by Tom Epperson
Roberto opens his trunk so a security guard can poke around in it while another security guard circles his car with an aging, plodding, bomb-sniffing dog. Nobody, not even the publisher or editor, is allowed to enter uninspected since it’s reasoned that a bomb could have been planted in their car without their knowledge, or their family could have been taken hostage and will all be killed unless they bring a bomb into the building. This is not mere paranoia. Aside from the fact this is a crazy country where anything can happen, five years ago a car bomb ripped the building wide-open, killing three and injuring eighteen.
He missed the explosion by about a minute. He had been at his desk when he got a phone call. He was working on a story about a massacre in a town called Contamana, where the killers had worn masks and their identities were unclear. The caller claimed to have inside knowledge of the massacre, and was willing to meet with him and tell him what he knew in one hour. He wouldn’t give his name and Roberto was suspicious of him, but he finally agreed to meet in a public place where his murder was unlikely: at the statue of Simón Bolívar, in Bolívar Park. He wasn’t surprised when the guy was a no-show. He hung out with the Liberator and hundreds of pigeons for half an hour, and then headed back to the office. He was a few blocks away when he heard the boom and saw the smoke.
He knew immediately it was his newspaper. When he got there he saw coworkers stumbling out of the building and he will never forget how white and red they were: covered with dust and streaked with blood. He saw a woman’s bare leg sticking out of the rubble, a stylish black high heel still on the foot. He ran over and started clawing away the bricks and plaster but discovered there was no woman attached to the leg. His grandmother suggested that it was divine intervention that saved him from the blast, that perhaps the caller wasn’t a person at all but a spirit, his guardian angel. He told her he didn’t believe in guardian angels and she said that was okay, angels didn’t hold it against you when you didn’t believe in them.
He takes the elevator up to the fifth floor and enters the newsroom. It’s a huge space that used to be filled with people and energy but now seems more like a warehouse where row on row of empty desks are stored. The Hour is an elderly paper in very poor health kept alive only by infusions of money from its founders and owners, the Langenberg family. He sits down at his desk and opens his computer. An email from his stepmother has just come in. Roberto, your father and I are having a few people over for dinner on Saturday. Please come. It would make your father so happy. We never see you anymore. Sometimes I think you don’t even like me. Clara. He emails back his disturbingly attractive stepmother that he will be there, then Gloria Varela, who seems incapable of doing anything other than dramatically, strides dramatically past his desk.
“Good morning, Roberto!” she says, not looking at him, with a breezy wave of her hand. She is tall and wears a long skirt, knee-high leather boots, and a black cape blotched with rain. Her most striking feature would be her hair, which is long, wild, and a blaze of red, except for the fact she has a piratical black patch covering her left eye. Which was put out by a bomb. Not the one five years ago but one twenty-two years ago that was meant just for her.
“Gloria,” he says, “can I ask you something?”
She stops, looks back at him, and smiles. “Of course.”
But he doesn’t ask anything, doesn’t say anything, he just sits there with his mouth shut. Seeing he’s at a loss, she walks back. She sits down on the edge of his desk and crosses her boots (she always wears boots; it’s rumored she has an entire closet filled with nothing but boots). She takes cigarettes out of her purse. You aren’t supposed to smoke in the newsroom, but Gloria is not the type of person to whom the rules apply.
“How do you do it?” he finally says.
She flicks her lighter into flame. “Do what, darling?”
“Be a journalist in this fucking country. For so many years.”
“That’s not nice, Roberto, you’re making me feel so old.”
“Tell me.”
She blows a cloud of smoke over his head. “Okay, here’s my secret. Have them make some stupid movie about you so you’ll be too famous to kill!”
