“He had no option,” another man said. “If he hadn’t worked with the guerrilla . . .”
“They castrated him and let him bleed to death. Why do that to a priest?”
“The paras like to send a message.”
“The paras?” Abelito said, the sound of his own voice surprising him. “But . . .”
No one paid him any attention. He looked back at the old woman, making her way through the stain. Blood, thought Abelito. Blood. He felt ashamed. The wound of the Holy Christ screamed. He pushed his way back out of the crowd, out the back door of the church. Heaviness hung over the town. The road down the river was full of people with their bags and carts, leaving. The road up the river was full of people with their bags and carts, coming.
Father Eustacio is dead, he thought. The thought made him calm. The heaviness eased. A voice told him, You must return home. It was the animal instinct that tells birds and beasts at the end of their lives to retreat to their nests, their burrows, to find a fallen branch or rock to die under, so as not to leave death in the open.
Abelito walked against the stream of people coming into Cunaviche, receiving strange looks and, from a Motilon woman, a warning. “The paras,” she said. Which didn’t make sense to Abelito, it was the guerrilla, the guerrilla. His town had not seen paras in years.
Or had it? Back then, Abelito had no real understanding of the groups operating in and around his town. Paracos and guerrilla and narcos and bandits and police and soldiers and even a few smaller groups, local militias put up by Motilones or other indios. And there were different types of guerrilla, and different types of paracos, and different types of narcos. He knew the guerrilla wanted communism. He knew the paracos wanted to kill the guerrilla. He knew the narcos wanted coca. But he also knew they sometimes worked together. Even the paracos sometimes cooperated with the guerrilla, working out agreements or banding together against local militias that threatened their power. It was all too much. The one thing he understood, the one thing that mattered, was that there was no one in this world a poor town or village could appeal to for protection.
After an hour the road cleared of even the stragglers headed in the other direction, and Abelito found himself alone beneath the clear blue sky. Or almost alone. His mean sister, Mona, and his smart sister, Maria, and his father and mother and grandfather, they still existed in his mind, somewhere near the gunfire he heard off in the distance. Somewhere near the smoke rising in the sky. Hiding in the back corners of his mind was the knowledge of a great evil. He walked to that evil. He belonged there, in the space that used to be a town, with drunk old men, cruel little boys, ugly women, and spiteful little girls. With young wives faithful to their husbands. Young men eager to spend coca money on radios and clothes.
He walked past the house where Jimena had lived before Franklin killed her, and where her family had shut themselves up in their grief. Empty. The door open on its hinge, somehow knowing there was no longer any point in securing the home. No one would return.
Abelito kept walking, walking to where he should find the friends, families, traditions, stories, games, and songs he had grown up with, where even the dead, like Jimena, remained stitched into the continuing fabric of daily life. But Abelito was not heading to a place of mourning. He was heading to a place of silence, where even memory had died.
He saw Pablo’s corpse first. Pablo, older than him, a hard worker, but shy among the other boys, lying facedown. Abelito knew him by his hands, tough, calloused hands. You can see a person’s soul in the eyes, they say, but you can also see them in the hands. Pablo’s left arm was twisted under his body, the hand just peeking out from underneath his right side, open palm to the sky, while his right arm was straight above his head, the right hand dug into the dirt. Abelito turned him so he faced the sky. Pablo’s face was trapped in an expression of terror, with a twisted, open mouth.
Even now, I cannot bear to look at the hands and faces of the dead. Whenever death happened in front of me, I would focus on the arms, chests, necks, legs as the work was done. That way, no one would see me looking away, like a coward. I’d be looking straight at them, but not seeing them, only seeing their parts as the life fled. Abelito was young, and did not know these tricks.
The sky was dark, the road hard to see. Abelito knew his way, even in the dark, but with each step his feet grew heavier, his heart more fearful. He passed Gustavo’s house, or what was left of it, one wall caved in and the tin roof crumpled inward. What has happened here? he thought, even though he knew. He had heard about other towns where people were chased off the land, towns become too troublesome so the whole population was turned out, become the displaced, ghosts haunting cities far away.
The instinct to return home had faded, but Abelito had nowhere else to go, no other home. The house he had built with his father and sisters appeared on the road like an empty tomb. He could feel that the circles of protection and prayers, which had kept it safe and made it a place of joy, had dissipated. Abelito reached down for the bracelet his father had given him, with its tiny wooden cross. All the sacred power
