MAMista

by Len Deighton

  All the vehicles were driven too fast and that did not help Lucas’ low spirits. The weight of the laden trucks caused them to slide in the soft dust at each hairpin. But the guerrillas were not sad. They were elated with the little victory they had scored, and the drivers enjoyed skidding on the corners while the men in the trucks began singing the old rebel songs.

  As they neared the valley bottom the earth was dark and loamy. On the firmer road they made good time. The convoy stopped only three times in the following five and a half hours but there were many times when progress was so slow that men could get down from their vehicles and stretch, urinate, spit and swear before climbing back aboard. Once they came to a halt at a place where the road had split badly, once when a three-quarterton Dodge needed half a pint of oil and once when they heard the sound of a plane. It was a commercial flight and passed over some miles to the west, continuing its straight course. After that Ramón ordered that the trucks should be adorned with leafy branches.

  Even the two American prisoners were permitted to get out when the progress was slow. They were not restrained or carefully guarded after the first two hours. There is something about the jungle that makes most men prefer captivity to being free and lost in it.

  The elderly Dodge gave more trouble before nightfall. It was a big strong four-by-four with a folding top and a useful winch at the front. One of the transmission shafts had gone. Despite his newly acquired vehicles, Ramón was reluctant to abandon the Dodge. When he heard that it would take most of the night to repair it, he had it towed to one of the derelict tin mines that are to be seen on that road between Rosario and the Sierra Sombra. The convoy would be kept together.

  The tin mine, long abandoned, had been stripped bare: no chairs, tables or portable equipment. Corrugated iron sheets had been torn from the sides of some of the huts. But even these wrecked buildings made a shelter inside which the guerrillas could enjoy a fire. It was a luxury denied to them in this disputed region except when its light could be hidden.

  The mechanics delved into the transmission of the ancient Dodge reconnaissance car. Ramón ordered that the meat stolen from the camp should be served to the men. It would not keep. Already it was thawed. Tomorrow it would be high; the next day rotten. So they roasted the cuts of beef over the open fires and the smell of it cooking made it a celebration. They relished every mouthful and when it was finished they slept deeply.

  Angel Paz did not sleep. Around him men were snoring and belching contentedly. Some smoked and some just stared. The events of the last two days went round and round in his mind. He was afraid of the jungle and he felt lonely. Until now he’d always told himself that the USA was an alien environment. He’d expected to find himself at home amongst the revolutionaries in this Spanish-speaking land. But suddenly, and inexplicably, he was feeling homesick for California.

  With a tattered blanket wrapped round his shoulders he went over to where the mechanics were repairing the Dodge. Lucas was sitting in the back seat, smoking one of the powerful little cheroots the guerrillas rolled themselves. The two mechanics were working on the gearbox. One of them was kneeling on the floor at the front seat and the other, visible through the open panel, was on the ground under the car. Every now and again Lucas would lean over the back seat, to see what the mechanics were doing and offer them advice or instruction.

  The folding hood was up and it was comparatively comfortable. It was typical of Lucas that he had not only found a good place to be but a legitimate reason why he was needed there. ‘I thought you were guarding the prisoners,’ said Lucas.

  ‘Why do you keep bugging me?’ said Angel Paz. ‘I’m sick of your lousy kibitzing.’ He didn’t go away; he climbed in and sat in the back seat.

  Lucas looked at him and decided he must try hard to be friendly. ‘These buggers always want to do things the hard way,’ Lucas said. ‘Fiddling about from the top. I had the devil of a job persuading them they would have to drop the whole transmission out to put the shafts in.’

  Paz said, ‘The white guy is blowing his mind.’

  ‘I gave him a sedative,’ Lucas said.

  ‘Whatever you gave him; it didn’t work.’

  ‘Shock,’ said Lucas. Charrington had shown the classic symptoms: pallor, sweating and weak pulse. There was no need to take his blood pressure. Lucas had seen it all before. ‘Have you tried one of these coffin nails?’ asked Lucas, offering him a home-made cheroot.

  ‘They stink,’ said Paz, waving it away.

