Orientation

by Daniel Orozco

  She watches his eyes shift, sees them sharpen and glimmer for a moment as he takes in what she has just told him. And then he is Osvaldo again, brash and gay, slapping his palms on the counter, changing the subject. He tells her about a fender bender in front of his kiosk that morning, about the drivers who got out of their respective cars to confront each other. They were veterans of the Chaco War, old men in their seventies, wearing identical medals on their dark wool suits. They stumbled as they took swings at each other and missed, until—exhausted in the midday heat—they collapsed, and Osvaldo had to call an ambulance to haul them away. She loves how he regales in the telling of the incident, whether it happened or not. She is rapt, and hopes that her attention on him will keep him with her a bit longer. But she has given him what he’s wanted. He glances at his watch, slaps his forehead. He remembers an urgent bit of business he must attend to, an errand for a cousin. And then, all showy and clownish, he brings Ynez’s left hand to his mouth. She watches him kiss it. She feels suddenly bereft, lost. The floor beneath her seems to shift and sag. He bids her good night. “Jajoecha peve, Ynez.”

  Until we meet again.

  And then he is gone.

  The evening is clear and cool. The markets and shops have closed, and the cafés are putting up their chairs. The boulevard teems with late-night strollers slowly heading home. Cook joins them. Her route back to the villa is a riot of plumeria in full bloom. The air is glutted with fragrance. Sagging branches overhang sidewalks everywhere. Spatulate petals reach down fat and heavy into her face. She swats them away.

  She waves to the guard in the guard booth. He waves back. Inside her apartment, she drops her bag and kicks off her shoes. She stares at a piece of honey cake wrapped in wax paper on the nightstand. She picks it up and goes outside. She walks to the iron fence that borders the cañón and kneels down. She squeezes the honey cake between her hands and waits. The kennel master has told her not to risk this, has warned her that his children are unpredictable, that they can be capricious and willful.

  Soon the dogs come, pounding through brush, slamming into the fence, taking the cake from her. There is the snuffling of the dogs and the sound of their tongues on her, and then another noise, somebody speaking to her. She turns around. It is the patrón, barking at her in English. He stands there in his stocking feet, with his belt undone and a chicken leg in his hand. Here is the man who tossed handcuffed prisoners out of airplanes over the Pacific Ocean, the man who invented this innovation for disappearing dissidents. Here he stands, shouting about who knows what, wagging a chicken leg at her. She watches a trickle of blood thread down his forehead. An omen, she thinks. She gazes at him. She feels nothing. She will perhaps feel nothing for a long time. Except maybe for these dogs. She turns to them now, watches their fat pink tongues flicking out of the bushes between the iron pickets, rasping at her fingers and palms and doing a thorough job of cleaning her hands.

  * * *

  At dusk, the dogs are loosed. The sun dips below the ridge behind the villa, a photosensor engages an electric switch, and the kennel gate swings open. The two rottweilers set off separately, bounding over root and tree-fall and crashing through sedge and bramble until they join each other in a defile that cuts to the top of the ridge. They piss along the perimeter of the cañón fence, metal chain-link topped with boas of razor wire. They gallop back and forth along the ridge—lunging, tongue-lolling lopes. Paladino, the younger, harries Cerbero, nipping and snarling at him, always testing the older dog. They settle down and linger here in the waning light, splay-legged and slit-eyed and content, their massive skulls bobbing, their damp noses twitching at the verdant rankness of Asunción—acrid smoke from distant forest fires; musks of sewage and slag from the river, and eddies of sweet decay from landfills; ooze of meat from the slaughterhouse district; the complex admixtures of blossoms and bleach, baked bread and dog shit, mown grass and motor oil. And always, intermingled, the slick and slippery undertow of the collective human scent. Only when it is full-on dark—when the sun has dissolved like a tablet into the Pilcomayo, draining the colors from dusk—only then do they descend from the highest point of the property. Until first light, when they know to return to the kennel before the gates swing shut, the dogs have the run of this cañón. For the next eight or so hours they are free to romp and ramble and hunt and kill.

  Guinea pigs are abundant year-round, as are lizards and toads. In summer, animals foraging for food and water come out of the jungle and down from the highlands. They breach the fence, attracted to the mulch of fallen fruit beneath the lime and papaya trees. Armadillos, capybaras, anacondas, a feral cat or two. Once, a tapir, far from its range, a two-hundred-pound calf that broke through and in a panic could not find its way out. It took them all night to chase it down. And once, there was a man, the greasy stink of him coming at them in torrents—the hot scent of prey like a desperate itching in the middle of the brain.

