The Tattooed Soldier (12 page)

The first thing Antonio noticed about the park itself was the green lake that never moved or breathed, a resting place for discarded bottles and condoms, a liquid trash can. A lawn rose around the water's edge in a steep incline, people arranged on the crabgrass like spectators in an amphitheater. The grass itself was marked with long scars, the tread marks of police patrol cars in hot pursuit of a suspect.

Antonio took one step into the park and tried to remember what he was thinking when he decided to come here. This was where people came to relax, and he needed to relax too, to forget and unwind. But everything about the park defied leisure. He had wanted to sit on the grass, but the grass was yellow and dying. The benches were occupied by a variety of anemic souls on the verge of unconsciousness. He watched a blond woman with a pus white complexion rocking on the bench as if she were trying to put herself to sleep.

“Why are we here?” José Juan complained. “It's a waste of time.”

Antonio thought about the question. “It's better than being at the camp,” he said finally. “I'm tired of the smell of all those drunks.”

“But this place is filthy too.”

“There are families here. It's the families that I like. The babies and the mothers. See?”

Antonio pointed to a woman who was walking along the narrow asphalt path that wound around the lake with an infant in her arms. Parents, girlfriends, lovers—all the “normal” people were walking around the park at a moderate pace, slowly enough to revel in the illusion of a pleasant stroll by the lakeside, fast enough to avoid being accosted by one of the men lounging on the grass. After a moment Antonio and José Juan joined the pedestrian flow behind two women pushing strollers and a
norteño
father with a baby on his shoulders, in shiny new cowboy boots.

Antonio and José Juan stepped around an amputee who had planted himself in the center of the path. A little on they encountered a grandfatherly man wearing a baggy charcoal gray suit and carrying a bulky camera. He tried to interest them in a portrait, pointing to a sandwich board covered with sample photographs and the words “
Retratos: Sólo $2.
”

“
Por favor
, let me take your picture,” he pleaded.

Antonio had no money but tried to look as if he were considering the offer. All the photographs were at least fifteen years old, he guessed from the hairstyles and clothes, which belonged to a time he did not recognize, long before he came to this country. He looked closer and saw that in this distant age the park grass was greener and the palm trees were free of graffiti. Small boats floated on the lake.

“
No, gracias, hermano
,” Antonio said to the photographer. The old man turned away, muttering to himself as if he had been cheated.

They drifted toward the small playground in the northern half of the park, a patch of sand with a set of swings, a slide, and a simple merry-go-round bearing two boys who were pumping their brown legs into the heavy sand like tiny acrobats. They spun too fast and fell in a splash of sand and laughter.

Every morning, mothers streamed down to the playground from the old brownstones in the neighborhoods that ringed the park. They came because they were tired of being locked inside their apartments all day, afraid of a neighborhood of criminal horrors where even the sidewalks were thick with graffiti. So they took a deep breath and held their sons and daughters tightly by the hand, eyes focused straight ahead until they reached the park and the children could finally run free. Now they stood guard around the sandbox, twentyish Mexicanas and Centroamericanas in jeans and T-shirts, single women who had just stepped into modernity, whose stance told everyone that they were far from home and wouldn't be pushed around by men any longer.

Antonio had reached a sanctuary, an oasis of everyday life. Leaning on the waist-high fence that circled the playground, taking in the sounds of the children, he could imagine himself a father again, watching his two-year-old son spin on the merry-go-round, jump off the swings. For a moment he lived in a fantasy free of loss and regret. Then one of the mothers gave him a dirty look, as if she thought he might be a child molester simply because he was wearing grungy clothes and smiling at young children.