  ‘Tomorrow we’ll be in Rosario,’ Lucas said. Then, noticing the way in which the mechanics were trying to fit the input shaft, he interrupted them and indicated with his hands that it should go the other way round. The mechanics grinned and nodded.

  Lucas looked at Angel Paz. ‘I suppose I’m an interfering old bastard but I don’t want to be stuck here all day tomorrow.’ He inhaled on the cheroot and blew smoke.

  ‘A sedative,’ said Paz. ‘Maybe that’s what I need too. I can’t get to sleep.’

  ‘Guts ache? You ate too much of that beef and rice,’ Lucas said. ‘In this climate it’s better to keep to small helpings.’ He looked at what the mechanics were doing. They were waiting for his approval. ‘That’s better. Put it all together. Now we all pray that it will get us to Rosario.’ He sat back with a sigh.

  ‘There was no way I could guess that stupid woman was going to go rushing past the generator,’ said Paz.

  ‘I can’t spare medicines for people who are fit. If you can’t sleep, you don’t need to. It’s as simple as that.’

  Paz didn’t reply.

  The mechanics bolted up the transmission, replaced the floor panel and went to wipe the oil from their hands. Now that the work was finished Lucas let his head fall forward and went to sleep.

  Paz curled up on the back seat alongside Lucas but he was unable to sleep. He kept staring at the eastern sky, willing dawn to appear. The phosphorescence of the decomposing jungle floor gradually lost its glow. Behind the swaying treetops the sky turned first to mauve then pink. In the mysterious half-light he heard a sound like water lapping under a becalmed hull. It was Charrington sobbing very quietly; his lungs gulping air and then releasing it. Whether he cried for his dead wife, his motherless child, this sad continent or his own dark future was something that even Charrington didn’t know. It was an ugly sound; the sound of inconsolable grief.

  11

  ROSARIO. ‘Mamista Grab CIA Bigshot.’

  A photograph of Rosario, artfully soft-focused and with some red jungle flowers in the foreground, might have made it look like a stage-set for Carmen. Angel Paz walked past the stone cottages, each with a red-tiled roof. He stepped through the patch where a water tank dribbled over the cobbles that sloped steeply to the street’s central gutter. Behind him he left wet footprints.

  It was peaceful. It was siesta time and most people were asleep. In the cool shade of the leaking tank a pig snored. Fitfully its small eyes gleamed. The street ended at the plaza. There stood a well with buckets and chains. Around it there were half a dozen local Indians, sleeping, smoking and chewing gum from the wild rubber trees. Some cottages had once been painted in pinks and blues. Now the colours had faded. Outside one that was the palest of blues stood a table with a red and white plastic table-cover nailed upon it. There were no chairs there, lest the villagers use it as a lounging place, but the table with its bright cloth was a sign to any traveller that here were sold the standard plate of pork and spicy beans – mostly beans – and cold bottles of local beer.

  Paz went inside to get a cold drink. He heard a rustle of movement and the sound of a door being locked. Paz called loudly but no one came. He looked for beer but it had all been taken from the shelves and hidden away. He went outside again.

  There were six trees around the well, providing shade from the hot noon sun. One tree sheltered the table too. As a travel poster, in an airline office on Fifth Avenue, this scene might have looked like the ideal place to go to get a winter tan. That�
��s because posters do not record the way the wood smoke irritated the eyes, nor the sour stench of rotting vegetables, nor that of human and animal excrement, that pervaded the village. Nor do such posters show the big fat flies and tiny mosquitoes that fight for a foothold upon any piece of pale skin.

  The smithy was making most of the smoke. The combustion of the wood did not provide enough heat, or high enough temperatures, to forge the metal piece the transmission needed now that the Dodge had broken down again. So now the smith – a huge man with curly hair and European features – was feeding the furnace with coal, piece by precious piece, turning each of them carefully and working the bellows. But not pumping them excessively, for it was vital that the coals all came to the right shade of red at the same moment.

  Paz called a greeting to him. The smith looked up and stared him full in the eyes before spitting at his feet to show his contempt.

