Body of Truth

by David L Lindsey

  His was the story of Guatemala. All over the country Haydon and anyone who bothered to notice saw these small people under enormous burdens, each single effort a metaphor for the history of their people. It was this figure, the solitary Indian struggling under grim burdens, that should have been on every piece of currency in the country, rather than the beautiful, emerald-tailed quetzal. Like the quetzal, which could only live and sing in freedom, the carefree peace that the bird symbolized was almost extinct. But sufrimiento was everywhere. Ugliness survived where beauty perished. The fact was that the land of eternal spring had vanished, and the land of eternal suffering had taken its place.

  He left the restaurant and drove to Zona 10, pulling into the gates of Janet’s drive shortly after one o’clock. Her gardener, another old man like the one Haydon had just seen, was cutting the grass beside the first courtyard with hand-held clippers, working on hands and knees, under a flamboyana. Haydon spoke to him as he entered, walked through the first courtyard, opened the wrought-iron gate and entered the breeze-way. He rang the doorbell, and one of Janet’s housemaids answered, recognized him from the night before, and let him into the sala. The room was cool and comfortable and was made to feel quite spacious by a pair of tall double doors that were thrown open to the well-kept courtyard and the shady veranda of the house that surrounded it. Haydon stepped out the doors where a slight, occasional breeze stirred the plants and wind chimes of brass butterflies. To his left, a little farther down the veranda, was a large jacaranda in which hung a dozen or so small wicker cages, each containing a confetti of tiny pastel parakeets whose reedy voices accompanied the brass chimes in an atmosphere of almost monastic peace.

  Haydon walked over to the jacaranda to look at the birds and had not been at the cages a moment before he realized the tree was situated just outside what must have been Janet’s bath. The next window beyond that and at a right angle to it, was the wide arched window of Janet’s bedroom. Through the high open windows of the bath he could hear water splashing. This was not an unusual sound in Guatemala where the temperate weather made for casual living and windows that looked onto protected courtyards were most often screenless and open. Open courtyards, open doorways, open windows. Sounds carried, and odors and fragrances. Often one could see into houses, though not very well, for in Guatemala living in the shadows was an art form.

  The water stopped in the shower, the high window of which was closest to him. Facing the cages, he adjusted his eyes to a different depth of focus and saw Janet come into the noontime shadows of her airy room, drying with a towel that she then tossed away. He saw her naked back and hips, the vague highlights of curved surfaces, glimpses made all the more erotic for their dusky inconclusiveness. A tall pedestal dressing mirror threw a glint of light, and he saw her move back and forth once or twice before he turned away from the cages and walked back to the open doors of the sala where he sat down on a leather-covered bench on the veranda.

  It was not quite fifteen minutes by his watch before Janet came out of the sala doors in a simple eggshell-white dress of thin cotton, thin enough to see that she should have worn a slip. She apologized for making him wait, and he apologized for having once again come before calling. Her hair was freshly combed out, though still slightly damp. She wore no makeup, and he saw in the clear midday light that her pale skin did not require any.

  “Have you eaten?” she asked, shaking her head slightly to loosen her hair. They were both standing.

  He nodded. “I just had something.”

  “Then how about a drink?”

  “A gin with lime would be good.”

  “Give me a second,” she said and disappeared into the house. In a moment she was back with the drinks. “Go ahead and sit down,” she said, and she sat in an armchair across from him, her back to the courtyard, an attractive portrait in white with the arches of the veranda behind her, and the verdant fronds of sago palms. The warming noontime air was filled with the fragrance of mock oranges, which grew thickly around the fountain. Haydon wondered what Cage had meant when he had said that Janet was a better friend than a lover. Coming from an old satyr like Cage, it was an interesting observation.

  “I spent some time last night with Taylor Cage,” Haydon said, and the pleasant, anticipatory expression on Janet’s face abruptly faded.

