And then I reached Rioclaro, and the numbers changed. A surge in votes for the Social and Political Front. I sucked my teeth and looked up at the archivist.
“What are you going to do with this information?” he said.
I answered him honestly. “I don’t know.”
• • •
It began with small things. Driving into the streets of Rioclaro and firing guns. Leaving flyers telling people to leave their homes. Then, a few days later, delivering invitations to funerals, with the names of living residents of Rioclaro listed as the deceased.
“By the presidential election,” Jefferson told me, “this town must not exist.”
That gave us several months. First to create a climate of fear. Make the citizens question what was going to happen, make emergency plans, think about what they will take and what they will leave when the time comes. Get them to imagine leaving the only land they’ve ever known, which had nurtured them and their parents and grandparents, and where they had dreamed of raising their children.
“The goal is to avoid a massacre. Nobody wants a massacre right now,” Jefferson said. “If you kill too many people, there are consequences.”
My role was to identify the resistance. The only person beyond the mayor I was sure was involved was Luisa, but I didn’t want to give her name to Jefferson. So I reached out to people in the town, and found out who mattered, who had influence.
The first was Juan Camilo. Jefferson sent four paras dressed in guerrilla uniforms to find him in his fields, rob him and beat him, and then smash his kneecaps with rocks so that he would never work fields again. A week later, the same four went to the home of Ricardo Gómez Gonzalo and raped his wife and daughter. Jefferson sent out paras to spread the word in Rioclaro that, because of the town’s disloyalty, they were no longer going to protect them from guerrillas and bandits. “Rioclaro is no longer safe,” they repeated to everyone who would listen. As they left they fired rifles and broke windows. Then they shot Leonel Fernando on his way to sell goods in La Vigia. He fell off his mule and was dragged hundreds of meters before another traveler stopped the animal and found him, bleeding not only from the bullet wound but from cuts and scrapes, bruised by rocks and sticks in the path, almost but not quite dead. I went to the hospital to check on him, and to hear from the doctors that he’d survive. He hardly looked like a man anymore.
“That is the best that could have happened,” Jefferson told me. “Not quite death but almost death. It makes less news outside of Rioclaro, but inside Rioclaro he’ll be a constant reminder of what it means to stay.”
Villagers began leaving. To walk the streets of Rioclaro was to hardly breathe, to be choked by the fear in the air. It only needed one final push.
“That,” Jefferson said, “requires death.”
• • •
When we moved on Rioclaro, Jefferson had his men take the piano out of Sánchez’s house and bring it to the center of the town square. Luisa and the mayor followed us, filled with fear and sadness and rage. The edges of the square were slowly filling with scared people as Jefferson’s paras beat through the town, driving everyone to witness. We set the piano down at the south end of the square, by the church.
Jefferson pointed to the piano and said, “Who plays?” And the mayor, terrified, pointed his finger at Luisa, now crouched on the ground, face in her hands. And Jefferson stepped over and touched her arm gently. And he said, “Ma’am, I would like to hear you play.” And Luisa looked up at her father, the mayor. And the mayor nodded his pale, frightened face, and she let Jefferson lift her up and escort her to the piano as if onto a stage. The fire I had seen in her was gone.
“Play,” said Jefferson. And Luisa looked at her father, and her father looked at Jefferson, and Luisa shook her head angrily, some of her fire back, where she’d found it I do not know, and she said, “I’ll play the Appassionata.”
She lifted the seat of the piano bench and pulled out papers with notes on them that she put on the ledge above the keys. Then she sat at the piano, and she gathered stillness around her. The crowd at the edges of the square, whose eyes had all been on Jefferson or on the men with their guns who surrounded them, seemed to fix on her, and the strange thing Jefferson had her doing. She laid her hands gently on the keys. Her hands, which I had first thought too large, and ugly, like a man’s hands stitched onto a woman, now looked lovely, and right. And she started to play.
The opening notes were dark and slow. Then she fluttered her fingers, a quick moment of light before it returned to dark. And then more flutters, and more dark, and quick dark stabbing notes struck with fat heavy fingers.
Jefferson grinned and gave the mayor a thumbs-up. He liked a good show, and this was a good show.
To me, it was not a good show. I did not understand why. Perhaps because I was overexcited, or nervous about what was to come. Perhaps because somehow the music dragged emotions out of me. Little emotions I did not know I had, and did not want to have, started flowering. In the hollow core of me, dead feelings moved in the emptiness, stirring into something like life.
Then the music turned, or maybe Luisa was having trouble playing. There was a flurry of notes with a lot of noise
