The Tattooed Soldier (15 page)

As the day passed and word of Teodoro's death spread, people came by to offer their condolences, as if she were a widow. They all thought that Teodoro had left her and that she still carried a torch that would burn even brighter now that he was gone. Each visitor added another layer to the story of Teodoro's last hours. They sat in her tiny living room and talked to fill the silence because Elena didn't know what to say.

“After the soldiers took him away, his mother went to the police station to ask if they had her son, and they laughed at her,” María Teresa, her friend from the anthropology department, told her. “Those pigs.
Animales.
You know how they are.”

Teodoro's torturers put a
capucha
on his head, María Teresa had heard, a bag full of caustic chemicals that singe your lungs. She recounted more details, with a detached, morbid fascination. “His brother said they found cigarette burns and machete cuts.”

Next to arrive was Agustín, a former suitor and the current treasurer of the student association. “Teodoro was completely surprised when they showed up at the door. He didn't even try to run away.” Agustín tried to bite his nails, but there was nothing at the tips of his fingers but pink flesh. “They knocked him to the ground. They grabbed him by the shirt and dragged him down the street.”

Agustín was afraid of being arrested, but he was going to stay in Guatemala City anyway, lying low, hiding out somewhere.

“Teodoro went down like a brave man,” Agustín said. “That's what everyone is saying. He didn't lose his dignity—if it's possible to maintain your dignity in such a situation. They say his tongue swelled up from the tortures. He could barely talk toward the end.”

Elena wondered about the source of all this information, how people could know so much about something that supposedly happened in the darkness of clandestine jails.

Pedro Lara, one of the most radical members of the student association, arrived in tan slacks, penny loafers, and a blue sports coat, as if he were on his way to a dinner engagement, and kissed Elena on the cheek. “I came to say goodbye.” He was going to Mexico that very evening, into exile. Given the circumstances, he seemed unusually calm, as if he had been expecting this moment for a long time. “At this point I'll be more useful to the movement outside Guatemala. If I stay here, let's face it, they'll probably kill me. They might show up anytime. I'm even worried about how I'm going to get to the airport.”

He lit a cigarette and lowered his voice to a whisper. “People are worried about what Teodoro might have said. No one would even suggest, of course, that he betrayed the movement. But believe me, Elena, it's in the back of everyone's mind.” He paused to let this thought sink in and looked her in the eye. She revealed nothing.

“Think of all the names he carried in his head,” Pedro continued, “everyone he knew, everyone in the student association. They say you'll give up your own mother if they turn up the electroshocks high enough. We're helpless in the face of these barbarians.”

Pedro had talked to someone who was in a cell next to Teodoro, a student who had been taken the same day but for some reason was released. The student heard Teodoro crying for his mother. Every time they hit Teodoro he would say, “I'm sorry, I'm sorry.”

Pedro put out his cigarette, embraced Elena one last time, and said that if there was any justice in this world they would see each other again when Guatemala was liberated. Maybe in five years.

“Be careful, Elena. They might have your name. Teodoro might have told them you were one of the leaders even though you weren't.”

Before she could argue, before she could say that Teodoro would never betray her, Pedro was gone.

The next day Teodoro's picture appeared in the paper, one column wide, the size of a passport photograph. The headline read: “Student President at National Univ., 3 others, dead; 6 missing.” The picture was at least four years old, pimply skin smoothed out by a generous photographer's airbrush. He was wearing a suit and tie and looked like a teenager going to church on Sunday, not like the man she knew.

She cut out the picture and tucked it into the corner of the framed Sacred Heart of Jesus, the forlorn Christ with the pulsating organ in his hand. She prayed a novena, nine Hail Marys in a row, three for Teodoro with the
capucha
, struggling to breathe, three for the Teodoro who apologized to his torturers, three for the Teodoro who left this world without hands. He was in Purgatory, and her prayers would help him pass through to Heaven. Silly beliefs she learned from her aunt, but it seemed like a time for faith. She lit a candle and left a glass of water by the picture so that Teodoro could replenish himself while his soul was stranded in the world of in-between.

