by Samuel Park
I didn’t say much on the way there, trying to find excuses to disentangle myself. Lazarus, however, was a big talker, and he smiled and chatted at the same time. Even though he’d just met me, he acted as though we’d been friends for a long time, I suspected because he led a somewhat lonely existence. He talked easily about music and surfing and didn’t seem to look for much conversational contribution on my part. Maybe the way I nodded and listened made him feel comfortable. He’d clearly mistaken my nervous silence for attentiveness.
When we got near the water, I expected Lazarus to go off on his own, having brought me safely to the beach, but he simply stood there, stretching a bit and staring at the hills in the distance and the low, foggy clouds around them. I wondered what it would be like to lead an existence like his, free to spend hours at the beach, without anyone to care if he missed school. Lazarus looked impossibly aimless.
Soon, I wasn’t anxious around him anymore; I’d even forgot my earlier apprehension at being caught. Standing around like this, watching the waves roll toward us, I almost didn’t think of him as the Police Chief’s son.
Earlier, I’d thought, if he knew who I was, and why I’d gone to his house, he would think I was mad, and he would run away from me. But right now, I was just a pretty girl he’d met by chance, a small diversion to kill time before lunch.
I took a deep breath, trying for a moment to forget who we were, and what had brought me to Lazarus. I let the sun cover me, and I closed my eyes for a moment, wondering how such a thin coating of skin could protect me from the hottest star in the sky. I felt a tear roll down my warm cheek. When I opened my eyes, I found Lazarus staring at me.
“You’re one of them, aren’t you?” he asked quietly.
Lazarus was sitting next to me, his legs crossed, his hands reaching in and out of the sand. He had a forlorn expression on his face.
“One of who?” I retorted, wiping my cheek.
“Daughters, or the women themselves. They show up sometimes. I watch them watching our gate. I never know what they’re looking for, what they think they’re going to get. I’ve never spoken to one of you before.”
I swallowed, unsure if I should pretend to have no idea what he was referring to. The women his father had tortured. “What made you talk to me, then?”
“I don’t know,” he replied, and I could sense the honesty in his voice. “I think the way you came up to the gate. You just looked so sad.”
“Do you know what your father did?”
Lazarus shook his head. “No,” he said, staring at the water. “And also yes. I don’t want to know.” His lips twisted in an expression of distaste, then he added, “Did he do it to you?”
I could barely breathe now. “My mother,” I whispered.
Lazarus nodded, his hands still sifting through the sand, a bit of sparkle here and there where the grains met the sun.
“So you want to hurt my father?” He suddenly stopped playing with the sand and lifted one of his legs up, resting his arms and face over it. I saw his elbow pointing at me, his face almost as anguished as mine.
I sighed, suddenly sure my answer. “I want him to stop. He’s been calling my mother.”
Lazarus’s eyes did not change expression, as if he already knew about this hobby of his father’s. I wondered if Lazarus had ever picked up the phone by accident, and heard one of the conversations. In the sun, I could see his deep wrinkles, how much time he must spend outside. Despite our mutual age, his gaze struck me as innocent. He did not seem to have any calculation in his bones.
“Maybe I can arrange for you two to meet,” Lazarus suggested. My heart beat wildly as I tried to grasp this miraculous opportunity he had handed me, my face scrunching up involuntarily.
Lazarus saw the intensity of my reaction, and he recoiled slightly. His eyes looked on the verge of withdrawing the offer, and I wondered if he’d meant to only say it in his own head, trying it out to see if it made him feel better.
“You don’t seem like the vindictive type,” he observed carefully.
“No. I just want him to stop calling my mother.”
Lazarus nodded. I noticed the sun disappear all of a sudden and I turned to see that a white ice cream stand had wheeled behind us, the word “Kibon” splattered across it. Its giant red umbrella covered us in its shade.
“Ice cream?” asked the vendor, a short, brown-skinned man with a mustache. He was reaching into the frozen box, as if we’d already agreed to it, but we shook our heads no, eager to return to our conversation. The ice cream seller went on his way. When the sun hit my face again, it felt oppressive instead of pleasant.
“You can come tomorrow tonight. I’m throwing a party. It’s mostly my classmates, and my father won’t know any of them, anyway.”
I was surprised to receive his invitation. But of course a sociable boy like him, who’d spontaneously throw away an hour or two with a stranger, would have a lot of friends. I was tempted to ask him questions about his father, but I refrained, not wanting him to change his mind.
I didn’t immediately say I would come. But we both knew that I would, that I could not stay away. I told him I would see if I could. I left soon after, and he waved a friendly goodbye over his shoulder as I trudged back over the beach, shoes in hand and sand burning my feet. I took the bus home wondering why he would invite me. I couldn’t realize then that I’d made the mistake of seeing the world through the eyes of one of his father’s victims, when I should’ve been seeing the world through Lazarus’s own eyes—those of the executioner’s son.
The next night, I lied to my mother, telling her I had to work on a school project with a friend. When I came into the Lima mansion and heard the song “Eu Sou Free” playing, I thought it might be a record player with big speakers, until I passed by the actual band in the backyard, singing the song. Sempre Livre was an old-fashioned all-girl group, an exception to all the all-male ones on the radio, and they’d cheekily taken their name from a popular menstrual pad.
