The Almanac of the Dead: A Novel (56 page)

Marxism had a bleak future on American shores. Irreparable harm had been done by the immense crimes of his followers, Stalin and Mao. To the indigenous people of the Americas, no crime was worse than to allow some human beings to starve while others ate, especially not one’s own sisters and brothers. With the deaths of millions by starvation, Stalin and Mao had each committed the sin that was unforgivable.

Only
locos
such as the Shining Path mentioned Mao anymore. The Shining Path refused to hear about any mass starvation except what they themselves had suffered; to them, all history outside the Americas was irrelevant. The earth could be flat as far as the Sendero knew or cared. If communists had starved
some
millions, the bankers and Christians of the capitalist industrial world had starved
many many
millions more. Look all around and in every direction. Death was on the horizon. Talk to the Sendero about Stalin’s or Mao’s famines and they will simply shoot you to shut you up. Marx and Engels could not be blamed for Mao or Stalin or Sendero any more than Jesus and Muhammad could be blamed for Hitler.

El Feo had worked out the wrinkles and snags between Angelita
and the elder sisters. The time was drawing near for the “beginning,” and they did not want misunderstandings or hard feelings among their people or allies. Many of the older people had been reluctant to hear about Marx because theirs had been a generation that had seen the high water of the flood of Christian missionaries, who had recited the names Marx and Engels, right after the names of Satan, Lucifer, and Beelzebub.

So Comrade Angelita did not hesitate to talk about anything the people wanted to ask. There was nothing to be nervous about. There was nothing they couldn’t talk about.

Was Comrade Angelita trying to get the village to join up with the Cubans?

How much were the Cubans paying her?

Wasn’t communism godless? Then how could history so full of spirits exist without gods?

What about her and that white man, Bartolomeo? To questions about her sexual conduct, Angelita was quick to laugh and make jokes. Sex with the Cuban was no big thing.

“JUST A LITTLE SOMETHING for you, Menardo, a little gift.” “Ah, Sonny, what is it? Size extra large? What are these? Falsies? You don’t think I’ve got a big enough chest and belly?” Menardo laughs as he holds up the bulletproof vest his friends in Tucson have sent him.

Menardo sits with the sun at his back by the pool. The gardeners are swimming on the bottom, cleaning bits of soil and stray rootlets from the water lilies. Twice daily this is done to keep the big pool crystal-clear as glass. The vest’s gift wrapping slides from his lap, but the maid catches it before it hits the blue tile decking. Sonny Blue finishes the piña colada, and another maid, older, with a face like an Olmec mummy, brings him a fresh drink. Sonny pokes a finger at the gardenia floating in the drink. He watches Menardo stand up and try on the vest.

“These pads—”

“They are called inserts.”

“These will stop a .357 magnum.”

“But they are heavy, hot to wear.”

“Yes,” Menardo said. “Still, I don’t mind. Hot and alive are better than cold and dead.”

Menardo fumbles with the bulletproof vest, then slips his white silk shirt over it. “
Pues! Qué guapo!”
Menardo struts up and down the length of the pool to get the effect of the vest. He glances at the big yellow and pale pink blossoms floating on the water. A gardener surfaces at his feet, but he is looking at Sonny Blue.

Sonny Blue was beginning to feel tired from the flight that had left Tucson so early. He traveled for their “friend,” Mr. B. Mr. B. rented warehouses in Tucson from Leah Blue. Mr. B. sent Sonny to Mexico to become familiar with a key supplier, Menardo. The U.S. government supports covert forces and supplies them with weapons got by trading cocaine through Tucson. Mr. B. has explained it before. Max Blue had worked for the U.S. on secret projects a time or two. Sonny found the secret war exciting.

“No, no worry my friend,” Menardo says in English. “We are shooting them to hell. We are making them a bloody pile.”

