by Tom Epperson
“Have you ever done ayahuasca?” says Daniel.
“No, have you?”
“Yeah, a few weeks ago. A friend took me to see this shaman.”
“In the jungle?”
“No, the shaman lives here.”
“What happened?”
“I met this giant anaconda that glowed in the dark. It said it was glad I’d come because it had been waiting on me for thousands of years. Then this giant green parrot flew at me, it was very pissed off, it was pecking at me and beating me with its wings.”
“What happened then?”
“I don’t know. The next thing I remember is vomiting into a bucket.”
Roberto looks around the room. He can’t quite get used to the idea that sloppy, disorderly Daniel is living in such a cool place. He had a girlfriend named Petra who was like Caroline in that she fixed up the apartment for him though compared to Caroline she was very short-lived as a girlfriend. Daniel has always loved the Beatles, especially John Lennon, and hanging on the wall is a large framed black and white photograph of a very young John Lennon, wearing a black leather jacket with the collar turned up, and gazing somberly into the camera. Other photographs are on the walls, all taken by Daniel. They show victims, mostly. Of war, crime, poverty, earthquakes. Roberto was there when most of the pictures were taken. He wrote a story about a bomb going off in an assassination attempt on a government official but the only casualty was the dog of a homeless man. Daniel took an award-winning picture of the weeping man holding the body of his dog. For the thousandth time, Roberto looks at it. It really is extraordinary.
“Why did you stop, Daniel?”
“Stop what?”
“Taking pictures. You were so good.”
“I didn’t stop taking pictures.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I decided I didn’t want to be poor all my life. You have money, Roberto, it’s easier for you. And I got sick of all the suffering. It’s not like when you take pictures of the suffering it goes away, it’s still there, so what’s the point? Now I live in a nice apartment and I take pictures of Fernanda’s tits. And no one can accuse me of being a sell-out because I’m not like you or Franz or Andrés, I never believed in any of that revolutionary let’s-all-save-the-world bullshit to begin with.”
Roberto’s very close to Andrés and Franz, but his connection to Daniel goes deeper. It can’t be summed up in words, it can be present in a fleeting glance that passes between them, it is akin to the bond between soldiers on a battlefield. Roberto and Daniel’s battlefield has been the country. They’ve covered stories all over its mountains and jungles and swamps and plains, and its big cities and tiny villages. They’ve been thirsty and hungry and hot together and wet and cold and happy and drunk and have fucked girls in the same hotel room together and stared at the smoking engines of cars that have broken down on desolate roads with the night coming on and they’ve seen death in its myriad forms and more times than Roberto can count they’ve been scared shitless together. It’s a part of Daniel’s personality that under difficult circumstances he will whine and complain and claim to be a coward and yet when it has been necessary to advance to complete an assignment Roberto has never seen him take a backward step and when Roberto has looked around because he was in need of help Daniel has always been right there.
And thus it seems paradoxical that despite his closeness to Daniel he feels as if he knows and understands Andrés and Franz much better. There is a part of Daniel that he keeps hidden. Roberto thinks it has to do with the three weeks he was a prisoner of the police. He came back changed. There was a darkness and bitterness in him that hadn’t been there before, and a loathing not only for the world he lived in but for himself.
“Tell me just one thing,” Roberto says.
“About what?”
“About when you were arrested. About what the police did.”
Daniel laughs. “Who the fuck cares? It was a long time ago, Roberto. Forget about it. I have.”
“I don’t think you’ve forgotten. And I don’t think it’s good to keep things bottled up.”
“What are you, a psychiatrist now? You should stick to being a reporter.”
“Don’t you trust me? Just tell me one thing.”
“And then that’s it? You won’t bother me again?”
“Yes. That’s it.”
Daniels sucks on his weed, and thinks about it.
“First of all, I was only with the police for a couple of days. Then they turned me over to the Army.”
“Okay.”
