Blood of Paradise

by David Corbett

  “I saw what happened.”

  “There you go, blaming again.”

  “I just meant—”

  “Nobody’s who you think they are, Jude. Nobody. Not me, not your dad. Not you. And that’s no great tragedy, either. The ones who don’t get that, they’re the real animals. Slit your throat on principle. Do it for your own good.”

  The fatigue turned into a mild sort of vertigo, then Jude realized it wasn’t fatigue at all. It was confusion, tinged with fear, and the fear had a rancid whiff of the very old to it. I should have a name for this, he thought. But where the name should be, he sensed an emptiness instead, and the bitchy voices of self-loathing he’d heard in his head for as long as he could remember echoed through that emptiness like crow caws. The effort of deafening himself to that sound, day after day, hour after hour, it was wearing him out. He resented it. He’d been doing it for years, it was no one’s fault but his own, still …

  “The thing that changed for me?” Malvasio’s smile spoke of luck, his eyes of treachery. “I’ll tell you what it was. I stopped pretending. I stopped fighting and just said, hey. This is it. People know they can’t trust me, but that’s exactly what makes me reliable. It’s who I am. I’m the guy certain men turn to when they’ve run out of better options. And know what? So are you. Now.”

  Jude supposed he should feel insulted or at least pissed off, but he couldn’t muster the will. Instead he glanced past Malvasio toward the moonlit window just beyond him, and suffered a freakish illusion as he caught his own reflection in the flawed glass. Stop worrying, the reflection said. Just one more favor, everybody wins. Who knows you better?

  “I know who that is,” Jude murmured.

  Malvasio ignored him. “The weird thing? It’s not how I pictured ending up, and that’s probably true for you, too, but in a funny kind of way it’s gratifying. We’re very good at what we do, you and me. Better than your father ever was at anything.” He turned to go back into the house.

  Jude, as though drawn by something he couldn’t see, followed him in. Given his state of mind, the hallway seemed twice as long this direction as it had coming out, Malvasio farther away than he really was. The trippy distortion held as they veered through the kitchen and Clara, a look of sudden panic on her face, leapt from her spot on the floor in the far room and scrambled toward the table. It puzzled Jude till he saw her pull the pistol out. He realized then Malvasio had set him up, might have meant to kill him all along, but then the rest happened faster than he could piece it together. Malvasio held the child tight to his body, shielding himself with her, shouting at Clara, telling her to give him the gun. But Clara just kept waving it at him, screaming for him to give her the child. It seemed to go on forever—their voices at a keening pitch, the little girl wailing now and the bare room echoing the sounds like a howl. Jude felt a painful dizziness even as, for the first time since arriving, he knew exactly what to do. It felt like sleepwalking. Stepping forward, he placed his weight on his left foot as he swung his right fist forward, turning his hip and shoulder into the blow, hitting Malvasio right where the spine and skull meet. He felt a vertebra crack beneath the punch and Malvasio’s head snapped back. His knees crumbled, his arms flew out, and the child slipped free before he hit the floor. Clara scrambled forward to grab the girl as Jude stompkicked Malvasio in the kidneys then reached down, pulled him over, drove his knee hard into the solar plexus. He tightened his right fist and began to pound as fast and hard as he could, driving every punch from the shoulder, using his whole body for leverage and feeling the bones surrender as the room around him gradually dissolved into a grainy shimmer that filled up everything. By the time he heard Clara’s voice again—she was screaming, “¡Pare!” Stop!—he was drenched in sweat and his lungs were heaving. He glanced up, saw her near the wall. She took form in pieces—gripping the child to her body, her face slack, her eyes hollow. She was staring at his hand.

  PART VI

  CLARA

  Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be The blood of paradise?

  —Wallace Stevens, “Sunday Morning”

  44

  I have witnessed many wrongs in my life, suffered them myself like anyone, even when I was a little girl. But not until I watched the young American, the one named Jude, kill with his bare hands the older one, the one we called Duende, did I feel myself in the presence of a great sin. And by that I do not mean a terrible evil so much as an aching, endless sorrow—our exile from God.

