Life During Wartime

sympathy would be as ingenuous and ill-informed as his lack of concern. He had no way of understanding what it would be like to starve in the hills. The hardships he had endured seemed by comparison a privileged form of agony, and just knowing that made him want to pay some penance.

The candles were snuffed out, and Alvina lay down beside him. He edged away, afraid of contact, afraid she might contaminate him with principle and lead him down a risky path. She smelted of earth, of musky heat, and those smells and the action of the drug inflamed his desire. And as if she sensed this, she said, ‘If you want me again, you have to pay.’

He couldn’t frame a reply that would convey his mood, but at last he said, ‘I can get you out of here.’

‘No, you can’t.’

‘But I can.’ He propped himself on an elbow, trying to see her in the dark. ‘I…’

‘The government has my sister and her children. If we were to escape, they’d die.’

‘They could be located, they—’

‘Stop it,’ she said.

They lay in silence, and the screams and gabble of the Barrio seemed to add a pressure to the darkness, squeezing black air from his lungs.

‘I don’t understand,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘You… I don’t know you well, and I don’t like you very much, yet I trust you.’

‘I’m sorry you don’t like me.’

‘Don’t feel put upon,’ she said. ‘I don’t like most people.’

Implicit in her statement, Mingolla thought, was a studied rejection of life, and he pictured how she must have been back in the days when politics was in the hills, when everything seemed possible: an ordinarily pretty Indian girl imbued with extraordinary zeal and passion. He wished he could help her, do something for her, and remembered the stack of romance novels.

‘Do you like making love?’ he asked. ‘I don’t mean do you like… your work, but would you like it with someone you cared about?’

‘Go to hell,’ she said.

‘I’m serious.’

‘So am I.’

‘I could make you like it.’

She laughed. ‘I’ve heard that before.’

‘No, really. Suppose I could hypnotize you, make you feel passion? Would you want me to do that?’

The mattress rustled as she turned to face him, and he could feel her eyes searching him out. ‘Ten lempira,’ she said. ‘And you can make me crow like a rooster.’

‘That’s not what I’m talking about.’

She reached down, fondled his genitals. ‘Come on, man,’ she said bitterly. ‘Ten lempira. You’ll forget all about the other girls.’

Humiliated, he pushed her hand away.

‘No?’ she said. ‘Well, maybe when you’re feeling better.’

He was tempted to coerce her pleasure, but couldn’t bring himself to do it, unable to shake the conviction that she was his superior.

‘I don’t understand,’ said Alvina after a while. ‘I just can’t figure anything out anymore.’

Morning in the Barrio was different from night only in that when sections of the roof were lifted, chutes of gray light spilled in, and people stood beneath the open sky, risking mortal harm for a glimpse of freedom; otherwise the same smoky orange gloom prevailed among the black beams and fires. The center of the Barrio, where Leon and Mingolla sat in a shadowed niche, featured a row of stucco houses strung out across the width of the prison; and in one of them, a house with a white wall and black shutters, and an oil drum fire burning at its corner, lived Opolonio de Zedegui. ‘See those four guys out front?’ said Leon, inserting the tip of his knife into his packet of frost. ‘They’re always there. His bodyguards. You’ll have to do something to get rid of them. A diversion, maybe.’ He inhaled from the knife blade. His black eyes widened, his cheeks hollowed. ‘Chingaste! This is good stuff!’

The four men ranged in front of de Zedegui’s house were young and well muscled, and Mingolla could tell from their slack attitudes that they were under psychic control. De Zedegui was being terribly incautious: these men might well have been the signal that had alerted American agents to his presence.

‘If you’ve got more of this stuff, I know some guys who can help,’ said Leon.

‘We’ll talk about it later.’ Mingolla did a bladeful of frost and looked around. He was beginning to get used to the noise and the smell, and he wondered if the place was growing on him. He chuckled, and Leon asked what was funny. ‘Nothing,’ said Mingolla.

Leon laughed, too, as if ‘nothing’ were a hilarious concept. Sharp lines spread from the comers of his eyes, making his reddish brown skin look papery. ‘So,’ he said after a silence, ‘you’re her cousin, eh? Strange she never mentioned you. She talks about family all the time.’

‘She didn’t know me,’ said Mingolla. ‘Different branch of the family.’

‘Ah,’ said Leon. ‘That explains it.’

Mingolla had more of the drug. It was doing nice things to his head, but was tearing up his nose, and he thought he should start taking it under his tongue. Or stop taking it altogether. But he had become so used to being drugged, the indulgence seemed natural.

‘I thought all her people lived around Coban,’ said Leon.

‘Guess not.’

‘Y’know,’ said Leon, ‘it’s crazy you coming here just to kill this guy. In here, he’s dead already.’

‘I suppose so.’

‘So what’s your real reason?’

Mingolla saw that he would have to do something soon about Leon’s suspicious nature, but he felt too loose and composed to want to bother with it now. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said, coming to his feet.

They set off toward Alvina’s, and Mingolla wondered if the place had grown on him, though more likely it was the drug that caused the Barrio to appear… not beautiful, exactly, but painterly. Everywhere were tableaux that had the inner radiance and important stillness he associated with the Old Masters. There, three men roughing up a woman, who was clawing, kicking, and all of them looking up as the roof above opened to admit a shaft of white sunlight that played over them, freezing and transfiguring the action. And there, almost lost in the shadow of a thatched lean-to, an old hag straight out of Goya, her ravaged face framed by a black shawl, staring with perplexed astonishment at a feather in her hand. And the whole of the place with its black divisions, its smoky orange segments of misery, leaping flames, and silhouetted imps, was a collection of pre- Renaissance triptyches. He could be like the guy who painted murals in the bombed villages, he could stay here forever and ensure immortality by memorializing a life of terror and deprivation.… A change in the noise, a wave of louder and more agitated noise rolling toward them, brought him alert. In the distance he saw a line of masked guards with whips and rifles driving a mob ahead of them.

‘This way!’ Leon grabbed his arm, yanking Mingolla toward the wall of houses. ‘We’ll be safe in there.’

Mingolla had a bad feeling. ‘Why there?’

‘They’re not hunting anybody… it’s just a sweep.’ Leon pulled at him. ‘They always do it about this time; they never check the houses.’

People were running in every direction, shouting, screaming, bright spears of sound that shattered at their peak, and Mingolla was slammed into a beam by someone’s shoulder. Diseased flowers swirling, eddying around him, all the same kind, with patterns of black mouths and empty eyes and mottled brown petals like skin, a wilted vaseful of them washing down a drain. Forked twig hand clutching his arm, wrinkled mouth saying, Please, please, and being swept away. He fought toward Leon, but was thrown off course by the tidal flow of the mob. The guards were closing, he could see the patterns of bloody muscle on their masks, hear their whips cracking, and shouts of pain were mixed in now with those of panic. A little boy clung to his leg with the desperation of a small animal hanging onto a branch in a gale, but was scraped off as Mingolla beat a path through a clot of people stopping up the flow. The screams fed into the smoky light, making it pulse, making the flames leap higher in the oil drums, and