by Tom Epperson
Lina comes in. They both look at her.
“Excuse me,” she says, “did I interrupt something?”
Reluctantly, Roberto sits up in his hammock. “Daniel thinks we shouldn’t risk going to El Encanto since the big story is what happened in Jilili. He thinks we should head back to Tarapacá tomorrow.”
Before Lina can respond, Chico jumps out of his hammock and runs over to her and jumps up in her arms and grabs a handful of her hair.
“Ow!” says Lina. “Stop it, Chico!” She walks to the door and tosses him outside. “Go play with Duque, all right?” Now she comes back and smiles apologetically. “Sorry.”
“So what do you think?” Daniel says. “About El Encanto?”
Lina seems hesitant. “I’m here to help you guys. Whatever you decide to do is fine with me.”
“But what’s your opinion?” says Roberto.
“I can see Daniel’s point. I’m sorry the people in Jilili had to die, but I’m happy we were there to witness it. It’s very important to get their story out to the world.”
“But what happened in El Encanto’s important too. There’s no reason we can’t do both stories.”
“We can’t do either story if we’re dead,” Daniel says.
“So how dangerous do you think it is?” Roberto asks Lina.
“Going there, we should be okay. Neither the Army nor the paramilitaries like to operate in the jungle if they can help it.”
“But what about poisonous snakes?” says Daniel. “They like to operate in the jungle.”
Lina smiles. “That’s true. You just have to be careful where you step. But once we get to El Encanto, who knows what we’ll encounter? There’s been a lot of hostile activity along the Otavalo River.”
Daniel and Lina both look at Roberto. It’s up to him.
If he regards the matter pragmatically, Daniel’s probably right. Why take a chance of blundering into a bad situation and being killed when he’s already succeeded beyond his wildest imaginings? But what Javier told him about El Encanto has been haunting him. The fairy tale castle on the jungle river, the sweet little man who makes up stories about his chess pieces, the peacocks and the hedge maze and the evil that came there . . . it’s a story he wants to tell . . . he has to tell.
“Look, Daniel,” he says. “You and I have always been lucky. We just need to be lucky for a couple of more days.”
* * *
Cicadas buzz in the dusk. A single star shines. There’s something very pure and simple about it. Lina and Roberto are walking toward the house.
“I spoke to my superiors,” she says. “I told them about the massacre. They couldn’t believe we’ve got pictures of Oropeza. They wanted me to thank you and Daniel for the work you’re doing.”
“We’re not doing this to help the TARV. We’re just trying to get the story.”
“I understand.”
A bat flickers overhead, feasting on the mosquitoes that are swarming out as the night comes on.
“So they must be happy with you,” says Roberto. “Your superiors.”
“I hope so. This is the most responsibility I’ve ever been given. I’m just trying not to screw it up.”
They reach the house. He smells diesel fumes. A rickety generator’s running and the windows are filled with light. Beneath the house, a rooster and some chickens are settling in for the night. Duque comes down the steps to greet them, panting and grinning.
They go in the dining room and sit down at a long table with Daniel, Ernesto, Roque, Marco, Quique, and Diego. A squawking blue and yellow parrot sits on a perch, which it’s attached to by a cord tied around one leg. Alquimedes, a bony old man who has no eyeball in his right eye socket, and Amparo, a teenage girl with a long black braid falling down her back, bring in food from the kitchen: fried fish, fried yucca, and a dish of beans, potatoes, onions, and chiles.
Roberto hasn’t eaten all day except for the guava-filled cheese from the airport and he’s famished. The fish is even better than what he had in Tarapacá. It’s pirarucu, a large river fish that Diego’s raising in a pond covered with green scum. Alquimedes and Amparo finish their serving duties and sit down at the end of the table with plates of their own. Roberto compliments Alquimedes on his cooking.
“Thank you, sir,” he says with a smile. His mouth is nearly toothless, and he has a necklace of blue, red, and green feathers around his stringy neck. “It’s taken me most of my life to find something I’m good at. I thank God and Diego for that.”
