by Tom Epperson
“Hey, Daniel,” Roberto calls, “are you still alive?”
“Yeah!” he calls back. “Go on ahead, I’ll catch up!”
“But we can’t leave you!” Ernesto says and he winks at Quique. “A jaguar might eat you!”
“Good,” says Daniel, “I hope one does!”
Ernesto and Quique laugh. Soon after, Daniel appears, walking slowly, his face pale and sweaty. Lina looks at him with concern.
“Drink,” she says, handing him a bottle of water. “You don’t want to get dehydrated.”
Daniel nods, and dutifully drinks most of the water.
“And I’ve got some Lomotil in my pack,” Lina adds, referring to the country’s most popular diarrhea remedy.
They come out of the trees and see Juan Carlos Mejía’s house. They walk across the lawn, big and green as the fairway of a golf course. They go by the waterless happy elephant fountain. Jota picks up a long tail feather from one of the dead peacocks, swishes it around like a sword. The same group of vultures that eyed them as they left eye them as they return.
A small bird is fluttering around near the ceiling of the great hall. Lina takes her medical kit out of her backpack and gets a bottle of Lomotil for Daniel. Roberto opens his pack, puts away his notebook, and puts his voice recorder in the ziplock plastic bag that already contains his cellphone. Now Lina addresses everyone.
“Okay, listen! We’re going to rest for half an hour, and then we’re heading back to Diego’s. From there we’ll be going to Tarapacá. It’s going to be a long night, so try to get a little sleep if you can.”
“Can we turn on the generator and watch some TV?” says Ernesto. “I haven’t watched TV in weeks.”
“No. I want you to sleep.”
“Lina, you never let us have any fun,” says Quique.
“We’ll have fun tomorrow in Tarapacá, I promise. We’ll have a big party at Yadier’s house, and we’ll all get blasted.”
“You too, Lina?” says Roque.
“Me especially.”
“And are you going to dance?” says Quique.
“Of course,” says Lina. “I’m going to dance all night.”
“You should see her, Roberto,” Ernesto says, “she’s a great dancer. She could win a contest, she’s so good.”
Lina laughs. “Go on, get some rest. The clock’s ticking.”
Everybody looks for some place comfortable to sit or lie down. Lina moves over to Roberto.
“You too, Roberto. You should rest.”
“You know what? I’m not really tired. I’m feeling okay, for some reason.”
“In that case, is there anything else you want to see before we leave? It’s your last chance.”
He thinks a moment.
“Could we take another look at the lake? It was so beautiful. I would imagine Juan Carlos spent a lot of time there.”
“He did,” says Lina, and then she calls out to her guys. “Roberto and I are going to the lake, we’ll be back in twenty minutes.”
Quique hauls himself up from the plush depths of a satin armchair, picks up his rifle. “I’ll go with you.”
“No, stay here.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, we’ll be fine.”
Quique looks happy to sit back down. Roberto goes over to a couch where Daniel is lying sprawled on his back, his eyes closed, one arm and leg hanging off, his French Foreign Legion cap sitting on his stomach.
“How do you feel?”
“Ready to get out of the fucking jungle,” he says, without opening his eyes.
“Do you think the malaria medicine is making you sick?”
“No, probably just the filthy food and water. I always get sick when I go to the jungle.”
“We’ll be out of here before you know it.”
“I hope so.”
Roberto and Lina walk down a hallway toward the back of the house. Suddenly Lina stops, and takes the rifle off her shoulder.
“What’s wrong?” says Roberto.
“Shh. When we left, that door was closed.”
She’s talking about the door to the library. They move forward quietly. Now she motions for him to stop. She goes to the door and peers through it, then lowers her rifle and looks back at him and smiles.
He joins Lina in the doorway. Jota’s curled up in a big leather armchair, reading a book.
“Hey, Jota,” says Roberto, as he and Lina walk in. “What are you reading?”