  Here in Rosario the hostility that all peasants had for the guerrillas was evident. The MAMistas stole their sons, and nowadays their daughters too, and demanded food and help and the promise of silence. And in their wake, as surely as the rains followed a harvest, came the Federalistas.

  Forced to reveal all they knew of the guerrillas, the peasants rationalized their betrayal by blaming all their misfortunes, not upon the Federalistas who dealt it out, but upon the MAMistas who prompted it. This rationale was fomented by the Federalistas. They pasted up big posters. One said: ‘Will you get a place in the MAMista government?’ Another said: ‘A blow against tyranny?’ It was illustrated by pictures of a demolished hydro-electric plant, lines of unemployed men and children outside a closed school.

  Other notices were tacked to the board near the well. There were recruiting appeals for the various Federal forces and for prison guards in the western provinces. But there were also hand-painted signs. Huge whitewash lettering painted on the mud walls at the approach to the town greeted all newcomers with the words: ‘MAMista = fascista’. It was a slogan not there entirely to placate the Federalistas.

  The guerrillas had entered the village before dawn. The first thing they did was seize a two-stroke motor cycle. Inez Cassidy drove off on it. No one knew where she was going. It was a secret mission for Ramón.

  Next in priority came the task of repairing the Dodge. It was a long job. At first the villagers crowded around the broken-down reconnaissance car. They stared at the guerrilleros, at their clothes and at their guns. They listened to their strange accents and helped with anything that was needed and prayed to God that they would soon pass on. But before long the villagers drifted away, leaving only the wide-eyed children until they too had been called back to their mothers.

  Those few guerrillas who had cash in their pockets made for Rosario’s only real shop. It was a bright red tottering structure run by a cheerful black called Henri. He’d nailed together the wormy timbers, holding them with the enamel panels that advertised baby food, beer and Ever Ready batteries. The shop smelled of kerosene. Charred timbers, just visible under the red paint, evidenced the combustibility of the paraffin wax firelighters that were one of his fastest-moving items. The porch was strewn with cigarette packets from the rubbish tin. Packets were unwanted in a shop where cigarettes were sold one by one – and sometimes half by half – and usually smoked on the premises.

  At the end of the last century this had been one of the communities to which Italian immigrants were sent. Many cottages bore lopsided and sometimes misspelled signs over the street doors: P. Lupo, Dentista; R. Tomasi; Cambio. Such signs served to boast the Italian ancestry of the village élite rather than to offer or advertise any goods or services.

  This morning most of Rosario’s élite were gathered at the end of the main street. The men wore their one and only suits and black felt hats. The women were in black churchgoing gowns. Some wore the little starched aprons and lace caps that were so important to villagers who wished to hold their social position. Most of them held umbrellas to shade them from the sun. All umbrellas here were black: it would be a wasteful extravagance to buy an umbrella that could not be used at a funeral. They waited outside the clapboard building with a tin roof that had rusted into a wonderful display of reds and browns. Chocolate and chestnut, beige and scarlet, the roof could be seen from afar, and so could the little tower with its bell. This building served as assembly hall, church and mortuary. It was also where the villagers came twice a year to face the pitiless inquisitions of the government tax collectors.

  The Lupos, Tomasis and Bandinis and their friends and distant relatives, forbidden by Ramón to ring their church bell, glowered resentfully back along the street as a coffin was carried towards them.

  Like the carefully darned black suits and starched dresses so obviously made for other waistlines, it was difficult to know which patronyms were handed down and which were borrowed for effect. A ciao or two, a snatch of La Traviata and half a dozen rusting tins of tomato purée do not make an Italian. But in spite of complexions darker than any Sicilian and the wide jaws and high Indian cheekbones, there was something in the appearance of this group of mourners that made them different from the rest of the villagers. Their stance, their stares, or perhaps the comparative cleanliness that they had achieved on this special day, made them look like a tour group who had put their polished shoes upon this alien soil only for long enough to let the bus turn round.

