The Tattooed Soldier (17 page)

*   *   *

They moved into a nineteenth-century house with chunky stone walls that were perpetually cool and clammy. Antonio's mother had rented it for them. It was spacious and airy and had a little courtyard in the middle with a fountain. Yellow and red tiles covered the floor and kept the temperature ten degrees cooler than it was outside. Elena thought she would catch a cold if she spent too much time in this house. She kept telling herself to buy some throw rugs but always forgot. The windows were huge portals with sills deep enough to hold a tray of food. She liked to open the shutters of splintering wood and sit by the window to feel the breeze, a book in hand.

Weeks passed and Elena came to know the patterns of the season, the richness of the sky and the clouds. Settling into her new life in exile, she decided that what she liked most about this otherwise desolate little settlement were its cobblestone streets, eight or nine blocks in the center of the town. The rest of the streets were dirt paths that became impassable rivers of mud or clouds of dust depending on the weather. Antonio and Elena lived on one of the paved blocks, on Tercera Avenida. The cobblestones were quaint rectangles with rounded tops, like hundreds of tiny loaves of gray bread.

After just a month or so it seemed that everyone in town knew them. She sat reading by the window, and they greeted her with
“¿Cómo está usted, Doña Elena?”
or
“Buenas tardes, Doña Elena.”
There was a sincerity to their words, a ring of unhurried cheerfulness you didn't hear in the capital. She marked the passage of time by the people who passed her window each day, mostly a parade of street vendors. There was the man who sharpened knives, the girl who sold tortillas from a basket balanced on her head, the boy who brought the newspaper, the woman who sold charcoal from a wheelbarrow that rattled as she pushed it along the cobblestones, the man who fixed shoes and announced his arrival with a long, wailing chant:
“Zapaaaaaatos. Zapaaaaaatos. Zapatos para cooooomponer.”

They smiled at her through the window and called her
doña
. She thought that she wasn't old enough to be called
doña
, that she hadn't done enough in life to earn that title of respect. Maybe after the baby was born she would have earned it.

She spent the days at home alone while Antonio worked. Her swelling womb was the factory of great shifts of emotion and disposition. Sleep could overwhelm her at any time of the morning, afternoon, or evening. She talked to few people besides Antonio and was amazed by how much she enjoyed the hours of silence. Just the sounds of the town outside to keep her company, the eyes of the polite but inquisitive neighbors, the occasional question about the baby masking other, unasked questions: “Who are you and why are you living in this town that nobody visits, not even the gringo tourists?”

They stood out, a cosmopolitan middle-class couple in a village of not more than twenty-five hundred people. In this provincial mestizo society of squat men and women, Antonio was tall, European-complected, with an intellectual air he couldn't seem to shake. Elena spoke too loudly for a woman, she was too direct: housewives in this little town were supposed to behave more demurely.

Their most persistent questioner, Mrs. Gómez, lived and worked across the street. A gray-haired woman with distrusting eyes, she smelled of vinegar and always wore the same print dress of faded blue. She ran a little bodega with a long glass-covered counter and cans of Mexican coffee and bottles of expired medicine stacked on shelves that reached to the ceiling. Three or four times a week Mrs. Gómez walked across the cobblestones to engage a reluctant Elena in conversation about the weather and similarly innocuous topics.

“I keep calling that man in Quetzaltenango, but he never brings my Bufferin and my Incaparina. How am I supposed to run a business without
mercadería?
When he gets here I'll give him a piece of my mind, that's for sure.”

It took a half-dozen or so such conversations before Mrs. Gómez finally got to the point.

“A nice day, Doña Elena, don't you think?”

“Yes, Señora Gómez. Very nice.”

“The clouds. So tall today. Have you ever seen such clouds?”

“No, Señora Gómez. Never.”

“Are the days this pretty where you come from?”

“Excuse me?”

“Well, you're not from here, right? Everyone knows that. So I wondered, are the days this pretty where you come from?”

“No. Not at all. The air is never this clear. The sky is never this blue in the capital.”