  I knew I was part of that terrible sin. The evangélicos say wanting more than you have is an insult to God. I don’t know. But I can say this—it can turn into a kind of madness. Wanting Constancia made me crazy that way. I would have killed Duende myself with that gun. Certainly the wish was in my heart. And so I was not blameless. And I could not turn away from Jude, who did no more than what, only a moment before, I had wanted to do.

  I watched as, little by little, he awoke to what had happened, seeing the blood, looking at his ruined hand as though it belonged to someone else, then looking down to see the monstrous thing he’d done. I have seen animals crushed by cars, and this is what came to my mind. You could no longer see a face. And then Jude began to weep. He crawled into the corner of the room and buried his head and wept so long, so horribly, I thought of the words the sisters taught me as a girl: We send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this vale of tears …

  As I said, I knew this sin was not just his but mine, and we needed, together, to make ourselves right with God. I knelt beside him and touched him and told him I could not keep Constancia. It was wrong of me and that wish had brought about this terrible thing.

  I took his hand still sticky with blood and felt his splintered bones beneath the skin. He did not cry out in pain, but just looked at me as though he had forgotten who I was. I said, “Get up. Please. Lead me to this little girl’s mother. We will go together and make this thing right.” And with that beautiful child bundled in my arms I helped him to his feet, led him out of that house, and we walked beneath the moon and stars together and I told him it would be all right, even as my heart broke. For I loved Constancia. I always will.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Although El Salvador obviously exists and many of its locales are represented in this book, some—such as San Bartolo Oriente and the Río Conacastal—are the author’s inventions. Even existing cities and places have been changed and shaped to suit the author’s sense of story and dramatic purpose, and thus the narrative should be seen as taking place entirely within a fictive world.

  As with places, so with incidents and people. Some of the events recounted herein did indeed take place—the election of 2004, the CAFTA protests, the riot at La Esperanza, the murder of Gilberto Soto—but they have been compressed into an imaginary time line to suit the narrative and thus must be seen as parts of an imaginary, rather than factual, whole. The principal characters herein are entirely the products of the author’s imagination and should not be confused with real individuals, living or dead. Although some persons named within the story do or did indeed exist—President Antonio Saca, assassinated Archbishop Oscar Romero, the murdered Teamster Gilberto Soto, and other persons of historical note—their roles in the story are minor and have again been shaped or changed to suit the author’s dramatic designs, and they should not be conflated with real persons.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The author owes a debt of gratitude to a number of people, without whose assistance this book would not exist. First and foremost are his editor, Mark Tavani, and his agent, Laurie Fox, who provided guidance and support throughout several drafts of the manuscript. The author’s profoundest thanks are also due to: Paul Hartford, M.D., and D. P. Lyle, M.D., for their assistance with medical details; Jay Pirouznia, Tempe P.D. (Ret.), for his guidance on executive protection matters and the details of sniper tactics, with additional assistance from the Tempe SWAT Unit sniper detail; Joaquin Aragon of Punta Mango (www.puntamango.com) and Dionisio Mejia of Guacamaya Eco
Tours (www.guacamayaecotours.com.sv) for serving as the author’s guides in El Salvador, patiently explaining its culture, flora, and fauna; Ana and Mark Ramirez for aiding the author with Salvadoran slang; Eileen Beall for assistance with Spanish phrasing; Katherine Baylor, P.G., Jon Fenske, P.E., and CPT Michael J. Fuller, USAR, hydrogeologist, for their help on groundwater issues, with CPT Fuller especially helpful with information specific to El Salvador; Carlos Vasquez for educating the author on gang matters (and a word of thanks to Claire Marshall, BBC, for steering me to Carlos); Special Agent George Fong, FBI, for details concerning Mara Salvatrucha and FBI procedure outside the United States; and Michelle and Chelsea Gonsalves for their help in understanding hypothyroidism. These informed and generous individuals are in no way responsible for the thematic material of this book, nor can they be held accountable for its content. The author is solely to blame for any errors or misstatements in the text.

