The Fighting Man (1993) (21 page)

He sat alone and he watched.

They were gathered in the sweep of a half-moon and they faced into the fire. Mixed amongst them, scattered with the women and men and children, were the guerrillas who had joined, and Eff and Vee and Zed, and the peasant villagers they had brought to join the march.

Jorge stood on the far side of the fire so that the flames seemed to leap around him and his face was lit, and the camouflage of his tunic was highlighted, and his hands in their gestures with the rifle threw bouncing shadows onto the low walls of the homes behind him. It was done in an Indian dialect and Gord understood not a word. But it was the stage for Jorge. It was the first bravura performance, and the young man seemed to Gord to have thrown off the exhaustion that was common to all of them. He held his audience in spellbound silence. He was able to speak with a soft resonance that carried from the brightness of the fire’s side and across the half-glow of the middle ground and right to the darkness edge in which Gord sat.

Gord watched Jorge play the recruiting sergeant, and he felt no pride that he had himself glanced across the men of this hidden community and judged them on their fitness and on their muscle and estimated what they could carry and how they would fight. At the end Jorge spoke of the future, kneeling close to the jumping flames, speaking with the conviction of a missionary father. Gord felt the sense of sadness because he could not know where any of them who joined would be led, and he felt no pride because there was the certainty of forced marches and battles and more forced marches and more killing fights on the road ahead to Guatemala City. There was the final peroration, Jorge on his feet again and standing tall and with his back straightened and his voice rising at the end in the call for their help. It was well done . . .

The morning would show the truth of how well done. In the morning they would know how many of the men with the shoulders and the muscles and the quality to learn how to fight would join their march. On the map, Guatemala City and the Palacio Nacional were eighty-two miles away, direct line.

There was the clatter of applause.

There was the throb of the music, and the jugs of the fermented maize passed faster round the half-moon and the fire was piled higher and the wet wood crackled as with gunfire.

The children danced.

The children held hands. Gord thought he saw the one who had clutched the piglet in the hole. They lived in the mud and they lived in the wasteland of the jungle, and their mothers had dressed them in their best clothes, scrubbed shirts and washed dresses. The children held hands and they moved to the marimba music in a snaking and joined line. They wove close to the fire and were lit, and away from the fire and were in shadow. The line, once, twisted away from the fire and passed in front of Gord and the children’s small feet, bare and muddied, skipped over his legs. Dancing feet and dancing eyes and dancing smiles, and one boy reached out a hand to try to pull Gord to his feet, and he freed the child’s grip, and he locked his hands onto the barrel and stock of the machine gun. He watched the line of dancing children, silhouetted by the fire, meander away from him.

Groucho was beside him.

‘Pretty, beautiful – they are the future.’

‘If you say so.’

‘It is what we fight for, the future of the pretty and beautiful children.’

‘Emotion doesn’t help you.’

‘If you have nothing to believe in, Gord, can you fight and win?’

He stared down at the darkened barrel of the machine gun, and the fire’s light caught for a moment on the line of the belt of ammunition.

Groucho asked, ‘May I tell you a poem, Gord?’

‘I never had much time for poetry.’

He recited.

‘I,

a man struggling

in the middle of the century

tell you: at the end

of this century

the children

will be happy,

they will laugh again,

be born again in gardens.’

They were just words. Words were empty. There had been children playing in the streets of Karbala, and there had been children standing in those streets and crying as they had driven away in the Land Rover for the desert waste, and there would have been children cowering in the cellars when the armour of the Republican Guard had smashed back into the holy city of the Shias.

‘From

my bitter darkness

I go beyond

my own hard times

and I see

at the end of the line

happy children!

only happy!

they appear

they rise

like a sun of butterflies

after the tropical cloud burst.’

He thought of the butterflies they had seen that day, and there were some that he had swatted at in his impatience as they fluttered into the sweat of his face. The gold and ochre and amber and scarlet of the wings he had lashed at . . .

The fire was dying. The party was ending.

Groucho said, ‘The poem was written by Otto René Castillo. He was captured by the troops of the government in 1967. I was twenty-five years old then, with my doctorate, and I was in love with the books of my study. He was captured and he was tortured and he was burned alive by the troops of the government. It was when I had read the poem that I left my books and went to the mountains and found the father of Rodolfo Jorge Ramírez. It was for the children.’

‘I hear you,’ Gord said.

And Groucho was gone from beside him. He cradled the machine gun. He watched the children in the growing darkness and the chain of their hands had been broken and the butterflies in light played at his mind.

The Fireman gazed down onto the bodies.

The bodies were in a ditch and the way they had fallen had made a dam for the water and a pool had formed to the right side of them.

The Fireman and the men on his team were given the order. They splashed down into the ditch. They dragged out the upper body first and laid it without reverence on the earth of the roadside. The rain fell continuously. The rainy season had started early in Guatemala City, more rain that day than the day before, more rain that week than the week before. The first body was unmarked, no bruises and no cuts on the face, only the ligature line at the neck. It was near to a year since the Fireman had seen the death signature of the string that was fastened around the
capucha
. He scrambled down with another man into the ditch again. There were slugs in the sockets where the eyes of the second body had been. He could recognize the signs. The first had died too early, and the second had resisted interrogation too long. He imagined a knife moving closer to the eyebrow, eyelid, eyeball. Perhaps, one eyebrow, eyelid, eyeball taken out and then the confession to the interrogator. Perhaps only after the second eyebrow, eyelid, eyeball had been knifed had the confession come . . . He lifted the body clear.

