The Tattooed Soldier (21 page)

Longoria was tired of mothers pulling at his shirt, sick of wrestling with wives who just wouldn't let their husbands go. You could have a woman punch you only so many times.

*   *   *

As the Jeep rattled along, Sergeant Longoria reviewed his orders. They would spend the night in the home of the mayor of this town and then carry out the first assignment the next morning.

Longoria picked up a large earth brown file folder from the floor of the Jeep. There was the standard identity-card photograph. These tended to be at least two or three years old, and people often looked much different when you finally encountered them in real life. In this case the photograph showed a serious and stern-looking young woman, anger in the shape of her mouth, as if somebody she didn't like was on the other side of the camera. Dark features, hair pulled back in a ponytail. Very attractive, Longoria thought.

A second photograph. The woman's husband. This one a little
chele
, light-skinned and clean-shaven, in circle glasses, suit, and tie, the classic university student. Startled, as if the pop of the flashbulb had caught him by surprise. The young man in the photograph reminded Longoria of a type he had come across in the army, the petit bourgeois graduates of the Politécnica military school who were already officers when they started out, and were promoted ahead of the real soldiers because their fathers knew men in the higher echelons of the Estado Mayor. Longoria would enjoy abducting this man.

Another picture, this one probably more recent: a fuzzy telephoto shot of the woman taken from behind as she walked along some kind of dirt path, a cluster of shacks in the background. The photograph caught her in mid-stride, and her print dress seemed to float upward slightly, suggesting a bounce in her step. Longoria was uncertain what this photograph meant to convey, why it was included in the file.

Under the photographs was a thin stack of documents. There was always more information in these dossiers than you really needed. Xerox copies of a handwritten letter from the woman, a letter from the mayor of the town, and the testimony of an informer in the municipal government. None of this he bothered to read very closely. He simply noted the address on the cover sheet and the details of his orders, which were to apprehend the two subversives, transport them to the barracks at Santa Cruz del Quiché, and hand them over to G-2.

He glanced at the subversives' names. In cases like this the names meant almost nothing to him. He stored them in short-term memory, next to what he ate for breakfast and the reading on the Jeep's gas gauge.

*   *   *

Elena hadn't spoken to Antonio for a week, ever since the argument about the letter. He had taken her courageous act and made her feel that it was stupid and silly. She had denied the enemy her fear, and that was worth something. She wouldn't allow herself to be humiliated by a man who let his fear paralyze him. She assaulted him with ferocious silence and barely concealed disgust until he finally broke down and apologized.

“I'm sorry, Elena. I'm sorry I yelled at you. I was angry. Forgive me, I beg you.”

Antonio looked at her with weak and pleading eyes, as if to say, Help me, I don't know what to do next. Elena felt her anger slipping away. Despite everything, she felt a deep compassion for him, a sense that she had to protect him. He was a good man who could still find his way. He was the father of her son, and that was worth something too. She wondered how she had stayed so angry at him for so long. Gently taking off his round glasses, she used her blouse to wipe off the layer of dust that had gathered on the lenses, something she had been wanting to do for the past two days.

“Now I can see your beautiful eyes,” she said. She stood on tiptoes and kissed him on the forehead. “We need to be strong.”

“Strong,” he repeated, looking very sad.

They made love that night. After a week of saying nothing, after so much coldness, all it took was one touch to trigger desires that obeyed no logic Elena could understand. It had happened many times before: an argument, followed by an apology, followed by desperate lovemaking.

He can seem so weak, but when we are next to each other, when I am next to my tall, beautiful lover, he is someone else. When he loses his sour, angry face, when his mouth relaxes into a smile, I can see the handsome man I fell in love with. The man who didn't notice how other women looked at him. Who didn't notice how people stared at us on the streets of the capital because we made such an attractive couple.

