I walked into the nave, one step at a time, over creaking floorboards. I had been baptized in this church. My parents had married here. Beneath the pulpit I learned to play the flute. Yet I didn’t recognize the place. No plank pews. No saints. No communion table. The nave glowed with a hygienic, Protestant light from the empty casements.
A plywood board, an inch thick, rocked beneath my feet where the grenade had landed. A stain darkened the floor all the way back to the entrance.
Whose body had they dragged outside? Nervy Jesús, who smiled with relief at her friends every time she sat down after reading the Gospel? Or Aguilina, who wore a hairnet, which gave to her head the appearance of something imperfectly, patchily dyed? Or Prudencia – a gossip with balcony-hardened elbows – always patting her wet hair and saying “La Posta is such a dirty place”? Or Maria, who had never been the same since the Turk’s tin sign for paraffin had fallen on her head in a gale?
Perhaps this bloodstain wasn’t a woman’s. Perhaps one of the men had crawled back into the church. Lazo’s son-in-law, the postman, who often delivered letters to the wrong houses, a nice man with a pencil-sharp chin whose name I couldn’t remember, but didn’t have the courage, just now, to ask. Or Nemecio.
The afternoon sun simmered on the pillars. Blotches of cement spoke of an attempt to conceal the damage. Limbs, eyes, blood, glass, screams. Standing on this spot, I hated myself. I had left this valley to work for the law – and this was how the law had repaid my people.
The soldiers had thrown the headless saints into the storage room. Chips of gold plaster scattered all over the floor. There were ripped hassocks and cigarette ends and something metallic. When I held it to the window, I saw that it was a spent cartridge case, regular army issue.
The mahogany lectern toppled at an angle against a twisted metal chair. I pulled the eagle upright. The blast had removed one wing. I wanted to feel an emotion, be moved, but my only desire was to get outside. I had reached the storage-room door when my eye was drawn to the wrecked diptych behind it. Through the mangled fronds of canvas I saw Father Ramón’s cassette-recorder. There was a tape still inside.
On this machine, every Saturday, the priest would record his twenty-minute talk. He would give the tape to one of the altar boys – Santiago usually – who would then run with it to the radio station. His sermons were immensely popular, their influence extending into the neighbouring valleys. On a tape like this our priest would have recorded his attacks on Ezequiel.
I pressed the start key. The spools revolved. In a voice from which he couldn’t keep his delight, I heard Father Ramón telling a story about Leonardo’s Last Supper.
“. . . try as he might – and how hard he tried! – he couldn’t find the model for Judas! He had painted all the disciples. There was this one blank. Years passed while he searched for a model with the appropriate expression. But no. There the fresco stood. Incomplete. And I have to tell you that Leonardo had given up on it. Until – incredibly – one day in the market he found the face he had been seeking all this time. Judas to the life! He showered money on the man, flattered him, dragged him back to his studio and set to work. Can’t you imagine the energy with which he picked up his brushes? Then he looks up and what do you think he sees? His model, head buried in his hands, is weeping uncontrollably. What’s up, asks Leonardo? What’s wrong, man?
“At first the other shakes his head, like we all do when we don’t want to confess something. Finally, he blurts out the reason for his distress. Many years ago he had sat in the same chair. He had sat like this, exactly as he was required to sit now. But then he had been posing as Christ . . .”
I stopped the tape. I didn’t know the moral of the story, didn’t care. I was conscious of my own tears tickling my cheeks. Blindly I tried to get out of that room. I knocked an object to the floor, and I might have left it there, whatever it was, under the lectern where it had fallen. But something made me retrieve it.
An ashtray from Fatima. In the centre was a reproduction of the apparition of Our Lady. Three children, watching in rapt attention, prayed to the Virgin, who was balanced on a cloud above some sheep. She held, flaming in her hands, a human heart, in shape and colour resembling a red pepper. Circles of dark brown tar obscured the Virgin’s face and part of a message reading “God’s Fiery Signature”.
I packed the ashtray in my bag and went to look for Santiago.
He was teaching a class of bored children. He lifted his arm and scratched a sum on the board, savoured its meaning, and chalked another sum, not glancing round.
After the class he came up to me and we stood there and looked at each other. His face, always so much his own, seemed composed of other people’s features. He hadn’t shaved and his beard escaped from his chin in wisps, while his fairer hair sprang straight from the scalp as if something had shocked it. When young, his eyes had had the expression of a child in a playground. Now, thin as a lamppost, he had the stone grey eyes of a plundered soul. Perhaps that’s what he thought about me.
“Hello, Santiago.”
“What brings you back?” He was not surprised to see me.
“It doesn’t feel the same place.”
“Blame your people for that.”
“They’re not my people.”
“Military, police, what difference?”
“I’ve just seen the church. It’s monstrous.”
We walked out of the gates, into the street.
“But any organization is like this,” I said. “People can go mad within it.”
He shot me a look. “Why have you come back? What do you want?”
“To see you,” I said.
He strode a pace ahead, keen to get home.
I said, “I talked to your mother.”
“We haven’t been in touch.”