I had never heard the song in its entirety before, and in the din of the party when they sang “Eu Sou Free”—“I Am Free”—it sounded a bit like “Eu Sofri,” “I Suffered.”
The Lima mansion was as enormous inside as the outside suggested, despite the small gate and unassuming driveway. I didn’t have any trouble getting in, which surprised me a little, until I saw some of the guests, all students my age, and I blended in effortlessly. Deep down, though, I felt like a foreigner around those mauricinhos and patricinhas, spoiled rich kids who ignored the facts about Lima and the men of his generation. Their parents might know, but they wouldn’t care; they belonged to the class that profited most from the repression. As long as the dictatorship kept the Left down, they also kept down the working class, who weren’t allowed to strike, and had to labor for low wages. Rich folks turned a blind eye to the Limas of the world, happy to rationalize that if torture did happen, it happened to those they called “terrorists,” the students who car-bombed politicians and kidnapped members of the military.
I looked for Lazarus, using that as an excuse to familiarize myself with the house. As I walked by the various groups—some sprawled on the sofas, smoking pot, others dancing in little circles near the band outside—I felt completely alienated from them. They didn’t have a care in the world, a single worry or responsibility to their names. It amazed me that there were people in the world like this, living so nearby.
I found Lazarus in the backyard, by himself, moving his head up and down to the beat of the song. The song was long, about five minutes, but by the time I reached him, it was coming to an end. I heard it being followed by a gap, and I realized the group must be lip-syncing to a recording of themselves. Lazarus spotted me at once, and he gave me a smile that I thought was out of sync with how much or how well we knew each other. I realized, as he walked up to meet me in the middle, that he had chosen to favor me over a lot of the other people at his party.
“Are you enjoying yourself?” asked Lazarus,
smiling. He wore an orange short-sleeved shirt and jeans, and he was playing with the white tie he’d loosely slipped around his collar. He was taller than I remembered, and with a jolt I saw that he was handsome.
Too nervous to smile back, I said simply, “You know that I’m not here for the party. When can you introduce me to your father?”
Lazarus shook his head. “Listen, I thought about it some more, and I don’t think you should talk to him. I don’t want any problems.” He paused, waiting for my reaction. “Besides, he’s not home. Is that all right? But I’m glad you came, anyways.”
I opened my mouth to protest, but instead, I just smiled weakly and nodded slightly, a vague gesture that could mean just about anything. Despite the noise, and the people, I was sure that Lima was in the house, thinking back to his sickly gaze the other morning. I knew I would not leave that house without confronting his father. I imagined Lima was somewhere on the second floor of the house, in a study I imagined filled with mahogany bookcases and the faces of stuffed deer and bears looking out from the walls. Something creepy, claustrophobic.
I left Lazarus by himself and returned to the house. The decorations were old-fashioned—antique glass curios in the dining room, a large horizontal mirror above the built-in shelves. I tried to think of a discreet way to get to the second floor, and did a little pantomime, in case anyone was watching me, of looking for an unoccupied bathroom.
I was immediately struck by how quiet it was upstairs, the band and the party below now only a faint echo. It was much darker, too: wood paneling covering the walls, portraits of Lima and his family posing in front of what looked like a sugar plantation. I vaguely remembered reading somewhere that after his successful defeat of the student guerrilla group, Lima had become a kind of minor celebrity and used his new status to divorce his first wife and marry the wealthy daughter of a senator. His now deceased second wife had helped him push for legislation in favor of environmentally friendly ethanol fuel. A popular stance after the 1970s oil crisis. It turned his sugar plantations into gold mines.
Along the corridor, I saw some pictures of plantation fields. Workers with huge knives whacking the sugarcane, clearing a path in the dense sea of shoots and stems. Sugarcane, machetes flying through the air, liable to hurt or maim if the cutter wasn’t careful. In the hot sun, in the tropical monsoon, blade against stalk, a sharply angled thwack. The sugarcane as cargo loaded into powerful crushers, their teeth sharp and wide, breaking up the soup of stalks into unrecognizably small pieces, dirt-brown powdered versions of their previous selves. Rollers and diffusers compressing the cane into residue and fiber, red boilers darting like the last moments of a fireworks show. A hot, bubbly liquid dashing down slats like a fermented river. Lima’s own oilfield, gushing as long as the earth would give him bagasse.
As I traversed the hallway, I moved in quiet steps, as if passing by a room full of napping children. I was glad for the thick carpeting that kept my steps from being heard. I tried to guess which room was his study, praying he’d be inside. All of the doors were closed. In my own home, we never closed the door to the bathroom unless it was occupied; same with the bedrooms. I felt a film of sweat on my back making the fabric of my shirt stick to my body. Near the end of the hallway, I chanced upon a small area with a console table and some flowers and a lamp on top of it. It was the kind of thing one might see in a hotel, in the lobby, next to the elevator. There was a phone. I put my hand over the receiver, and glanced back, toward the lit part of the other end of the hallway, to see if anyone was coming. If I were Lima, I thought, how would I pass the hours while everyone else remained distracted by the party, when everyone else had completely forgotten about me?