When Gloria was just starting out as a journalist, she made a fateful trip to the southern jungles. It was to an area controlled by the Popular Revolutionary Movement, a Marxist guerrilla group that had been battling the government for decades. She was seeking an interview with one of the PRM leaders, Luis Valesquez, who had earned the nickname Commander Romeo because of his dashing good looks that set the hearts of even right-wing women aflutter. A go-between put Gloria in contact with the guerrillas, and she was conducted to their headquarters. She had been led to believe that Valesquez was eager to be interviewed, but the PRM prided itself on being tricky and devious, and Gloria was promptly taken prisoner and held for ransom. After a little over a year, her release was negotiated, and it created a sensation all over the country when the movie-star-gorgeous redheaded reporter emerged from the jungle with her belly big with child. She was mum about the father, but promised to write a book in which she’d reveal everything.
Gloria wanted to call the book One Year, One Month, Eight Days: My Life as a Captive of the PRM. Instead, her publisher called it Commander Romeo and Me. In it she told of being chained for months like some hapless animal to a tree in the jungle, and of occasional visits from Valesquez during which a mutual respect and curiosity began to develop, until finally whole nights would pass with him and her talking and talking about the war, their pasts, their fears and dreams and their inmost selves as the equatorial stars blazed down through the gaps in the rain forest canopy, and then came the night when Commander Romeo unlocked the chain. “I felt a swelling sense of relief and joy as I realized I was free,” wrote Gloria. “But neither my body nor my soul remained at liberty for long, for they both became captives in Luis’s strong arms.”
Reaction to the book was passionate and divided, with many readers enthralled by Gloria’s soaringly romantic adventure, and others seeing her as at best a dupe of the Communists, if not their outright ally, who had concocted the story of her kidnapping as a way to get money for the PRM. A few weeks after the book came out, Gloria was walking up the stairs to her apartment with her and Valesquez’s year-and-a-half-old child in her arms when a bomb went off. She lost consciousness briefly, then opened her remaining eye and saw her son Martín lying at the bottom of the stairs—still alive, waving his arms around, but with a jagged piece of wood sticking out of his head. Two days later, in a hospital recovering from her injuries, she saw on TV a photograph of grinning government soldiers posing with the bloody corpse of Luis Valesquez as if he were a big-game trophy. Instantly the story started that Commander Romeo had been killed while on a desperate journey to the capital city to see Gloria and their injured son, but the truth was more prosaic: he’d cut his foot while swimming in a river, the cut had become infected, and he was on his way to see a doctor when he and some of his men had blundered into a government ambush. The movie rights to the book were acquired by a famous Spanish director who cast two Spanish movie stars in the lead roles. Commander Romeo and Me (with of course the tear-jerking Romeo-trying-to-reunite-with-Juliet ending) became a worldwide success, and Gloria was on hand in Hollywood when it was awarded the Oscar for Best Foreign Film.
“But they kill famous people,” Roberto says to Gloria. “Look at Ricky Cortés.”
“Yes, poor Ricky,” Gloria says. “But he wasn’t one tenth as famous as me.” The hand holding her cigarette is delicately cocked at the wrist, and her eye is gazing thoughtfully at nothing. “The truth is, I’m certain I would have been killed. If I hadn’t left.”
She moved to Paris after the movie came out. She became known for her eye patch and her flamboyant ways. She had a famous fling with the French president. She conducted a series of notorious interviews with world political leaders whom she somehow charmed into putting up with her often rude and outrageous questions. She returned to her own
country after eleven years.
“Why did you come back when you did?” he asks her. “Why did you think it was safe?”
“Well, one never feels completely safe, you know, but—time passes, people get older, some of your enemies die, others begin to forget or just lose interest. And it helps that I’m not the writer I used to be.”
“Oh, that’s not true,” he murmurs, but he knows that it is. She’s no longer the fiery radical figure of her youth. For the last several years she’s been writing a gossipy political column that seldom takes any discernible side. She studies the glowing tip of her cigarette as if it’s some odd phenomenon she’s never noticed before.
“It changes you,” she says. “Being blown up along with your baby. How could it not?”