Jota holds the book up; the tattered jacket shows a man in tails and a top hat riding in the gondola of a red and white balloon.
“Around the World in Eighty Days,” he says.
“I read that when I was a kid. Jules Verne was one of my favorite writers. Have you ever read Journey to the Center of the Earth? Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea?”
“No, are they good?”
“I loved them.”
“Great. I saw them on the shelf, I’ll read them next.”
“So you like to read?” says Lina.
“Yes. Sister Donna taught me. She told me I learned it faster than anybody else she’d ever seen. And then Mr. Mejía caught me in here one day looking at his books. I thought he’d be mad, but he didn’t mind at all. He said I could read any book I wanted as long as I didn’t take it out of the library and when I finished I put it back in the same place I found it.”
“Jota,” says Lina, “are you sure you don’t want to come with us? We’ll help you find a place to live.”
“No thanks. I need to take care of Fercho and Yineth and her mother. They wouldn’t know what to do if I wasn’t around.”
Roberto and Lina leave the library and walk down the hall.
“That kid’s amazing,” says Lina.
“Someday Jota will either be the biggest criminal in the country, or else the president.”
“What’s the difference?”
He laughs. They exit the house onto the patio. The three vultures have vacated the wrought-iron table in the corner. Three capuchin monkeys sit on the balustrade, still hoping perhaps for bananas. Roberto looks at the statue of the praying angel in the fishpond and remembers something unpleasant. So does Lina.
“Shit,” she says. “I forgot about the head. We’ll bury it when we come back.”
They step off the patio onto the grass. “Eeeee! Eeeee! Eeeee!” Roberto hears, and he sees the peacock walking around near the tennis court. Lonely, the last of its kind, at least at El Encanto. He was truthful with Lina, he’s not tired at all. He’s feeling the surge of excitement that comes with the knowledge that a job is nearly done. Maybe he’ll get a last detail or two at the lake that will make it into his story, and then he can leave El Encanto with the knowledge he’s done everything he set out to do and more. Even now the story is forming itself in his brain, it feels in some sense already written. He knows the journey across the jungle and then up the river to Tarapacá will have its dangers, but the situation is different now because he won’t be putting himself and Daniel in harm’s way to gather information like he did in Jilili. His only purpose will be to avoid trouble till he and Daniel can jump in his Twingo and head for Robledo.
Roberto walks with the girl guerrilla, her Galil slung over her shoulder. They’re among the fruit trees and the monkeys now. Maybe it’s not so much that he wanted to see the lake as that he wanted to be alone with Lina; this will probably be the last time.
“El Encanto,” says Roberto. The Enchantment. “That’s a great name for this place.”
“It used to have another name,” says Lina.
“What?”
“Las Matanzas.” The Massacres.
“Why was it called that?”
“It all had to do with rubber. Lots of rubber trees grew around here. The Indians called it the weeping tree, which turned out to be prophetic. In the late nineteenth century, rubber became very valuable. The automobile was invented, and they needed rubber for tires. Instead of a gold rush, it was a rubber rush. One day a man called Aquil
eo Vendaño showed up here. He’d tried and failed at many different trades, including selling hats. He’d scraped together a little money, and he established a rubber station. At first, he brought in workers from outside, but they would die of disease or run away because of the horrible working conditions and anyway Vendaño had to pay them. He decided a better business plan would be to enslave the local Indians. If they resisted, they were massacred. There were many massacres. Vendaño and his men treated the Indians with unspeakable cruelty. They would flog them, decapitate them, burn them alive. They turned little girls into whores, they had contests to see who could shoot the genitals off little boys, they chopped up babies and fed them to their dogs. All up and down the river people would see Indians with terrible scars, and the scars became known as ‘the mark of Vendaño.’ Vendaño became very rich; he was one of the most important men in Tulcán. There was one last massacre in 1913—the Indians rose up and killed Vendaño and all the other whites, and that was the end of Las Matanzas. It would have been finished anyway because the rubber boom was ending. All the business was moving to rubber plantations in the Far East.”
