The Tattooed Soldier (10 page)

Without warning, the barracks door sprang open. A bulky officer strode into the room, trailing the smell of stale liquor. The conscripts jumped to their feet and stood next to their cots, arms at their sides, as they had recently been taught to do. Several soldiers followed behind, one of them carrying a portable radio.

The officer began to speak, his words slightly slurred. He was the officer from the movie theater, a Captain Elías.

“You've all been working so hard. All that running and shit. Running and running. You've been such good draftees, we've decided to come and …” He seemed to have lost his train of thought. “What was it we were going to do, sergeant?”

“You said we would entertain the men, sir.”

“Yes, that's it. Entertain.” He snapped his fingers at one of the soldiers. “Music!”

The soldier turned on the radio, fumbling with the dials until marimba music came on. The deep resonance of the wooden instrument reminded Longoria of dancing at so many weddings and village fiestas.

“Louder,” Captain Elías called out, and the soldier turned up the volume. The music blared, rattling the tiny speaker.

Longoria and Alvaro exchanged looks. The song was a nostalgic waltz that only increased Longoria's sense of foreboding.

“Well, what are you waiting for, you
maricas
?” the captain said with a sneer. “Dance. Take a partner and dance.”

No one moved.

“Are you refusing an order, you faggots?” The captain grabbed the man nearest him by the shoulders. “Dance, you faggot, dance.” When the conscript only stood in place, trembling, Captain Elías picked him up off the ground and threw him against the flimsy barracks wall.

Elías moved to the center of the room. “When I give an order you will
obey.
”

The soldiers proceeded through the barracks, forcing the conscripts into pairs. A few cots from Longoria's, one of the soldiers slapped a reluctant conscript across the face, dropping the man to his knees. Longoria was paired with Alvaro. They began a halfhearted shuffle across the cement floor, barely touching each other.

“No, not like that,” yelled the captain. “Put your arms around each other. Do it with feeling.”

The soldiers were all laughing, showing gold and silver teeth, shaking their heads because Elías was crazy and drunk and funny. Longoria wrapped his arm around Alvaro's waist, feeling deeply humiliated, because he was acting against nature by holding a man the way you were supposed to hold a woman. Alvaro's palms were sweaty and he smelled of onions. A soldier pushed Longoria from behind, and his face brushed against the stubble on Alvaro's cheek.

They danced for thirty seconds or so, until the radio announcer's voice came on abruptly, followed by a commercial for deodorant soap. The men released each other and stepped apart.

“Why are you stopping?” Captain Elías said. Yawning, he sat down on a cot and closed his eyes. “Keep dancing,” he said faintly. “Dance.”

Longoria and the other conscripts shuffled across the floor to the sound of the radio commercial.

A few minutes later Elías fell asleep and began snoring, the moist vibrations audible over the din of the radio. The music played on, and the conscripts kept moving in a joyless waltz, steps everyone knew from childhood, steps Longoria first practiced with his mother in the cramped space of their little cinderblock house.

*   *   *

He was called Guillermo when he was a child. In the army he became “Longoria.” Longoria knew things Guillermo never dreamed of. The army was a cruel place, it was not for weakhearted people. But the army made you a man. The army made you do terrible, violent things, but they were things that had to be done. You had to love the army, because if you didn't love it you were finished. They might as well bury you, because if you didn't believe in what you were doing you'd go crazy, you'd spin out of control. Longoria had seen this happen to men, to good soldiers, the blood and life disappearing from them like water going down a drain. It was because they didn't believe.

This thing they were fighting was a cancer, and sometimes the children were contaminated with it too. You killed the cousins and the uncles to make sure the virus was dead. That's what the officers said, and you had to believe it. The parents passed the virus along to their children. It made you want to kill the parents again and again, even after they were dead, because if it wasn't for the fucking parents you wouldn't have to kill the children. Guatemala was like a human body, that was how Lieutenant Colonel Villagrán explained it, and if you didn't kill these organisms the body could die.

