Poso Wells

by GABRIELA ALEMÁN

  Sing with me, sing it, the nothing that we know,

  From the obscure sea we come, to the unknown sea we go . . .

  Between, the haunting enigma, three chests with keyless locks

  Tell me, what does the word say? And the water among the rocks?

  With Machado under his arm and a few pesos in his pockets, Benito’s future grandfather sought refuge in Guayaquil in the home of the Demetrio Aguilera Malta, whom he had met in Madrid in ’36. He soon felt he couldn’t have chosen a better place. He liked Guayaquil immediately, its topography, the gaze of its women, the pervasive smell of ripening fruit. His friend took him to meetings where the dust in the air still held the aroma of coffee and the lilt of voices carried him away from the war and the horrors that he had lived. He was sure that the more time he spent in this city, the faster he would lose the doleful look that he still couldn’t recognize as his own. When his memories started to blur, he knew he wanted to stay. He began trying to legalize his status but, on the advice of friends, rather than following the standard red tape he went straight to the head of the immigration department of the Foreign Ministry, a writer himself, with a letter of reference from Aguilera Malta. The man, with almond eyes and the air of a fallen French aristocrat, welcomed him with excessive warmth and told him that for a friend of an author of such stature, he would do whatever was in his power. What was in his power was to avenge himself for the fact of Aguilera Malta being the better writer, which had long ago cost him a girlfriend who preferred Aguilera’s skillful prose despite his ungainly appearance, over the bureaucrat’s starchy, antique style, disregarding his noble bearing and chiseled face. In red ink, the bureaucrat stamped “communist” on every page of Señor Pliego’s application for legal residence, as a result of which both visa and residence were denied. Thus began a pilgrimage that led Benito’s grandfather to Mexico, where he started a newspaper, La Verdad, on the Gulf coast, which was why, in due course, Ecuadorian literature, and especially that of Demetrio Aguilera, won followers in that corner of the world. The bureaucrat’s spleen could never pardon the Spaniard’s good fortune or the diffusion of the Ecuadorian writer’s work. He continued to pound his stamp with ever more vitriol onto any documents that passed before him, while in Veracruz they read his rival’s stories to the strains of danzón floating on the gentle sea breeze—and old Pliego, smoking Cuban cigars and sipping mezcal, never tired of saying that the worst-intentioned plans oft went astray. He married a local woman, and in their family home flowered the nostalgic memory of a mythical and brotherly Ecuador. When their son fell in love, it was with a woman from that country, from the province of Manabí, whose ship had anchored in Veracruz en route to New Orleans. The fruit of this love was Benito, who spent his infancy in Portoviejo and his youth in the D.F., where, after reading many poems, he became a poet himself. Since then he had devoted himself to writing while taking whatever jobs came his way. One of those took him to Veracruz, where he stowed away on the MV Rabolú, a Panamanian-flag freighter on its way to Valparaíso, which made a stop to take on cargo in Guayaquil, where he barely escaped being discovered. Though he was tempted to disembark where he ought to have been born, a sixth sense warned him this was a last resort, to be used only in case of necessity. He continued on to Chile and spent some years working on the banana boats that smuggled Chilean wine to Ecuador and Mexico. On one such voyage, while the ship was still taking on its bootleg cargo in Valparaíso, he picked the wrong moment to check the setting of the thermostat in the engine room. He stumbled into a settling of scores between two crewmen and ended up with a knife in his shoulder blade. The lowlife of a captain, seeking to avoid trouble with authorities, ordered the ship to sail straight for Guayaquil without getting medical attention for Benito. In the Ecuadorian port he was abandoned on the dock, with a broken jaw and the knife still in his body, among some crates of apples and grapes on the assumption that he was dead. The port police sent him to the morgue, which was where Varas saw him for the first time. He was on the crime beat at the time, so every morning he went to the morgue to find out what had happened the night before. This being an especially slow morning, Varas passed the time waving off the horseflies that had come with Benito from the docks and kept settling on his face. His was the only corpse resting on the six cement tables of the autopsy room.

  “So, this guy?” Varas asked.

  “We don’t know, they brought him in half an hour ago. No papers. We’re waiting for the police to sign off on him before we open him up,” answered a man eating a cheese sandwich, with breadcrumbs on his lips.

  “So, I take it you never get indigestion?” Varas asked while looking at the other doctor, farther off, who was spreading blackberry jam on a buttered slice of bread.

  “Varitas, you can see the answer for yourself,” that one said, sucking on his fingertip.

  Varas shrugged and asked the one nearby, “Where’d they find him?” while pulling out his notebook to write it up.

  “On the docks, he was tossed between crates of Chilean apples.”

  “That should make the fucker tasty. Want a bite of him, Varas?” the doctor who was still sucking jam off his fingertip said.

  Varas started toward that doctor with doubled fists, but the other one got between them to head him off.

  “Ignore the guy, Varas. He’s never had a girlfriend and he’s spent all his time since med school with corpses. You should pity him, not get mad.”