“I’ll tell you about what was the worst moment for me. I guess it was about two weeks after I was arrested. I don’t know for sure, because they never wanted you to know what day it was or what time it was. They never let you see the outside, and they kept you places where the lights were on all the time or it was dark all the time. And you never knew when the door was going to open and they would drag you out to another interrogation session. It was terrible, the waiting. Well, one day, they came and put me in handcuffs and put a blindfold on me. And then they led me to a car, and then we were driving. I could hear the sounds of traffic. Nobody in the car said anything. I was wondering what could this all mean, were they moving me to a new place, were they taking me somewhere to be killed, were they about to let me go, what, what? And then the car stopped, and they took off the blindfold. I saw I was sitting in the back seat of an SUV with tinted windows. And then I looked out the window and saw we were parked across the street from my mother’s house.
“There were three other men in the car. The man in the back seat with me said, ‘Cooperation, Daniel. You have a lot to learn about it.’ And then one of the other men got out of the car and walked across the street and knocked on my mother’s door. I felt in a panic, what were they going to do, kill my mother right in front of my eyes? My mother opened the door. I could see the man talking to her, and my mother replying, it looked like a friendly conversation. And the man next to me said, ‘See, Daniel? We can take your mother any time we want, we will do to her what we’ve done to you.’ And I felt at that moment as if I were about to lose my mind. Thinking about my mother in their hands. And me helpless to stop them. Helpless.” His voice trails off.
“And then what happened?”
“The man came back and got in the car. And then they put the blindfold on me and drove me back to where we’d been.”
Roberto mulls his story over.
“But you were already cooperating with them, right? Because you had nothing to hide. So what else could you tell them?”
“Roberto, come on. You said there wouldn’t be any more questions.”
Roberto nods. Then he yawns.
“I think your creepy just about did me in. Will you give me a ride home?”
“Sure.”
“I want to take a leak first.”
He goes in the bathroom. He stands at the toilet peeing for a long time. Then he goes to the sink and washes his hands then takes his glasses off and splashes water on his face. Then he towels his face and hands dry and puts his glasses back on and looks at himself in the mirror. Wondering where he’ll be exactly one year from now. On Saint Lucia with Caroline? Will they still be happy together? She wants to have children with him, will she already be pregnant? Will he remember this moment, or will it have slipped into oblivion like practically all moments?
He returns to the living room. Daniel’s head is lolling back on the sofa. His eyes are closed, his mouth is open, he’s breathing noisily.
Roberto takes his cellphone out and calls for a taxi.
Eight days until the day Roberto is to die
“It’s distressing,” says Caroline.
She’s talking about seaweed. It’s been washing up in great brown tangled heaps onto the pristine beaches of Saint Lucia. It smells bad and attracts bugs. Caroline is sure it has something to do with pollution or climate change.
“Don’t be distressed,” says Roberto. “It’s only seawee
d.”
“But I want everything to be perfect for my Roberto when he comes.”
It’s nearly noon. He slept late, and then awoke with a temple-pounding headache. He had just enough time to take some aspirin and make coffee when Caroline Skyped him.
“So when are you coming?” she says. “You don’t want to wait till the last minute.”
“I’m not waiting till the last minute. I still have eight days.”
“Why do you trust these people? They might be out on the street right now waiting for you. They might kill you as soon as you step outside.”
“It doesn’t make sense for them to give me an ultimatum to leave in ten days and then to kill me before that. It’s easier for them if I just leave. Then they don’t have to go to the trouble of planning an operation, it could always go wrong and there might be witnesses. And I’m a fairly well-known journalist and there would be an investigation and so forth. They’d just rather not deal with that. I’m not worried.”
“Well, as long as you’re there and not here, I’m going to be worried.”
Caroline loves to sleep late and she just got out of bed too. Her beauty’s a little blurred around the edges. She is makeupless and her hair is in disarray. She’s wearing a torn yellow soccer jersey she’s had forever and likes to sleep in. Looking at her, Roberto wishes he was there so he could take her right back to bed.
“You look like hell,” she says. “How much did you and Daniel drink?”
“Too much.”
“You always drink too much when you go out with him.”
