This mural, the work of many years, depicted in bright, primitive imagery the history of the country from earliest times—Mayan pyramids and minor conquistadors; Yankee traders and soldiers of fortune, the most famous of whom had been executed in front of Santa Maria del Onda, the cathedral that shadowed the heart of the town; the white ships of the fruit company that had controlled the politics of the region; volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, the great hurricane of 1998, and so on. The thing the colonel liked best about the mural was that his role in history was represented by a tiny gray airplane suspended in a lozenge of turquoise, with no reference to missiles or enemy aircraft. The thing he liked least was that on each successive visit he discovered that Tomas had added horrid details: a young girl curled up around the syringe protruding from her arm; the bodies of several dead children strung up like fish and a man masked by a bandana standing proudly beside them, his rifle ported. Emblems of the country’s recent unfortunate leap into the modern world. To his surprise, the colonel saw that Tomas had painted a lizard on an unexploited section of the wall, in the lower right-hand corner, a lizard very like the specimen that had caught his attention the night before, indigo, with delicate black markings and orange eyes. Beneath the lizard was an uncompleted face, bearded and pale, with one glaring eye and a sketched-in eyebrow—the space where the second eye should have been was occupied by the lizard’s tail. Tomas rarely included the face of a specific man or woman in the mural, yet this had the look of a portrait in progress.
“Oye, Tomas!” The colonel took a seat on the deck. “Por favor, un café!”
The old man glanced toward the colonel and shaded his eyes. He waved and spoke to someone in the shadows. Then he went back to his painting. Soon a barefoot brown-skinned girl wearing an embroidered blouse and a long red skirt brought coffee and a sweet roll, and the colonel sat happily watching combers rolling in from the deep green swells beyond Punta Manabique, regarding the palm-lined ochre curve of the beach and the town set along it, the stucco and tile of the tourist places, the grim eminence of the cathedral thrusting up from the central plaza, and the rusted tin roofs of Barrio Clarin, in front of which a small herd of piebald cows had strayed onto the sand and were nudging at mounds of seaweed in hopes of uncovering something edible.
When Tomas quit work on the mural he joined the colonel at his table and the colonel told him that he had recently seen a lizard resembling the one in the mural.
“How odd,” said Tomas. “For there are no such lizards. It is a magical creature born in the imagination.”
“My imagination…or yours?”
“We are of the same blood. Our imaginations sing the same song. What is in my mind, lives also in yours, needing only to be awakened.”
“Well, there is at least one flesh-and-blood lizard. I saw it clinging to the wall of my room last night.”
“One is very like none,” Tomas said. “There is only the slightest difference between these values. The difference between the ordinary and the magical. It is easy to mistake the two.”
The colonel decided that Tomas was playing with him, let the subject drop, and asked who the half-completed face was intended to represent.
“Satan.” Tomas spat over the railing to indicate distaste.
“So…” The colonel leaned back and tilted his face to the sun. “Satan is a gringo, eh?”
“Pale, yes. A gringo, no,” said Tomas. “But like you he is a colonel.”
Colonel Galpa saw that the old man was not joking and asked him to explain.
“Surely you have heard of him?” Tomas asked, and when the colonel said he had not, the old man said, “It is too pleasant a day to speak of such things.”
A romantic song, strings and guitars underscoring a passionate tenor, issued from the jukebox inside the restaurant, and the girl who had served them could be seen dancing by herself, her head inclined to one side, holding her long skirt up to her ankles. The sun had risen high enough to illuminate the crates of lime and orange and grape and strawberry soda stacked beside the jukebox, causing the bottles to glow with gemmy brilliance.
“I know what you are thinking,” Tomas said. “You are thinking how beautiful women are when they are sad, and how that sadness might give way to something more beautiful yet if a man with the proper respect and temper were to happen along. Be wary, my friend. Let a woman wound you with her sadness, and you will carry that wound until the day of your death.”
“When was the last time you were with a woman?” the colonel asked.
The old man squinted at the glittering sea. “It was nineteen eighty-three. The summer the army went up into Olanchito. When all the drug dealers came running out of the mountains, she came with them. She stayed five months.” He gave a mournful shake of his head. “Your way is best, my friend. A few days, a week, then adios.”