The noisy children who lived in the Westlake Arms could not be contaminated with the virus because they were not in Guatemala, because they could not grow to take up arms against the government. These children were rowdy and insolent, but they did not carry red flags, they did not threaten Guatemala's sovereignty. They only rode bicycles and bounced balls.

This was the worst thing to remember, the sounds children make when they are dying. The flutter in the throat. Crying because they're bleeding all over the floor and it doesn't make any sense. They cry because when you stand there in your uniform and shoot them they feel like their fathers are punishing them for doing something wrong. And you, in your camouflage skin, are in the room with them, watching this happen. You are the one who put the bullets in their bodies. The little boys feel their hearts winding down.
Why did you shoot me?
they ask with their eyes.
These are the last thumps of the tiny drum in my chest.
Their eyes turn dreamy and faraway when they feel the blackness coming. The little boys see the darkness and call for their mothers.
“Mamá.”
They don't want to be alone in the dark.
“Mamá, Mamá, Mamá.”
Only bullets can stop that sound, only more bullets can stop them moaning for their mothers.

There were days when Longoria thought the same kind of infection was spreading here in Los Angeles, although the symptoms might be different from the ones in Guatemala. Los Angeles could use a thorough cleansing. If he were still in that line of work, he would start with the
tecatos
in the alley. Then he would deal with the gang members who sat on the front steps of his apartment building, the boys who shaved their heads and covered themselves with tattoos to look like men. The cholos had guns hidden in the folds of their loose-fitting clothing. They could use some disinfection. But no, this work would have to be left to someone else. Longoria wasn't up to combat anymore. He had to accept this. Someone else would have to worry about cleaning up Los Angeles. Longoria had done his part in Guatemala, he'd made his contribution, made the sacrifices.

Small bodies in secret cemeteries, piled on top of each other in pits. By a bend in the river. Under the ruins of a church turned to ash. In the muddy soil of an abandoned cornfield. Could their bones be lighter than soil? If the bones of the children floated to the top, people might know what Longoria did. Who could know? Who were the witnesses? The children knew, but they were only sand now, sand children. The other Jaguars knew, but they were in it with you. They would never tell. Longoria would never tell, not even Reginalda, especially Reginalda.

To live forever with the voices of boys and girls, their last words, the calling out to their mothers. That was the biggest sacrifice. All of them cried before you silenced them for good, and a lot of them shit and pissed. Even now, the smell reminded him of death.

It took a lot out of a soldier to see this and hear this and live with it. You were never the same again.

*   *   *

They were walking by the lake in MacArthur Park, Reginalda clinging to his arm. She had attached herself to him again, enveloping him in the cocoon of her perfume, making a public display. Longoria wanted to pull away, but if he did she would get upset with him and pout. He didn't want her to pout because he liked it when she talked. So he let her cling to his arm, this out-in-the-open touching that so many women seemed to need but that Longoria would probably deny to anybody but Reginalda.

If the guys at the chess tables saw him, they would tease him later on and his face would turn red. He wouldn't have brought her to the park if he'd known she was going to hang on to him like this. They would make vulgar macho jokes about his sex, about the things they imagined he did to her. He would feel like a little boy caught with his fly open.

“I don't care what you think, I didn't like that movie,” Reginalda was saying, her black pumps snapping on the asphalt path. She was enjoying every step of their walk through the park, arm in arm, just like a normal couple. “Even if the blood is fake, it's disgusting to me.”

“If it's not real it can't be disgusting.”

Another Saturday afternoon date, better than most. After the movie, an American thriller with subtitles, Longoria had splurged for a change, taking her to the Mi Guatemala restaurant on Alvarado for a big
comida. Carne asada
, black beans, fried plantains. Just like the menu promised, a meal to remind you of home. They listened to the marimba, four men tapping at the hand-carved wooden instrument, playing the classics that made everyone nostalgic, made them wonder why they were living in Los Angeles. At “
Luna de Xelajú
,” a song about a romantic moonlit night in Quetzaltenango, people started dancing in the narrow space between the tables and the band, older couples shifting back and forth in an easy waltz. After she pleaded with him, Longoria even danced two songs with Reginalda, cheek to cheek. In the six months he had known her they had never danced before.