At twenty-three Elena was just beginning to enjoy making love. When she was younger, there was much about it that seemed like such a chore, like calisthenics. She had partners who led her to bed and made her believe that she was about to embark on a journey of sensual exploration, but the pleasure was all theirs. Now she had a lifelong partner, a neophyte she had educated in the subtleties of touch, the language of hands and lips and wet kisses. He had learned with time all the things she liked to do, where to kiss her, how to hold her. He didn't mind that she wanted to be on top. Antonio was not the same man who had taken her on a tryst in the back of his father's Volkswagen. This was the best part of their marriage, Elena had discovered, its saving grace.

She woke up the next morning feeling as if she had recovered from an illness. With a long embrace and a french kiss, she sent her husband off to work.

“I'll make you a nice dinner tonight,
amor.
Something special. Something you like.”

Antonio turned and walked away down the cobblestone street, his briefcase swinging from his arm in a happy arc.

A chill lingered in the morning air, but the sun was already high and strong with the promise of a warm day. Elena felt a lightness, an almost childlike buoyancy.
It's because he's trapped in this little town. That's why he gets so sad and strange. If we go back to the capital, or to Los Angeles, he will become the man I want.

They would leave soon, in a few months, perhaps. She would wait long enough that no one could say she left because she was afraid.

Elena stood at the front door and watched Antonio disappear around the corner. A few houses down, two children were staring at her. Boys, one perhaps twelve years old, the other a little younger. Skinny children, hungry, thin-boned.
Be careful. Even a child can be an informer, even a child can work for the forces of repression.
She looked straight at them, and they stuck their tongues out at her and skipped away.

Laughing at herself, Elena went inside and began to plan what she would make for dinner.

*   *   *

The Lorenzo Amayas would not get up. After a night of drinking with the mayor, the four men were hung over. They had dozed off at about 3:00 a.m., leaving a table covered with glasses, lime slices, and empty bottles of Venado rum. Longoria had sipped for hours at one drink, enduring the ceaseless teasing of the mayor, who made more jokes about Indians the more intoxicated he became, until he finally put his arms around the sergeant.

“You're a beautiful man,” the mayor said. “What you're doing is so beautiful. Facing bullets for our country. It's big. Bigger than just the two of us.
Es una cosa grande.
”

Now the mayor was passed out in one of the many bedrooms of this vast house. The man could sleep until noon for all Longoria cared, but he needed his squad. He needed these criminals to get out of bed and into the Jeeps, because they had to finish two assignments in this town and then be ready for the next one tomorrow. There was a lot of work to be done.

It was eight o'clock in the morning and Longoria had been awake for hours, doing push-ups and jumping jacks in the mayor's backyard. After finishing his exercises, he had gone from room to room to wake his snoring charges, but the men ignored him.

“
Levántate, cabrón
,” Longoria said as he tried once more to shake Mosca awake. But the overweight soldier of the counterrevolution only threw up his arms and rolled over on his stomach.

At 10:30 they finally loaded up the Jeeps and headed out for Tercera Avenida, not far from the town square. Longoria was dressed in black jeans and a green sweatshirt that probably looked too much like an army uniform, but he didn't care. He almost felt like defying orders and putting on his uniform with the new chevrons he had barely had a chance to wear. He double-checked the laces on his tennis shoes, which always seemed to come untied. Boots were so much better, but he couldn't wear those either. Boots were a dead giveaway.

While Mosca drove, Longoria reexamined the pictures in the dossier, trying to memorize the faces of the young couple. Mistakes had been known to happen. The addresses and the faces were the only things he cared about. He was getting tired of these assignments and didn't care if this particular couple had an arsenal of weapons in their house, if it held an entire column of guerrilla soldiers.

Through the haze of pale sleeplessness that covered their faces, the men in Longoria's Jeep looked tense and anxious. Mosca seemed to be gasping for air as he drove, taking a hand off the wheel to wipe the perspiration off his forehead. It's because he's so fat, Longoria thought, not in the right condition for this kind of work. In the back seat Mugre's eyes darted around nervously, as if he wondered whether they would finally encounter a real guerrilla, someone who would shoot back for once. It was stage fright that would slip away as soon as they had the target before them.

