Open Pit

by Marguerite Pigeon

  “There is inadequate water here for that. I want you to write.”

  “We need time to mourn our friend.” What’s the worst he’ll do to her for talking now? Hit her? Truss her up like Rita? These feel diminished as punishments. Danielle realizes for the first time how much Pepe needs her. For her language and her writing skills — maybe more. As a sounding board. It makes her brave. “There should be a ceremony. It’s only right.”

  Behind his mask, Pepe’s eyes roll in a strange pattern, as if he can’t take in the visual of an open-air funeral for someone he’s so recently killed. A beautiful young man. An innocent. “I can consider this later,” he all but grunts. “Now, write.”

  Danielle wants to scream. How can he still care about ancient history? How could he leave Antoine back there? She’s replayed the shooting over and over. She wants to pity Pepe the way she did before, but she can’t feel anything about what he’s done except confusion. Why? Why has he really taken them hostage? Maybe, she thinks, feeling ill at the prospect, it’s as simple as the fact that Pepe was trained to distill everything into violence. He never had the chance to exploit a different range of reactions. What else could you expect from a wild animal? Then again, maybe Pepe is just evil.

  She looks for a place to sit. There is none. So she drops onto her haunches with her back against the nearest tree. Despite her dwindling forces, Danielle’s legs have become much stronger since this started, and she feels a shameful glimmer of pride at the thought of how she can now do things she hasn’t been able to do since her thirties, at how she might look to others at home if they could see her so transformed.

  Pepe sits directly on the ground with his knees ahead of him, his black army boots scuffed and worn-looking, his mask stiff with dried sweat. “This will be the last report. To let people know why we are here.”

  So. He’s going to own up. Finally. Danielle is all ears.

  “I described my transition to la guerrilla. I believed in what I was doing. The man who saved me, my friend, was admired. But he was like some of the other highly placed combatants. He’d spent a lot of time with internacionalistas, had gone on training and fundraising missions to Europe and Africa. He was from a different class. He didn’t like to talk to some people. Probably he started to hate the poorest among us. I don’t know. I know I saw him one time and he was talking about how this great offensive was going to work, how we would knock out the government and the military, and I had my first moment of distrust.

  “I’d been hearing rumours that the very top commanders only wanted to use the offensive as a bargaining chip. They wanted to do just enough damage to shock the military and the elites. Just enough to make them negotiate an end to the war. They were sick of fighting. We all were. But some of them were tired of living like peasants, too. My friend was. He came from a rich family. That never leaves you. Like being poor.

  “I had a foreign acquaintance of my own. An Italian photojournalist. Someone respected by the faction. I ran into him when I was travelling near the Guazapa volcano. This was after my mentor had started to take clandestine trips to the capital to prepare for the offensive. The Italian had pictures. He didn’t know what to do with them. He was a supporter of our cause and didn’t want to publish anything that would hurt us internationally. I looked at these pictures. In them, the man who’d saved my life was in San Salvador. Dressed in civilian clothes, but it was him. He was meeting with an American. CIA, probably.

  “I thought no, it’s a mistake. I told the Italian that this man was a friend, someone I could talk to. The journalist and I, we had a history. He trusted me. He gave me the photos and his negatives. It didn’t matter. I never saw him again. He was killed a few months later.

  “I travelled here, to this province, near Los Pampanos, and eventually my mentor came back too. By then I was suspicious. I said to him, ‘What you’re doing is wrong. You’re selling secrets.’ He said I was crazy, that I should get my head checked. I said I had proof. He told me it was all part of the plan by Command. But I knew by his eyes that he was lying.

  “A week later, some guerrillas came and said I was to come with them. They wouldn’t explain why. They took me to the place where the faction handled internal conflicts. Finally I was told I was being charged with treason. They had a witness willing to say I’d been in contact with my old military commanders on the government side, that I’d been working as a double agent. They confiscated all my belongings, including the photos.

