Life During Wartime

by Lucius Shepard

  She frowned and edged away. “You don’t understand how hard it is having to fend him off. I know you don’t think—”

  “The thing is,” he cut in, “I know you’re capable of screwing him if you thought it’d save the goddamn revolution. Maybe that’s the right attitude to take. Maybe we should all hop in the sack together and get rid of our frustrations.”

  She tensed, and he felt her anger thickening the air. Laughter from the courtyard. Relaxed, confident Sotomayor laughter.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s not you, it’s everything.”

  “Just be quiet,” she said, turning to face the wall. “Let me alone.”

  “Okay,” he said. “But only if you let me touch you.”

  Shortly after that he fell asleep with his clothes on, without making up. It had been a long time since he’d had a dream that he remembered, but that night he dreamed he was lying in a featureless void and straining to dream. At length he saw a dream approaching, a thin slice of vivid color and motion against the blackness. He awaited its arrival eagerly, but as it drew near he realized that the dream had come in the form of an enormous blade, and he awakened just in time to avoid being cut in half by it. He sat up in bed, frightened, wanting to be comforted, consoled. Debora was inches away, but half-believing that the dream had spoken to their irresolute condition, he doubted she could provide what he needed.

  Two days after this, Mingolla broke into Ruy’s room and stole his notebook filled with poems and meditations about Debora. The notebook, he had decided, would give him the tool with which he could defuse Ruy as a threat; and yet he was not altogether sure why he wanted to defuse him, because he did not perceive Ruy as a serious threat. It seemed to him a whimsical act, one predicated on a desire to recalibrate his emotions, a motive similar—he suspected—to that underlying Ruy’s decision to pursue Debora. Seeing this resemblance to Sotomayor behavior in himself was alarming, but he was unable to deny the impulse.

  The contents of the notebook made Mingolla envious. Ruy’s observations on Debora’s character were more detailed than his own, and though he chalked this up to the fact that Ruy had the advantage of distance, the rationalization failed to diminish his envy. A few of the passages were quite well written, and one in particular struck Mingolla with its intensity and sincerity.

  …It’s the thought of your beauty that makes me wake, sometimes, from the middle of dreams I can’t remember, it’s not the image of your face, the softness of your skin, but just the sudden awareness of beauty, that first strike before any of the details come clear, that jolts me hard into the world and leaves me broken on the shoals of my bed. For a moment I’m angry that you’re not there, but then anger planes into longing, and I stand up, pace, and haunt the darkness of my bathroom, thinking of remedies. I see there’s no reason for anger, no reason we should make the right choices, no reason we shouldn’t ruin our lives…after all, our lives are ruined already, and what sense is there in denying the world that waits to transform us into lumps of pain and wizened hairless dolls, and why should we assign value to love or any emotion that menaces our conception of the expectable? And having agonized for an hour over all this, having explored hope and hopelessness, in the end it’s the thought of your beauty that makes me lie back on the bed, heavy in the head, weighting me down so that I plummet through the edges of sleep and drown in the middle of dreams I won’t remember.

  This passage and others firmed Mingolla’s resolve in that they caused him for the first time to see Ruy as a man; he was not inclined to see him that way, and so in order to reduce Ruy once again to the status of a characterless enemy, he took an irrevocable action against him.

  Twice a week Marina Estil held what she called “group therapy” in her hotel. She had tried to persuade Mingolla to join in, but he had refused, not wanting to involve himself more than necessary in Sotomayor business. However, on the night after he stole the notebook, he went to the hotel for the purpose of attending one of these sessions. Marina’s hotel was located three blocks from the Casa Gamboa and served as lodging for the leaders of the negotiating teams, both Sotomayor and Madradona. Mingolla arrived a half-hour early, and rather than standing around the lobby, he went into the lounge and sat down in front of a TV set that was hooked to a satellite dish on the roof. He asked the lounge’s sole occupant—a young Madradona man—if he minded the TV being on, and then flipped through the channels until he came to one showing a line of plodding soldiers moving up a hillside under an overcast sky, and superimposed on this, shot in fiery letters, the legend: William Corson’s War Stories. Corson had visited the Ant Farm during Mingolla’s tour, and though Mingolla hadn’t met him, by all reports he was a good guy. Baylor had done an interview with him, and when Mingolla had asked what sort of man the journalist was, Baylor had only said, “The guy gets high.” Which had been Baylor’s standard for acceptance. The credits rolled, and Corson strolled into view of the camera, the line of soldiers continuing uphill at his rear. He was bearded, tall, dressed in fatigues, with a hooked nose and fleshy lips; he looked, Mingolla thought, a little bit like a thinner, younger Fidel Castro.

