The Fighting Man (1993)

by Seymour, Gerald

The clerk flicked at close-typed pages, some corrected with ink, of a file half covered by the twin piles of photographs.

  ‘. . . It is said that the old whore dreamed only of returning to the triangle, that he sat in the cafés in the Campeche quarter of Old Havana and played the game of fighting his way back to his village – just the dream of an old whore. You know how it ended, the dream? Not at the head of a column, not in the jungle in the Petén, not in the mountains of the Cuchumatanes – it ended when he was hit by a bus that had lost its brakes, when he was crossing the road to go for his coffee with the other fools who believed he would take them back. I suppose it was possible, in the shithouse of Havana, to believe that one day he would return and that the Indians, dumbfucks, would follow him again. He had a good funeral . . .’

  The lieutenant’s breath played on the back of the clerk’s neck. The lieutenant’s hand rested loosely on the clerk’s shoulder.

  ‘. . . All the old men who went into exile with him were there, look at them, raddled, wrinkled, hair gone, all cretins. There are just three that I can’t locate. Too old, too changed. I tell you what I think, I think it would be a worse death to be in exile in Havana, than to face the guns of the Kaibiles. Look at them, if they were in the Petén, in the jungle, they would be gone in forty-eight hours. They are pathetic . . .’

  The lieutenant reached forward and pushed away the corners of photographs so that one was left clear. The clerk shrugged.

  ‘. . . His son. That is Rodolfo Jorge Ramírez. There was a daughter but she had already gone, she is in Europe. The wife of the whore was killed. The whore took his son with him when he fled. They went in the last light of the second day of the battle . . . Yes, a good-looking young man, I don’t mind saying that. Perhaps now that he is free of the chains of the old whore he will go to Europe to his sister . . .’

  The lieutenant poured what was left of the coffee into the plastic beaker of the clerk, and picked up his attaché case from the floor. The clerk shuffled after him, dragging the damaged leg, and cleared him through the outer barred door of the basement. Not for him to ask the business of the lieutenant now that darkness had fallen on the city, not for him to remember which file had been begged by the lieutenant for study. He slammed the door shut again. He called cheerfully to the lieutenant’s slim back.

  ‘It was a real war then. Not this shit of today. There was a time when it was thought they might win, the communists, might actually march into the Plaza Mayor, right to the Palacio Nacional. You know, all the flights, every day, to Miami, they were full then . . . a long time ago. Good night.’

  Just the sound of light footsteps slipping away up the basement’s staircase.

  He cackled his laughter. He was afraid of none of them, not the generals nor the field commanders nor the interrogators, all of whom would recognize the gold-dust value of the material he had assembled.

  The clerk returned to his desk. He packed up the file of a father who had died in exile and tied a length of string twice round the file and knotted the end of it. From the drawer of his desk he took a new file cover and slipped the photograph of the young man at a funeral into it, and he wrote carefully on the outside of the file ‘RODOLFO JORGE RAMIREZ’.

  The silence of the basement was around him. His company was the files of the dead and the living. He drank the coffee that had been left for him.

  He rang the bell.

  The doorway was beside the shop’s window.

  There was a mist off the harbour but the rain had stopped. The narrow street was deserted. Gord shivered. He rang the bell again, and was rewarded. A light came on behind the curtains drawn across the sash window above the shop front. There was a sign in the window, written in biro on cardboard, stating that the shop would be reopening in Whitsun week. The window was empty and the shelves in the interior gloom were bare. The sign above the window was Torbay Crafts, and flaking. He had come off the slow train that brought the mail and the newspapers from London, catnapped for two hours on a platform bench at Newton Abbot, and taken the first train of the morning on to Paignton, and then a taxi. He had walked twice round the harbour, seen the fishing fleet prepare to sail, and then climbed the steps to the street and the shop with the accommodation above it.

  He had been there once before, another dawn, the visit before he had flown out to the Gulf. Twelve hours’ leave, and most of it spent getting to and from Torbay.

  Gord was there, on that bloody wet doorstep, because he had thought that it was what his father would have wanted.

  There was the lock being turned. Not the opportunity to bring his mother flowers, nor a present.