  “How the hell do you know him?” she asked, clearly stunned.

  “I met him years ago, in Houston. I don’t know him very well, just as much as you get to know someone over a couple of days’ time. But Jim Fossler had run into him here and put us in touch again when I came down.”

  “How did Fossler happen to meet him?”

  “I don’t know. That’s part of my problem. Fossler seems to have dropped out of sight too.”

  Janet’s eyes reacted with surprise. “I thought you were going to have some news of Lena,” she said curtly, maybe a little warily, as if it were occurring to her that his motives for being there were suspect.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t. Last night you asked me to get back to you,” he reminded her. He had other reasons, of course, but she was acting as if she had forgotten her invitation, and he wondered why.

  “Oh. That’s why you’ve come? Because I said that?”

  “Yes.”

  She took a sip of her drink and looked at him.

  “You said you couldn’t talk in front of your ex-husband—”

  “Don’t call him that,” she interrupted, and then caught herself and tried to cover her irritation by making light of the reference. “I’m sure he’d like to forget that,” she smiled shakily.

  “You said you thought something was terribly wrong with Lena’s disappearance, that you weren’t going to wait for Pittner’s ‘diplomatic shtick,’ that you were going to ‘wade into it’ yourself. And you said for me to get back to you.”

  Haydon used her own words to pointedly jog her seeming loss of memory. He wasn’t going to let her off the hook.

  She nodded, a bit of an amused smile on her lips at his quoting her. “Yeah, I said that, didn’t I. I guess I was really revved up.” She seemed embarrassed now. “I’d been talking to Pitt. I’d gotten royally pissed at his…somnolent attitude. His damned foot-dragging. That’s State Department SOP. You know, so damned cautious that nothing gets done.”

  “Then you were talking a little out of school.”

  “Not out of school,” she said. “Out of control would be more like it.”

  Haydon wondered how much she knew about what Pitt really did. “How long were you married?”

  “Eight…eight years,” she said, as if it were far too long.

  “What does he do at the embassy?”

  “Political Section, like he said. I’ve read the job description, but that’s all I know about it. I was not cut out for that kind of life. ‘Harebrained’ was the word Pitt most often used when referring to my lack of diplomatic savvy. But he loved me, poor devil. Still does,” she added a little sheepishly. “I divorced him.”

  Haydon couldn’t decide whether she was acting or whether she and Pittner really had lived such disconnected lives.

  Janet looked at him a moment before she said, “What did Cage have to say?” She must have hoped it sounded like an offhand question.

  “I’m not sure he was that helpful. What does he do, anyway?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever heard him say.” Haydon badly needed some perspective on who knew what about whom.

  “He’s ‘independently’ well off. I’ve never known what he does. I think he had a rich daddy. He used to pretend he worked in imports, Latin American antiques that he’d ship to dealers up north. But that was bullshit. Latin America is full of people like him, people permanently unattached. It’s a culture that accommodates people in limbo.

  people who can’t find themselves or don’t want to find themselves, or who are running from responsibility. I know a lot of people who live down here in the fervent hope that they are
far enough away from civilization that nothing will ever be required of them.”

  “How long have you known him?”

  “Five years.” She smiled slightly at him. “You having a hard time figuring out this bunch of us down here?”

  Haydon didn’t say anything.

  “Were you at Cage’s house?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Well, you missed something. Señor Cage has gone native on us,” she said, and Haydon did not miss the slight note of sour grapes. “He lives with an Indian girl…a child, really. She can’t be more than eighteen now.”

  CHAPTER 20

  “Her name is Marielita,” Janet said. “He calls her Lita. She’s actually quite beautiful. He’s had her with him almost two years, playing Henry Higgins, I think. And I can tell you it doesn’t suit him. He’s not all that sophisticated himself.” She seemed to want to rein in her flippancy. “But the girl’s got one hell of a story behind her, and whether or not you consider him a child molester depends on how you look at the grim choices life offers in a country like this.”