*   *   *

She met Antonio in front of the Chinese restaurant and french-kissed him right there, reaching up on tiptoes to meet his lips. He seemed a little startled; after all, they were on a crowded sidewalk across the street from a sad little park filled with ice cream carts, retirees, and blind vendors of lottery tickets. A shoeshine boy standing nearby smiled at them, teeth like a white beacon in a face blackened by shoe polish.

Elena wrapped her arms around Antonio and buried her face in his neck. Just touching him was a release, a lifting of burdens.

She began to tell him about Teodoro but paused, surprised by his look of pale sleeplessness, a numbness that mirrored her own. She led him into the restaurant, and they sat down in one of the booths.

“What's wrong,
amor
?” she asked.
“¿Qué te pasa?”

He looked at the table and rubbed his temples, his fingers moving in quick circles.

“Tell me,” she insisted.

“Gonzalo,” he said finally. “He's disappeared. They took him from the university.”

Another blow. Anyone could be picked up, at any time, from any place.
A poison cloud is swallowing the people around me.
Who would be next?

The death squad abducted Gonzalo at the campus bus stop by the Faculty of Architecture—the same bus stop where Elena and Antonio had first talked. A slate-colored Jeep pulled up and disgorged four armed men in civilian clothes. There were six or seven people at the bus stop, but one of the armed men had a picture in his hand. Like Teodoro, Gonzalo was caught completely by surprise. They grabbed him and threw his books to the ground. For two days his parents had been making the rounds of the police stations, army bases, hospitals, even the morgue.

“I helped him edit
Provocaciones
a few times,” Antonio said. He narrowed his eyes, as if he were trying to find meaning in a story that had none. “He filled it with revolutionary poetry because that's what people submitted. Everyone at the university wants to write about love and revolution. Sometimes people get carried away and throw in a line about the armed struggle. But they're just words.” He rubbed his forehead, squeezed his temples.

“They're probably torturing him right now, this very second. They're going to kill him because they want the names of the poets,” Antonio said loudly enough for everyone in the restaurant to hear. “They're going to kill him because he won't tell them. Because he has too much honor.”

Elena reached across the table and squeezed his hands; she could feel the pulse in his fingers.
“Calmate, amor.”

“What's happening to our country?”

Antonio wore that childlike look of distress and tragic loss that had become so familiar these past few days. Everyone she knew had come to wear this face. She was a member of a generation perpetually in mourning, a generation whose brazen voice had faded to a somber whisper. Obituaries for teenagers and men-boys, condolences for twenty-year-old widows.

She placed her fingers on his lips. “Antonio, please, no more sadness today. No more news.”

Suddenly the restaurant felt like a coffin. Without a word Elena stood up and led Antonio outside into the searing midday light.

“Can you still get your father's car?” She had remembered that this was the afternoon of their planned escape in the Volkswagen.

He nodded.

“Good, let's go somewhere, right now,” she said, her voice rising with excitement. “Let's not wait. Let's leave the city for a few hours. I want to imagine we live in another country for an afternoon. I want to be alone with you. I want to be happy today.”

She looked into his eyes, red behind the round disks of his glasses.

“I want to feel alive.”

*   *   *

The Volkswagen struggled up the steep hills on the outskirts of the city. The engine sputtered, and even the overcrowded buses sped past them, baskets of food and produce stacked on the roofs, passengers clinging to the doorways, a thick cloud of diesel fumes billowing from the rear. This was the main road out of the capital, a winding four-lane highway rising from the crowded city to the countryside, a panorama of coffee plantations and patchwork cornfields growing on steep hillsides. Elena watched the city disappearing in the valley below.
Let Teodoro's memory fade with the city. Let it shrink away. I am not his widow. I loved him once but he is part of my past.