“You’re a cynic, Tomas,” the colonel said; and Tomas said, “Not at all. I have reached a venerable age and am secure in the things I know. Yet like a fool I fall in love every day. I am merely too old to be a consummate fool. It is you who are the cynic.”
“I?” The colonel laughed. “First you accuse me of being a romantic, then a cynic. Surely there is a contradiction involved?”
“Perhaps ‘cynic’ is not the correct word. Though I can think of no better word for someone so obdurate as to deny the tradition that bred him.”
The old man was referring, the colonel knew, to their Indian blood and to his skeptical attitude toward Tomas’s mystical bent, his magical interpretation of the world, a view he believed that Colonel Galpa would do well to adopt.
“Must we always argue about this?” the colonel asked.
“No,” said Tomas, giving the colonel’s hand a fatherly pat. “I merely find it amusing to do so.”
• • •
The colonel spent the day reading in his room; the telephone rang on several occasions but he did not pick it up. At twilight he lay on his bed and watched the rain-swept peaks in the west darken from gray to a soft purple. Once night had settled over the town, he dressed and went forth to do his duty, to mingle with the whores and journalists and bureaucrats who would be gathered at the Club Atomica, a discotheque on the edge of Barrio Clarin.
By the time he arrived the dance floor was overflowing with a confusion of men and women whose clumsy movements made them appear to be struggling to keep their feet, as if dazed by the flashing lights and deafening music. He found a stool at the end of the bar and ordered a vodka rocks from a pretty girl wearing a mesh blouse through which her breasts were visible. Someone tapped him on the shoulder. On turning he was pleased to see Jerry Gammage, an American journalist whom he found generally agreeable, apart from Gammage’s habit of addressing him as “Maury.”
“Hey, Maury!” Gammage clapped him on the shoulder. “They still got you out riding the circuit, huh?”
The colonel shrugged as if to say, “What else?” and had a sip of his drink. He watched Gammage, a big sloppy blond man in jeans and a faded “Just Say No” T-shirt, lean across the counter and flirt with the barmaid, making a clownish face when she playfully pushed him away.
“Every fucking year this place gets a little more like Vegas,” Gammage said, settling beside the colonel. “It’s a damn shame. But what the hell. These are the end times. Can’t sweat the small stuff, right?” He clinked glasses with the colonel and drank. Judging by the slackness of his features and the expansiveness of his gestures, Gammage was a good ways along the road to being very drunk.
“Got any hot flashes for me?” Gammage asked, wobbling on his stool. “Any pews that’s nit to frint?”
“I saw a manta ray near the point this morning,” the colonel said. “It may have been the shadow from a school of mackerel, but I don’t think so.”
Gammage drank. “I’d love to write it. Beats the hell out of shit like Six Priests Found Murdered With Brains Missing. Wha’cha think about all that, anyway?”
“About what?”
“About
Six Priests Found Murdered With Brains Missing.” Gammage leaned close, as if inspecting the colonel’s face for unsightly flaws. “Aw, man! Where you been? It’s the big story out of the capital.”
“Six priests were murdered in the capital?”
“And found with their brains missing, no less. If we luck out, we’ll get a shot at seeing the man s’posed to be responsible tonight. Word has it he’s in town.”
“The man who killed them? Why isn’t he in jail?”
“Because”—Gammage leaned close again—“he’s a fucking hero. Not like you, Maury. This guy’s your basic New World Order hero. A specialist in what’s being billed as ‘internal security.’ These honchos don’t get the free lunch treatment, but they know the secret handshake. And nobody fucks with ’em.” He signaled the barmaid with his empty glass. “I don’t know why I’m giving you grief. You’re one of the good guys. I’m just tired of this shit. You come to expect it in Salvador, Guatemala, Panama. But somehow I thought this place would be immune.”
The colonel thought of the new addition to Tomas’s mural. “What is this man’s name?” he asked, but Gammage did not appear to have heard.
“Y’know”—he accepted a fresh drink from the barmaid—“I’m ready to become a card-carrying freako. Know what I’m saying? Get my hand mirror, stand out on the desert at noon and heliograph the fucking mother ship.”
