by Tom Epperson
The talk turns to politics but Roberto does not take part. He’s always been more of a listener than a talker, a trait that has stood him in good stead as a reporter. But tonight he’s not even listening much. He eats his soup and drinks his wine. One of the silent little maids fills up his empty glass. He glances over at his father and finds him looking somberly at him; now his father smiles and looks away.
The woman with the fat lips says something to Roberto that he doesn’t quite hear.
“Pardon me?”
“Do you hear someone singing opera? I know it must seem like an odd question.”
He listens for a moment. Hears nothing.
“No,” he says. “Do you?”
“Yes. Very faintly.” Her head is cocked to one side, she is staring off into space. “This has never happened before. I’m a bit concerned.”
He’s puzzled. “What exactly is it you’re concerned about?”
“I know who it is that’s singing.”
“Who?”
“It’s a spirit. He lives in my house. I usually hear him in the kitchen, when I’m cooking. But this has never happened. I’ve never heard him outside the house.”
He looks at her. She doesn’t seem drunk, on drugs, insane.
“Do you think he followed you here?”
“So it would seem.”
“And you’ve never seen him? Just heard him?”
“Yes, that’s right.” She assumes a listening look again. “There . . . now . . . it stopped.”
“I’m sorry, I never caught your name.”
“Patricia.”
“I’m Roberto.”
“Yes, I know.”
“How long have you been hearing this opera singer?”
“Since within a week of moving into the house. That was a year and a half ago. I told my doctor about it, he said tumors or epilepsy in the frontal lobe can cause auditory hallucinations, so I had my brain checked out, but it was fine. Maybe you can write a story about me and my ghost. It’s a very old house, so there’s no telling who used to live there. I’ve done some research, but I haven’t run across any opera singers yet.”
She slurps up some soup then dabs at her big lips with her napkin.
“I can tell you don’t believe me, but don’t feel bad. Nobody does.”
“In this country, you govern with the military or not at all,” Valdivieso is saying. From the front Valdivieso looks okay, but in profile he becomes remarkably ugly, with a long pointy nose and a sharp pointy chin. Now Roberto notices Clara observing him and Patricia with a slight frown. He realizes he’s transgressed, because he knows that Clara likes to have one big general conversation at the table and not separate little ones. But now she smiles and forgives him.
* * *
After dinner he wanders out onto the roof garden. He moves past vine-covered trellises and a gushing fountain and flowers in small pots and small trees in big pots till he reaches the railing. It’s eleven stories up. He’s in the exclusive San Andrés neighborhood, which is on the lower slopes of Mount Cabanacande. Up at the top he sees the lights of the church, but in between it’s mostly darkness; no construction is allowed in the area since it’s been set aside as a nature preserve. The sky is dark too, covered up with clouds. Even on clear nights, the lights of the city make it impossible to see more than a few dim stars.
It’s peaceful up here on the roof garden. He can hear a murmur of traffic but not much else. He reflects that the people in the north part of the city live in a lovely bubble. The troubles of the country seem abstract when discussed between bites of delectable food and sips of expensive wine. In the mellow candlelight, you can know intellectually but not feel the fact that you live in one of the most violent places on the planet.
Ten or so kilometers to the east, the blinking lights of a passenger plane descend toward the airport. Roberto will be there in a few days, going the other way.
Willie Rivera joins him at the railing.
“Oh man, I ate too much,” he groans, patting his stomach. “And I’ve drunk too much too. How am I ever going to lose twenty pounds if I keep acting like this?”
“It’s Saturday night, don’t worry about it,” says Roberto, and then he asks, “Where’s Helen?” His wife.
“Home, with a cold. Sneezing her head off.”
“Give her my regards.”
“I will. She’ll be sorry she missed you.”
Roberto likes Willie Rivera. He’s in his mid-forties, balding, paunchy. Nothing flashy about him except his watch: a black Concord, glittering with diamonds. He’s been working out of the American embassy for the last five or six years. His boss is the assistant secretary of state for international narcotics and law enforcement affairs, but Roberto’s not sure exactly what it is that Willie does. He knows he travels around the country a lot. He’s been a secret source for Roberto on several stories. He’s the guy he goes to when he needs to get past the bland blather of politicians and find out what the Americans really think. Obviously, he doesn’t tell Roberto everything he knows, but everything he has ever told him has turned out to be true.