  A man in the doorway. The man had grey thin hair sprouting uncombed and he wore a vest under a woman’s dressing gown that was fastened only at the waist and below long spindle legs he wore a pair of crushed carpet slippers. The sleep was becoming anger on the man’s face.

  ‘What’s your bloody game then . . . ?’

  Gord stood in the clothes of the fish farm, and of the bar beside the sea loch, and of the train to London.

  ‘. . . What time of the bloody day do you reckon this is?’

  Gord didn’t know his mother had a live-in, but then he hadn’t seen her, hadn’t wanted to, since he had come back from the Gulf.

  Gord saw his mother in the shadow behind the guy. She was in a tent of a nightdress.

  ‘Hello, Mum.’

  There was her embarrassment, and the introduction. He was Bill, he was the lodger. He helped with the shop. Not Gord’s business if his mother was shacked up. Not for him to query, from a high horse, why the lodger needed to wear his mother’s dressing gown and be on hand to help in a shop that had been closed for seven months.

  He told her that he was going away.

  ‘You could have telephoned . . .’ said critically.

  He told her that he didn’t know when he would be back.

  ‘You didn’t have to just pitch up . . .’

  He told her that where he was going he would not be able to stay in touch.

  ‘You joking – how long since you were last “in touch” . . . ?’

  He told her to look after herself.

  ‘You got a funny way with words, you think you can just pick people up, drop them. Damn you, you’re your father’s son . . .’

  It was two hundred miles to be there and it would be two hundred miles back. He didn’t ask himself inside for a cup of coffee and it wasn’t offered. He had not been asked where he was going, and why, and when. He wouldn’t have told her. He turned away. He headed off down the narrow street. He had gone because it was what his father would have expected of him. He heard her call, perhaps frightened, perhaps in late good will. He didn’t stop. He didn’t wave.

  He went down the steps leading to the harbour. He had to watch his feet for the dog shit and the broken bottles. His sister was somewhere in the north of England and teaching at an inner-city primary school and likely still to be wearing a Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament badge, and she was contemptuous of him. His mother had made room in her bed for a guy who was, certain and sure, fleecing off her the money she’d made when she’d sold up in London. That was her business and only hers, and she had no room in her life for him.

  It was only for his father that he’d come.

  The last public goodbye to his father had been the memorial service at St Bride’s, the hacks’ church in Fleet Street. They’d been in the pews behind him, the old muckers of Theo Joseph (TeeJay) Brown, and they’d have been glancing down at their watches and working it out, how long until they could get outside and light up, and how long until they could get into the pub and start the rounds of doubles. They’d sung out of tune, off scale, and he’d blessed them because he’d heard the nose-blowing of the old bastards close to tears. There had been the hacks and the florid-faced men in their dark suits from Regional Crime Squad and Flying Squad and Drugs Squad, and there had been barristers’ clerks and the solicitors who wouldn’t have been happy to share a bench wit
h a detective. The lesson read by the chief sub who’d started on the same newsagency as TeeJay, and the address given by the last editor to fire him. Gord had never been able to reckon out whether his father would have approved of the service; sure as hell, wherever he’d gone, he’d have been cursing that he’d missed out on the piss-up in the pub round the corner afterwards.

  Gord Brown had no other business to detain him.

  He would fly with the men who wanted him.

  So goddamn alone, and lengthening his stride, hurrying to get to the taxi rank beside the bus station.

  When Colonel Arturo heard of the shooting dead of the two subversivos he ordered that the bodies should be brought down to the village for display.

  He watched from in front of the small whitewashed church that was close to the military compound as they were carried by the Civil Patrollers, brought down from the tree line that clung to the rising ground around the cleared area where the new community of Acul was settled. He could recite the statistics, because each time that a gringo bastard came down from New York or Washington or Los Angeles to write a lying and distorted article then it would be picked up and reprinted in the edition of the International Herald Tribune that he would find in the officers’ mess of the estado mayor. All of the senior officers attached to the Military Headquarters read the International Herald Tribune in the mess. The statistics that were always used stated that 100,000 civilians, what Colonel Arturo called subversivos, had been killed by the regular army and paramilitary forces. But they were harder now to obtain, the bodies of subversivos, because the war was won, the shit enemy was deep in the jungle, high on the mountains, and beaten. The shit enemy was little more than a nuisance . . . He had been told that these two men, down from the high ground and scavenging for food, were of the Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres, the group that still festered in the remotest country of the Ixil triangle. He raised his stub field binoculars, saw the procession enter the far extremity of the village.

