The Tattooed Soldier (13 page)

The nervous young man broke into a wide smile. This Antonio was abnormally tall for a Guatemalan, but not quite settled into his body, a recent inductee into the fraternity of manhood.

“I'm glad you like it,” he said.

After an awkward silence Elena flipped the pages of the book to the Spanish side and looked up “
gracias.
” She reached over, gave him a demure kiss on the cheek, and took great delight in saying, “
Qamov!
”

That night she carried the dictionary around at home, leafing through it when she did her chores, pronouncing words, resisting the sarcastic remarks of her father, who said he couldn't think of anything more useless than to learn a language “only a few barefoot Indians can speak.” Elena wasn't one to care much what her father said. She'd always done things her own way, a trait her father claimed she'd inherited from her mother, who died just hours after Elena was born. Her father had always told her to avoid political movements, so she brought home revolutionary leaflets and left them scattered around the house in the most conspicuous places. Her two sisters always stayed out of the sun, lest their cinnamon complexions darken; Elena became a sun worshiper, lounging in the tiny backyard in a bathing suit, setting up her lawn chair and towel not far from her father's small chicken coop. Her sisters shook their heads and called her a crazy woman, a
chiflada.

“I want to be brown,” she told them with a defiant smirk. “I want to be brown and dark like the earth.”

After their next Quiché seminar Antonio sought her out once more, an act that seemed to require great courage on his part. Short of breath from running to catch up with her, he was perspiring again. They spoke as she walked to the campus bus stop past the Faculty of Architecture, its powder blue walls covered with revolutionary graffiti that promised, among other things, “Unconditional Support for the Popular Struggle!” They went past a two-story mural of an ape wearing an army uniform complete with medals and epaulets, the painted banner at the foot of the wall declaring, “A Zoo for the Generals, Power for the People.”

“It seems to me that the Quiché language is indispensable to us, that every Guatemalteco should learn it,” Antonio was saying. “The language of the Maya is in our blood, after all. We can't deny it. It's who we are, where we come from.”

She watched him as he walked, this man she had ignored up to now, and decided he was not bad-looking, even if the hair on his upper lip was trying a little too hard to be a mustache. There was a gentleness to him; he seemed untouched by the harshness and arrogance that had contaminated the rest of the male species on campus. He was bookish but not without charm, and was obviously infatuated with her. Why hadn't she noticed him before?

“I think you're being overly romantic,” she said as they reached the bus stop. “I agree, it's important to know about our indigenous roots, but let's not romanticize the past. After all, the Mayans practiced human sacrifice.”

He made a point of agreeing with her: “Of course, of course.”

They talked for about fifteen minutes, discussing
indigenismo
and the Guatemalan novelist Miguel Ángel Asturias—long enough for Elena to conclude that he was not quite the hapless boy he seemed when he approached her with his gift. “Thank you for the dictionary,” she said as her bus pulled up to the stop. “I read it every day. It's the most practical thing anyone's ever given me. I really do treasure it.”

She boarded the bus and took a seat. To her surprise, Antonio was still standing on the sidewalk, looking up at her with a smile. She waved and mouthed, “
Adiós.
”

“
Liyik!
” he shouted as the bus began to roll away. “Look it up! It means peace!”

*   *   *

Antonio could not have been more different from the men Elena had known before. All of her boyfriends had been revolutionaries, organizers of boisterous protests, makers of eloquent speeches. Ernesto Sanchez, her first boyfriend ever, was also the one responsible for her political awakening. He was a short, curly-headed man with a thick mustache and one long bushy eyebrow, his chest and even his back covered with a forest of black hair. When Ernesto spoke, Elena could see Guatemala's future in the narrow slits of his brown eyes, a just nation, the country she wanted to live in, a country without open sewers and barefoot children begging on the streets. He assigned words to ideas that she had long understood but never heard spoken. He had shelves of books that explained all the poverty and injustice her family and her country suffered, books with titles like
Open Veins of Latin America
and
Guatemala: Occupied Country.