He feels sad for her. For her and Martín. He is a permanent patient in a Catholic hospital called the Home for the Relief of Suffering. Physically a young man but still trapped mentally in the time he was being carried up that staircase.
Now Gloria smiles. “So what’s with all the questions, my handsome one?” She reaches over and ruffles Roberto’s hair. Her demeanor toward him has always been a mixture of the motherly and flirty. “What’s up with you?”
“I’m thinking about leaving,” he says.
“The country?”
“Yes. I think maybe it’s becoming too dangerous for me here.”
“And where would you go?”
“Saint Lucia, at least for now. My girlfriend and her parents are there.”
“And what would you do in Saint Lucia?”
“The same as here. Only I wouldn’t be looking over my shoulder every three seconds.”
Gloria seems unsurprised by any of this. She’s quiet for a moment, looking at him speculatively—and then says, “I would miss you, Roberto. But maybe it isn’t such a bad idea that you go. I’m a little surprised they haven’t killed you already.”
* * *
He makes some phone calls, types up some notes. He’s begun work on a story about so-called “death bars.” Supposedly there are bars in the seedier parts of the city where young men go, not simply to drink and carouse, but expressly to seek fighting and maybe killing and maybe death. They fight with knives, and it’s said spectators cheer and lay down bets as if they’re watching cockfights. He’s made contact with a man who claims to be somehow involved in the scene, and he’s agreed to act as Virgil to Roberto’s Dante and conduct him on a tour of the death bar underworld. He’s doing it for a price, but it wouldn’t be the first time Roberto has paid sources; as the saying goes, truth is a whore and you must pay for her. But now, as he sits at his desk and looks at the man’s number, he decides not to call, at least for now. A story like this would take weeks of work, and in ten days, he might be gone.
* * *
He drives south, the neighborhoods disintegrating as he goes, poorer people on the street, more jolting potholes and skinny dogs, crummier cars spurting smoke. To the east and west, where the most impoverished live, dismal slums crawl up the sides of the mountains. This is a world that people in the north of the city can live out lengthy lives and never once visit.
It’s quit raining again, though the sun hasn’t come back out. There are two seasons in this country, rainy and dry; this is the middle of the rainy season, though there hasn’t been much rain yet. In other parts of the country, the rainy season has never come. Rivers are drying up and jungles are catching on fire. The drought is entering its third year, and scientists say they have never seen anything like it.
He’s on a wide commercial avenue. He stops at an intersection and a vendor approaches, selling cigarettes and sweets. He buys a Jet. It was the favorite candy bar of his youth. He was a little bit chubby when he was a kid, and candy bars seemed important then. But today, the Jet is not for him.
He reaches a neighborhood called Caballito. He turns onto a narrow side street lined with ramshackle houses, shacks, huts, whatever. He drives a couple of minutes and turns again and then parks in front of Manuel’s house. In case he actually does go to Saint Lucia, he wants to see Manuel one more time. He didn’t bother to call first. He knows he’s here. He’s always here.
He gets out of his car. It’s a blue Kia Sorento. Four-wheel drive. Six years old. He could afford a nicer car but he wants one that blends in. A vacant-eyed teenage boy approaches. In this city when you park your car someone is always approaching.
“Hey, Nemecio. What’s happening?”
“Nothing’s happening, man,” says Nemecio. “Life stinks.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
He gives him a two thousand peso bill. The money is so he will “watch” his car. “Protect” it. Protecting it primarily from himself.
He skirts a wide puddle of water. Different kinds of music drift out of different houses and mingle discordantly in the street. Above the roofs, beads of rain hang from tangles of black electric lines. A little girl stands in the doorway of Manuel’s house, looking at Roberto with black bashful eyes.
He sticks his hands in the pockets of his windbreaker.
“Which pocket?” he says.
She ponders him, biting her lip, then points to his left pocket. He pulls out of it the Jet candy bar and hands it to her.
“It’s amazing, Nydia! You always know. What are you, some kind of witch?”
