by Tom Pow
“Oh, Louise, go to hell.”
“Moth-er!”
* * *
We are following the same pattern—elusively successful so far, I suppose, for our captors—in that today we leave the cooler air of the hills behind and dip once more into the heat of the valley. But I sense we’re walking deeper into it than we’ve been since the day of our capture. There’s an unmistakable tension in the air. Though Rafael hides it well, I note Miguel and El Taino have brought their guns down from their shoulders and carry them in the crooks of their arms.
A scream rips through the air. Miguel turns his gun to us and we drop to the ground as we’ve been told to. I’m aware of them on either side of us, the slap of hands on metal. But when I look up, there is Rafael, still standing at the head of the trail, a smile on his lips.
“Tranquilos,” says Miguel. “No pasa nada. Miren.” And to our side, a lithe black piglet scampers through the trees to catch up with its mother.
The trees thin out and we see on a rise a small wooden hut with a palm-thatched roof and a veranda. There’s a patch of garden before it, showing green shoots in furrowed rows. An old woman with tight curls of silver hair rocks in a chair on the veranda. She rises when Rafael approaches, her heavy breasts pulling at her gray top. She greets him warmly—a kiss on each cheek—and peers over his shoulder at us, nodding slightly as she does so. Of course, I think, Rafael knows them all! He has scouted out his route beforehand and is not behaving from instinct, but from meticulous planning.
Rafael turns to Maria, smiling broadly. “Handsome but deadly” is Melanie’s description. He zigzags his hands a couple of times through the air. I pick out the word montañas. They all laugh a little, but I know it’s the laughter of release.
“This is good,” says Eduardo. “This is good for tonight. We all eat well.”
“Well there’s a change,” says Melanie.
“Yes, tonight,” says Rafael, “you are our guests.”
“Guests are usually free to leave,” says Melanie bitterly.
“Ah, that I’m afraid we cannot arrange. Not yet. But it is the time, I think, for a photograph.”
“Oh, Happy Campers now,” says Louise.
“Please,” says Rafael, and points to where he wants us to be.
“Close, please.”
Miguel pushes us with the flat of his gun and we bunch up—Jacques, Melanie, and me at the back; Carol, Louise, and Martin squatting before us. Rafael takes a small camera from his pocket. It’s one of the disposable ones—the ones that in all the ads are only for holiday or party snaps.
“Smile,” says Rafael.
“Yeah, sure,” says Martin.
“Tennes-see,” says Louise.
“And again,” says Rafael.
“Naturellement,” says Jacques.
“Naturellement—quoi?” says Melanie.
“Low tech,” says Jacques. “Everything is low tech. No radios, no mobiles, no laptops—nothing that could give any photo-sensitive imaging of where we might be.”
“So primitivism is the new sophistication,” I say.
“‘Exactement. The camera will be dropped off somewhere, maybe taken to the city and delivered to the world anonymously, leaving no trail.”
“Oh my God,” says Carol. “We really are lost, aren’t we?”
“Leave it, Mum,” says Martin. He speaks so rarely these days, Carol looks at him as if she’s been scalded.
* * *
We sit under the veranda, guarded by Miguel, watching El Taino and the old woman make the fire. But before they light it, they make a spit and cover the whole thing with an awning of woven palm leaves. Rafael appears with a piglet, its throat cut, still dripping blood. A stick is sharpened and forced up its back passage and out of its mouth.
“You learn, eh?” says El Taino, smiling.
“Aw, Jesus,” says Louise.
“Lost your appetite, honey?” says Melanie.
“You’re kidding,” says Louise. “If I could eat a horse, I’m not going to turn up my nose at bacon.”
“Well said,” I say. “What do you say to that, Martin? You hungry?”
“I’m up for it.”
“Good boy.”
As El Taino turns the piglet on the spit, the first smell of burned hair fills the air and smoke thickens in the V of the awning. Again, it seems without us noticing it, darkness has fallen. We are staring at the red-hot embers when I catch sight of two shadowy figures leaving the shack and moving swiftly down the trail.
