“Me ha … me ha dislocado el pie.” Dislocated my foot.
These mercenaries get kinky in the sack, the oldest choked. Learn all their funny tricks from the potato-faces.
“No se puede dejarle embarazada sin aprender que signífican el bastón y la bola,” asserted the man chalking his stick. No no, he’ll never get her knocked up until he learns the meaning of a stick and a ball.
At a corner pocket, exploding into laughter, “Y hoyo, un hoyo.” A stick, a ball, a hole.
As the fantasy smile faded Lupi began to feel nauseous. In his mind he began to lose his bearings all over again. When had he ordered the girl to bring him another bottle of beer? Moreover, what were they possibly doing to the stray dog in the next room that would cause it to produce such piteous yelps? The howling cascaded around him but abruptly reached its end. Lupi unclenched his hands. He drank from the bottle, waited for some kind of conclusion to the primitive drama played out before him, around him, but on a stage he could not directly see. In unsettling silence he kept eyes on the archway by which the two rooms communicated, expecting to witness a grotesquerie, one of the men to cross through, dragging the corpse of the dog by its tail, or lank hind leg.
After long minutes, the game resumed. The conversation, with its interjections and laughter, ascended and dropped off as before. The mongrel dog materialized in the breezeway, hobbled back to the porch door (opened again to a solid bar of day), and limped outside. It turned several circles in place before lying down; sniffed its paws in sequence and with a comfortable shudder closed its eyes to nap. Lupi wished he could pat it.
The door remained open. He watched the dog flinch in response to its dreams. Beyond, the resident snake had retreated. Having traveled lower in the sky, the sun left off warming the stones of the wall across the road. Lupi’s head was resting on his forearms. His eyelids slackened and there was the withdrawal just as he tumbled down through the precarious crack between planks.
He recalled having been dragged to his feet sometime after he had observed the dog cross the room into where the men were playing pool. He had been escorted through the rear doorway, curtained with hemp string, down a narrow corridor. In this corridor, he could remember, a pervasive smell of overcooked mutton lay in the air, clung to the damp walls. To the right, through a second, low-beamed door, he was directed into a cramped cell with baked tile floor, red as iron ore, and adobe walls of a pure white. On the far wall hung an image of the Virgin in an ornate tin frame; plastic flowers, tied with dried vine around their cock-eyed stems, lay along its top. A small table, cane chair, narrow plank bed. The men who had led him here exchanged a few words. Lupi listened hard but couldn’t understand. He was made to sit on the meager bed, whose ungiving surface was draped with horsehair pelts.
When the men left, the girl emerged from where she had been waiting in one corner.
She had removed her dress and Lupi could see it where it hung, limp as a brown flame, from a nail on the back of the door. A chemise clung to the form of her hips. She came to the bed.
“¿Tu eres bueno con las mujeres?” You are good with women? You must be very good to me, I don’t want you to hurt me, you strong tramontane …
No that wasn’t right, tramontane? and Lupi tried to speak, but his tongue was crippled, was like tepid tallow just drawn from a wax mold. Her hands were at work in his lap; she half-sat on the bed. She was muttering to him but her words were in the same dialect the men used and he understood nothing. He could feel her fingers on him; trousers unbuttoned, the flaps lay open. Her hands, coarse as heels of calloused feet, roughly stroked him. He winced. Flailing with his arms he caught hold of her neck and tried to draw her head down to his, but he discovered he hadn’t the strength to force her to move. Groaned indistinctly, it was like being crushed under a crowd. In a moment she stopped, clasped his hand, pulled it away from her hair, forced it back to the bed at his side.
“Deja: cállate.”
She shifted her buttocks on the horsehair pelt so that she sat closer to his face, ferine eyes staring down into his, which were swimming, as were the images they perceived. He watched her helpless as she slid the thin straps of her chemise off her muscular shoulders and leaned over his moving mouth. She gave him her thin blue-veined breast which he aimlessly kissed until by instinct his lips located her nipple and took it, an implacable hard berry, numbly and began to suckle. It seemed as if there were other hands exploring his lap and thighs but he concentrated on sucking at the breast. What the unseen hands tore away from his finger made a gurgling sound; away with the ring came a little of his own skin, a catastrophe.
