Eva Luna (32 page)

“Tell the
compañeros
we're coming to free them,” ordered Comandante Rogelio, counting on his men's daring.

Only one person had ever escaped from Santa María, and that had been years earlier, when a French bandit had reached the sea by drifting downriver on an improvised raft kept afloat on swollen dog cadavers; no one had attempted it since. Debilitated by heat, poor food, illness, and unrelenting violence, ordinary inmates lacked the strength to drag themselves across the courtyard, much less fight their way through the jungle in the unlikely case of a breakout. Specially guarded prisoners had no chance at all of escaping, unless they could somehow open steel doors, overpower guards armed with machine guns, pass unseen through the entire compound, leap the wall, swim a swift, piranha-infested river, and make their way through the jungle—all this bare-handed and in the last stages of enervation. Comandante Rogelio was not unaware of those colossal obstacles; nevertheless, he swore unemotionally that he would rescue the prisoners, and none of his men doubted his word, least of all the nine inmates in the escape-proof cell block. Once he had mastered his initial anger at my mention of Colonel Tolomeo Rodríguez, Huberto conceived the idea of using me as a decoy to lure the Colonel into a trap.

“All right, as long as you don't hurt him,” I said.

“We're talking about kidnapping him, not killing him.
We'll treat him like a princess, so we can swap him for our
compañeros.
Why are you so concerned about the man?”

“No reason . . . But I warn you, it won't be easy to catch him off guard—he's accompanied by bodyguards, and he carries a weapon himself. He's no fool.”

“I don't suppose he takes his escort along when he's with a woman.”

“Are you asking me to seduce him?”

“No! All I want you to do is arrange to meet him in a place we will name, and then distract him briefly. We'll arrive immediately. A clean operation, no shooting, no noise.”

“I'll need to gain his confidence, and that won't be possible the first time I'm out with him. I'll need time.”

“I think you like this Rodríguez. You'd think you
wanted
to go to bed with him.” Huberto intended his comment as a joke, but his voice was strained.

I did not reply; I was thinking that seducing Rodríguez might be very interesting, even though I was not sure whether when the time came I would hand him over to his enemies or try to warn him instead. As Mimí had said, I was not ideologically prepared for that war. Unconsciously, I smiled, and I believe that secret smile changed Huberto's plans on the spot, because he decided to return to his first scheme. Mimí thought it was suicidal; she knew how closely the prison was guarded. The arrival of visitors was announced in advance by radio, and if the visitors were officers, as Naranjo intended disguising his men, the prison commander would meet them in person at the military airport. Not even the Pope could get into Santa María without a security check.

“Then we'll have to get weapons to the
compañeros
inside,” said Comandante Rogelio.

“You must be out of your mind,” Mimí laughed. “Even in
my time that would have been difficult—they searched everyone, coming and going—but now it's impossible. They had metal detectors, and they'd discover the weapons even if you swallowed them.”

“No matter. I'll get them out of there.”

In the days following our meeting at the zoo, Naranjo met us in various places to work out the details, which, as they were added to the list, made the insanity of the project even more evident. Nothing could dissuade him. Victory is for the bold, he replied whenever we pointed out the dangers. I sketched the plan of the uniform factory, and Mimí drew details of the prison; we calculated the movements of the guards; we clocked their routines; we even studied the wind direction, light, and temperature at every hour of the day. In the course of the process Mimí became infected with Huberto's excitement, and lost sight of the final goal; she forgot they were trying to free prisoners and thought of it as a kind of parlor game. Fascinated, she drew maps, made lists, imagined strategies—totally overlooking the risks—believing in her heart that, like so many other things in the nation's history, nothing would go beyond the planning stages. The undertaking was so audacious that it deserved to succeed. Comandante Rogelio, along with six companions chosen from among the most experienced and courageous guerrillas, would camp with Indians near Santa María. The tribal chieftain—motivated to cooperate after the Army had swept through his village leaving a swath of burned huts, gutted animals, and raped girls—had agreed to take the men across the river and lead them through the jungle. They would communicate with the prisoners through two Indians who worked in the prison kitchen. The day of the attempt, the detainees would be ready to disarm their guards and slip into
the prison yard, where Comandante Rogelio and his men would rescue them. The weakest part of the plan—as Mimí pointed out, although no experience was needed to reach that conclusion—was how the guerrillas were going to get out of their cells. When Comandante Rogelio set Tuesday of the following week as the latest possible date for the attempt, Mimí stared at him through long mink eyelashes, realizing for the first time that he was truly serious. A decision of such magnitude could not be left to chance, so she pulled out her cards, told him to cut the deck with his left hand, laid out the cards according to an order established in an ancient Egyptian civilization, and read the message from the supernatural forces while he observed with a sarcastic smile, muttering that he must be crazy to entrust the success of such a venture to this bizarre creature.

