The Almanac of the Dead: A Novel (59 page)

The sound of the governor’s shots broke the paralysis, and Menardo was able to wobble to his feet. He had to go, he said. Just then he saw the manager of the country club frantically speeding across the golf course to stop El Grupo from shooting up the ninth hole. Three or four times a year it had been a custom of theirs after the sixth pitcher of margaritas, and what could the manager do? All but two of the group served on the country club’s board of directors. They had hired him. Still, when the manager came, usually that was a signal for the party to break up.

Time to go home for siestas before dinner. The governor had a date with his new sweetie. Just thinking about her made his manhood stiffen.

MENARDO LET TACHO HELP HIM into the backseat. Tacho could tell that he was not feeling well, but said nothing. That was one good thing about these Indians. They didn’t say much. But then Tacho did a strange thing. Tacho drove him past the mortuary, and suddenly Menardo recognized the sensation of paralysis he had felt earlier; he realized it was the sensation of a body being embalmed. He had felt the embalming fluid course through his veins. He could feel the sweat under his arms and down his back. He could feel sweat on his balls.

Menardo was surprised and frightened at how long it took to pass the mortuary. He realized it was partially his fault because he had told Tacho to drive slowly to conserve gasoline that every day became more expensive. The mortuary is visible for a long distance because it is a two-story building in the style of a Castilian mansion. At first the red-tile roof was all Menardo could see. Then he could see the purple blossoms of vines that climbed the outer walls. The plump flowers were grotesque. They seemed to have been approaching the mortuary for the past twenty minutes, and still they were not quite even with the mortuary’s entrance gate. He tried but could not think of what the purple flowers of the vines resembled except human intestines. Menardo regretted he had gone to see the victims of the ambush. Corpses were not yet a common thing, as in lands to the south. The bodies had barely begun to swell, and there was only a faint odor when the wind stirred. Although they had each been shot at the base of the skull, all the stomachs had been slashed open. Menardo could only think of the travel brochures for the Hawaiian Islands where Alegría wanted to go. Human intestines resembled Hawaiian necklaces of flowers. The car seemed not to quite reach the mortuary, even as it moved along the road. Menardo had felt the same sensation in a dream in which he was always just approaching but never quite reaching the treasure. Sounding as indifferent as he could,
Menardo asked Tacho to speed up a bit because the Señora would be waiting. This was a lie, because Alegría always played tennis on Friday afternoons. He felt the Mercedes surge forward, and the added speed broke the strange spell so at last they were past the mortuary.

Menardo had taken to sleeping in the bulletproof vest after university professors had been awakened by masked men and marched to the big fountain in front of the university library. The assassins shot the night watchman too, but he had lived long enough to describe the execution. With pistols buried in their victims’ stomachs, the assassins shouted, “Test this!” Of course the professors had all been communists, and the assassins were likely men working for the Police Chief’s special unit. Still, in times such as these one could not be too careful. So Menardo had slipped his silk pajamas over the vest. The vest no longer chafed or caused heat rash over his stomach. Without the vest, Menardo felt strangely exposed and somehow incomplete.

Alegría had made fun of Menardo in his vest. They no longer shared the same bed, and he was careful to remove the vest before he slipped into the velvet robe he always wore to her bedroom. She had joked about Menardo without his bulletproof vest.

“Aren’t you afraid the communists will shoot you right here?” Alegría said, laughing. Alegría had a cruel side, which his first wife, Iliana, had never had. “They have a small size for women you know.” Menardo wanted to please her. Sex required such effort now that Alegría had moved to her own bedroom. It was her design showcase, she said, but the next thing, she wanted to sleep there alone. Her excuse had been fear of pregnancy, but Menardo knew the vest he wore to bed was responsible. Still Menardo had no choice; without the vest, his sleep was lacerated with nightmares.

Iliana had been dead little more than a year and already the world had changed a great deal so she might not recognize newspaper headlines these days. The rebels rely almost entirely on dynamite. They hit key railroad and highway bridges. Last week terrorists had wired the staff car of a general called Fuentes with ten pounds of dynamite. The blast had blown away both legs and both balls and only left a flap of skin for a piss tube where his dick once was. Let that story get around. Later the rebels had scattered flyers with cruel cartoons of General Fuentes in a wheelchair with a comical dildo strapped on attempting to fuck a cunt labeled “Capitalism.” Menardo had been shaken by the bombings. He had met Fuentes on four occasions briefly. Strangely, they had once stood side by side at the Governor’s Palace urinal; Menardo had not
been able to resist the compulsion to glance quickly to his left to see the size and the shape of Fuentes’s cock. To think General Fuentes had been unmanned by exploding steel fragments—the very organ Menardo had so recently seen in the men’s room—had left Menardo nauseous.

MENARDO HAD ASKED TACHO what he thought about men cutting off the sex organs of other men and women. Menardo had conversations with Tacho he would never have dared with a white man. Tacho had watched Menardo in the rearview mirror as he answered. The blood fed life. Before anything you had the blood. The blood came first. At birth there was blood.

