by Tom Pow
He had called him compañero—“comrade”—perhaps in jest. He had certainly joked about his possible offensces.
“Soy ladrón. I am a thief.” José did not mutter the words. Each syllable rang out clearly in the fetid air of the cell. “Soy ladrón.” The final syllable of the Spanish fell heavily, like something laid down that was naked, inescapable.
“Sí, señor, one of your punishments is to share a cell with a common thief. I steal from tourists.”
Miguel nodded slowly, giving José’s admission proper attention.
“Perhaps, comrade, what you say is true. But you are not only a thief.”
“How can you know that, when all you know of me is living in this place?”
“I know. I know from living with you in this place. Comrade, you are so much more than a thief.”
José felt his eyes burn with the tears that rolled down his cheeks in the darkness. Miguel’s rough hands fell on his shoulders and circled them a couple of times. Truly, Miguel wondered, which of us here is really the wounded one?
“When we get out of here, come with me,” he said. “There is someone I’d like you to meet.”
“But how can we ever…?”
“A time will come, believe me.”
“What person should I meet?”
“The less you know, the better. All I will say is that there are people working in different ways. My torturers could not know it, but when I asked myself, What must I do now? they wrote the answer on my back.”
* * *
When the door was opened and they were brought out the first time, the sea air hit them with such power it was like a wind that poured through a building made of sand. They held on to one another and gulped in the air.
For Pepe, the transvestite, with his black haunted eyes and his bruised body, the promise of freedom was too much. He broke away from the rest of the group and jumped the castle wall. Perhaps he’d thought the waves, far below, would break his fall and that he’d swim the white-flecked waters of the bay to become himself again. But the water withdrew from the rock and his leap was too weak. “Like a girl’s,” one of the guards said later. His broken body lay on the rocks. The splayed limbs made it look as if he were still running.
Miguel took José’s forearm and pulled him firmly back into the body of the work party.
Each day thereafter, as they were led outside and taken to the Convent of Santa Catarina, which they were renovating as part of the Colonial Tourist Trail, they felt their strength returning. Working in Miguel’s shadow, José began to feel the stirrings of another life forming in the nothing he’d thought he was. He watched Miguel apply himself to the building work they were given to do and, protecting his damaged hand as best he could, he shirked nothing. He stood beside Miguel in the cool of the cloister as Miguel told the foreman that there was a better way to restore the old convent, reminding him that this was not just work for today, but for History. “Even you, foreman, will be judged some day.”
“Is that a fact?” the foreman said. “Well, have a good sniff. Can you smell it—the dust of all that withered passion? That’s the closest you’re going to get to a woman for the next thirty years. So save your judgements for yourself, asshole.”
By the third day they had a plan.
The convent had a false wall. Miguel would break through it, then drag a huge mahogany dresser over the gap. At the end of the day they would both go through the break in the wall and Miguel would, with his fingertips, pull the dresser over the gap behind them. It was audacious and difficult, but it worked.
They found the passage led to a small window at the back of the convent. From there they had to jump down to the ground. José landed badly on his ankle. Miguel picked him up in the darkness and ran with him through ill-lit streets, his eyes the eyes of a desperate man keeping everyone at a distance. They reached a small wooden hut by the railway. There, Miguel lowered José onto an iron bed and turned silently to the owner, an old man so bent over he had to twist his head to look up at Miguel. His eyes glistened in the lamp-light. The last things José saw before sleep consumed him were a black-and-white photograph of a slight but wiry young black boxer, peering at him arrogantly behind raised gloves, and the grotesquely swollen knuckles of the old man, his ruined fists like paws on Miguel’s shoulders.
He woke next morning with the jolt of another prisoner’s screams. But it was only the early morning train, hauling its way along a track that would lead it, haltingly, across the spine of the island to the opposite coast.