“She hadn’t heard about Father Ramón. I had to tell her.”
He unlocked a door. The spirit of the Sixties lingered like a joss stick in the room. A poster of a Brecht play. The sleeve of a Beatles record. Books stacked against the wall: Marx, Kant, Bakunin, Camus. I had parroted their ideas during Fuente’s revolt. Once, in an “underground” café in Pachuca, I had listened to Santiago quote Lukacs in defence of murder, a hint of madness in his eyes. My revolutionary ardour dimmed when the left-wing military took power. I ought to have approved of their seizure of the coffee farm. My correct reaction should have been: if our hacienda, seized in the people’s name, would better serve the masses, so be it. But that’s not what I felt.
“Weren’t you going to be a priest?” I put down my bag and sat. The sofa, covered in pillows, lacked an arm.
“I changed my mind at university.” Santiago, holding a tray, came out of the kitchen. He poured a mug of strong tea.
“You’re not drinking?”
He patted himself. “Stomach upset.”
He drew the curtain and sat down, crossing and recrossing his legs.
“What with the drought and the bridge being closed, we haven’t eaten well.”
Do you have friends you half apologize for, but whom you would hope to defend if they were criticized? At school Santiago had possessed a guileless quality which moved me to protect him. What had kept our relationship from developing into the sort of friendship I enjoyed with Nemecio, was his stubbornness. No sooner did he find a phrase that pleased him than he would repeat it like a rosary. The same with his ideas. If anyone interrupted him, his lower lip would tremble. He had the inflexibility of an actor who has grown too much into his part. An unscripted line he saw as a terrible threat.
I think this explains what happened after his mother left the Valley for a stranger, a man much younger than herself. I was already at the Police Academy when she discovered her lover’s cotton fields were no more extensive than the bar in Cayara where he was employed to collect empties and wipe the tables. My sister wrote to say Santiago had been badly affected by his mother’s defection. It must have been at about this time that he shifted the focus of his reve
rence.
“What did you study?” I asked.
“Religion, for a term. Then philosophy.”
“The opium of the people, eh?”
“If you like.”
“Because you were very religious, and all of a sudden you changed your mind.”
“It seemed irrelevant to what was happening around us.”
“Do you think Father Ramón was irrelevant? You used to admire him, all the good things he did. What seems irrelevant to me is the fact he’s been killed.”
“At least Ezequiel has drawn the attention of the government – who would rather forget us. We ask for clinics and what do they give us? Grenades. No, Agustín, the revolution must put up with its own violence or be fucked.”
“Then you accept Father Ramón’s death?”
His mouth folded up. “That – it’s not something I can explain. It–”
“Don’t you feel disgusted?”
His eyes blinked, grey, nervous, strained.
“Well, no. Not really. But yes.”
“If there’s a word to justify such an action, then tell it to me, Santiago.”
He stared at the back of his hands, licking his lip.
I said, “Then you understand how I feel when I’m confronted by the sight of that church as evidence of what I’m doing, or what my side is doing. But I tell you this. I’m leaving here tomorrow and my first action will be to file a report. I want to see the people who did this in prison as much as you do. You, on the other hand, have to play your part. What happened to our priest is no less reprehensible. You didn’t kill him any more than I threw that grenade, but if this sort of thing is to stop, we must help each other.”
“There are bound to be accidents,” said Santiago. “‘To act immorally is the highest sacrifice the revolution demands.’ Remember? Besides, Ramón had been speaking out against Ezequiel. He was judged an enemy of the people.” The rhythm of his speech was too fast, too stuttering.
“Rhetoric is rhetoric, Santiago. Could you have stood there and spouted that stuff as they forced him to eat his Bible? Any more than I could have stood and watched that soldier toss his grenade into the church? I would have done all in my power to stop him.”
“Kant says–”
“What does Kant have to do with anybody in this valley? Didn’t they teach you Plato, for God’s sake? Philosophy is impossible among the common people.”
“The communists ban Plato.”
“So do the fascists,” I said.
“Kant is relevant. If we live according to his precepts, we will achieve perpetual peace.”
“And old priests will be found slaughtered on river banks till the end of time.”
“Through Kant and Mao,” he persisted, “Ezequiel has constructed a cosmology that can be understood by the masses.”
“Reality is stronger than any cosmology. Ezequiel’s ideology has no basis in fact. Look around you, man. Communism is dead, even in Albania. If Ezequiel is the rational person he claims to be, he would have come to accept the changes in the world. He’s like a chicken tottering about after its head has been cut off.”
“I promise you, his revolution–”
Santiago was scrambling now. He retreated into the bleak, unsubtle territory of revolutionary socialism, the Kantian dialectic as promoted through the books strewn on his floor. Capitalist society reduced our people to objects. Those old women outside were of no more importance to the state than their pathetic shawlfuls of potatoes. Clinging to the wreckage of familiar jargon, he addressed his words not to me but to the world. But it was the shadow of a speech composed by another.
I listened, and I understood what had happened. At university, while I studied law, Santiago had transferred into the political sphere this moral stubbornness of his, this obstinacy that brooked no opposition. He had wanted to be a priest, but he had come up against an absolutism more attractive than Father Ramón’s bustling humanity.
