The Tattooed Soldier (23 page)

“Don't be so rude!”

When Antonio's feet touched the sidewalk, he looked to his right just in time to see the soldier step into a storefront a few yards away from the bus bench. Not daring to follow him inside, Antonio stopped in front of two large plate-glass windows. Above them, on a sky blue wall decorated with painted flags of the five Central American republics, ran a series of yellow letters.

EL PULGARCITO EXPRESS

YOUR PACKAGE TO CENTROAMERICA IN TWO DAYS!

RELIABLE SERVICE WITH THAT TOUCH OF HOME

BECAUSE WE'RE CENTROAMERICANOS LIKE YOU!

*   *   *

Longoria wandered away from the chess tables, half wanting to challenge the old man to another game even though it would make him late for work. To come so close and then lose because of a stupid mistake! Longoria would have won but for a single move when he allowed his concentration to slip. At least he could revel in having kept García on the defensive until the very end. Longoria's game was improving, García admitted as much during their brief postmortem of the match. “You gave me a little scare, sergeant.” Sooner or later Longoria would beat him.

He walked to the bus stop. Checking his watch, he paused to see if the street vendors had anything interesting, perhaps some music Reginalda might like. There was one singer who was her favorite, an effeminate Mexican. What was his name? Longoria couldn't remember.

The buses didn't come as often on Sunday, and he wasn't surprised to find a large crowd waiting at the stop, girls in dresses and patent leather shoes, women carrying black purses, people going to or coming from church. The ride to work would be slow, plenty of time for him to go over the game in his head again. Maybe he should start writing down his moves like the grandmasters did, so that he would have a record later of what he had done right and what had gone wrong.

There was no one waiting in line when he entered the lobby of El Pulgarcito, so he went back to what was called “the sorting room.” He found Carlos Avilés there, sitting at a large table. The office manager had a stack of opened letters before him.

“Hey, Longoria, I got a real good one here, take a look,” he said, holding up a photograph, a letter, and a torn envelope. “See? She's in a bathing suit.
Qué chula
.” He made a loud kissing sound. “If you see this woman come in here again, let me know. I want to talk to her. I'll tell her it's a waste for her to be saving herself for some fool who's so far away.”

He returned the photograph and letter to the envelope, sealing it with tape from a dispenser he kept on his desk for this purpose. The tape was running low.

El Pulgarcito's customers were rarely suspicious when their letters arrived in El Salvador, Honduras, or Guatemala with the backs torn open and resealed with tape. They assumed army intelligence or the national police opened the letters, just like they tapped the phones and spied on the priests during sermons.

Carlos too said he opened the letters “in the interest of national security.” It was common knowledge that more than a few former guerrillas lived in Los Angeles, and Carlos said it infuriated him to think that these subversives might use El Pulgarcito to transmit messages back home. There was a war going on in El Salvador, and you had to seek out the enemy wherever you might find him. Carlos sat with his lanky frame hunched over the gray steel table and peered through his reading glasses for any hint of leftist sympathies, any word or phrase that suggested belief in secularism, land reform, or raising the minimum wage. Then he copied the names of the suspected subversives on a legal pad that was always lost the next day.

Most of all Carlos was interested in doing as little work as possible. He took three-hour lunches and left Longoria in charge. Longoria, in turn, tried to leave as much work as he could to Yanira. During the morning hours, when business was slow, he liked to slip into the back and read the opened letters.

Carlos yawned, pushed back the green-skinned swivel chair, and announced that he was taking an early lunch. After he left, Longoria settled into the chair and picked up one of the dozen or so letters spread out on the table. It was addressed to a Gonzalo Venegas in the city of San Pedro Sula, Honduras.

They disconnected my telephone because I owed $400 in long-distance calls. So now I have to write to you. There has been some bad news recently. Your cousin Williams was burned in an accident at work. He was putting on a roof and he got burned real bad all over the arms. Hot tar fell on him. I visited him at the county hospital and he is very, very depressed. They have him in a room with six other people and it smells very bad there. I was surprised to see this. The place was as bad as the hospital back home. I tried to cheer him up the best I could. But you know how he is. You can't tell him anything because he's always in a foul mood. And now this. You should write to him, or call him as soon as possible. I have never seen him so depressed.