  With the war won it was good to take the opportunity to remind the people of the Model Village in the Pole of Development, the new housing programme where Indians could be supervised and controlled, of the protection that they received from the army and their own men who served in the Civil Patrols. He thought that he would make a speech, impromptu, and perhaps suggest to the captain who commanded the village garrison that a small fiesta, plenty of drink for the animals, should be held that evening. Once inside the perimeter line of the village, the bodies were taken through the side streets, the dirt strips that ran between the lines of tin-roofed houses. Up the Calzada de Libertad, down Avenida República de China, along Avenida Soldado Guatemalteco. It was correct that as many of the villagers as possible should see the bodies.

  He had come to Acul that morning because the place was set in the history of his military service.

  The bodies were carried into the open plaza in front of the whitewashed church. A Civil Patroller was at each end of the long and bent poles, taking the weight on his shoulder.

  Ten years earlier Colonel Arturo, then a major, had commanded the assault company of the Kaibiles that had taken the former village of Acul.

  The ankles and the wrists of the two subversivos had been knotted together with rope, and the poles had been threaded under them so that the bodies hung down and swayed in the motion of the carrying and the heads that were mud-smeared and bloodstained rolled with the movement.

  Colonel Arturo had been decorated by the President of the Republic for the assault on the former village of Acul. He wore the ribbon of the medal, with others, on his camouflage combat tunic.

  The bodies were dropped in front of him. He told the captain that all the villagers should be brought to the plaza, compulsory. He said that the bodies should be stripped naked. It was necessary to make a show.

  He had heard, that morning, of the death of the old whore Ramírez in the communist nest that was Havana. He had thought it would be of interest to him to see for himself how the news was accepted in the village . . . A hard battle it had been, casualties in his company, and the old whore Ramírez had organized good defence lines . . . it had been the air strike that had finished the resistance . . . no prisoners surviving . . . he could remember how he had cursed when he had found finally that the old whore Ramírez was not amongst the men herded into the church of the former village of Acul . . . there had been the smell when the fire had taken hold in the church, the smell was still with him.

  He could see across the plaza that the priest had come to stand and watch him, challenge him, surrounded by women and condemning him with silence. He hated the priests. The villagers were pushed forward by the Civil Patrollers. They should come close to the bodies, spit upon them, laugh at them. Because the bodies were naked he could see the way that the ribcages jutted. They were starved up there in the mountains. Colonel Arturo knew all the textbooks, he knew about denying the fish the freedom of the sea.

  Colonel Arturo stood on a wooden box. He was protected by the guns of his escort.

  ‘They are the kind of scum that destroys your crops or steals what you have grown. They bring violence to your village. They make life bad for you. Show what you think of them . . .’

  He stared out at their faces. Dirty sub-human faces. There were pigs and dogs searching for food scraps among the homes behind the crowd. Expressionless faces gazing back at him. He saw the defiance of the priest. When the order was shouted to them, then more of the villagers came forward in file and ritually spat upon the bodies. He asked the captain, low voice. What would they think of the death of the old whore Ramírez? The captain shrugged. How would he know? Who would tell him? Colonel Arturo felt a small sense of failure and that was rare for him.

  Later the bodies would be taken down to near the river and buried. They would be buried not from respect, but in shallow graves that were far enough down for the dogs and pigs to be unable to maul the remains.

  His failure was that he had learned nothing of what they thought of the death of a man in Old Havana.

  And he thought that he would learn nothing more in the two hours that he would be in the Model Village before the helicopter returned to ferry him back to Guatemala City.

  They would be late for their table and that didn’t please him.