Such people are always hungry for imperatives, especially when those imperatives coincide with their own. And who was it who supplied what Santiago sought? Ezequiel, that poisonous red mushroom created by Kant. My fellow altar boy would, of course, have perceived in Ezequiel’s Kant a disembodied Christianity. Treat all mankind as your equal, everybody as a person, nobody as a thing. Look to yourself as the source of order. How alluring it must have seemed. But it was not what Ezequiel had meant at all.
I had heard enough. I interrupted the speech. “It’s cowardly to set philosophy above life when such atrocious things have happened, are still happening. Cowardly and evil. Tell me, why is it that people who espouse Kant’s liberation doctrine always end up putting other people in chains? I could use Kant to justify bourgeois morality, yet you use his categorical imperative to justify Father Ramón’s murder. Why, Santiago? Why?”
“So I’m nuts, completely nuts. What do you want me to say?”
“I want to know who killed him.”
“Forget it.”
“Under the emergency code, I could arrest you for everything you’ve said. These books alone–”
“Look, don’t make threats about arresting me – I just need to yell ‘police’ and everyone in town will come running.”
“Fine. I’ll go away. I’ll build the evidence against you. I’ll watch you night and day. And then I’ll come back. Do I have to spell it out?”
He looked down at my feet. “Why do all policemen wear white socks?”
“Who supplies the food? Who are Ezequiel’s contacts in the village?”
He threw himself back. “I don’t know. I don’t know.”
“But you know about Father Ramón. I’m certain you do.”
His lower lip trembled and he clutched his knees. When he raised his head, his eyes were not looking at me but at the side of my face. “You don’t understand. I’ve signed a blood pact with these people.”
“You’re a lot better off dealing with me, buddy. You know Ezequiel’s ways. If he discovers we’re friends, he is likely to make the same moral sacrifice of you that he made of Father Ramón. And you’ve seen how the military behave. It’s a miracle they didn’t get you last time. You’re fucked, Santiago.”
I gave it time to sink home. Then I said reasonably, “It could be lucrative, you know. How much do you earn teaching algebra? I can offer you more. A reward. Start-up capital. Settle you in a new country, new identity, leave all this despair behind. Miami. White beaches. The good life.”
“Go on, Agustín, squeeze my balls some more.”
“Don’t you see? Ezequiel’s made an idiot of you. Is that what you wanted when you were an altar boy? To see your priest, the person in the world you most wanted to emulate, choke on his Bible, see him gutted like a fish, see his face sliced off?”
No reply. He was not listening. In a faraway tone he addressed the sofa beside me, breathing uneasily. “They came here after they’d done it. They wanted bed and food.”
“How many?”
“Three.”
“Male, female?”
“Two men, and a woman who was in charge.”
“How old? Where was she from? Was she educated?”
“It was Edith.”
“Edith? From Pachuca?” A girl with cold, mint eyes and make-up who wouldn’t dance with us.
“Ramón had to be punished by someone he knew,” he said doggedly.
“Where is Edith now?”
“No idea. They operate away from home. Like your army friends.”
“But she used to live in the next valley.”
“Not for twenty years.”
“How did she behave? What did she say?”
“She said be patient, the revolution was in our grasp.”
“And the men with her?”
“Kept pretty quiet. Said almost nothing.”
“You knew them?”
“No. They were from the capital.”
Had Edith slept on this sofa afterwards?
“Did they want you to lead them t
o Father Ramón? Is that what they wanted?”
“They were angry about his sermons. His attacks on Ezequiel.”
“He had also spoken out against the army.”
“Anyway, I wasn’t here.”
“But you were here when they came back.”
“That’s right.”
“Where were you, Santiago?”
Dismally, he said, “A woman. She’s married. I see her in the afternoons. You can have her name, if you like.”
I didn’t want to hear more. “How do you feel? You waited all these years for the call, and this is what the revolution demanded – and you weren’t even here. Nor when they killed Nemecio and the others.”
“No, I wasn’t. And by God, Agustín . . .”
“How did you know who these people were? How did you know they weren’t spies?”
Santiago got up and went into his bedroom. A cupboard creaked. He came out again, unfolding a piece of paper.
“Here. This is all I can offer you. This is all I know. This is all I have.”
A photocopy of a computer print-out. Four names, each listed for a village in the area. At the bottom, on its own, a telephone number prefixed by the code for the capital.
“You’re ‘Comrade Arturio’?”
“That’s what they called me at university. I had no choice. Don’t ask who the others are. I’ve no idea.”
“What about this number with no name?”
“She said to use it in an emergency.”
I copied down the information.
“Do you still play the flute?” he said in a not very interested way.
“No.”
“I’ll never forget the sound you made as we came down the glacier.”
“And you, Santiago, do you still sing?”
Before he could answer, voices sounded in the street. He jumped up, parting the curtain. “I told them to play in the yard!”
Someone pounded on the door. Santiago said, “Excuse me”. He puckered his lips in a schoolmasterly way and charged out into the street.
The Dancer Upstairs Page 17