Big deal, Longoria thought. We've all got problems. Stop whining, who cares about your friend's accident. He picked up the next letter, the address written in a hurried, barely legible script. It was headed for El Salvador.

Well, here's the shampoo you asked me for. It says “medicated” on the bottle so I guess this is the right one. I don't see what the fuss is with this shampoo. It cost me $20 to send this package. I hope you realize this. $20 is not a little money, not even here. We're not all rich here, you know. I can't believe you couldn't find it anywhere in San Salvador. If you had looked a little harder I might have saved these $20.

Poor man, to be persecuted by such a wife. Longoria had to deal with equally unreasonable requests from Reginalda, who thought he could get any package to El Salvador overnight, for free, because he worked at El Pulgarcito.

Longoria turned to an envelope addressed in a neat, roundish female hand to Zona 7 in Guatemala City.

I have never been so bored in my entire life. Six days a week I spend cooped up in this house, my love, looking after their little boy. His name is Jason and he is a brat,
muy malcriado
, two years old and a real terror. All I can do is read and read to pass the time. At least the couple is nice to me. She works in a museum and I haven't figured what he does yet. My English is getting better now. (If only I had taken that English class when I was still in the university. What a mistake it was to take French instead! That's what I get for being a romantic.) There is a chance I might be able to get a job at a department store downtown. Pray for me to be liberated from this boredom.

In the meantime, please, please send me a good book to read in Spanish. Any Miguel Ángel Asturias you can get a hold of would be much appreciated. (Except
El Señor Presidente
, which I did manage to find here.) I am going crazy in this place. Won't you please come to rescue me?

Con Amor,

Graciela

P.S. I took my first driving lesson last Sunday. Aren't you proud of me?!

There was something Longoria liked about this Graciela. He felt sorry for her, trapped in a stranger's house, stuck in a job beneath her obvious intelligence. “Won't you please come to rescue me?” The return address on the letter was just four or five blocks from the office. He could teach Graciela to drive. He was sure he would know this woman if he saw her on the street. He was about to copy her address onto a sheet of yellow paper when he heard Yanira calling him from the front counter.

“Longoria, I need you up here. There's too many people in line. I need help.”

He left Graciela's letter on the table and forgot about it as soon as he went out front and saw a half-dozen people waiting impatiently. For some reason an old woman at the back of the line caught his attention. She was at least seventy, and Longoria wondered if she knew exactly how ridiculous she looked in that yellow sweatshirt that said “So Many Men, So Little Time.” Grandmothers should comport themselves with more dignity. Of course, she probably didn't know what the sweatshirt said; she probably didn't speak, much less read, a word of English.

The woman in the yellow sweatshirt moved forward in the line. She wore her salt-and-pepper hair in a long braid, and her neck was a gathering of loose cinnamon skin. An Indian, unmistakably Guatemalteca. Now she was giving Longoria a strange look, staring at him across the room. What was it about old women that they were not afraid to look you right in the eye? The baggy sweatshirt hung over a faded print skirt—hand-me-downs she might have had even before she came to Los Angeles, because of all those stores in Guatemala City that sold used American clothing by the kilo. Longoria thought she looked like a Cachiquel Indian, the ones who started causing all the trouble around Sololá. Longoria was from Huehuetenango, a good two hours from Sololá by bus, but he knew the Cachiquel people because the army had once sent him to the area for a six-month stint.

When the old woman finally made it to the counter, Longoria looked at the envelope she was mailing and saw an address in Santa Lucía Utlatlán, a little
aldea
in the department of Sololá named for the patron saint of the blind. Longoria congratulated himself.
I haven't lost my touch, I can still tell a Cachiquel from a Mam from a Quiché.
This was not an easy thing to do. It was a useful skill in the army, on patrol, to be able to tell who didn't belong, who might be the rebel infiltrator, the propagandist in the bunch. The old woman opened her mouth to ask how much it would be to send the letter, and sure enough, she spoke in that heavily accented Indian Spanish that everyone in the army always laughed at, the singsong dialect of housemaids, the voice of backwardness.

