Life During Wartime (52 page)

‘You mean back in ’Frisco?’

‘Un-uh.’ Gilbey tripped, regained his balance. ‘What happened to you here.’ He tapped his forehead, very gently, as if afraid he might punch a hole.

‘Bad drugs,’ said Mingolla. ‘War. Shit like that.’

Gilbey nodded, his brow furrowed. Same here,’ he said.

On a night not long after he had found Gilbey and Jack Lescaux, Mingolla was about to enter his room at the Casa Gamboa, when he heard Ray’s voice issuing from an open shutter. He flattened against the wall and peeked through the window. Ruy was standing at the foot of the bed, dressed in jeans and a black wind-breaker; his hair was combed straight back, and the collar of the windbreaker was turned up, framing his face in such a way as to give it the austere nobility of a vampire.‘

‘Leave me alone!’ said Debora.

Mingolla couldn’t see her, but the distaste in her voice was clear.

‘I’ve been trying to,’ Ruy said. ‘But I can’t.’

‘You have to,’ she said. ‘I don’t love you … in fact, you’re beginning to disgust me. Don’t you have any self-respect?’

‘Not where you’re concerned.’ Ruy moved out of Mingolla’s line of sight. ‘Don’t you understand how he’s stifling you, stunting you? God, you should be—’

‘I’m not listening to this! Get out!’

‘Debora, please.’

‘Get out!’

‘For God’s sake, Debora. Don’t do this!’ There was a catch in Ray’s voice. ‘If I could just touch you once … like a lover.’

‘I want you to leave right now.’

‘Sometimes,’ said Ruy, ‘sometimes I think if I could touch you just once, that would be all I needed … it would sustain me the rest of my life.’

A pause, shuffling of footsteps.

‘Are you saying that if I let you touch me, you’d leave me alone afterward?’

‘I … I don’t know. I …’

‘Suppose I were to let you touch me,’ said Debora coldly, ‘Would you swear not to bother me again?’

‘You shouldn’t treat me like this,’ said Ruy. ‘I love you.’

‘Answer me.’

‘You’ll let me touch you?’

‘Only if you promise to leave me alone.’

His anger growing, Mingolla went to the door.

‘Please don’t do this,’ said Ruy.

Another pause, and then Debora said, ‘I’ll tell you what. You can touch me, touch my breast, if you swear you won’t even talk to me for at least a week.’

Mingolla put his hand on the doorknob.

Ruy was silent, and Debora said impatiently. ‘Well? Do you want to or not?’

‘I … yes,’ Shame in the quaver of the words.

‘All right,’ said Debora, and then: ‘No, I can’t. The idea of you touching me … it’s repulsive. Get out of here.’

Mingolla opened the door, and Ruy spun around to face him.

Debora was standing in the bathroom door. ‘He was just going,’ she said calmly.

‘That right, Ruy?’ said Mingolla.

Ruy shot Debora a resentful glance, then stalked from the room.

‘I was …’ Debora began.

‘I heard,’ said Mingolla.

‘I was trying to degrade him,’ she said. ‘I thought if he could see what a fool he was acting, he’d leave me alone. I think it worked.’

‘It won’t last,’ said Mingolla, throwing himself onto the bed. ‘The son of a bitch isn’t going to quit.’

‘Maybe not … but I want to handle him myself. Please don’t do anything foolish.’

‘How foolish am I allowed to be?’

She lay down beside him, flung an arm across his chest. ‘Please don’t do anything. Promise me.’

‘Sooner or later he’ll do something even if I don’t.’

‘He might not, he might get over it.’

‘Depends how far you’re willing to go. A quickie in some dark corner might diminish your air of unattainability.’

She frowned and edged away. ‘You don’t understand how hard it is having to fend him off. I know you don’t think—’

‘The thing is,’ he cut in, ‘I know you’re capable of screwing him if you thought it’d save the goddamn revolution. Maybe that’s the right attitude to take. Maybe we should all hop in the sack together and get rid of our frustrations.’

