The Fighting Man (1993) (5 page)

The lieutenant was looking over his shoulder, down to the yellowed sheets of paper from the files, down onto the new photographs that had come that afternoon from Havana.

He liked the boy. He respected the lieutenant’s attitude to work.

The clerk’s forefinger, taken away at the upper joint, jabbed at the photograph that showed a coffin on a trestle at a graveside. He peered into the lieutenant’s face and smiled.

‘The end of the old whore Ramírez. It was taken eight, nine, days ago, from Havana . . . You had heard, lieutenant, of the whore Ramírez . . . ?’

It was good coffee that the lieutenant brought in his flask. He could smell the quality. He saw the shaken head.

‘. . . From Acul, from the Ixil triangle. He was a
Ladino
, he ran a hardware shop in the village. He was the big man there. He reckoned himself the leader of the Indians in that village. There was a poison in him, and he spread the poison through the villages around Acul, right to the towns of the triangle. A cunning old whore because he had learned the matter of defence. The army came to destroy him, but not with enough force and could not take the village. He was successful against the campaign of Victory ’82. In the campaign of Firmness ’83 he was again permitted to survive. It was not until Institutional Re-encounter ’84, when the Kaibiles were used against the village, that he was defeated. The village of the whore was the last in the triangle to be taken. It was a big battle, a day and most of a night, the whore had taught them to fight well. It was where my leg . . .’

The clerk grimaced. It was always in the evenings when the wasted muscles around the shrapnel wound had stiffened that he felt the greatest pain. It had been a small mine, made in the village, positioned off the road in the cover beside a track, well sited. It was the rusted nails in the mine, scattered by the explosion, that had torn into the calf muscle of his right leg and caused the secondary gangrene. It was where he had lost the tip of his right-hand forefinger.

‘. . . He is still remembered, a little of the poison remains. He went into exile. He went to the clown fantasy land of Cuba. I have it here . . .’

The clerk flicked at close-typed pages, some corrected with ink, of a file half covered by the twin piles of photographs.

‘. . . It is said that the old whore dreamed only of returning to the triangle, that he sat in the cafés in the Campeche quarter of Old Havana and played the game of fighting his way back to his village – just the dream of an old whore. You know how it ended, the dream? Not at the head of a column, not in the jungle in the Petén, not in the mountains of the Cuchumatanes – it ended when he was hit by a bus that had lost its brakes, when he was crossing the road to go for his coffee with the other fools who believed he would take them back. I suppose it was possible, in the shithouse of Havana, to believe that one day he would return and that the Indians, dumbfucks, would follow him again. He had a good funeral . . .’

The lieutenant’s breath played on the back of the clerk’s neck. The lieutenant’s hand rested loosely on the clerk’s shoulder.

‘. . . All the old men who went into exile with him were there, look at them, raddled, wrinkled, hair gone, all cretins. There are just three that I can’t locate. Too old, too changed. I tell you what I think, I think it would be a worse death to be in exile in Havana, than to face the guns of the Kaibiles. Look at them, if they were in the Petén, in the jungle, they would be gone in forty-eight hours. They are pathetic . . .’

The lieutenant reached forward and pushed away the corners of photographs so that one was left clear. The clerk shrugged.

‘. . . His son. That is Rodolfo Jorge Ramírez. There was a daughter but she had already gone, she is in Europe. The wife of the whore was killed. The whore took his son with him when he fled. They went in the last light of the second day of the battle . . . Yes, a good-looking young man, I don’t mind saying that. Perhaps now that he is free of the chains of the old whore he will go to Europe to his sister . . .’

The lieutenant poured what was left of the coffee into the plastic beaker of the clerk, and picked up his attaché case from the floor. The clerk shuffled after him, dragging the damaged leg, and cleared him through the outer barred door of the basement. Not for him to ask the business of the lieutenant now that darkness had fallen on the city, not for him to remember which file had been begged by the lieutenant for study. He slammed the door shut again. He called cheerfully to the lieutenant’s slim back.

‘It was a real war then. Not this shit of today. There was a time when it was thought they might win, the communists, might actually march into the Plaza Mayor, right to the Palacio Nacional. You know, all the flights, every day, to Miami, they were full then . . . a long time ago. Good night.’

Just the sound of light footsteps slipping away up the basement’s staircase.

He cackled his laughter. He was afraid of none of them, not the generals nor the field commanders nor the interrogators, all of whom would recognize the gold-dust value of the material he had assembled.

The clerk returned to his desk. He packed up the file of a father who had died in exile and tied a length of string twice round the file and knotted the end of it. From the drawer of his desk he took a new file cover and slipped the photograph of the young man at a funeral into it, and he wrote carefully on the outside of the file ‘
RODOLFO JORGE RAMIREZ
’.

The silence of the basement was around him. His company was the files of the dead and the living. He drank the coffee that had been left for him.

He rang the bell.

The doorway was beside the shop’s window.

There was a mist off the harbour but the rain had stopped. The narrow street was deserted. Gord shivered. He rang the bell again, and was rewarded. A light came on behind the curtains drawn across the sash window above the shop front. There was a sign in the window, written in biro on cardboard, stating that the shop would be reopening in Whitsun week. The window was empty and the shelves in the interior gloom were bare. The sign above the window was Torbay Crafts, and flaking. He had come off the slow train that brought the mail and the newspapers from London, catnapped for two hours on a platform bench at Newton Abbot, and taken the first train of the morning on to Paignton, and then a taxi. He had walked twice round the harbour, seen the fishing fleet prepare to sail, and then climbed the steps to the street and the shop with the accommodation above it.