The colonel was accustomed to Gammage’s despairing tone, but this outburst appeared to signal a new and unhealthy level of disillusionment.
“Speak of the devil,” said Gammage. “Here’s the man of the hour now.”
Hector Canizales, the portly owner of the cantina, was pushing his way through the crowd, and in his wake, walking with immense dignity, as if he were the actual owner and Hector merely a flunky, came a pale heavyset man resplendent in a dark blue uniform that bore a colonel’s insignia. He stood a head taller than anyone else in the club; his hair was black and oily, combed straight back from a forehead so high and smooth and white, like a slab of marble, it seemed to warrant an inscription, and his thick eyebrows were so dark by contrast with the pallor of his skin, they appeared more decorative than functional. His face was squarish and had a soft, hand-carved look; his nose was aquiline, and his eyes large, set widely apart, and his full mouth put Colonel Galpa in mind of portraits he had seen of the old Spanish court—the mouth of a voluptuary, vaguely predatory and given to expressions of contempt. More to the point, he had no doubt that this was the face Tomas was painting on the wall of the Drive-In Puerto Rico.
“Colonel Mauricio Galpa,” said Hector, mopping his brow with a paisley handkerchief. “Allow me to present Colonel Felix Carbonell.”
“Mucho gusto,” said Carbonell, shaking the colonel’s hand. “I am honored.”
“Wow,” said Gammage, gesturing with his drink. “This is fucking massive. The veritable confluence of past and future.”
As he stood there enveloped by the overpowering sweetness of Carbonell’s cologne, the colonel was mesmerized by his opposite number’s face; despite its calm expression and regularity of feature, he derived from it a sense of tension, as if there were another face beneath it, one fiercely animated and straining to shatter the pale mask that held it in check. Though he had never before met the man, he had met with his reputation. The name Carbonell was associated with the worst excesses of the regime. With brutality and terror and slaughter.
“You might even say it’s kinda mythical,” Gammage went on. “Or do I mean mystical? Whatever. I’m talking the meeting of the twain, y’know. Yin and yang. Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader.”
Carbonell’s eyes slid toward Gammage.
“I’d love a shot of this.” Gammage gave Carbonell a jolly smile. “You do show up in photographs, don’tcha?”
“Excuse me!” A slim brunette in slacks and a white blouse grabbed Gammage by the elbow and yanked him away from the two colonels. “Jerry, I need you over here!”
Carbonell watched them disappear into the crowd; when he turned back to the colonel, he said. “Drunks, gringos, journalists. The new trinity.”
Colonel Galpa felt a gulf between them, as palpable in its own right as he might feel standing at the edge of a deep canyon, struck by a chill vacancy inspired by the thought of a misstep. He pretended to be amused by Carbonell’s comment and sipped his vodka.
“Well,” Carbonell said after an awkward interval. “It’s been a pleasure, Colonel. But if you will pardon me, there is a lady in the back who demands my attention.”
They exchanged polite bows, then Carbonell went off with Canizales, who had stood by all the while, toward the rear of the establishment. The colonel finished his vodka and ordered another, wondering how much longer he needed to stay in order to satisfy the requirements of duty. He did not expend a great deal of thought upon Carbonell; he had known other brutal men during his days of service, and though he disapproved of their actions, he had accepted the fact that history seemed to require them. Three drinks, he decided. He would stay for three drinks. Maybe four. Perhaps it would not be too late to call his father.
“Colonel Galpa?” The slim brunette woman who had dragged Gammage off now took the barstool beside him. She was somewhat older than he had thought. Forty, perhaps. Attractive in a quiet way. Framed by her dark hair, her face was kept from being a perfect oval by a longish chin. With her small mouth and large brown eyes, she put him in mind of one of his high school teachers, a pretty, no-nonsense woman who had rarely smiled.
“I’m Margery Emmons,” she said. “CNN.”
The colonel saw his immediate future. An hour or two under hot lights, questions, a camera, an experience that would ultimately be reduced to a ten-second sound bite. Unpleasant, but it would thrill his nephews.
“I’d like to speak with you about Battalion Three-Sixteen,” Margery Emmons said.