“So now it’s not rubber anymore,” says Roberto. “It’s coltan.”
“Exactly. Nothing’s changed. Thousands of greedy bastards like Vendaño will be coming down the river to rip the jungle apart.”
They reach the lake. The sun is going down and it’s mostly covered in shadow. A breeze is coming in off the river, ruffling the green water. They walk along the edge of the lake toward the pavilion. A heron lets them know they’re getting too close, and flaps away on wide white wings. Dragonflies are flying over the water lilies, it’s like the wallpaper in Juan Carlos’s bedroom come to life. Roberto tries to fix all this in his mind, like a photograph. Roberto and Lina by the lake at El Encanto.
They step onto the walkway that leads out to the pavilion. A lizard skitters out of their way. Lina walks ahead. Roberto’s boots are covered with mud, but he notices there’s hardly a speck of it on hers.
The pavilion’s covered with a thatched roof and open on the sides. Around its circumference are a railing and seven brightly painted wooden statues: a jaguar, an anaconda, a parrot, a monkey, a great egret, a bare-breasted mermaid, and a pink dolphin with a huge erect phallus jutting out from it.
“So what’s the deal with all these dolphins with dicks?” says Roberto. “I saw a painting of one in Tarapacá.”
“Supposedly dolphins can transform themselves into handsome young men. They come out of the river at night and seduce the prettiest girl in the village. Nine months later she’ll give birth to a baby that’s part dolphin.”
“So can female dolphins transform themselves into beautiful girls and seduce the best-looking guy in the village?”
“No, I’ve never heard that. But travelers have been known to see beautiful wild laughing girls on the other side of the river who call out to them, and then they try to swim across the river to the girls and drown.”
“Hm. Sounds like sex can be dangerous around here.”
Lina laughs. “People have such funny ideas about sex. When I was a little girl, I thought that falling in love with a boy would make you pregnant, so I was always afraid of liking a boy too much. My mother became very worried about me because she thought I wasn’t interested in boys. She would pray to Saint Antonio for a husband for me.”
“Have you ever come close to getting married?”
“No, not really. How about you? Are you and Caroline getting married?”
“Yes. As soon as I get to Saint Lucia.”
She nods. Roberto goes to the railing, leans his arms on it, and looks out at the lake. Lina joins him. As the fierce heat of the day subsides, the pace of life quickens. Birds are everywhere, he needs Roque here to name them, he’s never seen such vivid colors, it’s like the changing patterns of a kaleidoscope or something you might see on ayahuasca. There are sudden splashes all across the lake as fish begin to feed, and monkeys jump and scream in the trees. Turtles stick their heads out from among the water lilies. On the other side of the lake, the two dogs he saw at the workers’ houses are trotting along briskly to some obviously important destination.
“I’ll never forget this,” Lina says. “Not any of it.”
“I won’t either, Lina.”
She looks at her watch.
“We should go.”
“We’ve got a few minutes.”
“And what’s going to happen in the next few minutes?”
“I don’t know.” They’re both silent, and then he says, “I’m half in love with you. Do you know that?”
“Yes.”
“What are we going to do?”
“We’re going to go back to Tarapacá, and then we’re going to say good-bye.”
“And I’ll never see you again?”
“Probably not. Look, I don’t like it either; I care about you too. But it’s life. You deal with it. You don’t ask why.”
“I can’t stand the thought of leaving you here. You’re going to get yourself killed, and it will all be for nothing. You can’t save Tulcán. The world wants it, and it will get it, and it will do whatever it wants to with it. And people who try to stand in the way, they’ll just be stepped on, like bugs.”
“If you really believed that, you wouldn’t be here now. Things are going to look very different in a couple of days. You’re going to be where you’re supposed to be, and you’re going to have a happy life with Caroline. And I’m going to live through this, and I’m going to have a happy life too. And the years will go by, and maybe from time to time we’ll think of each other, and we’ll smile a little.”
