The Tattooed Soldier (20 page)

“No, love of my life. Not at all.”

She took his outstretched hand and rose to her feet, blue jeans and blouse moist with gray slime.

“We found it,” she said, as much to herself as to Antonio. “We found what's killing the babies. All this trash is contaminating the river. It's so obvious.”

At the top of the dump they reached a lonely dirt street with a few ramshackle houses. Elena recognized this place. Marisol lived just a few blocks away. From here they could walk to their house on the other side of town.

A narrow ditch ran along the side of the road. Looking down, Elena saw a muddy liquid buzzing with flies. There was a pungent smell of urine. Feces floated in the yellowish brown creek. Sewage. She tracked the liquid's path. The ditch drained into the garbage dump and thence into the river below. This was truly unbelievable. The residents of this neighborhood ran a septic pipe right into this ditch.

“There's absolutely no sanitation here,” Elena said in a daze of revulsion. “All of this sewage is draining straight into the river. This is like the nineteenth century, things I read about in books, conditions that belong to history. And I'm seeing it right here.
No lo puedo creer.
We've got to do something about this, Antonio. We have to stop it. This sewage is killing the people downstream. It's killing the babies.”

Antonio bit his lip. “This isn't our home,” he said after a long pause. “We're outsiders here.”

“I will do what I have to do.”

“Elena, please, don't do anything rash. Don't do anything without talking to me first.”

As they walked home, a cloud bank passed before the sun, casting the town in gray, erasing shadows from the streets. Soon the afternoon rains began, falling in thick sheets from the sky, the hyperbole of the heavens. Elena looked up gratefully as the clouds drenched her in water and washed the stains from her clothes.

*   *   *

Antonio's anger arrived in the kitchen before he did, in the form of a violent bang of the front door. Standing by a pot of boiling beans, the smell of onions heavy in the air, Elena wondered what humiliation he had suffered at work, what new resentment he carried, what accusation or complaint.

She listened to his approaching footsteps and turned to face him, wearing her apron like armor. “
Buenas tardes
,” she said.

“The mayor called me into his office today. Two years I've been here and I never met the man, and today he wants to talk to me.”

“
¿De veras?
About what?”

“About you, of course. What else?”

Antonio put his briefcase on the table and took off his glasses, pinching the bridge of his nose. He was angry, yes, but there was something else. Something was wrong, there was a graveness about him, a sense of fear. He put his glasses back on again, very deliberately. His hands were balled into fists. “You know, Elena,” he said slowly, “I asked you to tell me before you did anything.”

Momentarily surprised, Elena composed herself. They must have received her letter. Word of what she had written to the president of the departmental government in Totonicapán must have filtered down the official chain of command.

“I did what I needed to do.”

“They've been following you, Elena. That's what the mayor told me. They know where you go, what you do, who you talk to.”

Intimidation. They are trying to intimidate my husband. This is an old trick.

“He's lying to you,” Elena said. “He's bluffing. He said that to scare you.”

“They have pictures,” Antonio said quickly. “Pictures of you walking to La Joya. The mayor said you've been talking to some people who live there. And he said something about other letters, correspondence to Guatemala City that has been intercepted. And then—and this was very, very strange to me—he said you're ‘gathering intelligence.' About the war.”

She grabbed at a chair and sat down, feeling vaguely faint.

“And do you know what else he said? Do you know, Elena?” The hostility was definitely there now, a tone of voice that was all too familiar. “He said, ‘Control your wife. Control her or both of you will be in grave danger.' ‘Man to man' he told me this. And then he said they know everything about us. They know where we come from and what we were mixed up in at the university. He looked at me like I was some sort of devil. As if I were a guerrilla or a terrorist or something.” He fiddled with his glasses again.

“All of a sudden they know everything about our past, and now they're wondering why we're here,” he continued. “Thanks to your letter, they put it all together.”

The pot boiled loudly. The smell of beans and onions filled the kitchen.

“Well? Aren't you going to say anything?”

Her black beans were getting better every day.

