The Origin of Species (20 page)

After that, he’d just gone along with whatever agenda she set, even though he couldn’t rightly say he was making any progress with her, however that might be judged. Mostly, when they were together, there wasn’t even a chance to talk properly: the music was too loud, or María was speaking in rapid Spanish to her other friends, or there was just too much going on,
pupusas
were being handed around or someone had started a sing-along or there was some heated argument on a fine point of Salvadoran politics. The worst of it was that he didn’t really possess any extra verbal communication skills—María had quickly given up taking him onto the dance floor, though that never stopped her from finding other, more suitable partners. Seeing her move out there, with a visceral precision that seemed its own dialect, he felt like a closet
WASP
, as if this tight-assed, godforsaken country of his had somehow beaten him down to its own image.

They’d reverted to English as their lingua franca, the only real asset Alex brought to the table, but the switch hadn’t given him much advantage in their exchanges, or deflected María from the thankless but necessary work of challenging his every utterance. If he disparaged something, she’d find a way to sing its praises; if he tried to raise something up, she’d
be quick to dismiss it. Alex figured this was some sort of Latin courtship ritual, like a tango, though more often than not she caught him out. She’d torn a strip off him when he’d claimed Canadians were less racist than Americans, using the unfair advantage of actual experience.

“Canadians, they think they are very good,” she said. “But in Canada, only six thousand Salvadorans. In U.S., six hundred thousand.”

Never mind that all of them were there illegally and that the Americans were shipping bombs to her country as if they were Corn Flakes. Yet he had to take her point: even in the Land of Reagan some sort of place had been found for those hundreds of thousands, while the Canadians let in their piddling handfuls and thought they were saving the world.

After a few of these batterings, Alex grew more careful. Most of what passed for his worldview suddenly seemed horribly glib: he’d always thought of himself as holding the right opinions, but there was a whole order of things he’d never seen through to, that his little cocoon-life had always protected him from. He’d had an image of being a sort of confessor to María, but grew more and more uneasy about picking his way into the minefield of her personal life.

“Because of the union,” she said, when he’d screwed up the courage to ask why she’d left home.

“The union made you leave?”

She actually laughed.

“Because I was part of the union. Is very hard then.”

She’d been a teacher in San Salvador, he’d got that much out of her—“
dans la banlieue
,” she’d said, in the suburbs, whatever that could mean. He couldn’t picture it, what her school might look like, what sorts of lesson plans she might write up. All he knew of her country were the acronyms he read in the news,
FMLN, FECCAS, FAPU, ERP,
the splinter groups within splinter groups, the leftists who couldn’t be trusted and the rightists who could. In the library he looked up articles in back issues of
The New Republic
and
The Manchester Guardian
, but the more he learned, the murkier things became: here was a country with a semblance of order, opposition parties, an elected government, but all that was the merest scrim, a rag draped over the void. In a garbage dump outside San Salvador truckloads of bodies showed up every morning in various states of mutilation, split in half, maybe, or with the heads cut off or the severed genitals stuffed in the mouth, and all this
went on while American congressmen praised the progress in human rights and voted funds for new helicopter gunships. The bodies were just a sideshow: meanwhile, there was the war, whole villages burnt to the ground if the rebels had so much as begged a glass of water in them, and half the country in refugee camps, where you waited for the chance in a million that some government or church group would pick you out from the miserable rest and take you home.

At El Mozote, the soldiers brought everyone to the square and separated the men from the women and children, putting the men in the church and the women and children in some nearby houses. Over the course of a morning they tortured the men and then executed them, either decapitating them in the church with machetes or taking them to the woods outside town to be shot. In the afternoon, they started with the women, first the younger ones, whom they raped and killed, then the rest, whom they shot in groups in a house at the edge of town. Some of the children they had already hanged from trees around the playing field near the school; the remainder they herded into the sacristy at the back of the church and machine-gunned through the windows. Only two people survived, a boy who ran into the woods after seeing a baby speared on a bayonet, and a woman who somehow managed to crawl behind a bush when her own group was taken out to be shot.