He bit hard into the girl’s flesh and she gave a surprised cry. Somebody else spoke what, he deciphered from rhythm and tone, were words of encouragement, if not instruction. She wedged her thumb and fingers between his teeth which forced his jaw to come unlocked. Her face now smothered his, her mouth clamped down over his nose and she inhaled, withdrawing air from his lungs, forcing him to breathe through his mouth. He could feel the weight of her on his own chest. She had one hand clamped on his erection. She ran her tongue across his eyes, as they both awakened with a start in Lupi’s filmy mind.
3.
THE DREAM THAT had left him in bed, writhing in the scarifying and oily pelts, had given way to something ominous and solid and crystalline. From across the stained table of the bar the fat man, accompanied by another, regarded him. The fat man’s companion was dressed in fatigues, a smart, violet kerchief knotted around his neck. In either side of his face a deep crease ran vertically from cusp of cheekbone, under tiny eyes, to the edge of jaw, a swarthy marionette whose lower lip, teeth and jaw were cut away so that they seemed independent of the rest of the head. His eyes—their blackness lodged in the flat, wide berth of his face—were dead as they stared in at his own nose. Were he a Contra, Lupi wondered, would he be able to move unobstructed in this hamlet? This was not a government soldier. A bottle of the same clear alcohol the fat man had been drinking before rested on a tray with three glasses, each differently shaped.
The fat one said with cheerfulness that renewed memories of the first optimistic day, his face serene as an egg washed in water, “So here we are.”
Lupi looked at him, glanced at the door and observed the dog where it slept on the now-lightless porch. There was nothing to be heard from the pool room. “You have been where?” he asked him, head aching with each pinch of his heart, falling back in his chair—he crossed his arm over his chest; forehead wrinkled, pulling brows together. He glanced over at the bar, but the girl who wore the yellow dress was not there. The three of them were alone. This establishment was, after Santa Maria de la Rosa, the Catholic cathedral that dominated the plaza at the heart of the village (rocky parvis crowned by pigs and children), the most frequented and important in the community. The men who had access to its pool table—table confiscated from the home of a British coffee exporter who had fled in the earliest days of the revolution (having been bought from partisans in Bluefield whose grandparents had appropriated it from yet another Londoner after the first war)—were the hamlet’s dominant males: if not guerrillas, at least in possession of matériel. They’d left.
“Drink up, Lupi, and don’t worry so much. I can tell you you leave tonight. You’re being deported. The government deems your continued presence here dangerous to the security of the state.”
“What, that’s ridiculous.”
“You should be thanking me, that I have been able to make these arrangements on your behalf.”
“Va fá’n culo.” Lupi rubbed his eyes with the butts of both hands.
“Carlos why don’t you kill him?” he said evenly. “This country is, after all, at war. Infiltrators, agitators from outside, common as flies. It’s of no consequence to me who misunderstood your aims here and killed you, people are—as an old American friend in the diplomatic corps was fond of saying—so many bubbles on the horse piss, they get popped and what happens—nothing happens …” (changing his
tone) “a beautiful evening, smells like wattle, smells like cunt.”
How many movies had the guy seen? Lupi wondered as the three sat silent for the time it took the fat one to draw a small cigar from his jacket pocket, open a pearl-handled knife which he used to pare one end, twirl it along his teeth, languidly put a match to it and manufacture smoke, rancid willowy cotton, over them. Bad actor, B-grade—he swallowed a cough.
“You were brought here because you’re a blank slate.”
“I’m not, though.”
“Blank enough.”
“I thought you said I was done.” The inner smile faded.
“Well, you’re done, try this, to all purposes you are deceased for two or three days now. Your passport and all those sham papers? We’ve returned them to the Italian authorities.”
He thought, No such thing as Italian authority.
“You were buried in a shallow grave under a little rock salt—Carlos decided he didn’t want to eat you for dinner, right?”
Carlos shrugged.
“Right?”