That name put a notch in the colonel’s expectations and alerted him to danger. “I’m sorry,” he told her. “I can’t help you.”
“You’ve never heard of Battalion Three-Sixteen?”
“You must realize, Miss Emmons, I’ve…”
“Margery…please.”
“Margery. You must realize that I have not been active in the affairs of my country since the war. Since my war. I am as you see. An exhibit, a public relations opportunity.”
“But you must have some knowledge of Three-Sixteen.”
“I probably know less than you. I know, of course, that they were closely involved with the contras during the eighties, taking their orders from the Americans, and that they have been accused of atrocities. That is all I know.” The colonel made his delivery more pointed. “As it was your country that commissioned these atrocities, you might do well to ask your questions in Washington. Information of this sort is widely disseminated there.”
“I hear you, colonel. But this is where the bodies are buried.”
He acknowledged the statement with a shrug and a “Yes, well…”
“If you knew anything, would you tell me?”
“That would depend on the circumstances under which you asked your questions.” He had not intended this to sound flirtatious, but now that it was out there, he could not come up with anything to say that would reduce its impact.
She smiled. “The question for me, then, would be, ‘Do I believe you know something that would be worth my creating such a circumstance?’”
“Probably not,” he said.
She patted down her hair, an unnecessary gesture—it was held by a gold barrette, not a strand out of place—and stood. “I’d better see to Jerry. I left him out back. He’s not feeling too well.” She extended her hand and he shook it, saying, “Good luck with your story.”
The colonel turned back to his drink, to a consideration of the woman. Margery. Perhaps, he thought, he had intended to flirt with her.
“Oh, colonel!”
She had stopped a few feet away.
“I’m staying at the Loma Linda.” Once again
she smiled. “In case you remember something.”
• • •
When the colonel returned to his hotel that evening, he found the indigo lizard clinging to the wall beside the bathroom mirror. A little tipsy—it had been a while since he’d had four vodkas in such a short time—he put his face close to the lizard and asked, “Are you magic?”
The lizard did not appear to notice him.
“Do you eat flies, or do you consume?…” The colonel could not think of a word to finish his sentence; then he said, “Light. Do you consume light and breathe out fire? No?” He looked at himself in the mirror, at his ridiculous uniform and gilt-braided hat. His tired eyes. “To hell with you,” he said. He bent to the sink and splashed water onto his face; on straightening he discovered that the lizard had crawled onto the surface of the mirror and was staring at him. The stare affected the colonel profoundly, causing him to perceive his own woeful condition. Alone except for a lizard; half-drunk in a bathroom; on an endless fool’s errand. He resisted the easy allure of self-pity and stood rigid, almost at attention, until the feeling had passed. The lizard continued to watch him, and the colonel grew annoyed with those unblinking orange eyes. He clapped his hands, trying to drive it away, but it remained motionless, lifeless as a rubber toy. Its stare made him feel weak and unfocused, thoughts slopping about inside his skull, and he lifted his hand, intending to knock it from its perch. But before he could act, a curious lightness invaded his body, enfeebling him, and a burst of orange radiance blinded him, and for a moment, scarcely more than a second or two, he saw an enormous figure looming above. A darkly complected man wearing a hat, one hand upraised. His vision cleared and he felt once again the weight of flesh and bone; he saw his reflection in the mirror. A befuddled little man in a silly hat, standing with his hand upraised.
The lizard was gone.
The colonel hurriedly undressed and switched off the lights and slipped beneath the sheets. He could not put from mind the absurd notion that he had seen himself briefly from the lizard’s perspective; he recalled the feeling of dizzy instability he had derived from looking into the lizard’s eyes, and wondered if the two experiences had been connected. But what did this speculation imply? That somehow his soul had been trapped for an instant inside the lizard’s skin? Even more absurd. And yet he could think of nothing else to explain such an extreme disassociation. Though the colonel did not subscribe to a view of creation that accepted explanations of this kind, neither did he demand logic of the world, and he refused to let the experience ruin his sleep. He closed his eyes, said a hasty prayer for the souls of the three pilots he had shot from the sky, and soon drifted off into a black peace that lasted well into the day.
Eternity and Other Stories Page 22