  Varas looked at his watch and decided he didn’t have time for fighting with a pair of degenerates, so he made his rounds of the hospitals instead. Around noon he got to the Luis Vernaza, next to the former prison by the shore, and there he found the corpse he’d seen in the morgue, waiting in a hallway in the emergency ward. He went looking for a nurse.

  “This one?” asked. “He wasn’t dead after all?”

  The woman looked through her charts and finally answered, “Broken jaw and a knife wound in the shoulder that’s made him lose a lot of blood.”

  “Sorry, miss, I didn’t ask for his diagnosis, I mean why isn’t anybody taking care of him?”

  “Because nobody has come to say they’ll pay his bill,” she answered before hurrying down the hall.

  Varas was about to make a scene when he took full note of his surroundings: burned-out lightbulbs, long lines, gaunt figures slumped in beat-up old chairs, and in all the hallways, three patients per cot. Instead of writing stupid pieces on wounds and murder victims, he should be sticking pins in the eyelids of those who had the power to change this daily sight. Or taking direct action, putting bombs under their SUVs. He ran after the woman.

  “I’ll be responsible, miss,” he said.

  “Go to the desk and give them your ID, then they’ll give you a number.” Still walking, the woman pointed out an area where more than eighty people were waiting to be called.

  “Why not just put all the corpses out to tan in the sun?” Varas yelled down the crowded hallway of Luis Vernaza, but everyone just looked away. He went over to the man who had been left for dead that morning and took his pulse, finding hardly any. He pulled out his cellphone and decided it was time to collect some favors, so he dialed the number of a college friend who was now the son-in-law of the Minister of Health. He kept track of the time on the wall clock in the hall. In less than five minutes the wounded man was in the operating room. While the surgeons were busy, Varas went to revisit the dynamic duo at the morgue. They were in the middle of an autopsy, and he was sorry he hadn’t waited outside. The smell was worse than a garbage dump in summer at high noon.

  “Easy, Varas, this guy had hepatitis, see the color of his liver, here?” Just then the other doctor lifted out his intestines. “And he hadn’t finished digesting his last meal.”

  “Never mind, you Neanderthals. I just want to know what happened with this morning’s corpse.” Varas covered his nose and mouth with one hand.

  “Simple, Varitas, somebody didn’t do their job right, and we almost took the electric saw t
o one that was still alive and kicking. But since we’re professionals, we noticed the corpse was moving its eyelids so it couldn’t be all that dead. We found a pulse, and before the cops arrived we’d already sent him to Luis Vernaza. Nobody cared, everything’s fine, and then suddenly we got twenty very dead ones, thanks to the express buses of the Cruz del Sur line.”

  Varas was halfway out the door when they called him back.

  “Listen, Varas, next time you write an article, write about the sonofabitch soulless bus drivers. Here’s a piece of information for you. When we get one of them on the table, the first thing we do is look for it, but nothing, not even an ounce. They really are soulless, on the word of a well-educated scientist, and your paper can quote me in headlines as big as you like. If it weren’t for the bus drivers, I’d have time for the occasional cigar once in a while, but they’re relentless. Can’t get even half a cigarette in, you hear me?”

  On his way out Varas decided that the pathologists were not as maladjusted as he’d thought. When he got to the hospital, he was given a bill itemizing everything used in the operation: anesthesia, gauze, gloves, all in detail. They told him to go pay at the cashier’s office; they also gave him another list with everything the patient would need during the rest of his hospital stay: analgesics, drips, anti-inflammatories, antibiotics; they told him to go buy those at a pharmacy, and they gave him a form to take over to the blood bank to make a donation, because the man who’d been stabbed had required several pints. When he returned, somewhat dizzy and with a bandage on his arm, Benito was out of surgical recovery, in a ward with eight other patients. He was very weak and his jaw was wired shut. Three days later they discharged him because they needed the bed, and all Varas could do was take him home. The circumstances were strange, but so was life. For three weeks Varas fed him through a straw, this man he didn’t know from Adam who couldn’t tell him anything. But one day, somewhat recovered, he mimed a request for pencil and paper, with which he wrote: “If you have eyes to see, turn them inward. Your only room is the room you’ve got; a darkened shack can be your castle, the axis around which you spin. But if you spend all your time inside yourself, you’ll end up thinking that’s all there is.”

  “Hey,” Varas said enthusiastically, “you’re a poet! What’s your name?”

  “Benito,” he wrote.

  Varas shook his hand. “Encantado. Glad to meet you. But you’re turning white as a ghost so let’s leave it for now,” Varas added, fearful of the pallor creeping over the man.

  From then on, the words on paper kept flowing, day by day.

  Perseverance is virtue and damnation. ‘The pursuit of ruin is the path to salvation,’ a poet said.

  Hunger and cold may be our lot, but dissatisfaction is a knife we plunge into ourselves.

  A small, poor world, desire’s honeycomb. It incites us, it satisfies us, and it buries us, too.

