Aida manages her own weak smile. “I’m sure they do.”
“So you’ll stay with me again? When we go back to San Salvador?” Marta asks, but doesn’t have time to wait for the answer, because now several reporters approach, and the Committee needs every bit of this coverage.
Aida nearly says “Yes.” Or more: “I’m sorry about your husband,” or “I heard you call my name.” But none of it feels necessary. There’ll be time later. Instead, Aida tries to sort through her feelings about being here. Sensorial bombardment. That’s what it’s been so far. The surprise meeting place for this demonstration. The two-hour ride from San Salvador on that dirty bus. The ugliness of the mine, which, really, Aida can only glimpse behind the massive fence that extends as far as she can see, but that seems like a wasteland of broken earth. Nothing in Aida’s experience can help her here. She can grasp the business side of running the mine, but she has no context to understand what’s going on right now behind NorthOre’s gates. She doesn’t know about digging up bones. Until now, she has genuinely preferred to let the past be.
Meanwhile, moments from the demonstration keep returning to her like clips from a film. People scurrying. The sound of guns. The look on Carlos’s face when she slid the envelope down the bar. Riding back to the rooming house in the taxi, her ears buzzing. Waiting, weakened, for Neela’s call, for her to say whether Marta had made it out of there alive.
Today, her host has swept her up again, this time depositing her on a distant planet, the Salvadoran countryside. Aida’s brief glimpse of the famed town of Los Pampanos didn’t make much of an impression. It was bleak. Low, cement-brick buildings jumbled together on either side of an insignificant stretch of highway. But what made it strange for Aida was her certainty that the town is part of her now. All of El Salvador is. She was made here, by two parents. Danielle tried to reduce that number to zero from the start, substituting in her own parents, and later claiming to Aida that the man who fathered her had been nobody, that he’d died. Aida gets Danielle’s choices more than before. Danielle had her reasons for wanting to remove herself; she’d been an idealist and was played for a fool. She took Adrian out of the equation because he’s the one who played her. Still, she lied. And still, Aida has managed to have two parents. She wonders how she’ll react when — if — she sees her mother again, whether she can forgive Danielle for her selfishness. At the same time, she understands in a new light her own reasons for being here. She needed to apologize too. For trying to hurt her mother back all these years, for making it her business to keep Danielle at arm’s length and ignoring the toll it’s taken on them both. She has failed just as badly as her mother at rigging the numbers and making the past nil.
An old woman approaches and hands Aida a faded scarf, indicating that she should cover her head from the sun. Aida accepts it, pulling it tightly over her head, then returns to rubbing the cut on her shin and thinking about the new dynamics introduced into her life by having a living father. A bad man. A good man. Adrian. Carlos. Gone now to repair the unrepairable. How?
“You think we’re nuts to be here?” says Ralph, who’s come to sit beside Aida on the gravel. The way he says it is funny and Aida can’t help but laugh a little. She’s assumed they’ve been in some kind of fight since she suggested that Marta’s arrest might have been justified. She nods her assent, widening her eyes for effect.
“Me too.” Ralph takes a swig from a dusty water bottle. He has on his signature dark shades and a red kerchief tied over his substantial hair. “But where else we gonna be?”
Aida still says nothing. She doesn’t know where. Part of her wants to blurt out what she knows about Carlos, which she hasn’t told anyone yet — not even André. But it feels too strange to say aloud. Too soap opera. Her own certainty about him arose so quietly she didn’t even notice it reach the surface until she held his hand as they ran from the cathedral.
“I’m not really impressed with the embassy,” Ralph goes on. “They said, ‘Stay in the city. Don’t go to this, don’t do that.’ Forget it. This makes more sense.”
“Not to me,” says Aida, looking back at the guards along the fence. Beyond them, in the distance, are scrubby hills, and behind those, actual mountains. Then she catches herself. “But yeah, I’d rather be here than sitting alone in San Salvador.”
