’ll be sad to leave. He’s been happy here. It wasn’t much till Caroline moved in. She basically got rid of all his stuff and started afresh and he was fine with that since her taste is so much better than his. The style she imposed was clean and modern, crisp and white. There were two tiny bedrooms but not for long as she zestfully knocked down walls and made the apartment one open space with just a half wall separating the bedroom and the living room. She laid down organic moso bamboo flooring, refurbished the cabinets, added a capacious closet for her clothes, painted all the walls white, brought in simple wood furniture, and installed track lighting that artfully illuminated her unfolding creation. In the bathroom, she put in white porcelain subway tile and a glass mosaic backsplash behind the stone sink. He’s all thumbs when it comes to practical things but Caroline did much of the work herself and was never sexier than when she was dressed in old clothes and was a little dusty and sweaty and disheveled and was hammering or sawing or polishing something.
Since she would not look out of place working on Good Morning, Everyone!, he was initially surprised to learn she had a bookish, scholarly side. She recently finished work on her master’s degree in art history and is thinking about getting her PhD, but he’s encouraging her to go into interior design or something similar, since that seems to be what she enjoys the most.
He finds himself in the bedroom, staring at the bed. He remembers having sex with her a year or so ago, she was on her period and he had entered her from behind and a rubious drop of menstrual blood plopped down on the white sheet. He remembers gazing at the blood as he thrust into her and how vividly red it was against the white.
The phone by the bed rings. He walks over to it. It says “private caller” in the ID window. He lets the
answering machine take the call.
“Roberto?” says the voice from yesterday. “We know you’re there. Afraid to pick up the phone? Look out the window.”
He hesitates—then goes to the window and looks out the blinds. The green Renault from yesterday is parked across the street. Behind the wheel is the guy with the moustache and the broad, red face, looking up at him, like yesterday, with a careful lack of expression. He’s smoking a cigarette, and he takes a puff then throws the cigarette out on the pavement. Now he starts the car, and it moves away unhurriedly. Roberto tries to get the license plate number, but it’s blocked by the foliage of the trees. The cigarette sends up a thin wavering line of smoke till a passing car crushes it out.
* * *
When Roberto first started working at The Hour, an old-timer reporter named Alvaro took a fatherly shine to him. He was a haggard alcoholic and heavy smoker who would die of lung cancer within a few years. Alvaro simply hated editors. He said to Roberto more than once: “Always remember, Roberto, the editor is your enemy. He answers to the owners and the advertisers. His job is to obstruct you in your search for the truth in every way possible.” But Roberto happens to like his present editor, Rubén. Rubén’s given him a lot of freedom to pursue the stories that interest him, and doesn’t usually screw around with them much once he’s turned them in. He’s a small man with a pixyish sense of humor. As Roberto sits across his desk from him and tells him about the death threat, he smiles and nods, as if Roberto’s launched into a rather long-winded joke and he’s waiting patiently for the punch line.
“So I’ve decided to leave the country,” Roberto concludes. “I’m going to Saint Lucia to be with my fiancée. It wasn’t an easy decision, Rubén. You know how much I love working here.”
“Oh yes,” he murmurs. “Yes.”
“I’m sorry I can’t give you more notice. I hope it doesn’t cause any problems for you.”
“Oh no, no, no, no.”
The smile modulates a bit but doesn’t quite disappear. His hands are clasped on his paunchy belly. His thumbs go up and down in an alternating way as he looks pensively into space, and then he looks back at Roberto.