The Fighting Man (1993)

by Seymour, Gerald

  Gord took the lead, set the pace faster.

  He read the digest of the interrogator’s report.

  The vantage point had been from behind trees, their vision had been incomplete.

  Colonel Arturo scanned the single sheet of typed-up paper.

  The first plane had landed, two wings on each side. There had been eight men who had come from the plane. They had unloaded boxes. There were guns in the boxes. There had been three Indians amongst the men, and three more who were old and Ladino, and one who was young and also Ladino. There had been one last man, one who had worked the fastest to get the boxes from the plane. The last man was European white. The subject under interrogation had known that he was European white because he had once worked on an oil drill under a German engineer, near Sayaxché. The subject under interrogation could tell the difference between a European white and Ladino stock. A second plane had crashed on attempting to land.

  The fist of Colonel Arturo was clenched on the sheet of paper. He wondered how the man he had seen, splashed down, regaining consciousness, questioned, hooded again with the capucha, breathing broken, had come to make so factual and chronological a statement.

  He telephoned an office in the G-2 behind the Palacio Nacional.

  No, he was told, it was not possible to question further the subject of interrogation.

  He tried to call the office of the Chief of Staff, gone to a restaurant party for his wife’s birthday. He called the office of the Director of Intelligence, gone to the Army Club to play tennis. He called the HQ of Army Command, Petén region, and was told the brigadier was not available.

  He swivelled in his chair. His chin rested on his locked fingers. He stared up at the wall map that displayed the chinagraphed symbols denoting the location of the country’s armed forces. He had placed on the map an orange-headed pin at a spot south-east of the Santa Amelia finca, and a second orange-headed pin on the Sayaxché to Chinajá road.

  The excitement had worn.

  The Archaeologist struggled to hold the pace that was set. The Englishman was merciless to him. When he slipped back, when the Indians who manhandled the weight of the cart with the tubes came past him, when the old Ladinos elbowed him aside, when he was at the back of the column, then he felt the shove of the Englishman’s hand or the weight of the boot into the seat of his trousers. He would have thought that he was in good condition, and he was wrong.

  Impulse had taken him into the jungle to follow the group and he had tracked them for six hours while he had dragged for the courage to close on them. The impulse was long gone. His breath sagged, the muscles in his shins and thighs ached pain, his arms and body were scratched raw. With each step that he took, weighed down by the rifles and mortar shells that he carried, so the decision of the impulse became more binding. There was no going back . . . The straps of three rifles cut into the flesh of his shoulder and the burden of the mortar shells bowed him. As the moment of impulse drifted more distant, and the sense of excitement thinned, the Archaeologist found himself drawn more closely to the silence of the Englishman who bullied the column forward.

  At each rest halt he slumped down beside the Englishman.

  At each stop he sat close to the Englishman, a dog at a master’s feet, like when he’d been young and his parents had owned the cross Labrador and spaniel bitch and the dog had sat the winter evenings against him. He would settle beside the Englishman and watch him at his work, checking his backpack straps, cleaning his weapon, poring over the frayed map, boots off and socks off and massaging his feet.

  He spattered the questions.

  ‘I’m really interested, Gord, why you’re here . . .’

  ‘. . . Is it politics brought you, Gord, would you be a liberal . . . ?’

  ‘. . . Eight men killed back on the road, does that bother you, Gord . . . ?’

  ‘. . . Your family back home, do they know you’re in Guatemala? What do they think . . . ?’

  ‘. . . A revolution and going all the way to the centre of Guatemala City, real or just joke talk . . . ?’

  ‘. . . Gord, this is an army country. Can you win? Is winning something that can actually happen . . . ?’

  ‘. . . Is it that you saw something that was wrong and wanted to change the wrong . . . ?’

  Never an answer. Sometimes a slow smile, sometimes the slap at a fly in irritation, sometimes a quiet curse of annoyance. He had a girlfriend, a good but on-hold relationship, in the psychology faculty on the campus at Minnesota. They used to talk through her study work . . . and he could not read the man, and he didn’t think his girlfriend could have done better. He’d hack it, too right . . . in time he’d break the silence wall . . .

  On the last march session of the day, as they pitched ahead in the falling light, they came to the cleared space.

  Groucho told Gord that it was a place of the Communities of Resistance. Scattered through the space were small huts of rough-cut wood walls and with wide leaves stacked as roofing. Not a person to be seen, not an animal, not a chicken, and the quiet hanging in the dusk, and the rain falling heavier through the canopy.

  Groucho told Gord it was a camp for a community which had fled the army and made new homes in the secrecy of the jungle. Jorge had gone forward, only Zed with him. With hand motions, back at the edge of the tree line, Gord gestured for the others in the column to fan out. They were all wary. Jorge had left his weapon in Zeppo’s hands and walked unarmed to the centre of the clearing. There was a half-kicked-out fire smouldering in front of a hut. There were worn paths. There were filled buckets of water near Jorge. There were children’s clothes strung from a vine line and still dripping from their washing. There were a dozen huts that Gord could see, maybe more that were masked from him, there were corral fences of cut thorn to hold animals, there was no sound and no movement.

