Happy Families (15 page)

From the deck of the ship, Manuel did not see these details. He saw the mirage of the ancient imperial city, the fiction of its lost grandeur restored only by the imagination, by the hunger to know what once was better than what is and what could have been more than anything else.

From mirage to mirage, from Venice to Spalato, the world of memories was turning into the world of desires, and between the two beat a heart divided by love that was put to the test between past and present.

Then the Adriatic wind blew, the damp, warm sirocco carrying the threat of rain and fog. Dry in its North African origins, the sea impregnates it with smoke and water.

Not yet. The wind was gentle, and the Dalmatian city sparkled like one more illusion of the god Apollo.

Manuel only murmured:

“I still think about you.”

Chorus of the Murdered Family

My father and my mother

died in the massacre of El Mozote

on December 11 1981

since the army of the dictatorship couldn’t conquer the guerrillas of the Farabundo Martí Front

they decided to kill the innocents to frighten the population

they sent word they would invade us but wouldn’t kill

those who stayed in their houses

only those wandering around the streets and outskirts

those they would kill like rabbits

then the Atlácatl Battalion financed and trained by the USA

made a surprise attack and slaughtered all the inhabitants of El Mozote

men women children

on the tenth of December the soldiers of the battalion

entered

El Mozote

dragged everybody from their houses

gathered them in the main square

ordered them to lie down on their stomachs

kicked people

accusing them of being guerrillas

demanding that they tell where they hid the weapons

but there was only seed plow nail hammer tile

after an hour they ordered them to go back to their houses and not

show even their noses

we crowded into the houses we were hungry

all we heard were the men from the battalion in the streets laughing drinking

celebrating their victory

then at dawn

on the eleventh of December

they dragged us from the houses

gathered us together on the level ground in front of the Church of the Three Kings

kept us standing there for hours and hours

then they put the men and boys in the church

the women and little kids in an abandoned house

we were about six hundred people

they put us men facedown and tied our hands

and again they asked us about hidden weapons

and since we didn’t know anything the next morning they began to kill us

they cut off the heads of the men in the church with

machetes

one after the other

so we could see what was in store

then they dragged the bodies and heads to the sacristy

a mountain of heads looking without seeing

and when they got tired of cutting off heads

they shot the rest of us outside

leaning against the red bricks and beneath the red

roof tiles of the school

that’s how hundreds of men died

the women they marched to Cruz Hill and Chingo Hill

and fucked them

over and over and over again

and then they hung them stabbed them

set fire to them

the kids died crying hard

the soldiers said the kids that are left are very cute

maybe we’ll take them home

but the commander said no

either we kill the children or they’ll kill us

the children screamed as they killed them

kill all the bastards kill them good so they can’t holler anymore

and soon there were no more screams

my grandmother hid me in her skirts

we saw the slaughter from the trees

I swear that when the Atlácatl Battalion passed

the trees moved to protect

my grandmother and me

then it was known all over the region

that the soldiers of the regular army

came back to clean up El Mozote

from the farmhouses you could smell rotting flesh

they took the bodies out of the Church of the Three Kings

and buried them all together

but it still smelled of sweet corpse

pigs walked around eating the ankles of the dead

that’s why the soldiers said don’t eat that hog it ate human flesh

nobody picks up the dolls, the decks of cards, the side combs, the brassieres, the shoes scattered

all over the village

nobody prays to the bullet-ridden virgins in the church or to the heads of decapitated

saints

in the confessional there’s a skull

and on the wall an inscription

the Atlácatl Battalion was here

here we shit on the sons of bitches

and if you can’t find your balls

tell them to mail them to you at the Atlácatl Battalion

we’re the little angels of hell

we want to finish off everybody

let’s see who imitates us

me and me and me and me and me and me

the mara, the gang?

the children of the soldiers of ’81

the children of those slaughtered in ’81

nothing is lost in Central America

the slim waist of a continent

everything is inherited

all the rancor goes from hand to hand

The Armed Family

When General Marcelino Miles marched into the Guerrero Mountains, he knew very well what ground he was walking on. He was in command of the Fifth Infantry Battalion, and his mission was clear: to finish off the so-called Vicente Guerrero Popular Army, named in honor of the last guerrilla of the Revolution for Independence, shot in 1831. “His lesson was ours,” General Miles muttered at the head of the column struggling up the slopes of the Sierra Madre del Sur.

He had to persuade himself under all circumstances that the army obeyed, that it did not revolt. For over seventy years this standard had established the difference between Mexico and the rest of Latin America: The armed forces obeyed civilian authority, the president of the republic. That was clear as day.

But this morning the general felt that his mission was clouded: At the head of the rebel group was his own son, Andrés Miles, in armed rebellion following Mexico’s great democratic disillusionment. From the time he was very young, Andrés had fought for leftist causes, within the law and in the hope that political action would achieve the people’s goals.

“A country of one hundred million inhabitants. Half of them living in dire poverty.”

It was Andrés’s mantra at supper, and his brother, Roberto, gently took the opposing view. Social peace had to be maintained at any cost. Beginning with peace in the family.