There is a woman laughing. The sound pours through the French doors of the balcony. Both men look up. “Alegría,” Menardo says, and smiles again at Sonny. “She loves beautiful, expensive things.” Sonny suddenly hates Menardo’s tone of certainty about his wife. He longs to tell Menardo what Alegría really loves, what she wants to take and take all night long. Instead Sonny Blue stands up suddenly and extends his hand. Menardo points at the piña colada Sonny has not finished. “Alegría will be furious if she misses you,” Menardo says. Sonny Blue knows he should go. Menardo works with all the factions. His number may be coming up—bulletproof vest or no vest. Sonny shakes his head.

“Next trip I’ll come for dinner.”

“Your word of honor!”

Sonny Blue lets Menardo embrace him and kiss both cheeks. “My word of honor,” Sonny says softly.

The older maid escorts him out. Her face is a mask, but in the eyes Sonny sees danger. He looks around the vast mansion, the pale marble staircase and the white and black checkerboard of marble in the entry hall. Beneath the glass dome of the conservatory, gardeners’ assistants hang like monkeys from ladders, tending orchids with cascading spikes of yellow blossoms flecked with bright red. The sky above the dome is the blue of gemstones, not sky. The glass dome is Alegría’s dome. It is
her design. Sonny is impressed. Alegría had graduated from architecture school in Madrid. Menardo wasted no time in replacing the dead wife with one as young as his daughter. Sonny knows there are rumors Alegría killed the old wife.

All the thick hairs on Menardo’s stomach and chest have turned white. He will be fifty in the spring. He wants to wear the bulletproof vest to the ambassador’s party. But he can not decide if an undershirt should be worn to prevent chafing.

“I don’t want to be in the middle of dinner and have it pinch my ribs.”

“There’s no chance of that happening unless you mean pinching the layer of fat hiding your ribs.” Alegría is angry because Menardo scolded her for the new shoes and purse to match.

“Reptile, aren’t they.” He frowns. “You know how I dislike snakes.”

She laughs and he turns suddenly from the silver box containing his cuff links. She realizes then he is serious. He has never been so angry with her before. She stands motionless and stares at him like the little doe blinded in the headlights of their Mercedes the night before. She is selfish and thoughtless but she knows it. All the shoes and dresses with his money are intentional. Why else is she married to him?

Menardo turns back to the mirror and fumbles with the thin metal inserts that slip into pocket panels sewn in the front and back of the vest. The insert that belongs in the pocket over his heart does not lie flat. He had read the instructions that came in the box. The vest is the finest body armor made. The vest is sold only to the U.S. military and U.S. police forces. The instructions must be followed or the maximum protection will not be obtained.

“Is everything all right?” The sight of the vest makes Alegría uneasy. Lately there is an unidentified dread that shadows her.

“Of course. Don’t be silly.” Menardo says, taking a silk shirt from the closet. “We are going to be late.” Alegría feels the tears. She had not thought of tears, but there they are in her eyes.

The scene is a replay of her afternoon with Bartolomeo, who complains he can’t even tease her anymore.

“You will look good as a widow,” Bartolomeo had told Alegría as she was dressing. She was wearing a black silk slip.

“What do you mean?”

“Just that you look ravishing in black.”

“You know something else—tell me!” But Bartolomeo rolls over
on his side and laughs. He tells her paranoia comes from guilt, but she had been frightened. Had spies seen her with Bartolomeo? Bartolomeo teases her after they make love; he calls her “the double agent.”

“On whose side?” Alegría says, though she knows it is dangerous either way.

Tears get nowhere with Bartolomeo, but fortunately Menardo is different. Menardo refuses nothing to her tears. She removes the black lizard shoes and carefully wraps them in the white tissue paper. She wipes the back of her arm across her face like a child. He is right. They are all right. About her. She’s selfish. She lives for herself. She knows this but can not stop. There is no other use for her. She knew this even while she was in school. The others at the university sneered at her drawings full of delicate lines.

“Whom are those buildings for? What meaning do they have for any of us?”