“Now,” says Maria, “better you all inside.” We move into the shack and the old woman, Julia, lights a kerosene lamp. It shows her rusted metal bed. A table. A chair. A chest of drawers. A cross on the wall. The fire has burned through the skin of the pig and the smell of roasting meat is almost overpowering.
“What’s happening now?” says Louise, and the way she says it sounds just as if she’s at home on any Saturday night when the parents haven’t filled her in on their agenda.
“What do you mean, what’s happening?” says Maria. “We wait. That’s what’s happening. We wait for the pig to cook.”
“And for Rafael and Miguel?” says Jacques. “I saw them go off down the trail.”
“So you saw what you saw,” says Maria, and runs her hand tiredly through her short hair.
“Why do you hate us so much?” says Martin, in that way he has of suddenly springing the awkward question.
“Martin, not helpful,” I say, under my breath.
“I don’t understand what you mean by ‘not helpful,’” Maria says. “But no, is a good question, why I hate you so much.”
It seems for a moment as if she won’t answer the question, will simply leave it hanging in the air for us to work out for ourselves. She undoes a shirt button and massages the back of her neck. Then she begins, in an even voice.
“I don’t hate you. What are you? Fathers, mothers, two childrens on holiday. No, I don’t hate you. I hate what you stand for. Not tourism. I am proud of my country. I want to share it with others. Our people share their history and their pain and their struggle. We are used to sharing. No, I hate the dollars economy you bring, which makes our pesos, our once proud pesos—now defaced with Quitano’s ugly face all over them—almost worthless.”
“We were right,” says Melanie.
“Right?” says Maria. “You think you’re muy listos—very clever—to see what is wrong with my country? You look past the beach and the hotel and what do you see? A people with its nose in the dirt. So do not feel too clever, my friends.”
Julia, who surely can’t understand a word of this, still nods her head in support of Maria—who isn’t finished with us yet.
“And with your dollars you bring prostitution, thieving, the lack of pride that says, ‘Why work? I can beg dollars from the tourists.’ You tourist men”—she looks from Jacques to me—“you all think we’re ‘up for it,’ as you say. I’ve seen it in all your eyes—even in the eyes of the innocent. Yes, it begins and they cannot stop their imaginations going to that possibility. It is so close, yes, no further than their wallets. And how do you think this makes our men feel—our boys—when they see old men with fifteen-year-old girls—girls who should be with them at the cinema? I tell you, it strips them of their dignity, as surely as the women are stripped of theirs.”
“But these are choices,” says Melanie.
“Choices! Ah, your American choices. You say they have choices. At four dollars a month? When doctors have to cycle rickshaws to make ends meet? You call this a choice?” She shakes her head. “No, no, my friends, this”—and she taps her gun—“this is a choice.”
* * *
We sit silent, motionless, in the dim yellow light of the hut. A large moth bangs repeatedly against the casing of the lamp till the heat withers its wings. It lies on its back, kicking its legs, till Julia brushes it from the table. She takes out some dried brown leaves from a drawstring bag. We watch as she uses her two fists to crush and roll them tog
ether. She places them in the groove of a piece of wood and begins to tease out a whole leaf on the table. It’s elastic as skin. She takes the crushed leaves and rolls her cigar, feeling for unevenness, repacking or adding bits of leaf till she’s wholly satisfied. She cuts a crescent from another leaf and licks it, smoothing it round one end, then, with a knife, neatly trims the other. She places the first cigar to the side and begins to work on a second.
“No need for that trip to the cigar factory now,” says Melanie.
“Pah,” says Maria.
“Do you know … do any of you know”—Jacques speaks into the silence—“what you’re risking with this kidnapping?”
“Ay-ee, you think we’re childrens playing a game?”