Longoria was counting the bills and coins she had stacked on the counter when she reached out and grabbed his left forearm.

“
Señora
,” he said in his calmest service-sector voice. “What are you doing?”

Without answering, she began inspecting his arm like a customer inspecting a slice of beef or a melon at the market. Longoria decided that sometimes you had to humor people, especially when they were old and frail and probably senile like this woman, a grandmother in a coquettish sweatshirt.

“This mark on your skin,” she said in Spanish. “I've seen this before.”

“It's a jaguar,
señora
.”

The expression on her face changed from curiosity to horror. “You're one of those, one of those soldiers, aren't you?” She dropped his arm and grabbed his shirt and started yelling.

“
¡Matón!
Murderer!
¡Matón!
”

Longoria was so surprised that he just stood there for a moment. Then he methodically pried the woman's bony fingers from his shirt. Undaunted, she reached across the counter again and beat at his chest with her fist, tears welling in her eyes.

“What did you do to my son? Where is he? What did you do to him? Just tell me where his body is. For the love of God, where is Demetrio's body?”

“I don't know what you're talking about. I don't know any Demetrio. You're crazy. Crazy
vieja
, get out of here.”

“Where is he? I have to know.” The old woman dropped to her knees, and Longoria thought she might have a heart attack right there in the offices of El Pulgarcito Express, branch number two. She began shouting to the people waiting in line. “Don't you understand? They took Demetrio and his wife. They took Demetrio and left me with his children. I'm an old woman, and I have to take care of his children.” She looked up at Longoria. “
¡Matón!
Where is Demetrio, where is he?”

Longoria unlatched the counter door, stepped around, and tried to lift the old woman up. She started screaming at him again as she struggled in his powerful grip. Then she went limp. She was small but heavy, and she smelled sour. He was dragging her toward the door when she twisted violently and bit his forearm.

“You whore!” He dropped her to the floor. Standing over her, he swung his arm in a broad arc and slapped her across the face, the swack filling the room. There was an audible gasp from the people in line, who stared as if they would spit at him if they could get away with it. But no one moved or spoke, and for an instant Longoria felt like he was in Guatemala and he had this control over people again, the power to keep them frozen in place and silent as he walked through a room. The old woman was lying on her side, coughing softly. Longoria noticed a pebble on the floor in front of her—a tooth. Blood began to seep from her mouth. She spat a red blotch onto the white linoleum. One of the customers, a young woman, leaned down to help her.

The job wasn't supposed to be like this. After all, he was working in the service sector. The service sector was supposed to be orderly and clean. And now this old woman's blood on the white floor.

If he were still in the army, Longoria wouldn't have any qualms about hitting someone, even an old woman in an absurd sweatshirt. But he was trying to make another life now. His violent reactions belonged to a distant, black past. Now he felt ridiculous for having lost control and slapped a seventy-year-old woman.
This can only be a sign of my own weakness, my lack of internal discipline. The rules are different here. I must learn to obey the rules, just like I did in the army.

*   *   *

Antonio sat on the edge of the bus bench waiting for the soldier to emerge from El Pulgarcito Express. He watched people go in and out, entering with packages and leaving with receipts in their hands. Several buses arrived at the stop and drove off, and a blur of passengers came and went around him as the day turned from nippy morning to sun-drenched noon. The soldier did not come out, but Antonio couldn't see him through the plate-glass windows. Worried that he might have slipped away somehow, Antonio stood up abruptly and went to the door.

He saw the soldier at the counter right away, talking to a stout, dark woman. The long nose and shaved head were familiar features by now, but he looked smaller than Antonio remembered him just a few hours ago. The soldier was stone-faced, an expressionless wall against the whirling gestures of the angry woman, who was waving a yellow slip of paper in his face like a soiled rag.