In the following days José learned that, in his heyday, Pedro Juan Crespo—“The Kid”—had owned more than two hundred suits. He’d ridden in the back of open Cadillacs. And the girls! Every time a car he was in stopped, “Chicas! Chicas! Chicas!” But his American managers had found it more profitable to deny him the title fights he craved,; to keep him always as “The Contender.” So he’d fought on, till his fists seized shut and the pain became unbearable. He discovered far too late that they’d picked him clean as a bone.
Still, he hadn’t lost hope. What they couldn’t take from him was his experience, and he’d had some little success in training young boxers. One prospect in particular had looked bright—a young black heavyweight who’d brought a fierce intensity to each fight, but who was disdainful of the crowd’s approval. He was the kind of fighter many people would pay to see take a beating—box office gold.
“But Miguel,” Pedro said, “he would not fight in the expensive hotels. He would not do as he was told. So stubborn! Very soon no one would touch him.”
“I saw what happened to you, old man.”
“But maybe it could have been different.”
“Ah, maybe. But not with me.”
“Pity,” Pedro said, turning to José. “What a left hook he had. And what a temper!”
“Well, I still have that, old man. So watch out!”
“Eh, José,” Pedro said, “you fast?” He flung a fist at José’s head. José ducked and felt the knuckles graze his ear.
“Not bad,” Pedro said, his grin showing off the three crooked teeth he had left.
“Quiet, old man,” Miguel said. “Keep your old dreams to yourself.”
Pedro’s daughter, Cristina, brought them fresh clothes and every day something to eat. She was slight like her father and José could see the handsome features of the young boxer in her tired face. But she hated to hear his stories.
“What has boxing done for him?” she asked no one in particular. “But what else has he got left?”
* * *
A week later, wearing the clean clothes Cristina had brought and with the swelling in his ankle almost gone, José was led to a safe house in the old part of the city. There, Miguel introduced him to Rafael and Maria. The unions and the university radicals had shared platforms in the past, but Rafael’s path had rarely crossed Miguel’s. So he had a natural suspicion of José.
“What were you in El Castillo for?”
José hesitated. This was not the same place as the cell. He was confounded to find that his new-won strength had left him, that there was no honor or honesty in admitting his shame. With the eyes of the woman, Maria, fixed on him, Miguel took him back to the moment of his first confession.
“He was a thief. But he was never only a thief. And he is not the man he was when he went into El Castillo. None of us are. But I know what he is more than he does, and I trust him with my life.”
Again José felt the sharpness behind his eyes; but he clenched his jaw and stemmed his tears. Rafael was looking at him and smiling.
“José, you, more than any of us here, resemble the first people of our island.”
José said nothing.
“With your bronze skin, your black hair, your almond eyes, you could be one of the Taino people.”
Miguel was smiling now—even the woman was—as Rafael continued: “And you know they used to say the Taino people were wiped out early in the Conquest by war, disease, and oppression. But it
wasn’t so. They went inland and became guerrilla fighters and continued to raise their children in the mountains and the forests and to maintain the original line.”
“El Taino,” said Miguel.
“Yes,” said Rafael, “that’s who you are. Come back to reclaim your country from the oppressor. El Taino.”
“Yes. Yes,” said José. “From now on, José the Thief is no more—only El Taino.”
* * *
Eduardo was surprised at how moved he was himself in the telling of a story he had only heard. He turned to Louise, whose eyes were shining on him.
“So you see, preciosa,” he said, “you see who these men are and you know now, I think, why I could never be the one to let you go free.”
[CHAPTER 9]
nada por nada
The next day Martin watched the arrival of the small man from the tourist office, Gabriel, as intrigued as any of the others. Gabriel seemed slightly embarrassed by the greeting he received. He lowered his head and smiled sheepishly. Unusually for an islander, he turned from their embraces.
That night Martin talked with Louise about the significance of Gabriel’s arrival; and about the revelation that Quitano, who sat at the heart of it all like a black spider, turned out to be Rafael’s uncle.