A boy came walking down the road. He was whistling, tunelessly, still too far away to be heard from where Lupi and the others sat. He had a stick in his hand and with it he tapped the dirt ahead of him. Sometimes he slapped a stone away from his path. His clothing flapped in the small breeze that was coming up from the valley below. He walked past an old man whose skin was brown and rilled as bark and who drove two oxen before him. Behind this man trotted a dog. Upon seeing the boy’s stick, the dog bared teeth and began to growl. The boy unholstered his revolver and aimed it at the animal’s head. The man cried the dog’s name and the dog ceased. The boy did not shoot the dog.
A mocking fly that’d droned in loose spirals over their heads landed on the revolver, walked its length and facets from hammer to cylinder and down the barrel and cast off again. Carlos scratched behind his ear. He had tried to capture the fly in his hand but had missed. Once he had been told that these insects take off just the opposite of a helicopter, that they cast off backwards. To catch them one must bring the palm in swiftly from behind. He discounted this as fallacy, even myth, something a missionary would make up.
The familiar footsteps of his nephew were heard and he looked out on the porch where the mongrel wagged its tail in a patch of sun spiked by shadows tossed across the wooden planks.
“Con permiso,” Bautista asked, and came in.
“Good, good, fine,” then extinguished his cigar on the sole of his shoe. As Bautista’s father continued to speak, he pared the ash off the cigar and replaced the unsmoked portion in his pocket. “Now listen to me, señor Matteo. And you must trust what it is I tell you even though I realize your experience here these past few days has not been the most pleasant, has not been what it was you were told last month in Zurich. You must trust me since as a matter of fact I don’t see you have other options.”
Lupi found it difficult to suppress his disdain for the abundant self-importance the fat man displayed with each fresh statement, the lips puckered as walnut meat within the convoluted shell of this scheme. Here was a man so accustomed to having his way with people the only interest left in it for him was to twist, pervert, entangle.
“You had no future in Italy. If you never go back, no great loss to you, is what I think, a bunch of lazy people stuck eating salami in fancy churches, and your priests over there. I’m a good Catholic myself—but your priests. Thieving embezzling priests and they all like the choirboys, eh, Tista?”
“¿Si papa?”
Lupi interpreted the quick rush of Spanish. The boy swiveled his hips rubbing his groin with his palm, rolled his eyes and moaned “Ohh-ooh.” Carlos pounded the table in approval.
“You people don’t know the meaning of Mother Mary’s scriptures. And Rome. I’ve visited there. Graveyard, bones, decadence, four hundred fifty years ago you are smart enough to get out, spread the pestilence over here, and look. No. But as far as you are concerned you must admit you worked too many sides of the fence. It was not you were greedy. Just that, well, you were … what is the word, disaffiliated maybe, disorganized, shortsighted. But you’re already clear on all this. The fact is—and this you may not have figured—fact is, your name was on at least one list, maybe oh, maybe another, not high-priority but eventually you would have been got around to.”
“What list?” incredulous.
“You keep asking me questions about things that do not matter. You can guess. But this is why we approached you. Your identity was already shaky, based as it was on poorly printed and worthless documents.”
“I …”
“You were broke, there was no way you could decline our offer. It was a fair offer it remains fair.”
The ring caught Lupi’s eye. “Where did you get that?” pointing at the boy’s hand. Bautista was wearing Lupi’s ring on his thumb. Its ruby eyes winked.
“You gave it to him,” the fat man broke in, impatiently. “Boy here admired it lifted it off your body what does it matter, little souvenir. If he hadn’t taken it somebody else would.”
“I want, give it to me.”
“Want this, want to know that, you may get it back or may not. Meantime, the ring is Bautista’s. He killed you, one clean shot, just like that, bunng, up on the mountain.”
The boy, misjudging the meaning of the dialogue, cocked his hip and moved his palm over his crotch in wide circles. He looked around to Carlos who hadn’t noticed.
“Here,” as the clean manila envelope was pushed over the table. “Here are your new papers, your tickets. Bautista will take you to the place, this time you ride quietly, you do nothing, you go by a longer but less active route, all right? No one-man wars. From there you will be taken on to Danlí to meet a bus. The papers aren’t the highest quality, not even as good as papers you came with which, as I have pointed out, were trash, but they’ll work.”