  Once a week the master comes. He sweeps out the kennel, refreshes their bedding and their water trough. He brushes each of them, massages their hindquarters. Always Cerbero first. Paladino—patient—waits his turn. The master looks into their ears, checks their teeth, tends the occasional wound. He examines their droppings. He runs them through their commands. Sit! Stay! Catch! Hold! Tear! Finish! Good boy! When they are done, he kisses each of them. He is not afraid. The dogs know this. The scent of the master is neither of predator nor prey, of friend nor foe. He is simply the master. Before he leaves, he reaches into a waxed bag and throws a slab of round steak before each of them. The dogs watch him, mouths shut, eyes steady. On his command, they fall on the meat. They take food from no other.

  But there is one other they are drawn to. She is redolent of blood, and deep in the fissures of canine memory lies a trace of what the tang of her blood once meant. (For Cerbero and Paladino are neutered males, and while the madness of the rut is absent, the absence is always present in them—dogs know their balls have been cut off.) It is this trace—the faint and fleeting residues of estrus and the mount—that brings them running. But they take food from her because it is the scent of the master that prevails. He whelms her, and she is steeped in him, and but for that, they would not come to her and gift her with their gentle mouthings. But for that, they would instead do all they could to clamp down on her hands and pull her in chunks through the cañón fence.

  * * *

  The Presidente-in-Exile is bleeding.

  He holds a blood-dappled monogrammed hankie to his head. The cut is above the hairline, a tiny wound, but a real bleeder. He has just gotten home, flung his coat off, kicked off his pee-splashed Berluti mocs. He stands in front of the portable Sony in the kitchen, looking at a documentary—a history of the War of the Triple Alliance. In 1864, Francisco Solano López, third president of the Republic, invaded Brazil, then declared war on Argentina and Uruguay, engaging in a doomed six-year campaign that wiped out two-thirds of the population; by 1870 there were only thirty thousand men left in all of Paraguay. The debacle is rendered in history as a glorious act of national pride and will, and the ten-part documentary about it is aired on state television again and again. Aside from World Cup soccer in the summer and Miss Universe and the Oscars in the spring, television in Paraguay is a tedious déjà vu zone, awash in reruns of Stroessner’s inaugural addresses and cooking shows from Argentina (¡Mundo de bistec! ¡Barbacoa loco!) and American sitcoms (Hogan’s Heroes, Green Acres, Happy Days). And of course, the War of the Triple Fucking Alliance.

  The Presidente-in-Exile sighs, flips off the TV. He cocks his head, listens. He drops the bloody hankie on a kitchen counter. He opens the refrigerator, finds a pair of baked chickens, and tugs at a drumstick until it comes off. He pads to the sliding glass door, unlocks and opens it, crosses to the iron fence a few yards away. He rat-a-tats the chicken leg between two pales, and waits. He knows the dogs are trained not to take food. They never come. But tonight he hears them, panting and tumbling down the hill, crashing through undergr
owth, then moving past him along the fence perimeter toward the back of the house. Could they be hunting? He has heard that the dogs once killed and ate a man. Gallardo—talking to the gardeners or chatting up Stroessner’s monkeys—has relayed such stories to him. A drug lord tossed an informant to them for vengeance and sport. A Mossad agent prowling for Nazis got trapped in the cañón. Some street kid climbed over the fence on a dare. The stories are varied; they always change, and they all intrigue the Presidente-in-Exile.

  He follows the dogs along the gravel walkway that runs the length of the house for thirty yards, toward the back. Where the cook lives. He comes around the corner into a tiny patio area no more than fifteen feet square. A pool of light from Cook’s open apartment door illuminates the soles of her feet, the backs of her calves. She is on her knees, up against the cañón fence. Her back is to him, and her hands are moving in the gaps between the iron pales.

  The Presidente-in-Exile is peeved. She is feeding the dogs. “You’re not supposed to do that,” he says to her. He can see their tongues, pink and sudden at her hands in the dark. “Hey!” he says. “What the fuck are you doing?” She turns, and her level gaze confuses him. He looks at the chicken leg in his hand, points it at her. “You stop that now.” But she doesn’t. She seems unfazed, perhaps even bored. There was a time when he could have done anything to her and gotten away with it. There was a time when women were afraid of him. But he sees nothing in this india’s face. It is the face of a woman who wouldn’t care what you did to her. She turns away, back to the dogs.

