Life During Wartime (32 page)

‘Debora?’ Amalia’s voice, weak and whispery.

Her eyes were open, and she thrashed about as if being swallowed by the hammock.

‘How do you feel?’ Debora leaned down to her, stroked her hair.

Amalia stared at Mingolla. Though not in the least pretty, asleep she had embodied a youthful healthiness; now a sullen energy had gained control of her features, and she looked to be a fat little prig of a girl, the one with whom nobody wants to play.

‘Why do you love him?’ she asked Debora. ‘He does evil things to people.’

‘He’s a soldier, he has to do bad things sometimes. And I
don’t
love him.’

‘You can’t fool me,’ Amalia said. ‘I know!’

‘Think what you like,’ said Debora patiently. ‘Right now we want you to tell us more about Panama.’

‘No!’ Amalia twisted onto her side, facing toward Mingolla, her dumpling belly netted by the hammock mesh. ‘I want to play with you.’

‘Please, Amalia. We’ll play later.’

Mingolla started to exert his influence on her, but the instant he touched Amalia’s mind, a pattern he hadn’t noticed, one that must have been buried beneath the surface, began flowing back and forth, creating an endless loop that seemed to be threading through his thoughts, fastening itself to them with stitches of bright force. A point of heat bloomed in the center of his forehead, grew into a white-hot sun of pain filling his skull. He felt the jolt of a fall, heard Debora crying out. The pain dwindled, and he saw Amalia sitting up, skewering him with a look of piggy triumph.

‘I want him to play, too,’ she said.

‘We’ll both play with you afterward,’ said Debora. ‘After you tell us about Panama.’

‘
You
play with her.’ Mingolla pushed himself up. He gingerly touched the back of his head, found a lump. Then, alarmed by Amalia’s scowl, he backed toward the door.

‘Don’t hurt him,’ said Debora.

A sly smile spread across Amalia’s face. ‘Say you love him, and I won’t.’

Debora cast a grim look toward Mingolla.

‘Say it!’ Amalia insisted.

‘I love him.’

‘And you’ll keep loving him forever and ever, won’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Can I have something to eat afterward?’

Mingolla almost laughed at the greediness that came across Amalia’s face, it was so comically extreme an expression.

‘I’ll cook you chicken and rice,’ Debora said. ‘I promise.’

‘All right!’ Amalia lay back in the hammock, arms folded across her immature breasts. ‘What do you want to know?’

‘Tell us ’bout Sector Jade,’ said Mingolla.

She glared at him, then turned her eyes to the ceiling. The innocence of sleep seemed to possess her once again. She remained silent for a long moment, and Mingolla said, ‘Is she …’

‘Shh!’ Debora waved to him to quiet. ‘She’ll tell us.’

‘Into …’ Amalia wetted her lips. ‘… Vanished … all vanished beneath … as smooth as stone, like a sector of jade amid the bright tiles, and he imagined that they would never reappear, that they were traveling an unguessable distance to a country beneath the shell of the world to which Panama was affixed like a curious pin on a swath of blue silk, and there, in that faraway country, the blood knot would be unraveled and the peace would be forged.’ Her intonation grew firmer. ‘Not the peace that passeth understanding, no, this would be a most comprehensible peace, one purchased with banknotes of blood and shame, with the coinage issued by those who at last have realized that what is fair in war must be incorporated into the tactics of peace, and from this issue would be established an unnatural yet stable order, a counterfeit of salvation, which is in itself a counterfeit of hope, and once … and once …’ She sighed, lapsed again into silence.

‘I’ve heard that before … those words.’ Mingolla couldn’t jog his memory.

‘Where?’

‘It’ll come to me. Ask her about “the others.” ’

This time there was a longer pause after Debora had put the question, but when Amalia began to speak it was with more certainty.