“No, but—”
“Ah, la vida. You’re asking me if we know we risk our lives? You ask me if I know what life is worth?” She seems amused by the question. “Do you?” This she issues as a challenge. “In that moment when you must decide, when you must truly know the worth of your own life? What would you be prepared to put in the scales against your life?” She looks at us each in turn. “Eh? Eh? Eh? Pah!” This time it is like a small, breathy explosion that tilts her whole head. “Nothing, eh. Nada por nada. Which is why your life is weightless, why it drifts without anchor—through the jobs you do not like and the years passing. Yes, I hear you and I ask again, what are you prepared to put your life on the line for? We know. That is the difference between us. We know.”
There’s no sound, but the doorway darkens with the figure of Rafael, then Miguel.
“Maria,” Rafael says, and there’s a lightness in his voice. She rises at once to go to him.
There are other questions I still want to ask, but we are waved outside. After the hut’s smoky glow, the stars are so thick, the sky seems curved with light.
“Let’s eat,” says Rafael, and Julia carves great slabs of pork for us—so sweet and juicy I can’t remember tasting anything better. Afterward, Julia brings Rafael, Miguel, and El Taino their cigars.
Rafael tells us that we are privileged to celebrate with them the Día de la Libertad.
“Yes, you know, once it used to mean something,” he says. “Something real to the people.”
“Well, whadda ya friggin know?” says Melanie.
“If you please, ladies,” he says, and one after the other they light their cigars on the embers of the fire.
Day Nine
Whatever news Rafael went down to the village for, it’s not news that will free us. We’re given some time in the morning to sit in the shade, then we’re told to pack our few things and get ready to go.
Julia kisses the guerrillas on each cheek. Very gravely, she takes Eduardo’s face between her hands and looks into his eyes.
“Cuidado, eh?” she says. She turns to Rafael. “Cuidado con el niño.”
Rafael both nods and shrugs his shoulders, and we start climbing once again.
“Did you get what the old woman was saying?” Louise asks me.
“She said, ‘Take care of the boy.’”
“Yeah, sure,” says Melanie. “May he rot in hell with the rest of them.”
And we fall into silence.
* * *
Martin heard the front door open and his father stamp the cold from his feet. He knew he would soon be up to see him. He shoved the magazines under the covers and reached for his headphones. He pressed the arrowed start button and his head was filled with the raw opening chords of Test Drive’s “Guilty As Sin.” He looked up at the black-and-white poster on his wall of Tony Kurlansky stripped to the waist, his chest glistening and his hair smeared over his face. Martin had found that if he was looking at that image, when the first words of the song were sung in Kurlansky’s ravaged voice—
“You can’t escape me,
You won’t let me go.
If I was an island
I’d be covered in snow.
And if I was a city
I’d rot from within.
I won’t play the victim
But you’re guilty as sin…”
—he could shut his eyes and the image lived on, the singer twisting and turning to the clear but broken rhythms, as the music welled inside Martin’s head, then spread along his nerve endings, till he felt like an instrument of sound himself.
He didn’t hear the bedroom door open and wasn’t aware of anyone in the room till his father touched his shoulder. He felt his father’s hand, still cold, through his T-shirt.
“Martin.” He saw him mouth his name.
Martin took off the headphones and pressed the stop button.
“How’d I do?” his father asked.
“You did OK.”
“Thanks.”
“Some tough questions.”
His father nodded. “To be expected.”
“I suppose so.”
“Oh, good news about Mum, wasn’t it?” his father said.
“What?”
“Didn’t she say?”
“What, Dad?”
“A London gallery wants to have an exhibition of her Captives drawings—the originals.”
“Wow,” said Martin. Then, to fill the silence: “I’m happy for her. Really.”
There seemed nothing else to say, yet his father hovered by his bed. Once again Martin wondered what kind of approval his parents wanted from him.
“You’re not coming down then?” his father said.
“No, it’s late. I’ll go to bed soon. Just listening to some music.”
“What?”
Martin knew his father didn’t have to ask. The stack of empty CD cases was all Test Drive, ordered over the Net. He could get five of them on his new machine. He’d listened to nothing else since.
“Test Drive,” he said.
“Isn’t it time, don’t you think, for something else?”