  And as swiftly as it came, his anger is gone, dropping away like a stone off a precipice. He sighs, picks his way back down the gravel path toward the kitchen. He gnaws absently at his drumstick. His eye stings and he wipes at it. Blood. The cut has opened up again. Something in his stomach shifts and plops, and he grimaces. He’ll need a bromo before bed, and the thought of this leaves him somehow disconsolate and vaguely depressed, and only adds to the chain of disappointments in this life of exile.

  * * *

  The Assassin of the Presidente-in-Exile gets the word. Osvaldo, calling from the magazine kiosk on Avenida España, repeats the go code into the phone: “Blanco, blanco, blanco.” The Assassin of the Presidente-in-Exile loads a rocket into the launcher and sets a percussion cap. He hoists the launcher onto his shoulder and rests the barrel on the lip of the sill. Through the open window he trains the sight on a statue in a sliver of park across the street. He focuses on it—Francisco Solano López, killed at the glorious battle of Cerro Corá in 1870. He can hear Analisa warming up the Chevy pickup in the driveway outside. The engine rumbles precariously. They’ve had trouble with the throttle, and she revs it up. He can see Josias at the curb watching for the Mercedes, his M16 shielded by a topcoat draped over his wrist. He sees Lourdes across the street, minding a baby stroller filled with Browning 9mm pistols and an Ingram MAC-10. He sees Josias wave, hears the truck ease down the length of the driveway, piston-slap rattle receding. Through the sight he watches the Mercedes glide into view. He lifts the barrel of the launcher off the sill and glides with it until the Mercedes is stopped short, blocked by Analisa in the Chevy. He seeks the trigger and finds it and nestles it into the crook of his index finger.

  The Assassin of the Presidente-in-Exile inhales. He is suddenly taken with the clarity of the scene before him. What a beautiful morning! Sunshine pours into the street, filling it like a container. The Mercedes sits submerged in radiance, tense and gleaming in honeyed light, as if straining against the very weight of light itself. It shimmers within the crosshatched field of the launcher’s reticle.

  The Assassin of the Presidente-in-Exile exhales. The rocket fires and scoots waggle-tailed toward its target twenty yards away, slips into the armored Mercedes. The Mercedes levitates for an instant and disappears behind coils of black smoke. The Assassin of the Presidente-in-Exile drops the launcher, stands up, peels off his latex gloves. The sofa behind his station at the window smolders from the rocket exhaust. A black circle six feet across is seared into the wall; the paint in it bubbles and pops. He goes out the back door of the house, into the yard. He can hear the ack-ack of semiautomatic fire—Josias and Analisa and Lourdes emptying their weapons into the wreckage. He passes through a gate in the property fence that opens onto an alley, turns right onto Avenida Venezuela, and strolls to a bus stop at the corner. The crowd there is looking past him, gawking upward at a column of smoke rising thickly into the blue. He turns, gawks with them. He recalls something from a book he’d been reading, a history of the North American Indians, and he tries to remember what it was Sioux warriors told each other before going into battle. The bus pulls up, and he stands on line with the other commuters. He jingles the change in his pocket. He can hear the click and pop of pistol fire, benign in the distance. The bodyguards in the Datsun have arrived. He pays the driver, moves into the press of standing passengers, situates himself near the back door. He pats the Browning pistol in his coat pocket and says a prayer for Josias and Analisa and the others—his compas for these past fifteen months.

  And then it comes to him, and he smiles for remembering it. Today is a good day to die.

  * * *

  In the backseat of the Mercedes, the Presidente-in-Exile looks up from his paper.