Blood was powerful, and therefore dangerous. Some said human beings should not see or smell fresh blood too often or they might be overtaken by frightening appetites. Usually Tacho said little, but on gruesome subjects, Tacho was like all the other Indians, even Menardo’s own grandfather, who relished stories about accidents and death. Menardo wanted to take advantage of Tacho’s mood to ask certain questions. Were there human sacrifices anymore? Not by the Indians, Tacho said, but the human sacrificers had not just been the Mexican tribes. The Europeans who came had been human sacrificers too. Human sacrificers were part of the worldwide network of Destroyers who fed off energy released by destruction. Menardo laughed out loud at Tacho. Tacho believed all that tribal mumbo jumbo Menardo’s grandfather had always talked about. Tacho looked at Menardo in the rearview mirror as if the laughter had insulted him, but Tacho continued.

Blood and its power had been misused by sorcerers. Long before Europeans ever appeared, the people had already disagreed over the blood and the killing. Those who went North refused to feed the spirits blood anymore. Those tribes and people who had migrated North fled the Destroyers who delighted in blood. Spirits were not satisfied with just any blood. The blood of peasants and the poor was too weak to nourish the spirits. The spirits must be fed with the blood of the rich
and the royal. God the Father himself had accepted only Jesus as a worthy sacrifice.

Menardo thought Tacho had finished on the subject, but then Tacho had blamed all the storms with landslides and floods, all the earthquakes and erupting volcanoes, on the angry spirits of the earth fed up with the blood of the poor.

Menardo did not raise the subject again with Tacho. The talk of blood and spirits thirsting for blood made Menardo feel nauseous. Then later in the day the disgusting subject had been raised again by General J., who wanted to talk about castration over lunch. The general fancied himself a bit of a scholar.

Menardo was disturbed that both General J. and Tacho had been so anxious to talk about sex and blood; he expected it of Tacho, but not of the general, who was highly educated. Yet the longer the general had talked to Menardo, the more animated the general had become, and a flush had spread up his throat to his cheeks, and Menardo had thought he saw a suspicious bulge in the general’s trousers. The general had continued with a theory some French doctors had had: he speculated that the sight and smell of blood naturally excited human sex organs. Because bloodshed dominated the natural world, those inhibited by blood would in time have been greatly outnumbered by those who were excited by the blood. Blood was everywhere, all around humans all day long. There was always their own blood pumping constantly.

Here Menardo had interrupted the general to ask, surely the general was referring to savage tribes—Indians and Africans—and not to civilized Europeans? But the general had laughed and shaken his head, draining his glass and wiping his mustache on the back of his hand. “No, these are the ancestors of the French we are talking about. The cave people of France.” Menardo did not recall the nuns and the priests or even the high school teachers ever mentioning that the early ancestors of the French had lived in caves eating raw meat. But the general was an intellectual, and Menardo knew the Catholic Church was old-fashioned about modern science. The French doctors had further speculated that the sight and smell of blood of the castration caused the body to release chemical signals to the genitals so that in primitive times, the conquerors who had castrated their prisoners would immediately impregnate the geldings’ women. The general had asked Menardo to forgive him for going on so unabashedly as he had about the unpleasant subject. But the general was about to complete a scholarly treatise on the use of physical measures such as castration to subdue rebel, sub-versive,
and other political deviants. General J.’s main thesis was that only the body remembered. The mind would blank out. Tortured nerves and veins had a memory; what the torturers did to prisoners was to make human time bombs. General J. believed the best examples of the Nazi torture work were Jews who proclaimed themselves survivors. Because their bodies had carried cruel memories for years and years, and when the Jews thought they were home free, and safe, then the time bomb went off and they committed suicide.

The general’s other theory was that man had learned the use of rape through the observation of the sexual behavior of stallions in wild herds. The soldiers of the invading armies had simply made certain all pregnant captives had been repeatedly and violently raped until bleeding commenced. Like stallions, they replaced the aborted with seed of their own.

The talk about blood had left Menardo shaken. He tensed his muscles to feel the firm outline of the vest on his belly and chest. Oddly he had never feared wounds in his back. All he had ever been was a serious businessman, a pioneer in the world of casualty insurance. Menardo had never lifted a hand against anyone except those who had in some way threatened damage to one of Universal Insurance’s clients. Even then, Menardo himself had never touched a hair on anyone; he had always left those decisions in the hands of General J., who commanded their security services. As the president of Universal Insurance, Menardo enjoyed state-of-the-art protection around the clock. Expense was of little concern. It would look bad for business if anything happened. Menardo had been thinking about a dealership for bulletproof vests. He liked the name Body Armor and knew it would sell strongly with his regular insurance clients. “We cover you for everything” was the slogan he would use.

Menardo began to make plans. It would be such a simple matter. He and Tacho would conduct a test. A simple but dramatic test of the bulletproof vest. By none other than himself. Menardo had studied the body armor brochures closely. Bullets had only left dark-purple bruises. Testimonials that accompanied the photographs again and again described the moment that vest users saw the end of the gun barrel and got ready to die. The velocity of the bullets had slammed them to the ground, but a miracle of high technology had given them a second chance. Menardo wanted to feel it, to experience it and to know the thrill, to see the moment of death and not have to pay.