She tensed, and he felt her anger thickening the air. Laughter from the courtyard. Relaxed, confident Sotomayor laughter.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It’s not you, it’s everything.’

‘Just be quiet,’ she said, turning to face the wall. ‘Let me alone.’

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘But only if you let me touch you.’

Shortly after that he fell asleep with his clothes on, without making up. It had been a long time since he’d had a dream that he remembered, but that night he dreamed he was lying in a featureless void and straining to dream. At length he saw a dream approaching, a thin slice of vivid color and motion against the blackness. He awaited its arrival eagerly, but as it drew near he realized that the dream had come in the form of an enormous blade, and he awakened just in time to avoid being cut in half by it. He sat up in bed, frightened, wanting to be comforted, consoled. Debora was inches away, but half-believing that the dream had spoken to their irresolute condition, he doubted she could provide what he needed.

Two days after this, Mingolla broke into Ruy’s room and stole his notebook filled with poems and meditations about Debora. The notebook, he had decided, would give him the tool with which he could defuse Ruy as a threat; and yet he was not altogether sure why he wanted to defuse him, because he did not perceive Ruy as a serious threat. It seemed to him a whimsical act, one predicated on a desire to recalibrate his emotions, a motive similar – he suspected – to that underlying Ruy’s decision to pursue Debora. Seeing this resemblance to Sotomayor behavior in himself was alarming, but he was unable to deny the impulse.

The contents of the notebook made Mingolla envious. Ruy’s observations on Debora’s character were more detailed than his own, and though he chalked this up to the fact that Ruy had the
advantage of distance, the rationalization failed to diminish his envy. A few of the passages were quite well written, and one in particular struck Mingolla with its intensity and sincerity.

… It’s the thought of your beauty that makes me wake, sometimes, from the middle of dreams I can’t remember, it’s not the image of your face, the softness of your skin, but just the sudden awareness of beauty, that first strike before any of the details come clear, that jolts me hard into the world and leaves me broken on the shoals of my bed. For a moment I’m angry that you’re not there, but then anger planes into longing, and I stand up, pace, and haunt the darkness of my bathroom, thinking of remedies. I see there’s no reason for anger, no reason we should make the right choices, no reason we shouldn’t ruin our lives … after all, our lives are ruined already, and what sense is there in denying the world that waits to transform us into lumps of pain and wizened hairless dolls, and why should we assign value to love or any emotion that menaces our conception of the expectable? And having agonized for an hour over all this, having explored hope and hopelessness, in the end it’s the thought of your beauty that makes me lie back on the bed, heavy in the head, weighting me down so that I plummet through the edges of sleep and drown in the middle of dreams I won’t remember.

This passage and others firmed Mingolla’s resolve in that they caused him for the first time to see Ruy as a man; he was not inclined to see him that way, and so in order to reduce Ruy once again to the status of a characterless enemy, he took an irrevocable action against him.

Twice a week Marina Estil held what she called ‘group therapy’ in her hotel. She had tried to persuade Mingolla to join in, but he had refused, not wanting to involve himself more than necessary in Sotomayor business. However, on the night after he stole the notebook, he went to the hotel for the purpose of attending one of these sessions. Marina’s hotel was located three blocks from the Casa Gamboa and served as lodging for the leaders of the negotiating teams, both Sotomayor and Madradona. Mingolla
arrived a half-hour early, and rather than standing around the lobby, he went into the lounge and sat down in front of a TV set that was hooked to a satellite dish on the roof. He asked the lounge’s sole occupant – a young Madradona man – if he minded the TV being on, and then flipped through the channels until he came to one showing a line of plodding soldiers moving up a hillside under an overcast sky, and superimposed on this, shot in fiery letters, the legend:
William Corson’s War Stories
. Corson had visited the Ant Farm during Mingolla’s tour, and though Mingolla hadn’t met him, by all reports he was a good guy. Baylor had done an interview with him, and when Mingolla had asked what sort of man the journalist was, Baylor had only said, ‘The guy gets high.’ Which had been Baylor’s standard for acceptance. The credits rolled, and Corson strolled into view of the camera, the line of soldiers continuing uphill at his rear. He was bearded, tall, dressed in fatigues, with a hooked nose and fleshy lips; he looked, Mingolla thought, a little bit like a thinner, younger Fidel Castro.