It was Ernesto who introduced her to the language of the revolution, who taught her the meaning of terms like “proletariat” and “organic struggle.” He pronounced the words “
revolución
” and “
pueblo
” in a smooth, aphrodisiac baritone. They made love in his apartment nearly every afternoon for three months, in a bedroom lined with dusty, allergy-inducing tomes, including a twenty-volume bound set of the collected works of V. I. Lenin. And then he left for Costa Rica, driven into exile when his name appeared on a list of “subversives” targeted for death by the “Lorenzo Amaya Anti-Communist Brigade,” two days after he had made a now legendary speech calling the army chief of staff “goat face.” From exile he wrote her letters that gradually diminished in both frequency and passion, until they finally stopped coming altogether, just four months after he'd gone away. Rumor had it that Ernesto had found himself a Costa Rican girlfriend.

Her most recent boyfriend, Teodoro Pereira, was the current president of the student association. She had dropped him after discovering that he was dating at least one other woman, maybe two. Every time she heard him open his mouth at a rally or a march, she muttered “
hipócrita
” under her breath. He'd make an angry speech against the suspension of civil liberties, then lie to her a few moments later about where he was last Wednesday afternoon, making up some pitiful excuse, saying he was at such-and-such meeting when she knew full well he was off somewhere with Filomena or María or Teresa.

“Teodoro, I can't tolerate this anymore,” she told her lover during their final confrontation. “You make a fool of me and every woman who is blind enough to fall under your influence.”

Teodoro looked stunned, and for a moment genuinely hurt. He gave her a theatrical pout. But when Elena wouldn't buy this act, he slipped into a sly grin, the look of a boy caught stealing cookies.

“I treat women the same way I treat everyone else,” he said smoothly. “As equals.”

That was the problem with her revolutionaries: the same masculine chemical energy that made them so brave in the face of the dictatorship also drove them to distraction whenever there was a pretty woman around.

It seemed the revolution would never be free of machismo, even now that the Marxist-Leninists were gaining sway. The Leninists had begun to impose a strict bourgeois morality on the rank and file, declaring that monogamy was preferable to the dissension caused by so much incestuous cross-dating. Philandering was a serious threat to the movement because the enemy would take advantage of any kind of internal rift, so the Leninists cracked down on the Don Juans, telling them party discipline demanded that the comrades keep their pants on. But the change was only superficial: all the leadership positions, Elena had noticed, were still held by men. “This Leninism, or whatever they call it, is just the same machismo,” she told one of her women friends. “Machismo with a more serious face.”

The Leninists were gaining influence because the movement had come under violent attack. During the day, soldiers dressed as civilians came to kidnap professors and students; after the sun fell, graffiti artists worked until dawn to cover the university walls with the spray-painted names of the dead: Professor Juan Peralta, Ana Saravia, Julio Gomez Asturias.… The walls seemed to have an insatiable appetite for the names of dead students. Elena became more discreet. She stopped distributing revolutionary leaflets at the markets, and when she went to a demonstration she always tied a blue bandanna over her face, leaving only her brown eyes to display her anger.

When Antonio entered her life, Elena was ready for a change, ready to meet someone outside the movement. The old Elena might have been irritated by Antonio's quiet, obliging manner; the new Elena found it refreshing. After the storms and choppy seas of her revolutionaries, Antonio would be a calm lake of patience and thoughtfulness. And he was nice to look at, with features that were at once masculine and vaguely feminine, somewhere between the Mayan and the Spaniard. His gentleness she found erotic, hinting at untapped reservoirs of passion. She was flattered that someone this handsome would be so completely infatuated with her: she was willing to forgive herself this small vanity, which in no way could be mistaken for a revolutionary value.

After class, in their brief talks during her walk to the bus stop, she learned that even though he wasn't directly involved in campus politics, he did work on the university's literary journal,
Provocaciones
, which was edited by his friend Gonzalo.

“Of course, it's impossible to publish anything these days without touching on the social issues,” he said in a matter-of-fact tone. “At least half the submissions are political. Especially the poetry. That's what people want to write about. The revolution.”