  The author also relied on numerous written sources, specifically: From Madness to Hope: The 12-year War in El Salvador: Report of the Commission on the Truth in El Salvador, by the UN Commission on the Truth in El Salvador, Belisario Betancur, chairman (1993); Our Own Backyard: The United States in Central America, 1977–1992, by William M. LeoGrande (University of North Carolina Press, 1998); “Window on the Past: A Declassified History of Death Squads in El Salvador,” by Cynthia J. Arnson, from Death Squads in Global Perspective: Murder with Deniability, edited by Bruce B. Campbell and Arthur D. Brenner (St. Martin’s Press, 2000); El Salvador, A Country Study, edited by Richard A. Haggerty (Federal Research Division, Library of Congress, 1990); Culture and Customs of El Salvador, by Roy C. Boland (Greenwood Press, 2001); Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism, by Greg Grandin (Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2006); Understanding Central America (third edition), by John A. Booth and Thomas W. Walker (Boulder: Westview Press, 1999); Inside El Salvador: The Essential Guide to Its Politics, Economy, Society and Environment, by Kevin Murray and Tom Barry (Albuquerque: Resource Center Press, 1995); Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America, by Walter LaFeber (W. W. Norton & Company, 1983); On Your Own in El Salvador, by Hank and Bea Weiss (On Your Own Publications, 2001); The Art of Executive Protection, by Robert L. Oatman (Noble House, 2000); Indian Crafts of Guatemala and El Salvador, by Lilly de Jongh Osborne (University of Oklahoma Press, 1995); The Blood Bankers: Tales from the Global Underground Economy, by James S. Henry (Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003); Water Wars: Drought, Flood, Folly, and the Politics of Thirst, by Diane Raines Ward (Riverhead Books, 2002); Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource, by Marq de Villiers (Houghton Mifflin, 2000); Field Hydrology in Tropical Countries, A Practical Introduction, by Henry Gunston (Intermediate Technology Publications, 1998); “Water Resources Assessment of El Salvador,” October 1998, US Army Corps of Engineers, Mobile District and Topographic Engineering Center; Basic Ground-Water Hydrology, by Ralph C. Heath, United States Geological Survey Water-Supply Paper 2220 (prepared in cooperation with the North Carolina Department of Natural Resources and Community Development, Eighth Printing, 1995); “The Way of the Commandos,” by Peter Maass, The New York Times Magazine, May 1, 2005; “The Girls Next Door,” by Peter Landsman, The New York Times Magazine, January 25, 2004; “Gangs in the US: A Multipart Report,” by Ann Scott Tyson, The Christian Science Monitor, February 27, 1996, through May 12, 1997; Gangs and Their Tattoos, by Bill Valentine (Paladin Press, 2000); Street Gang Awareness, by Steven L. Sachs (Fairview Press, 1997).

  FROM TROY TO BAGHDAD

  (VIA EL SALVADOR)

  By David Corbett

  The Story’s Genesis

  I conceived Blood of Paradise after reading Philoctetes, a spare and relatively obscure drama by Sophocles. In the original, an oracle advises the Greeks that victory over the Trojans is impossible without the bow of Herakles. Unfortunately, it’s in the hands of Philoctetes, whom the Greeks abandoned on a barren island ten years earlier, when he was bitten by a venomous snake while the Achaean fleet harbored briefly on its way to Troy.

  Odysseus, architect of the desertion scheme, must now return, reclaim the bow, and bring both the weapon and its owner to Troy. For a companion, he chooses Neoptolemus, the son of his slain archrival, Achilles.

  Neoptolemus, being young, still holds fast to the heroic virtues embodied by his dead father, and believes they can appeal to Philoctetes as a warrior. But Odysseus—knowing Philoctetes will want revenge against all the Greeks, himself in particular—convinces Neoptolemus that trickery and deceit will serve their purposes far better. In essence, he corrupts Neoptolemus, who subsequently deceives Philoctetes into relinquishing his bitterness to reenlist in the cause against Troy.

  The tale has an intriguing postscript: It turns out to be the corrupted Neoptolemus who, by killing King Priam at his altar during the sack of Troy, brings down a curse upon the Greeks even as they are perfecting their victory.

  This story suggested several themes, which I then molded to my own purposes: the role of corruption in our concept of expedience, the need of young men to prove themselves worthy in the eyes of even morally suspect elders (or especially them), and the curse of a hard-won ambition.

  Why El Salvador?