  “Behind me,” Corson said, “you see members of the First Infantry heading toward the fighting north of Lake Izabal. Once they cross that hill they’ll be in a hot zone, a zone that’s been hot for nearly three years, a battle without resolution. That fact speaks to the character of the war. Battles flourish like hothouse plants in the midst of pacified territory with no apparent justification other than a command strategy that can be best described as cryptic. All wars have their character. World War One was called the War to End War. World War Two was a righteous crusade against a legitimate madman. Vietnam has been countenanced as both an exercise in the demonic and as a gross political misjudgment. And this war…well, the poet Kieran Davies has pronounced it ‘the vast sputtering signal of the Age of Impotence, the evil counterpart of topless tennis matches and fast food solutions to the nutritional problem.’ Davies’s imagery has a basis in…”

  “Very sad,” said a voice beside Mingolla.

  The Madradona man had taken the adjoining chair. He was in his twenties, pudgy, smiling, wearing a red Coca-Cola T-shirt and chinos. “But soon,” he went on, gesturing at the screen, “it will be all over, yes?”

  Mingolla shrugged. “I guess.”

  “Oh, yes.” The man patted his chest. “We will end it soon.”

  “Terrific.”

  “You are Meengolla, no?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I am Chapo. Pleased to meet you.” Chapo held out a hand, and reluctantly Mingolla shook it. “Where are you from in the United States?”

  “New York.”

  “New York City? But this is wonderful! I am living a year in New York, in Green-witch Village.”

  “How ’bout that.” Mingolla tried to get back into Corson’s monologue, but Chapo was relentless.

  “I love New York,” he said. “I love especially the Mets. Such a wonderful team! Do you like the Mets?”

  “No.”

  “The Yankees, then?”

  Mingolla nodded.

  “They are good, too,” said Chapo with some condescension. “But I think the Mets are a little better.”

  Mingolla stared grimly at the TV.

  “You are interested in this show?”

  “Right.”

  “I’m so sorry. I will watch with you.”

  Corson had begun an interview with a crewcut kid younger than Mingolla, who was wearing an Air Cav patch on a nylon flight jacket. “Would you like to say anything to your parents…or your friends?” Corson asked him.

  The kid wetted his lips, looked at the ground. “Naw, not really.”

  “Why not?”

  “What’s there to say?” The kid gestured at the soldiers, the jungle terrain. “Picture’s worth a thousand words, right?” He turned back to Corson. “If they don’t know what’s goin’ on, me tellin’ ’em ain’t gonna help.”

  “And what d
o you think is going on?”

  “With the war? Fuckin’ war’s bullshit, man. This place’d be all right, wasn’t for the war.”

  “You like Guatemala, then?”

  “I dunno if I like it…it’s weird, y’know. Kinda neat.”

  “What’s neat about it?”

  “Well…” The kid studied on it. “This one time, I hitched a ride to Réunion with these minitank guys…they were convoying oil trucks along the Petén Highway. So one of the trucks turns over in the middle of the jungle, oil spills all over the fuckin’ place. Nothin’ can move till the spill’s cleared up. And alla sudden out of the weeds comes all these Fritos, man. They got little stoves and shit. They start cookin’ food. Fritters and chicken and stuff. Selling pop and beer. Like they been knowin’ this is gonna happen and they was just waitin’ for us to show. And there was girls, too. They’d take ya into the weeds and do ya. They wasn’t hard like the city girls. Sweet, y’know. It was ’bout the best time I had down here, and it was weird the way they was waitin’.”