There were others who carried the two bodies to the back hatch of the fire engine.

He was given a cigarette by a policeman. The policeman was talkative, rambling because of what he had seen.

The policeman told him the story that was told, what he had heard from a friend who had a brother whose wife worked as a waitress in the officers’ dining hall of the
estado mayor
. The waitress at the High Command officers’ dining hall had told her husband who had told his brother who had told his friend that she had heard the colonels and brigadiers discussing an aircraft landing in the Petén, and an action on the road between Sayaxché and Chinajá in which many soldiers had died. It was the story that the policeman with the cigarettes offered to the Fireman.

When the bodies had been left at the morgue, when his duty was complete, the Fireman went home. In the room where he slept with his wife and his daughter, in the house that he shared with his mother and father and sister, he packed a small bag. The Fireman told his wife what he had heard. He kissed his wife in the privacy of the bedroom. He left her numbed and holding their baby. He walked to the Zona 4 bus terminal and bought a one-way ticket.

Because nine men joined them, they started late and there had been the drawn-out farewells, and the arguments, and women had hung on to their sons, and children had clung to their fathers. They had nine recruits because of Jorge and the speech that he had made against the fire flames in the night . . . They needed the men and they needed the speed, and the two were unmeshed cogs in the charge that he demanded.

His guts were loose from the coarseness of the drink and the richness of the cooked fresh pork meat. It was a humiliation to Gord that he had to stop once after the march had started and dig his small hole and squat over it.

He chivvied and he kicked and he persuaded.

In the fourth rest halt of the morning he was called forward.

Zed, ahead, had reached the road and seen the men.

The map showed Gord and Jorge that the road ran from Playa Grande to San Benito and then on to Chinajá.

Zed led Gord and Groucho away from the rest halt and to the road.

Where they reached the road there was a sharp left bend. Like the Sayaxché to Chinajá road the sides had been cleared. There was no vantage point. They lay on their stomachs on the wet grass and the rain ran from the leaves above and onto them. Gord could hear the voices of the men and he could see the upper bodywork of the grey-blue painted station wagon. They talked like waiting men, lowered tones as if all the time they listened, small laughter as if all the time they were keyed for the work ahead. The vehicle was pointed back up the road, where the map told Gord Playa Grande lay. There were four men and the rain streamed down onto them and they wore no hats and their shirts were plastered to their bodies and their jeans were dark blue from damp. Two carried Uzi machine pistols and one held a rifle across his chest, readied, and the fourth had what Gord recognized as a Colt revolver placed loose in his waist belt. Gord pressed his hand down through the grass and into the earth below and he ground his hand at the earth until the mud stuck to the palm and he wiped the smear of mud across his face and across his hands, and he did the same for Groucho, and he wriggled two, three yards further forward. He motioned for Zed to stay back. He was concerned . . . if the men were to stay long where they waited beside their vehicle then he must return to the column and lead them on a detour, and lose the time that was so precious to him. He wanted to be laid up outside Playa Grande by the evening because that was the village and the garrison that had been chosen. He lay quite still, which was his training, and once he fastened his fist into the shoulder of Groucho’s tunic as the man fidgeted.

He would know the sound anywhere. A man who had been in the British army would never forget the engine whine of a Land Rover.

The men on the road were alerted. They moved sharply. He guessed they were soldiers, perhaps paramilitary police. He thought they knew their work. Two had taken position behind the tail door of the vehicle and one was crouched in the cover of the forward wheel, and the fourth man, with the Colt in his waist, sauntered to the middle of the puddled road. It came round the corner. The Land Rover was swerving to avoid the potholes and coming slowly because of the tightness of the bend and the man with the Colt revolver blocked its path and waved it casually down. The shout rose in Gord’s throat and was stifled, and the weight of his hand pressed down onto Groucho’s shoulder and demanded his silence. The Land Rover stopped. He could see the broad smile on the man’s face and his relaxed arm hid the butt of the revolver. The man opened the door of the Land Rover. There was the explosion of movement. The man in cover at the front wheel of the vehicle throwing open his own door. The two men behind the vehicle sprinting forward. Gord saw the flash of the young woman’s hair and he heard her shout. She was dragged from her seat. A man on each arm and running her to the station wagon, and the cacophony of barking from the depth of the Land Rover, and her door kicked shut behind her. He saw the trapped dog leaping and clawing at the window of the Land Rover. So fast, Gord had the palm of his hand over the muzzle of Groucho’s Kalashnikov. They would not shoot. His other hand loosened on his own weapon. They would not intervene. His decision was made. He watched. The engine of the station wagon was gunned. The young woman, blonde hair, shouted at the skies and the tree line and the bend in the road. A garbled cry for help. He heard the mess of the words, English, incoherent,
English
. She was thrown into the back of the station wagon and there were two of the men piling in after her, and the station wagon accelerated past the Land Rover and raked it with a long burst of firing on automatic.

The station wagon disappeared at the corner.

The engine sound was fainter. The dog roared in the closed interior of the Land Rover. He took his hand from over the muzzle of Groucho’s rifle. He saw the bitter anger on Groucho’s creased face.

‘You let it happen.’

‘It wasn’t the place . . .’

‘You let the Death Squad take her.’

‘You don’t question me . . .’