He met Willie through his father, and his father met him through his practice. Willie’s wife developed a heart condition that required emergency surgery; his father performed it, and Willie credits him with saving her life. When Helen had to go back to America for further treatment, she was terrified that something would happen to her heart during the flight, that she’d be stuck up there at the top of the sky with no one to help her. So his father sat beside her on the plane to Houston, literally holding her hand the whole way, and since then, Willie has not been able to do enough for him. And Roberto knows Willie helping Roberto falls under the category of Willie helping his father.
Willie takes a drink of his scotch on the rocks as they ponder the lights of the sprawling city.
“I’m glad you were here tonight,” he says. “There was something I wanted to talk to you about. Not the kind of thing you can talk about on the phone.”
Roberto looks at him. Knowing he’s about to get something good.
“Okay, Willie. What’s up?”
“I was up in Tulcán last week. I wanted to see how the NTS was going.”
The NTS is the Northern Transversal Strip, which is a road being built through the jungle that will connect Tulcán to the coast and open it up for “development.” It’s a massive undertaking being backed by loans from the World Bank. It’s a very popular project among the political and business elites of the country. Not so popular in Tulcán.
“And how is it going?” says Roberto.
“It’s way behind schedule. Some of the locals are making a nuisance of themselves: planting bombs, assassinating workers, and so on. In the long run, it’s not going to matter. The NTS is a done deal. But I ran across something while I was up there.”
He falls silent as if he’s finished, absently shaking the ice in his glass and making it rattle. Roberto hears a high-pitched giggle and sees Valdivieso standing near the fountain with Rolando. They’re both smoking cigarettes. Rolando is talking and gesturing and now Valdivieso giggles again.
“Have you ever heard of the Sri Lanka option?” Willie says finally.
Roberto knows Sri Lanka is the island nation in south Asia that was formerly called Ceylon. He knows there was an insurgent group called the Tamil Tigers that recruited pretty young women as suicide bombers but eventually, the Tigers were crushed by the government. And that is all he knows.
He shakes his head. “What is it?”
“Go home. Google it. And if it piques your interest, we’ll talk some more. But let me tell you this, there’s a big story up there in Tulcán. It’s ripe as an apple, and it’s just waiting for some enterprising young journalist to go up there and grab it.”
“Thanks for the tip, Willie. But I don’t think I’m your guy.”
“Why not?”
He listens quietly as Roberto tells him. Drains the rest of his drink.
“That sucks,” he says,
in English, after Roberto’s finished. “Does your father know?”
“Yes, I told him right before dinner.”
“I guess that’s why he looked like he was about to throw up,” and then he sighs. “Poor Clemente. You should hear the way he talks about you. I’ve never seen a man so proud of his son.”
“Yes, I know, I feel terrible—”
He hears a brisk clicking and turns and sees Clara walking toward him over the roof on her high heels, her leg flashing in the slit in her dress.
“Roberto, your father just told me, is it true? Are you really leaving?”
She has tears in her eyes, she seems more angry than sad. Before he can say anything more than “Yes,” she reaches out and grabs his forearm.
“But this isn’t fair, we need you here.”
“I know, but—”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I was going to tell you, I just haven’t had the chance—”
“Clara,” says Willie, “give Roberto a break. This can’t be easy for him.”
“This is unacceptable, we’re just not going to let you go,” she says. Still grasping Roberto’s arm hard as if she means exactly what she says and she is going to keep him here on the roof for as long as necessary.
* * *
When he returns to his apartment a little after one, he finds a black funeral wreath on his door. He pulls out of a small white envelope a note card on which is written neatly: You have seven days, Roberto.