He had been there once before, another dawn, the visit before he had flown out to the Gulf. Twelve hours’ leave, and most of it spent getting to and from Torbay.

Gord was there, on that bloody wet doorstep, because he had thought that it was what his father would have wanted.

There was the lock being turned. Not the opportunity to bring his mother flowers, nor a present.

A man in the doorway. The man had grey thin hair sprouting uncombed and he wore a vest under a woman’s dressing gown that was fastened only at the waist and below long spindle legs he wore a pair of crushed carpet slippers. The sleep was becoming anger on the man’s face.

‘What’s your bloody game then . . . ?’

Gord stood in the clothes of the fish farm, and of the bar beside the sea loch, and of the train to London.

‘. . . What time of the bloody day do you reckon this is?’

Gord didn’t know his mother had a live-in, but then he hadn’t seen her, hadn’t wanted to, since he had come back from the Gulf.

Gord saw his mother in the shadow behind the guy. She was in a tent of a nightdress.

‘Hello, Mum.’

There was her embarrassment, and the introduction. He was Bill, he was the lodger. He helped with the shop. Not Gord’s business if his mother was shacked up. Not for him to query, from a high horse, why the lodger needed to wear his mother’s dressing gown and be on hand to help in a shop that had been closed for seven months.

He told her that he was going away.

‘You could have telephoned . . .’ said critically.

He told her that he didn’t know when he would be back.

‘You didn’t have to just pitch up . . .’

He told her that where he was going he would not be able to stay in touch.

‘You joking – how long since you were last “in touch” . . . ?’

He told her to look after herself.

‘You got a funny way with words, you think you can just pick people up, drop them. Damn you, you’re your father’s son . . .’

It was two hundred miles to be there and it would be two hundred miles back. He didn’t ask himself inside for a cup of coffee and it wasn’t offered. He had not been asked where he was going, and why, and when. He wouldn’t have told her. He turned away. He headed off down the narrow street. He had gone because it was what his father would have expected of him. He heard her call, perhaps frightened, perhaps in late good will. He didn’t stop. He didn’t wave.

He went down the steps leading to the harbour. He had to watch his feet for the dog shit and the broken bottles. His sister was somewhere in the north of England and teaching at an inner-city primary school and likely still to be wearing a Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament badge, and she was contemptuous of him. His mother had made room in her bed for a guy who was, certain and sure, fleecing off her the money she’d made when she’d sold up in London. That was her business and only hers, and she had no room in her life for him.

It was only for his father that he’d come.

The last public goodbye to his father had been the memorial service at St Bride’s, the hacks’ church in Fleet Street. They’d been in the pews behind him, the old muckers of Theo Joseph (TeeJay) Brown, and they’d have been glancing down at their watches and working it out, how long until they could get outside and light up, and how long until they could get into the pub and start the rounds of doubles. They’d sung out of tune, off scale, and he’d blessed them because he’d heard the nose-blowing of the old bastards close to tears. There had been the hacks and the florid-faced men in their dark suits from Regional Crime Squad and Flying Squad and Drugs Squad, and there had been barristers’ clerks and the solicitors who wouldn’t have been happy to share a bench with a detective. The lesson read by the chief sub who’d started on the same newsagency as TeeJay, and the address given by the last editor to fire him. Gord had never been able to reckon out whether his father would have approved of the service; sure as hell, wherever he’d gone, he’d have been cursing that he’d missed out on the piss-up in the pub round the corner afterwards.

Gord Brown had no other business to detain him.

He would fly with the men who wanted him.

So goddamn alone, and lengthening his stride, hurrying to get to the taxi rank beside the bus station.

When Colonel Arturo heard of the shooting dead of the two
subversivos
he ordered that the bodies should be brought down to the village for display.

He watched from in front of the small whitewashed church that was close to the military compound as they were carried by the Civil Patrollers, brought down from the tree line that clung to the rising ground around the cleared area where the new community of Acul was settled. He could recite the statistics, because each time that a gringo bastard came down from New York or Washington or Los Angeles to write a lying and distorted article then it would be picked up and reprinted in the edition of the
International Herald Tribune
that he would find in the officers’ mess of the
estado mayor
. All of the senior officers attached to the Military Headquarters read the
International Herald Tribune
in the mess. The statistics that were always used stated that 100,000 civilians, what Colonel Arturo called
subversivos
, had been killed by the regular army and paramilitary forces. But they were harder now to obtain, the bodies of
subversivos
, because the war was won, the shit enemy was deep in the jungle, high on the mountains, and beaten. The shit enemy was little more than a nuisance . . . He had been told that these two men, down from the high ground and scavenging for food, were of the Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres, the group that still festered in the remotest country of the Ixil triangle. He raised his stub field binoculars, saw the procession enter the far extremity of the village.

With the war won it was good to take the opportunity to remind the people of the Model Village in the Pole of Development, the new housing programme where Indians could be supervised and controlled, of the protection that they received from the army and their own men who served in the Civil Patrols. He thought that he would make a speech, impromptu, and perhaps suggest to the captain who commanded the village garrison that a small fiesta, plenty of drink for the animals, should be held that evening. Once inside the perimeter line of the village, the bodies were taken through the side streets, the dirt strips that ran between the lines of tin-roofed houses. Up the Calzada de Libertad, down Avenida República de China, along Avenida Soldado Guatemalteco. It was correct that as many of the villagers as possible should see the bodies.

He had come to Acul that morning because the place was set in the history of his military service.