‘… Only the latest incidence in the centuries-long feud, which
was called by the Madradonas the War of the Flower, this euphemistic characterization exemplary of their tendency to embroider reality. Now Diego Sotomayor de Cabrillo, whose niece had been violated, was not slow to take his vengeance, yet went about it in typical Sotomayor fashion, preferring to concoct an ornate and subtle reprisal rather than initiating an immediate strike. He was at the time a man of great influence in the government of Panama, and using his high office, he sent against the Madradonas an army of tax assessors and other civil servants, by this harassment seeking to occupy their attention while he prepared his plot. From the populace of Barrio Clarín he selected a witling tool, a handsome young boy with a shred of the natural ability, whose brain had been damaged by a fall in his infancy, and from this stone of a child he constructed over the years a weapon of sublime elegance, supplying him with the gifts of poetry and song, making of him a pretty toy that would be sure to delight Serafina, the youngest daughter of his nemesis, and burying in the deepest labyrinth of the boy’s thought a violent potential to be triggered by the sight of her naked body …’

‘Son of a bitch!’ Mingolla pounded a fist into his palm.

‘Don’t!’ Debora bent over Amalia, who appeared to have dropped off into a deep sleep. ‘You can’t interrupt her. She just stops if you do. Damn! Now we’ll have to wake her again.’

‘It’s okay. She said enough.’ Mingolla went to the door, stood looking out at the lethargic activity of the village. Women rolling cornmeal on wooden flats, sleepy children lolling in hammocks, pigs waddling and snooting. ‘It’s like you were telling me. Clues. Izaguirre was giving me clues.’

Debora joined him in the doorway. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘What she calls the others,’’ they’re characters in a story about two families who’re addicted to this plant that gives them mental powers. They can influence people like we do, but it takes them a long time to get the job done. They’re weak.’ He gave a rueful laugh. ‘But they’re hidden. Their power isn’t detectable.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Wake her ass up again, milk her dry, and head the fuck away from Panama.’

‘That wouldn’t do any good. She always uses the same quotes.
It’s probably all she’s been programmed to say. I just never understood the part about the families.’ She looked up at Mingolla, seemed startled by his proximity, and walked off toward the river.

‘Where you going?’ he called.

She didn’t break stride. ‘For a walk … to think.’

He caught up to her, fell into step. ‘I’ll go with you.’

‘No.’ She paused beside a hut in whose doorway two naked little girls were playing, flattening cakes of mud between their hands. ‘I’d rather be by myself.’

‘We’ve got more to talk about.’

‘I think we’ve covered everything.’

‘We haven’t covered you and me.’

‘That’s a dead issue.’

‘Bullshit! I know damn well what you feel.’

She took a step back, not in fear, but as if she needed distance in order to see the whole picture. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said coolly. ‘I may have misled you. There’s …’

‘Uh-uh. You …’

‘… absolutely no chance of a deeper relationship between you and me.’

‘You can’t deny what you feel.’

‘That’s exactly what I intend to do.’

Her voice had risen in volume, and the two little girls were gazing at them in awe.

‘Sure, you save my life and tell me it’s ’cause I can help you with Amalia. Then we wake her and you say she’s already told you everything she knows. You didn’t need my help. So why’d you save me?’

‘I felt responsible,’ she said. ‘I got you into this.’

‘Be real. It didn’t take Amalia saying you loved me to make it true.’

Anger notched her brow. ‘If you think I’m going to let emotion control me, then you don’t know me. The revolution, that’s …’

‘There isn’t any revolution,’ he reminded her.

‘Maybe not. But I’m going to learn what’s happening, and nothing I feel for you is going to get in the way.’

‘I don’t believe I’m hearing this shit,’ he said. ‘I mean you
musta got this dialogue from a bad movie. “Forgive me, Manuel. But until all wrongs are righted, my heart belongs to the cause.” ’

She slapped him hard on the cheek, slapped him again, coming at him with a flurry that stung both sides of his face. He grabbed her wrists, and when she tried to knee him, he shoved her away. ‘You bastard!’ she said, standing with her hands clawed, staring at him like a madwoman through strands of hair. ‘Stupid bastard!’ Then she spun on her heel and strode off, disappearing behind one of the huts.