Turning away from the woman's stare, Antonio saw that José Juan had fallen asleep on the grass behind him, his arm thrown across his eyes, his mouth a pink circle open to the sky. Antonio looked at the adults gathered on the lawns around the playground. Men with Cuban accents stood in a circle throwing dice on a patch of dirt. Next to them were five stone tables with chessboards painted on the surface. A dozen spectators had gathered around the seated chess players, their eyes fixed on the boards, the plastic pieces, the silent confrontations. The faces of so many men locked in concentration seemed to hold the promise of intellectual stimulation, something Antonio had been missing lately. He left José Juan asleep on the grass and walked toward the chess players.

Most of the men were in their fifties and sixties; they wore dark clothes and smoked cigars and coughed too much. It seemed like a club, a group of intimates. Not wanting to intrude, Antonio took in the action from a polite distance, standing ten feet from the nearest table. Four games were going on at once, but most of the attention was focused on one of the older players and a man in his late twenties or early thirties, with full lips, a long, narrow nose, and cropped hair cut nearly to the whiteness of his scalp. Everyone else was in sweaters and coats, but the younger chess player was wearing a navy blue T-shirt that clung to his muscular frame. A soldier, Antonio told himself. They get their heads shaved when they're in the army, and they never change. Antonio had seen men of his ilk here before, the former soldiers who were now drug dealers, criminals, and hustlers of all sorts.

The younger player lifted his left arm and picked up a chess piece. One of the spectators shook his head, disagreeing with the tactics. For several seconds the man's bare arm was suspended above the table while he decided whether to move his rook. He finally put the rook down, then propped his chin in his hand to await the other player's response. The arm was raised just long enough for Antonio to make out the tattoo of a yellow animal.

*   *   *

Longoria had never come this close to winning. The other players stopped their games to gather around his table. An audience had formed, half a dozen men looking over his shoulder, watching him, stroking their chins, staring at the board as if it might be some sort of mirage. It seemed they were about to witness a historic victory. Longoria had reached the endgame and was ahead by a bishop and a rook. For once García looked worried.

Concentrate. Be careful not to make a mistake, but remember to attack.

Longoria was moving in for the kill. He set down his rook on the penultimate row, two moves away from the final trap.

“Oh no!” someone said, and the men standing around him let out a loud collective sigh. García smiled and quickly took Longoria's rook. A few minutes later Longoria had lost his bishop too. García picked up a half-smoked cigar from the table edge and lit it in triumph.

“Well, sergeant,” he said between puffs. “It pleases me to observe that you are losing once again.”

Longoria lifted his eyes from the board and looked for help. The two men standing behind García were shaking their heads, clearly losing interest now. On the lawn to the left of the tables, another man was standing on the grass, staring at Longoria in a peculiar way. He looked like someone from Guatemala. An innocent, provincial, friendly kind of face, the face of someone you feel sorry for because you know they're Guatemalan and thus gullible and luckless by definition, the whole host of things Guatemalans are famous for.
Una cara que da lástima.
Longoria turned his attention back to the board.

*   *   *

The recognition seeped into Antonio's consciousness through layers of disbelief and confusion, finally registering with great clarity, the light-flash of truth. After so many years, the soldier from San Cristóbal, the killer of Elena and Carlos, was sitting right here in front of him playing chess, just a few feet away.

The son of a bitch is in Los Angeles.

It seemed so incredible Antonio wanted to laugh out loud. Then, for an instant, his mind reversed course. The tattoo and the face were so familiar they could only be an illusion. How many times had Elena appeared to him in his dreams, caressing him in his sleep? How many times had he seen Elena's face in the features of a passing stranger, his heart racing with impossible hope, all the pain lifted for an instant, until the mirage dissolved. And yet this tattooed soldier had never appeared in any of his dreams. Antonio had never seen him again until the moment he came to life at the chess tables.

The soldier raised his tattooed arm to rub his temple while he studied the board. He looked perplexed, pained, and vulnerable. He glanced up at Antonio and the other men standing around him with a plaintive expression, as if to say, What should I do, what's my next move? The shaved head bent and moved its eyes back to the board, as if the man could force his will upon the complex geometry of the game.