“At the price of one delay after another?” Andrés protested, sitting on his father’s left, naturally.

“Democracy makes slow progress. Authoritarianism is faster. It’s better to settle for a slow democracy,” Roberto said with an air of smugness.

“Fastest of all is revolution, brother,” Andrés said irritably. “If democracy doesn’t resolve matters by peaceful means, the left will be forced to take to the mountains again.”

General Miles, the mediator between his sons, had a longer memory than they did. He remembered the history of uprisings and bloodshed in Mexico, and his gratitude for seventy years of one party and peaceful successions that in 2000 had allowed it to achieve a democratic alternation.

“Alternation, yes. Transition, no,” Andrés said energetically, refraining from banging the teaspoon against his cup of coffee as he turned toward his brother. “Don’t close the doors on us. Don’t badger us with legal trickery. Don’t underestimate us in your arrogance. Don’t send us back to the mountains.”

Andrés was in the mountains now, at the head of an army of shadows that attacked only at dawn and at sunset, vanishing at night into the sierra and disappearing during the day among the men in the mountain villages. Impossible to pick out a rebel leader from a hundred identical campesinos. Andrés Miles knew very well that to city eyes, all peasants were the same, as indistinguishable as one Chinese from another.

That was why they had treacherously chosen him, General Miles. He would be able to recognize the leader. Because the leader was his own son. And there is no mimetic power in the gray, thorny, steep, trackless, overgrown tracts of land—the great umbrella of the insurrection—that could disguise a son in an encounter with his father.

Under his breath, General Marcelino Miles cursed the stupidity of the right-wing government that had closed, one after the other, the doors of legitimate action to the left, persecuting its leaders, stripping them of immunity on the basis of legalistic deceptions, encouraging press campaigns against them, until they had the leftists cornered with no option except armed insurrection.

So many years of openness and conciliation ruined at one stroke by an incompetent right, drowning in a well of pride and vanity. The growing corruption of the regime broke the chain at its weakest link, and Andrés declared to his father:

“We have no recourse but violence.”

“Be patient, son.”

“I’m only one step ahead of you,” Andrés said with prophetic simplicity. “At the end of the day, when we’ve run out of political options, you generals will have no choice but to take power and put an end to the passive frivolity of the government.”

“And along the way I’ll have to shoot you,” the father said with severity.

“So be it,” Andrés said and bowed his head.

Marcelino Miles was thinking of this as they climbed the foothills of the Sierra Madre del Sur. He would do his duty, but it was against his will. As the troops advanced, using machetes to cut their way through lianas in the impenetrable shadow of amates and ficuses intertwined with papelillo trees and embraced by climbing vines, in his mind, love for his son and military duty similarly fought and were entwined. Perhaps Andrés was right, and once again, the sacrifice of the rebel would be the price of peace.

Except what peace? General Miles thought (since one had to think about everything or nothing to triumph over the arduous ascent of an unconquerable mountain, watchword and symbol of a country as wrinkled as parchment) that Mexico didn’t fit into the closed fist of a mountain. When it opened its hand, out of the wounded skin poured thorns and quagmires, the green teeth of nopal, the yellow teeth of puma, streaked rock and dried shit, acrid odors of animals lost in or habituated to the sierras of Coatepec, La Cuchilla, and La Tentación. At each step, always within reach, they sought the intangible—the revolutionary army—and what they found was something concrete: the excessive, aggressive evidence of a nature that rejects us because it is unaware of us.

How could Roberto Miles not oppose his brother, Andrés? The general had brought up his sons in modest comfort. They never lacked for anything. They didn’t have an abundance of anything, either. The general wanted to prove that at least in the army, the national pastime of corruption had no place. He was a Spartan from the south of Mexico, where the difficulties of life and the immensity of nature are the salvation or perdition of human beings. The person who maintains a minimum of values that the forest, the mountains, the tropics cannot subdue, is saved.

Marcelino Miles was one of those men. But from the moment his superiors transferred him from Chilpancingo to Mexico City, his sons’ tendencies were revealed outside the rules (his pact with nature) the father had imposed.

The forest and the mountain were the ironic allies of Division Commander Miles. He fulfilled his duty by climbing the sierra with the help of machetes. He fled his obligation by thinking that guerrillas never engage in formal combat. They attack the army in its barracks or ambush it in the wild. Then they vanish like hallucinations, clouded mirrors in the terrifying, impenetrable magic of the forest.

They attacked and disappeared. It wasn’t possible to foresee the attack. The lessons of the past had been learned. Today Zapata wouldn’t fall into the government’s trap, believing in good faith that the enemy had come over to his side and would meet with him in Chinameca to seal the double betrayal. The feigned betrayal by the government army of its leader, Carranza. A clear prediction of the certain betrayal of each Zapata.

Betrayal was the name of the final battle.

Now there was a deficit of ingenuousness, just as yesterday there had been an excess of trust. Marcelino Miles thought this bitterly, because if he, Marcelino Miles, offered amnesty to his son Andrés in exchange for his surrender, the son would see a trick in the father’s generosity. The son would not trust the father. The son knew the father was obliged to capture and shoot him.