It beggared the mind that humans could ever do such things, and yet Alex couldn’t remember having taken any special notice of the event when it had first come to light. Even now he could feel his brain trying to shunt it off to some back corner: there was no use to it except the guilty thrill of its unambiguousness, its stark evidence that the enemy was a monster. Beyond that there was only undigestible horror, the blood and the screaming, the children hanging from tree limbs while their legs twitched. None of these things brought him closer to María—rather, he felt the weight of them like a third person between them, someone who knew, and knew, and made anything he could say pointless. He kept seeing the scrubby woods of El Mozote, the soldiers, the mud houses, like a bad dream he couldn’t shake. The soldiers were just rebels with better uniforms, disgruntled peasants whom the army had got to first. People heard of these savageries and always imagined themselves as the good guys, but Alex wasn’t so sure: if the captain had come to him and said, “Kill the children,” who knew if he’d have resisted.

It didn’t help to be off spelunking like this in the gray zones of moral relativism when he was at one of María’s church-basement solidarity nights. Not a lot of the people there were disgruntled peasants, it turned out—they were ideologues, Marxist-Leninists, Trotskyites, Maoists, educated urbanites like María and Miguel who hadn’t clawed their way up the continent to get there but had taken a connecting flight through Miami to Dorval. He met a mechanic who ran a hamburger joint off St. Lawrence; an accountant who’d done agitprop at a camp in Costa Rica but worked in construction now; a sociologist who’d been an advisor to the guerillas, on matters like the most humane colors to paint the detention cells where they held kidnap victims. He never met an actual fighter, he wasn’t sure why: maybe they didn’t survive long enough to leave, or were just having too much fun.

He could tell there were all sorts of fault lines at these gatherings, but was never quite sure where they ran. There’d been betrayals and reversals, splinterings, questions over methods, but it wasn’t as if people were ready to bear their wounds to him. He got treated probably just as he deserved, as someone who couldn’t be expected to understand. A scuffle broke out once at one of the pan-Latino nights, and it took him a while to figure out what had happened: a couple of Cubans had tried to crash the event, looking for women or just lonely, and had been roundly turfed out. The Cubans were reviled for having abandoned Fidel, although in the Great Chain of Latino Being they still had a certain cachet over the Salvadorans, who languished on the bottom links, well below the Chileans and below even the Guatemalans, who at least had their colorful national garb to set them off.
Guanacos
, the Salvadorans were called: hard workers, but not too bright.

María fit half the national type. She’d take him to these events—though it was more as if Miguel did, and she just happened to come along—and then she’d be off arranging tables or selling food or carting kegs of draft to the bar while he was left in some back corner with the men. It put him in mind of the courtships he’d seen in his childhood, where the suitor would come and drink highballs in the living room with the males while the women did the work. Except that there was no intimate moment afterward, with the trailing chaperones: the whole night might pass, and he’d be lucky to so much as bump elbows with María. Meanwhile his conversations at the back of the room, with men who all stood a good head
shorter than he did, were never quite as compelling as he might have hoped: there was all the forced bonhomie to be got through, until his face hurt, and the problems with language and noise, the sense of sticking out like an extra appendage. It was almost worse than getting stuck with the other gringos—
las masas
, he thought of them as, the hangers-on, the milling dispossessed—or with Miguel. Miguel came and went, had his own shadowy network of associates that he checked in with like a secret service agent, but sooner or later he always turned up next to Alex.

“Is good for you, man? You like it?”

He kept trying to figure Miguel’s angle. More than once it crossed his mind that Miguel was trying to marry María off to him. Alex was ashamed at how his blood quickened at the thought: he would stoop as low as that, in a pinch. Over time, surely, she’d grow to love him, which he took to mean that she would sleep with him. But then this was the sort of scheme at which María would have laughed out loud, even Miguel would have understood that.

