by Tom Kratman
“Are you leaving us, Maria?” he asked, a look of real twelve-year-old’s sorrow in his eyes. “Is it because you’re going to have a baby?”
I just threw my arms around him, trying very hard not to cry. Emilio had always been my favorite; ever since the day Mother had brought him home from the hospital. I loved my sister and other brother well enough. There had always been something special between Emilio and myself, though.
Emilio asked me to wait a minute while he ran to his room. When he came back he had about twenty-five drachma in his hands…that, and his favorite baseball glove. “Please take these, Maria. I know you don’t need the glove…but it may remind you of me. And you will need the money.”
I started to really cry then. I buried my face in his shoulder to muffle my sobbing. Then he started to cry without any shoulder to deaden the sound. I worried that we’d wake my parents.
I told him, “Emilio, I have to go. But I’m going to miss you most of all.”
“But how will I find you?” he asked.
“Don’t worry. Once I’m on my feet, I’ll find you.”
With Emilio’s little fortune in my purse, his glove weighing down my satchel, tears in my eyes and a lump in my throat, I left.
* * *
I walked for hours through the city, switching my suitcase from hand to hand as I did. I was pretty naive in most of the ways of the world, but I knew I’d need money until I could find a job. So…no taxi. And I didn’t know the bus routes; I’d never had to take a regular bus before. Still, by noon I had reached my destination, an even seedier than usual part of the Rio Abajo Barrio. There I went looking for a room.
Finally, an apartment manager showed me something in my price range. “For what you can afford to spend, miss, this is about as good as you’re going to find.”
But, God, it was awful. I don’t mean merely dreary and dirty, though it was those things, too. The one window was cracked. There were cockroaches scurrying around the floor when the manager of the building turned on the one, bare, light bulb. And it stank, of grease, of dirty bodies…of sex, too. Nasty, you know. And it was the best of what I’d seen in my price range.
Well, I did some mental figuring. With the money I had I could afford this place for about six weeks and still eat once a day. I thought six weeks would be enough time to find something to do, some kind of work. Then I could get a better place.
I took the dump.
* * *
You can’t hold a fifteen-year-old, boy or girl, accountable for being dumb. The money lasted maybe three weeks. And I sure hadn’t found work by then.
I’m not going to talk about the next several months. Go ahead and assume the worst you can imagine. It was probably, in most ways, worse than that. But at least it wasn’t prostitution.
Eventually, my pregnancy began to show so badly I couldn’t get any kind of work, even the Barrio pimps weren’t interested. I lived off charity for a while. You cannot imagine how much that hurt, coming from my family, with my father—to say nothing of my mother.
Then came the big day. My water broke, I went into labor. One of the neighbor women helped me bring the baby into the world, there on my filthy mattress.
It was hard. The baby was big and I was…tiny…inside. Writhing in agony, I cursed Juan. I cursed my father. I cursed every man who’d ever lived. While I was at it, I cursed Eve.
Mr. Rios waited outside while his wife held me and helped me and comforted me. When Mrs. Rios held Alma to my breast, I thought she was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I still think so. I can’t imagine ever thinking differently.
Alma was fine and healthy. I got sick. If it wasn’t for Mrs. Rios and her husband I don’t think I would have made it.
After a few months—yes, that’s how sick I was—I was able to start looking for work again. Unfortunately, there were no jobs for little ex-rich girls with no skills, a tenth-grade education and a baby to care for. Not unless they were in the new legions, and I was too young to join even if I’d wanted to. Not that the thought ever even crossed my mind.
I’ll tell you the truth: I considered going to work in one of the whore bars. I don’t suppose that I had any real skill at that sort of thing, Juan or no, but I’d been an eager learner. I might have become a whore, too, if my having been sick so long hadn’t made me—temporarily—pretty damned unattractive. I’m just as glad I never had to find out if I could have.