Now she holds her hand out to him.
“Come on, Roberto. Let’s go.”
He takes her hand, but stays where he is.
“I’ve got an idea.”
“What?”
“Are you really a good dancer?”
“Why?”
“Well, since Daniel and I are going to miss out on the party tomorrow night, I thought we could dance now.”
“But we don’t have any music.”
“We’ll imagine music. Something beautiful.”
She gives him a musing smile. “Okay. But only for a minute.”
She slips the rifle off her shoulder, leans it against the railing. She comes into his arms. Roberto dances slowly with Lina over the hardwood floor of the pavilion. Her head’s on his shoulder; he feels her warmth and softness. The statues of the jaguar and the parrot and the monkey and the rest all seem to be watching, as if this is a solemn performance put on just for them.
He closes his eyes. He hears her sigh. He feels not half in love with her but fully. For the first time since he entered the jungle he’s in no hurry to leave it. Or maybe he’s already left it, it’s like he’s dancing with Lina in no particular place or else every place at once as space and time become mere words and fade away. He was supposed to dance for just a minute but thank god there is no such thing as a minute.
“Roberto—”
Lina’s pulling away from him, looking in the direction of the walkway.
Roberto sees uniformed men with guns coming out of the trees. They’re wearing black berets.
Lina makes a lunge for her rifle.
“Lina, no!” says Roberto.
She grabs the rifle but he wrenches it from her grasp and throws it in the water. He looks back toward the bank and sees twenty-five or thirty men with their guns pointed at them, and then he sees Lina pulling the pistol from under her shirt. Expecting bullets at any instant to start tearing through them, he grabs her arm and struggles with her.
“No, Roberto, let me!”
The gun fires with a startling bang and then he gets it away from her and throws it in the water too.
“They would’ve killed us, Lina!”
“Of course, that’s what I wanted!”
They stand ranged along the edge of the lake, the men in the black berets, the Black Jaguars. Roberto sticks his hands
in the air. He notices Lina slipping her cellphone out of a pocket and tossing it in the water, and then she raises her hands too. Four Black Jaguars are moving quickly down the walkway. The one in the lead is screaming and motioning with the barrel of his assault rifle for them to lie down on their stomachs, and Roberto and Lina comply.
They lie side by side. Roberto hears the clomping of their boots getting louder. Lina whispers, “We just met today. My name is Carmen. That’s all you know about me.”
He sees boots and the barrels of guns and then his arms are roughly twisted up behind him. His hands are secured with zip tie plastic cuffs and then he’s dragged to his feet. Lina’s received the same treatment. They both are searched. The thick hands of a man with a moustache go all over Roberto. He finds the wad of cash in his pants pocket and pulls it out. A young grinning guy is searching Lina. His hands slide over her breasts and squeeze her buttocks.
“That’s enough of that, Chávez,” someone says.
Another Black Jaguar comes strolling onto the pavilion. He’s tall and fair, with very light eyes, more gray than blue. He seems like a slightly older version of Franz. He looks Roberto and Lina over in a not unpleasant way.
“So what do we have here, sergeant?”
“No ID on either of them,” says the guy who searched Roberto. “I saw the girl throw something in the water, probably her cellphone. I found this in his pocket.”
The sergeant hands Roberto’s money to the man with the light eyes. He looks through it quickly.
“It’s wet,” he says to Roberto. “Why?”
“I was wading across a stream, and I stepped in a hole and fell in.”
The man hands the money back to the sergeant, and then barks out, “Chávez! Go in the lake and get the cellphone, the rifle, and the handgun.”
Chávez makes a face. “Why me, colonel? How come I always get the crummy jobs?”
The colonel gives Chávez a wintry smile.
“Because you’re a crummy soldier, Chávez, and that’s the only kind of job I can trust you with.”
Chávez starts taking off his boots. “There better not be any fucking piraña in there.”