For Martin such events were the only relief to the extreme tedium of the day. He lived only for the evening, to lie beside Louise, to feel her warmth against his own, though this closeness was almost unbearable. When finally she rose, after the night bird called, he found a silence enveloped him. It was not that he did not wish to speak, but that he could not. The words stuck in his throat, hooked there, and would not come out.
“Marty,” she said, “don’t take it badly.” He shook his head and shrugged in the darkness.
Louise never mentioned Gabriel or Quitano to Eduardo, never asked how many other secrets he was keeping from her. The day had been long for them too, and in whatever time they had, they wanted to talk about themselves.
“You know,” Eduardo said, “you are your parents’ daughter.”
“Don’t say that.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I want to be myself.”
“You are, preciosa, you are.”
“But what do you mean? Tell me. I’m interested.”
“Like your parents, you have fight in you. You do not accept things as they are. I like that.”
“Maybe I will like that in myself too one day.”
“I hope so.”
“And you? Are you like your parents?”
“I like to think so. It was my dad who was Test Drive’s number one fan.”
“No!”
“Yes. And you know, sometimes I hated him for that—for coming into my world. Such a small thing.”
“I’d like to have met them.”
Eduardo was silent. His brown eyes mournful.
“I know,” she said. “It’s nuts to talk like this.”
“No, it’s just … it’s maybe not the time to talk right now.…”
* * *
The helicopter that passed overhead the next day was the sign for them all that this life would not go on for ever. Not that any of them thought it would, but there were times when, out of despair—or a secret joy—each of them had thought, Is there no end to this?
Louise began to think that they had been wrong, her mother and she, to separate time and geography, to imagine that either had any real meaning. “How long are you away for this time?” her mother had asked. Or “Where to this time?” sighing at the distance mentioned. But it was obvious now that space and time were one. She felt herself, in so few weeks, in a huge space, belying time. But that night even Louise was forced to acknowledge that the helicopter had signalled the beginning of the end.
Orders had been given for the break-up of the camp, so time was pressing. She held Eduardo’s face in her hands and whispered to him the words that Julia, the old peasant woman, had all that time ago: “Cuidado, Eduardo, cuidado.”
Eduardo did not dismiss her words. He took the weight of her concern as he had the force of her challenge at the rim of the camp, but this time he nodded and smiled slightly at the pleasure of it. And Louise remembered, as well as the old woman’s words, what Maria had said about the weightlessness of their lives—and she dismissed that with a smile of her own. For she felt, held in the balance of the life that was all around her—the fear and the desire and the restless green growth—her own life, not light with insignificance, nada por nada, as Maria had judged it, but holding its own, drawing on what surrounded her and becoming part of that too. And she kissed the face she held and thanked Eduardo, his hand cupped on her naked breast, for giving her the gift of herself.
Then it began to rain.
[CHAPTER 10]
another life to live
When they came to the river, the morning sun had already dried them and the packs they carried. But the river was swollen from the rain that all night had drummed on the broad palms woven into their shelters. At first the river looked uncrossable, but Miguel gave the idea no thought. His feet were on the first two stepping stones and his hand held out before Rafael could pass judgement. But even Rafael was surprised that it was Martin who stretched out his hand and stepped onto the first stone. Martin gave Louise the briefest glance. She had made her choice, but he wanted to show her that he was still worthy—still one of them. A Test Driver. In Louise’s words, “Pure energy unplugged in the jungle.”
He could never get straight in his mind whether Miguel had been unable to reach his hand, when he had begun to twist and fall, or whether he had disdained it, knowing he would only endanger Martin. Or whether, worst of all, Martin had begun to withdraw his own hand in fear for his safety. Whichever of them made such a decision, Martin was forced to watch helplessly as Miguel twisted savagely, almost comically, before he finally fell. There was the sickening crack of his skull on the stone, then his blood bloomed in the water.