I picked up the phone, being careful to slide my fingers over the switch hook in case the phone was, as I hoped, in use. Before I even put the handset against my ear, I could hear the voices on the line, and they made me close my eyes. As I listened, I heard the same voice that had called my mother, though this time he was not speaking softly, and he seemed to be talking to a man. But it was the same person, I knew, with the same slightly European accent—an affectation of the upper classes. It wasn’t just the voice that I recognized; it was the slight thread of melancholia running through the words. I put the handset back on the cradle, once again careful to make sure the switch hook stayed down; I didn’t want the person on the phone to know someone had been listening in.
I looked around, trying to guess which of these rooms hid Lima. Then, through the crack below the door, I saw some light in one of the rooms. I decided to try it; if I ran into a family member, I could say I’d been looking for a bathroom. But as I opened the door, and the room shone dimly in front of me, I recognized the aura of a man I had met before. Though he no longer looked like the man I’d once met, or even like the recent pictures I’d seen in the microfiche newspaper articles in the library, I knew at once that this was Lima.
“Who’s there?” he called out, hanging up the phone. He looked in my direction, but his eyes did not rest on my body. It made me wonder if there was somebody else next to me. Without waiting for me to reply, he added, “The party’s downstairs. There’s no reason for anyone to be up here.”
I stepped quietly into the room. The lights were off, and the only source of illumination came from the TV. Still, I could see yellow-tinted photos of people hung in frames, some dressed in 1930s and 1940s garb. In the corner, there was a statue that looked as though it had been transported intact from the early days of the Republic. And in a giant armchair, made to look small by his tremendous stature, was the Police Chief. He’d gained a remarkable amount of weight. He was the fattest man I’d ever seen, a giant mass of dough parked on a chair, a woolen throw over his lap.
“If you don’t leave now, I’m going to chase you off with my cane,” he barked, waving a long wooden backscratcher in front of him. The reflection of the TV caused him to flicker in front of me like candle.
I gathered all the courage I had in my body. “I came to talk to you.”
This silenced him for a few seconds. He still would not make eye contact, would not look at me directly, only in my vicinity. He rarely blinked, staring continuously at the same spot. His eyes had no life in them.
“Who are you?” he asked, suspiciously. “Aren’t you one of my son’s friends?”
I shook my head, but my movement prompted no reaction from him. “I’m not,” I replied.
I saw his hand shake slightly as he gripped the head of the backscratcher. “I knew this party was a bad idea. Did you come here to try to rob me?”
“I’m not a thief,” I said, offended. “I’m not the person in the room who is a criminal.”
I didn’t intend to come on so strong, but I was melting away into my shadow self.
I expected him to react with force, but instead his face curled into a smile.
“Ah, a fan,” he said, in a sarcastic tone. “You know my work? You came to pay your respects?”
“I came to ask you to leave my mother alone.”
“Who’s your mother?” he asked, furrowing his eyebrows.
I hesitated. No turning back now. “Ana Alencar.”
The Police Chief’s mouth opened slightly, as if to let out an exclamation, but he made no sounds. He started nodding. “And you are her . . .”
“I’m her daughter.”
His eyes suddenly showed some signs of life. He sat a bit more upright, one hand gripping the arm of the chair and the other the backscratcher he used as a cane. He looked like an emperor in his throne, though not one at his peak, one in his declining years.
“Lazarus brings too many people to this house. He shouldn’t have such a big mouth.”
“I found your address at the municipal records,” I said.
The Police Chief cracked an unexpected grin. It unnerved me much more than his earlier coldness. “You’re very resourceful. Clever. Ana was like that.”
“So you don’t deny that you’re the one who’s been calling her
? The one who hurt her?” The words jumped rapid-fire out of me, unable to contain my anger. I thought of how nice it’d be to charge him, maybe head-butt him, slam him against the wall. Somehow find a way to use his weight against him.
“I don’t know what she told you, but I never hurt your mother,” he said quietly, calmly. “I helped her.”
I shook my head. “I know who you are. You hurt a lot of people. You tortured them.”
The Police Chief did not react to this, as if I were talking about a person he had heard of, but did not know very well. He had turned his past into an acquaintance. If everything my mother told me was true I could see why the Police Chief would want to distance himself from his horrendous deeds.
“By the sound of your voice, you must be in high school,” he said.
“I’m not here to talk about me.”
“And probably very beautiful, if you take after your mother.”
“If you keep talking about my mother like that, I’m going to hurt you.”
I reached for a sharp letter opener sitting on the console table next to me. I took it instinctively. I could see its blade glowing, suddenly alive.
He smiled slyly again. His voice grew silky, almost plangent. “You want to try? Why don’t you get closer to me?”
“All I want is for you to leave my mother alone. Don’t contact her, don’t call her, forget she exists.” I didn’t expect the wave of emotions that suddenly flooded me. “Why did you call her after all these years? Why?”
“I felt like it.”
That didn’t satisfy me.