“In that order?” says Diego.
“I thank Diego and God,” says Alquimedes and everyone laughs.
Roberto’s curious about that empty eye socket but thinks it might seem rude to ask about it.
“I can see you’re wondering about my eyeball,” says Alquimedes.
Quique groans. “Oh no. He’s going to tell us his life story again.”
“I was only going to tell him about my eyeball.”
“Yes, and it’ll take you an hour to do it.”
“Alquimedes loves to tell people about how he lost his eyeball,” says Diego. “If he can’t find anybody to listen to him, he’ll go out in the jungle and find a snake or a monkey and tell them about it.”
“Don’t listen to them, Alquimedes,” says Lina. “Tell Roberto about your eye.”
“Yes,” Roberto says, “I’d love to hear about it.”
“Me too,” says Daniel.
“Very well. Since you’re asking. I lost my eyeball in the House of Rabbits. The neighbors called it that because the people that lived there raised and sold rabbits. I was a young man, but I don’t know what my exact age was. My whole life, I’ve never known how old I was. My earliest memory—”
“Okay, here we go,” says Quique, and Ernesto laughs.
“If they’re going to understand how I came to be in the House of Rabbits in the first place,” says Alquimedes patiently, “they need to have a little background. My earliest memory, I was probably seven or eight years old, and I was walking, walking, walking. I didn’t know where I came from or where I was going. I was in a terrible land, a land of death. Cow skulls on fence posts. Dogs hanging from trees. Empty houses, no people anywhere. Finally I came to a river, and I sat down and waited. Pretty soon a boat came along. An old man was in the boat. He was smoking a pipe. He looked at me and said, ‘Just stay happy and take it all in stride. Nothing is as bad as it seems.’
“Well, I got in the boat with him. He asked me my name. I said I didn’t know, so he called me Alquimedes. He sold, you know, this and that, little things: amulets, medicines, candles, perfumes, pictures of the saints. He had a tiny black dog with huge ears, he called him Negrito. So I went up and down the river with the old man and his dog for years. Eventually Negrito got old and died, and we buried him on the riverbank, and then one day, I buried the old man on the riverbank, too. Before he died, the old man told me I could have his boat, so I just kept going up and down the river selling candles and perfumes and so forth. I liked the life, and I’d probably still be doing that, but God had another plan. A big storm caught me on the river, and the boat sunk, along with all the potions and perfumes and amulets, and I was lucky to make it to the bank without drowning. I walked until I reached a town called Peribuela. I figured Peribuela was as good a place as any to start a new life. I got a job in a grocery store. I slept in a shed out back until I made enough money to rent a spare room in the House of Rabbits.
“A girl would come into the store from time to time; her name was Emma. She wasn’t pretty exactly, but there was something about her that caught a man’s eye. I know it’s hard to believe but I was a handsome devil then, and pretty soon Emma and I were seeing each other secretly. It had to be in secret because of her father. His name was Bartolomé Lúrquin, but everybody called him the Turk because his grandparents were Lebanese. He was the richest man in town, he had a finger in every pie. Emma didn’t think he would approve of me.
“Well that, my friends, was an understate
ment,” and Alquimedes laughs. “One night, I was in my room in the House of Rabbits, and the door opened. Two men came in. One of them said, ‘This is a message from the Turk,’ and they beat me in the head with iron bars. My eyeball fell out of my face and onto the floor. They carried me out in the jungle and threw me in a ravine. They thought I was dead, but after a while I woke up. I heard barking. I looked up, and I saw Negrito with his big ears at the top of the ravine barking down at me. You can say it was a dream or a hallucination, but that’s what I saw. I didn’t know what else to do except crawl out of the ravine and start walking again. And so that’s how I lost my eyeball.”
They’ve all been supplied with bottles of beer, and now Daniel grins and lifts his. “Here’s to your lost eyeball, Alquimedes.”
“That’s not a bad story, even if I have heard it before,” says Ernesto.