  If the planes found the place, Groucho told Gord, it would be napalm bombed, if the soldiers found it they would level it and herd the community back to the new secure villages.

  Gord motioned for the others to stay back. He held the machine gun across his hip. He moved lightly on his feet towards Jorge. A few minutes and the darkness would have enveloped the place, and they had walked well the last part of that day, and they needed their food and their sleep. He felt almost a sense of anger that they had happened across the place and now the food and the sleep would be delayed.

  ‘Jorge, we don’t have time. We should move through. We should keep on going. We should . . .’

  He was falling.

  He was going down. The earth rushed at him.

  There was the shrill screaming around him.

  Panic movement, tipping and tumbling. The screams piercing at him.

  The machine gun was wrenched from his hands as the rim of the hole cracked against his elbows.

  The pigs were in flight, scrambling from the pit and scratching at his body, jumping from the hole, and his face was filled with the wing feather beat of the chickens. He heard the laughter echo around the cleared space. When had he last heard laughter? The loud laughter of Zeppo and Harpo, and the giggle of Groucho, and the squeaked chuckling of the Indians. He blazed in his fury. His fury was his humiliation. The laughter pealed in his ears, louder and gayer. He was shouting for quiet. It was the breaking of discipline, it was the loss of control. The pigs had fled, the chickens had flown. He pulled the pencil torch from his tunic pocket. He bent below the snapped mass of branches that had been covered by an inch of earth to hide the tunnel hole. He shone the torch into the recess at the bottom of the hole. He saw the child that clutched, as if it were a nursery toy, the piglet not older than a week. He saw the wide eyes of more children. He swung the torch. A crouched man held a knife. A woman drew a swaddled baby closer to her bosom. Gord turned the torch again. He shone it into the fullness of his face and he smiled into their fear. He offered his hand to the man with the knife. He jacked himself up out of the hole and he reached down to help out the man who held the knife.

 
; There were calls in a language he did not recognize, and there were sharp whistles that aped the jungle birds.

  The clearing in the last light was filled with men and women and children emerging from the tunnels, and animals that had been hidden in pits, and chickens sprouting from the ground.

  Groucho came to Gord and he still grinned, and he carefully wiped the earth filth from Gord’s trousers.

  The Archaeologist was at Gord’s side. ‘Because of these people, and people like them, is that why you came?’

  The captain at the garrison camp at Playa Grande sat in his office and dully turned the pages of a newspaper and thought of his girl who was in Guatemala City, and awaited a response to the signal he had sent to the offices of the G-2. The signal requested orders as to what should be his response to the activities of a shit woman of Peace Brigades International. The captain knew in which village Alex Pitt stayed that night.

  The major of G-2 murmured, ‘If nothing were seen . . .’

  ‘On the open road,’ Benedicto prompted.

  ‘If it were at a place without witnesses . . .’

  ‘Alone on the open road.’

  ‘If it were in an area with evidence of subversive attacks . . .’

  ‘Foreigners are warned that the villages around Playa Grande should not be visited.’

  The major of G-2 scratched gently at the hairs in the lobe of his ear. ‘If it were possible to interrogate, to trace the lines of contact, to search deeper into the network of involvement . . .’

  A chilling and hollow laugh. ‘A person taken into custody, interrogated, is a witness.’

  ‘If . . .’

  Gord had said to the Archaeologist, quietly, would he be so kind as to leave him alone.

  He sat on the edge of the cleared area and his back was to the jungle and the machine gun was across his lap, and the cart was behind him with its angles gouging at his shoulders.

  There was a fire of leaping tongues in the centre of the cleared area, heaped high with wood. A pig had been killed, its throat cut with a knife after capture in a stampede chase. Meat slices were cooked over the fire, skewered on long sticks. They had drunk the fermented maize brew. Gord thought it was the atmosphere that Jorge would have wanted. There was a marimba frame that was played, the beaten tubes making a throbbing and compulsive music, not like anything he had heard.

  He sat alone and he watched.

  They were gathered in the sweep of a half-moon and they faced into the fire. Mixed amongst them, scattered with the women and men and children, were the guerrillas who had joined, and Eff and Vee and Zed, and the peasant villagers they had brought to join the march.

  Jorge stood on the far side of the fire so that the flames seemed to leap around him and his face was lit, and the camouflage of his tunic was highlighted, and his hands in their gestures with the rifle threw bouncing shadows onto the low walls of the homes behind him. It was done in an Indian dialect and Gord understood not a word. But it was the stage for Jorge. It was the first bravura performance, and the young man seemed to Gord to have thrown off the exhaustion that was common to all of them. He held his audience in spellbound silence. He was able to speak with a soft resonance that carried from the brightness of the fire’s side and across the half-glow of the middle ground and right to the darkness edge in which Gord sat.