“Ah,” Mrs. Gómez said with a victorious raising of her eyebrows. “I see. Yes. They never are this clear in the capital, are they?” After a pause, ostensibly to look up at the beautiful cloud-laden San Cristóbal sky, Mrs. Gómez asked her next question.

“So, what brings you to our little town, Doña Elena? I mean, since you're a
capitalina
and all.”

Elena swallowed and tried to remember the exact wording of her much rehearsed answer.

“My husband works for the Department of Public Works. They transferred him here from the capital. A shortage of workers in Totonicapán, apparently.”

“How unlucky for him. I mean, you're both so far away from your homes. Your families.”

Elena thought she detected a sarcastic smirk on Mrs. Gómez's face. “No. Not at all. We wanted to get away from the city. Like you say, the sky is never this clear and bright in the city.”

“I see. But to be transferred from the capital to such a small town. How is it possible? A demotion, no?”

“Señora Gómez, I think you have a customer waiting. See?” Elena pointed at a boy standing in the bodega doorway, a bill and coins in his hand.

“What does
he
want?” Mrs. Gómez said with a frown.

“
Buenas tardes
, Señora Gómez.”

“Buenas tardes.”

*   *   *

It was Elena's prerogative as a middle-class woman to have someone come and help with the cleaning and the chores. For the first time in her life she had a servant, María de la Soledad, Marisol for short. She was a scrawny woman, only twenty-four years old but already the mother of four daughters.

“No sons yet,
señora
, but we're still trying. My
viejo
will keep getting me pregnant until I give him at least one son.” Elena wondered how Marisol could be so thin after having four children, the youngest eight months, but thought it would be impertinent to ask.

Marisol was a walking encyclopedia of folk wisdom about pregnancy.

“Don't cry while you're expecting, or your baby will carry sadness for the rest of his life.”

“
Caldo de pollo
makes the baby strong, but if you have too much your baby will cry at night because of the onions in the soup.”

With no one else to talk to, Elena came to rely on Marisol's advice and experience. “Marisol, I want to ask you about something,” she said one day as the servant scrubbed clothes in the washroom behind the kitchen, slapping wet fabric against a stone basin. “I'm having strange cravings. I'm craving ice. All I want is ice in my mouth. I could eat a bucket of ice. What do you suppose it means? Is it some sort of sign? Does it mean my baby will be hard and cold?”

Marisol thought for a few seconds, then looked up from the wet clothes.

“I think it means you're hot,
señora.
Don't go out in the sun so much.”

In the morning Elena and Marisol washed clothes in the stone basin and hung them on lines stretched across the small sunlit square of the inner courtyard. In the afternoon, after cooking lunch and putting dinner on the stove, after Marisol swept out the house, they would move to the cool air of the bedroom to fold the laundry. The routine repeated itself day after day. Cooking, cleaning, washing, folding. Marisol left at four and Antonio arrived home an hour later. A repetition of chores, interrupted by time for reading and letter writing.

On the day her pregnancy entered its sixth month, Elena was in the bedroom with Marisol when she heard a noise filtering in through the shuttered windows, a sandpaper sound. Feet shuffling on the cobblestone street outside. She put down the sheet she was folding and opened the shutters. Sunlight flooded the room, dust dancing in the bright beam. Leaning on the windowsill, Elena looked out and saw a barefoot boy with straight jet black hair and a cowlick. His face was blank and numb, a look of exhausted resignation. He and another boy carried two long poles on their shoulders, attached to a small table that held a pine coffin painted canary yellow and barely two feet long. They were
campesinos
, and their clothes were dusty and threadbare, once-bright colors muted by wear. The procession reached the patch of street in front of the window, and the tiny coffin floated in gentle bounces across Elena's field of vision.

“My God,” she whispered.

“What is it,
señora
?” Marisol asked anxiously behind her, looking up from a stack of towels.

“It's a funeral,” Elena answered. “For a baby.”