Ralph clears his throat. “If it’s true there’s bodies in there, they should get them out. We’ve had that situation at home.”
Aida assumes he’s referring to the kind of conflict between golf courses and traditional grave sites that occasionally pops up on the news. Until now, Aida has tended to dismiss these sorts of claims. Now, Ralph’s words provoke a strange feeling of regret, for stories she hasn’t read carefully enough, at the knowledge that much has been lost while she’s been busy looking away.
“Anyways,” Ralph says, pushing his sunglasses up his nose, “Benoît brought some sandwiches from the hostel. You want one?”
Though the white-bread sandwich looks decidedly unappetizing, Aida takes half. She wants Ralph to stay with her and to keep talking.
11:10 AM. El Pico expansion site, Mil Sueños mine
“Excuse me.”
Alejandro Reverte looks up. He’s been so immersed in his work he hasn’t noticed anyone approaching. A big man stands at the site perimeter, accompanied by an armed guard. The man has his hands shoved into the pockets of pressed pants and wears a white hardhat with a green NorthOre logo stenciled on the front.
Reverte stands and starts moving towards him, but his assistant walks up with the latest status sheets. Reverte stops to quickly review and sign them.
“Excuse me,” the man repeats, more impatiently, and Reverte, who is accustomed to people breathing down his neck, understands that whoever this is won’t go away. He winds along one of the paths they’ve cleared for movement in and out of the dig site.
“Mitch Wall, CEO,” the man says, extending a chunky, freckled hand. “You’re on my property.”
Señor CEO looks uncomfortable under his helmet, his grinning face blotchy and red. It’s as hot as it’s been every day so far. Re-verte’s used to it. This guy isn’t. Reverte takes the moist palm and smiles coolly. Ownership does not impress him. Neither do mines. It’s not the big holes in the ground he’s interested in, but the small, careful ones. But due to his life of conducting digs under all kinds of circumstances — with guns pointed at him, politicians defaming him, local press insinuating that his work is bogus — he’s learned that of everyone he makes nervous and angry, landowners have a special place because they are also, in their hearts, embarrassed, and their bluster, which covers this fact from themselves, is comical. This keeps him smiling as he gives the CEO’s hand a hard shake. “Alejandro Reverte,” he says.
Wall looks a little disconcerted by the enthusiasm. “I wanted to introduce myself and see what kind of progress you’re making. We’re going to need you off the expansion site relatively soon,” he says. He could be speaking to his own child.
“Yes, the deadline. That gives us today, all night — we have flood lights — and tomorrow still.”
“Yes, but. . . I wanted to —”
“We are just beginning,” says Reverte, interrupting. “Normally, we have several days, even weeks, just to choose an ideal site. Normally, families of the deceased are permitted to watch and to help us. Your security people have refused to let anyone through. We can only go so fast. We cannot afford interruptions.”
“How do they know where to look?” says Wall, changing the subject. He looks peeved to have been reduced to an interruption, but also curious, Reverte can see, as he watches a team of local men turning up small shovelfuls of the reddish, dry earth under the tent they’ve erected over the upper quadrant of the dig site.
Reverte follows Mitch’s eyes over to his labourers. “Despacio!” he calls, seeing the speed at which they’re removing the soil and gesturing to them to please be as gentle as possible, even with the deadline pressure. The men imme
diately slow their hands. Reverte knows more than one of them probably had family members disappear during this country’s war. Which is why the skill level of local hires is never important. They nearly always want things done just so.
“We have that map they sent,” says Reverte, addressing Señor CEO again. “But usually, as I say, we have more to go on. Our last project — in Iraq — we had exact coordinates. Those were recent burials, mind you. Very systematic.” He pauses, returning to a set of memories he knows the CEO will want to know nothing about.
“Can I see it — the map?”
Reverte scrutinizes him. There is very little to lose in satisfying the curiosity of local authorities, and much to gain, Reverte knows. They tend to be as awed as everyone by his work. He calls his assistant back over and has her hand Mitch the single piece of paper sealed into a see-through plastic cover.