  “You served in Guatemala, no?” Chapo asked.

  This time Mingolla was glad for the interruption; the interview had made him feel that he was watching a depressing home movie.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Artillery.”

  “It must have been horrible,” said Chapo, and made a doleful face.

  “Wasn’t great.”

  Chapo nodded, apparently at a loss for words. “Perhaps we can be friends,” he said. “Perhaps you will come to visit me in my room. I live on the third floor.”

  Startled, Mingolla said, “Maybe…I don’t know. I’m pretty busy.”

  “I would like it very much.”

  “We’ll see.”

  On the screen, the kid was talking about his duty. “These choppers, man, they are fuckin’ fast. You come in off the sea, you’re so far out you can’t see land, and then the land pops up, green mountains, cities, whatever, like one of those pop-up birthday cards. And then you’re into the clouds. I’m talkin’ ’bout hittin’ at the guerrillas, now. Up in the mountains. So you’re in the clouds, and when you unbutton your rockets, all you see is this pretty glow way down under the clouds. Like glowing marble, that’s what it looks like. And the only way you can tell you done anything is that when you make a second pass, all those little hot targets on the thermal imager ain’t there anymore. You don’t feel nothin’. I mean…you do feel somethin’, but it’s different.”

  That was enough for Mingolla, who still felt the deaths he’d caused. He got up, and Chapo, too, stood.

  “I hope I will see you again,” Chapo said. “We can talk more about New York City.”

  Stupid blocky brown face. Earnest smile. Common clay of the Master Race. Chapo’s ingenuousness—similar to that Mingolla had encountered in dozens of young Latin men—had sucked in him. Maybe it was for real, but Chapo was no less his enemy for all that.

  “Not a fucking chance,” said Mingolla, and walked out into the lobby.

  Marina’s bedroom was a touch more luxurious than those of the Casa Gamboa. Carpeted with a patchy shag rug. Wallpaper of a waterstained oriental design that might have been plum blossoms, but had worn away into a calligraphy of indefinite lines, with pale rectangles where pictures had once been hung. The bed was draped in a peach-colored satin spread that rippled in the light from a lamp on the night table. Seven Sotomayors, including Ruy, were seated on the bed and floor, and Marina, enthroned in an easy chair, led the discussion…less a discussion than a bout of fabulous confessions. Mingolla stood by the door, watching, listening. He had been disconcerted by Ruy’s presence, but he was now considering changing his tactics and confronting Ruy with the notebook rather than sandbagging him.

  “It was in April of the year,” said one of the Sotomayors, a man named Aurelio, slightly older than yet strikingly similar to Ruy in appearance. “All that month I’d been feeling at loose ends. Even though I was involved in settling the Peruvian problem, my involvement wasn’t enough to prevent idle thoughts, and my thoughts came to settle on Daria Ruiz de Madradona, the daughter of my father’s murderer. She was also involved in the Peruvian operation, but that was not a factor in my decision.”

  As Aurelio described the process of plotting that had led to his abduction of Daria, he maintained a downcast expression as if he were revealing a matter of great shame; yet his tone grew exuberant, his description eloquent, and the others, though they sat quietly and attentive, seemed titillated, leaning forward, breathing rapidly. Especially Marina. She had on gray slacks and a silver-and-gray blouse imprinted with a design of black birds flying between stylized slants of rain. Crimson lipstick gave her mouth a predatory sexuality, and her cheekbones looked as if they were about to pierce her skin. With each of Aurelio’s revelations, she appeared to sharpen, to become more intent and alive.

  “I don’t think,” said Aurelio, “I’ve ever known myself as I did in that moment. My location in the world, in the moment. Certainly my senses had never been so clear. I took in every detail of the walls. The grain, the knotholes and wormtrails. All in an instant. I could hear the separate actions of the wind in the trees outside, and how it was flapping a piece of tarpaper on the roof. Daria was not a beautiful woman, yet she seemed unbelievably sensual. Fear drained from her face as she met my eyes, and I couldn’t hate her any longer, because I knew that this moment was more than mere vengeance. It was drama. Ritual and destiny coming together. And knowing this, knowing that she knew, there arose a kind of love between us…love such as arises between a victim and the one who is both torturer and bringer of mercy.”