  I saw in the Greek situation a presentiment of America’s dilemma at the close of the Cold War: finally achieving unrivaled leadership of the globe, but at the same time being cursed with the hatred of millions. Though we have showered the world with aid, too often we have done so through conspicuously corrupt, repressive, even murderous regimes, where the elites in charge predictably siphoned off much of that aid into their own pockets. Why did we look the other way during the violence and thievery? The regimes in question were reliably anticommunist, crucial to our need for cheap oil, or otherwise amenable to American strategic or commercial interests.

  We live in a dangerous world, we are told. Hard, often unpleasant choices have to be made.

  It’s a difficult argument for those who have suffered under such regimes to swallow. They would consider it madness to suggest that it is envy of our preeminence, or contempt for our freedom, that causes them to view America so resentfully. Rather, they would try to get us to remember that while their hopes for self-determination, freedom, and prosperity were being crushed, America looked on with a strangely principled indifference, often accompanied by a fiercely patriotic self-congratulation, not to mention blatant hypocrisy.

  Not only have we failed to admit this to ourselves, but the New Right has embraced a resurgent American exceptionalism as the antidote to such moral visitations, which such conservatives consider weak and defeatist. Instead, they see a revanchist America marching boldly into the new century with unapologetic military power, uninhibited free-market capitalism, and evangelical fervor—most immediately to bring freedom to the Middle East.

  The New Right’s historical template for this proposed transformation is Central America—specifically El Salvador, trumpeted as “the final battleground of the Cold War,” and championed as one of our greatest foreign policy successes: the crucible in which American greatness was re-forged, banishing the ghosts of Vietnam forever.

  There’s a serious problem with the New Right’s formulation, however: It requires an almost hallucinatory misreading of history.

  Misremembering the Past

  In their ongoing public campaign to justify the Iraq war, many supporters and members of the Bush Administration—including both Vice President Dick Cheney and former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld—have singled out El Salvador as a shining example of where the “forward-leaning” policy they champion has succeeded.

  Mr. Cheney did so during the vice presidential debates, contending that Iraq could expect the same bright future enjoyed by El Salvador, which, he claimed, is “a whale of a lot better because we held free elections.”

  What Mr. Cheney neglected to mention:

  • At the time the elections were held (1982), death squads linked to the Sa
lvadoran security forces were murdering on average three to five hundred civilians a month.

  • The death squads targeted not just guerrilla supporters but priests, social workers, teachers, journalists, even members of the centrist Christian Democrats—the party that Congress forced the Reagan Administration to back, since it was the only party capable of solidifying the Salvadoran middle.

  • The CIA funneled money to the Christian Democrats to ensure they gained control of the constituent assembly.

  • Roberto D’Aubuisson, a known death squad leader, opposed the Christian Democrats as “Communists,” and launched his own bid to lead the constituent assembly, forming ARENA as the political wing of his death squad network. His bid was funded and supported by exiled oligarchs and reactionary military leaders, and managed by a prominent American public relations firm.

  • “Anti-fraud measures” proved intimidating. For example: ballots were cast in glass jars. Many voters, who had to provide identification, and who suspected the government was monitoring their choices, feared violent reprisal if they were observed voting “improperly.”

  • ARENA won thirty-six of sixty seats in the assembly, and D’Aubuisson was elected its leader.

  • This was perceived by all concerned as a disastrous failure for American policy. When D’Aubuisson tried to appoint one of his colleagues as assembly president, U.S. officials went to the military and threatened to cut off aid. D’Aubuisson relented, but it was the only concession he made to American demands.

  In short, there was American influence, money, and manipulation throughout the process, putting the lie to the whole notion the elections were “free”—though Mr. Cheney was arguably correct when he stated that “we” held them. Unfortunately, all that effort came to naught, as what America wanted from the elections lay in shambles. Even when, in the following year’s election, a great deal more money and arm-twisting resulted in Washington’s candidate being elected president, he remained powerless to reform the military, curtail the death squads, or revive the economy, measures Washington knew to be crucial to its counter-insurgency strategy. By 1987, the Reaganites decided to abandon the decimated Christian Democrats for ARENA—the party it had spent five years and millions of dollars trying to keep from power.