“We think that stone over there is this one on the map,” Reverte explains, pointing at a rough shape on the homemade diagram. “We measure along a straight line up the slope to where that southernmost peg is.” Reverte watches as the CEO tries to make sense of the poorly rendered map that was faxed anonymously to the Canadian embassy Monday night. An arrow points right and upwards from the stone, the words “aprox. 50 pies” written along its trajectory. Where the arrow ends, there’s another drawing, a crude tree, with the words “arból de fuego” written below it. Near that tree is an X, marking the spot where the team should dig. “Unfortunately, there are no instructions about how high he means for us to go uphill from the stone, just the distance,” says Reverte. He runs his finger across the brief typed instructions on the bottom half of the page, reading them aloud for Wall — who knows if Señor CEO reads Spanish? “ ‘The grave will be a 15-min walk straight uphill from the site of what was once Ixtán, on the western side of El Pico.’ ”
Reverte shakes his head. “Of course, we might have guessed wrong. The stone we found could have been moved here recently when your company built this road extension. The tree the map refers to was probably cut down for firewood years ago. Luckily, one of our workers from Los Pampanos, Lionel, at least remembers where Ixtán was. There isn’t anything left of it — as you know. One of our senior team members was kind enough to walk the fifteen minutes, up and down, four times, from where Lionel pointed us, to estimate an approximate location. You see why our work takes time.”
“Well,” says Mitch. He now looks positively faint with the heat. “I guess I came up here to say that likely this is all a figment of a deranged man’s imagination. No one has any business taking any of it seriously.”
Reverte stares at him hard. He doesn’t mind a challenge. His never-ending dig in Guatemala — that’s a challenge. Negligible supplies. Very little money. No help, except from unskilled family members, who’ve at times been too afraid of retribution to identify gravesites where they absolutely know relatives are buried. And constant bureaucratic and police interference. But there, he’s had the necessary time. This assignment is far less reasonable. Three days is laughable. And they’ve been treated like prisoners from the minute their van pulled up to the Mil Sueños gate. Especially by the mine’s head of security, a rat-like little creature who took time out of his busy schedule to threaten Reverte directly. “I have friends in the Guatemalan military who would enjoy paying greater attention to you when you return — if I call,” he said through his rodent teeth. Of course, he is only the heavy. The final word rests with Señor CEO.
“I always take my work seriously, as I’m sure you do,” says Reverte, shaking away a mounting rage. In reality, snooping capitalists and insecure men with guns only make him more eager to find whatever he can in the earth and place it on public display. For Reverte, exhumations are the true language of justice, wordless but undeniable. Cruelties do not decompose. They can be hidden, lied about, covered by the earth’s incessant sedimentation, by laziness, by denial and fear. But they’re there, underneath. And Reverte knows how to speak to them, how to coax them out so that they have to say what they really are, what they’ve really done. He is exhilarated at the thought of helping something emerge from NorthOre’s property, which he knows Señor CEO is busy tearing apart for totally different reasons, to unearth wealth, to try to erase the land’s memory, cut its tongue.
Wall looks ready to leave, but now he snaps back around. “It’s senseless!” he yells. “If you knew the kinds of lies that have been involved in this case. I am not the bad guy, believe me. I am responsible for letting you be here at all.” He points a finger in the general direction of the dig. Both the team members and the local hires have stopped working and are staring at his raised voice.
Reverte puts out his bottom lip and nods in acknowledgement of this generosity, then picks up his trowel and returns down the marked path to within the dig’s parameter, putting the small blade in the dirt to cast a little of it in Mitch’s direction.
After Reverte’s assistant politely reclaims the map from him, Wall stands there a minute longer, unsatisfied until, finally, he signals for his guard to follow and goes back down the road towards wherever it is a man like him prefers to spend his time.