  “It was him, of course. My old friend. He wanted me gone. By this time, he’d gone underground for good in San Salvador and there was no possibility of contacting him. The punishment for what I’d done was death. They were going to keePMe under guard until they made their final decision. I thought I was a goner. I didn’t mind so much. But I was sorry that he’d done away with me like that, like I hadn’t been worth anything to him.

  “Security in those camps was not ideal. It was late in the war. People got lazy in the controlled zones. The good guerrillas were either on the fronts or dead. I was experienced. I got out of the place they were keeping me by overpowering two guards. Just country kids. I retrieved the negatives of those photos, which I had hidden, just in case. But what was I going to do with them? Who would believe me? I’d left both sides of the war. And both sides were everywhere.

  “I must be fated to spend time in holes,” he says, and Danielle looks up to see if this is meant as a joke. It isn’t. Pepe’s mouth has a slackness about it that repels humour. “I lived in one again, a large cave. Several weeks underground. I wasn’t alone. There were other campesinos. They always shared the bits of food they had. You probably met some like this,” he says, throwing Danielle a harsh look to make her return to her notes instead of ogling. “I took what they offered, went to San Miguel and blended in, tried to look like I’d been there for the whole war just praying not to be killed. I had no ID. If they asked me for any, I was a dead man. So I moved and moved again. Survived for two years that way, until I nearly starved.

  “The general insurrection was a failure for those of us who’d wanted victory, but it was exactly what my mentor had hoped for: it let both sides sit down and sign off on Peace. They did the deal in Mexico City and the big boys in the guerrilla came out of the mountains and formed a political party. It was over. For them. But for many of us it was like an amputation. People who’d been in the mountains since they were seven, who’d been carrying a gun all their lives.

  “I was one of those who couldn’t claim any benefits in the government programs. I was nobody. I was not human. I drank so that I would die, but my body wouldn’t let me go. . . . Then I met up with Cristóbal — you’ll change the name in your story. Call him David. They were handing out meal tickets to dig holes and fill them in again. UN money. The drinking didn’t stop, but with him, I could continue.

  “I liked the news. I read all about the Truth Commission. The political parties. All about the things they were doing ‘for the people.’ I saw that a lot of the commanders I’d worked under on the military side, some of the cruelest, were doing very well, starting businesses, private security mostly. On the other side, some of the guerrilla commanders were doing okay, too. The man who’d been my friend was placed in charge of all kinds of things. Cooperative farms. Micro-credit schemes. Then he took his big job overseeing police conduct. Because people trusted the Comandante.

  “I watched all of it and did nothing. Too drunk. I’d always intended to go to the place where I’d last seen my parents. But I’d been too ashamed. Just when I finally decided I would do it, the mine came. They cleared Ixtán — wiped it out, bought the land the guerrilla had won for the people. They installed guards and their big electric fence. You know the rest.”

  A strange sensation makes Danielle shiver: this really is about the mine. The same gold mine Partners for Justice sent the delegation to observe. Pepe’s asking something from the mine; he wants his family acknowledged somehow, or he wants the right to — to what? Visit their
grave? But he doesn’t even know for certain that they died there. Whatever it is, the mine hasn’t conceded to it. Or she’d be home by now. And Antoine would be alive. She suddenly burns with a brand new hatred for a company whose name she can barely remember. North — something. “All of us came here to support the people who want to shut that mine down,” she says, gulping air, feeling like she’ll hyperventilate. “Why would you choose us?”

  Pepe’s eyes narrow. “What do you think the Committee for the Environment has gained, so far, from people like you? They get visitors all the time. The jefe there, at Mil Sueños, has never agreed to meet with anyone face to face. Not once. El Pico will be gone in weeks — days. Dynamited. My way was the only way.”

  Danielle’s mind continues to race. “And this man, your friend, who tried to get rid of you, is he still alive? Is our being here connected to him?”

  Pepe stands, adjusts his pants.

  Danielle senses she’s touched on something, though, in reality, the possibility that Pepe might be looking for revenge interests her less than what it means that her capture is directly related to that Canadian-owned mine. She can’t wait to tell the others. It might help, might make them feel that there’s some meaning in their abduction, in what happened to Antoine.