Two calculations presented themselves to General Marcelino Miles’s mind as he led his troops through the mountains. One, that the populations of the mountains and the plain offered their loyalty to the insurgents. Not because they had identified with the cause. They didn’t support them out of necessity or conviction. They were loyal to them because the guerrillas were their brothers, their husbands, their fathers, their friends. They were
themselves
in other activities as normal as sowing and harvesting, cooking and dancing, selling and buying: bullets, adobe bricks, corn, roof tiles, huapango dances, guitars, jugs, more bullets . . . It was the familial link that strengthened the guerrillas, sheltered them, hid them, fed them.

The general’s other calculation, on this night of droning macaques and clouds so low they seemed about to sing, covering the column and driving it mad as if the real siren song came from the air itself and not from the distant, atavistic sea, was that sooner or later, the countryside would grow weary of the war and abandon the rebels. He prayed that moment would come soon: He wouldn’t have to capture and try his own son.

He was fooling himself, he thought immediately. Even if the villages abandoned him, Andrés Miles wasn’t one of those who surrendered easily. He was one of those who went on fighting, even if only six guerrillas were left, or two, or only one: himself. Andrés Miles with his tanned face and melancholy eyes, his shock of hair prematurely grayed at the age of thirty, his slim, nervous, impatient, crouched body, always ready to leap like a mountain animal. Obviously, he didn’t belong to the pavements, he wasn’t a creature of the sidewalk. The wild called to him, nostalgic for him. Since his childhood in Guerrero, he would occasionally get lost when he climbed the mountain and not be heard from for an entire day. Then he would come back home but never admit he had been lost. An admirably stubborn pride had distinguished him from the time he was very little.

Was his brother better? Roberto was clever, Andrés intelligent. Roberto calculating, Andrés spontaneous. Roberto the actor in a smiling deception, Andrés the protagonist in a drama of sincerity. Both victims, the father suspected with sorrow. As an adolescent, Andrés had committed to the leftist struggle. He didn’t marry. Politics, he said, was his legitimate wife. His lover was his adolescent sweetheart in Chilpancingo. At times he visited her. Other times she came to the capital. Andrés lived in the house of his father, the general, but he didn’t bring the girl home. Not because of bourgeois convention but because he wanted her all to himself and didn’t care to have anyone judge her, not even himself.

On the other hand, Roberto, at the age of twenty-eight, had been married and divorced twice. He changed wives according to his own idea of social prestige. He began in a high-technology company, decided to start his own electromagnetic equipment business, but his ambition was to be a software magnate. Things were not going too well for him now, which was why he returned, a divorced man, to his father’s house, following the “Italian” law—today universal—of living at home for as long as possible and in this way saving on rent, food, and domestic help. He always had women, since he was good-looking—“cute,” his father said to himself—but he didn’t bring them home or mention them.

One woman united father and sons, the mother, Peregrina Valdés, dead of colic before the boys reached adolescence.

“Take care of them for me, Marcelino. I know your discipline, but also give them the love you gave to me.”

Roberto was very different from his brother. Lighter-skinned, with a green-eyed gaze walled in by suspicion. He shaved twice a day as if to file down all the rough spots on a face that demanded trust without ever receiving it completely.

The warm memories of his family did not prevent the general from acknowledging the discouragement of his troops. Every day, inch by inch, they explored the Guerrero Mountains. The general was methodical. Nobody could accuse of him of negligence in his mission, which was to seek out the rebels in every corner of the sierra. Miles knew his effort was useless. First, because the rebel band was small and the mountains immense. The revolutionaries knew it and hid easily, constantly changing their position. They were the needles in a gigantic haystack. The general explored the sierra from the air and could not make out a single road, much less a village. In the vast extension of the mountains, not even a solitary wisp of smoke betrayed life. The dense growth admitted no space other than its own compact green nature.

And second, because the troops under his command knew that he knew. Each day they resumed the trek, aware they would never find the enemy. No one dared to say aloud what he was thinking: that this useless campaign of General Miles saved them from confronting the rebels. Until now they had fired only at rabbits and turkey buzzards. The first were fast and offered an exciting game of marksmanship. The second devoured the dead rabbits, stealing them from the soldiers.

The pact of deception between the commander and the troops allowed Marcelino Miles to enjoy the gratitude of his men and avoid recriminations from headquarters. Let them ask any soldier if the general had or had not carried out the order to search for the rebels in the sierra. Let them just ask. The commander’s well-being was also that of the troops.

They had spent six weeks on this ghostly campaign when something happened that the general hadn’t expected and the troops never would have imagined.

Quartered in Chilpancingo after three weeks of exploring the wild, Marcelino Miles and his soldiers had an air of duty fulfilled that authorized a couple of peaceful days for them. Though the general understood that the troops knew as well as he did that the guerrillas were not in the mountains, the physical effort of climbing and exploring redeemed them from all blame: What if now, right now, the rebels slipped up to the top and now, right now, the general and his people captured them there?