“It can't be Tuesday, it has to be Saturday,” she determined when she turned over the Magus and his head was upside down.

“It will be when I say,” the Comandante replied, leaving no doubt about his opinion of such madness.

“It says Saturday here, and you're in no position to defy the tarot cards.”

“Tuesday.”

“Saturday afternoons half the guards go on a spree in the whorehouse in Agua Santa, and the other half watch baseball on television.”

That was the argument that tilted the scales in favor of the stars. It was at precisely that moment, as they were arguing, that I remembered the Universal Matter. Comandante Rogelio and Mimí looked up from the cards and stared at me, perplexed. And that is how, without ever intending it, I ended up in the company of half a dozen guerrillas mixing
porcelana
in a native hut a short distance from the house of the Turk where I had spent the best years of my adolescence.

*  *  *

I rode into Agua Santa in a battered car with stolen license plates, driven by El Negro. The place hadn't changed much. The main street had grown a little: there were new houses, several shops, and an occasional television antenna. Absolutely unchanged were the sound of the crickets, the implacable noonday heat, and the nightmare of jungle that began at the edge of the highway. Tenacious and patient, the townspeople had endured its steamy breath, and the erosion of time, virtually isolated from the rest of the country by that merciless vegetation. In principle, we should not have stopped. Our destination was the Indian village that lay halfway to Santa María, but when I saw the tiled-roof houses, the streets gleaming from the most recent rain, the women sitting in rush chairs in shadowy doorways, memories swept over me with irresistible force and I begged El Negro to drive past The Pearl of the Orient so I could take one look, if only from a distance. So many things had disintegrated during the years since I had left, so many people had died or gone away without a goodbye, that I expected to find an unrecognizable fossil, ravaged by time and tricks of memory. To my amazement, the shop appeared unscathed before my eyes, like a mirage. The front had been rebuilt, the sign newly painted; the shopwindow displayed agricultural tools, foodstuffs, aluminum pots and pans, and two brand-new mannequins with yellow wigs. There was such an air of renewal about it that I could not resist getting out of the car to take a peek inside. The interior had also been rejuvenated with a modern
counter, but the grain sacks, bolts of cheap cloth, and jars of candies were as they had been.

Riad Halabí, dressed in a batiste guayabera, his mouth covered with a white handkerchief, was adding up his accounts beside the cash register. He was exactly as I remembered him, not a minute older—as sometimes the memory of our first love remains. I walked forward timidly, moved by the tenderness I had felt when I was seventeen and I sat on his lap to ask him for the gift of a night of love, and to offer him the virginity my
madrina
used to measure with a cord of seven knots.

“Good afternoon . . . Do you sell aspirin?” was all I could say.

Riad Halabí did not look up or lift his pencil from his account book, but gestured toward the far end of the counter.

“My wife will help you,
señorita
,” he said with the lisp caused by his harelip. I turned, expecting to see the schoolteacher Inés converted into the Turk's wife, as I had so often imagined; instead, I saw a girl who was probably no more than fourteen, a short, plump little brunette with red lips and an obsequious expression. I bought the aspirin, musing that years ago when this man had rejected me because I was too young, his present wife must have been crawling around in diapers. I will never know what my fate would have been had I stayed with him, but of one thing I am sure: I would have been very happy in bed. I smiled at the red-lipped girl with a mixture of complicity and envy, and left without exchanging a word or a glance with Riad Halabí. I was happy for him, for how well he looked. From that moment I have thought of him as the father that in fact he was; the image fitted him much better than that of lover for one night. Out
side, El Negro was grumbling with impatience; this stop had not been included in his orders.

“Let's get out of here. The Comandante said that no one should see us in this crummy town where everyone knows you,” he complained.