  Gord watched Jorge play the recruiting sergeant, and he felt no pride that he had himself glanced across the men of this hidden community and judged them on their fitness and on their muscle and estimated what they could carry and how they would fight. At the end Jorge spoke of the future, kneeling close to the jumping flames, speaking with the conviction of a missionary father. Gord felt the sense of sadness because he could not know where any of them who joined would be led, and he felt no pride because there was the certainty of forced marches and battles and more forced marches and more killing fights on the road ahead to Guatemala City. There was the final peroration, Jorge on his feet again and standing tall and with his back straightened and his voice rising at the end in the call for their help. It was well done . . .

  The morning would show the truth of how well done. In the morning they would know how many of the men with the shoulders and the muscles and the quality to learn how to fight would join their march. On the map, Guatemala City and the Palacio Nacional were eighty-two miles away, direct line.

  There was the clatter of applause.

  There was the throb of the music, and the jugs of the fermented maize passed faster round the half-moon and the fire was piled higher and the wet wood crackled as with gunfire.

  The children danced.

  The children held hands. Gord thought he saw the one who had clutched the piglet in the hole. They lived in the mud and they lived in the wasteland of the jungle, and their mothers had dressed them in their best clothes, scrubbed shirts and washed dresses. The children held hands and they moved to the marimba music in a snaking and joined line. They wove close to the fire and were lit, and away from the fire and were in shadow. The line, once, twisted away from the fire and passed in front of Gord and the children’s small feet, bare and muddied, skipped over his legs. Dancing feet and dancing eyes and dancing smiles, and one boy reached out a hand to try to pull Gord to his feet, and he freed the child’s grip, and he locked his hands onto the barrel and stock of the machine gun. He watched the line of dancing children, silhouetted by the fire, meander away from him.

  Groucho was beside him.

  ‘Pretty, beautiful – they are the future.’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘It is what we fight for, the future of the pretty and beautiful children.’

  ‘Emotion doesn’t help you.’

  ‘If you have nothing to believe in, Gord, can you fight and win?’

  He stared down at the darkened barrel of the machine gun, and the fire’s light caught for a moment on the line of the belt of ammunition.

  Groucho asked, ‘May I tell you a poem, Gord?’

  ‘I never had much time for poetry.’

  He recited.

  ‘I,

  a man struggling

  in the middle of the century

  tell you: at the end

  of this century

  the children

  will be happy,

  they will laugh again,

  be born again in gardens.’

  They were just words. Words were empty. There had been children playing in the streets of Karbala, and there had been children standing in those streets and crying as they had driven away in the Land Rover for the desert waste, and there would have been children cowering in the cellars when the armour of the Republican Guard had smashed back into the holy city of the Shias.

  ‘From

  my bitter darkness

  I go beyond

  my own hard times

  and I see

  at the end of the line

  happy children!

  only happy!

  they appear

  they rise

  like a sun of butterflies

  after the tropical cloud burst.’

  He thought of the butterflies they had seen that day, and there were some that he had swatted at in his impatience as they fluttered into the sweat of his face. The gold and ochre and amber and scarlet of the wings he had lashed at . . .

  The fire was dying. The party was ending.

  Groucho said, ‘The poem was written by Otto René Castillo. He was captured by the troops of the government in 1967. I was twenty-five years old then, with my doctorate, and I was in love with the books of my study. He was captured and he was tortured and he was burned alive by the troops of the government. It was when I had read the poem that I left my books and went to the mountains and found the father of Rodolfo Jorge Ramírez. It was for the children.’

  ‘I hear you,’ Gord said.

  And Groucho was gone from beside him. He cradled the machine gun. He watched the children in the growing darkness and the chain of their hands had bee
n broken and the butterflies in light played at his mind.

  The Fireman gazed down onto the bodies.

  The bodies were in a ditch and the way they had fallen had made a dam for the water and a pool had formed to the right side of them.

  The Fireman and the men on his team were given the order. They splashed down into the ditch. They dragged out the upper body first and laid it without reverence on the earth of the roadside. The rain fell continuously. The rainy season had started early in Guatemala City, more rain that day than the day before, more rain that week than the week before. The first body was unmarked, no bruises and no cuts on the face, only the ligature line at the neck. It was near to a year since the Fireman had seen the death signature of the string that was fastened around the capucha. He scrambled down with another man into the ditch again. There were slugs in the sockets where the eyes of the second body had been. He could recognize the signs. The first had died too early, and the second had resisted interrogation too long. He imagined a knife moving closer to the eyebrow, eyelid, eyeball. Perhaps, one eyebrow, eyelid, eyeball taken out and then the confession to the interrogator. Perhaps only after the second eyebrow, eyelid, eyeball had been knifed had the confession come . . . He lifted the body clear.

  There were others who carried the two bodies to the back hatch of the fire engine.

  He was given a cigarette by a policeman. The policeman was talkative, rambling because of what he had seen.

  The policeman told him the story that was told, what he had heard from a friend who had a brother whose wife worked as a waitress in the officers’ dining hall of the estado mayor. The waitress at the High Command officers’ dining hall had told her husband who had told his brother who had told his friend that she had heard the colonels and brigadiers discussing an aircraft landing in the Petén, and an action on the road between Sayaxché and Chinajá in which many soldiers had died. It was the story that the policeman with the cigarettes offered to the Fireman.