Marisol glanced out the window. “That is sad,” she said with only a trace of sentiment, picking up another towel. As an afterthought, she added, “Those babies die so easily.”

Across the street, Mrs. Gómez stepped onto the narrow sidewalk in front of her store to watch the procession and bless herself, an almost perfunctory gesture, the casual up and down and across of the arm and forefinger, like brushstrokes of holy paint on the face and shoulders.

“Which babies are those?” Elena asked. “The ones that die so easily.”

“The ones from that neighborhood,
señora.
Sometimes they bury three or four in one month.”

“In one month?”

“Yes.”

“Why so many?”

Marisol looked perplexed. No one, it seemed, had thought to ask her that question before. “The air is bad in that neighborhood,” she said finally. “It makes the babies sick.”

“What neighborhood is that?”

“Colonia La Joya. That's where those people are from. See how dirty they are? It's a
limonada
, a slum they built in the ravine by the old bridge.” Seeing Elena's distress and confusion, Marisol added with mild exasperation, as if the explanation were too obvious to bother with, “The babies get diarrhea. It's because they're poor. Even poorer than I am.”

Elena turned back to the window and watched the slow procession reach the Parque Central a block away, then disappear down a side street. There were about twenty people in the group—just one adult man, the rest women with flower-print shawls covering their heads, and shoeless children with the soles of their feet calloused lime white. Aquamarine paper streamers attached to the bier fluttered in the breeze.

Elena thought it was both the saddest and most beautiful thing she had seen so far in her new home.

*   *   *

The newspapers from Guatemala City gathered in a stack by the window. Elena seldom opened them, and when she did, she rushed through the pages as if her haste might shield her from the picture of a corpse or the obituary photograph of a friend or acquaintance. She was seven months pregnant, indisposed, in no condition to hold banners or paint slogans on walls or run from tear gas canisters. For the moment she would simply try to pass the time, watching the street vendors of San Cristóbal through her window and writing long letters to her sister.

Querida Hermana: I am so bored. You would not believe the slowness of this place. The clocks move like turtles in San Cristóbal.

Her mother-in-law had told her not to write home, but she defied orders and wrote regularly to family and friends in Guatemala City. The letters to her sister she sent via a second cousin who surreptitiously hand-delivered them because their father destroyed the letters he found in the mailbox. She got only one response for every half-dozen letters she sent, but she kept writing because she was afraid she would be lost to San Cristóbal forever if she stopped. Already she wondered if her speech was slowing, if there was a new lilt to her Spanish. You could hear the Indian influence in the Spanish here, though no
ladino
would admit such a thing.

The letters were a promise to herself that she would return home.

Boredom and depression are frequent dance partners, I have discovered. The trick, little sister, is to keep busy. If there were a good music teacher here, I would take piano lessons. If there were a place to dance, I would take dance lessons. Instead, I read. Twenty novels in six months. I have read enough Borges and Cortázar to write a doctoral thesis on Argentine literature. Antonio is very excited about this new hobby of mine, and we fill the evenings with long literary conversations. I have taken up cooking also, a feminine art I have too long neglected.

Her husband patiently suffered her experiments with black beans, vegetables, and chicken. Every two weeks or so they took the bus to Quetzaltenango, the nearest city of any consequence, to go shopping and sit in the cafes and remember the life they had before. Antonio and Elena sat sipping coffee and tea on the colonial balcony of the Pensión Bonifaz, looking out across a plaza at a municipal building with a façade of Greek columns.

Whenever Antonio talked about his job, he sounded defeated. The Department of Public Works provided little in the way of excitement or interest. With each passing day he seemed lonelier, further adrift. “All I do is sit around and listen to the secretaries. They're always asking me to get the fan fixed. Today the big event was the arrival of our yearly supply of carbon paper. Can you imagine? Carbon paper! This is what I've been reduced to.” Elena found this hysterically funny and couldn't stop laughing, until the laughter finally infected Antonio and he began to lose his sad face. She took his hands and looked into his eyes and told him they both needed to be strong now. They would be partners in seclusion, each strong for the other.