The Armies

~ ~ ~

Monday? Another letter from my daughter. Geraldina brings it to me, accompanied by Eusebito. I do not open it. What for?

“I already know what she says,” I explain to Geraldina, and shrug my shoulders, smiling to myself.

Yes. Smiling and shrugging my shoulders; why do I not read my daughter’s ninth letter, even if just out of affection, although I know in advance what she says? She is asking about Otilia, and one day I shall have to answer her. Not today. Tomorrow? And what shall I tell her? That I do not know, I do not know. The letter slips from my hands, a dead thing, lands at my feet. We are in my garden, sitting in the middle of the rubble; Geraldina picks up the letter and hands it to me, I put it in my pocket, folding it.

Then the boy’s face appears before me, he plants himself in front of my eyes, like I did to him, at the table.

“You asked me about her,” he says.

“Yes,” I say. But who is she? And I find, very far away in my memory: Gracielita: the two children were prisoners.

The boy’s face is stunned; it is a rapid memory, that terrifies Geraldina and me, without knowing exactly why.

“We were looking at a butterfly,” he tells us. “The butterfly flew, behind, or around, we couldn’t see it, it was gone.

“‘I’ve just swallowed the butterfly,’ she told me. ‘I think I’ve swallowed it, get it out,’ she said.”

She opened her mouth all the way; she was someone else, disfigured by fear, her hands at her temples, her eyes popping in disgust, her mouth open wider and wider, an immense round darkness where he thought he could see the iridescent butterfly flapping its wings against a black sky, going further and further in. He put two fingers on her tongue, and pushed. Nothing else occurred to him.

“‘There’s nothing,’” I told her.

“‘I’ve swallowed it then,’ she screamed. She was going to cry.”

He saw on her lips a film of the fine powder that detaches from butterflies’ wings. Then he saw the butterfly crawl out of her hair, flutter a little and soar up to the other side of the trees, in to the clear sky.

“‘There’s the butterfly,’ I shouted. ‘It only brushed you with its wings.’”

She caught sight of the butterfly as it disappeared. She held back her tears. With a sigh of relief she saw again that the butterfly was flying far away. It flew in front of the sun, far from here. Only then did they look at each other for the first time, and it really was as if they had just met — in captivity. A shared joke made them laugh: were they playing and tumbling in the garden, their faces together, not letting go of each other, as if they never wanted to be separated again, while the men were coming to take them? But he looked at his fingers, still wet from Gracielita’s tongue.

“And Gracielita?” Geraldina asks her son, as if she had just realized, or understood at the last moment that all this time she had thought only of her son. “Why didn’t they bring her?”

“She was going to come, they had put us both up on the same horse.”

The boy’s voice trembles, broken by fear, by bitterness.

“One of those men came and said he was Gracielita’s uncle, and he took her. He made her get down off the horse, and took her.”

“That’s all we needed,” I say to myself out loud, “Gracielita turning up here in a uniform, dealing out shots left and right, filling the town she was born in full of lead.”

I burst out laughing, unable to hold back my laughter.

Geraldina looks at me in surprise, disapproving; she moves away, taking her son by the hand. They cross through the breach in the wall and disappear.

I keep laughing, sitting there, my face in my hands, uncontrollable. The laughter hurts my gut, my heart.

Thursday? Mayor Fermín Peralta cannot return to San José.

“I am under threat,” he reveals, and no one says specifically by whom.

Enough to know he is still under threat, what more? Not long ago his family left town, to be reunited with him. Now he deals with things from Teruel, a relatively safe town — compared to ours, with its landmines, and the reminder of war every now and then.

Professor Lesmes returned only to collect his things and say goodbye. We were with him, six or seven regulars, at Chepe’s, sitting at the tables outside. Among us was Hey, distant but alert, a beer in his hand. Apparently, Lesmes had forgotten that Chepe’s wife, and my own wife, had been kidnapped.

“Did you hear?” he asked us, almost happily. “They kidnapped a dog in Bogotá.”

One or two smiled, amazed: was it a joke?

“I saw it on the news. Didn’t you see it?” he asked us, not remembering that we, without electricity, no longer had access to television, and perhaps for that reason we chatted more, or sat in communal silences, for whole afternoons, at Chepe’s.