Caroline is fond of Franz. Adores Andrés. Disapproves of Daniel.
“There’s nothing wrong with a few drinks sometimes,” Roberto says. “And who knows when I’m going to see him again?”
“Maybe it’s not such a bad thing that you don’t see him. I know you love him, Roberto, but—he’s such a mess. So self-destructive. And he wants to drag everybody else down with him.”
“That’s a little harsh.” But, he thinks, only a little.
Señor, Caroline’s fat gray tabby cat, jumps up on her desk. She starts to stroke him.
“You didn’t answer my question,” she says.
“What question?”
“When are you coming?”
“In a few days. I still have a lot to do.”
“Like what?”
“I have a lot of stuff to pack up. My books and clothes, plus you left a lot of your clothes and things here.”
“Oh, you can throw them all out the window for all I care, I just want you.”
“Okay, I’ll do that. And I have to do something with my car. I have to draw up some kind of rental agreement for Iván to sign. And there are some people I want to say good-bye to.”
“Old girlfriends?”
He takes a sip of his coffee, and nods. “Yes, there’s quite a few of them. They’d all be heartbroken if I didn’t say good-bye to each one personally.”
Caroline addresses her cat. “Did you hear that, Señor? Roberto is so wicked. The devil is coming to Saint Lucia!” And then she turns back to him. “Wednesday is a few days. Why don’t you make plans to come Wednesday?”
He thinks about it. “Okay. That should work.”
Her face lights up. “Really?”
“Yes.”
She smiles. Radiantly. “Wednesday!”
* * *
He takes a shower and feels a bit better, and he refills his coffee cup and returns to his computer. There’s an email from Clara reminding him about dinner at his father’s tonight. We’ll have a fascinating mix of people. Pombo will be there, have you ever met Pombo? He has. He’s the most famous painter in the country. He’s always referred to just by his last name, like Picasso. The one thing about his paintings that everyone knows is that the people in them are all enormously fat. I know you’re not crazy about this sort of thing, Roberto, but don’t back out! I’m sure we’re all going to have a wonderful time. Maybe not so wonderful, he thinks, after he tells his father he’s leaving the country under the threat of death. As usual, I can’t decide what to wear. I’ve been moving in and out of my closets at a feverish pace, dressing and undressing, dressing and undressing. And so Clara, who never does anything by accident, ends her email with the image of herself undressing.
He takes a look at the news. A hospital in the coastal city of Puerto Alegra has had to be closed down because of an invasion of fruit flies. A labor leader trying to organize workers at an oil palm plantation in the province of Trujillo was gunned down by men in police uniforms. The local police deny involvement and say the killers weren’t really police but were just dressed up as police. Raising the question, was the labor leader killed by killers dressed up as policemen or by policemen pretending to be killers pretending to be policemen? In Tulcán, an Army patrol was ambushed and seventeen soldiers were killed. President Dávila has issued a stern warning to the insurgents: “Violence is not the way. Demobilize, because as we have said many times, otherwise, you will end up in jail or in a grave.”
He googles himself, checking activity over the last twenty-four hours. An article on the website of a right-wing group called the Journalistic Alliance for the Preservation of Patriotic Ideals comes up. “We are a democratic multi-party country that allows people to express their views in accordance with the related laws,” writes the anonymous author. “But we do not need chaos that harms public security and abuses democracy.” Then Roberto is criticized by name for “semi-clandestine, subversive activities aimed at discrediting the organs of power.”
All right. There it is. Right there in front of him. His death sentence being pronounced publicly in a semi-official way.
He wishes there was a number he could call to let them know that they don’t need to try to frighten and harass him anymore. That he has got their message. That they have won.
He goes on the website he always uses to book flights and sees what they have to Saint Lucia on Wednesday.
* * *
He takes a walk up Avenue Six. He goes in a bakery and buys two pastries filled with guava jelly and a cup of lulo juice; when he has a hangover, his body always craves sweets. He resumes his walk, eating his pastries and drinking the juice. He gazes up at Mount Cabanacande and he thinks: My last Saturday in the city.