Seven days until the day Roberto is to die
I’m counting the days, Caroline says in her email. Seeing you on Skype is nice but the thought of hugging and kissing the real flesh and blood you again makes me dizzy with happiness. You know the little guest bedroom on the second floor? Well I will be working furiously between now and Wednesday to turn it into your office, I want you to walk in and have your breath taken away because it’s so beautiful and perfect, I know just the desk I want, a Victorian walnut desk from the mid-nineteenth century, it’s in a store on the island, I’ve been eying it for a while, it will sit in front of the window and what will you see when you look out? Ocean and sky my love and sky and ocean going on and on, so your thoughts can go on and on with nothing to limit them as you sit at your desk and write. Moving without transition from the romantic to the practical, Caroline says she has prepared and attached a lease agreement for Roberto’s apartment and all it needs is Iván’s signature.
It’s Sunday morning, and he hears a church bell off in the distance. Calling the living. The view from his window is gray, drizzly, melancholy. The tops of the mountains are obscured by clouds. He sits at his computer in his blue tracksuit and he thinks: What next? He’s got plenty to do to get ready to go. Pack his clothes and all of Caroline’s stuff, box up his books and papers, throw things away. But he just sits there, gazing out on the sad gray day.
His mind drifts back to last night. To Willie Rivera on the roof garden, talking about Tulcán. Should he go ahead and google the Sri Lanka option? No point really. He wouldn’t have the time to do anything with it before he left. And if it’s really as big a story as Willie thinks it is, it will just make him feel bad that he’s missing out on it.
He takes a drink of his coffee—and then he types “sri lanka option” into the Google search box.
Sri Lanka was riven for a quarter of a century by a savage civil war between the majority Buddhist Sinhalese, who controlled the government, and the Hindu Tamils, who sought to establish their own state in the northern and eastern parts of the country. The Tamil Tigers, as the rebel army was known, waged ruthless guerrilla warfare and sent suicide bombers to the Sinhalese. The Sinhalese launched an offensive in 2006, aimed at ending the insurgency once and for all. The Sri Lankan army rampaged through the Tamils’ lands, murdering and raping, burning and torturing. They made no distinction between the rebels and civilians, who died by the tens of thousands. Humanitarian workers and journalists were expelled by the army, who wanted no witnesses. When word of the atrocities leaked out, the army simply denied it, saying that any atrocities had been committed by the Tigers, and all they were doing was trying to save the country from Tamil terrorists. The war came to an apocalyptic conclusion in 2009 when the surviving Tigers along with three hundred thousand civilians were trapped between the army and the sea on a narrow strip of beach on the north coast of the island. The army pummeled them for days with artillery and air strikes, the beach was an inferno of smoke and explosions and mangled corpses littered the beach and the heads and limbs of children flew through the air. The people desperately dug holes in the sand and tried to hide and then the army moved in and threw grenades in the holes. The bodies of forty thousand civilians were buried in graves scooped out by bulldozers or burned in bonfires, while the dazed survivors were rounded up and put into detention camps. The Tamil leaders who hadn’t already died were killed along with their families when they tried to surrender. The United Nations made disapproving clucking noises about what had transpired, but the government blithely ignored them and got away completely with their ghastly acts.
Militaries around the world have become intrigued with what has come to be known as the Sri Lanka option. That means solving the problems of insurgency not politically but militarily, isolating the insurgents and the civilian population so you can do to them what you will with no pesky reporters or human rights workers around to object, and basically telling the international community that if it doesn’t like what’s going on it can go fuck itself.
Roberto lifts his eyes from the computer screen to the wet Sunday morning outside the window, and he thinks about it. It’s clear to him what Willie’s big story must be: the Army is preparing, if it hasn’t already begun, to implement the Sri Lanka option in Tulcán.
* * *
He’s driving to his grandmother’s. She lives in Montería, the old colonial district north of downtown. He’s having to take a somewhat circuitous route since on Sundays many of the main thoroughfares are closed to cars and open only to bicycles—this in an effort to cut down on the insane traffic and the choking pollution. He feels as if he’s being watched and followed but this is nothing new and he sees no sign of any followers or watchers.