  After Aurelio had finished, the group analyzed his story, dissected it in terms of its bearing upon Sotomayor psychology, all with an eye toward repressing their baser instincts; yet their dissection had the prim fraudulence of sinners who were justifying their wickedness and pretending to be sad. Other stories were told, and Mingolla—seeing in their gleeful descriptions, their delight over their violent traditions, and their penitent pose a perfect setting for his presentation—bided his time.

  After an hour of this, Marina asked if he had any questions, and stepping to the center of the room, he said, “Sure do. They might annoy you, but I hope you’ll answer them.”

  “We’ll do our best,” she said.

  “From what I’ve heard tonight,” he said, “and what I’ve heard before, it seems that a good many of your operations have been undermined by someone suddenly reestablishing the feud. And this usually happens at the last minute, right when success is at hand. Is that fair to say?”

  One of the men started to object, but Marina interrupted, saying, “It’s not unfair.”

  “What makes you think that won’t happen here?”

  “That’s what we’re trying to prevent,” said Ruy haughtily.

  “Right.” Mingolla beamed at him, surprised to feel some fondness for him now that he had him in his grasp. “Anyway, there’s a casualness to your operations that makes me nervous.”

  “What are you leading up to?” Marina asked.

  He ignored the question. “Everybody except you has admitted to some sin. Don’t you have anything to confess?”

  “Marina is our exemplar,” said Ruy with a measure of bitterness. “She’s blameless in all this.”

  A smile carved a little red wound in the gaunt planes of her face. “Thank you, Ruy.”

  “You must have been affected by the feud in some way,” said Mingolla. “At one of the negotiating sessions, Ruy mentioned something about your pain…something somebody’s uncle had done to you.”

  “Yes? What about it?”

  “I’d like to hear what happened.”

  “I don’t see the point,” she said coolly.

  “There’s something I want to say, but I want to be sure of everyone before I commit myself.”

  “Very well…but I trust it isn’t just curiosity.” She smoothed wrinkles from her slacks. “Some years ago I was married to a Madradona…”

  “I d
idn’t know that ever happened,” Mingolla said.

  “It was an attempt at ending the feud,” she said. “I balked at it, of course. I’d been living in Los Angeles, and I’d become rather a free spirit. Quite undisciplined. Perhaps it was my father’s intention to check these tendencies, for the Madradonas are nothing if not disciplined.” Laughter from the others. “Despite my attitudes, after the wedding I grew to respect and care for my husband…though I can’t say I ever really loved him. But I had sufficient confidence in the marriage to become pregnant. Things were going well for us, but then one day an old lover of mine came to visit, purportedly to offer his congratulations on the baby. In the course of our conversation he drugged me and laid me out naked on the bed. It was his plan to have my husband return home and catch us in flagrante delicto. And so it happened. I was just waking from the drug when my husband entered. He and my lover got into a terrible fight, and though I was still groggy, I tried to intervene. I received a blow in the stomach, and as a result I not only lost the baby, but was unable to conceive another. Later I discovered that my lover hadn’t been entirely to blame. My fatherin-law had manipulated him with tales of my husband’s cruelty to me. He’d never accepted the marriage, and I guess the prospect of a child was too much for him.” She glanced up at Mingolla. “Will that do?”

  “Sorry,” he said. “It was important.”

  “Now what’s this all about?”

  He let his gaze swing around the room, lingering on Ruy, who was sitting on the bed. “I hear the negotiations are going well.”

  “Extremely well,” said Aurelio. “So?”

  “Would you say they’re on the verge of success?” Mingolla asked. “Isn’t this time frame the time of greatest risk, the time when someone is likely to lose it? To find some reason for blowing everything out of the water. Like with Tel Aviv.”

  “If you have something to tell us,” said Marina, “I suggest you get on with it.”

  Mingolla took the notebook from his hip pocket, unfurled it, and saw Ruy stiffen. “Ruy knows what I’m talking ’bout…don’tcha?”