It is windy and the sun is shining. The shadows of clouds move over the face of the mountains and across the valley where seven million people live. There is a sameness to living here in terms of the weather and the daily ebb and flow of light. The city is near the equator so the days all year round are split about equally between day and night. And even though it’s near the equator, because it’s high in the mountains the weather isn’t hot. Nor is it cold. All year round it is temperate and pleasant except for when it rains and even the rich don’t have heat or air conditioning in their homes since it’s simply not needed. To put such a fucked-up city here almost seems like a waste of good weather.
He reaches Flower Park. It’s small, green, lovely, and filled with flowers. A guy and a girl are lying in the grass in the sun sleeping. The girl’s head on the guy’s leg. The girl holding a leash, at the end of which a dog, also asleep, is lying half in the sun and half in the shade of a tree. So peaceful, man, woman, and dog. This is the way things should be, he thinks. No need for all the violence and horror.
His cellphone rings.
“Hello?”
“Roberto?”
“Yes?”
“It’s Diana Langenberg.” The publisher of The Hour.
“Hello, Mrs. Langenberg,” he says, a bit taken aback. She’s always been a benign but distant boss, and he’s not used to getting phone calls from her. “How are you?”
“A little unhappy, actually. Rubén told me that you’re leaving.”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“Is your mind made up?”
“Yes.”
He hears her sigh. “What a shame. But I understand.” And then she says, “Could you do me a favor?”
<
br /> “Of course.”
“Could you come by my house today? Say, around three? I won’t keep you long. I have something I want to give you.”
“I’ll see you at three.”
“Good-bye, Roberto.”
“Good-bye.”
He puts the phone away, wondering what Diana Langenberg could possibly want to give him. The dog lying in the grass suddenly lifts its head and looks at him, as if he’s called to it. Then it flops its head back down and goes back to sleep.
* * *
He follows a winding road up into green hills and the neighborhood of Rosales. Once, it was where all the elite of the city lived, but now most of the rich have moved on to new neighborhoods to the north and west. Magnificent old homes are being pulled down everywhere you look and being replaced with high-rise condominiums. But a few of the old families remain, like the Langenbergs.
In 1898, Simon Langenberg, an adventurous young immigrant from Sweden, happened to acquire a tattered letter written by a priest named Ignacio. In it Father Ignacio wrote that “the mines of Pangoa are situated on the point of a ridge from which the Guapi and Matarca Rivers can be seen.” When the Spanish conquered the country, they found the Indians in the region of Pangoa in possession of a great quantity of high-quality emeralds. The location of the emerald mines was a secret the Indians couldn’t keep after the conquistadors began to torture and murder them. The Spaniards were beside themselves with joy when they reached the mines and saw emeralds everywhere just waiting to be plucked out of the earth as easily as apples out of a tree, but then the Indians counterattacked and slew them nearly to a man. Only three Spaniards escaped, including Father Ignacio. They managed to take with them just one emerald apiece.
In the ensuing centuries, uncounted questers journeyed into the remote cloud forests of the Central Cordillera in search of the lost mines. The only thing they found was failure; they were bitten by poisonous snakes or killed by Indians or they died of diseases or tumbled shrieking into deep ravines. The mines of Pangoa began to be regarded as legendary, nonexistent, a fairy tale luring fools to destruction. But then Simon Langenberg bought two mules, one to ride on and one to carry supplies, and late one afternoon, in the mountains and the mist, reached that point on the ridge described in the letter where the two rivers could be seen. A blue and yellow parrot squawked overhead at the precise moment he became one of the wealthiest men in the country as he bent down and picked up a shiny green stone. Shortly thereafter, Simon fell in love with and married a young woman named Emilia, who was reputed to be the most beautiful socialist in South America. Though Simon had little interest in anything beyond making money, Emilia persuaded him to start a progressive newspaper called The Hour. And they seem to have passed down socialist and capitalist genes in equal measure to their progeny all the way to the present.