The talk turns to Jilili.
“How do you explain it?” Diego says, shaking his head in bewilderment. “How can God allow it?”
“It’s easy to allow something when you don’t actually exist,” says Daniel.
“Tell God he doesn’t exist when you see him on the Day of Judgment.”
Daniel laughs. “Okay, I’ll do that.”
“Killing you have to expect,” says Quique. “It’s what war’s all about. But setting old people on fire and hanging children from trees? That’s just crazy.”
“But it’s not crazy at all,” says Lina. “Once you understand that violent repression in this country is not a deviation from the norm but is the norm itself, then things start to make sense. The perpetrators of violence aren’t crazy and out of control, they’re acting according to the dictates of logic and reason. Their actions flow naturally from the premises they start with.”
“So what are the premises?” says Roberto.
“Study economics at any university, and they’ll teach them to you. The Army and the oligarchy take our land, use it up, destroy it, to make products to put on the global market. This is happening everywhere. In the name of the market, they’re chewing through the earth like locusts; soon there will be nothing left except an endless wasteland. And if you resist you’re called a terrorist. The war on Communism, the war on drugs, the war on terror . . . it’s the same war every time, a war on the poor and the powerless, a war on animals and birds and fish and plants.”
“I love you, Lina,” Diego says, “but sometimes you talk like a book. I don’t always understand what you’re saying.”
“Well, I understand,” says Quique. “In this country, it’s all about those on the top staying there, and those on the bottom staying there, too.”
“Amparo,” says Lina, “you look like you want to say something.”
Everyone looks at Amparo. A delicate silver cross hangs at her neck. She looks shyly down at her plate, and shakes her head.
“No.”
“Oh, go on, girl,” says Alquimedes. “I’ve always found you worth listening to.”
“Well,” Amparo says, slowly looking up. “I was just thinking . . . how strange life is.”
“In what way?” says Lina.
“The people in the village didn’t wake up this morning knowing they were going to die. It must have seemed like just a normal day to them. It just seems like when something so important is going to happen, you ought to know about it.”
Lina gives her an encouraging smile. It’s clear she’s taken an interest in her. The parrot is shouting “Hello!” and “Lucho!” again and again. Lucho is its name, and those seem to be the only two words it knows.
“All I know is,” Quique says, “the Army had its day, and we’ll have ours.”
“Are you coming with us tomorrow, Quique?” asks Roberto.
“Of course. Why else do you think I’m here? It’s to babysit your ass!” and Quique looks around the table and laughs.
Roberto’s not offended. In fact, he laughs too. He couldn’t be any happier that Quique is going to accompany them to El Encanto, and then hopefully back.
* * *
After dinner, everyone goes out on the porch to have a beer and talk, but Roberto walks back to the guesthouse. It’s night now, and the croaking of what seems like thousands of frogs floats out of the jungle. He gets his toiletry kit out of his pack and goes to the bathroom. As he switches on the light, a scorpion scuttles across the floor, its wicked-looking tail curled over its back, and disappears behind the toilet. Roberto stands at the sink and brushes his teeth. His arm is red and throbbing and sticky with honey. Suddenly the bare light bulb hanging from the ceiling goes out. He feels uneasy about sharing the darkness with the scorpion, his flip-flops leave plenty of skin on his feet exposed to that poisonous tail, so he hurriedly washes his mouth out and leaves.
Roberto finds Amparo in the guesthouse, leaning over a hurricane lamp on the table, lighting the candle in it.
“What happened to the power?” he says.
“Diego only runs the generator for two hours every night.”
The silver cross on its thin chain dangles and shines.
“Where’d you get that? The cross.”
“My father gave it to me.”
“It’s very pretty.”
“Thank you.”
“Where is your father?”
“He died. When I was ten.”
“What happened to him?”
She’s silent. Staring down at the candle.
“It’s all right,” says Roberto. “If you don’t want to talk about it.”
She looks up at him. He can see the gleam of the candle deep in her dark eyes.
