Body of Truth

by David L Lindsey

  Though his story was a bitter one, Grajeda’s manner did not reflect that attitude. As he doodled again with his pen, a serene smile remained on his lips as if it were his belief that the corrupt men who had greatly contributed to this catastrophe were stupid children who could only be pitied for their horrible ignorance. He pushed back his chair and turned sideways to Haydon, his profile squarely in the center of the window behind him. He crossed his legs and looked at a colored poster of venereal disease sores on the wall opposite him and shook his head.

  “Well, there were deaths in Huehuetenango too,” he said. “Hundreds and hundreds. But there were also many cases, too many cases, in which the children survived…except for a lingering infection in the eyes. That’s not so uncommon, but where you have modern medical facilities you can fight it. However, here…there is only one treatment.” Grajeda looked out the window. “Either you let them keep their eyes and allow the infection to spread to the rest of their system and eventually kill them. Or you remove the source of the infection. Send these children back to their families in the countryside to continue living in poverty…blind. We spent days and nights taking out tiny eyes and throwing them away. ‘Be of good cheer, Mama…we have saved the life of your child.’”

  Grajeda watched something out of the window, the side of his face washed in an oblique white light. He reached up and ran a hand through the curl that hung over his forehead, pushing it back out of his eyes, and revealing a dark crescent of perspiration under the arm of his stained laboratory coat. He uncrossed his leg and let his foot drop to the gritty floor as he turned around to face Haydon again. He picked up a tiny, strangely shaped gourd and examined it. He held it up so Haydon could see it.

  “‘¡Un pescado!’ Does this look like a fish to you?” He made it swim into the light and back, weaving it gently in the airy waters. Then he put it to one side on his desk again and rested his forearms in front of him and looked at it. “A child gave it to me,” he said. “Of course, this child had never seen a fish…what did she know? Her mother had seen one once and told her about it.”

  He hung his head a moment, a gesture of weariness, then he looked up.

  “So I was in Huehuetenango helping my friend, saving lives like Albert Schweitzer,” Grajeda continued, a self-mocking remark with only a hint of cynicism. “It was ten o’clock at night, or ten-thirty. We had operated a long time, and my colleague had gotten sick and had to stop. A stomach virus hit him quite suddenly. He had been down on the Rio Buca. I think he got something there. Anyway, I was almost glad of the attack. I was exhausted, and if he had not been stricken with cramps and diarrhea I think I would have embarrassed myself by collapsing. They brought her into the hospital, these guys.”

  “The police?”

  “Two were in National Police uniforms, two in plainclothes. I don’t know if the two men in suits were G-2 or DIG agents. It doesn’t really make any difference. They didn’t bother to show me any identification. I was sleeping on one of the operating tables—it was the best place—and they just wheeled her in there and shook me awake. When I got up, they tossed her onto the table where I had been sleeping. Autopsy. ¡Ahorita!

  “She was still wrapped in a rebozo, and she stank of rotten cassava. I called in a nurse and we started. She was so…pale. I had gotten used…to dark skin…”

  Grajeda wiped a hand over his face and sighed. “It wasn’t much of an autopsy. I was angry at them. I told them to get the hell out while I did my job, but the lieutenant insisted on all of them staying. They were nervous anyway, having the responsibility of a white woman like that. It was muy importante that they stay, he said, for official reasons. No. They were only voyeurs.” He swallowed, tried to swallow again but couldn’t. “I tried to do a real job of it, methodical, but they got impatient. I yelled at them to get the hell out of there and waved a scalpel at them. Instantly four Uzi’s cocked and came up.”

  Grajeda raised his arms and positioned them close to his chest as if he were gripping the snub-nose Uzi and fixed the imaginary barrel and his eyes on Haydon. He held the pose a moment and then dropped his arms.

  “Those guys, they’re in love with those weapons. They love to swing them around and point them at people. They love to see your face when you suddenly realize there is just a small breath between the tension in their fingers and your death. Believe me, when you are in that situation it shows in your face. Forget machismo. It makes you want to shit your pants.”

  Grajeda stared at the top of his desk.

  “While we were squared off like this, frozen, facing each other, one of them, one of the guys in street clothes, slowly reached out the barrel of his Uzi and put it under the hem of the nurse’s dress. He put the barrel up under there, you know. She was petrified.” He shook his head and smiled sadly. “All of these guys are cowards. I knew they could wait. Later the nurse would have to pay for my arrogant belligerence. And they would make sure I heard what they had done to her. That’s the way they do it. My God.” He waved languidly at a fly. “You slip into a kind of moral triage. Your friend was dead. The nurse had to go home to her husband and children. What the hell did it matter, really, if I didn’t do the autopsy by the book? I had a live woman and a dead woman. What was I going to do? The nurse knew all this. She was terror-stricken that I was going to stand on principle or something.

  “When I finished, they took the body of the girl away in a plastic bag with some ice from the commissary. That’s all I know.”

  “What about the autopsy?”

  Grajeda looked at Haydon. “What about it?”

  “What happened to her?”

  Grajeda was weary; he stroked his goatee. “Oh, she was tortured to death.”