On the radio he hears that the superintendent of industry and commerce has ordered the company that makes the beauty product Revertrex to remove the claim that it’s “the secret and source of eternal youth” from its advertising. “They’re suggesting their customers will live forever,” says the superintendent, “which is clearly untrue.” Supermodel Alexa Cediel, the spokeswoman for the product, indignantly defends herself, saying “I never said it will make you live forever, just that it has helped me to look young. And I can assure you that yes, it has helped me.”
Tulcán. He knew something was cooking there. In recent weeks in the press there have been numerous pronouncements from high government and military officials about the rising terrorist threat in Tulcán. They’ve been selling a message in the same relentless way that Alexa Cediel has been selling Revertrex. General Horacio Oropeza, the commanding general of the armed forces, went to Tulcán last week to “assess” the situation. Oropeza, who grew up very poor in the countryside, is fond of homely metaphors involving animals, and he’s been issuing rather menacing statements like “Kill the dog, you kill the rabies” and “A cat with gloves on doesn’t catch any rats.” But in case anyone is concerned that the Army will be overly zealous in pursuing the insurgents, Oropeza had this to say: “We are training our soldiers to be strict observers of international humanitarian law. We will never use more force than the circumstances dictate. The size of the stone you throw depends on the size of the toad.”
Roberto’s wondering what he should do with the information Willie has given him. It’s about the future of many people, it’s about massacres and mass graves and he cannot simply sit on it. Maybe Willie would be willing to supply him with more details and when he gets to Saint Lucia, he can write up something and put it on some left-
leaning website. Though he realizes a story without any first-hand reporting to back it up will probably have as little effect on what happens as shooting a water pistol at a house that’s on fire. But he does have a certain reputation for accuracy, and maybe some other reporter will be encouraged to undertake the perilous journey into Tulcán.
He’s stopped at a traffic light. A gusty wind has come up, and a newspaper is rolling over and over across the intersection. A beggar is approaching—a woman limping along on a crutch with a foot sticking out exactly sideways. A light rain speckles the windshield, is removed by the wipers, speckles the windshield, is removed by the wipers . . .
* * *
He finds a parking spot on a crooked side street and walks through the rain toward his grandmother’s apartment. Mount Cabanacande looms above him in the clouds and mist; Montería is built on its foothills. Steep cobblestone streets descend in a rolling way till the topography flattens out at Liberty Plaza and the tall buildings of downtown arise.
The capital city was born in this neighborhood 450 years ago, when a band of vicious Spanish adventurers arrived and burned down the Indian village they found here and killed all of its inhabitants that they could lay their hands on and pursued the survivors up the face of Mount Cabanacande, tracking them with large hunting dogs, until they were all killed too. For three centuries this is where the elite of the city lived and most of the houses they built still remain, painted brightly in yellow and orange and green and blue with ochre and turquoise balconies and terracotta roofs. Montería has become a favorite of artists and writers and other bohemian types. There are galleries and museums on every block, including the very popular Pombo Museum, which Roberto is now walking past. Pombo bought the building and donated it to the city along with many of his best-known paintings, as well as works from his private collection by Monet, Matisse, Picasso, and Dali. As if drawn there by some mysterious affinity, a cluster of fat gringo tourists stand in front of the museum, consulting a guidebook.
Roberto hears the raucous cries of birds above him, looks up and sees some large birds with greenish plumage hopping along a rooftop. He doesn’t know what kind of birds they are, he’s not very good about knowing the names of his country’s flora and fauna. They’re moving along at the same speed he’s walking, and it’s as though they’re intentionally keeping pace with him. A chilling memory is called up. He and Daniel had traveled to a miserable little town by a brown, sluggish river. A wealthy landowner in the area had begun to grow japtropha, a plant used for biofuel, and Roberto was there to investigate reports that workers on his plantation were being brutalized and kept virtually as prisoners. It was a Sunday, like today. It was hot and humid. Daniel has always been a big sweater, and sweat was pouring off him, and he cursed as it trickled into his eye. They were walking down a street. The town seemed eerily empty. Something was wrong, they both felt it. Even the sunlight seemed sinister. A skeletal dog hobbled out of their way, rolling his brown bulging eyes at them in fear. And then Daniel nudged him with his elbow and said softly, “Look.”