  “You’ll write it now. The phone will ring later and I need this done.”

  “What if these stories don’t change anything? What if your demands aren’t met?”

  Pepe shakes his head. “Write,” he mumbles and settles in to watch her do her work, his mask an expanse of gloom.

  Danielle tries to hurry through the report, but she keeps getting stuck on Pepe’s story and has to start over. The betrayal he’s described is so much like her own. Memories return to her from the day in November, 1980, when she handed all her features — a year’s worth of writing, her future as a journalist — to her senior contact in the guerrilla faction. He’d been assigned to vet them before she brought them back to Canada for publication, a deal she’d struck at the outset. He took the stories, sealed into a plastic bag, and Danielle never saw them again. He needed time to read them over and recommended that Danielle visit the guerrilla’s literacy centre to alleviate her boredom while she waited. He thought he was doing her a favour. But it was on that walk that she saw Adrian murder the boy. Adrian must have made something up afterwards. That she’d gone to that village expressly to undermine the faction. That she was untrustworthy. Danielle’s contact wasn’t a man who would’ve been easily fooled. But Adrian had clout. He was convincing. Then, not long after she’d returned to camp, after Adrian had come for her that last time, on a day when a group of campesinos was going to be led over the mountain pass to the refugee camps in Honduras, Danielle was informed that she would have to go too. No explanation. Nothing to negotiate. A low-ranking guerrilla simply advised her that her term with the faction was up.

  Danielle tries again to leave her own past aside and get through Pepe’s, but it ends up taking all afternoon. Pepe pops up every now and then to prod her, swearing and pacing around. The feeling that he has no intention of letting them have a ceremony for Antoine becomes more concrete with the passing hours, which also slows Danielle’s hand.

  When the phone finally buzzes on Pepe’s belt, he answers and hands the phone over. Danielle delivers her text, ad-libbing the end. Then Pepe takes his phone back like it’s a part of him, hooking it onto his belt. He lets her return to sit with the others.

  Danielle is starving, has missed two meals. She doesn’t really care. She’s bursting to tell the others about the mine: the company could still concede to whatever Pepe’s demands are; they could still be freed. But Cristóbal orders her and Tina to follow Delmi. Everyone freezes with the same question: follow where? They’ve never been asked to go out alone, just the women, except to bathe, and Pepe said that can’t happen here. What else is there to do, alone, out of view? Still ashen with grief, Pierre and Martin stare nervously as Danielle gets back up, then Tina, to trail Delmi out the door of the shack. They walk several minutes in a different direction than Danielle has just been with Pepe. “Allá,” says Delmi pointing to a tree. Tina looks at Danielle with intense negative anticipation as they step towards it. They both flinch as Delmi tosses something at their feet. “Open those,” she says. The women look down. It’s a can opener. A stupid can opener. Danielle looks around. There are several cans to one side, really dirty, like they’ve been dug out of the ground. Tina sees them too, relief smoothing her face. Delmi throws something else: a tied plastic bag. Danielle unknots it. It’s filled with rubbery tortillas. Finally, Delmi passes them a stack of plastic plates. All in all, the makings of a very unappetizing meal. But they’re only being asked to help assemble it now that Rita is incapacitated. A deep tremor of satisfaction runs through Danielle at this manifestation of Rita’s demotion.

  Tina works scrupulously to achieve fair distribution of the food, sometimes brushing up against Danielle as she works. Danielle enjoys their physical closeness, the fact that whatever barriers previously existed between them have dropped away. Her mind turns to Aida, to how little real physical contact they’ve had.

  Arriving back at her parents’ house after a lengthy transit through Honduras in 1980, Danielle didn’t know how to go on. She didn’t have the guts to tell them what had happened or to end her pregnancy. After Aida was born her parents were so willing to help that it was easier and easier to let them bring the child her happiness. Danielle occasionally felt a deeper attachment to that small person. It was like sensing something alluring in the distance that she couldn’t, or wouldn’t grab hold of. The thought of doing so was exhausting. No one blamed her. People saw Danielle and Aida together and figured everything was fine. But they couldn’t see the missed connection, that Danielle wasn’t making the effort.