He doubted he’d ever seen Miguel and María exchange more than a dozen words the whole time he’d known them. Yet some line of force joined them, nothing as straightforward as affection but more like an animal awareness. He thought of Miguel as her chaperone, but the matter wasn’t as obvious as that—he was always there in Alex’s peripheral vision, sometimes just standing alone, talking to no one, watching over things, yet Alex had the sense that if he’d been the sort to get María off by herself, Miguel wouldn’t have stood in his way. But then he wasn’t the sort; maybe that was why Miguel had chosen him.

About the only time Alex and María had actually been alone together had been at a mass, at her little neo-baroque church in the East End. Alex hadn’t been to mass in years, and it felt to him like the primitive blood ritual it actually was.

“You are not a Christian,” she said after, in her blunt way. “I can see it.”

He reddened. There had seemed an openness to her in the church that he’d never seen before, as if she might be approachable, someone he might get around to touching one day.

“I was raised one. But no. Not anymore.”

“Is okay,” she said, making light of the subject. He’d caught sight of her room once and there’d been a shrine in the corner with a little plaster Madonna and votive candles. “Is still time.”

He didn’t know what made him think he could bridge gulfs like these. He thought about her constantly, obsessed with her with the sort of achy unreasonableness, the readiness to court humiliation, that he hadn’t felt since high school. Yet the more he saw her, the less there was to say. She was working two jobs now, waiting tables and doing piecework for a sweatshop on the Plateau; he’d call her and dread getting her brother and suddenly hang up after the second ring, then ten minutes later call again. Then he’d manage to see her and there was always the same sense of anticlimax. The few times he’d stolen a moment alone with her at the end of a night he had stood there at her door, the blue light of late-night TVs flickering in the neighbors’ windows, and all feeling, all hope, had drained from him. It wasn’t just El Mozote and all that; it was everything, his life, the lie he had made of himself as this shambling, good-hearted white guy.

“Well.” He’d lurch in awkwardly for the kiss on the cheek. “
Hasta la vista
.”

“
Sí, sí, hasta luego
.”

More and more she was just this burden to him, of knowledge, of thwarted desire. He’d joined a local chapter of Amnesty International over the summer: not for her sake, he told himself, and certainly not as anything he’d even dare mention to her, and yet she was the one who had driven him to it. Amnesty was exactly the sort of white, liberal do-gooder group he loathed, but then he came across an interview with a former death squad member in one of the journals he had been reading.

“If there was a protest from Amnesty or something,” he said, “then we let them go. Otherwise, we killed them.”

Twice a month now he met in an airless room in the downtown Y with a group of lonely-looking hair-shirters like himself and drafted letters to tyrants around the world politely beseeching them to cease their atrocities. At home, he continued the work on his new personal computer, a suitcase-sized portable with a flip-up plasma screen that he’d talked his father into funding—or rather, that his mother had, on his behalf—to help with his dissertation, though so far about all he’d done on it was write his Amnesty letters. “Your Excellency,” the letters began, or “Your Highness,” or “Your Grace.”
It has come to our attention. There have been reports. We are deeply concerned
. He sent the letters out not so much because he believed in them but because he reasoned that even if he didn’t, it didn’t mean they wouldn’t work. He had quickly learned to
avoid the Salvadoran cases: too much conflict of interest, he thought, after appeals started coming in against the guerillas under the dreaded heading “Extrajudicial Executions.”

Somehow he had frittered away his summer like this, mooning over María and finding every excuse to avoid whatever was truly pressing. His dissertation, for one thing, on which the only progress he’d made was drafting a new, as yet unapproved, proposal; getting his life in order, for another, making a plan, sorting out his priorities. He’d been home for a week, with the obscure intention of gleaning some sort of insight into how families ticked; though with each day that passed, it only became clearer why he abhorred them. There were children everywhere all of a sudden, nieces and nephews he’d taken for granted for so long they seemed like weeds he hadn’t tended to.