  Janet stirred her drink with a finger, picked up her lime and squeezed it, dropped it back into the gin, and dabbed her fingers on her napkin.

  “Was she an orphan?”

  “She was by the time Cage met her. Her ‘story,’ unfortunately, isn’t all that rare in the highlands where the army is a fearsome presence.” Janet took a sip of her gin and hesitated just a moment before continuing.

  “She lived in a little village called Ojo de Agua, Eye of Water, in the northwestern departamento of El Quiché. Her father was just a little milpa farmer, like everybody else, just scratching out a living. When she was fifteen she and her parents were awakened in the middle of the night by a group of soldiers who grabbed the girl and forced her into a truck parked a few meters from their front door. When her father tried to stop them, the soldiers shot him in the heart, point-blank. Her mother’s screams angered these guys, and they proceeded to bash in her face with their rifle butts and left her bleeding beside her dead husband. Marielita was taken to the nearby military garrison.

  “But her mother wasn’t dead. The old woman, bleeding profusely and crazy with fear for her daughter, managed to make her way through the night to the next tiny hamlet where Marielita’s two brothers were also farming. The old woman told them what had happened. They left for the garrison within the hour, on foot, and arrived there about daybreak. The garrison commandante said there was no such girl there. But, by the way, he said, didn’t he recognize these two boys as guerrilla spies? So the two brothers were seized and taken into custody.

  “The soldiers ‘questioned’ them using a method known as el capucho, the hood. The boys’ arms were tied behind them, and they were made to kneel on the ground. Nylon hoods were slipped over their heads and pulled tight around their necks, and an insecticide was sprayed into the hood through a small hole in the top. It’s strong stuff, commercial grade, and it scalded their faces, eyes, and lips on contact. And when they gasped for breath, it blistered their throats and lungs immediately. When they passed out, buckets of water were thrown on them until they revived. They were questioned. Wrong answers. El capucho again. This went on for a long time, I don’t know how long, but I’ve heard that the soldiers are taught how to drag out the procedure to prolong the suffering. The boys’ faces swelled beyond recognition. They had convulsions, their lungs hemorrhaged and soaked their hoods and their clothes in bloody vomit. Just when it seemed they would not be able to endure another round of insecticide and water, they ‘confessed.’ They lied, of course, to save their lives. They made their marks on a piece of paper on which the commandante had helpfully written out their ‘confessions.’ Their tongues had swollen to fill their mouths; they couldn’t talk.

  “‘Just as I thought,’ the commandante said, looking at the ‘confessions,’ and the soldiers took the boys out and cut off their heads with machetes because they were ‘spies.’”

  Janet stopped for a sip of gin. She looked away to one side, out to the courtyard for a moment and then turned back and continued.

  “Marielita was kept by the soldiers for three days. When they were through with her, she couldn’t walk out of the garrison. She couldn’t even stand up. Without any fear or shame that anyone would see what they had done to her, the soldiers went into Ojo de Agua and brought back three widows with a litter. The frightened old women were taken into the garrison where they were made to put Marielita onto the litter and carry her back to the village.

  “Marielita’s mother died the day Marielita was brought back from the garrison. Wild with grief and anger, Marielita showed her pluck. Against the wishes of everyone in the village, she filed a formal denuncio with the village’s chief commissioner, who was the civil patrol’s liaison with the army. It was a hopeless, stupid gesture. It was her right under the law, of course, but people knew better than to accuse the army of atrocities. She was issuing her own death warrant.

  “There was an ‘investigation,’ and it was determined that Marielita had lied. The ‘facts’ discovered were: that her father had died in an accident in his own cornfield; that the missing brothers’ wives said the boys had left their families, like many other men, to work for the season on the coffee fincas along the Mexican border in San Marcos; and that, as for the rape charges against the soldiers, well, it was well known that Marielita would spread her thighs for anyone.