11:15 AM. Near the Salvadoran-Honduran border
Danielle is back in Toronto. Aida and Antoine are set to marry, but her invitation names only a date and time, not the place of the ceremony, so she’s on the subway, guessing which stop is hers, frustrated by endless delays, wearing an uncomfortable and unflattering outfit of her daughter’s choosing. She’s retying the strap on one of her too-tight high heels when blood begins to pool at her feet. It fills the subway car, rising to her armpits. She tries to scream, but no sound comes out. The blood is pushing past her lips when the car begins to shake. Someone has her by the shoulder.
Danielle blinks. Pepe’s palm is over her mouth. He signals for her to get up. She rises, trying to shake off a feeling of horror as she steps over the rest of her group, all asleep, then past Rita, who is sitting, wide awake but refusing eye contact. The reality that Antoine is dead and buried somewhere behind them, that they’ve left him there and walked away, returns to Danielle like the taste of blood.
After the shooting, Pepe ordered everyone moved out of sight of Antoine’s body. The hostages protested, crying and refusing to get up. Cristóbal took Pierre by the arms and lifted him forcibly. After that, the others followed. They carried their backpacks and tarps like sacks of stones and went into the trees in the same direction from which the bullet that killed their friend had come. All of them were sweaty and shaky. Rita was especially dirty, her balaclava torn on one side, revealing a pale bit of forehead. Her hands tied behind her, she kept her eyes on the ground. Delmi and Cristóbal held a steady watch over everyone, Cristóbal’s mask taking on a grim flatness as he stared at his wife in plain disappointment.
Early in the afternoon Pierre became hysterical. Half lying on the ground, he started grabbing at the earth and weeds, pulling up random handfuls and mumbling in French about Antoine. He was only calmed by a lot of effort from Tina, who gently persuaded him to sit back down, putting her head on his shoulder and an arm around his waist and rocking him. After a time, she reached her free hand out and clasped Martin’s wrist. Martin let her hold him that way as he prayed aloud. In turn, he reached over and put his free hand on Danielle’s back.
Danielle had become so unaccustomed to being offered physical support that she jumped, but then relaxed some. They all cried together, knowing Pepe had moved them so that he could bury Antoine. He’d refused any help, which Danielle offered on the group’s behalf. And so they had to wait, watching the sun drift across the sky and fall, eventually growing less visible to one another in the darkness.
When Pepe finally returned it was so dark only his bulky outline was visible. A stubby Grim Reaper. “Cinco minutos,” he said to Cristóbal, who went about getting everyone into line.
Danielle could see that for Pierre, leaving was worse than knowing that his closest friend was dead. It was punishment. She watche
d as he called upon all his strength just to get up. She and the others helped, easing on his pack and sticking close until he found his feet.
They hiked all night, as usual, but more slowly than before. Each focused on the physical labour of their nighttime, fugitive life. They were allowed a longer rest in the middle, but it felt superfluous. There would be no whispering now and no escape plans to excite or worry anyone.
Just as Danielle started to notice gritty light opening across her field of vision, the predawn set to turn blue, they reached the new campsite — an abandoned shack with crumbling earthen brick walls and no roof. Cristóbal had everyone wait outside, shivering and fatigued, as he quickly fashioned several beams from tree branches, spacing them evenly across the top of the structure, then covering them with bows, as they’d seen him do before, ensuring no one would notice them from above. Finally, the hostages were ordered inside, where each fell into their fitful sleep.
“We’ll be over there,” Pepe says to Cristóbal. He pushes Danielle behind the shoulder to hurry her out the doorway and about fifteen feet away, but still within sight. No more leaving Cristóbal and Delmi alone with Rita.
To her surprise, Pepe pulls out the papers Danielle assumed had been lost before the shooting, the ones she’d been writing on, and thrusts them at her along with a pen. When he speaks, his voice is as dull as the first grey light of day. “Write what I say.”
Danielle physically aches with resentment. “We all need to bathe,” she says.
Open Pit Page 21