  When Benito was well enough to talk, he told Varas the whole story of what had happened to him. Since he was still weak, Varas got him work that he could do without leaving the apartment. The poet found himself writing for various cultural supplements, proofreading theater and concert programs, editing algebra texts for a private school, writing on movies and TV for a national paper. But when he had recovered enough and Varas proposed they go talk to the publisher of the paper where he worked, Benito said no. He didn’t explain, and Varas didn’t press him. Once in a while he’d go out to the store, and he’d go as far as the corner to buy the paper, and when he found a room for rent nearby, he moved so as not to trouble Varas further, although he held onto the apartment keys. He never ventured farther than four blocks away. Varas kept on finding jobs for him but aside from that, he decided Benito would have to deal with his own problem, whatever it was. Varas believed the answers to everything were usually in plain sight—sometimes obvious, sometimes not—but this didn’t make the path to follow any easier. Besides, he wasn’t a poet and couldn’t explain things. You had to deal with your own fears, or you’d wind up resenting the world. And then someone else would have to take the blame.

  “Where do we start?” Benito asked.

  Varas, who was a man from a bygone era, had two Polaroids of the woman. He gave one to his friend and kept the other. They were standing in the vacant lot.

  “You go downhill, I’ll go up. We’ll meet here in three hours.” He hesitated before continuing, but finally said what he wanted to say without beating around the bush.

  “Or if you want, I’ll go with you.”

  Benito didn’t say anything, but he shook his head from left to right.

  “Okay, back here at noon.”

  The poet set off down the street. The first two hours didn’t yield anything. Everybody was on edge from all the soldiers still making the rounds of the neighborhood, clearly unhappy and acting more like hired killers than legal authorities. Meanwhile, the tension with Salém’s men had only increased. Three weeks after Vinueza’s disappearance, there was no point in their coming into people’s houses to search for him, but few denied them entrance for fear of repercussions. Bella, however, had opened a new battlefront after one of her sons found a piece of paper on the street bearing the same symbols painted on the houses that had been searched. The list was long but it showed that among the more than twenty messages coded in apparently innocent designs were instructions for burglarizing houses: a circle surrounding a triangle meant only after 8:00 a.m.; two lines inside a circle meant only women live here; and there were eighteen more like that. Bella had invited her neighbors over to hear about her discovery but only three women came, one of them her friend Rosa. Then she’d taken the sheet of paper to the soldiers and asked them to compare the signs with those painted on the houses, to see for themselves that they matched up and thus have evidence against Salém. They ignored her and when she demanded to speak to the officer in charge of the operation, he made light of her complaint and argued that their mission was to find Vinueza, not to get involved in the barrio’s quarrels. Before declaring their meeting over, he counseled resignation.

  “Señora, I’m a great believer in the Lord’s design, and you should be, too. Ask Him and you shall receive. And don’t worry so much. Have you been robbed?”

  Bella shook her head.

  “Then stay out of it. Let everyone stick to his own business.”

  “Colonel, I think that whoever taught you your faith has done their job poorly, because from what I can see, you don’t understand anything. But that’s not my problem, your beliefs are up to you and you do what you want with them. I have my rights and you’re here to look after the security of the citizens. I’m a citizen and I expect you to do your job.”

  “Do you have documents to prove that?”

  “I was born in this country, Colonel. That’s all I need.”

  “Listen, little lady, you seem a bit weak in the head. That’s not my problem, you hear? My problem is finding Vinueza.”

  “Who pays you, that lawyer’s companies or the Armed Forces of Ecuador?”

  “Señora, don’t provoke me. If you don’t leave, I’ll have to arrest you.”

  “Colonel, beliefs can drive a person crazy. I want your name, because this is not going to end here.”

  “Old busybody, are you trying to tell me you have contacts in the government?” The officer laughed, then straightened his shoulders. “Colonel Alcíbar Peña at your service.”

  He turned his back and went on his way, but not before scolding the corporal who had fetched him to speak with her. All that had happened a few days before the poet and Varas came with their photos of the unknown woman, and it was one more reason why the cooperation they got was almost zero. Very few people opened their doors, and those who did were highly suspicious. About 11 a.m. the poet knocked on Bella Altamirano’s door. He showed her the photo and asked whether she could identify the person.

  “And who are you?” the woman in the doorway asked him.

  “A friend,” Benito said.

&nbs
p; “If you’re such a good friend, why don’t you know her name?”

  He liked the way this woman talked back.

  “So you know her?” the poet asked.

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Your question. If you didn’t know anything, you wouldn’t care who I am.”

  Bella smiled.

  “That could be. So who are you?”

  “Let me buy you a soda and I’ll tell you.”

  Bella put her hand to her face to be sure no lock of hair was covering her scar. No, she had her hair in a bun.

  “You know, I can’t right now, but what I’ll tell you is . . .”

  “Maybe some other time,” Benito interrupted.

  Bella ignored him and went on. “This girl lived here, around the corner with her parents. Less than a year ago, she disappeared, just like that. Everybody had an opinion. You know what they say: small town, big hell. I think she was from Manabí, or anyway that’s where her parents went after she didn’t turn up. Do you know where she is? Did somebody find her?”