Life During Wartime

‘All right,’ said Debora, and then: ‘No, I can’t. The idea of you touching me… it’s repulsive. Get out of here.’

Mingolla opened the door, and Ruy spun around to face him.

Debora was standing in the bathroom door. ‘He was just going,’ she said calmly.

‘That right, Ruy?’ said Mingolla.

Ruy shot Debora a resentful glance, then stalked from the room.

‘I was…’ Debora began.

‘I heard,’ said Mingolla.

‘I was trying to degrade him,’ she said. ‘I thought if he could see what a fool he was acting, he’d leave me alone. I think it worked.’

‘It won’t last,’ said Mingolla, throwing himself onto the bed. ‘The son of a bitch isn’t going to quit.’

‘Maybe not… but I want to handle him myself. Please don’t do anything foolish.’

‘How foolish am I allowed to be?’

She lay down beside him, flung an arm across his chest. ‘Please don’t do anything. Promise me.’

‘Sooner or later he’ll do something even if I don’t.’

‘He might not, he might get over it.’

‘Depends how far you’re willing to go. A quickie in some dark corner might diminish your air of unattainability.’

She frowned and edged away. ‘You don’t understand how hard it is having to fend him off. I know you don’t think—’

‘The thing is,’ he cut in, ‘I know you’re capable of screwing him if you thought it’d save the goddamn revolution. Maybe that’s the right attitude to take. Maybe we should all hop in the sack together and get rid of our frustrations.’

She tensed, and he felt her anger thickening the air. Laughter from the courtyard. Relaxed, confident Sotomayor laughter.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It’s not you, it’s everything.’

‘Just be quiet,’ she said, turning to face the wall. ‘Let me alone.’

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘But only if you let me touch you.’

Shortly after that he fell asleep with his clothes on, without making up. It had been a long time since he’d had a dream that he remembered, but that night he dreamed he was lying in a featureless void and straining to dream. At length he saw a dream approaching, a thin slice of vivid color and motion against the blackness. He awaited its arrival eagerly, but as it drew near he realized that the dream had come in the form of an enormous blade, and he awakened just in time to avoid being cut in half by it. He sat up in bed, frightened, wanting to be comforted, consoled. Debora was inches away, but half-believing that the dream had spoken to their irresolute condition, he doubted she could provide what he needed.

Two days after this, Mingolla broke into Ruy’s room and stole his notebook filled with poems and meditations about Debora. The notebook, he had decided, would give him the tool with which he could defuse Ruy as a threat; and yet he was not altogether sure why he wanted to defuse him, because he did not perceive Ruy as a serious threat. It seemed to him a whimsical act, one predicated on a desire to recalibrate his emotions, a motive similar —he suspected—to that underlying Ruy’s decision to pursue Debora. Seeing this resemblance to Sotomayor behavior in himself was alarming, but he was unable to deny the impulse.

The contents of the notebook made Mingolla envious. Ruy’s observations on Debora’s character were more detailed than his own, and though he chalked this up to the fact that Ruy had the advantage of distance, the rationalization failed to diminish his envy. A few of the passages were quite well written, and one in particular struck Mingolla with its intensity and sincerity.

… It’s the thought of your beauty that makes me wake, sometimes, from the middle of dreams I can’t remember, it’s not the image of your face, the softness of your skin, but just the sudden awareness of beauty, that first strike before any of the details come clear, that jolts me hard into the world and leaves me broken on the shoals of my bed. For a moment I’m angry that you’re not there, but then anger planes into longing, and I stand up, pace, and haunt the darkness of my bathroom, thinking of remedies. I see there’s no reason for anger, no reason we should make the right choices, no reason we shouldn’t ruin our lives… after all, our lives are ruined already, and what sense is there in denying the world that waits to transform us into lumps of pain and wizened hairless dolls, and why should we assign value to love or any emotion that menaces our conception of the expectable? And having agonized for an hour over all this, having explored hope and hopelessness, in the end it’s the thought of your beauty that makes me lie back on the bed, heavy in the head, weighting me down so that I plummet through the edges of sleep and drown in the middle of dreams I won’t remember.

This passage and others firmed Mingolla’s resolve in that they caused him for the first time to see Ruy as a man; he was not inclined to see him that way, and so in order to reduce Ruy once again to the status of a characterless enemy, he took an irrevocable action against him.

Twice a week Marina Estil held what she called ‘group therapy’ in her hotel. She had tried to persuade Mingolla to join in, but he had refused, not wanting to involve himself more than necessary in Sotomayor business. However, on the night after he stole the notebook, he went to the hotel for the purpose of attending one of these sessions. Marina’s hotel was located three blocks from the Casa Gamboa and served as lodging for the leaders of the negotiating teams, both Sotomayor and Madradona. Mingolla arrived a half-hour early, and rather than standing around the lobby, he went into the lounge and sat down in front of a TV set that was hooked to a satellite dish on the roof. He asked the lounge’s sole occupant—a young Madradona man—if he minded the TV being on, and then flipped through the channels until he came to one showing a line of plodding soldiers moving up a hillside under an overcast sky, and superimposed on this, shot in fiery letters, the legend: William Corson’s War Stories. Corson had visited the Ant Farm during Mingolla’s tour, and though Mingolla hadn’t met him, by all reports he was a good guy. Baylor had done an interview with him, and when Mingolla had asked what sort of man the journalist was, Baylor had only said, ‘The guy gets high.’ Which had been Baylor’s standard for acceptance. The credits rolled, and Corson strolled into view of the camera, the line of soldiers continuing uphill at his rear. He was bearded, tall, dressed in fatigues, with a hooked nose and fleshy lips; he looked, Mingolla thought, a little bit like a thinner, younger Fidel Castro.

‘Behind me,’ Corson said, ‘you see members of the First Infantry heading toward the fighting north of Lake Izabal. Once they cross that hill they’ll be in a hot zone, a zone that’s been hot for nearly three years, a battle without resolution. That fact speaks to the character of the war. Battles flourish like hothouse plants in the midst of pacified territory with no apparent justification other than a command strategy that can be best described as cryptic. All wars have their character. World War One was called the War to End War. World War Two was a righteous crusade against a legitimate madman. Vietnam has been countenanced as both an exercise in the demonic and as a gross political misjudgment. And this war… well, the poet Kieran Davies has pronounced it the vast sputtering signal of the Age of Impotence, the evil counterpart of topless tennis matches and fast food solutions to the nutritional problem.” Davies’s imagery has a basis in…’

‘Very sad,’ said a voice beside Mingolla.

The Madradona man had taken the adjoining chair. He was in his twenties, pudgy, smiling, wearing a red Coca-Cola T-shirt and chinos. ‘But soon,’ he went on, gesturing at the screen, ‘it will be all over, yes?’

Mingolla shrugged. ‘I guess.’

‘Oh, yes.’ The man patted his chest. ‘We will end it soon.’

‘Terrific.’

‘You are Meengolla, no?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I am Chapo. Pleased to meet you.’ Chapo held out a hand, and reluctantly Mingolla shook it. ‘Where are you from in the United States?’

‘New York.’

‘New York City? But this is wonderful! I am living a year in New York, in Green-witch Village.’

‘How ’bout that.’ Mingolla tried to get back into Corson’s monologue, but Chapo was relentless.

‘I love New York,’ he said. ‘I love especially the Mets. Such a wonderful team! Do you like the Mets?’