“I'm afraid,” she said.

 

10.
THE WRESTLERS' BRIGADE

 

His new chevrons pointed skyward, gleaming yellow birds in flight against the drab camouflage forest of his uniform. He had been promoted to sergeant because he didn't flinch or hesitate when given a difficult assignment. They had swept through Huehuetenango and San Marcos and El Quiché and so many other places that he was already beginning to forget the names. He had become adept at the use of knives, guns, and grenades, and had learned new uses for his machete. And he had started to carry a cigarette lighter as a regular piece of equipment, even though he didn't smoke.

Longoria had turned many things to ash with his lighter, walls and roofs, schools and churches dissolving into the wind, taking up residence in the clouds. When there were bodies to be burned, kerosene and gasoline helped, although corpses never seemed to burn all the way. Instead they became black stones, brittle and flaky, stone people.

Although he had rarely encountered an armed enemy and his life was seldom in danger, he was proud of having survived so much war and destruction. It was exhilarating to find yourself still walking and breathing when you left a village that would soon disappear into the smoky sky. There was a sense of being fully alive, a deeper appreciation for the simpler pleasures, like drinking a beer or listening to the radio when he got back to the base.

When he put on his sergeant's uniform for the first time, Longoria lingered for a moment in front of a tall mirror in the barracks, next to the showers. His pants were tucked into his boots, the laces crisscrossing upward. The red beret on his head was emblazoned with a black jaguar patch. Longoria held up his arm and compared his tattoo with the patch. Then a glance at the chevrons again, the structure of the army in these yellow bars, hierarchies and responsibilities, layers of lieutenants, captains, majors, and colonels all stacked on top of each other. The chevrons told everyone where Longoria fit in.

No sooner had he put them on than he was forced to take them off.

A few days after his promotion, Captain Elías assigned him to G-2, military intelligence, to carry out some special “
acciones
.” For reasons that were officially unexplained but obvious nonetheless, these operations had to have a civilian veneer. The enemies of the government had to disappear in a fashion that would allow the army to say it wasn't responsible. Longoria was to wear civilian clothes. This struck him as somewhat ludicrous: with his cropped hair and muscular frame and the tattoo on his arm, he looked like a soldier no matter what he wore.

To go without his uniform made him feel tainted and dirty, like a thief. There was no pride in trying to hide what you were doing, as if it were something to be ashamed of. To make matters worse, much worse, he was ordered to work with a group of civilians, the hired guns of a certain businessman in the capital. The businessman was supposedly very rich and had financed his own private army, the Lorenzo Amaya Anti-Communist Brigade. But the businessman was not all that rich, apparently, since the men he hired for his “army” were unkempt thugs from the
reformatorio
who did not know the pleasure of shampoo or freshly laundered clothes. They were not warriors in any sense of the word.

Although no one had come out and said so directly, the reason for his assignment to this group of civilians was clear: to bring order to their actions. They were without training or any idea of tactics, stumbling through their tasks like clumsy wrestlers. He knew them by the nicknames they had picked up during their long careers as street urchins and petty thieves: Mugre, Buitre, Sapo, and Mosca. These four men constituted the entire Lorenzo Amaya Anti-Communist Brigade. They had many bad habits, like smoking and spitting on the sidewalk.

Everything had gone wrong during Longoria's first action with the brigade, the attempted abduction of a famous trade unionist in a working-class neighborhood of the capital. Longoria drove to the subversive's home in a Jeep with tinted windows, accompanied by Mugre and Sapo. Mugre, an ex-convict with wide gaps between his rotting teeth, sat in the front seat with a submachine gun across his lap. It seemed he had never held such a weapon before, because he allowed his finger to drift over the trigger and played with the safety, his hands confused by so many latches and springs. He lifted the gun, the barrel's line of fire passing across Longoria's torso.

“
¡Pendejo!
” Longoria snapped. “Don't point that at me. Keep the barrel away.”