  The newspaper in his hands disappears, goes poof! like a magician’s trick. His hands smoke and glow and burst into flames. The suit he is wearing vaporizes. His eyeballs explode, and his mouth fills with gasoline. The backseat of the Mercedes becomes an arena of transformation, the effulgent white-hot heart of a flame brighter than a hundred suns, a whirlpool of shrapnel and fire taking its passenger apart. Hands—gone! Yet there is the glide of silk on the fingertips. Eyes—no more! Yet before them hang the pale breasts of a first love, a girl from Stony Point, New York, named Amanda. The slide of gasoline on the tongue gives way to the textures of pulque, milky and sweet. There is the smell of Cohibas, of Tres Flores brilliantine. The scrape of a father’s beard against skin, the slap of breakers on a shore like the beating of a giant’s heart. The tug of an erection. Strokes and caresses. A pressing upon the chest like the vise grips of God. Gunfire in the distance. There is running, stumbling. There is falling. Free fall. And amid the onslaught of sensations without stimulus and memories without context, amid the random firing of synapses in a brain poaching inside its own skull, what is revealed and understood of a life in its last instant—as the Presidente-in-Exile looks up from his paper and mutters “Fuck me” when his driver’s head disappears—what is understood is simply this: the transformative power of weaponry and surprise.

  * * *

  In the back patio of a trattoria three blocks away, an old man sits hunched over the morning paper laid out on the table before him, waiting for his espresso to cool. With his right hand he flips the pages of El Diario. With his left he holds the crown of a gray felt fedora and fans himself with the brim. He turns a page, peers at it. The fedora in his left hand stops moving. His breath catches, stops, begins again. He throws his hat on the page open before him. He looks around with histrionic furtiveness, in the manner of a lonely old man reveling in the melodrama of the moment. He sees mostly other lonely old men. One is tearing up a croissant and feeding the pieces to a tiny yellow dog in his lap. Two others sit staring down at a checkerboard between them.

  He nudges the fedora aside, revealing a full-page ad with the headline DO YOU RECOGNIZE THIS MAN? There is a picture, a blowup of a passport photo from some twenty-five years ago, of a glowering, beetle-browed man with black slicked-back hair and a broad, neatly trimmed mustache. The hair is now chalk white, full and untended. The mustache is ragged, and the brows have thinned out. The face is tanned. The glower is gone.

  The old man reaches for his demitasse and tosses back the espresso. He shudders, gleefully. He calls to the waiter, orders another, and a crème de cassis as well. The waiter looks him in the face, bows, departs. Nothing. The old man giggles. He ponders a delightful paradox of photo portra
iture—the picture in the paper is an accurate likeness of himself a quarter century ago, but so much so that no one will recognize it as him today. Remarkable. “Ausgezeichnet!” he says aloud. He shudders again, claps his hands. His chair gives a sudden leap. He hears a muffled roar, feels movement in the ground beneath his feet. The other old men look past him, upward, and he turns, cranes his neck. Above the apartment building across the street, a column of thick black smoke jeweled with embers boils upward. The waiter arrives, sets the drinks down, stands and gapes with the others, all of them watching the smoke drape across the sky like a closing curtain. The old man squints, sniffs. He can smell diesel fuel, burning oil, the stink of molten rubber. And something else, something distant and familiar. He reaches for his crème de cassis, raises the glass, and carefully brings it to his lips. He pauses. Yes, of course—the smell of burning flesh. He sips the thick, sweet syrup. The liqueur is served neat here, to the brim in a warmed cordial glass, in the style called Martyr’s Blood. And although still atremble with giddiness, the old man spills not a drop as he drinks to whoever has died today.

  * * *

  Meanwhile, back at the villa, a bony cat rasps its tongue at a congealing smear of mashed bug on the slate tiles of the west patio. A wind from nowhere disturbs the trees and a blossom-fall erupts, sending slant flurries across the grounds. Security cameras tucked high and low throughout the compound click and whir to each other. In the kitchen, Cook slathers chicken parts with mayo, dices tomatoes and onions, and puts water up to boil, going through the motions of preparing a luncheon that will not be served. And upstairs, in the master bedroom, the mistress Dinorah sleeps. Twenty years from now she will serve iced tea to fellow expats on the balcony of her modest condo in Coral Gables. She will regale them with the stories they want to hear, of her life with El Presidente—the palaces and the private jets, the fetes and the galas, stories of jewelry and couture and thousand-dollar bottles of wine, of weekends abroad and late, intimate dinners with movie stars. But she will keep to herself the details of their last shimmering days together, when the ardor of their love seemed to flower even in the ignominy of exile, when they swam and gamboled in lagoons under the stars and made love all night and toasted the dawn with champagne, the both of them—sated and spent—taken truly aback by the remarkable clarity of light at sunrise in Paraguay.