  ‘These people are not worth fighting for,’ said Maestro, who had been arguing with them. His sad face and heavy-lidded eyes made it a doleful judgement. Permitted to continue with their funeral, the priest and the deputation of villagers had expressed no thanks; they’d simply complained about the delay. Maestro believed that all priests should be shot, but Ramón’s policy was to keep the Church neutral while he fought the Benz regime. ‘Not worth fighting for.’

  Ramón smiled. Maestro was an emotional fellow: his volatile disposition precluded him from ever being a leader of fighting men. Every small setback saw him in despair. ‘They are our people, Maestro,’ Ramón told him. ‘Just as the Federalistas are our people: good, bad, stupid, cunning, saintly … whatever they are like we are stuck with them. We must make a revolution with what we have: any fool can make a revolution among revolutionaries.’

  ‘Abandon the Dodge, comrade Ramón. We have Volvos, the Toyota and the jeeps and our old GMCs. We have plenty of transport. Abandon the Dodge.’

  ‘No, Maestro.’ Ramón knew how to make the name mean ‘schoolmaster’ as well as ‘master’ and bring to it a measure of censure. ‘We will abandon nothing until we are forced to. We will abandon nothing until our existence is threatened. That is not the manner of our revolution.’

  Ramón had ordered that the post office radio operator should not be harmed. Such operators were usually in the pay of the police, but the radio was needed for the day-to-day life of the village. It warned of storms and floods and brought medical aid.

  At noon – the funeral over – a deputation came to the plaza where Ramón had slung his hammock between two trees. They bore a huge array of jungle flowers and a message of good will that included an offer of a meal for all his men. It was an offer that Ramón accepted graciously.

  Maestro urged otherwise. Nervously he twisted the end of his moustache: ‘They will drug the food and send for the police. The jungle is filled with strange plants that cause hallucinations, drowsiness or death.’

  Angel Paz, who seldom wandered far away from what he judged to be the centre of power, supported Maestro. ‘Perhaps they used the radio when they first heard us approaching.’

  Ramón had sent a jeep an hour ahead of the convoy. Its task was to take the radio before such warnings could be given. Ramón shook his head and reassured them both. ‘Put aside your fears. Would you have us cowering from the gunfire of the Federalistas? Then how much more cowardice we’d show in being so fearful of a meal with the villagers.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t they poison us?’ Angel Paz asked Ramón. ‘They swear at us and spit at us. They hate us. Why
wouldn’t they poison us?’

  ‘They are fearful that we will take their cattle and goats. They are offering us a meal in the hope that – drunk and full-bellied – we won’t take their livestock.’

  Paz noted the unconcerned way in which Ramón dealt with such problems, but to Paz’s mind Ramón’s determination to be benign left an impression of weakness. Paz noted too the way in which Ramón arranged that some village notables – the priest, the mayor and half a dozen farmers – would sit beside his men and share the same platters of food.

  The villagers turned the event into a celebration, for they themselves seldom ate on such a scale. As the siesta ended, tables were brought out from the houses and set up in the plaza. There was tinned meat, sliced razor thin, and ugly river fish cooked whole and served in pepper sauce. There were baked yams, huge pots of beans and trays of rice studded with chopped peppers and nuts. Bananas of many shapes and sizes were served, and half an orange each. Finally they brought out jugs of an alcoholic drink made from tapioca for which Ramón offered profound thanks but said that his men must not drink. (At which order Maestro and Angel Paz exchanged knowing and satisfied looks.)

  The men sat down in two shifts. During the first meal there was an alarm given by a sentry perched on the tower of the assembly hall. A convoy was approaching. Radio messages were sent to the outlying posts but the convoy was not a military one. It consisted of trucks taking flour to distant villages where the crops had failed for the second time. The trucks continued on the valley road and did not turn off at the Rosario junction.

  The second meal was a more relaxed affair. Men who had been very cool to Angel Paz, and to Lucas too, drank with them and accepted them. Nameo, a huge black fellow, told jokes. He related his stories in the slurred accent of Cuba, which seemed to make them much more comical. The eighteen-year-old twins sang an unrecognizable ‘American’ song. Even Maestro was seen to laugh. It was as if the deaths of the sentries, and of the American woman, had welded all of them into a bond of complicity.