“It isn't a crummy town. Do you know why it's called Agua Santa? Because it has a holy spring that washes away sins.”

“The hell you say!”

“It's true—if you bathe in the waters, you will never again feel guilt.”

“Please, Eva, get in the car and let's go.”

“Not yet, there's something I have to do, but we'll have to wait till dark, when it's safer.”

It was useless for El Negro to threaten to leave me stranded, because when I get an idea in my head I seldom change my mind. Besides, I was indispensable to the rescue. He not only had to wait, I also set him to work digging as soon as the sun went down.

I led him behind the houses to some rough ground covered with heavy undergrowth, and pointed to the spot.

“We're going to dig something up,” I told him, and he obeyed because he had decided that unless the heat had melted my brains, this must be part of the plan.

He did not have to expend much energy; the clayey soil was wet and soft. A little more than half a meter down we found a plastic-wrapped package covered with mud. I wiped it off on my shirttail and, without opening it, stuck it in my purse.

“What's inside?” El Negro wanted to know.

“A dowry.”

*  *  *

The Indians met us in a cleared ellipse, their fire the only source of light in the dense jungle darkness. A large triangular roof of branches and leaves served as a communal shelter, and numbers of hammocks were strung beneath it at different heights. The adults wore minimal clothing, a habit acquired through contact with nearby towns, but the children were naked, since parasites and a pale, unhealthy mold thrived in fabrics never free of the damp. Girls wore feathers and flowers above their ears; a woman was nursing a child at one breast and a puppy at the other. I studied those faces, searching for my own image in each of them, but I saw only the tranquil expression of those who have encountered and answered all questions. The chief stepped forward two paces and welcomed us with a slight bow. He held himself very straight; his eyes were large and wide-set, his lips fleshy, and his hair cut like a round helmet, clipped at the back of the neck to reveal the proud scars of many cudgeling tourneys. I recognized him immediately; he was the man who every Saturday led the tribe into Agua Santa to ask for charity; the man who one morning found me sitting beside the body of Zulema; the same man who sent news of the calamity to Riad Halabí and, when I was arrested, lingered outside police headquarters to stamp the ground as if a drum of warning. I wanted to know his name, but El Negro had explained beforehand that it would be discourteous to ask. For these Indians, he said, to name is to touch the heart; they consider it offensive to call a stranger by name or to be named by him, and it would be best to avoid questions that might be misinterpreted. The chief looked at me without a hint of expression, but I was sure he recognized me. He
pointed to indicate the way, and led us to a windowless cabin smelling of scorched rags and containing two campstools, a hammock, and a kerosene lamp.

Our instructions were that we were to wait for the other members of the party, who would join us sometime before Friday night. I asked about Huberto Naranjo, because I was counting on our spending those days together, but no one had news of him. I lay in the hammock without removing my clothes, disturbed by the incessant hum of the jungle, the humidity, the mosquitoes and ants, my fear that snakes and poisonous spiders would crawl down the ropes, or might be nesting in the palm thatch and drop on me during the night. I could not get to sleep. I spent two hours examining my reasons for coming there—without reaching a conclusion; my feelings for Huberto did not seem sufficient pretext. Every day I felt more remote from the times when I had lived only for our furtive meetings, fluttering like a firefly around a guttering flame. I think I had agreed to be a part of that adventure in order to test myself, with the hope that by sharing in that unconventional war I could again be close to the man I had loved but asked nothing of. But now I was alone, huddled in a bedbug-infested hammock reeking of dog and smoke. I was not acting from any compelling political conviction, because even though I had accepted the principles of that utopian revolution, and was moved by the desperate courage of the small band of guerrilla fighters, I sensed they were already defeated. I could not escape the prickle of disaster that had haunted me for some time, a vague uneasiness that flared into certainty when I was near Huberto Naranjo. In spite of the revolutionary passion that still blazed in his eyes, I felt an air of calamity closing in about him. I had espoused his rhetoric to impress Mimí, but in fact I believed
that the guerrilla movement would never triumph in this country. I did not like to think about what might finally happen to those men and their dreams. That night in the Indian hut, unable to sleep, I was disconsolate. As the temperature dropped I grew cold; I went outside to spend the night huddled beside the coals of the fire. Pale, barely visible light filtered through the leaves, and I was aware that, as always, I was calmed by the moon.