“To tell you the truth, I haven't read your journal,” she answered. “I don't have time for such things, really. Literature is a luxury for me now. Given our economic situation, it's a luxury for the country too.”

“There always has to be room for poetry, for literature,” he insisted. “Poetry is like water. We can't live without it.”

“How can you say that? I'm surprised at you. What a petit bourgeois thing to say. It's not like water. Poetry is not like water,” she said with rising vehemence. “You can live without poetry. But without clean water, like so many of our people, that
is
impossible.”

Hours later, Elena regretted her little speech, deciding that she sounded too mean, too masculine; she blamed it on the lingering influence of Teodoro and the other revolutionaries. But to her surprise, her brief tirade had not angered Antonio; he merely raised his eyebrows, a gesture of enlightenment or amusement, she couldn't tell which. In this conversation and others, he never seemed to take offense when she disagreed with him, didn't try to prove that he was really smarter than she was, didn't seemed to feel threatened or intimidated. Once, after they had stood at the bus stop for twenty minutes talking about Quiché cosmology and the Mayan calendar, she realized that he had not once condescended to her. Here was a man who was more inclined to listen than to argue.

Finally they went out on a formal date—at Elena's suggestion. They had dinner at a Chinese restaurant and talked about Federico García Lorca and Russian literature, his favorite topics. She told him she was surprised that someone as reserved as he was would be drawn to the sensuality of García Lorca. “Really, Antonio, all that suppressed sex. The jealousy, the passionate love. It doesn't seem like you.” He blushed and quickly changed the subject, saying how tragic it was that a man as talented as García Lorca died when he was just thirty-eight years old, shot by Franco's Falangists. “He had his best writing ahead of him.”

All of his fervor was for books. Antonio said he had learned about politics through literature, by reading Steinbeck and Upton Sinclair and the Mexican novelist José Revueltas, among others. “That's interesting,” Elena responded, “because I did things the other way around. I discovered literature and art through politics.” Her Marxist boyfriends had given her revolutionary poetry to read, like
Vamos Patria a Caminar
, by Otto René Castillo, the Guatemalan writer turned guerrilla fighter who was one of the movement's first martyrs.

Antonio had signed up for the class on Quiché rituals to better understand the
Popol Vuh
, the Quiché Mayan book of creation, which he called “the very first book in Guatemalan literature.”

“Your friends might not think that reading the
Popol Vuh
is a revolutionary act, but I do,” he said. “People talk about honoring our Mayan past, but how many really do it, how many take the time to understand our roots. To feel the Indian in us. Hardly anyone. Even among all these revolutionary students, to call someone
indio
is still an insult.”

Antonio was smart, but like so many other men, he needed a woman to take care of him. His glasses were usually dirty, covered with dust: she was tempted to reach up, pull the circular disks off his face, and wipe them clean so she could see his copper eyes without having to look through those spotted lenses. His height made him somewhat clumsy, like an adolescent after a growth spurt. It occurred to Elena that she could take this tall man, who was still almost a boy, and mold him into the lover she had always wanted. He would be beautiful, intelligent, respectful, and passionate, and he would never lie to her. She would buy him new clothes to replace his faded slacks, those unbecoming windbreakers. She would train him in politics, teach him everything he needed to know.

“Let's stop by the university,” she said one afternoon as they embarked on another date. “There's something I want to show you.”

It was a Sunday. No students walked on the green lawns, no one filtered in and out of the powder blue buildings. Only the graffiti-covered walls spoke, announcing the coming proletarian revolution to flocks of birds plucking insects from the grass. She took him to the Faculty of Accounting. Turning the corner of the building, she pointed with an outstretched hand. “This is what I wanted to show you. They just finished it yesterday.” A huge mural of Che Guevara rose above them, curls streaming from beneath his red-star beret, his face rippling across the wall. Eyes that conveyed a Christ-like kindness, a father looking down approvingly at his Guatemalan children.