He’s being serious. It is amazing, Nydia does always know, she is like some kind of little witch. She giggles and tears the wrapper off and bites into the bar of solid chocolate. She’s eight. She’s related to Manuel and his mother but Roberto’s not sure exactly how. She’s a recent refugee from the fighting in the countryside. A bit of inconsequential flotsam cast up on the shore of the enormous city. He knows she can talk because he’s heard her talking to others, but she has never said one word to him.
He moves past her, calling “Hello?” into the dimness of the house.
He sees Manuel’s mother, sitting in her usual chair, a wooden bowl filled with peas she is shelling resting on her arthritic knees. She’s watching a cooking show on TV called Fernanda! She’s surrounded by religious bric-a-brac. His eye is caught as always by a porcelain figurine of Christ. It’s a particularly macabre representation of the crucifixion, blood spilling down Jesus’s face from his crown of thorns, his eyes bugging out and his mouth agape in horror, as if to say, “Hey, I don’t care if I am the son of God, it’s no fucking joke to be crucified!”
“How are you?” he asks. “How are your knees?”
She keeps her eyes on Fernanda, a hyperactive blonde whose big tits seem to be threatening to fall out of her low-cut top and land with a plop in the food she’s preparing.
“As good as God wants them to be. He’s in the back.” Meaning presumably her son and not God.
He goes out the back door into a tiny fenced-in yard. Mateo, Manuel’s dog, a low-slung burly brute with a muddy belly, greets him with some growls and hearty barks.
“Hello, Mateo!” he says.
“Mateo, shut up!” says Manuel. “It’s okay, it’s Roberto!”
Manuel is sitting on a low bench in an open-fronted shed built of flattened soda and beer cans and scraps of wood. Around him are dumbbells and a barbell and stacks of iron weights, and a radio is playing a peppy salsa tune. He’s a good-looking guy in his early twenties. He’s wearing white workout clothes that have somehow remained clean despite the griminess of his surroundings, and his upper body is bulging with muscles. His face is turned toward Roberto but he does not really see him except for his general shape. His left leg is missing at the hip. He was a soldier who stepped into a booby-trapped hut in the rebellious province of Tulcán.
“How are you, Manuel?”
He gives Roberto a big smile, showing his even white teeth.
“I’m doing great, Roberto. Something wonderful has happened!”
“What?”
“Some people from the Army came by yesterday. They said I’d been accepted into the Center for the Courageous. I’ll be going there ne
xt week.”
The Center for the Courageous is a treatment facility for soldiers who have suffered grievous injuries. Now Roberto grins as widely as Manuel.
“Hey man. I’m really happy for you.”
Manuel extends his fist and Roberto bumps knuckles with him.
“It’s because of you, Roberto. I have you to thank.”
He wrote an article about the many Manuels who have been casualties in his country’s unending warfare with guerrillas and subversives and are living on meager pensions in grubby little shitholes minus eyesight or limbs or reproductive organs or feeling below the waist or any combination of these and most of all minus a future. The Center for the Courageous has an excellent reputation but also a very long waiting list. Roberto quoted a retired Army general who called the country’s treatment of its wounded warriors “a stain on our national honor” and radio and TV talk shows went into a self-righteous tizzy and panicky officials promised reforms and launched investigations. Most of what Roberto does seems without consequence, usually a story he writes is like a stone dropped into a well so deep he never hears it hit the bottom, so it makes him feel good that he seems to have had an effect on at least one person’s life.
“I’ll miss Mateo,” says Manuel, scratching his dog’s head. “But they said he could come visit me any time I want.”
A white rabbit with gray spots hops slowly around a corner of the outhouse. Manuel’s mother got it with the idea of fattening it up and cooking it in a coconut milk stew, but Manuel has become attached to it and has made it his pet. Mateo, though, is giving the rabbit a murderous look, leaving no doubt that if it were up to him, its protected-pet status would be immediately revoked.