By that point nobody was smiling.

“And what was this dog called?” asked Hey, strangely interested.

“Dundí,” Lesmes told him.

“And?” Hey urged him on.

“A purebred cocker spaniel; what more do you want to know, the color? The smell? It was pink, with black spots.”

“And?” Hey continued, actually interested.

Lesmes looked resigned.

“He showed up dead,” he said at last.

Hey sighed heavily.

“It’s true,” said Lesmes, contradicting the incredulity of his listeners. “The news program was tracking it. It was all the country needed.”

A very long silence followed his words.

Lesmes ordered another round of beer. The serving girl brought them, unhappily. Lesmes explained that he would travel with a military convoy, back to Teruel, and from there he would go onto Bogotá.

“I hope they don’t blow us up on the way,” he said.

And again, silence, while we drank.

I was about to take my leave, when he started up again.

“It’s this country,” he said, licking his sparse moustache. “If you go down the list, president by president, they’ve all screwed up.”

Nobody replied at all to his words. Lesmes, who really seemed to feel like talking, answered himself: “Yes,” he said, “when it comes to the crunch every president fucked things up, each in his own way. Why? I don’t know, who can know? Egotism, stupidity? But history will take their portraits down off the walls. Because, when it comes time for tea …”

“What tea, damn it,” said Chepe, growing exasperated. “Coffee, at least.”

“When it comes time for tea,” Lesmes carried on, unperturbed, dazzled by his own words, “Nobody has any faith.” And he downed his beer in one gulp.

He waited for someone to say something, but we all remained silent.

“San José still is and will go on being vulnerable,” he added. “The only thing I recommend to everyone is to get out, and the sooner the better. He who wants to die, stay.”

He was still forgetting about the kidnapping of Chepe’s wife, who had given birth in captivity.

Chepe dismissed him then and there, in his way, with a shout, and kicked the bottle-covered table.

“First, you get the hell out of my shop, you son of a bitch,” he told him, and jumped on him.

I saw, in front of me, the others pulling them apart. Hey smiled to himself, expectant.

But Lesmes was right: for anyone who wanted to die, here was his tomb, where he stood.

As for me, it does not matter. I am already dead.

Saturday? The young doctor has also left San José, as have the nurses. No one is in charge of the improvised hospital. And the Red Cross trucks, which supplied the population with food and fuel, have not been back to visit us. We have had news of another skirmish, a few kilometers from here, near Maestro Claudino’s cabin. There were twelve deaths. Twelve. And among the twelve a child. It will not be long before they come back, that we know, and who will come back? It does not matter, they will come back.

The contingents of soldiers, who while away their time in San José, for months, as if it were reborn peacetime, have been considerably reduced. In any case, with them or without them the events of war will always loom, intensified. If we see fewer soldiers, we are not informed of this in an official way; the only declaration from the authorities is that everything is under control; we hear it on the news-on small battery-operated radios, because we still have no electricity — we read it in the delayed newspapers; the President affirms that nothing is happening here, neither here nor anywhere in the country is there a war; according to him Otilia is not missing, and Mauricio Rey, Dr. Orduz, Sultana and Fanny the school caretaker and so many others of this town died of old age, and I laugh again, why do I laugh just when I discover that all I want to do is sleep without waking? It is fear, this fear, this country, which I prefer to ignore in its entirety, playing the idiot with myself, to stay alive, or with an apparent desire to stay alive, because it is very possible, really, that I am dead, I tell myself, good and dead in hell, and I laugh again.

Wednesday? Two army patrols, operating separately, attacked each other, and all due to a bad informant, who warned of the presence of guerrillas on the outskirts of town: four soldiers died and several were injured. Rodrigo Pinto, our neighbor up on the mountain, came to visit me, alarmed: he told me that Captain Berrío, in his district, accompanied by soldiers, warned that if he found evidence of collaborators he was going to take steps, and he said it in person, shack by shack, interrogating not just the men and women but children under four, who barely knew how to talk.

“He’s mad,” Rodrigo told me.

“Truly mad. He wasn’t removed from his post as we all thought he would be,” I tell him. “I saw him shoot civilians with my own eyes.”

