Tours of the Black Clock

147

IT’S THE SIGHT OF the little girl that does it. We come into the village late at night, past midnight; a mile outside, the rebels know something’s wrong. There’s an odor in the air and a low din, which turns out to be the flies. The flies are everywhere in the village; the bodies of the villagers are black with them. Even for the guerrillas who’ve seen such atrocities, it’s shocking; but for me it’s more, the manifested vision of everything I’ve known but never had to see. The guerrillas stealthily sweep the village to make sure Germans aren’t waiting. Lucia must decide whether to burn the village and the bodies or take the time to bury them. She opts to bury them. She sends a two-man scouting party on to the next village to see if there’s a priest. It’s as the men are digging that I come across the dead little girl. I don’t want to talk about her. I don’t want to tell what they’ve done to her. I … it’s enough to explain that someone has pinned to her a note, which says, as far as my own German can translate, “Another virgin for the Leader.” The girl, she must be all of eight. She’s small enough that it’s not so difficult imagining Courtney that age, if she’d lived a little longer to become that age. I turn my back on the girl. I can’t even bring myself to remove the note, to pick her up and carry her in my arms to the graves. I turn my back on her and go out beyond the houses of the village to where I’ve left the old man lying in a clearing. Another virgin for the Leader, is all I keep saying to myself; I guess I’m still saying it when I find him lying there in the clearing. Silently, without a word, I just begin to beat him. I beat him and he’s staring up at me with his eyes popping out, and the guerrillas come along and pull me off him when I’m within an inch of his life. They pull me off and it’s clear that, in their own rage over the village, I’ve become to them the German who murders old people and children. You vicious bastard, Lucia says to me, while the others hold me back and someone tends to the old man. Another of the guerrillas, a short stocky Mayan who’s second in command and hasn’t spoken a word of English the entire time I’ve been around, speaks it quite well now. He says now, This man’s like the rest of them. They stare at me; if they’ve ever considered shooting me, it’s never seemed a more reasonable solution than at this moment. The old man lies at my feet bleeding from his nose and ears. For a moment I’m about to tell them. I’m about to tell them who he is, whether they’ll believe it or not, and I don’t suppose they would, but I’m about to tell them because I’ve been waiting to tell someone. And then I know I won’t tell them. I won’t because I believe it’s better they villainize me, a big violent man my whole life, than an old weak sick man. Because there’s always the one awful chance that they will believe me, that they’d look into his face and eyes and see that it’s true, at which point the pure righteous wrath of their fight would have to accommodate the humanity of his evil. They’re fighting for an age in which the heart and consciousness have not been stripped of the reference points that have become denied to time and space: they’ve stared into the bloody rorschach of the Twentieth Century and seen the budding of a flower. You can’t do that to them, I say to myself. If you do one good thing in your life, I say to myself, let it be this, that you leave them their faith, that in your monstrous form you reaffirm their vision of what’s monstrous, and what’s therefore to be defeated; and that in his weak helpless form you reaffirm their vision of what’s weak and helpless, and therefore to be defended. With one shudder from my torso up, I retrieve what havoc I need to shake the guerrillas free of me, and hope that in the process I provoke them to shoot me. They almost do. But Lucia barks a command within an inch of my own life, and instead throws me a shovel. With the others I return to the village to dig. I remove the note from the little girl’s body before anyone can see it, and bury her myself.