Martin saw Eduardo, stripped to the waist, his body bent into a Test Drive riff—
“I’m a Chicago mobster,
I’m a fairy queen,
I’m each godforsaken place
My guitar’s ever been.…”
—Then he saw his body bending again, writhing, as the bullets hit home.
“No, Dad, I don’t.”
“Fine,” his father said, and reached out a hand to—to what?—to ruffle his hair? Was he serious? Martin turned his head away before the gesture could be determined, leaving his father’s hand to fall awkwardly on his shoulder.
“Night, Dad.”
“Good night, Martin.”
His father turned away in that defeated fashion, his shoulders slumped. But that would have to be the way of it. It wasn’t Martin who had stirred it all up again. The memories. They had lived too closely, shared intimacies no teenager should share with his parents. They knew too much about each other—though not the one thing that might have led to an understanding. Let them reach out to Nick. After all, it had been what they’d wanted to do all along.
Martin lifted the covers, brought out the magazines, and began to read again. There were times, he felt, for all the re-workings, when his father simply lost control of the narrative. It became repetitive, dull, as his father’s eye had grown jaundiced and tired. This next section was a case in point. For three days they’d climbed back up the foothills again and then higher, till, once more, they were astride the valley. It was three days’ walking and the diary dutifully recorded the swollen feet, the sweat rashes, the blisters, and the aching muscles. It noted how little their captors carried; how serviceable was their combat gear for the terrain; how they themselves, with their sun hats, T-shirts, and expensive trekking gear, began to look faintly ridiculous. But the landscape, as described, remained distant, monochrome, nothing but one shade of green. It wasn’t how Martin remembered it. And what would Louise have made of these anaemic descriptions? Louise, with her “Jesus, Marty, there’s a rainbow with seven colors in it and they’re all green!” Yeah, just what, he would never know.
Eventually they had come to a
stand of palm trees, which gave good cover, but whose undergrowth appeared to have been cleared.
“Here we stay,” Rafael had said.
Day Twelve
It looks like we’re to be here for a while. It’s the farthest inland we’ve come, following trails that were at times so narrow we had to draw in our shoulders to avoid the evil-looking black thorns. But now there’s relief that, for however long, we don’t have to climb for a while. We can all, I think, feel a little energy returning to our tired bodies.
Jacques continues to amaze me. The journey seems to have taken little out of him. I think he and Melanie are happier being active, doing something that takes their minds off the situation they’re in. So they take the lead in constructing new shelters for us and in digging the latrines—a luxury! Carol and I help, of course, but again it’s better that Martin and Louise are active too, so we tend to take a back seat and let them all get on with it. I’ve the diary to work on and Carol’s begun the sketches she’d once thought would be of innocent landscapes. Our captors don’t concern themselves with what we do. But today Rafael takes the diary from my lap, as I’m writing. A feeling of utter panic passes through me. Since the beginning, there’s been a voice saying, Write this down, write this down, and now I feel I’m going to lose it all. But all he does is skim a few pages and throw it lightly back to me.
“Tell the truth,” he says.
“I’m trying.”
Carol’s hand isn’t quite in with the drawing yet, but somehow that doesn’t matter—it gives her pictures a quality of rawness and energy that seems to match the experience. She sketches our camp, its shelters, and us—increasingly ragged as we are. She’s even tackled our captors, though her work doesn’t meet with Miguel’s approval. He grinds his thumb into the faces Carol has drawn of El Taino and himself. Unwittingly, the smudged faces only add to the power of the image—enemies unknown and unknowable. El Taino merely shrugs.
“Is not right for Miguel. But I want to know what El Taino looks like,” he says.
Since then, no one’s paid much attention to what we do. And I can see no better way to get through this.
Day Thirteen
The strain is showing on Melanie. Today she explodes at what seems a trivial thing. Louise asked Martin to cut her hair. Maria gave them the scissors. Of course, Martin should have known better, but there’s so little for them to do and Louise can, I’m sure, be very persuasive. We are always guarded, but often not in sight of one another, so it must have been behind one of the palm tree trunks that Martin took the scissors to Louise’s hair.