  “How?”

  Grajeda’s eyes came back to him, and his face assumed an expression of mild curiosity. “Why do you want to know that?”

  “I’m a policeman,” Haydon said. “While I don’t see torture as a general rule, I do see it. I have to report it in detail the same way a pathologist does. Unfortunately, it’s necessary for me to know.”

  Grajeda’s exotic eyes regarded Haydon through the lenses of his small round glasses. He was a striking figure, almost theatrical in his unusual mixture of features and his manner of seeming to understand and even accept with a kind of pained sorrow the horrors that were commonplace in his country.

  “These are very bad things,” Grajeda said. “These deaths.”

  Haydon waited.

  “Here in Guatemala the cruelty is unimaginable,” Grajeda mused. “They’re trained, you know, these soldiers, to be inhuman. They do whatever they are told. So many of them are only ignorant kids, intimidated and brutalized. Indian kids the army has kidnapped off the streets of the little towns and villages all over this country. And then there are the sadists who get into this business. Every death is a message, a letter to the living. People are not just ‘killed’ by the death squads, by the G-2, by the DIG. Men are not just disemboweled, their genitalia are cut off and stuffed into their mouths. Women are not just raped, their uteruses are ripped out of their bodies and stretched over their faces. Children are not just killed, they are dragged over barbed wire until the flesh falls from their bones while their parents are forced to watch. Death is not ‘just death’ in my sad, unfortunate country.”

  For a moment his eyes seemed to lose contact, and Haydon believed that the young doctor’s thoughts were far away from either of them.

  “She didn’t die quickly,” Grajeda said finally. “That’s all that really matters.”

  Neither of them spoke for a moment, and the sounds and the smells of the shanties and their attendant miseries accompanied them in their silence.

  “Did you know that there’s a report at the Gabinete de Identificación that says that you brought her to Guatemala City?” Haydon asked.

  Grajeda sat back in his chair again and raised his eyebrows as though he were offering a mystery. “Let me tell you how it is in Guatemala,” he said, “the true importan
ce of the relationship between integrity and vocabulary. Words are nothing here…nothing…less than nothing. Here lying is pervasive; we discount language altogether. Because there are so many lies, because words are so cheap, they are considered little more than static in a system that has lost respect for language. People are judged by what they do, not by what they say. Belief in the integrity of language does not figure into the equation of everyday life. The lie has attacked my people like a disease and is destroying them as surely as if it were a pestilence. Sadly, it means nothing what the police say or what their reports say. The men who are entrusted with keeping the peace in my poor country are murderers and liars. This is horrible for me to say, but it is the truth.”

  “Then the last time you saw her was in the autopsy room?”

  “The last time I saw her,” Grajeda said kindly, “those four men were putting her into a plastic body bag and hauling her out to one of their vans with black windows, and the ice they had thrown in there with her was already melting and dripping out of the bag in little rosy driblets.”

  It was a cruel image, all the more shocking because of the soft voice with which it was spoken. Grajeda seemed surprisingly free of bitterness. It seemed to Haydon that perhaps the only way the young doctor could hold himself together in the squalor of Mezquital, amid the plastic bags of children’s eyes, in the dirty autopsy rooms of the morgues, was to try to make some kind of philosophical peace with the easiness of human cruelty.

  “How long have you been here?” Haydon asked, standing.

  “The clinic?”

  Haydon nodded.

  “Three years,” Grajeda smiled. “An eternity.”

  “How are you supported?”

  At this question, the young doctor seemed to be uncomfortable. He stood too, facing Haydon across the desk. He seemed to be uncertain about his response for only a moment before he replied.

  “I come from a very wealthy family, Mr. Haydon.” He tilted his head a little awkwardly; another apologetic smile. “They were proud to have a doctor. My grandfather was a doctor, my father did very well in…business. But…they were not pleased at this kind of practice. Unfortunately, by insisting on this I caused something of a family disturbance. Now I am something of a black sheep, I’m afraid…but they allow me a small stipend. I use it here, and twice a year I go to the United States to raise funds.”

  Something caught his eye, and he looked past Haydon toward the door and stood up. “Pase adelante,” he said quickly.

  Haydon turned and saw two soot-covered women in shabby Indian dress hovering outside the door, looking in with large skittish eyes. Their deeply lined faces had the blasted, greasy look of women who had trudged many kilometers along highways and roadsides and streets, grimacing against the hot, particulate thunder of diesel exhausts. They each had children, one with two, the other with three, each with one infant wrapped in a rebozo. Grajeda stepped around his desk and said something in his soft voice in an Indian dialect as he approached the doorway, trying to put the women at ease by seeming to speak of their children, three youngsters clinging to their mothers’ stained cortes, their matted hair standing in shocks as if startled by their condition. Flies drank at the corners of their eyes and sought shade around their runny nostrils. The women shied away like wild, harried creatures, and Grajeda squatted down in the thin shadow a few steps away from his doorway and talked to them, smiling in his way, seeming almost as shy as the women themselves, who, despite the heat, were bundled up in the heavy garments of their people.