He clenched his fists, needing to hit something, but found only air. The little girls watched him, big-eyed and solemn. ‘Take my advice,’ he said. ‘Grow up to be lesbians.’

They exchanged stares and giggled.

‘I’m serious,’ he told them. ‘It’s got to be easier than this shit.’ He ambled toward the river, rubbing the sting from his cheeks, looking at the hut behind which Debora had vanished. ‘I love you, too,’ he said.

Some days it seemed he was moving through a vacuum, an airless gray created by his lack of purpose, and other days it seemed he wasn’t moving at all, that life was flowing past beneath a projection of rock upon which he had been stranded. He had nothing to do, nowhere to go: He had come to the end of purpose, and though the frustration caused by Debora’s rejection had acted to shore up his feelings for her, she was a problem he had no energy to solve; he thought she might be right about the comparative values of commitment and emotion, and he envied her capacity for denial, because seeing her every day drove him to distraction. Whenever their paths crossed he would – like a vampire anticipating a hot feast – relish every detail of scent and dewy fever; he would imagine himself following her to Panama, saving her life, and receiving infinite gratification. He had the idea that she was delaying her departure, that she was having trouble putting him behind her; but while this augured well for his chances with her, he knew that to take advantage of those chances he would have to endure more war, and he doubted he was capable of endurance. The memories of the dead men in his wake were weights bracketed to his heart, holding him in place. He could feel them. They were solid and fundamental restraints. And even more solid, more fundamental, was the idea that he was a pawn in a centuries-old feud. He wasn’t sure he believed that to be the case: spoken out loud it had the ring of fantasy. Yet each time he added up the elements of his experience, it seemed clear that fantasy and truth were in union. He saw that the feuding families in Pastorin’s stories, the playful way he had been maneuvered, and much of the war were imbued with a common character, a
whimsical arrogance, and this enforced his belief. Belief made him angry, and anger made him eager to explore the perversity that underlay the war. But anger and eagerness were outfaced by his spiritual exhaustion, and so he did nothing.

He went often to the hollow, occasionally accompanied by Nate Lubove. Sunsets were the best time. The shafts of light bathing the chopper would burn red and orange through the canopy, kindling fiery glints from the cockpit, scalloping the black metal with gleams, and the huge silhouette would take on the aspect of an evil Easter egg waiting for a monster child to reach down and snatch it. Mingolla would feel that the light was congealing around him, armoring him in orange and black, and he would think darkly romantic thoughts concerning solitary adventures and high purpose. Whenever the computer addressed him, he would refuse to respond: he didn’t want its solace or companionship. Its skeleton pilot and divine mechanical voice seemed to him emblems of the fraudulence of the war, and he sat beside it only to remind himself of this state of affairs.

Now and then he tried to engage Nate in conversation, and for the most part Nate begged off. Always a minimal soul, he was growing more minimal, less inclined to both speech and action, content to watch his butterflies, and Mingolla, who, like him, sensing a resonance between them, chalked up his taciturnity to a brooding nature. Once, however, Nate did talk to him, telling stories about the wars he’d covered. Afghanistan, Kampuchea, Angola. He’d come to be a war tourist, spending his days in luxury hotels talking to other bored correspondents, comparing the current conflict with the various back-fence wars they’d seen, filing sentimental human interest pieces and getting drunk with ex-presidents while mortar fire chewed the surroundings into ruins.

‘I’ve never experienced a war like this, though,’ he said, kicking his heels against the boulder. ‘It’s insane. And the most insane part of it is in Panama.’

‘You’ve been there?’ Mingolla asked.

‘Yes, a year ago. The place was a puzzle. Most of the city went on as usual, but one barrio – Barrio Clarín – was barricaded from the rest. The official word was that it had been quarantined, but
no one could tell you what disease had caused the quarantine. It was impossible to get clearance to enter it, but we heard things. Rumors of pitched battles in the streets. And stranger rumors yet. They sounded ridiculous, but you kept hearing them over and over, and you couldn’t help but pay attention to them.’