‘Behind me,’ Corson said, ‘you see members of the First Infantry heading toward the fighting north of Lake Izabal. Once they cross that hill they’ll be in a hot zone, a zone that’s been hot for nearly three years, a battle without resolution. That fact speaks to the character of the war. Battles flourish like hothouse plants in the midst of pacified territory with no apparent justification other than a command strategy that can be best described as cryptic. All wars have their character. World War One was called the War to End War. World War Two was a righteous crusade against a legitimate madman. Vietnam has been countenanced as both an exercise in the demonic and as a gross political misjudgment. And this war … well, the poet Kieran Davies has pronounced it the vast sputtering signal of the Age of Impotence, the evil counterpart of topless tennis matches and fast food solutions to the nutritional problem.” Davies’s imagery has a basis in …’

‘Very sad,’ said a voice beside Mingolla.

The Madradona man had taken the adjoining chair. He was in his twenties, pudgy, smiling, wearing a red Coca-Cola T-shirt and chinos. ‘But soon,’ he went on, gesturing at the screen, ‘it will be all over, yes?’

Mingolla shrugged. ‘I guess.’

‘Oh, yes.’ The man patted his chest. ‘We will end it soon.’

‘Terrific.’

‘You are Meengolla, no?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I am Chapo. Pleased to meet you.’ Chapo held out a hand, and reluctantly Mingolla shook it. ‘Where are you from in the United States?’

‘New York.’

‘New York City? But this is wonderful! I am living a year in New York, in Green-witch Village.’

‘How ’bout that.’ Mingolla tried to get back into Corson’s monologue, but Chapo was relentless.

‘I love New York,’ he said. ‘I love especially the Mets. Such a wonderful team! Do you like the Mets?’

‘No.’

‘The Yankees, then?’

Mingolla nodded.

‘They are good, too,’ said Chapo with some condescension. ‘But I think the Mets are a little better.’

Mingolla stared grimly at the TV.

‘You are interested in this show?’

‘Right.’

‘I’m so sorry. I will watch with you.’

Corson had begun an interview with a crewcut kid younger than Mingolla, who was wearing an Air Cav patch on a nylon flight jacket. ‘Would you like to say anything to your parents … or your friends?’ Corson asked him.

The kid wetted his lips, looked at the ground. ‘Naw, not really.’

‘Why not?’

‘What’s there to say?’ The kid gestured at the soldiers, the jungle terrain. ‘Picture’s worth a thousand words, right?’ He turned back to Corson. ‘If they don’t know what’s goin’ on, me tellin’ ’em ain’t gonna help.’

‘And what do you think is going on?’

‘With the war? Fuckin’ war’s bullshit, man. This place’d be all right, wasn’t for the war.’

‘You like Guatemala, then?’

‘I dunno if I like it … it’s weird, y’know. Kinda neat.

’What’s neat about it?’

‘Well …’ The kid studied on it. This one time, I hitched a ride to Réunion with these minitank guys … they were convoying oil trucks along the Péten Highway. So one of the trucks turns over in the middle of the jungle, oil spills all over the fuckin’ place. Nothin’ can move till the spill’s cleared up. And alla sudden out of the weeds comes all these Fritos, man. They got little stoves and shit. They start cookin’ food. Fritters and chicken and stuff. Selling pop and beer. Like they been knowin’ this is gonna happen and they was just waitin’ for us to show. And there was girls, too. They’d take ya into the weeds and do ya. They wasn’t hard like the city girls. Sweet, y’know. It was ’bout the best time I had down here, and it was weird the way they was waitin’.’

‘You served in Guatemala, no?’ Chapo asked.

This time Mingolla was glad for the interruption; the interview had made him feel that he was watching a depressing home movie.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Artillery.’

‘It must have been horrible,’ said Chapo, and made a doleful face.