I did find work; as a waitress. It was hard work and the restaurant was hot. And me? I’d never worked a real job a day in my life before I got pregnant. And the odds and ends things I’d done so far didn’t require even as much skill as a busboy needed. I was also still weak from being sick so long.
My family had paid for dancing lessons for the girls, fencing for the boys. I thought I was pretty graceful. But I seemed to spill more food on the floor than I served the first few days I was there. The manager fired me after an unfortunate incident involving a large bowl of hot soup and someone’s trousers.
The next foray into economic independence was as a maid. Now, you understand, I couldn’t be a maid for any of my own people. My parents might have found out and died of shame. I still owed them something, I thought. So it had to be for some foreigners. And the Taurans were the most numerous foreigners around.
That first maid job lasted two days. It was for some old man who lived in Balboa and worked on the locks of the Transitway. He was Sachsen-born as I recall. He kept insisting I…well, it doesn’t matter, I wasn’t going to do it, not for him. Once he understood, out went Maria on the street again.
After that, I went to work for a Gallic couple, the Mangins. He was an officer, a captain, in their army. She was a housewife. They were really nice to Alma and me. We lived in a little room underneath the house. It was even air conditioned and had its own bath. Life was not bad.
However, all good things come to an end. By the time I went to work for the Mangins they only had about a year left in the country. When they moved away, so did my job. Back to Rio Abajo I went. Still, since the job with Mangins had come with room and board, I’d been able to save almost six hundred drachma.
With the money I’d saved I was able to pay for some new clothes and a better room. The new clothes got me another job, this time working in a store on Avenida Central. I was on my feet all day, six and a half days a week. The Rios continued to care for my daughter. Whenever I could, I looked for a better job.
* * *
“Well, Miss Fuentes, your office skills aren’t really what we’re looking for. Still, you’re young. You can be trained. We’ll give you a try.” The speaker was Señor Arnulfo Piedras, a chubby, jolly-seeming man of about forty. He ran an office in a bank off of Via Hispanica.
I gushed, “Oh, thank you, sir. Thank you. I promise you won’t be sorry.”
“I’m sure I won’t,” he said meditatively. “Please come back tomorrow at eight to begin.”
I left feeling some real hope for the first time in many, many months. As I walked past the rows of desks, I never noticed that none of the women working there would meet my eyes.
* * *
“Close the door behind you, Maria,” Mr. Piedras said gently. I did.
Once the door was shut, his face went from gentle to a mask of utter fury. “Idiot!” he screamed at me. “Idiota! Can’t you do the simplest little thing right?” He waved a piece of typewritten paper in front of my face.
I stood there by his desk, speechless. I couldn’t imagine what I’d done so wrong. I’d only been working for about two weeks.
Piedras continued, “I gave you this job out of the goodness of my heart and this is how you repay me? Fool! Blunderer! Moron!” I still had no idea what he was talking about. Hell, I was too much in shock to even begin to understand what he was talking about.
Then he shouted, “You’re fired.” That hit me. I started to cry. I didn’t know what I’d done so wrong. What could I have done so wrong? My old job was already filled. I couldn’t even
go back. I’d taken a better apartment, one I could only afford on my new salary. And he was firing me already. I had a baby to support.
At my tears, Piedras seemed to relent. His fat face softened. He put his arms around me as if to comfort me.
I stiffened as I felt him unsnap my bra, one handed. I think now that it must have taken much practice for him to learn to do that so easily. I soon found myself bent over his desk, face down, the sausagelike fingers of his left hand playing with my breast, the other lifting my skirt and tugging at my panties. When he had those out of the way he stuck a hand into his desk drawer.
I didn’t start to sob out loud until I felt him rub something, lubricant, I suppose, between my legs. He put a hand over my mouth to shush me. Then he raped me.
* * *
Alma looked up at my face from where she’d been resting her head on my chest. She asked, “Whatsamatter, Mama? Why are you crying?”