When they arrived at the subversive's address, Longoria jumped out of the Jeep with jaguar efficiency and ran toward the house under the klieg-light sun of the hot afternoon. He had not taken three steps when he heard gunfire, a patter of shots from Mugre's automatic weapon. On the sidewalk lay a septuagenarian priest and a street vendor, the two men in identical poses, hands over their bellies, bleeding profusely. Bystanders, both of them. Like the other ex-cons in the brigade, Mugre had no discipline of fire. Bang-bang at the slightest provocation.

Longoria rushed to the subversive's front door and kicked it in, his worst fears soon confirmed. The gunfire had alerted their target to the brigade's arrival, allowing him to escape out a back window.

“
¡Idiota!
” Longoria yelled when he returned to the sidewalk, where Mugre was rubbing his chin and watching his victims bleed into the pavement. “Why?”

“They were staring at me,
sargento.
They were looking at me.”

Weeks later Longoria would learn that the trade unionist had reached Mexico City, where he gave regular press conferences defaming Guatemala and denouncing violations of human rights. Longoria winced every time he saw the man's name in the paper.

Mostly the brigade operated during the day and took people out of their homes. “In broad daylight,” as the expression went. They stopped cars on the open highway and dragged drivers from behind the wheel. Sometimes the victims resisted, sometimes they didn't. The Lorenzo Amayas liked it when their captives fought back, grabbing onto the door of the Jeep, trying against hope to get away. Once, they abducted a couple from their wedding reception, women in fine dresses and men in tuxedos running out the doors, falling over chairs. The thing wasn't just to take the people but to make a show of it. It was street theater, a tug-of-war on the avenues and boulevards, in the parking lots and plazas. Longoria remembered his training in psychological operations and knew that the general principle of disorder and violence applied here. The point was to allow the neighbors, friends, and relatives to see, so that they would tell others. Accounts of the brigade's brazenness would grow and spread like a contagion. All Guatemala would come to know that the chaos of the Lorenzo Amaya Brigade, the cruelty of common criminals, would fall upon them like a hammer if they even thought about doing anything subversive.

Longoria would have enjoyed this work more if they permitted him to wear his uniform. He didn't see why he couldn't wear his chevrons. Politicians and generals made these decisions without thinking about the impact on morale. What sort of message was that to send to the fighting men? To say, in effect, that these tasks were so despicable you couldn't wear your uniform when you did them?

In the beginning he tried to approach the job with professionalism. He planned the actions thoroughly, staked out locations, double-checked intelligence. The work had a secret-agent quality. There were dossiers filled with photographs and classified documents, G-2 files, transcripts of wire-tapped conversations, newspaper clippings. Together the documents formed a portrait of a person and the particular problem this person presented: agitation, suspected weapons cache, guerrilla cell, defaming the army, trade union activity, and so on. You had to look over the dossier and sort out the series of minor and major obstacles the assignment entailed. There were details of daily life, habits and patterns, the routes people took to work and school, the addresses and phone numbers of relatives, mistresses, acquaintances, friends. The information in each dossier required a series of tactical decisions.

Longoria made all the decisions. He liked the sound of his voice when he gave an order. “Kick him! Get him on the ground! Look out for his teeth or he'll bite you! Pin him! His arm! Grab his arm!”

But no matter how much planning Longoria did, something always seemed to go wrong. It was hard enough to keep the four Lorenzo Amayas in one room without two or three of them breaking into a fistfight, flailing away and pulling at each other's hair. He thought about ordering them to get their heads shaved, but he wasn't sure they would obey, and headquarters might not like the idea anyway. Headquarters was a mysterious place. It did not seem right that they spent years training him to be a good soldier and then rewarded him by packing him off with thieves.

The whole situation, and his inability to escape it, frustrated him. Abductions were not easy work. The inevitable public screaming began to grate on him. After months of these disappearances he could tell which ones would be screamers just by the look on their faces when they first saw him, in that moment when the vision of him, the implication of his tennis shoes and his submachine gun and the thugs behind him, was still sinking in, that first moment when they thought Longoria might be something from a dream.