  They went on for so long that way that the gap between them came to seem natural. Danielle travelled. Worked. Had affairs. Took her time. Then her dad died of a heart attack, less than a year after her mother’s last cancer. Danielle rushed to Aida’s school to find her in the principal’s office sitting beside a terse school counsellor. Aida was barely twelve that year, and Danielle wanted to embrace her, to say and to do the right thing. But Aida’s face, still a child’s face, forbade it. The counsellor put Danielle through the wringer, tossing judgmental looks her way, calling Social Services and administering all kinds of useless paperwork before letting Aida leave with her. That one moment seemed to establish a no-pass zone between mother and daughter, one that Danielle accepted. The loss of her parents had fixed a border in place. She would have to stay on her side until Aida told her otherwise.

  But now, as Tina plops the last portion of beans onto the last plate and hands it to her amiably, Danielle questions her easy assumptions. It wasn’t only Aida who was angry that day. Danielle resented her too, for forcing an end to what she had always defined as freedom. To be alone. Come and go. Figure things out slowly, in order, and without too much painful looking back. The shock of knowing they would be together full-time, from there on in, made Danielle claustrophobic. It’s not that she didn’t love Aida. They didn’t even fight much in the first years after that. Instead, silence floated like a laden raincloud through the house Danielle had inherited from her parents — never quite bursting. Aida was practically never around anyway, always in her room, studying, or out adding some achievement or other to her résumé. Things got ugly when she moved out just four years later with her first serious boyfriend. That event marked the beginning of their more vocal period of mutual attack.

  But to Danielle it was also a huge relief. She didn’t admit it. Not in her failed attempt at therapy with Aida. Not even to Neela. In a way, taking herself out of the country after leaving those letters on the dining room table was another act of evasion. She’s given Aida access to a partial truth. Danielle did plan to explain, when she got back, why she lied about Adrian being dead, how it would’ve been cruel to tell a child that she had a liar and a killer for a fa
ther when he was still out there, unabashedly alive. But picturing Aida reading through the letters, perhaps even pitying her, makes Danielle feel wretched and regretful.

  Tina must sense it. She puts her hand on Danielle’s back. Delmi frowns at her under her mask, but Tina leaves the hand there defiantly.

  “I think I’ve really been a shit to my daughter.”

  Tina nods. “How old is she?”

  “Your age.” Danielle catches herself. “Wait. How old are you?”

  “Twenty-eight.”

  “Oh. She’s younger then. How old’s your brother?”

  Tina gives her a strange look. “Twenty-four,” she says, warily, as if she thinks Danielle might have another motive, but also obviously happy to speak of her sibling.

  “Aida turns twenty-four in August. She’ll be in Paris by then.”

  Delmi doesn’t intercede in this exchange. Her sister’s failure seems to have subdued her. It’s like she doesn’t know where her safety is anymore now that Rita isn’t controlling her and Pepe has no time for her.

  “Tina,” Danielle says, as Delmi prods them back to a standing position with their arms full of plates, then marches them towards the campsite. “I think I know why we’re here.” Danielle is relieved to say it, her eagerness to share the news returning. “It’s about that gold mine.”

  Tina starts to ask what Danielle’s talking about, but Delmi hushes them: Pepe is visible through the trees. Danielle and Tina hurry forward to place the food in front of everyone. Then they sit, Danielle across from Pierre, on the packed earthen floor of the abandoned shed. She eats quickly, waiting for a moment when Pepe will be out of earshot.

  Ten minutes later, he finally steps out with Cristóbal. “Pierre,” says Danielle.

  Pierre turns lethargically towards her. His hair clings to his sweaty, pale face. His slender nose seems tragic now.

  “I think this has all happened because he’s against the mine — the one we were going to see. In Los Pampanos. He wants to find out what happened to his family. They were killed in the war.”