“No reason, baby,” I sniffled. “Everything’s fine,” I lied. “Just cuddle into Mama and sleep.”
It had gotten better at work, actually, over the past several months. Where Piedras had called for me two or three times a week to begin with, now there was another young girl for him to break in. I didn’t have to feel the swine inside me more than once every few weeks.
I’d stopped crying once I realized the fat pig enjoyed it. My only protest now was, if he forced me to my knees, to push him so far into the back of my throat that I threw up on him. He didn’t enjoy that. After the first couple of times of cleaning my vomit from his trousers, he gave up on it.
He still usually pushed me face down onto his desk. After the first time I threw up on him, he took me…behind…to punish me, I suppose. He still did that from time to time.
Why didn’t I complain? Well, the first few times maybe I could have. Just maybe somebody would have listened, too. Then he’d have told his story. You know which story, the one about the little tramp who tried to seduce the boss. They would have believed him. And I’d have been fired. And maybe Alma would have starved.
But what about the law? Same thing; same ending. My country just wasn’t set up to protect women who were alone, women who didn’t have a husband, son, or father to protect them. Nothing is stronger than custom and that was ours at the time. I had no one. I was alone, nearly without rights. I was helpless.
I took showers all the time, but I never felt clean anymore. I was barely eighteen.
* * *
Things began to really fall apart again when the civilian government used the Taurans and our police force to try to get rid of President Parilla and Duque Carrera. Everyone knows how they failed to do so, how Lourdes Carrera escaped from captivity, got some help, then fought her way to a TV studio to rally the tercio of Volgans to save her husband. Then came the Revolution, along with a very large number of public executions. Then came the Tauran financial embargo. And with that, my job disappeared. Besides, Piedras had to make room for a new addition to his harem.
I had to find us a smaller place, no choice. Alma was too little still to understand why she had to leave her old playmates behind. I didn’t know how to explain it.
It was at about that time that I discovered that we were no longer a democracy, at least what I’d always thought of as a democracy. On the other hand, I was still too young to vote so I really didn’t give it much thought.
* * *
Also at about this time my sister and my mother found me. Forget the tears and recriminations, forget the money they offered me too. I was my father’s daughter, and I had my pride. Still, they would sometimes bring something for Alma that I could never quite bring myself to refuse. The poor baby had so little.
Well, my financial situation just kept deteriorating. The country as a whole was surviving the foreign embargo, but for those of us who were on the margins of society and weren’t in the legion, life got grimmer and grimmer. I thought about giving Alma up to my mother but couldn’t bear to be apart from her for the rest of my life. And Daddy most emphatically didn’t want me back.
I really didn’t know what to do. I was rapidly coming to the end of my rope. I had to sell my emerald quinseñera ring. I’m pretty sure I was cheated.
* * *
During one of the regrettably short stints I did as a waitress I caught a news program on TeleVision Militar, the military TV station. It seemed Carrera was officially adding a new organization to the legion. I’d probably have forgotten all about it except that the Tercio Gorgidas was eventually, much later, to play an amazingly important role in my life.
There had been a lot of ceremony and drum beating, most of it quite meaningless to me. Parilla led the bulk of the men standing on the parade field through another ceremony that sounded suspiciously like a set of marriage vows, though the emphasis was maybe a little more on mutual support in battle than mutual support in life. Then the camera showed Carrera leaving his wife’s side and going to the microphone to speak. He opened a book on the podium.
I heard him say this: “The ancient Old Earth writer, Plutarch, tells us of an extraordinary military unit of ancient times, its life…and death. Listen: ‘Gorgidas, according to some, first formed the Sacred Band of three hundred chosen men…it was composed of young men attached to each other by personal affection…For men of the same tribe or family little value one another when dangers press, but a band cemented on friendship grounded upon love is never to be broken, and invincible; since the lovers, ashamed to be base in the sight of their beloved, and the beloved before the lovers, willingly rush into danger for the relief of one another…they have more regard for their absent lovers than for others present, as in the instance of the man who, when his enemy was going to kill him, earnestly requested him to run him through the breast, that his lover might not blush to see him wounded in the back.’