She laughed nervously and pretended to erase a smudge. “When you take power, you will want big buildings too,” she teases, but the hostility from them is always there even though she uses her key to get into the architecture building late at night to mimeograph leaflets for them. She loved making the drawings—floor plans of vast rooms, interiors flooded with light from high windows and domes, the pearly-yellow light framed on white walls. She wanted the gardens to penetrate the rooms. The only criticism of the drawings for her final project had been that they contained no human figures. The professor of the design class finds the figures of little dogs, parrots, and monkeys too whimsical. She does not tell him the human figures she draws spoil everything. They always look like police or men in dark suits, and they are always too large. She cleverly drew little dogs on the stairway. A monkey played in the orchids of the hanging garden, and she drew a scarlet macaw on a perch.

In the backseat of the Mercedes, Menardo pats Alegría’s hands absentmindedly; ahead of them are two bodyguards in a truck, and two more guards follow in a white jeep. The vest causes Menardo to hold himself straight. He moves stiffly when he turns to take a second look at an armored personnel carrier parked outside the Governor’s Palace. Mexico is almost bankrupt and the country is about to explode, that is what her mother and father write to her each week. “Come home to Caracas,” they plead.

“You are upset about something,” Alegría says to Menardo, who has a sour look on his face. He tugs at the corners of his small, neatly
trimmed mustache. “It’s nothing you need to worry about, darling.”

“But it is,” Alegría answers.

At the party he watches her dance with each of the host’s four handsome sons. Alegría is the only woman dressed in black. She is the most beautiful. He had not meant to scold her about the shoes. But somehow black reptile skin is part of the nightmare he has from time to time. He struggles to remember the dream, but knows only somewhere in the dream there is scaly, black, reptilian skin. He had been startled that Alegría had found shoes and a purse identical to the reptile skin in the nightmare. She could not have known about the reptile skin because he told no one his dreams except Tacho, his driver, who came from a village near a Mayan temple ruin. In Tacho’s village they were all trained to decipher dreams. Menardo paid Tacho twice the going rate to ensure strict confidentiality. Enemies could use your dreams to destroy you, that’s what Tacho had told Menardo in the beginning. Right then Menardo knew he must double the Indian’s salary or tell Tacho nothing about his dreams.

Menardo talks to Tacho about other delicate matters. He asks Tacho who these Indians are who join up with the guerrillas in the hills. Tacho turns and flashes a big smile into the backseat of the Mercedes.

“They are the brothers of the soldiers who guard the Palace,” Tacho says, and pretends he is serious. Menardo likes a servant with a sense of humor. Sullenness upsets him. He had been relieved when Alegría had changed out of the black lizard shoes without pouting. Gardeners, servants, and the Indians had become more sullen since guerrilla forces had made regular strikes across the border. Guatemala had too many educated Indians. It was the fault of the Church. From the very beginning priests treated them like human beings.

“Nowadays you educate an Indian and he becomes a Marxist,” the former ambassador says. The governor signals for the expensive champagne. Although they have been discussing the guerrillas, and before that the upcoming elections, Menardo’s attention wanders. It is probably due to lost sleep from the nightmare. He watches Alegría dance with an investment broker from São Paulo. She smiles up into the man’s face. It occurs to Menardo he could ask Tacho if Alegría had ever been unfaithful. Indians could detect such things. The governor jokes this is the last of his French champagne, now that the socialists had spoiled everything in France. Someone jokes about the Americans with money frozen in Mexican bank accounts. It isn’t a mistake any wealthy Mexican would have made. Menardo allows the dark-skinned servant to refill his
glass again. He is getting drunk, but he wants to. Alegría is dancing with the host’s youngest son. They stop. The boy gestures with both hands.

“It’s not just the Indians, really.” Someone behind him is talking about guerrillas. “A few come from the best of families.” Menardo takes a big swallow of champagne. He wants to dance with his wife. The boy sees him and bows away graciously. Alegría looks surprised. “Are you all right?” she asks.