“What am I supposed to do in Honduras? Porca madonna.”
The fat man slapped his hand on the table with such force that two of the empty glasses jumped, toppled; one rolled off the edge of the table to the floor. In a movie it would have broken (Lupi tried to restrain himself)—
“Oiga—se calle,” with such calm as would completely belie the violence of his prior gesture. “A very fine man my colleague will meet you there. You listen to him. Krieger. He’s a good yanqui boy. He’ll accompany you from Danlíto Tegucigalpa. Then you’re on your own. My friend will show you what you need to know. You will go to this address. There’s a woman there who will help you. It’s all written down. Bautista? Okay, vaya bien,” and when Lupi agreed, to the surprise of all, the word si meaning something to everyone, Carlos upset the fat man though he amused Bautista, by closing his lips around the revolver barrel pumping it subtly in, out, raising his eyebrows. Lupi thought to reach over and punch the gun back into his throat, but he couldn’t.
Fireflies were flashing over a calm darkening hillside which rambled up behind the hamlet and its collection of mud-walled huts, their tiny yellow-green points dimpling two dimensions where they ascended in the very heat of the light they made. Lupi blinked and they were gone, replaced by phosphenes, luminescent glowworms that squiggled under his eyes. Smoke from kitchen fires clung in the pure air of the peaceful evening. Women in twos and threes strolled arm in arm down the street. Roosters, as yet unsettled in some faraway rafter, cried against the curtain of night.
It was all so beautiful, Lupi thought. He wished he could tell Bautista that the fireflies flew upward when they flashed because the heat of their tails made them rise in the air but (well) of course, he couldn’t. It was something he knew. He was sorry he couldn’t say.
Beyond the outskirts of the village, in a clearing beside a river, the party reached a man whose ratchetlike teeth chewed at a length of sugar cane. He was holding their horses. This time Bautista rode, too. Carlos followed them on horseback, trailing at a distance. He deviated into the woods for periods as long as several hours only to reappear behind them wit
hout comment or ceremony.
“El se ama mucho,” Bautista joked. Loves himself better than any girl. Carlos called forward, What’s so funny? but neither Lupi nor the boy made any response. The rear guard was eventually spelled by someone else, by several others in turn, as they made their northward journey, through that night and into the next day.
Tight clusters of gunfire were heard early in the morning of the third day. A helicopter’s blades battered the jungle air, making its leaves sigh, and seemed to come from across the long ridge. The boy dismounted and signaled Lupi to follow him and they led their horses hurriedly up into pine and brush off the trail, and for an hour scanned the blue rim of sky that topped the ridge out to the east, but they saw no sign of human activity. They were past the border and had crossed over into Honduras and as they did the first movie strains of Dvorak’s From the New World began to play in his head—
We were at the border. Maybe we had crossed over into Honduras. The fire and the beating of the gunship blades rhapsodic against the humid air.
I can still hear, I’ll always hear sounds from before, from back in Parigi, in Milano, and Torino. The canisters of tear gas shot at us. The craziness of the crowds. Chanting and screaming. Running in all directions. Rocks and bottles and bricks and inevitably someone with a gun. People climbing over people running from the Palais de Justice gates toward Notre Dame. The odor of cars burning, overturned in front of the black-and-gold gates. The crackling of the blaze, and battalion of police rushing in across Pont St. Michel. Trying to make the cathedral where the cops wouldn’t go inside. Barricades in the side streets and shoulder to shoulder the cops bearing down from this unexpected flank. Stupid cops, with their high-fashion riot gear and fancy shields.
But the gunfire, what a simple, passionate sound it is, a gun or a rifle going off. Who’d ever think that along with that tiny sound no more than the sound of a paper bag blown up with air: you slap it and it busts. With that sound is the possibility, the plausibility. And if the cop can aim it’s probable that the sound’ll be tied up with another man’s being hit. In the head or the shoulder. In the thigh. The groin, the heart.
Come Sunday Page 5