“Mad, but that doesn’t surprise us,” says Rodrigo. “Far from town, in the mountains, what surprises us is that we’re still alive.”

Rodrigo Pinto, who went with me and helped to bury Maestro Claudino, a week after I found him decapitated, dead in the company of his dog, on the blue mountain, where you still see vultures circling around, swears that despite the sorrows he is not going to leave the mountain, and that his wife agrees.

“There we’ll stay,” he says.

We are talking at the edge of the cliff, on the outskirts of town, where Rodrigo will select the path that will take him back up to his mountain. He repeats that he is not leaving, as if he wanted to convince himself, or as if trying to get me to back up his proposal, his possibly lethal obstinacy in staying.

“Another mountain would be better,” he says, “further away, even further, much further away.”

He took a bottle of aguardiente out of his bag and offered me a swig. Night was falling.

“You see that mountain?” he asked, pointing to the distant peak of another mountain, in the middle of the rest, but much further away, inland: “I’m going to go there. It’s far. Good thing. I’m going up to the top of it, and nobody will fucking see me again. I have a good machete. I only need to take a pregnant sow, a cockerel and a hen, like Noah. And my wife wants to come with me, we won’t be short of yucca. You see the mountain, don’t you, profesor? Beautiful, productive mountain. That mountain could be my life. My father raised me in the mountains. For now I'll stay on the neighboring mountain, profesor. You know it, you’ve been there, you know I live there with my wife and children; the next one’s been born now, there are seven of us now, but even if it’s just on yucca and cacao, we are going to survive. We’ll be expecting you there, when you have your Otilia with you. Then we’ll all go, why don’t we all go?”

We have another drink, finish it off, and Rodrigo throws the empty bottle into the ravine. But he still does not leave: stony, his eyes on the distant mountain. He squeezes his white hat tightly in his hands, twists it: his characteristic gesture. And then he scratches his head, and his voice changes.

“Dreams don’t cost anything,” he says, and, almost immediately: “Wake up,” and we both laugh.

It was at that moment the little soldier appeared; he was, in fact, a boy, almost a uniformed child. He had probably been beside us the whole time, without our noticing. But he seemed agitated, and he had his finger on the trigger, although he was pointing his rifle at the ground.

“What are you laughing at?” he asked us. “What’s so funny? Do I look as if I’m joking?”

Rodrigo and I looked at each other slackjawed. And laughed some more. Inevitable.

“Friend,” I said to the soldier, and I suffered, in my eyes, his opaque, sharp eyes, “now you’re not going to tell us we cannot laugh.”

I shook Rodrigo’s hand heartily, in farewell. Rodrigo put on his white hat and set off along the path, without turning around to look. He had a long walk ahead of him. I returned home, with the soldier behind me, in silence. I sensed that they were keeping an eye on Rodrigo, and, by extension, they were keeping an eye on me. Just a block from my house another group of soldiers came to meet me; were they going to arrest me, as on the day I got up too early?

“Let him go on,” I heard Captain Berrío say.

Tuesday? Others are leaving now: General Palacios and his “troop” of animals. Hey tells us at Chepe’s that he witnessed the evacuation of General Palacios’s most valuable animals by helicopter. Ever since the arrival of this general, whom we almost never saw, we knew that he had devoted body and soul to developing a zoo; a zoo we never saw, or which we only saw in black-and-white photographs, in the pages of a Sunday newspaper. And we read that there were sixty ducks, seventy tortoises, ten caimans, twenty-seven herons, five stone-curlews, twelve capybaras, thirty dairy cattle and a hundred and ninety horses on the hundred hectares of the San José military garrison, in the care of the General and his men. Military medics attended this contingent of bipeds and quadrupeds. Every morning, in the company of his purebred dog imported from the United States, the General did the rounds of the garrison to supervise closely the care of his animals. A macaw was his special favorite: so spoiled that he put an officer in charge of its diet, but so inquisitive that it was electrocuted on the garrison’s perimeter fence. Ever since he was a colonel, Palacios has been devoted to animals.

He also claims to have planted more than five thousand trees.

“As if he planted them himself,” Hey says, and also tells us that he saw Hortensia Galindo and her twins leave town in one of those cargo helicopters, full of animals.