They reached the center of town, the Jeep rattling as they rolled onto cobblestone streets.

“There it is!” Longoria yelled. “Stop!”

*   *   *

“There's nothing revolutionary about being a good cook,” Elena thought, fighting off a faint sense of guilt as she put on the sky blue apron she had just bought at a little
tienda
two blocks away.

In the courtyard Carlitos was playing with his latest discovery, a new set of multicolored blocks. He liked to build things and then destroy them. Elena put the chicken in the marinade and went into the living room to watch through the window as he lined cylinders in neat rows, stacked squares into a little tower, and knocked everything over with a quick slap of his hand, laughing as the blocks spilled to the ground. She was relieved to hear him, because Carlitos didn't smile and laugh as much as other children she had known. She was afraid he would grow up to be a morose boy because his mother was too busy and worried to pay enough attention to him.

Returning to the kitchen, she could hear the sound of the blocks crashing harmlessly to the cement floor over and over again. She was washing vegetables in the sink, rinsing tomatoes and celery, when she was startled by the sound of screeching brakes.

*   *   *

The Jeep skids to a halt a good ten yards past the address they are headed for. That idiot Mosca. Sapo, who has been trailing too closely in the second Jeep, just misses hitting them from behind. Longoria makes a mental note to switch drivers for the next assignment, but he won't remember until this happens again, two days from now, in another town.

The Jeep doors open and the Lorenzo Amayas spill out onto the cobblestones. For a moment it seems like a well-coordinated drill, the men moving gracefully with machine guns and pistols at their sides, their tennis shoes landing on the street with a quiet pop. And then they run to the house and crowd around the steel door, stymied by the simplest of obstacles. They are frozen there until Longoria steps forward, pushes open the small glass portal in the steel rectangle, and reaches in to release the latch. This isn't the city, he feels like telling these
capitalinos
around him. People in the provinces rarely lock their doors, even when they should.

Now Longoria is stepping into the living room. Standing right there, in a doorway that probably leads to the kitchen, is the woman in the photograph. She looks stunned and confused, expressions that are quite familiar to Longoria and tell him there is probably nothing to fear in this house, that they've caught the subversives completely by surprise.

Longoria raises his 9-millimeter pistol and points it at the woman.

“Where's the other one? Where is your husband?” To the men behind him he shouts, “
Búsquenlo!
Check the other rooms.”

The Lorenzo Amayas are fanning out through the house, knocking over lamps and furniture in the process. That's something they're good at, Longoria thinks. Knocking things over, making a mess when it isn't necessary. Turning back to the woman, he yells again, “Where is your husband?” And then, looking at the small paper folded in his hand, “Are you Elena Bernal?”

“What do you think, you bastard?”

“Where is Antonio Bernal?”

The woman says nothing, of course. She is as stoic as the rest of them, although she may be a little more spunky. Longoria wonders how long it will take to break her. The look of fear is gone, replaced by defiance. She is going to be one of the tough ones. He grabs her by the hair and yanks her violently to the ground so that she'll know he means business.

“Where is he hiding?”

“Go to hell.”

The Lorenzo Amayas are turning things over, as if they're going to find the man hiding under the couch or the dresser.

“Hey, I heard something,” one of the men yells from a distant room. “There's somebody in here.”

Longoria orders Buitre to guard the woman, then follows the voice out of the living room and into a small courtyard covered with building blocks and toys. He enters a bedroom and discovers Mosca standing before the closet with his machine gun trembling in his hand. Suddenly the room fills with a deafening burst that splinters the wooden door from top to bottom.

Longoria opens the door and a small boy spills out, forehead hitting the tiles, tiny hands formed into fists. Scorching bullets to the neck and skull.
What's this? The dossier didn't mention any children. Or did it?
Longoria steps back to avoid getting blood on his white tennis shoes.