Antonio's plan was to drive to Lake Amatitlán, pull onto one of the side roads at the far end, and find a secluded place to park. They were just a kilometer or so from the lake when traffic began to slow. There was some sort of checkpoint up ahead: the National Police, three officers in sky blue shirts and navy pants, loose belts of rifle cartridges dangling from their waists.

When Antonio reached the checkpoint he handed his identity documents and the car registration to an officer with a thin Hitler mustache of the type still worn by many older men in Guatemala's provinces. The officer leaned against the Volkswagen's door and looked down at the open leather wallet on Antonio's lap. “What's that?” he asked. Antonio's student identification card had caught his eye.

“Step out of the car,” the officer said in a voice that was neither threatening nor polite.

Antonio opened the door and stood on the asphalt road, avoiding the officer's eyes.

“So, you're a student.” The officer waved the identification card as if it were contraband. “That nest of troublemakers.”

“I'm a literature student,
jefe.
That's all.”

“This car isn't registered in your name.” He turned to one of the other officers, a man holding a rifle, the barrel pointing to the sky. “
Sargento
, this guy's one of those troublemaker Marxists from the university.”

Elena's heart began to race. They were going to take Antonio away, right here, while she watched. They were going to drag him into that police car, and she would never see him again. And it was all her fault; she had talked him into coming here because she wanted to make love to him.

“It's my father's car,” Antonio was saying as he pointed to the document in the officer's hand. “See, it has the same last name.”

The police officers wore pins on their uniforms with little quetzal birds. They were letting the other cars pass through. All three of them were gathered around Antonio, staring contemptuously at this university student who had been so bold as to wander into their checkpoint.

“What are you doing here?” the officer with the rifle asked. “This is an area of guerrilla activity. Did you know that? See if this son of a bitch is carrying any weapons in his car.”

The officer with the mustache opened the Volkswagen's front hood. He asked Elena to step outside while he checked underneath the seats. Finding nothing of interest, he told her to get back inside.

“This car is not registered in your name,” he repeated, and shoved Antonio toward the patrol car. Antonio was a foot taller than the policemen, but he looked small and helpless as they pushed him down into the back seat. Elena could see the back of his head, and then he turned around to look at her and she caught his brown eyes, sad and doomed. His lips moved silently, forming the words “Don't worry.” While the officer with the rifle leaned in to talk to him, the third officer opened the patrol car's front door and sat down, pulling his hat over his face. Elena could see Antonio shrugging his shoulders and opening his arms in a gesture of exasperation. The officer stepped away from the patrol car and walked over to the Volkswagen.

“So are you going to take care of this, or what?” he asked Elena. “Your boyfriend says he doesn't have any money.”

Elena breathed a sigh a relief: they wanted a bribe. Suddenly the situation was familiar, understandable, part of the natural order of things. The National Police were always looking to make a little extra money on the side. She reached into her purse and produced a twenty-quetzal bill. The officer frowned and went to consult his partners. A moment later he waddled back toward Elena and the Volkswagen.

“Ten quetzales more.”

“I only have five.”

He took the money, and in no time Antonio was stepping out of the patrol car. The policemen patted him on the back, smiling as if it had all been an unfortunate misunderstanding.

“Be more careful next time,
licenciado
,” the officer with the rifle said with a wink.

Antonio started the Volkswagen and drove off without saying a word. They were a good mile or so down the road when he started to laugh, a strange, manic sound.

“I thought they were going to shoot me. I really thought they were going to shoot me!”

“Those crooks,” Elena said. “That big show, and all they wanted was a bribe.”

Antonio guided the car off the main highway. They were on a hillside overlooking the lake, a tourist spot that had fallen into decay when the government built an oil-burning power plant on the shore. Dilapidated weekend homes rose on tall stilts at the water's edge. The Volkswagen moved onto the rough surface of a dirt road, and they came to a bend covered by the canopy of a thick grove of trees.