The longer Antonio looked at this man, the sharper the memory became. In San Cristóbal, all those years ago, in another park, not so different from this one, while Antonio waited for a bus by the kiosk. The soldier on the iron bench, eating an ice cream. The blood of Elena and Carlos still sticky on the floor of the house, just a block or two away. Here was the man who cut into their flesh, painting the floor with their wounds. A box at Antonio's feet as he waited for the bus. Antonio falling, spiraling with his box, falling for many years, landing in Los Angeles. The skin had puckered around the soldier's eyes; the younger features Antonio held in memory were now molded into this other face, covered with the faintest sheen of weariness. The killer's face. Antonio spun in the flux between decades and countries, time and space distorted. He was in a park in Guatemala, a park in Los Angeles. The present, the past, somewhere in between.

There could be no doubt this was the same man.

Suddenly Antonio realized that he was not standing still, that he was shifting back and forth on his feet like a boxer, drawing attention to himself. The tattooed soldier was going to look at Antonio again and recognize him.

Instinctively Antonio took a step back. He began to tremble, the ground seeming to rise and fall underneath him.
Get on the bus, hurry. On the bus.
He was too close to this man. Once a killer, always a killer. Even the concrete table where the soldier was sitting began to look menacing, a stone animal that could come to life and swallow him whole. Antonio had to get away. He would slip off unnoticed past the pepper trees. But no, the tattooed man was not running after him; he was still sitting in front of the chessboard, he had not moved. He had only put a pawn down, raising his hand to his chin again, showing Antonio the tattoo again, as if to mock him.

You see, I am the same man. The proof is in the skin. What will you do now, refugee?

Antonio tried to catch his breath. The tattooed man did not know him.
He did not recognize me that day in San Cristóbal, so why would he remember me today?
Antonio felt exhilaration in this discovery, a falling away of his fears. The soldier would never recognize him. A girl with long braids pedaled past Antonio on a tricycle, her father just behind her on a bike much too small for him, his long legs bent awkwardly, like broken wings. They were both laughing. Antonio wasn't in Guatemala anymore. There was no reason to be afraid.

The old man sitting at the table took a satisfied puff on his cigar. “Checkmate,” he said.

 

 

PART TWO

ANTONIO AND ELENA

 

6.
A ZOO FOR THE GENERALS

 

Elena Sosa was sitting in the cafeteria at the Universidad de San Carlos when the man who would become her husband entered her life, gift in hand. She was eating alone, reading
Nicaragua Avenged
, an account of the assassination of Anastasio Somoza, thinking that the bastard got what he deserved. Immersed in the gory details of the dictator's demise—he was blown up by bazooka-wielding guerrillas—she did not notice as her future mate walked across the linoleum floor and sat down at her table.

“Elena, I bought this for you, I hope you'll like it,” he said.

Startled, she looked up from her reading and saw a nervous young man with round-frame glasses, a hardcover crimson book in his outstretched hand, beads of perspiration on his forehead. He was in one of her anthropology classes. She had talked to him three, maybe four times. It took a moment, but then she remembered his name. Antonio.

“The other day, in the seminar on Quiché rituals, you were talking about how you'd love to learn the language,” he explained. “So when I saw this in the bookstore, I thought of you. I thought you might like it. You don't have one already, do you?”

Elena took the book and examined the title:
Bilingual Dictionary of the Quiché and Spanish Languages
, printed in gold leaf on the cover. By Dr. Francisco Trujillo, Universidad de Sevilla. It must have cost him a fortune. She opened it and looked at the columns of words from the ancient Mayan language, the exotic glottal sounds and their Spanish equivalents.
Baatz
': spider monkey.
Balam
: jaguar. A yellow ribbon, a place marker, dangled from the spine. She flipped to the Cs, and a scent like wet cement drifted upward from the newly printed pages.

What sort of boy would give an expensive gift to a girl he hardly knew? She was touched by his kindness, but also a little embarrassed for him. “It's the most beautiful book I've ever seen,” she said.