  Haydon stepped out of the door behind Grajeda, who had completely forgotten him, and walked away. He knew that the Indian women were watching him, wondering if his presence would in some way mean trouble for them. It was best to be gone. He waited until he was about to turn in to one of the paths that went down among the shanties again before he looked back. Grajeda had managed to get one of the women to let him look into her rebozo at her infant, his shoulders hunched into a tender approach as he rose slightly from his crouch and looked into the crusty bundle of rags.

  CHAPTER 19

  He made his way back through the shanties, down the slope to the railroad right-of-way, across the tracks, and up the trails that wound through the shanties on the other side. The heat was stifling, and the rancid odors of poverty weighted the air as the cicadas sang in the wilting weeds. By the time he topped the embankment where the wispy pirul tree marked the position of his car, the dust had caked his shoes and stuck to his pants legs in dry rivulets where he had sweated through the material.

  His car was still there, but the boys he had paid to protect it were gone as were his hubcaps and a long chrome strip that ran down either side of the car. He checked his windshield wipers. They were gone too. And the hood ornament. Considering himself lucky, he dusted off his pants legs, unlocked the car, and got in. Rolling down the windows to let out the pent-up heat, he started the engine, turned the car around, and drove back toward the city.

  If Grajeda could be believed about the two men in civilian clothes, Haydon was guessing they were DIC agents. The G-2 probably would not have come in the company of two National Police officers, rather, they would have come in the company of soldiers or soldiers poorly disguised as civilians—an incredibly stupid charade that happened far too often. On the other hand, things had changed so dramatically in the last twenty months, the military and National Police had become so closely intertwined that Haydon doubted if anyone really knew their jurisdictions anymore, or even cared. Each agency and the departments within these agencies were little fiefdoms. Intrigue was their single shared characteristic, and turf wars were constant. It was impossible to guess who was in ascendancy or descendancy until the signs of change were so clear that it was too late to do anything but stand back and watch the slaughters that accompanied each shift of power.

  That was all the more reason for Haydon to get in touch with Efran Borrayo. It had been Haydon’s good fortune to have done Borrayo a big favor in return for his having helped in the apprehension of the run-amok Colombian. The favor turned out to have been a larger one than Haydon had in fact intended. He knew a Houston businessman who was opening a manufacturing plant in Guatemala City and recommended Efran Borrayo to him as someone who could set up an effective security operation for the company. Borrayo turned this one-shot assignment into a permanent second income, one that yielded much more than his captaincy in the DIT. This had continued for four years until the Houston businessman became involved in a political squabble with the government and closed his business. But Borrayo was eternally grateful to Haydon, and once when he had passed through Houston on his way to Virginia for a special antiterrorist course paid for by the State Department, he called a local liquor store and sent Haydon a case of Bordeaux. Even if Lena’s story was way too delicate for Borrayo to become involved in, Haydon could at least expect some first-rate advice. And if the security forces had dealt with Fossler, Borrayo was likely to know about it.

  The real puzzle of Lena’s death, beyond the question of why she had been killed in the first place, was why she had found her way back to Guatemala City. Foreigners had disappeared before in the hinterlands of Guatemala, really disappeared. Why had the Indian women risked such a perilous journey, carrying a white woman’s body out of their refuge? Or could that account even be believed? Why had the military commissioner of Soloma not buried her in the local cemetery rather than tossing her on a vegetable truck to Huehuetenango? Why had the report that accompanied her body to Guatemala City said that Dr. Grajeda was bringing her? Why had the Gabinete de Identificación in Zona 6 written an addendum pointing out the discrepancy between how the body had arrived at their offices and how the report said it had arrived? And once they (whoever they were) had gotten Lena back to Guatemala City as they wished, why had they left her in obscurity, put away in the morgue as an XX? And who had told Fossler that Grajeda was a personal friend of Lena’s?

  None of these questions seemed to issue from a common front. It was
almost as if Lena’s death had involved so many different factions that it would be impossible to say that it had resulted from any singular intent. Haydon could not believe that she had—in whatever way—made herself so threatening or bothersome to such a wide variety of factions that her death would have been welcome to all.

  He looked at his watch. It had taken him longer to go out to Mezquital and back than he had anticipated. It was almost twelve noon, an awkward time to call on Janet Pittner. He turned off Diagonal 12 and went to the Los Cebollines in Zona 9 not far from the Plazuela España. He ate quickly, washing the food down with a couple of Gallos.

  While he ate, he watched an old man on the opposite side of the street carrying an oversized load of new, terra-cotta parrillas, huge disk-shaped cooking griddles. The old man had them strapped to his back with a cheap but stout grass rope and a leather strap called a mecapal that went around his forehead and was attached to either side of the bundle on his back. His load and his age were so great that he was making torturously slow progress along a bare dirt path under the eucalyptus trees. During the time it took Haydon to eat, the old man managed to travel only a block and a half, even using a staff, his head bent and neck buckled against the mecapal, his eyes always on the dust at his feet. Drenched in perspiration, he stopped frequently, once even holding onto the trunk of a eucalyptus and going down on one knee to relieve the strain on his neck. But after a while he rose with a painful force of will and continued on.