“But I like this job sometimes,” she had whispered to me, “and I like you. Come back anytime you’re feeling better.”
There was cruelty in her kindness. The power her beauty held over me was painful. Kindness only twisted the knife. So that night I went to her, wanting to fuck her the way Jefferson fucked—hard, mechanical, discharging a need, masturbating into a pussy. “You shit in the toilet, you come in a woman,” he had told me. I wanted her to be nothing, for Luisa to be nothing, and for my desire to disappear.
First, I drank five or six shots, enough to deaden my senses and my awareness of her and other people, enough so that I felt I was swimming inside my own body. This was enough to let the devil inside me, and when I was alone with her I took her and fucked her with hatred, and I released the poison, and then she took my money. I hated myself then, and I wanted to apologize, but for what? She was a whore. This was her job, I told myself, and she had said she liked it sometimes, though even in my haze I could see in her face that she had not liked it. I had hurt her somehow. My soul swam in drunkenness. I tried to give her more money and she said no, and then I said it was for her child, not her, and she took it. I would never speak to Flor again. But my virginity was gone. I had cured myself.
• • •
Not long after that Jefferson took me up into the cold mountains, alone. We reached a dirt trail and a little farm at the edge of a mountain pass, and we got off our motos and began to walk.
Flowers were in bloom. I wondered if Jefferson knew I had hid information from him about Luisa. Perhaps, I thought, Jefferson was going to kill me. So I took great care to look not at him but at the trees and flowers. There were trees full of fruit with branches that spread out at the base and then curved upward to the sky. There were trees with deep red and purple flowers with yellow stems that shone so brightly it seemed they had their own inner light leaping up to greet the sun. Jefferson stopped and pointed out two hummingbirds with brilliant blue coloring. One had its beak in an orchid that was strangling its way around a tree branch. The other flittered angrily above. “They’re going to fight,” Jefferson said. And he was right. As the first bird drank deep from the flower, the other dove down, stabbing its beak into the first bird’s neck. Jefferson clapped, delighted as a child. It was strange to see beautiful creatures fight.
We walked for about two hours, and the trees changed as we got higher. Tall, narrow trees shot up, then burst at the top in a star of thin green palms. We walked through a cloud, and mist and haze surrounded the forest. The sunlight, already weak through the vegetation, became further shrouded. Everything appeared through dark layers of suffocated light. As we climbed I felt as though we were moving back through time, to older and older forest, each step taking us further into the past, to the beginning of time, just after God made the trees and flowers but before he made us humans, and before he declared his creation good.
Eventually we emerged into a clearing where we could look out on the valley. The sun returned in all its force. Clouds dotted the mountainside, some level with us, some below us, some high above.
“Stay here,” Jefferson told me. And he disappeared into the wood. I turned to look at the view but could feel him behind me, a prickling in my back. If he was about to kill me, what should I do? Should I pray? And to who? To the broken, screaming Christ of my childhood? To Luisa, who had seen me and known me for what I was? To God, who has no mercy?
Jefferson returned with firewood in his hands, and he dumped it on the ground.
“Comandante?” I said.
“Yes?” he said. But I did not know how to respond. He disappeared into the wood, and then again returned with more wood, and he disappeared again, and again, until we had a large pile.
Then Jefferson arranged the wood, stacking it into a little structure, almost like a building or a cage. And he stood before me, staring closely into my eyes. I did my best not to tremble. To this day, I am sure that had I trembled, he would have cut my throat and burned my body there, high in the mountains. Instead, he pointed to the forest behind us. “Go,” he said, “and get more.”
So I went into the forest, following a little path, and I saw, next to a pile of firewood, the corpse of a naked man chained by the neck to a tree. His head was slumped and his body covered in bruises. I walked to him, knowing this was what Jefferson wanted me to see, and I put my hand under his chin and lifted his face to mine, and Osmin’s dead eyes looked back at me. His mouth fell open, as if the dead man were about to speak. I took some water from the canteen on my belt, and I poured it in my hands and washed his face, and then I let his head down and picked up some firewood and carried it back to Jefferson, who said nothing.
I did not ask him why, or what Osmin