Martin allowed himself to be held, to hear his mother’s draining sobs so close to him, he felt they would drown him. As soon as he was able, he withdrew into himself on the bank. He felt the blame of Maria and El Taino burning into his back.
“Nothing you could do,” said Louise. “Nothing. None of us … about anything.”
She had lost the composure of the past few days. The space she and Eduardo had created was gone. From now on, it was made clear, they were to remain a tight group. They would camp close together and, in their closeness, she and Eduardo felt an ocean of distance open up between them.
It was then that the nostalgia began for a place they had so recently left—an encampment in the heart of a forest that was unreachable and vast. She had spent a lifetime there, she was sure of it: Eduardo and she. If there were others there, they were no more important to them than were the trees and the birds.
Eduardo had told her the local belief that it was in the green heart of such a forest that God created man and woman with a song. “The woman is born and the man is born,” said the song. “Together they will live and they will die. But they will be born again. They will be born and they will die again and be born again. They will never stop being born, because death is a lie.” For those who believed, Eduardo had said, the song was not a promise, it was just the way things were.
Strange that she should find love, not at the high school dances, not hanging about Starbucks, but in the middle of a forest. She closed her eyes and imagined Eduardo and herself still there. They were sitting around a fire. They were entwined as the sun rose, before striking camp and walking deeper and deeper into the dim green light where no one would find them.
But out of the forest, by the riverside, she found other forces at work. She had another life to live.
When El Taino pushed the muzzle of the machine gun into Jacques’s neck for his stubborn refusal to stand at Miguel’s graveside, she didn’t see the “asshole” she had seen during the card game. Instead there was a tired man, holding on to his dignity a
s he refused to acknowledge the man who’d humiliated him. He rose painfully slowly and turned to face them. His eyes briefly flared when they met Louise’s as if to say, This is for you. This is the man your father is. It was the man whom Eduardo had told her of.
She felt sharp pangs in her heart as she was forced to acknowledge that she was not and could never be free, walking the paths of the forest with Eduardo. The pain came to her in waves—exquisite and fresh—and she did not fight it.
She had never felt so alive, though all she shared with Eduardo now were scraps—a brush as they passed each other; a glance, like the one they shared at Miguel’s burial. When Rafael spoke of the things that divided them all, Louise thought, I know, I know, and thanked Eduardo for what he had shared with her about El Taino and the dead Miguel.
[CHAPTER 11]
what scares you?
There was a small hut in the sandy soil and the thinned trees before they reached the beach. An old man with black weathered skin was sitting outside it, mending a fishing net. Rafael called to him. “Hola, buenos días, señor.”
“Buenos días,” said the old man. “I think I know you. But what do you want of me?”
“We are in a struggle to make all our lives better—yours too. We will win, compañero, but in the meantime we are hungry.”
“Amigos, you will not go hungry here.”
The old man went into his hut and brought out a line with several fish hanging from it and an armful of plantains.
“This is all I have,” he said, “apart from a little for myself. It was for the market tomorrow.”
“It is enough,” said Rafael. “Gracias, abuelo. You will be remembered.”
“De nada,” the old man said.
The hostages came onto the beach, blinking in the open light, like frightened creatures flushed from the forest. By the blue sea they looked at each other, at what time had done to them, with an understanding denied to them in the closed world of the forest.
Martin saw their ripped and soiled T-shirts, the ingrained red earth that was in their shorts. His mother was painfully thin. She’d bitten her nails down to the quick and her eyes looked one way, then another, as if they couldn’t find rest. His father was shambling, distracted. His beard was matted and wild. Jacques, more lightly bearded, was a shrunken figure compared to his former self. He dragged his feet through the sand. A line of coin-sized sores, weeping pus, tracked down one of Melanie’s shins. Down the center of her hair, a band of gray marked the passage of time. And were their captors any better? El Taino too had bags under his eyes and trudged forward as if into an imaginary gale. Each of them had also lost weight, drained by a constant vigilance.