  Benny had sat at the bar for more than twenty minutes now, was well down on his second gin, knew none of the older men around him, and had little to do but fidget and wait. Benny came to London twice a year from the Adventure Training School in mid-Wales that he owned with the bank manager, and each time that he came he alternated with Sebastian in paying for lunch at their mutual watering hole. It was a place that was not mentioned outside the company of members, an address that was never written down and a telephone number that was unrecorded. They were mostly old-timers who gathered in the middle of the day at the Special Forces Club, veterans nostalgic for the North African campaign or the Malayan Emergency . . . Sebastian was sitting near the window, huddled with a chappie who looked short of a bath and a shave and a haircut and a visit to a tailor. Benny had come in, prompt to the minute for the schedule, seen Sebastian in company and been casually waved away. Strange bloody company that Sebastian was standing him up for, and the chappie even had a plastic dustbin bag, that was filled and knotted at the top, under his legs. He glanced at the barman, gestured with his eyes towards the man with Sebastian, and there was a wry smile, and then a raised thumb that said, No call for panic, vetting is positive. He relaxed, eavesdropped on haphazard conversation. Silly of him, to have considered that an ‘undesirable’ would have made it across the doormat in the hall. The talk around Benny was the same as half a year before, and half a year before that. The talk didn’t change . . . What should be done in Ulster. What should not be done in Bosnia. What should have been done in Iraq. What had been done in the Falklands . . . About bloody time. Sebastian on his feet, and shaking the chappie’s hand, and seeming to wish him well. Benny turned to the barman, ordered the Campari soda
that was Sebastian’s drink. Too right, about bloody time. He saw the chappie shamble out through the door.

  ‘Sorry about that.’

  ‘Charitable work? Bringing tramps in off the street?’ Benny grinned.

  ‘Actually, no. I don’t suppose you knew who it was . . . ?’

  ‘I pass.’

  Sebastian, whom Benny thought quite the funniest man that he knew, had no humour just then. Rather bloody stern-faced. ‘After your time, but before I came out. Poor smell it left at the time. If he hadn’t been so pig-headed . . .’

  Benny queried, ‘Not the fellow who . . . ?’

  ‘ “Bullshit Brown”, the very same. Not much of a label for a guy to be lumbered with. “Bullshit”. I don’t mind it being known, but I fought that geriatric committee here to keep his membership . . .’

  ‘I heard it didn’t have to happen.’

  Sebastian, retired fourteen months back with the substantive rank of major, now a security adviser to any sheik or emir or prince with a hefty enough cheque book, snorted. ‘All he had to do was apologize, grovel for a few minutes, would have been forgotten. Obstinate beggar, he wouldn’t. Did you know that he was even in for a medal, gallantry, not the “stand and stare” brigade. The citation was torn up. To put it mildly, he wasn’t well used.’

  Benny called for another gin, and a second Campari soda. ‘So, what was the germ of the heart to heart?’

  ‘Bit bloody odd really . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Came to me because I used to be in Belize, last posting, well you know that . . . I was up on the Guatemala border. Mossies, malaria, the shits day and night, awful place. He wanted to talk about Guatemala . . .’

  They ordered. They would be called when the table was ready.

  ‘What the hell for, Guatemala?’

  Sebastian grimaced. ‘Wanted a run-down, capability of the Guatemalan armed forces.’

  ‘And . . . ?’

  ‘I gave it him . . . best fighting outfit in Central America, probably better than anything in Latin America. Very tough, quite ruthless, heavy motivation. We took them seriously enough when we thought they might come into Belize. Not that well equipped, but just ruthless. I did my best to warn him off. You see, he wasn’t chattering about going out there and advising, lecturing, the government forces. Too bloody easy for “Bullshit”. He was talking about joining up with some guerrilla group. I gave it him straight, I said he was out of his tiny mind . . . They really are very good, the Guatemalans, and arrogant. They’ve just about won their little war and they got that far with no American help, hence conceit. I warned him, but I don’t think he was listening by then. It’s the problem of “Bullshit’s” life, never knew when to step back. I told him that the Guatemalan army would mince any little group with holes in their trousers. He told me to listen to the radio . . .’