“No. I don’t mind. My father was a traveling dentist. He carried all his equipment on a mule. I went everywhere with him.”
“Where was your mother?”
“I don’t know. He never talked about her. Usually we traveled along the river, but one day, we were going to a village, and some men told us about a short cut through the forest. So we took it, and pretty soon we saw the men again. They beat my father and robbed him and took the mule and all the dental equipment and left. My father was unconscious. I kept waiting for him to wake up, but in the middle of the night, he stopped breathing. When the sun came up, I tried to find my way out of the forest, but I got lost. I was lost for three days, but then I was found by wild Indians. They were hardly wearing any clothes, and they had feathers and bones in their noses and ears and paint on their faces, and they carried spears and blowguns. I’d always heard Indians were cannibals, and I was scared they’d stick me with their spears and eat me. But they gave me food and took care of me. I stayed with them for a few weeks, and then they brought me here. Diego knows their language and he’s friends with them.”
“Do you like it here?”
“Yes. Everyone’s nice. Especially Alquimedes. But I want to leave.”
“Why?”
“I’d like to go to school. Learn about the world. See things. Travel. Lina says she’ll help me.”
Amparo leaves, and Roberto sits down at the table in the glow of the lamp with his notebook. The first thing he writes down is everything Amparo just told him, trying to remember her exact words as much as possible. Then he goes to the other end of the day. He and Roque peeing together in the morning coolness and watching the squirrel monkeys in the treetops. The twins and the watermelons. The ten helicopters, and the one that was so frighteningly curious about them, and Ernesto, hands on hips, grinning up at it. But he is stopped cold when he gets to Jilili. He takes his glasses off and rubs his eyes. A mosquito whines in his ear and he brushes it away. He cannot write about Jilili, but it seems to exist in a ghostly swirling all around him. He continues to rub his eyes, it feels comforting to do so. The frogs grow louder and louder, it’s like their noise will swallow him like a fly. The birds on the river. The way Roque smiled, looking at the monkeys. The murdered girl with her murdered baby. He cannot understand life, he cannot understand this day. The beautiful and terrible all entangled.
* * *
“Robe
rto? Roberto?”
He awakes to Roque gently shaking his shoulder. He lifts his head off the table. It feels like it weighs fifty kilos.
“I’m sorry, Roberto. But it’s Daniel.”
“What’s the matter with him?” His tongue’s so thick with sleep he can hardly form the words.
“He’s very drunk.”
“Shit.”
Roberto gets up and puts his notebook away in his backpack.
“What’s he drinking? Beer?”
“No, Diego brought out a bottle of rum, and Daniel’s drunk about half of it.”
“Great. Rum. Just what Daniel needs.”
Roberto and Roque walk toward the house. He can hear music and Daniel talking loudly.
“Is he pissing people off?” he asks.
“Maybe. A little.” Roque laughs. “But he’s also very funny.”
They go up the steps. The soft light of a lamp spills out of a window onto the porch. A CD player plays an insipid pop song, and Marco laughs as Amparo tries to teach Chico the monkey how to dance. Further down the porch, Lina, Ernesto, Diego, and Quique are sitting in chairs around a table, while Daniel stands, leaning against the railing. Lucho the parrot is tethered to the railing and greets Roberto with a happy “Hello!”
“Hey, Roberto!” says Daniel. “Just in time! Join the party!”
He’s smiling broadly at Roberto, a cup of rum in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
“It’s getting late,” says Roberto. “Let’s go to bed.”
“Late, are you crazy?” and he looks at his watch. “It’s not even nine o’clock.”
“We have to get up early—”
“Alquimedes!” yells Daniel, and the old man’s gaunt face appears in a window. “Bring a cup out for Roberto, this man wants a drink!”
“No thanks, Alquimedes,” says Roberto. “I’m fine.”
“Whatever you say, boss,” says Alquimedes.
“We’re having a very interesting conversation with your friend,” Quique says, as he hand-rolls a cigarette. “He’s explaining to us his philosophy of life.”