Now, an hour later, they were strolling through the park. They stopped in front of a stout woman selling mangoes from a flimsy metal cart in the narrow shaft of shade created by a palm tree.

“I'm usually not down here in the park,” the vendor offered without being asked. “I'm usually up on the sidewalk. But the police are chasing people away. They won't let us sell up there. If you come back later I'll be on the sidewalk. Up there.”

The vendor took a mango in her left hand. With a few quick strokes of her knife she cut it open in the shape of a fleshy yellow flower and stuck it on a stick. The juice dripped down Reginalda's chin as she bit into it.

Longoria was wiping her face with his sleeve when he first noticed a scratchy sound coming from the band shell on the western edge of the park. He stopped to listen. It was a woman's voice on a loudspeaker, some kind of rally. The patter of clapping hands followed, then an echoing shout. The meeting seemed to have a religious overtone. More applause now, rising in volume, wafting across the park, making even the mango vendor raise her head in attention.

“What's going on over there, Longoria?” Reginalda asked. “What are they celebrating? Is it a holiday?”

Without answering her, Longoria began walking toward the rally.

“Hey, wait for me!”

Slightly more than a block away, Longoria saw people formed in concentric semicircles, T-shirts glimmering white in the bright sun. They were holding signs and blanket-sized banners busy with letters, though he was still too far off to read what they said. The crowd rose above and away from the band shell and its concrete stage, hundreds of people filling an amphitheater of wooden benches. Hundreds more spilled onto the gentle slope of the park's grass embankment and stood under the eucalyptus trees holding sky blue and white Salvadoran and Guatemalan flags. Longoria was getting closer, and the voice on the stage began to sharpen into clear, angry words. He could make out the messages on the banners now.

SOLIDARIDAD CON LA REVOLUCION SALVADOREÑA

ALTO A LA REPRESION EN EL SALVADOR Y GUATEMALA

APOYO TOTAL A LA LUCHA ARMADA

Longoria stopped on the asphalt walkway, his mouth agape.

“What is it?” Reginalda asked behind him.

Again he did not answer. What he was looking at was too incredible for words. He could not believe that these people were being allowed to gather in a park in Los Angeles and mouth their hateful ideas freely and openly.

A swarthy man in jeans and leather sandals walked by and smiled at Longoria. “
Buenas tardes, compañero.
” On his shoulders was a boy waving a little red flag with a white star and the letters
FMLN.

Longoria could feel his face and ears turning crimson.
Compañero.
This was a Communist word. Someone had called him
compañero.

“How much are they paying you to be here?” Longoria snapped at the man. “Who's paying you?”

The man smiled again and looked at Longoria with amused bewilderment, as if he were speaking in tongues. The little boy wrinkled his forehead and waved the tiny Communist flag. They stepped past him, heading for the mango vendor.

Longoria charged down the asphalt path toward the band shell, holding back a scream with each step. He had come three thousand miles from his country to find these people again, these Communists, up to their old tricks.
This is a real kick in the pants.
Reaching the grass embankment, he plunged into a mass of demonstrators with their backs to him, bumping their shoulders and arms as he worked his way forward. No one seemed to care. They were all gazing up at the stage, eyes fixed on the small, fair-skinned woman at the podium. He looked at the speaker for a moment and saw her raise her fist in the air, the Marxist hand signal of radical students and guerrilla fighters.
¡Idiotas!
he wanted to shout.
You are like sheep. You're being tricked by her pretty words.
Suddenly everyone around him sang out in chorus, “¡
Presente!
” To his left, an old woman in a ragged dress threw her fist into the air, and Longoria stifled a bitter laugh.
In Guatemala we knew how to handle these people. In Los Angeles they are allowed to operate freely. In Los Angeles we cannot stop them.
Longoria kept pushing forward, the bodies packed tighter as he got closer to the stage. Speaker and audience were caught up in a chant, the speaker calling out names, the audience shouting back “¡
Presente!
”