  “The girl was stunned by these lies and was bitter that the villagers and even her widowed sisters-in-law had been too fearful to come to her defense or even to tell the truth. She withdrew into isolation. Cage came along at this point—he’s always roaming around the countryside—heard her story, found her living alone, the sole remaining member of her family, an outcast in the village, and brought her to Guatemala City. I understand there was a long period of emotional rehabilitation. Time passed. He enrolled her in high school, and she got her degree. Then he enrolled her in the National University of San Carlos. She’s studying there now.”

  In the course of telling Marielita’s story, Janet’s voice had lost its former impertinence. It was the kind of account that had its effect on its narrator as well as the listener. As with holy scriptures, you could not deal honestly with tales of moral outrage and remain unaffected.

  “What goes on between them in the way of intimacy is the subject of rich gossip,” she added, a piece of information from which she derived no pleasure.

  “The girl didn’t have any other family?”

  “None. And the village was glad to get rid of her. She was a constant reminder to them, living alone like an aggrieved Hester Prynne, of their cowardice and cruelty.”

  Janet drank from her glass.

  “There is one fascinating side story to all this that I would like to think is apocryphal but, actually, it has the ring of truth about it too. During the past two years, two of the soldiers who had broken into Marielita’s home that night were discharged from the army. They’d served their time. One of them took up selling watches and Japanese radios from a vendor’s stall in 6a calle. Zona 1; the other one went to work for his cousin in a parking lot only a few blocks away, near the Banco Metropolitano. Not long ago both of them were killed within two weeks of each other. There was a witness to the second killing. According to him, the assassins were a Guatemalan woman and a ‘big’ man. The witness told the newspaper reporter that the woman did the shooting. She walked right up to the victim and said something to him, and when he reacted in alarm, she shot the man in the face. After he fell, she bent down and shot him twice more. She tossed her gun to the ‘big’ man, and they disappeared in different directions. It was at night. The investigations never went anywhere, of course.”

  Haydon thought of Lita holding him to her naked breasts, thought of the way she felt and smelled; he thought of her standing timidly beside him in the courtyard outside Macabeo’s medieval mortuary. This is the way of many peoples in Guatemala…a long time dying. Lo siento mucho.

/>   “Some story, huh?” Janet said quietly.

  Haydon nodded. He did not believe the story was apocryphal either. In Taylor Cage’s world, it was entirely within the logic of the way he lived. Haydon thought a moment, trying to phrase the question without giving away more than he was learning.

  “I understand Lena was working for AID.”

  Janet nodded. “Right. She was working on some data-gathering project having to do with crop diversification. You know, trying to get the Indians to grow something besides com.”

  “Did she ever work with health service workers up there?”

  Janet frowned at him.

  “American or foreign volunteers working with the Indians, doctors, health specialists, dentists…”

  Janet shook her head and crossed her legs at the knees, rearranging her skirt. “I don’t know,” she said. “She must have.”

  “Would you care if I looked at her rooms?”

  “I guess not,” she said. “But if you’re going to be looking for something…I mean, I don’t think you’re going to find much.”

  “Oh?”

  “No. The sleepy Mr. Pitt has beaten you to it.”

  “He’s been through her things?”

  “Not him, but some guys from the embassy. And they didn’t go through her things. They took them. Practically everything. Cleaned the place out, boxes of stuff. It made me feel queer. I couldn’t be in there when they did it. It was like she was dead, they were cleaning out ‘personal effects.’ I stayed over here in the sala and watched them gut the place over there,” she said, looking across the courtyard to the other side of the fountain.

  “Were Guatemalan police with them?”

  “No. Just embassy guys.”

  “Were they from the consular offices?”

  She shrugged, then said, “Well, I don’t think so. I recognized one of the guys who’d been by here one time to pick up Pitt when we were still married. He had said at that time that he worked with Pitt, so I guess he was from the Political Section.”