“ ‘It is stated that the Sacred Band was never beaten till the battle at Chaeronea; and when Philip, King of Macedon and father of Alexander the Great, after the fight, took a view of the slain, and came to the place where the three hundred that had fought his phalanx lay dead together, he wondered, and understanding that it was the band of lovers, he shed tears and said, ‘Perish any man who suspects that these men either did or suffered anything that was base.’ ”
On the screen, I saw Carrera turn slightly to send a dirty look to someone to his right rear. I later figured out that this someone was either a senator named Cardenas or a legate named Suarez.
After that, Carrera turned back to his audience and continued, “ ‘Gorgidas distributed this Sacred Band all through the front ranks of the infantry, and thus made their gallantry less conspicuous…But Pelopidas, having sufficiently tried their bravery at Tegyrae, never afterward divided them, but keeping them together, gave them the first duty in the greatest battles…thus he thought brave men, provoking one another to noble actions, would prove most serviceable, and most resolute, when all were united together.’ ” Carrera closed the book from which he’d been reading.
“Your tercio has a glorious ancestry; quite possibly a glorious future. Don’t fuck it up.”
TV Militar would never dare to censor anything Carrera or Parilla said.
The Gorgidas boys did a parade then, in front of the cameras. The people, men mostly, in the restaurant seemed to have mixed feelings. Many of them were in the reserve forces. Some, probably most, were thoroughly pleased at getting whatever mariposas had been in their organizations out of same.
* * *
One night, sometime later, I heard some heavy weapons firing from not so far away. (Not that I knew the difference at the time; though I know the difference now). This was followed by the sound of a crash and an explosion. I hid with Alma under the bed. The next morning we came out and everything seemed pretty normal, except that the neighborhood was buzzing over some Tauran helicopter that had been shot down the night before. Curious, Alma holding my hand, I walked in the direction of the crash.
Sure enough, just outside the walls there was a
helicopter, wrecked and burned. It still smoked slightly.
I saw a man, tall for one of us, though not so tall for the ex-gringo I’d heard he was. Carrera was looking over the wreck as some medical people removed the bodies from it. I saw him lose his temper and strike one of the medics. I don’t know what for.
I kept watching. Unfortunately—or perhaps fortunately, as it turned out—Alma drifted away. I didn’t worry when I realized she was gone. Say what you want about the people of Rio Abajo. They may be poor but, at least since the legion exterminated the criminals, they are basically decent, more decent than the richer folks I’d grown up with, a lot more decent than people like Piedras.
Then I saw Alma and I did start to worry…though panic might be a better choice of terms. She was running across the street directly toward Duque Carrera. I don’t know what you remember from that time, but Carrera had a damned terrifying reputation. When one of Carrera’s guards began to turn a rifle on my little girl, I nearly screamed.
But Alma just stopped in front of him with her hands behind her back.
Carrera squatted down and talked to her very softly for a little while. She took her hands from behind her back. She had made him a bouquet of flowers. He laughed, took the flowers, and scooped her up in his arms. He spoke to her for a little while then Alma pointed at where I was standing.
Oh, my God, I thought. He’s coming towards me.
“I take it this is your little girl, Miss…?”
“Fuentes, Señor. Maria Fuentes.” I guess he’d figured out from the lack of a ring on my hand that I wasn’t married.
He consulted his watch. “Well, Miss Fuentes, little Alma here has brightened up my day considerably. Would you do me a big favor and let me take the both of you to lunch?”
One does not refuse an invitation from someone who is not only the second most powerful man in your country, but also has a reputation Attila the Hun would have been proud to own. Still, it was the strangest thing to me, walking through the streets of the City, Carrera carrying my daughter, and all of us surrounded by big men carrying guns.
